Jude Murphy

Poetry Summary 08&09

2009-08-12T15:28:00.000-07:00

14/2/08 No.6

Disasters, Angels, Violence!

Oh well. We are one.

And who's to blame

for one-ness?

It's that look in your eyes.

I can never communicate with that place,

that look.

It's all disasters and angels and violence.

10/3/08

It was a long way home through those eyes.

Your soul lay just beyond the horizon,

hiding shyly behind it,

and I could tell

from a shimmering mirage on the ocean between our gazes,

that it had its tail between its legs.

And still you smiled,

as part, even,

of the expression you wore

by which your brow so endeavoured

to put a veil like night upon those restless seas,

so weakly,

so helplessly and effortlessly,

and yet at such a length,

and it was such a long way home.

17/7/08 No.5

I understand

all those heads cocked sideways,

under the weight of heaven.

Such a proposed idea

must be a burden indeed.

An angel

nervously playing a lute.

Robes of bright primary colours.

It's all about waiting for something to happen.

That's why we still love them.

3/8/08 No.2

A little hornet. Some

of the leaves on

the rosebush are

rotting. The hum

of insects, but

not one to be seen, not

for fear of a little hornet,

not for play or for

some hideous metaphor.

Amongst this a flower,

though truly amorous, drops,

like liquid to

the floor

of a little garden.

12/8/08 No.3 (After 27/4/08)

There were?

Things that stared at me

from the side of the street.

Bearded men,

cigarette buds

littering the pavement,

being frantically nibbled upon

by birds browsing for souls.

Colours which ever receded,

but never disappeared.

Hungry pedestrians,

sewerage sitting as still as a cloud,

depending on the weather,

rain brought a frantic,

gazing vacancy.

15/8/08

I'd bet there's no one

who knows how long those

fatigued shutters,

still with a hint of

someone else's faded blue,

have hidden

what one may presume to be

a time-forgotten home

of dust mites and unheard noises.

17/9/08

A wall,

built between the black and white

of a soul. A fish,

flopping on the deck of a ship,

a locked in creature, with

neither life nor death in its eyes,

waiting for death in a fit of panic.

Your feet take turns to keep a look-out,

sometimes

you lift your hand to your mouth,

another bolt on the door. A mother

violently shaking her death stricken child,

tears unseen amongst a flurry

of wading pilgrims. You

can't stop them from drowning.

11/10/08 No.2

I stared beyond it, still,

it was all that stood before my eyes.

I didn't understand how

something that far could

be so bright. The swan,

(the swan,) its light (an inferno),

I approached it, and

it pecked my heart out.

15/10/08 No.2

Oh, despair! I've fallen

into far too many flames, and now

the skin grafts on my soul

have disfigured my thoughts beyond recognition.

Those burning eyes, I feel their heat

with a platonic purity. A

lack of context other than the

vast space between the

inevitable lonesome wanderings of two,

(as is the human condition,)

overly conscious minds. So,

my love, be you my enemy do please excuse me

that I would call you such a thing.

25/10/08 No.2

There's dead foliage in the forest of my thoughts.

Autumnal beds of the long forgotten

hiding saplings on paths long overgrown.

There are birds to distribute the seed of fruiting trees,

they fly, confused and distracted

in long and winding paths.

The winds and rains come day to day.

The forest of my thoughts is fed by those of yesterday,

by the soil of leaves long decomposed and soon

again cold winds will see branches bare.

17/11/08 No.2

All just warming their hands on the fire of my soul,

like parasitic thieves they took my thoughts,

made off to the bay and

sipped wine by the lapping waves.

17/11/08 No.3

Silence and the hiss of what one might be thinking,

the temperature cannot continue to descend,

for everything is still.

Somewhere from birds, a trill,

and somewhere in the ice my thoughts have met an end,

and in the sea of your words I find I'm sinking.

19-20/11/08

Today light greets my eyes with a new stealth.

The old withdrawing blues turn on their heels

to run, the yellow of the midday sun

takes cover under a crimson vale, and

its rays reflect but unseen greys upon

the pure white feathers of a sleeping swan.

Today the sound is cautious to my ear.

Somewhere a child whistles a melody,

and though shrill in the air, it's warm to hear,

and though dead leaves waltz to a strong wind's tune,

it dares not so tempt one strand of my hair.

Nor as my still, unblinking, eyes are struck

by violent gusts and particles of dust

do I hear but the voice of dreams and hum

the tune to which I feel I may go numb.

24/11/08

My thoughts are written in a foreign script,

and I can see your eyes endeavouring

to read it, fruitlessly, by focusing

beyond the sharp horizon of my light.

But one must know that, eyes upon the sea,

beyond the gaze's reach where land still lies,

there gazes back another pair of eyes,

whose strength but reaches one identity,

and no two thoughts were ever spelt the same.

27/11/08

There was no consensus between the gods

that nothing can be still on the plane of time,

which but quietly admires that which firmly stands.

Consider the heads of men

that were carved from stone which may by now,

having been used instead

in mighty ancient constructions, castle walls,

the gates of Rome, or housed a man

who wrote a text now lost,

have crumbled, long eaten by another of Earth's plans.

He's in that gallery every time you visit,

and the distance behind you reached by his dead gaze,

ever increases.

But only so there is something

by which you can acknowledge it,

it's a spacial vibration within your soul,

the space where you come to visit

and gaze back at him.

1/12/08

I swam, bereft of light,

carried silently at the heel of an ocean current,

and something passed me by, I heard

a green shimmer,

which sparkled for the water's random distortions,

or caught reflections of my drunken heartbeat

as it tripped over itself.

To my timely means

there could be no elsewhere,

and all the more wildly the seagrass danced

as, having become ignorant to words,

I drifted within your heathen laughter,

and all the more sheep gathered in black herds.

9/12/08

I'd been too long bound by the ropes of your deceit,

my blood the silent hostage of a single glance

which forced an entry to my veins,

and therein grew the parasitic vines, like deadly strains

of every virus which had ever known your blinding light.

A glance after which I could know no other

for a sudden impenetrable thickness in the foliage of my thoughts.

So then to this depth, I plunged

blindly,

and ropes are still breaking under the weight of your eyes.

4/1/09 No.2

A viral buoyancy in my soul,

you rise above all thoughts

at an expense through which they can't afford to live.

A cloud above the forest of my thoughts,

you starve its leaves of sunlight.

All would be well, but

that your rains evaporate as they fall.

It's a brilliant light by which my soul's been stricken blind,

more brilliant than the sun, it's one from which

I can't equate the distance

that my mind's Earth should set a cautious,

yet indebted orbit.

4/1/09 No.4

One can climb out of their cavernous gazes

to feed upon thought

of a subtler nature, there are pockets of fresh air,

indeed oceans

to be explored beyond the focused lens of a human eye.

Light can be tremendously diffused with time.

4/1/09 No.5

I spend sleepless nights by the tracks of time,

watching my thoughts

self-importantly sliding by from no direction.

Comforted by a gentle heat,

I let my gaze permeate the star flooded sky.

