The Sum

It is beautiful
this equation of the moment
fully answering
every question.
A totality is here.
As if all the planets and stars
were rounded off
into an iconic figure
and that figure
were the body
and limbs of my being
and I were the sum.
My heartbeat
a stone dropped into
a liquid fire of creation.
I am Adam
and my soul is Eve.
My figure whole
and born this instant
into an Eden
of Now.

Soul Temple

Be related to the kindred of your heart.
Make friends
with those who give themselves away.
Be mutually gathered
like clouds and rain.Be an opening
and a beginning for each other
not a closed book.
Be a spirit house
for the sharing of heart-space.
Allow this inner architecture
to flow and evolve
with a sacred geometry.
This ashram you build beyond time
let it grow naturally
becoming visible
to the many,
to the kindred of the heart
to yourself.

Voice

I catch your voice
in my cupped hands
where it flutters
as your invisible heart.
A creature of light
an image of your soul.
A romantic notion
a poetic simile?
Lovers do this all the time
and call it talking.
Love has a thousand forms
to show you its one face.

Bears & Moths

Grizzly bears curl up in the dark
like delicate moths.
The hands of time are malleable
as moonbeams
under the multifaceted play of water.
It is somewhere between the day,
and your body is a cocoon
for the dark dreams of the sun.

Later, you will get up
and make deep black coffee
looking into your soul
for signs of new life.
You will stir clouds
and divine the shape of yourself.

There is always a new wonder to find.
A broken backed dream to nurse.
A house devastated by a ravishing light
you must slowly rebuild
into a daily perception.
A garden of star-blooms to name.

Then you will go out into the world.
There are fences to build
and to tear down.
There are paths to cross
out in the open
where you are often mistaken
for a human being with an address
somewhere on the outer rim
of a lesser galaxy.

But you know in your heart
you are part grisly bear and moth.
A dark angel of incredible lightness.
A moonbeam so deep
it has to live under the starlight
as a spectre of itself.

And come the soft acres of the velvet night
you will return to your true forms
you will return to your unfathomable soul
to recreate the world again.

Art of Love

So that you will know the darkness of flowers
I will kiss your lips (all of them) in the dark.
At first light as you awaken
to your own flowering
I will provide some sweet morning rain.

Because you must have poetry in your life
I will make breakfast for you
pouring sunshine into jasmine tea and
placing the taste of the morning neatly
onto sky blue plates for your pleasure.

You must have music also. I will call the little bird
that lived in the house of Mozart. I will call
the great transatlantic gulls
to encircle your hours with the seas mystery,
and I will write little songs for your fingers to play.
Duets of the wind and grass
for us to sing together.

We will spend our days in the garden
painting eyes on butterfly wings,
and in the studio
where the children of our heart
shall reproduce
the paintings of the great masters
only with more light and hope.
And when the day runs to the night
with its arms full of jade and emeralds
we will count the precious stones
as we return them
into the deep pools of our silence.

So that you will know that you are not alone
and this world is a place
for love to meet love
I will watch over you as you disappear.
I will vow to be near,
even as your hand slips away from mine
to be a cloud in a far off realm.
I will be that new shore on the other side
of where we are now
a place we have envisioned together
with this art of love.

First Write without Words

If you have no words to sing
then write a song of silence
but keep the line breaks.

There must be a certain order
and harmony in a symphony.
Nothing need be said
but the spaces
are important
they compose the formless.

Poets and other
spacemen
need ships to take them
on journeys beyond their words.

Words are their craft
so they do not abandon them
they just honour the infinite holes
in every symbol
and the sky inherent in every image.

Keep rearranging your space.
Then words will appear
at the beginning, the end
and the middle
but first write without words.

Meaning needs windows
the frames are only there
to provide different views.
If you have no words
then maybe
you are making more space
for your heart to speak.

A new idiom will emerge
something symphonic
like a flower in bloom
or an ocean.

Something that speaks
for itself.
Words will come
like petals and colour.
Like the shoreline and boats
words will come
to reveal the space.

Mermaids

I have no idea why
we need mermaids
but maybe it is their task
to comfort us
or drown
what cannot be saved.
We come out of the water
weeping.
And the mermaids
(the shell maidens
who live in the waviness
of Gods life),
must sing of the ocean
until we are only
water pouring water.

Making Out

She did not see him coming
she only felt his body relax
like a cloud over a lake.
Then his musculature
hardened into contours of pain.
The anguish of stars
as they glimpse light
bursting away from them
roaring away into the darkness.
She held him or he held her
and they rocked over themselves
finding a few words
in a vast incoherence.
Grasping handfuls of sky
as they fell through their own graves.
She felt him quake in the dark
she let go of her memory
they hurt each other then
like a high-tide marks the shore
they foamed and named their hurt
and they gave up the struggle
but the bliss of surrender
also bruised.

It is Winter

It is winter
and the light grovels sometimes
and then peaks and spires
into sheet music for ice.

It is winter
and the buses are convoys
of people working together
to keep going.
Snow bounds
and binds the ankles
of sniffing dogs.

It is winter
and the cold lollipop
is stuck to the popsicle
of related words
to describe how we slide
on through.

Soon slushy wetness
will swill the guttering pipes.
Soon the down flow
will gush into green gardens

and we will spill outside
the stiff itchiness of being
to be seen in shirtsleeves
where bare arms
can be tattooed
with the face of the sun.

Nightmares and Love Poems

I have thousands of gifts to give you.
Pearls and stars, paperweights the weight of paper,
a language no one understands
freshly cut flowers that bleed black rain.
Nightmares and love poems
blended together. And so it is. Indubitably so.
You have claws that rip at the end of a sentence.
Gut reactions that go on forever.
A life under an exploding molehill.
I am going to love you no matter what baby
because you pay the bills when I forget
and wash my socks regularly
that I go not stricken and barefoot in the world.
And so it is with us
and what comes after--no one knows
but the bleeding rose and the dawn
that just walked in
with all its mixed blessings
bundled up as wedding presents.

A Breakfast Poem

This morning I crave peanut butter and toast.
I usually do not take breakfast
I like to wake up inside the unwritten poem
my celestial engine ticking over
turning over some deep soil
like an early bird digging for juicy worms.

There are basically three human types (not counting all the
mad bad people).
Those who like their peanut butter smooth and those who
prefer the crunchy kind. Then there are the ascetics,
nomads and philosophers who do not care which texture
peanut butter arrives in.

This morning, I am smooth, on lightly toasted
cinnamon bread.
The birds in my head are pulling up
big buttery worms
which they gobble down with a light chardonnay
of effervescent air that if it could be spread on toast
would be another good poem
worth writing about or eating.

Rain

I love how the rain does not oppress the sky
and does not own any hue
but sees itself in whatever colour weeps it.
I was born in April
in a rain shower,
in that hour when the world both cries and laughs.
I was a rainbow planted in green and blue seas.
I love a tin roof
drumming under its own weight of music.
Listening to the rain at night
my moon falls deeply into my lake.
I first learned to swim
in a rainstorm by walking like a wave.
Flowers speak in the rain;
in the dry they are silent
but when full of raindrops
they are poets.
I could not live well
in a dry place.
A place where water had to be hauled up
and rationed out just to keep eyes clear.
I like to wade profligate in the flow
whether that flood
be drowning tears
or the fountain heads of quick joys.
I like the way rain does not explain itself
but just falls when it is heavy enough
and does not oppress the clouds
with its burden
but runs away
to be the song of the earth.

Hidden Together

There are green cats in the fields
where the wind mews and hunts
its own voice.
I have walked further today
for I have not wanted to be anywhere.

The fox and the hare
live out in the open
and hide from each other in the light.
At night
they sleep so close together
that they hear
each others breathing dreams.

The rain has stopped
and the trees are waterfalls
of the sky.
My walk is a labyrinth;
something I etch into my soul
to be read later.

I understand that we are all here
hidden together in full view.
It has to be this way
otherwise souls
would have no paths to take
and green cats no self to stalk.

Soul

We know She livesfor we see
what is reflected of Her.She is the lightbut She is
that other face of the light:A sable poemonly read
in the deepest room
of the heart. She shows you
what the word soul
can only imply.One must forget soul
in order to remember it.
Soul is not anything
your mind can tell you about.
Soul is a chasm in the flower head
of a feminine mystery.
It cannot be described
only tasted and felt
its shape molding
to the intelligence
of your desire.
Soul is She
and we know She lives
for we are reflected
like blooms
in the darkness
of Her.

I Turn to You

I turn to You in the bare moment
when oil and water
combine to make vision.
To make visible things seen
where there are no eyes
to intrude on what is there.
I turn into a curve
a glance
an aperture of infinity.
I feel the shape of You
dancing through my fingers
even though my hands
are now inside something
so dark that it blooms
and gleams
in the gloss
and depth of its substance
and can only be seen
by turning away
from its brilliance
but is felt
as a feather caress
of Your desire to be known
as I.

Under the Ice

The meadow is under
its sleeping mind
yet buttercups are there
just as the sun is there
in the chill dark.
There are green dreams
in the frozen grass.
Crystals are fracturing light
into glacial worlds.
Escarpments and canyons
reshape enclosed spaces.
Under the ice
particles, massive
with the weight of atomic blooms
break apart
shaping continental shelves,
land to withstand
the solar flare
of one meadow daisy.

And It Is Dawn

The sky rains leafless trees.
It is winter,
it is frost melting
on your breath as you walk.
It is cold air saturated with warm blood.

There is a line under the door of night:
At first a sliver of ice
then an auric beam
then a flight path for geese.

A narrow place
where for a moment
it rains golden owls
that moisten your eyes
from the inside

where you can see
through an amber glass
the world held like a fossil.

Then the light thaws
and the trees downpour
and you have crossed your own river.

You stand
in that place
you last looked
wondering what next?
As if your slate had just been wiped clean
by the driving rain

but then
instinctively
you step into
the oncoming flood
holding your life up above you
like a green leaf
and it is dawn.

Mushroom Love

I miss you on Sundays

when the world

makes separation soup

but we keep orbiting

a giant mushroom

of intimacy

that grew out of the dark

and has become this lovely

edible part of the Sabbath

we both enjoy.

Me and J.S.Bach

When I was between myself:
When I was a young Ibis of a child
rare, extinct, new and teenage,
my soul (by which I mean
my thought world dipped in blood),
my soul was fine sand
sifted through what I heard.

I was golden winged but behind my eyes
I was as white as night.
I was, what the stars shed
and what we now call mud.
I was born to be crushed, refined
and loved.

Like any half-grown challenge
I was the change I sought to impose.
My pose awkward and quarrelsome
bashful and bold.
I did not listen
but heard a self-revealing music.
A music not understood
but rode with a wild confusion.

J.S.Bach. what did you and I have in common?
Me a thin green stick
planted in a common clay pot
and you the thunder of heaven
filtered through
endless fugal variations of awe?

