My friend Ceri Shaw - originally from Pontypool but living a long time in Portland, Oregon -  tells me there's not much left-wing poetry being written out there.
   Although I found a number of environmentally-committed poets when I visited the States a few years back, the notions of leftist politics and poetry didn't tally.
   The days when Ginsberg and the Beats took on the full force of the establishment, or Denise Levertov railed against the war in Vietnam seem long gone.
   A unique feature of Welsh poetry in both languages is that we always have poets whose socialist ( and usually republican) sympathies are at the fore in their work.
   While this is rarely reflected in mainstream magazines - which tend to be dominated by university Creative Writing departments - it clearly sets us apart from any other country in these Isles.
   There is no doubt that Ireland, Scotland and England have their voices of dissent, but not on the level and intensity of Cymru and not with our strong sense of particular communities.
   One reason may be that the well-known poets from Ireland and Scotland soon cease to be marginalised and are sucked into the London scene and away from their roots.
   In Cymru, even our most famous poets like Gillian Clarke, have retained a sense of belonging and social conscience, however diluted.
   Here, there has always been a tradition of political writing from a working-class perspective, such as Idris Davies in English and Iwan Llwyd in Welsh.
   These are exciting times for a whole new generation of left-wing  poets, supported by both small and larger presses.
   I'm still astounded and delighted that Jonathan Edwards won the Costa Prize for 'My Family and other Superheroes' , when his politics are unashamedly socialist and republican.
   Like Jonathan, Sion Tomos Owen and Michael 'Mao' Oliver have read with Red Poets and featured in the magazine.
  Both have books coming out from Parthian this year : Sion's book 'Cawl' is a brothy mixture of poetry, stories and essays, sometimes using the vernacular of his native Rhondda valley. 
   Mao hails from Ely in Cardiff, but now lives in Siberia. His book of poetry 'The Elephant's Foot' promises to be full of wit and , like Sion's, a scathing take on the injustices of our planet.
   Last year saw the publication of 'Rock Life' by Gemma June Howell, originally from Graig-y- Rhacca council estate in Caerffili.
   Gemma cites the Red Poets as a major influence and has a unique style.
   Most of these 17 poems are written in the distinctive dialect of that area, similar yet different from the dialects of Rhondda and Merthyr.
   Howells has an excellent ear for everyday speech and captures its rhythms and cadences very well.
   She takes the personae of working-class people and shows how they struggle :-
           ' I live in the Valleys ooz gunna employ me?
            Get on-nuh bike tuh Cardiff?
            Yew fink bikes, buses, trains uh free?'
   As someone who writes in the vernacular and was inspired by the 'Swonzee' poems of Dave Hughes I immediately identified with her work.
   What I admire especially is the way she avoids sentimentality and isn't afraid to describe apathy with complete candour :-
   ' A'rite, she sez, stay air.
    End up like y'farva....in priz-zun,
    tha'll serve yew rite.
    A'rite Mam, I shout, I'll bee down inna min'eh.

   And when th' frunt-door slams, I turn ova.'
   Howell shows how problems of survival can so easily push people into crime, both stealing and drugs :-
   'Round-dee ouses we gor,
   door-tuh-door we knock.
   Ev'ree-fin's arf price
   fuh th' residents of the Rock.'
   But if anyone believes there's no hope, then read these poems out loud or listen to Howell live. The language defies any overall feeling of negativity in its forceful , funny and fierce way.
   In a world of so few shared experiences, it is a common bond between the people of a neglected estate.
   Living in Lewisham but very much a Merthyr boy, John Williams' latest collection 'Blood Cells' is the first of several by Red Poets to be published by Debbie Price's BBTS.
   Julie Pritchard, Tim Richards and Phil Howells will follow , in what promises to be a very lively series of publications.
   Williams owes much to punk poets like John Cooper-Clarke and Attila the Stockbroker.
   He adheres to couplets or sometimes alternate rhyming and his poetry's full of anger at a system which treats people with callous indifference or downright hostility.
   It opens with '3 Litre, 3 Seater Overeater' which captures a crazy night out in Merthyr :-
   'Brains flow down the gutter
    Brains left at home by the guilty nutter'
    Anyone from south Wales will appreciate the pun here.
   Like Howell, Williams writes in the language of the streets, but with himself as the central character in a drama where the police represent a heartless system.
   In one poem ' Is it a bird? A plane? No, it's my girl on the Jubilee' he tells of police brutality at a demo in Cyfarthfa Park, Merthyr against the visit of Mrs Windsor:-
   ' Thrown into crash barriers with no understanding
     From ground control to major prod
     Emotional PC please go easy learn how to do your job'
   Williams writes from first-hand experience with verve and humour.

