Author Archive

Puzzling

I was alone from an early age.
Strange what made me realise it.
I was in the car with the radio on,
And listening to one of the soaps.
Jenny’s dad was seriously ill,
Perhaps dying.
She was so upset.
Sort of drugged.
Only just coping.
And I thought how
Strange it is that people
Are so upset by death.

Jenny was saying how her dad
Had taken her to football;
And sat and talked,
Even laughed with her.
I have no memories like that.
When my dad died
I felt it deeply,
But it wasn’t anything
To weep about
Or be upset by.
It was just
A meeting with death –
Sort of face to face.
Same with my mum.

Then I realised
How I had been alone
All those years.
There were adults
In the house with me,
Called Mum and Dad.
But those were just names.
We lived in the house together,
But I was alone,
As far as being there with love.
And it feels okay now,
Though it has been bad.
So it seems to me
As if most other people
Live in a different world,
With their feelings
And connections
With others I mean.

It seems to give them a lot of pain.
So my world feels pretty good.
It was rough to start with,
But I learned to let go
Of things and people,
And don’t feel as if
They are part of my
Own self being ripped away.
It is strange hearing Jenny’s
Misery though –
Sort of puzzling.

God – I Ask

Love that does not grasp.

Power that does not bend others to my will.

Wisdom that lets others look upon your face.

Tony Crisp

Round Four

This is round four,
And the bastard has hit me hard.
I’m groggy on my feet
And he is still coming at me.
The crowd is wild.
Is it blood they want to see?
Do they want to see me on my knees
Just like they would love to do
To that big prick at work
Who constantly goads them?
Maybe, but the bell has rung
And I have time to look at their faces.
Yes, some want revenge.
Big time they want it.
But there is another story
In some of the eyes.
I can feel it.
They are right here inside me,
Taking each punch,
Feeling each blow
As it bores into my face.
It is everything
And everybody
That has hit them;
And they want to know
How I stand up again
When all that shit
Hits me in the guts.

Miracles

Such common things,
Miracles,
We often fail to see them,
Passing through them
With a set jaw.
Sitting at the bar
In a dim room,
Or filling our attention
With the latest magazine
And its perennial sex advice
And horoscope.
Yet we might be sitting astride
Immense wings
With hundreds of others,
And, powered by the channelled
Fury of the sun,
Lift into the skies
And cruise above clouds,
Above seas,
Above mountains
And continents,
To land — where?
It’s just one of those
Common, everyday,
Wonderful, miracles.
And why did we invoke
This miracle —
To meet with love?
To experience the new?
To confront opportunity,
Or run from shadows?

And didn’t I
Just yesterday
Walk casually from a house
Warmed by fuel stored
Some million years ago,
To board a vehicle
Waiting through wind,
Storm and shine
To meet my need?
Then, when near it,
I sent a ray darting through space
To unlock the vehicle from its sleep.
Within moments,
I can start a journey of ten,
A hundred,
Even thousands of miles,
In this amazing carriage.
Isn’t that a miracle;
An experience beyond imagination
Just short years ago?
And from that same carriage,
Even while it moves,
I can hear distant voices
Speaking, singing, arguing.
And with a tiny object held
In my hand,
I can reach out to
Almost any spot
On the whole earth,
And question and converse
With someone of my choice.
What strange common
Miracle is that?
How many miracles does it take
To make us cry out in awe?
How many to bring words
Of thanks from us?

Letter to a Son

Never let me forget the day I saw clouds. It was the day I noticed a speck of dust shining and floating for the first time since childhood. It was the day, my son, I thought of you, my oldest, and remembered the pain I have caused you.

Never let me forget that on the day of the clouds, of the speck of shining dust, I realised why I have often hated you and hurt you. What I saw is not easy to explain, yet it is so simple. You see, I have never been a man, and perhaps only now, by Gods grace, may I become one. Not being a man, and feeling the misery of my lack, I have tried to stamp out in you, any signs of that enviable state. For that state of manhood grows in one like a plant, and if its seeking stem is broken, its promise of leaves and blossom can never be. So I ground upon the tiny green shoots of your manhood with my violence, envious of my firstborn, seeing him reach toward the manhood I could not attain.

So, my son, I ask you to forgive me. Not in words, but in your deepest self. For only in that way can you redeem me, and expunge from yourself the scars I have written upon your soul. Because in some strange way, the destinies of parents and children are thus linked, that you must redeem my sin that is yet your own.

