The rhythm of the cosmos
Is a waltz
In three steps
Create
Sustain
Decay

A movement
To which all of life
And so art conforms
From literature
With it's beginning
Middle
End

To the great civilizations of the Earth
That rise
Hold
Fall
Just as chest draw breath
As she sleeps

Or the theologians speak
Of their holy trinity
The metaphysical systems of old Indus Valley
Create
Sustain
Decay

Making way for the new notes
We play
As the old fade
Into silence
One step
Two step
Three

Come and dance with me
As the stars inhale
And hold their breath
As we find our feet gracefully
And move in the moment we have
One step
Two step
...

Find the flow

Accept

Let go

Let the music get inside you

Take control

And the cares of the world

On a roll

Down and out

Forgotten

Forbidden

Hidden from the conscious mind

A state divine and silent

As the body twists

In bliss and peace

And smiles wreath the faces

Of the maelstrom

Clattering beats

Descending from the bass bins

No beginning

And no ending

In the ever present now

As I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to take
Another morning gently weep
The price I pay when I awake

I sit in stillness

Listening

The slow beat of my heart

Tuning in to the spectrum

Where intuition speaks

For the first time in weeks

I hear her
With that infinite wisdom

She delivers in silence

Be patient

Be quiet

Be alive and be present

The best is right now

Enjoy it

What the future holds

Is for future you to behold

So let yourself enjoy it when you get there

Don’t mind me

When I get a little ahead of myself

Time is infinite

When you know how to stop it

Catch a breath in the eternal moment

There is no need to hurry

Or say anything at all

Everything in its right place

They say the only certainties in life

Are death and taxes

I say the only certainty is change

The vehicle by which

The old becomes new again

The only thing that prevents

The same day being every day

Sometimes we fear change

As we fear death

The ultimate change

Yet how easily we sleep at night

Our daily preparation for the Long One

And every morning we wake up again

What is change but a movement

A flow

The same way energy traverses the Universe

A dance with many steps

Left, right, and left again

Move to the rhythm

Keep time to the sound

Change brings new life

New places to explore

These paths we haven’t walked before

Shifting patterns

Coalescing and transforming

Every one breathtaking

In it’s own right

We seek out new ways to speak

Without speaking

In a moment looking up at the same stars

Knowing that even though they are so far away

Their light still reaches us

Part of it enters us

Right through the windows to the soul

And bounces on the retina

At rest after millennia

In a place made of the same stuff that it is

Stardust to stardust

Light to the soul

Suspended in time they lie
Beholden to memory
Stealing moments from the present
These little points in the minds eye
Of pasts and futures not
Like painting a picture of the girl of your dreams
Only to realise you've met her before
And it wasn't to be
These little shifts in the make up of the cosmos
Echoes of the butterfly effect
Many poets who have come before I
Have spoken of the road less travelled by
That very essence of a point
Where everything changes
Almost imperceptibly
Until looking back you see the hurricane

Been writing haiku
Much better than this one though
This isn't that good

I sometimes feel like I

Have taken too big a slice of pie

Like I

Am too small to fulfill my obligations

I

Have bitten off much more than I can chew

I’ll say to you

It frightens me sometimes

In those times beyond the hour of sleep

I sleepless weep

And creep without the lights on

So as not to wake the neighbors

Or the cats in the backyard

Startled by the stirring

So early in the morning

So as not to really be morning

Yet mourning still

Too small to fulfill my obligations

My cobblers making boots to big for me to fill

I fear it still

And try not to think about things too much

At such a time as this

As peace shall surely escape me

How many lives will fit in one

How big a cast can a one man show perform as

Perhaps it was better to pick one thing and stick with it

One small thing

That just one man can do

Just the right size to fulfill his obligations

But the die is cast

The pie from crust is taken

And I’m left shaking at the magnitude

And scared they’ve got the wrong man for the job

It scares me

The fear stares at me and I stare back

Who has my back in this battle of wills

When he has all the ills of Hell

And self-deception

Delusions of Grandeur in the DSM

No no, it can’t be that

I can’t do that

Those boots are huge

And who am I

But a man, I cry

Too small to fulfill my obligations

Where you going to run to
When you find out that God hates you
And everything you’ve learned
Has been turned around in front of you
And written down
Like a manual to fail by
To try to no avail
What use are eyes
To the sighlessness
Of this hapless narcissist
No need for shining eyes of his
Twisted so deep inside himself
He cannot see the sky
What use are ears
When noone speaks to him
Nor tongue that he may speak
He’d scream
And be lost in the din of the endless scrolling dashboard
Forgotten in a heartbeat
As his heartbeat soon forgotten
A life ill gotten
And rotten to high heaven
Until he cries out and rolls over
And soon forgets his dream

