The Personal Website of Michael Foord

There's nothing like a cheeky grin from a child you don't know for cheering up the soul A collection of short poems from the last few months. For more of my poems give these pages a whirl: The Great I Am Fragments of a Once Broken Mind A Momentary Lapse of Reason My Son To Those Who Worry Aspects of the Divine Rage and Roar Tangle Heart Words, Fucking Words Muddy Waters Didn't There Used to be Magic Didn't there used to be magic? When you were five the world was magic. And then gradually, the magic fades. But it hasn't gone, it's still there. When you were five. A Short Poem by Irina Foord Roses are red, Violets are blue, We're weird, Just like you! Free to Fly Free to fly To soar and roam For a fire burns for me at home That I can see as far away As infinity. I know my way back For wherever my mind may go My heart stays here With you. Here I Sit Here I sit amidst the wreckage of my life. What pretty ru

"The measure of intelligence is the ability to change" -- Albert Einstein Stupidity and ignorance are not the same thing. In fact I reckon they're kind of the opposite of each other. There is an infinity of things that each of us doesn't know. So just being ignorant, not knowing things, can't possibly be the same as being stupid. No matter how clever you are, no matter how much you know, there's still an infinity of things you don't know. And a lot of what you don't know will seem blindingly obvious to other people, and they might think you're very stupid for not knowing. What's really stupid is not knowing that you're ignorant. We're all ignorant in so many ways, so I reckon the first step of being clever is acknowledging that. Know, as much as you're able, what you don't know and be willing to learn. And that makes you pretty clever. Being able to learn. If you're able to learn and to change and to grow then you&#

The iris in your eyes is a ring muscle, a sphincter. Making the eyes the sphincter to the soul. I was on antidepressants for about six or seven weeks this year. I was on the lowest normal dose, 50mg daily, of Sertraline. It's from a class of antidepressants called SSRIs, Selective Serotonine Reuptake Inhibitors. The most effective one, normally prescribed first in the UK, is called Citalopram. This is the one most of my friends on antidepressants are on. Citalopram has a reputation for being the hardest to come off of the common SSRIs. SSRIs work by raising the base level of serotonin in the brain, by reducing the ability of the body to re-absorb serotonin. Serotonin is the hormone responsible for love, happiness, and it turns out capacity to actually feel like doing anything. Antidepressants helped me for a little, but I sort of came off them by accident. A friend of mine suggested that her experience of life was flattened by antidepressants. Another friend described it

Living in a world of weird coincidences. That's what Jung called synchronicity and Gaiman calls magic. A couple of tales from my travels. Both from flying back from the US to the UK via a layover in Iceland. Iceland Air One of the things I like to do on a transatlantic flight is make friends with the flight attendants, in lieu of sleep. They're usually bored and not many people treat them like humans, so it's a good chance to make a friend you'll never see again. All of the Iceland Air employees, all 4000 of then including 1500 flight attendants, are Icelandic. It's not a requirement, just the way it is. The whole country is only 300 000 people or so, not much more than the population of Northampton depending on how you count. I asked Selma if she was from Rekjyavik, and then suggested it was a dumb question. If you're from Iceland you're probably from Rekjyavik right? I wasn't far off, about two thirds of the country live there. Her husban