Me with not a shred of musical accomplishment
(unless you call tuneless whistling symphonic),
and you
the irascible pugnacious German.
Father of 20 children
the sublime organist.

Yet I grew up in your counterpoint
and like any ibis
on the quicksilver waters of time
I danced.
I became a tenacious organist also
in my own teenage way
and I would play and play and play
potently enmeshed
in your harmonic gears
and the star-seeded journey
of my tender years.

Works of Love

I apply my secret labour,
etching out a new symbolism
from the amorphous floss of chaos.
I paint blindfolded
from the inside
with air, fire and water.

Soon an image
will pull a thought
into the void and clothe it.
My tongue learning again
the foreign languages
needed to build altars
out of detritus.

The work will groan
in the limb-buds of time.
Malformed at first
yet perfect in its inception.
The silence will crouch misshapen
before the utterance.

Then it will offer its clay
but it will not speak
until I move my tongue
like a hand
over its diffuse obscurity.
Attending like an acolyte
to the wound
from which all words are born.

Pigeon

My low bungalow window
looks out over a deep garden.
This morning
there was a pigeon on its sill.
A blue-grey fat pigeon was there,
so I am mentioning the pigeon
and not my garden
in February
when there are crocus
and daffodil in the snow
because the worlds climate
has gone nuts.
Today I am talking pigeon-
a plump wood dove
cooing and preening on my windowsill.
He is magnificent
and comic
as he struts back and forth.
I want you to picture
the look on his face
as he suddenly looked in at me.
He just stood there
and I swear he gawked.
It is impossible to gawk
when you only have a beak
to gawk with
but I swear he did.
Then he clattered away over the hedge
probably to tell his mate
that a strange creature
was loose
in that poorly built nest
at the foot of their garden
and like the weather
appeared to be nuts.

How Do I Love You?

How do I love you?
Let me count your toes.
And kiss them
even before you have had a shower
after a long day.
I will cut your toenails
but please don't ask me to paint them
for I would want to paint
the sunrise and the sunset
and the suns golden rays
as it moves through the day.
I would want to record its dazzling journey
through your soul.
I would even try
to paint the sun as it shines in the night.
I would consider each toe nail
my canvas
to paint your beauty upon.
I would get lost
in the painting of your toenails
and we would have no time
to be ordinary lovers
who occasionally
massaged each others feet
just to relax and unwind
at the end of the day.

Deer in the Woods

There are five of them
perhaps six
there is always this unseen factor
when observing deer in the woods.
The trees are uncountable
have never been counted,
have never been observed as a number
only a plurality
but because the deer move
between the trees
and because the trees
make that movement their secret
that unseen factor of their
ecological whole number
we count the deer.
It is important
It is not like I am a ranger
or game warden or conservationist.
I am just an observer
but numbers are important
especially from 1 to 10.
After that we lose focus;
what we watch, looks back at us
like a forest
or every blade of grass in a meadow.
The numbers are only coherent
because we are incoherent
and so it is important
to count small numbers when we can.
There are five known deer
maybe six
it is hard to be accurate
because they stay
moving through the trees.
The trees are numberless
and the deer
move in that numberless state.
In truth, I cannot say for sure
whether there were five or six.
There was a group
a movement weaving in and out
of the uncountable woods
and like any old time prophet
speaking of his revelations
I am incoherent
and have said nothing about the deer
their differences, their sameness,
but have only indicated that random factor
and wholeness
in the plurality of what can actually be
seen and comprehended
in numberless things.

On the death of a whale that swam up the Thames and could not be saved

We tried to save her.
We thought she might have been pregnant
disoriented and far from her songs.
We waded deep into the river,
rafts and boats set out to guide her.
We felt her confusion:
For have we all not felt this
lost idea of ourselves on deep waters?
For have we not all felt pregnant with a deep truth
in the low tides of this life?
She weakened and swam, weakened and swam.
The river narrowed like death.
We looked on
some helpless, some helping
we discussed her plight in pubs
on the television
trying to harden our hearts to the inevitable
losing our sorrow in technical jargon
while hoping against hope.
When she died from the stress
of this narrow shoaling of her life
we all felt stranded for a while
and then we remembered how we cared
and how we did our best
even though we did nothing really
but help her die
in our shallows.

Duende

I throw open the light glazed window
inviting death in
embracing that dark night
that is not an ending or a beginning
but the lover I married
and swore to be unfaithful to.
I receive its deep kiss
warm, chill, near, far.
I gather myself for prayer.
The light draped over me--- a shawl only
a vestment for the deep blood-waves
of my ancient soul.
Elfin songs strum
goblins hammer my heart
into earth oracles.
Shells that speak for the unknown-
fingertips, eyelids, the curled ears of my flesh:
The whorls and apertures of my hypnotic life.
I am played in the threnody of joy
and bequeathed to each moment
as the guttering lamp
the luminous urn
the forest flame that eats
its green heart
to be the sunlight of flowers.

Making Room

Somewhere warm and folded
is where my soul is in you.
Wrinkles of comfort.
A gentle listening
in the pleat and quilt
of differences shared.
Shapes fit whatever form
space makes for love.
A mushroom fits into the earth
because it folds itself
deep into those curves
that nourish growth.
This is how my soul rests
in you.

Midnight on the Beach

Midnight blue kelp
strung between dark green pods.
Mermaid hair
washing itself in the moonlight

I remember the mottled crab
scuppering its sea legs
abreast the foaming ramparts.
The gulls open beak
where the caves of the sky hung,
where the wind roared
grinding the brittle bones of the surf
into avalanches of darkness.

I recall that voice again
that I made of my breath
that I rolled over my tongue
in the tides rolling surge
that I spoke softly
with the roaring mouth of the sea.

My kelp anchored journey
for a moment lifted on the surf
on the spread wings
of a gibbous moon in flight
and the gulls cry.

Fishing for Light

It is morning in that grey area
where mindfulness melts like ghee
over your nocturnal flames.
You cast your lifeline
knowing that the great love of your life exists
but that you will have to let Her in
one moment at a time.

Fortunately that divine patronage
your body relates to
is beyond anything you can fix.
Soon your words
will speak without any aid
from your unlettered tongue.

You rest from weary thought.
It is that black mamba coffee time
where dark flowers turn to sunspots
on the backs of your hands.
The day must break its vow of silence
to become the voice of your Beloved,
to be a sonority
you recognize as your own-

a timbre and reverberation
you reel in, as you fish
for your immortality.
Knowing nothing lasts beyond
a carefully worded summons
to be here.

Nets

Give me a ballpark figure of you
I will double it with my hands.
I am sewing lingerie for your apparel
not that your nakedness needs it but I do.
Every lover wants to slip
through the net
and not get caught
but these holes in your appearance
are my own not yours
and my life depends on your seduction.
Name me anything more useful
and useless as a garter-belt
and I will double it
with my hands.

A Saviour Quest

We arrived late
looking for signs.

In the town there were rumours.
The temples were full of books.

Weary of investigation
we retired to the inn.
There the air was thick with presence
but evidence of his passing
there was none.

Haunted by disappointment
we sought the hills
above the lights.

We camped
and lay there alone with the stars.

The fresh dawn awoke us.
One by one
we abandoned our quest
and made this new day
our saviour.

Glowing

The Beloved came to me last night.
She left a mark under my skin.
A place where one fingertip of desire
pressed its image upon another.

That impression was enough
to make this whole day blush from the inside
and for my body to wear
a half-shy, half-dressed appearance-

to have that same look
that lovers have
when they are out in the world
but still touching each other
beneath the public gaze.

Tea

This is what is in front of me-

Space, mind, light.

A pot of hot water
planted
with the thought of tea.

Yellow-brown clay pot,
round ochre belly.

Sunlight pouring.

Water pouring.

Hands pouring green leaf.

A concoction
of space, mind and light.

This is what I saw
when I held the little
Chinese porcelain cup
up to the window-

Blue dragons in a white sky.

A shimmering sun
in a green pool.

A visible aroma
encircled by a thought.

Hot tea pouring breath
into the air as flavour.

Space, mind, light
in a drop of
time.

New Birth

We gestate
in the space we make
and then rush out of nowhere
as if we were late

or on time
but piqued and a little surprised
that everyone else
had got here before us.

Babies birth themselves.
The mother
and the onlookers
just predict life

but what shows up
is not a new life
but a demonstration of what Life can do.

How it can form images of itself
and arrive at its own birthday party
as the surprise guest
time and time again.

Speaking from the Opening

And when the bell is fractured

and mute with emptiness.

When I am blinded

from the light of dead stars

I shall still carve out sound

from my hollow tree

just as the wind does.

I will speak from any shape

and mouth

the sky can form.

Silver Birch

Silver Birch pool
in the drifting mist
and I am caught up in this
estuary and dwindle of night
walking at a distance from the sun.

This dawn is etched
as a hallmark of holiness
stamped by a crafting light
that is a finely worked mercury
of my living observance.

For a moment
the moon and sun dome the sky
into a quicksilver drinking bowl
for the earth
and I am engraved into silence,
a relief and depth of infinity.

I interlace my path
through the dappled woods
embellished by silver-leaf and bark.
Here I am a sutra for the trees
woven into their molten speech
as they gild the sunrise
with their silver tongues.

Cold Fish

Cold fish.
He said he was a cold fish
but I saw the white flesh
of his fire,
His deep fractured eyes
were shards of the ocean
and not cold
but holes in the ice
where flames came up for air.
I watched his hands knuckle
as he fought
to express himself.
A fiery reef under his pale skin
for a moment burgeoning
before he hid its emergence
under the shielding scales
of a cool wave of formality.

Winter Flower-beds

Mud and ice
gleam silver veined
in the garden beds
where sparrows whirl
in a winter fleece of sunshine.

I like to look under the stiff plants
and imagine the roots
pulling up the green juice
of a subterranean cosmos:
A succulent milky way
that worms dream into sap.

An impulsive energy
that drives sparrows
to fly and twirl
in a dance of joy.

Cat on a Wall

Cat on a wall
a marmalade rug
hanging
between a lanquid sun
and the top of the garden.
The sky drips warmly
over its dangling ease.
It stretches all its limbs
as stiff as table legs
then it lets go
of its bones, melting
into my background
where birds
watch out
for its quick dreams.

Muse Angel

You make poems out of twigs and moss.
You dig me deep
and nothing gets wasted.
You pour me out like honey
or dredge my mud for buried bones.
You make words into centipedes and millipedes
into butterflies, worms and beetles.
You paint dragons and seraphim
and then
you let them all out of your cage of light
so that they glow and glimmer
on the white surface of the void.

There

There will be times
when you can walk from here to there
without effort.
Times when the sky parts to let you through
to the other side of yourself.
Times where each infinitesimal now
belongs to an unending Here
that you belong to.
All the other times
are platforms where you arrange your journey
to suit your desires.
You are a special needs kid
and the Universe has complied to your request
to take your time
on this Path of Love.

