Author Archive

The Table

We are sitting at TABLE.
Table is very important you understand –
For a family that is.
Table has all the right knives and forks.
It has all the correct glasses.
Table has manners.

Into this ‘table’ comes a little kid.
He is about three.
Mother is on the left.
Next to her is her eldest son.
He is a shattered person.
Daughter is successful.
She is like Mum –
Who is ‘successful’.
The daughter is an attractive girl.
Mum has ‘made it’ –
So everything Mum says goes.

Husband, across the way,
Is shut out.
HE is not even at the table.
But is standing by the
Outside door,
Not allowed at table,
And barely existing.
His task was to fuck her
For her to have a baby.
This is the woman.

So into this came the four year old.
With all this business going on.
The mother doesn’t say anything.
She doesn’t have to.
She’s got the daughter trained.
So well trained she’s running
Hither and thither.
She leaps up –
It could be my own daughter
And her mother –
And says ‘Caleb’ – the child –
‘You either sit here and eat this or -‘

I don’t know what the alternatives were.
don’t think there were any.
As a feeling creature
This small boy was given no options.
The elder son, Eddie,
Is sitting there squirming.
He has already been through this mill,
This degradation.

He groans – ugh ughhh.
But he doesn’t step out of it.
He hasn’t earned his own living,
So he can’t step out of it and say,
‘Fuck you, you cunts’.
He can’t, he is still at home,
And mum is still keeping him.
So he’s got to be careful.

He says under his breath,
‘I’ve got to be careful
Of this dangerous bitch.
Ugh Ugghh –
Give Caleb space.’
And I sit there,
Trying to be polite.
I say to myself,
‘Be polite Josh.
This woman has already,
In front of my wife,
Asked me to give her a baby.
It felt a bit like rape;
Like she was trying to devour me –
Like I was a titbit.

But I talked with the boy,
Pointing out the scene –
Father at the door –
Baby being trained.
The ball was set rolling.
‘Thank you! Thank you!’ he said.
‘You dominant bitch,
You’ve got me by the balls.’

The Cloud

You can’t see space,
But you can feel it.
In the sky,
When the clouds hang
Distant from each other
In the clear air,

The territory of the mind’s
Vision fills the empty miles
Of sweep between the floating
Worlds of white and whiter.
Fills space,
Fills distance,
Fills all the limitless heavens.

Yesterday,
Hanging over the sea,
Ten miles from me,
A mile above the water,
How tall itself I do not know,
A cloud shone
In the sun,
Covering the sea
With light.

And back,
And back,
And beyond
Again and again
Other clouds hung
In the limitless emptiness.
And I laughed
At the radiant cloud.

Quietly Entering Lives

I’ve been painting windows,
Up a ladder,
In the street where Mr. H. lives.
Its his house
That Ive been working on,
In a Bristol side street.
And each day
As Ive worked
Ive watched the people
Of the road go by.
And slowly
They have come to know me,
The old guy
Up the ladder
Painting windows.

Two boys live next door
And they say Hi
As they go by.
Their mum asked me
Yesterday,
If I had heard her
Fall down her stairs
From top to bottom.
She showed me the bruises
On her arms.
I felt the pain.

A man from down the road
Says hallo each day,
And the Indian families
Across the road
Bring out their children
Every morning for school.
Their voices are
Such music to me
As I look down
From up on high.
So many questions
They ask so eagerly.
And when I smiled
The mother smiled too,
To share such joy.

A black guy drove
Slowly by just now
In his large BMW.
And further down the road
An African woman
Always catches my attention.
She has a body like
Ripe fruit,
Bursting with juice,
Full of life.
And several times each day
I see the woman with
Red, yellow and green hair.
Walk by or cruises
On her bicycle.
She dresses like her hair.

And as they each pass me,
Up the ladder,
I feel the sharing
Of the road;
Of our proximity;
Of smiles
And childrens laughter.
I sense the entering
Of subtle things
Given to each other
In Mr H’s Road.

Planes

From where I stand
The clouds spread in every direction.
Multitudes, thundery but not black.
A plane slides under them,
Heavy and slow as it
Approaches landing –
Yet drifting beneath the clouds
Ponderous but floating easy
In its controlled fall.

The afternoon clouds
And the warm sunshine
Are filled with planes
Coming home
Like bees I have
Watched circling their hive
Gliding in weighty
With nectar or pollen.

Planes, cumbersome with lives.
Lives gliding in from elsewhere.
Returning home?
Leaving home?
Parting, endeavouring,
Loving, enduring
Lives come sinking to earth
From the forever sunlit
Starlit place above.

