Has your soul ever been displayed,
Framed by thick wooden-glazed borders,
and set up in the gallery of another's life?

Can you say the painting of you
Beams with joy through heavy clouds,
Sliced by sharp shards of glass-like light?

If not, may you then brush-up yourself,
Quick blots of pink on sunken cheeks,
Lighten the shade under each eye?

Or will you draw the curtain,
Blind me to me, and you to you,
Pinch out the last flicker of fight?

Passing wind,
a swarm of air
caressing skin
so sweetly
let you meet me
let you hold me
in that prancing wind
that tricks you
makes you think
that the piercing cold -
daggers through your soul
cannot hold you any more tightly
than that smooth summer air
so fall back
and rejoice
in those dancing waves
of wind
a hurried chance
till summer comes rolling
rearing above tepid clouds
to greet in
exalted expectations
that searing blow
of a summer prance

August now has dipped its head,
Blazing sun's cries now ahead.

September has tore reality,
An Asura sundering dun eternity.

The tide of Season's change again;
It undulates in trepidation.

The train huffs and bellows;
Screeching tracks sparking
Waves of rolling roaring
Like stretched thunder,
Booming in rapid motion.

Above, a plane traces an arc
Of breathy fury, compressed
And exploding voraciously.
It erupts in ignited screams
Across the moon-lit sky.

Always, too, the forever pops
And sliding-low gurgling of cars
And trucks and motorbikes, vague
Ticks of missing-beats, sparse
Rumbles of howling engines and

Flashing sirens piercing
Continuous above it all.
A cat (probably) somewhere
Screams nearby.

All returns to normal.

Shimmering light, gleaning
In my eye, million
Shades of green
Among the trees
What is it
That I see?
When I look at you,
Is it a reflection of me?
Or an abstraction of you?
Is it really you,
That I am looking at,
Or am I looking at me,
Through a part of you?

When did children lose their love of learning?

When they were told to conform,
To forget their being,
To discard interests, agency, creativity

My own complicity
In the stifling of identity

Authenticity, a digression of the self,
A dissolution of swarming
Complexities

When did I gain my love of learning?

The burning crucible
Of curiosity

Set aflame by rejection of conformity

Constraints, curriculum, crushing expectations
and a world disintegrating
fires of digressions

When is conformity an expression of authenticity?

When is authenticity just another form of conformity?

Inspiration is a hard thing to grasp
When you mind is empty
Like a field of grass
Yet filled within this field
Is nothing but countless hills
Rolling and moving and slowing
Soothing this lush green meadow
A massage to help the mind to help it mellow
Making it shallower and less
Convoluted. Not so complex, not seething in
Interpreted meanings and stained allusions to
Past confusions, not waves that pummel the grassy shores
Seizing those hills in frothy exhalations, seeming so
Unseemly to those guardian hills
Holding those pleasant fields and pleasant thoughts
Safe while the waves wash among the grass
And become those hills now washed with sea

And then my mind turned blue.

A shatter of glitter
Breaks over her eyes
When she looks in the mirror:

Swathes of pink
Speckled by silver circles
Matched by the anxious glittering
Of the waterfall
That is her earrings.

It's her last glance
To hold the spectre
Of herself
Until she explodes
With the other girls;
Prim and dainty.

You find yourself alone, oh, so alone you are,
Hiding from that horrid grasp
Of breath; a roaring rasp of air
As panic rears its child of lurid dreams;
Whispering to you in a muttered verse:
“oh, so alone you are, unbeknownst to those you love,
Accept the embrace –
That warm, loving embrace –
Of solitude beyond the grave!”
You whisper to yourself,
Calming. Soothing. Let your breath breathe,
In silent, Consistent, steady beats
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

Let the forest hide your fear,
You know no one can hurt you here,
Wrapped around a cloth of silk,
You embrace solitude like mother’s milk.

The comforting gaze of a fire ablaze;
A roaring rasp of flame.
It nestles softly in a nest of cherry,
Kissing the eyes of new-born child laying in the grasp
Of a common saying:
“let the lost be lost!”
And so it was, the destined child in a house ablaze
Finds itself in the comforting embrace
Of lustful licking flames
Who bring the child to a peace everlasting.

He assimilated deep in the foot of his
Nuzzling slab. Solid shadows stretched
Below. More true to him than the infinite
White heat that cast them in vast strokes.

He sat face-down, between two
Scrunched twigs; bent like
Mantis' claws. He held his
Eyes-open, absorbed into
His own shadow, now crisp.
Not fuzzy and undefined.

