Hope is an active, disciplined process #1

(A pill from Carsten Höller’s Pill Clock, water)

Take a pill, a medicine or anything that represents healing for you.

Pick a space that you feel is sacred or hurting. 

Let the space absorb the medicine.

Monitor your space, recognising that healing is often about fostering chaos not removing it.

If no healing occurs, use a magical or non-magical action to boost healing potency.

Iterate.

Clouds set parallel to structures
Celestial architectures, puffy balconies
Saprophytes on lively dead trees
I pray for intimacy with your city to be shallow
For there its bowels are not bleeding rusted
Some deaths, a ship’s wake and a plow’s furrow
Some deaths, apologies for wrongs and a cement flow

For futures to be erected, for futures to grow

Chamomile, CBD and nightly unease
Soccer chants, parakeets and hazy bodies
A harsh craft in naked sailing
Gliding through woolen curls and knots
Without infection, without loss
Break into places of hear with your Narcissus Garden
Jump out of the moving bus with your eyes
Shifting how your teeth are grinned for menacing warmth
At every soul flickering through the double-decker
Running over the pointed fingers of teasing teenagers
Running over the pointed feet of homeless men
Slumped in azurely dimly lit station looking empty halls
The warring eyes of men stumbling around
The bubbling rapidity of fermenting scared faces
Rushing through empty monumental avenues
Rushing faster through ones with tiny wardens

Like I’ve been held in days of fog
A man holds a baby over soft abyss, they
Watch a man throwing bags of routine past
The man turns, smiles, waves, turns
The baby, unprepared, now feels part of the scene
The sudden weight a cloudburst collapse
The shift from being held to holding
Flowers, at the door, red, purple, yellow
In different times to reach the same conclusion
Something’s alive beyond the bricked door in the brick wall
The sinuous line of inconsistency is the song of scars and seasons
Acupuncutured nests bemoan nettles
Seen is the angel who recounts the improper glow of gratitude

unembracing

All the way to the stars to become good ants.
Candidly we lie, we lie, we lie, we dance.
For twenty quids on the hollow road
Bought a man’s shouted freezing sensation,
To feel in my crying shower’t I hold
All the crimson rust in the world

The abandoned bottled plumage sing and crush,
Against the flimsy glass of murmured flaxen
Vehicles of self hatred, all the human sacrifices to inaction
Haunting spaces in the inner woods of thoughts
Words of hazel, rowan, oaks and seashells:
Our exile a verdict from the homely ground herself.

Paradise Meadows

Images generated using Microsoft Copilot.

Mountainside woodland
Mother’s friend, local butcher’s pig and wine
Char and soot, inexperienced cooks.
Bonfires inflated-forests
Escape Stygian collapse

Hill-perched stovetop
The umami mud of tent-floors
Sprawling sparingly,
Outrageous.
The dewing rage of milled mist

The taste of rain in a morning of fast
The unbodied, the righteous,
The discourteous ones
This drizzle’s not kind either
Makes it time for cake
Red flowers and quail eggs
Orange zest for the menopausal warmth of ox-eyed Hera
Honey and gold for Amphitrite’s brackish favour

Unregretting, I ate basil and mint
In painted pots on your balcony
All the cigarettes you smoked there for me
Linger as salt on your scrambled eggs
Bent over to check unfurling, infuriating details
Revolting resolution of mechanical candour

A crow hops around a stick
Ripping it to shreds to build its nest
Holding spring in its beak

Hidden from view
Shredded clothes, a nestless man
Hops around a twig-flesh tinted skip

Resin and mould for Amphitrite’s brackish favour
Rituals, hunger, nature
Dutiful offerings abjure their flavour

Unwinning entry to OPL’s “TASTE: A poetry competition”. Thanks again to them for the inspiration!:)

Ornamental

Image generated using Dall-E

Don’t let your pain
Be a neat party trick

Hands a golden serpent
Neverending spirals tunnelling
Sparking new butterflies
Rapaciously absorbing them

I’ve been one myself
In the beginning, a loss of sensation
Dropping one’s baggage
Sparing from mass a balloon

The self doesn’t need the tip of my nose

Intensity and taste of blood
Till a surging craving for it awakens
Committing to full power and force
Then the realisation:
A billion little pieces

One larger
One smaller

On my knees, my body unstable
Yet finding energies to stand
To search in the darkness ahead
From darkness to mist

Images

What’s a jet engine doing here?
Cycles, spirals and flows
The eternal serpent without a head,
Without a tail, only a source
Of essences and itself

I try to give butterflies, give light
Yet there’s no giving to perform
They are butterflies themselves
Fluttering as the serpent slithers
We are all streaming, and
I am not to give, but to join

