Cancer

Right, you got me off the mark fast and furious:
You bring to mind the word ‘canker’:
n. 1. An ulcerous sore of the mouth and lips:
That’s fine, by chance I have that at the moment:
Stress-related, embarrassing, but at least it’s not going to kill me.

n. 2. An area of dead or decaying tissue in a plant surrounded by healthy wood or bark.
That’s more like it. I always found that fascinating, that trees had dead parts next to live.
Are you then the canker of the human world, the dead we tolerate among the living?
No, you are worse, the dead that presumes to be alive,
The fool haunting our world not seeing the light.

n. 3 & 4. Any of several animal diseases attacking especially the ears of dogs and cats.
Any source of spreading corruption or debilitation.
Dogs and cats are sensitive creatures, their ears burn with your lies.
You are corruption, corrupt, bankrupt, broken to pieces, entropy,
Infesting others, investing others, wanting them to mirror your lie.

Cancer, the crab, crustacean, carapace over cephalothorax. Carcinoma, creeping ulcer.
Clutching with claws your hold on our lives, demon of material realms.
Malignant tumour caused by the abnormal division of cells, invading surrounding tissues.
Blind materiality. Carcinomatosis – n. the existence of carcinomas at many bodily sites.
Ah, but epiclesis - the call to the Holy Spirit to turn bread and wine into body and blood of Christ.

We will name you, Cancer. We will address you by all your names.
We will learn the words to hold our power against you.
Even if cancroid – adj. 1. similar to a cancer 2. similar to a crab – we will know you and see you.
Our call is life, of the living, to the Life Force, to consecrate again our daily bread of life.
The transubstantiation of the Eucharist is more a miracle than your self-making.

Take this bread and wine and make it known to us as human flesh in kinship with the divine.
Anull in us the pernicious notion that this body can mutate in darkness by its own.
From the ouroboric ovum of a single cell, to the birth of a baby with 20 million million cells,
And the universe of 50 million million cells in adulthood, we are the united light.
Lend us the language of metaphor – it is body and blood because we pray and say it is.


3 - 2 - 2007

Talk of Such Things

Talk of things where one holds one’s breath.
Walls of citadels dusty with the desert’s wrath.
Face of fear, and death is stalking the streets.
I cover my heart now aware it is heaving red meat.

Night is swarming with locusts and lies.
All appearances wear a disguise.
In darkened doorway does my body give in,
Disappear in my chest and grow thin.

Eyelids shade like a camel’s wisdom.
I ride on the storm from my fabulous prison.
A troubled genii in a bottle’s throttled torment.
But the blood clutches the feet on the pavement.

The singular eye turns a gurney of gyres.
Golgotha is its claim and desire.
What witness am I that I’m caught in this web
While the light of the world rose into red?

The wash over me clears my mind of illusion.
Such imaginal memories seem not a delusion.
Wouldst my heart drip with red and the light lift my lungs.
Wouldst my breath give away and such speech light my tongue.

Child At The Breast

Sun-golden mounds of molten motion
Home-warmed hands hold bobbing boobs like the ocean
Knoll-nudged fudge-brown nipples rippled roll out
Thumbs tug titty-treats of teats in your mouth.

14 - 4- 06

Past Life Memories With My Father

1.

We sat upon the temple steps
Overlooking the marketplace.
Casual, side by side, on the uppermost step,
So that neither would presume to sit higher.
And yet still the dark mystery behind,
The large doors, the smaller one inset like a jewel.
Only at times of great festivals
Would the larger doors be opened wide.
Then the crowds jubilant and wild
Would bridge the distinction made
By these soft low steps of stone.
In my hands, forearms resting on knees,
I finger a stalk of straw, blown by winds
That gust occasionally through the city gates
Lifting feathers and dust from the streets below.
I turn the stalk as I turn my mind,
Sifting the dry contents of fields forever turned to hay.
You too are unsure where to look.
But your hand gestures to stay my meandering
And point out something that occurs below.
Ah yes, this stalk is yet no cryptic key.
I stab the air in vain and flick it away with my wrist.
Whatever, we must stay present with this.

2.

Maddened fireflies assail the lanternlight.
The envy of these motherfuckers might
Come to grief with little distinction
Other than their own extinction.

3.

Bearded we might
Scuttle down priory hallways,
One leading the other by the elbow
As though in flight.
Cloistered amid the booklined walls
We try to recall where we have read
What might beckon the other from the night.
Something seen when the moon was passing
The leadlight window framed above.
The hands turn thin sheaves of manuscript
As though we know there's little time.
And who could say what was discovered,
How much the two friends dared to share,
The ages lost and yet in passing,
Who now knows what's next in line?

4.

Sorry, the train began on time.
The words were planned that were to rhyme.
The sense is now what's left behind
Once thoughts have been committed to line.
Some missed the junction, went astray,
Like you and I from day to day.
What use regret and guilt and shame,
The many thin grey shades of blame.
The most is what is left today,
To bring it forth else fade away.