13/1/09

I am a prisoner of gravity

and the impenetrable Earth,

my soul contorted

like spilt oil riding on a rough sea,

shackled in the space between pleasure and pain.

No higher freedom is known than that of

animals whose minds were spared of language,

who sing the un-fretted notes of the cello

while we, the fixed tones of the harpsichord,

those born in a long coat who need no more

convincing,

to whom fortune is still but a moment,

and necessity a bridge

over the torrent as which we know it.

28/1/09

The feeling is inherent of drowning in one's own breath,

and the pulling forces of fear and hope

that should life sound its sirens, death will stir.

Hope

both sticks in my throat, choking me,

and embraces my fear with a medicating force.

I watch

as the sun rises on the inside of one eyelid,

sets on the other.

I'm looking at something far beyond that.

It's illuminated at every sunrise but

seems to worship the vast expanses of the night.

31/1/09

Hiding in an enclosed system of caves,

I'm haunted by everything from all directions.

Feeling my way around a corner,

for an interrupted heartbeat I

catch the light of a cat's glowing eyes,

a substantial ember in the heat of a distant star.

Needless to say, I'm falling.

Landing on a choice

between a detailed map, or the general illumination of my world,

simultaneously all of my muscles contract.

A lost echo in the distance tells me...

1/2/09

I'm hard hit that time can't move horizontally.

Every unit of movement is a change in the weather,

each new light seen with a new eye.

There's so much here, that

one often may as well have started again.

9/2/09

There's more movement within me than all of that which I can't see,

I extend farther inwards than the universe does outwards,

and still my will to escape is an interminable force.

I afforded one of these suddenly brief days

to a full loop of thought.

It's a polychrome existence ruled by a colour-blind god.

Somewhere time, as the rose, works alike by any other name.

Elsewhere, on a spherical Earth,

light dims the passing continents.

18/2/09

Bathed suddenly in a warmer light,

the air breathes with a new viscosity.

Unconstrained, my blood flows

by the pulse of a discretionary thought,

and somewhere far away

there is absolutely nothing.

I still may not afford

that there be wind or rain outside, but

the windows firmly disregarded,

I am content.

11/3/09

The walls are a breeze through my field of vision.

They accelerate

behind my head, rupturing

a struggling tail of minutes.

16/3/09

Unzipping the air on my path,

I wrote my thoughts again today

in steps on the city's tangled pavements.

I'm chasing the tail of time which I drag

behind me like a ball and chain,

black snow gathering on my fetters

by new light as they roll around every corner,

by old storms as they grind along the weathered concrete.

Actions, of course, can

never dance well to the tune of a thought.

6,8&13/4/09

Drink a broad spectrum of compassion,

of the very most diverse, yet

unburdened smiles,

there's no richer water for the flower of one's health.

An eye, reflecting again the light of a

bicycle mirror comes slowly floating around

another grey, smooth-edged corner,

another star-like twinkle, and the down-turned human nose,

and a mouth that shouts "keep walking,

subject,

keep walking!"

It's known, each horizon is too far to tread

when effort strikes the settled human soul,

yet every foot has danced through forest thick with thorn,

(and every hand so been cut

to show blood's fiery lust,)

but

to smell a single rose at its centre.

"Keep walking,

subject,

keep walking!"

Does one trample the rose

for it too is thorned?

A scent being but a decorative,

or apprehensive note in the chord of a moment,

that is. One knows to let it be,

and keep walking.

The sun comes

to peep over a frowning hill,

on the far side a fleeing hiker is blinded.

Budding leaves return a trusting glance, and

are caressed by an exhausted breeze.

The crackling of a cyclist on the stones gives way to silence

as the last shadow floats away in pursuit of a cloud.

21/4/09

It's the difficulty of knowing a moment.

The memory and anticipation, on the same plane,

of the same thought,

in an expression, a signal.

Isolate a moment, nothing

of the sort exists, takes place,

they might say there's

no synchronised movement,

no platonic emotion, no,

and then that there's no

"single" word.

And yet one holds it with all earthly grip,

as the more words we use...

30/4/09

My lungs, that would see air's ill-tempered substance

saturated with joy, have slept

in dismal ocean currents, known too well

the liquid substance of Earth's knotted disorder.

Heads have lain on pillows of wounded stone,

hearts, with all their might, kept time with phantoms

of pursuit,

only to conclude with giggles of palpitation

which leave one eye forever exposed to the wind,

and the other tightly shut.

9/5/09

I've felt so strongly

and so merely present,

the illuminated ochre bottle

locked inside the nocturnally toned mahogany cabinet,

eyes marching through my path of thought,

the teeth of a caged dog piercing, in its mind,

through the soul of an offending onlooker,

right foot tapping impatiently and left pointing to the door.

I've been dormant.

Put to sleep by public immobility.

20/5/09

The air gathers as behind a dam of indecision,

breathes as if retracing its steps over every moment,

yet again to turn and observe its path.

They're incomprehensible,

the dimensions suspended in the projected light of a thought.

Often one may have been better stricken blind.

21/5/09

It's a maze of soul-grating grey,

every inch more a victim of apathy than the last,

somewhere a pipe drips continuously and God

bless every dead spider like fallen troops,

bright eyed poets and a place on another planet.

It's the passage to death that's too small to get through.

5,11,12,15,16,17,18&19/6/09

I'll speak of the parasite, though it's not my art,

by which this pus oozes from a wound in my thoughts.

It perches its profound effect

first vulture-footed on my Earth-set eyes,

and with its screeching, groaning nails, denies

all reason that I may detect,

my constructed, sunlit thoughts, sculpted by an intrusive hand

to the cruel curves of yet another night.

The mask it wears depicts a man about to break

helplessly into a fearful fit of laughter,

maybe about to suffocate,

maybe hanging from a cliff's crumbling side

wondering how he ever came to hide

in such a dull and morbid state,

he that would mindlessly pass his life to another

and cast away the rest.

It's pitiful, the sickness to which I succumb,

by what is but a hormonal trick of the light.

Limbs that I myself do not miss

reflected in barren tears of desire,

my stomach forced to turn, and how I tire

of losing time to all of this,

of watching films with no ending on the inside of my eyelids,

of watching even direst enemies through a shameful lens of jealousy.

There's a darkening shade of grey upon my past

where lust's periphery has been beaten to death,

memories, veiled by charcoal clouds,

of days on which the sky seemed blue and bright,

sweet sounds that were made dissonant by light

and thoughts that became lost in crowds.

The blood being drawn from my soul by this monster

is dripping over my eyes.

I often cast my thoughts to hopeless ideals,

bare my fists at desires by which they came to be,

which distance the frown from the smile

too far to cater for the platonic

so that the ecstatic and the chronic

are left fighting for blood and bile.

I float like an unseen, transitory cloud

through dreams of freedom from beginning and end, cause and effect.

What is this futile, sickly moment of repent

compared to the years that I've lost to this disease,

running to dead ends through wide eyes,

tripping over steps I could clearly see,

wasting hope-charged breath so ignorantly,

balancing on a rope of lies?

