late cab, where do you go
slicing through the silence
this damp hour?

it must be the night, for I'm
not worried-
though my phone's on

do you work late?

this is the worker's fate:
from father to son,
that we work to work ever harder ,
to break the tether
round our necks
invisible, but slavery -
when did it end?

it was the plantations then;
cabs and the keyboards now:
sugar grows on the brow
wet of the beaten man's sweat;

and oh we all want to rise,
far above from this shanty town
tither on that hill past the neon sea

so we dream, endlessly:
the reel
broken by the sound of rain
dripping on the roof

there are shadows that talk
very leaf is a witness

Streaking past, a momentary cloud,
there goes hope, a severed kite;

Rain-grateful the stream: but the dunes,
still menacing, forlorn all around;

Hanging over our world, the inevitable:
shivering among a hundred stars;

Will we go blighted, Chenrezig, without
the Polestar through the darkest night?

Crimson-crowned, the snow-peak, now,
the end we shudder to think past;

For her sundered from space and time
at the dawn of phenomenon,

not the little pettinesses of our world:

and
a portal to the unknown beyond -

the sky flaming red at dusk,
still in the lake the late summer hill
little a bloom in the bush hidden,
even shy a smile devoid of guile,

little every joy here;

Thought they,
faint of heart she was:
but every swoon carried her across
the world of the river of lights

In Her presence dawned on this
forlorn our earth -

Beauty since the beginning of time
exuberant in the hills
in the plumes and vales
and in the cruel hearts of men;

And grandeur, of the kind
unbeknown before, as the king
her father sewed up an empire vast;

And perfection in works
unknown before -
in every weave and hew;

All that men ascribed to her
father the great.

Love that is pain, the unspeakable
joy of the heart, a transformation

and here in this world cruel of men,
it is to love that is to suffer;

And so when you love with all your heart
with all your soul,  with all your mind
with all your strength,

so is the suffering sweeter the water
deeper the well, dug into the earth
where walked the prophets;

But we can die a hundred times on the cross,
for there is no love that does not heal, and

blessed is this sky under which
such a thing as love blooms;

Risen, we live, when in suffering we die, loving
such is the gospel of love we contemplate tonight.

After long the terrible night,

flaming as hope searing the eastern sky
one with the dawn, she rises:

Now quenched of aeons
a soul-thirst of the suffering world
for realms of unending light;

Sing now the Gods in the hymns
of a thousand cherubs
flying past,

dancing among the ripples
in a hundred lakes and petals
awoken to the victory of joy;

Born of the flesh here mortal
now a Goddess no less
miracle end of a love
birthing across cocoon lives,

adorning her beloved vast
like a vermilion dot
the gong of the syllable high,

humming in the wind breaking,

hair streaking clouds across the horizon,
and yet a human She is like us,
but for all the cells,
transformed in the alchemy of light:

The bridge for our plane
to the wisdom worlds across

ascending past ought and nought,
into the arms of her beloved
the ineffable base of all that is;

And thus went the first of us
a daughter of the mountains
that ascended from here,
uncovering for us the paths
to the realms of unending light

By the bonfire in the winter night
warming hands, a shadow

Dying muffled in the mist,
What about
my languid soul?

A hundred shadows echoing
in the wind beating in the wood:

How long this slaughter?
How long this pallid war
that nobody wants to end?

Hit, skirmish, dew-blood,
death and night,
and the stench at dawn.
How long?

Are you done smouldering,
firebrand? That from the ash
must rise a conflagration,

raining a harvest of ghosts
on this highway to hell.

In a blank by the shroud of the night,
here by the mourning peaks,
here where the snow weeps,
I've lost my body
in the bus to nowhere

I am ever the other -
rice field by the river,
where flutter the kites of joy,
that dustbowl
where still a thing of pride
to stand up to the coward
in the bully's garb;

You of the black flag,
toting borrowed guns
pimped across them holy
the lands of the vile,

what cause do you soak in blood,
the frozen streams for?
Sullied pride
for some ****-highs
trinkets, those
grenades on your thighs;

Uncloaked those that speak for you
from the pedestals in our tongue
who confer with us, yet
whisper to the dark
alleys by the sullen hour,

faceless the name of the evil
that stalks your soul -
weep, Shakuhachi,
echoing in the wells
dug deep of the earth

Here on this moonless night,
here in the valley of pain,
here I came
to give you guard
from the evil in your heart
here I die,
on the bus to nowhere.