Look for the hidden path
Search out the hidden path
Run down the hidden path
True love the hidden path

Love is something we all can find
Love is something for all mankind
Love is something, feels much better
Love is somewhere in a letter
Love is something when it is found
Love is something which will turn around
Love is something to make us laugh
Love is somewhere down a hidden path

Look for the hidden path
Search out the hidden path
Run down the hidden path
True love the hidden path

Love is something we cannot hide
Love is something a blushing bride
Love is something within our head
Love is somewhere inside our bed
Love is something we want so much
Love is something, a gentle touch
Love is something with which to heal
Love is somewhere we can reveal

Look for the hidden path
Search out the hidden path
Run down the hidden path
True love the hidden path

Harry Rogers, in the old study, 2012

Is this the end of all reason?
End of democracy season?
Where critics are tried for treason?
Unstuck beyond cohesion?
Assange says we’re last of the free.
The last to choose who we can be,
It’s death of the concept of me,
A I writes our new history.
Now, as the planet is burning,
I still have a certain yearning,
For days before machine learning,
Where ink filled pages are turning.
Governments give themselves access
To all our data in practice,
Feed minds with fake news in excess,
Breed ignorance of their praxis.
Is this the last throw of the dice?
We must become lions not mice,
Not enough to say “Please be nice,”
Somehow we must loosen their vice.
When nothing is quite what it seems,
Where tyrants manipulate dreams,
And castles are built of ice creams,
We can’t hear the most silent screams.
Perhaps it’s a little too late,
Maybe there’s too much on our plate,
Come, gather the good and the great,
One last chance, keep open the gate.

Harry Rogers, In The Red Bedroom, 23rd August 2021.

Fallacies fly across airwaves again,
Foreign policies broadcast day and night,
Newspeak rife, failure spun as success,
Witness chronic analysis abuse,
Across the mainstream media platforms.
Bombers for democracy gain traction,
Extreme centrists cloaked up in denial,
Former leaders praised up for their actions.
Arms contractors have stuffed themselves with gold,
Blood and treasure, of which we’re seldom told,
Truth now one more propaganda victim,
Reality swamped by fake journo lies.
This the twenty first century pity,
No-one accepts responsibility.

Harry Rogers, in the Red Bedroom, 22nd August 2021

Trawlers are active over your accounts,
They search for evidence to throw you out.
The party is under new management.
Those meetings on Zoom that you attended
All of them will have to be defended.
The party is under new management.
Those votes that you made to change policy
Consigned to dustbin of history.
The party is under new management.
Were you once in a room with Mr Corbyn?
Did you discuss human rights in Gaza?
You don’t have the right to investigate
Alternate positions, nor to conflate.
The party is under new management.
Everything now has become crystal clear,
You can’t contradict the word of Sir Keir.
The party is under new management.
If you feel upset no need to worry,
We’ll point you towards the Samaritans.
The party is under new management.
Gone are those days when your voice could be heard,
They’re checking you out, every single word.
The party is under new management.
They’ve replaced all thoughts of democracy,
Welcome to New Labour autocracy.
The party is under new management.

Harry Rogers, In the Red Bedroom, 21st August 2021.

Yesterday extreme centrists surpassed themselves.
Such a denial of responsibility,
Beyond Blair’s propensity to spin history.
One after another acclamations rained down.
Self congratulations for the Party’s good work
In Afghanistan, where people needed their help.
Reality meaningless when America
Has pulled the plug on global never ending war.
The use of force to impose ideology
Inextricably bound to failure in long run.
Weaponising of western liberalism
A patronising folly of rotten judgement.
Untold gallons of blood, shed year in, and year out,
As arms entrepreneurs revelled in abandon.
Corrupt political privateers filled their boots,
Whilst social experiments ran onto the rocks.
Outside of urban elites poverty prevailed,
Propaganda victory handed on a plate.
These days imperialists watch too much telly,
They’ve forgotten to read their Machiavelli.
Regime change comes not from capitalist steeple,
Usually it stems from the heart of the people.

Harry Rogers in The Red Bedroom, 19th August 2021.

The uprising
The uprising
Of 1831

Merthyr Tydfil
Merthyr Tydfil
In 1831

Give us cheese
Give us bread
In 1831

Flying the flags
Of deep blood red
In 1831

The uprising
The uprising
Of 1831

A flowering
Of the people
In 1831

Dic Penderyn
He stood so brave
In 1831

Innocent man
Sent to his grave
In 1831

Merthyr Rising
Takes us all back
To 1831

Brings spirits back
Where they belong
In 1831

Red Poet’s read
Strong polemics
Of 1831

Once more we raise
Loaves up on sticks
Like 1831

Merthyr Rising
Merthyr Rising
Now Rising up as one

As the people did
Brave people did
In 1831

We shall not lie
Down in the mud
We will rise up as one

Still fly the flags
Of deep red blood
From 1831

Harry Rogers, Pencnwcau, late night, 24 October 2018.

