Poetry

The other pages on this website tell you about what I can do for you. This page is a creative outlet for me—a home for the wonderings of my heart and mind, shared for their own sake, and so that you might have a window into my world. These poems, paragraphs and artworks are inspired by my own journey towards wholeness and self knowing, my own attempts to describe and make sense of the profound and life changing moments I’ve experienced, and the expression of a deep desire to communicate more fully about life’s most extraordinary and beautiful possibilities. I write poems inspired by nature and by people. I use poetry as a way to creatively explore the nature of psyche, and to express the insights and experiences of my own explorations in consciousness, and deepening initiation into the archetypal worldview.

Endings, Beginnings

is it really so; we are no longer one?
the memory of us slips,
as through fingers, or an hourglass
I feel you still, phantom limb
you, the mountain; I, amnesiac
wandering confused among your foothills
no longer your peak and slopes
nor your caverns, nor your timelessness, am I.
all that is now mine is to wander
cataloging every fractured piece until
I might remember us

It Is What It Is

There’s a pain that’s only pain

And not the why and when and how

And how-to-make-it-go-away of it

There’s a grief that’s only grief

And when it comes it’s not about

The process or the lessons that we learn from it.

There’s loneliness that’s not about

The number or the quality

Of friendly faces there to help you out of it

There’s longing that’s just itself

Requiring not an object, nor

A subject, nor a failed attempt to capture it

It is what it is

There is love that’s only love

And not the person who’s in love

Or hopes and fears that lovers would attach to it

There’s a joy that’s only joy

And when it enters into you

You think not of the reason you are blessed with it

There is grace that’s only grace

And not the questions that you have

Regarding what you did earn the right to it

And peace that’s only peace, within

That needs no explanation, nor

A timeframe, nor a purpose, nor a start point, nor an end to it

It is what it is

October 2023

I Shall Be a Rose

Go, be what thou willst

I shall be a rose

Mayhaps your tasks be worthier

More complex, even nobler.

It may be so

that life for you is nought without adventure,

that to blossom once a year is insufficient treasure,

and if the sound of birdsong opens not your heart to wonder,

then go, and do what you will.

Go and conquer

let your wanderlust command you

and be free to roam the markets of the world,

tasting all the many spices in their dazzling combinations.

I shall stand and eat the sunlight and the soil,

mostly dormant, still and waiting for my moment

to make the Earth a little brighter,

slightly sweeter, wanting nothing in return,

but the visit of an insect

for to make a honeyed bargain,

and a breeze to carry gifts of perfume to some other pasture.

Perhaps there is a calling yet more steadfast,

more important—something grander.

A world of promise lies beyond this trellis, I suppose

Yet say what will about it, I shall remain, a rose.

Oblivion

how do people do it?

live among bricks

it must be oblivion

I feel the sorrow of the sky starved earth

in my feet and ankles as I walk

over concrete curtains which

permanently drawn, maintain the dark night

of the soil

thirty years from now I’m cursing

the brutality of pavements

trying to get a knee replacement

remembering my mothers trembling hands

in the hospital

and thinking

all the plans I never thought to have

because of concrete

and I can feel it

a thudding in my eardrums

the unforgiving hardness of slabs

my clunking bones

knowing not how to appease this future ghost of mine

I nightly wander

try to see the beauty

in rain reflected streetlights

to summon up some pleasure

at smiles on stranger’s faces

If I could only judge the works of humans

without the harshened edges of perception they give rise to

I try to see the work of art

amidst the mundane gloam

of masonry

but these grey defences

inspire me only to dial down my senses

so I can’t.

I can’t see the Mother

in a long abandoned phonebox

I can’t appease this grieving future person

with a lavender bush in somebody’s front garden

I know she is there

but the incommensurability of it

it’s like gravity

dissociative coping

the internalisation of boundaries

a simple self protective impulse

of blurring vision

so as not to see the cruelty

Prescription for oblivion:

Twice daily

(Always read the label)

(Consult your physician)

But ensure to gobble up your white placebo

Side effects include:

sinking feelings

incapacity for wonder

estrangement from the senses

and the forgetting

so much forgetting

oblivion renders latent

the deeper purpose of the senses:

to bear witness to the constant

mutually contingent moment

bursting forth

not to connect dots but

to be connections

not to observe nature but

to be nature

not to own land but

to be land

not to simply dwell upon, but to

be this earth

not only to have been born

also to give birth,

to be birth

oh, what surrender is required

that bricks, having not mothers, would protest

that concrete, having no womb, would resist

perhaps there is some refuge in the crumbling

and the fortitude of weeds

the mycelium that lurks beneath the roads

less oblivious to us than we might think

yet infinitely more patient than I

and more forgiving

Oh, child

Awaken not too soon from such sweet slumber

swaddled in the soft enfoldment of the Mother

destined though you are for this world of such grown up amnesia

for now, remain in dreams, and in your dreams, remember.

Remember how it is to be the cloth that you were cut from

how it is to be the block before the chipping

before too long, you’ll find yourself awake and blinking,

the knowing of this oneness like a tide, receding.

