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Erica

I saw you today
Standing in the middle of the stream.
You were trying to lift the pushchair
Out of the four-wheel-drive,
Balancing your baby
In your other arm.

The current was really strong.
I can’t always see it that clearly.
But today Erica,
It was apparent to me,
Swirling around your limbs,
Along your arms
And out of your breasts.

And I know you have already told me,
But some days I am blind.
Only today, as you held your baby,
Could I see
What you are doing with the torrent
You are standing in.

It’s what you told me
When I asked
How you are dealing with motherhood.
You know – giving birth –
On your feet fast – smiling –
Being the perfect sex goddess
For your man –
Renovating the house –
Being intelligent and witty —
The everything woman.

And there you are
In the middle of the stream,
As the water rushes
Out of the old Welsh mines.
And you – balance –
The pushchair and the baby,
Your husband,
The house –
Everything.

Bob

It’s up the muddy lane with lots of puddles,
Past the graves with bright green stones,
Into the field of pretty flowers –
That’s where Bob lives.

In a wooden shed like ours at home,
With a fire inside to cook his dinner on,
Burning great big trees that make my eyes cry –
That’s how Bob lives.
He doesn’t wash his hands like Mummy makes me,
And his face is black as well,
And he eats his breakfast with his fingers –
That’s what Bob does.

His bed is all old overcoats,
And I could see his toes come out his shoes,
And he never combs his hair like mine is –
That’s how Bob is.

But it must be lovely having blackbirds
Come to sit and talk to him at tea,
And not to have to do the things that I do,
That’s why I wish that it were me.

Bend in the Road

I had walked and talked with my friend, left them, and was nearing home. Only a gentle bend hid home from my view.

Then, on that stretch of road, by the bend of houses, I saw my son.

His freckle face with missing tooth looked from a roadside porch.

Seeing me he came, halted, went back and came again. A step nearer, a moments halt, a pace again, nearly a halt, now walking, becoming a run.

And I looked into that face wordlessly loving me.

And I too, losing all words, took him up into my arms.

Walking I tried to tell him, but the words were too big to come up out of my chest and through me.

But they came, haltingly, and I spoke them quietly lest they explode me there in the road, “Leon, I love you.”

We were home. It was a good place to be.

And my children, open, talking and secure in me.

Yes, I had helped to build this good place, this home.

And it was mealtime, and Leon was sitting on the floor with eyes darting to mine, face amove, showing and hiding that wonder that had led him to stand waiting an hour at a bend of houses for a man to walk that stretch of road.

He stood, and from some concealment took a tiny cake, part of a jam roll he had made, and gave it to me. “This is for you,” he said.

I took it and looked at his mouth, open with pleasure, and then his eyes –

Sunshine.

Adoring me.

Wonder.

Space

and love.

A whole world of love — shy, trembling, wanton love.

And it tore me.

Babs

I saw Bab’s body.
She was thin,
Wasting,
And not remembering.

Then at the funeral
I stood among the
Branches of the
Family tree –
Just me
Among the many
Who watched
The chipboard
Coffin carried by.

And I had
Touched Bab’s body
Before she died.
She was thin
And not remembering.

In the church
The priest had
Called her Barbara.
But she was Bab’s
So thin
Within the
Chipboard box.

A hymn was
Played
While I was
In the branches
Of the tree,
Above the heads
In liquid light.

I wept then
Quiet among the
Branches
As Bab’s rose to her
Wedding,

Light flaming from
The many single heads
All unknowing.

To think her
Funeral was her
Wedding.
And all remains
Were laid to rest.

All New

I was only four,
It was all so new to me
On that seashore.
To see what’s there
I turned the rock,
Like opening a magic door,
Uncovering creatures
With eyes or claw.

I looked at me
Through their own eyes,
Without the words
That speak such lies.
I loved them,
For I loved myself.
What will I find
What new, what wealth?
What will I see
What will I feel,
What will I know,
As there I kneel?

No plastic toy
With this compares.
No bow or gun
This mystery shares.
Just one more rock,
One more stone turned,
To see those eyes,
That with mine burned.
With life they shone,
And lit my own.

Without the words,
That tell the lies,
I knew what life was
In those eyes.

