A Universe Within

After struggling through episodes of profound mental ill health Mack is living life as though in a coma. Mack encounters an actual coma patient who somehow entwines together a series of people and events, beginning a life affirming process for all involved. The journey weaves together environmental issues, mental health experiences and spirituality in a search for meaning and vitality. The vital issues tackled in its pages around mental health stigma, recovery, existential dread and trying to be human in a confusing world are themes that many will relate to.

The story is a meditation and celebration of the natural world and friendship.

Available on Kindle

Assemblage

 

He has a heart of gold

Money has ruined him

He doesn’t know who to blame

Buckets of shame

 

The secrets of construction

Rush a broken heart

Place your hand in mine

Let me lead you to the temple of desire

Built to be destroyed

Then looted

Then replicated

Forever more

 

Block thoughts

Cubes of dissonance

He wants to be better

He wants to be fine as he is

The bricks and mortar of sound body and mind

Will never last

 

Your private bomb sanctuary

Is bright red

 

Toxic fury

Unwieldly brain

A fist of neurones and receptors

Tighten

Uneven breath

Unkind words

 

Dust of a nation

Collapse and call us on

Primordial peace

The womb of a dove

Diminished by the dead

 

Still, going nowhere

Built not to last nor rot

Just be

Break bronze idols

Replace with robots

It does this

Violin strings flutter around the still centre of a single moment

The Irish flute patterns the air and my soul

Surges in the moonlight of deeper sound

I am thermal coasting on the spread shawl of music

What I long for unfolds before me and rushes ahead

The arrival turns to nostalgia

Then home

Then back again

In a tumbling spiral of desire

and complete presence

A response to 'Agua Viva' by Clarice Lispector

Clarice Lispector an angel human you have me mute and shivering hot. Longing to write dance in a one two step of consciousness. I, as in soul me, stutters and fizzes into life. Yearning replaced with the instance. A balm remedy with the excitement of yes!

Sweat pours down me as you talk about the bodily knowledge of word sounds and the endless question of why being replaced by the art of doing, of churning and leaping and turning inside out on the page. Keep going deeper into the pace and intention of writing. Writing is claiming something from time and asking for nothing. There is a partnership at work I don’t know anything and on the walk here a stream of bile filled my mind that is just as much me. I am replacing honesty with better honesty. The truth of things is painful and yet I have to turn to it, lean in and find space for my spirit. To write with a greater now that has within it blood and life as Clarice says the ‘plasma’. I haven’t fed from the placenta but here is a sound that is feeding me, her thoughts on the page. The sound of her words in my skull. Am I trying to emulate a genius, something more, for she unshackles me and I am inspired. Once again I believe.

Blood liver. Life giver. Host or roses and other such things. Round it off, round it off. Rounded instinct pivoted by forces unknown. And full stops come up against a wall. Hear the water flush the dust.

The air is timid but the opposite _ bold. Both around me as enough, a throbbing embrace.

Vibrating potential. Field of belonging and expectancy. State of expectance on the air that is also tepid and slow yet pulsing. Oh and the birds.

Incessant contours of sound stab darts siren in the heat undulating throbs of a drill brief exchanges of words on the street, like the flutter of wings, rustle quiet rustle amongst engine surges and clatter.

And there the hiss of a cool drink being opened, punctuation I relate to, release. I am forever looking for release, a dive into the eternity of the moment, a lapse in pressure from the endless boiling point of my frantic mind. A mind which swerves from one thought to another trying to grab something with marrow and suck on it. Another thought muscles in, or is it instinct telling me such marrow will not be found in thought. The rich juice of life lies beyond. This is a moment to stretch it, to smile with this illusive essence, to laugh, to write it on a page, bottle top and laughing I am learning slowly, learning a nonsense that is freedom laced with meaning or do I mimic, is that my most taut muscle, lacking lyrical genius and without the richest depository of vocabulary. I litter this page with speed and doubt, give way to moments of roundness, the loop completed and darting into synergy like magnetism, those brief moments of perfect fit. I am talking about tessellation and this really is a response and half cooked notion, having read the work of a mind in flight. I am inspired amongst the mud of my limitation, making sandcastles without the sand. Yet my back is not to the sea at least. I am facing front on, drinking in the view. In the distance I constantly see and feel the tug of the tide as the water of life pulls near, draws away, rushes back. Intimacy in constant appraisal and my net glistening over-head, empty again, though through faith once again filled.  

Dreaming For A Future

We march for life

For our survival on an agile globe

For a receding reality, one fairer and greener

Something better than the world’s wealthy huddled together

In the dust and futility of their narrow horizons

All that is good in jeopardy that is the emergency

I pause for a drink, to quench my thirst

In that moment truly thankful for clean water to drink

Every sip is a portal to a well of worry where water is scarce

Even a glimmer of brevity sharply focuses the mind

Surge of panic amongst the colour throng

Breath shallow quick stalling

I fight for fresh air, to fill my lungs in a stubborn city

 

I think of womb you

A fragile whisper

This beautiful promise that already sends tremors across mummy’s tummy, your whole world

Alive yet unborn you wait to inherit the earth

Such an inheritance was never to exploit but cherish

A joining in with this exponential dance of teeming forms

An exchange of love

Are you dreaming of the future as you wait in there?

If nothing changes then by my age

Like so many already alive

You could be blighted by not enough food and the smallness of violence

A future at the mercy of water and fire

Put at risk by the very ground you stand on and the air you breathe

All the elements skewed against you by past generations

Things will shake you and rush you

try to tumble you and I tremble at the thought

The innocence of my youth was a luxury

Now we must strain for a world where all the trees of the wood rejoice

Where kindness can survive escalation and thrive

I want a world where we can hold each other’s gaze

I am heavy now with the weight of dread, the status quo

A fog pervades and the tide moves in

I held a sign

Oh I held a sign and stood in the way

The work won’t stop and its calling me

To imagine in higher definition and in new dimensions

Shoulder my fear and act out of love