Archives
Sections| The Golden Country, set 1 | The Green Hills, set 1 | Rites of Passage, set 1 |
| Wilderness and Wasteland , set 1 | The Travelor Returns, set 1 | The mood that passes through you, set 1 |
The faery kind Pheonix in flight Alice and the caterpillar Red shoes The Sea Witch Mermaid Fly away Peter Peter's reply The legacy Family memory My inheritance
The Faery Kind
Curious fire globes,
Drift in a forest outside Athens
Among the oaks and aspens.
Spin higher, take fire.
The burning brand
Is passed from hand to hand,
Weaving in a circle towards completion
Echoing in symmetry the celestial dance,
To purify these heavy forms
Into lighter wind born creatures,
The Faery kind their pixie features
Masks of delight and glee
And solemnity when they glance at the moon,
Their goddess floating high
Wide and stately globe in the sky,
Her silver tresses descending
Like a future that is still pending,
They are waiting for the dawn
To swarm into the deep hollows.
Phoenix in flight
Out under the starlit sky bats fly,
Possums move along branches
Birds stir and sleep,
Night insects creep.
Over the water the moon is rising,
She is round and ripe
Glowing like a fruit
A windblown apple.
Dappled by white and grey light
The phoenix is in flight,
Crying like an eagle
Brilliant strong and regal,
Lost from its home
Alone among its kind.
It left the nest bereft of a mate
Now in a world where time moves slowly
It is bewildered.
Let this bird return to its home
As swift as a hawk
Let it talk to the night and aim for the light.
Alice and the Caterpillar
I’m bored said Alice,
Lets go and play .
Now, now , said the caterpillar
Don’t confuse the realical with the fantastical .
Realical?! Said Alice, there’s no such word.
How would you know , said the caterpillar,
You’ve never used it .
Alice thought him quite absurd
So they sat in silence for a while,
The caterpillar puffing and smiling
Alice with her lips turned down
Her face a frown.
Then the caterpillar spoke as though making a joke,
You know only boring people get bored.
Alice looked at him in shock
He poked out his tongue to mock,
Alice thought she might storm and rage,
The caterpillar battered his eyelashes in play.
It wasn’t an adult way of talking
But it was very interesting as they went on walking.
Red Shoes
I am the girl who tied on red shoes,
Then went dancing at her mothers funeral.
At first I was a torch,
A pure flame of movement
Then I was a tattered fragment,
A shadow of my former self.
I danced until my feet ached,
I danced asleep, I danced awake,
I danced and twirled around the snake,
An infinity symbol a figure eight.
I was the whirlwind in the desert.
No-one could speak to me, I couldn’t hear,
There was only the whistling wind in my ears.
Every gesture was hard, sharp, compulsive,
Nothing soft, gentle or decisive.
I danced and became so weary,
So tired, so empty inside.
I danced and became so thirsty,
So hungry I thought I would die.
I danced with imaginary partners,
I muttered to them as they whirled me on.
I waited for someone to take an axe,
To chop off my feet.
To cripple me and set me free.
To hold me tenderly
Yet hold me still.
To free me from will,
To let me cry for my mother.
The Sea Witch
I was the mermaid,
Who didn’t want feet.
I didn’t want to be complete.
To walk over hard stones,
I preferred the soft sand of my watery home,
Where I could sing and play alone.
I saw you and my cold heart knew desire.
For the first time I felt something
A soft little butterfly rising inside.
I looked up through the water,
I saw a wavering distortion of your face,
I thought I have a face, maybe he is like me.
I stumbled up on dry land,
Gasping and sure I would die
Yet hoping to see your kind eyes.
You saw only the witch
Believed her lies.
I moved mutely behind her,
I had no words.
Silent and unsure
I had cold feet.
When you rejected me,
I felt the second knife blade
I recalled all my pain.
Each day when I see you
It is like the death of a thousand cuts.
Now I look down,
I wonder what to do with these feet,
Can I really learn to walk?
My heart longs for the days when I laughed in the foam.
Mermaid
She slipped into the water.
Drifting down to still cool places,
The mermen waited for her there
With pale and alien faces.
Her skin tore on the coral,
Hair tangled in the weeds,
She watched the aimless bubbles rise
Breathing in the sea.
Is this death? Her glazed eyes
Stare into other regions,
Where the world is ruled by tides
Forgetting the seasons.
The mermen caught her limp still form
And took her up above the foam,
With alabaster arms they willed the waves
That drove her to the shore.
To trouble them no more.
To be stranded like a piece of jetsam,
Her edges worn away
But no way of forgetting.
Her eyes long for other skies,
In which not birds but fishes fly.
The life that was so lightly scorned
Has left her gasping on the shore.
Fly away Peter
Fly away Peter,
Fly away, don’t stay,
Wendy has to go back again.
She wants to grow up and have children…
But she still loves Peter
The brightest boy she ever knew.
He took her flying without her shoes,
First star to the right and straight on till morning.
Can’t you hear the Never Never calling?
It can never be, can it Peter?
Wendy is sad.
She teeters on the window sill,
But she will step back into the room,
She still has a future.
Little mother Wendy and that jealous Tinkerbell,
Shake that little fairy, watch the bright dust fall.
You are the star in Wendy’s mind.
The one who crowed it’s mine all mine,
But Wendy isn’t yours,
Not any more.
Fly away Peter
Or come back by the door.
Peter’s Reply
You caught me trying to sow on my shadow.
You gave me a thimble for a kiss,
Said it will protect me from the pricks.
I gave you an acorn the seed of a tree,
You looked at me in wonder and didn’t quite believe.
It’s a mystery Wendy,
Use it to protect your heart.
Why couldn’t you stay?
Play with me in the fantasy?
