Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard Afterlife Airlines.
I’m your pilot, Captain Meta Physics.
Please fasten your sleep belts
as we are about to leave the body.
Please direct your attention to your stewardess
while she demonstrates safety procedures.

In the event of a drastic reduction in karma,
a mask will fall down from above you.
Place it on and breathe deeply of pure love.
Should those passengers who are clinically dead
find themselves returned by a surgeon’s skill,
the life raft under your seat will inflate
with a new sense of purpose.

After take off the stewardesses will serve milk and honey.
For your entertainment, the movie is
anything with Shirley Maclaine in it
or there are seven channels of chi
on the chakra-phones being dispensed soon.
For those contemplating joining the Tantric Mile High club,
please be considerate of your fellow passengers.

We’re making good time because
the breath of God is always behind us.
Below us to the right is the Ocean of Ego
and to our left some passengers may glimpse
the chain of islands: Faith, Hope and Charity.

We’ve been advised that it’s a little busy on The Other Side
so we’ve been placed in a holding pattern
on the astral plane.
Passengers are reminded to retrieve all emotional baggage
for security reasons
and please help Customs
by declaring all religious preferences.

Ladies and gentlemen, we’re cleared for landing now.
On behalf of the crew, I hope you enjoyed
your transdimensional flight with Afterlife Airlines
and we hope to see you aboard again soon.
Please fasten your sleep belts,
we’re coming in for reincarnation.

He wanted it to be perfect,
for the words to fit together
like a well-oiled…
scratch that…
he’d heard that some Muslim women
(in Turkey or were they Moors?)
purposely wove a mistake
into their intricate tapestries
because only God is perfect
and they were right of course,
but he felt perfect just now
sitting still, warm
in a buck-fifty’s worth
of sunshine.

Child,
wistful child,
within the spiral framed.
Upward into encroaching shadows
where each rung
steals another colour
from the blossom of your days.

I see you at my door,
huddled against the night
in your Kermit-green jacket
and purple pants
like a refugee from a rainbow.
Patiently waiting
for my enfolding arms,
to spirit you upstairs
for flannelette passion
which makes us feel safer
than the safest ***.

Walking home alone on Saturday night,
social sounds spilling around me then
fading in my slipstream,
I round the corner of my street and
an image of your face rises
to combat the cold that searches for
the marrow of my bones.
Hope flutters like a wounded bird into
the pale sky of a vision desperate
with longing.

Forgive my physical hunger.
You were right to deny it
because by morning
you had given me
a far greater nourishment.

There he is,
between the Siberian Tiger and the Maui's Dolphin,
**** Mobilis Nullius.
She does not own a cellphone.
Text for her is the letters and words
that make up a book.
If he wants to take a picture,
he'll use a camera, thanks.
She doesn't want to download, upload,
freeload, overload,
girl, you've got to carry that load
of debt to the telco company.
He watches movies in the cinema
and he doesn't want to be hooked up
to the internet
or caught in the ever-widening net of commerce.
She's happy with the ancient ways,
songlines on the landline
lines on the land
where a woman can walk away
and hear only the ringing
of bird song,
lines on the land
a man can follow to the heart
of somewhere lost
and know only peace.