You Are It

I feel so satisfied,
Having finished the work
That only slowly
Revealed to me how much
I wanted it done –
Things seen out of
The corner of one’s eye.
And now I am sitting on the floor
In front of my wood fire –
Timber I cut and chopped myself –
Looking out of a window.
Brilliant blue sky,
With an edge of heavy dark clouds.
And as I look,
That feeling pervades me again.
It has put green shoots
Above the dug soil
Of my awareness.
I barely know it yet,
But I sense what is growing.
It is the knowing that everything
Is here in this moment.
The past is here,
Ancient, hoary, and as
New and fresh as each breath.
Yes, the rise and fall
Of this beautiful beast breathing.
Breathing as it ever has,
Through all the lives
Of the mothers and fathers,
The kinsmen and kinswomen,
Who gave this life it now is.
And this now, knowing itself,
As the latest dancing moment
Of all those moments we call
The past – as if to dismiss them.
Yet here I am still carrying
That slippery ooze in my balls
For love of it,
And love of all
That my dance sprang from.
Here I am with everything
I danced upon the way.
And yes, everything
Is with me too.
I’m not sure why
I could never see it before.
So I ask you
Are you breathing too?
And can you feel it?
That you don’t exist
Without the air?
That you are the air!
And don’t you drink,
And don’t you eat also?
Doesn’t that light something in you?
Recognition maybe?
Woven you are,
Of everything around you.
The gravity –
Where would your house, car,
Chair, body, be without it?
The fire, the sun,
The mazing beginning of it all
Where would you to be without that?
You wouldn’t
Would you?
There would be no sun or rocks or
Ought else to be with us.
And don’t you want to sing with me?
Seeing how every moment,
Every ordinary thing
You do, is completely,
Utterly, absolutely,
Unendingly, fully,
An expression of it ALL!
You can’t scratch yourself
Without it being holy.
It couldn’t happen
Without everything taking part.
So please laugh with me,
And cry.
Tell me you know.
Know that here –
This moment –
All that has been,
All that can be –
Is with you.

Angel Soul

More than a man and less than a God,
A fool by any name,
I traipse the dim lit streets of life
Discovering my shame.
I have the soul of an angel,
With the great wings of the air,
But my heart and bowel,
They still run foul
Of the manliness hid there.

I’ve every good intention,
To take the world by storm,
But my every good intention,
Turns out to be forlorn.
My foolishness turns in my lips,
To jewels of pregnant wit.
While in my efforts to be wise,
I make an ass of it.

Where Am I

I asked the web of hugeness,
Of which I am a woven part,
To help me understand
What I face this day.
And in the silence
I heard the hugeness say,
Listen — what do you hear?
You hear the beating of your heart,
And in your ears
The flux of your own blood.

Now look —
What do you see?
You see your shadow
Ahead of you
On the track you walk.
And looking back
You see the path you came by
Winding to the past,
Full of memories and deeds.

I listened and heard.
I looked and saw,
Just as the hugeness told me.
But what of the future,
I asked.
And the answer was;
If you turn your gaze
In that direction
You see the uncreated.

And yes, there in front,
The swirling possibilities
Of all my dreams,
Emerging forms of
My longings and my hopes.
Before me were the patterns
Of my passions taking shape,
And my working days
Moulding the road ahead.

So in this moment now,
With prayerful craft,
I form the subtle threads
Of passions and of thoughts
Into the weave
Of what will come to be.

What is a woman – What is a Man

It was the dead fish in a dream that led me to these feelings.
I was reminded of all the sperm that comes away from a man during a lifetime.
Then image after image of women flashed through my mind.
Pictures of women in black brassieres and black corset straps.
Women with fags in their mouth with unfeeling hard faces.
Women having a period.
As I watched I saw they were all images pushed at me by our culture, by advertising and films.
They were images I had been handed of women.
It’s so fucking unreal. It’s so unreal.
It’s just a whole big picture people have made of what a woman is, and what sex is.
So unreal. A huge picture people have painted about this thing.
It’s so terrible. It’s just not like that.
Life, sex, isn’t like that – as awful or as beautiful.
We keep going off and getting stuck like a bloody old record.
These images and feeling dead inside like the fish in the dream are all a part of it; part of being dead.
All this bloody muck on top of you from our culture about tits and brassieres, and pictures of women with their legs open, as if that is womanhood.
That’s not womanhood. It’s a part of a woman’s equipment, but a woman is something so different.
Womanhood is a lovely thing. Why picture it as all those things?
It’s not just a fairytale thing either.
A woman is a real animal who feels something personal behind all her body equipment.
There’s a real human being, with fears, hopes, love, weakness, strength, and we give our youngsters this bloody stupid image – of men too – and it’s all part of the deadness.
Such a huge thing this dead fish.
It is an image of the sickness of sexuality in our society.
As a nation we don’t want to admit it as sickness.
We accept the strip shows, pawnshops, prostitution, rampant homosexual activity, as parts of our permissive or accepting society.
It’s suave to accept.
But we accept because we don’t want to take a look at ourselves as individuals, individuals who make up this culture we live in.
We would rather blame it on to somebody else – it’s them – the youth – the coloureds, the dorpouts.
Well it is, isn’t it?
We still have the ghost of the middle class, or upper class ideal of the English culture and family life of loving devotion and romance haunting us.
We’ve got a crippling image of what is right to do, but what a terrible price individuals have to pay – prostitution, pornography, strip clubs.
We torture ourselves by trying to live morals and a way of life, rules of relationship in marriage and family, that is flagrantly sick.
We try to conform to a society that has a deep sickness.
Because of this I thought I was sick.
I have been murdering myself trying to cure my own beautiful wildness.

