LINDA M. CRATE

wild warrior of the birds 

i let people in 

not realizing

my love was not universal,

and people used and abused

my heart;

so i started building walls

and locking doors—

they say you have to let people in,

but i don't expect that i might;

i am too afraid of carrying new wounds in

the name of love

don't know how much more of people

i can take—

would rather be alone and happy than alone in 

a crowded room because i know i can find

joy in the wild wood where the trees always welcome me

or in the pages of a book or in the waves of music of the sea,

all they want are ties that bind;

i am looking to be free

for i am that wild bird always resisting cages

and no matter how pretty my song is i will forever 

keep it free of those who would seek to own me—

i am no one's property or damsel,

warrior of love and light;

my magic and my dreams will destroy any

who would seek to shatter me with

their needs and nightmares.

not your stepping stone 

the sun oversees the day,

but it is the moon

that holds my heart and secrets;

she is my mother

and the siren singing songs

to the sea of my heart—

i am wild and fierce

warrior of the flowers and trees,

i prefer kindness and compassion;

but like the moon i have

a dark side

with claws and teeth glimmering

i transform into a monster

hungry for destruction—

i am not your stepping stone,

too long i have allowed things

i ought not have;

no longer shall you walk all over me.

the music of life

i am woman

vessel of strength and divinity

magic and power and dreams and ambition

if you a hurdle in my life

will just jump over you

don't need any more obstacles in the pursuit

of who i am meant to be,

and i know there is more to life than this;

i crave something beyond this existence—

for some this may be enough,

but i am always wanting to sing new songs

and journey new journeys and know 

new adventures;

i always want new growth

because whilst a comfort zone is always

comfortable it is no place where i can shed pieces

of my soul that no longer suit me—

sometimes i need new clothes,

new oceans, and new moons; sometimes

my mouth needs to know the melodies

of new songs.

**********************copyright linda m. crate 

BRYN FORTEY

I GUESS THAT'S WHY THEY CALL IT THE BLUES by Bryn Fortey
(Outlaw Chapbooks Press)
212 Caerleon Road, Newport, South Wales, NP19 7GQ, UK

This book is a small delight. 17 poems about the blues by a great human repository of stories about black American music. Here we can read about Chuck Berry, Charley Patton, Arthur 'Big Boy' Crudup, Bessie Smith and Howlin' Wolf. Important names to people versed (if you'll pardon the pun) in musical history. (Crudup, for those not so well-versed, wrote 'That's All Right Mama', which Elvis Presley covered. One of those men died in penury.)

Other characters populate the book, men and women only someone with an expert's compendious knowledge would know: Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lil Hardin (who married, and divorced, Louis Armstrong), Earl Zebedee Hooker, the Mound City Blue Blowers. Each poem brings a different player or band to life in a few short stanzas, telling their stories, recreating the cultural atmosphere of the times they lived in. If you love music, it's irresistible.

But there's more here. Poems about memory and how music crosses and intersects it. Which is part of its magic: put a piece of music on, and if it's important, you will leap back instantly to where you were the first time you heard it. That's the subject of what I think is the best poem, 'Honky Tonk':

more years have passed
than I like to count
and I don't know where you are
or even if you're still alive

As someone who was first published by Bryn Fortey 21 years ago in his print magazine 'Target', I had a real thrill of nostalgia when this chap arrived in the post the other day. It was better, somehow, listening to the postman open the front gate and push your letters through the door, seeing a handwritten envelope from an editor or another poet on your mat. Bradlaugh's Finger is a tribute to those more maverick times, in a way.

There's no price listed at the top of this review because I GUESS THAT'S WHY THEY CALL IT THE BLUES is free to anybody who wants it. All you have to do is drop the author a line at the address above and ask for a copy. I'd do that, if I were you. It's an excellent read. (BH)

FUNERAL MARCH

Your esteemed editor went down to the Extinction Rebellion Funeral March in the middle of Northampton today. The funeral was for all our futures, and many of those who came were suitably attired in black, although there were top hats, big boots and fishnets in evidence, as well as things pinned onto jackets and hats like 'conscientious protector' and 'rebel'. A stylish way to check out, for those who committed. I couldn't have pulled it off if I'd tried.

