Calvary

In this tenuous space we occupy,

this place suspended somewhere

between nothing and everything,

between nowhere and everywhere, 

pacing back and forth in this interval 

marked by clocks counting seconds

that delay the end of time,

sieve the simultaneous, 

split the instantaneous,

the present is our single shared self.

Echoes in this deferred eternity

create the illusion of many mansions. 

We distract ourselves with reports

of the ecstasy of others and ancient terrors.

We allow ourselves to exist 

diffracted over many imagined selves,

each gesture a pattern of possibilities.

Speech permits us to speak of only one,

so we become little more than 

a card trick we play on ourselves, 

a guess, a bias confirmed by a revelation,

a sleight of hand that fools us 

into believing we exist here and now

when that is impossible. 

Only nothing and everything are real, 

only nowhere and everywhere present,

now and forever, and anything else

is a detour and a daydream 

of that distracted god

we nail to a cross, pin to a time and place,

because we want his undivided attention.

Raise Calvary in your own heart

and die, to release the god within. 

Jellyfish

They are immortal, so I'm told. 

The lie that we are civilised, settled, 

that our wandering is at an end,

must be at its most tenuous now, 

during the whisky hour, the vigil

just before dawn at high latitudes

in the summer, in this luminous night,

where houses are paper lanterns 

floating over a landscape stirred

by the call of cuckoo and corncrake

and caravans of the mind peregrinate

like deep sea jellyfish, bioluminescent,

alert to a love that saturates the world. 

Suicide should leave people asking 

if it was despair or a surfeit of beauty

that reduced life to a mere detail, 

breathing a chore 

and a distraction from the immortality 

in which we are immersed, 

the beauty in which we drown. 

Our ancestors raised stones

to mark places they returned to,

places where they gathered.

They litter this land and provoke us.

We must find in these monuments

not paperweights for that dull prehistory

we commit our ancestors to in writing,

making the spines of books on our bookshelves

the bars of their cage, not paperweights, 

but prompts, invitations

to contemplate all the journeys that intersected there,

where they came from, went to, 

in the great loop of the world

before and after their brief conclave and conventicle

when they observed the heliacal rising of a star

at this same hour I raise this glass of liquid light

and hold my vigil among the barnacles of grief

and great imagined blimps of love 

drifting in the aquatic twilight of dawn,

the ocean trench of the solar system

in which the universe has seen fit 

to deposit signs of life. 

Spider baby

There was no anaesthetic. It was denied. 

It was not allowed through the checkpoint, 

so when the injured limbs were pruned off the child

it was in the brightest midday of pain, 

a sudden nuclear flash of pain

with no welders' glass to dim it.

Later, in the vitrified desert of the aftermath,

scabbed with sand once melted, now cooled and congealed,

it hatched from its glass egg: the spider baby,

discarded arms and legs fused together

like a relic of childhood, when you dismantled dolls,

destroyed them in a fit of trauma and dysfunction and ennui,

then furtively reassembled the pieces in the attic

using a stolen cigarette lighter to melt the stumps,

then forgot about them, 

left them for the next occupants of the house 

to discover and speculate about. 

They will be surprised to see it twitch alive

and scuttle free and try to escape.

Horrified, they'll probably club it to death

with the heel of a shoe, as a matter of instinct, of reflex. 

We do these things without thinking, after all. 

Epic

I can't read for tears.

Man's tawdry commerce of error, 

trading increments of sin,

bartering partial absolution

at the pain exchange, 

shorting forgiveness 

under artificial light, 

while dawn, on pause, paces 

below our moral horizon

while we bathe in the tar

of our inner midnight. O Muse, 

it is here I would invoke you,

tell you the pretext of my song,

dedicate to you my epic tale

of the deeds of gods and men, 

invite you to preside over our ecstasies,

underwrite my trance with your divinity,

as I describe the miracle of creation,

but you are a muse abused,

insulted with impunity, or ignored,

or assaulted on a casting couch 

by pimps of celluloid illusions,

and this is a tale curtailed,

an aborted epic,

because I can't read for tears. 

Conscience

The dog cavorts in the shifting red and yellow mosaic

of late autumn leaves on the ground

and pauses for a moment to look at us 

as if she's looking on behalf of everything, 

lending sight to a blind world in disarray around her. 

Is it only my guilt 

that makes me sense an accusation behind those eyes?

You say perhaps it's pity. 

The world is not blind, we are, 

encountering the world as an obstacle,

our sense of self emerging from unexpected impediments

as we stumble and stop and struggle to understand our pain

while observed by creatures at ease with their angelic nature.

Arms deal

If I arm my grandfather's victims

does the blood on their hands

exonerate me of their blood on mine? 

Do we now share a common purpose, 

and celebrate the sanctimonious sadism 

of a symmetrical slaughter?

Is my loss of humanity redeemed

- no, not redeemed, that's the wrong word - 

ratified, endorsed? Please bear with me

while I consult my genocide thesaurus -

is my loss of humanity legitimised 

if I help them squander theirs?

I uphold their right of self-defence

only to legitimise crimes today

that indemnify me against yesterday's guilt,

protecting me, and exculpating every criminal 

who would emulate this entitlement to carnage tomorrow.

We are using them. Their impunity is our impunity. 

More often history rhymes with horror than with hope, 

and why seek an answer beyond fathomless horror, 

putting our faith in some benign ontology, anyway, 

seeing purpose, aetiology, teleology, eschatology?

The primitive materialism we dream into being

to furnish and make commodious the grave

as a refuge from decay we imagine for our ancestors,

stimulates a curiosity about the world

that ultimately only death can satisfy,

leaving the world to be governed by competing nihilisms, 

howling their claims from the muzzle of every gun, 

declaring their sovereignty with the detonation of every bomb, 

their logic propelling us towards apocalypse,

so can I wash my hands of blood my grandfather spilled 

with blood spilled by the grandchildren of his victims

if I provide them with the blade,

making the latest massacre the last act 

of a war that ended long ago? 

This blood makes us cousins of a kind, does it not?

Cousins in carnage, tracing our lineage 

to our grandparent's dark, anonymous embrace? 

We both extol a twisted righteousness.

Do we not seal our covenant by splitting flesh

as Abraham did by the terebinths in Hebron?

The path to the Promised Land is a gutter. 

The road to the Promised Land is buried under rubble. 

God must surely have known

we would never uphold our part of His covenant,

never meet the terms of the bargain He set

as conditions for receiving His gifts, 

swapping milk and honey for white phosphorus, 

treating His covenant like just another arms deal. 

The sky where God invited Abraham to count the stars

is now populated with flares and rockets and drones. 

These days our angel of death is a parody.

It does not check door frames for lamb's blood. 

Instead it sends text messages to eavesdropped lines 

allowing you to gather a few possessions

before your apartment block is demolished,  

all to perpetuate that most basic of lies, 

that we are strong, that we are powerful,

when we are powerless. We are humiliated. 

What is the deal we are really trying to make?

We are as weak and helpless as infants 

or old men, brandishing fists at the sky,

and when the sky proves indifferent

we practice that violence on each other instead

rather than admit we are weak and powerless.

We don't see people deserving pity, 

pity as fathomless as the horror we plumb 

with every atrocity we commit 

as if at war with the very idea of pity.  

We see vermin or victim, them or us,

and prefer to lie to ourselves and kill each other,

indulging extravagant blasphemies of bloodshed,

usurping creation itself with our arbitrary nihilism,

rather than to lay down our arms and stand humble

before the God of Moses, defenceless

before the God of Abraham.

(Nearly a third of Israel's arms imports used to prosecute its genocide of the Palestinians are from Germany)

Sunset

In your prime you were the bright midday Sun,

generous, shedding radiance, illuminating our days.