   It's no coincidence that it was the young who embraced the surge towards a 'Yes' in Scotland and have taken to both Sanders in the States and Corbyn.
   We have yet to witness a similar phenomenon here in Cymru, but as far as poetry is concerned we are very much in the middle of a resurgence of left-wing fervour.


                                   SLEEPIN IN-A SUBWAY

Down inta the subway
call it ell, call it Ades,
I take my place
with the rollin cans
an piles o waste.

If on'y I ad rats
f companee or mangy strays ;
ee've flung me out, no key.
Concrete bed, the flat above
got motors an wheels.

Wearin my blankets
jacket an jumper,
I keep expectin visitors,
some gang o piss-eads
ewsin me as a target.

No spice or skunk
t carry all my worries 
far from my shiverin body.
I curl inta a foetus,
​wish I woz a baby.
  
   
     
        

   I had lost track of local working-class poet Dai 'The Rhyme' Davies recently.
  I assumed he'd been off on one of his over-60s jaunts cruising the Med ( avoiding Egypt, Tunisia and others).
   I almost literally bumped into him while walking down the hill to our Post Office. He nearly ran me over with his notorious shopping trolley.
   I didn't recognise it at first, as he'd pimped it up for St. Valentine's Day in some style.
   It was adorned in glitter, with several heart-shaped balloons tied to the handles.
   As he almost crashed into me in his haste, I was struck by the absence of his trusty hound Vlad, whose head usually pokes out of the front pouch.
   'Hiya Dai! Where you been?'
   'Can't stop Mike! Gotta catch the bus! Come round for a cuppa tomorrow.'
   And with that he shot off downhill, waving at the legendary John's bus-driver Ron to pick him up on the way up in order to go down to town ( a ritual in our village when it's raining).
   So, I caught up with him the day after Valentine's.
   Vlad was in the house, sitting by the fire and looking disconsolate.
   Dai, on the other hand, was full of it.
   ' I'm in love Mike! Can you believe it? Me! 73 years old and with a dicky chest.'
   'Who's the lucky lady Dai?'
   ' It's Iris Burnett and we met at this proper Writers' Club I'm attending now....they're all tidy poets not like some of your free verse Open Mic stuff. These ones all rhyme and she took to my poems straight off - 'Dai, she says, you don't half rhyme good. It's like nursery rhyme do rhyme, only for adults like.'
   But, tell you what Mike. It weren't her stanzas caught my eye......No, it was her shopping trolley. It's purple and velvety and all's I wanted to do was smooth it.
   She do love Vlad and all, but he can't stand her. He's jealous he is, aren't you Vlad?'
   The Jack Russell gave Dai an indifferent look, but had lost all his bounce.
   ' I've given up writing them political limericks for now. All's I write is love poems and my trolley's packed full of 'em. Don't think I could read them at the Writing Group mind......too embarrassing.
   They do call themselves the Merthyr Metres....clever eh? It's like a pun, plus you could do one of them alliterative tongue-twisters with it, like 'The Merthyr Metres had a meeting in Merthyr and wrote in metres.'
   Like it Mike?'
   I was delighted to see him so chirpy, but also keen to ask if he'd seen anything unusual on the pigeon front, as I'd heard reports of strange happenings down town.
   ' Funny you should say that Mike ......not only did this mad seagull burst one of my heart balloons, but I witnessed a really bloody terrible thing the other day.
   I was shopping down town and had just left Crosswords with my ham when there was total pandy-bloody-monium opposite.
   It was all kicking off at that Pet Shop....what's it called ,Pet Sounds? Heavy Petting?.....no, that's just my frame of mind.
   Anyroad, all these cage-birds come flying outa the shop squawking and flapping.....parrots, budgies, canaries, the lot.....straight inta the faces of passers-by.
   All the college students could do was reach for their phones and take pictures.....bloody dot-dot again!
   Then, following all these birds come about half a dozen pigeons. Well, at first I thought they was crows coz they was all blacked-up like the army with night camouflage.
   But they begun this weird coo-cooing like I never heard before. It sounded a bit like a chant at some demonstration.
   Barkin', or what?'
   'The RAF!' I uttered.
   'What? Do you reckon they'd take on them pigeons?'
   ' No Dai, it was the RAF....the Revolutionary Avian Front. That Wayne-O Pijin has begun his actions and I've got a funny feeling this is only the start of it.'

