Potem

Contentment

2009-10-16T16:17:00.001+13:00

The rock that sits
that waits in the corner
Behind the door
should it be needed
As a doorstop.

The picture of my guru
arms upraised in blessing
That never tire;
the fullness of that moment
As a constant reminder.

The tan underside
of the guitar strap
Turned to view.
No shoulder needs
To stretch its weight.

The droop of the lily
over the horizon of the pot.
My mind resting enough
to note its want of me
With a little water to revive.

Cancer

2007-12-12T10:06:00.000+13:00

Right, you got me off the mark fast and furious:
You bring to mind the word ‘canker’:
n. 1. An ulcerous sore of the mouth and lips:
That’s fine, by chance I have that at the moment:
Stress-related, embarrassing, but at least it’s not going to kill me.

n. 2. An area of dead or decaying tissue in a plant surrounded by healthy wood or bark.
That’s more like it. I always found that fascinating, that trees had dead parts next to live.
Are you then the canker of the human world, the dead we tolerate among the living?
No, you are worse, the dead that presumes to be alive,
The fool haunting our world not seeing the light.

n. 3 & 4. Any of several animal diseases attacking especially the ears of dogs and cats.
Any source of spreading corruption or debilitation.
Dogs and cats are sensitive creatures, their ears burn with your lies.
You are corruption, corrupt, bankrupt, broken to pieces, entropy,
Infesting others, investing others, wanting them to mirror your lie.

Cancer, the crab, crustacean, carapace over cephalothorax. Carcinoma, creeping ulcer.
Clutching with claws your hold on our lives, demon of material realms.
Malignant tumour caused by the abnormal division of cells, invading surrounding tissues.
Blind materiality. Carcinomatosis – n. the existence of carcinomas at many bodily sites.
Ah, but epiclesis - the call to the Holy Spirit to turn bread and wine into body and blood of Christ.

We will name you, Cancer. We will address you by all your names.
We will learn the words to hold our power against you.
Even if cancroid – adj. 1. similar to a cancer 2. similar to a crab – we will know you and see you.
Our call is life, of the living, to the Life Force, to consecrate again our daily bread of life.
The transubstantiation of the Eucharist is more a miracle than your self-making.

Take this bread and wine and make it known to us as human flesh in kinship with the divine.
Anull in us the pernicious notion that this body can mutate in darkness by its own.
From the ouroboric ovum of a single cell, to the birth of a baby with 20 million million cells,
And the universe of 50 million million cells in adulthood, we are the united light.
Lend us the language of metaphor – it is body and blood because we pray and say it is.

3 - 2 - 2007

Talk of Such Things

2007-12-11T08:45:00.001+13:00

Talk of things where one holds one’s breath.
Walls of citadels dusty with the desert’s wrath.
Face of fear, and death is stalking the streets.
I cover my heart now aware it is heaving red meat.

Night is swarming with locusts and lies.
All appearances wear a disguise.
In darkened doorway does my body give in,
Disappears in my chest and grows thin.

Eyelids shade like a camel’s wisdom.
I ride on the storm from my fabulous prison.
A troubled genii in a bottle’s throttled torment.
But the blood clutches the feet on the pavement.

The singular eye turns a gurney of gyres.
Golgotha is its claim and desire.
What witness am I that I’m caught in this web
While the light of the world rose into red?

The wash over me clears my mind of illusion.
Such imaginal memories seem not a delusion.
Would my heart drip with red and the light lift my lungs.
Would my breath give away and such speech light my tongue.

Child At The Breast

2007-12-11T08:34:00.000+13:00

Sun-golden mounds of molten motion
Home-warmed hands hold bobbing boobs like the ocean
Knoll-nudged fudge-brown nipples rippled roll out
Thumbs tug titty-treats of teats in your mouth.

14 - 4- 06

Past Life Memories With My Father

2007-12-10T08:59:00.000+13:00

1.

We sat upon the temple steps
Overlooking the marketplace.
Casual, side by side, on the uppermost step,
So that neither would presume to sit higher.
And yet still the dark mystery behind,
The large doors, the smaller one inset like a jewel.
Only at times of great festivals
Would the larger doors be opened wide.
Then the crowds jubilant and wild
Would bridge the distinction made
By these soft low steps of stone.
In my hands, forearms resting on knees,
I finger a stalk of straw, blown by winds
That gust occasionally through the city gates
Lifting feathers and dust from the streets below.
I turn the stalk as I turn my mind,
Sifting the dry contents of fields forever turned to hay.
You too are unsure where to look.
But your hand gestures to stay my meandering
And point out something that occurs below.
Ah yes, this stalk is yet no cryptic key.
I stab the air in vain and flick it away with my wrist.
Whatever, we must stay present with this.

