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. 

Find me

Find me in the trees. 

Find me in the stars. 

Find me in the newborn cry. 

Find me in the weary sigh

of the prophet we denied. 

I was destroyed in Schliemann's trench, 

discarded in the recension of Pisistratus.

My voice lies untranslated 

in a forgotten archive

buried in the unexcavated capital

of a civilisation unknown to scholarship.

I am like an ancient space probe

with corrupted firmware

turning a deaf ear earthwards

from interstellar space,

although my journey 

has no beginning and no end. 

I have not gone, 

I am just so far away

your voice cannot reach me. 

I see your lips move

light years out of sync

and hear what I want to hear

whispered in the diffuse gas

between the stars. 

Let it be love. 

Let it be love. 

Let it be love. 

Ilium on the Clyde

"Fuck your stupid horse". 

We left it for driftwood.

The occupants climbed out, 

sat down on the sand, 

drew up their knees 

and watched, confused, 

as we set fire to our own temples,

tossed infants from the ramparts,

torched our topless towers

and celebrated the ashes

as our greatest achievement.

"We don't need your fucking horse". 

Stone

Nursing a stone,
cradling it in your arms,
holding it to your breast,
as if it would suckle,
this skull sized cobble,
setting it down in a crib
and singing it a lullaby,
feeling the memory of it
inside you, in the place
where your son grew,
the son the sniper took.

The birds

There is no silence. Even beyond 

the mechanised rattle of the city,

nature is loud with chorus and chaos,

giving public notice of births and deaths

with alarm and lament, and hungry,

insistent with its urgent demands,

ungrateful at their satisfaction,

making creation one continuous howl,

and even once we die

and surrender to decay

we fill the grave with voices

of gods and ancestors

speaking for us, pleading our case

when confronted with our ultimate fate,

elevating our petty quibbles

to the status of eternal truth, 

and having learned this new way to think

we invent new kinds of artificial ear

to listen to the palpitating cosmos

and thrust them into the airless void

that can carry no conventional sound

to eavesdrop on the metallic chime

of distant cataclysm.

Even if you withdraw into your mind

you overhear arguments in chambers

adjacent to the one you occupy

or attend to that one voice

that visits you where you are

and provides these words you write. 

There is no silence,

so we must make of sound itself

a substance in which we swim,

air into which we can extend our wings,

and with these words, take flight.