PERMANENTLY STRANGE
Tales from a frozen foreign land
labyrinthine tourmaline-dreams
of black horses flowing out to sea
told in a strangely twisting tongue
that chords can barely bend to chant
the rime and rhythm in the line.
How fools found gold in streams that curled
and mazed round roots by boggy banks
What are you? Why are you here?
His-story hisses out of flatulent balloons.
and fools all fall about the place
while others look round for helpful signs.
It wasn’t that they didn’t.
It might be that they’ll never.
It might be that it’s permanently strange.
Adventure Culture Spirit Comment
16.4.10
Dominic Gill-A hero for our time!
Adventure Cyclist and film maker Dominic Gill on his Hase Pino Tour Tandem with Ernie, a 75 year old man with Lymphocytic Leukaemia. Dom and Ernie plan to cycle the Pino across America raising funds for Cancer Research. The trip has always been a dream of Ernie's and with Dom on the rear it's one he will now achieve.
Dom's last adventure cycling from Alaska to Tierra Del Fuego on a tandem and offering random passengers a ride was a great documentary that you can check out at www.takeaseat.org.
Beautiful bike too, provided by Hase Bikes. Good job guys!
4.4.10
THE BOOK OF THREE RINGS PROLEGOMENA: MOMENTS OF IMPENDING TRANSFORMATION
A thin whipcord clacks a screech. Nerve-shock and wibble-wobble. He is become a touretted marionette. A low moan gut-birthing. Shake-handing. Eyes tear-fill streaming blue as sapphires. Shoulders up-jumping down-sledding. A dense weight stone-black and heavy gut-deep and yet deeper. Steady breathing, try to focus, anything, but cannot. Room-spin. Chair-toppling like a statue on a broken plinth. How long there? Moments, houries, yearies. Incandoes of the Lesser Hell. Purgatorio that stops all clocks.
Years later he goes to the bedroom where she feigns sleep and pulls on someone’s shorts and trainers and a tee shirt. As is his way he responds to all vicissitudes by running running running.
Everything that was familiar, that was home, is now alien-strange. He is the strangered in a strangely.
He runs down the country lane, past the golf course shameless in its grassy nakedness. Dead golfers eye him coldly from the hillow-humps. Clubs resting against their legs descried against the horizon sculpt them into living gallows
Stiff-running. Heaviness in his gut that seems to include his heart as if the organs have turned to granite or slate perhaps. Past the graveyard, up a steep little track and into the wood. The grim, grey dawn slowly jumps up and down on the death’s head nights head beating beating beating until its brains spill grayley onto the fields. He runs under beech and oak; ash, and clumps of you. A huge droplet of water drips off a broadleaf and lands with a dull phut on his head. Up he slowly wends. Outcrops of limestone yield to him.
The weighty belly and another limb grown heavy as pitch.
He emerges like a beetle onto a small limestone plateau and the village is spread-eagled and spatch-cocked out below him with its little stone walls and pretty houses of the good folk. The village is spread out below him but now is like the vilest lie; an insult and an affront. Does he hate it and all that is in it? Or, has he always hated it? All it’s pies and flaunty marrows. It with it’s giddy reeks and shallows. It’s shoreline saltmarsh slashed with sinuous rills. It’s pockmarked limestone sharp against the skin. It’s limestone sheep hot with ticks and vacant eyed, except for the Leicester Blue prize-winning flock, immense in the morning mist, shrugged from a llama.
And the ubiquitous yew-death tree stooping to conquer, trollopped up with scarlet baubles in it’s greens.
Almost disbelieving his own Self he asks Good to help him. He does not know if Good exists and even if It did whether It would be listening to him right now. He guesses that Good, if It did exist, would be incredibly busy, with hardly any time even for Its own family, if It had any. Good would be an absent parent! Good probably didn’t exist but, you never know.
‘Please help me Good’ he breathes. ‘Please. Please help me.’
He briefly considers flinging himself upon some pointy limestone shard where he can lie impaled like one of the world’s great tragedies, but the height is minimal and that would be absurd. Even now, he realises that death is not an option, even if he possessed the gravelly to open such a door. The existence of somethings will not allow.