Your Goddess

She has bandaged feet.
Her eyes are too bright
something in her nature
is a semblance of you.
She loves like a street girl
she is male like a stag
and heavy
with the kind of tears
that can only be weighed in oceans.
She is you on your worst
and best day.

She loves you
for you have begged for candy
with abandoned prayers.
You see her
in the dark
when the light glares
under your buried eyes.
When the light
frantic to be known
pulls you down into her
and up into her for comfort
for candy
so that you can be beside yourself
to love her with your dark hands.

She is the little female child
you wished for.
The mother your friends had.
The whore you turned away from
that cold night
her thin blue legs shivering
her lank hair plastered down
in the rain---with the chill pain
any city has at 2 am in the morning
before tomorrow.

And when you look for her
she is blind.
You recall her
you pull her out of your life
where she is drowning in you.
You place her on an altar
made of sticks and stones
you apologise to her
for your sorrowful songs
the abuse,
the quarrelsome argument
of your life in hers
and she gives you her candy
as if she had only just found you
and delights to feed
this stray gangrel creature
you are to yourself
but not to her
not even on your worst day.

Spin-drift

I roar with moonlight.
I am a whorl within a shell
an arabesques of the waves
and the sea is my ear.

Mother, father, lover
we are all here speaking
through the throat of a spiral
we have named love.

Geese

In the simple light where dawn dreams of itself
I watched geese awake.
They had been as still as stone,
each one a hill of silence by the whispering water.
Then suddenly I saw them dreaming.
I saw their goosiness arrive
one feather at a time.
I saw their hearts beating
and I watched the rich saline plasma of their minds
stiffening their plumage.
I could see their avian curiosity
to be one with the wet air of the morning.
The sun glimmered and stretched its arms
creating silver ripples on the lake.
The geese were awake
and gathering themselves together
as a flock of clouds gather
to become a landscape for the sky.
I saw the birds speak in their native tongue.
I witnessed the sounds the wilderness makes
when there is no one there
to translate water, air and birds
into separate things.

Lara

I am back in her story
doggy paddling in the lake
and biting the water
just to make it go whoosh in my mouth.

Smell is vision--- (her soul tells me)
I used to see 360 degrees.

Only she does not say that
she just wags here tail and rolls her eyes
like she used to do
when she was so overwhelmed with life
that her tongue became a language
dipped in bliss.

I watch her spirit drift in and out of her body
and into my own story.
She says: I am looking forward to this,
this new place you will take me to
is it as good as here?

I cannot lie to her for we are
both in the same tale
and I do not want to exaggerate.
I tell her it is as least as good
but she is going to have to dream it with me
until we can both see it.

Only now she is distracted by something else
an odour from the open window
and I am running away over the fields
barking at the wind
and chasing cats in my heaven.

Passionflower

You can disappear,
fade and splutter
in the quick pace of the commonplace.
Such threadbare times
move us unaware
like leaves cut from the
the flight of the wind.

Let the meagre you have
honour the place
and consignment of time
you can fill.
Make each moment
a passionflower
you open
to touch, investigate
and absorb.

Suffer yourselves
to be present in the scattering.
In the doldrums
look deep into the stasis
for love-waves.
Stay with the weave of your soul
even as it unravels.

Dawn Journeys

Soon the sky will fragment into light.
This deep plush of dark dissolve
and leave us panting for footholds.
For a few breathless moments
we are lost to the night
and the day.
We arrive between the worlds
covered in dreams
and then remove ourselves
through the broken doors of ghost houses.
We draw back damask curtains
of perception
to reveal one window peering into another
as we witness the dawning mind.

Earthenware

I am refined by the stark.
A wind sculpture
fashioned by a remorseless profiling.
Beaten into a shape to caress
and to hold the sky in an open tenderness.

Age me if you can, I am not a grown man
but a growing space for gentle hearts.
I live as a sign, like a tree is a sign and sentinel
of a directionless place, and also a stand
and figuring of persistence.
I honour my slow disappearance
as well as the knurled root of my life.

Consider my clay
yet see as well, a fine porcelain here
a translucency of distillation.
Such a polished essence
cannot be reproduced
but must be hammered
through a fine gauze of visibility.

This transparency of being
takes an age of presence and crafting.
A lathe is here
where love was turned and shaped
into a sign of acceptance;
into a poetry of what can be awry
and bent into sacred positions
from a hundred opaque conditions
and then professed
through a forgiving earth.

Above the Keys

Mozart fiddles with his cravat

while playing a sonata with one hand.

Because he can, he plays the fool

for serious music lovers.

His fingers have dimples of laughter.

I like his little twinkle toes

as they dance unseen

under the sombre black weight of the piano.

The Hidden Poem

Imagination runs naked

words sweat

until they melt into each other.

Inspiration now becomes invisible

like the taste of butter on sunlit skin.

The poem has let you in

into its secret chamber of love

but you only paint the walls

and the soft furnishings

all the real art stays hidden

in-between the lines

and behind the curtains

of form and appearance.

A Certain Hurried Grace

A gunmetal sheen of awareness-
hands find themselves.
The morning walks in on slippered feet
fearing to tread
upon the decaying road of your bed
and the trailing hem of the night.

To day we shall pick up pieces
rest like a hen when we can.
Suck our pettiness down
like cold porridge, while smiling
to digest its aftertaste.

What if we live to see the ghosts in our head?
What if we, being half past dead
live lively past the hour of our minds
time-placed face?
Such ponderings stagger
under a weight of apprehension
what if there is no coffee for our sugar?

I watch the moment
I am overlooked by those prying neighbors-
the past and what is to come.
I am an egg shaped submarine
for my hunting soul.

Is it true that all worms turn
into fire-breathing saints?
I kick this muse around
until I squeak some words into the void.

Today I shall rise again
fully-loaded
with a simmering passion to be heard,
dragging light behind me as a comet does
with an obsidian flare for immortality.

A Travel Game

I bend under the low hills
reaching into this country lane
while walking in myself.

Each curve curves me around
a journey that my feet are unaware of.
Fields flat-line while trees doze in their shadows;
I move in a rumination of being.

Some walking meditations are open eyed.
They witness and draw in every blot
and smudge of reality

but today I practice inwardness.
I blend my bones into liquor for the mind.
I trundle down my own hill
sinking upwards into the moment
from another direction.

If You Want

If you want me to come tomorrow
let me in today.
I am far away right now
but have the means and the management skills.

If you want me
then I am available for holy communion
with your body, mind and libido
but first let me know I am here.

Relationships just do not happen
like bar fights:
We must properly introduce God
into this dream sequence

then if you want me to come
I will wear something distinctive
like a small white lie
pinned to my visibility.

In The Responding Zone

I am intact today
every atom of this self-reflecting being
echoing a commanding light
of the heart.

Sinew and plasma so in sych
that they do not just thrive
but thrum in unison
with a vibrating panache.

A harmonious orchestration
of tissue and mind
that finds itself in tune
not only to its organism
but to a vast resonance of creation.

A Universe light-years from my arms reach
yet conjoined to me
by celestial synapses
of infinite choral wavelengths.

A music driven by the pulse of stars
and surged into cosmic arias
that sing within as one voice.
Proclaiming beyond doubt
my infinite capacity
to be me.

Take a Walk

Walk through yourself.
There are so many places
you have yet to see.
Take an inner space walk.

There are realms complete with ghosts
that you have closed from view-
sumptuous pleasure palaces
and deserted amphitheatres
devoid of oratory.

There are gardens for soul flowers
some jagged with thorns
some as soft as a velvet night
while others are as bright as rainbows.

Travel inwards with your mind wide open.
Drink from flowing streams
plant rain in the desert places.
Exercise your right to know yourself.

I may meet you someplace.
I may discover that my inner realms
connect with yours in many places.

Maybe we will have a common language
some similar paths we have shared?
Inner lands
stretch as far as the eye can see
in every direction known
and they parallel each other
in different dimensions.
There are worlds within worlds
especially within soul worlds.

Turn over some stones
greet the iridescent scarabs
of a dark and ancient wisdom.
Enter dragon caves
to teach each beast the law of love
so they can fly without doing harm.

In some places we will be mice
and in others lions.
Often we will be human like God
at other times divine like snails.
Here female, there male.
Often we will be devils with halos
and then sometimes angels with horns.

The outer world mirrors
our own inner diversity.
It is good to know
where all this contrast comes from.
It is good to walk in a true reality.

A Donkeys Tale

I have walked out of my shoes
and am done tip toeing around.
All the prophets of the dawn
are speaking now in colloquial accents
through a megaphone of ever increasing silence.

The world has changed and I am on the edge
looking over the shining sky.
I am not in the forefront
I am an old donkey who got lucky
and found himself a beautiful vision to follow.

I am out of my old shoes now
I leap over a whole history of myself.
I push ahead with a cheeky smile
to be a newcomer
in the world that love has revealed.

Utterance

And then there were daisy flowers
pronounced clearly in the sparkling air.
There was an attar of rose scent
that was heaven bent upon being seen.
The day was cold like champagne
my breath glittered into effervescent blooms.
An ornamental lushness of a living poetry
written over my inner sky
that could be read upwards and backwards
and still it spoke for a Divine utterance
of this my eternal instant of life.

Sailing

I have a houseboat, it belongs to the sea
it rocks my socks gently.
I have an ark upon the flood
and when I am not walking upon the water
I rock my soul-creatures gently
within its floating harbour.
I have this relationship
with the ocean
I bring it salt for taste
and it sustains me with essence.
I enjoy being both the ship and the water.
I enjoy being that which moves
upon that which moves.
If I had only a raft in a storm
I would still be this movement
of this moving thing.
Still the hand that rocks
and the rocking.

A Fine Day in February

February and the crocus are diving out of the ice.
The sparrows have come back from nowhere
and flit under the pale sun like myths.

Everywhere a phoenix light is finding its fire
and yet, winter is hardly over
it is still grinding the earth and sky
in its frigid maw.

But today, the land is bathed in a white-gold.
The temple bells of daffodils are ringing
and even a blue sky flag
flying high recites some brave prayer.

I emerge out of my stiff neck
and sniff the new-born scent
of something delicate and carefree being dressed.
Some floral petticoat being flounced
in a changing-room of time.

The dress not quite ready to be seen
but here and there
frills and taffeta appear
as a sign of Springs grand entrance.

