Month: August 2017
Song Of The Dung Beetle
Begin the curve of the world
you become
Stretch and roll out the land
into a little continual womb
on which to dance
and discover
a laughing elasticity
to circumference.
Upside down balance
backwards
Legs translate the muttering
of stars effortless touch
Synchronise solar sighs
into straight paths
Do not ask, there is no code
but course, the disembodied voice
of cosmos
Organism sing whole
the scatterings of continent
Dew settle restless into
collective sediment
and let setting sweat
remembrance
∞
One must mix gravel and grit
in the round gut of a drum
mortal must help shape
the colour brown,
Rib the night with wind
whipped stick, the mixture
will soon sit quick – smooth
the roof over our cool dark pit,
plaster the dome walls and still the heat –
a gourd – this hut of skin, flesh and/organ
will wrinkle and crack in umbels of light,
peaking its head like a worm
does the splits, we drift
and move along as morning, learn
the soft turbulence of soil, become
the tuberous fold of the world’s home
Rolling and tumbling
tumbling and rolling
loosen like surf
Journey man – Journey bug – Nomad
and astronomer, carry what you cannot
and unravel unstable as song
the remainders of the longest beyond
Rolling and tumbling
tumbling and rolling
travel like surf
You passage of earth
∞
Termites furrow and tunnel
blindly woven webs, networks
branch underground
The mound becomes
a mountain
and rain returns us
back to the ground
Go around,
Disturb the Ant lion
and fall into its curse
collapse curvature
and wall in
on itself
let the circle
get caught – open
∞
Sun sunk and gone
sun sunk and gone a’
runnin n a’ jumpin – archin’
like a blue striped marlin
parts water to come back –
a boomerang ping-ponging
in action.
Shit son,
sun don’t know how to act
It’s a scab, a shell
a flesh-
less cuttlefish. Washed
up urchin orb
drawing into the shore
The law of tomorrow
crawl out. Glance
Have no choice
but to leave your body there
and start the dance again
The turning tide will bring
away the incessance
of daylight
Towards A Metaphysician’s Paradise
O atomless ancestor, unending
gesture of genesis
you action
that descends doubtless
upon the highest heaven
you chance
of enlightenment
and silence – all-at-once-
plunge of nothingness
you rest in loudest tempest
and acrobat of expansion, dwell-
er of becoming
lay your way in waves
your wake is a snake
laid in layers of waking
disentangle and form, you
figureless symbol, unhinge,
blind opening of angle,
you alchemical throw that turns
the skimming stone into an archipelago,
drums and lips, spills and distinguishes
this pellucid metamorphosis
yes you, residuum of creation
must be heard in imagination
the blossoming frond
and the tendril that curls,
the purr of wave and waterfall,
the dreamtime you arise behind
you astronaut of the ocean
and submarine of sky,
you sea of sun and mountain
of clustered vapour,
you alembic angel, condensing
sensation of dispersal, essential
ineffable
resolve, you shy – interjecting phenomenon
lonely listener in the midday anemone
of moon, interloper, here welcome
to answer the needless ticking
of speech and indecision
oh, you ongoing project-
ion of the poem, motion after which I
fumble for – the onward roll
of afternoon
downwards
toward possible
and the getting there
of nightfall coming
together a-
part—
The answer
always forming
Footholds and Soles
We walk in footsteps we have never owned
dance in gestures of the animal who awakens us
amorphous – within the stone we hold
We were born old
in the knowhow of the baobab
We saw the mangroves
as their shadows wore holes
in our body
Aunty ocean told us
this was soul
before it came to be
sewn-
it poured us in petrichor-
the smell of once was
whose nearness still
lingers here – there
restless familiar
as dust and chance
wake the absurd
∞
There was a colobus, long
lost but passed before us – outstretched
in the palm of the afterwards
we asked her about otherness
and she burst outwards in
arcs of laughter
is that enough for you, if not, where to?
∞
Marabous stalk somnambulant, beyond
the where-from of the oncoming
horizon, a chorus of slurred consonants
thrum-throng and call to us
swarmed within the wind, sweeping
up our tonsils, we hear a tickle
creep through – out inside
the opening O of vocal
spontaneous call-of-the-owl
pulses life into the gulf
of our tired vowels
∞
The elephant’s little cousin
shrieks a little louder
than you could believe
crescendoing and
slowing pure in-
tensity
spirit reaching full
for pitch
tearing to construct
and surpass its own
echo –
let go
little Pimbi, grow.