Just in front of me a guy was conducting a band made up of drums and some sort of cowbell percussion instrument -- that's what somebody near me called it (pardon my dumbassery) -- and in front of them, five or six men and women shouldered a symbolic coffin. It was a tremendously moving sight, given what it represented. As we started to walk, the Saturday morning shoppers watched us. Some stood in silence. A few raised their voices contemptuously. Most filmed us on their mobiles. If that was all this was -- a spectacle, a stupendously-dressed freakshow interrupting the great grinding wheel of capitalism temporarily -- we were literally finished as a planet, and all of us belonged in the coffin.

Our route, for anyone who knows Northampton, began outside the BBC Radio building and took us the full length of Abington Street. We were led -- coffin-bearers, band, marchers -- by the Red Rebel Brigade, a troupe of incredibly moving … I don't know how to describe them as anything other than mime artists but their performance is more profound and moving than any mime I've ever seen. Watching them, all clad in long red costumes and head dresses, with their faces painted white, seeming almost to float through the town in co-ordinated movement, I was reminded of Japanese Kabuki and Noh theatre. Possibly I was getting a little pretentious. But every hand gesture and tilt of the head they made reinforced the tragedy our leaders are bringing on the planet by ignoring warnings about the imminent climate catastrophe.

Once we'd reached the end of Abington Street we did a circuit of the market square, watched by traders, still followed by the police who'd been with us since the start of the march; there was somebody from the newspaper taking pictures too. I tried to give her a good shot when she pointed her camera at me by staring away into the distance with my best, set jaw. In profile I can occasionally look slightly heroic, I'm told, although the person who said it might have been taking the piss.

The last part of the march, which wasn't trailed in the pre-event publicity -- probably for obvious reasons -- was a die-in at Barclay's bank on the Drapery. You may have seen them in other places, and at other protests. It's where people lie down on the ground and pretend to be dead. Some people mock it as pointless, self-indulgent, attention-seeking; I think it's extremely persuasive. More people who witnessed the activists lying down in the middle of Barclay's today will think actively about the claims XR's spokesman made as he filmed them -- claims about Barclay's investment in fossil fuels - than they would have done if someone had been standing outside growling at a closed door through a megaphone. 

And the claims, by the way, are true. Look them up. Barclay's bank is the leading investor in fossil fuels in Europe, despite its attempts to greenwash its corporate image. What can you do if that displeases you? (and if it doesn't, it should.) Simple. Close your account and start another one somewhere else. We have the economic power to force companies to re-examine their more questionable behaviour, if we act in large enough numbers. But that, of course, is the problem. Even with climate change. Sometimes you'd think it wasn't an issue at all, watching the mass-consumption continue unabated, seeing ancient forests crushed and cleared to make way for new rail routes and planning permission given for the expansion of airports. But the catastrophe that's coming can't be wished away. Thank God a few people out there are trying to keep climate change in the public consciousness. (BH)



'The weight of this sad time we must obey
 Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.'
(Shakespeare 'King Lear')