But what is this state of manhood, and why should I not have reached it, even at this late date?

Let me say first that manhood, or womanhood, as the case may be, is a very beautiful thing. Beautiful and mysterious, for it reaches into the lives of others and enriches them out of itself. Yet manhood is not our own. It is the out flowing of life within us. Invisible life, unknown, unseen, only felt, grows manhood in us. It grows in us all. But it can be twisted, broken, held back, made hateful, by the evil in men, or the ignorance. I have suffered this just as you have at my own hands. Here is why, having a mans body I have not been a man.

If life is allowed to fulfill itself in us however, then the beauty of manhood can be realised. This beauty is shown as the power to give of oneself to a woman of ones choice. To give freely and lovingly of ones body, of ones flame of succouring manhood, that is lifes gift, of ones sympathy and arms in trial, of ones steadfastness.

My son, you are a piece of my body, and I love you. I hope you will understand when I say that when life is allowed to renew itself in us constantly, to forever continue its growth, we find resources of love for each other. This love, at its first stirrings from the soil of your being is sensuality. As you grow and develop the organs of manhood, it becomes sexuality. In our own age, it is at this point that its growth is capped or maimed. But just as sexuality grows out of the secret places of sensuality, so out of the loveliness of sexuality comes sympathy, understanding, self-sacrifice in loving service, a warm heart to mankind. Only then, as the blossoming from these, comes the spirituality and godliness that so few men have.

At this point, all the others remain, but they have reached up from the earth to the light. While between the earth and the light is a sweet flowering of our human possibilities, wrought not by us, but by life in us.

Reading this, do not misunderstand. None of these things do we have to strive to develop. Our striving is in the sphere of surrender to life or God, that it may be wrought in us. In this way our inner growth is as gentle and unselfconscious or unaware as our physical growth, or the growth of our emotions in adolescence.

This is what I saw on the day of the clouds. This is what I ask to remember through my experience in and beyond this life. This, my son, I pass on to you. This, I hope, your children to, will remember with me.

Your Father

Japan

I couldn’t help seeing it
When he stood before me.
His soul I mean.
There was a big scar
On this Japanese man.

So I asked him
What it was he was carrying
Inside himself.
And at first he turned away,
But I could see he knew
Even though he usually hid it.

Then he turned to me
As I waited for his reply,
And his face was twisted
Making it difficult
For him to talk.
But he pushed words out of his mouth.

It was like he was spitting
Out something bitter.
The Americans,
He managed to
Grind out between his teeth.
They shit on us.
He paused, struggling.

They shit on Hiroshima
Like no other humans
Had ever shit on a nation.
Then – and here he wept,
Not easy for a Japanese man –
They said to us, ‘Now you vermin
We are going to show you
What it is really like to be shat on.”

So they abominated Nagasaki.
We were warriors,
Still fighting like a
Medieval nation,
As the West did in its medieval past.
Nothing had prepared us for
Such humiliation.

He stood upright again
Wiping his eyes
But looking to the ground.
We were conquered,
But those bakayoro (bastards),
Those vengeful strutting foreigners
Made us renounce our Emperor.

Our bodies were vapourised and burnt.
Then they pushed our faces
Into the shit and made us eat it.
They made sure our spirit was
Broken and fouled too.
They urinated and polluted our temple.

He stood for a while,
Slowly breathing deeply
And raised his eyes to mine.
So, with tears in my own eyes
I asked again what he carried.
He smiled slightly.

We have learned to watch
What comes in the sky.
We have learned that when
Such a pig is going to shit on you,
To stand well out of the way!

Hologram

and

Gentleness

Love, through love, was brought into the world. Through love God gave to us the loneliness love brings. The soul longs for what completes it. The world plunges the soul into incompleteness. We, so lost, run through life’s picture show longing for something wonderful. Longing – for those who follow it – leads us to look wherever life takes us.

Somewhere we hope to find ourselves. But through longing we look to others. Nowhere and in no one can we find ourselves. Yet everywhere and in everyone lies the self.

So may you seek with longing for the strange inexplicable that will bring fulfilment. The soul so pours out itself to the world; so does God pour out to man. The path for man lies in pouring yourself out until you are empty. Thus may you be full of emptiness. The pouring calls out all that you have ever taken into yourself. So all experience pours through your being. Pour yourself out to those around you. Burn, weep, be still, and thus becoming all things. Being everything you become everything. The soul breaks, its boundaries dissolve. So dissolves longing, and all that is longed for arises in the self. Emptiness is filled. The filled is empty. Man passes away to become God. God melts and is man. Love lingers like an echo, trembling forever.

