Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war

Do nothing to stem the flow of blood

From veins to ****** floor

Your temperance be ******, you fool

You think that simple platitudes will save you?

The sword will brave your utterances and incantations

Speculations on how best to carve up thine wrists

Will spare you the rod of another man’s hands

And throw light upon the thought ways

Of the creatures whose bones sit picked clean around you

Cry ******

Cry foul play

Just cry out the rivulets burning holes into your cheekbones

Slicing through ash and the program of fear

Written into your features

As you sit in sullen contemplation

Of how this might end for you

The flickers of fickle light exposing dirt under your fingernails

Cuticles pared back to ****** knuckles

Honeysuckles feeding from the filthy dripping faucet on the corner

Brilliance turned to grey and muted brown

And down beneath the soldier’s feet they fall

Their roots frozen into concrete as yours are

You shall not venture this way again

You shall not move from this moment

Where time stopped

And words failed

If I spoke or wrote
A note that set the Universe on fire
Would you notice?
Would you sit up and disclose
To those placed around your goodness
“My goodness! The Universe is on fire”?
Or is it too small a gesture
To get your attention
To get your blessing to proceed as I was
Before the view of you arrested me
Suspended me in honey
Until I swam past where you sat
And walked home covered in bees

Who is this broken thing
Who holds her broken things
And dreams stuffed in a ***** handbag
Dangling from her fingertips
Where strips of skin have hardened
Like she has
Streaks of shame and fear
And tears coursing lines down her wrists
Thick with blood and grit
Where every scar tells of a heartbreak
Until she closed it all up
And broke all her stuff
And she cries sometimes
Does not see between the lines of sheet music
Notes played just for her
A special symphony of minor chords
The saddest chords there are
I hope she hears it one day
Forgets the shame and pain of it all
To know that even in sad chords there is beauty
And even the sad things can be loved

It’s time again for one of those free form sessions
Where the mind is too tired to speak
So the heart dreams
Sentences don’t form by their usual means
No vetting or checking or editing
Crediting wordplay to intricate trickery of weariness
Of someone other than yourself speaking
Eking out a living on the cobblestones
The cornerstones of this modern discourse
Big rocks for the first course
Rubble for seconds
Sand for dessert
Marking Time up to its old tricks again
Slipping away
Tripping for days
Flipping in ways inconceivable to creatures grounded in 4 dimensions
Spatial henchmen
Brutes in solid matter
Doesn’t matter really
Except when we neglect the rest
Who’d have guessed we were in fact immortal?
Store bought and all
Eternity in a bottle
A buck fifty per litre
You don’t need much
Just a touch should last you til the end of time
When rhymes finally start to fall apart
Under the limitations of the language
And some time back you started to substitute sandwich
Blangstitch
Gingrich and sanskrit
And mords wade up and stolen
Like a generation once removed
Then finally put right with
After the damage was well and truly cemented
Around their feet and chucked overboard
Struck a chord?
Just take a look around you
It still happens every time you say Abo
Or wonder if this place would be better if there weren’t so many Indians
Or if Asians spoke English
Or Engrish was the new international language
Minds that can’t see past the colour on the tip of their nose
Perpetually in the picture
Painting white over everything
So we can rejoice in the sameness
Like how we rejoice in eating boiled potato for every meal
No salt and pepper
No texture
Just lectures on that time we tried out what management schools called diversity
And how it failed horribly
Because we are all so different
That we have nothing in common
Like species or anything
Or the way music makes us feel
And dance
And sing
Even if it’s just in our own heads
Or the way sad things make us cry
And feeling loved is important
It’s that moment when you realise the guy pointing the gun at you is you
Only in a different coloured uniform
That has a family at home hoping he comes back
That he has a picture of in his wallet
And a dog that thinks he can do no wrong waiting to pin him down and clean the grime out of his nostrils
You can pull the trigger on him
Let slip that slug of lead into your brain
It’s only a dog eat dog world because somebody has some money on it
You’ve been thrown in the ring
And told it’s to the end
So you fight
But it’s not and you don’t have to
Isn’t that good news
That you’ll never see on the news
“Life is not a battle, it’s a collage!
More at 11”
But you’re asleep by then
Assuming you were ever awake at all

It’s the morning after the last heart session
Eyes open but brain still crackling with static and white noise
When I try it again
Hoping to get pen to paper
Before consciousness can recover sufficiently to intervene
And proffer pretty syntax to the poem
Hold the mind blank
And stack the words in rows of green growth
Like garden beds
That only need time and attention to bear fruit
Let truth come from some other place
Than reason or left brain
Or the extensive vocabulary
Meticulously indexed in the cranial cavity
Somewhere near the brain stem
Or maybe in the DNA
As C, T, G, and A
Storing data like binary only twice as complex
The recall mechanism operating in the darkness of our comprehension
Apprehension of its failure threatening to leave the poem unfinished
Unillustrated
Uncalibrated
Un-fact checked
Like that matters somehow
Like the facts are important in art
Like the right brain has no sense of propriety
Just as surely as the heart tells lies in gibberish
A chattering maelstrom of syllables in a cyclonic vacuum
And yet somehow the heart speaks with perfect clarity
Uncluttered rhythm
Timing and flow
So you know there is more going on here than we fully understand
Lend a hand to help decipher the intentions of a part of yourself wayward from the rest of you
Leading to a collapse of the ego
And a blurring of the lines between you and I
Turning discrete data into continuous
On the fly
On the run
Under sun and and moon and sky
Until the day that even death fails to be discrete
Or even an event any more important than a fire
Converting energy from one form to another

Then there are those times you write
Because otherwise the words will tear you up inside
Like supercharged particles
Of steam under pressure
Or uranium reaching critical mass
So you set to the task
Grab pen and paper
Or iPhone and browser
And start uploading your sins onto clean white sheets
Of loose leaf or LCD
As if possessed by some other self
Or non-self
Itself a fountain of diction
A percolation of syntax
Bubbling up and out so as not to **** the messenger
And lines flow
Kia ora koutou katoa
Nga hoa
Me toku whanau
My friends
And family
Be well
See well through this life
And her pitfalls
Tall walls and
Crash courses in experience
Standard variance and deviation from the mean
She can be mean
She can be cruel and unkind sometimes
But you’ll find rhymes to make lines line up like signs on the highway
And find even in grief there is beauty
Truth in pain
Life in suffering
There is no judgement inherent in these things and none at all other than that which we place upon them
Negative or positive are uniquely human conditions
Everything else just is
It sits within itself
Without apprehension of the fourth dimension
Not beating up younger selves for poor decisions made by poorly equipped versions
Nor fearing an abstract time hence
From whence march our fears about death
And a life well spent
And incontinence
And I think my phone bill is going to be massive
And I think my 2 minutes is up
And I think my 15 minutes is up
Where was I again?
Words have surfaced
Simmered and settled down
Beauty in the badness
Truth in the madness
Tiredness overtakes
Like post coitus
An **** of the monastic order
Intellectual intercourses subsequent exhaustion
And sleep calls ceaselessly
As if nothing else mattress

Love, light, beauty and truth
Magic misappropriated by an all too common world
And turned into clunky words
That leave no trace of what they mean
Except to poets and children
Which are really the same thing
When you think about love, you do love a disservice
When you feel love, you are at one with all things
But when you embody love, you are the light of the world
And you, child, you are such a light in the darkness
What is beauty if not this?
To see a sea of contrast and recognise truth
Amongst conflicting ideologies and persuasions
That become meaningless
When in your arms
Defying the supposedly immutable laws of the Omniverse
And reining time to a halt