Why can’t it just be Simple? [poem]
Why can’t it just be simple?
We laugh. We love. We let.
So just forget the ersatz needs
or any other bogus thought
which feeds or strokes our
ego’s ghostly cheek. No need
for expectations of what
others shouldly do or bring
or sing for love can harness
nothing ever but the wind.
Ruffled Feathers [poem]
Sat here in my cloistered
calm but reckless room
I wonder what you fear?
Are you afraid that passion’s bloom will somehow
warmly wildful interfere with your old controlled and
perfect ordered mind in such a way that you will lose
that cool composure you have taken years to find?
Bemused (Meditations on a New Year) [poem]
The New Year looked me gravely (frankly) in the face and said:
“What resolutions have you made as that old year began to fade?”
I took her hand in mine and thought I saw some future light
begin to shine. Perhaps I was mistaken for as I looked into her eyes
she took me on a journey far beyond my skies had ever been before
and if I was to tell you what I saw you would (like me) begin to shake
and thoughts then flickered through my mind that I would never
make it through her year unless some superhuman strength
I’d soonly find. She squeezed my hand and smiled that soft and
drenchful face reserved for those who will wholeheartedly embrace:
There’s a Concert coming up
THERE IS A CONCERT COMING UP in Berlin on 20th January, the thought of which is already going through me like a whirlwind. I am so excited about it that I can hardly even think straight! Two of my favourite musical works ever. An emotional maelstrom of music written in the 1930s. Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto in D minor (1939) and Dmitri Shostakovich’s monumental 4th Symphony in C minor (1936). To programme these two pieces in the same concert is a stroke of genius as they are woven from very similar cloth. Britten wrote his concerto on the eve of the Second World War when he was just 26 years old. It is a 30-minute outpouring of passion for life in the face of the impending horror of war. Wrapped up in a strangely exotic Mediterranean lustre, with an almost gypsy feel at times in the violin (both vivace tempestuous and lingeringly impassioned), it powerfully demolishes your composure and cuts you to the quick. Getting through it without tears is strictly for psychopaths. Of all violin Concertos (alongside Shostakovich’s 1st Violin Concerto), it is my favourite. Shostakovich’s 4th Symphony is what he later called his “problem child”. The problem was that, at 29 years old, he had composed a kaleidoscopic vortex of emotion (clearly influenced by Mahler) which he knew the Stalin regime would suppress. His opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtensk, had already been denounced by Stalin as “chaos not music”. In those days, one had to create optimistic art which glorified the workers and the regime. Any hint of melancholia was likely to be accused of “bourgeois formalism” or other such politically correct nonsense! So he took the step of withdrawing the symphony and it didn’t have its first performance until 25 years later, after Stalin had died. It wasn’t that he was frightened of Stalin. In fact, Stalin was frightened of HIM. While Shostakovich watched almost all his artistic friends being assassinated or disappeared after a “3 0’clock knock” (the early hours visit which they would receive from the secret police), he survived because Stalin superstitiously accorded the composer “yurodivy” status, as if he was some kind of prophet who must not be touched. The composer encoded many dissident references into his works, for example through the use of Russian folk song and even in special notation. While the rest of the world was whooping with delight that Hitler was gone and Europe was free, Shostakovich knew otherwise. Thus the deep melancholy which pervades much of his work was directed at the fact that Bolshevism had descended into the same kind of totalitarianism which it had purported to overthrow. For me, his 4th Symphony is the most important of his fifteen symphonies, as he himself called it his “composer’s credo.” One has to take notice of that. While the whole symphony is like a crazy journey through a myriad themes and moods, somehow it all leads inexorably to a jaw-dropping coda which is both shattering and epic. In fact, I first became aware of this symphony in the 1980s when the coda was being played as soundtrack music, alongside Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive” and “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun”, in a BBC documentary about outer space. Yes, that’s where this symphony takes you! I am determined to get to this concert on the 20th. It will be a life-changing experience (the only kind of experience in which I am now interested).