Just the Facts

We want to know.
We demand to know why the colour green
has persistently refused any litmus test of reality.
We want to probe the universe with a latex finger
until it coughs up every last sly little secret
it has been withholding from us.
And as for God, if we seriously believed
in that random factor
we would strap him to a table
and probe him to, if we were able.
We insist that the gist of life be explained, labelled
and filed away. All its loose ends tied
neatly around little boxes marked *done with*.
We abhor anything in our pending try
and if the day has any surprises left
we want them to be explained away
as incidental phenomena in the knowledge machine,
not ghosts more an indication of a need for an oil change,
not signs of the inexplicable, but a malfunction
of our sorting equipment. A small administrative glitch
in an orderly cosmos that with some closer attention
we can entirely eliminate from the system.
We can handle the truth
we can manhandle it until it talks
and by god if it refuses, we are going to make it sorry
it ever crossed our minds
and dared to suggest
that there were more things in heaven and earth.
Of course,
we shall keep a few myths and folk-tales around for the kids,
a few fairy stories for childish minds
at least until we can wash their brains out with
a sanitising logic and some deep abrasive hard facts-
some indisputable reasoning that eventually
shall scrub every last residue of wonder from their thoughts.
And when we have caught every last mystery by the balls
until it squeals to tells us all it knows
we shall be triumphantly acknowledged as lords
of our own enlightenment, at least as long
as the batteries in our intensely manufactured technology
are able to keep running on pure bullshit.

House-Space

I am a state of Your art,
a precursor
to Your wand strokes of thought
and even before the paint daubs
I appear in the idea You have of me.
And You,
belong to that aspect of my breath
that is in the intermission.
You fill me up where I am empty.
Not with a moving in or going out
but with such a volume of my absence
that I am Your house space.

I could speak more of this symbiosis
but even to speak of You is to be Your
voice not mine
and if I praise you with a name
it is my own that I extol.
My only reason for humility
is that when I praise You too rapturously
I eulogise my own grandeur.

We live in this house.
It has walls as deep as space.
It has no roof for there is nothing above us.
We share the same occupancy
of every substance and dream.
There is nothing between us
but devotion and slavery
for we have made each other a status
of ourselves
so that the One can relate to Itself
and learn new steps
in the dance of love.

When people ask me what is my faith?
I point to my breast
and then I tell them
about this poetry that comes through me.
How quaint and old fashioned it is.
How it does not follow any rules
of meter or rhyme
as if it has been translated
through a thousand languages
to be understood beyond any form.
It does not paint pictures with anything
but this soul-talk.
This poetry is not about
any painted life
but is the life of the reader
I offer a mirror to the sky
and all these words
are just its frame.
I converse a little
and then commune
with the house we are all in
until the conversation
falls into a silence
which You authorise
and sign as Yourself.

Trains

The world passes by like two trains
going in opposite directions.
I point out one thing
and you point out another
features flash by
perspectives stand out here
and vanish elsewhere.
We discuss the journey
I tell you I am going someplace
you disagree
and point to a map you are carrying.
I produce my own clearly written itinerary.
For a moment there is confusion.
Should we both be here
and why does the world seem
bound in different directions?
I offer a theory
you gainsay it
the world rushes past us
heading everywhere we look.

Intermezzo

Stories occur between the action
the dormant pause,
the quiescent phase
where nothing seems to move onwards.

The saga of this living poetry
that we speak into creation
needs a hiatus
for the revealing of more legends.
A space for the maturation of myths.
New ways to walk and fly
and beginnings that are an evolution
of every destination.

In that stillness we are discovered again.
We attend there to the original poem-
that place that is our life
always seeking
to say itself in original ways.
Intervals where an in vitro world
of our dreams can be imagined into
a fascination of the mind.

In those soul intermissions
the sea emerges to walk upon the land.
A thought finds its timbre and resonance,
visions grow wings.

There in the suspension
we build spans to bridge the unknown
and from that ovum of rest
the tale is reshaped,
allegory metamorphosed
yet again into odyssey.

Soul Dancing

I follow your words around
tracking your feelings
how you respond to a person
who is a conundrum of love.
An anagram of what we know and perceive
and what we both are in essence.
I have e-mail.
I look to see where you are this morning
and discover
we are in the same poem.

A Park In Winter

Brittle brown mementoes
of windfalls of green.
We take our children into this space
hoping perhaps to see flowers
or at least some suggestion
of color between the ice
and the granite sky.

Snow would be welcome.
Something soft and white
to cover these scattered bones
of frigid transience

but there is too much open ground
and the children
huddle close to our legs for warmth.

Little Hill

Up on this small hill
green horizons topple
over the edge of my view.
Villages coddle into the earth.
A tablecloth of homes and fields.

A far off train
insinuates itself
silently through the landscape.
A hawk above me
hangs like a breathless moment
above the wind.

All this land is laid out
into dwellings and paddocks of time.
Places to cultivate and define
but here on this little hill
I am just a windmill
for the sky.

Sowing

A dandelion seed of self
twirls above a haze.
A pirouette of sensation
an atmospheric pressure of thought.

And because you follow it
seeking your journey
an attraction and gravity
correlate to become a germ
of god-speak within you.

You immerse your tongue
in voice and flavour
until you are heavy with child
a substance you must deliver up
both as flesh and blood
and a seed of you
planted in deep space.

Crest

I have overslept.
All before now
was an ocean of dreams
and all that is afterwards
but a moment.
I have overslept it seems
but to sleep
one must have been awake
and to be awake
one must have been asleep.
Only here in this instant
of my timeless awareness
do I exist
as the wave-crest.
Here I am seamless;
an oceanic concurrence
where there is no room anywhere
for chance.

Intonations

I sleepwalk into your dreams
find you composed, a fugue
playing through your soul and mine.
We are a contrapunctus
and a variation upon a theme of desire.

Humans are not supposed
to speak like this.
We have a language and words
we have letters and poetry
but this engaged performance of passion
is beyond such written reflections.

It is not a musical impression
but an expression of what we are.
A vocal arrangement
of a divine opera
and you are my soubriquet,
both my hand-maiden
and my own hands made
to sing in your voice.
We are defined in that blur.

We are a wordless communiqué:
a dialogue of implication.
This is how love replies to itself-
in counterpoint and tryst
and threadbare
of anything else in-between.

Renovations

You have a habit
of moving the furniture around in my soul.

I wake up
and the living-room
of my being has changed.

Tables and chairs rearranged
into some other
ergonomic mandala.

I touch this new spatial arrangement
of your care
and feel your handiwork,
your desire to shape your own soul
in mine.

Some days
we walk in and out of each others rooms
like guests
but always we find a place for the recognition
that this dwelling place of love
is a home we make together.

Lake Laman

We are out on the lake.
Geneva is floating away;
its well intentioned dreams
spiritually realised at last
as it disappears behind soft hills.

Lakefront property drips wealth for a while
and then we are out in the open.
In the distance the Matterhorn,
and MontBlanc raise up their glacial peaks
to dislodge snow from the sky.

Here on this wide inland sea
I am dining first class.
The views are tremendous
but the grilled sole
a more delicate taste of heaven.
I wash down the deep flavour of Lake Laman
with a light Riesling.

At the ships rail
near the large turning paddlewheel
I watch a seagull fly over the Alps.
Its wings motionless upon the wind:
Now only the mountains seem to be moving.
We are both light headed here
and far enough away
from the respectable soul of Geneva to feel it.

A Green Leaf

In the later times
when age takes you back towards today
you will be the green leaf of a journey.

In those times
your path will be seen as a many branching river
a tribute to a preordained flowing.
You shall recognise
how each twist and turn
made yet more connections
and proposals of discovery.

From that vantage, this dance of life
shall be seen
as a conjunction and kismet,
a thing of inevitable beauty.
From there to here
recalled as a spiral movement
of a cosmic certainty.

You and I shall have circled a question
with our answers.
A great synchronicity
and coincidence of meaning
will have appeared
as a gentle smile of understanding
we share between us

and we will have discovered
that wisdom that flowers teach
beyond their blooms.
We will have grown
(quite by chance it would seem),
a verdant leaf
in an evergreen place.

Spiral

I move beyond my substance
this tightly wrapped body of supposition,
my makeshift random artistry of self.
I drift
but I am not adrift
I am starlight aimed into vision.

And no ghost of spirit am I
but a lushness of my soul.
A green unwinding coil of being
heavy with sensual curves to kiss
the light I unfold.

I am my journey
I tread upon the cosmos
and it oozes
between my toes as rich as mud.
I am fed in the artery of love
blue veined with desire.

Come meet my living fire.
You are not a passing thing
you are a divine blaze of wonder.

Some creature, too perfect for our imagination,
has breathed an eternal passion into us
and what truly lives shall not die.

Come be my limbs and heart
for there is a universe under my ribs
where your hands can birth new senses.
There we can both step away
and yet into other bodies
to be the hereafter of all that is known.

And there become
an opening in the spiral
of our own bright courage.
Our challenge always to be
what we now cannot see.

Journey

This soul of my good earth
how crunched mathematically it is
into substance
and spread by spin-drifts and windfalls
seeds of replication
each one inimitable and matchless
a replicant of eternal change.
Genetically encoded into holiness.

My dress formal for each climate
and naked enough to be adapted
into shifts of consciousness.
A desiring lust to be a thorn for my own flesh
and to define this journey
through every atom of God.

I pace myself into light.
I run ahead
of the mill and confusion of time.
I plant my prayer loudly
with an ever deepening silence.
I honour this soul of my good earth
and think it not strange
that my spirit drips passion
or that I walk upright in my sinews
as fearless
as any dragon unleashed.

Sunset

Night folds its maps.
I am scooped out
and spooned in.

The evening
is a flamingo dance.
Rose hued like a peach.
In-folded into a secret sexuality.
Inviting in its oral darkness
and thirst.

Lights are going on to go out.
Houses creak in the leavings of the sun.
We come home late
and leave early for the night
just to be here
where the sea disappears
upon the edge of the soul.

Painting Time

The sleek pelted evening
slips into the deep-end of time
sporting neckties of horizontal shadows.
The wind blows away its heaviness
and becomes a thin night-dress.

You who have the long gaze.
You who have the deep glance of God in you.
Your must face the covered light
and fall away to be seen.
You must live in your next footstep
to be the breaking open of infinite shells.

Da Vinci painted
in the alchemy of mist and refraction
hauling light into timeless self-portraits.
Bach built cathedrals of the mind
and filled them with his own soul.
Come say a good thing
and be.

Paint yourselves in spirit and flesh
Go tell it on the mountain
that you were not born
but came out of a mind-bloom
and from the deep waves
of butterfly effects.
Go tell the canvas how to sing.

Day to Day

We could all go to the beach to day
and watch the storm-waves.
Perhaps hurl prayers into the flowering sky.

And when the days wizardry deepens
frogs will fasten their hold upon the world.
Barn owls will regurgitate cover songs
for the hunting wings of night.

We may become
a music played one-handed
by the bodiless maidens of the moon.
Soon too be only one song
in an echoing room of memory.

Or prayers returned from the storm
as the cry of gulls in the dawn
fully clothed again.

Glimmer

Night hawks skim silently
through the ghost huddled woods.
I am a channel
in the chakra train of my illumination.
A hoot owl
for the nights unspoken bible.