28 - 11 - 96

Meditation On A Photo Of Red Cloud

Grace falls from heaven.
This healing grief.
My throat catches.
I cannot express the way
This crosses my heart.
The suffering that bleeds
Into the plains.
The rivulets that run into the earth.
They are channels
Like the grooves of my forehead.
From the diamond centre
I am pierced like an arrow to the depths of me.
What has happened to my people?


17 -3 - 96

Solitary State of Wealth

I find myself in edges where
Litter is lodged amid despair.
The ghosts of others who came this way
And left too soon, they did not stay
To find the reason for moving on,
But carelessly left a state of abandon
With evidence they thought it wrong.

I choose to lose myself now here.
I leave no litter but take the care
To clear again this natured nook
Of rubbish, contain within this book
The unwinding of my bandaged self,
Reveal a healing into health
Of soul, and solitary state of wealth.

No Still Life

This spirit then.
Licentiousness of the artist.
Overture, sheer determination
To give meaning to possibility.
A film about Picasso.
And now, dying lilies in the vase.
Where does the life reach to in them
As they are withered by the sun,
That once drew them forward in childhood?
Each parched petal a thirsty tongue,
Purple flame, dog-earred, panting.
Reaching out to the atmosphere in hope.
My body itches where my shirt
Tucks into my trousers.
Picasso wore a belt, white trousers,
Red shirt. Blinking eyes unbelieving
That he must make his own universe.
Ideogogue, circus master, well-formed
Rehearsals in canvas and the necessity
Of paint to pronounce and punctuate.
Sheer fortitude. Restless and responsive.
No still life.

Keep

You keep house,
And I'll earn my keep.
While I work,
I need somewhere to sleep.

Ditty

The only piece of hair on his face
Hung from his lower lip,
That it looked as if he'd left a trace
From eating an unskinned rabbit.

A Dream About Counselling Work

My brother, Steve, and I, talking to a guy.
There's some work he wants to offer us.
(Steve's been struggling around work issues too).
The guy's a brilliant young biologist.

He's been working with trout, growing them large,
He says, up to eighty kilos.
Wow, that's one heavy lifting job, I joke,
Imagining giving them the heave-ho.

The guy knows my joke, but knows me better,
The cap-tipping banter of one anxious about work.
Of course, I'm working with them when they're lighter,
He says, and I, in a sudden realization, know my quirk
Of finding in images the heart of the matter.
I look inside again to what my soul calls me to.

And sunlight flashes on scales of silver,
As I lift heavy fishes and pour them on through,
To slip into streams from their large holding tanks,
And I know this is the work I will do.

Sounds

Cicadas buzzed as he wrote,
Listening to the music of Donovan.
The traffic up the hill sounded heavy.

And then the tape stopped playing the song,
Hissing with the cicadas and vrooming,
And clicking off, he could hear his baby breathing.

The traffic came down to the sound of waves,
Lapping and crashing on the coast.
And between the birds, he could hear these words
Creating.

The Holy Masculine

Bagpiper stands at the top of a hill,
And he’s calling to his clan:
I’ll find my art and perfect this craft,
Til I know the holy masculine.

And a poet prays til he falls silent,
And trusts his words again.
Then writes of things that touch his heart,
Til he knows the holy masculine.

And both alone they travel home,
To communities of other men.
To play their songs and share their words,
And embrace the holy masculine.

Listening With Two Ears

If I can listen
With one ear and then the other,
Listen to where I listen from,

Then my head is like a darkened cave,
My self caught in the light of the entrance.
Seeing me there.
Listening from back here,
As I feel along the ridged interior
Of myself echoing.

Balls

I remember the day,
Down at the site of the sweatlodge,
When squatting naked, I had the realization
That I don't sit down in my balls.

It was after the fire was out.
Around the rim of the firepit, it was wet.
And going deep inside, I felt my cock relaxing,
But I still wasn't down in my balls.

I was moved to spread my thighs wider open,
And really sit down on my haunches.
My knees pushed the muscles of my biceps wide
As I tried to feel down into my balls.

I felt like some long-limbed frog,
My feet feeling the suction of the mud,
As I leaned slightly back and nearly sat down,
And my balls touched the cold of the ground!

Electric eels could do no more!
But soon the cool mud pressed around,
And relaxing further, I discovered I was able,
Heels against the bones of my arse, to sit stable.

And the frog became an ancient toad.
I sat there for nearly an hour,
And pondered life on the edge of the pond,
Sitting down in my balls and my power.

Jasmine

Already the jasmine has taken me
To sunny Sunday mornings as a boy
Cold concrete and wet washing on the line
Linen from the laundry basket left to dry
Steaming into a high day of far-off clouds.
The narrow path down the side of the house
Stroked with long reaches of light
Where the cat curls on the earth by the weatherboards.
Chug-chug of the washing machine working further
Warm metal flashing by the drain where the water spills out.
Odd places beckoning one to sit down with eyes closed
Crisp still fresh full day-dreaming days gone by.


9-6-04