It's a single, excruciating five second break

on the repeatedly enforced sprint between one's first and last breath.

2009 Poetry

2009-07-19T16:44:00.000-07:00

2/1/09

Our eyes grow tired of each other, we sleep

as the sky falls like an autumn leaf.

3/1/09

The glasses I pour grow bigger the more I drink.

I'm peeping blindly into tomorrow's knowledge,

let this be objective or God rest it,

and yet there's no substance, but

that my hand has been let loose upon a page.

An old sonata puts my soul to rest

as I wait for another fruitless sunrise.

4/1/09

The air was trying to rob me of my skin,

was so thinly temperate that

distances increased,

between inches, between seconds.

A foul wind blowing from nowhere

I felt haunted by a hailstorm,

saw it reflected in my own eyes by the air's thoughts of ice.

The panic rose in my frozen legs,

so by knees of stone I trod around the corner of a smile,

landed softly by a glass of wine

and that flame in which I see your gaze to harmonise with mine.

4/1/09 No.2

A viral buoyancy in my soul,

you rise above all thoughts

at an expense through which they can't afford to live.

A cloud above the forest of my thoughts,

you starve its leaves of sunlight.

All would be well, but

that your rains evaporate as they fall.

It's a brilliant light by which my soul's been stricken blind,

more brilliant than the sun, it's one from which

I can't equate the distance

that my mind's Earth should set a cautious,

yet indebted orbit.

4/1/09 No.3

It's in the stride of your heart and the spectrum of your skin,

a wait far longer than is just,

your pulse is making you itch.

Sometimes a moment would consume a week,

others it would make one of a minute.

Every time you draw another breath

you're struggling to witness your own birth.

4/1/09 No.4

One can climb out of their cavernous gazes

to feed upon thought

of a subtler nature, there are pockets of fresh air,

indeed oceans

to be explored beyond the focused lens of a human eye.

Light can be tremendously diffused with time.

4/1/09 No.5

I spend sleepless nights by the tracks of time,

watching my thoughts

self-importantly sliding by from no direction.

Comforted by a gentle heat,

I let my gaze permeate the star flooded sky.

8/1/09

I even sought your failing light

within a wine which we had shared,

or by its daring aroma to live the music of your voice.

9/1/09

One can run rings around stillness,

I came to think as I listened to their echoing footsteps.

The sun, of course, is waiting only for

death,

and elsewhere stars run stillness around rings.

9/1/09 No.2

My birth is rare

that the candle's flame not be mourned,

which plagues the forest of my mind in swarms

and is extinguished by a single breath.

Were you born as I, the Earth

itself would perish by

every flame which has ever burnt.

13/1/09

I am a prisoner of gravity

and the impenetrable Earth,

my soul contorted

like spilt oil riding on a rough sea,

shackled in the space between pleasure and pain.

No higher freedom is known than that of

animals whose minds were spared of language,

who sing the un-fretted notes of the cello

while we, the fixed tones of the harpsichord,

those born in a long coat who need no more

convincing,

to whom fortune is still but a moment,

and necessity a bridge

over the torrent as which we know it.

28/1/09

The feeling is inherent of drowning in one's own breath,

and the pulling forces of fear and hope

that should life sound its sirens, death will stir.

Hope

both sticks in my throat, choking me,

and embraces my fear with a medicating force.

I watch

as the sun rises on the inside of one eyelid,

sets on the other.

I'm looking at something far beyond that.

It's illuminated at every sunrise but

seems to worship the vast expanses of the night.

31/1/09

Hiding in an enclosed system of caves,

I'm haunted by everything from all directions.

Feeling my way around a corner,

for an interrupted heartbeat I

catch the light of a cat's glowing eyes,

a substantial ember in the heat of a distant star.

Needless to say, I'm falling.

Landing on a choice

between a detailed map, or the general illumination of my world,

simultaneously all of my muscles contract.

A lost echo in the distance tells me...

1/2/09

I'm hard hit that time can't move horizontally.

Every unit of movement is a change in the weather,

each new light seen with a new eye.

There's so much here, that

one often may as well have started again.

9/2/09

There's more movement within me than all of that which I can't see,

I extend farther inwards than the universe does outwards,

and still my will to escape is an interminable force.

I afforded one of these suddenly brief days

to a full loop of thought.

It's a polychrome existence ruled by a colour-blind god.

Somewhere time, as the rose, works alike by any other name.

Elsewhere, on a spherical Earth,

light dims the passing continents.

18/2/09

Bathed suddenly in a warmer light,

the air breathes with a new viscosity.

Unconstrained, my blood flows

by the pulse of a discretionary thought,

and somewhere far away

there is absolutely nothing.

I still may not afford

that there be wind or rain outside, but

the windows firmly disregarded,

I am content.

26/2/09

Look at the tips of my fingers with their

quickly knitted rainbow lines of me,

like blunt arrow tips pointing at the heavens.

Rusting shields of my continuous demise

lining the advancing regiment of another algorithmic expression,

nothing is won as

there are no loops in the path of creation, but

nonetheless I feel an army clash with mine,

and alas another storm closes in on that clear sky.

28/2/09

There's one free sand at least

and at most on any monolithic planet.

One stain on any surgeon's window

on which breeds a family of casualties,

every time you sleep you're running and

for every non-existence there's a potential.

As you die at the time of your birth there is

indeed surplus to

any extent.

3/3/09

There's someone who wants to

touch you everywhere,

and that will be the crown on their royal being,

to know your extraneous flesh as does your

personal sentience, to trap your self and

get to know it like you'd always wanted to.

Reflect and don't tell me, lest it be

after the day you die,

that our souls are any more industrious than the smallest fly.

4/3/09

A dull, reverberant buzz zips around this micro-landscape,

upon which the walls close in, until

time floods the air, as water does the vacuum

of a drowning swimmer's starving lungs,

and the scripture says we can proceed.

11/3/09

The walls are a breeze through my field of vision.

They accelerate

behind my head, rupturing

a struggling tail of minutes.

16/3/09

Unzipping the air on my path,

I wrote my thoughts again today

in steps on the city's tangled pavements.

I'm chasing the tail of time which I drag

behind me like a ball and chain,

black snow gathering on my fetters

by new light as they roll around every corner,

by old storms as they grind along the weathered concrete.

Actions, of course, can

never dance well to the tune of a thought.

22/3/09

The drop of blood that escapes the pumping whip

of a slave-driving heart

illuminates one's being. I

can never tell if that equates to the sun

being crossed by a cloud, or peeping out from behind one.

I can inflict my well meant influence upon those who are,

and yet, I am.

My luck

is like that of a child who,

having been lost in the woods, has been found and

brought to safety,

but it is I who will forever be drying tears from faces.

22/3/09 No.2

Let me trace your eyelash with the flat of my thumb

when your luck is out,

just,

that the rhythm of my pulse might be a positive force.

Let me take that globe from your shoulders, Atlas,

that it might never escape my unsleeping gaze.

I'm watching the stars.

The glints in your eyes that mirror hardships and smiles.