I know,
As the sky sounds to
The hum of another flying giant,
That I want to go home.

Morning

Twelve cockatoos fly swearing and shouting at each other
In the warm air – dropping and weaving,
Lifting and rolling through the sky,
Making the waves washing over me –
Waves of sound, of movement, of being alive.

Then, along the path in the early morning
A snake necked cormorant standing with
Wide wings spread to the sun
Head high, eyes open,
Ageless life, manifest,
In unbounded variety.

Two moorhens, each with a chick,
Small, fragile living fluff moving
Rippling their tiny presence
On the water, in the air,
Through everything.

Further, a pelican, still, waiting,
Watching for movement
Within the lake with patient alertness,
As you or I might watch for opportunity,
Might reach and touch and see each other.

Mexico

He asked me this silly question, ‘Was Mexico good?’

I said to him, ‘Good’ What do you mean, ‘good’?

‘What happened in Mexico picked me up and shook me. It threw me on the ground and made love to me. Then it left me alone and I cried like a child. The mountains skirting Monterey opened my eyes to a vision of God’s immensity, and I was dumb with it.

And all the time Mexico revealed its poverty to me, and I saw its orphans, the weak ones, with cross-eyes and vulnerable. I held the lovely girl with the scar across her head from her father’s machete attack. I met the young boy bursting with intelligence who was trying to exercise his mind, but only had a dud battery and broken electric motor from a toy to do it with.

I watched birds under the eaves of the house rearing their young, and saw the small ones fall back into death.

Everywhere there were children on the streets, working, trying to sell to eat, and there were places with waiters dressed like servants to attract the American dollar.

For weeks I had the shits from the food. But my guts developed antidotes and I ate and slept and dreamt wonderful dreams, feeling and losing my manhood to age.

In Mexico, before the rains came, and in the dark of night, love spoke to me. It opened the deep rooms of my heart, where a child hid and waited. And love spoke to the child of my heart in its own language. Then the child came out from its hidden room, because it had waited my lifetime to hear those words. For Love said, ‘My darling child, I want you with all the passion, longing, and desperate pain that you want me. I must reach out to you always, else I am lost.’

And the child received those words and was made whole.

Then Mexico fed me with experience. It exercised my soul to its extremes, until I collapsed laughing and crying. Anger tore at me until I kicked the wall and fell on my bed beating it in frustration and loss. Anger because events parted me from love, until I found peace in the difficulty.

Mexico took me from everything that had been home. My work, the good facilities of my house, my longtime friends and loves were gone. And she and I transformed an empty house into a home, and in that home created warmth.

Mexico has her face etched upon it in my soul.

Melbourne Bars

Vengeful bars vomiting their breed
Of people onto the pavements.
Like clusters of wasps buzzing
From the noise of the
Electronic vibrations
That have irritated them.
And restaurants
Instilling hurry and worry
Into the commerce of
Eating.
Pay the bill.
Pay the price!

Walking into home
Removing the street clothes
To bathe in the warmth
with bare skin.
And the dog moves a paw
In recognition of my passing
As he soaks the cool from the wall.
And I sit in the shade of the house
Watching the cat spread on the
Path away from the sun.
The flowers shine colour
without moving,
Touching me
As the breeze moves things,
Slowly.

Kin

At the bottom of the yard today,
Down where the ground slopes
Into the creek
I sat near the great fir tees
Listening to the breathless hush
In which we each make our sounds
And commit our movements.
Looking up I saw the crows
Flying with twigs in their beaks
Building their nests.

I had built a nest for my children
With the help of my mate.
I had worked
A day
A week
Years – to feed my chicks.
I know the struggle
I know the joy
I know the kinship
With these birds
Whose young,
As did mine,
Look awkwardly
Through bright eyes.

These trees
I know too,
Who have toiled
Establishing themselves
From tiny seeds.
Haven’t I
Been a tiny seed,
Braved the journey of growth,
Of winter and storm,
Of competition
Disease and fall?

I witness
Upon the body
Of these trees
The marks of life
As upon my own.
I am a kin
To this wide garden
In which
All manner of things
Exist with me.

It Was A Quiet Day

It has been such a hot dry summer,
And I stood on the bridge
Looking at the shallows in the river.
I wondered if the salmon could come upstream yet.
There was so little water,
Even the trout seemed quiet.

Idly standing there
I noticed a drop of water
From the recent shower
Fall from a branch and strike a berry
Hanging near me.

And in that moment I could see
Everything in the droplet’s fall,
And the berry’s gentle swing.
Everything and everywhere
Were in that moment —
In each moment and its movement.