I feel the cold air
As I prepare
To face my final wilderness
The wildness inside of us
Conspires endless
To bring us to our knees
I seek the trees
To hold me close
To eat my sins
Protect me from the whims
Of this bleak humanity
Inside of me
And all around me
A festering wound
That will **** its bearer
Ever nearer to those green fields
The earth wields its mighty clubs
And drubs the battered sky
Scattered high the white clouds flee
And me?
I lie below
Swallowed whole
Held by the warm embrace of roots and burrows
Rows and furrows
Scored deep in the earth's surface
Where the life below draws me in
And transmits me back into the stars

Don’t write about the dark things they said

Don’t hide from the truth I replied

Well, part of the truth anyway

Which, any which way you look at it has two sides

A sun which hides its shadow

But even the sun must sleep sometimes

Then creeps and slides the oozy woozy darkness

Of drunks and floozies and drug addicts

Thugs and gangsters, hatchet men and fixers

These nefarious predators and scavengers of the night

Shuttered sight eating victims of urban decay

Never sated in their bloodlust and greed

That need that is so deep 

You could feed it without sleep

Forever and never fill it up

This is reality in our **** city

Where effluent flows down footpaths between bars

Climbs out of cars in high heels or collared shirts

“Sorry mate, not in those shoes"

Drunken harlots beckon rapists and sadists

Transfixed in the ever-pressing lusts of the flesh

Without joy or connection

Or even satisfaction, most of the time

Am I right? Ladies, am I right?

Another wine to fill the soul’s great hole

Another devastating moment when the sun gets in

To find you weeping in your make up

Black streaks down cheeks of bloodless faces

All because nobody told you what was possible

They simply told you what not to do

Which of course you did anyway

Over and over again with the same results

That part isn’t your fault, it’s society’s

It’s religion and propriety’s

It’s dogma and denial’s

The cultural hangover of the morning after the decades before

The holier-than-thou edicts of our preachers and teachers

And leaders without leadership

We’ve cut the slip

Caught the rip

Been flipped so many times we can hardly tell what is useful anymore

The answers you seek are inside yourself

It’s like Rafiki said: “Look harder"

It’s like Sigmund said: “Unexpressed emotions will never die.

They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”

Our society reflects repressed attitudes to ***

And brings them forth in uglier ways

Like rapes and splays of legs to the most persistent bidder

Soulless sexuality

Stuffing ya pork sword into a drunken receptacle

Such a spectacle

You might swap names in the morning

It’s *** on a tray like a TV dinner

Forget the word “sinner"

It’s the lack of nutritional content that ills

That kills the real deal for these counterfeit thrills

This isn’t some moral crusade

There’s no need to drink the kool-aid

Throw out the gimmicks

But pay attention to the limericks

Be open, be honest

Be Eros, be Adonis

Be Venus, in furs / **** resplendence

Take lovers my dear

Make love and not fear

Turn empty lust in transcendence

It's a beggars lament
Of life before never after
A ***** dirge from the bottom of a broken heart
Plumbed to the depths and left hollow
Spewing forth its thick black fuel
To burn in the engines of strangers
And suffocate the cities
Turn greens to mottled greys
And decay's dusty brown
Coats everything in sight
Until all lose their sight
And sink into dark pits
Despairs and graces
Nameless faces
Since nobody can recognise their brothers and sisters
Past the soot and ashes of their fallen ideals
They broke the only law there was
Live within your means
But paid no heed
For greed we shuffled down the mortal coil
Until our rotted corpses
Became tomorrows oil

Then night fell
And darkness ruled
The sun coming up just a shadow of it's former self
Casting a half light too dim to read by
To frail to see by
Leaving the people scraping walls
Crawling floors and termites tearing down buildings
Cockroaches crunching under hand and foot
Cleaning, always cleaning
As bodies fell where they stood
Hope snuffed stuffing life under the carpet
Filthy with rat **** and acid rain
Disdain and discord
Disconnection
Souls sold at market prices
A bucket's worth for a buck fifty

Falling over the lip of the precipice
Into inky stillness
Where the heart sings dirges
Of the dead and lost souls
Holes poked through and dripping muddy waters
Like the sons and daughters
Of the god of decay
Rusting in the back of the pantheon
Running on down into the catacombs
Of black corridors and Minotaurs
Weeping for salvation
Red hearts beating on pikes in blue flames
That burn hot but no light
Nothing to bright the abject savagery of the surroundings
These things show no mercy
That hold old souls under rusted grates
Sluicing juices into terra firma
Thousands of feet below sea level