27/3/09 No.2

Your eyes the only gap on the horizon between time and space,

one might gaze right through them, that if they existed,

there'd be no end to inhalation and

exhalation and circulation,

and the wind as ever would

drop every leaf to the root of another tree.

27/3/09 No.3

What are you but a

cognitive atom

in the molecular structure of my light?

4/4/09

What are those meandering lengths of the back of my hand,

life sailing life to the port of a fleeting dream,

I just saved a drowning child

who can do no more itself.

6,8&13/4/09

Drink a broad spectrum of compassion,

of the very most diverse, yet

unburdened smiles,

there's no richer water for the flower of one's health.

An eye, reflecting again the light of a

bicycle mirror comes slowly floating around

another grey, smooth-edged corner,

another star-like twinkle, and the down-turned human nose,

and a mouth that shouts "keep walking,

subject,

keep walking!"

It's known, each horizon is too far to tread

when effort strikes the settled human soul,

yet every foot has danced through forest thick with thorn,

(and every hand so been cut

to show blood's fiery lust,)

but

to smell a single rose at its centre.

"Keep walking,

subject,

keep walking!"

Does one trample the rose

for it too is thorned?

A scent being but a decorative,

or apprehensive note in the chord of a moment,

that is. One knows to let it be,

and keep walking.

The sun comes

to peep over a frowning hill,

on the far side a fleeing hiker is blinded.

Budding leaves return a trusting glance, and

are caressed by an exhausted breeze.

The crackling of a cyclist on the stones gives way to silence

as the last shadow floats away in pursuit of a cloud.

21/4/09

It's the difficulty of knowing a moment.

The memory and anticipation, on the same plane,

of the same thought,

in an expression, a signal.

Isolate a moment, nothing

of the sort exists, takes place,

they might say there's

no synchronised movement,

no platonic emotion, no,

and then that there's no

"single" word.

And yet one holds it with all earthly grip,

as the more words we use...

21/4/09 No.2

There's a space that's frozen,

we all walk and think right through it.

26&29/4/09

The smoothing sun's shackles, they're

all about keeping waves from conscious oceans,

when nothing has come clean,

when the battle's lost and won

and yet thoughts of which the mind grows fonder

wander through neurological cobblestoned lanes,

lost, and glad to be so,

eyes cast beneath a passing bird

which will proceed to do no more than die.

30/4/09

My lungs, that would see air's ill-tempered substance

saturated with joy, have slept

in dismal ocean currents, known too well

the liquid substance of Earth's knotted disorder.

Heads have lain on pillows of wounded stone,

hearts, with all their might, kept time with phantoms

of pursuit,

only to conclude with giggles of palpitation

which leave one eye forever exposed to the wind,

and the other tightly shut.

9/5/09

I've felt so strongly

and so merely present,

the illuminated ochre bottle

locked inside the nocturnally toned mahogany cabinet,

eyes marching through my path of thought,

the teeth of a caged dog piercing, in its mind,

through the soul of an offending onlooker,

right foot tapping impatiently and left pointing to the door.

I've been dormant.

Put to sleep by public immobility.

9/5/09 No.2

I've spoken to the creature who watches you from rooftops.

Don't worry,

it gets pleasure from the pure pursuit.

Time is on a chain attached to your thoughts.

20/5/09

The air gathers as behind a dam of indecision,

breathes as if retracing its steps over every moment,

yet again to turn and observe its path.

They're incomprehensible,

the dimensions suspended in the projected light of a thought.

Often one may have been better stricken blind.

21/5/09

It's a maze of soul-grating grey,

every inch more a victim of apathy than the last,

somewhere a pipe drips continuously and God

bless every dead spider like fallen troops,

bright eyed poets and a place on another planet.

It's the passage to death that's too small to get through.

21/5/09 No.2

It's a "time for contentment" moment, one on which

to draw back the corners of my mouth with my fingers,

to gaze wide-eyed at the air before my face.

I've probably had a drink.

28/5/09

It depends on the weather;

emotions build like mortarless bricks

upon a tidal foundation,

a tightrope walking breath that varies

between rosy-cheeked summer afternoons and lost parasites.

29/5/09

I'll run to the very last syllable of tomorrow

until it is no longer burdened by the cowardly question-mark.

I'll feel razor blades in transient smiles,

and under your grave will always grow

the roots of another

barren, self perpetuating tree

with nothing to show for its ever flailing limbs.

30/5&2/6/09

Beware conclusions drawn by the fleeting hands

of sweat-glued tunnel-vision moments.

Stars debate amongst warring colonies of light,

dreams hide beyond the horizons of dreams and

every breath that reaches yours

lived long behind another set of lips.

5,11,12,15,16,17,18&19/6/09

I'll speak of the parasite, though it's not my art,

by which this pus oozes from a wound in my thoughts.

It perches its profound effect

first vulture-footed on my Earth-set eyes,

and with its screeching, groaning nails, denies

all reason that I may detect,

my constructed, sunlit thoughts, sculpted by an intrusive hand

to the cruel curves of yet another night.

The mask it wears depicts a man about to break

helplessly into a fearful fit of laughter,

maybe about to suffocate,

maybe hanging from a cliff's crumbling side

wondering how he ever came to hide

in such a dull and morbid state,

he that would mindlessly pass his life to another

and cast away the rest.

It's pitiful, the sickness to which I succumb,

by what is but a hormonal trick of the light.

Limbs that I myself do not miss

reflected in barren tears of desire,

my stomach forced to turn, and how I tire

of losing time to all of this,

of watching films with no ending on the inside of my eyelids,

of watching even direst enemies through a shameful lens of jealousy.

There's a darkening shade of grey upon my past

where lust's periphery has been beaten to death,

memories, veiled by charcoal clouds,

of days on which the sky seemed blue and bright,

sweet sounds that were made dissonant by light

and thoughts that became lost in crowds.

The blood being drawn from my soul by this monster

is dripping over my eyes.

I often cast my thoughts to hopeless ideals,

bare my fists at desires by which they came to be,

which distance the frown from the smile

too far to cater for the platonic

so that the ecstatic and the chronic

are left fighting for blood and bile.

I float like an unseen, transitory cloud

through dreams of freedom from beginning and end, cause and effect.

What is this futile, sickly moment of repent

compared to the years that I've lost to this disease,

running to dead ends through wide eyes,

tripping over steps I could clearly see,

wasting hope-charged breath so ignorantly,

balancing on a rope of lies?

It's a single, excruciating five second break

on the repeatedly enforced sprint between one's first and last breath.

2008 Poetry

2009-07-19T15:53:00.000-07:00

14/2/08 No.6

Disasters, Angels, Violence!

Oh well. We are one.

And who's to blame

for one-ness?

It's that look in your eyes.

I can never communicate with that place,

that look.

It's all disasters and angels and violence.

19/2/08

The pain felt quiet.

It was the red glow on a tropical horizon.

Warm rain in the distance.

There's a rumble,

it's in my veins,

and there's a flash in my arteries.

The comfort felt quiet.

The warmth on my skin,

the musical rhythm of my pulse.

