Let The Dragon

Potent Keeper of Womb and Serpent Spear 

Made of Word and fierce Holding says:

You are come to this Plane

Having been everything and yet

Free from having, now, to experience all again 

To live and die well, or not at all.

So, there. Take that.

Aye.

And again, be ever ready to say

Adieu, Farewell and good Night

To your Muses of Sound and Sight.

Be blessed as you walk in the Light.

You are giants there on Earth

And yet there exist greater giants beyond and before you.

You are never alone,

Though recognise:

In your longing you may find a sweet desire

To truly be so.

So, send out, little Brothers and Sisters,

Little Mothers and little Fathers,

Silent Love and Greeting to each other

Across the space that is yours; 

Share your hearts with abandon.

For you are in good Company 

Bound in and to the Mystery

of good,

Clean,

Kind,

Cruel Love.

Let it be possible that

You have on your hands and in your hearts now

Impeccable restraint,

Hard learned and hard earned, yes!

Through a difficult, dark time of 

Repression and suppression.

Oh! This space given you is wondrous, 

Marvellous, magical,

Your Mother Earth, Your Father Sky,

And you walking, sleeping, eating,

Lying, dying, dreaming 

In between.

Haiku: Daydreaming in miracle

Staring at nothing
I daydream in miracle
Gaze at everything

The Morning Birds

The call of Silence is relentless

Remarkable, how much space there is

In between the noises and sounds of this world.

Such sweetness and promise

Sing the little high pitches of the morning birds 

That shake the leaves awake

To open again to the outpouring

Of the sun’s light falling

Relentless is the Silence

Graceful its quiet calling

The Evening Birds

What does it mean to save the world?

Upon Apocalyptic doomsday countdowns of

Those who say everything’s getting worse, I say: 

Heaven! It doesn’t make sense when I feel better,

Watching my own bloom blossom open into Life.

Hear the evening birds as dark grows

And new day begins, and always

The ocean, just over the dune,

Among all the other music 

The silence surrounding me sounds.

It’s the Tiyoweh, the sacred silence

That is to be found when we give ourselves

The moment,

A gift within a gift within a gift:

To sit. To remember.

That is the human life that can hold

All these things

And lift a pen to write the prayer

That records and gives words to

The heart that sings.

To save the world is to be one’s self

Wholly, highly, honestly, quietly.

Lovingly, gently, patiently, respectfully.

Grateful, to know the door is being held open

By the giants that have come before

So that we may walk the steps

Upon each our path

And life on the page

Of the one heart song

To keep each other from falling off the edge.

*according to the old Celtic way, the new day begins when the sun goes down.

*Tiyoweh is a native American word for Stillness, or The Great Sacred Silence.

Grace/The Elegance

Running helter-skelter through my new life,
Skipping and sliding around, 
Feeling blind sometimes, and then
Through Grace, found,

I hold the Book of Stories in my hand - 
The grand span of imagination and all the fictions
That succeeded in filtering through Genius and Muse
onto paper, into physical Time.

I clamber up onto the giants’ shoulders,
All those who have chosen to go quietly inside,
Recognise, allow, accept, meet
And converse with their selves,

And read about all we bring into life
And take back through death:
Compassion for and union with the organism;
How, having witnessed up close, through stillness,

Words and impressions so self-evidently beautiful,
And the divine fleck of light in the animal’s eye,
We are moved beyond the compulsion to record, keep, store in story
For it is already complete and exists for its own glory.

Dear Human

Hissing and sizzling beetles in summer trees now,
Squeaking song of crickets and river frogs,
And mosquitoes filling up the spaces in my sinuses,
All singing, ringing in the sinews in my head;

Butter-filled flying ants yearning for 
That point to get to,
Bats swooping down and through them,
Feasting on their hopeless fat;

All yelling at me to remember I am in a body,
And to forget the rush of getting things to be done,
As though I were aiming for that same point.
To remember I am here to play.

There can’t be a point if I can’t have fun.
The last of the friends have been harvested and
My heart can not be broken any further,
Suffering this I, dear sweet human. 

The Saddest Girl In The World

The last mental flickers of a human

unable to talk any longer

her moans and groans

is she in pain. does she know where she is.

can she feel her body shutting down.

can she see anymore. hear. feel.

the weight.

the heaviness 

of wanting 

to remove all that.

a human 

unable to do away with that.

the angels of darkness, 

Aletta and Quincy,

full of compassion and grace at 9PM 

on a Johannesburg Saturday night.

Their clear, reassuring 

instructions. 

We will now check to make sure

She has departed. Say your goodbyes.

We will now take off her rings.

You may wish to

We will now

My wretched father and uncle

appalled at the prospect of 

helping to heave her new husk

into a body bag and onto a gurney,

jumping to attention when

their manly muscles were required

The saddest, 

happiest, 

most curious

most exhausted girl in the world

adamant 

at taking in every second with her eyes, her body

the sound of the wheels clicking 

into place

rolling across the bricks and up the driveway

into a van.

doors close 

she walks away. 

Junk

 1 - acceptance

Ten thousand breaths taken

each day

three hundred days in being creative

(64 and a quarter doing nothing)

each year

decades full of years well lived

each life

a hundred thousand million lives deeply experienced

each cycle

this is exactly the place we sat when last we met

seven years ago 

now again, barely two weeks after our mother died.

Died. 

we say the word. no beating around in bullshit, like

passed from this world or transcended.

What do we do with all these blind spots

like feeling but never really understanding

not being liked

or grasping at the visions of what we look like

outside of ourselves 

what do we do with trite and tipsy hipster tattooed

conversations about evolving as a human

or overplayed, kicked-to-death pop music

playing through scratchy speakers

or how now only Nelson Mandela quotes

appear on the back of sugar packets.

what happened to all the other mighty orators?

and

where does all this seemingly 

unnecessary plastic detritus get generated

and what is the purpose of it?

we live in the ideal that it is an easy

navigating system

thoughtfully and elegantly designed to guide

the would-be discerning through 

to the good stuff

that it flows in fun back to its source.

to be recycled.

surely. 

2 - laughing

For history and trauma are slippery

narrow and biased

who said what and who fired the first shot

a series of convenient omissions and

half-baked authorities 

on what really happened 

as though we could ever be certain

in this sort of prison system of lost truths

and locked-down lives 

lived colourfully and mysteriously otherwise

bodies 

are buried under petrified volcanic lava comet strike floods,

blood and bones on battlefields make up green hills,

deserts, beaches

bodies

lie preserved in submarines or served as food 

in sunken ships on blind black ocean floors

nameless names, our ancestors, comrades:

myriads and myriads, anonymous,

smitten. 

wiped out of sight, mind, memory.

horror. darkness. silence. cold. 

3 - yes

Flung fast forward i once was born

i was tough once

innocent

moved through life

got tenderised, me

spiced, marinated

beaten, prepared

for sacrifice

in crisis

so excited 

witnessing first hand paradox

adjusting perspective constantly

so i don’t slit my wrists 

or drink myself to death prematurely 

just because i tend to 

often forget