In your House, part 1 [sonnet]
I stood before your winsome house today
(I swear it had a face which seemed to smile).
The architecture took my breath away;
I lingered and admired it for a while.
The garden, though immaculate, was bare;
it seemed as if some vandal had passed through.
For only in one corner flowers were there:
Geraniums, but in the colour blue.
The Hidden Effects of being a Whistleblower
I’m just having an interesting correspondence with a highly-respected clinical psychologist I worked with more than 30 years ago and haven’t had contact with since. We were both involved in whistleblowing an exposé of sustained physical abuse as part of the treatment system in a showcase children’s assessment centre. I’m speaking about aggressive power-games by staff on children, beatings-up, threatenings, subtle and outright cruelty of many kinds — even forcing children as young as five years old to eat their own vomit. I had worked closely undercover with an investigative journalist on The Guardian newspaper; and after a couple of months of evidence-gathering the story broke on the front page of the paper. As you can imagine, all hell broke loose as the local authority council and department of social work set about covering their asses. Shortly after, a Public Inquiry, presided over by a judge, was held during which potential witnesses were plainly bribed or threatened and mass betrayals took place by people who had promised to testify against the centre. My legal representative at the Inquiry (who was actually a lawyer for the National Council for Civil Liberties — what a joke!) behaved like an imbecile. (I later discovered he was in the same Freemason’s lodge as the Director of Social Services 
😉 ). The police had also aggressively tried to threaten me to drop my witness-stance (they had been involved in the abuse too, beating kids up, covering up, etc.). Needless to say, the directors of the childen’s centre were eventually declared to be the innocent victims of a smear campaign. It was a total debacle.
Limited Edition [poem]
A myriad vermillion stripey smears
smash into skyly overdriven bluefulness
while the drooping setting sun apologises
quietly on a bleak horizon narrowed by
the rueful season’s finely bitter triumph
Ignoramus Protocol [poem]
We think we know so very much
but truly we know next to nothing.
For every new discovery made
will at some later [higher] stage
be overturned or altered by another.
The smallest particle in this wondrous world
is only that which so far has been seen;
(microscopic limitations standing in-between).
There must be even smaller ones to know
within this effervescent sparkle show.
Perhaps the universe in which we dwell
is oh-so-delicately held within a tiny droplet
of some alien rain which dribbles in another
huger universe which dangles in a particle
in yet another even vaster world
and on and on and on the cadence swirls…
Now think of it the other way…
Thus, in a quark within an atom in a microbe
in a particle of dirt stuck to a flea upon a dog
outside your house there is a vast array
of smaller worlds within yet other worlds
and maybe even worlds beyond those too:
A hyper-cosmic reproducted Russian Doll
with each one thinking it’s the only one;
enveloped in an ignoramus protocol.
I bow before the magic of the interface I see;
this hologrammic white-lie surface world
where light and darkness emanating from beyond
have been for longsome battling for supremacy
(though all the spoilers clearly demonstrate just how
the ending [next beginning] here will culminate).
For only when we climb upon the back
of each new learned digested fact
can we then see the next and then
the next one after that. For it is only
in this way we grow; and thus we must
not think that what we nowly know
is wholly or completely where it’s at.
Everything we witness with
our eyes is kind of bluffing.
We think we know so much
but truly
We.
Know.
Nothing!
.
.
© Alan Morrison, 2014
A Single Thread [sonnet]
So many years since perfume graced my nose;
I’ve now forgotten how to bathe in skin.
No fecund business in that garden grows;
no longer would I know where to begin.
We have no Home [poem]
Loneliness increases exponentially
according to the vastness of the crowd
which is surrounding me.
A cast of thousands
sends me underground
while being with a carefully chosen few
still means that I with graciousness withdrew
to lick my wounds
(which were extensive
notwithstanding
it may seem like nought to you
but my threshold for withstanding
seepage not appropriate to
[as it may well be judged by you]
the social situation’s light demands
is lower than my friends can understand).
The Naked Troubadour 