to sculp a new david - research.monash.edu

To sculp a new David

with COVID-19 poems

By

Edwin Creely

Melbourne, Australia

Sculp a new David /Edwin Creely 2

This diverse collection of original poems for this time,

including verse written about COVID-19, presents

explorations of being human and living in our complex

world with each other. It also has many nature poems that

reflect my concern about our connection with nature and

the preservation of the natural world. Some of these

poems are intensely personal, other are meditative

reflections on life and issues to do with living justly and

fully in this time.

My centrepiece poem, To Sculpt a new David, considers what

it means to be a man in a time of moving to full equality

of men and women. These poems are designed to

challenge and provoke thought, as well as create reflection

about living in a time of profound change.

To sculpt a new David has been written and produced by Edwin Creely

© Edwin Creely, 2020

ISBN: 9798696236216


LIST OF POEMS

A poison Is this me?

Stance To look

Flood my soul Babylon

No one can lift but you Hold them

Fucking silence Rotting

This dual thing (love) I am the one

Wake, my souls! The pot of gold

Cracks Lift

Post-atheist Time to breath

Connection Knew not themselves

Before dawn Teach me

Come join the danger! Shall be

In silence Come love

When love smiles Strange Alien

My refuge (words) The darkness

Circle of white Exist now

See the horizon Wet


The lot Conquered Dark water

Speak through whisky Mine alone!

This Plato’s child

Surface Can you feel my anger?

Heat Present

A bunch of atoms To sculpt a new David

On the horizon The scene

Be still How do I feel? I see you there

Perennial Be a man

Sleep Delicate Intimacy

My darling ones Stand with me

Old tree O god

Gratitude’s release The graves This cloth I will not Salvation

Time to be Irony

Only you see Ask me not My stories Poetic spell Grand plan


Words Eden Grace

This place Suffering To forget Kindness Relentless

Retrospective Unpredictable

An ethics No songs

Say it Take me

‘Shared humanity’ Delusion

Ash Wednesday I thirst

Of the water made This day

Gift? Curse? Of the earth Back to life Deprecation

Reservoir Call it out

Wait Looking up I am mad Breech Stop

Deepness Mystery

Dreaming The now Infinite

Intangible Traces Change


Spark Strike out Silence fell

Economy|biology A work for modern times

Waves Our light

Two ducks Bursting

Consolation Swirl

Photos New foundation

Sadness Measuring Courage God is Desert

Divided Give back That’s okay

The universe Examination

Thus is America Winter morning in Kinglake

Centre|essence Skin

On a screen Sharp arrow

Regret Times

Burying them Night passion

The singer Go on living

One year With words

Masked people Synchrony


Progress Presence|Absence

Expansive I write

The invisible Limits of control The poet’s pen

Refraction The only one

This earth Dark days Flowing

From home Touch Within Clue

Resolution Sunrise Words

The man on the path Being in love

Flux Of now Mystery

Category|Being Got to be better What happens? Late winter day

Of love Not so old

Thread Around and around

I am here Not cheap Definition Steady rain Invitation Two faces

Forgiveness


What the world needs now Overview

Escape The space between Phenomenological

The rain Singing

Spring (part 1) Spring (part 2)

The trees Tomorrows

Goodbye No thought

Ideology Pockets

Which me? Filters

Lockdown My grandmother

Jagged Our kookaburra

Point I am

Absence The door We go on

Tied Unicorn

Human|category Pride Walk

We write Signpost

Ambiguity Holy ground

Needle Fight

In sleep Not a waste


Mandala Centeredness

Wisdom The deep

There Gratitude

In the middle of the night Conversation

Silence is around Lies

The Queen The joy of self

Zero Awareness|Being

Between Reign

See it as it is Look beyond Space to be New child Numbers


POEMS

A poison

We feed the baby not milk, we feed the baby not the openness of life—we feed the baby poison instead—not fast but slow, a poison that lingers stealthily and unrelenting with the child, a poison that keeps the body alive but not the soul. Is this me?

What is this me, this self, that I construct that also lives with the flashing surprises of anger, fear, vulnerability, concern and darkness that shoot unexpected out of strange crevices. I keep going ‘cause I must, and I shift this fluid self to be the show for any occasion; but the body throws up the the gnawing creep of age that takes the self’s construction to the bitter thought of death, or worse, the signs of decline. Yes, what is this self that I craft for others but not myself? —the put-ons, neatness and pretence, the savvy line said at the right time


and place—what is this house of repute that I have built that I don’t like living in at all? And the construction is about what might be and about the approvals that drive the world and helps me survive, pay the bills, and be what I believe I must be as a social being of worth. What is this me, this self, when my conscience speaks against it and says that all is not right, and the world is not well, and our ways of being should change but there seems no way to move. Stance

I want to be recognised, but I don’t want recognition; I want to be admired but I don’t want admiration. I want my life to count, but I don’t want it counted; I want to act with bravery, but I don’t want to be brave.


To look

Let me look: look inside out look outside in, let me see these many ways and angles; see, though dimly, for I cannot see all in this dark and light, see because it is my honour to see, and to look in this tiny space that is my own true life. Flood my soul

I see your beauty that shines through smiles, and tears and touch, and brings to me the energy of the universe to fill my soul with hope. Babylon

The light of Babylon is rising across the thin threads of history, in mystery across time, from the cradle of civilisation to recent demise, but the cries go on from the captives and the gate of god is now the fate that comes to all from the rich Fertile Crescent to the


desert of despair, from the Babel of confusion to the truth that is no truth at all. No one can lift but you

Suffering, doom, is there in the eyes that divide and look two ways, not knowing which is truth and which is lies; suffering rests like a cloud of toxicity that no one can lift but you, just you—the one above the feeble best. Hold them

You, the heartless one, collect my tears and hold them in jars of stone—cold; hold them there till they are aged with the cure of life; hold them there till death sucks them up to the sky; hold them till the clouds burst and they are thrown on the waiting dry earth. Hold them, hold them, these precious drops that contain all of humanity, contain, the suffering, the love, the pain, the fear,


the joys and laughter that soon fades away. Hold them, heartless one— let the dam be full, let the storm be held. Fucking silence

We live in fucking silence, so fucking silent I can hear its sound, here the fucking sound roaring out in nothing—hear the words of Simon and Garfunkel, falling, falling down, falling down in fucking absence, while we drink our coke and our beer and laugh so that no fucking one can hear. Rotting

I am not embarrassed anymore to speak words that need to fall, even on ears that will not hear; I am no ashamed to call out loud some truth that pulls apart the rotting core of this decay. Are you hearing? Are you seeing what I see? Can you smell the rotting flesh of hypocrisy? Hear my words!


Know the truth that scares you to your bones. See that this world is not all it appears or seems to be.

This dual thing (love)

Love is this human thing, this animal thing, that binds and repulses, and draws us in and makes us strive beyond the places we thought we would go. Love is this dual thing of holding on and letting go—for to hold on too tight is not love anymore and to let go too easily is not to seek to know love at all. I am the one

I am this one who can cry beyond the grave; I am this one who can shout through the pain. I am standing in a crowd


and feeling alone; I am lying in darkness and seeing this sin. I am feeling so weak but my voice is so strong; I am feeling this empty but my mind is alive. This is me and me alone making a decision to be the One. Wake, my souls!

Can you feel your own humanity? Billionaire died from his own hand. Can you feel the inhumanity that sweeps its death on countless hands? Can you see your contradiction? Paradise is not for all. Can you see the world’s infection that plays out well on mealtime screens? Can you hear the sounds of crying? Superstar just up and died. Can you hear the leaders lying, across the land where silence sighs? Can you smell the forests burning? Mother crumpled on the road. Can you smell the corpses rotting, through the subtle waft of your perfume?


Awake! Awake, my souls! Look into the light, the dark. There is nothing more than this. There is nothing worse than loss. The pot of gold

White, black, brown–and all the colours of the rainbow whose pot of gold lies waiting for us at the end of the circle of multiple light that we all see and share. JUSTICE is that pot that hides in the pool of light that is one colour and every colour. I saw it one day while in the car; it made me stop in the middle of the road and sigh, and be entranced in its beauty, till the man in the car behind blew his horn and sped off with a one finger salute to my moment of inspiration profound. I wonder if he saw the rainbow too and thought about that pot of gold that Martin Luther King saw; and I wonder if he felt the golden universal that we both shared.


Cracks

The cracks, the cracks are there, at the death of each day, at the rise of lightened sky, in the full moon beaming out the lonely call of night. The cracks, the cracks are formed and they are deep as deep itself, as deep as love is felt in the darkness of the loss and the shadows that cross and cross the sleeping weeping land. Lift

Lift our hands to friendship, lift our hands to joy; lift our hands to the fragile ones that have nothing left at all.

Lift our voice to hard fought love, lift our voice to pain; lift our voice to the suffering ones, so they can hear our call. Raise your hands to the other! Lift your voice of concern! Cry for justice across this land till it is loud, and strong, and heard. Never let the cruelty win, never turn away; lift your hands and celebrate,


and raise your fist up high. Together we have a winner, together we will cry, and wash this place with our tears and stand till we shall die. Lift your hands with friendship, lift your voice with love; stand this ground together and let Truth be our guide. Post-atheist

God is in the world itself, scattered amongst the doom and in the rising warmth of sun, in ground as fine as dust, as something to behold when there’s nothing really there at all, as a myth to hold close, even unto death. In the rising and the falling this God thing undefined seems to come unrelenting and then go and die in the tears that follow loss and the scientist’s eye and the axiomatic turn that waits to tear God asunder from the breach. There is nothing in the universe but the stuff itself as appearance without a cause, as its own god


unfolding and becoming what it will; and if there is more, which well might be, then what do I care? For existence is not the question (it never was!); for the question is what and how it shalt appear in the diverse forms that fit the human and the Fall.

Time to breath

I live with uncertainty as I live with the clouds that one day are fluffy and high in the sky, playing around the sun, and the next are dark and loaded and ready to drop on the living, the dead and the unliving alike. That is the life game of what is to come and what will be in these days that are as temporary as the flowers in the field and the bees that hover over them waiting for the succulent nectar to brew. So, I will stand in the storm bold if it comes, and I will sniff the flowers full that are in bloom, and I will savour the honey of the bees, and I will say many words of love and praise if I am lucky and have much time to breath.


Connection

O connection that is life, O for a touch that is beyond death. O for the music of skin on skin, O for the feeling of being itself. Knew not themselves

I will not live to see this destruction that’s coming slowly, coming fast, peaking over the horizon as the Jesus cloud that’s not from heaven and not about hell, but about creatures that once lived that knew not themselves. Before dawn

In the dark small hours before dawn, when eyes should be shut, and minds stilled, and night is silent waiting for the radiant sun, it is here that sleep is far away, expelled from her Garden of Dreams, and the fingers move and the words flow, and the sleepy soul is open to say whatever it will.