Now you are old and the Sun is setting in the West, 

and sometimes we think that we have lost you entirely, 

but it only seems that way. You are becoming the Moon,

your absence only apparent as your phase wanes

or clouds pass in front of you, obstructing our view.

In this new lunar existence you sometimes still shine,

only now it is with the reflected light of memory, 

reminiscing among the noctilucent clouds,

your occasional recollection of better days, flashbacks

to righteous causes, battles won and wars you waged,

when we relied on you for warmth and light

and you were strong, invincible, and right. 

Horse

"Where does the music go 

after we listen to it?"

the child asks. 

She is six years old, old enough 

to have learned from us the bad habit 

of thinking back to front, 

but after a moment of thought

she answers her own question:

"maybe the music is always there,

and it's us that come and go, 

like riders mounting a wild horse."

The descent from Elbrus

Prometheus wasn't chained to that rock

because he stole fire. He stole fire

because he was chained to that rock. 

The story is told backwards, don't you see,

to make an enigma of the obvious, which is this: 

there is no such thing as power, human or divine. 

Every apparent expression or exertion of power 

is to compensate for its absence. 

We feign authority, control, agency,

because we have none. It's all a pose.  

Every punchline, every announcement, 

every declaration, every statement, 

every convention we observe or flout

about what is important or unimportant, 

cycles of oppression and liberation,

history, violence we inflict on others 

to compel them to comply with our will,

are all a kind of petty larceny, 

us picking the pockets of the gods

for a box of matches, only to discover

the gods don't have the power to make fire. 

The matches won't light. We made that story up.

We stood there, looking foolish, 

so we made the story up to spare our blushes. 

There is a lost epic that contradicts our theogonies

in which we only steal each other's poverty.

We need to believe someone, somewhere, 

is powerful, because we are powerless,

because there is no such thing as power. 

Prometheus' theft was more profound. 

He exposed the impossibility of power.

That is why we fantasise his punishment. 

On Lethe wharf

What lost Elsinore, 

what forgotten Camelot,

is turned over by the plough?

We are worms in the marrow 

of their defeated champions

and crown liars in the dust 

to rule our misremembered realm. 

The fortress I built to protect myself

has become my prison

though I furnish it like a palace. 

I run away. I escape. I am pursued. 

I am lost in the camouflage I conceal myself in, 

become the forest, become Brocéliande,

and everything important falls away

like leaves the trees discard in autumn.

Let me lose this wasted self. 

Let the wind scatter my confetti soul.

Let each guiding star achieve its zenith

only to drain itself into the deepest well

until all of its light is extinguished

and no-one can point out where it once rose.

Let the well provide a draught of anonymous light

to amazed, untutored cottars, who drive the plough,

so fields they sow with broken castles

yield crops of marvellous astronomy

and the Earth becomes the sky and passes away.  

To be nothing is enough 

when one cannot be whole.

Every star is an aperture 

through which some soul falls,

its world receding as it descends 

until it is just a distant point of light

and the soul forgets its limits

and becomes a part of everything

unless it succumbs to vertigo,

the tug of ego, 

and is earthbound once more.

Then time and her retinue of lies

dismantle and divide us into parts,

fragments we defend with many deaths,

and we pretend they make a pretty pattern

when recorded in our chronicles,

discerning purpose where there is none,

for time exists before memory, 

innocent of recollection,

and saturates this amnesiac land

where myths tease us with mysterious toponyms.

Stone monuments protrude and pose their riddles,

stubborn dentistry of the ancients, 

prehistory biting into the present,

the past embedded in our experience, 

subject to our speculations and etiologies

which will, in time, be forgotten,

to be repeated as if original

by other scholars unaware of precedent

and that there is nothing new

given sufficient passage of time. 

Memory absolves our crimes 

and gilds our misery

through the spurious agency 

the act of remembering confers, 

memory as penance,

but to be truly forgiven we must forget.

New empires rise 

cradled in the wreckage of the old.

New faiths formalise ancient heresies.

We cite creature comfort to extenuate our crimes,

crucify the sky with rocket propelled nails

and tease evil from the innocent atom,

while traumatised, brutalised, blinkered people 

stumble through and scrape the raped world's ruin

too numb to scrutinise or criticise the billionaires

or the sanctimonious sadism of their project, 

as they hoard the withered world's dwindling wealth 

while plying us with vacuous platitudes about growth,

their mausoleums the paperweights of history

from Castel San Angelo to Les Invalides, 

and our unleavened ashes will feed 

a nameless, blind, prowling nocturnal truth

that would incinerate our tongues 

had we the wit to speak it, 

and our humanity is a pretence

we are deprived of by knowledge

of what we truly are, so we must forget. 

I withdraw to a remote forest hermitage. 

The north wind exposes leaks 

in a roof I thought weather tight,

driving rain into secret declivities

to slip past all seals laid 

against the world's intrusion

and infiltrate my refuge. 

Will the roofless ruin

this edifice will become

after a few generations of neglect

find itself swept away

in a slow torrent of time

that proceeds drip by drip? 

Perhaps all that can remain

is the prayer I make tonight.

Polaris holds court 

at the centre of the star-swirl, 

the celestial vortex through which we fall,

bending the path of every wanderer

around himself. To him I make petition. 

Let me not forget what I learned when I forgot.

Let me carry this sacred absence, this unknowing

that contains time unviolated by description,

make of my heart a vessel of emptiness

that will shatter should it contain anything

and prevent it from being filled

with today's quotidian romp and riot and rot and gossip

for love contingent is not love at all. 

Summon zodiacs to guard my insignificance, 

and preserve the glory I experience

when I encounter the nothingness I am,

because to be nothing 

is the only wholeness I can know 

under the orbit to which my star is bound.

The drought

When I was a child the stakes were high. 

People were not people, these first humans, 

they were mountain ranges that divided the world. 

They were stars and sunsets, tides and seasons, 

life and death, ancestors and oblivion,

inclusion and exile, famine and abundance. 

I came to rely on the dependability of drought. 

I followed the Polaris of my abandonment

into the desert where horizons melt in Moonlight. 

Aloof, I observed remote, cosmic forces struggle

from my ledge on the precipice high above the plain

with no companion. It was only once I was older

that I realised it was not the gods who play games, 

moving people like pieces ruled by cruelty and chance. 

It was me all along, unable to see them as human

until I had recognised that quality in myself. 

The seed's secret is the flower it becomes,

and the seed is always the last to find that out. 

My heart breaks for the person I was

now that I must give up the sacred solitude

where I protected the child I was from the world,

now that the rains have come and I must grow.

The wound

My soul is a quiver full of arrows, 

all the different lives I've lived,

my heart the target I aim to hit

and more often miss, often enough

to wonder if it is a mirage,

to wonder what part of me really exists

beyond the motions I go through, 

draw, aim, release, and follow.

Before I healed from the wound I received

I could not forgive the one who wounded me. 

After I healed there was nothing to forgive

as if the injury happened to someone else.

I was two different people, connected

only by a faint and unreliable recollection.

I fletch these lives and fire them.

I try to persuade myself they are the same

because they hit the same target, but I miss. 

Perhaps the wound did not afflict one life. 

Perhaps it split life into many splinters. 

Perhaps the damage can not be known

while I am limited to living just one of them

at a time, the latest nocked on the bowstring.  

I will continue with this hopeful archery

and gather them all once my quiver is empty

and they are just a bundle of sticks, 

not arrows anymore. 

The martyr

Some lives are lived backwards.

Consider a martyred saint.