The Word

I was there when he
Spoke his first words.
He slept in the room
Across the landing,
With his parents.
So the door to my bedroom
Was opposite.
And he liked to
Come in each morning
To see what I was doing —
Maybe to sit with me
And look at the photos
Flitting on my computer screen.

But on this morning
He was being led past my door
By his mum, holding his hand.
And as he was reluctantly passing
He called my name,
For the first time.
I can’t remember ever hearing
My name sounds like that.
It was thrilling to hear
His child voice.

It wasn’t just a sound,
Nor just my name,
But a call from his
Whole being to reach me.
It came out of his
Unbroken body.
No, more than that —
I experienced
The soul of his intent
Touching me.

The Vigil

This is the darkness of night,
I stand in vigil and vigilant.
It is my chosen task to be the one
Who through this time of shadows
Remains awake and dwells
For this season amongst
The corridors of memories and thoughts,
Watching over those whose lives
I celebrate and desire to be.
And in me rises the light that
Keeps at bay the creatures
That might otherwise haunt these hours.
It is the primal light of Life,
The drive to be, the
Innate power to exist.
And as I am the sentinel
Of the darkness,
The eyes of my sleeping kin,
I know I must remain alert
And keep alive awareness
That I am the urge to be.
I know too that dawn,
The light that changes all
So magically with its easy touch,
Will come despite the
Seeming endless watch I keep.
And in that new day
We can live another life.

The Tree

I am a tree,
With my roots
Deep into the earth.
Feeding from all that has lived
In the past of my family.
I feed from the lives of others,
Who have left, sinking into the earth,
The leaves of their creations
And their endeavours.
Up from the deep darkness
Of the unknown
I draw my sustenance.

So many bodies have been formed,
So many words engraved,
So much love and war,
Buildings shaped and crumbled,
For me to draw on in my sap.
These are the rich soil,
The rich souls,
For my boughs and leaves
To draw on in their forming.

And on my leaves
The sunshine
Of the unformed,
The as yet to be.
I draw it in to mingle
With what already lived –
And died.
And in that mingling
I can sense fruition.

Innate in me,
As in every tree,
The blossoming and seed –
The passion and the flowering.
And this I give to you,
As all those beings at my roots,
So gave to me –
Their leaves,
Their seeds,
My life.

Photo From Toyota zero emissions advert

The Song

Did you hear it?

What, the song thrush here,
And in the tree the blue tit?

Yes, but did you hear the dog bark?

I heard a dog howling
Last night in the dark.

Was it joined with sounds of cricket on the green?

Only now you mention it,
The crack of ball on bat,
I hear but haven’t seen.

Was there a piano accompanying all those too?

I didn’t catch the music’s voice,
Not as well as you.

You didn’t hear the harmony,
The voices all as one,
The orchestra of all those sounds
With single voice of none?
I heard it here this afternoon,
One voice sang through them all,
Collecting all the sounds of life,
Into one vibrant call.

The Hand

See my hand is opened
Look at what it held
Some night dreams
And some day dreams
That for a while impelled.

See my hand is opened
All it held is gone
People, desires, and longings,
Leaving me alone.

The Jungle God

The path led through arm thick bamboo,
Up past open glades on that small mountain,
To sit that glad night through
Huddled with Sarah against the wet mist.
Talking on the strange emptiness
At the middle of things.
Pondering slowly,
In the dark Jungle,
On the mysteries.

Then, talking still,
We walked back down
That oriental mount.
On paths worn smooth
By human feet
Through millennia’s use.
Through jungle strange with night,
Sensing our way,
We came upon a dim glade.

We stopped – awe full.
Around us,
Around the central phallic column of stone,
Rising from its Lotus base,
Buzzing power.
Breathless we stood,
Anxious, wondering,
Confronting a sense of death,
An unknown force,
Perhaps a being.

Unprepared, we had stumbled
Into a temple without walls,
A living shrine to a jungle deity,
A god, alive and felt.
Sarah, stunned,
With a presentiment of death,
Stood facing that dark doorway
Known to us all,
Though often mist obscured.
And I, amazed,
And penetrated by the presence,
Stepped slowly forward,
To know it better.
And in its voiceless way it spoke.

It was the timeless jungle life,
Growth, decay, death and renewal.
Forever changing,
Forever the same,
Focused, there in the stone,
Through the ages,
By men and women who,
As we, had pondered the mysteries,
Venerated the stone,
And honoured the traces
Left by past minds.
Traces of perception
And collective wisdom,
Into decay and renewal,
Into life and death.