Teach me

Teach me ever to be me; teach me ever, ever, ever to be free. Teach me always to look to the sky; teach me till the universe shall die. But live it will inside this man that’s me; this man that shall be no more and no less. than free. Come join the danger!

My poetry is political, atypical, uncomfortable, mad, treading in the danger zone, where only fools dare go for fear of ridicule. But here I stand, here I stand, you fuckers! While others stand outside and take their well-honed praise. Here I stand, as fool, who here, now! decides to be nothing but a voice


calling in the wilderness, calling for all to wash themselves in Jordan’s dangerous stream. Can you feel it? Or are you too resolved? So, come all ye who lead this sacred fragile place– come all ye! Leave the folly of your ways. Come join me maddened; come join the danger that Is the hope–come! Come join me all of you who feel this weight of sin that came from multiplying and conquering, and let us purge ourselves in the unsettled stream, and strip away the faith that have it all we must. Let’s purge ourselves, washing away our politics and greed till the lamb shall indeed lay down with the wolf.


Shall be

When the shall be is in the shall be, where will I be in the shall be among the things that might have been? Abandonment

Abandonment is not leaving– it is the grief from the silent turning away and no longer believing that that you are there with belonging, there with the right to love and there when thoughts run to you. In silence

In silence I contemplate this beautiful world, with beautiful landscapes and beautiful people, with beautiful care that’s there beyond the shabby walls that shut us out from each other’s true eyes. In silence I feel for the other, for the sister and the brother of this multitudinous family


that lives around me, and in me, and far away. In silence I see into this living soul that is my good self, my bad self, my self of indifference that views the other with coloured eyes, and I, in my silence, am terrified by what I see. In silence I contemplate truth, not as some ideal of absent gods removed from flesh and blood and the travail of tears, but in the mess of humanity– in living together rough, and working out how we can be united, clenching hand-in-hand as sisters and brothers, as family surviving together, thriving together, working together, believing together that heaven is possible, even if it is not there at all. In silence I contemplate beauty, and it is you that I see.


Come love

Come to me at midnight; Come to me at noon; Come when unexpected, Or when I’m waiting in the gloom. See me in my weakness, See me in my strength; See the many faces That create the one I am. Sit with me in silence, Sit with me as friend; Sit with me as the wind blows and never leave again. Wait with me in ashes, Wait with me in pain; Wait till the time of death Has gone past his hour again. Come love and see this mortal waiting at the door; sit with me steadfast and wait till breath be gone. When love smiles

When I despair of the world there is always love that seeps out in unexpected corners to keep the fragile faith alive and fill the empty bucket of my joy.


When I think of this universe of icy loneliness in which I spin, and wonder about brevity in all its forms, love and passion come to keep the moment alive, for that is all there ever is and shalt forever be. When love smiles at me and winks its eye of hope, I take a second look and dream that life is by this defined, even if there is decay; for in this smile I see myself held sure by something like the velvet touch of peace. Strange

Strange place to be– both in and out, part of and removed, a familiar alienation. The voice it speaks, and there is utterance, but what is heard–the same old pattern, a point of meaning with nothing new. Yes, strange–like this life that’s changing but remains the same, like connection and disconnection at the same time, like love that’s not infused with hate


but with something darker: Distain!

Alien I have moved, that much is clear, and it has been through so much stealth that I have not seen the change, and thought I remained the same when in truth I am now an alien in my own place. My refuge (words)

It is to words that I go as refuge in this life of the ordinary, of success, and disappointment. Words are the friends that tell my story and lift my head above the dust on my feet to the grandness of the sky.

The darkness The darkness: the darkness of the night, the darkness of the day flowing, the darkness everywhere like


the threads of the universe invisible to sight. The darkness watching but not watched, not diminished by the light; silent and waiting like it always has, everything and nothing as the core of mystery itself. Circle of white

The great melted gold in the blue cast sky looks down on me in the hot centre of the summer day, and I look back at this circle of white, just long enough to get a glimpse of its life and death, dependent under its gaze and feeling with gratitude the heated smile on display. Exist now

I exist now in the moment between the events and memories of many yesterday’s and the expectations of calendared tomorrows, surrounded by the fears of what might be.


See the horizon

I am not buying into this shit and entering this pit that you want to drop me in; for I am resolved to be better than that and lift my head above the petty to see the prospect of what I strive to be. I want to lift my eyes above the shit and see the sun coming over the horizon to welcome in this day of fresh beginnings and full living. Wet

When earth meets water from the urgent clouds and all the world is grey and wet with nourishing tears, it is then that green has the day and life bursts forth with fulness, as the birds sing and merry in the steady rain. The lot

I guess that’s it–that’s the lot that comes to us; that’s the crazy haze of living


and breathing through smiles and tears and fears that hang on like barnacles on a hull left to rot and rust in its shallow water grave. That’s the lot and we the brave want more like in Oliver’s Twist; we may want more but this plate is all there is and when it’s cleaned the circle ends. That’s the lot–the circle ends! The lot–for this is it and memory is all that’s left. This is it. Conquered

All powerful human, so convinced by the vision of a world conquered and tuned to this evolved will and civilised distain. But the world is not fooled by a creature still dependent, so weak in the face of fury that contends with arrogance.


Dark water

Dark water still and potent black; deep longing mystery that’s heartlessly cold within the depths that holds the secrets none can fully tell. Dark water stirring; movement that is life that is death, that is waiting within the urgent liquid dim of consciousness itself. Speak through whisky

I speak through the whisky, and the whisky speaks through me— speaks the universal sound of the meaning of this place, this place of laughs and tears. The smoky drop distilled from life opens up the channels of my fears and loves, and fills me with such hope and fairy dreamy stuff, only to drop me down and down into the pit. Let me sit with a bottle and a glass and let it snake itself warm inside of me and lubricate those parts of weal and woe so I shalt ne’er forget the human that I am.


Mine alone!

If it be true that I have this brief and trembling patch of earthy time to make my way and do something within the line that’s drawn around my life, then let it be mine alone to fill with greatness or the ordinariness of despair, mine alone—you hear!— to create with energy, to build or to fuckup as I please, mine alone to dream and savour or waste with regret, mine alone to live out fully or empty and sad as I wish, mine alone to take with me to my boundless forgotten grave. Mine alone! This

There is this among all the ways it might have gone; there is thus the creation of all that is as a speck of infinity, as moments caught in moments, the now that came from many nows, the creation


that is always creating–there is this–not perfection, just us. Plato’s child

The cynics among us say they believe that love is Plato’s child: a form without substance, a dream that’s not awake. I say instead that love is the child that lives in me as dream amidst the troubled feeble world where dreams are commodities to be leased or bought or sold. Surface

I am the laughing clown– laughing and crying, crying and laughing, sighing from the curtain to the stage. I am the painted fool– holding back the tears that spoil the paint and taints the illusion that all is fucking well. I am the one of surface– living without depth


but depth is what I need as I plead with this mask to come loose and let the hidden stain ooze out. Can you feel my anger?

Can you feel my anger that is not for thee but for the THOU that uses only the separated person, only the OBJECT for weeping flesh, and only the SECRET words for those who seek the truth that is just and free? Can you feel my anger? Heat

The long body of heat lays its sweaty flesh across the sighing land, and all the creatures beneath its bulbous weight feel the oppression that cannot lift till the sleek body of cool changing wind lures the heating flesh away to play for just a short moment of delicious respite.


Present

I live right here in present presence, but always moving forward to futures with tiny steps and expansive vision; and yet I live as well in what’s gone and done as completion, and only with knowledge as I look back seeing, then look forward with expectation renewed. A bunch of atoms

A bunch of atoms feeling, a load of stuff that thinks, that’s aware of being— holy shit just stop and consider a second— a collection of bits so small we can never see them, and these drops of twirling energy makeup all of this humanness; doesn’t seem possible, yet here we are—here we are my friends— every last one of us are mere atoms strewn around in the flow of the world—moving and breathing and eating and shitting and sleeping, and fucking and dreaming and dying as atoms to atoms, flesh to flesh, mind to mind, and dust to dust—a bunch of atoms— living and hoping in the turning estate of this world.


To sculpt a new David

The place of men is changing, has changed, and they are no longer the centre of all that makes and defines the history of humankind’s brief and daring escapade in the long eons of planet earth’s evolutionary path. Women have risen and are rising, with fists to the blue sky smiling, and men walk beside, not in front, as friends, companions, carers, sojourners, lovers, co-makers, and yes, even rivals; women are doing and creating, thinking and being, as agents strong for their own sake, not just for men; so men have to find a new centre to the ways of being a man, a new existence and shape that is not about the the tradition, the divide, the religion, the hunter or the tribe, but about fresh discoveries and insights into the human in the man, and the person in the woman. What will that new centre be? What is this new creation sculptured by thee? Perhaps it is a fresh artistic vision about men not seeing themselves as warriors apart, defined in dominance, demanding respect,


standing like David proud and erect in the square, for those times have passed, but about men together, men for humanity, men for community, men for family, men for diversity, men for women, men for each other, and each man for healing personally, globally. Perhaps it is about recognising a new time in the evolution of a species that, hitherto, under the fist of men, hath wrought destruction, prejudice, oppression and cruelty, and given us the bloody spectre of masculine war; but now is the moment for delicious change, for a revolution from equality’s beat, for emergence formed in curiosity, for nurturing each other kind, for circles of peace and reconciliation, and for respecting the planet weakly blue that suckles us all unseen, even if we live as reckless children, quite apart, quite naive. Yes, the place of men is changing, but the tasting is sweet, not Ill or bitter; so let us taste together, and open our hands at the table, as women take their place,


in our evolutionary path, and men see the gain, and women new vistas, as we bring tools together, to sculpt a new David. The marble awaits! On the horizon

The smoke hovers in the valley, unmoving scent in the air, expectation heightening, fearful waiting for the glow on the horizon and the sparks that fly relentlessly with the wind. Memories packed in a bag that sits in a hot dusty car, with the sun’s hazy baking overhead and the shimmering heat of the day rippling across the fields and into the dense bush that lies always waiting. Smoke signs the horizon in orange and then the faintest glow that grows with the wind and the scurry of animals across the landscape, then the roar of the engine and the dust cloud that waves goodbye.


The scene

The sun is shining high, the scene is beauty amplified, and everything is not okay; among the serene there is the despair stirring and the heavy wonder about what might have been. Birds flying and landing on trees with the breeze soft in the afternoon; and life is rising as the mood dives with the leaves that fall in anticipation of the coming days without you. The sky is a blue painting hovering above the scene, enclosing the world entire; but below there are the shadows and the agony of life’s retreat that will not be moved by sun, breeze, or temporary blue. Be still

Be still and be human. Beyond the fallow fields of dire times, there lies the harvest that keeps us alive and gives us the grains of hope. The cycle goes on


as it always has. The beautiful rose dies but the plant lives in its intimacy with the earth. Water it and believe in life. Water it. The human is not more than the rose. Be still and tend the earth. Be still and nurture each other. How do I feel?