What if the murdered innocence 

by which their sacrifice redeems us 

is siphoned from the child they become

in the next life, their death 

a moment of de-incarnation, 

a reverse re-incarnation 

that pulls the child from birth

in the future life, as we see it, 

into the one they have just completed 

that must now be lived in retrograde, 

its end a beginning, another birth, a vertigo

through which they fall again, and again

until they become at last the first human,

finding their way back to Eden,

bestowing on it the accumulated innocence

of all subsequent ages, only to fall from grace,

and embark upon a concatenation of lives,

incarnations lived forwards once again,

and again once more backwards, in retreat, 

oscillating between Eden and Armageddon,

until we realise all lives

are just different paths of a single soul

in its peregrinations through time,

recycled through every depth of despair 

and every moment of ecstasy and bliss, 

every extreme of ignorance and enlightenment,

all knowledge, in the final analysis

serving only a moral purpose, every idea 

ultimately meeting only emotional needs,

each discovery a spiritual revelation. 

The human soul is a multiverse,

a lung containing every breath, 

a garden tended by many hands, a chart 

on which we map a route through a strange land:

the tangled lives of all who lived and ever shall. 

As we riccochet down the centuries

we find life is, as Khayyam said, 

a chequerboard of nights and days. 

A chair is painted black, 

then white, then black again, 

and in between we sit on it, 

thinking we become someone else,

because the world is seen 

through different eyes, but all eyes 

that have ever opened and shut 

are arranged in a sequence, 

their lenses lined up 

like Galileo adjusting a tube

and turning it to heaven, 

to form a telescope used by God 

sitting at the end of time 

looking back at the moment of creation.

Or perhaps the martyr 

finds their way back, 

not to Eden, 

but the first grave, 

a ditch they stand next to, 

the first human to experience grief 

in all its cold kaleidoscopic strangeness,

and God is just the sense they make of it,

and all words since are echoes of that howl

acquiring meaning in the soul's recoil

from the horror it has just witnessed,

describing the world as waste and decay,

all history just the sadness of one day. 

 

Armageddon

It is the end of meaning.

We can't kid ourselves on anymore. 

Our ideas have always met emotional needs

but we pretended to be rational,

objective, dispassionate.

We pretended not to pretend. 

This is difficult now.

Our words are dust devils

as the megadeath calculus

on the bleached rib cage abacus

accumulates, a skeletal tally 

kept by bony fingered history,

its bad breath sour 

with radioactive decay.

We are determined to be stupid,

summoning armies of straw men 

to defend our feel good truth.

There is nothing you can say

that will persuade us, and anyway, 

the time for discussion is over. 

Radio

I'm not a camera. 

You've heard it said, haven't you?

"I am a camera". Well, 

I am not a camera. I am a radio, 

an old fashioned radio, 

with stations marked on the dial, 

and in between song and sermon, static,

dead stars and electric discharge

of more mundane and domestic origin:

faulty washing machines going supernova

while distant pulsars on their own spin cycle

fill the frequencies I scan through

and testify to the emptiness of space. 

A camera captures and image. 

If it was blank, how would we know

if an exposure had happened at all, 

and we were looking at a picture of nothing?

A radio is empty already, silence

interrupted by accidental voices

from invisible cities written on the antique dial, 

civilisations that may as well be light years away

whose vagrant transmissions

may already have been reduced

to Geiger counter crackle by now

for all I know or care. 

Perhaps all technology 

is an antenna for a future apocalypse

when we will finally open our chests

and release the void we caged inside, 

broadcasting horrors 

to consume our dreams

and peel back the night

and reveal a darkness

we cannot comprehend

so that our final thoughts

are ones of confusion,

and we turn the dial 

and tune through hiss

and buzz and fluff

trying to find something

that makes sense,

something we recognise

as human, and only find

the depths of space

and broken appliances

talking back to us

of failure and indifference. 

Perfect life

It's over. We all lost. 

We lost different things, perhaps, 

but we all lost something. 

If we gather it all, assemble it, 

stitch and sew scraps and patches, 

glue and weld the fragments together,

can we make a single perfect life

none of us could live as individuals

but all of us can feel good about?

The world leaves us all with needs, 

some in common, some in conflict, 

but all met and reconciled in this life

that we can imagine for each other,

precisely because we don't have to live it. 

Higher learning

The lesson we learn is up to us. 

Nothing is more confusing than cruelty or neglect.

We may conclude the pain instructs us we are bad, 

or those who hurt us are bad, or both, 

and there's no point trying to be kind, 

that no-one benefits from our doubt, 

and only strength redeems our weakness,

and only as a tribe can we be strong, 

or we can dissolve in doubt our certainty, 

these inflexible axioms we cling to, 

these articles of unyielding faith

that fossilise into dogma

to be dug up as an excuse

to repeat patterns of violence

and create more victims. 

Take the hard path of compassion,

and forgive yourself for being weak. 

Step to one side. Parallax past the cruelty.

Look beyond the neglect. 

See those who hurt you in the world, 

victims of it themselves, failures themselves.

Stop letting them define the world. 

It's time to look for what you could not see before, 

and when you're ready, drop those assumptions

you have discovered you no longer need. 

Use the momentum of the past

against itself. Set yourself free. 

The lesson we learn is up to us. 

Lost souls

We are all lost souls. 

Either the world or ourselves 

will be deprived of salvation, 

and we can only know which 

after a tragedy of discovery 

once it is too late to choose.

Either way we are alone.  

The interior void 

you immerse yourself in 

is unique to you. 

No description of it

can communicate to others 

the horrors and ecstasies 

it contains. 

We either explore terra incognita

or we are terra incognita. 

Life is an archaeology of loss, 

a process of unearthing 

some pale prehistoric gem 

that contains a decision 

you forgot you made, long ago, 

a brief moment of lucidity 

buried under the landslide

of elapsed time, a moment

that explains everything since. 

We find it, and deposit it 

in the museum of mistakes,

file it in the archive of error, 

perhaps linger for a short time

in the gift shop of excuses,

then make our way to the exit. 

Trigger warning

Twelve billion bullets

were manufactured

last year.  

Moonrise

Her luminous disc slides up

across the infinitely remote surface

that demarcates the limit of my imagination,

the farthest distance thought can cast itself,

shining its flashlight into the fathomless night. 

Clouds intervene. 

Their baroque interruption

obliquely hints at the depth 

in which my words are lost. 

Only the brightest stars are sprinkled, 

sparse upon the midsummer midnight, 

bright enough to compete 

with the Sun's lingering, diffuse radiance, 

and presumptuous enough to trespass

upon the Moon's majestic fullness. 

The Atlantic surges and sags on shingle, 

the shambles of the centuries waltzing

in the orderly chaos of the Outer Hebrides, 

the unguided, aimless procession of pure time,

time before hope and ecstasy of youth 

wither into bitterness with age,

irritated to learn that death comes too late

to save us from disillusionment. 

Nearby a hidden corncrake complains

and a cuckoo laments impending departure, 

while farther off some seagulls, 

giddy after an orgasm of ululation,

gather and launch themselves 

towards a rumour of debris and carrion. 

My own voice is redundant. 

My contribution is silence. 

I become nothing

standing naked in the ruin of speech,

my power of description undone. 

A sentry megalith on the horizon

guards unknowable infinities beyond. 

Once only nouns, names for things, objects 

- not actions or qualities - could be spoken, 

and then only at the right time and in the right place,

naming as invocation, performance, spell, curse,  

with ritual purpose and sense of occasion, 

and all sophistication since has been retreat

from the meaning words had then, in the beginning,

but all language disrobes for me here and now, 

beneath the Moon's all-seeing indifference

where I am at ease with my own insignificance. 

Mnemocide.

They murder more than the body, 

more than the people. They murder memory. 

It is a deletion worse than death.

It is as if you never existed,

not even as absence, pause, punctuation,

a presence implicit in ellipsis ...

No-one struggles to control themselves

during a difficult eulogy. 

