This Spiral Wind

Treading home

School now my work,
Jocular no more

And if only I thought like this then
Make someone think I'm right.
Make a teacher maybe
Again I long for their ear 

Draw parochially near.
In the same corridors. Still lime green and tights
Still gummed up desks
I am just embryo, glowing and foetal
A somehow indecipherable life
primed boyish, brimming
and precious
Turning slowly, rotating, muffled
Of little consequence
I am stretching for validation
So wanting to put distance between the old
To carve more new
I make it so in my mind
Flesh and circumstance limp in line, behind
Accusing stand the looming dammed


My very own Shelley
Burns bright on the vast beach of my imagination
Wolf and owl and tree and more

Gone now
Fuck he was holy
And more elemental than even the romantics

A skeleton in the chalk

I flounder in seas turned hard

Desperate in excavation

Digging everything up

Tentative on every boundary

Terminus threatens futility

There is lots to know

There is lots to be
Oh, let me last
Invisibly
Less of me, invincibly
Charting a spiral wind
Permanent in crisis, a hymn to reality
strained vision traces the silhouette of a solitary tree

The bigness in me is too there, so more, so very more, 

Expletives shagged bare lay coiled amongst an amplified intensifier  
This swelling largeness too much, 
too temporal, too burgeoning,
too groan and call and howl and wish, too fickle too illusive 

Too Water
Drop a notch in a windy mind
Crash and boom
Toss air in tree, like the ocean
Tight jaw
loose for a moment
As demanding as a fire
Quench not
Satiate sorrow, fly
Some where else
Someone when
illusion and lie
Won't satisfy

Treading home to not my house
I don't generate. I think swell up
I sway and loaf, aloof
I pontificate
And earn little money
Sage to the grace of others
Sorely
Truly
I beg to hide or trick
Giddy in freedom my script
Laden with exception
Heart squirming, pulse heading all of me . Colour squeeze. Pressure reign and fidget non ending

Yearning blueish fervour
Tone and. Blue

Colour
Permeate, ignite me
Won't you
Permanently unite me

/ˈfantəsi,-zi/

Fantasy: 

The Mountain named after a man

Facts never rest

On the summit 

When you can go no higher

Jump and try to Fly

http://adultjazz.tumblr.com/BIB

the Universe is as Big as my Heart

A sense of the broken places presses upon me

Compresses my mind

As my sickly fortune balloons into oblivion

Guilt mixes with bile

I am full of the urgency to love

Oppressed by friends and strangers, all scattered

Slashed at by life's sharp edge

The block stop wedge

A bleak point, without purpose

Pains hammer, relentless

The inevitable terminus,

relief?

And me with a sense of hope

A bubble not yet burst

Borrowed eyes still seeing

Recognising life in the presence of its shadow

Oh thick black shape!

I pray that something good billows in your depths

I try to imagine some end to life that is bigger than its parts

Fingers press for blood

The wish a rusty eyed red scream

It is one

Precious in pain

Illusively here

It is not me, why is that so?

I am here, something not

I do not know how to interpret the vague impulses of this formless monster

So I drift in an absurd world

Love seems my only cause of action

Off runs fear, melancholy drains

Guilt remains

What of those who cannot get hold of anything to navigate by

Who have dismantled every story yet can not tell another

Or the simply tired,

Named or not, those that suffer terribly

Do so quietly

I cannot think for them

Lying, still breathing

As foolish as when I first entered this world

The thought lingers like a bird with no nest
I was born
The terrifying thrill of it rises in my chest
BORN!

Evolution as elevation

'I'm not after religion! I want mercy'
Said Jesus
No one listened and on it went

So as a child I worried when I forgot to start god with a
CAPITAL
Yet neglected my natural wonder
And was blind to my blessed life
Gratitude did not exude, it was fleeting
I wanted my next fix

In the addled essence of adolescence
Performance poured
So on it went
The drama of a personal universe
Taking license with the script, ad lib
Always half an eye on the prompts
Who waited in the wings like hovering vultchers
Ready to devour stray ideas
Screeching lines like that was all there was

As an adult
Other peoples voices still echo in my inner cathedral
Though truth be told
I could never say everything
I would always stumble over the punch line
Honestly
I revere justice too much to make myself it's depository