No, it is clear he must live, but how will he live with these two wolves fighting for possession of his juicy bones and grits? He does not know. He knows that now which he does not know. But does he know what he knows? And how will he know if he does not know? But what he does know, even now, is…
THE BOOK OF THREE RINGS-RING 1: OF DESPAIR
1. PROLEGOMENON: MOMENTS OF IMPENDING TRANSFORMATION
2. PERMANENTLY STRANGE
3. STARLIT NIGHT
4. THE VILEST LIE
5. THE SLAVE-DREAMS OF CLAUDIUS AND GERTRUDE
6. TONIGHT YOUR HEAVING HEART…
7. ARE WE ARIGHT?
8. WHO KNOWS WHAT LOVE IS?
9. NOT HANDLING IT
10. DOMESTIC VIOLENCE BLUES
11. THE ANGRY FLAGS
12. SURRENDER
13. ADVICE TO A WOMAN
14. THE PALIMPSEST
15. THE CROOKLAND’S SERIES
16. PSYCHIC WOUNDS
17. THE WICKER MAN ATTENDS MEDIATION
18. BLUE HALLOWEEN
20. SESTINA OF THE DARK NYMPH
21. BECAUSE YOU ARE SO BEAUTIFUL
22. I WILL NOT BE CAST DOWN
23. UNSAID
3.4.10
DELCIA McNEIL-ARTIST VISIONARY HEALER-LONDON EXHIBITION
I am delighted to invite you to 'Energy Landscapes' - the first solo exhibition of my paintings in London at the highly acclaimed Koukan Gallery,106a Alexander Park Road, London N10 2AE. www.koukangallery.com
The invitation is attached and also posted below.
The invitation to the preview on Tuesday 27th April, 6.30-8.30pm is for you and any friends that you may wish to bring along.
Apart from being at the preview - of course! - I will be at the gallery personally all day on Thursday 29, Friday 30th April (11am-5pm) and Saturday 1st May (11am-3pm).
Bounds Green on the Piccadilly line is the nearest underground station. Free parking is available in nearby residential roads. Alexander Park Road is also a major bus route, including the 102 and the 299.
If you would like you can see my work at my new website www.delciamcneilgallery.turnpiece.net
I look forward to seeing many of you soon!
all good wishes,
Delcia
015395 62420
07515 807366
The invitation is attached and also posted below.
The invitation to the preview on Tuesday 27th April, 6.30-8.30pm is for you and any friends that you may wish to bring along.
Apart from being at the preview - of course! - I will be at the gallery personally all day on Thursday 29, Friday 30th April (11am-5pm) and Saturday 1st May (11am-3pm).
Bounds Green on the Piccadilly line is the nearest underground station. Free parking is available in nearby residential roads. Alexander Park Road is also a major bus route, including the 102 and the 299.
If you would like you can see my work at my new website www.delciamcneilgallery.turnpiece.net
I look forward to seeing many of you soon!
all good wishes,
Delcia
015395 62420
07515 807366
1.4.10
The brilliant Tony Judt on the European dilemma with Israel.
Tony Judt puts the Israeli/Palestine issue into a nutshell. An essential read from the London Review of Books March 2010 (in interview with Kristina Bozic.)
Q: (Kristina) It’s been doing this for a long time in the case of Israel and Palestine, expressing disapproval of the occupation but doing almost nothing to bring it to an end. Is there anything Europe can do to exert pressure on Israel?
Israel wants two things more than anything else in the world. The first is American aid. This it has. As long as it continues to get American aid without conditions it can do stupid things for a very long time, damaging Palestinians and damaging Israel without running any risk. However, the second thing Israel wants is an economic relationship with Europe as a way to escape from the Middle East. The joke is that Jews spent a hundred years desperately trying to have a state in the Middle East. Now they spend all their time trying to get out of the Middle East. They don’t want to be there economically, culturally or politically – they don’t feel part of it and don’t want to be part of it. They want to be part of Europe and therefore it is here that the EU has enormous leverage. If the EU said: ‘So long as you break international laws, you can’t have the privileges of partial economic membership, you can’t have internal trading rights, you can’t be part of the EU market,’ this would be a huge issue in Israel, second only to losing American military aid. We don’t even have to talk about Gaza, just the Occupied Territories.