To become gentle, that is what I speak to you about. But how? For it is a thing I cannot form. Even the word does not describe it. Is there a way to scatter words around the invisible so the formless be seen? Will the dust of our thoughts be like motes in a sunbeam making it known to us?

When we strive for goals we are not gentle. Nor are we gentle when we give up all striving. Gentleness lies in striving with all the hunger yearning in us, yet at the height of that yearning, realising the human weakness in it, but not killing it because we do not like feeling weak.

Gentleness lies in suffering the torment of power and childlike vulnerability, and through love not hide from ourselves or others. And more than that, in the very midst of it, to live with the valour of the abandoned.

Gentleness is in being willing to go out to others enough to have our love make mighty bonds between us. To do this even though we know bonds bring attachment and pain with their joy and wonder. To commit ourselves to enter into the pain and ecstasy of separateness, yet knowing there is oneness.

And gentleness – if only I could throw a mantle over you, revealing you in the very act of veiling with form; you are, more than all else, to melt, to drop, to go on, to suffer not knowing, not having, not being, and to suffer them gently, with love for the human soul, for the man and woman near you. They too long, seek, feel they have succeeded, yet from gentleness we know they do not know, do not have, have not become, and there arises a great tenderness in us for them and for ourselves. And this is gentleness, which is beyond being, having and knowing.

Freedom

On the stairs from my room,
A wide window overlooks the village,
And beyond that the sea.
Passing on this warm day of radiant light
I see a swarm of flies – trapped.

For hours my thoughts have run,
They have stooped and pressed,
Broken open, images of liberation.
And the flies want it.
They press for release.
They seek it and ceaselessly,
Till life ebbs from them,
Thrust against the glass.

I open the sliding window.
Deep is the space of escape.
But still thrusting
The flies cannot find it.
I cannot help them,
Trapped between the sashes,
And pass on –
To return and see
That every one has found
deliverance
By the intense rejection
Of their plight.

I begin to pass
And see a butterfly
In the lowest corner
Still – as in death.
Its wings tattered
By its own earnest
Yet fruitless quest.

I pick it carefully
And place it
Stood upon the very brink
Of that great open void
Toward the sky.
Motionless still
I nudge it toward the space,
Either to fall lifeless
Or to have what life is in it
Called upon fresh.

It falls.
Like a leaf dropping
In the air.
And then it flies
Lifting me with it
On tattered wings
Already spent.

Up, and up yet
Against the dark clouds
Lit from behind
In mighty grandeur wild.
Climbing against sea and sky,
Daring across the wind,
Bold amid the unending
Impersonal immense.

Falling Away

Things fall away.
Leaves fall from trees in the autumn,
Which if taken in the summer
Would have torn living tissues,
And bled.

Words tumble from our mouth
When the heart is right,
That have held long years
In our body.

Babes kick and fall
Gasping from the womb.
For time is a ripener
That drops the unseen into form.

So evils fall from us
Without tearing them from the bosom.
So too the transparencies
Of our failings become opaque,
And drop away.
So do all things leave us
As That emerges into Time,
Making it Timeless.

End Times

This must be the end times,
When a nation manages to
Give bodily form to
Its grossest expression
Of political and financial
Manipulation and suppression;
And then to release it
On the very stage of the nation’s
Decision making forums
And world stage.
People turn their face away,
They are so shocked
To see revealed the years of
Previously hidden
Corruption in high places.
This Golem,
This George Bush,
Stands before us
As the very incarnation
Of what a nation
Failed to root out.

Butterflies

I guess they are signs of change,
Those butterflies in the wind.
Who would think such fragility,
Such anxious fluttering
And felt frailty,
Can, in the season,
Fly miles in the thousands
To find their needs?
And this is the season.
The winds change.
There is warmth
Touching us.
And the butterflies
Take wing
For new homes.
So my heart takes wing too,
Anxious for their success
In the winds of fortune
And the changing seasons.
Fragile as they are,
Life in them knows
The way.

