Bring Me Sunshine

As they say, now for something completely different.


http://youtu.be/ZedhoqYdfTM

The Black Tulip

Bitter to taste, something offensive
But addictive too, like one's first drink
The body knows it’s of no good
But the ingrained mind going
Soft, seedy, getting mildly fouled
Knows no better than that world
It had abandoned, when it was fresh
Full of sapience, vital and almost free
Flowing without hesitation, in the wind
Blowing without obstacle, on the tulips
Swaying without trepidation, in that song
Of May, yellows through reds, the season
Where life should of begun- nothing was
Sombre or murky- the rain fell as pure
As diamond crystals, the quite Earth
Was a gift to be gently unwrapped,
An unhurried experience to be revealed
In its own rhythmic surely paced way
There can never be any going back.

Still with age the tulips change their colour
And their fragrance the mind will forget
For black has become the colour of light
Absorbing all into the ways of this world,
Where only memories redeem the lost soul.

Dante In Limbo

 

 

I could imagine golden boned Dante,
That exiled noble, waiting for Virgil
Under these drab perspex bus shelters
Queuing with us for the 45 @ 3.35,
To Bray - amongst the fag faced women
Wrinkled almost to death with their
Over laden shopping bags and husbands
Gone quite indifferent with each passing year,
Having broken conversations with the skies
Or with the coiled bends in the Liffey- in fact
With anyone who’ll  stop to listen anymore,
For everyone, even Beatrice, it seems there's a destination
With their unique number boldly embossed on it
For like the hairs on one's proverbial head
Death comes in minuscule well tempered steps,
Strolling like a fat sated dandy or Businessman,
Well healed and always hitting the correct notes
Causing sudden stirs or creating dramatic scenes
He loves an audience- And for heads to turn;
He who has seen it all- visible as a tramp
Musing without a word on the passer-by’s
Circling our thoughts, circling this Limbo
Waiting just out of the rain, waiting just like us.  

Ode To A Telephone Box

I didn’t think they made

Them, anymore, archaeology

Or architecture, you wink slyly

But, I can’t honestly say- anymore

What such terms really mean!



Yet, in Dunfanaghy’s quaint lined street

Lights, they seem to ambiguously greet

This old grey fella, as one of their own

These static, stately ambassadors, made

In an world that wasn't always ahead of time!

Red Admiral

Butterfly, Butterfly

Your sudden motion

Awakened, something

Deep, within.....



I watch you, transfixed

Simplicity and beauty

Formed into one

Butterfly, Butterfly


I watch you take first flight..!

Intermezzo

The voice of objective reason.

Normal as Job’s glided asylum

With sanity observing the clouds

And condensing the contradictions

Of her, fragile disembodied truth

That is forecast to rain, black tears

From your grey desiccated mouth


The lustrous river deity has entered

Its ultimate stage, broadening along

The bitten serpent, shaped as Cancer

With a body, not of its own, washing out

The contours, of your age, of your time

On the loosening tides of natural definitions

Where the mind’s pulse distorts, each breath

Swimming to catch up with the next breath

Dead weights hang like charm and tough luck,

When the gravity of such things, eventually settles-

Like condensed droplets irradiating the sky

In symbols only the stray gulls can interpret


In abeyance, living becomes microscopic-

A careless purple spot, the rotten thumb-track,

The overripe, obese, tanned, decaying grapes

Absurdly, suggestive of a Claesz painting
In the overheated wards of ones imagination

We can, but wonder at what currents leads us

To those obscured walls, with fading graffiti

Stating the plain, indisputable fact “I was here”


Yet, tonight, they will arrive, as on every night

Dislocated fragments, stacked up, on newspapers

Fingered and stained with Royal weddings

And that blazing star who didn’t quite make it

A suicide, A homicide, no matter, it seems

It’s just a corpse, in the dreams of yesterday

It’s just another day their dreams were made of-

It’s just another night where their dreams ended-

When Nurses robed like fables came and went,

Patrolling their estranged souls like oversized orderlies

Unlocking every doorway under the high sky-lights-

Of a surgeon’s knife, mending the flesh wounds

That cannot be fixed, for they cannot be determined-

Like yourself and that malignant serpent, inseparable,

Entities you believed, your good God had created.