2.

Maddened fireflies assail the lanternlight.
The envy of these motherfuckers might
Come to grief with little distinction
Other than their own extinction.

3.

Bearded we might
Scuttle down priory hallways,
One leading the other by the elbow
As though in flight.
Cloistered amid the booklined walls
We try to recall where we have read
What might beckon the other from the night.
Something seen when the moon was passing
The leadlight window framed above.
The hands turn thin sheaves of manuscript
As though we know there's little time.
And who could say what was discovered,
How much the two friends dared to share,
The ages lost and yet in passing,
Who now knows what's next in line?

4.

Sorry, the train began on time.
The words were planned that were to rhyme.
The sense is now what's left behind
Once thoughts have been committed to line.
Some missed the junction, went astray,
Like you and I from day to day.
What use regret and guilt and shame,
The many thin grey shades of blame.
The most is what is left today,
To bring it forth else fade away.

28 - 11 - 96

Meditation On A Photo Of Red Cloud

2007-12-10T08:51:00.000+13:00

Grace falls from heaven.
This healing grief.
My throat catches.
I cannot express the way
This crosses my heart.
The suffering that bleeds
Into the plains.
The rivulets that run into the earth.
They are channels
Like the grooves of my forehead.
From the diamond centre
I am pierced like an arrow to the depths of me.
What has happened to my people?

17 -3 - 96

Solitary State of Wealth

2007-12-04T09:26:00.000+13:00

I find myself in edges where
Litter is lodged amid despair.
The ghosts of others who came this way
And left too soon, they did not stay
To find the reason for moving on,
But carelessly left a state of abandon
With evidence they thought it wrong.

I choose to lose myself now here.
I leave no litter but take the care
To clear again this natured nook
Of rubbish, contain within this book
The unwinding of my bandaged self,
Reveal a healing into health
Of soul, and solitary state of wealth.

No Still Life

2007-12-04T09:20:00.001+13:00

This spirit then.
Licentiousness of the artist.
Overture, sheer determination
To give meaning to possibility.
A film about Picasso.
And now, dying lilies in the vase.
Where does the life reach to in them
As they are withered by the sun,
That once drew them forward in childhood?
Each parched petal a thirsty tongue,
Purple flame, dog-earred, panting.
Reaching out to the atmosphere in hope.
My body itches where my shirt
Tucks into my trousers.
Picasso wore a belt, white trousers,
Red shirt. Blinking eyes unbelieving
That he must make his own universe.
Ideogogue, circus master, well-formed
Rehearsals in canvas and the necessity
Of paint to pronounce and punctuate.
Sheer fortitude. Restless and responsive.
No still life.

Keep

2007-12-04T09:18:00.000+13:00

You keep house,
And I'll earn my keep.
While I work,
I need somewhere to sleep.

Ditty

2007-12-04T09:17:00.000+13:00

The only piece of hair on his face
Hung from his lower lip,
That it looked as if he'd left a trace
From eating an unskinned rabbit.

A Dream About Counselling Work

2007-12-04T09:08:00.000+13:00

My brother, Steve, and I, talking to a guy.
There's some work he wants to offer us.
(Steve's been struggling around work issues too).
The guy's a brilliant young biologist.

He's been working with trout, growing them large,
He says, up to eighty kilos.
Wow, that's one heavy lifting job, I joke,
Imagining giving them the heave-ho.

The guy knows my joke, but knows me better,
The cap-tipping banter of one anxious about work.
Of course, I'm working with them when they're lighter,
He says, and I, in a sudden realization, know my quirk
Of finding in images the heart of the matter.
I look inside again to what my soul calls me to.

And sunlight flashes on scales of silver,
As I lift heavy fishes and pour them on through,
To slip into streams from their large holding tanks,
And I know this is the work I will do.

Sounds

2007-12-04T09:07:00.000+13:00

Cicadas buzzed as he wrote,
Listening to the music of Donovan.
The traffic up the hill sounded heavy.

And then the tape stopped playing the song,
Hissing with the cicadas and vrooming,
And clicking off, he could hear his baby breathing.

The traffic came down to the sound of waves,
Lapping and crashing on the coast.
And between the birds, he could hear these words
Creating.

The Holy Masculine

2007-12-04T09:06:00.000+13:00

Bagpiper stands at the top of a hill,
And he’s calling to his clan:
I’ll find my art and perfect this craft,
Til I know the holy masculine.

And a poet prays til he falls silent,
And trusts his words again.
Then writes of things that touch his heart,
Til he knows the holy masculine.

And both alone they travel home,
To communities of other men.
To play their songs and share their words,
And embrace the holy masculine.