The world is changing, small and big, inside and out, bodies beyond minds, fear beyond hope. How do I feel? Sleepless in the world. Tender and raging, all at once. Home but not safe. Should I laugh? Yes, probably, maybe not. Nobody knows what’s to be done anymore. Maybe nothing, possibly much.


It is here that I am, sober and between; and on this night of waking dreams, I dare not look ahead. I see you there

I see you there unseen—millions behind the windows peering out on empty streets and wondering about an end that will not come. I see you there imprisoned by an enemy unseen—held together by the threads of dignity that are stretched and pulled beyond relief. Nothing matters against this darkness except the empty streets and the people locked away—not knowing the hour or the day for health, death or release. I see you there in the buildings seeking a fragment of humanity, and while the world peers through a camera lens, you look out—on empty streets pondering why. For Italy Perennial

Time is an intimate circle made not of moments moving endlessly


around the drum of nows but of seasons shifting from loss to budded growth, from the dread of death to spring’s emergence, from the dank tomb of yesterday’s frayed winter bodies to the zest that is the risen new life. Be a man

Be a man, be a man, you say, whatever that means. I am a man but that is not your meaning, for you ask me to be what I am not, or cannot conceive. I am, rather, a man divided— with all the parts that make me a man, but not the parts that makes me the man you believe I should be. I shall forever fall short and live with the ignominy of being just a person who is no man at all.


Sleep

We are all in a great big snug fucking opium sleep sponsored by the elite that play the game of more and more, of less and less, of animals dressed, and mice and men designed to impress. Sleep on, O my little ones, sleep and drowse away the cares and dream of teddy bears, and all the perfect things that are without sin; and no monster will ‘er haunt or ravage thee— I promise true; I cross my heart and hope to die— as the world drifts away… as the world drifts away… as the world drifts away with a whimper, not a bang… …and that is how the story ends… Delicate

In my private spaces, in my delicate places, I have an edge of tears and beating fears that run as deep as the hollow sounding


caverns of dark boyhood dreams—filled with screams from a future that’s far away and as close as your delicate touch. For my grandchildren Intimacy

Intimacy. The silk of you present. The sounds old and new. The not letting go. The sadness. The joy of longing fulfilled. Intimacy.

My darling ones

O my darling ones, what will I leave you when I am gone? Will it be treasure? No, I have none of this stuff, for my only wealth is my struggling words.

Will it be reputation, renown or fame? No, it cannot be this either for I am sadly unknown. Will it be a family’s love and devotion complete?


No, for families are often like frayed works of art that people forget. My darling ones, all I can leave you from my poor lonely estate is my sweet thoughts of you and these few words I wrote. For my grandchildren Stand with me

I know I am just a white male standing in a time of fractured reconciliation, but I stand with tears and I stand with hope, and I dare not speak but I know I must. Stand with me please and hold my hand like my mother did when I was six; and do not walk away in scorn— which you could do without regret— but stand instead by my side and look ahead right through the smoke to the days not broken, to the ways unsaid.


Old tree

The 200-year-old tree is ash, black, hollow, just memory, taken whole by the flames, reduced to a sculpture of death; but in its roots, there is connection to time, to place, to existence, to earth where once there was plenty, and fires burnt life not death across a landscape that was not possession, just home. O god

O god I have yearned for you, forgotten you, believed in you with a passion, and now let you go as a myth that serves this pathetic aching soul’s dream of filling this emptiness with existential stuff that only the soul’s imagination can truly really ever give. Forgive me for I have sinned against my humanity. God forgive me for I know not what I do.


Gratitude’s release

At night, awake and no sleep, I think of my demise, with no regret or bitterness, but with gratitude’s release; for I have been here— lived!—and been able to write, speak and love, and that is enough for one man, for this soul with passion’s weight who came with nothing and will leave the same— that is enough when I contemplate how much I have and the privilege it has been to live a life of manufactured choice. The graves

Can’t you see the graves waiting for you in the mist? And yet you play with such ease, and see but the colour, not the disease. The graves are waiting and the world is turning grey.


The mist is rising, and soon all will disappear. This cloth

I have sewn an intimacy with you, too strong, too soft, too beautiful to be thrown away, though there are tears, and stains, and frays hanging, and some of it has long worn out. We have created this cloth that wraps us close and warm, and we shall cling to it in winter and in sun, in rain and in last dust. I will not

I will not be drawn; I will not be quartered. I will not buy in and take on civilisation’s dross. I am instead a man of gratitude; delighted by life, even at its worst. I will not be painted;


I will not be cornered. I am, and I am who I am. Each day is magic; each day has pain. Salvation

Salvation is here walking among us, shadowed and grey, avoiding the colours that take us all into the lair. Salvation is waiting among the ruins and the lives not lived in perfection but in survival’s desperate place. Salvation is here, conscious, grieving breathing, smiling, a touch away, not out there in Plato’s cave. Time to be

Time to think. Time to sit.


Time for love. Time to listen. Time to pause. Time to wait. Time for feeling. Time to give. Time in moments. Time in gratitude. Time as passage. Time in loss. Time to search. Time to wonder. Time for sorrow. Time to be. Time to be. Irony

COVID-19 knows no gender, no ethnicity, no country, no racial group, no religion, no politics, no social class, no ability level, no disability, no body type, no sexual preference, not even age really.


It is truly and remarkably inclusive. It discriminates not. It reminds us that we are at heart all one. Only you see

Let them judge from the outside and label you as heartless, selfish or cruel; but only you know the layers of grey that wrap themselves around your life; and only you see beyond the game of blame to the mess of being human and the need for courage in the place of despair. Ask me not

Ask me not to be still and silent in this time of peril, when all I want to do is shout and cry and say that the days are coming and open your eyes to see the smoke of the future rising.


My stories

I will look back and tell imagination’s stories about myself and create my uncertain truths; I will look forward and speculate what I want to be and what I dare become. Beginning, middle, and end are forming inside me; my stories form like a creeper around time’s branching tree. Poetic spell

Yes, this is a poem, surprise, surprise! Supposed to be profound, and draw you into its poetic spell. It’s bullshit, of course— the worst type of bullshit— because it claims to be just so insightful, profound, about the deepest oceans of soul. But this fucking poem


is nothing but a lie, one that I will rhyme so beautifully until the day I die. Grand plan

If we are to be honest— and that’s a hard sell— then we would admit to the proposition that we actually make it all up as we go our merry way. Yes, I know we seem organised, socialised, systematised, and— heaven help us— suitably sanitised. True believers, one and all; joining together in the Way. Yes, I know, for I once believed it too; but now I just do, and there is no grand plan to guide our sacred ways— there is really nothing at all except the noise that we make and the great plans we fake.


Words

I wish I could put words in those places that bleed, that hurt, that make you less against the world: words that fall as grace, as songs to soothe the terror of this place. I wish, I wish for words to stop up this flowing pain that binds you to the signs of death: words as sutures of the soul, words that heal the boundless ruptures and bring you back dancing from the open grave. Eden

Though it be not true, still I long for Eden, for the garden of earth’s delights, for the connection to the bounty of nature that is being lost. Though it be just myth, this is my fable of joy in being near the


breath of living things tethered to the soil, flowing to the sky, growing in the instant, and turning with the earth. Grace

To hear your voice, to feel the pain that brings me to humanity, that is your gift, your grace, your lasting endowment to those like me who heard with rapture the songs that skipped and flowed as waves, and touched us quietly, moved us deeply, drilled down tender to stir a waiting soul. For Jeff Buckley This place

O that you could see the place where we are and the place where we are not. So advanced and beyond the optics of writers from long ago, and yet still human, not divine. The gods still live with broken backs


and love has its way on the crazy chain of living with machine and noise. And here we all are in this place where we never imagined to be: in the big and small and the siren call of the whole damned human race. Suffering

Sadness deeper than sad. Loneliness beyond the lonely. This is the place where they gather. Remembering greater than memory. Believing far from belief. This is the end of the beginning. Suffering greater than the sufferer. In memory of Auschwitz To forget

I will take it to forget the state of the world, and I will drink it to escape the pain of being born. Hear me now, my beautiful ones, that wish to smile at the face in the moon. The dark night sits


behind the light and the sun comes up to hide the vastness of the stars. And we are here with our feet on this fragile ground, and nothing—nothing—can change its inevitable course. Kindness

To offer kindness costs nothing for the giver, and even if it is expensive it is a gift worth funding. It costs nothing at all but it gives riches to the one who receives this gift and lifts everyone above poverty. Relentless

Do I feel satisfied, no I do not! The desires rage quietly and deep, sweeping wildfires politely contained but smouldering relentless, unseen. I want more but there is only remains, and the urge now sits waiting in the coldness of sober light, and I realise that the season has shifted to the late autumn cool of change.


Retrospective

If I look back at what I’ve done, look back on what has come, along my jagged way to where I am, am I happy, am I sad, content, or in dismay? I am any, I am all, living with this memory and forgetting what brought me to this place of blessing, and of curse, where time is leaving me behind and I am running, running, to keep up. I have been pushed and fallen down, taken this way taken that; flown like a leaf to this place under my tree where I am home and away— a traveller who knows


that all will end and there has been just moments, no journey to defend.

Unpredictable

We are living in the unpredictable, the novel: existing not on some road with a sure path but entering a land with no maps or trails, no ways trod neat by those who came before. But enter this strange land we must, for there is no way back to the safe ground of before and no assurance of the promised land, just the courage to say, step forward and trudge we must. An ethics

From what do we make an ethics, my friends? The philosophers have tried, and conjured everything from god to ideal forms that stand above the mortal ape with the large brain; they even surmised eruditely about the good that’s not so common and the pragmatism of living the best life, whatever that may mean in a goddam affluent white world. The religious have formed it into intricate systems and moral codes—they serve only


the interests of a few through the guise of a faraway god who rewards the obedient, and gives vengeance to those who decide to misbehave and not follow his intractable law. None of these work for me; they say nothing of the human that suffers, breathes and dies, and wants to be free but cannot find a way. They haven’t worked for anyone else either, if you want to listen to my awkward point of truth. For ethics is not delivered, like a neat package from the caste who know about such things. In this case we have but ethical servitude and an oligarchy of the clever who speak from far away like gods through the thunder of a darkening night. So, how do you make an ethics then, smart arse? I guess I can only speak for me— which is the only thing I know, apart from the dirt under my tired and wandering feet.