One day I will meet a girl
Set aside for me
Of all the people on all the earth
I'll know her by her chemistry

Her eyes will shimmer like an allotrope of C
With one of Cu(NO3)2
One of CuCO3
And hair of Cu straight
Or perhaps the deeper hue when Fe2 meets Oxygen
Her skin an alloy of Cu and Sn
Tall and thin like a long chain hydrocarbon
And electroplated in Zn
To steel her on her mission to heal this mad and broken world
Her heart of Au
And Ag tongue
And mind as quick as Si chips in sequence
Resonating on my frequency
Like a SiO4 oscillator tuned to me specifically
She is what happens when H2O meets Na
Or Li, or K, or Cs
Or by adding HNO3 to glycerin
She burns as bright as Mg
As H fusion
Waiting to lift the Pb from my soul
So we can float away like He

Forced into action
False starts of recognition
Badly ascribed motives
And motivational speakers dying by the boat load
Trying to make a quick buck
From the wisdom of the cosmos
As if it wasn't freely available to anyone who will listen
Blistering lips and burnt fingers
**** bliss and listerine
Coughing up your anatomy
In a cacophany of coffee drops and cheap plonk
Like the company of even cheaper politicians
Civil servants serving their civil selves
While Santa's elves run the workshop
For pig slops and platitudes
It's so easy to short change people with no change
But big hearts and some semblance of social conscience
Who want to see their fellow man succeed
While greed drives more powerful men to darker ends
The soul corrupted green and crispy
Neatly pressed and folded in a money clip
While the trip of a lifetime waits in a little black bag
But who's keeping score
How can you when the game is so confusing
Quietly excusing themselves from the sidelines are the ones making the money on the whole **** thing
It's rigged, you should know this
Quit while you're ahead

My life seems to flit between extremes
Of light and darkness
Like I'm trapped between Greatness and Death
I feel this so acutely that it cuts me to my core
Maybe it is a necessary condition for an extraordinary life
That it rests upon a razor blade

How long has it been?
Days, weeks, millennia?
Ways speaks to character
Methods of ingress
Or egress
Or regrets about time spent
In the pursuit of something wholly less valuable
Something less palpable
Less tactile
More senile
My words have hit walls at high speeds
Left bleeding on the pavement
Leading on the evening news
Amongst the views of corporate hucksters
And genuine accidents
Dodgy precedents set by corrupt intuition
What am I even saying
These nonsensical ramblings
Born of too much time and too little patience
Have swallowed my cognition
Until I dribble to a halt
The moon is out tonight

Sharp darts
Spits barbs
Cut heart
To bleeding shreds
That no meds can cure
Torn in two
Push pull
Stay or go
It's a lose lose
Suffering waits around every turn
So I'll misspend my soliloquies here
Pour my bleeding heart out to nobody in particular
For no reason more particular
Than to not do so might **** me
Spill me out on the pavement
Like a skydiver with 16,000 feet
And no rip cord
Although nowhere near as fast
A long protracted fate awaits
Death by a thousand cuts

Snowflakes melt
Smiles flicker
Eyes light up
Sunlight glints
Love happens
Life conceives
First kisses
Leaves fall
Tears form
Then are brushed away
Ropes snap
Hearts break
Flames turn to ash
Energy turns to nothing
Stars collapse
Death comes
The road there is long and painful
Nevertheless when you get there
Your life will seem but a moment

We were all there
The anime girl and the flower child
Surf boy and the Queen of the Pixies
The lads with the tattoos and ***** in pink coolers
And many others with us
And many many more around us
Holding beer cans and buckets of Hot Chip(s)
Stuffed into The Flaming Lips
We sat on the hill where the sun sat next to us
Smoked grass in the grass
By our Beach House
People sliding up and down the hill like a Flume
With a Boy & Bear for company
And a First Aid Kit
And the Village Brass Band
From Pleasureland
We had to hand it to them
They knew how to use those horns in the wee hours
As we marauded around the hillside
The valley and the Enchanted Forest
With its lemmings and white tigers, kookaburras and pixies
All vying for the title of the Best Sense of Humour
Where the sun came up between the trees
And everything went pink
You couldn't tell the canopy from the clouds
In the alien sky
With the moon in dark night at one end
And the ****** first light at the other
Until the light wins and day Falls