In this full-blooded dawn
I am bosom bare in the far away
fishiness of a thriving mystery.

A love personified,
and arriving as
a host of magical creatures
to paint the world green.

Contemplation

Ankle deep,
in the middle of some slow poetry.
Dark waters, some pesky mosquitoes,
a blood dancing;
a wine tasting.

Thoughts are molten glass
deeply set in a herons breast
that watches my river running mind.

I am Thy servant,
and I serve no one but the pulse
of existence.
I eat my own body-weight of love.
I feed off a full table.

Back in the pool
where the swamp swirls,
algae islands float
illuminating the dark.
No-see-um bugs
flit in-between my flesh
and make some words come true.

Ghosts

I take a walk around 9 in the evening.
Some lamplight star gazing
but head down mostly,
collar up, tracking my thoughts.

You are miles away
and I am far too near to you
to be out here in the cold.
A pocket of my civilization
howls like a lone wolf.

A cat on a low wall
meows, tail up wanting attention.
I rub its ears
and its head and body
tilt and lean into me
as if I were a cat dream
here to scratch its fantasy card.

And I think: Maybe we are all
out here in the cold night
like apparitions
haunting each other
to be near what we love
not knowing
we are all the ghosts of God.

Live on The Edge

The pavement is widest near the edge of the road.
Safety margins come in two sizes. None or enough.
Your thoughts are profoundly deaf.
Superstition and assumption lead to blindness.
If you cross my path
I am part of your life forever, that is how it works.
Do not make words your wisdom
unless they are your poems.
Only love can see anything real.
Rename and reclassify just for fun.
Experience is home-schooling.
When you are young cause as much trouble as you can.
If you have nothing to be sorry for
then you have not really lived.
You are not here to be right
only to learn how to enjoy being wrong.
You can only feel the truth
what you cannot feel is not truth, only data.
Long for peace
but know the difference between piss and rain.
Trust love.
Fear is the narrowest path you can take.
Live on the edge where the road is widest

Loy Krathong

The villagers are not loud
they chatter like birds
gathered on the river bank
at night in the full moon.

They carry lotus flower boats
and candles to the water,
and then set them adrift
as gently glowing prayers
moving like faith into the unknown.

Beside me
a young Thai Buddhist
in saffron robes
explains that he is a soldier
but for this year he is a monk.

I ask him if he will remain in holy orders?
He points to the flotilla of lights
now passing below us
and tells me that he has a lover
who waits for him in the next village.

He says that the Buddha
will surely answer him.
For like the full moon,
he is not at war
with what the dawn may bring.

Tepee

It is hard to be objective
I keep slipping you under my tongue
and tasting you.

Your face is not clear.
Your body so sexually fluid
that it slips through my mind.

A metaphysical romance
needs deep flesh to hold it together
or it is just a ghost dance.

In the solitary twilit prairies
of our two souls
I want to be your tepee.
Somewhere for you to snuggle
and talk of the world outside of us.

I will wrap you in my own pelts.
My body shall be a campfire
where you can warm your hands.

We will make this poem of our love
breathe deeply,
make it speak from the rich earth
like a real flower.

First Light

The meadow is on fire.
Dawn delights in its face.

The trees are blazing
with a flickering joy.

The wooden fence near the brook
is tilting into radiance.

I wade neck high in water music,
the rest of me is flame.

A horse steams in the paddock
illuminated by its breath-
by my gaze.

I lift my eyes up for the sky.
Little flowers shine
under the earth.

Birds glow like shooting stars
in the morning sun.

It has begun.

Two Women

Two women talk in a tea room.
I watch them
through a windswept window
as I shelter from the rain.

There is some age difference,
they could be mother and daughter,
perhaps sisters or lovers?
There is something more than
chatter and charm in their demeanour.

When two women gossip
they invite a third unseen guest
to be an audience for their words
but these women are alone with themselves.
There is no other
hovering between their lips.

As they leave the café
they kiss tenderly.
One of them
seems to carry the others sadness.
One woman shelters the other.

What attracts my eye
is how they seem to care
and correspond.
How their words
even when not overheard
are shaped only for themselves.

On The Death of a Mentor

I just wrote a death card to my teacher.
One last pitiful bleat of my heart.

He always told me: I can teach you nothing.
He did not answer questions
he just pushed the question out of its box.
He was a good teacher
always throwing me out of
every secure nest.

I keep looking around
like a mourner at a strangers burial
wondering who died
and what kind of person
would leave this empty hole
for us to celebrate
with such uncertain silence.

Communal Dreams

Cats mew before dawn.
Twilight songs
moan in shallow nets
of dissolving night.

Town houses terraced
with thin “skinned walls”
leak out dreams
through a porous proximity.

People sleep just yards away
in different landscapes.
I imagine we share territory
where worlds blur together-

some rock falls and landslides
of a mutual reality
must percolate and collect
into pools of common experience.

Listening to cats
may be the only way I will meet
my neighbours today.
Wake up calls
will lead them invisibly away
upon paths not intersected by my own.

The indolent lust of late cats
in the early morning
the only place
we listen-in together
as our minds soften to be overheard.

Mining For Poetry

Words are stolid, austere today.
They are concrete blocks
mute monoliths
in a soundless stalag.

I will have to be
subversive and subtle
if I am to slip through their walls.
As insurrectionary as a weed
in asphalt.

I will work underground
undermining and chiselling
the stone roots of gravity.

Symbols must be chipped away.
Openings revealed
by tunnelling beneath
the immovable.

Furtive skills
employed destabilize the literal
weaken stolid foundations
loosen the towering
suppression of the voiceless.

I shall dig into this silence
until the packed soil gives way.
Until the bleak rocks
grind together
to speak of a sky they are blind to.

Working deep
I will be an insurrection of light.
A mole inching through infinity
pulling down the colossal and defined.

Covertly I shall
dissolve the granite image
with a fluid impulse to speak
and flow beyond.

Terracotta Army

We drove to Xian
in the Shaanxi province
to a huge hanger in the dust
to see the clay men.

A whole group of us
ushered in deep, and hushed
trying not to disturb the dust.

The army is arrayed stiffly
in large archaeological pits.
There are raised galleries
and we walk above the dust
admiring the dust.

It is sweltering.
Our guide is a beautiful woman.
Like any good general
she leads from the front.
Her bright cheongsam clings to the
peach of her ass
as she leads us
through the ranks of piled
colourless dust.

The clay figures
and horses stare on.
Their dust-masks
ready for a death that no
living hand can give them.

I don't want to be herewith all this dust.
I want to be back
in the air conditioned coach
with a woman
sitting next to me.
I want to feel her thighs
next to mine,
the sanctity of her transience.
I want to drive away
from all this dust
that does not live enough to die.

The Gypsy

The Prado in Madrid
a cool tent of marble
set back from the Retiro park.

I have come here
to see the gypsy girl.
Goya painted her twice.
Maja Desnuda is her soul
the other, the clothed version,
is a mannequin.

She is not shy.
She reclines naively as if adopting
an assumed position
of demure sexuality,
a gauche enticement.

Her breasts are aroused.
Her eyes calculating
but also ready for love:
Perhaps she is calculating
her pay by the hour?
Perhaps she is weighing
the cost of love?
I stand as near to her
as Goya would have
I feel the space between us.

Her bellybutton is inwards.
Running vertically from it
there is a line of fine hair
that points to her vagina
which is tucked into
the purse of her flesh
like a sleeping lioness.

A less uncompromising artist
would not have painted
that erotic trail of hair.
Its suggestion
is the boldest stroke of his brush.
A hint of reverence.

It is as if her belly
were marked with a holy sign.
A finger pointing to the moon.
A station of the cross.
A poem of flesh
that only gypsies of love can read
on the dark surface
of this blind world.

The Parting Waviness of Now

After many years
we met again
from God knows when.

We drink tea
we talk
our lives remain silent.
Lips stagger
to keep up with the past.

Unearthed memories
look at each other like strangers.
They are not the same.
They are small stories
that loom large.
Fictional amalgams
of paths crossed.

I keep trying not to look at you,
for you do not remind me of
anyone I know,
and it is impolite to stare.

I reach over my teacup
back to a place where you are
still young
and I even younger.
I see us there
in-between
the life raft
and the sinking ship
and I wonder
were we rescued by time
or did we drown?

The Music of Living

Haydn wrote forty-three piano trios,
many of them before
the piano had been invented.
Lets all say: Wow.

Every word you write is great
some of them are also good.
We create havoc and call it poetry
in that a-musing way that God does.

Sometimes fish swim in the sky.
I have no idea why fish swim in the sky
but I like leaps of faith
and all things that bounce.

I like it when you
(not knowing where you are going),
start something
that only a miracle can finish.

When evolution turns out
to be the perfect place
you were always heading for.

A Christmas Buddha

Mid-winter and daylight
is carried around like a fading flashlight.
For a few short hours
we collect our time in tinselled halls
hunting for the sun.

The Buddha light
is everywhere shinning gently:
It is wheeled along in pushchairs,
it begs for pennies outside
the red and green foliage of shop windows.
On street corners
Siddhartha laughs in groups
saving December by getting it on.

The homeless travel home,
we drink and eat too much.
We go out again
to provide more dreams for the sleeping sky.
We credit the Lord Jesus
with the nativity play of each morning.

Out in the world, I wrap up warm,
I carry a torch for you.
I am Buddha shaped,
avuncular in my wisdom
of nothing much to say.
I preach diffidently
with the open vowels
of eyes and hands.
I stand, plainly hidden
in my non-theist robe of self.

A short day
in the life of the World Honoured One
comes and goes.
We light candles for the electric angels
of hope.
We all shine in our own way.

Tombs of the Sun

Morning tea outside the Winter Palace
watching a lone felucca ply the west bank.
The desert slips sideways
as Luxor emerges
from the dreams of the Nile.
Behind an African tulip tree
the sun sets a flame to each red bloom
as a tireless heat climbs the steps
of long denuded temples.

I smoke a Turkish cigarette
enjoying the harsh flavour
as it mulls my wine slowly.
Soon the light shall go seeking
the fine cotton of the street vendors,
but later we shall all return
to thetombs of the sun
and wander these arid valleys
as a dialogue of the dust.

Empires have coupled in bloodshed here.
Have beaten a metallic passion
into bloodlines of faith.
And each shrine and vaulted pillar
is covered now with the graffiti
of every coarse camp follower.
Greece, Rome and the sword of Islam
all laid down in the tolerant ground
as catacombs under the nights amnesia.

The waiter is Nubian,
his fez a token gesture of an adopted heritage.
He sweeps the floor whistling a Cairo melody.
The sand creeps over the boulevard
seeking to drown the town,
to cover whatever small hold we have
on this momentary oasis of dawn.