Come to the party, everyone
Respond without judgement, let go
Police others thoughts no longer
No more will you vanquish all that threatens you
Give up on being so correct
Deal in real and make room for mercy

Mother Water

Finally my day is ending. I grab a Dark Beer Lao and relish the hiss of the murky larger as I open it. Free beer, a perk of the job. I flop down heavily onto our tribal style reclining cushions that the tourists love so much. These same cushions I patrol during the day collecting empty drinks and uneaten food. Now I have time. I let out a luxurious sigh and roll my head back, looking up at the weaving of the bamboo roof. The discolored buff of the structure already looks old. I recall teasing the lithe green strips into place during repairs at the end of the last rainy season. The tension and danger of fresh bamboo is still a source of joy to me, its strength and simplicity remind me of home. Of cutting myself on its sharp fibers as a child, wielding a machete and feeling like father. I’ve not been back now for many years. I try to remember the smells of home. Slowly I wind down and begin to enjoy the position of the platform, it’s a good bar and it has been my work for years now. After a brief, but free, schooling at the monastery I had intended to pay my way through higher education but things aren’t always so simple. I linger for a while in lost dreams whilst feeling the hot wind build for a storm. Where have those political aspirations gone? No longer does the restless fiery rage of my motivation toss and thunder or drive me on. Still, I am happy.

The Me Kong winds beneath me, Mother Water it’s called here. My feet stretched out point to an open vision of the lazy bulging current. She speaks to me of permanence and a lasting origin. Long before human imagination named her, there she was behaving as she does. Yet, it is illusion, she too will cease. My life flickers before me, wrapped up in the impermanence of all things. Down on the muddy banks children play and their parents wash. It is the same view which draws the western crowds in their droves. They come for our lighting and the menu. I watch each day as they grease their lips with burgers and toy with their phones, letting everyone back home know what Laos is like. There not all like that of course. My ex – she was different, more wide eyed, more lost, far kinder. I put my bare feet up on the table. Eyes wandering aimlessly I notice someone’s iPod in an ash tray, lost property is not uncommon at closing. Eager for a good one I pick it up and scroll. Her greatest import was music, it’s all she left, that and me wondering where she is now and what happened. She’ll be in her own country of course, finally obedient to the allure of normalcy. It was inevitable we would be crushed by the centrifugal force of her roots.  Anyway, I am grateful to her for exposing me to the wide universe of music out there.  I settle back into the immediacy of the moment. Rhythms unfold. Driving, tumbling beats from another shore. Malutu Astakae calls to me from Ethiopia. Its vitality is primal and has me rising to new planes. Leaning into the adventure I am spurred on and cradled by deep tones of exotic tongue. I journey with no intention. I try to be still and absorb the bat bat stabs of the screaming groove. I lift the beer to my mouth, breathing deeply through my nose I fill my lungs, I tip then swallow, and pause, holding the moment, then releasing air hard I let out a harmonized smack of my lips. There is only sweeping bliss.

Before me the cobalt sky drains into a violet scowl, contorting constantly in color and shape the sky sets for me. I watch the crimson violence of day’s final breath. It fills me with the anticipation of loss. Music unhurried and euphonic now I am elsewhere. I am holding the dying hand of my Father. His ragged breath is joined by the sound of the jungle, me fighting back the tears, hearing everything. We are nestled amongst the hills of our Northern Farm, the water singing by us rushes to meet Mother another life away. He had hardly left the area, nor had his Grandfather before him. He had watched his way of life decay around him before he had breathed his last breath. Both of us knew I would leave as soon as I had delivered him back to the cradled scent of his soil. I exhale and say my only prayer – ‘Thank you Father’ - my way of keeping him with me and fighting his gradual fading. With twilight comes the building thunder of that future storm, dark clouds tumble in from distant seas, the calm of the sky gracefully exits.  I wonder if time exists without change, and nobody to even watch it.

As dusk takes hold, saxophone diffuses into my consciousness; it is raw, ragged and streaming. The solo continues with a confidence and energy I can't contain, it is both a straining and arrival. I am going, go, go. I am hit with a jolt into now. Pleasure in presence reigns. I am floating in folds of bliss and nothingness. There is infinite space. For me it is the head back embrace of the 'I' that exists between my thoughts.  

Music stops, I pocket the pod and grab the mop.