Still Happening

Way out on the prairie, a house stands
Empty of the echo of farm-feet
Cracking paint lets all the air fall through,
Windows open to the wind, oh, open to the wind
And as it passes, there's a ghost-tale in a sigh:
'They came, drew breath,
And made the miracle of everyone:
The human feat, of hewing life from all that might have been, I
Heard them cry aloud for grief and love,
Make their cacophony of facts and actualities; a marvel.
'I heard them hope
I heard them worry down beneath the fall, I heard them fail
I watched them leave.
I saw the dust die when they stopped.
And now the house is hanging open at the boards.
'History is routed, and entropy wears splinter-robes
Bragging of its only trick, and naming me in vain:
"Behold, the heartless wind!" But I lament.
'Humanity was here, but not for long.'

Tin Roof (Kuakata)

Don’t shake
Dear child, cold and scared
Of what the night will bring
Of what the next horizon sneaks in while you sleep
Don’t shake. I make no promise
But that I will stay awake, so you can dream
And be alive before the sun
Before the sun

The light died; the sea sits
Hiding evil violence behind the secret line
I know; you know. I wish it had not come
Eight years is too short a time to live
Before betrayal by the sky.
Don’t shake below the ceiling’s rattle
There is so much cause for fear – it is a fire
You will never need to feed. So starve it well, and sleep
And wake. I’ll die so you do not while you are gone.

If you don’t leave
Your cries stuck in your throat, if you
Breathe to break them loose
So they will die out loud
If you don’t fear, and
While fearing walk past nightmares
This village has no tales for what you’ll be.
Don’t shake. Even if these filthy waves
And hammer-air destroy you,
Accidents will not become you. You are more than they are; son
Don’t shake. I’ll see the night out if
You wake to greet the day.

If you step onto a tin bridge
And see rocks rounded, unyielding
And looming tiny below; do you fear?

If you step onto a dead-baked
Cold-bound tarmac path, and see
Nothing extraordinary - are you safe?

If you step through any air
To any toughness, will your sinew meet the test?
And did you bind it if it does?

Will blood and bone entwine at your behest
To make you master of your pendulum
Or any of its hours?

Are you Lord over any at all?

Who then is your comfort, on the bridge and in the clock
Where your will is like a vapour and
Your muscles like a cloth? Will you pull yourself to heaven?
Will you leave yourself below?

Are you the architect of futures - do you know?
Up high, then, the void smears. And either
Free will is a joke, or a gift to be revered. Then given out.

As you step onto a tin bridge
And every fear resounds, ask: who made the bridge
My marrow, my wraith and my might? And does he love me?

You find out when
You fall.

'Surrender before
you win.' The advice has two
Edges, at my neck.

Breathless, watch
The kaleidoscope smash
And inaudible grandeur's approach across
Light years. And breathe. Scull. Lean back
On the solar wind and imagine you are not
Tied to the fierceness and fastness and heat
Of your place, for a while. But recall -
'This is a fantasy of every reality'.
You are the heir of more freedom than this;
Lost not in tales for the heights and the shallows
What you were born to is
Greater than this.

Chained to a stone, you
Wail. Once a day. Alone. Bled.
Your crime unatoned.

You wagered, for there
Was no covenant to hand.
Blood bet; blood taken.

I cannot stand dumb -
Your fate is a gutter crime.
But the answer palls.

Don't talk about what's
Fair. Nothing is. But I am
Set for the eagles.

If you are far, in
Mythical space, I am
The tale of each myth.

If not you, then me.
Become complicit in your
Villainy's demise.

Take heart. Drink up.

Prometheus, wait
No longer. I am coming
And you will eat me.

One three six oh ecks
Seven six eight is a poor frame
For blinking the world.

We wait for what we cannot say -
That we will not be sad.
Joy will be ours, and we'll give it away

We're lone, and tired, and lost for purpose;
Frozen where we once were glad
We wait for what we cannot say

We know we're made for what escapes us;
All we loathe has come unclad.
Joy will be ours, and we'll give it away

Watched the world go dead around us
Bitterly. Where are you, dad?
We wait for what we cannot say.

Dead so safely, bound by coldness,
Trust our hatred. Love is mad.
Joy will be ours, and we'll give it away.

Light is returning, the flight of our fastness;
Love will be known by the best and the bad.
We wait for what we cannot say:
Joy will be ours, and we'll give it away.

Happy advent.

He finally rose, a man never grown
But always old, mature without relief
Born to inescapable, self scoring, perfect points
Against a stained and wooden multitude he had to call his kin.
He stood, and knew his stiffness for itself, and let
His tiredness go spoken, and knew he had been wrong
For rightness' sake, and become a cathedral
A micro-metered masterpiece of quiet rage, populated
By his pains. A man dead in his certainty.
And he said sorry, and he breathed.

And as the skies fell in on his world,
The veteran smiled and set his medals all alight
Filling up an oil-can's worth of flame,
Denying the frost its purchase on the air
For just a cylinder of glow.
'If this is all my scars are good for,
I should have burned them long ago,' he said, aloud
And awake, smiling as the light of his dead past lit the fog.
And a breeze began to blow.

Baffle-sounds, that batter in
A gentler and more shocking thing, I see
The angels lined up in their choirs
To sing a song too vast for one, or two,
Or twenty billion tongues, an idiom
Too great to bear just one extent
All man is here
All man is spent
On songs that make the case for tongues, and
Cry delight for all he's done
And stammer out a beat
That says, I know,
Surprise should not surprise
And generosity is thine, and yours,
And all the other tongues left left to grow,
See now, he makes our stutters into grace notes
And gives us all we need to sing the song
We have been waiting since our origin to cede.

And he has done it;
He has torn our Babel from its rootings,
Torn our hatred into ribbons
And made rhythm from our ceasing, he
Has made us each a monoglot of praise in different tongues
Made tones of comprehension from the dischords of our wrongs
And not for all our glory but the nature of his name -
He's bellowed straight through our linguistics that
He made us for his praise.
He's punctured every wall between us not with monotonic ease
But with the boundlessness of power which caused
The planets to believe. So see them singing, at the back
And in beyond, before his throne
The God who conquered all our swords
And made our music for his own.