You looked so grave and solemn,
All I could do was laugh and try to win you back.
You talked about the future,
What is the future Wendy?
Where does it live?
Perhaps we could find it together.
No?
Well that broke my heart.
I cried a little and got up in the morning
With Tinkerbell that bright spark.
She said don’t cry Peter, Tink still loves you
Wendy has gone away to her bright future.
The Legacy
The Legacy of childhood
Is the fairytale that teaches,
That all frogs will be princes
All Cinderellas princesses.
A sparkling dream of a perfect self,
Or some perfect other who will liberate us.
We ignore the seven miles the seeker walked,
The moments they were lost, blind or distraught.
There’s always a happy ending, isn’t there?
No, not always,
Some things can’t be cured
No matter how pure the heart
Or how hard we work.
The secret of life is compromise.
It’s growing old with style
Or as best we can
For all those Wendys and Peter Pans,
The little children
We can’t bear to break it to,
The real world isn’t like fairyland
It’s stranger, sadder and occasionally better.
Family Memory
My father rewrote his history to please,
Ignoring all the ugly details.
My mother left hers bare,
All the facts were there to see.
My father gave us dreams of ancestry and innocence.
My mother gave us reality with a touch of commonsense.
I guess I am a dream weaver,
My history a story far removed from its berth.
My authorship cleaves a path between the two
In dreams at least I am made new.
Sometimes I cry without knowing why,
Sometimes I sigh knowing exactly why,
I only ask that you hold me while
I try to distinguish truth from lie.
My Inheritance
My father’s ideals have colonized my mind.
I always loved him,
Knew his vulnerability from the inside.
That his mind was like mine,
Full of dumb love and a passion for ideas.
I could never reach what my father wanted to teach,
In this he was inflexible.
I wanted to be his Chekhov, his Ibsen
But had to wonder why he loved Hedda.
Why that was the book he gave my mother
What in that stove heated room did he recognize?
My fathers life was ruled by his mother,
Mine by him.
My mother couldn’t make his happiness and set herself free.
Then there is still me,
Compromised, divided and trying to be,
While loving as best I can, the difficult man
| Childhood | Growth | A tree |
| Unearthing | O’Riely’s Kingdom | River Road |
| Lost | Rough track | Other senses |
The lay lines lye in saying
Here is the boarder or setting.
The land is seeing the seeking of feeling.
I walk with a stick to measure out meter
To speak and to sing and to bring my foot down.
The crown of my head is touched by the sky,
Permanent stars and shifting clouds.
Tell me a story with the shapes that you saw…
When I was here,
When you were there,
When we were nothing
But the fruit of this land.
Some grow like staffs from root to tip,
Brief twists against the light
With buried roots that echo down
Beyond and out of sight.
Then thoughts and memories grow over,
Brief flowers in the sun,
Some are weak and some are lit
With a soft and inner glow.
The seeds were sown so long ago
Though twisting roots reach back,
From flowers tip to deepest root
It is very hard to track.
A tree knows what itself from the time it is a seed.
We sometimes forget that we are human.
A tree stands still all it’s life,
It watches and what it observes is all it needs to learn,
Be still for a moment and think like a tree.
A tree occupies this world fully.
It’s roots reach down and it’s branches up
It knows itself to be here
Tip to toe, root to leaf.
It responds to the sun and the rain
The wind blown tree is shaped
Like and expression of the gale,
Here there is no separation and nature is nurture,
You however, are not your only maker.
A tree can be interpreted,
Seen as a connection between the conscious and unconscious
Shamans climb them in their dreams.
A tree is also a tree, intimate with what is real.
We will die and feed the trees.
Seeds will grow and great trees fall,
This is the cycle of birth and death
Life itself is more complex.
The tree gives as it lives
There is shade under its branches
Sometimes flowers and then fruit
Even the skin of the tree is given over to moss.
Do you give as much of your self?
Pursue every potential of mind and body?
It is all right to natural,
To follow a dream,
To run with the impulse in your blood
That is living as much as the tree.
Trees are worth keeping,
Honoring.
They are central to our survival.
They breath with us and teach us,
If we will watch still and quiet
Becoming aware of the beauty and meaning of trees.
The roses are buried amid the ferns,
In another time they would have burned.
Their fronds curl under in crisp bracken,
I work on and do not slacken.
This is the garden of my yesterdays
In which I and time have played,
As thoughts and memories rise in my mind
So I bring pale plants up to the light.
Day lilies and Jonquils and other spilled seeds
Lie hid amid the burgeoning weeds.
Now at last I reach the rose
Look how thorny it now grows.
Thorns to draw skin and flesh apart
There is dead wood close to its heart
But wait the outstretched thorny wand
Is wick and green, it grows beyond,
So I begin to choose and divide the ways
Cutting out the deep decay,
Then a centimeter above the bud
From which a new stem should spring.
This I know… life can be like trimming the rose
Painful but necessary if it is to grow
Strong enough to reach the sun.
Choose and divide
Let new thoughts collide.
In Orylies I woke early and went out past the fires’ edge,
To wander and watch the morning birds,
To hear and know their calls.
I saw them hidden in the thickets,
Watched them dart from twig to twig,
Their little bodies, dancing, dancing
I lived for the flash of their bright eyes.
As the day rose out of morning
I heard other voices calling
To follow up and buy the seeds
So that we could stand
Bright parrots poised upon our hands
Calling loudly to each other,
Are we not the kings of birds?
While I remembered other stories
About the searcher led astray
By the echoing cooee call a lyre bird had made.
In that place I ran through gardens
Breathing in the fragrant herbs.
I read a poem on a plaque
Linking garden, god and bird.
Although I can’t remember other interlocking words,
It seemed that there was something in this
For hadn’t I like other pilgrims
Come to see the bower bird?