It's that red's affect on my soul.

It's my rumbling armour of tropical quiet.

19/2/08 No.2

There never was a sky,

just a plane of blue which played host to your mood.

Nor was there ever an Earth,

just a mood of yours which played host to the sky.

10/3/08

It was a long way home through those eyes.

Your soul lay just beyond the horizon,

hiding shyly behind it,

and I could tell

from a shimmering mirage on the ocean between our gazes,

that it had its tail between its legs.

And still you smiled,

as part, even,

of the expression you wore

by which your brow so endeavoured

to put a veil like night upon those restless seas,

so weakly,

so helplessly and effortlessly,

and yet at such a length,

and it was such a long way home.

22/4/08

'Twas on all days that I would stay at home,

watching the minutes pass expectantly.

Waiting for the week's eighth day to arrive,

like life continued only on the ninth.

Then come night's fetters I would be surprised,

'cause day time's "lease hath all too short a date".

And then my eyelids played a film to me,

and my own drums would bang a happy tune,

but then awake from seventh day to first.

And every time it hurt just that bit more.

'Tis these days now I wander aimlessly,

dismissing every minute that I waste.

I wonder sometimes 'bout these seven days,

if life's entirety could have an eighth.

22/4/08 No.2

Sleep that night crept

up on me with stealth,

and played me like a

silent violin.

Watching giant waves

approach me from the oceans,

or springs amongst the

mountains,

or from nowhere,

from beyond my eyelids.

Stairways, hotels, whatnot,

cities.

then it played me like

a drum and I awoke

in a pool of sweat.

26/6/08

That persistence,

that damned human

persistence.

It feels like

being dangled

from a building

by the hair.

It feels like

a tumour in my love.

17/7/08

There's always a little

unoccupied crevice

somewhere in this city.

That's where I can put

my head,

into a little urban hole.

I hear the patter of

feet,

others trying to find their own

little niche.

I hold my pen between my teeth,

wait for someone to kick it out.

17/7/08 No.2

Seduced by murky chatter

and twilight harmonies,

a smugness in the light

painting its subjects

in bold strokes with a soft brush,

my eyelids let down their guard.

My blood is flowing

by an unknown pulse,

I can hardly care to think of it.

The back of my mind says

it won't translate into a thought.

A little breeze,

a yawn.

I look around smiling vaguely.

17/7/08 No.5

I understand

all those heads cocked sideways,

under the weight of heaven.

Such a proposed idea

must be a burden indeed.

An angel

nervously playing a lute.

Robes of bright primary colours.

It's all about waiting for something to happen.

That's why we still love them.

24/7/08

Bowing heads

around shyly glowing wooden tables,

sad, melting, dirty sorts of candles,

sly, dark little flames.

One lifts, slowly

even in its nervous

jittery shaking.

One with

deep set eyes,

or maybe just a protruding forehead,

no,

he doesn't have eyes,

nor any form of a face,

but he says:

"Oh,

what a terrible future we live in!"

24/7/08 No.2

Men found ways through

mazes of gazes to get here.

Walk briskly,

look down at your feet.

There. Sit down.

Now,

you're sitting in a

café.

You ordered a coffee,

you're wearing an awfully silly hat.

You plodded in your clown shoes,

you tripped and

fell into a few puddles.

But now you're here and you

reach into your pocket and now

you're truly grinning like a clown.

28/7/08

Have a look

down

towards your feet.

They're staring back up at you,

a sly little wink and

a nod, shuffling feet those and

a medium

for your love of the floor.

Ahead, a person,

and it has an

arm, one with a hand.

Oh for the love of a hand,

for the love of

shuffling along when

you know,

they stare back at,

by love by nature by

your love of the floor,

you, a shy little wink, and

now it doesn't matter where you shuffle to.

30/7/08

In my hands I feel

an ungodly nausea.

I wrap my fingers

around the stem of a glass,

caressing softly

the holy grail of my heart.

It's a sip of your

soul, I like to imagine.

Though in all sad truth,

'tis but a sickness in mine.

30/7/08 No.4

You remember

the one who put fire in your gut.

The one

who dragged your soul

from coast to coast,

and back again,

thrice in a moment and twice again.

That nonsense, of

climbing up and down the same hill,

of averting your gaze

only to find yourself facing

everything else at the same time.

If only you knew

how much you really loved that one.

If only you knew

the sands and

the winds that

give substance to those coasts.

3/8/08 No.2

A little hornet. Some

of the leaves on

the rosebush are

rotting. The hum

of insects, but

not one to be seen, not

for fear of a little hornet,

not for play or for

some hideous metaphor.

Amongst this a flower,

though truly amorous, drops,

like liquid to

the floor

of a little garden.

4/8/08

That church on the rock,

crushing all of that to which

my soul has ever given in.

Now for that which proves imposing,

where once I was but exposing

that which dances for the eye,

('spite the truth) I humbly lie.

Such proves (though by dogmas many),

man's sweet soul,

it certainly moves

with an admirable force.

7/8/08

The clouds

holding back the stars

so violently, so

tearfully disturbed

that this alien light is

invading,

teasing the inhabitants of

this beautiful terrain to which,

they maintain,

they have given such loving birth.

8/8/08

A dialogue:

Have a look at

the nearest wall to you.

Look how

beautiful it is.

And when you feel your spine so shiver

that it puts a haze upon a whole

vertical section of your soul,

turn your mind to your feet and

move them such that

you face the other way.

A monologue:

(Have a look at

the nearest wall to you.)

12/8/08 No.3 (After 27/4/08)

There were?

Things that stared at me

from the side of the street.

Bearded men,

cigarette buds

littering the pavement,

being frantically nibbled upon

by birds browsing for souls.

Colours which ever receded,

but never disappeared.

Hungry pedestrians,

sewerage sitting as still as a cloud,

depending on the weather,

rain brought a frantic,

gazing vacancy.

15/8/08

I'd bet there's no one

who knows how long those

fatigued shutters,

still with a hint of

someone else's faded blue,

have hidden

what one may presume to be

a time-forgotten home

of dust mites and unheard noises.

16/8/08

I found a little light,

hidden under a dismal bridge.

It pointed t'wards a little spot

on the otherwise dim brick wall,

on which was written:

"Please, I'm only

an inevitability, and oh,

what a terrible future we would live in,

were this such a thing".

Slowly, I walked

through to the other end of the passage

under the bridge.

Slowly,

the corners of my mouth turning upwards,

and distant eyes squinting under the sunlight,

I came close to a thought that I'd chased,

for some time.

But it ran away again.

18/8/08

A momentary clicking noise and

that was all I heard, apart

from the lazy murmur, and

the hazy whisper

of other energies elsewhere and

a sharp, ecstatic inward breath

which I took when, for a moment,

the sun peeped out, as if

to see if all was well.

(It was a young woman

gliding along the little cobbled road

on a bicycle,

a gentle summer breeze

blowing her hair out of her eyes

so that for a gentle summer moment

they could meet with mine.)

20/8/08

What can one do for

such a disease as

cancer of the love, but

eat one's proverbial "apple a day",

and search

for a metaphysical base

on which to sculpt a smile?