Butterfly photograph courtesy of Nature’s Treasures – 213 W. St Julian Street, Savannah, GA, USA. (912.234.1238)

The Book of Life

It is so frustrating,
To only ever see the part,
The piece, the moment.
I so long to see the whole,
Not just this moment,
Today, here, now.
I am a pen in the
Hand of Life.
I look to see
The scrawl I am making,
And find a senseless mark,
A shape I do not understand.
But as the line goes on
I look and see
A word appearing.
And standing further back,
I see the word within a sentence;
The sentence in a paragraph.
And then, a wonder.
The paragraph is a statement
In a chapter.
And the chapter takes its place
In the Book of Life.

Another Kind of Beauty

It came upon me in my garden,
As I stood one morning
Drinking in the sweet beauty
Of the flowers and herbs
Flirting gently with the bees.
Then, in the quiet place
Of space and mind,
I saw the autumn coming
In the leaves,
As death began to curl them.

Suddenly it was everywhere,
As if my eyes had been closed,
And now were open
To see the withering,
Last year’s dead wood,
The rotting compost,
My own body’s putrefaction.
The very earth itself
Was everything that had died
And now in some way lived.

Onwards the vision went,
Broader and inclusive,
Encompassing all around me
And beyond.
Here — there — and everywhere,
The coloured beauty
Such as flowers have
Was mingled with decay,
Corruption and with death.

And that was when the vision
Burst splendid on me,
As all the many parts
Merged into one grand theme,
Revealing to my feelings
And to my outstretched mind —
Another kind of Beauty.

Around me it spoke
And sang its hymn —
I am the Everlasting Everything,
The All Inclusive,
The Dark and Light,
War and Peace,
Birth and Death.

Yes — I am that Beauty!

Angels in my Room

Suddenly there were two beings with me in my room.
I could not see them with my eyes,
But they were standing in my awareness,
To my left, suspended above the bed
Where I lay musing.

Surprising, because I had not sought them.
Frightening, because they were the living dead.
Radiant, because they were angels.
Inspiring, because they shone with wonderful life.
Uplifting, because of the gift they brought.

The living dead!
Yes. That I knew of them.
It was everywhere about them,
Communicating itself to me.
Telling me the majesty of death.

Speaking to me without words
They led knowing in me,
As you might lead a friend
Through your new house,
Revealing its secrets.

Thereby I knew,
All that I considered human,
In them had died.
Desire, longing to possess, power, sex, ambition,
All had melted away.

And I understood in their presence,
If I surrendered to the Highest,
This was my path.
My own person would melt away,
My desires fade like shadows in the sun.

Fear – Yes – in the loss of myself.
In the sense of my own futility.
In the knowledge of my littleness.
In the confrontation of majesty.
At the loss of what I thought my wisdom.

In them I saw beyond myself.
Through their emptiness
Of all that I so valued.
I saw shimmering light,
Cosmic in its vastness.

Their death allowed,
Shining through them,
Dimensions of a life
Beyond the very best
Of all my mind, or love, or art.

Radiant they were
With all the mystery of life itself.
Suns shone through them;
Not just with light,
But with ungrasped joy and love.

Inspiring me
By showing me the possibility
Of my life,
And all the lives
Of those myriads around me.

Uplifting too,
By unveiling to me
The meaning of the story He told,
Where, having lost ones cloak,
You offer your coat also.

Not, as I had thought,
An act of selfless generosity.
They said it was a statement.
“How strange. You want this old coat,
When you could have the life unbounded?”

That was their promise.
If I dared lose my self,
Let that coat be taken from me,
My being too would shine.
As theirs shone on me that day.

Also Ran

I learned something too well at school
Ever to forget the lesson.
You get stars or a prize
If you are top of the class.
But, you know what –
Out of twenty of more of us
It was only ever three
Who got the reward.
That was the real lesson
I learned at school –
Not maths or writing –
But that only three ever get the prize

It was the same with sports.
I really tried hard, legs pumping,
Heart pounding as fast as it could go.
It never got me in the top three though.
So could never manage to get noticed;
Never got chosen or praised.
All I managed was to be ‘also ran’.
Sex, money, success –
Heart pumping, legs pounding,
All without reward.

I heard someone talking
About advances that will
Enable people to live for extra years;
And I thought to myself,
What the fuck for?
To carry on being an also ran?
To continue forever struggling hard
To lose the race?

Us ‘have not’s’ won’t see
That longer life.
We’ll never get the rewards.
We never got hold
Of that much cash.

Next >

< Previous