Stood before his little temple,
Hung with lovely blue discards
Some from forest some from humans
Stayed silent reverent and determined
To leave him undisturbed.
Soft waterfalls of green vegetation
Cling to steep slopes.
Plummet down them,
Scratched and dirtied but elated.
Feel rivulets of sweat drawn out
Humid air calling to water.
The air thrums with cicada rhythms
That wax into threat
When the clouds cross the sun
Causing the inner twisting of some prehistoric memory…
Then out onto calmer ground,
The valley,
Cleft between rising hills.
The cool space
Where water flows gently
Aiming for some yet distant waterfall,
The river road,
Where we are made small
By giant boulders that tumble and fall
In an ancient rivers roar
And are now awesome in their stillness.
The glow of exertion spreading through,
The talk passed back along the path,
Here we are alone in the world again
Children who still believe
That we are the first to trace this path.
Lost, because you decided to stay behind,
Tired by three quarters of the climb.
To sit on a lonely rock, on the side of a mountain.
You contemplate the view and the songs the birds are singing
Then you could not wait and with unsteady gait
Set off down the hill.
Propelled from tree to tree, hoping someone will see
The small signs you leave behind.
It was a clear winters day and you were a fool to get lost that way
Forgetting every rule, lucky to find the path again,
But not before you had seen
The charred trees and fallen logs,
The rising spindly sharp bladed grass
Thick with yellow daisies,
Then thought what it would be like
To be followed by the searchers
To find a stream and walk for days
Back to civilization.
You tumbled down that hill,
Lost the tying string of your skirt in the thicket,
Found it!
Reached the open gully,
Knew you could find your way
Because you remembered the fall of the land,
But not until after you had called for absent friends
And invoked god, like a child again.
Bush land, scrub land
Running like a river,
Just beyond the windows shield.
Highway, freeway
You say, this land is beautiful,
Poetic in the morning light.
I am cold despite your platitudes.
My way, your way.
We pass a prison,
It’s mesh glitters like a spiders web
It’s beautiful, is that incongruous to?
I read the map, is this the way?
You shrug,
My way, your way
The freeway or the highway.
The salty sap of life is green to the cat’s eye.
They wade hock high in fields of red grass,
Such as we imagine will be seeded on Mars.
Cats live in a world inverted
Under a sky we can’t imagine.
Humans rely so much on their eyes
To inform the other senses.
We do not sup as the bee sups
Never seeing the secret meaning of flowers.
If we could have the freedom of the birds
To fly at whim,
How much greater the world would seem.
Perhaps we would have cause to sing.
Even though the dog regards the world in monotone,
His nose tells him where to seek the hunted one.
I wonder where the world has gone?
Where humanity is going, and
I can almost smell it.
| The green ones | The first decision | The crossing |
| Weaving | Growing up | And I am |
| Iron eyes | The fragile truth | The barrier |
We come to you green with our most recent dreams,
Our eyes are full of stars, mouths open on unsaid words.
We are vulnerable but so alive
That the skin tingles with barely suppressed self.
Yes, we long to sing a song beyond our present knowing.
All the shifting lifting winds that take us too and fro
Will make us grow.
Don’t try to control this to much
Just give it time.
Time to be, time to see
All that lies and all that tells truth.
What was doubted,
What was flouted,
Until calm at last we come to grasp
That it is okay
Simply to be here and breath.
Children are born with the light of love in their eyes,
Their smiles ready to rise
There are no rules to shape these spirits
Not in the beginning.
As they grow, fast or slow
There comes the knowledge of an audience,
So we surrender our joy to ambition
Our faith is replaced by perseverance
We learn adherence to the rules.
Our dreams are fueled by desires
We never knew as a child.
And I?
I hover on the edge of cynicism,
I lived with ideals and so feel it keenly.
I am on the edge of my first decision
Do I release any idea of control?
Walk away from all I know,
Trust that a child will lead me,
That I will be free and no-one need free me.
It’s as if I had crossed some meridian
That said here a child, here an adult.
In one I played with make believe,
In the other I make reality and it makes me.
In one I am served in the other here to serve,
To teach and learn in both.
Yet there is no fixed line I know,
No birthday or defining moment,
That tells me when this crossing is.
I may give up that and this
Try to live up to some pattern sure to bring bliss
Yet I feel to be an adult is to be humbled.
Once I was all the wide world
Now I am part of that world and made no smaller.
I try to weave patterns into my life,
To texture the cloth with a steady design
But it shimmers with silken illusions.
I say this is why, no wait this is why,
The weave went this way
I thread some colourful yarns.
I try to control the weft and the warp,
To believe in continuity,
In cycles and changes.
I say here is the beginning, no here is the beginning
Or is it the end?
I sometimes loose the thread.
I imagine that life is a tapestry
In which I must be
The flaw the artist left.
Each time I chase it
Or try to unmake it
I find myself falling back into my mind.
I say now is the time
But I stop and I wait
As life unravels around me.
My life is merely shape and shadow
I can feel it lifting, peeling,
Plucking stuffing from the seams.
Poured out and drawn out
It dawns on me that I am as free
As a plant in the wilderness.
Sensible and senseless
Strong and defenceless
Crying and feeling emptiness
Nothing as a feeling.
Void
I avoid
Dodge the bullet.
I should do it
I could do it
Yes, if I wanted to…
The shoe is on the other foot
Take it out of your mouth
Put some words there instead
Say something that makes sense.
Wear a tie or a dress
Get a job and be a slave to your boss.
Address your elders with respect
Keep your resentment well hidden
Do the task unbidden
Make the big decision
Pin it to your mirror and look at it every day
No-one ever understood that she was never young,
Only innocent.