21/8/08

Heavenly bodies, the shyest,

most subtle of things.

They interact by means,

it seems,

of intimate and ever changing

polyrhythmic dances 'round

a subject be that you, or me, they

watch it, anyway,

like eyes, like children

passing 'round an image

which they know they shouldn't see.

And somewhere in your eyes I see

reflected, an infinity.

A far, romantic entity. So

quickly, I avert my gaze.

You're blinded by the sun,

and soon

enough I turn,

and once again you're gone.

8/9/08

A dead heat

somewhere in my throat

I think, and even though

my breath has risen far above my lungs,

above my nostrils and

seems just to linger in my head,

my brain still seems starved of oxygen.

I stretch my arms and legs,

yawning on a closed throat, and

for a moment it feels,

hitching a ride on a passing erythrocyte

(which let down its guard, I imagine),

like perhaps a cautious whisper of air

may have stirred to life

one of my muscles, maybe,

it was just a thought, and

then once more

my vision took on the haze

of the morning that was in it.

10/9/08 No.2

A momentary flash

which I caught in my peripheral vision:

that was all for which I turned my head.

15/9/08 No.2

It was too far between midnight and dawn

for you to be crawling around under

my skin.

My blackened room too bright for sleep,

my eyes set alight by your intense heat,

my conflagrating soul tried to escape,

and, panicking, I held my eyelids shut.

Still I saw your face as if by daylight.

15/9/08 No.5

I am an alchemist:

I turned lead into gold.

Turned a plague ridden sewer rat

into everything I dream about.

And then I opened my eyes

and I saw something else,

a kitchen,

I am a chef:

I turned a lump of flesh

into something someone would eat,

so I dreamt. So

I dreamt when I was a pig:

you slaughtered me.

Cut my throat with a blade of gold.

16/9/08

I wake up, having

swallowed a sword.

Blood trickling into my eyes,

the air breathes like liquid,

snow sleeps on my toes and

stale breath on the floor of my lungs.

The hair on the back of my hands

responds to every whisper, tries to

alert my frosted fingers, but they,

still in dream dazed catacombs,

respond with but the glaze in my eyes.

17/9/08

A wall,

built between the black and white

of a soul. A fish,

flopping on the deck of a ship,

a locked in creature, with

neither life nor death in its eyes,

waiting for death in a fit of panic.

Your feet take turns to keep a look-out,

sometimes

you lift your hand to your mouth,

another bolt on the door. A mother

violently shaking her death stricken child,

tears unseen amongst a flurry

of wading pilgrims. You

can't stop them from drowning.

26/9/08

I hadn't the time

to think about it,

'twas a gut instinct,

'twas necessity.

my eyes on you,

put pen to paper.

My heart beat but steadily in my chest,

the birds sang but as sweetly as ever,

my mind

susceptible to drift as clouds,

partial to following the wind as they,

my feet

still placed as firmly on the ground

as ever, though I must admit they were

affected, locked in by a trembling nerve.

Still, I lent you my soul and got it back.

28/9/08 No.2

You wept

because they couldn't finish your thoughts for you.

Your gaze

met theirs in a catastrophic collision,

got back up and kept racing into the horizon,

or towards

the centre of the Earth. Then as if

by a string,

your mouth was pulled into a smug little grin,

because you wept

and they couldn't finish your thoughts for you.

28/9/08 No.3

During that dream

in which your teeth fell out,

a glass bottle, a serrated blade,

the far away focus of my gaze,

hovered above your voyaging head.

You reached out in that dream and you

put your arms to my comfort. You

gave me a taste of your soul.

My teeth fell out and I

woke up beside

a glass bottle and a serrated blade.

30/9/08 No.2

Your image, not the size

of a candle flame

runs rings around this wooden table,

your reflection

dancing around another glass of wine.

My memory, from its collection

of broken records,

plays your voice, it

plays your voice; "Please,

play with my hair!"

Another lazy little smile,

another dancing little flame

reflects my hypnotised gaze.

7/10/08 No.2

Where you are, be it

dead, be it elsewhere,

my lens is focused, my

love, (or be it my hate,)

with precision on

everything between us. Be it

dead, or just lost,

I dare not ask,

not knowing, universal truth be told,

just what you are.

7/10/08 No.5

You told me not to move, I

didn't, I'm still in the same spot today,

you spoke to me in words

the wild colours of the Fauves,

a soundscape from the tropics and

dealt me the comforting smell of your hair

in a verbal embrace.

I love you still, as if

just by honour as I told you that once.

You might have told me

to hold on,

or wished me goodnight. And,

I must say I'm still holding on

with all my earthly grip

to the prospect of a good night.

11/10/08 No.2

I stared beyond it, still,

it was all that stood before my eyes.

I didn't understand how

something that far could

be so bright. The swan,

(the swan,) its light (an inferno),

I approached it, and

it pecked my heart out.

15/10/08 No.2

Oh, despair! I've fallen

into far too many flames, and now

the skin grafts on my soul

have disfigured my thoughts beyond recognition.

Those burning eyes, I feel their heat

with a platonic purity. A

lack of context other than the

vast space between the

inevitable lonesome wanderings of two,

(as is the human condition,)

overly conscious minds. So,

my love, be you my enemy do please excuse me

that I would call you such a thing.

21/10/08 No.2

Dusty bricks, they

make me want to stay, contented,

close my eyes,

they close your eyes. Incomplete

darkness, light, what not, I just

smile to remember

that which was ever perfect,

the new wall with its wet cement,

fell over and crushed me.

I rose above it, a flame and

my ash

was blown by a half-hearted gentle wind,

came to rest in a momentary dream.

25/10/08

Confronting he whose hand reaches around a bolted door,

it's that or let the eye wink at the hand,

it's that or know the fire hid by the stars

was but that of the hearth or of the candle

one lights for peace or for the unbolting of doors.

That parasitic fear of blind necessity, of

hunger, of lust and of the three witches.

You'll not have kingship for it,

but death. You'll not have

planets to revolve around your conflagrating heart.

You'll have a grand reflection of your soul

in a clear night sky and an imposingly empty doorway.

25/10/08 No.2

There's dead foliage in the forest of my thoughts.

Autumnal beds of the long forgotten

hiding saplings on paths long overgrown.

There are birds to distribute the seed of fruiting trees,

they fly, confused and distracted

in long and winding paths.

The winds and rains come day to day.

The forest of my thoughts is fed by those of yesterday,

by the soil of leaves long decomposed and soon

again cold winds will see branches bare.

25/10/08 No.5

A railway in the air carries scents past me,

it's long ago, I'm elsewhere,

I'm with this or that person. Oh,

that I was anywhere but here. Oh

that I could catch a train

to a warmer cavity in your thoughts.

28/10/08

Delaying hopeful sentiments

in a voyeuristic search for new light,

I stare at a concrete floor without projection.

I've missed something inherent in all of this.

