Heart is breaking

He sits atop his lofty minaret
Long legs wrapping round the tower like a spider
Surveying his kingdom of faceless travelers
With his dark eyes and the tick tock from his chest
Nameless forms all touching hands
And speaking in some foreign tongue
Impenetrable to him
Familiar words in unfamiliar circumstances
Like TV commercials all clamouring for attention
Saying nothing at all at high volume
The only voices that make sense are the crows
With their mournful reminders of decay
The inevitable end cycle of things
Rot and rebirth
He sits in this place
Watching the beetles and flies turning things over
Waiting for them to turn him over
So he can start again as something new

Sadness such as not felt for some time
A heavy, brooding melancholy
Swinging like a pendulum
To the tick tock of my mechanical heart
This is gravity's territory
Light snuffed and stuffed into black holes
Packaged up in best sellers of dime store self help
Flying off the shelves at Christmas time
To people looking for that quick fix
Those tid bits of instant mix wisdom
Just add water to change your life forever
Why address your character
When your cult of personality will get you laid
And get you paid by other poor suckers
Trying to cut corners on the road to enlightenment
Heaven sent, heavy set and rent in pieces
En Lighten Me N(o)t
Lighten my load
Lighten my leaden heart
Set me alight so that even in my darkness I may light the path for others
Sometimes the best you can be is a warning

Can the unstoppable force overcome the immovable object? The waves have been a teacher with more wisdom than any I have ever had before. Something so constant, so committed, so unflappable as the lapping or crashing of the waves upon the shore. If you need any evidence of her relentless nature, look no further than the foreshore, great boulders and cliff faces worn down to grit. A true mechanical entity, with precise surety, well versed in engineering, mathematics, weather patterns and fluid dynamics. Who would have thought a philosophical question would have an engineering solution? The answer is no, but the question lacks precision, it doesn't quite paint the picture as it happens. I dive into the crashing waves, stretched out long, offering no resistance, the wash thunders around me but still I glide forward in the water like a shark, no resistance. I am the immovable object. Suspended weightless I overcome the unstoppable force by holding ground, offering no resistance as it rages around and past me, trying to capsize me or push me backwards. The way of the seas, the ultimate peacemaker.

The parallels to life do not need pointing out thus, especially to those who fight for justice, the Davids versus their Goliaths. History's great peacemakers have been here before, the art of war is in passive resistance, principled adherence coupled with civil disobedience, your silence is considered tacit acceptance, so be not silent but give unto Caesar that which is Caesars. The fight is an uphill playing field, you must play by their rules, or the game is over, but you can win by their rules if you know where they bend. So stand peacemakers, face rows of riot shields, plow fields as Te Whiti did, collect salt as Gandhi, be not silent, tip toe that fine line between real change and hard time, wherever you see injustice speak, and seek conciliation. Peace is not achieved when nations put down their guns, peace is achieved when people embrace their neighbors as their brothers and sisters. It is achieved when people no longer speak of peace with longing in the same breath as cursing the person that parked in their carpark. Be peace and you will see peace, wish not to see it in the world if you cannot be it in your world. Change yourself and the world changes with you. So can the unstoppable force overcome the immovable object? That much is up to you.

Carbon slides furiously over pad
Mad as a Hatter only angrier
Scribbling circles and stabbing the paper
It's so obvious, ******* it!
It's right there in front of you!
Look! Can't you see?
You gesticulate wildly
Silently cursing and trying to send the answer psychicly
Pictionary that ******* game
By any other name would not be any less infuriating
And yet we play it every day
When I say "I think..."
And she says "I feel..."
And we wheel around in circles
To get our point past our own noses
Guessing what the other's prose is
Until we think we know and then...
That's irrational!
This doesn't feel right...
So where do you go
When your words makes sense
But your concepts are lost in translation
When your language fails to convey meaning?
There's an old saying I heard somewhere
If a lion could speak English we would not understand it
Without being underhanded you have to hand it to them
Those old timey folks knew a thing or two
About me and you and the breakdowns in syntax
That afflict us on these occasions
Maybe the only answer is to sit with it
Will you think on it
While I come to terms with how it feels?

Like the pages of a book
We took to read an authors mind
Our lines define us
In a way
They say what sometimes we've forgotten
Or neglected
Or reflected upon many times
Our lines tell us the story
Ourselves in all our glory
As we bolted down that hill on a skateboard
And did somersaults on the concrete
Or slid down steps on plastic sheeting
Left bleeding where the board cut into wrist
When it stopped at the bottom
And we didn't
Our childhood misadventures notwithstanding
We are still standing looking back in time
Through our lines
Our cuts and incisions
Our many decisions that left us souvenirs we can never throw away
But never would anyway
Because what else tells stories like scars do?
Of what we've been through
What we've seen to
And come out the other side
Just to hide our reminders
As if we don't find them satisfying
A blemish on our perfect skin
As if there's such a thing
As if you'd want such a thing
Like you'd bin a book of poetry because of its lines
Or throw out a painting because it was no longer a perfect white canvas
Perfection lies in the imperfection
There is beauty in the brokenness
The flaws in the flawlessness
The differences and nuance
That are lined upon our skin
Akin to lines upon the paper
Taper off towards the end
And then the storytelling starts
For what is art if not a story
And what are lines if not art?

He's a strange boy
Dusty hair and cobwebs in his ears
Musty clothes and rusty bones
He doesn't wash
He doesn't even brush the grit from his eyes
So when he blinks little trails fall his cheeks
He sinks into old black boots
Always moves with the wind
Like he's pinned to it
Grinning glint of the sun warms his cold face
As he floats from place to place
He cries but no tears come
Instead some tiny spiders come sliding
And devouring each other
Retreating to weave webs around his head
He hears the wind whistling through them sometimes
Tries to learn the notes
To play on his bone piccolo
The Spider Web Sonata
He'd call it if anyone would ever listen
But it doesn't seem to be the type of thing
That would ever happen to him
Not in this life anyway