Black Night

Last night I was woken up
By old ghosts, and they brought along
Their new friends.
They talked all night
And kept me awake with the noise
Of running feet and hands that wouldn’t stay still
For long.
They said I was the ghost
And wanted me out,
Out.
But the door was locked
And I watched them
Invade my room,
Tear apart my music
And replace it
With their ruptured, guttural voices.
And before I knew it
They opened the window
And showed me a way
To escape
The dark night.
Last night was black.

A Nod at Hobson

So what hurts most, I often wonder…
(your deceit’s place is beyond doubt).
My folly, perhaps, when I first fell under
your witch’s spell, before the rout?

Or the greater one, when I should have laughed
at my mock consecration as your God:
the joke revealed when you used my craft
to woo and take to bed a fraud?

***

Watching my Unspeaking Father Board the Bus Home

That tree on the other side of the road
Seems bare.
Only yesterday
I stood by the cemetery,
Mesmerised by the fiery blooms
Hovering over silent bones,
And heard the leaves whispering
Secrets of those who come and weep.

This tree stands silent
And yet,
Defies steel hurtling past
Trying to flee, trying to weave past
Patches, unravel threads,
And create new patterns
That have no place for a tree,
Any tree.

And as they check the tickets,
The exhaust smoke
Blurs the long road
And my tree becomes
A Picasso dream in water.

Escape

I had wondered at this proximity,
an intimacy of thoughts, like a nakedness,
unimaginable, a union supreme.
Distances were irrelevant, propinquity -
a word that applied, when our oneness
amazed, silences weren’t rude.

It’s said we seek mysteries; an escape
from the banal but in a meeting
of minds, could banalities intrude?

Perhaps they could if on barren landscapes,
mirages, mere illusions, had sated a longing
undefined. They could serve as preludes
to deconstructed lives scrambling
for slivers of reason to conclude:
the enchantment’s as real as the escape.

PLAISANTERIE

"I hope the noise doesn't disturb your prayers,"
says the man come to clean my room.
His tone and question catch me unawares -
you'd think he'd come to sweep a tomb.

Which, all things considered, isn't far wrong
given the life I seem to have led.
The man's earnest, and the temptation strong
to tell him to lightly vacuum the dead.

***

ANNIVERSARY

Last week it slipped by unobserved.
Oh, not a wedding or a birth –
the weather had closed my mind,
and this probably wasn’t worth
a pause: there was little to remind
one of it, and even less that it deserved.

Two years ago it marked a typhoon’s edge.
At its rim I stood callow-faced, and paying
obeisance to a mistress out to woo. The winds
were held in check, the smiling calm betraying
no artifice, nor whiff of later violence,
with neither portent nor a presage.

But soon it blew, and its malignant force
left entire histories changed, and charts
as futile parchment – things to grace a wall,
or gift someone unlettered in the arts
of fickle seas. And all hopes of a landfall
gone with reason, blown hopelessly off course.

***

Welcome home!

I stared out with unseeing eyes, lost in an unseen but real enough world. Bits and fragments of memories swollen with longing burst low in a shower, drenching the snarled traffic below in silent reproach.
The skies had stilled-for now- and eyes glittered with stilled fears. A deep breath! Eyes squeezed shut! Arms wrapped around myself. A jumbled collage of a locked home; a scattered tear; a broken kiss; a lonesome airport; a goodbye that happened even before the meeting could, formed amorphously. I miss you.

But. Then.

I smile at the richness of it all, a textured lustrous pain draping life as it lives on, within the ever expanding horizons of hope and possibilities amongst and amidst chaos and loss.
A cool breeze floated past; saline cheeks bathing in the cloud burst as I let every pore drink in, quenching my thirst and....

I opened my arms wide to life....

Welcome home! I need you.

Peter

Contemplating a certain thought of wisdom
on these smooth and broad gentile plains
my brain ached and remembered a room
in a familiar, strange and restless city
where as a young man I was gently led
like a sheep to the fold.
There I was but not alone,
really there were twelve of us
each one timid, fearful and unaware
only silently listening to what He said.

Silently after a little while
we broke bread and ate because we were hungry
and needed food; and we tasted the wine
which was so bitter and also so strangely sweet
that in our thirst we remembered the prophets:
what they had yearned for and,
how easily in our midst we beheld that.

This much of theology I understood
that is, how much ever I saw
not only because it was so tangible and real
but even so because I could fathom it
in my mind and rationalise its implications
but there was something else that happened
which I was not prepared for,
something which made me curiously baffled,
speechless and completely out of ease,
something which, for a moment at least,
forced me into a sudden indecision
that now on reflection I ask myself,
"Why was I hasty to have my feet washed?"

But time has inflicted a better cure
and whenever afterwards I remembered that night
always a new thought strikes me,
a new wisdom speaks to me; as if it was
God himself talking to me and telling me,
how much of myself I have to give to Him;
how much of all that I cherish I have to sacrifice
and how much more I have to lean on Him
to cleanse me and my feet
as I walk reluctantly in these chains
on these smooth and broad Gentile plains
to my inevitable death and obvious glory.

Manic Monsoon !

A.


A filtered haze of
grey and blue
as I drenched
in you....

The cravings
eddying
flooded with pools
of you....

Awashed bodies
and garbage
bodies are garbage
too....(?)

A remembered
flurry of
You and I
washed away

But why then
does my skin
still ooze....

With the thought
of a monsoon
you....(??)