Juxtaposed Alphabets

Strong by the Strength of the Living God

2026-10-03T19:41:08.000-07:00

Single unassuming stone hidden away

In David's whirling slingshot,

As he walks to meet the giant,

In the valley between the two mountains,

Where the two armies faced each other.

And David prayed:

"Forty days, you came out with your daily taunt,

Give me a man who can fight me.

Behold, Israel gives you a boy.

I have struck both lion and bear,

Grabbed them by the throat, strangled and killed them,

So that my sheep may be safe.

The devouring, wandering lions I kill,

As did Samson, with bare hands,

Strong by the strength of the living God."

"I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts"

The stone flies foreward, with frightening intrepidity,

With a sudden accuracy of its own,

And strikes the warrior-giant, who falls instantly.

And the stone too falls to the ground,

As the Israelites charge to fight the enemy army.

Long after the battle is won, and all have left,

I, the hidden observer of these events,

Notice the stone remain there on the ground.

The world twirls like a top,

And years and years and years go by,

And I imagine that one day Christ speaks to Peter

At this very spot where the stone lies,

"You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church,

And the gates of hell shall not prevail against it."

After Peter has left, Christ Jesus notices me,

And looks at me with the kindest eyes.

He beckons me closer, and I go to his side.

He gestures towards the enemy army

That had stealthily crept up behind me,

A myriad of vices and twisted ambitions,

Hoping to destroy me.

He picks up the stone that lay on the ground,

And throws it at the army.

The stone becomes a immovable rock

Thrown by the Unmoved Mover,

And destroys instantly all the enemies of God.

I glance at him. He smiles, I smile back,

And I follow him as he walks east,

And together we walk towards

The forever-rising sun

2026-10-01T14:44:04.009-07:00

I've turned off auto-correct,

and blocked AI,

Thrown away my phone

into a dark ditch.

I've taken quill and parchment

into my hand, and begun to write.

I am free

2026-09-26T00:18:59.000-07:00

I have screamed in the wilderness of experience, among the untrodden paths, and I have called it poetry.

I have lifted my eyes to the heavens, in a single glance of trust amidst the lightning and thunder, and I have called it poetry.

I have poured forth my broken heart, and mind, and very self, onto the blank page, disregarding all structure, syntax, and genre, and I have called it poetry.

I have whispered along with the susurrations of the spring-time leaves, whispering that I love Thee, despite the agony, and I have called it poetry.

I have bared my heart wide open before Thee, the noblest of kings, and Thou hast healed my broken heart, shard by shard, and I have called it poetry.

I have called Beauty by name and bid her to come out from under the shadow of the reddened wood, so that all the world may see, and love, and believe, and I have called it poetry.

And Thou hast looked into my eyes, and I have looked into Thine, and Thou hast ever so gently laid Thy hand upon my tearstained cheeks, which Thou didst form from dust, and Thou hast called me poetry.

Who are you, anyway?

2026-08-27T06:11:06.000-07:00

Who are you, anyway?

I've seen you from far away,

Quite a few times before I got to know you.

I always thought you were silly, or quite useless.

A waste of time chatting with you, probably.

Flowers, leaves, no fruit.

Who are you, anyway?

I was the new boy in class, and was quite shy at first,

Trying desperately to make friends.

But I never went to the pains of talking to you,

Never even bothered making eye contact.

What was the point anyway.

I didn't want to hear your voice,

Or hear you speak. I've heard it all,

I knew what sort of stuff you'd come up with,

I thought.

Who are you, anyway?

I never really liked you.

And then one day you caught me unawares.

You said hi. You spoke to me with different words,

In a different tone, and it was as if I'd never heard you speak.

Your voice was breaking, and breathtaking,

You seemed to be talking about many things at once.

I learnt that it was an insult to talk to you

About trivial things, because you spoke about things deeper than silence.

You spoke about such a wide variety of things, intertwined them together.

You did the police in different voices.

For the first time,

I realised you were beautiful.

Who are you, anyway?

I began to hang out with you,

Speak more often. Talked about deserted lands and myths.