In your awakening dreams of this sprawling city

A thought, becomes ever-green, from street-to-street

You dream of her grotesque inhabitants being cured

Of that collective detritus of your newborn condition

Of acrid pavements perfuming where patients lie

Of road-sweepers disguised as waxed sentinels

Coming with buckets, ice-picks, and rubber gloves

Talons for blazing hands, detergents on the nostrils

Festooned with the flashing beacons of their trade

Before the reddening of day-light, you dream

We shall be asked, like homeless vagrants, to move on.


Still they are here, inert visitors, love long gone

Within their wilting daffodils and clinging hands

De-flowering their memories in the colour of sulphur

The Sun is consumed through them, an artificial light

Ignites the dark empty hours with her lonely satellites,

Remote, as distant, as impenetrable, as the heavens

And like, you here, now, a dying star, somewhere

This second, they tell me, is shedding its final radiance.



JH 21/02/13 

Recycled Waste

A new track by me, I like to think of it as "beat poetry on helium", lyrics are inspired by a creepy street corner I live by.

Lyrics: We wait at the cold, dead street corner, its indentations filled with cigarette butts and mucus, A puff of smoke floats past me, it screams in my nostrils like a neglected new-born, the thick sheet of gray that has taken the sky hostage projects a blueish hue on everything, the only colors we can see are in our minds now, As the buzz-cut skeletons and bleached corpses wander around us, one wonders if they are content with who, what they are, do they sleep, do they dream? The cold air blows the thoughts from my mind, as the light beckons us to the other side of the road.

The Trial: Flight From Self

In The Trial by Franz Kafka, Josef K. is put "on trial" for an unnamed offense. Prior to this, conflicts and inconvenient desires are ignored, festering under the bland surface of his rigid, routine existence, where even his visits to his mistress take place on the same day each week. The trial brings those conflicts out into the open.

K's plight worsens the more he shies away from taking responsibility for himself. He represses a strong feeling of guilt which emerges abruptly at decisive moments, while in court, he denies all guilt until the very end. To Miss Burstner he says: "Your room was thrown into disorder a bit this morning, through my fault to a certain extent--it was done by strangers, against my will, and yet, as I said, through my own fault." The "strangers" in question are the warders, who are whipped by the authorities following K's accusation, and he cries out, "I do not consider them to be guilty at all; it is the organization that is guilty, it is the high officials that are guilty." What is more, "it would have been almost simpler if K. had taken off his clothes and offered himself in place of the warders." And on the following day, he closes the door to the lumber room where they are being whipped, "hammering against it with his fists as if it would be shut tighter that way." His ultimate reaction to anything that doesn't fit his heretofore tidy, cloistered way of life is to deny and "shut the door" on it. He wants the lumber room cleaned out: "I tell you, we're being drowned in filth!" Conflicts, irrational incidents are experienced as overwhelming filth that must be thrown out, rather than faced and worked through.

Josef K. is very attracted to Miss Burstner, but is passive in relation to her. She has little "experience in legal matters", but she "would like to know everything, and legal matters, particularly, interest me very much. A court of justice has a particular attraction, don't you think?" She is "inordinately disappointed" that K. himself does not know what his prosecution is all about. The "court of justice" here represents the law of Josef K's inner being, or soul-self. Since he fears and in fact flees from that self, he is unable to have an truly intimate relationship with another person.

K.is in a rage at his arrest, but at the same time, he succumbs: "He harbored the intention...of offering himself up to them for arrest." He sees the situation as a "comedy", and at the same time, it gives rise to thoughts of suicide that recur throughout the novel.

His first impulse is to deny any wrongdoing, proclaiming that he has been falsely accused. He can only think of struggling against the forces threatening him. In the face of such external blows, he has not developed the kind of unassailable inner freedom and security that Kafka spoke of in Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way: "The fact that only one world of the spirit exists, takes hope from us and leaves us certainty."

