Month: September 2019

Dancing

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Insistent whispers from distant places,
tease & menace;

the hold is held*,
coils then melds, melts & is gone forever.

Solid & insubstantial, all objects
whole & partial
resist or yield,
or stubbornly reveal futility

to be both the cause & death of meaning:

every answer
a more graceful dancer than the question;

                            never ending
tension between existence & being.

It slips away,
                            eternally
within the reach,
of a grip that cannot keep what it holds:

grains of sand in the hands of a creature

who doesn't understand
either…

*Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Alive

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Here we’re
            alive.

Here we are as we love & complain,
orgasm & menstruate;
vomit & piss & waste our hate
on the smallest of things.

Here we are
            with or without
mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters;

comrades or enemies;
consumers or revolutionaries*,
            attack or defence,
for or against:

reasons so solid yet insubstantial
at the same time.
 
An accident upon infinite accidents,
so improbable
as to constitute a miracle,

here we’re alive
                to the glorious light:

your life is not a cage, a stage
or a performance,

                it’s just an accident.

You’re alive, & one day you will die

So…laugh until we burst**?

*Those Anarcho Punks Are Mysterious – Against Me!

**Idioteque – Radiohead

Evergreen

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With all the inevitability
& perfect frailty
of autumn’s final fallen leaf

the secret violence of our silence,
stands exposed;
a distance so vast in a space so small.

Every word we once shared
now hides, & the meaning
of their patterns

The summer is turning it’s back;
darker mornings,
colder evenings.

Will the winter destroy the warmth we need,
or will we find a way to keep our dreams
from fading?

Can we still cling to the belief,
that there is some hope remaining,
of reclaiming

what once was, because, after all,
not every leaf will fall:

some trees are evergreen…

There is a robot that lives in my brain*

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Warped
        the shape & sound of thoughts
contort as they rise & fall

in the darkness.

I cannot catch them all.

So now pure instinct reigns supreme
& the Will relents
to every whim
of this self-destructing machine:

object
not a subject;
the It
& not the I.

Or is that just one more excuse?

When tomorrow becomes today,
perhaps it all will change

or stay the same.

*No Future Part 111 – Titus Andronicus

The Madness of Crowds

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The talk,
        the talk goes on forever;

unfocused, the tumult of noises sounds
like the symptom of a fever.

I pick out one voice after another,
disappointed as each
seems to me to be a foreign language
I cannot speak.

It’s the silent ones I can understand,
shrouded in loneliness or pensive thoughts
        or maybe just nothing at all.

Are they, like me,
        bewildered
                as to how the past
can blend
from Spring into Winter
so swiftly?

As the noise, the
        noise goes on forever…