Man on fire

I am on fire. 

My flesh is flame, 

insubstantial, light, 

heat, idea, incandescent

in the night of the mind.

I twist anger into the logic

that strikes the shadows

crowding close and hot

like a furnace penumbra,

armed with their analogies

whose crude similarities

stiffen with salience, 

solidify into system,

give basis to accusation.

I do not recognise 

their hologram indictment,

their ash excuse for a world 

of wrath and fallacy.

I escape between the bars

of the cage they close on me.

I am on fire. My flesh is flame. 

Nomads

It is only now 

when you confront their consequences

that you contemplate the possibility 

that perhaps, just perhaps, 

cowardice and complacency 

were never a sound basis

of a long-term strategy.

Even now you believe these were aberrations,

a temporary lapse in otherwise solid standards

that led to disaster and the ruins that surround you.

You will accept the help of the outsiders, 

the awkward squad, the people that don't fit in, 

the people you normally ignore or actively exclude.

You will recruit barbarians into your armies,

tolerate heresies in your cloisters, 

chastise the mob that enforces your rule

by persecuting the very people you now need, 

expose corruption, make inspiring speeches,

and eventually you will reinstate the old glory,

bring back the good times, save civilisation, 

replace acute embarrassment with self-respect,

roll down your sleeves and put back on your gown,

and with wig and epaulette and chains of office,

take up again your seat in court and senate

but you were always like this.

You were always a corrupt complacent coward,

and always will be. The crisis was always inevitable,

and it will happen again, and again, and again.

Evil will always blossom in the stupidity 

and selfishness you cultivate to beguile the mob. 

Nevertheless, when order has been restored

you will still ostracise your saviours,

exile them to the margins from which you summoned them,

or think you summoned them. 

They don't answer your call. 

The wreckage you brought upon yourself

was interesting to them for a while, 

but now your mind is closed again

and your self-delusion is tedious,

and so they return to wander

in the world beyond your understanding, 

beneath stars your city light bleaches from the sky,

in fellowship with birds and beasts you recognise

only as either vermin or as food,

in the wilderness where cowardice is impossible,

and complacency is replaced by wonder and love,

and the pain of exile and solitude subsides 

in the sense of connection with all things,

until your world falls apart, as it inevitably will, 

and you find yourself contemplating 

the same horrific possibilities, 

and you need them once again.

The unsung Nereid

After the ecstasy, 

I am still, somehow, alive.

The god has used me

and somehow I have survived his pleasure. 

I have not been consumed by fire like Semele.  

His desire has not destroyed me.

He has not set me among the stars

to be remembered as a constellation.

I remain earthbound and unremarkable, 

spared the eternal post-coital infamy 

of his other conquests. 

No jealous wife has transformed me

into a plant or an animal like Callisto. 

My story is not told. 

Perhaps in the languid, unruly aftermath

the small measure of wisdom I can find

is this: the ecstasy I felt is not me,

even though I wished it would overcome me

at the time, and leave nothing besides itself

shimmering like the sun upon the waves.

 

I remain after the ebbing of the tide. 

I am what remains

when all that once was part of me 

is washed away.

The end, for me, will be quiet,

no less tragic for being quiet, 

and no more tragic than it is for everyone else,

but quieter than the fanfare I expected

when the god first introduced himself

and informed me of his love. 

My unremembered end, 

my gently fading light, 

is unsuitable for the heavens, too dim 

for the nights of future generations.

The whispering entropy of the surf

erodes me as slowly as time itself

like the rain on the corrugated iron roof

of my cabin back above high water,

marked on the shingle by a barricade

of seaweed infested with kelp flies.

They leave me to contemplate my error

in the dwindling wholeness I inherit

from that brief, passing moment of joy,

and to learn that it is not who I am. 

My fate is different: to watch the sunset, 

rather than be consumed by it

as if all sunsets were a single sunset,

to watch until my eyes no longer open,

to bear witness to the world

until I slip from its arms

and no longer feel its rhythm,

no longer hear its heart 

palpitate against its chest

as I rest in its embrace,

or feel its breath in the sea breeze,

not discarded by a god this time,

whose whim and caprice I indulged

during a moment of bliss and oblivion,

but finally released by a gentler, kinder world

now knowing its more enduring love. 

Promenade

We write. Words flow. 

The music of ideas, the polite masquerade

where otherwise raw, inarticulate emotions

can now bow and curtsy to each other, 

rather than tear each others' throats out,

promenading around the ice statue centrepiece

that would be a bloodbath if allowed to thaw.

We seek meaning behind the mask and find none. 

We try to make ourselves believe 

our search itself generates meaning 

only to find we chronicle our loss of faith, 

yet writing is no more futile 

than the life that it records. 

The pretence of knowledge we perform 

is a sin, yes, but one with which 

we can purchase our former innocence, 

and so in the end the only options left 

are compassion, kindness, and love

for those, witting or unwitting,

who share this fate, who walk with us

if even for only a short part of the way. 

In the end it is not a choice.

Words flow. We write. 

The God Number

Let us accept, as our first postulate, 

that much of what seems obscure to us

is an artefact of our imperfect way 

of conceiving of and representing numbers.

Imagine there was a way of thinking about numbers 

that made everything obvious and self-evident, 

a God Number

which was not in itself a quantity 

but the key to all quantities.

Simply knowing it is a moment of creation,

an eruption of paradox and axiom, 

a Fiat Lux, a beacon, 

and our minds are shadows,

our numbers mere plunder we hide in them, 

weak candle counterfeits of that creation

by which we read about worlds we dream

but cannot see. 

Prophets are blind at the threshold of knowing, 

their words to us a grudging valediction 

we extort from them as they depart 

to learn at last the God Number. 

Hope

Let us be authors of optimism alone:

no history or nostalgia, no manifestos,

no grand plans, no penetrating insights,

no pretence of knowledge or understanding, 

just hope, expectation, confidence.

We will prevail, not by anything written,

but the simple expedient of who we are.

The economy of kindness

The world makes sense to psychopaths. 

Its cruel calculus, its torture menu,

provides a complete explanation

to those not expecting hope, 

not seeking compassion, 

those whose economies 

do not accommodate kindness. 

They see the world as it is 

with no ambition about how it should be.

Their unsympathetic, solipsistic reality 

is perfectly insulated from all other possibilities.

These are the monsters we allow to govern us. 

We live in their blind spot. 

We only speak to them in dreams. 

We are ghosts in the corner of their eye

that elude their direct attention, 

anomalies they attempt to eliminate 

with the toss of a coin, because chance 

is the kind of carnage they understand,

so they think. 

In their certainty they exile themselves 

from our commonwealth of ignorance,

in which our salvation is each other,

known risks taken for unknown rewards,

because all likelihood is an illusion,

and no probabilities can be evaluated. 

Chances are not taken, they are given, 

increments of hope offered to others

that do not enter a psychopath's reckoning,  

because we don't have all the facts. 

We will never have all the facts, 

other than what we know we do for others.