Author Archives

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Discern, he said

Don’t judge

With the measure you use

It will be given back to you

Tenfold, running over

Out of your arms and back to into them

You are doves delivering news of dry land

You are serpents making a path through sand

You are Shamayim, everything contained

Chaos within limits within oceans within coasts

Love yourself as others do.

Love others more

Everything is perfect in moderation,

Including excess

Everything has time, a speed,

A point, departure, entry, regress

A place. A space

Even reason has its own season

Let me ingest my own advice first

See if it is worth dispensing.

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Carpentry

Strip me bare and polish me

Smooth-grained

Stained

Warm wood under your fingers

Twisted from a wild living thing

Fate selected

To fall and be carried in sections,

Mauled by screaming saw-blade

Laid out in the heat to cure

In quiet darkness, kept forever

Ministered by you in silence

Warm daylight of your shed

Shavings curl to the wood-dust floor,

Soundless

Your hands deft on the plane

Eyes soft, lips parted

Working me

Seeing my curves before they appear

From the edge of possibilities

Satisfied before you began

To let me take shape according to

My knots and your fluid design

Each adjusting in turn,

Bonded by the interplay

Movement, stillness

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Liminal

Use your edges

Don’t shave them off,

Slice by slice

To please your neighbour

Don’t erode your boundaries

For the sake of saving face

For a false promise of peace

Keep wilderness at your edges

Sanctuary at your core

Value your margins

Life is greatest at the interface

A bifacial blade cuts two ways at once

Value your margins,

The marginal ones

Use them,

Don’t abuse them

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Dead Horse Flogging

Not much else to say.

Was right to stop then

Most recent exercise

Bracing confirmation

Problem is always acceptance

Damned both ways

Problem is a solution

Winner is all

It’s me. It always was.

And you

Could look at this as a racetrack

Circular

Or a binary issue

1 vs 0

Winner vs loser

I want to break out sideways

Make my own steeplechase,

Smash the barriers

Escape to the highlands

Where I might belong,

One millenium

But they turn those ones into glue,

Once they’ve run them down

Black Beauty had a good life,

After the abuse

It’s not like that

It’s just a matter of temperament, breeding, training,

And who you get sold to.

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Brushcut

Dear Bursaria,

I’m sorry I killed so many of you today.

I started gently

Then he said

‘They regrow better when you slash them’

Just doing my job

I believe in you

I know how it feels

I know so little

Chipped you back to stumps

To get to the weeds

Woody, canopy-climbing, seeding multitudes

Even into your splendid thorny thickets they push themselves

Crowding out your blossoms and rattling fruits

Kerwon

I’m sorry

This is temporary

Has to be or how else can I live with this mulched destruction

Taste bitter zinc-sweat dripping from under visor

Blinding mid-morning sun

I apologise to each one

If I pause, listen carefully

I imagine I can hear you

Can feel your whispered, spiky presence in my mind

Perhaps not all lies

Your thorns are imbedded in me,

Engulfed by my skin

I see you everywhere

Can never forget your face

Even if you hate me

I wait to be sent back here,

Want to watch you rise up and dominate this light gap

All mornos I lie prone

Arms aching from my penance

Nothing like what you must feel

But I am you. Somehow

I feel it too.

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Plotlines

Around my neck

Hooked in eyelids open before

Breathing down fire escapes into

Future tense

Melodramatic nonsense

Threads pull on my mouth, the valves

Of my veins,

We’re arguing again

Me and I

Somebody pulls another punchline out of

Thin air I’m never going to be breathing

This off-world non-existence

Snarling at rescue

Undressing from the tangle of

Past expense

Running my hands down

You in whatever body

Adorn us with

Suspense

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Contemplating Freedom

And all of its attendant trappings

The dangers of getting what you want

I’m grateful for shelter

For a bed that’s always warm

Even when I’m not

For small consistencies

From which large salvations are built

I’m grateful for gratitude, when it comes

I made my home here

Willingly and willfully self-domesticated

Like I was born for it

Not least resistance,

This path we walk

Wilderness to city and back again

No master, no slave

We share a vein

Common as blood

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Cart First

Sometimes I miss the old days

When I could just come home and ride,

Or be ridden

Knowing there was always

Sweet hay, clear water

A single horizon, visibly unknown

I’m double-blinded, on foot again

Though I feel the wind sawing,

Always at my back

Parting the tall grass before me

Like a sea, whispering secrets

And sometimes songs come back

Shouting wisdom from a decade ago

Reduced down to a vibration

I call nothing and everything my own

Echoes in my body

This ringing in my bones

Sometimes I seem to be

Just a voice

Inhabiting someone else’s head

Something dreamt

I could live with that, if that’s what this is

Word first, motion second

How thought precedes me,

I can at least relinquish that

Power that came before, that binds me

Pulls me onward with a joy

Only a working animal could understand

Barley, oats

Wild and crafty, woven between wheat

Insinuated themselves into necessity

Willing dispersal onto every distant island

Toast the virtue of mutual meeting of needs

Like the fruit of true vines

Spirits distilled from blood, full-bodied

Quenching thirst and inciting fire

Until every roof proclaims its liberty from decay

Partnership,

Not domestication

This is how new worlds are made.

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I tried to unsee but all I know is

Christ

In the way he says

I’ll never turn you away

Christ

In the sunrise,

In my blindness

Christ

In the Buddhist, in the Tao,

Beyond the temple

Christ

In the fallen and in the raised 

In my childhood,

Rosary light across the sea

In my weariness and in the lightning

Christ

In the multitudes

In singularity

Christ in their patience,

In their common sense

Christ

Despite current events;

And within them

Christ

I see you in Mollison and Lovelock,

In Antarctic heat waves

In rainforest relics

In my blistered conscience

Christ

Where I thought I’d escaped

Where you carried me

Christ

In expansion and condensation,

In the shield and the suffering

Christ despite Tiananmen,

Christ in Hong Kong

Falling apart and breaking through again

In fish and fields,

In their fearful hesitation

Christ

Whether I make it or I don’t

Christ

In every substance and story

Whether I’m sane or insensible

Christ

In the focussed timebomb of the present

Christ

Despite all instants, all irrelevancies

Love

Is your name and I am here because truly all is