And what I speak is about the human in front of me, who stands with eyes ahead, and sometimes down, with thoughts about life and death, and doubts and desires unsaid, and the grip of fear unresolved, and not understanding much of anything fully from one day to the next. I speak of the human in front of me, of pleasure and pain, of listening closely and seeing in that human all of my trembling and uncertain fucking self. That dear friends is an ethics, though I am loathe to call it that for fear it will become just another pleasing package, or some god awful system that becomes another hell. In defence of old books

Ghostly words spread neat across a page of history. Ink-dry and resolved mystery that remains the wanderer’s meat. Pages turning in the winds of time, fluttering handless in the breeze. Once lived thoughts from the spline that flow out with ease to fleshy minds.


No Songs

Sing no songs for me, for I am mystery: living in my words that tremble with my breath that long since has ceased and given way to the sky. Sigh not for what has gone for in my words is nothing and is all of me. Say it

Say it. Say it again. Say it often. Say it strong. Say it. While the words can be said. Take me

Ocean black, ocean deep, ocean flowing planet wide, swallow me up, take me whole, take me beneath your cold wet arms,


bring me down, enfold me breathless, take me home. Free will

My free will is no myth, like the determinists say: it is a flower opening in the jagged course of this evolutionary day—as mind emerges with brain and the passion to create full and be remembered beyond the browning individual rose of death that sweeps each of us away; yet minds and passions keep coming— growing ever with the wind and the rain as new flowers grow—individual but in rows.

‘Shared humanity’

There is the cliché, ‘shared humanity’: but what does it actually mean? ‘Tis thrown around; ‘tis thrown about, and battered in severed use. For ‘shared humanity’ is no cuddly term dragged out to impress in feel good moments of white excess.


It is, as Shakespeare understood: Of all the flowers and all the dread; Of all the suffering and death in bed.

Of all the beauty that lies out and in; Of all the terror, the ugly, the anger, the sin. Of all the pleasure and pain as one; Of envy, compassion, joy and fun. Of a person contemplating the state of the world; Of a community together with tragedy unfurled. The Bard is speaking; the Bard hath spoke: ‘shared humanity’ is a weeping sardonic joke. Delusion

The drive to happiness— delusion, confusion about the human being in the world of troubles, of sorrow, of laughter, of pain and pleasure in tasting all that is thrown on this plate of mixed offerings on the table of sour and sweet that comes one day and not the next— no, not the next in the grand time of eternity’s bleak feast.


Ash Wednesday

Be reminded, be reminded, my sweet and precious ones, that we are of this earth made, and we shall go back again in ashes and in dust; for we are not above the earth to rule but of the soil, the sun, the breeze, and we are as the sparkling, flailing, foam of the whispering, stirring seas. I thirst

I thirst. My mouth is dry. I want the water of trouble; I want the taste of grace. I want words again in my mouth. For without these words I shall surely die. Of the water made

How I miss you— spread across the waters where I bury your body and wash my soul. The you of molten touch,


of pleasures sure and bold, of smiles told true, is elemental again. How I love you— sweet shadow soft laying across my bed and my body warm— but no more, no more, just water! The you of gentle heart, of divinity in human flesh, of heights and loss, is of the water made. This day

I only have this—this day of riches, of gold, of love, of moments to treasure and hold. This day of possibilities to make: to savour, to laugh, to cry with tears for the other who is less than me and more. Gift? Curse?

This gift is also a curse— thrust upon me without cause. This gift is a sleepless weight— laying upon me as part of my fate.


Of the earth

Don’t say, “In the time I have left on earth”! Say instead that I am on earth, and ever will be. Say instead that you are earth and of the earth. This is your heaven, your mother—this is your home! There is nowhere else to be but this incubator blue and this grave that is grey. Back to life

The day’s cold light through mist greets my waking sleepy eyes, and the morning song is missing as the winter this way comes. Till the angled sun rises to dismiss the giddy white of night, and the winter sun shines striking to brings me back to life again. Deprecation

I should offer you consolation at these times of death and need. I should say just the right things like, “It’ll be alright in the end.” But none of this bullshit seems


to cut deep to the truth: for I, in my privilege, am just a fucking fraud. I’ve struggled to find words to build up some hope, wanting to say that all’s okay, you’re all special—love works! But all this seems trite and stupid in truth, for how would I really know the depth of this HURT. So dearly beloved reader of this pretentious swill, call me a liar, call me a user, call me a whore seeking reward. And say it to me just how it is— “What the fuck would you know, you middle class white prick!” Reservoir

I shall find inside a reservoir that has been untapped till now, and dip into its cooling depth, finding there the utter stillness to calm and quell the raging fire. Call it out

I call it out—redress! I call for truth in this mess.


The law is for the strong, not the weak, not the less. I call it out—privilege! Authority speaks over the tears of victims, silent pawns in a system that favours influence and the persuasion of cash. I am calling it out! I am calling it plain. The law is an ass, but no one will complain. ‘Cause the law is for the strong and the weak can be damned! The law is about money— be warned, it’s a scam. Wait

We know not of the days to come; for we are helpless, everyone. We are here and that is all; enough to be steady in the stirring sea. And what we thought would never go, has disappeared in the foaming show. And wait we must for seas to die, holding tight to the things we prize.


For we are helpless everyone, not knowing what the storm shall bring. Tie down, tie down! Wait! Wait for the day. Wait for the sea to subside, the clouds to clear, and the sun to rise. Looking up

I will look at the stars and wish; I will lift my head and feel freedom’s space. I will look at the black and see words; I will feel the void and hear the music reverb. I am mad

I am mad but I have never been so sane; I have turned over and risen from my grave. Crazy I am but seeing the world as it is; I am free at last, free at last, released from the chains within.


Breech

Forcep agony, separation, pulled apart—extraction— into the world of grief that life and living cannot heal—for we were together, now torn asunder, in this breech of nature that only the chill of death can find an end and unite us full again

in the black tendrils of eternity. Stop

I cannot stop, cannot stop, like a rabbit whose teeth keep growing, I cannot stop—for to do so is the anti-growth of death, not life. Deepness

Come to the deepness with me; Come and join me in the sea. Come Ye who yearn for something more; Come to the deepness and be reborn.


Mystery

There is no god out there— no deity to own freedom. But there is mystery at the heart of all these things. There is the deep that exists beyond description innate. Let me find it in no robbing god, but in the small and the large. Dreaming

I have not stopped dreaming— looking out star gazing beyond these feeble limitations small that would hold me not to earth, which is my soul’s place incarnate, but to the ways of men that desire to tie me down like a tethered beast waiting for the glistening steel to fall. This is my dreaming—stars upon stars, expanding—out to the whole universe itself. The now

There is no past, just the nows and the memories that live here as demons and angels— one day to the next, as the saying goes— and what is coming from heaven or from hell we know not of— just the romance of dreams and fantasies that point us to another now,


the now that might well be. Infinite

The universe is infinite and infinitely small; living inside me, and beyond it all. Intangible

This history is inside of me, not outside, ‘cept in the memory of the stone; this place soft, intangible, subject to the whims of nature’s fast decay, is where what was, is—in each me that passes the trodden stones along the beaten way. Traces

There are traces of me across the world: left in pockets, left as fragments real, surreal and hyperreal; left in images and words, unseen as switches in some machine—and in the end as dust that floats on the wind to reach the places where nothing of me lives.


Change

How things have changed— across the years, through the tears and the smiles of joy that sparkle and then die, and into the heart of together there is decay and goodbyes that defy these wishes that we had for a happy life; but still we live “day to day” with what we have and what is not within the reach of this limited life, so full of freedom, so rife with pain, but no one is to blame for all that comes our way, for it is the order of the world turning with desire one sunny day and still with loss in another bleak winter of despair. Spark

Can we relight the spark that once was a beacon of our desperate love? Or is it now dissolved into the drab greys of antipathy that mark the death of the flame? Strike out

Strike out at the enemy, strike out at the enemy, strike out at the enemy, the enemy within.


Take a knife to the creature that destroys your heart; chop up the gorging worm that severs you apart. Strike out at the enemy, strike out at the enemy, cut down the enemy, or the enemy will win. Silence fell

Silence fell. Wondrous smell of death as all stood still in this moment of clarity that all too soon will slip away, but today at this time, in this moment, silence fell, as a leaf falls to its hell. Silence fell.

Economy|Biology

Buying, selling, trading money, value, stock—all seemingly inert from the world of life, death decay and the animal


that is dressed in pretty borrowed robes. But in truth biology and economy are unitary— wave functions, one above the other that give energy in the rise and fall of movements across the actions of time and the terrors of life itself. A work for modern times Where shall I find the suffering—out open in wails, demonstrative and shared? Maybe—for that is the way of old, where sorrow was given form, as performance, in the black cloaked spaces of grief’s time. But now in the times beyond old, there are only the tears that come incomplete and hidden in the crevices; and loss, the dark companion of suffering, flows murky beneath the surface that shines for all of us that choose its glare. I saw a woman burst into tears the other day, right in the street, in the middle, for all the flowing people to see— and I know not why. Well, I do know, but I will not share. She stood—frozen—in the street,


a statue of a failed mad sculptor, and everyone past her by. Not a glance. Eyes ahead. Corralled by the avenue. And I stood a while watching her, studying the form, a work for modern times; then left and went the other way, not down the street—no, I could not, for I was afraid. Waves

I We are of no substance made, just waves that compose totality as nothing and then everything, as here and now and everywhere at once. II Akasha—the universe itself: flowing endlessly without centre, without cause, with only energy jumping here, jumping there, dancing with rhythmic beauty and then still. III God is the memory across the waves of the


universe—outside and inside, of no substance made, of no time unfolded, but moving with the totality of the whole. For Baruch Spinoza Our light

You are our light now, pure light my beautiful one: shining ever as glow into our darkened hearts. You are our beacon in the night: casting along the way so we shan’t fall, and revealing our tears which we wish to hide after so long a time. Pure light my beautiful one: risen above, rising within, ever present, death’s eternity come. Two ducks

I saw two ducks the other day: on a rock with natures’ gentle hand all around—endangered— a species at the edge of goodbye, sitting and staring back at me; and I, in my privilege, could wait and think about what we have done


and what we still have left to do.