The sun, the wind,
The Earth’s slow circling,
Clouds and living things,
All had taken part
In the production
Of that moment.

It was a quiet day.
I spoke to no one.
What need was there?
In every moment — everywhere.

Then time was so wonderful,
When for years I had longed
For it to halt.
There had been too many days
Testing my life
And asking so much.

But now I wanted to look
At everything,
So grateful for spaces
Between things,
And that it all came
One thing at a time
So I could appreciate
Each new thing.

Enmeshed – Merging and Emerging

Tonight I walked from the cluster of houses into the warm desert. There I became a surface for the full moon to shine upon, and food for crowding mosquitoes.

Living by myself has grown that habit, of walking alone, of looking at things from a distance. Yes, I am enmeshed in the life around me, in other people’s lives, in work and relationships. But there are degrees of involvement. There are shades, steps and angles to the way we move and exist within a community and within the world.

On this stage, and on this full-mooned night, I am made aware of this. I feel the place I stand intensely. With sadness I know a breach was made, a connection severed, and my place in the life of my fellows altered. I never previously saw the extent of my links with the normal, with the acceptable, with what people respect or feel easy with. But now, standing in this new place, sitting alone in the desert, feeling the mosquito bite, I know it clearly.

The known is that I am sharing a house with a married woman whose husband has only just become present. If I were a servant, separated from the woman of the house by the firm social barrier of employer and employed, of servant and mistress, there might be some programme in the minds of observers that shows a green light instead of the red light of suspicion. But the questions are asked, ‘What is this man doing in the house of this woman? How is it her husband allows this? Why does the woman want this?’

It means that any care or contact must be hidden. Love must be denied. Any depth or freedom of communication undertaken only when there is no possibility of others present.

Essentially, while living with another, I am alone, denied, hidden. There is no wonderful intimacy I might have with a lover or wife. I am devoid of the social status and acknowledgement I would be offered as a husband or committed partner.

These I have known in my marriage and in other relationships. I took them hungrily, holding my woman in public, taking her hand, feeling secure in intimacy. I was proud of our social recognition as a couple.

You seldom know how good those things are until you have lived with them for years, then lost them. And I lost them, and stand-alone under the moon, hearing the dogs bark and fight in Los Frailes. The woman and her man are away somewhere together, and I am sitting on a rock wondering about what I have lost, and what I have gained. I look at the emptiness in my left hand, the emptiness of loss. In my right hand is what I gained, and I search it to see if it satisfies.

I wander back over the years, meeting and warmly greeting old familiar memories. From being with them again I see that I wanted this aloneness. I moved toward the freedom enabling me to explore new relationships, to go in my own direction. This can be a wonderful feast of choices. But I want to warn this woman I feel love for, that it is also a torn place, an experience of separation and divorce. Few of us can tolerate freedom in someone we depend upon or need. It is too painful. Anxiety, jealousy, anger or hopelessness, the destruction of dreams, arise too easily. Few of us who ourselves want freedom, can tolerate it in others we love or are bonded with. It is one of those paradoxes of human behaviour. The man who so easily has an affair, is riven and angry if his woman behaves in the same way.

I walked slowly back into Los Frailes, feeling new bites from mosquitoes, and still hearing the dogs barking. I quietly explored roads I had not seen before, feeling, as I had intensely felt many times before, that human love has a finer face than we see when jealousy, possessiveness, competition or childhood pains not yet outlived shape its features. I had longed to find an expression of love in myself and others, not evoked by human frailties. My dream has always been of a new family, a new form of trying to build carefully and caringly within the strange and often awful world of present-day societies and cultures. I see it built upon mutual support and sharing of skills, on a form of love that is not possessive, nor ignorant of sexually transmitted diseases. In my dream, I see this Family mutually owning property, goods, and the larger needs of everyday living – not as a collective, but on the understanding that this mutuality has enormous benefits. Not least among these would be security through ownership for one’s children and oneself, that in the past was only known by the church through its enormous riches in property, by large corporations, and by families who had accumulated enormous wealth through the work of underpaid, or enslaved employees.

Perhaps this is only my personal feelings, but I love to walk in its quiet streets, looking at its beautiful walled gardens and hearing the cicadas sing, as I am doing here in Los Frailes this warm night.

A Stand of Trees

Above Coelbren in the hills,
There is an ancient Roman road.
One bright November afternoon,
I sought that road.
Along unmarked footpaths,
Through the creviced hills
Of river valleys,
I roamed in hope
To set my feet upon the stones
Of that old way.

Then, discovering an unpaved track,
I followed its sloping downward path
Toward another valley.
Past inclined meadows
Rich green, and reeded,
Mossy with the rain,
Across sounding rivulets
Spattering in their flow,
Down into sunshine.