Why do Europeans not do it? Here, the problem of blackmail is significant. And it is not even active blackmail but self-blackmail. When I talk about these things in Holland or in Germany, people say to me: ‘We couldn’t do that. Don’t forget, we are in Europe. Think of what we did to the Jews. We can’t use economic leverage against Israel. We can’t be a critic of Israel, we can’t use our strength as a huge economic actor to pressure the Jewish state. Why? Because of Auschwitz.’ I understand this argument very well. Many of my family were killed in Auschwitz. However, this is ridiculous. Europe can’t live indefinitely on the credit of someone else’s crimes to justify a state that creates and commits its own crimes. If Zionism is to succeed as a representation of the original ideas of the Zionist founders, Israel has to become a normal state. That was the idea. Israel should not be special because it is Jewish. Jews are to have a state just like everyone else has a state. It should have no more rights than Slovenia and no fewer. Therefore, it also has to behave like a state. It has to declare its frontiers, recognise international law, sign international treaties and agreements. Furthermore, other countries have to behave towards it the way they would towards any other state that broke those laws. Otherwise it is treated as special and Zionism as a project has failed. People will say: ‘Why are we picking on Israel? What about Libya? Yemen? Burma? China? All of which are much worse.’ Fine. But we are missing two things: first, Israel describes itself as a democracy and so it should be compared with democracies not with dictatorships; second, if Burma came to the EU and said, ‘It would be a huge advantage for us if we could have privileged trading rights with you,’ Europe would say: ‘First you have to release political prisoners, hold elections, open up your borders.’ We have to say the same things to Israel. Otherwise we are acknowledging that a Jewish state is an unusual thing – a weird, different thing that is not to be treated like every other state. It is the European bad conscience that is part of the problem.
SOCIAL WORKERS GET IT IN THE NECK FOR ROONEY INJURY
Social workers blamed for Rooney injury
writes Loof Prial
Thursday 01 April 2010 11:36
Social workers 'should have done more' to prevent Manchester United and England striker Wayne Rooney injuring his ankle during a recent football match, a critical report has concluded.
The study, by the Centre for Rational Analysis of Practice, found that social workers failed to carry out a proper risk assessment of the footballer's ankle prior to the game against Bayern Munich on Tuesday evening. It also highlights numerous breakdowns in communication and failures in joint working with colleagues in both health and sports management.
One of the report's authors, Dr Rodney Feelgood, said social workers needed more training. "I know more about ankles than most social workers do. What does that say about the profession? Well, what does it say?"
"It doesn't exactly bode well for our World Cup chances in South Africa either. We'll all know who to blame when England don't win though, won't we?"
Arsene Wenger said: "I'm happy to confirm that Arsenal will vigorously defend the social workers involved if there is any suggestion of professional misconduct and would draw attention to Para 5.7 of the GSCC Code which requires social workers to "not put yourself or anyone else at unnecessary risk", clearly something likely to happen if any member of my team (or any social worker) is tackled by Wayne Rooney."
from Community Care website April 1st.
writes Loof Prial
Thursday 01 April 2010 11:36
Social workers 'should have done more' to prevent Manchester United and England striker Wayne Rooney injuring his ankle during a recent football match, a critical report has concluded.
The study, by the Centre for Rational Analysis of Practice, found that social workers failed to carry out a proper risk assessment of the footballer's ankle prior to the game against Bayern Munich on Tuesday evening. It also highlights numerous breakdowns in communication and failures in joint working with colleagues in both health and sports management.
One of the report's authors, Dr Rodney Feelgood, said social workers needed more training. "I know more about ankles than most social workers do. What does that say about the profession? Well, what does it say?"
"It doesn't exactly bode well for our World Cup chances in South Africa either. We'll all know who to blame when England don't win though, won't we?"
Arsene Wenger said: "I'm happy to confirm that Arsenal will vigorously defend the social workers involved if there is any suggestion of professional misconduct and would draw attention to Para 5.7 of the GSCC Code which requires social workers to "not put yourself or anyone else at unnecessary risk", clearly something likely to happen if any member of my team (or any social worker) is tackled by Wayne Rooney."
from Community Care website April 1st.
31.3.10
29.3.10
BLOG POST FROM ADVENTURE CYCLING
ADVENTURE CYCLING'S LATEST BLOG POST
Biking Without Borders
Mac, Field Editor
Monday, March 29, 2010
I know I’m not alone when saying one of my pet peeves is seeing people talking on their cell phones, or fiddling with their handhelds, while multi-tasking at something really important -- like, say, operating a motor vehicle. Nothing terrifies me more when I’m bicycling down the road than the thought of someone barreling up behind me at the wheel of a ton of steel who’s arguing with his girlfriend over the phone, or tweeting her friends about the amazing herd of deer she just saw.
That's why it made me happy last week to learn that Click and Clack, the hilarious Tappet Brothers -- aka the Car Talk boys, Tom and Ray Magliozzi -- have teamed up with researchers at the University of Utah to launch the Driver Distraction Center at the Car Talk website.