There are no witnesses to the crime,

no police record, no cold case to re-open, 

and the criminal's children and grand-children

remain oblivious to distant relatives who don't exist,

and the remote degrees of cousinage we all share

with unborn generations whose parents are dead children.

We write our names in the sand. This is vanity enough, 

and sadness enough. It serves no purpose to usurp the tide. 

"The Gaza Health Ministry now reports separately the number of unidentified bodies among the total death toll. As of May 10, 2024, 30% of the 35,091 deaths were unidentified"

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext  

"The tragedy of Babyn Yar also lies in the fact that its many victims remain nameless"

https://babynyar.org/en/names/about

"[In] the historic mission [...] to restore the personal identity [...] of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis [...,] The Hall of Names currently houses about 2.7 million original Pages of Testimony"

https://www.yadvashem.org/archive/hall-of-names.html

Attack

My words are remote, 

like kestrels loitering over a meadow, 

or soaring higher, with the eagles,

hitching a lift on thermal up-drafts. 

They are not a confession.

Their content is not relatable.

They do not convey emotion. 

They survey and reconnoitre, 

search for carrion or prey.  

No, when the time comes,

they will stoop like a falcon,

and the emotion will be yours.

The funeral of innocence

Every word is a coffin.

We usher silence into soil

with a eulogising tongue, 

all memory commemorative 

in ghostly recollection

of pre-verbal innocence.

Obelisks taper skywards, 

the earth's stone roots 

combing the cemetery air

to sustain dead branches

bursting in the dark, unseen,

in a world inverted by grief. 

Savage

"Behave yourself. You should gratefully yield 

to the civilising influence of your superiors. 

You are a field to be enclosed and cultivated, 

a garden to be brought into bloom, a bower, 

a boudoir, a vessel to fill, not a wilderness."

"No, I am a wilderness. I will tolerate you 

to the extent you observe the same terms as me

as we both pass through a world that is not ours, 

and I will yield nothing further. I am a savage."

The idiot club

People kept forming clubs

and we wanted to discourage this.

People should be atoms, drones, 

mindless, not social and active, 

should obey, not think and participate,

so we started an idiot club,

with rules only an idiot would follow,

to see if enthusiasm for joining clubs

would blind them to what membership requires. 

The people joined in their droves. 

One rule was to persecute non-members, 

and those who didn't follow all the rules.

Another was to constantly change the rules,

and to ensure they contradicted each other.

The rules were deliberately insane,   

and the more insane the rules, 

the more keenly they were enforced, 

because their very insanity meant 

the only way to prove you were a member 

was by enforcing them.

Before long everything was in ruins. 

Everything any club had achieved

had been destroyed. With nothing left to do

and all appetite for clubs finally expunged, 

the people meekly submitted to our control.

Sad song

I've always liked sad songs.

Have I been mourning so long?

I don't remember feeling any other way. 

Perhaps I miss the boy that left,

the boy I've pretended to be ever since,

lost between the faces of a double life,

seeking in the maze a self I've been denied, 

the mirrors lining the hall with lies I tell 

to survive this carnival. Is that why?

Is that why I've always liked sad songs?

Exile

There is no city

that can exile me. 

I am a citizen of the wilderness. 

I may walk among you, 

but I am not one of you. 

I have always been an outcast. 

That was your decision, not mine, 

long ago. You don't recall making it. 

There's much you don't understand. 

The worst punishment you can imagine 

for me now is no worse

than the place I just came from. 

Your laws are hollow threats, 

your assembly of elders as subtle

as a prowling lynch mob. 

I exile you. I condemn you: to ignorance

of your own mediocrity, to know only

your own opinion of yourselves. 

Build a wall around your exile

and insist that it encloses a city.

It will always be a garden of fools. 

I surrender myself to a higher court, 

and accept its unpredictable verdict 

in an indifferent wasteland. 

I would rather be nothing there

than less than nothing 

here with you. 

Pearl

We dance compulsively, with balletic precision. 

We pirouette upon the thin ice, unaware 

of the bottomless reservoirs of evil beneath.

When, from time to time, we pass a face, 

gaunt, glazed over eyes gazing up from under, 

expression frozen, a mask of horror and despair

preserving a last moment of realisation, 

we dance over it and on to our next arabesque.

Sometimes we pause, perhaps, to reflect, 

briefly, just as long as decency dictates,  

and ponder our superficial, irrelevant thoughts,

wisdom some might call it, but we must continue, 

movement is essential. We mustn't rest our weight 

too long in one place. The ice might break. We dance,

until we don't, until we fall in, into the inky sin, 

and swim in ice water, acid vice, breathe in the brine,

fill up our burning brimstone lungs, until our skin

is just a thin membrane between the dark within

and a fluid amniotic evil that surrounds us, 

a midnight sea, biological without being moral, 

a confluence of every lustful discharge in the shadows,

where we dive for the black pearl of our conception.

How many masks pressed up against the ice

does it take to warn the other dancers not to stop.

Don't risk this knowledge, lineage as carnage, 

the dark cousinage that condemns us, 

implicated by ancestors we share 

with all the murderers and rapists, 

touched by all the evil in the world

clotting in our veins when we are dead. 

Pray

The children were made of ash.

Their voices had fallen silent, evaporated, 

and all trace of them as individuals

had been swept away in oblivion's embrace,

to become the indistinguishable dust

in which they shared their uncommon end.  

I pray those final moments of pain and fear, 

and worse, knowing they had been abandoned, 

dying alone, surrounded by fire, not love,

I pray, I pray that in those final moments

they were visited by something else

from somewhere else, something kind, 

that took them by the hand

away from that terrible place, 

leaving behind all the pain and fear, 

and all the memories of pain and fear, 

and took them somewhere else, filled 

with all the peace and love and joy

their little hearts could bear. 

We must pray. We must pray. 

We must pray to stop the screaming. 

(Written after the Rafah massacre on 26th May 2024)

Not worth it

People are so stupid. 

They think all you need to do

is open up, be vulnerable, 

confess your fears and pain, 

find a shoulder to cry on, 

let it all out, let someone in,

like someone would care,

would think for a moment

you're worth a second 

of their precious time.

What they're really saying

is all you need to do

is expose yourself to ridicule, 

expose the fundamental worthlessness,

you've spent your life concealing,

reveal the secret you have worked hard

your entire life to keep hidden,

the unalterable fact everyone taught you

before anything else you can remember, 

these same people who now expect you

to spill your guts for their amusement

once more. Why would anyone do that? 

Why would anyone worthless

think it was worth it? 

Ghost story

"There's a rational explanation for everything".

The man reassured his family. There was no ghost,

just the sound of the wind, or the faulty plumbing, 

or timber joints creaking as the house shifted its weight

to accommodate a sudden change in the weather,

joists expanding or contracting with the heat or cold.

The ghost felt sad and lonely. 

These were all perfectly adequate explanations,

except for one detail: she did exist, though now deprived

of every opportunity to manifest that existence to others

by rational alternatives that explained 

to the complete satisfaction of those she haunted

every phenomenon she was capable of evoking 

with her weak powers. 

It made sense to the sad, lonely ghost, though. 

Things had been that way while she was alive.

No-one was aware of how she truly felt. 

Feelings were attributed to her. 

People jumped to conclusions, made assumptions 

that suited their own narratives and agendas,

and she could never make herself heard

over the stories people told on her behalf.

Dog

I was a wounded animal, 

not human: a dog perhaps, 

lost, limping, weak, helpless, 

when she found me, bound my wounds,

and smiled, and held me, and cared

without expecting anything in return.

I was powerless to provide anything.

She told me I was allowed to be weak.

No-one was going to laugh at me

and mock me, and reject me.

I didn't have to pretend to be strong.

I wasn't pathetic and ridiculous. 