She was rigid as a child,
Chaste as a teenager,
Displaced as a young adult.
Her body never let her forget it
Being thick about the hips, with roles and folds.
That told the story of middle age
Even though she occasionally moved with the spirit of youth.
No-one knew how slow she was inside,
That time had let her drift behind, distracted in her mind.
No-one knows yet, that is why she is still innocent.
You can not touch that core
Without touching what is in her.
You can’t know why she laughs,
Without having seen the tears.
Knowing the years of pain and
The years of yearning.
You can’t listen to her sing
Without having heard the silence.
Know that the gentleness she brings
Is not without its’ violence.
Yes, she was young once, but in her own way.
She will quote those words again
And I will softly echo them.
“I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now.”
You have stood under the cruel neon again
Looked in the mirror and considered your shame.
Under the bitter sweet iron eye
That helps you laugh at yourself and life
But also mocks your simple click eyed questions.
You say it has always been this way
But that is not true,
Your sweeping denigrations
Have brought you to the realization
That others are much kinder to you
Than you are to yourself.
Sometimes the truth is ugly
The inside is as flawed and cracked
As the outside aspect.
The jealousy that goes unacknowledged
In a small mind.
That is battered by years of knowing
That the body is unacceptable and
Can not claim a recognizable beauty.
Other definitions are needed
Some dreams must be relinquished,
You are not diminished by this.
I feel fragile inside like a butterfly,
Though my body is still a grub.
I am young though I wear the signs of age.
I am tired of being judged, of judging myself.
I am weary of wishing to be someone else.
If only our society was more humble,
Think of life as a measure of beauty
There are many versions of pretty
Some we wouldn’t recognize if they bit us.
She emerges like a butterfly,
From drab chrysalis to exquisite wings
But both are lies to delicate to touch.
In both images she hides
The essential truth of herself.
The need to stand naked is persuasive
Like a fire under her skin.
Her mind rests within
The brine of desire
It’s shape is alive and mysterious.
She longs for solidity
To be held by the gaze of a single eye.
I was always searching for a reason
A reason for the rejection.
Something to pin my difference on
Now I feel with some acuteness
That I am the same
And disguise won’t hide
Me from myself.
| Lost and falling | Vertigo | Paused and posing |
| Fragment | A pattern of feeling | Words |
| Script | Shell like | Speed |
| Time and slippage | All the roads to nowhere | That stillness |
Darkness in the Silent sphere,
Silken and smooth in the silence sheer.
I turn to speak but no-one’s there
The moths are tangled in my hair.
My breath is shattered ice before my face,
My eyes are glazed with frost like lace,
While ice forms on my fingertips
And seals my yet unbroken lips.
My feel strike dark forsaken rock,
My knees reverberate with shock,
I feel the wet wash of the sea
Breaking this dark reality.
In the east the dawn is breaking,
In my chest my heart is quaking,
I breath in with the renewed light,
My eyes are blinded by the sight.
I stepped backwards and
Heard the earth spinning on its axis.
I felt the rush of space and
Looked out on limitless stars.
The ground felt solid
Though I knew I stood on energy,
Held to it by gravity.
Space travel seemed a nightmare,
To loose my human shape
To empty space.
To replace the natural vista,
With man made structure.
I wanted to reclaim the earth’s surface
To stand firmly on the land of my birth
Knowing that it is the only place that has meaning.
Time weaving back on itself,
Pain flicking through like a blade.
What I can and can’t say
Trembles on my lips.
I am paused and posing,
Falling through glass ceilings.
It is revealing.
I fall in a blaze of light
All lies beyond my sight or grasp.
A feeling that takes away
All things known and unknown.
I am lost from home
Like a creature seeking a dark burrow,
A furrow to hide my darkness
These thoughts of pain.
What would they now find?
Something sweat like cinnamon
Or an empty mind?
All things deteriorate into patterns.
Images blur without motivation
To drive the pen forward in expressive motion.
The lines weave back on themselves,
Tighter and darker.
They are not three dimensional
But flatly deny with a surface
Under which it is impossible to trace
The original face.
Shelve your problems for another night,
Frustration eats at you, time takes a bite.
Words and phrases murmur themselves into habit,
Comforting for their familiarity.
Time worn and tested
No rest for the weary,
Who’s tears blur pictures into patterns,
Separate words into syllables,
Break personality into psychology.
Battered into wearing the checkers
Of the Mad Hatters.
Words are streams within my mind,
They describe the thoughts I held dear at one time.
Only conscious control gives them meaning
Around an image I was dreaming.
My mind is always singing
Old songs to fill the silence,
In silence I face annihilation
So I turn to noise makers,
Radio’s and CD Players,
I say, save me from ever being still.
Lastly I pick up my pen and write another line
The act means little beyond this point in time.
Links and skills and thoughts are spilled,
Like water, like ink on the page,
Rage for rage at every stage,
I listened and looked and what I mistook
For one thing was another.
The smallness of my script, crypt, ellipse.
Visual and spatial skills, when and how was that all killed?
The questions I deny, even to myself.
An economy of space,
The words are interlaced with rhyme,
Then placed in time,
The rapid thought of a mind distraught,
When all your dreams have come to aught.
I am lost in a fizzing drift of thought.
I can feel an unsettling shift and flow,
I let go and feel faint like an empty shell
Drifting of its own accord,
Not motivated from within.
My solar plexus shifting, twisting and gut ripping,
I am lost in a shift of internal tides.
I raise my head and lift my eyes
Longing to feel calm inside.
It is as if a war is waged within
I wonder when the end begins,
Breath a life force set free.
Surrounded by constant sound,
Drilling pathways in my head
That fed upon the silence.
I recognize a need for speed,
Do not want to be still.
