Seek freedom from the anxious mind
For, you have the freedom to choose
Break the shackles of intimidation
Claim your freedom for the sleeping madness
Wake up to a world of freedom, for it’s yours
Freedom for the prejudices and the dogmas
Claim your freedom for the untrusting world
Freedom beckons you from the deepest caverns
Thwart the advances of violence, and seize freedom
Do not pay heed to the abusive words
As your freedom to speak up is jeopardized
The weakest of hearts and minds, resort to violence
And their abode inside is wrecked by loss of freedom
You freedom will come when you walk out
Opening the gates of your heart to freedom
The weak personalities seeks to strangle freedom
To dominate the beautiful souls, as they feel threatened
Assert your freedom; this is becoming a puppet’s world
Always made to act when the strings are pulled
There is a world full of love and freedom waiting for you
You just have to cross the threshold of the murky world
Only you can win your freedom, if you choose to
Seek freedom, and slam the door on the world of captivity





© Amitav (Radiance)

One swing
another swing
thud,
you fall to the ground
lifeless you lay
not making a sound
as I wipe the blood from my face
I think
why did things turn out like this
and what have I done

It is simple, and yet sublime;
Incapturable.

You need not go in,
Take away the man, destabilising the economy
That you so love
Letting them die

You need not assassinate and collaborate,
Scheme and puncture
Spheres of influence that stretch and bubble
In Latin America and Southern Asia,

You need not sign secrets away
Safe and deep
In silos and bunkers
Where Armageddon sleeps.

You need not supply, buy and axchange
Implements of violence and rage,
Picking sides in civil war, tribal conlflict
And bigger,
In lands you do not understand
Lands where the mountains resonate with holiness,
Lands of spiritual awakening awaiting for the young;
Concepts you can’t grasp, that don’t sit well

You need leave them be.
Enough has been done,
Not always with bad intention
But rarely for the greater good
Enough has been said and bought and replaced
Captured, shot at, disgraced,
Caricatured into funny cartoons
Taken over, the masters’ role assumed.

For all the radars and sonar
It seems impossible to listen;
Simple, yet sublime.
Incapturable.
Irreplaceable.

watching as my mother is dragged up the stairs
by her arms and hair

I get pushed down them for my efforts to try and stop him,
she is shouting screams into the wall -

they go into the bathroom ,
on the other side of the locked door, my blood runs cold.
next to me my siblings and aunt cry.

only screams and whimpers escape under the crack in the door
words of : “please stop”
“help”

      “no - you are hurting me”

he said “ i just wanna talk to you” . then my memory stops until the police are inside the house

Question them both. My mother in the kitchen  -
he is .. i don’t remember , it doesn’t matter....
i sit on the stairs that he painted white not that long ago , where my friends and i had stuck mirrors on each step , making the stairs look like they are floating.. kinda... i do not feel.

The cops stick around for less than 20 mins , arrest my step-dad.
As they take him away , i run upstairs watch from the window. It is a grey london day , they duck his head into the car and drive.

i do not feel.
the downstairs bathroom with stone + aqua tiles , collage of posters , family photos , newspaper clippings, postcards and play pamphlets become’s my hole in the wall for the next few hours. i cry. it is rain, matching the growing darkness outside.
i feel bad for letting the police take him away without saying anything.
i do not feel.

the shouting arguments
heard whilst i try to fall asleep , night
after night had been hiding the extent of unhappiness
of sadness expressed as anger in them both. At the time i could only smell fear
on their breath.
The next time there would be a yellow green bruise on her face and
screams at 4am.

11 year old me
has few memories of home.

angry men who do not know I do not have a dollar or a cig to spare. Ugly irrefutable contagion-handed howlers. Angry mischievous heathens that pantomime on 6:00a.m. sidewalk, Wicker Park gallow stop-sign, choreographed gutter-punk drunk walk. And of all he wants and could ever want splits down his gooey membrane brain in the outline of a noun shaped fragment of a clause, "Couldja spare 80¢ for the train," but of course I don't spare on the ellipsis or the period. Semi-colons I won't! My rubber-bottomed leather boots lash out, heavy scraping sounds trail this mirrored shadow half an angle behind me.

*****!! Blonde framed sunglasses from American Apparel, a gift from my sister in a folded Ray-Ban case is scattered on last nights bedroom floor, my girlfriend has certainly not noticed, the gloom-coated morning sun spray has not noticed; but I have unzipped a fissure in the ocular lens. My heart skips a beat. Her bedroom might as well have swallowed them whole. Now the house can halt and have the shade, swaying in Spring air in 10:22a.m. shadows. The aviator himself Howard Hughes would strike me with his 488 aircraft. Edwin Starr in his invincible sinister calypso of War would turn me round. I was sturdy as a rock until I began to forget my forgottens. These unknown unknowns I knew I needed. I'm over a quarter-century on to noon going nowhere- and quite blindly.

But then, still she could stand upright and find me. Her neck crooked, looking onward through the East, the gristly roots of rhubarb buried in her searching fingernails. She's threaded worse, and of course if I could just tell her- this is the kind of nursing which requires acute temperament and flexibility. I am thus on a journey to strike nonsense and fear from the idiotic vocabulary that put this nonsense in my head. Split through me like a butter knife into my apotropaic. Perhaps tar water could cure my ails. If not, certainly a sliver of vanilla would set me straight. Or if could just rain rain rain all day, then I'd make do without, but she is at school. My pistons are racked and nervous, and I'm not going anywhere but my rucksack stoop. I am camped in midwestern Spring soup. Fog, rain, and shade. The nightmare of day.

Within that magical moment
The world is at one and at ease
Everyone is loving their neighbour
And we have control of disease.

But it doesn't last, it cannot last
It will all go back as before
To the dying from hunger and violence
To man’s unending desire for war.

One man plants a crop for food
But another man reaps the gain
The one making life from the profit
While another’s reward is just pain.

That man is black, or yellow, who cares!
His blood like yours is red
The bullets or knives that pierce your skins
Would make you both as dead.

A man gets beaten in the street
His crime was being gay
Who gave those others the right to judge
Will prejudice never go away?

The ones with strength to dominate
Should nonetheless take heed
When they themselves are wanting help
Who’ll stay to fill that need.

I hear the ever-growing rains
They flood the town and field
Where hardship’s felt so gravely
Where man is forced to yield.

Perhaps we brought it on ourselves
We feel the need for so much
But there are so many more with nothing
Who’d benefit from a gentle touch.

Back to that magical moment
It’s the one just before I awake
Where the next moment comes and it’s over
And it can’t be put right with a shake.



©Joe Wilson – A Magical Moment…and then it’s gone! 2014