Bursting

I am bursting at times, like an over-filled balloon or a rotten piece of fruit. This thing with words just loads me up and I have to let it out, let it go, release the inner pain and pleasure of what it is I want to say. What matters for me is the release: not even whether it is liked or whether it has anything profound to say. Do I have a dis-ease? Maybe. Perhaps I should take myself off to the poetry priest and get her to exercise this demon of words that is possessing me. Yet, if she did her job well, and I was no longer bursting, where shall I be? I am a human filled up: possessed, strange, with an ancient madness So, in writing this verse,


far from feeling all released I am, I know, bursting still. Consolation

I take consolation, comfort, shelter, in my words, and hide in their meanings that cover my dismay in this world. Words are companions when none else is found, and live as my playthings in this playground of mind. I find energy, life, a spark as they form their patterns and rhythms in the routines of living a life that’s worthwhile. Words are my lovers that taunt me and caress my bold imagination that comes out erect in the silent freedom of night’s charming bed. Swirl

The swirl of things to do surrounds me with lists and demands and all else that


smothers a wonderful day. The enemy is on all sides and I have to fight to keep them all from closing in and suffocating this precious life. Photos

I watched photos of another time—seeing ordinary people with ordinary lives go their ordinary ways in a world of long ago forgotten in its grey ordinariness. I thought how I might have been in such a time and what would have been my thoughts in such ordinary living of long ago when the world was not as it is now in this extraordinary time. But then again one day another being much like me will look at photos of my extraordinary time and wonder what it would have been like to live in this ordinary time of long ago.


New foundation

I am talking here about resolution and revolution—standing together in quiet indignation and holding firm till the wheels of oppression are ground to dust and mixed so well with love that it forms a new foundation. Sadness

I have a sadness there as surely as the clouds drift over the sun but no one notices—a sadness clinging beneath the gratitude I feel for all this living—a sadness under the smiles that light this day of loss and opportunities won. Yes, a sadness forged in change that takes and never gives and lingers with acceptance that must come in living this wretched perfect day. Measuring

I am in this droll stroll of time before the hardness drops, and measuring—measuring circles as the line slopes forward


toward a destiny that’s not mine but is fully Thine alone. Courage

Through strength I will move forward; within courage I will find my way. Though I feel this weight, still I will stay this course and grit my teeth and look beyond this day. God is

God is a construct of derision. God is a reason for oppression. God is a vehicle for submission. God is a concept of beginnings. God is a way to transcendence. God is the plural weight of religion. God is the comfort for the afflicted. God is the ground for moral decisions. God is the substance of existence. God is seen as all in all. God is mystery beyond understanding. God is the darkness and the light. God is the wonder of looking up. God is the first cause and the last. God is judgement and hate. God is love and all that’s good. God is the vision for what will be. God is nothing and everything.


God is the fears derived from doubt. God is order and chaos at once. God is existence itself. God is. God is dead.

Desert

We cannot be, yet we are; souls apart, but together: fools romantic, believing in destiny’s charms when only the bleak landscape remains of passion and love. And we look hoping across the village green of our former love; but nothing but desert sand and parched despair is left and even the dripping fruit of imagination has long dried.

Divided

How lovely it is to live in a divided world. Such joy to feel the enmity! Such pleasure in the rage! We don’t have to get on with everyone. No, sir! Piss off, I say! We can stick our fingers up at those we don’t like and feel good about it. Cooperation is overrated—I like the way of the fist instead. Is that a dagger I see before me—damn right it is!


We are beasts after all— wolves in a pack, and it such great fun to tear the enemy apart. All this soft and cuddly nonsense is not the natural way—which is dog eat dog, survival of the fittest, look after your tribe first. And the lamb shalt lie down with the lion—bloody hell! I know who’s gonna get up. And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon (Revelation, KJV). Give back

I shall give back the life that was given me—growing from the earth, living in the cycles and the generosity of time— and return the eternal atoms (that who I am made me thus) to the ground, to the open sky to the creatures, where they will be part of something new, a complex rhythm heard again— the major scale that goes on and on in this global symphony. That’s okay

I’m at this place, and seeing back and knowing where I’ve been, and sensing forward to what might be or not;


and whatever, whatever shall pass in this little life of grand design, that’s okay, that’s alright with me. The universe

The universe is in here, it is out there—it is everything, it is the nothing and forever; it is time and timelessness, and ribbons of connection that are in all and all in all. Examination

Examination. Of myself. As a man, as a human, as a being with drifting flesh; examination as truth: person-wide, no lies, darkness into light, stuttering to open. Examination. Old but young. Time but no time. A face in the mirror


that shapes with thoughts of yesterday, today, but not tomorrow. Thus is America

Thus is America—so he said with soul in his nodding head; shot down, shot down, down, nothing more, nothing less, so run you bastards run! run! from the odour of the gun— just run, run with your pumping hearts in hand—run with the silent death surround—just run, just run, for there is nothing more to say but thus is America, thus is the world, thus is the grieving parents’ tears washed up on the shining shore of god’s bleeding promised land of hope. Winter morning in Kinglake

Walking in the morning seeping mist, cold as winter’s creeping death but tinged green with luscious signs of life; strolling above the valley blanketed below with trees bathing muted in the boundless sea of cotton white amid the stillness of eerie first light in a day of drifting drizzle numbingly wet, with curling smoke swirling hopefully


from wooden fires in silent dripping houses where sleepy waking humans greet not the yellow god’s striking coloured rise but the pastel grey of fluid ghostly clouds covering up the waiting nakedness of lazy day. Centre|essence

The centre is here in the living being existing, breathing, curious, loving— not stolen away by the turning of events that pull this way or that, and offer losses and wins. The essence is within this uniqueness of you, as body aware, timeless dropped— not caught up in the spinning wheel of changing life that traps the unwary in its promises of happiness.

Skin

We have skin, we have skin, but not within— where we are pink and vulnerable, and seeking love, and waiting grimly for the


trumpet call of hope. We live with skin, yes, with skin, but the heart pumps around the same coloured blood that keeps this living being alive to live a life of something less than joy. On a screen

Living and dying on a screen, with numbers that tell a story, but not the tales close to the ground that only a few can see. Charts that show the trends of populations and ends cannot show dissolution cold and tears warm from recent loss and grief. Numbers lie not because they are untrue but in hiding the human that is filled with loss, despair, grief and the tentacles of a hopeless fear. So, we are dying and living on a screen, that tells us of the state of the world and nothing of the world of humans living together and through death apart.


Sharp arrow

Fear has found its mark and the sharp arrow has pierced through the thin armour of hope to find a bloody heart beneath. Regret

The problem is not loss and grief, for it is pain in simplicity; the issue is regret that spins out complex like a poisonous spider’s web. Times

I am in this time: wrapped in its ways, forged in its habits, sculpted in its thinking, captured by its laws. But I do wonder about other times, and how it was for the I of then, for being there in all that was therein.


Burying them

They are burying them in body bags—packed all in neat rows—and covering them with earth, so that they are out of sight, but not out of mind, in death’s cradle of endless time. They are not bringing them home for homeless they now be—stateless aliens encamped beneath the dank earth, victims all of an invisible swift savagery, that sees nothing beyond biology. They are entombed in plastic that shall remain when all else is gone—a symbol of humanity— as planet earth takes back its own, and steals the memories of what had been, and dissolves it all with the rotting worm of time. They are sorting them— numbered, tagged, itemised— loading them in trucks, burying them in fields like the wars to end all wars; placing them in neat rows like in Flanders Fields— but there are no guns or shells, just the thud


of flesh extinguished on silent waiting earth. There be no memorials, no national mourning days. Who shall remember them? How soon shalt we forget? In memory of all those buried in mass graves from COVID-19 Night passion

Outside the night is dark, and the fog quilts the landscape with its fine yarn that trails in wispy threads across my path. And I walk, how I walk, to my own drumbeat heart, through this space as stranger and friend, heading along a place made unfamiliar by the inky black, lit only by the steady gaze of stars. Yes, I walk with one focus, one thought directing my urgent steps: to see you, my dark princess of night, bathing in the pool of sooty crystal lit only by moonlight. To see you as my passion of night’s quest—waiting there for me and unfurling the silk of your display among the night shadows, midst


the tender garment of evening’s mist. Walking to you—secret foot fall across the dusky expanses of my mind. The singer

The singer stands upon the stage—expectation high for all who wait for her first authentic note as wave out to the world through aired vibration heard melodic; but more than this she is giving of her self as body resonating lithely with sound that connects, simpatico, to other bodies that share her tempered joy and sign her art. Go on living

We go on living our lives, while others die in the chill quiet of wards and houses. We go on living in front of screens that tell us this and tell us that about the face of life and the fact of death. We go on living in our spaces that confine us and protect us and make us feel that we are right.


We go on living as an imperative of being human, but we do not subdue the earth—even if we think we do—for we are creatures everyone, subject to the whims of what the ancient earth allows. One year

What is one year? One year between expectation and the unexpected. One year of thinking this and then that.

What is the circle of 12 months? From optimism to oblivion. From safety to not knowing the state of the fragile world at all.

One year? In the scheme of the universe— nothing—but in the sweep of a human life— monumental.


With words

I am experienc-menting with words—sound, expanse, small, big as the world; flowing, jarring, trilling along as song and then stopping to remind me of the pause that is thought along the way to another group of words that sad cry, happy smile with the grand banality of human life and the strife that follows us like a stray dog begging for food in the foggy cold morn of another longing day—yes, with the lithe and heavy art of words and sounds in embolden permutations, in combinations, and unceasing with no repetitions till the universe shall give up its treasured heat and the gods shall die, and all will be whisper lilting quiet for an eternity of absent nothing that can never ever know itself.

Masked people

The masked people are walking the street, walking the street, walking the street;


the masked people are crossing the street on this dull and still cold morning.

The sad people cannot be seen, cannot be seen, cannot be seen; the sad people are wearing their masks on this quiet and lonely forenoon.

Synchrony

How now my lover wilt thou touch me?— sweet, clean and honest, and pure as the distillation of a mountain spring’s flow. How shalt my body meet thine in the urging?— as tenderness unfurled, as skin laced with skin, and pulsing hearts in living synchrony. Progress

How far have we come? Have we come anywhere at all? We still do the same things. Same unconcern.


Fractured and looking for the whole. Primitive and civilised. Biological and reaching for heaven. Progress is the word. Progress. Presence|Absence

Presence. Absence. A smile inside a smile. A smile without a smile. Being. Nonbeing. A touch remembered. A touch given. Flesh. Spirit. You. Me. Now. Gone. Expansive

I have discovered in this time of limitations that my spirit will not be confined, shall not be defined by forces that hold my body but not the expansive universe of


my travelling keen mind. I have learnt that my power to be is as great as Nietzsche thought and more, as I create, in this Tardis of possibilities, the devious room into which nothing can come—nothing— unless I will and allow it to be. I write

I write for no one; I write for everyone. My poems are here, but not in place and time. They live for me; they are dead when I am gone. The words will dissolve in the caustic vat of time. So why do I write these words of mind and soul? It is a compulsion; It is an addict’s dreadful curse. Or perhaps it is a way to prove the determinists wrong. The invisible

The invisible is shaping us, is shaking us whole, is shutting us down as it always has done, and ever will, as terminal flesh and blood.