Like cigarette smoke
blown through an open grave
Thebes rises out of its memories,
it seems to envelope
the passing breath
of all our abrupt endings.
I watch the light unravel
on the far shore of the river
where burial places
are already opening up
for the tourist trade.

Reading

I feel the page turn.
Sense your eyes
lifting the printed words
into your mind to taste them.

A tactile vision of you
reading a poem we share.
A book cover flaps away-
origami birds
in a parchment sky.

Syllables
As light as feathers,
are traceable over moving lips-
on the tip of my tongue
words form
wings lift.

After

This is what happens after you die-

If you have been a non-smoker
you will need a cigarette.
If you have been dieting
you will crave a donut ring
even though the hole itself
(but for the joy of sugar)
is all that is required to nourish you.

Thoughts that have been eating you up
get digested, and if you have been
a coward or a fool
then you will still be one,
but it will be more agreeable
to eat your words.

Your body will a be mental play-dough
that you can mould as you wish,
so no change there.
Whatever you have envisioned,
made into an idea, considered plausible,
had faith in, or established as likely
will be the reality you are heading for.

Make your truth now.
Create something to take with you
to avoid confusion and debate
when you get there.
Do not ever come back
to tell me what it is like:
I want to open my own doors.

Our New Testament

Jesus gave his sermon to the desert wind.
Knowing it would one day become soul.
The Buddha gave life to the mind
before the dead returned.

A prayer of silence
shatters reason
and brings Prophets to their knees.

I am pleased to appoint you
minister of my heart.
When you climb the pulpit of being
I will be your Amen.
Our spirit, an exaltation of doves.

The New Testament
has not been written yet.
It is the scripture of our silence,
where we listen together
for loves answer.

Stay In The Hollow Breath

And when you are alone
And the day has walked away
Remove yourself from your clothes.
Take off every garment
That the mind would keep
To dress itself.
Even the skin, tissues and bones
Of your thoughts.
Rest now in the hollow breath
For all that you have made real,
Fashioned and devised
Belong now to Absence.
Only love can bear down
To give birth
From your nothingness.
Let that womb
Be empty of your fears.
Give yourself back
To the One who opens flowers
And closes them
Let go
And let the dead bury the dead.
Listen to where your breath
Arrives, and to where it goes.
Keep looking into the dark
For the night
Needs your eyes to see itself.
The naked unformed night
Awaits your listening gaze
And the unfilled cup of your soul.
A dark anonymity
Needs a passage
Through your hollow breath
As if it were a root and stem.
Then a light shall break open
From the room you have given it
And a dark flower
Bloom as the dawn.

Being Born

A mother pushes her child into the world.
The child cries
and starts pushing
against Gods womb in a million ways
until it finds its own birth.

Please consider this life as a droplet of gold in the sun.
The melting pot is much greater than what it melts.

Man must be born once from woman
and once from God
yet we are always leaving that womb
to birth God in each other.

Stay close to the Beloved.
She is your next breath.

Stay between the axe and the stone like the sky.

I Ride Her Breath

I Ride Her Breath
I ride Her breath
and she is what the flower is
as its soul
becomes a sexual painting
of essence.

I am Her flute
yet I have no notes
unless She rides my breath
to play me.
We are the sound
of every sensual instrument.

I said to my soul:
Speak to me of love.
It said: Take me
there moaning.
I asked who was speaking?
She said: Your desire
to be known
beyond the instrument and the flower.

I ride Her breath
and She is that which I am
before the petal appears
and the music plays.

Love Has all Kinds of Ears

My dog is deaf
she does not listen with her ears anymore
but with her heart.

She taught me how to do this.
She taught me with love and patience
as if I were a child that had to be shown
by example.

Love has all kinds of ears.
The Beloved shows you how to listen
until you are alert and eager to please.

You become a good dog
ready to hear any call to love.

Morning Market

Early dawn
and the market in Chaing Mai
huddles by the floating mists
of the Ping river.

Young girls squat over upturned straw hats.
Hats full of small dangerous chillies,
or tiny smoked anchovies.
Chattering like birds
and smiling shyly as we barter for
cupfuls of their produce.

The market people are not from the city.
They ride in on bicycles
from the villages
sometimes all through the night.

They have only small amounts of fish
and vegetables to sell.
They pour their labour out
onto old newspaper
carefully bundling and tying
the purchases together
with pink raffia.
They offer tokens of their livelihood
and the chance to share their simplicity.
They offer us grace.

A few coins are passed.
It is a simple thing we partake in,
a ritual of recognition
Not a bartering
but a blessing.

She Speaks

She Speaks

When I sit and rest
something of the Universe of Love
runs through,
threads its way through me
as a network of fluent stars.

When I rest a finger of awareness
on this mind mesh
It becomes that space
we call soul.
A receptivity.
I am both the music
and the keyboard
of an endless connectivity.

I am channelled through
by a divine software-
an animate utterance
that opens doors in the dark.
I call this light
but really it is
a seed of the cosmos opening.

When I touch and reach
I become
like the space between lovers
or the interim of sensation
between two hands;
an intelligible matrix
and movement of love.

Then,
when the silence is deepest
She speaks.

Devotion

If you want a blood red devotion
see how the poppy falls to pieces
in the dancing wind.

When a pot is fired in the kiln
it becomes both beautiful and fragile,
a breakable part of the sky.

If you want security
make of your heart a paper lock,
mulch it open with a melting key.

Street Dancing in Beijing

The Wu Li Masters of Beijing
are not an esoteric thing
they are grocers and clerks,
they are wheels within wheels
where everyone who can, turns
to share the hub of a natural
propensity of life to dance.

They have a measure and phase
a syncopation
not learned in any temple
class or school
but in the Tao and spiral
of a salient physics of love.

Waltz, foxtrot, jive and tango
emanate not from teachings
but from the ad hoc social gatherings,
and fluid actions
of an unprompted fun.
Loosely organised affairs
become movements of the people
that occur spontaneously
in plazas, parks and embankments
or wherever there is space to be
the emancipation of hearts
hands and feet.

The masters of choreography
and their families
turn like Spring and Autumn leaves.
A certain formalized restraint
but underneath the cultural paint
a peaceful revolution
subverts every angle and square
into circles and waves.

Time is allowed to go
and the past danced
not in the scripture or play
of what has been before
but as a door opened
in the oomph of a present
particular way.
A poise and motion
of bodies of energy
to converge, orbit and corresponded
with each other.

The dancers are an unaffected
affection of whatever-
and it is not
a borrowed thing they do
but a flow of Wu.

Connections

We stayed the night in your villa
near the top of Penang Hill
close enough to the stars
to be hidden from the island.

The rich and well connected
live there
high above the bustle of Georgetown.
I was not wealthy
but briefly connected to you
by shackles of desire.

In the dawn we played tennis
before the jungle heat
crept like molasses
to the edge of the manicured lawns
and the ties of your world
demanded we part.

You made me promise
to tell no one;
that our association must be
a hidden link between us
not a chain connected to your public life.

I heard you married money
but that connection had also fallen apart.
When you died in a car crash
they raised a memorial plaque
in the sports club
where we occasionally
joined behind masks
of casual acquaintance.

These connections
are now only traceable
as a few missing links
of us both

Winter Blood

Berries, drops of blood
on snow covered hedgerows.

A bright vitality
where green leaves have left
only empty pages.

There is blood in the ground.
It is painted on the walls
of frozen caves
disturbed
by foot and paw prints.

When the thaw licks
those stains will bleed out
roots will bruise themselves
into a pointed sap

spears will drive
up through the earth-

blades saturated with the blood
of the sun.

Seismic Activity

Dawn highlights
a magma of subterranean night.
Arboreal creatures
scuttle under thoughts,
become furtive, but more visible.

We wake up in a wild place
and struggle to tame
an acre of consciousness
behind closed eyes.

Under the lava flow
and the ash of dreams
green ground breaks open.
Shoots that feed upon the
upheaval of heaven and earth
labour to birth a personal sky.

Morning cultivates its appearance
in the forest fires and fissures
of first light.
We are born to survive
our own earthquakes.

To seed the world again
from the enduring flowers of a deep devastation
and to bloom where we can.

Dancing with Ghosts

It is dark
and there are pale beings about still.
Winter ghosts are often shivers
between your ribs
but they can be tickled into snow
or a light raining dawn.

Being born each day
and having to make your own way
out of the Mother of the All,
you are bound to dangle and drip a little.
Either you will bound and bounce around
like a puppy
or crouch like a snarling wounded fox.

A sense of perspective is important
as winter sucks you into its ice.
Your face is really only frozen
in an idea of this cold reality.
Once your ghosts are warmed up
and adventurous socks are put on
over reluctant feet
you can walk like God
over the dark waters.

Dawn Patrol

A dream turns out its pockets
and becomes a question for the dawn.

I put on my life haphazardly
remembering to keep warm
in that absent-minded way
that I have cultivated
in order to dress reality
loosely enough to see its figments
and chimera.

Out in the chill
it is a daze-light still.
Half revealed awakened beings
forage for tracks and fashion footsteps
out of a yesterday that has temporarily
lost its way in the dark.

I am one of those pathfinders.
I salvage and pick over the terrain
sifting and naming,
reclaiming land
out of the substance of memory.
Identifying creation
as I hoard bits and pieces
from the discarded remains
and residue of a natural surplus.

Am I a God or a tramp?
A homeless person saving the light
or a drifting deity stuffing
the world into address lists and almanacs
of recognition and perception?

I keep the captains log of a space ship
of myself.
I record the waves
in-between that which transpires
and that which appears.

Then I remember I am just a poet
out star-gazing in the early morning
and there is really nothing to record
only things to sing along with
as existence comes together
in the hand-me-down clothes
of a present attire.

Rachmaninov in the Morning

Violins pant in their dark cases.
The night has been ridden hard
through a dark romance
and now the lathered music
is pulled up snorting
while ebony clarinets
are reined in by the light.

I imagine Rachmaninov
in America
with his big workmanlike hands
at the wheel of a sports car
constantly falling foul of the law
for driving too fast.

This morning his lush concertos
stamp restlessly as they are led
to the stable of dawn,
their horse-power throbbing
with enigmatic compositions
that still ring
with the soul of Russian bells.

The night is an Atlantic
for love's émigrés
and though we race through it
like submariners
in the belly of symphonic whales
we arrive in the morning
like wild horses
our notes singing and restless
under the hood of time.

Conjunctions

There are ripple effects
where the night has been disturbed.
Where conjunctions have burst
into moments beyond time as crests,
or as wash from dream stones
plunged into real lakes.

I close the garden gate softly
with hands feathered
and covered with wisps of twilight.
Hands as pale as owls in the shadowed dawn.

I turn and a suggestion of my path
becomes a hint of sunrise.
Steps emboss
a sculptured frost with footprints
and other transient carvings
of presence and weight.
A warm breath forms soul effigies
in the chill air
signing the seen
with my imperceptible passing.