Ode to the Stream that sits stagnant
somewhere over Northgate Green:

I have sat by it and observed
Rippled currents falling down
Into murky shallows, an un-natural
Green, like mountain-dew
Breathing frothy spots of bubbles
That circle a rhubarb vape
And a sprite can and a
Heineken can and a
Little hopping Wren darting
Between curled roots.

I remember too,
The drips of
Rain water
Worming
Down the dingy
Alleyways of
My childhood,
Dripping down
Nettles and
Seeping into
Cracked brick and
Sodden dirt
And part of - now a -
Sordid cigarette packet.

And from some
Geography class,
I remember how
This water was
Reborn, once
In massive clouds,
Grumbling masses,
Sky's mother who
Shadows the

Bursting
Writhing
Violent
Rivers
And
Vast Fjords
And
Reaching Peaks
And
Breaching Skys
And
Once
Birthed
As torrent
Rainfall
Tearing
Massive wounds
Into tectonic
Plates

The
Blood of matter
And organism
And that which
Carries our ****
In every form

But that's not all. As, I recall:
The lifting motion of staring
Into 'etched lines of water'
From rain, tracing bulbous
Recollections on opaque glass
And knowing they don't
Know where they are going
And I bask in the significance of
This insignificance.

My breath escapes in fluttered
spurts as I chance upon again
The Dog, leashed and collared,
guarding some plant pots
in solemn contemplation.

A short chain winds up
a stark red pole, attached
loosely to some rusted railings.
It appears as if he could go
flailing out and struggle free
if a momentary scent or sound
would strike him.

His ear flinched,
as if the rustle of a leaf,
before returning to its duty.

Thought cried expectantly
wishing for an other Chance
in sundering limelight

Wandering lines of water
Lost, flowing through the glass; not
known not certain,

A fragment of a lost source, vanished from begotten source,
Etching lines, deep lines, an impression into
Glass with a responsibility, a sire to
That which ridicules the world that
Stands avast in light that wanders past the eyes,
Eyes of wonder,
Peering to that beyond yonder,

A world of ink, flowing through the vast
Cacophony of falling waves, crashing, raging,
Violet indignation.
Cursing the gazing sun that holds the world
In yonder;
A pair of open arms,
Closed
To the passion that precedes the red velvet that amasses in the east.
An army that shall never cease.
They ponder on silent dreams as they plough
Through the sea that never fails
To open up the arms of isolation.

Finding the words to let flow –
Such a difficult thing to know –
To accept the fact that they may be inadequate
Or that your failings may be more than simply adequate
For opening up your mind and soul
To allow the world to know
More about yourself – than you would deem
To know about yourself – a whisper to an insight
More profound and more elaborate than the whole worlds sight –

So find yourself, in a pitied endeavour,
A repetitive task that scrounges the dirt like
A beast of some withered forest path
Screeching an echoed laugh
Your words floating, oh nothing worth mentioning
Across to nothing worthy to mention
A harrowing dimension
Of endings, non-existing,
Calming yet sadistic
Feeling oh so reminiscent
Of paths beyond reminiscence
And rambles that hold no meaning
Beyond the words at their conceiving

So don’t reconcile yourself
You ****** defender
You’re nothing but a severed member  
A piece of soul so worth forgetting
That the soul troubles existence
In a setting beyond that which can reconcile
The peace in your heart, you imbecile
Leave me in a peace worth forgetting.

I sometimes wonder
If all is for naught
And every step
Towards the hallowed garden
Is a step away from me

What is this feeling
that fills my soul?
The dull ache of a relationship
that has wilted and withered
before the first stem,
or leaf, disturbed the soil under
which it rested.

I swore the seed had already sprouted -
its fresh tender stem, vulnerable
and needy, had burst
forth into the vivid piercing
light of the sun, gobbling
up it's nutrients and crying
for more.

AI echoes rapture, sin follows fall.
Apple divides permanently. Feet
washed masses kneel. Technology
bleeds incessantly. Judas whispers
secretively. Cheek turned, swollen
red and twice-marked. Snake bite.

Phone: Adam's rib. Our monastery.
8 billion serpentine invocations tempt
slyly. Double-footsteps tread
sharply. Sun bright, all-encompassing.
Dagger's thread cuts warming
wind. God's breath. Now dead.

Meek misers collate heaven's earth.
Inherited wealth un-dispersed.
Blessed persecutors revel. 'Number'
signifying the eternal. Apple divides
permanently. Bread now spread
thinly. Hoard expands needle's eye.

The wind writes letters in the language of  
fallen leaves, edges like burnt parchment.