∞
The Octopus knows
the color of before,
head of water
like yours was air
He spoke of a chameleon, who
blinked in his inward blink,
a wisdom older than thinking
a riddle to leave us there
nowhere but aware:
pierce your skin as it wrinkles
in a rhythm of ghosts, those
animate willings – touch and listens
are vision,
see, you stubborn goat
you are
the hum the
sum humming sun-
bird,
the answer to the conundrum
the hum-anima/l
the world is a walkabout, if but
an oyster an odd choice
of your words
language is but land, sand and and
The trail of voice
tailing inseparable
from yours
To listen to the earth
is at once the comfort
of being –
heard
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
If you skim a stone over the rolling ocean
and watch it pour long into the horizon
it will smooth onto your palm
the tropic Capricorn
If you skip a seed along the ever same ocean
to watch it grow in another land, a home
for the birds and bees, pollinators
of your memories
Will you still keep throwing
seed after stone, stone after seed
until fluidity leaps from its lips
and it, itself, flickers in speech
begins beginning its own riddle of rhythm
blissfully waking ripples
with the nimble feet of a flying fish
skilfully dipping and teasing the surface,
freeing the ceiling, singing with
the wind over the reef –
nothing is ever complete
Laughter, laughter, further and further
everywhere the expanse expanded bouncing
bounded outward and un-encompassed
from its birth-pod of cloud
and ocean the cosmos
of sound and gas
Until the laughter did burst the rupture
reverberating all around, soft and loud
and mirth emerged in one lasting dance
And you, reaching all distance
kept this feeling kindled
inside of a miniature heartbeat
I shed a stone that iterated infinitesimal,
a note skidding headlong into another kingdom
where every door lay ajar, and every path
fed the avalanche of sun
An iridescent pebble that grew to song
before it knew I was gone
to sky to dream
a loophole in the dream
The largest part of small
becoming a hum
like I became the stone
Listen
Listen,
on the riverbed
the words within the stone
refuse to open, unable to form
the song in my head they show
me there is more to the world
in what cannot be said
Alone
in a room talking
I know
for my silence I am
whole
My sage
is a blade of grass
a fern or a
geranium
an in-
carnation
Delusions of the written form
I.
We are always wanting
to be
that little something
More
Always turning
and in turning
turning from
I guess this is thought
walking forwards, towards
the hope of horizon but
sloping back down the walls
of a circle, reaching for
the abyss Freedom
and coming up short
distraction, distraction
bottle, action or
drug of choice
attaching fulfilment
to the finite
body, love, will
or even
these paltry words
ringing in my head ‘don’t
don’t – O do, you
fool’
we sing and dance, mask
ourselves and perform
but who for if not the truth
of self?
We aim for this that and the other,
make lists and twist ourselves in delirium
and oh always this or that other we come
to miss
is this existence.
II.
Can I say something?
what happens when then becomes
another then,
then then becomes no more
more and more the course
must reach all
and before you know
we are old, mute
and reborn
but are you so sure?
At what point does discovery turn to ruin
Surely we either become nihilists or
we remember
to bloom
Life may never reach its goal
its only purpose is to be self-curious
only then we may enjoy
and truly discover universes
III.
You should not listen to me,
I am only still learning
And you are still only your own force
Turn and evolve
this oh so insatiable motion
inwards, revert the current
condition, compulsion in-
to consciousness – song-
bird swallow ocean, comfort
your beaky bones, the water
slows, holds before and
beyond the shore
you are already
already born-all
Let ego
follow
and fall
do not blame it
but observe yourself
how the shadow
can no longer pour
into something
whole
The eye, now so hollow,
bald and dormant
will journey, sponge
and blend rawness
Spontaneously
a longing will
un-form,
re-open
the storm
morning will spread, lend
the socket
its vision, O
lost volition
oh who am I, what is place
what is circumference
if not space
and what of today
no more
than a mote, a cell
a magnificent emerging for us
once more to soak in up
IV.
Fill the
reality of this orb,
ye old namesake of sensation
yes shed and shake snakeskin
voyage, voyage, journey down voice
all the way up the angles and chords of
your own throat
until there is nothing left
between it and dream or
this belief of the imagination imagined things ideology
nothing to separate life
from the poem
yes commence,
eye said the I will open
the echo will sound
its source
One must only know the process
of nature’s invocation
and respond
to this oldest liberation
The unknowing cure
that germinates shapeless
as breath
at your forgotten
Core
Ponder
In the stillness of a river
I have sat and dwelled
three lifetimes or more,
I cannot tell.
Witnessing the world
pour-me over
In a silence
I could not spell
I was a pebble, stirring
and swelling the constant
shed of depth
floating all along the cosmos
in the smallest of songs
I was the aura
of what one cannot be
quiet sure of, a nebula
of ocean
you see
I was both at once and
once, once more
I was the source
no longer man,
nor woman
nor god, but
chorus
confluence
of all
divergence
a humming puddle
of dilating nothing
I had wet the stone
and dried the water
tasted the salt and
thirsted no more
I awoke
with each moment
until bursting we over-
turned the stone
an empty shell
laughed and
cracked open
out of absence
flourished a forest
i was lost
there was no knowledge
there was no focus
a turtle was born