Tuesday 3 February 2009

Sustainability and Poems

Poems have the unique challenge; of trying to say what can not be said in words.

We ourselves are often left with the everyday chatter of the verbal mind, the oppressive history maker and commentator of our own media inner world. We need to become more sustainable, to hand over power and decision making to the non verbal aspects of our minds, bodies and soul.

For me, sustainability in ourselves is allowing the understanding that is presently gagged because it does not use words, to come out into the summer sun and kick its heals as did the mining ponies when they were brought up on their annual excursions from the always dark mine tunnels to the meadows up by the pit head.

We can in ourselves uproot and transplant the broken children of our emotions and spiritual lives, presently struggling in the cast out rocky unnourished lands, to stand in the fertile soils, the water chattered and sun drawn land of regrowth and loving care.

We can not command this to happen with sentences created in the mind, with agendas, policy statements and on-message dross. But we can use the word medium weapons of the oppressors by creating poetry that is dipped in the magic of humanity, keeping these vision and waking dreams alive in our heads. The rhythm of the words and their meaning trickle through, the mind drops its 24/7 tell tail security, and the words become meanings greater than the sum of the word count whole.

Here are 3 to go ............ do you want fries with that?



Do the Dead need a Passport?

Do the dead need a passport?
No rictus smile photo
No physical characteristic
No distinctions at all
All become the same, for once and ever more.
Memories in others conciseness.
Do we sit on their bones
Or stand upon their shoulders?



The Circus has taken over the Asylum

The Circus has taken over the Asylum,
Lifestyle is the new Entertainment,
Fast Food is the new Bread;
How's your appetite now that it's Formula Formulaic?
Desire is the everyday new Requirement,
Spending the new cut Drug,
Credit the new word for Debt;
Can you juggle or ride bareback?
If you can do neither, I am not interested:
Tough.........................................................................................................next................



Washing away those tears
Funeral of my father, January 06

We all see people differently from where we each do stand,
And sometimes too emotionally close
We suffer from intimate bad sight lines.
The cutting razor of challenging intellect,
The drive of our passion and our blood,
Divided us behind pools of stagnant unasked questions
And sea barriers of emotional soft unbidden soul drifted sand.
They hold back parental closeness
With a ruthless, smothering cold hand.

And time, the healer through learning,
Or pacifier through memories gradual loss,
Either sharpens one's true feelings,
Or blunts us with soft pillows of so much dross.
The Reaper's arm is moving closer
Father taken in this year's crop.
My love for the old man has flown stronger,
As the sands banks and marsh he was safe behind
Are swept away by the flood tide
Of my grieving, howls, tears and sobs.