Turning a right-hand bend,
A wonder stopped me.
There, across a river,
A grand hill sloped wide
Across my vision.
And on its rise,
In clear fresh sunlight,
A stand of trees.

Quietly I adored them.
The birches,
Like a dappled nearby edge
To this great wood,
Are leafless now,
Making a billowing misty purple
Against the dark green power
Of the many pines.

Playing other notes of colour,
Swelling and falling
On the soft curves of that hill,
The oaks, still holding leaves,
Play yellow and amber music
With the sun.
But here and there,
Peeping through,
Hazels shine spring green.

The voiceless voices
Of their great limbs;
The artless art,
Of their rich colour;
The river sounds,
The framing meadows,
All gave to me,
The stand of trees.

Whose Pussy Are You?

From the moment I was born
My pussy was not my own.
Some big corporation
Wrapped it up
As if it were their own.
Everybody was muscling in
To get at my sweet pussy;
They powdered it,
They washed it
And bathed it
In sweet soap.
But as I grew
They didn’t leave,
But muscled in anew,
To own parts of my pussy
And penetrate yet more.
The pharmaceutical companies
Plugged me up if I should bleed,
They took away my periods
In case I should bear child
And all the precious things I had
Are cared for now by them.
And so my poor dear pussy
I wonder who you are.
Will they let me visit you
In your sterile jar?

Where My Stallion?

I want to die!
Even my body aches
And creaks with the struggle of this life.
Is it old age,
To be in one’s fifties?
Does it mean my life has finished,
That I can find no work,
No creative spark,
No love, in my life?
Does age always lead,
Like this, to feeling second-class –
To being unproductive,
Impoverished,
With no way ahead?
No sex. No money.
No opportunity,
To be part of
Creative action in the world?
Must I accept this,
That I cannot achieve
Any reward or satisfaction?
Yet I had climbed
Such mountains of vision.
There was in me
A sparkling fountain
Of ever new creations.
The zest in me
Was a wonderful horse —
A stallion of power —
Carrying me,
Sometimes laughing,
Sometimes weeping,
Over and through challenges,
Despair, chasms,
Love and hate.
So where is my stallion now?
Where the steed
That carried me through all barriers?

The question pauses me.
I stand and look around.
It is a dark world,
Lonely and desolate.
And as I look,
I realise its strangeness.
I see my shabby clothes,
My hands, bony and wrinkled.
And I am on a stony track,
Winding ahead.
A track, whose every stunted tree,
I now recognise.
Recognise as having passed
A hundred times before.
Recognise at last
That I am on a loop,
Trapped on a Mobius strip,
That has no end.
No way out.
No pause.
And yes, it is a dream!
But no, not sleep induced.
A waking nightmare
Of entrapment.
And as I look around,
Eyes now made sharp,
By this new perception,
I see that, as with dreams,
Each rock, each tree,
Is shaped by my own fantasy.

Happening upon this path,
Suggested by my being
Without my love,
Without my work,
And hope lost on the way,
I believed this self-created world
Was real — was waking true.
Yet how can this not be so?
My wife has gone.
There is no work.
My body truly ages!
I do feel lost,
Afraid, and dying.
And yet! And yet —
As I look about
With this new insight,
I sense a saddle,
And the beauty of my horse’s strength.
I feel the power and the possibility
Of my life.
Yet, in looking down,
I see no saddle, and no horse.
But I feel them still!
So what is real?
And, wondering,
I close my eyes,
And reach with searching fingers,
To find the living, pulsing flesh
Of my great stallion,
There beneath me.
But, pulsing with the movement
Of my hopes and fears,
It comes and goes.

I stand amazed!
Pounded by an obvious fact,
That what I thought was me,
Is but a fragile moving thing,
Inconstant as my shifting
Thoughts and feelings.
The reality that pounds me,
Is that beyond emotions,
Beyond my thoughts,
I am Nothing!
Nothing but Existence–
And with my heart and soul
I create the world’s
In which I dwell.
Light or dark,
Heaven or Hell,
Prisoner or free.
All of them,
Each one of them, is me!
And with a swelling heart,
With joy, I see
That if each thought, each fear
Creates this world I’m trapped in,
How can I be a failure,
Or a success,
Or great, or small?
And with this amazement
Still upon me
I see that in my essence
I am none of these.
And in my nothingness,
The wonder is,
I can be anything!
Ah – Here’s my stallion.

What is Born this Christmas

What is born this Christmas?
Each moment is born to us.
Opportunity calls us
To respond
With care? With haste?
With awareness of the
Perpetual meeting?