28/10/08 No.2

Like an epiphytic parrot on my shoulder

it cries new substance to my ear

upon the world by which I know you, puts

a mark upon your gaze misplacing you within my thoughts,

the deeper breaths of my soul

to which I know it's parasitic.

I dared wish that it would relax its guard,

trust a breath of earthly air to mirror

an observation, an emotion. And

it came to be that you saw through me,

with your own life-sustaining pain.

31/10/08

That men were found in spaces without doors,

my heart palpitates a sigh,

I'll eat again. And

again, oh for the sake of my breath.

Time digs deep caves, do hide in them with me,

Psyche.

I've found in hearts a weariness of the unknown,

though night in me a certain warmth.

And the warm doors of the night will suffice to make

blind connections, I'll be running really,

though, for

in the end love knows only hate.

31/10/08 No.2

A flower bed border of the vision, or

an anchor I should say, but too

a buoyancy aid

to my intent. So I may truly know

a tune to the key of my thoughts.

Is this a form of joyous neutrality, and

in true optimistic style a gravity

on what it says to me that life should be,

or is it that my skin has come to be

a cloth to some old melancholy?

God forbid a constant answer.

A smooth and soothing light another

little claret, day has lifted

David to Goliath's eye level. Eyes,

you're mostly eyes. Now

I can read them, or

for once can cease to read them.

You love and you hate, so

you're in debt to Bach and Mozart too,

they'll tell you.

I came to stumble upon masquerade,

words felled trees in the forest of my thoughts.

They who by practice would never

come to rest upon a word

by the frequency of its vibration in your soul,

they'll tell you,

but now I know and I am guarded by the scent,

by petals blue of the heavens and

the fearful red of blood-spill. And

it's by their light, objectively,

that any gaze perhaps may know a focus.

1/11/08 No.4

Giant creatures shed imposing tears of stone,

I climb them but at every peak

I find planted the flag of another moment.

So then,

some saying that we're not alone,

I'm waiting for the lights,

and some that we

shall consciously return in masquerade,

I'm waiting in the forest that I couldn't find

to see a creature cry that I may stay.

5/11/08 No.5

We are forbidden;

were life a wine,

'twas corked by death.

12/11/08

Men watched and equated the world

through eye lenses of a clear, heat resistant plastic.

Mine of a green tinted glass,

I became lost

in a forest of withered cognitive leaves.

I heard the calls of its diverse inhabitants

as they came to terms with new solar winds.

The innocent fearful cries of lust,

laughter through veils of barren memory.

Still, I'd voyage time and again

to the lands of other souls. But

no one ever sees that at which they look.

12/11/08 No.2

A blind man could predict

the flicker of a flame, heard

a rhythm in a winter's winds,

other moments in the buzz of a passing fly.

Mute, he couldn't

find a word by which to name a smile.

Deaf, for all of that, and he could see

the words spoken by the next candle.

He knew, hanged for his sins,

a calm blown in by the winter's winds.

12/11/08 No.3

I spent an evening in July

drinking wine with God. The

personification to which they prey.

Intoxicated, he wept.

"Heaven", he said,

"comes every day to know more

of an inferno worse than that of hell."

"Black", I told him,

"would not be so dark but for

the white with which it is compared."

"Ay," said he, "they were painted

on the same canvas..."

12/11/08 No.4

That conversation took place on the lips,

I'll dream!

But it was that by which the piercing sword

of my old gaze has lost its gleam.

The words of old know now but shallow tones,

and only hearing them I'm lost in drones.

And 'tis by them, blindfolded

and barefoot I tread on stones.

12/11/08 No.5

Have you heard that everything finds

a circular niche

on the emotional spectrum?

Of course not,

for you are made of glass. And

for the incomplete you can never shatter.

17/11/08 No.2

All just warming their hands on the fire of my soul,

like parasitic thieves they took my thoughts,

made off to the bay and

sipped wine by the lapping waves.

17/11/08 No.3

Silence and the hiss of what one might be thinking,

the temperature cannot continue to descend,

for everything is still.

Somewhere from birds, a trill,

and somewhere in the ice my thoughts have met an end,

and in the sea of your words I find I'm sinking.

17/11/08 No.4

Only the ripples on Lough Tay can read my thoughts.

They know that those on the hills before me,

at sunset when the mist has gathered in their barren recesses,

can almost reflect my love with an earthly power.

19-20/11/08

Today light greets my eyes with a new stealth.

The old withdrawing blues turn on their heels

to run, the yellow of the midday sun

takes cover under a crimson vale, and

its rays reflect but unseen greys upon

the pure white feathers of a sleeping swan.

Today the sound is cautious to my ear.

Somewhere a child whistles a melody,

and though shrill in the air, it's warm to hear,

and though dead leaves waltz to a strong wind's tune,

it dares not so tempt one strand of my hair.

Nor as my still, unblinking, eyes are struck

by violent gusts and particles of dust

do I hear but the voice of dreams and hum

the tune to which I feel I may go numb.

24/11/08

My thoughts are written in a foreign script,

and I can see your eyes endeavouring

to read it, fruitlessly, by focusing

beyond the sharp horizon of my light.

But one must know that, eyes upon the sea,

beyond the gaze's reach where land still lies,

there gazes back another pair of eyes,

whose strength but reaches one identity,

and no two thoughts were ever spelt the same.

27/11/08

There was no consensus between the gods

that nothing can be still on the plane of time,

which but quietly admires that which firmly stands.

Consider the heads of men

that were carved from stone which may by now,

having been used instead

in mighty ancient constructions, castle walls,

the gates of Rome, or housed a man

who wrote a text now lost,

have crumbled, long eaten by another of Earth's plans.

He's in that gallery every time you visit,

and the distance behind you reached by his dead gaze,

ever increases.

But only so there is something

by which you can acknowledge it,

it's a spacial vibration within your soul,

the space where you come to visit

and gaze back at him.

30/11/08 No.2

There are magnets on the soles of my shoes,

and tears roll up my forehead that hell exists.

There is an armour of will on my breath,

and I sleep that I cannot conquer it, or

by other means to some extent I hibernate,

because at night I'm haunted by the passing of seconds.

Your eyes seemed once to house my soul, but now

I've drowned

in the waters of human intricacy.

1/12/08

I swam, bereft of light,

carried silently at the heel of an ocean current,

and something passed me by, I heard

a green shimmer,

which sparkled for the water's random distortions,

or caught reflections of my drunken heartbeat

as it tripped over itself.

To my timely means

there could be no elsewhere,

and all the more wildly the seagrass danced

as, having become ignorant to words,

I drifted within your heathen laughter,

and all the more sheep gathered in black herds.

2/12/08

I keep the glowing candle close to me

round whose light I once saw your image

running in circles,

in whose hypnotic dance I saw your eyes,

through the heat of which I'm driven by your memory.

Burnt out many times to no significant end,

you, like all of us,

are the only person who does not exist.

9/12/08

I'd been too long bound by the ropes of your deceit,

my blood the silent hostage of a single glance

which forced an entry to my veins,

and therein grew the parasitic vines, like deadly strains

of every virus which had ever known your blinding light.

