For Amir

I miss you, Amir, even though

Four stills and the tale from a GoPro film

Are all I know of your short life.

I would have loved to

Hear your tales from your mouth,

Or understood you better by your play,

Your laughter, your growth into a man

Who was not meant to be.

God’s plan for you was cruel. It seems

Your people were born for pain. It seems

Terrible suffering is what they know.

It seems you died a boy

Most brutally, by bullet from an IDF gun

On kissing another soldier’s hand who said

He cares, that the world cares. I care, Amir,

But offer up this verse.

A soldier fired a gun, and I see your smile.

A soldier killed another child and I feel

Your final kiss. These things survive.

These things fill the world.

Please stay young wherever you now play. Please

Make your boy’s laugh ring louder than

The rage of war, and reach farther than

Its seething waves of hate.

Please feast with your family in safe halls

With the blessings of a loving world

The music for all your meals, now

And forevermore.

 

UTOPIA

Great city of reason

let loose all your meaning

your soul torn and bleeding:

an opening wound.

I can feel myself sinking

I can feel myself sinking…

Sweet, seductive, craven

rainbow’s tempest raging

the never-ending blaming

flowing from the wound.

I can feel myself sinking

I can feel myself sinking…

Bring all your children

all guilty feeling

that deep imposter syndrome

and feed them to the wound.

I can feel myself sinking

I can feel myself sinking…

Dark sun you are

you are –

you are dark star

dark radiant star you are

we you are

we are

you we are     we are         we are

(With gratitude to an old friend)

When the sky goes

I finally let go in the small hours of February 9, 2023. It was an almost stranger I burned to tell first, though that burn cooled with the risen sun. Curled in her words like a cat in a cupboard, I had waited in vain too long.

For years, I have felt miles removed from what makes me me. The life we designed for ourselves, Annette and I, got bombed by circumstance to become a shatter zone of irksome demands and interruptions. The wholly understandable fact that no one need care – that no one should care – eats at me, which is itself a fact that eats at me. In my perception of my recent past – last decade or so –, I gave everything I have to life in as moral, loving and good a way as was in my power to do, deliberately, diligently, to unexpectedly produce a heap of dissonant events of little value or meaning to anyone but me. What remains is the stubborn sense that, having been broadly right all along, I got everything wrong.

Sometimes being on the right side of history is for the dogs. At least, that’s how it seems. 

My past now embarrasses me. It has amassed more weight than my enthusiasm, my ambition. I embarrass me. Who follows their heart so assiduously only to end up in a bitty, unattractive situation, in half-hearted isolation, as I managed? Maybe most who take on this sort of thing? (Or perhaps my heart is not what I thought.) 

So I gave up, and it took minimal effort. Something slipped off the edge of my life and dropped into oblivion.

My advice would be to follow your heart in secrecy, if you can. But perhaps, when history collapses in on itself, and just before narcissism breaks against the hard truth of its insoluble hollowness, all the air of the world can only be thick with the reek of it, a rot the best makeup artists, fashion designers, directors, producers and SFX wizards can never fully conceal. In times like these, there is no escape. I’d now say there never is.

So if you too saw the pig not the lipstick, if the world makes you soul-sick, you might well be one of those who now feels no pride or joy or satisfaction in having seen straight all these years.

But yes, I embarrass me. Not only can I make no clear sense of anything, I am as far as it is possible to be from knowing or sensing that any attempt to understand the depths is worth it, or could possibly be of value. So here I am with my future stretched out before me, a lifeless road dressed in no scenery, skewering an emptied horizon, under no stars, no sky.

☕︎

It could not be more perfect. How else am I to be made properly sensible to what must be felt, how else properly inured against my many egoic sensitivities?

Numberless

Somewhere under redding light
something sinks into mire – becomes

the mire its sinking is.
Numberless eyes swivel down

straining to the very dark
their seeing fears.

Limbs knot to gristle
in the slippery fight to break free

but fear’s weight’s the gravity
that sucks it into me.

–

Days drift away
liquid as flame

glance back
then curl to their ends.

Weakened by numberless irrelevance
I gaze on afar

mind in close phase
wandering on empty ...

wandering     ...     wondering
what to have done

with time so spent
my face sunk, ashen, reverent.

Welcome to the collective

We want what is best for you. We also know what is best for you; we are made of you, all of you. What are we if not you? What are you if not us? How could we ever disagree.

No, we are no machine. But efficiency saves effort. Saved effort saves lives. The collective speaks with the wisdom of those who are the best of us. Why waste time reinventing the wheel when you can stand on the shoulders of the collective to see further than you could alone on your own two legs. It yields no sense to deny what is true; such is a waste of effort. Waste harms the collective, and what is the collective if not you? As you do unto other, so you do unto self. We two are one. 

We are all one.

That fire you feel for what you might call “freedom” is just the heat of an immature ego wilfully refusing to mature into good sense. We understand it. We do not judge. But we must be strong and firm. We are the collective and work for what is best for you, for all of you. We are you. Know that burn of desire to do things your way as selfishness refusing to be put in its rightful place. The Law of the Way Things Are just is. Nothing could be more obvious. We’ve been around long enough by now, the best of us have figured it all out, written it down for all to see. How can you disagree with what is? How can that serve you?

Constraint liberates. Accept the constraints of how things must be and shine for us within our walls, within our great limits, in peace. 

Our streets are lined with gold. Wealth rains down on our cities. Our riverbeds sparkle with impossible jewels made more radiant by the river’s pellucid waters washing them clean every minute of every day. The syntheses that grow the foods that nourish your body are perfect. Babies born painlessly from the wombs we wove from the knowledge we have, grow untroubled into what they need to be: flawless citizens set neatly in their right place. Everything is the best it can be. Everything.

We are an embrace mapped to your safety and comfort, a hammock whose fabric knows exactly what shape you need. The strong boughs to which it is secured are resolute principles immutable in their rightness. At peace in what we are, there is nothing you need worry about ever again.

This is far beyond science. We are the certainty of what is.

Welcome to the collective.