It is early, and there is no one here to see.
Not a fox nor bird to acknowledge
the corridor of my being.
My camouflage is too subtle,
I am as yet unnoticed by the visible-

I am a ripple
where the night is disturbed
by the rise and fall of conjunctions
and by palpable stones
dropped into dream lakes.

Dawn in the Teahouse

There are no melodies
in a Japanese teahouse
the music is in the reverence
and the ceremony,
how the tea is prepared
is all that you taste.
It happens one note at a time.

A Zen garden suggests itself
with flowers of water and stone
its lushness is implied like the tones
of a hollow reed
before the wind blows through it.

If you watch the ritual of first light
as if preparing yourself as its flavour,
not rushing to arrive
but being the procession of its arrival,
then you will be like a Zen garden
offering yourself some green tea
from the leaf of your own soul

You will be a garden arrangement
of your emptinessand
you may flower in that watching.
The moment will appear as it is
with its own lyrical accompaniment
and not as it was or will be.
A song bird may suggest itself
or an oratorio may bloom
from water or stone.

Anything can happen
for you are not making anything
you are only a process of something.
A simple reverence will have prepared you
like the music of flowing water
to see and taste some essence
in a teahouse of silence.

Sleepwalking with Sparrows

I am bone thin
yet my organs are fat and hung about me,
bloated upon my exterior
like bruises.
I am just tired,
My tread worn,
my thread frayed.
Soul displaced.

There are two things
I probably should not do,
so naturally I do them both.
I sleep fitfully
consciously awake
and bent over my mind
like a mantis of fear.
I go for a long walk
as blank as verse
spaced in-between
the mizzle of a frail rain.

Somewhere along the way
a few bedraggled mastodons
break away from a herd
of sleepwalking thoughts.
Indwelling sparrows attempt
to dry their wings
in swamped rooms.

Arriving back
I am put together again.
A latex form has been moulded
into a more flexible reality,
enough at least,
to hold together
the twigs and swellings
that become the few words
it takes to speak of myself.

Beach Flotsam

Pulled out of a deep water chute
of the night,
I am shelled into shell-shock.
I gasp breathless in the dripping twilight
unplugged from a deep ocean.

In the East,
where seafood restaurants
are extensions of their fishing boats,
crustaceans are pulled apart while still alive.
Lobsters and crabs wave like the sea
as they are torn
from the mute carapace of their bodies
to be ripped quickly
into a pink flailing death dance:
A freshly plucked froth of life
that is cooked and consumed
while still blindly moving.

Sometimes I awaken
like a blood-soaked shadow
picked over by night-gulls.
I pant traumatised in a too thin air
unable to withstand the moment.
I am a shell discarded
to be an echo of the sea,
while the dawn eats me alive.

What The Poem Said

What the poem says
is heard in a sailing ship
on the far side of the world.

It is moon rock still cooling from the sun
and, the deep drumming space
between the two.

It is a cough in an empty hall
that you fill with expectation.
The busy station
where trains arrive
but only ghosts get off.

It wakes you in the night
for you to remember a phrase
that you will forget in the morning.

It is the whisper that you try to write
in the shouting day.
It cannot be mentioned
without another knot
being tied in your tongue.

It is the rattle of rain
upon the dark window of your soul,
a broken hinged door
in the storm of you.

It speaks harshly of what you do
when your options are empty milk cartons
full of owl music and solitude.

What the poem says
rumples your bed with moth-eaten images.
It clothes the stuttering mind
for the light to leak through.

It talks in a scarecrow language
wanting to be rags for the wind.

The poem is a speaking fire
but you only have wet wood to burn.

Something must be said
but the lyricism gets minced
in the grinding wheels of the mind:
There is bloodshed between the words.

And you wish you had answers
and you wish you had questions
but you only have this poem
stretching a cosmic wire in your brain
upon which you must walk.

Your words are like bird song
in a hurricane
you misquote and parody
their silence far too loudly.

You long to remember
what your poem said
but it shall not speak
until you let go of your words
long enough to listen.

Reflections in Closed Eyes

Night moths haunt the twilight.
My daylight falls apart
with pale wings,
and tattered moments.

Sepia images half-consumed
vacillate half-full into forgetfulness.
Momentary imprints
and ghostly rainbows
dance once and disappear
many times.

I unfold my insight,
take the path of the dead
where the living live
like lovers in my head.
I sink upwards like mist.

This meditation
is a sand bath.
It scrubs off my face
one blotch and smear at a time.
A child sobs in a dark room,
remembers it is not here,
has not been here for years,
yet it wonders why
it still aches to be born.

Silence shatters my eyes.
Presence lights a small lamp
in a mud hut,
sits down and waits
for the stars to run out
of sorrowful songs to sing.

Perhaps attracted to
the flickering of transience,
a moth-eaten void
flutters in from nowhere
and burns-out over
the glimmering flames
of ambient shadows.

Messy

You tell me this feeling is sacred.
You tell me it is a butterfly in the wind.
But I want to feel the weight of it.
Do some wild flesh dance with it.
Hold it in my hard hands
And abuse it a little.

You should be able to paint
Where you are, not just declare it.
Not just put it into words.
Words are shadows,
They are sherbet and mud pies
For parched lips. Mirages
And murals of feelings.

Seep a little.
Ooze from yourself,
Leak some sap
From a tangible movement
Of your life.
Not a sorbet too light to taste
But a thick cream.
Not a Grecian temple
But an emotional car crash.
Paint the moment
Of impact. Be Messy.

Words Are Our Dwellings

Sometimes we write
to show people
that words have no home
and could not have been written
by anyone else but the homeless.

Poets are windows without walls.
Words are our dwellings.

Sometimes we are mad prophets
scribbling graffiti
over crumbling structures.

We are not anarchists
we preserve the fallen
and the falling.

When poets are alone
their words haunt them.

They travel the unnamed streets
of ghost towns.
They write on walls
to let you know
that they were once there.

Melt-Worlds

Crows squabble
like black Knights
on the frost licked lawn.

There are teeth marks in the sky
where the wind gnaws its limbs off.

Miniature mammoths
have rampaged through the grass
leaving molehills of significance.

Tyrannosaur stalk worms
in the wispy dawn
where earthquakes have ravished
the neatly plucked eyebrows
of garden statuary.

This window scene
screens me from its reality.

It has features upon it
that are placed between
view points.

It has melt worlds
that speak for themselves,
not in fact or fantasy,
but as ice dissolving on a glass pane

and that landscape
like a frozen view of the mind
is as real as the ice that forms it.

Fast Food

The bacon sandwich is not greasy

but it is still good.

Black coffee

with lots of sweetener

and then a small poem about

breakfast at the computer

where my words

turn into food for the soul

Stay In The Hollow Breath

And when you are alone
And the day has walked away
Remove yourself from your clothes.

Take off every garment
That the mind would keep
To dress itself.
Even the skin, tissue and bones
Of your thoughts.

Rest now in the hollow breath.
For all that you have made real,
Fashioned and devised
Belong now to Absence.

Only love can bear down
To give birth
From your nothingness.
Let that womb
Be empty of your fear.

Give yourself back
To the One who opens flowers
And closes them
And let the dead bury the dead.

Listen to where your breath
Arrives, and to where it goes.
Keep looking into the dark
For the night
Needs your eyes to see itself.

The naked unformed night
Awaits your listening gaze
And the unfilled cup of your soul.

A dark anonymity
Needs a passage
Through your hollow breath
As if it were a root and stem.

Then a light shall break open
From the room you have given it
And a dark flower
Bloom as the dawn

Dark Flower and Sky Blooms

If you cannot awaken ecstasy in you
then ask a flower how it makes love.
One energy spirals within another
to spin its own sexual soul
into substance.

God emerges from wet ground
and where the soil is dark
a divine light ploughs.

An interior language
twists, and circles;
composes itself into articulation
from a stirring of radiance.
From the gyre, a fire transpires
and seeks to be known beyond itself.

A womb in the earth opens
where the Goddess knits
new strands of fire together.
She twirls her sable hair
into lustrous threads and sutras.

This is how the soul speaks-
with tongues of sexual flame.
With a poetry manifested
from out of its own weft
where the void finds its voice.

Clouds

We cannot hold onto You,
we can only be the open hands
and the compliance of grass.

You hold onto us
like the sky holds clouds.
We have the freedom
to always fall out of ourselves.

We wait for the surrender and the grace
while the whole of You
has already surrendered for us.

Holding on to nothing
we become empty hands
as we rain.

My Purse Is Full Of You

Love hides behind its dreams.
It takes out its purse, thinks twice,
budgets and dies of poverty.

Ghosts get married and the miracle is
that sometimes they have real children.

A love-child develops in the dream
and even the lie of love
cannot help but become a true love
it seems.

One day somthing real happened to me.
There was an opening that flowered
but you could not see the flower
only the magnitude expanding,
only the opening.

I have more to offer now
for I have less
and even so
my purse is full of you.

Mist and Fog

It is a beautiful morning.
Visibility is down to inches,
and what you can feel
and see
is the fog sliding through your lungs
like a poem.
The ground inching its way over your feet
and the air being birthed
under your tongue.

Just beyond the five-bar gate
Beauty disrobes
by putting on her nudity.
You lean over
the ploughed field
as she slips into view
one naked island
at a time.
You breathe in the mist
and translate what you see
from an old bible
of buried meaning

but this morning
has yet to discover words:
It is an Eve
before Adam.
Its womb a hidden sky.
There is a conception though,
a deep unwinding conception.
The immaculate whore
dreams of creating seeds
from the dark prayers
of her lust to be loved.
To be a concubine
for the rising sun.

It is a beautiful thing
to be parting the twilight
with your hard thighs tingling
with the fire of this acquiescent
femininity.
This womb-wet flowing out
of the dawn
as it unveils a sensuality
that asks to be known.
Later,
when there is more to see
and less to discover
we will name the goddess
mist and fog.

You Are Beautifully Written

You are beautifully written this morning.

I see the sky
flowing out of your words like milk
from a full cosmos.

Light comes out of dark flowers.
Every symbol has a prior life
in a womb of silence
where it learns the language
of time.

When the void overflows
it speaks of the night like the dawn.

You are fully clothed and flowering.
You are beautifully written
like the speech of the sky.

As the milk of morning stars
your words bloom
and appear.

Closets of the Sky

I hold your hand
but your hand is a lake
and my hand, a cloud
that is always full of you.

Thoughts appear
in a landscape and view
we inhabit together.

In the astral world
where eagles fly out of raindrops
people like us are only seen
in a shared reality of one relationship
of light to another.

Here by the lake where my mind wanders,
time seems to enter momentary rooms
to become a living-space of us both.

Sometimes we are clothes in the same closet
and sometimes the closet itself.

Closets are in-between the world.
They are secret places to change
the plumage of eagles.