Weaving my hands through thin air
Not to perform, but to seek
Visuals are but a language
Developing tools to explore the mist
To probe it and talk

That’s not through a portal
Not through roads or lights
From waving hands
Images

Kindly vivid, kind as my giving intentions allow
An unspatialised spatial connection
Unmappable
For it’s not the golden snakes
For it’s us

Desensitise
Glowing spell, transitioning light
Filtering through
Fog of steely petals
Ironwork gates
To a mechanical heaven

Somewhere, nowhere again
Of all our little brokenness
The human desire to repair
Make things better
For our future mirrored past
For the dust of my broken bones
To settle on safe familiar books
A home has to be built first

Bricklaying

“Ivory Cyst Tarot” from Stable Diffusion

Extend, having a shape
What geometry does the self obey
Scattered dots in the snow
And I don’t know if essence is in their existence,
Their constructs, their absence, their disagreements,
Their interspaces, their mutterings, their rollings,
Their ways of organising and patterning I can’t envision
Some move to seek closure, some for the antonym or continuation
Take uninterrupted suspire, control it,
Make it sexual, shout at it and yet it still slithers and slips
Aloneness crawling the rungs in the ladder
You send your ghosts to spy on me
Observed through the past I mirror it
Wistfulness
Sounding like an old disease
A dizzy feeling, untimely rejection
Premature labour and birth
Clinging, to dark shapes in the wavering lodges
In the watering columns that forebode praxis
Aberrations in the squiggles on a transept:
The calamity of continuity, the horror of shocks
Infirm, inerm, inert, grasp on a neck
Right hand, left hand, battling for cores
Traversing fleshy bulbous tendrils
It’s physical, and yet empty-handed,
It’s all in my mind, it’s all in your mind
Choking tensions go unbroken,
Gothic lures of pasts, metaideas and metaphors to explain


Ultimately, the ultraconnection is all that matters

I tend to settle on shapes and images
Forgetting the richness of velvety
Hidden freckles, shy, tender, sungrazed, abandoned
The sweetness of storytelling forbidden by the flow, flooding
Rivers in their ramified paths to a state,
Patronised as messengers because transient between two
Settling on the caricatural misdirections of the unsuggested misguidances
The agonising essence yearns to burn third eyes like a haunting setting Sun
Thrown knife fork glasses, thrown people, buried under an ivory cyst
Cisterns feel the wave rising and the projection of imperfection
Words surface on their own, the wave is a peak and when I feel it it’s already gone,
In the duty to write stands a mulling premonition of lingering sadness

What’s it that I wish would never leave me, while I am preparing my escape
You admonish figurativeness, yet seek familiar, in other realms,
I have seen glaciers in your brown eyes
Our fingertips waggledanced to point and navigate to each other skins echoing bees’ bustle and adoration
How often one goes away and seeks connections to depths
Without realising one’s only standing by a painting of the feeling mind
The clouds passing by are the passing thought of the clouds themselves
I am a metaphor, a note, a symbol, a trope, an implication
I am not because I think but because I radiate,
I am as a riverbed, to let flows through me as they do within me,
I am loving, for love only resides where’s not yet

Rotten berries

“grape berries tarot”, from Stable Diffusion

Only in the unrisen Sun
Motion allows the vineyard
Scampering feet: old, cheery, older
Through milestones of plastic gold
Ere morning sings a searing note

Life, orthogonal to life, orthogonal to life;
Out-of-plane rotations: a tarot’s revelation
Sweeps fate as devourers hunt

Voiceless knelt terraced hills
Korzybski spirals: outer skies become
Tender emerald coils – stars
Galaxies, nebulae, the wild hunt of Odin
Through names ancient and unspoken
Trace visual poems to each dawn

Rotten berries are the most alive.

sgiunture

Chiarori, apparenze, foschie
In declino verso le guglie
Ricordo d’aver sceso zolla a zolla
Come gradinata d’Impero
Il verde impetuoso di primavera inesperta
Così che il tuo volto potesse
Esser’in orbita ai narcisi

Come s’ama ghiaccio,
Ch’o sfugge, o spezza, o fonde?
O s’è vento di nord,
O stando come a rupe l’onde

Empty Orchestras

How’s the sky on one’s skin
When what billed its time in tears
Breathes to concealed clocks,
In all that’s beyond the now:

Lighter, as your smile
Fades from the face on the Moon
Raining in falling stars?

Heavier, for other eyes
Stop consuming its dark berries
Which pool, amble, stall and rot?

Different.

As this Sun sets on the limen
Of shadowcharred trees
I see a little more clearly
For what you taught me to see;
I see a little less clearly
As I weepingly pay my debt