ANDREW DARLINGTON

A Letter to the Editor Hello Bruce,
time is a strange thing, sometimes Considered As A Helix Of Semi-Precious Stones. I turned on BBC2 to watch ‘Mock The Week’ without realizing it was a repeat. It gradually became apparent that it was from last December, before Xmas, before the election, in a bizarrely disorientating sense of timeshift. It seemed like an eternity ago, although in fact it’s just a little over six weeks ago. We did a postal vote because we were going down to Colliers Wood to stay over with my son Stephen and his family. I stayed up long enough to see the exit polls. The following morning Stephen came in at breakfast and said ‘Wakefield has a Conservative MP!’ I assumed he was joking. I was wrong to think that. It already feels like forever ago. Fast-forward to now, I went into Wakefield this weekend to the ‘Jackanory’ Lit-event. There were sketches and artwork on the walls from classes held in the venue during the week. Some of them were quite good. Others not so good. Nick Toczek was reading. It was good to see him again. He seemed really pleased that I’d turned up to see him. It was a relaxed informal reading. After the event we went for a coffee – he’s doing a ‘dry’ January so we didn’t go near alcohol! And we did a lot of catching up. He was wearing a Ramones T-shirt. I said ‘I see your Ramones T-shirt, and raise you...’, I was wearing a Thirteenth-Floor Elevators T-shirt. So we instantly began trading music stories, almost as if we’d been doing it yesterday and forever. More timeshifts, when I first met Nick, in an Art Gallery as I recall, we both had long hair. No more. We’ve done joint readings since, published each other and appeared in the same magazines – ‘Little Word Machine’, ‘Wool City Rocker’, and in fact we still do, we both write for ‘R’N’R: Rock ‘n’ Reel’ today. He got to see Allen Ginsberg. I never saw Allen Ginsberg. But I got to see William Burroughs. He never saw William Burroughs. We both got to see the Ramones, albeit separately. We compare tinnitus-levels, ‘it’s always there, even in the quietest silence.’ And when he tells about eating fried-scorpion in Thailand, I call him out about his vegetarian phase. I remember him doing a thing about turning veggie, yet being tempted by the aroma of burgers from McDonald’s. And bacon. Always bacon. Now he says black pudding too, which is hard-core even for carnivores. I was never tempted that way. The one thing I missed, the one thing I used to enjoy, was Sweet-&-Sour chicken. But the ‘Pagoda’ in Wakefield do a great Sweet-&-Sour tofu instead. Another timeshift, three of us once turned up for what we assumed was a Poetry Booking in a Wakefield Alternative Cabaret, only to see the poster outside the venue announcing us as ‘Three Comedians’! Which was not exactly what we had in mind. I simply drop all my serious poems and just do the humorous ones. Nick did a long rambling thing about haemorrhoids. It was a kind of X-Factor with a prize for the most popular voted set. The third person onstage was a lady poet from Horbury who had stacked the audience with her friends, work-colleagues and family with the intention of swaying the vote. Which made it all the sweeter when Nick actually won. Then we talk about those we’ve lost on the way. Steve Sneyd. And Richard Mason. Nick says the Wakefield cabaret was one of Richard’s promotions. I don’t think it was. But he could be right. Richard blasted into the Leeds poetry scene, took it and shook it by the scruff of the neck, an activist who set up readings and Alternative Cabarets. We did lots of wild events together, me and Rich, including stoned trips down to Dorset. Then he vanished. Nick told me he’d retreated back to Cowling, and died five years ago. I didn’t even know. Until that moment. As we part, Nick gives me a CD he’s done. I give him a copy of my ‘Tweak Vision’. With all manner of vague promises to do more. But time is a strange thing, considering... I was going to write more, and different, but I got sidetracked… next time, maybe
Cin Cin
-Andy-

LINDA M. CRATE

you: my hell 

savior

is the identity

you assume,

a deception;

because

you're a devil

an angel who lost his wings—

because you cannot fly

you seek to break the wings

of those who can,

to pull them into your dark void;

a maddening and painful hell

without warmth only winter—

but i am summer's daughter,

so i burned away all your ice and snow;

planted flowers in my gardens

watched them grow and promised myself

i would never stop winging my way

towards the way of my dreams

because they are my heaven—

& you? my hell. 

don't stand in my way

you buried me, but like a bad habit i came back from the dead;

learned to embrace my darkness because without night

there are no stars and moons no matter how much light i can emit i am shining—

you are a black hole a place where things and hearts come to die,

but you do not have any power here; i am a queen not the rabbit hearted girl  you left behind—

i've reclaimed my voice, my magic, my power, and my ambitions; i have become limitless—

stand in the way of this damphyr, and you shall find the sweetest music of silence echo in your ears for eternity 

as death becomes your bride forevermore; and never more shall i be your prisoner. ****************copyright Linda M. Crate