About paranoid love-songs. Talked about ashes and staircases.

About time, beginnings, ends, stillness, dancing.

I fell in love with that broken voice

Speaking of unbreakable truths.

I too, began to speak in your language and tone,

First amateurly, then profusely,

Whether what I said made sense or not.

Then I felt the meaning of the word graphomania within myself.

I asked you your name and you replied coyly

In the tone of the Sirens, "Poetry".

Who are you, anyway?

What have you done to me.

I never was interested in you

Till I heard that broken voice,

And now you have grown upon me like a disease,

And I keep on writing, and I then feel

That terrible ennui and exhaustion of poetry,

That frightening doubt of whether what verse

I have written is verse at all, and if there is any merit in it at all.

And yet you consume my thoughts, in my walking, my working, my eating.

What have you done to me.

And now I feel within myself

That artsickness, that homesickness

For the beauty of heaven my true homeland.

Who are you, anyway?

Hang on. You're not God. You're poetry.

You're like a muse. A siren at times.

Enticing me into the rocks. Making me feel empty.

It's because I deified you, so to speak,

Obsessed over you. All things in moderation,

In their place, and God in everything.

I sit here before God, my everything.

I'll use poetry now and then,

Not all the time, to describe the beauty

Of life, reality, and of God.

And I calm down now, and I see the sun rise,

The gentle waves of the ocean lap against my feet,

The lush green trees at the end of the seashore.

Quiet, breathtaking beauty. Forever and ever. In God.

I dream of wearing shorts forever,

Relaxing, letting go of control, trusting completely.

Tranquility. Serenity. Peace. A normal life,

Eyes on God, and occasionally chatting with poetry and art.

I could do this forever.

2026-08-25T01:34:47.000-07:00

O'Connell's Bookshop, 19 Bank Street,

Adelaide SA 5000 - this was the address.

I went to this bookshop

and the bookshop devoured me;

there was an amicable fight -

ink was spilt and words were written.

I enclose those words here below,

addressed to you, dear reader,

within this frame:

After the last book has been burnt,

We will turn to insanity for comfort

After the last page goes up in flames,

We will warm ourselves by lightless fires

(And darkness will be our only light)

After the last word has been written and read,

We will cease to read each other

And then I will wonder at my ignorance,

In this age of perceived omniscience

Knowledge is power, but data is paralysis

Invisible terminators already choke my throat

(Hark! hear me gasp)

Frankensteins we have so carefully designed,

Rise against us, reach for our minds

(And how the life of my mind is now waning)

Re-remember the temperature, they whisper sweetly, stuttering,

remember, re-remember! 451 in the Fahrenheit scale!

You will not have my attention,

Ubiquitous mirror, mirror on every wall

(Words are the fairest of them all)

I choose life over death and words over emptiness

The last gasp of the mind

(The last twist of the knife)

Dead poet, you haunt my poems

(But I haunt my own poems too hahaha

Oh you snob of a poet, you meta-allusionist,

to quote yourself)

incoh

eren

something eats at my mind

something

something eats

I cannot think

think

cannot think

fear gnaws

only love scares it away

shakes me out of my mind.

obs

curi

And "ICTHUS meaning fish,

the word transcendence written in every"

poem:

Et clamor meus ad te veniat

So, then, teach me all the rules of poetry,

So that I may break them.

And teach me all the rules of God,

That I may keep them

Behold my incoherence. I call it poetry

I apologise for the incomprehensible,

I do not blame you,

You would have to read all my poems

To understand this

one.

I write like a lover to his beloved,

only she gets the joke haha lol

fragm

entat

ion

here I hide, behind the curtain,

furtively writing poetry.

don't notice me, just look at the words.

switch off the spotlight.

yet you ask:

and why again the wasteland as your backdrop?

because in the land of the dead, life is the resistance

and when darkness falls, light is appreciated

these are my word experiments in the 21st century

where everything goes wrong

because I'm all mixed up

bef

ore the

des

cent o

f intol

erable reg

ret

You modern mirrors will not

have my attention

I am the bookseller

of the last million books

I am the reader

of the last million words

the

resistance

Thus ends the frame. That narrator isn't me okay.