   This is Dai's love poem to his Iris which he composed on Valentine's Day and asked me to dot-dot for him ( he knows that she isn't online). ​    


                                          O MY IRIS!

Iris, O my Iris!
Never again will I go on the piss.

Soon as I saw your velvet trolley,
It made me feel so jolly.

The best trolley I ever seen,
It bulged with promises unseen.

You told me how you loved my lights,
How my dog was cwtshed up tight.

We were in the Writers' Club just a while
When we did share a warming smile.

Iris, O my Iris!
Just to say your name is bliss.    

   When I was a young boy growing up near Aberystwyth one day altered my perception of my father forever.
   Up to then I didn't regard him with awe, yet he was certainly much closer to me than my distant mother.
   She was an often absent figure, more preoccupied with her many male friends ( whose identities weren't disguised). I loved the music she played ('Shostakovitch' was a name I soon learnt to say!) and also listening to her recite Dylan Thomas into a Grundig tape-recorder in the kitchen.
   But she was the very antithesis of a maternal being.
   That day my dad and I went fishing together off the jetty at Tanyblwch, near our home in Penparcau.
   I must've had a tantrum because we caught no fish and he couldn't handle it.
   It was rare to be with him alone and that's why it stands out to this day.
   He completely lost it and snapped my new plastic rod into tiny pieces, throwing them at bewildered fish in Cardigan Bay below us.
   The drive home was something I'd become more familiar with as a teenager : his zig-zag forehead vein was bulging and writhing , as the car became a wheeled missile in his hands.
  I shrank to the size of Tom Thumb and shook with fear.
  I didn't know then that he was taking medication to try and prevent these episodes.
   I didn't know till years after that he had suffered a severe mental breakdown and spent some time in two psychiatric hospitals, diagnosed as a 'schizophrenic'.
   I certainly couldn't question that assessment, which never seemed to accurately describe his condition.
   I now look back at the many years of such incidents, not just involving me but countless others : neighbours, almost every boss he had, a policeman on a Cambridge street , an irate husband and his several wives.
  It actually astonishes me that he never killed anybody ( not to my knowledge anyway!).
   Knowing more about mental illness now, I realise that 'schizophrenia' didn't tally with his behaviour, nor did he show the extreme mood swings of someone who is bi-polar.
   It's hard to label it and while his medication did help, it didn't come close to curing it.  
   Yet, I ask myself, where did his illness end and his own personality begin?
   Like my mother, he was totally egocentric and drifted from one craze to the next, spending money on each one , but not on other people.
   Was this characteristic the product of some 13 years of growing up without a mother's presence, when my Gran worked away?
   Or was it an integral part of his neurosis : the charming man who could amaze with his erudition, yet soon step over into an uncontrollable rage which led to many catastrophes in his life, including divorces, dismissals and even court cases.
   I often wonder if he hadn't married my mother - someone equally self-involved, who could never express her emotions - whether he'd have changed for the better.
   ( But then....I wouldn't be here, nor would my brother and sister!).
   Just before my mother died, when she was confined to her bed in a Home, I discovered that she'd been addicted to the sleeping tablet Temazepam since the 1970s.
  This had a serious affect on her mental health and , later in life, she suffered from depression and spent time in a psychiatric hospital.
   She suppressed all her feelings and they must've emerged at night-time because, when I lived with her and my step-dad, I recall being woken by her screaming. It was a terrible noise of suffering and those tablets must have been her solution at the time.
   This shocked me because my mother always showed a very cold, hard attitude, not just to mental illness but physical as well.
   She often dismissed it as a sign of weakness and my father as  a flawed creature.
   She was a devotee of D.H. Lawrence and I often thought of her as a kind of Lady Chatterley, seeking her love and excitement elsewhere.
   Her addiction and depression came as a shock to me and she never confided in any of the family.
   I don't pretend to know where it came from, that darkness which is all-consuming and which offers no way out.
   Her life had become obsessed with finding another man and it's quite possible that no-one could satisfy her quest for perfection.
   She had been an excellent teacher - a Scientist like my father - who re-trained in Dance & Drama. She was a highly intelligent woman who ended up surrendering her independence entirely to one person.
   When I consider my sister, whose life has been seriously affected by a dreadful head injury ; my older daughter who has written so eloquently about her own struggles with depression in the anthology 'Gyrru Drwy Storom ' and my Gran, who died in a psychiatric hospital after years of Alzheimer's disease.....when I think of these, I do understand the prevalence and variety of such problems.
   Yet, I still imagine the human brain as being like Space : the more we seek to know, the more there is to know.
   Maybe we, as a species, should focus more on discovering its bewildering, fascinating but sometimes, very disturbing mysteries.