Listening With Two Ears

2007-12-04T08:55:00.000+13:00

If I can listen
With one ear and then the other,
Listen to where I listen from,

Then my head is like a darkened cave,
My self caught in the light of the entrance.
Seeing me there.
Listening from back here,
As I feel along the ridged interior
Of myself echoing.

Balls

2007-12-04T08:46:00.001+13:00

I remember the day,
Down at the site of the sweatlodge,
When squatting naked, I had the realization
That I don't sit down in my balls.

It was after the fire was out.
Around the rim of the firepit, it was wet.
And going deep inside, I felt my cock relaxing,
But I still wasn't down in my balls.

I was moved to spread my thighs wider open,
And really sit down on my haunches.
My knees pushed the muscles of my biceps wide
As I tried to feel down into my balls.

I felt like some long-limbed frog,
My feet feeling the suction of the mud,
As I leaned slightly back and nearly sat down,
And my balls touched the cold of the ground!

Electric eels could do no more!
But soon the cool mud pressed around,
And relaxing further, I discovered I was able,
Heels against the bones of my arse, to sit stable.

And the frog became an ancient toad.
I sat there for nearly an hour,
And pondered life on the edge of the pond,
Sitting down in my balls and my power.

Jasmine

2007-12-03T14:36:00.000+13:00

Already the jasmine has taken me
To sunny Sunday mornings as a boy
Cold concrete and wet washing on the line
Linen from the laundry basket left to dry
Steaming into a high day of far-off clouds.
The narrow path down the side of the house
Stroked with long reaches of light
Where the cat curls on the earth by the weatherboards.
Chug-chug of the washing machine working further
Warm metal flashing by the drain where the water spills out.
Odd places beckoning one to sit down with eyes closed
Crisp still fresh full day-dreaming days gone by.

9-6-04

Memories

2007-11-30T13:36:00.000+13:00

Whose are the caring hands,
That gently fold the worthwhile moments
Of the open days that fall behind me like calendar pages?
In what linen cupboard are they layered,
Placed in what arrangement?

And are some left untouched, hardly noticed in a corner,
Special things with scalloped edges,
Made for times when company comes calling?
Are the creases still able to be ironed?
Do they resist being laid out in the open?
If lovingly kept do they yet grow old?

Unfold the treasures there.
I seem to have forgotten.
Brush away the dust of years, and
Lift the corners into the air, and
Place them on the bed and table, and someone
Light a candle for night and day, I’m afraid
I have forgotten.

9-6-04

Prayer

2007-11-30T13:33:00.000+13:00

tether it here, in the cool midnight air of light
waving warm rippled streams, enter into my dreams
loosen my lean swathes of flesh.
encolour my chest, inrush an infusion of beams
fill the crater inside, warm its tide of new life
overwhelm all the sides, make a nest.

awaken fractal tendrils of power.
give the breath girth and width
carry clear heart forthwith from the window
of my tenanted tower.

may sourcewaters flow free from this well
in this uncharted realm, let my lungs be the helm
and my ribcage cut waters in half.
end the occupation of lies and constriction
call my spirit return from its enclosure of fiction
and fiercely guard this new craft.

call the corners of walls to new dominion
seal all corridors, redraw lines of permission
sound inside a long note that now lets down the diaphragm.
ancient ancestral fathers of yore
expand me to be as I am once more.

14 – 2 – 05

Smokescreen

2007-11-30T13:31:00.000+13:00

Candlewax drips in a sudden profusion.
Flame crippled drops as it splutters confusion.
Now strikes up again with a red-enraged hand.
Slaps some smoke as it smotes to create a diversion.
Lake of wax fills again under burning desire.
Settles deep in the heat in retreat from the fire.
Fomenting rebellion as its twists in the torment.
Til the wall’s rent anew and it runs til it tires.

So too does this wounding seek its natural discharge.
The curse bursts its banks and drains me of courage.
If I falter I’ve fallen and soon comes the blame.
If I rage to recover remember
Through screen of smoke heals the flame.

14 – 2 – 05

Six Passers-by

2007-11-28T08:36:00.000+13:00

Middle-aged, papers clutched against her chest, fingers entwined.
As though her life were undelivered, although apparently sealed and signed.

Pear-shaped body, swaying hips, hands hooked inside long black sleeves.
Hair tied into ponytails, handbag swinging, to and fro she weaves.

Thin white shirt, rippling in the wind, pasting against bare skin.
Long unbuttoned cuffs signal the end of his business day, evening begins.

Small Asian face almost covered by wrap-around sunglasses.
Earrings flash in flaxen hair, flared jeans reveal high fashion shoes as she passes.