I let sound spill around me
Compel and dispel my fear
Of being here,
Alone with self-knowledge.
We are discouraged from knowing
The pain that is almost too deep to bear.
The joy that is beyond explanation,
Also the peace that is still and quietly grows
Into ourselves as we grow old.
I watch the second hand slide by
While my body longs for other rhythms,
Heart beat, hand clap, back slap
All confirming my humanity.
It seems that time has trapped me,
I’ve lost all sense of meaning
All the purpose of my dreaming.
Times sand can’t trickle backwards,
Life isn’t flaring in me as it should
I feel the walls nearer and nearer
I am like Alice,
Shrinking to smaller and smaller dimensions.
No longer my own hero,
Not even able to take the hands that offer help,
I have no scope.
The panorama of my mind
Is the torn screen at the empty drive in.
I’ve never chosen anything,
Only reserved my heart
A dormant and unaltered seed.
I wish I had one less skin.
Oh god draw me in,
Make me real and give me a reason
To wake up tomorrow.
My heart has stopped its wild beating
Slowed by thick pulses of blood.
Everywhere my eyes retreating
So that they will not meet yours and be implored
To go on.
What do we surrender?
Our wisdom and our certainty,
The prison that binds in the shape of the self,
While we go all unknowing
On all the roads to nowhere.
I had lost and could not scry
Where I had left my artists eye.
A stone, a bone, all rhyming words
Making meanings now absurd.
This makes no promises but contains
The only one I could break
That belonged to a child
Who started writing not caring why
Anyone would read her words.
I can hear it, a high-pitched ringing,
Like the sound in a shell,
The tones of a bell.
The music in my blood
Heard when I sit in silence
Watching the sunlight as it moves.
Why can’t I move?
Dance or write or see with clear sight.
I am tire of wresting with my ego,
I would like to let go
Just for this afternoon
To sing as I have wanted to,
To make real what I feel to be there.
| Singer | The Journey | |
| To John Ashbury | Here I am at last | Life story |
| What I didn't know | The map of perception | The mesh |
There are many things that heal the heart,
Standing in sunlight on a winters day
Finding your voice and having your say
Laughing without meaning
Feeling your dreams returning.
I was like a sick cat,
Wanting to be alone to die.
I have felt that many times,
A phoenix am I, rising from ash.
I have wings of fire,
It was enough
It was enough
It was enough
Just being there.
Oh singer between the worlds
Today is yours.
See the cycle turn,
Here it is winter,
Here it is spring.
You are waiting
Like water under ice.
Your state moving,
Move, sing, bring it up,
Dance it down,
Rest with it.
All things in there time,
Your mind a mirror,
This is the light of the sun
Reflected upon it.
If for a moment in my life
I were flung back on my own devices
Would I have the skills to survive?
Would the mysteries in me rise?
For all my life I have imitated,
Spinning webs around a core
Of history or knowledge of pattern
In a social interaction.
In my moment of isolation
I would not be a little prince
Innocent on a far asteroid
What would my solace be in the void?
Would I rebuild society with pretend?
As my sanity came to an end
Would I become a being lost in vast and silent thoughts?
Unaware that I am distraught,
That I no longer dance or speak or write
But tend only to what is in my sight.
Would I hear a small voice within?
Would I peal back layers and begin to discover who I am?
Then let creation come out of the void
That reflects myself, and the world that has been destroyed.
Would I be like a prophet in the wilderness?
Speaking the first new words in a hundred years,
Bringing strange new knowledge to human ears.
You see? Here I return
To what I yearned to escape from,
For what is light without eyes to see?
What is the use of a world of silence to me?
Words require others to hear,
Perhaps I require too be
That others know, love and think of me,
So I want to discover the light of myself
In a wilderness that contains nothing else,
Then I want to come back to the world
To unfurl what I’ve learned to someone that cares.
Slipping into your strange language,
I could almost hear the magic.
Is this how we will speak after the apocalypse?
When there are only bits of that and this,
It still means something doesn’t it.
There you are with your cheek pressed to the door,
Your eye against the keyhole,
Wanting to know more than you were told.
When you came back like a drunk from the desert,
Like a stranger from another planet,
You found there was much you couldn’t say,
How after all to describe the flowers of Mars?
Or the jars of stars they kept as light bulbs.
More evolved?
More or less coherent?
You unfold and we inherit
A jumble sale of postmodern culture
A taste of the past and a glimpse of the future.
Here I am standing in your shoes
A paradox whose chimes are laid bare.
At last I can see what was there,
No rose coloured spectacles,
No blind mans eyes,
Wisdom is not pain and I was not wise.
What could I give to make reparation?
I would like to answer all your questions,
Not to take up another stick
To beat myself with,
Because I was defeated
Made insensate to feeling.
The brave way is to feel it all,
Recall it until your stories
Finally call some truth out of you.
I did this and this and I am sorry.
My tomorrows will be all about joy,
I will tie my sticks to trees
To build the future and set us free.
Some trade on beauty,
Then grow hardened never forgiving time.
Some on character, bitter without beauty.
Intelligence is harder to define as a state of mind.
I trade my life,
Returning to the bland lands
Somewhere near the boarder
I seek broader definitions.
My coin is love,
I trade in stories.
Let me hear yours,
Make yourself before my eyes.
My own is a legend,
Shape shifting and lifting me on it’s back,
As heavy as a sack,
As light as a husk.
I have been to a place shadowed in dusk,
A place where there was only memory,
There was nothing there but grief
It had little to teach
Except that I must remember
Must tell you that we all suffer.
Sometimes people are cruel,
Though not as a rule.
They hunted me,
I hid among the animals, behind the trees.
I learned to be so still so silent,
So inwardly violent
And when I turned it outwards
It was on innocents.
Years go by and I am slowly breaking my isolation.