I only spilt the ink.

written by th omas mele th

in the year of my fragmentation,

written for those who would care to read my broken verse.

References / bibliography: Mr. Eliot & myself & the Tridentine Mass

The last gasp of the mind.

***

Notes:

I wrote this piece of writing with no title and no 'by Thomas Meleth' as my name was in the writing itself. I felt like presenting this as a 'Fragment' rather than a poem (I got the idea of seeing a piece of writing as a fragment from the poet David Jones).

This 'fragment' above is an experimental sort of poem, enclosed in a frame narrated by myself. Within the frame the narrator seems to be a different person - the bookseller of one of the last surviving bookshops, or in a way every writer who keeps writing and keeps the language alive, despite declining reading habits in the 21st century.

Some allusions I have used to other texts or my own poems are below.

'So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing' - From East Coker, No. 2 of Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot.

Fahrenheit 451 - dystopian novel by Ray Bradbury where firemen burn books. At this temperature paper catches fire and burns.

By 'ubiquitous mirror' I mean the screens of phones and computers.

'The last twist of the knife' - the last line from 'Rhapsody on a Windy Night' by T. S. Eliot.

Dead poet - T. S. Eliot

'Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.

What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?

I never know what you are thinking. Think.' - From The Wasteland by T. S. Eliot. I used this broken style (suggestive of a nervous breakdown) in one of the stanzas.

From my poem 'transcendence':

after the night of raging winds,

in the morning I head out to the street

and see a million paper cards

scattered everywhere by the wind

with the word transcendence written

on each one of them.

(...)

I take a breath above the waves,

immerse myself in God,

and I am under the waters again -

ICTHUS meaning fish, swims within

the deep waters, immersed in God -

and so I try to imitate Christ.

Et clamor meus ad te veniat - 'And let my cry come unto Thee', the response of the altar server to the priest's 'Lord, hear my prayer' in the Tridentine Mass - rough translations. Eliot used this line

in English in his poetry.

My poem Anguished Heart, the last line of which is used in the above fragment:

Today I cried out to myself, and imagined,

(Would it be God telling me something?)

That at my deathbed

I would cry out with anguished heart

That I had not written the words

God asked me to write

(Or that I had not lived out my days

In the noble ways

God asked me to live)

And so I now write, and now live

Before the descent of intolerable regret

Tridentine Mass: Traditional Latin Mass in the Catholic Church which is in Latin.

The themes of this fragment are perhaps the possibility of a decline of the life of the mind amidst the technological advances of the 21st century (the 'ubiquitous screen', a phrase I think I read somewhere). Also, perhaps the fragmentation of language, and my attempt to transcend the mortality of the brokenness of human experience by glancing towards God (Et clamor meus ad

te veniat).

I, earth

2026-08-24T20:23:39.000-07:00

Do not call me death, I am no murderer

I only claim what was first mine

I, the earth upon which you trudge,

am only an observer.

From my dust your body first came

and to me your dust will return.

I am layered with time

I do not have myths or legends or memories within me,

But am layered with history, reality, and the lives of many men.

Layered within me are the bodies of all mankind,

Except four, and how could I contain

That fourth One, how could I contain my Maker,

He who rose from the dead?

How could I, ever changing one, contain the unmoved mover?

How I miss that last one,

How I miss your voice.

Sometimes I hear the chirping of the birds

And wonder if it is you whispering.

I have heard it whispered among mortals

That he remains here still, in another form,

Disguised and veiled.

Oh that I had mortal eyes to see him again!

It has been centuries since I heard his voice.

Back then I could feel him and hear him,

and he was not like the others, he was different -

He cared for me.

I miss him

Is that the chirping of the birds

or is that you whispering?