I was allowed to be weak. 

I still think of her sometimes, 

this woman I liked to imagine 

when I was five, and a dog. 

Footprints

One hundred millennia ago;

a layer of volcanic ash

before the rain came 

and it stiffened like cement.

Two thousand years ago; 

carved into stone on a hilltop

to mark where the king must stand

to receive the people's acclaim.

 

Fifty years ago and forever;

on the surface of the Moon.

The one we love has gone.

We live on in the silence 

of the beautiful hell

of what we did not say,

our steps together now fossils

for strangers to interpret.

The long haul

Welcome to the long haul, 

the journey without hope.

Once you marched with heroes. 

Now you walk with ghosts. 

Welcome to the long haul,

the pursuit of high ideals,

the march toward a better world

through the wreckage of the real.

Welcome to the long haul, 

and try to make some friends.

We're all on the same journey,

and the journey never ends. 

The lover

War runs his fingers through your flesh

as though it was his lover's hair, 

and for pillow talk, challenges you

to say the worst thing you can think of, 

and when you bite your lip and confess it, 

he leans in and whispers something worse. 

He finds you in the forest of your limbs, 

the delirium of the dismantled self, 

lights a fire that turns your bones to ash,

uncoils generations ravelled in your blood,

and launches his rudiment into the remains

as if he is hastily burying something 

he doesn't want found, your boudoir 

a mass grave, your genitals a crime scene, 

yet you invited him into your embrace.

You saw a part of you that had returned

you didn't remember sending into exile. 

He remembers everything, and all his lovers

are a single lover in whom he seeks oblivion.  

The reprieve

This cloudy flesh, 

this thick drift, 

blood fog condensed 

as dew on brittle nerve 

on frosty web sense net, 

frozen tense trap, triggered,

snapped to pad out stiff 

stumbling trees

erupting necromantic 

skeleton love wandering

in this illusion of flesh

from soil sown, strewn, 

with dragon teeth to bite, 

puncture, sink and suck life,

to plant seeds of death

that sprout steel sterile

scaffold structures,

inflate doomed zepellin egos,

tight wound coil tethered

to ancient hatred. 

I beg for many

when I beg for me, 

else I would not beg. 

I beg for many. Please, 

spare us from the machine. 

I beg for many. Please, 

spare us from the machine.

Dead air

We think it is silent, but we realise

we cross a threshold without knowing it,

into a quieter place, and from there we pass

even further, into yet another airless country

where even the vacuum is depleted.

We are untroubled by checkpoints,

our progress as unimpeded as a cortege,

borders only existing in the imagination

as we discover new extremities of silence.

As we try to find words to describe 

each new horror this war reveals,

we simply identify new reserves of silence,

as if it was a crude resource we need,

which we were exploring for all along, 

to keep lights shining somewhere,

in a distant bar perhaps,

filled with the chatter of the certain,

where the ultimate silence is heard.

Dawn

Truant nature, innocent of all artifice,

more beautiful for not knowing what we mean

when we call her beautiful, ambushes me

with the honest deceit of breaking day,

although the truth is we bring the lie, 

our power to describe limited to falsehoods

cultivated in class to practice on the world,

so, standing in the sudden untutored morning,

I pick a flower for my lover's hair

while high in the blue brightening sky

a contrail cuts the throat of dawn. 

Catacomb

Can you feel the seismology of clouds,

the earthquakes in the air? Not thunder, 

but the shifting tectonics of the centuries,

the avalanche of bone that has come to rest

burying us in catacombs where anonymity is thick,

subterranean, like oil waiting to be discovered,

the accumulated silence of a million graves.

Time sits like a beggar at the entrance, 

the clock face his collection plate. Inside, 

the seismology of silence: femurs stacked

where the orphaned present shuffles past 

pilfering seconds from the altar

that must eventually be surrendered to death 

who will fire them into the earth 

in a single volley someday. 

When we confront the final reality,

when our investigations reach their conclusion

and we are faced with undeniable truth,

we learn nothing exists and everything is a mirage,

a tapestry of guesswork we weave,

possibilities to which we assign likelihoods

to pretend to measure the increments of our ignorance, 

because they conceal absolute impossibility, 

absence, a void bereft of any attributes

excavated beneath the solid ground,

where we return to our ground state, 

and breathe cold catacomb air once more. 

Confession

From our shadows we infer 

the existence of ourselves,

as if we were sentient sundials, 

as if these observations reveal anything 

other than the movement of the sun, 

and if this deception were to be believed

it would leave everything in darkness eventually, 

but we are a path taken by someone else

who walks in our footsteps for while,

at least, what we consider to be our footsteps:

retrace them far enough, back towards the light, 

and you will discover they are not your own.

All lives belong to a single journey

apprehended by our limited understanding

only as individual trajectories, perhaps, bifurcating, 

splitting as it collides and subdivides,

constrained to what we can perceive as real,

leaving us in an endless search for meaning

in an apparently indifferent universe

which we enlist an invented shadow self to pursue

through elaborate calligraphies of inky speculation,

but all these stories cascade from a common source

beyond time and death, to which the darkness yields,

for which no explanation is required. 

We live in an age of lesser demons

We live in an age of lesser demons. 

We are confederates of those fallen angels

who first offered us plutonium fruit

in the irradiated Eden of our carrion dreams

where the border between paradise and perdition runs

and we lose ourselves in geometries of doubt.

Bureaucrats of heaven compute increments of sin

while the absolute magnitude of our error

remains a mystery. Some say it will be revealed

in a final reckoning, and lure us with promises

broken and mended, fractured and reforged

by some blacksmith metallurgy of divine law,

a muscular law that hews commandments in stone.

In the meantime we gain knowledge through injury.

The scars and anatomy of these hard lessons

grow infected and contaminate our science. 

We build glass towers to act as chimneys

from which our stale ideas spread like plumes

and settle on the world like dust, like fallout.

We forget the power of speech, 

abandoning words for guttural gestures

indicating tribe and ownership,

and imagine indolence is industry 

and ignorance erudition, 

the announcement of any appetite is language

and the calculus of hunger civilisation.

We digest the ash of tongues we cut out

and threw upon the fire to celebrate 

our loud silence, our exquisite barbarism,

and worship a bloodthirsty god. 

The petty evils of stupidity and selfishness 

ensure a present free from curiosity

and the threat of alternative futures,

and so we live in an age of lesser demons, 

confederates of those fallen angels

who first offered us plutonium fruit

in the irradiated Eden of our carrion dreams

where the border between paradise and perdition runs. 

Parade

In the end time shows all strength is weakness.

We recognise empty pomp only once it is punctured. 

Pageant does not impress, nor placards persuade.

Cancel the cavalcade. 

Our heroes' cardboard armour is useless and ridiculous. 

We can't pretend it protects against the monsters 

they claim to slay on our behalf: harness perished with age, 

fastenings disintegrating, plate corroded, panoply ridiculous;

their services are self-parodies on parade.

Cancel the cavalcade.

Our demands exceed their waning powers. 

Proclamations and announcements are hollow boasts.  

The monsters have shrunk. They are harmless, 

vulnerable themselves, persecuted victims

of our strident self-deception and charade.

Cancel the cavalcade. 

Every threat is revealed to have been an excuse,

a pretext for a posture that defies the helplessness 

to which we all succumb as our youths fade.

Cancel the cavalcade. 

 

Spectrum

Imagine discovering your religious sensibility, your spiritual awareness, is based on post-traumatic dissociation, which you mistook for a mystical experience. Imagine discovering what you thought was creative flow is autistic focus, that the ecstasies you mistook for aesthetics were really how you escaped from an unbearable situation which erased your existence. Imagine discovering your ethics are based on an unrealistic ideal of humanity you found could alleviate the excruciating loneliness of the isolation to which real people seemed to have abandoned you. 