We walk hand in hand.
We wear the same clothes
but in different ways.

Like clouds and rain closeted together
we come out of the same space
to be seen.

Prelude

It rained before my eyes opened
I saw the falling though
and I felt the sky
as it poured out its night
as a million drops of light.

It is good
to let the dawn drown itself in you
and it is good to plummet and shower
where the dark bursts apart into rain.
To fall on the roof
of your own silence.

To be a million drops of night
splashing into vision.

A Blessing

An old Buddhist monk
mumbles over a length of string.
After his unknown blessing
he ties it around my wrist.
I give him ten Malaysian Ringgit
“You will need this,” he says in English.

I did too.
Three years later
when I at last cut the string off
both my parents were dead
and a Thai girl had died in my arms
as we drove a jeep into the endless night.

A blessing
often does not give you anything,
but takes away
what you are unable to carry anymore.
Such blessings take time
and can seem like an endless night.

A little piece of string
worn around your wrist
takes three years
to say its prayers
and when you finally cut it off
your hands are empty.

Come Like Twilight Out Of Your Clouds

Come like twilight out of your clouds;
This is how light gathers itself into dreams.

Let there be dark flowers here.
Mystery needs a face, a place to ponder
Its simplicity. Earth is a good medium
For experimental openings-

For tangible poems of mud and rain
And dark flowers blooming joy and pain.
Let there be light here in the softly calling night
A mystery of what can be seen.
Touched with a sexual heat and rubbed
Into vision.

Come fashion yourself
In the free hand of a pagan paint.
A vitality and dye you are interpreting
From a cosmic illumination
A rough likeness of a ghostly colour
That can only live in your crude markings.

Daub yourself as if you were
Something worth decorating
In the handiwork of earth tones.
The ochre and tawny splodge
Of a rudimentary wattle and straw
And here and there spatter blatantly
Vermilion and gold celebrations of your clay.
Splash yourself
With the streaks of a tribal passion
With the elemental scratches
Of your native art.

Make a simple model of the cosmos.
A pot bellied fertility figure of your being
And offer that to the light.
Proffer your stain soaked signs of fruitfulness.
Offer up your primitive idol
Wet and still saturated with God.
And place that totem
Upon a pristine cloth and be not shamefaced.

Then spit on your hands
And walk into the clouds
Shaping another mystery for yourself.

Invisible Magnets

Birds fall out of the sky
but the sky moves on.
I am talking about life and death.
I am being truthful as far as these words go.

Words are like fridge magnets
you only notice them
when they are not holding up
something important you need to remember.

Poems do not have beginnings or endings
they have bodies created for flight
and so they have souls.
I think if there is another word
that has the exact same meaning
as the word soul, it is poetry

but meanings and words are many.
Souls speak for the sky
they breathe with the sky
they fly the sky like poems
and are beyond words like
life, and death.

Souls are invisible magnets.
You need them to remember
your poetry.

Dawn, And There Are No Eagles

Dawn and there are no eagles,
only talons
for the wind to cling to.

It could be any day of the year
but it is now.

Your eyes will open
because that is what the sky does
hoping to see itself.

You hope to see yourself also
as the night buries your soul
under the light

but there are no eagles
only talons that open and
let you go.

It could be anytime of your life
but it is now

and you are going to have to deal with this

as you fall,

not knowing
where, or who you are.

Wind Songs

Butterflies in the park
but the wind is too strong to see them.

Some look like flowers
that appear only in Spring,
some like spinning leaves in Autumn.

We are strangers in this place
and the colour of love
is a wind-song we make visible.

Life is a poem,
a brief butterfly
that paints the sky.

Some of us are words for the wind,
some of us are wings for words
as the world spins by.

It is enough.

Bird Calls

I anticipate myself
my arousals and my substance.
This incitement into riotous bird calls.

I savour the cloud of my moments
that now fall like the memory of rain
to splash up as droplets of awareness.

Soon I shall have arms and legs
for the earth to pour through.
Soon the sky shall coalesce,
being born again into the space
and blood of being.

I lick my light, growing whiskers of reality.
Hairs of mindfulness are touched
and combed into a language for the soul.

Feelings converse with their movements.
They form emotional affairs
and secret relationships with identity.
They speak in wing spans
of mutual appreciation.

It is good to be this mockingbird
in the nest of time.
I mimic the concept of human being
and preen my dark feathers.

I am a divine thought of plumage,
dressed to vocalise this morning
into birdsong.

Love Kicks

Fire breaks out on the tip of a small hair.
Elephants stampede under your skin.
Your soul is a riot quietly spoken
through a megaphone.

You are in love.
You have fallen through the floor
of a very tall tree.
Nobody told you that branches
were full of open spaces.

You thought romance was just for humans
but monkeys also make-out on the upswing.
Giraffes neck above the clouds,
its just a matter of timing
but you are out of time
and out of your head.
you are in love.

When your feet trip over the world.
When your tongue sticks out so far
it is spoken of in awe
on far off galaxies a million miles from nowhere.
When your brain is a calculation machine
with only zeros for numbers
then you are
notifiably, insanely in love.

Love will carry you around in the pockets
of millions of people who look for it
but once it kicks you
on your outstanding ass
you become the only bullet
in a shooting gallery of one.
It is too late to duck,
you can only quack one last time
before your heart goes
boom!

Thai Dreams

My house has legs,
stilts, that in the morning
ascend out of the mist, lifting my living space
into the jungle canopy.

Hornbills thrum in
the red silk cotton trees that flame
with the rising sun.
Macaques woof and dart
in the plush orchid beds of the dawn.

Mornings in Chiang Mai dream themselves awake.
The light is a chameleon
that captures every hue and fragrance
blending blossoms into green washed water-fields
for transient rainbows.

On the veranda, I look down
and call to the Tiffin carrier.
He has bowls of green aromatic tea
that he sells quietly
as he glides from house to house.
His earthenware pots are strung upon a bamboo pole,
his straw hat covers his face with silence.

He is part of this reverie
and he has returned this morning
thirty years later.
A silent ghost, offering me
a warm bowl of green tea to nourish a memory
and to flood my house
with the flavour of tropical mists.

I am raised up now
above the grey chill clouds
and I see again a Long-Tailed Bird of Paradise
flash through my mind
as it paints a multi-coloured flight path
for the pale winter sun to follow
like a dream.

A Winters Vision

It is already evening
and the light has fainted away.
It never became sheer enough
to be seen through today.

A strained mist has oozed and seeped
through a muslin cloth of gloom.

The visible has been
a negative image of itself.
The darkness sieved through a collective mind
that stalk its own shadows.

As the wind bites deeper into night
there will come a time
when you will have to dream for the sky.

It is good to have
a deep rooted light in all this dreariness,
a cave for the sun to gather strength in.

Without a memory for your eyes
you might be swept away
by the murk;
you might wake up too grey to be seen.

A Winters Tale

Sparrows talk in their dreams.
The grass cracks the frost slowly
with a memory of green.
Nights window melts
one drop at a time.

I will sit by a fire and read Shakespeare
to the flames.
I shall write a poem over a bent knee
in the flickering shadows
frowning over the words
until the mute image speaks.

Phantoms will come and go.
The Tragicall History of Romeus and Juliet
will be translated from a foreign tongue
to become a music to be sung.

“A boy who kills cannot love,
A boy who kills has no heart.
And he's the boy who gets your love
And gets your heart. Very smart, Maria,
very smart!”

There will always be tribal conflict.
One rumour shall be pitted against another,
but we dream together.
Like sparrows we all wake up
in the heart of winter
reinterpreting an old romance
into a green poetry of life.
Our stage, the recorded history of light.

The Messiah of Flowers

Jesus was often heard
talking to flowers.
Folks in those days, like today
did not believe in all this New Age stuff.
They wanted old age, old time religion.
They wanted to be told what they already knew,
and they knew flowers were dumb.
Jesus did not know that flowers were dumb,
he was a Flower Child at heart.

He studied flowers
and he saw how the earth fed the stalk
through the root
and he marvelled that such a beautiful thing
could come out of mud.
He said: You should pray like this.
His friends hurried him away.
for that kind of talk can get you killed, even today.

Jesus was just a farm boy and a part-time carpenter.
He was once asked why he did not get a regular job?
He replied: Compare me to something,
and tell me what I am like?
He often talked crazy like that
always answering a question with a question.
Some said that the kid was a bum
and would never amount to anything.
Others said:
Give him time he will grow out of this nonsense.
Still others predicted a bad end for him.

One day Jesus left his village
and became an illegal immigrant
in a far off place called the City of the Angels.
The angels in that city wore gang colours.
He told them:
You are to love God with all your heart
and all your soul and all your mind. Follow me.
Some did, some stayed.

To those that went with him
he taught the religion of flowers.
How they grow in the dark bud
until something beautiful happens inside of them
and then they bloom.
And though they are named
this kind of flower, and that kind of flower,
how really, they cannot be compared
to any other flower at all.

Jesus had a lot to say about flowers
and he would tell people what the flowers told him:
That kind of talk can get you locked up.
His friends begged him to find a job
so he became a poet
and wrote about the secrets of flowers.
Folks felt less threatened by his craziness then
for no one takes a poet seriously.
Some even read his stuff
but only a very few ever tried to
love with all their heart, mind and soul.
Only some, even to this very day,
ever incomparably flower like God.

Fog

Airports fly away and ground the planes.
Fog filters through our motor cars
and we nose the tail of the sky.
We are looking for a parking space
to put the world in.
The city is crowded with living space
but we have no space to see it
so we take endless journeys
to be somewhere else.
A day becomes a night-time
and runs out of runway.
People disembark
and imagine a morning departure.
Anywhere will do
the fog has no opinion about places
and drifts in and out of our dreams
until we move on again.

Walking with Ducks

The lake is a silver ghost in the early mist.
I have come here with my dreams
still wrapped around me like a winter coat.
The sun is not rising but sinking through the sky.
It will be a day that will not entirely thaw
but only melt enough
to enter the nights backyard as
a silent footstep of tomorrow.

I have come here in this early light
to walk and find my sacred ground.
Some days are outside and wait for you to
be their pathfinder.
Some mornings you are both Adam and God,
or maybe you are just that uprooted heart
of loneliness seeking its purpose.
A prophet looking for a teaching
in the unassuming awakening of life.
The kind of awakenings that ducks have
on a chill November morning.

I watch necks emerging from islands of feathers.
The delicate warmth of plumage
relearning the art of swimming in the mist.
The hesitant drowsy cheeping
as small black eyes open
to break the grip of the icy twilight.

Soon I have a following,
a train of waddling ducks tag along behind me.
I walk slowly, leading my troops
to a promised land
where crumbs fall like manna from heaven.
To them I am the Second Coming,
a memory of their faith.
I am the Buddha of the dawn
and where the air quacks quietly
I walk the earth again.