We think that we are above the force unseen, as conquerors of nature, but we are creatures still, beholden to its stealthy power. The invisible has memory back to the roots of a species marching out in social packs that is the strategy of survival but also, the silent source of death. The invisible had come among us as quiet as a cat waiting for its prey—and pounce it will, for this is evolution on display.

Limits of control

In these strange times I do as I’m told and I’m not so bold as to question the social order. But still I wonder, yes, I ponder, about the limits of control and what this contract is that I’ve signed with the society that calls me one of its own. What have they taken, and what is given in return? Is it freedom to be healthy, or is it healthy freedom?


I cannot tear up my contact for it is binding until death; so here I am—a citizen held in this state of liberty that is no liberty state at all. The poet’s pen

The poet’s pen is not a pen for poetry, as if this is the purpose of the art; it is no more a pen for poetry than the artist’s brush is for painting or the sculptor’s tools are for the great installation on display. No! The poet’s pen is the feeling wand that creates not tidy words of accomplishment but the magic of seeing fresh the messy human state. Refraction

The woman. The girl beneath. Afraid. Hiding behind the door and not seen. A life building. A career. A family at the back, hiding. Love muted. Solo.


The woman rises with a dead smile. Seen and not seen. Hair done. Makeup. The only one

Why shouldn’t I feel the lust to be exceptional? I don’t hold others down, or even suppress creatures, who feel their uniqueness too. Do I have to apologise for wanting to make this this little time of me filled with all that it can contain? I am distinct like all the sentient life that treads this rounded ancient floor. There is no domination, no sense of owing, or control; there is just me, the human who ever and always remains the only one.


This earth

I tread upon this earth, this ancient garden, that those of my kind trod long ago; and in this treading so sublime, I feel you, I feel me, I feel all of us in time. This earth from which this creature grew, will hold and erase all our steps, and memory of journeys long since fought and done will continue on apace as we bipedal creatures walk our ways in search of another promised land. We walk across this earth undeterred—believing that all our falls of foot upon the sacred ground are heard in some other realm. But the earth silences all, and takes entirely those who seek the rainbow’s end to the ground where there is no memory—just once again.


Dark days

There are these dark days on planet earth where all is poised to strike against the living and fill the coffers of the dead who once saw the light and sunny days of yore with their own hopeful and watching eyes. Flowing

Water flowing. River named in movement. Flux of being. Fire. Water. Never ending. Body living. Pulse. Beat. Systole. Diastole. Fixity. Death. Stagnation in a pond. All things pass. And then beginnings. Being. Becoming. Seeking stability. Peace. War. Love.


Hate. Wisdom. Ignorance. Pleasure. Pain. Tears. Laughter. Only change. Circling. Never stopping. The river moves. Fluidity. The universe. Expansion. Bubbling. Birth. Eternal action. Extinction. From home

The days roll on, roll in, fold over so they all seem the same. This is the way of working from home in the space that is ever so familiar and really strange. Touch

Felt through skin: Touch. Hand. Connection. Rejection.


The manifestation of the human body in the world, beyond mere representation. Being as becoming. Visceral–the flesh– the incarnation of the human as creature among creatures, bodies with bodies, lovers, families and friends. Touch–binding, repelling, intimate, alienating. Fundamental to life. Procreation. Intimate bedroom scenes. Desire. Sensation. Touch given, touch withheld. Touch as gesture, as performance, as sign, as intimidation, as control. Touch as politics. As exploitation. The body in space, reaching out, shared places,


together. Handshakes. Greetings. Alone. Touching the self, the first intimacy. Negotiating the world as feeling body. Safety.

Danger.

Mother. Newborn. Life as touch. Tenderness. Abuse. Striking skin. Power as pain. Cruelty. Feeling the air rush on skin. Touches of nature. Feet on the ground. Hands on sand wondering. Manipulating, learning. Last goodbyes, grieving. Final touch of skin in death.


Within

When there is no way out there is only the way in. Within the boundaries that hold healing away and dismiss hope, there are the depths of ocean within. When change will not come, movement is person deep. Clue

I don’t know what I’ve done, and I don’t know what to do; I am lost and bewildered, so give me a clue. A clue about what it is that you need and where I fit in the scheme of your mystery being. Resolution

Beyond sadness, through loss and despair that cannot end, there is resolution to BE–not as some courageous soul honoured to serve someone else’s needs,


but a resolve to say: here I stand, here I am, here I sit, not in pity, but in refusal to let providence win. Sunrise

We walk into the oranges of sunrise, brushed across the pale blue sky crawling out of nights inky grip, and shadowed across the water still dark but sprung to life in crystal display, as the gold ball of life appears in the frosty stillness and silence of the morning so near and far away. Words

Words have been born in me, and I am born in words; they are the cradle that rocks this soul–they are the moving hands of hope. Beyond all else from which this fragile creature draws life, words are the prana, the breath of being, the energy that permeates all that I am.


The man on the path

I met a man some time ago. He had a slight smile and a sad face—wrinkled and tugged by time. He looked up at me when I dropped my coin and extended the curlicue of his smile and I felt the weight of his gratitude. I paused a moment to note the number of pieces in his hoard: there were three coins alongside mine— the outcome of a full day’s work. He saw me look; he sensed my gaze, and his worn ruddy face sparked with light. “What is it that you seek?” he said, “What do you want to know about life?” I gazed at him stunned, for who was he to speak from such a place on the dusty forlorn path? “There are four coins here, and that is enough,”


he said, as if tracing my thoughts with his insistent smile. “You have added to my day.” Being in love

How sweet and clear Is the simple fact of being in love–aligned and tender, wrought in passion, as two bodies filled with feeling and two minds sparking with each other’s thoughts unfurl the beauty of future hope. Flux

The new shall emerge from the old, and what was will become what is. Thus is the way of the world as nature shifts and moves but always and ever remains the same. The old as form remains but the new as content cannot be as it was. So it is for humans


as part of the flow of the material world. But for us we are conscious of what is stable and what is ever part of this flux. In it we are caught, as we are held in the net of time that drags us along to the end that is the beginning in this utter endlessness. Of now

When there’s nothing left to spark and kindle hope, there is the serenity of now: that burns slowly with the unattached peace of being, attended by living breath, emptiness and awareness that now is all in all. Mystery

I am in birth. I am in death. I am in all there is. I am the beyond. I am the present, I am the timelessness.


The river runs, The river stops. That is movement. That is the end. I am the giving. I am the taking. I am in you and you in me. Category|Being

Politics. Race politics. Gender politics. Sexual textural politics. Category breeds category, scattering across the meaning landscape–navigate the sea of rhetoric and signs and find a harbour if you dare or turn your back and say there is nothing there. See a person–see a skin. See a smile, without, within. What is there? What is missing? Is it category? Is it being?


Got to be better

There’s got to be better ways than killing a body with a shaded face, out of fear, out of rage, out of difference that displays the enmity that does not exist but survives all the same, in these days of ringing progress, and these times of heated change. There’s got to be better thinking than the same old, same old, of the wheel of inequity, of the cycle of blame, that’s driven the tragedy, that points to the shame of a living being that dies for no just cause, and falls for no real gain. What happens?

What happens when I’m long gone from here, when I’m long gone and dissolved, long gone and resolved at the end of it all, at the end of the Fall when heaven and earth meet and the sky falls and all


that was known, all that was sown, is no more? Late winter day

The sun on my skin, the wind rustling through my hair, the sky an optimistic blue, on a day tentative before the coming of spring–thrust out to counter the winter chill and the dogged rain that has circumscribed the living in this time. Of love

I write of love shown clear in the smiles and laughter of the ordinary and in the delicate carved memories of what is no more but binds together still the parts of us that we long for in these days darker than we have known. Not so old

I do note that I am getting older, signalled in the mirror that speaks


back to me in not so complementary ways. Yet I still give the finger to the mirror and say back that this old soul is not so old in heart and mind, with dreams and desires of a younger man who also looked in the mirror and saw the approving smile that came back. Thread

The tender thread, holding us, keeping us, from oblivion’s fatal jaws. Holding us, dangling, over the edge of life and death, looking down to the fatality below. The tender thread that is as fine as human hair, as strong as a spider’s web, and holds us there suspended,


keeping us alive. to the end. Around and around

I am with Eliot: ever starting again–around and around, and around, and back to where it began, back to the routine days, and the same dull ways of yore that circumscribe this life–a history etched out in circles that start so well, then swirl down and down and down, and back to the ground whence it began. I am here

I am the artist’s brush; I am the musician at play. I am the dancer’s moves; I am the sculptor’s blade. Words are the blocks of this grand cathedral of rhythm and shape, held together with meanings that come from outside in, and inside out. Sing with me,


bleed with me; love with me, hate with me. I am present; I am absent. I will take you to death; I will bring you to life. I am here in these words, in these sounds of synchrony. Listen if you want; write if you must. Read if you will, for I shan’t ever go away. Not cheap (freedom)

Freedom is not some cheap disposable thing thrown away when used or paraded garishly for the whims of fashion or the expedient aims of politicians seeking to deploy it not for the greater good but their own short-term gain. Freedom is not that cheap, like a wrapper thrown in the wind, but hard won, emerging from the bloody barricades to earn it noble place


as a treasure for all time. Definition

This is the definition of eternity, of forever, of infinity, of separation with no together, of vastness without consciousness …death. Steady rain

The words fall, yes, they fall like steady rain, like bullets cutting through pretence that all is just so well– raining bullets that find their target in living flesh that bleeds too easily, and spills like rain. Edge I heard that edge to your lovely words of goodbye–that edge


of darkness and fear that you wanted no one else to hear in that tender time of moments before you are gone– time caught in breaths, caught in last touches, before memory is the remnant of eternal sleep. I heard the tremble in the words said with a smile and measured in your uncertain eyes, that looked with the thought: is this all the fuck there is. I nodded back and signed in my uncertain smile–fuck yeah, but what a life you’ve lived! Invitation

I invite you in to this private thing— this grand tradition that is the poetic way, the imagination space in a sheltered world away from the glare of intrusion’s stare.


Here you can explore whatever you wish– hidden beautifully in the secret of words; and play is the key as the feelings and words flow without explanation’s need. I invite you in but it is you alone who create this freedom place where no may enter accept if given the key to this oasis– your sovereign home. Two faces

You have two faces that you neatly turn one way or the other–one fitted with smiles, so caring and mild, and the other drawn in lemon sour. I see both, and to me the sour turns, but others see the sunny side and never suspect that the other resides– never see through to the after time, when all have gone away, and its me that’s left to see this nether mask.