Spectrum

What I thought was flow is focus. 

What I thought was trance is trauma.

What I thought was bliss is dissociation. 

What I thought was ecstasy is escape. 

I thought I was nothing.

I took comfort in being nothing,

took refuge in it, revelled in it,

flowed through it, resigned to it.

Was I wrong? Do I really exist?

What I thought was flow is focus. 

What I thought was trance is trauma.

What I thought was divinity is dissociation. 

What I thought was aesthetics is escape. 

Love was a mystery.

Why would someone love me?

What purpose does it serve?

What's in it for them? 

How do I play this game?

It certainly can't be as simple

as them actually loving me,

because I don't exist

and therefore all emotion

is theoretical. Or perhaps

the emotion is too intense 

to experience and survive,

and can only be approached 

in theory, the empathy so profound

as to be identification and oblivion.

What I thought was flow is focus. 

What I thought was trance is trauma.

What I thought was bliss is dissociation. 

What I thought was ecstasy is escape. 

Maybe I'm less than nothing.

I thought I could trust no-one,

that they were all out to get me.

I looked for ways to disappear, 

into music, into astronomy, 

into art, into poetry, 

trying to paint a picture 

that was all background,

where I could be represented 

by the opposite of a portrait,

not up front in the foreground

but lost in a landscape, absent,

unnoticed by the casual observer,

but the pulse, the flow, 

the ride, the glow

was always more 

than I could know.

What I thought was flow is focus. 

What I thought was trance is trauma.

What I thought was divinity is dissociation. 

What I thought was aesthetics is escape. 

Was trauma the gateway to God,

not opened but shattered, kicked in,

or was God just a way 

of dealing with the trauma, 

of picking up the pieces

and making sense of them?

What I thought was flow is focus. 

What I thought was trance is trauma.

What I thought was bliss is dissociation. 

What I thought was ecstasy is escape. 

Cult

To have a cult of personality 

first I'd need to cultivate a personality. 

I am flat, blank, in two dimensions. 

In three you'd describe me as empty.

In more I am a hypersphere of absence

across all spaces you'd care to map.

I am a balloon that does not burst.

In fact, you must take care

not to deflate the world

should you puncture me,

as it is the only source 

of anything you attribute to me.

I am entirely content free. 

So you see, it's you I worship. 

It may seem I seek your devotion,

but that says more about you than me, 

by definition. There's nothing to tell. 

There's nothing else to say. 

I'm blank. Empty. That's my secret. 

The choice

Summits we would never reach

were we not restricted to ascend

only one small step at a time 

rather in a single all or nothing bound; 

sonata cycles we can play by memory

only because we are not required

to play all notes at once; marriages 

built on increments of forgiveness

for what is in its totality unforgivable;

cures that would kill us

if administered in a single dose:

we live by limitation. Is it any surprise

that God appears with so many faces?

A wise man once said there are many paths

up the same mountain. My nana told me

that all gods are the same god

in defiance of the doctrine of her sect

and the faithful with whom she shared communion. 

Find holiness wherever you can,

which is to say, everywhere. The difference

between the meaningless and the miraculous

is a choice you make. Take that step. 

Pollini

You should play music
as though your life depends upon it,
because it does. I saw him on the TV.
It looked like he wore white gloves
because of the studio lights
and the cameras. The applause
reminded him there was an audience
once the performance was complete.
We had eavesdropped on Ludwig
and Maurizio, we realised.
It was an interrogation, and the few feet
between the front row and the piano stool
was enough to prevent us from knowing
who interrogated who. Our lives
require further inspection.  

(In memory of the pianist Maurizio Pollini (5 January 1942 – 23 March 2024), renowned interpreted of Beethoven's piano sonatas)

Zeit

Dew drop stars strung along lines 

drawn in the night sky by ancients

connecting them to illustrate 

the toil of those gods and heroes

vomited from their imagination

ring out like cat collar bells

to warn a celestial mouse or moth

and postpone its demise. 

The dark puppetry of my struggle

in time's tangled meridian web 

sends a distressed morse signal

along silk spun over the abyss.

It is observed by remote arachnid eyes

waiting for exhaustion and surrender

and my final acquiescence to annihilation.

Ewigkeit im Augenblick

There is no death. 

There is only pure, infinite,

undifferentiated being. 

Death makes no sense

from this perspective.

The contents of experience

are artefacts of limitation

that is itself an illusion. 

Surrender to your inner void:

the safe, lonely refuge

that comes to claim you, the place

which you withdrew to as a child

when the world could not be endured,

the secret chamber of your heart,

the solitude no heartbeat reaches, 

hidden from the storm of the flesh,

your pulse the dull and distant thud

of artillery in someone else's war,

while you sit alone in the corner,

knees tucked under your chin,

waiting for time to end. 

This inner void

and the outer void are the same,

from the point of view

of your insignificance in both.  

There is no pain or fear here,

and if you should die tonight

how would you know?

You exist between heartbeats. 

What would you say?

Everything has already been said.

Your voice is sealed 

within the celestial monotony 

that resonates between the stars, 

and has been since the beginning.

What we call life is just a moment

when the cosmos

was distracted from its song, 

and the moment passes. 

If I should die tonight

So far I've dodged the curses,

the mines scattered by ancestors

over the land I must now cross.

That's how it seems. Fates 

negotiate in secret with each other

about the precise disposal of luck.

We mustn't count our blessings

lest we tempt them to rescind

some favourable arrangement. 

The therapist suggests

another interpretation. 

I'm happy to pay to have options. 

I haven't choked on trench mud,

shat myself away with dysentery,

gone mad, got locked up yet, 

limped, lame and doomed 

into an era of impotence, pity, 

and disgust, to endure decades 

of disappointed half-matrimony 

perched on the mattress edge,

or, heaven forfend, caught a bullet

that spared me from that outcome

in an anonymous instant 

of imagined heroism, catalogued 

with all the other fairy tales.

I haven't fallen foul of all the things

we now joke about, "health and safety

gone mad" - no mine collapse, 

no fall to the deck from the mast, 

no asbestos corrupting my lungs. 

Hungry looms have left my limbs intact.

Genetic liabilities seems to have found

their way to other branches of the family. 

No, if I should die tonight, 

if I should die tonight, know this:

it is death fresh and new, 

not stale, rekindled flesh 

from some clarty kirkyard deposit

stealing a last breath, dragged 

from a lit fag burnt to the filter,

before it finally reclines forever

into the damp incommodious dirt, 

no, this is life's first edition

being remaindered. The rich

have many iterations of their privilege,

but we are richer still, dying

free from their inheritance of rot. 

If I should die tonight, I die clean, 

pristine, unburdened by misfortune

or by the crimes of the fortunate.

Come, cut my throat now. 

The chase

The dwindling of hope

from a promise of respite,

to a possibility of respite,

to the ability to imagine respite,

to the ability to understand

that such a thing might exist

even without being able to imagine

what form it could possibly take, 

to a stubborn refusal to give up,

a decision to define oneself

in terms of that refusal,

to make your brain a fist

wrapped around that single thought,

until eventually a bone-tired fatigue

drains that decision of meaning,

and the only thought you can hold

is the certain knowledge that to stop

would have death-march finality

and this is enough to make you continue,

until at last it is not enough

and you stumble in your marathon of mourning 

over the hard packed grief-yard ground, and fall

in the ground down justice dust of broken faith

and briefly dream of Eleatic paradox

in which your inevitable fate is Achilles

unable to match your now gastropod pace

but this was never a race, or if it was, 

it was away from, not towards, the finishing line, 

and the infinite madness that pursues you

vaults the logical hurdles you hurl at it,

and in this final split second 

it takes the form, not of Achilles, 

but a tracked vehicle, a bulldozer, a tank, 

rolling over your house,

rolling over your head. 

