Where is heaven?
Only here
With the past drawn up
And collected
Like the skirts of time
Were no longer historic,
Nor paid much mind,
The future too
Is clawed back home
Until the now is pure and plump
And filled to brimming with love:
And the measurement of things
Is scrapped
And swapped
For the absolute value
Of the universe,
The self brought
Wholly to heart.
Never too late to acknowledge love:
The love that beats in every heart,
Sustains every self,
Brims ever full
And ever beautiful:
There in ignorance
Or in knowing,
Binding us to the world,
Bringing us the world,
Allowing us to be
As we are,
Free in the conundrum
And wonder of it all.
The heart says
Do not fear
Even if the danger seems imminent.
You must act
For the body’s safety
And as the conscience decrees,
Of course and most wisely,
But not from fear,
Not from an idea of future doom.
For the future is unborn,
Made of imaginings
And infinite potential
And all the combined karmas of the world:
And who can know that conundrum?
The now, however, is filled with love
And made of love
And witnessed by love,
And so too are all possible futures
Despite the dark veneers
That might come to pass.
And surely these dark illusions
Will tempt and prod
And precipitate
Any knot of fear held within the body,
Inviting the mind
To follow their bitter prospectuses
To a seemingly pitiful demise.
And perhaps you will be ensnared,
Caught fearful and flapping,
Making up facts
To fit the worry
You’ve whisked into a maelstrom.
Yet, you might pause
When fear offers its seductive hand,
Pause in the precious moment,
A moment with no past
Or combined future,
Just the here
In being and beauty –
A beauty never once touched
By fear’s tarnishing word.
And in this quite,
The heart’s voice
Offers silence
In a hundred multiples of love,
And fills the dawn
And itself in one
As love is unveiled
In its entirety,
Ever unfettered,
Never annulled
And never ever diminished.
I hold my opinion
As you hold yours:
A collection of ideas
Raised on the twists and turns of our lives:
Individually accrued
And shaped into a weave
That we wear like coat:
A personality,
An identity,
Who we are, perhaps?
–
Can you be loose
With the luggage of the self,
This weightless stuff
Made of weightless thoughts
And thoughts amalgamated into belief?
–
How real it appears
How solid it seems
As if the weightless thoughts
And invisible ideas
Made something tangible,
A thing, actually there in the world.
–
Better to be loose
With opinion.
Better to see it
As merely a point of view
Among eight billion,
No more or less valid
Than the next,
No more or less serious
Or stupid or laughable.
–
Better it drift off in the wind
Better it evaporate under sunshine
Better it be like a friendly shadow
Whom you love
Despite its ignorance.
–
Be free unimportant opinion
Who I held so close,
Be free
Here in me,
For I see you small
And light and fragrant
And harmless,
A nothing who might alight
My indifference
And flit there unworried,
Restful for being wholly untethered.
Love breathes
Its breath
Upon the suffering of man:
A sweat breath
Upon the knots of thought
And tangled emotion;
A fragrant breath
Laced with the ingredients of freedom
And possibilities infinite.
To the prison of locked thought
And tight-chested constriction,
Love melts itself
And all
Into beautiful lubrication,
Absorbs what is not light
Into light’s overwhelming union,
Consumes illusion
And false belief,
Turns mind
To truth,
And flowers in itself
As oneness wholly felt.
Cooling
When you are hot blooded
And wanting to the burn the night,
Love brings the flood.
–
Warming
When you are chilled
And lonely and dark,
Love brings you inside of itself.
Already by 10 AM the sun is merciless
But the birds are twittering
Under the shade of leaves,
Cool in the undergrowth.
Sounds arrive in the garden
Brought by a breeze:
Cars swishing in the distance,
Workers on scaffolding
Laying tiles,
A child cries out
After its mother:
Just everyday happenings
Of a suburb in a town in the summer.
As I sit, hearing the world,
Brought the waft of honeysuckle
And jasmine flowers
Generous and comforting,
I realise
That I am here
And I am now,
And that life is perfect
As the buddlier flowers’
Drooping purple spires
On which the bees drink thirstily,
And butterflies flit,
Their tongues unfurled
Tasting the world,
Sipping at the nectar of it.
There were downpours last night,
The patter of swollen drops
On leaves and the absorbent earth.
The guttering dripped intermittently
And sung me back to sleep.
This morning, when I step outside,
The garden accepts me
Inside itself,
Merges me wholly
With the rain-heavy air,
Easy on the breath
And dampening like a sodden blanket.
Bird calls are shrill in the moistness
As if the lubricated air
Conveyed sound more easily.
The separation between things
Is altered and healed
As though my senses,
Conducted by the closeness of molecules,
Reach far beyond
What I might call the body.
Where once there was dry air, the sky,
And things existing in it,
Now there is one fluid medium
Where all things touch.
The boundaries of bark and stem,
Feathered skin or the insects chitinous
Exoskeleton are as porous
As the canopy of the overarching tree.
And the osmosis between
Is a luxuriant movement,
Energy’s transient enquiry,
Unconcerned by the names of things
And free to pass between,
Free to roam
A borderless and singular being.
We fret
For the things in the world:
How many,
Which ones we should get,
Their value,
How they make us look and feel
As if
Our arbitrary
Systems and scales
Were in fact
Real
And not at all made up.
–
What we forget
Is the equality of seeing,
How each
Has an equal
Eye upon the world,
An equal stake in being.
The vagrant on the street
Is no less
Than the champagne oligarch:
The poor man Is
As the rich man Is;
They are one
In the space of seeing
Where being rises
Fresh to the crisp now.
–
And so,
Out our minds go
To squabble for resources,
Ever waring
Over the importance
Of tiny little pretty things,
While the fact of our being
And our seeing
And the one who sees
Is sunk under mounds of stuff
That once attained
Lose their sheen and their gleam,
Dulling in the ignorance
Of our self
To our self.
London is sweet
In June’s ownership.
Roses billow
From front gardens
In to quite, shady streets.
There is a cool breeze
Beneath the plane trees,
And reality flexes
With a deep breath
And a mind expanding.
I read in the paper
That rare orchids had materialised
On a green roof
Among towering edifices –
An astronomical improbable chance!
Someone was quoted saying it was miraculous.
It made me wonder
What other miracles
Are yet in store,
Idling just off stage,
Unseen in the formless realm,
Unexpressed possibility
Awaiting only
A nod of our head
And an invitation to be.