Accusations rain down hard in New York,
A song and dance man skips through smoke and fire.
Memory’s faded fifty six years on,
Tambourines clash, rolling stone gathers moss.
Approach Eden’s gate, boots no longer fit,
Perhaps the highway now leads on to hell.
Question marks abound, truth told or liar,
From the lost days at the Chelsea Hotel.
Whither now poet from Minnesota?
Time tangles, water muddies, luck runs out.
Apologists fill up their pens with ink,
Lexicologists trawl through every verse,
Searching for clues, or havens to shelter
From storms, hurricanes, perhaps even worse.

Harry Rogers, Y Cwtch, 17th August 2021

I watch the Afghan bourgeoisie
Funnel through airport lounge and flee.
Earlier, the same old story,
Leader flew wrapped in “Old Glory”.
The Taliban have won, of course,
And now? They have their own air force.
Low grade British politicians
Squabble with bankrupt positions.
Tory, Lib-Dem, right wing Labour,
Government by US sabre.
From Downing Street nothing is heard,
The whole thing now becomes absurd.
Parliament is to be recalled,
Too late to undo mistakes old.
Kabul staff climb onto chopper,
Western leaders come a cropper.
It’s lackaday for poor Old Joe,
And Johnson, though you’d never know.
New caliphate now has risen,
Yet Bush and Blair? Not in prison,
People asking “What was this for?”
“Did we need this illegal war?”
Fortunes have been salted away,
The killings ramp up every day.
We eat our first crop of courgettes,
We know we ain’t seen nothing yet.

Harry Rogers, in the Red Bedroom, 16th August 2021

Through half closed eyes things are more than they seem,
I’m in a Pembrokeshire National Park dream
I ride an Unbroken Pony today,
This first time he carries me clean away,
Over Preseli Hills we run and run,
True freedom we share, wild horse and tame man.
A hobby flies from Africa, on high,
Chases a swallow across crystal sky,
Grasshoppers all around me do chirrup,
I whoop loud as I stand in the stirrup,
Murders in Plymouth, bad climate change news,
Taliban takeover, more Covid blues,
All left behind in this sweet reverie,
Would it were real, if you know what I mean.

Harry Rogers In The Red Bedroom, 14th August 2021.

Churchill sent his troops into Llanelli,
For to break up a railway workers strike
1911, a militant year,
When people earned much more than they were paid.
In Britain, one in ten, outside the gates,
Workers ranked together on picket lines,
Seamen and dockers, colliers, miners,
Pre first world war working class radicals
Stood strong, side by side, as they fought for change.
Churchill, ruthless, ordered fixed bayonets
To be used on the streets of Llanelli.
Some jumped up nob mumbled riot act words,
Quiet, so most people there never heard,
Naked iron fists slid from velvet gloves.
After one warning shot, fired over heads,
Tin plater, Jac, fell dead in Llanelli
With English lead pumped into his belly,
All told six lay dead, hundreds more wounded,
As London released it’s Leviathan.
Churchill had acted as Thomas Hobbes taught,
Keep people in order with only one thought,
Keep all in awe of terror of the sword,
As they made martyrs they sang praise the lord.
Nothing Churchill did
will ‘ere be forgot,
This butcher of comrades he ordered shot,
As they fought for our rights in Llanelli.
When they died for our rights in Llanelli.
This precursive act, and so many more,
Prefigured mass slaughter in first world war,
Workers lives come cheap throughout history,
As they did on the streets of Llanelli.
Stay staunch now comrades, keep singing our songs,
We won’t forget them, their fight carries on,
Our heroes on the streets of Llanelli.

Harry Rogers, In the Red Bedroom, 19th July 2021.

I will be reading this poem at this Live Poets Society Event on Monday 16th August at 7.00pm British Summer Time. https://facebook.com/events/s/live-poets-riot-at-llanelli/2872288779703594/

Turn the party inside out
Flush those lefties down the drain,
This is what they’re all about,
Bring back Tony Blair again.
Nevermind illegal war,
Dubya pacts and cluster bombs,
This is what they’re really for,
Rebuild New Labour fiefdoms.
Let the housing market rip,
Wrap up warm in union jacks,
Occupy ground from UKIP,
Sell their soul to right wing hacks.
There is no alternative,
Once more party battle cry,
Mandelson and Kinnock live,
No red clouds in clear blue sky.
Throw the unions to the dogs,
Wear business suits, shoot a cuff,
Write in Sun, on Tory blogs,
Spin Ayn Rand like Call My Bluff.
Outside I deplore these ghouls,
Who tricked us with PFIs,
Again wouldst take us for fools,
Watch out for fake alibis.
On the left we’re mourning still
The Corbyn interruption,
I’ll not be back, had my fill
Of careerist corruption.