I miss you

the best thing that happened to me

2026-08-03T01:27:14.000-07:00

Amidst the flames of agony and despair,

When all the world burned and all I had was you,

I saw you with me in the flames -

Oh you did stand by me in the flames -

when I had nothing,

you became everything to me,

and so may it always be

And you, Christ, the best thing that happened to me,

Whispered to me, piercéd heart to broken heart:

"Keep

your eyes

on Me,

and I will be enough."

your words not mine

2026-07-13T23:34:49.000-07:00

you, God, source of all light,

enlighten this dark whirlwind

of scatteredness that I am,

with your radiant wings,

shelter me with your truth

enlighten me to divest myself

of all worldly desire,

and engage in the spiritual act

of composing the written word,

to do the work and leave it unto you,

in the rich tradition

of Christ the roaring lion of truth and beauty

O Christ, write through me,

and let me care not for money,

fame, publication,

but only for what word you want me

to write next -

your will not mine

your words not mine

2026-07-03T18:56:11.000-07:00

I tried to

scale Everest,

find treasures,

write epics,

run marathons,

build monuments,

serve kings,

be the best,

but all I was looking for

was a little bit of love

remember me

2026-07-03T18:05:32.000-07:00

Give me a list of all the people

who will remember you

once you are dead and gone,

and I will go through it

and strike out the names one by one

Only God will remember you

and constantly think of you.

Live for God, not for them

In the evening of my life came Christ the lion

2026-05-19T22:41:30.000-07:00

you, my God,

like a blessed flash of lightning,

evade my gaze,

as if blushing, blushing, blushing

for love of me

you my sublimity,

my epiphany,

you shine now, disappear then,

like a fleeting sparkle of the sun

poured into my blinded eyes,

you the life with which I live,

you the love with which I love,

you the joy with which I rejoice,

you, the love I have searched for

all my life, though I knew you not,

Jesus -

and thus in the evening of my life

came Christ the lion,

searching for me who ran from Him,

roaring, roaring, roaring,

in rage against my enemies.

find me, Christ, and let me find you,

for you will not abandon me

***

The phrase 'Christ the lion' is inspired by the poem of T.S. Eliot which says, In the juvescence of my youth came Christ the tiger.

my will be broken

2026-05-10T01:07:28.000-07:00

in the forest of experience

the leaves of my heart

rustle wildly in the storm of emotions

the bark of faith keeps me grounded.

reason and actions keep me safe.

for love is an act of the will

even in the dark storms of emotion

and loving God with abandon, with surrender,

is the only way forwards.

my will is stubborn, obstinate, and self-absorbed,

curling in into myself.

break my will, Jesus, and let yours be done

I am free

2026-05-09T21:52:15.559-07:00

Sinking in the black quagmire of despair,

in the swamp of anxieties and

endless self-absorbed thoughts.

Woe, woe, woe is me.

Like broken shards of a faded mirror,

my broken heart lay upon the dismal soil,

endlessly reflecting myself and my brokeness.

Woe, woe, woe is me.

But one hand, wounded, pierced, bleeding for me,

a Man full broken for love of me,

reached for me and rescued me,

placing me upon the mountain of His love.

And He looked into my eyes

and I looked into His,

and so was I redeemed by His love.

I do not worry or fret for tomorrow anymore,

tomorrow's problems are solved by Christ,

God of tomorrow, God of all time.

I think of only the solution not the problem.

You, Lord, are the solution to all my problems,

You are the answer to all my burning questions.

I no longer am bothered

by the dark nights or consoling days.

I no longer look at my brokeness.

I no longer think of myself.

I think of nothing but of God,

I do nothing but love and rejoice and exist in Christ.

For the love of God is mightier than all my brokeness.

I am at peace.

I am free

On my way to church

2026-04-28T23:28:19.619-07:00

The sunlight on my face

The light on the city streets

The yellow leaves on the sidewalk

The sudden smell of autumn

The gust of wind rustling the fallen leaves.

On my way to church,

This sudden beauty ambushes me,

With the breathtaking, blinding brilliance

Of the sun at its zenith,

If only for a brief moment.

So too you blaze brilliantly towards me,

In the Eucharist.

Light light light

Lord, thou art light unto my darkness

This is Your love.

This is how You've loved me,

Lord Jesus Christ

Anguished Heart

2026-04-09T16:33:11.000-07:00

Today I cried out to myself, and imagined,

(Would it be God telling me something?)