A double exposure, two dark-haried women, each holding a hoisted handbag.
In smiles and hair heads nod together, but one seems lighter, feet white sandalled.

Chinstraps frame a silvered beard, a cyclist in yellow windbreaker.
Speeding by, his smile is surprisingly permanent, the freedom in this cocooned caper.

27 - 11 - 07

The Child of Hills

2007-11-28T08:28:00.001+13:00

Walk in the child of hills with legs that shine like apples
In pockets open to sunlight with daffodils holding the air.
Look to paper planes catching from leaves that green the blinking eyes
To butterflies lifting from waterfalls spreading fingers on the stairs.
Take chimneys dressed at daybreak passing shadows off the fields
Caught in waves at grassy ridges growing warm clouds off clear blue.
Wait near old brown bridges for shoes that hang like coloured fishes
And hide near branches folding out for worms in borrowed suits.
Show candles roaming under stars past roads that whistles turn to view
While seeds shy under fallen logs down past grey crickets hicupping.
Embrace long days at childhood’s end in meadows facing head downwind
And wrap full coats at owl’s long note in hair flung puddle-jumping.

13 – 3 – 05

Rage

2007-11-28T08:26:00.000+13:00

We hated those men then,
With all we could muster,
Who bore down above us,
With blades bloody-lustred.
Who tore us from land,
And forced us here into danger,
Where the heart beats on fire
At the hands of a stranger.

In our rage we were hardened,
To confront the dark lords,
Those steel eyes of requirement
To submit to their swords.
Though our hearts lay wide open
To the rivers of blood,
In our anger-filled frames,
We were as large as the gods.

And our chests grew like furnaces
Roaring with logs,
And our cries were the ravings
Of wolves and wild dogs.
And our teeth showed their edges,
And our brows ran with sweat,
As we fixed on our foe,
And knew blood must be let.

In a wave of defiance,
We ran forward to fight.
And our fierce pride dared them
To question our might.
Arms and hearts reaching upwards,
We exploded in red,
Yet our anger declared
We’ll not be of the dead.

For our hearts harboured children,
And wives and kinfolk,
In our crazed cries of courage,
It was for them that we spoke.
So we called on the gods
Of rage, weapons and war,
To put fire in our chests,
And burn brave evermore.

21 – 02 – 05

Silence

2007-11-28T08:25:00.000+13:00

Fresias fade, withdraw their bloom
As though reversing time.
A smile she smiled at him now curls back
Toward herself in self-reflection, fades too.
She wants to crease the silence between them
Like a sheet of paper with no words.
Words get stuck in time.

Chocolate and Sex

2007-11-28T08:24:00.000+13:00

Chocolate and sex.
Sweet dreams of warm woman’s steam,
Hot and wet and heating,
Love’s own sweet furnace beating.
With each deep breath she wants
To cool it down.

12 – 10 – 06

Archaeopteryx, Metempsychosis

2007-11-28T08:20:00.001+13:00

Surely the arbitrary cannot be so arbitrary,
determined by chance or caprice?

Archaeopteryx, metempsychosis.
Ancient bird of the Jurassic era,
The transmigration of the soul.
One actual, one abstract.

The half reptile, half bird, one of the earliest flying animals.
A creature living one hundred fifty million years ago,
A creature now dead, now extinct.
Ah, but did you ever really live for many millions of years?

A prototype.
A transitional form beween reptiles and birds.
Jawed teeth & a long lizard tail: feather & wing.
A form between demons & angels, a collage of concepts.

Archaeo-pteryx.
Archaeo-logy, Encyclo-paedia.
Etymology. From the Greek etumologia, ‘the word of the true or real’.
‘Archaeopteryx’. New Latin. ‘Ancient bird’.
We took pteryx from pterux from pteron, the Ancient Greek, up from Eden.
Pterux – ‘bird’, from pteron – ‘feather’, via ‘wing’.
Ah, but did you ever come from feather via wing?

I see the fossilized imprint of your body.
An encyclopaedia encircled, a cycle, a circle, a final stage for your breath.
A footprint on the path of time, your fossil wings visible as feathery lines.
Radiations from your spinal column.
And your feathers radiated out from these.
Ah, but was it ever that feathers grew first on your body?
Did you ever feel your skin feel like feathers, for the feathery very first time?

Feather to wing to bird. Flying as a finer degree of feeling. Metempsychosis.
The passing of a soul into another body or form of existence.
A physics of flying, a metaphysics of dying. Metaphor.
Ah, had you flown on the wing of the flow, thrown by the throw of the dice?

Words form into rhyme, their meanings divined from the signs.
Archaeopteryx, metempsychosis.
Arbitrary existence & an A to XYZ of time.

31-3-06