But for now, indwell the dream, it is more real

than anything so apparently distinct as the corporeal

you were born complete, with all the love you’d ever need

an ocean of the sacred, perfectly contained inside a seed.

Fated as you are to become a fragment, and then to fragment further

to forget this dream, and take a lifetime to remember

through all the trials of separation and becoming singular

you’ll draw the world into yourself, and piece by fractured piece,

Remember

January 2023

Tides

One has to learn to trust the water

to step into the ocean

feel the way its heart is one of longing

how it reaches out serenely to its cratered, pockmarked lover

bulging up toward the moon,

who never wanes (if you’re an ocean), seemingly

unbothered by the rolling rumbling heart

of dirt and stone and molten metal

whose as-yet-uneroded rugged edges

cause a turbulence to stir amidst the waters

that would have you see the ocean as a frenzy—

But it isn’t.

That’s why you have to learn to trust.

The water isn’t holding you at gun-point

demanding your surrender

but it shows you how to do it-

How to feel the pull of gravity

as well as all your churning, hardened centres

and nonetheless to fall, in love, into the sky, forever.

The sea will hold you, if you let it

It will teach you how to fall

Without landing

Without ending

The ocean is a master of surrender and of longing

To be at once at one with tireless want and endless peace

To desire fully and be sated by your wishing

To wake from feathered dreams and, smiling

Watch them as they fade into oblivion

Without grasping, trust.

Prepare the Way for Love

Hold no secret in you, move softly
Speak your heart into the trees
In the welcome haven of night’s darkness
If that is what it takes, go.
Unburden yourself—gently. Remember
How it was when first you loved
And nothing else was there to be prepared for
And nothing was salient but love
Prepare the way for love
With desperately brazen adolescence
Trembling just beneath the skin

Keep no object about you, let go
And melt your boundaries down
Like unattended ice cream in hot sunshine
Exfoliate your edgy
Disposition into talcum powder
Trim things you’ve not thought to trim
Like nails, or pubes, or bitterness, or nose hairs
Put down what love would push against, and
Prepare the way. For love
Comes bidden to those ready to be merged with.
Where love’s agenda can be served,

Love arrives resplendent, and receives
You without question, golden
Like sunshine if the sun were your own lover
Folding you within a cloth
Of iridescent quality, of colours
Which shall stay unnamed forever.
Bring your flowers to the road love walks on,
Lay them down and then, with empty hands
Prepare the way for love.
Love expands to fill what would contain it, so
Pour out your cup, it’s time to fill it up with something better

The Thing Itself

The thing itself

As well as all the things it isn’t

The moment, this one here

As well as my reflections on it

The great enfolding and unfolding

All the tireless inclusion

Every possible perspective

Stacked together in ecstatic codependence

The experience I’m having

And the web of stories bursting from it

My future memory of it co-mingled

With anticipation of remembering it

Your ideas about the way I tell the story of it

Plus that which arises in my noting of your feeling

The dream I had last night which in this moment I’m reliving

The reality it speaks to, plus the fiction and its meaning

A certain posture finds a certain stillness in the churning,

Ah, I remember now

for a moment

A Letter To My Tender Ego

Dear small me, who lives to serve, in constant
fragile agony, who endures the sticks
and stones in seeming perpetuity.
You’ll feel better, if you remember this:

Do not underestimate the depth, the
breadth, the scope and magnitude of this, our
interior. We incorporate vast
and sprawling vistas, teeming plenitudes,

tempestuous oceans, bristling with
ambivalence and paradox, swelling
up to eat the feigned stability and
permanence of mountain ranges, crumbling

in brilliant surrender, the drama
and monumental scale of our inner
landscapes, coated with a fuzziness that
exudes a warm familiarity—

This is home! This vivid spaciousness is
what I am and where you are. I the whole
and you the part. You the open eyes and
I the seen. What I need from you is not

your shame. Please, be relieved. Your duty’s not
to see my yearning, climbing in the foothills
and be punished for the innocence of
it’s as-yet un-fruition. Be at peace.

What you hear as judgement is the simple
yearning of my bigger heart, and though it
makes the ground you stand on quake and tremble,
threatens your defences, rearranges

boundaries you’ve erected with great purpose,
what I need from you is wonder, watch in
awe at lava spewing, safe in knowing
you’ll be needed to till the soil after

it’s fecundity has been, in good time,
replenished by the ashes and the dust
once they’ve settled. All this inner turmoil
will not be the end of you. Don’t worry.

Since reading Jung, I’ve always known that growth concerns a task of de-centring one’s ego to make room for something else—a larger self of some kind—to flourish. But it wasn’t until I began to undertake a deep and systematic exploration of my own psyche that I learned what that actually meant. When one experiences any degree of liberation from the mundane concerns of the ego, the insight and experience demands to be expressed and shared. So for some this poem is a reminder, and to others, a call, to the inner adventure.

May 2022

Process

The interplay of am I this or that?—
With how do I belong?—or how I feel.
The place from which my thoughts and words arise—
The tender heart of that which I hold dear.
The way an impulse seizes me and so
Inflates the scope of vision wide
Requiring my foundation to endure
All the turbulence of stolen fire
And reconnect to something boundless
Permitting my unravelling into
The wild frontiers of psyche
To feel the one of yes and no
In cataclysmic soaring ecstasy
And in the letting go erupts
The world again within me.

