X69

My hands to no

Swords and stratagems

For sustenance,

I engorge on silence;

And for days there is no contact

With the outside world.

I straddle slowly, closely the winding banks of rivers, the mirror of my own veins.

I avoid the hinterlands, rife of noises and competitions;

And in the

Mist one morning

Will laugh at a distant madness.

X68

We are never more than walking distance or a few miles away from the ocean,

looming large,

mysterious,

fearsome,

just beyond the hills,

between

the canopies of trees,

the blue

backdrop to every act of living.

At night

her soft breaths lull us into the pleasant realms of dreams,

though now to free upon the remnants of all that has gone missing;

but

this is not farewell,

only

the sea again becoming sea

for the girl whose eyes were sad, glistening lakes

You were quiet but visibly upset;

our time was too short.

There was a stirring in the autumn air.

At first it appeared mere shades of green,

but there were other distinct colours,

explosions of browns, reds, blues, of yellows.

Then, if only could I, with my too human heart, extract from this a general rule

– Let all dying be this beautiful.

X63

You held me in a 

downtown park

with stern hands

that conveyed not warmth but safety,

a roof,

a full tummy.

It was 

April

and the birds and the bees and the soil and the flowers and the trees and their blossoms could no longer contain their secrets.

Today it all came back to me.

and now I think I understand 

Brother,

In this strange limbo of absence and bereavement, there is no wine or religion to mollify us. For will we meet again some distant morning, as the insistent birds encroach upon our forlorn thoughts, and the dew that springs forth from our eyes is that of our joy? But here in the midst of happiness come the tides of grief, so tell us: what is this to not know but hell…

https://ello.co/sirmorose/post/zowlan6rt0zdh1uor_nbbw

Because you said your favourite couple decided to call it quits, and this distresses you(for why give your all?)

An eye on the clock. Once half-hearted. I would have loved you. On borrowed time. And when I’m upon the moon’s harsh tiding, I will say I lose near nothing in its dying. Only one half heart. One eye lent to the clock. Though what dark foreboding seeps to the other side.

X60

Last night I slept in the twisted sheets of wanting. 

Though I wish to be, as

when the sun is at its peak, 

in deeper devotion to all beautiful things,

without bringing them to my lips,

or chain them in servitude about me.

And should there still must desire be – 

be only now in the muted streams of yearning,

or in those odd nights,

and in those odd dreams with

laughed-off meanings.

X57

Father,
To my ears, you
Made no sense,
Would you upbraid
A man for his cleavings and then in his mourning?
That “A man loses all that he would love.”
But he is no callous crow; who would that dance upon the stones of his friends?
But in your smirk –
A subtler compass showed:
“Whatever comes I hold,
And whatever would leave I let go.”

X49

There are odd days in self seclusion I cannot twist my thoughts to suit your ears. I have swum too much the river of aloneness. I must set to the freeing of arms and limbs up into the wide expanses of the universe, and without the grinding, halting commerce of a touch. And in only these moments, of being and yet nothingness, I have found solid honesty.

X47

Wide and deep is the mind that it encapsulates the universe, but not her beauty. In other realms there are worlds left barren, and silent chaos rules. And they are smile-less. And they are ocean-less. And they are treeless. And flowerless. And without echoes of children laughing or birds singing. And there is no rain or verdant green garden, only sadness and searing light; for some great god has deemed only her worthy and has poised all delicate beauty beneath her skin.

.

Of Rumi & Spring

It is, as I walk the blue dusk.

And it is the sweet river twisting, coursing through my room, from an open window.

And in the morning, though fainter still, weaves itself the rousing, waking scents of everything.

And though I’m but old, it is my first spring.

So I do not curse but prize all wounds
that let the fragrance in.

X44

On a hill, in the black light of the half moon, I do not know why I stopped at the tree, a blind supplicant in the tabernacle, a pauper at the gates. We are two or three or infinite in number but all are we the same. But I knew not the meaning of these words, though would the truth come to me in a moment, and from the blossoms, and in a gust of fragrance.

X41

There’s this moment, before she becomes white hot, pale sea blue along the edges, climbs the ladder of the skies, I would turn left, east up the hill along Albert, a bucket of molten gold she pours – in the middle of the street, and it is briefly blinding, or I can see clearly the intentions of her heart. 

Bequeathed

Saw you again today. Met you years ago. Harboured no recognition. Spent too many days dreaming you. The all too human limitations. The frantic hands. The betrayed impatience to fix what was too late in fixing. Felt neither love nor rage. The crashing disappointment. Saw you again today. Asked with the silence bespoken by those soft and shifty eyes. Do not too harshly judge. 

X33

After the storm, before the sidewalks are plowed, we share the narrow roads with the cars and the busses and the trucks. But the drivers are decent. They drive slow and are careful. I walk pass an old school that sits on a hill overlooking the road. I go down wide flights of steps that take me to other roads, and avenues, through alleyways, and onto side streets, all the way to the edge of the city. “I belong to you,” some lovelorn, plaintive, 70/80s era R&B Natalie Cole line stuck in my head. A romantic waste. In every city. The high rise buildings. The streets wide but always empty. The buzz that never did come. And I wait for you there.

X28

From the factories, how the angry, purple clouds rise; to the skies, the softest of blues to the palest of whites; to the east, where the blazing orange sun rages; across the bay, where the carefree gulls glide lazy*; by the side of the road, and how the wild wheat endure the terror of the cold; and how my heart blood pumping and red goes every place my eyes go.

Joshua

On his second coming, and out of the political wilderness, an elder statesman laughs off the suggestion he was no longer a democratic socialist, that he was no longer committed to the ideals of social justice. We made mistakes back then, he says. We put the cart before the horse. We pursued economic equity. We pursued education, and nutrition, and housing for the poor. But however urgent the need, we simply could not afford to do these things. We made the mistake of overestimating the goodwill of the upperclass. That’s one of my abiding regrets, not expressing my vision more clearly, my frustrations more elegantly. Politically suicidal, he once made the allusion to the many international flights in and out of the country; for many this was the last straw, interpreted as a not so veiled threat to those who opposed him. And so they left in droves, taking with them their wealth, their capital, their privilege education; closing factories, supermarkets, hotels – sinking the struggling economy deeper into turmoil and the nation further into a bloody ideological war: pro West versus pro East. But now, decades after, back in power, overflowing with charm, he talks about NAFTA and globalisation as inescapable facts; he talks of efficiency; he talks about the well meaning but ultimately unproductive nature of protectionism, and subsidies; he preaches fervently the gospel of the IMF, the World Bank, more so now than even the suddenly tepid Right. For there are no more national assets to exploit, he says. I have learnt, I have, and the mind is the nimblest of roses…