What is born this Christmas?
It is a child –
Any child, anywhere, any day.
You and I were that child.
The son or daughter we
Might have are that child.

What is born this Christmas?
It is life.
It is love
Born this day.
In hovels and palaces
It is born this day.
In malice or wonder
It arrives and walks with us.

What is born this Christmas?
My reaching to you.
I may not be who you
Would me to be.
But I am born
To you
As you are born to me
Today.

Wayside Flower

As the lithe green plant withers
And drops into the earth,
So my soul crumbles to you
Like dry leaves into the formless
From which I arose.

By an unknown faith and love
The herb dies gladly into the soil
From which it struggled,
Lost in all the fragments
Of past summers
And warm springs yet to come.
Dispersed and scattered,
Dissociated and unformed.

And I look upon the wayside flower,
Reaching through the tall grass,
And in its petalled face
See peace and a great prayer.
For flowers can pray.

Within me I hear
The echo of its worship.
“I am here!
I am here!
Out of the dark into the light,
I am here.
Out of nothingness
The mystery wrought me.
Out of the pieces of its being I arise.
In surety I live,
Until I die, back into the mystery,
To be lived again,
Or be forever that which lived me.”

Thus spoke the flowers to my soul.
So can I too,
In a more conscious faith and love,
Die into the nothingness
From whence I came?
Can my trust transmute
My fear to joy and
Willingness to be dispersed?

Am I convinced
My soul too
Will be relived
In yet another summer,
When a warm spring
Will bring me
Out of the darkness
Of my unknowing?

Yes, somewhere,
My soul too is a wayside flower.

Watching Nature Groan

I stood looking at the urban life around me
And as my vision cleared,
I saw the influence of commerce,
And how nature groans under its impact.
As I watched I saw the signs of
Nature moving toward ridding itself of this parasite;
A parasite that is clutching its dirty hands
Right into the earth – Right into you.
It is going to suck at you in any way it can;
Suck to earn a living – to survive.
Suck at long suffering nature;
And nature is your own body.
As we abuse and misuse
This nature that we are,
So sickness develops.
Isn’t that why so many people
Develop cancerous growths
Where there once was life?
The breasts the ovaries,
The testicles, the prostate;
They have been abused for so long.
We need to recognise what we do as unhealthy.

Do you want a mechanised life?
Do you want to be part
Of a huge mechanised food machine?
Because the way we live,
We are not only treating nature and the animals
As if they are machines,
To be plugged in and run without care,
We are doing it to ourselves.
The processes and drives
That have taken millions of years to develop,
Are being abused by our attitude
Of seeing nature as something
Without awareness or response.
And as nature hits back
People are so surprised.
Those attitudes are impinging
On your own life,
On your own children,
On your own reproductive faculties.
Are you and your children
Simply resources to be eaten up
And used by huge commercial companies?
Do you want your ovaries and sperm
Measured, dictated, controlled
By pharmaceuticals?
There are so many people
Handing their genitals,
Their emotions and their body
Over to these companies to control.
The mind manipulating drugs,
The contents of the food
We now eat are dictated by commercial interests –
Such things as shelf life,
Quantity of sales,
And the unhealthy desires
In those who buy the goods,
Poisoned day after day by alcohol
And tobacco.

But the mother is the supreme guardian of her eggs.
They are her sacred trust,
Her treasure,
Her ancient and wonderful heritage.
Each woman must judge,
Through inner searching and questioning,
What her deepest being shows her
About how to relate to and care for that treasure.
She must penetrate the motives
Of those who attempt to take control
Of her reproductive faculties.
Are they benign,
Or are their activities
Directed by commercial interests in profit motives?
Are they perhaps, as in past ages, disguised predators?
What you want done with your eggs
And your children, is your choice.
It is through that choice you create the future.
You create your future and the future of the world.

Tread carefully with life.
Each of us in our decision-making
Are quantum probability generators.
How we handle our sexuality
And reproductive functions,
Creates and destroys futures.
The choice to have or not to have a child,
To bear or to abort,
Alter the very future.
On those moments of decision
Whole new futures are built or destroyed.
The moment of decision
Is an unbelievable point of flux.
Around that moment
Infinite possibilities surge.
They break through,
Moving toward becoming real,
Or are pushed back remaining mere potential.
If we could view this as a process,
We would witness
An astounding play of energies and possibilities.
And often, we, in our ignorance,
Play with these mighty forces
As if they were games to be amused by,
Or simple sensory pleasures
That can be used without any consequence
In our lives or in the lives of others.
But we stand amidst an infinite mystery.

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Tony Crisp