(Written in response to evidence of war crimes discovered at the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza)

The promise

I thought I loved them

but eventually I came to realise

it was the promise they made that I loved,

at least, the promise I thought they made,

the promise I made back to them in return,

and so this imaginary romance with humanity

which I pursued with bold altruism

and confidence in its reciprocation

found itself frustrated 

by the miser and the idiot,

the cowardice and cruelty

of people simply being people

unaware of any promise,

and unable to imagine it,

but I must remain true to the promise

even though it was never made.

I don't know what else to do. 

Palimpsest

I find myself haunted by the possibility 

that every ecstasy and despair, 

every height and depth, 

every joy and agony that is humanly possible, 

not just those I have personally experienced, 

must be encountered once I am released 

from the limitations of this lifespan, 

all recurrence coiled into a single simultaneity,

and my task in this life, my purpose, 

to the extent that there is such a thing 

that can be described that way without conceit, 

is to develop an awareness and understanding 

enough to reconcile me to everything. 

So when we observe some human misery 

which we believe we have been spared, 

remember, this too is ours. When we witness a crime, 

know we are both victim and perpetrator. 

Every course must be plotted through the maelstrom.

We must drink every poison as well as every elixir 

eventually. What transcendent knowledge 

can make our complicity in nightmare worthwhile? 

How can we achieve that level of understanding 

that lets us recognise ourselves 

in the virtuoso we most admire

at the moment of their greatest triumph?

How can we aspire to heaven 

knowing we must survive hell first,

that every shining truth will tarnish,

all foundations turn to sand,

and there is no authority we can trust

that is not ultimately corrupt and compromised?

The answer is not found in beauty, but in it 

we experience the act of surrendering ourselves,

without which no answer can be found.

Chronogeny

Grief is the mother of time 

emerging from absence, ache, abyss,

with a false promise of immortality. 

Ritual thrusts a tool or weapon

into the lifeless hand,

places a crown upon the head.

The corpse is not a doll

with which we perform a parody of life. 

We refuse to accept the life is over.

Love makes us try anything 

to persuade the dead to continue living.

We fail and summon instead a monster.

The eternal present is shattered.

Time offers us grave and afterlife.

The world is abandoned to death and decay.

Dreams and nightmares are now more real

than all our forgotten fellowship 

with everything we separate ourselves from.

We invent a God to take the blame

and call His crime creation

as if to make a virtue of necessity.

We live according to an ethics of exile

between the beginning and the end 

of this new dream called time.

Love was the author of all this.

Grief, when the one we love died,

was the author of all this.

Prayer

Do not flex 

your mighty muscles 

for me, O Lord, 

answering other prayers 

offered with menaces

for promised lands sought 

and prophecies fulfilled. 

Do not steal the sunrise 

from the unsuspecting child

to wrap around the shoulders 

of a king who comes arrayed 

in splendour and glory on my behalf.

Do not vanquish the unjust just for me.

Do not tutor us in wrath and retribution. 

Let sinners unravel the calculus of their sin

alone. Reveal yourself to me in miniature.

Be content to go unnoticed if need be. 

Let me find you where I least expect it:

in a kind word I can cling to 

when I dwell on disappointments,

or a moment of curiosity and trust

from a bird or animal who knows you

better than any priest or preacher, 

or by understanding my own errors

that imposed barriers, now removed

to allow healing, growth, and connection. 

I need no judgement in my favour.

My squalid, irredeemable self 

is satisfied. It finds heaven enough here 

while it finds you in the world this way.

Ungovernable

Poetry is the elder child, 

the big brother of language,

the trickster of the tongue,

who first showed us the game

and how to play it,

taking secret paths through the forest 

to pilfer fruit from the masters' orchard,

stolen words repurposed, chipped like flint

to acquire exotic, intoxicating new meanings

that penetrated deeper than any blade;

names that originally labelled property, 

signposted tribe and territory,

let us locate resources, alerted us to hazards, 

subverted, juxtaposed, de-contextualised, 

re-contextualised, to create mischief and mayhem,

and in the chaos we found our voice

and took our petition to the gods. Remember that, 

the next time you complete some tedious form,

or read the same sentence for the third time,

or hear reports of innocence turned to ash,

of one history erased to clear land for another.

Remember your debt to forgotten, unrewarded poets

who elevated us above the hunt and harvest,

who invited us to think past order and obedience,

whose rebellion twisted the masters' words 

so they could sing of feelings

the masters would have us leave unsaid.

Remember the gift of insurrection. 

Remember the ability to be ungovernable.

Your beauty is enough

What if the miraculous was mundane,

if Lazarus' resurrection was a daily commute, 

if we are all in a constant state of teleportation

and the very idea of static location was heresy,

if all memory is false, apart from that one

which you pursue through forests of amnesia

until you reach the trap it lures you into 

and all understanding is achieved through disappointment

after the desecration of a thousand hopes?

What if you are only free to choose

between meaningless options, 

false dichotomies, rival deceits, 

and fate is baited with an illusion of choice

and you take the bait

and are reeled in by the wrong reality

and that pretty little head of yours

in which you keep all your clever little thoughts

is about to have its brains bashed out

before you are gutted and grilled for dinner?

What if there is no good and evil?

We all crave meaning, and see shapes in the chaos,

and develop competing, incompatible moralities

from the ideas we generate to make sense of them,

but my round peg will never fit in your square hole.

We are uniquely weird.

We may briefly share some common purpose, 

perhaps, from time to time, 

but let's not confer on that situation 

the status of universal truth

in an apotheosis of coincidence. 

What if every apparent contradiction, 

every opposite, every strenuous disagreement, 

was a consequence of a failure 

to understand the fundamentals:

that there is one unknowable truth

an unattainable target, out of range,

and our attempts fall short,

and are all equally inadequate?

All that leaves is our kiss. 

Just let the memory of my kiss on your stomach

linger for as long as it may. 

Your beauty is enough for me. 

Your beauty is miracle enough. 

Caravan

I have this fantasy. 

I'm staying in a caravan

with just books and whisky

to see me through the winter. 

A small caravan is big enough, 

parked on an Outer Hebridean coast

where ancient rocks witness

to the endless struggle 

of wind and wave. 

I will slowly deplete

a case of Linkwood twelve year old

as I reckon the passage of time

in drams and chapters and storms. 

It's the same latitude as Helsinki

but the sea doesn't freeze here, 

it is always moving against the shore

and there is a deeper silence

in the constant sound

than you can find between the stars

during the long winter nights. 

I know where I stand: 

far from people, 

and the ice that forms 

and fills the space between them.

I can never tell how thin it is, 

and if you don't know what's thin ice

then it's all thin ice. 

No, I'll just come here

and keep my head down.

The books bring me close enough. 

They moderate distance for me, 

while everything I want to be near to

has a different voice

that makes words redundant. 

Sediment

Dust settles in the lungs,

making each breath a stratum

in a garbled geology of the present, 

choking, marbled by haemorrhage 

after the sudden upheaval 

that metamorphosed domesticity 

into a bomb site. 

Blood clots 

like an igneous intrusion

beneath the rubble. 

Fault lines lie exposed.

The history is obvious

to those who can read the terrain.

Let's not pretend that isn't everyone.

Let's not pretend we must excavate 

and deliberate 

with slow, scientific circumspection 

and calm, forensic scrutiny,

to understand 

how diminished we are by this, 

dis-individuated, anonymised, incinerated, 

aggregated and prematurely reduced 

to a layer of sediment 

in someone else's orogeny,

an era revealed and discussed 

in the past and passive tense

even while blood 

cries out to us from the ground.