K's conversation with the priest in the cathedral illustrates this concept of spiritual independence. They agree that his case is "going badly", and the priest asks him what he proposes to do about it. K's answer is: "I'm going to get more help...There are several possibilities I haven't explored yet." "You cast about too much for outside help," said the priest disapprovingly. "Don't you see it is the wrong kind of help?" K. then makes a derogatory remark about the character of the men in court, calling them "petticoat-hunters", and the priest loses patience: 'Can't you see even one pace in front of you?'...It was an angry cry, but at the same time sounded like the unwary shriek of one who sees another fall and is startled out of his senses." The priest then relates the parable "Before The Law." In this parable, there is the possibility that the man from the country can enter the door to the Law (which again, is his God-self, the Law of his Inner Being) after his death; what is more, he could have entered it during his lifetime, had he asked earlier for whom the entrance was actually intended, instead of waiting until he was at the point of death. Then he would have received the "redeeming message": the door was meant for him all along.

K., in plotting how to get "help", puts himself in the position of the man from the country pleading with the doorkeeper to let him in. As the man from the country is fixated on what he thinks of as the ultimate power of the doorkeeper, so K is fixated on the idea of getting help from others who he imagines to be "in the know", somehow more able than he to solve his problems. He has hopes that the priest will be able to help him: "...it was not impossible that K. could obtain decisive and acceptable counsel from him which might, for instance, point the way..." But at the end of their meeting the priest also identifies himself as a member of the Court, and once again K. is thrown back on himself.

K. comes to feel it is his "duty" to execute justice upon himself, but as he is never clear about the details of this, he is executed in a "play" put on by puppet-like "tenors" and "supernumerary actors." In the end, he is assailed with questions:

Like a sudden blaze of light, the casements of a window flashed open there; a human being, faint and tenuous in the distance and at that elevation, suddenly leaned far forward and stretched his arms even farther out. Who was it? A friend? A good person? Someone who was concerned? Someone who wanted to help? Was it a single individual? Was it everybody?

Josef K. does not know the answer to these or the other questions raised by his trial; he has not attained certainty within himself. But, even as the man from the country in the parable "Before The Law" may be able to enter the door to the Law after his death--for the "portal of the Law is always open...always, that is, irrespective of the duration of life for the man for whom it is ordained, the doorkeeper will not be able to close it"--so too, perhaps, Josef K. may attain certainty after his death. He has made progress; he has been forced to look into himself, has learned that there are important questions, and he yearns to know the answers.

Tierra del Fuego

How they lived in the land of fire

A naked race elbowed out of existence

Naked not just to the shallow, oily flesh

But to the raw, jutting, white bones beneath


Our common humanity- their lives too unimaginable

To us- invisible points on a bare compass- no needle

Can guide us- to that unmapped archipelago-

Made before -The world and The Flesh, and Man


Become one destiny, before the Lord’s people

Walked like Christ’s miracle from that frenzied sea

Arriving, one cruel, savage, inhospitable day - in that year

1520- with salvation and bible joining unconquered hands,


What did they see- a motherly Indian wrapped in seal cloths

Her Children’s oval sockets slanting from wicker holes

Emerging winged, wild, wonder struck, unaccustomed eyes

For everything had changed- horizons were no longer- distant.


Overnight the sky God had fallen, like a starry legend suckling

The Fires, feeding against her naked breasts, generations

Had poured, but no more would they chant to that mystery

As inscrutable as the frozen Earth with her blank skies


A God had landed- He was not like they imagined

For soon, their crowded heavens would be thoroughly cleansed

By his singular Spirit- they would be shown,without exception

The errors of their crude ways, Mother, Father, and child


How they would learn, How He was the God of fire

Of sharpened, eager sword, How They would learn

How it was written, in the half-light of their pale God,

"That He was Love"-  and they would learn this God's

Hard lessons, en la tierra del fuego, when their voices sung no more

 

 

Candelabra with Heads

Legendary, pin-striped Medusa, fleshed out on the 8.45,
A vision leafing gingerly through Tuesday’s' electronic "Times"
Pursing, too easily, Monday’s ups and downs like tonight’s football scores
Someone always wins, and someone always looses, the rest is history

But there is no mystery, anymore, that cannot decipher such lexicons,
Like her, there is no doubt, or obscurity, to be had in the entomologist’s
Book, life is written into everything, like Drosophila melanogaster genes
They are the monosyllables that protect us from the cosmic night

From colum-to-framed-colum and from sleeper-to-awakening-sleeper
We gently lose momentum, “A signal fault at Clapham Junction” no doubt
Sighing into unison, regular nine-fivers fated like Asechylus’s elderly Chorus
To finish out their apportioned sentences in everyman’s cryptic- cross-words
Where naked gardens uncoil majestically through the slumbering caterpillars

We shall arrive too- a rough chrysalis of sorts- A Candelabra with Heads
A brown ticker-taped Medusa, A Mannequinn, as erect as a desert Cactus.