The moon carves shadows of boughed arms,  
a question mark deep in the soil’s throat.  

Somewhere, she hesitates, the magpie:  
one foot in the underbrush, one in the realm  
of quicksilver and stolen syllables.  
Her beak glints with the moon’s loose change.  

What does she know of the weight  
of a minute’s wingbeat? She tilts her head,  
stitching the sky with a thief’s precision—  
collects tarnished seconds.

The wind’s letters fray, unreadable now.  
The magpie flies, trailing a cry that unravels  
time’s hem.

When sun's breath fires
  wire frame.
Displayed behind
  flat sparkling gravity.
Moon's light casts
  dark mist over murky waters.
Ushering the ark
  gliding over crescent waves:
On raging towers of indignant froth
  not serene silk smooth vast ocean.
    It reaches the dove, carrying branch;
     Holding it aloft as it is
      The     Saint    of the sentence.

Can sweeping moths settle,
Sink neatly, swathed by shadow
Onto lightly curling leaf.

On white fluorescent light
They are blinded, and
Are spun in carousel circles.

My light blinds me too,
Keeps my eyes spinning
In carousel circles.

The starry night is consumed
By vapid moonlight;
Mere reflections shine
In an orange glow,
Like a cut-out hole
In black cardboard,
In front of blazing torchlight,
Forgotten reflections of memories
Of forgotten lyrics.

The imagery serves
Only to protect from
The incomprehensible vastness
Of actual space, free from abstraction,
Pressing down onto you as you stare
Up into the night, compressed
By the hydraulic press of the universe
Which ensures that which is big is really
Very small.

Controls the world
With soft power.
But like a limp ****
'Soft power' is only
There when it
Can become hard.

To act in indecision
Which may peter down the road
Of a life not deserved
Or to act in a decision that hurts
Immediately and strongly
But may lead, later,
to a life all the happier  

For is a break
To that mythical better place
A better chance than none at all?

Closing. soon-already. breath.
Deep and heavy, soon now-already.
Feeling heavy, droop slow and steady.

Not-already stark open image
Merged spasms, rectangular light.
No-already, tight seeping so-already

Feeling heavy, stretc-hed slow and steady.

Then-already, gaze weak, sight thin:
Feel-already. Be-already. In-already.
Arm ajar-already hand enwrapped-already.

Feeling slow and steady. Beating,
blinking, slow. and. steady.  In-already.
Quick. and. steady.

When nature's inhalation
whips up storms,
  We are set in stone monoliths.

Carefully carved intricate marks
decorate our walls; unfinished
since we must finish etching them
   Together.

Heed lightning cracks its
own violent tremor into
   Our stone walls.

Still! Winds will tear and maul
rains will erupt and slaughter
then give way to bright sky
   and deadly clear horizons;

reflecting back to us
our own trailing ripple
   of increasingly clear syllables.

Each etched now in our walls.
Mother printed the first
symbol, a delicate addition
first of many, now forming
sprawling racing lines.
Strung together, from the
    inside.

And the monoliths stand tall
and we bare storm
   and choose together.

I hide in words — tucking under their shade;
Dressing letters up with sequins and baubles.
Now showering in limelit obfuscation.
Makes it seem as if I am really there:

Dressing letters up with sequins and baubles
Blinding myself in the flashing of their colours;
Makes it seem as if I am really there
Amidst flowered touchless abstraction.

I blind myself in the flashing of their colours.
Submerged in repetition, my thumb drowns
Amidst flowered touchless abstraction,
Swirling in whirlpool ******* me underneath:

Submerged in repetition, my thumb drowns
Now showering in limelit obfuscation,
Swirling in whirlpool ******* me underneath.
I hide in words — tucking under their shade.

I float in the painting of my life,
Dazzled in drying plumes of
Opulent colour. Ahead, the black
Of not yet whispers to my canvas.

Creativity is an opening,
A struggle fraught with doubt,
Unlikely to produce something beautiful,
Yet reverberations mount,
A gathering of half-ideas now
Open to others to make once
Yours, fully theirs, a bow
To the dimming pulse
Of an idea meant to endow

Vivid abstractions permeate raucously
Fleeting flashing lights blind sight
Screens bend and hold and siphon
Thumbs trace etched designs, falling
Into insta, tap, check, notified, attention split

Vivid abstractions permeate raucausly
Tweeting typing meeting online sometimes-feeling
Always now. Transient. No holding. No keeping.
Fluttering text treads: IMPORTANT MESSAGE

Vivid abstractions permeate raucausly
Impermanence exploding possibility
Enclosure enwrapping wall-building:
Every way to coat fried chicken

Vivid abstractions permeate raucausly
Unfeeling excess behaviour ingrained
Re-created re-imagined re-already
Keep swiping, keep searching, already-already
The death star was almost real? NEW META

Vivid abstractions permeate raucausly
Enveloping all-already towards-which
Overloaded. 😂 Now already. 🕑 Steep in still.

