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City of the mind
This section looks at my experiences in the city and more subtly in my own mind. Here I try to nut out my philosophy and ideas that interest me.
| Waterfall | Rain in the city | The Icarus daughter |
| What Alice said | I haven't got your touch | Bread making |
| Many portholes | Hymn | The ghost in the machine |
Today water falls and calls softly
To the melancholy in my soul.
Salt mixes with the rain
And goes unnoticed.
All colour is shifted to the cool Spectrum,
When the pendulum swings back again
I shall no doubt find an answer
And some measure of happiness.
Now I turn from all the troubles of the day
To wend my weary way home.
Lulled behind the streaked glass
Of the bus as it speeds through the night.
Palely sculptured by the light
My reflection travels beside me
And stares back with eyes
In darker recesses than my own.
Light in contrast scatters in star bursts,
It streaks the dark streets with warm fingers.
Now it is time to step out of the shadows
To join the life beyond the bright windows
This is the hearth my heart returns to.
Today rain makes the pavements slick,
We slip and slide trying to hide from the wet.
Everyone has their eyes turned forward,
Ignoring others in their struggle,
We huddle at traffic lights like penguins.
Rain is a great leveler,
Each of us looks disheveled
From businessman to bum
Even those with umbrellas
Have to remember the wind.
Today there is rain in the city.
A letter from the Icarus daughter
My mother thinks I am beautiful but immature
She and my father have been weaving these wings.
I’m not sure they want me to fly.
I am like Icarus,
I don’t know what it is like
To approach the hot glare of the sun.
Even standing here I can feel them melt,
Burning tears of wax sliding down my back.
The feathers gently falling down
In a trail from town to town
All unused in flight.
I’ve had to use my hands and feet,
Forget that I have wings.
Icarus never understood this but he flew none the less.
Sometimes I think there is freedom in being
An earth bound creature,
Then all I need to be is human
With time to contemplate love and death,
The changing seasons of life.
I can be like a stranger in a new city,
An ordinary person casting one shadow
Yet I’ve always had this dream of flight.
That is why I can’t forget
What it is worth to cherish wax and feathers
I mean to use them but I’ll walk there first.
Alice said write lyrically about beautiful people.
I thought of Oscar and Lewis, Wilde and Carrol and
All the other souls who sent my senses souring.
I see them as outlines, shapes in the mirror
Looming small in all our lives.
If I draw near with word and pen
I couldn’t bring them back again.
Not in mind nor heart nor eye
Just the truths I can spy
From chains of words
The plains of recollection.
I wish to be that then,
To stand in their skins,
To partially glory in their notoriety.
Let me count my own rosary
My life displayed, made into art.
All fully revealed in part…
Some secrets I keep even from myself
But perhaps they are all too obvious to you.
Words so intricate they turn on a pivot,
Marching backwards over their meaning.
Images bleeding with improbable colour
Fuller of life than anything I’ve ever seen.
It was only a dream that I could be a poet.
Your complexity and simplicity
In describing a drift of leaves,
Leaves me like an insect caught in the breeze.
My words are nothing,
My meanings are transparent
I haven’t got your deft touch,
To make each line respond
To a conductors batten.
I flatten my words and try to fold them
Until they hold their own shapes up,
In the end I hope that it’s enough.
Cliché’s are like husks of wheat,
I am searching for the kernels among the chaff.
Flinging them high in the air,
Then watching them fall,
In random kaleidoscopes of subtle change.
There is always a pattern to find, a thought to unwind.
Sometimes there is a kernel of solid seed,
That offers a promise of fulfillment.
Where is the difference?
In these particles twice removed from the earth.
Do they belong to someone else?
But I am the one that kneads them,
They have the prints of my fingers
Half practiced art and part true feeling.
Like a bird beating at my temple,
I drift in the between space of anxiety.
I want to be far from here
In a place of safety and serenity.
The city of my mind,
A city of many portholes many gates,
Let it go in, make this the end.
I have see the wide pavilions,
The teaming billions and individual souls.
My passion rises like a lava tide,
Magma making heated thoughts felt
Yet I am not now someone else
Just more myself.
I want to be glad with every fiver of my being,
To walk this path through life.
I want to meet it with all my soul,
If this can’t be
Let me find the glory
Of the stories I’ve yet to tell,
The gifts I’ve not given and can’t sell
Except for love.
In a state of trance
Writing words between breath and dance.
What lies behind
The surface of my mind?
Am I plunging into the depths of myself?
Did I create them or did someone else?
I see a multitude gathered in the dim,
Or I sing God’s praises and call it hymn.
Words that beat like echoing feet.
Searching for a soul, that ghost in the machine,
I dream therefore I dream.
Like a Buddhist monk I think all mind an illusion,
Religion offers up confusion,
I seek to distill it but not to live it
I am my own experiment.
Psychology opened the back of my clock,
This is what moves you.
I saw myself like Frankenstein,
Shaped in someone else’s mind,
I was not mine.
I longed to belong to God
Or anyone that would love me
Yet my mind went on ticking
Questioning everything.
Science and religion seem to fail me,
Instead I stand as I have stood,
Unsure of what is wise or good
Yet searching, questing and testing.