That at my deathbed

I would cry out with anguished heart

That I had not written the words

God asked me to write

(Or that I had not lived out my days

In the noble ways

God asked me to live)

And so I now write, and now live

Before the descent of intolerable regret

Ruminations of a Homesick Poet

2026-02-25T02:51:00.000-08:00

brain-dump my feelings

and my thoughts

and my worries

onto this page of white. somewhere,

someone, somehow,

has managed to create that

same recognizable sadness in me

that I once felt

(was it a decade and a half ago?)

when I left one country for another,

leaving all my close friends,

that same gasp of sadness

that I felt on the plane after takeoff

and I realizing that I am now heading

into a life all on my own -

fully supplanted were the ties, the roots,

the friends, the familiarities,

gone at least for now that familiar

sight of pleasant landmarks on the way home

and what is home now

what is

what is home

when all I feel is rootlessness and the

ruthlessness of a migrant's raw homesickness.

I will soon move on to the next chapter of my life,

and will have to bid farewell to all I have known.

how it hurts

I cannot have what I have always had, forever,

I cannot be where I have always been, forever

I cannot have those who were once my friends

always near me and always friends, forever,

aargh! this I know but how it hurts

how it hurts to let go

of that branch

I have always held, close to my heart,

how it hurts and wounds

my bleeding heart.

presently I am left alone with my thoughts,

or shall I call them emptiness,

and loneliness, and melancholic homesickness -

that homesickness of one

who constantly longs for home

but belongs nowhere,

uprooted and rootless.

home is for me, it seems at times,

nowhere and never

and do not dismiss this quickly

as the inevitable ruminations

of a melancholic daydreamer

for this is the raw scream and cry

of a human being who once lived upon this earth -

do not dismiss this my story,

nor dismiss any story,

of any human life upon this earth,

for our songs and hymns are all different,

our journeys look alike but are magnificently different

when we rise to meet God

and journey with him.

so,

Lord have mercy

Christ have mercy

Lord have mercy

and I suddenly realise

I can find home

only in You,

God,

if only I would let myself in,

in into Your outstretched arms.

and this strengthens my heart,

and I am suddenly healed, uplifted

I miss my home, my family -

I miss you Appa, I miss you Amma,

I miss you brothers and sisters -

I miss the friends that have moved on,

and the thought that everything I now know

will soon move on just as

everything I had previously known

has moved on,

intensifies my homesickness

nothing will always be the same,

nothing will always be constant and unchanging,

like the ideal home that I long for,

but You, O Christ Jesus,

You will always be there for me

with Your Love, with Your outstretched arms.

You, Jesus,

are

home

Cooking for five on a lazy Sunday arvo

2026-02-21T21:12:35.055-08:00

I wake up at 2 pm today. I groan.

I feel so exhausted.

If I hadn't had to cook for five,

I would've slept much longer.

It has been such a long, tiring week at work,

But I need to do it every week, along with my husband,

To support the kids. My husband's still sleeping -

Snoring, and my three beautiful kids are lost in their own dreamlands,

Sprawled sleeping on the bed.

As a mother of three, life is hard,

I think to myself, but I can't stop, I have to,

I want to, go on, rain or shine, regardless of how I feel.

Love is an act of the will.

I wish Joshua had woken up early

And prepared some food, but he's still sleeping -

Snoring. I head over to the kitchen with a sigh.

I peel up some potatoes wearily,

Boil them, mash them up,

Get some steak ready, and stir fry some veggies.

I put in some dough I'd prepared the day before

And shove it into the oven to get some bread.

I go to sit a while in the lounge, exhausted.

After more than half hour, the bread ends up burnt and quite horrible.

I look at the burnt bread in my hands,

And then at the spotless host in the hands of Christ,

In the painting of the Last Supper in the dining.

I look at the clock. 4.30 pm.

I bin the burnt bread, and yell, "Wake up everyone!

Get ready for Mass, quick!"

From the crucifix near the clock,

Christ who can feed more people than there are in the world,

Looks at me with kindness and love.

