Letterinth 2

Desert Empire

Here's a poem of mine in a fascinating new issue of Unlikely Stories. It's called Desert Empire. Check out the issue for work by Marton Koppany among others.

Indigo Children

Something Close to Comfort

Pink Penis

A cheekily titled sequence of abstract experiments up now at Department Blogzine. Probably not the best title I've ever come up with...

Chiromancy

Pigeon Poetry

 

A man leaves a roadside cafe at dawn. He has a pigeon in his eye and floats feathers on his tongue. The sky forms itself into pigeons and swoops down to meet him. The man yells, "Behold! Behold!" Up above, a new kingdom of clouds is anti-celestial. Hands take a chainsaw to history which reforms as a puzzle in space. More children are born with herring in their eyes while ancestors weave nets to catch them.

m'eyes

Every Drop of Blood is a Ghost Vibration

Red Haiku Variations

beneath
my window,
red aching tulips

*

Wind blows
the moment I
branches aching heaven

Bob Grumman on Pwoermds

Bob Grumman comments on my Dream Pwoermd at his Poeticks blog. Thanks, Bob:

Poeticks on Pwoermds

Shmnthing

Deft on Dante

                                  

Now seems a good time. I've been putting it off for years. Now seems the right time. Ok I'm going to pick up Dante and start reading, perhaps spice it up with a dose of St.Thomas Aquinas. Yes, now seems the right time. The plan is to write a series of poems in response, salted with medieval mystical theology and flavours of the early renaissance. Truth is, I'm scared. Dante is daunting. But Bede Griffiths told me to do it. And Thomas Merton. And I trust those guys. I probably won't post many of the poems here. I'll sit on them, save them for something special, who knows what? But I will post the poem I wrote today, an introductory poem invoking divine mercy and all sorts of other stuff to help me on my journey into the underworld. Here it is . . . wish me luck:

Forest of half formed misfortunes,
half moon hang nails,
half hung
              demoniac embryos,
I approach you with a slacker’s concupiscence,
metaphysically maladjusted.
Go lightly with my slow-witted digibox,
my irregular dopamine WiFi.
You transcend the equinox,
the suppurating Catholic beatification
of a plum coloured sun penumbra.
You shape me brickless.

Dream Pwoermd

Glaswegian Crucifix

No-Self Discovery

I seem to have found it!

It is I. It is not I.

Let’s call it Christ, because Christ is the constant in whom all things manifest. It is Christ and I am. Yet I am not Christ. Such a claim would be ridiculous. It is I.

You see the muddle I am in?

Ha! I have found it. Here it is. The I, the all in I. Christ. I have it here in me like a bean. It appears transparent, flares up, moves from my sight, then reappears, here, then here. I hold it in my heart, cupped, in the palm of my heart, cupped, lovingly.

Christ the bean, which is I.

At sunset I almost had it, but it would have destroyed me. Red sky spaciousness. It burned me, tore my eyeballs to shreds, left me dumb and gaping. Such catastrophic beauty! The all in all in I. Almost. It.

One place I find it is the bench up there. It happily comes through the trees and the flies and the tyre factory, sits with me happily, as it should do, as it wants to. Jesus, I call it. Here it’s a gently exploding glass, a drenching in love. Here it sits. Jesus.

It leaps from the young lovers to the family enjoying a summer stroll to the little boy peddling his bicycle uphill. It leaps to me. It leaps like the moment you recognise the world and everyone in it, the I that they are. Yes, that’s it! That’s . . . oh everyone listen to the eye that’s new me not me. Swallow it whole! Digest it!

You as I.

You, not you.

Not I.

We seem to have found it. You in me, the I. It.

Crystal

The Mother and Son of Spirit Text

Meditation 1:

Towards the end of a long and troubled meditation, I began to imagine my body and soul as an ancient kingdom, where Christ was king and lord and overseer of a free and prosperous people. Coupled with this spontaneous visualisation was a deep sense of acceptance of my being as it was, right there and then, slowly emerging from its daily metaphysical wrestling match.

I was able to penetrate a secret region of the heart where Christ had his throne, and freely explore its royal chambers. I knew the kingdom was administered from my brain, a centre of government and bureaucracy, and my whole body was a flat, fertile plain, a rich landscape of agriculture and cottage industry, where the inhabitants dwelt in harmony and concord. I felt incredibly at home in this inner terrain - it was, after all, me, and I prayed for protection and peace for myself and everyone who dwelt here. Guests, visitors, travellers, tourists, and, most essentially, citizens, those who made their home in the happy land.

From this pious georgic, an image of the Mother emerged, a powerful archetype, metamorphosing from Christ the King, enfolding me her tender son. At once my whole being was in her arms. The sense of security and wellbeing was overwhelming, and she began to suckle me at her breast. I could taste the milk, the sweetness, feel it nourishing me, feeding every fibre of my soul. A faint sexual sensation stirred but was overpowered by the mothering instinct and the deep infant comfort I felt entrusting myself to it.

There followed soon a burst of kundalini energy from my base chakra, an outpouring of sexual energy flooding my genitals. I gasped and tried to relax, allowing it to spread around my body’s fertile flood plain, all the while saying soft, gentle prayers to the Father. Once again I was back in the land flowing with milk and honey, in the company of the Mother Queen and her mighty energies. An image of the Virgin flashed in my head, a sense of the Christ child comforted, the Saviour nurtured, before the world outside began to penetrate my consciousness, spilling into me from the street like an army of invading children.

Trinitarian Concrete Poetry & A Glimpse of Nonduality

These last days of summer have a peculiar flavour for me. There is a taste of salt in the air and on my tongue, kitchen smells and cooking clatter, the cry of gulls and a taste of freshly caught fish. Each day rises like a smoke ring, spreads itself out thinly, before fading into the breath from which it came. At the end of one week and the beginning of another, I practise the pure act, or art, of sitting. Sometimes when I sit, alone or with people, outdoors or in a coffee shop, a faint awareness arises of something more true to the course and meaning of life, a fine connection to an underlying mystery.

On one occasion, I was fortunate enough to be sitting in an open square at the heart of the city’s great piping festival. I had just eaten a sandwich and was watching the pretty girls walk by, when a cloud of dense, undifferentiated sound rose up behind me. From the sonic maelstrom, snippets of melody, patches of tone and colour emerged and disappeared at random, chased in and out of hearing by a hairy sound beast. My individual consciousness was ransacked, pushed out into the air around the square, into the energy and vibration of sound, into pure abstraction; melting, merging, welling up like the colours of the dawn, like a bliss poem.

I remember the girl who sat opposite me. I remember the stillness of my body. Who needs to move? Yet the vision of the girl and the physicality of passers-by felt wholly present and elevated in my mind as it lapped all around the square. The energy of movement became a dance, a play, held together as one in the wholeness of sound and mind I occupied. I remember my mother sitting beside me, trying for all her life’s worth to re-adjust a setting on her mobile phone. I remember trying to help her, hopelessly failing.

Tumbling Treated Windowglyph