Lazy Sunday

A new track by me. Please enjoy!
 

The Universe . . . is alive

The Universe, as it has so far been observed, is very vast, and full of all kinds of phenomena that have yet to be explained. But that's the problem. We are only OBSERVING it, not being a part of it. Feeling it, knowing it, and realizing that there's a whole lot more going on than meets the eye.

You see, just sitting there and looking at it with human, physical, eyes doesn't give us the whole picture. Neither do x-ray or radio telescopes, and even if they do, I don't believe we are interpreting the things we find in the proper way, because again, we are looking at them with our physical eyes, and comprehending them with our physical minds.

But what if all the energy in the Universe, that we CAN actually see, is much more than we've ever assumed it to be? What if it's actually a consciousness, one that we ourselves are a part of, at least when we're not in these physical bodies? What then?

Our physical existences are not without clues. Take a look at the events of your life, and realize that everything that has happened is in reality an ordered sequence of events that have, before, and in the future,  continue to lead to one conclusion or another. You are who you are today because of the results of those events, and if any of them had been different, you would not be where you are today, sometimes, literally. Your location might even be different. You can look at everything that has transpired in your life, and see that there is indeed order from seeming chaos. Each event happening at precisely the right moment, when it NEEDED to happen, in order to facilitate future events, and so on and so on.

The Universe is constantly at work, bringing order to chaos, sometimes slowly, sometimes it seems that order turns to chaos, but that's only because we are not looking at the big picture. The Universe works in the long term, not just today. Everything is planned out, orchestrated, and placed just where it needs to be, when it needs to be there. It's all about the movement of energy, and the Universe is full of it, it's made of it, and that energy is a part of us too. We are not outside of it, we still obey the same rules. We may not be aware of it consciously, but deep inside of us, we can all feel it. That's why we constantly search for something greater than ourselves, because we sense that consciousness. We "know" the Universe is alive.

Think about it.

Pictures at a Gallery: Vincent Van Gogh

 

Against the rows of translucent eyes,

They paused, with their clumsily head-sets

Hanging half on and off, flashing the ecliptic's

Troubled furrows with smart-phones "referencing"

The sad genius as an obvious, immutable fact,


In that solitary figure sowing his seminal seeds

Against a yellowed, thickly cut, sun's swirling light

Beckoning his nature, through a rhythmic, purposeful

Stride- was he the measure of her whole creation-

Pressing the friable clays between his rough, sure hands?


The grains will gather in another year's ripeness

And disperse their inconspicuous vitality on the loose strands

Lost through this endless crowds' shuffling, quietly by him,

The pictures becoming  pictures, like Brugel's blind leading the blind

Through an immaculate gallery you would of despised

The strict geometrical emptiness of our pure pristine shapes

Transversing some abstract, universal terrain, without man or beast

No shadow would of ever fallen to fertilise your barren land-

Yet they appalled and maddened your frenzied mind - to rage-

 A crazed fist at the crows circling the reaper's blue heaven.


Yet, the wisest and the stupidest have their ultimate measure-

Not in waxed galleries where faces become nothing more

Than a travesty, but in parched canvass, where you were always

Alone, under fiery rays, waiting for God's secret revelations. 

The Reaper, Van Gogh Gallery Amsterdam

Anne Frank Speaks

[…] I get cross, then sad, and finally end up turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside, and the good part on the inside, and keep trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and I could be…if only there were no other people in the world. (8/1/1944.6)

I am a young girl still, yet no age at all,

and I have learned some things.

I know now I have always been free

to be all I can be,

to soar with the birds of the soul

even as we hid ourselves away

and hardly dared to play,

tiptoeing around

for fear of being heard downstairs.

I see now that all I've lived

has been part of me.

and I know, beyond doubt

there are no "other people" in the world

or anywhere,

for my heart is still turned inside out

and I see them there,

sharing, living, loving, free,

my heart, my part,

dancing here upstairs with me.