Category Archives: humanimals

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escape goat

Audio Version

Remember the precious seconds

There is no one

To tie you down

You are only an animal under these trees,

Listening to the cicadas clicking

The two faces you wear

Are an archetypal artifact

You’re the person you hate

Two horns and a dolphin tail

Swimming through shadows

There is no one

Except one

You’re the person you love

Everyone can relax now

Excuses, excuses

Won’t take away bruises

But you fulfil your role

As the bearer of curses

Come, say the spaces

Come to the wild places

Watch the mirror of the moon

Praised in every phase

Oh, Narcissus’ soul-mate

The person you love to hate

Come outside, within

Is a foreign forest of familar feasting

Make me an instrument

Of placid temperament

And elastic sentiment

And ecstatic armament

Remember this precious second

The sheep and the goats are the gate

There is no one to punish

Everyone is an escape

We are animal, vegetable, mineral

Listening, still

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Inner Flight

Audio Version

I saw a satinbird

Wait for a crested pigeon to drink

Perched together on the edge of the dog’s water bowl

Waiting, like my soul

To submerge herself into someone else’s sea

All the crimes of politeness

Scream from inside my cells

Maybe it was easier

Before consciousness decided

What was lawful to give,

And when taking would create a contract

Before we needed to negotiate

Every word,

Every form of contact

I sat at the river

Waiting, like the silver gulls,

For that unscheduled instant

When we would all depart

For the next patch,

The next occurrence

Maybe love only exists

In a multitude of opinions of what it is

Maybe it’s all that exists

Maybe it was easier before ideas

Before ‘easy’ became more than

Movement towards fulfilment

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Magickat

your tongue is a cat catching

itself in a mirror

scratching

in inner intervals

a tiny tiger

praying for prey

in place of peace

pacing

playing at placing

a piece piercing

pleasure please

your heart’s here hearing

hearth and hurt hurtling on

on onyx wings

swing westwards

wings

swinging and singing

of swans swimming

your heart is a tiger cat

your car is a hurtling death trap

your house is a hire

a high mire on fire

your chords are cords

you cut your curt curdling

meow yowling

of how howling horses

want out

out

out

all our outs

sharp shards of your claws

shredding icey floes

back in your forwardness

leaping for every shadow box

🐈‍⬛

by

Beyonder

Go out
Look at sky
More there than you or I can ever describe

Out
Not just through window
It’s plain as day
The pain from these panes keeping at bay

Sky
Enter eye
So shy
But try
Pry yourself away
Now is the time to be
Out.

Go

by

If need creates greed

Audio version


What seed can you plant
What spell can you chant
To reverse the curse?

A part rejected
Tribe-self ejected
Mourns, disconnected
Twitters for a look
Pages the endless book
For a face to grant grace
Where’s a human in this race
Who’ll suffer my shame and call out blame
As my oppresser
Fear of pain the worst transgressor of all
The scourge standing at the flogging wall

If desire could speak would you be meek enough to hear it calling out its lack
Not step forward or back
Meet it on your side of the river
With the giver of Life
Dipping from that eternal brew
The same dew they drew for you
Before you grew to know more than
now
The simple pleasure of present

Do you trust in lust alone?

When shown all your hardest shells
Which of those hells do you run back inside?
When you get there
How do you hide from those walls?

????

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Fear

Sidles over,
Swinging low
Sings its halting notes of
Graceless tension
Taut strings twanging
Sharp. A warning
Harken! now to doom
Your peril lurking
In every shadow:
Monster
Every sickness:
A demon that shouts the name of Healing
And seeks it’s own blind end

Third eying the door

The glimmer of another crystal

You participate in that archaic

Self-preservation system

Perhaps this time your skin will lift

This time you feel the shift

And it’s true

That rue will rule you

But it’s not a real end yet

Your sense of ruin

Is a tune you’re tired now of whistling

Kite-strings hissing

In that pre-storm hum

Then it’s done.

Not running, sailing

Lighting strikes to claim you

He always told you

Never need to fear

Now you feel it,

Air, cloud, scorched paper

The sound only your ears can hear

That song you ring with when all is clear

When terror turns it’s tail

And slinks away.

Audio version

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Body Text

Audio version

Before temples there were groves

Before groves

No dressed stone. Are you listening?

Just cruising the headings

There’s an ocean leak like energy tide

Before cops and robbers,

Before baseline

There’s a king cockatoo flying roundabouts

A koala court

A vacant niche

Not so. One is always none is never done

But the pulse, quick-stepping

Change your beat, heart

Not too late to restart

Between action is retraction,

Dissatisfaction,

You never come when I call

You’re never away

A pilot auto,

Flying towards stars.

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Muscle/Memory

It’s in my arms
This ache, this ache
From over-reaching
It’s in my throat
From speaking out of turn
Too ignorant
To slow to learn something as simple as
A rest
A break
A silence
A real musician knows
When it’s time to wait
And when to play

It’s in my bones
This ache for home
This graceless, traceless

This pain, this pain
We all complain
But how many trace it
Chase it down to the source,
Follow the course back,
Forth
Back
To find
What’s yours
What’s mine
This pain
This plain old
Life-defining game

And still
Killed me, dying off

You’re perfect

Caused the perfect pain

I’m still

Happy in this hurt
Still here to learn
To unlearn

It’s in my neck
From looking up, down
It’s in my wrists
From holding too tight
To you and everything.

It’s in my eyes
The window out
It’s in my mouth
The loosened shout
It’s in my ears
The silence soothing
It’s in the moving,
The making, breaking
Giving up taking
Finding the feeling
Bruises healing
It’s in the moment

Breathe.

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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.