Harry Rogers, Edwinstowe, 7th August 2021.

I saw a German woman on the news say that nature is angry.
She stood beside the wreckage of her home as dirty brown torrent swept under a nearby bridge.
She is clearly devastated, as are thousands of people in Germany, Belgium, France and Holland.
Houses swept away, cars and lorries swept away, roads, motorways, railways, infrastructure all ripped up.
I understand how people can say that nature is angry, as if nature is a being.
One can walk this earth for decades, nature, not being sentient, behaves anarchically.
No matter how much we, as a species, might convince ourselves of our ability to control nature, or the weather, we find that to be a fallacy.
What we appear to be good at is continuously demonstrating a propensity to act without thought of consequences, especially where the well being of the planet is concerned.
As the heat waves rage, rather than question our own actions, humans rush to buy air conditioning units, ever bigger refrigeration cabinets with built in ice makers and smart chips to inform us when we are running low on produce.
On a macro level politicians and developers prance around implementing dreamscapes from the misguided minds of ambitious 20th Century mindset architects and planners, designed for a vision of society that ultimately is destructive in a myriad of ways.
We need to move on from concrete and glass phallic symbols lancing cityscape skies as legacies of power obsessed, careerist, oligarchs.
The production of concrete is, in itself, a process that is responsible for 7.5% of global warming. And yet this “miracle” product is the go to material for projects large and small across the planet.
When I look back sixty five years to that time when I, as a ten year old boy, first looked at The Queens House and The Royal Maritime Museum from outside the Royal Observatory, in Greenwich Park, it stood alone and majestic against a backdrop of low level London. Now the legacy to Thatcherism monstrosity that is the Canary Wharf development defiles that view in an act of pure vandalism that is hard to surpass. The more time that passes the more jaded that whole area looks. It is a crime against aesthetic beauty. Concrete junkie architects are, even now, designing ever more paens to brutalism in cities across the planet. Prizes are offered for the most innovative use of concrete. The production of cement is helping to destroy the planet through contributing towards global warming, but it is also responsible for some of the most hideous buildings in history, and this rotten Tory government wants to make such development even easier to implement by relaxing planning rules and regulations.
I won’t be here in sixty years time, but I dread to imagine what the view from the foot of General Wolfe’s Statue in Greenwich Park will look like then.

Harry Rogers, In The Yellow Room, 5th August 2021.

Words come hard now my elder family
members are deceased. I now am eldest.
The realisation that I am next
in line for the morgue, for eternal sleep,
weighs, heavily, as I try to recall.
I think about those now gone before me.
Moments remembered now only by me,
shared solely between me and them alone.
Tenderness, laughter, anger, fun and love.
Many thoughts flood my mind in a jumble
of unconnected images and sounds.
Weddings, Birthdays, Christmas time, and parties.
Those days, long gone, only I know about.
Holidays, tete a tetes in restaurants,
songs played just for me at the piano.
Wee Willie Harris on Six Five Special,
in black and white in grandmother’s kitchen,
air rifles and golf clubs in grandad’s shed,
cigarettes, brandy and Coty L’Aimant,
every last one of them stood round the font.
Mostly the waters we sailed on were smooth.
Rarely did storms rage, well not openly.
Now that I’ve risen on high, from beneath,
do I understand how mortal is grief.

Harry Rogers, In the Yellow Room, 4th August 2021.

Locked away in your poison cabinet
Are those thoughts never knowingly revealed.
Where they came from nobody will ever know.
No matter who tries to storm your ramparts,
Your impregnable castle remains safe.
The only way anyone gets access,
Is those times when you leave your drawbridge down.
Poe like imps and tricksters hide in corners,
Ready to whisper fake thoughts to beguile
You into morose, and pain filled, actions.
Don’t want to be part of your domesday book,
Nor caught up in your hurtful sideways look,
Sit by your open fire, live in your past,
Rewrite history, as life flies by fast.
Miss out on good times, the laughter and fun,
You’ll never know as backwards you run.
Time runs out,
Time runs out,
Now is now,
Then was then.
Time and again,
Time is up,
Clocks run down,
Time…runs….out.

Harry Rogers In the Yellow Room, 31st July 2021.