Moving the Manor - update your links

Halloween has been and gone and all the strangers have visited the door of Marlowe Manor for the last time, their costumes charming and distressing by turn.    Now is the time for me to board up the doors and windows and leave the old place to the ghosts who prowl and moan among the creaking boards.

My blog is now moving to a new home, a brightly lit and spacious property sold to me by a property dealer with a cast in one eye and a shifty expression.   It was a bargain and entirely free of curses and ghosts he assured me, as he stood carefully in front of an old wooden sign announcing "Ancient Burial Ground" and bearing the scrawled picture of a skull and crossbones in dark and faded red paint.

The new address is in the name of my nom-de-guerre Finn Cullen and can be located at

finncullen.co.uk

Please update your address books, electronic memory devices or tattooed slaves with the new address and I look forward to receiving you there for new poetry, fiction, gaming insights and updates on my work in progress novel The Crow Journal a tale of Victorian sorcery and Faerie horror.

Bare Handed

Every empire falls, there’s not a one that’s lasted,

A state has an expiry date, and yours has slithered past it

It happened to us once , and soon you’ll join us in the wreckage

Your influence is fucked your credibility is lessened

Make enemies of friends and you suck up to dictators

Brag about your bombs but you’ll only devastate us

With a tanked economy and a trade war that’s not needed

And tariffs on the borders just for headlines for the readers

Of the press – If I can call them press but really that’s a joke

Just a propaganda outlet for the racist redneck volk

“He’s a big tough guy, and he’ll make us great again”

Bullshit, he’s a moron, and you’re going down the drain

All his lackies they’re investigated, for fraud and collusion

And he fornicates with porn stars, cos his marriage is illusion
It almost made me numb to all the stories that kept breaking

At how fucking dumb a nation gets when it’s mistaken

In choosing an orangutan to try and run the country

He’s a moron not a politician, don’t you understand he

Only tears things down, can’t build things up not even when he

Says he’ll build a wall, he’s screwed you all, you’re just like Stormy

But I’m not numb no more, what  provoked me into rage is

When I heard the screaming of the kids you put in cages

Crying for their mothers and for help and they’re just babies

“They’re not cages they’re just wire and concrete summer camps to stay in”

Then you have the nerve to start to play the fucking victim

When some privileged white bitch gets grief at dinner, she’s evicted

“That’s just not polite the restaurant it should be shut down”

Fuck you, you’re a joke, and every tyrant ends up cut down

You spent the last three years saying “Toughen up you snowflakes”

Now you whine and cry, you dish it out but cannot  even take

words aimed back at you, you weakling moron traitor

Oh was I rude?  Well as of now I’m glad to be a hater

“It’s their fault we took their kids cos they’re all undocumented”

We see right through your rhetoric we know that what you meant is

We don’t want them in the country cos their skin is kind of brown

And they speak another language, they won’t fit into our town

“The left are so damned rude and they claim to be so tolerant”

Well that’s our fault so far, now I’ll say that I’m belligerent

Cos reason only works when your foe is reasonable

And reason doesn’t penetrate the Fox and Breitbart bubble

We see where you are headed, and we recognise each lie

When a cage becomes a summercamp and arbeit fucking macht frei

But this will pass, it always does, dictators always tumble

And the marching feet of demonstraters make a building rumble

Of thunder in the cities and you’re gonna face the fighting

Cos you cannot have the thunder without a bolt of lightning

Freedom’s terminally ill now, and the future world is urging

You to sort the country out, you need to book a surgeon
Cut deep and cut right now, because I heard the rumour

The USA is sick, and Donald Trump

He is the tumour.

A Step Beyond Context

There are excited noises coming from Marlowe Manor at the moment.

I've just released my first novel "A Step Beyond Context" which is now available on Amazon as both a kindle ebook and a paperback.

It draws on ideas that first surfaced here in my Lucksmith stories featuring the irascible old meddler Lucas and his maverick team of dimensional travellers, and focuses on a young woman with a complicated past as a mercenary and computer hacker who has to balance this with her family background as a Regency lady.

Called home for a family gathering she is thrown headlong into intrigue and danger and takes it on herself to unpick the tangled web that ensues, crossing different worlds to find the truth.

It's published under a pen-name Finn Cullen and is available from the links below.

Kindle
Paperback
(these are the amazon.com links - other countries are available)

If you do feel inspired to give it a read please review and spread the word.

Millstone

To err is human, to forgive divine

But I’m no god, no angel, and therefore

I’ll own the frail humanity that’s mine

Eschew forgiveness and admit that flaw

Amazing grace is offered, but you know

If what you did was part of His great plan

Then call on Him, for Him to mercy show,

For He’s amazing.  I am just a man.

A Light Motive

Old demons never die, they simply dim their flames

And decompose through all the crime scene stages

Righteous hatred stiffening in the rigor of history

Prodded and examined, Questioned and challenged,

The images of fire debated and heat’s meaning discussed.

Then decomposition sets in and infernal foulness

Mulches down in parody and meme's rich loam

And makes of slicing stamping real, a simple word

A name to slander any, every, thing disliked,

Dust, then, to dust in sleeping eyes and demons wake

Unnoticed and unjust they change their name and sing

The same old songs, bright torchlit rallies seen anew

Men in rows, coloured spectacles where e-books burn

And the old fire kindles and liberty turns to face

The dawn with open, readied, leveled arms.

Jody Call

Drumbeats tonight and every night

Distant enough that you can lie to yourself

That it’s within you

Hypertense blood fleeing the pounding rhythm

Corpuscular refugees surge and rest, surge and rest,

Fading, flagging, carried in the current panic

Until depleted coming round again, again, again

To the drump, drump, drump

Of the remorseless heart and its everlong cadence,

Drum of the body politic, marking days gone and going

Bye, Koo.

Counting syllables

Does not make a haiku, pal

There's much more to them.

An exposition in verse of conditions, both meterological and biological, experienced during a daily commute from home to work.

Inside fire, and mist outside

Unpleasant, lengthy, morning ride

In Support of the Land of Crasti

They were here, right here, I’m sure

Last night before I slept I’m sure I left them here

By the bed, by the alarm clock

Ready for me to pick up in the morning

I almost babble with panic as fingers scrabble

Over throat lozenges and fake wood veneer

Filled to bursting with the stuff I picked up in school

And added to with things I shaped myself

(haphazard and unwieldy though they were)

Shining and polished, and so so many of them

All ready to use, right here, I’m sure they were

Where did they go?  

Could they have been so carelessly mislaid

Or did some thief, clever-creeping come to my room

In the night

In the silence

And take them away?

My years.  Where have they gone?

(in response to Studio30Plus prompt "Babble")

Anathema Drumbeat

In the dusty caverns of the temple, in the burned out ashes of the hall

In the empty echoing of ages we stand and smile and silence takes it all

Through the endless empty march of seconds, Through the days so brilliant and bleak

Through the nights and through the days so foolish, are we quite so foolish as to speak?

Where’s the voice that once proclaimed the sunlight, Where’s the hand that framed the tyger’s fire

Where’s the blood the drowned a deadly serpent?  Who’s the fool who dares to thus enquire?

We will raise our voices in the silence, we will raise our hands to show our cause,

We will shed our blood if blood needs shedding, fear and fright will never give us pause

We have something shining and surpassing, We have life that quickens every heart.

We have that within that passeth knowledge, We have light and darkness. We have art.

(For Studio30Plus and their prompt "Anathema")