This poem is a reflection on the symbolic foundations of mind—a meditation on the deceptiveness of the self’s apparent unity, solidity and simplicity. What we view as enduring, stable and self-defined identity, in reality, emerges within a complex dance of archetypal forces, is defined relationally, and is preserved only by its own willingness to be unravelled and consumed by its own surroundings.

April 2022

Time

the silhouettes of trees in spring
against the darkening evening sky
backlit against the cold blue light
of dusk as I go softly walking

home to light a fire and prepare
a meal, as though its 1851
and for a curious moment, unaware,
forgetting what our doing has undone.

the bleating of the spring lambs
and their mothers mingles with the distant
resonance of church bells clanging
and for all the world, you might not

know it's 2022 and we are raging
in the comments for attention—
what is data, to a robin, serenading
other robins and the just departed sun?

and in the stop and listen of it all
the past is here, not in some abstract sense,
but living through this moment and the next
in the way I go to meet it,
and bursting, songlike, from the robin's breast.

Through the Mirror, Met

Curious, now to watch myself
breathing in this sparkling universe
who seems to enjoy being mirrored, as if
simple reflection may yet give rise

to novel beauty, expanding
the great breadth and sum of quality;
a wild and fractal dance of frames and lensing.
As though my reverent curiosity

is itself a pleasure to the
breathing, purring depths of Psyche, all
around, dreaming layers of experience
into being, shifting, merging,

asking: Why not hold a mirror
up to me and see what’s there displayed?
you will not capture me within its frame, but
I will venture into new terrain

whenever doors are open. I’ll
pour myself, sloshing through the threshold
and explore. And in comes the melting world, to
render thoughts of static permanence

nothing more than adolescent
fantasy of capturing handfuls
of sand amidst my anxious fingers—
No. My liberation and the world’s

are one, a mutual dreaming
two way mirror, attentions meeting,
every point of focus a potent being,
infinitely deep, and strange, and yet

familiar, continuous, and there
to be reflected, and through the mirror, met.

Reciprocity

Go to meet the world
And in your going, notice
How it also comes.

To give attention
Invites reciprocity
The world’s eye looks back.

To find ease in this
Is to afford relief to
The wandering soul

Whose striving footsteps
Retrace a path not taken
Inwards, Outwards, Home

March 2022

Forgiveness

Are you angry? Fair enough. You have been wronged, most likely.

Perhaps you carry hard and heavy seeds of hate, planted

by bitter hands, in darkness, dimly fumbling for some power.

In that instinctual place beyond the reach of nurture

you protect that seed of hate like treasure, like its all you

have to cling to, while your heart, for loss of fullness, grieves.

Could be, you interpret this as grief itself and hold on

thinking, this is mine to carry now and always, never

noticing that what you have is someone else’s self-hate.

Maybe, as resentment grows, private in your quiet heart

it takes on the guise of Justice, yet to be enacted,

and picking up a pitchfork, whispers malice in your ear.

So, the setting of your inner borders renders brittle

your capacity to love yourself and others with you

then time passes, and it’s you who seems to need forgiveness

For all the time you bore that blackened seedling within you

all your hardened boundaries ossified the world around you

whilst inside, a smothered, gentle voice was speaking, saying:

If you will not forgive, for fear of easing evil’s doing

and you cannot forgive in hopes of reconciliation,

and won’t forgive for sake of simple personal wellbeing,

Still, you must forgive, because the bitterness you carry

is contagious and pollutant. Your participation

in this world depends upon the softness of your centre.

I know, it hurts to think of letting go of that which hurts

but here within the privacy of your own memory,

take this leap of faith, let’s find out how it is to be in love again.

Some people feel resistant towards heart opening work such as loving-kindness, forgiveness or gratitude practices. It can seem as though opening the heart is a naive and inadequate response to the harsh cruelties of the world. In reality though, if we have no way of quieting the mind and opening the heart, then we have no way of getting in touch with our most deeply important work. It is the internalised voice of industrial colonialism which would seem to call for a toughening of our outer layers, an armouring up and an arming. The strongest, most resilient responses that we can imagine will come from our willingness to soften, to disarm conflict with understanding, to keep an inner flame of love burning brightly, sheltered against hate and bitterness; to forgive.

February 2022

Rocks

Why is it that rocks, of all things
sing to me of impermanence?
Is it that they seem to insist
upon remaining, long after I depart?

Do I covet their bleak stillness
and seek to simply sit forever,
to be eroded, revealing
layers laid in haste to cover over and protect a tender heart?

What yielding patient ore is held—
the silence of that cold embrace
denied emancipation, but
for water's gentle nagging, calmly prising me apart

Would that my crumbling edge expose
cross sections, forgotten longings
The history of my wishes,
And all the things my instincts had me cling to,

Stacked and broken open, showing
all attempts at lasting or outlasting
cast in laughter, what a funny thing to want—
most of me was once a rock, may I remember that.

January 2022