I made a decision to break the division
Between longing and love.
I found compassion and now
I am laughing, crying, speaking and sighing.
Believe in miracles,
Believe this story if you like,
It represents a rocky trail
An ocean I have yet to sail
The waters may be turbulent
But I am ready to be drenched.
What we don’t know can hurt us.
The thinnest line keeps back insanity,
I imagined that I would be taken away,
Or loose my life to the madness.
I wondered if I had a choice,
Yet as the years drift
I fear it less and less.
I have shed my tears and learned why I cry,
I tried to master another way of seeing,
To keep on and keep on and keep on believing
That I could walk freely, tall and proud
Without the shroud of the past
Obscuring my face.
I wanted to make curtains and lace,
You might have felt the same
If you were in my place.
I carry my body with me like a map of memories.
I am like a butterfly that never burst from its pupa,
Full of secret recollections,
Metaphors to hide my mind from the source of its’ pain.
Sometimes I find fragments of my soul
Splintering form that great core of lost time.
I see the distorted reflections of past and future selves,
Yet both are of someone else,
Not the person I was, am or will be.
For a while I live with them and these
Reflections are composed of me.
Sometimes I need to remind myself of physical dimensions
All these ideas may be entrancing but need not be lasting.
This is all I really am,
The span of two hands
The stance and stride of two feet
The gap where teeth meet
The sound of a voice
The look in an eye
The shape and the shadow
The hill and the hollow
The texture and feel of a skin.
All this it only the briefest part
Of what people see and know.
When they look at each other
They fill in details that are not evident
They seek a history with which to indent my body,
In a minute or less they guess all this,
For me it is the same.
The mind and the heart and the soul remain,
I don’t know the tenth part of those.
There are secrets buried so deep
That I keep them,
Only my body knows of their truth.
It is too vast for one word or concept,
Even from my narrow perspective
I sense the vastness there.
Like something seen in the corner of my eye
Or a sound that I heard, yet was not there.
Sometimes I curl myself up and try to hide.
I limit myself to my own inside and
Become like an unfeeling stone,
In which an animal has made it’s home.
Sometimes I try to embrace it,
And my mind and body races,
But without a true focus or any direction.
The patterns without and within,
Understood and misinterpreted.
I am one fish in the ocean,
One thread in a mesh of thought and emotion.
| Romantic comedy | Circus masks | To give and recieve |
| The Leonardo of lemmings | Mayfly | Now I am mine |
| Passion play 1 | Passion play 2 | Passion play 3 |
Let me start by finding the joy.
I don’t want to bring you anger or sorrow
Not mockery or malicious laughter,
Merely a chuckle at the irony of being human
Like the best of Shakespeare’s plays.
Our confusions, our delusions
Tickle the fancy of the gods,
They think it odd
That we don’t speak straight.
They watch us run and arrive to late,
Then find a flower seller in the rain
Yes I’ve been watching those films again.
There’s something comic about love,
Helping us to laugh despite the pain
It does me good to smile,
Again and again and again.
Clowns wear two faces.
The white faced clown appears sorrowful,
The smiling clown appears joyful.
The secret is to know that whiteface accepts the irony,
He is secretly laughing and toys with us.
The smiling clown may tumble tike a fool
But fool to you if you think he’s merry.
He secretly cries and asks for your pity
And we, we sit in the audience,
Brought to laughter, brought to tears.
We smile tenderly at each other,
We frown and get angry,
Lastly we believe that we don’t need masks.
More fool us.
How many secretly laugh, rage or cry
Then look surprised at being caught.
Be still in your own truth
Then your face will reflect it,
You old trickster, you comedian.
Me? Well I am a paradox
Never sure if I am smiling or white faced.
Hunger calls to hunger,
Need calls to need.
The starving man on the street
Sees the need for love in me.
When I give to him I am receiving,
When he takes he is giving,
So both of us feed.
That is the secret,
The empty hunger for love
That pleads for more than food.
Sometimes we can’t consume enough
It is like a lust for life,
Or a space that remains unfilled.
Sometimes we can’t eat anything,
So hard are the barriers,
So fragile is our pride,
That there is no way for anything
To reach the inside.
I would like to learn balance.
The middle way of standing still
Inside my own peace,
That beautiful place
Where compassion makes lasting change,
So that I do not hunger
But give all the same.
The moods that move through me are unsteady
Yet always ready to rise to the challenge,
But I’m no warrior,
I have no armor.
Before you I am disarmed,
My bravado is a sham.
I am a lover,
A knight on a white stead.
I have no sword, only soft eyes
That imply that there could be love,
But when you turn away
I have to give up.
Who am I to chase you?
Oh rabbit why must you love foxes?
Oh mouse why must you love the cat?
There you are your heart pounding with fear
In a Panic,
Dancing with the great god Pan
But Pan is dead…
Didn’t you know?
He died long ago.
There is only Dionysus now,
Drunk on the wine of love.
Oh liberate me from my drunken foolishness
A cat is a cat and a fox is a fox
If I forget this I am lost.
Like a mayfly
Aware that it is going to die
I tried to fly into your arms.
Making that last gesture of continuance
Before fluttering, broken winged
To the surface of the lake.
How deep it goes.
Love is a many splendid thing,
It knows no boundaries of space.
How to explain the pain in my mind,
I was your child at one time
But now I am mine,
What a sad person I am.
All things weighed in the balance
Lets not judge each other to harshly.
So I can’t quite accept your version,
So you can’t quite see my point of view.
I am still your daughter
Yes I still love you.
My passion given birth
Out of the ashes of despair.
I find a rising fire inside me,
A need to embrace and heal.
The wound went so deep
So the healing is strong.
