TICK TOCK ROCK

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 but also to attack the musical 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 .

It's about time the human realised that a tree is flesh and blood not just timber or a price of wood , these beautiful living entities give us shelter shade and our lifesaving breath ,without them we are condemning our selves to a curtain death

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 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 .

The sloth is portrayed as the epitome of laziness but this little arboreal adaption turns out to be a perfect green dream a hairy little leaf eating machine that has a zero carbon footprint and could save the world all on its own we would do well to put a little of the sinful slow sloth back in our own fast food life styles in order to try and save our poor planet .

The human hunter gatherer brain is so very hard to truth train but maybe not if you start using the new silicon scopolamine dream and drip feed it daily with some digital dopamine served up from our omnipresent Turing machine.

A musing about Lord Kitchener who's Sabre rattling speeches come sermons raised rampant applause back in Whitehall and Westminster whilst unfortunately his young Virgin soldiers were dying by 6000 a day , he had printed into their guide books for war , "avoid wine and women" meaning french prostitutes , with a life expectancy of 17 hours catching the pox would have been the least of their worries .

After the third slave uprising was crushed by Rome a hundred thousand men lay dead on the battlefield and another six thousand slaves were crucified along the appian way and left to rot as carrion crow fodder they were there as a lesson for anyone else minded to rebel against the might of Rome ; the appian way at that time was the main freeway into the capital city .

Setting off on a world tour in the late seventies was nothing like it is today there were no mobile phones or multimedia just the odd phone box for calls : your thumb and forefinger were used for hitchhiking thousands of miles around the globe taking years and years almost a decade to the point where many of us became wonderless with our own wanderlust , but we did become quite skilled in the art of conversation due to spending so much time speaking with strangers , back when you had the safety of being completely anonymous due to not having any mobiles or multmedia where as now the new wage travellers or tech tramps are so guarded due to the sapiens surveillance of God Google and the silicone starzi Siri .

Krystyana Skarbek was a polish beauty queen a countess and the longest serving spy in Churchill's war time SOE , with a life expectancy of just six weeks she lasted seven years as a field agent fighting against Nazi tyranny  only then to be  betrayed by her own trusted powers that be the British who at the end of the second world war with a stroke of their Judas pen turned her into a stateless refugee and also leaked her name to Stalin's newly formed KGB . On the day that she was due to fly out to be married and alas finally set free she was murdered this bravest of the brave  Femme Fatale of destiny .  

Living as an artist's muse you can understand the expression of The Doom in the room what artist's don't realise is that there ego's can be so burdensome to everyone else and probably they have to be in order for them to achieve , this is usually why their muse's are always so miserable. Whilst living with an artist as their muse I was painted with my own blood she thought it to be a wonderful contrast of colour red onto the stark white canvas my Anglo-Saxon skin reminiscent of the old George Cross flag .