Nitrogen

There's a special kind of air
I need to breathe to live,
but it's in short supply.
It turns out
they've been trying to kill me
my whole life, but I just won't die. 

The fall

Satan was a suicide.

Jumped, not pushed.

Heaven has a death toll,
a body count that piles up.
Antics at this planet's wrap party
in the celestial penthouse
left a weary angel on the edge.

He couldn't take it anymore.

We walk a moonbeam tightrope
between towers that tumble
from Babel to Manhattan,

a starlight high-wire 

between stumbling stiletto skyscrapers,

celebrating the first New Year's Day,

recovering from the final Hogmanay,

on the doomed observation deck.

I dreamt I was flying once.
I woke up falling
because an angel
stepped off a balcony.
He left his blood
all over my invitation

to his leaving party. 
Let me in, of course,
but tell the host,

the Lord of hosts,
I have questions.  

Trance

Ecstasy induces a kind of amnesia,

memory's insistence silenced by euphoria,

its commotion calmed. 

Pure unalloyed joy takes priority. 

The passage of time itself 

is stalled in spasm and trance.

It is only in this moment that we find freedom. 

We have no choice but to surrender to it, 

a contradiction anywhere else but here, 

suspended in this single brief interval of time, 

its duration incalculable and irrelevant 

because all that matters is that it happened,

it really happened. 

Eternity elapses in an instant, 

and all distances collapse,

so that there is nowhere else but here.

I am nothing. I am connected to everything. 

Inevitability is midwife to freedom:

all judgement is folly, all decision indecision, 

the selection of meaningless alternatives,

equally pointless routes to nowhere,

when observed from this summit, 

this immeasurable altitude where we are finally free 

from the tedious, quotidian, exhausting, futile, 

so that the sum of all our volition

finally finds its only possible expression

in a moment of transcendence and bliss. 

Even attempting to describe the experience 

is a betrayal of that which cannot be described

and so I defer to the eloquence of silence, 

and testify to the taciturn truth.

Wilderness years

Welcome to the wilderness.

Is there anything I can do

to make your stay here more comfortable,

unaccustomed as you are 

to your own insignificance? Forgive me 

if my sympathy seems somewhat limited.

It's not as if you were born here

and are destined to die here

without even being forgotten 

because no-one was aware 

you existed in the first place,

such was the obscurity in which you lived.

Oh for the luxury of being forgotten! 

Also, 

why do you refer to your "wilderness years"

as if it's a bad thing?

Every year is a wilderness year for us, 

plus, the wilderness is where the real action is.

Prophets and angels wrestle 

for our entertainment nightly

and put on matinees at the weekend. 

We tease the occasional peripatetic messiah

as they try to "find themselves"

with all sorts of ridiculous promises.

God is a vagrant like anyone else. 

There is no evil here, 

only whatever stupidity and cowardice 

we bring with us. All your big questions 

are irrelevant celebrity gossip to us. 

We don't even laugh at your quest for meaning,

we simply step over your desiccated corpse

lying in the desert you tried to cross.

You come here complaining 

they've taken from you 

something we never had,

and once it is restored

you'll return and rewrite history 

rather that learn from it,

and forget all about us. I tell you what, 

just fuck off back to civilisation. 

You don't belong here. 

The genealogy of morals

We are the singers of the sin,

singing the song of right and wrong,

but there's no melody in this song.  

We are so desperate for meaning

we will defend to the death

(our own or someone else's)

the ways in which we find it, 

no matter how varied and ridiculous,

how incompatible and contradictory. 

This is the genealogy of my morals, 

the bastard pedigree

of that mongrel moon howl.

We are the singers of the sin,

singing the song of right and wrong,

but there's no melody in this song.  

The first thing we were told

was a lie we thought was true. 

The first thing that we said

was a truth we thought a lie,

told to deny what we couldn't bear,

and everything we've said since

lies to defend this first inadvertent accuracy,

or the concatenation of self-deception

moored upon it, until

we don't know what's true anymore.

We are the singers of the sin,

singing the song of right and wrong,

but there's no melody in this song.  

Think back before those words,

before the thoughts they forced on you.

There was no right and wrong,

there was just you,

then something came and poked and prodded, 

twisted and stretched this neutral clay

to form the image of a man, 

a little man burdened with meaning,

with all the things they said were good,

all the things they said you should,

even when they made you feel sad,

when they made you think that you were bad, 

because that is why they lied to you,

to stop you reverting to that ball of clay,

that happy ball of clay that knew 

nothing, lies that you were told 

because someone else who was old

found something meaningful 

once upon a time.

We are the singers of the sin,

singing the song of right and wrong,

but there's no melody in this song.  

Music is a detour through sound

from the first silence to the last,

a route tethered to silence,

its phrases contours of a map

that shows the way to its own extinction,

all tension and release, 

instability and resolution,

turns taken in a labyrinth

whose ultimate purpose is escape, 

but we are the singers of the sin,

singing the song of right and wrong,

and there's no melody in this song.  

We are the singers of the sin,

singing the song of right and wrong,

and there's no melody in this song.

Subsistence

I plan to subsist 

on zero point energy

alone in the depths of space.

As any musician could tell you

it is possible to live on music alone

and to anyone who might dispute this 

I would say "you call that living?"

You cannot tether me with trade,

snare me with the gravity of barter,

pretend your presumption is necessity,

and flog me trash for sustenance. 

Your words are an unreliable telegraphy 

between coffins, a bony Morse 

tapped upon the blue sky, 

a lid I sit above,

singing my celestial song,

strumming starlight for a lyre,

and spurning the society of atoms.

The war palsied child

When this war palsy 

afflicts the children, 

trembling and shaking, 

rocking, eyes looking about

but not seeing anything, 

lost in a maze of shock, still ignorant 

of the measure of their loss

in the immediate dusty aftermath,

we crumble. We can't bear it,

even though for us it is

a brief trip to the well of tears

that is the handheld device

where we scroll our socials,

a matter of convenience 

and indulgence. They choke 

in the drought of sympathy

while we bathe in our sense of outrage

and parade our indignation,

yet this war palsy, this child 

trapped in a seismic instant

of injury and bereavement, 

an endless deafening reverberation

of the bomb, taking and shaking

and not letting go, a tremor

and a tinnitus of grief,

a scream that never stops

but shifts to a different register

to serve as descant to memory,

the sight will stay with us, 

those of us who have seen it,

the war palsied child. 

It will stay and stain and scar

like phosphorus on the mind. 

The good Palestinian

"We took limbs left over

from unnecessary amputations
(the wounds could have been treated
if the hospital hadn't been bombed),
and other body parts we found
lying around in the rubble.
We assembled a new person
who would be deemed acceptable,
one we could live with, side by side,
in peace. He didn't pose a threat.

He didn't need much of anything -

you know, stuff like food, water,

land, housing, freedom, dignity ...
He didn't think for himself. 

In fact, he was sort of a zombie, 

which makes sense I suppose.

After all, the only good Palestinian
is a dead Palestinian."