                                        HER  FOUR  SEASONS


She knew enough to know
there was no way out of there,
down on the third floor :
the codes, the locks.

'I want to go home!'
'I'm sorry but you can't!'
'You bitch, you fuckin bitch!'
The nurse, patient as a Samaritan.

She knew enough to wander
where she wasn't wanted
and saw the pictures on the walls
all painted by that woman

with the wild haystack hair
and long Indian robes
and always bare soles
and one eye put out.

The colours screamed at her,
the big-eyed people stared
like jailers with keys concealed,
like the nurses whispering.

The TV yelled 'Do it, do it!'
With a spoon ( knife and fork prohibited)
she tore into each canvas
quick before they pulled her back.

She was moved to another floor,
her dosage upped ; fuzzy TV voices
mumbled instructions she couldn't make out.
Blank walls, her four seasons. 
      

   After the sighting of fugitive Wayne-O Pijin in Winchfawr near Merthyr, I set about trying to trace his location.
   His erstwhile comrade Bazza of the Black Wood had heard a rumour that he was ' up to something in the mountains'.
   Former legal adviser Timothy Rich-Pickings believed that he'd actually joined his former enemies the seagulls in Cardiff ; while ex-campaign manager Al-Wings Jones thought he might be forming a religious coo-coo-mune.
   Eventually, I hatched a plan to capture an interview with the notorious criminal himself.
   Having purchased a bird-cage and chocolate doughnut, I placed the latter inside the former and draped a cloth over the cage.
   On a Sunday morning  I had an idea where I'd find one of Wayne-O's favourite wives Gloria McFly and , sure enough, there she was 'clearing up' overnight splashes of vomit down by the Labour Club.
   I told her that Pijin was inside the cage together with his final treat, before I would return him to Merthyr police station.
   {I had placed a small recording device inside the doughnut, so Wayne-O's voice came from the cage}.
   I assured Gloria that I'd promised Pijin 'one quick bonk' before returning him to captivity.
   Most obligingly, she eagerly entered the cage and I immediately locked the door.
   She was in such a flap that she even ignored the tempting doughnut, which was still emitting Wayne-O's words of wisdom.
   Once inside I explained that if she failed to inform me where Wayne-O was hiding, then I would take her to the police for aiding and abetting.
   She was distraught and denied that she knew of his whereabouts.
   However, she wanted me to promise I wouldn't turn him in and merely interview him.
   When I did so, she admitted she'd heard rumours that he was hiding in a cave in an abandoned limestone quarry.
   After several miles walking over difficult terrain and trying to avoid suspicious bands of 'magi pickers', we arrived at his possible hideaway.
   In the cave I thought I was being attacked by a plague of bats.
   I soon realised that these were, in fact, pigeons camouflaged in black, all wearing dark glasses and berets.
   I hurriedly agreed to release Gloria McFly and produced several corned -beef pasties to show I had no evil intentions.
   Sure enough, in the depths of the cave and perched on a ledge, was Wayne-O Pijin.
   On the rocky floor, spelt out in bird-droppings, were the letters RAF.
   When I asked if he'd joined the Air Force he coo-ackled.

   ' My friend, all is changed. I now reject totally the cult of Pijinism.
   When in prison, I had a revelation.
   I would never have escaped without the help of a seagull and a mynah bird.
   Now I know that all birds must act in solidarity.
   So I have formed the RAF, the Revolutionary Avian Front.
   Our avowed intention is to bring liberty to all oppressed birds : turkeys who will be slaughtered for Christmas, chickens daily assassinated in their thousands and to many imprisoned comrades in zoos and wildlife parks.
   My friend, you can tell your fellow No-Wings that from now on we will not act in servitude.
   We are guerillas on the wing!'


                                   PIJIN   GUERILLAS

We are the RAF,
we're guerillas in the air

we will unlock all cages
we'll release every factory hen

no Pretty Pollys squawking,
no budgies or canaries tweeting

we will open up every zoo,
bring down fences of wildlife parks

Homers no more, or clipped wings,
turkeys will be celebrating Christmas freedom 

we are the Revolutionary Avian Front :
​a bird-for-each-bird movement!