Birthday

There was an old man 

who fed the birds birthday cake 

every day. He would go to the co-op, 

buy a cake, and take it to the park, 

and feed it to the birds. 

"I'm old now, and don't have long to live,

so why can't every day be my birthday? 

Why should I only celebrate once a year? 

It's a miracle I'm here at all."

No man's land

In the end 

what we had thought matters most, 

even to the exclusion of all other considerations,

turns out not to matter at all. 

What turns out to be important

is something we have completely overlooked 

the entire time, and so

I'll meet you in the no man's land 

between equivalence and dichotomy, 

between competing certainties, 

and we'll spread our picnic by some crater, 

paddle in waters we've muddied with fallacy, 

while artilleries of argument 

cough contradictions at each other over our heads, 

our only audience skeletons 

stumbling through wire barbed with ambiguity 

strewn over earth peppered with shrapnel-seeds of doubt, 

their last grimace of conviction melted from their bony faces,

until the only truth left for them to witness

is a wren perched in their empty eye-sockets for a while, 

and our irrelevant truce, while it lasts, 

before this permanent warfare intrudes upon our pleasantries, 

shall be all the world knows of peace.  

We'll talk about the ethics we discover 

only once we run out of excuses, not the morality 

we use to express ideas of compassion 

and understanding and responsibility

but that sense of obligation that remains 

even when we don't understand, have no clue, feel no pity, 

but from which we draw meaning nevertheless, 

because the alternative to credo is chaos, 

and so we stay loyal to the unknowable,

follow rival codes to conceal our common ignorance, 

blame each other for their ambiguities, 

and chase tattered banners across contested battlefields, 

rather than confess, humbly, that we cannot explain our cause

any more than a shadow can describe the Sun.

Here in no man's land we find what we need without seeking it.

We find it in each other. 

The courage to confess comes as a surprise. 

We are most fortunate in our misfortune.

The dinner lady of Pantglas

"Wake up Nansi," the children whisper,

tugging her dead hair in the heavy dark,

five children saved beneath one dinner lady, 

become Egyptian sky goddess in a Welsh valley,

painting stars on the firmament of their future

in the starless depths of their present. 

Digging

Digging through dread, not digging in hope,

not anymore, you've been digging too long,

not knowing how long you have to dig,

you dig knowing already the only thing

that will bring your digging to an end, 

the only reward waiting for you under the mud,

will be to take into your arms at last

something that until now only existed

in an imagination darker than the deepest pit,

born, made real, beneath the fallen mountain,

two hours before half term was due to start. 

 

The salmon

I roared among men in all the places

we chose to shout at each other,

formed the circle when required 

and stood in the centre when it was my turn, 

but in all my days of boasting, my stout heart

was empty, just a woven willow basket

in which I hoped to see a salmon someday, 

a fish out of water, like me, the thought thrashing

in my blood for a while, beating it like cream

to a curd I could display in triumph 

to those whose esteem I truly craved, 

a salmon plucked from the stream

that flows through my youth, 

on whose banks the shieling of memory stands, 

now roofless and derelict with failure, 

and I return now to where the lies

with which I protect myself from shame

and disgrace wither and shrivel to tinder 

strewn over the marsh, and my heart breaks

again and again, and the towers of glass

where men fold and file their paper estimation of me

are oceans distant, and the fish still eludes my caress

as it has since before I was born and will

to the end of time, and time takes possession of me, 

and there is no escaping from it into dreams, 

but then the salmon turns and I catch its eye,

and time becomes my prisoner

as I stroke its chin and share my doom with it, 

let it take my doom from me as I hoist it

into the air, see it land on the wiry gauze of heather

and gasp, but there is no triumph, 

I have been saved from needing victory anymore, 

and eat without appetite, wear their crown

as briefly as expectation permits, concede what I must

before departing, and go at last, to live. 

Abandoned

I seclude myself from the world,

and clear my thoughts of worldly things.

I let myself become aware of the universe,

slowly, calmly, but when I reach out and touch it, 

all I feel is sadness. Infinite sadness. 

I try to find a music that shares this with others

because the universe is lonely. We abandon it. 

All it can do is exist, while our fictions are fatal 

to that which only has the capacity to be real.

It is an absence our myths step around, 

a shadow in the labyrinth of their dance, 

a silence implied in every word they speak,

and everything we say and do in emulation. 

It can never accept an invitation to be our friend. 

We must leave our friends to be with it,

and then only in that one single respect

in which we share its infinite sadness,

but I do not think you are ready to give up

everything you must abandon simply to exist.

The message

The intended recipient of the message

was not some extraterrestrial intelligence

residing on some distant planet orbiting another sun

towards which alien vegetation turned, its leaves

not green, but tuned to a different spectrum.

The probe slid through the interstellar void,

its plutonium heart not palpitating, but alive,

still, with a fading hiss of radioactive decay

that raised its core temperature above

the cosmic background in which it bathed.

The message it carried was not meant 

for any creatures like those that built it. 

It was not incised onto a golden plaque

along with images showing its origin 

and representations of its maker, naked, 

hand held up in a gesture of goodwill. 

It was conveyed purely by implication. 

What it said was this: "this place is not lifeless.

I bring life with me. Wherever I am,

my presence alone is gospel of intelligence,"

and this it said to the infinite dark itself. 

Feral

I was not raised by wolves.

They were not needed. 

I was not abandoned. 

I had a home among men,

but still I wondered, sometimes, 

would I not have been better off

with wolves? I imagined that snout

discovering my different scent,

accepting it, and moving on,

my divergence obvious, unremarkable,

not a cause for suspicion, 

not perceived as a threat,

not something to reject.

So, even though I was not feral,

I was something less and more. 

Part of me was raised by men, 

and part of me was never raised at all. 

October 2021

Everything is progress towards the light

and so must begin in darkness. 

The sun sets for the last time in October.

The new year germinates in the belly of Winter,

secret and unseen. We converse with ghosts,

wear masks, burn the bough that bore the fruit

we spice with tales told around the fire,

and observe the solstice' star beam puppetry,

as the Northern Lights draw a luminous curtain 

across Polaris. The rumour of Spring 

does not yet intrude upon our conversation,

but though our revels echo in the dark

we will be rescued by the recoil of the seasons,

and forget the hollowness of time, 

the cavern whose mouth exhales another Summer

onto the pastures of our happy amnesia.