Category Archives: Poems

by

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

by

Nothing’s amiss then

suddenly

Negative pressure

Mist feels fine

Blood simmering beneath

Go to fill the kettle

Waterless

Boiled down to bone

Still clear to the irises

Walk slowly to shade

Lava pillow glowing, growling

ruptured cap quake expulsion

I am criss-crossed hollow mined harrow

Can’t get burial out

No aerial stand-by

Not even an emergency yet

Drawn and quartered in the waiting room

Everything tastes of you and I am suffocating

So be it

There are worse ways to be awake.

by

Curiosity

Was an efficient assassin

That’s not the whole story, she says

Without giving her a timeline

I make my offerings to hope

Without needing a true name

I leave my cave and begin with slow, eager, thankful steps

Back towards your mystery

Going by old trails of birthright and mountain singing

Cool solitary air and visits from hands

Expecting nothing except

Correction

Peace

Pain

Sorrow

Goodness without limits.

by

There is no one solution

To our dissolution

We desire an endless peace

Communion

A settling, a smoothing out

A relief from the dints of every slight sound and thought

That keep us wakeful

The small, subconscious bumps

These peas hidden, prodding

Bruising even through piles of featherdown

Keeping us turning,

Over and over

Most placed unwittingly

Through no fault of others, or our own

Of sabotage we will not speak.

We cannot blame You

When sunset and sunrise follow one another

Only by Your bidding, and Your love

Is the rhythm by which we rise and fall

In spite of agony I know

Your sweetness

Soft, steady

I cannot help but worship, discounting pain

At this, I am still more in awe

And praising You, cannot help

But rest

Even here, in my displaced state

I love You more.

by

Cannibal Kingdom

Audio version

Always Eve’s idea

To give ear to the long one

In the interests of equity

Ecological democracy

Give pleasure a chance

Reconnaissance, not romance

Man retains enjoyment

Yet perfect, pleasing, God-sent

Husband, home, employment

Become vaguely insufficient

It’s because she gathers

Novelty, her search-image

It’s supposed to serve her

The urge to collect

Into her arms the lovely, fallen

Entire orchard of paradise

And lose herself in the giving and receiving

But again she’s coming to

With its hard tongue inside her

Eyes open under thick scales

Slip-squeezing muscular

Air only a prayer away but

Dusky, half-forgotten…

Squirm out of cold coils

Back to the warm, honest soil

Of birth and rebirth

The cinnamon-scent of earth

Listening for holy footsteps

Hearing murmuring of wasps

Chasing nectar-dripping skin

And so it begins

Anew

Beside her in the furnace

Gold calf forming, reliquefying

She drinks in each burning breath

Long, deep, uniform

Sweating out the venom

Thinking of eternal love

And on the third day she rises

Sloughs the grey, blistered skin

One long, untidy tangle

Walks upright again.

by

In defence of silence

Audio version

Go to the water. Sit

At the feet of the Casuarinas

Cushion of Dahlwah’s shed silver hairs

Where lost children flee

Listen for the stories the women told

Wait

Here on the mossy toes

Of the sandstone tower

For the rock warbler to whistle

In between insects

From its sideways perch

Walk with me

Stalk the blue marron before

It shoots into the sandy gloom

Tea- coloured mirrors of yesterday’s rain

Stay

In this breathing, declaring forest

Unfurling itself from forgotten dust

This does not need to be solitary

But how else can I hear them speak?

Listen with me

Let words coalesce in the spaces we leave for them

Let love do the rest.

Go to the water. Sit.

Wait. Listen.

Receive with thanks.

by

12/12/13

In a paradigm of eyes

Lies paths charted yesterday

By earnest men in boats of words

Restless hearts for those in yokes

To see them broke, and baring pure light,

Aglow from inside. Fields none of us can tread:

Foxglove and feverfew

Febrile dreams, vivid in beds

Of eyebright, for the Lord’s delight

We are bound to these crosses

Hung on them

Drawn and quartered by words opposed

Hoping for an outlook of yeild,

Something unseen

A gleam, buried

Beneath the roots and skeletons of weeds

Thorn upon thorn piled in this rubbled mess

Of the ones who have been pulled up before

We live with our eyes, searching for that horizon

In the sharp smoke of guttering flames

Arching back upon ourselves,

Needing your streams to clear our heads

Your breeze of change, the steadiest gale in this

Storming uncertainty.

We’re yelling for you to wake,

Our rudder. Our oars.



by

Simbahan

A tree is a tree is a tree

Concrete is concrete

Dust is as a Bangladeshi street

Motifs are devout, sacrosanct

As in my distant childhood

Yet you persist in my present

Hovering afterimage over green alleys, banana fronds

Taro-supplanted drainage lines

Chasm-high concrete pillars

Planted like hands on hips astride slipping valleys

Coin-coloured stones

A phantom in triplicate,

Ever attendant in dressed stone solemnity

Juxtaposed colourful confession

The confidence splashed over the sides of pedicabs

And sprinkled over food,

Bowed heads making stanzas holy.

A house is a house

Is a home, is a workzone

Is a labour. Is love

Faithfully limping down with slops in hand

Animals and dependants bawling

Vines crawling ceaselessly over food

Waiting for a Day to rest

Home is here

Where humidity rises,

Golden in the close din

Of coconut smoke and roosters roaring.

by

Backswell

Here it is

It’s at this point you remember

You were always a lazy swimmer

The wave is coming

To break you, and all you can think to do is

Stare and make some internal comment

At its voracious inevitability,

Instead of kicking

Feel it dragging you back to powerlessness

While you were half-turned,

Watching your childhood float past

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Your face thrashes the seaweed sand-pit

Tumbled by tidal giants

Sunward and gasping

Don’t look to them for help

You wanted this beach deserted

You wanted this familiar defeat

Welcome the jelly-flesh rashes

The sunburnt tongue,

The scorched eyes

It’s the same argument you love to have with yourself

And lose.