I am the one who lives with it
The eye of the cyclone,
The dog with the bone,
The stone that caused the ripple.
Please don’t cripple me
Just let me be human
Balanced,
Remember that I am still young
Still growing and prone to error.
I wish merely to be
Yet I am tested each day.
I don’t know what to do or say
Half the time.
I only realize with hindsight
Just what it meant.
Have mercy on me,
Restore me to that watery child
Or rather let me be comprised
Of all four elements,
Reconnected with the spirit.
I wish to be a graceful girl once more.
The fire is cooling,
There is no more colour and movement.
I am left bereft.
I can’t ask for passion back,
The dance is over.
I smolder among the coals
Somehow compensated by growing old.
Evolving into a stable human,
I who was as volatile as potassium
Cut me and watch me darken and flair
Yet passion is still there
Branded into my mind,
So closely linked to who I am
That I wonder what I would find without passion.
What is passion for?
It is a call from the depths of my being
To do and be what I believe in.
I believed in connection.
My desire is alive
It grows beyond me,
I change to match it’s size.
I was never passionate,
Always cool,
Cautious in how I used my fuel.
Now the wellspring of life
Bubbles up inside me
Looking only for an outlet.
I cannot help but create,
Poems visions even children
Want to spring into being.
Passion also burns,
The passion of anger,
The fire leaping over the break
Gone mad among the eucalypts.
It is not wrong in itself but,
It may burn me or someone else.
| Twelve Nights | What Now | The sound of one axe chopping |
| I flew away | Why am I so sad | |
| Evaporating | Shattering | Returning |
I have thought of loves past of late
Of a time love flowed like a flood in spate,
When my dreams were filled with reflections of you
Though I knew that we both loved love in truth.
There is the world and the world of the mind
If they are inseparable perhaps we find
That dreams in one lead on to the other.
The strong will contains what will harm another
But then is there anywhere we should not go?
Is there any door that must be left closed?
I wonder if all were seen under the sun
Is there any true difference from where we began?
Ah love my idle tempter,
A sweet moment of vulnerability,
I see it more clearly
When it is denied me.
The love of one person can be incredible
And leave an impression that is indelible.
I see people search for the same face over again
For one night of passion and twelve nights of pain.
So I knew I was seeking another somewhere
An imaginary figure, lean, pale, sweet mouth and curled hair,
With eyes that see straight through
Finding something familiar and new.
I found love beyond that face
In the soft tones of a caring voice,
In the firm touch of the hand of a man
Who’s mind I loved,
In the swing of a footstep that went beside mine.
It only takes one thing to love
And that is to give up all expectation
To free yourself for the invitation.
What do I so with you tattooed on the inside of my eyelids?
Suddenly you come into view,
I remember how beautiful you were to me.
I can’t explain my love, it’s pitiful, hopeless
Yet it swells like a tide returning.
Why feel this when it’s only grief?
I have stepped over that threshold into the room of somebody dead.
I saw such gentle humor in your eyes,
Twenty eight and still a lost boy.
You would be twenty nine now,
I am twenty six, how time plays tricks with us.
You will always be young and beautiful to me,
A future that could not be.
I remember loving you
That and the sadness are all that remain.
I want your presence to sing to me,
Just to be in your vibration.
No words,
Yet sound playing on my drums,
Spinning in the shells of my ears.
I know you are here,
Like the sea,
Like a memory returning.
Should you but turn, your tread ringing
In this empty room,
Then I would come back and listen
To hear your whisper and be your observer,
To make you real in a way
That you can’t be alone.
I would be your timber getter,
Axe rising and falling
Then pausing to hear you fall.
So many words that can’t be said,
The grief rises like a balloon inside me.
My throat aches with what I can’t say
Only my breath escapes me.
Last night I dreamed that I said goodbye,
I flew away as a little bird.
I don’t know why I can’t be joyful
I want to howl.
There is a gift in this world
To see what could be,
This questing takes us to the edge
Then there is only the bravery of leaping.
Why is it so hard for me?
The leap of faith that I can’t make,
I tell you to be brave
But reserve my suffering.
I can’t touch happiness lest it burst,
I won’t see happiness without mistrust,
I have no lust for life.
Oh god I am so sad
Why am I so sad ?
It begins by missing the touch,
Those hands that are not there,
To make the gestures of conciliation and comfort.
The hands reserved for small children and lovers.
For those alone or lonely among many
There is a different rhythm to the touch.
Your hands become like disembodied puppets.
With thumb and forefinger you pinch the bridge of your nose,
Cupped fingers linger as they draw back hair from your eyes,
Predictably stirring the skins sensitivity.
You become intimate with the gestures
Not only in surface textures
But by sliding beyond them into deeper pools,
Into an intense awareness of sorrow, ecstasy or monotony
Finally towards the self-contradictory slap
That brings you back.
Tender comfort and regularity
Are languid in your hands
Which are to aware to awaken another reality.
These words are as tainted and real as any words can be.
Double meanings and insinuations glaze the cake,
Can you guess what lies beneath?
Where the fury came from and why it burns in me?
I saw myself evaporate
Your face crumpled, mouth opened to swallow,
I was inside and the terror of it
Left no place to hide.
I am a mystery the key to which is hidden.
The unknown stretches before us.
I tried to populate it with visions,
Carefully crafted decisions.
I decided to fall for you,
Why did I speak?
Why did my feet walk back to you?
To something I thought I had to do.
Now my illusions are shattered,
There are only scattered fragments,
Pieces of me, pieces of you
Throwing back strange knew reflections.
I try to believe that it wasn’t rejection
That I am better without deception.
The pain has opened me wide,
I scramble for meaning across the divide.
Over and over I wonder why
I built that tower so high but you didn’t fall.
Stay strong, stay tall.
