Ignored

One of the downside consequences of choosing to be aloof is that you can quite easily be ignored your grateful words may not be read or at least not read by many and so very few who choose to respond

The photographs you post of YSP may not catch another viewers eye or at least not spark their imagination and the extracts of your Red Telephone Box book may not be endorsed even if they were read in the first place

Yes there are consequences of standing apart from the crowd for out of the mainstream you may well be ignored but is it not better to be yourself to go and gather your own unique thoughts in your own way and in doing so build up your own inner strength

Saying hey this is me yes here I am you can take me or you can leave me but don't expect me to do just as you do for if everyone did that how dull would the world soon become if it was not already dull because of you in the first place

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Amplification

Much of my poetry is an attempt
To amplify those experiential moments
The ones which I share with myself

Those slight glimpses of the past or of the future
Which enter unannounced silent
As a thought or indefinite as a vague fleeting image

Which require the crystal-set amplifier
Of amplification to be turned up to the very top
Such as if Roger Bacon's magnifying lens

Might be used to inspect the cell
Or the Jodrell Bank telescope may be used
To interrogate the stars or the cosmos

Imagine now if you will that deep meditation
Which realises itself as a visualisation
However with no Polaroid or such device at hand

It would surely fade as easily as it arose
Becoming obscured
By the mere transience of life

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Yorkshire

Sat on the real stone steps
Sheltered by the Hawthorne and by the Oak
From the prevailing wind

Or should it be
Sheltered by the Bougainvilleas
From the ever fragrant breeze

Either way the sun shone
And the gardener mowed the grass
With his rather noisy eight-bladed machine

The children
Now as then and then as now
Engage with the sculptures

Perhaps see something of themselves
Reflected in the works of art
See something of their future see something of their past

And the visitors from near and far away
Jostle with all of a vacation's excitement
They hold hands as they walk down the pathways home

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Excess

As one way to counterbalance your self-congratulation
You had a day of extreme over-indulgence

Beating head
Sweating skin
Severe indigestion
Counteracted by more and more ablutions

Then by chance to find recovery
In the many-fold dreamscapes

Old friends
Old lovers
Obtuse fanciful situations
Exaggerated by more and more awakenings

Yet almost without a pause
A few moments of nostalgic reconstruction

Unsteady in mind
Unsteady in body
More than a touch of anxiety
Differentiated by more and more promised abstentionism

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Elsewhere

Is where I might have been
Or where I might have been thought to have been
Even where I might have hoped to have been

Yet I was only there for a moment
Before the vanishing trickster
Performed his vanishing trick

Moving me on elsewhere
To where the good drummers drummed
To where the good vibrations vibrated

And in doing so seemingly caused the dogs to bark
The lawnmower engines to start
And the roll-along refuse wheelie-bins to be collected

I want to be elsewhere I silently chanted
To be where I might have been
Or to be where I might have been thought to have been

Even to be where I might have hoped to have been
Where I would have hoped to stay longer
There I would no longer have searched to be elsewhere

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