A glance after which I could know no other

for a sudden impenetrable thickness in the foliage of my thoughts.

So then to this depth, I plunged

blindly,

and ropes are still breaking under the weight of your eyes.

12/12/08

Blood vessels carry spices to my brain

in little decorated wooden boats,

cinnamon calms the light behind my eyes,

and the grass grows greener in the rain,

and the rain falls slowly in the barren air

as I watch a street lamp glowing shyly,

casting cautious rays to the road, and the pain

of other days lies flattened on the stone,

and the pleasures perched on a fence between together and alone.

12/12/08 No2

Four hours past midnight,

the wine has run out

and the silence changes intermittently.

The soul dances ever more freely, and then,

a distant bird calls my eyelids to rest.

15/12/08

On an axis of fifteen hours,

she giggled as the fat soprano appeared,

and on one swing through the night, I sit

with my head in my hands, and again I think,

no memory can justify this.

A bird last night sang a sweet tune on a bare branch,

and crowds of red nosed shoppers smiled so warmly

at the proudly glowing lights that hung

like the ghosts of sleeping vines and leaves along the street,

and on one swing through the night, I lament

that today the light would be so proud,

and a dead frost lies imprisoned in my bones.

I smile that I could swing back

to uncork another bottle by her side,

and that such moments could afford these fettered days,

that swinging on could apprehend the course of such a gaze,

yet heavy still it is to hold the past to pride.

29/12/08 No.3

My soul is like a puppet.

About you,

I feel every way I possibly could.

My eyes are worn out running rings in their sockets,

my tongue locked in the chains of possibility.

You broke me down yourself so that I might

be at the mercy of your living hands.

You effect not my thoughts, but what's worse:

the very way in which I think them,

as I live within the constraints and on the ocean of your gaze,

thrashed about in the storm of your labyrinthine gaze.

31/12/08

I did everything being followed by God,

stealthily into a bark basement,

cold sweats breaking between my memories.

Consistently we were searching

for something

and quickly, despite my prayer driven efforts

it would pass into his hands.

He was our teeth, our nails,

and he was an inherent insecurity.

There was no available courage to stop, to turn around,

seize his arm, turn him to the floor,

to invite God's concealed light to my tired eyes.

Knowledge perished by his hands as soon as he wrote the word.

On the Illusion of Individuality

2009-07-19T14:42:00.000-07:00

I would like to try to communicate a simple concept, which nonetheless has somehow proven itself beyond the grasp of most people, and serves as a vital link in understanding why the aspirations of the animal liberation movement describe the most important achievements towards which any person can work.

This concept concerns the way in which a person interprets how he or she relates to every other person in existence. Each human has some idea of the space that they themselves, as individuals, occupy within Earth's living community as a whole, and the way in which they interpret their understanding of this idea is determined by their interaction with the extent of this community to which they are exposed. One vital interpretative step is the forming of concepts by which we segment this understanding. The word "space", in this context, can refer to a number of things. The first, and most basic, of these, is physical space. This is the amount of matter within a line of causality which is attributable to an individual. It is indisputable that within a universe which, in terms of life, contains only two people of exactly the same size, each of those people is accountable for fifty percent of the physical space within that universe's living community. Each of them, by means of their sight, is aware of one hundred percent of that space.

Physical matter, though, is not alone in being applicable to the concept of space. This matter only exists on account of its capacity to contain a concept of "existence", and is therefore intrinsically linked to subjectivity which, as its only possible host, is essential for the existence of a concept. Every person experiences subjectivity, but may only know a small part of the extended physical reality which, because of the processes therein which were necessary for that subject to come to exist, is implied by its existence. A person's experience of this part can be interpreted as their mental space.

If the concept of mental space is applied to the same hypothetical which I used for physical space, it seems justified to say that each of the two existing people in this universe is accountable for fifty percent of its mental space. Neither of them, though, because this type of space consists of awareness itself, can use their awareness to recognise the existence of the other fifty percent, as they can for physical space. This leads to the logical conclusion within each of these people that their personal sentience accounts for one hundred percent of that which exists. To suppose that this is true, though, would be as absurd as concluding that upon closing one's eyes, that person would represent the entirety of physical space within Earth's living community, by means of sensory knowledge of their own body's mass.

In interpreting the relevance of their personal space to all of that which exists, the average person has their eyes closed in exactly this way. In claiming that one's sentience is a unit and not just part thereof, one is personally claiming the subjectivity which necessarily hosts the entirety of physical reality, and thereby assuming the physical identity of that entirety, which anyone of sound mind must realise is ridiculous!

It can be said, given this concept, that every human on Earth is born with a natural "God-complex". We instinctively assume that, because when we pinch someone else we don't feel any pain ourselves, there is no pain connected to that action. The majority of people can intellectualise this to the extent that they know the pain exists, but still have the natural inclination not to acknowledge that pain, as it does not endanger them as a human specimen. If anyone can claim that this pain exists, and yet remain unconcerned that it is minimised, (save certain fetishists who are in a psychological condition to obtain pleasure from that pain,) it is hard to imagine in logical terms how that person might explain the existence of that subjective feeling. On crossing the subjectivity barrier between two living specimens, does one cross into a different universe? Is it that you can't increase the amount of pain existing beyond that which is felt by you, just as you cannot increase the amount of matter existing within the universe which hosts that feeling?

Of course, neither of these is the case.

The simple fact is, that the phenomenon of subjectivity must be thought of as a singularity. Sentience is broken up into sections which we call the individual, each of these being determined by the presence of a brain with its own genetic configuration. These sections, as separate expressions of subjectivity, each of which processes it in terms of a different brain, conflict with each other for full control of how it is ultimately experienced. By the chaos of this conflict, the net experience of sentience is driven blindly in the direction of the unpleasant, as pain and anguish are overlooked in favour of unjustifiably small amounts of pleasure which lie beyond them, though which seem by the illusion of individuality to be unobstructed by such feelings.

Happiness, therefore, is a much more complicated equation than we are all led to think by personal experience. In a dangerously misguiding contradiction, that which we call "feeling happy" very rarely increases the amount of happiness being felt. Instead, it is likely to be an illusory product of harvested suffering. To give an example, upon receiving a fur coat from her ignorant, rich husband, a woman may see the value of happiness slightly increased, when in fact, unbeknownst to her, the torture and murder of some fifty mink has led it to be decreased by significantly more, leaving the net value lower than it was at the start. The same phenomenon occurs upon the consumption of any animal product, and indeed many non-animal products for which the production process involves any exploitation, be it based on colour, language, religion or gender.

The act of ensuring that one's existence as a part of sentience is not a negative force because of this illusion, is called living ethically. Only by developing empathy, by relating to that which lies across subjectivity's barriers, can we know our true emotional state. Despite the large shares of existing happiness which may clump together in an unethical individual, to live unethically is, by its definition, to be unhappy. No matter how large a person's share of happiness, if it is gained unethically, their contribution to misery proportionally negates it such that pleasure's net value rapidly drops. Given this, the way people currently live paints a bleak picture for Earth's future, and indeed its present.