“Though Tom and Ray have been speaking out about distracted driving for years, National Safety Council research indicates that cell phone use and texting while driving cause at least 28 percent of all traffic accidents -- around 1.6 million accidents each year,” says this Newswise story. “This startling statistic moved the brothers to redouble their efforts and partner with the University of Utah Applied Cognition Laboratory to produce the online Driver Distraction Center.”
Similarly, I don’t think cyclists should talk on cell phones while they’re riding, either. So imagine the roller coaster ride it sent me on when, shortly after reading about Click and Clack, I ran across information about a product called the ActiveBLU Wireless Bluetooth Helmet Headset. According to this website, the gadget “provides high quality Bluetooth wireless audio transmissions from the user’s Bluetooth enabled cell phone to their helmet. It easily attaches to any helmet and allows the user to quickly and safely answer or place calls without having to slow down or stop riding. The unique engineering of the microphone and ear piece delivers remarkable sound even at riding speeds of up to 40 MPH while allowing both hands to remain on the bike for maximum safety.” The italics are mine.
Aaaaarrrrghhh.
I have to say I agree completely. Yesterday a passenger in a VW Golf stuck his rather porcine face out of the window as they roared past and screamed at me. These prats are everywhere!
That's why it made me happy last week to learn that Click and Clack, the hilarious Tappet Brothers -- aka the Car Talk boys, Tom and Ray Magliozzi -- have teamed up with researchers at the University of Utah to launch the Driver Distraction Center at the Car Talk website.
“Though Tom and Ray have been speaking out about distracted driving for years, National Safety Council research indicates that cell phone use and texting while driving cause at least 28 percent of all traffic accidents -- around 1.6 million accidents each year,” says this Newswise story. “This startling statistic moved the brothers to redouble their efforts and partner with the University of Utah Applied Cognition Laboratory to produce the online Driver Distraction Center.”
Similarly, I don’t think cyclists should talk on cell phones while they’re riding, either. So imagine the roller coaster ride it sent me on when, shortly after reading about Click and Clack, I ran across information about a product called the ActiveBLU Wireless Bluetooth Helmet Headset. According to this website, the gadget “provides high quality Bluetooth wireless audio transmissions from the user’s Bluetooth enabled cell phone to their helmet. It easily attaches to any helmet and allows the user to quickly and safely answer or place calls without having to slow down or stop riding. The unique engineering of the microphone and ear piece delivers remarkable sound even at riding speeds of up to 40 MPH while allowing both hands to remain on the bike for maximum safety.” The italics are mine.
Aaaaarrrrghhh.
I have to say I agree completely. Yesterday a passenger in a VW Golf stuck his rather porcine face out of the window as they roared past and screamed at me. These prats are everywhere!
22.3.10
The Magick of We.
THE MAGICK OF WE
The narcissistic frenzy of the cock,
whirling in the dust of his own strut.
There’s never been a cock that didn’t crow and I
am no exception but at least I’ve known
a moment, when I seemed to disappear,
swimming in the pools of her dark eyes:
Slate-smoked and soft as new baked bread.
To be called so fierce to heart’s account.
To breathe ‘I love’ and ‘I am loved’;
cradled in the amber of a dream.
Those words of Raymond Carver sing like steel:
‘To be so loved upon the earth: That
is what we seek.’ And maybe why
sometimes, the flailing grasp exceeds the reach.
21.3.10
GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY CHILD AND DELIVER US FROM JUSTICE
Alleged followers of the gentle Nazarene turn out to be women-haters and paeodophiles shocker.
Ex-Hitler youth member Herr Ratzinger calms the nervously jostling throng of black robed followers at the recent child sex abusers convention in the Vatican, one of the few countries to have signed the Convention for the Protection of Paedophiles. (CPP). (This may be because they constitute most of its population.)
"Worry not my children." He says..."We have the money to buy their silence. We have the power to provoke their fear. I will write a letter, and all will be well. Even in Ireland where that fool Brady has disclosed the true nature of our evil and the thousands of children whose lives we have ruined, even there my letter will be like oil upon the stormy sea. Stick with me my children, and once more they will be at our mercy and we shall be the wolves feasting upon the lambs as we have so feasted for two thousand years. Hahahahahahaheeeeeeyyyeeeeeee." (Dr Evil type laughter ensues.)