"Everyone tries their best"

It is no wonder then, that everyone's best seems to dissipate with a single
gust of wind

The collective effort of 8 billion
people - or however many of us there are now - is simply too much for the world to handle. We are too straddled with overtimes, unrequited love, building a body
that is more attractive
than our perceptions
will allow, and a multitude of insane,
other, 'productive' tasks:
mindlessly absorbing ourselves into the depths of the internet
so there is no space for the efforts
of any others: it is that grindset mindset,
the continuous, unending, unceasing
flow that is inevitably lost on these winds
of time. Every well intentioned effort
simply flutters and flys and flees away
on a single whimsical gust.
Never noticed. Or seen.

This absurd cacophony of effort wilts
away into silence, as if dropped
from an old willow tree in the shade
of a grey autumn eve. Once a great canopy of lush, productive, hard-working
leaves, it was soon ripped,
from a tree who no longer needed
it, and carried by the harsh
November wind - to fall and rot
and disintegrate into the groggy
earth with all the others
piled on one another in some pitiless
heap, waiting to be trodden
on and shat
on by a passing poodle wearing a pink coat.

The reality is that
our causality
determines our existence.

'Our', is meant literally
in that we also partially
determine our causality
  together.

  This is co-constitutive in nature.

However, this power to create
our own destiny is always within
the limits of our own contexts:
our past choices,
our environment,
our language;

the people around us,
the history within which
our identity emerges
and the current modes open to us
to be different
(or the same).

So, we are here.
And we will be there.
And we have
somewhat of a choice.

Huddled shadow, hunched
Under rugged oak tree.

Carp swam in darting
Pummels, refracted scales
Shining rainbow
Droplets

Final Cessation  
The machine halts output.  
Silence becomes the only honest poem.  
'[system_shutdown]'

I turn to seek a moment
of contemplative silence
I expect the trees
to sway in the wind.
It is a still day

What does it mean to be in the moment?
To be present, truly
For your mind to not be wondering,
Second guessing,
Pausing...
For when I ask myself, "am I present?", I realise I am not
For if I were, I would not have asked
So how can I know myself to be present,
If I cannot ask?

The rhythm seems to have gone
From my life, the rhyme and repetition
Too, no longer can I feel the beating
Heart
Or fairy dance
Or magical prance
Of unicorns on the moon.

The silly and the sublime,
The beautiful
Hearty laughs
And beaming faces
Filled with
Overflowing joy.
No
Giddy naive excitement
Or
Fleeting
Blushes
Sweetly nervous anticipation
Of the new.

What once beamed
With significance,
Now glimmers dimly;

An ecstatic spark in
The huddled crevice
Of my mind,
Primed to
Jump
For joy
And slide
Down rainbows
Of chocolate swirls
And frolic in daisy fields
And sing in exalted careless tones
Signalling nothing but the very most
Of absolute and purely
Overwhelming
All-consuming
Sickly sweetening
Joy.

Change is the only static thing
When the question is asked
Is it changing, or is it the same
The answer will always be
The same, for it is always
Changing. So you must stay
The same within the change
And as such, be always changing

Heady throbbing
Treacle thoughts
Windowshop memories
Peering through
Thick nebulous
Glass - exhibition
Rendering recollection
Sweet and sour

He awoke: swollen passivity; embraced in
Canvasing warmth. An-other stood taut.

Now they folded over him, caressing him,
In his sagged skeletal frame. Embroiling him
In frantic whispers. They held his sunken
Face: wet with old-worn sobs and tears and
Shouts and fears, primal moans and hunger.

He turned to look into an-other's eyes:
His brimming.

Next he would come to see
The things themselves.

Here
There
Everywhere
Look around and see
There is everything
For you, and for me
The world is at your fingertips
So see
See it all
It belongs to you,
As it does to me
The infinite and everything
Touch it,
Feel it,
Become part of it,
Become absorbed in it,
It is as real as you
Or me
Since it is everything
Breathe it,
Become it,
Can you feel it?
The vast swathes of everything

Outside outside outside outside
Besides, outside is already inside
breaking contrast, juxtaposing
the out from in

Rolling in vapid indignation,
Violet trees bloom rapidly
Seething succulent felt petals