This stratigraphy is scripture 

where prohibitions we ignore 

are carved into slabs of stone 

torn from the mountain that buries us.

We are jettisoned from time

to drift in the antediluvial deposits

of someone else's imagination. 

Dolls are now fossils,

the heart a batholith,

the bedroom window sill a horizon,

and all evidence that we lived and loved

fragments interpreted by others

who reconstruct a parody 

and display it with all the solemnity

of those who require a sacrifice 

beneath the foundations of their house.

"Sin lieth at the door"

The world is bigger than Eden, 

and innocence is now a memory, 

which is the same as a myth, 

some would have us believe,

who crucify children on rebar

in the ruins of a world shrunk

to something less than a garden. 

Flares fall into a Mediterranean sunset

and night comes to interrogate the soul. 

Constellations of invisible eyes 

seek innocence in its desolation. 

The soul asks the sky for directions.

It got lost while looking for food.

We speak the words of conquerors. 

We learned to speak at sword point, 

instructed by the steel tongue of conquest.

We crave legitimacy, to be heard

in the words of the conqueror, 

having surrendered our own legitimacy

to our oppressors' imperial pretence. 

We make our humble petition.

We fill in the forms provided. 

We beg for mercy in triplicate, 

lost in a labyrinth of alien concepts

that only exist because of their cruelty. 

The first names for things are now forgotten, 

names first used to evoke the world

even as we set it to one side on the altar,

labelled to denote its acceptability

to a God fresh from the labour of creation,

whose own name we may not pronounce,

and generations later, 

deposited in tomb and temple,

offerings and grave goods

to commemorate wordless ancestors,

those innocent of fire and flint

who knew the world as beasts do, 

without the intercession of language, 

without its vanity and deception

that prevails in the noise words make

in the tedious interval between the time

they are no longer forbidden 

and the time they are finally forgotten.

Beasts will kill you, or eat you alive, 

but none surpass Man for cruelty

for Man has divided the world with his words

and brought into it a darkness 

summoned from beyond the line he draws, 

the walls and borders and barbed wire

that protect the names of things. 

His words whelp a darkness 

the night does not recognise,

something crouching by the door

that would possess us

if we do not force it to obey,

as the Lord told us

when He replied to Cain's complaint.

We do not find innocence in silence

but in speech there is only guilt,

words exchanged in a field before murder,

so we simply cannot speak any more. 

The reason we held the tomb to be sacred

was not out of reverence for the dead. 

It was to contain the darkness there,

the darkness we imagined 

that had no place in the world of beasts, 

and now the world is bigger than Eden, 

and innocence is just a memory, 

which is the same as a lie, 

some would have us believe,

who crucify children on rebar

in the ruins of a world shrunk

to something less than a garden. 

Multiverse

Infinite possibilities 

do not imply parallel universes.

Our vanity assigns certainty 

to everything we perceive,

so that we must invent worlds 

to cope with what we don't,

Measurements don't determine what a thing is.

They narrow down the possible worlds 

where the thing in our imagination could exist

They narrow down the number of worlds

in ways we can never fully understand

while we are part of one. All we can do 

is reduce the number of ways we know nothing. 

The past is a fiction we invent,

an excuse for not knowing the future. 

Were it real we might need many worlds,

attributing our own limitations 

to the one in which we find ourselves,

but it is not real. All there is

is our faith in a future we don't know yet.

The universe is governed 

by the statistics of our ignorance,

meaning just coincidence from chaos,

a game of chance 

in which we narrow the odds

but can never win. 

The world seems upside down, 

statistics existing prior to solidity,

not posterior, as we insist it must, 

assuming light quanta cue a billiard pin balls

for us to catch and count in eye socket pockets.

No, the counting comes first, 

even while the pocket is empty,

before there is a number to reckon.

The world only seems upside down like this

because we approach it back to front. 

We walk backwards to the light.

All we see is our shadow, 

and believe there must be others

to keep it company,

and alleviate the loneliness 

we have dreamed into being,

until we become one with light,

standing in the light at last, 

utterly changed, finally ourselves, 

all shadows gone. 

Massacre

Is this loaf of bread a tank shell?

Is this flour or phosphorus?

Is my meal seasoned with shrapnel?

An explosion turns my body inside out

so my stomach can digest the rubble.

I am the one being consumed. 

Death feasts on us while we starve.

I exist for them only in that single breath

between the muzzle flash and my murder,

living in a sniper's cross-hairs, just a target, 

chosen for how my death demoralises others.

My brains garnish the debris.

A thin gravy of blood

is drizzled like jus in the dust. 

Apart from that I don't exist at all.

(Written on 29th February 2024, the Flour Massacre, Gaza)

The anonymous bride

She was just an undergarment.

That's all she was to him. 

There was nothing else. 

It wasn't that she had jilted him, 

slipping away from the ceremony naked,

leaving him holding an empty item of clothing.

The absence of a human female 

was deliberate, was part of the ritual. 

He was completely satisfied. 

He didn't need a woman. 

His needs did not extend 

beyond the social media post

in which he displayed 

this latest limp, torn trophy, 

to jubilant cohorts of online followers,

joined in celebration of her annihilation. 

His embrace with the woman

who once wore the abandoned lingerie

had already been arranged weeks earlier

by a random comrade he didn't know, 

who had inadvertently served as matchmaker, 

as שַׁדְּכָן, when he had pulled a trigger, 

or pushed a button to drop a bomb, 

and she had disappeared entirely

in a consummation of dust. Somewhere 

a wedding ring lost in the chaos 

sings to the night of other lives.

(Written in response to the phenomenon of members of the IDF sharing images of themselves posing with items of lingerie looted in Gaza)

 

Other poets that I admire

are so far out of my league, 

I can only aspire to what they achieve, 

effortless for them, impossible for me. 

Their words are a kind of high trapeze

that makes a myth of gravity. 

Not a mockery, but a myth:  

they demonstrate that thing 

which anchors me so firmly to the ground

simply does not exist. 

This is their gift to us:

the incomprehensibility of what they do.

They untie the knot of what we thought we knew,

understanding that tethers us to a lesser world,

and liberate us from the luxury of our chains.

Our souls must breathe miracles

in the upper atmosphere they inhabit

where their words cast aurora.

They reveal truths that make us immune to lies,

expose as lies long revered truths that bind us.

In a world in which we mean to be free,

they show us the only freedom that has meaning.

Carbonado

A hollow star palpitates and exhales. 

A nebula condenses like winter breath.

The chambers of its heart

are fortified by walls of black diamond.

The darkness they conceal

is darker than the darkest night, 

cold, hidden, tucked away, 

inside its blinding light.

The heart fractures. The star dies. 

Fragments are cast across a secret sky,

a shattered firmament mosaic

we scrawl upon and constellate

with our infinite capacity for myth, 

etching invented connections

across our flint-faced imagination

to chart the limits of our journey

making of the celestial sphere

a ceramic skull, a goblet

from which we drink to ourselves,

celebrating our false zodiac.

We degrade everything with trade.

Two and a half billion years later

a diver plucks black carbonado diamonds

from river bed gravel in Bahia. 

He does not know he feeds his family

by selling star-bones to monsters. 

We contain unknown astronomies of grief

cascading down the fathomless past. 

We are a confluence of loss. 

This fragile lament preceded voice

and seeks the silence where it began, 

the place we steal it from by singing. 

The abducted world 

whose organs we traffic

remembers its ancient origins

before any Eden we can dream of,

and innocence, hiding behind the light,

which no pimp scrutiny will expose, 

no sex cannibal appetite violate. 

A crab shell universe retreats

in the rock pool of our curiosity

where sea anemones blossom

only once the tide comes in

and leaves us out of our depth

so that we abandon the invasion

for which we pretend 

discovery is an excuse.