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

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

Sometimes it can be difficult to avoid
Playing fast and loose around the edges
As if time were bearing on you
Like the past you’ve tried to run from
Or your impending sense of mortality
As if time were just slipping away
Maybe it is
Maybe it isn’t
Maybe it doesn’t matter either way
So long as day to day you do what you are supposed to do
Get that? Supposed…
Not required nor coerced
But just assumed as in a natural cause of inaction
This lack of satisfaction in your circumstances
Can easily be allayed
By staying on your feet in front of your dismayed public
Who hoped silently to see you stumble
Lest your success cause them to lament their circumstances
Just by proving it can be done
Staying on your feet I mean
And playing fast and loose around the edges

Tired
Brain spits words in fits and starts
The internal running commentary misfiring badly
Ideas stuck in bottlenecks
Traffic backed up and down the on-ramps
Leading off the congested thoughtways
Tired
Stormwater overflow pours out of blocked drains
Sidling up the gutters of fallen leaves
And other assorted detritus of modern existence
Spewing out over footpaths and under cars
And over the tops of the boots of downtrodden dawn treaders
Tired
Mountain pass impassable under it’s mercurial precipitate mask
Features only glimpsed in snatches
Like looking through a white picket fence while running
Thought trees bunching up around the middle
Warping under the sun and the scrutiny of others
Tired
Collapsing under the weight of the wave function
Subatomic particles currently in a state of nonexistence
Abandoned altogether by the Higgs, thoughts vibrate and dissipate
In extraordinary frequency and noise
Drowned out by the audible hum of the big bang
Tired
As if running a marathon in treacle
Start with a whimper then dribble to a halt
Running barefoot on salt flats
Or over pillows in stilettos
More time spent on face than feet
Tired
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more
The court jester prances for the Big Queen *****
And her merry King of Fools with his band of merry drunkards
Quickly losing the point of it all
As words start tumbling down in random order
Staccato signal messages like binary or Morse code
Information overload threatens to upend the boatload
Like the military dumping refugees into the harbour
Buckle up armour and wait for the onslaught
Of somnatic visions, twisted psychedelic impressions
Land mine concussions in the fevered dreams of veterans
Who witnessed limb torn from limb
In the name of something nobody remembers
Lose their tempers and start a war on home turf
Jungles petrified into concrete monstrosities that blot out the sun
From the flowers that feed in the cracks of the pavement
Everywhere bereavement and none shall take leave
From the cold, impassive logic of Death
Who comes knocking as you read this
Wired
No chance of sleep now
This is why one shouldn’t write poetry late at night

The weekend dead and buried, the week ahead looks hairy

Oh much to do in little time, here’s not the place to fall behind,

The marks that mark the passing of a much beloved dream,

With every hopeful falling to the dust so it would seem,

That life she twists and turns and pulls,

And in her midst she gathers fools,

And leaves a path of starry eyed idealists in her wake,

Lets hope she learns more gentle means for her reluctant sake…



*~ L. Alexander Carlé

We need to talk, she said at last

Her perched up high and holding fast

Like some towering iconoclast

And I bowed to her whim



She looked me up and down and then

She threw a fist under her chin

Cocked her head and to begin

She said “Well, I’ve been thinking”



I sat and let her thoughts collect

My silence somewhat circumspect

No words for fear they would inflect

And belie my position



A million possibilities

Of personal fragilities

A lack of sensibilities

An abject lack of tact



An endless scroll of mournful songs

The devil’s list of total wrongs

Small evils gather by the throngs

Just what is it I’ve done?



Or maybe that’s the problem here

It’s not mere acts that cause my fear

For the ills I own are not so clear

It’s the fault of willed omission



Have I not noticed something change

Or left things fester like a mange

Priorities to rearrange

Oh so much left undone



And in a moment she begins

To load upon me my grave sins

Just think of all the dreadful things

Resign me to my fate



And then her lips begin to move

Her voice a breathy open louvre

Her words of silk are just as smooth

“I think we need a cat”



*~ L. Alexander Carlé

10 hours, 2 hours, 4 hours, 9

Stop, start, wait, eat,

Can’t sleep

Fall in a heap

At the terminal



Feeling terminal

As time zones shift beneath me

Rearranging sequences on a metaphysical scale

Flight fail

Stuck here again now

Another 2 hours I’ll never get back



Meetings here and yonder

Time to ponder

Falls victim to jetlag

As I sag under the burden of my workstyle



A carousel of different faces

Fleeting encounters of disparate races

But it’s all worth it

When I can drop the charade

And wrap my arms around

My welcome home parade



*~ L. Alexander Carlé