The meaning
is to listen. To learn. To speak.
To dream. To imagine. To welcome.
To be welcomed. To rest. To play.
To understand. To be understood.
To share. To dare. To inhabit.
To value. To be valued.
To connect. To act. To fulfil.
To touch. To reciprocate.
To hold. To be held. To love.
To become.
To be.
Ever spent a long period of months when you felt life was on hold or that time had stopped, that you were sitting in the waiting room, but you didn't have a reason or a plan or knowledge? A time lacking in communication or interaction? I wrote this poem based on a feeling that I'd missed something, that there was something I didn't know, and as I was thinking about it, I started thinking about a character, who was initially gonna be a woman waiting at a station with no destination, but it turned into a guy who had written a letter to a woman who never received it. And I imagined the note as a living thing, carrying this lightness, which turned into a weight as it was never delivered. And it made me think what might have happened if she'd read it. It's a poem about missed opportunities and sixth sense, and invisibility. It's one of those. It makes you wonder how much you miss in one lifetime. It's about feeling versus knowing.
Musical
notes
tethered in
silence,
always locked
inside,
so he wrote
a note,
just for
her.
swept up by
the west wind,
caressed by
strangers’ hands,
misunderstood.
swept up in
rhythmic tides,
never heard
his story,
never knew
what he held inside.
it still
travels,
experiences
many lives,
but never
encounters love.
Walk
so take it slow. Build a raft of faith tied
with hope, bypass this bottomless void,
coral devoid of pearl. Cover your scars
sway in anemones’ arms & you lose your charms
in wishing, take the hits as they come,
wait for the ever-circling shifting sands.
only time, but time is everything.
You get your allocation, can’t expand on it.
search out this invisible, ever-travelling light.
Blink & you might miss it pass you by.
on calendars already etched with bloody crosses.
They paint obstacles and you excavate tunnels,
pack your bag of treasured things and move on.
It’s the one thing you know, the one thing
they can’t take away from you.
Numb
she feels
everything,
hears
morning rise,
the ache
of the world
in the
break of dawn,
feels the
switch,
a pause
she cannot fill,
a sense of
emptiness,
the
knowing of being
nothing at
all.
Simply blue
curiosity’s stilted mime, this out-of-focus line,
a make-believe that we can be something more,
people in a bottle in a box outside of time,
tripping colour of a something folded outline.
& we are struck dumb by its stark silence.
of the mind, out of mind, even out of sound,
& we are pained by the squares of the round,
yet what we seek is here, not out of time,
it hasn’t crossed the line, so make it mine.
invisible wand, tempest torn, the unbroken wild,
sensing what can’t be seen, hearing every distant
shore,
begat, begot, wanting less simply to become more,
free in your lost time, woken now, endure and done.
feels what it is, puzzles it out, churns it all
inside,
& we are but ghosts watching as dark waters reside,
our audience calm, a woven quilt, all linked beside,
the breadth of us suspended within our sacred breath.
The dip in the
book
where ink gathers
to explode
the traces of
places been & faces seen,
to reinvent every
missing moment.
gets the time right
to offer a smile,
offers advice when
it isn’t even needed,
struggles to keep
her own counsel.
takes flight upon
starlight’s ocean streams,
a-wandering in and
out of time,
seeks to reorder
the crazy things she’s seen.
so no implosions,
only happy endings.
Meaning lies in
the waking hour,
but it’s groundless
when she forgets to dream.
Pilgrims
shapeless forms on shifting sands,
a walk without an end in sight.
abandon our shoes in the ocean,
pursue our wanderings into tomorrow.
wish away our whole life on a maybe,
dig deep inside to find the thing to live for.
Flames
as in
water,
unwritten.
Unsaid.
Fire curls
the edges of wrath,
flames without
a phoenix.
a drawbridge
with no end.
This path divides
and redivides
into a soar
of mountains.
And then it’s
gone.
Aces high,
delusion low.
Fire
breathes a lion’s soul.
blown on languorous
breeze,
for there
is movement.
Otherwise,
all is stasis,
all is illusion.
Just coal.
Moths
lair of the moth,
quiet watches the moon rise,
the shift in the cosmos,
a shaking of time.
this eaten-out horizon,
a drifting sand expanse untrod.
We are but blighted stars,
torn strips of gravity.
he watches the spaces
betwixt knowing and exempt,
as though all the light is cried out
and the ocean churns to drown.
Journeying
to bark to stone to living water,
this glistening, a rapture to spring,
an endeavour to be more, not less,
to flower, aspire, to be.
to air, speaks a language only
the river knows, and our feet sink
into mossy roots, a juncture read,
seek to walk the breath of nature.
without the weight of ourselves,
to travel light in pursuit of this missing part.
We measure each footprint we make
lest we leave too deep a mark.
unbridled, leaves shielding us from glare.