Forgiveness

I wish I could talk about forgiveness in an age when nothing is gone except our souls that are blunted by the noise of always on. I wish I could moralise and teach, and be preacher man, calling across the gulf for forgiveness and understanding in a time of confusion about what’s right and wrong, true and false. I wish I could but forgiveness has often alluded me in my penchant to judge and this self-righteous egoistic thinking that I’m always correct. So, in the wishing I look not to me, not to charming but hollow quotes from sages down the ages, but to those with no good reason to forgive but do so anyway. What the world needs now

What the world needs now is not love sweet love, like some sticky sickly vanilla cake, but the sharp


knife of clarity and the magnifying glass of urgent honesty. Overview

This life division separation us them crowds contestation between us male female other unidentified gender race politics survival food water jobs money redemption education who learns over us not heaven the sky satellites flying high and minds on screens images dreams scenes of beauty devastation seeking love relationships failed


families clinging children playing in schools staying away below us no hell just ground earth dust bodies burned returned with nature cycles seasons change all in one one in all humans earth history life death comes to naught here now

Escape

How good it is to escape– away from enclosures to the vision of flowing water and the sparkle of sun skipping on the flapping eternity of beaching waves– and feeling that this is a moment that stands still and filled with the joy of abject loneliness.


The space between

I am a reader of the world. I am a reader of my soul. I live in the space between, figuring out what the hell it’s all supposed to mean. I am a reader between the lines. I am a writer with some words. I make sense of the absurd, and create the fantasy that all is well. Read my words and make your sense, and read the world and hope the best, and read your own searching soul for something in the space between. For Albert Camus Phenomenological

Looking in at experience caught in mind as phenomena, moment to moment, breath to breath: in the body, states of being. Feelings reported in the range. Bodies as sensorial. Bodies in space and moving. Locating in space and time. Temporalities. Orientation. Real, virtual. Bodies as objects, seen, ascribed, felt, desired, positioned. Living today in our histories,


genealogies, families as place, home or alienations that move to death. Living in geographies, in geologies, in landscapes that contain culture, language that now is moving, extinguishing, reforming, reshaping in the evolution of time across time, that constrains our existence. Then touch and interaction. Manipulating, changing, and putting things together. Fresh and then obsolete. Thinking in forms, ideas and words of today, yesterdays, futures that are imagined, dreamed, constructed in the wishes that may come true, whatever true means. Connecting it all together to make beliefs about the whole, and telling stories with self, as internal dialogue of self. Constructing a self for Others in entanglements of groups and communities. Speaking, listening, connecting. Language and the feeling of writing, of reading the text and the world: the world as material, the world as Others, as strangers, aliens, friends, intimates in this horizon called a life, told and retold as narrative to convince the selves of meaning and Others that we have meaning, whatever meaning means, as we consider our biology, our frailty, anxiety, tension, finality, sense of being creatures with mortality


among other creatures that find their place and survive on this fragile blue rock strung out at the edge of our galaxy among galaxies, created perhaps by god, perhaps by nature, perhaps by happenstance, who know? This is us as feeling momentary beings, as lumps of flesh caught in the uncertain world, in the spheres, in our horizons of awareness, in the circles of our presence, in being here as the fact of our existence. The rain

The rain falls in living streams hitting the ground in puddles and soaking into the earth that takes the life and binds it to its own in this flow of giving and taking that ancient served the cause of life in all its wondrous forms. I sit and watch the droplets fall and feel the cool of the breeze that sways the drops this way and that in their certain path to the soil that serves the garden and its life and brings its blessing to all the creatures rich and poor who need its wet relief. Singing

We started out so well: lovely sayings of unity that brought the cosy feeling that we were all


in this together, or some such cheap and unthinking shit to appease the masses and cover over thin the cracking disputed ground. And then the enmity from the snake arose and we saw ourselves for what we are–tribal creatures sworn to protect their own–and so we followed the way of fear and did not consider that another way might be found–the way beyond the tribal itch to a circle of singing where all voices are heard and then the harmony can form and sound.

Spring (part 1)

It is the time of spring, the season of renewal; and from the naked branches that slept in the blanket of winter’s deathly cold comes the flowers pink and welcoming of the season of new life, promising the leaves and the fruit whose summer taste is cool and sweet. Spring (part 2)

My garden wet through window shows the signs of spring’s artistic hand at coloured play, and as I watch the birds frolic


in the wet and dig and scratch and find their prey, and sing in the trees and flit from branch to branch in their celebration of life. The trees

The trees are the breath of the earth–pointing to the sky and embracing the sun in their patient living that sustains all else with their roots and leaves connecting the whole to the whole. However separate we claim to be in our independence from nature, the trees are the link, the trees are the sign, the trees are the vehicle that drives our lives from beginning to end that is the start again. Tomorrows

I have thought about tomorrows, but then again methinks I think too much. For what part of tomorrows can I change or influence even a little, even a jot? I am a creature of moments just like a worm, for I move and I burrow but no more can I predict than the next turn and the next digging down in this convoluted world that is my life.


Goodbye

I should have said goodbye in the usual way, with all the tears and kisses and the grim looks, all on social display. Instead, I stood stone struck and as deathly cold as you in that final enclosure to a life lived in so many parts of right and wrong. Not that I know of the entire collection, for I only knew the you that loved the riches of edgy living and the full generosity of a heart stirred by love. But to others you turned a different face–one with the courage to be cruel and to pay no attention to the vile expectation of civility that you so disdained. Yes, you were an honest turd, I’ll give you that, and as you lie in your final bed, and others around are glad that you are gone, I will miss the wink that so said it all. You gave me that as I sat on the bed and I wanted to cry, but you said, “Enough of that shit. Do it when I’m gone!” And then you offered me that sign that you were there and it’s okay. All the tears came out that day to play and you would have loved the irony of it all as the ones who wished you a speedy end were red-eyed and sad and played well the game on this auspicious day. And I, the one who loved you true, who loved you anyway, was not brought to sad looks and abundant crafted tears,


but merely stared at the cot in which this wondrous child of cheeky delight could go to sleep and find the night.

No thought

I thought of an idea for a poem but none came, so I write a poem without any idea at all. It’s just a poem stripped of thought and without any substance, and as hollow as an empty room. My poem has no purpose other than to announce that this is a poem that is not a poem in the end. So, here, happy reader of these words with no ideas, is a poem that offers only a form without a single thought.

Ideology

Ideology is still alive and thriving and leading to division–pulling us apart and stretching the bonds of cooperation that were supposed to make this world a better place.


Left and right, right and left, seem to be the stride of life caught up in sides that war on the street and fight campaigns about issues that concern us all and which we all share in this world of resources diminishing Ideology stands proud between people to hold back the working together and the solutions that seem as elusive as a thief escaping in the fog of a starless night. Ideology serves no one except those who benefit from its pooling of people and money into ventures that ignore the ordinary plight of ordinary people who live and scrape and survive in their ordinary lives. Left and right, right and left, religion, atheism, socialist, capitalist, causes and conflicts, isms and schisms: not about needs at all, not about the person standing in the line, fleeing, living a life and seeking the happiness that it seems only some deserve. Ideology is alive but I wish it dead,


and bring to life community instead. Pockets

I am finding pockets of time, little spaces that are neatly defined to be, to be in ease, in rhythm with the soul and wall away the limits of the day that bind you down in discontent and with thoughts about what might have been if only this or that. These pockets are set aside for anything other than demands or doing for others what they don’t want to do themselves. Let me go away, I say, to this time, this space, this eternity that seems not like living at all but a holy interval and the holding of the day where I can be just myself and no other. Which me?

I wonder what I did to you, woman of colour defined by race. Was it the whiteness of my skin that offended you? Or maybe it was the whiteness of my attitude that I knew it all as Colonial boy, or that I judged too much. You, of First Nations, saw a different me than the one shaving in the mirror, this me stripped of the virtues


of which I am proud. But what that me is I will never know. The mystery remains for the conversation ended in silent resolve to seek no more. And so, two beings of noble worth are consigned to silence and no singing at all.

Filters

I have always looked at you through filters that changed the hue and turned the colour of my mood, and that is the way it has been across the years of being with you, across the spaces of our lives that have intersected in many turns of the kaleidoscope. But now I see with plain light what these filters have brought to the painting of our lives, and I wish to see the filters gone, and instead the steady cold white light of the truth of us.

Lockdown

In lockdown I am waiting with expectation, uncertain of the rolling of time and the points of change when life as so-called ‘normal’ will come to greet us again.


Days fold into days and the car sits idle, unused and not taking us to places distant that is the instant modern urge in the era where travel defines the shrinking world. But the world now is larger and smaller, and I to my garden go and enjoy the quiet stillness of a place away from the space of living so confined and same that has characterised this strangeness time. What will we make of it when all of this is done and we return to the madness of rush that was there before our homes were the refuge that we loved and cursed all at the same time, as we wait, still wait? For Melbourne in the COVID-10 pandemic lockdown (2020) My grandmother

My grandmother had beautiful hands— silky, touching my face, touching the cake that she decorated, touching my feelings when they needed to be touched; but they were fragile hands, like fine glasswork that cracked over time but could not be repaired, for it was too damaged. They used to touch the sparkling keys of her piano with delicate strength and with a passion that unfurled the hidden rhythms of her creative soul;


but that is long gone and locked away from the person that stroked my hair with her long lively fingers and said in sadness, caught between the words, that she loved me still.

Jagged

I know that we are disposed as beings of the convergent kind to gather with others that agree with our tastes and points of view. That seems natural doesn’t it? A gathering of like minds that come together in a celebration of being all the same and together, one with one, on the same page. I like the food you like and the sorts of films, so we agree! Agreement is so nice, so smooth, like rocks in a flowing stream. But I like rocks of the jagged kind– that don’t sit smoothly in the hand but have rough edges and spikes that make me feel what’s there and sense the textures that a hand can feel as it seeks to understand the unrepeated varieties of the world. So too the pleasure of disagreement, of divergence, dissent, of all the


shapes and sizes of the world that come into the realm of my senses and make this experience of a life always brand new, variegated and troubled with others that don’t share my preferential tastes at all. Our kookaburra

Our kookaburra is back and came and sat upon a tree, and made such a racking laugh that we were caused to look and smile and happily welcome back the bird that went away but came again to our garden in the spring.

Point

I start with this. I end with this. I stop at each point between. This is the scale of the ethical universe. This is the Other. This is the person in front of me: a person of dignity that is not less, that is not more, that is the point of morality.


I am

I’ve got to say as a being that is human, not a human being, that I reject Plato’s idea that we are something less, a corruption. I reject the religious view that we are god’s alone in his awful realm. Kant is wrong that we are essentially rational beings given to the universal. And Nietzsche thinks we are all about our will to live an authentic life when will is a luxury that only some can afford in all of life ‘s constraints. I say I am something less and something more, that I am mine and mine alone, that I can be rational and irrational and this is still all of me, and my will is to make a life that might have meaning but I can never be sure at all.