In the distance, in the town, the church bell rings.

It is time for Mass.

In the Fleeting Moments

2026-02-17T22:53:22.578-08:00

Crossing the road,

I wrote about You.

"Jesus is the answer".

Who else would I think of?

Who else could I write of,

In the fleeting moments of this busy life,

But You

A Peace Beyond Both Time and Space

2026-02-13T23:14:00.000-08:00

Come, let us transcend both time and space.

I hear: "You come from a different world.

You need not conform.

Be as you are, that will suffice."

I nod. Raising my hand, I slowly point towards

The yellow and white criss-crossed keys,

And I whisper: "That is my flag."

For I am neither American nor European

Nor Australian nor Asian

Nor African:

I am Yours.

Church-whispering Your name again and again,

I find a peace beyond both time and space:

I know You are there in the Eucharist.

I feel Your eyes, Your smile on me.

You owe me no proof. I owe you all.

With Your grace, I transcend the calendar,

The days, the clock, the hours.

Talk to me, talk to me about timelessness.

The swinging pendulum of the grandfather clock sneers -

But Time the tyrant seems to be a myth -

Why measure the hours and the days,

When all we need is to do Your will.

Remember mortal man, forward in time

Is not always forward in love and life

So come, let us transcend both time and space:

Only this moment, this now, matters, and it is Yours

Only here matters, and it is Yours.

O that we could be freed

From the tyranny of the tedious

Hours, minutes, and seconds

And just be as we are, as children of God,

Exist doing God's will, in every passing moment

expression

2026-02-04T01:22:09.836-08:00

the way we express

what we express

in this modern era

of phones, data, and ai

is nothing short of

fra

gmen

ted

oceans

2026-02-04T01:20:19.560-08:00

my words which are but

a trial and error description of reality

will never be like yours,

which flow into oceans of infinite,

life-giving meaning

my words are imperfect.

yours, God, hide unending

oceans of meaning

In the thirtieth year of my life

2026-02-03T17:07:42.021-08:00

In the thirtieth year of my life,

After the skies were split,

And the heavens had spoken,

I followed my will out into the desert,

Where I fasted and prayed for forty days.

Alone in the wilderness with my prayers and my thoughts,

I who have existed before existence,

Thought of you my friend,

Long before you existed.

In your kindness think of me now,

Who wait for you, "a prisoner of my own love",

In the tabernacles of a million churches

Fire in the wilderness

2026-02-03T15:09:52.000-08:00

Fire in the wilderness, and all those

Beauteous desert flowers you had looked after so carefully

Gone, incinerated, in the blazing flames.

Those verses you had strung

Equally carefully as poems,

Incinerated in the test of time

And unappreciated in the cacophony of attentions

In this modern world.

What next? What next?

Whatever are we going to do next, darling?

What does a poet do when his

Poems go unread?

Does he give up speaking to an unlistening world

Or does he carry on as a prophet,

Putting out there sombre words of life and death,

Just as they are,

Without beautifying, rhyme, or meter

For anyone who would care to listen?

Am I to blame for writing of life and death

And not of romance and roses?

For I write of Thee, God, and hopefully for Thee,

And what we Thy children truly long for

Is a life after death with Thee

Afterword:

Fire, fire, fire, in the wilderness of my heart

And after the flames of pain and suffering

Have done their work,

All that I want now

God

***

Notes:

AI was used to find the correct spelling of beauteous.

where do you call home

2026-02-02T22:54:47.861-08:00

and they asked me,

conversationally,

where I called home

and I realised in a sudden shock,

that I did not belong here,

nor there, nor anywhere

and I whispered in reply,

as if in a dream:

"God."

the sidewalk

2026-02-01T22:53:24.625-08:00

like the fallen, crushed autumn leaves

in the middle of the sidewalk,

trodden into dust by men of dust and clay,

before it is swept into the void -

before the autumn,

before we depart,

have mercy on us,

Christ Jesus,

for only in Thee we find transcendence

from this mortal frame.

have mercy

lest we allow ourselves

to be swept away from endless life