RAVENHEART

Being at sea aboard huge luxury vessels is very glamorous and as a skipper come captain it is so easy to be wined and dined each evening by billionaires with the finest foods and drink the only drawback is that you steadily become an old soak, I worked alongside many captains who became just that, thinking back to a collision at night with JJ the skipper and a refugee boat he had got drunk with a stewardess and gone to bed leaving the vessel on autopilot the similarities to Titanic are on a much smaller scale but just as deadly , doing double dog watch shifts doesn't help instead of 4 hours you do 8 covering for someone or even the milk shift when you start at midnight and sometimes finish six hours later dozing asleep is so easy if the auto pilots on many of our crew used to come on the milk shift smelling of booze - sea watches disorientate you I've seen quite a few old sailors having a beer for breakfast as they come off the first watch at 4 am .

A poem for the king of rock and roll he was born into extreme poverty raised in a shotgun shack but managed not only to break out of that but also to attack the apartheid of America he was one of the first to start singing the black man's blues , he went from busking as a bum on Beale Street to having the world worshipping at his feet .

Walking into a very expensive veggie vegan boutique i listened to the sermon of a spiritual salesman it felt as if you we're about to sign papers of adoption the high priest of the Celtic druids absolutely worshipped his wild woodland produce , I got the uneasy feeling that my blood was going to be sacrificed under the oak tree called Zeus after i touched a sacred sprig of his mistletoe obviously a crime punishable by death .

The crisis of covid-19 has caused our fast spinning world to slow to a seizing after trillions of dollars of quantitative easing it still feels like the whole world has been hit by some dreadful physical freezing now everybody waits with bated breath for the chancellor of the Exchequer to begin his terrible squeezing an just when the pandemic feels over winter arrives and again people start coughing an sneezing gasping an a wheezing .

The old post office Harrogate is located about a century behind Greenwich mean time, if you should slip out of sync or cross the line then the old soldiers will bark you back into their very discordant malign, they believe that you've committed a terrible war crimes my crossing over their precious ensign , but lets face facts it's been completely worn through by so many a shuffling shoe, but to them it's still sacred mark in time similar to the Siegfried line or the bridge at Oppenheim , a piece of their treasure disciplinarian design , that we should all . worship in patient purgatory until the end of our time .

This is a poem about the complacency of people and their attitudes towards the temperature rise of two degrees you'd think that the powers that be were waffling about a couple of cream teas or the price of peas, some have the audacity to blame the up and coming new economies such as the Chinese after we have been pumping out the smoke and sleaze since the early 1750's others think that it's just a temperature tease and come the next year we'll all be back to the big freeze I don't know what it's going to take to move the world's most powerful trustees maybe when it begins to back flush the drains up around everyone's knees .

Buying power tools at the hardware store

You may as well  arm yourself with a weapon of war

casualties around the world run into the hundreds of thousands the body counts are  higher than in most modern theatres of war.

To own a car in the swinging sixties was extremely rare especially for young people but if it was a jaguar then you were the nouveau rich make believe millionaires the fake faux movie stars . Members of my family and their friends were just this usually their balloons burst into bankruptcy debt and divorce, too much money in young hands its like mixing desire together with hell fire .

A poem I wrote about the sixty three year love affair between a member of the royal family and one her dutiful long standing servants known as G M for short the old Queen mums cool companion.

A poem about men and their midwife crisis as a matter course men feel the need to try out a new horse so they get a divorce and set off in search of adventure usually riding a Harley-Davidson towards the sun and what they think will be some all new sexual fun .