All I know is that I am, I think, just me, a person that exists as a creature among many creatures and as I look up to the sky I wonder about the Why. Absence

We can only know absence when something is gone, when the taken-for-granted has been taken


and we are left with the emptiness of the gaping black hole into which we peer with terror and it looks back. The door

The door is behind. The door is in front. Enter you can. Closed and locked. Take the key that’s no key at all. Open and walk in to this threshold of love. Open the door and see what you find. Is it terror, is it beauty, a beginning, an end? Or is it the same place from which you began? We go on

We go on because it is too hard not to go on; or there is no choice because the tide pushes us along and we are just the flotsam and jetsam of life waiting in hope for the waves to turn the other way.


Tied

I am tied to my body and my body is tied to me. I am my body but I’m also more than my body, for I exist beyond the flesh in the scattered things I leave in this world that are also part of who I am and claim to be, and I live in the memories that are now and are left when this body is gone. I am my body but this body is of the earth, and so am I; and this body is part of a long line of bodies, of persons, that led to me, and my body leads to others and on and on till eternity’s end. I am tied to my body but that is the way of universe where consciousness is contained in the mystery of materiality. Unicorn

You are my unicorn: real and unreal, a product of the imaginative, but tied in the senses to the earth. You live, but you have died, and in your quiet sleep you come to me as eIven, as person, as the dream


of what was and might have been in the palace of beyond. Come to me my unicorn, running and free, and not constrained by your earthen prison where suffering was the course of your day. Come to me and live forever in these living thoughts that take you too another place that imagination reserves. Human|category

There’s a human being in there– haven’t you noticed? Or is it that there are other things at play that drive the agenda? And so the mask goes on the face and the mask becomes the category, and the category fits neatly into the system where the human is a case and not a person to face. Pride

I start with just one word–pride. Just one word before the Fall, one word that is about the the sin that leads to all. And then I remember that this one word has another side, the head of the coin and not the tails.


Pride. About dignity and standing up, feeling tall, when others want to make us small, in a world where some think it’s okay to say whatever the fuck they want and bring us down to the ground with the snake that fell and never got up again. We are not with the snake, fuck no, we are with the birds, flying high, leaving all the narrow minded cunts behind, and swooping over the scene and squawking loudly that we have pride, and nothing is gonna make us fall to the level of the snake again. Disclaimer: By the way, we actually think that snakes are okay and are not cursed beasts at all. Snakes can fly too. We believe they once did. Walk

Sun, rain sit together, and the wind is swirling now, while we walk in nature. We write

We write and we write across the globe about everything and anything that someone in a room deems its worth writing about. And in all that writing, that is profound


and trivial, detailed and cursory, you would think that wisdom and compassion should have grown, as we explore new ideas, write many reports and chronicle the progress of civilisation. But to my eyes and ears the evolution of being better beings has not progressed, and, if anything, it has regressed. The old divisions are the new but on a larger global scale, and we are less kind than we used to be in my thoughts and memories. And most of all, after so much writing, so many reports, so many great speeches written from the wings, we are least kind to this planet and the species that depend on the decisions that we make, so, we write, and we write, and we will write much more, but I say to what end? To what day? Are we growers or are we slaves? Signpost

The molten ball greets me and I think how lucky I am to have existence, and to wonder about being alive at such a time as this, when the human species is at the signpost deciding to move that way to doom or this way to life.


Ambiguity

Do you understand ambiguity? I walk in the bush and around me birds fly, and I hear the ancient frogs giving me their call from waters still able to help them spawn, and then the native flowers greet me with their surprise of colours caught against the greenery. And I am happy, and I am sad. That is my unrelenting ambiguity. Holy ground

Standing before an ancient tree that will outlive me: this is a place of reverence, a holy ground where I reflect on who I am and what I should decide to be. Needle

He is playing the record again, needle worn, over and over, the memory in his grey head. Old man keeping the sound alive, in his loneliness, in his detachment from all that he loved that was good. Needle scratching along the groove of all that was and is no more, in this


life of echoes in a soundproof room. Fight

Don’t run away, stay and fight this day and find yourself alive in the difficulties that we can’t avoid; stay and be you in the struggles and build your life not from the zone of comfort but from the dust of pain and ashes. In sleep

I shall look to sleep and be still in my bed of uncertain dreams, built on memories, formed from life, Freud’s archive to the hidden soul. There my body will renew and my brain find its pulse again. But of what will form I know not of, much like life which is our waking dream state of living our lives in the stream.

Not a waste

It’s not a waste, not a memory to erase, not a time to let go– no, no! not at all; for this time is a growth that stirs us up to the


heights of what we are and and what we don’t know. Not a waste! Not at all! There’s no purpose in regret, for all there exists is now and when, and to that end let’s seize it for ourselves and make the time not pass without a planting of beginnings that grow from this history of not so normal to a place of finding the living in the dusty garden filled with new soil. Mandala

Feeling, and listening to my body, each part its own, but all together; and sensing in my body as body, and also standing apart and aware of what’s there as curiosity about what might emerge as new beings evolve and then dissolve into flux. Then scoping out in imagination’s vision to the horizon, to the world itself as material, as spiritual, built on what is known through the intimate senses, and in the minds that come together to form this wondrous shape to the totality of my shifting world. Inward to the body and to the practice as refuge that exists in this infinity of moments lived now with gratitude for


each treasure that sits with the body as insight and for each new chance to live in interbeing with other creatures that have the right to be in fullness. Centredness

When not feeling right, when not being well in my being and as the centre shifts to that which is odd, I accept it and observe it and seek the centre again as a new unfolding of the being I can become in the openness to the breezes of a new day. Wisdom

Wisdom is not a thing to seek from ancient texts or grand masters, though these posts can point the way to it. Wisdom is not held apart from what you are as a being moving with the changing world and the new horizons of experience. It is instead right there inside at the points of awareness as you seek to know and open up to the possibilities that lie in the delightful infinite richness of now.


The deep

To seek the deep, to desire significance, runs counter to the narrative of the consuming world of ‘get this’ and ‘do that’ to be happy in a life of want. To seek the deep is the joy of living, found in contentment with the now and in seeking that which cannot be bought. There

I want to take you there, there swooping to imagination, there to the fantastic that emerges in holy intervals to dream, to think above the din and the ordinary thoughts that are okay but not enough. Gratitude

Can I teach you gratitude? No, I cannot. For gratitude is not a principle to learn from some well laid out textbook on life. It is an attitude and an openness to life that I can only show in mine. It is a seeing above the grasping that makes us want but never be satisfied; and in the seeing the enjoyment of just living is enough.


In the middle of the night

I love to create in the middle of the night, in the stillness unreserved, in the night light of thought, where it is me and my pen as weary companions in this nocturnal adventure with the joy of words. Conversation

My conversation goes on in sound, with words, and all the parts of language large and small; and yet it also goes on in silence, in the deadness or night and the liveness and movement of day. It’s always going on as thoughts striving together, and all the senses sparking at once in connection with thoughts and the unrelenting layer of feeling that sits under it all like the earth. My conversation never ends, moving this way and that as argument and dialogue formed in the world and living on in the internal life that possesses us all. Silence is around

Silence surrounds me, silence as emptiness, silence as distance,


silence as invisibility that I feel but others do not know or see. The usual ways of being are there to maintain the silence like a cloak put on so that the flesh under cannot be seen, even as it feels. Do I shout into the silence and say that all is not well, all is just the loneliness of the heartless beat. of absence that shapes my world? Silence may surround me, but I will not give in to its suffocating walls that would take me to a personal hell, for I choose to be in a place of noise. Lies

Lies, manipulation, post-truth: can we expect better than that? Saying, “I don’t know” or “it’s the others’ responsibility” is the sign of the times when nothing is open, and honesty is scarce like a bird flying high over the barrel of a gun that will bring it down full dead. So, there is no truth, no right no wrong, no answers to the questions we all ask? Nothing at all except a construction of fiction that is so neat it


just has to be believed. No truth, no right, no wrong, no lies, except what we are told is true by those who we trust that are supposed to know. The Queen I am given to the Queen of words, Poetry, the lady of the lake of creativity in which I bathe daily to cleanse me from ordinariness. And I swim with her naked, and we love under a cold pale moon in this night of stillness in which the words flow and I swoon. The joy of self

When there is nothing you can do to change the world, then look inward to the joy of self where imagination’s shapes can be found, and the world that will not move gives way to the movement of the soul. Zero

What was there is no more, and so the score is zero, not one plus one that adds up to two


in this life of together that now is the abject dissolution of being apart. Awareness|Being

Being. Presence. Awareness the thread between. Otherness. Being. Between

I am a simple man caught in an interval of history, and thinking back and thinking forward, and living in the space between what made me so and formed the world thus and what shapes world to come; and then imagining what will pass when I am gone to the ground from whence I came. I am a man of contradictions; wanting the sky and the space beyond and yet given to be the tasty food of worms.


Reign

I am sleepy in my house as the steady fall of misty rain denies the day and sits heavy on my mood as I look out beyond the trees to the blurred horizon and sense all the earth is covered with this wet blanket of doom. Then to my left a fleeting ray darts across the heavy sky and gives it yellows to the blanket mist only to be swallowed up again by the blackened clouds that reaffirm in full their absolute temporary reign.

See it as it is

What can you say of a time? you’re living in it, breathing it in, feeling its rhythms and buried in its cares; and then you stand back as if given the gift of time

and see it as it is-a thing of the moment, living like a green leaf, only to dry and fall at the turn of the year when all things change, and only the memories remain, and nought can be relied on except the flow and ebb of life itself.


Look beyond

Since when was it all about you? you who hear only your own voice and see yourself falsely in the mirror, never daring to look beyond the sphere of your own influence and above the pride that is rotting away in your putrid shrinking soul of no regrets. Look to the sides and look behind, and observe what is there that you have forgotten to see in your haste to be the one and only that matters in your little world of fears. Space to be How can I say with words that I am over it?–fully beyond the state of this world and wishing for another place and a better time when I was free to move and explore and be all of humanity. But for now, I am parcelled up and packaged and not belonging to myself, and wishing to break the bonds that limit my world and find the space to be again. New child

This new child. Early to the world, and breathing in life.


Eyes closed, pressing flesh on flesh. Touched with our hope that will become hers one day when the world has changed, and we are old, and she is older, finding her way, forming her life in this place yet to be; but for now, she is the dependent one, small, sucking from the breast, sleepy and full of growth, adored but knowing it not yet, only feeling the beginnings of living diffuse, and the hunger and the warmth that surrounds her, as we wonder about her becoming as this new person of a future yet to unfold and show its wings. Numbers

Numbers, always numbers– thrown out as hope and despair, shaping freedoms, and holding us in and out and inward in this interval that is of the human condition in nature itself and made by the will of humans who think they can hold nature herself away.

to sculp a new david - research.monash.edu

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