Blazes

We saw from the hilltop

Rome and London ablaze

Ashurbanipal’s library 

Writhing in flames

Ur and Damascus

Torched to the ground

And today this Buddhist monk

Who set himself on fire

Was like standing there 

to watch the world burn

 

In the grey

I walked in the grey

Right after waking up.

In the unlate hours  

Passers-by were

Stolid effigies of fog.

It was too early to feel.

Stories were being woven.

Paths were being carved.

Whether my eyelids were close

Did not matter much. 

I walked in the grey of that day

Knowing full well the only light to be had

Was that which she would shine on me.

Necessity is the mother of intention

"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."

William Pitt, British Prime Minister (1759-1806), in a speech in the House of Commons on 18 November, 1783.
 

The hollow man

I realised I have nothing to share

no treasured memory of my mother

no great song to sing to praise my brother

no feeling normal folk feel they can spare

I have been on more battlefields

than I can care to count

the type of wars where no spoils

but your own skin may be claimed

I've seen rougher skirmishes than tonight

yet here I am, scared to live, to breathe,

scared of my own fright

and nothing whatsoever to bequeath

no darkness, no blinding rage

only the unchurning emptiness

at the pit of the stomach

only the silences – which have grown

deeper with age –

where my heart should beat

where my soul should lurk

so instead I read an author's memory

of her mother and I call it my own

I listen to a song about another's brother

which I pretend I'm the first to sing

I fake feelings I think others feel

so that folk makebelieve

I have a heart

 

Weighing in on the scales of Good and Evil

"I should dearly love that the world should be ever so little better for my presence. Even on this small stage we have our two sides, and something might be done by throwing all one's weight on the scale of breadth, tolerance, charity, temperance, peace, and kindliness to man and beast. We can't all strike very big blows, and even the little ones count for something."

Arthur Conan Doyle, physician and writer (1859-1930), in The Stark Munro Letters (1894).
 

Fragment #189

It was all too soon that we forgot what it was which made us what we were. Beasts of burden, that we became. They made us love the work. So we changed our mind. And we became intoxicated. We wouldn't question, after a while. We were thought important. We were overwhelmed. We thought we were central, that we were in control, that we had it all. We loved one another and when the stabbings began none batted an eye. It was the way life was, wasn't it, and had always been, hadn't it. We were we, and no one who mattered would be left behind. Words were what they had always been, yet were different now that we had only we to use. We didn't remember what we used before we, but we were so happy that we forgot. We was all which had weight. We were few, but the happy few. We were brothers, we had one another's back. We were formidable. We were infinite. We were and there would be no end to us, ever.

 

Fragment #177

"We thought it was over. We should have known better. We were tossed right inside the eye. The horizon had sunk behind billowing walls of grumbling wrath. The ship headwayed towards the edge, unseen in the growing darkness. Our sails, destroyed. The anchor line, snapped. Drifting inside the spiralling tower, electric arcs clawmarking the masts. Praying proved futile, Nature was stronger than any god."

 

Once heart

I know all too damn well
that I have a heart —
it’s pumping searing sadness
in my veins as I feel
the cold, unused space
on the other side of my bed

This be the end

"But hatred gripped his heart tightly, making him tremble from head to toe. He would have liked to fight, one last time. To have the enemy within his reach, to see a blood that wasn't his. He looked away from the myriad droplets around him and went back to contemplating his gaping wound. It was being sucked inside his chest. In turn, he was sucked in. He saw only vast plains bleached by waving floors of blazing daisies, under a bare sun and the silvery reflections of a river in the distance, edged with reeds and dragonflies – yes, thousands of dragonflies dancing in the green wind of the grass, their wings rustling furiously, deafening, whirling around the tips of his fingers; he felt the hair on the nape of his neck bristle; the sun was duplicated to infinity, dazzling, repeated in thousands more suns in the iridescent prisms of their finely metallic and diaphanous, ridged elytra, and each of the thousands of suns on each of the thousands of facets burst with such blinding rage and such opaline wrath on the coruscating plains lying before him that he was forced to shield his face with his hand, and to close his eyes."

 

Home

Home is where we are

together home is your

sunny laughter

I know I'm home when you

speak to me with

your eyes into mine

– your eyes so fleeting

with others –

I miss home when you call

and your voice rings

like waves of

sleeplessness

Home is why we are

together home is our

sundog slumber

I want to stay home when

you hug me so hard you

push the stars right

into my hair and

cry meteors

I feel home when

everything down to

the spoon on the counter

spells your presence

Home is when we are

anywhere home is a

deepsun silence