The forces of the jungle,
And the worshipful mind,
Focused beyond the small view
Of personal existence,
Had glimpsed the great cycles,
The one in the many,
The timeless in the changing,
And fused, they became
This jungle God.
A God evolving and existing
Through countless generations.
The jungle, the collective mind,
Shining through the stone,
In the jungle dimness.

Then it was done.
We were alone again,
In the dark trees,
With the cold stone.

The Interior Castle

I am Recorder.
I record if I can but stand beyond
Personal desire for my own fame,
My own aggrandisement of self.
As recorder I am a priest.
Not a priest in a temple.
Not a priest who needs a building or creed.
I am a priest of life,
Because I am blessed with the ability
To stand naked in the middle of Love.
Imperfect as I am,
I can still stand here as a witness.
Standing in my own weakness,
In the prescence of love,
Naked.

Love is the greatest preparation in realising your Centre,
Your universal spirit.
Love is life, and we cannot set rules and regulations around it.
Telling love what it ought to be doing,
What it should be doing, is ridiculous.
Love is its own law.
It doesn’t need a priest or lawgiver
To tell it what is right or wrong.
It IS life.
It IS the lawgiver, the judge and the goal.
Love carries within it all the magnificent processes of life –
Attraction, repulsion, reproduction, caring and death.

Sometimes all that keeps us alive –
Alive in the sense of having a feeling spirit,
Of having love in our life – even the caring for a pet or a child.
Those are the channels of life in our times.

Finding the depths of Love,
Of Life and its power, is called initiation.
And the first stage of initiation is Opening The Gate.
In this first stage you are allowed into the walled city
Because the gate has been opened to let you in.
And the walled City
Is the secret place of your own being that you,
Out of your own wisdom or fear,
Have kept shut from yourself.
But the city has walls within the outer wall.
So although you are in the gate
You can only move around in the outer circle.
This large part of the city allows you to trade,
To work, to have relationships with other inhabitants,
To make and spend money, and all the other activities of the outer life.
If you live in this first level in a way
That does no harm to other inhabitants;
If you do not proselytise
Or try to get others to follow you as a leader for personal aggrandisement,
Then you are given entrance into the second level of initiation.
This second level is when you begin to see,
Within the ordinary, the strange mystery underlying all things,
And start a quest for it.
And there are seven levels to this interior castle,
Levels that will open to you on the quest.

But I am old.
I am wounded.
And I have trodden the high ground of the interior castle.
I stand here with pride, in my wounds, in my strength,
But mostly in my humility and love.
Those are the gifts
That have been forged through parenthood,
And through the knowledge I have gained.
Blessings to those who shared the land.
Blessings to those who gave to me of themselves
To forge this path upon which I am only a footprint.

It is from this place I wish to speak to you.
I wish to tell you a secret of the High Ground.
It is that Lust transcends all.
It reaches across chasms.
It dares and achieves where the delicate traceries of hope,
Care and succouring cannot exist in the harsh climate.
Perhaps lust throws trace lines across chasms,
Across places previously untrod.
Perhaps it throws a tracery that again and again
May be torn or disrupted – again and again –
Until something holds.
Then, across and through that tiny link,
Life passes, making it a capillary, a vein, an artery.
The artery becomes a thoroughfare,
commonplace and thronged.
That is the life of Pathfinder.

Sometimes lust is enough.
But when we have food enough,
When we have shelter and companionship,
There is time enough for care.
There is time enough to look upon our family
And those near to us and recognise their needs,
And to give of oneself.
That is the first step beyond lust.
This may be called from us by parenthood,
Or by the simple caring for the person sitting next to us,
Injured next to us, dying next to us.
Inadequate as our love may be,
The opening of the second gateway
needs some small measure of love,
Of care, of self-giving.

But beware of large groups –
Of companies – for they take on a life of their own.
Keep your ideals high,
And expect the same from those who deal with you.
To work for an organisation
Is the same as any commited relationship.
If you have given much,
Do not accept being dropped or thrust aside.

And learn from the animals.
Be close to them in your life,
For they are great teachers, and great in love.
Watch the beautiful bitch,
Running, barking in joy at her heat,
But having her eye on a particular male.
There is beauty.
See the horse, running, jumping,
Feeling so free after release from its day’s work.
In that way it is returning to itself,
Returning to the spirit through its free movement.
You too should run thus
And find again the rhythm of your most interior self.

Us little people,
You and I,
With such great loves,
Transcending ourselves
Making us wonders –
Lifting our fearful feet
Beyond our sense of self
Toward some unknown
We dare not tread,
Except through love.

Touched by your
Ever present desire
I am alive
Who was dead.
I am wondrous
Who was ordinary.
I am made
Beyond myself.

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Tony Crisp