Sometimes life is so hard to bear.
I wish I didn’t care,
That I was a blank wall
That no one could scale.
I failed and I trail that disaster behind me
Like sparks and fluttering ashes.
Crash and burn what did I learn?
To test reality and be cautious in my trust,
Yet somehow I can’t return
To that bleak friendless place.
I lifted my head at last awake,
I saw all beings interconnected,
I just didn’t belong.
You rejected me gently,
I keep the best part of you.
Now my mind is sharpened like a sword
Cutting open the past,
At last dispersing my grief,
Letting me see myself complete.
Pain and learning are linked,
So is pain and laughter
I hope to look back at that.
| Paper dreams | This city | Loneliness |
| Loneliness again | Lost self | The end of fear |
| The lost year | Common ground | The wavering way |
On the thin skin that is the surface of this planet
With a scalpel we scrape away the worries of this land,
For something new to stand.
We sink down footings to connect with the blood stream
Then raise up something that was once a paper dream,
So old meshes with new.
Between the overlapping of the two
There can be an uneven fight
As towers like trees struggle for the light,
The suburbs layer themselves like leaves.
Human beings always search for meaning
So with a subtle mind and pen,
We try to embrace the land again.
So that a few foundations grow from sympathy
Out of an older synchronicity.
This city erodes me,
Here there is a difference between internal and external air,
Here the atmosphere draws out moisture.
I am filtered and filtering all life through strands,
That I don’t understand.
The pavement frustrates me,
It separates me from sensations.
My shod feet reverberate with the ache
Of always walking on pavement.
My heart is beating in time with another place,
Just up the coast,
Where the air is rich and succulent.
The clouds can’t drift by without giving vent
To a downpour of rain.
There above that stretch of coast,
Where humanity floods against the oceans edge
They weave softer edged music with lyrics,
That slip around the rim of logic.
Whipping high and fast like the birds wing
Through the rain forest.
I am always enough company for one.
Rarely lonely unless in a crowd,
Then I am acutely lonely,
Aware of my silence.
Being alone in a room differs
From being lonely in a city.
There is after all more space to be lonely in
More to distract you from yourself.
Here I am in the city again
Renewing old scars and feeling new pain,
With a people who do not dance and sing
Who’s expressions are set and do not change
Except in familiar glances shared
It’s where I want to be, but I’m not there.
What a strange and alien place
When you do not know a single face.
I can not find where you have gone,
Phantom of a separate self.
In the ether I have breathed,
In the places I have been.
Ancient maps frayed at the edges
Indicate the hidden secrets.
I feel their texture like brail
As if their existence is significant.
Somehow my inner world stays blank
A gallery that echoes, a space I can’t fill
Yet I dream that one day I will stand surrounded
By icons of beauty and truth.
Artifacts that represent a journey
I forsake all meaning, I am no museum
Living breathing being, never the same for a moment.
These scars run so deep
I lost myself and keep on searching
Star maps for references to who I am.
The old legends of lost innocence
Ravel round in a tight cocoon,
A tomb of recollection.
They are myth-like,
Sagas that reach beyond event
To a deep lament, that knows its truth is.
I can not see myself there
Except to feel the angry eyes of a child,
While I soothe with adult platitudes.
How can I explain that I had to make the past a story?
Far away and long ago with characters I did not know
I try to explain that forgiveness meant sanity.
I had to believe in the goodness of people.
The child wants me to hold that pain to my chest
To bear witness and give testament.
I tell her she exaggerates,
I let tears well and fall,
I can’t always carry her like a burden.
Life can’t stay frozen
Yet part of me stays sentinel to her furry.
I plough the scars into furrows
Of fresh and fertile earth.
The glaze in my eyes is fantasy
Turning its mirror between you and me,
Telling me what I want you to be
Not what you truly are.
There is a scar here
How did you get it?
I can’t remember.
How could you forget it?
There is a haze in my eyes,
Memories moving, shifting and clicking
But I can’t remember
Somehow that is soothing.
Now what was I thinking?
Last year you had a lost year.
I put it in Pandora’s box,
I’m not afraid to look.
Somehow I mistook you for me
Do you see?
No, no? I don’t either,
I just see my face in your place.
You know all artists carry cameras
To shield them from life,
It’s a little too raw
But I can’t feel the pain anymore.
Sex and violence, sex and violence,
When you have poetic license
It’s all love and death
Yes? Yes.
Those are just the loud bits,
Between them it’s all static.
No, there’s meaning in the everyday.
Is there?
Yes, bliss and pain.
Oh now I remember where that scar came from.
Ideas, fantastic,
Life, pragmatic.
Moving between these dreams
Seeing the seams
Yet feeling the mesh
Of spirit and body, mind and flesh.
All I need is the eyes to see,
To distinguish and make decisions
And yet not be too caught up.
I live my life,
I drink from the cup.
I lift it up and say cheers
I am grateful for being here,
Hears to absent friends.
You look at me
I wonder what you see.
I look at you and I see straight through
But let’s not be to hasty,
All people are blind
Quick to judge, quick to jump to conclusions,
Becoming lost in their confusions.
We only want for a way to talk,
A common ground on which to walk,
A way to respect each others wisdom,
A way to reach mutual decisions.
I have walked and talked behind a mask,
Been reticent in my tasks.
Now I choose a beginning that has no end.
Greet each day as a new found friend
But other paths have drawn me on
The follow through is never gone.
Forge ahead I must and do,
I trust and hope to be lead through.
Synchronize my feet and eyes
Aware of the earth my gaze on the sky,
An inner compass to reveal the road
It seeks the warmth of a true abode,
It’s point is sharpened by knowledge and wit
But the spirit is what is guiding it.
Hermiones Cabinet
Acrylic by Laura 2004