Reflection

There is courage so profound 

it ceases to be courage 

and tutors us in life as dialogue

between competing necessities.

There is cowardice so complete

it becomes a kind of death, life

exchanged for shallow compatibilities

found in temporary expedient

and disingenuous rationalization.

When you look in the mirror

which do you see? Both? Neither?

We are not entirely dead, 

nor fully alive, occupied, as we are, 

with the mystery of ourselves

which punishes every good intention. 

The object

It was blue. The committee agreed. 

There were so many names for the colour

and we agreed on "blue" by consensus,

which is to say, there were no tantrums, 

no strops, no-one storming out the room,  

only huffs and grudging acceptance. 

The shape was easier. We had precedent, 

Greek words for side and corner

and rules for how to combine them, 

yet this too was somehow inadequate. 

The world's greatest minds, together,

assembled in an exclusive luxury resort, 

all expenses paid, for as long as it took, 

with nothing else to do but think

about what to call this thing, and yet

there was still something eluding us, 

something we could not put our finger on. 

As to provenance, no-one knew. Had it come 

from the ancient interior of the Earth?

Did it have an extra-terrestrial origin,

or, indeed, was it from the future? 

That night I slept unsoundly. At last

I woke startled from a vivid dream

in which my dead wife came to me.

It had been so long the grief was now

a low monotone, an attitude, a filter, 

a grey snow settling on everything, 

and I had forgotten how much I loved her.

The memory felt like a sudden fall.

The sensation woke me. What happened

before then? I formed a clear impression.

She held her hands against her chest

then reached toward me 

and offered me something. 

ὕβρις

Just let them get away with it. 

How could we forgive ourselves

if we don't let them get away with it?

The world burns

and they are going to get away with it.

Billionaires who lit the fire

retreat into their bunkers.

The poor suffer the consequences.

Everything we value is now worthless.

Fraud perpetrated on a planetary scale

has lined the pockets of the very criminals

we aspired to emulate during the good times

and still envy for their stockpiles and safety

even now their betrayal of us is manifest. 

I know it isn't fair, 

but the big lie we were told

is just the sum of all the little lies

we told ourselves. We chose to believe

the big lie when it suited us, 

turned a blind eye as the blameless

were ignored or mocked or worse, 

raped like Cassandra in the temple.

Our outrage now 

is cancelled out by our indifference then.

There is no way home. 

We deserve this curse

that is lifted only by our destruction

and the absolution of those

we have chosen to destroy us. 

Εὐαγγέλιον

The miracle of love:

to constantly witness your beauty

always as if it is for the first time,

to see you with new eyes every day,

constantly renewing my love,

every crisis only bringing fresh clarity

in an eternal awakening of the soul,

a great dawn that pulses 

in every beat of my heart.

What kind of thing is this I am, 

what ground, what mud, onto which

divinity descends, which it treads

to announce this living gospel?

We are imperfect vessels, 

broken, leaking, useless, 

other than the extent to which

we allow love to flow through us. 

We cannot contain it, 

were we to try to make it stand still. 

We must let it flow. 

Meditation

Sometimes just consider my rage a meditation:

my agitation, anger, impatience, 

all sentiments with apparent targets,

all movements needing an external cause, 

all responses to something, 

but maybe whatever was there has passed

long ago. Perhaps

there never was anything there to start with,

leaving you with only whatever theory

serves to explain a wrath

that requires explanation, 

as far as you are concerned. 

Maybe the rage is just another kind of silence, 

a kind that I can hear in a noisy world. 

Maybe it is the only unmechanical sound

I can hear among the door slams and car horns

and the endless elaborate embellishment 

of stupidity and selfishness 

we collectively celebrate and value. 

Maybe rage is the only peace available to me. 

Performance

Let us pretend to be human together.

Let us partition the infinite heart. 

Let us veil its radiance 

within the mask of our individual identities

and in this dimly lit room I will remember 

who I am - I am not you - 

and I will remember you,

and you will help me forget who I am

with whispered confessions 

of secret shared desires.

Let us pretend to be human together. 

Let our bodies be kites, our skin paper 

on which finger tip nibs write promises

so that our gentle hearts beat as one

within a single fragile lantern chest

like a bird trying to escape

the aviary attic of our dusty life, 

and we will take it between our palms

and release it into the night,

rising through the starlight rain,

restored to infinity forever and again. 

Let us pretend to be human together.

Let us catch time in its passing, 

interrupt that career criminal,

that devil let loose, and siphon

silver champagne flutes of sin

through thin pursed lips in celebration

while we hear him tell his tale,

offer his excuse, as ransom, perhaps, 

making him sing for his last supper.

Listen to stories of ancient lust, cruelty, 

and misfortune, in epics lucid and obscure, 

in border ballad and music hall medley. 

Let us pretend to be human together.

Let us kneel, happy to pray in temples

whose columns are the ribs of monsters

killed by something worse in a prehistory

we dare not imagine or refuse to recognize. 

Light the fuse that makes every pillar

a stick of dynamite, 

and retreat to lifeboat solitude, 

and I'll meet you there,

and we will pretend to be human together

at the end of all things. 

A child sees the stars for the first time.

Everything anyone says after that 

is just something adults say to children

to stop them looking at the stars.

Let us look at the stars together

and be human. Let us pretend. 

Annihilation

It's like a conservation law in physics, 

a symmetry, but applied to morality

with mathematical precision and inevitability.

"Never again" is the action, the aim, the objective.

The events that subsequently unfold

are the equal and opposite reaction, 

a set of scales, a zero sum. 

We place the blame. We load the guns,

and never becomes always, 

again and again and again. 

We turn time backwards 

with appeals to the immutable past.

We cultivate excuses in the atrocity garden.

We turn time backwards

and in accordance with the laws of physics

we create ethical antimatter. 

The rest is history.