Thus the ever strange nature of colliding reality. Have you never noticed the obsession of the priesthood with blood of all kinds? Like 'this is my blood' etc...etc 'drink this in remembrance of me.'
Yes...'True Blood' resonances abound. The constant references to blood, the fixation with torture, the strange black robes and knotted girdles? That's right, vampires are running the vatican. Lock up your children. Ditch those crucifixes and pray. What? To whom? Well these are the guys who turned it upside down and Lucifer means 'Light-bringer.' Who ya gonna call?
14.3.10
New Major Publishing Event!
Well, not really. It's just that my poetry collection-'The Book of Three Rings' will be published here first over the next few months. And that's it really...No there's nothing more. Just that I hope you enjoy and thank you for reading.
31.1.10
First Audio Poem on Heart of Balance-Low Millerground
LOW MILLERGROUND
The shores of Windermere-LowMillerground.
I lived there nearly five years and loved
the way the sun painted Langdale’s peaks with fire.
The way the lake held it’s breath at night.
The way the night-boats crawled on her to fish
for arctic char, like lice with lanterns lit.
The way, on moonless nights the dark became
almost a weight, that pressed against your face.
The hooting of the owls-little and shriek.
The trees budding in the beam beneath
riots of ramsons and wood anemone.
The beck tumbling to the old stone bridge
like a story from a country myth.
All of this was grist, and ground it was!
22.1.10
The theoretical underpinnings of Freudian Analysis in a quatrain.
PEOPLE ARE LIKE ICEBERGS
People are like icebergs,
bobbing on the sea.
Glistering minarets in sun,
and dungeons deep beneath.
Pssst-this pic's a fake made up of three icebergs apparently. That simply adds weight to my case non?
People are like icebergs,
bobbing on the sea.
Glistering minarets in sun,
and dungeons deep beneath.
Pssst-this pic's a fake made up of three icebergs apparently. That simply adds weight to my case non?
21.1.10
And more on Politics
politics 2
politics is that corrupting wind that blows
the ship of state to ruin
the self-same wind that blows the self-same
ship laden with grain
to far-flung starving shores
a flummoxing wind
of hot air and sudden frenzied lightning strikes
politics is that corrupting wind that blows
the ship of state to ruin
the self-same wind that blows the self-same
ship laden with grain
to far-flung starving shores
a flummoxing wind
of hot air and sudden frenzied lightning strikes
18.1.10
Politics
Just as Tony Blair explains his crimes before the Iraq whitewash sorry enquiry, here's a little poem for politicians everywhere. Bless them all!
POLITICS
There once was this dictator
famed for breaking legs
who said 'but you can't make an omelette
without breaking eggs.'
I cycled over his whole land
from sea to shining sea.
I never saw an omelette,
I think he lied to me.
POLITICS
There once was this dictator
famed for breaking legs
who said 'but you can't make an omelette
without breaking eggs.'
I cycled over his whole land
from sea to shining sea.
I never saw an omelette,
I think he lied to me.
6.1.10
The Necessity of Poetry
The very wonderful Mary Oliver from her also wonderful 'A Poetry Handbook.'
A very joyful new year to all our readers wishing you success, fulfillment and much happiness.
From the heartof balance crew.
1.12.09
Millie Dougan on the wisdom and spirit of the Moon-Blood
That space…
I love being a woman, and strange as it may seem to some of my sisters,
I actually enjoy the ebb and flow of our sacred moon cycle as I like to call it.
Are you with me or do I have to put it more bluntly?
Well okay then, ‘Periods’ I don’t like that word; it doesn’t do it justice,
It doesn’t sing out, life, nature, sacred space, earth, water, moon-blood.
Period just gives you that slot in time, it doesn’t embrace and encapsulate that feeling of
Loss, sorrow, pain, anger, joy, light, and being at one with nature its self.
To me that’s what being a woman is all about, being at one and peace with your cycle,
Embracing that feeling you get every month that makes you feel alive.
Going deep into your self and honouring ‘That Space’.
)O(
THAT SPACE
I’m in that space again. You know the one?
When the Moon rises, big and full
And men run from the sharpened tongue
When the air is so thick you could taste it.
I would rather,
Swim the swirling seas
Find that beacon on the distant shore,
Climb the highest mountain
With just the shirt upon my back.
I would rather,
Turn belly right side out.
Sing the blues and wash the
Blood, so sacred, from my skin.
Be held by the man I love,
And cry into the night.
Stand naked:
Howl at the Moon and her power!
I would rather Run with the wolves,
And find my self again!
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