Tag Archives: Poetry

"GroUp" Ink & Coloured Pencil on Paper, 40 x 60cm (2009)

We’re rolling out our sleeping bags, staking our places on the floor.
“It’s a psychedelic sleepover.”
(laughter)
“It’s like psychedelic scouts!”

The talking stick sounds like shifting sands as it passes through my hands:
“So often she goes through me like a train. I want to find the strength to sit up straight
and really pay attention. I want to become a better, stronger, person. More fully myself.
Not just for me but for everyone.”

One by one we go kneel outside the garden door;
Cyril stands behind us spitting florida water,
he puffs smoke into our auras and fumigates
the seats & crowns of our spines. Cleans off the street.

We link hands, one up one down, a clockwise circuit, and chant Oms.

One by one we drink down the honey. “Bless your journey.”

We visualise floating upwards – above the house, above the clouds,
above the earth, above the solar system, above the stars – to the infinite
white light outside the black electric bubble of our universe. We exhale
our souls into the light and then pull it back inside us. We hold on tight
to the light, take it down through the swirling stars to our solar system.
Back to earth. Back to our bodies. Connected.

I’m nervous. Alert. A burp.
Sat up straight.
Waiting.

Soft music is playing. Stringed bings weaving a playful tumble.
A small stream, attention settles like a leaf.
A tapestry in which all is centre.

Inner-light is outside.
A space without dimension.
Difference is measured in degrees of intertwining.

My stomach writhes
like a wounded slug
on a bed of snakes.

In my outside I
two triangles touch
tip to tip. Tentative.

I am a queasy paradox:
apprehensively welcoming.

I try to give myself permission
to act in my absence.

A stretch unfolds.

I think of all the dark and fearsome things,
feel them shifting behind the curtain -
worry I’m bringing them in. But not for long -
all is subdued by a trust warm and deep,
an abdication that does not negate responsibility:
what will be, already is.

I convolutedly compute the ramifications of following through
on an urge to empty my bladder. My self-image kicks the bucket
so I don’t have to. I am quiet and shuffling like a monk
taking infinite care in the shutting of the door.
Candlelight animates the dancing dakini
as the water leaves me like a song.

I pass back into the room renewed.
Bend my knees and sit on my feet
to court a delicate reverie. Be Silent.

The dog is my brother. I am thankful for this
sturdy, muscular little bundle, simple & humble.
A shiny kNight with islands of white like squashed stars
pattering nails across the wooden floor, grumbling sweetly
into the corners and sniffing at the door. A house jaguar.

Ayahuasca
sings with whispers
in the chambers of my heart.

Ayahuasca. Ayahuasca.

My stomach turns
into a yawn, an offering
to be taken up by those
with rainbows for eyebrows
and full cheeks of dawn.

I give my hands to the sky
they arc back to massage my shoulders.
Aching mole-beetles urged out of their cocoons
roll away like fleshy tears to be absorbed
in the forgiving earth.

Cyril joins his voice to the Icaro
and the bottom falls out of the boat
tracers echo the chorus of ancestors
in which we now float. An audible rainbow.

His voice rings true, raw with the sincerity of effort,
I remember him saying: “Once you start it can be hard to stop.”
I can feel the truth in that, the momentum of it.

When we truly listen,
our bodies sing.

Pensively in tensity I sit
on a stomach that squirmily requests
a little womb. Am I warm enough?
I fight the temptation to go foetal;
I feel weak in the face of an angel,
withering in a whirlpool of strong songs.
I give a little, slide down inside my sleeping bag
allow my soul to spread like a garden… Soon enough
the glittering rust of my ribs is all that remains
of the barrow that wheeled me in.

I am a plot in the allotment of the universe
a plant in a box tended by a shaman of sound
who makes presents from the ground with absent hands
and stands tall man. Ipulating. Undulating over me.
Making MudrasSshaking The Walls.
Mad Skills. Twelve feet tall man. Ipulating.
Undulating liquid puzzle of structural integrity
sorting itself out with orchestral inner-logic
turning organic cogs in my own puzzle box -
I am part of this puzzle man. Ipulating. I am
a candle approaching a bank of cloud. A
small animal sniffing at the feet of a human-shaped bush.
Take that back like a nervous cat. Shrink like a rewind man.
Ipulating. A few steps forward. Undulating. A few steps back.
Where we were is no longer here. The puzzle clicks
and releases a tear, a tiny purge,
nectar for the humming birds
of the One Great Heart.

But this work is hard!
To be fully conscious of my body
as a network of factories
using time as a fuel
to manufacture eternity ( in the flesh, )
and to do so gratefully ( in a flash, )
as a matter of good taste – ( lightwork. )
Said another way:
so I taste good,
and know my place
in the mystery
of the dance
that is everywhere
and for everyone’s sake
and to know that
me that makes
no different to anyone,
intertwining.

I sit up again. Rest my bum on my feet and my hands
on my knees, bow my head, quite naturally.
The gaze of holy beings falls
warm like sunlight
onto my crown.

This spiral of hair, this bubble of baldness,
a mark of respect. An unseeing eye that acknowledges
deference. A love that walks the bridge of difference
on kind feet that gently sculpt a loop, a globe,
a unity.

I feel cold
struggle in the inexplicable folds
of my heavy orange poncho.

Lost in the inexplicable folds
of The Great I-Don’t-Know.

Propping the huge sagging tent
of a dark sun, searching blindly
for a head hole. Giving up
and pulling it round my face
like a sad Mary.

Cyril and John are drinking another glass.
They ask if I want one but the question is like a bubble
riding on a river and I don’t notice when it pops.

The house jaguar comes to climb on my arms
and madly lick my face. I see one dark gleaming eye
looking into mine, dark gums and spittle-shining teeth
flashing beneath. I ask him to go away, I’m tired but
I think eternity still wants to play.

My queasy belly has turned around and gone the other way,
winding like a snake towards the opening of a cave
a long, long, way away.
Awe-way.
Awe-why.
Awe-aya-who-ask
King Ayahuasca.

I get back on my back and get back to work
making gifts in cellular-cottage-industries
churning my cheese with the juice of an invisible sun
whose light is everywhere and whose warmth is everyone.
Inhaling is exhausting. Expressions are experiences exercising.
I am burning up. My breath steams from my face
and tears stream from my eyes.
Songs propel themselves relentlessly
like thoughts in an open mind.
Like wild horses in a tame field.
Like smoke in a concrete sky.
I am thirsty. I am dying
from too much
exposure to eternity.

Cyril and John are sat near my feet
crooning like werejaguars
over the bucket.

John-jaguar is purring support
to Cyril-jaguar whose barking-body wracks
with the force of a thousand stampeding gibbering-gaps
slimy green phlegmatic snake-snaps chattering out
a gurgling torrent, a clattering centipede
of accidental splatter. A good boo burp.
A glurbur burglar. A nurgle further phew.

The house jaguar is slurping up water
with his flapping tongue
making a music of wetness
to highlight my thirstiness.

A laugh speaks for all of us,
we seek it out and drink it down.
Eternity comes back for another round,
this time I hold my ground.

Cyril moves in geometric gestures
like a shape-shifting peg fitting through
a series of self-generating holes.
He stands and the candle casts
a mystery play on the walls
as old as time.
The silent mime of a fire-cast shadow,
archaic, thick with the flesh of living memory,
telling a wordless story, an entity in its own right.
As old as time.

Moonchild.

The very fabric of my being unwinds
the spreading threads of my soul shine
a light that is known only as reflection.
Knots that never were untie themselves endlessly,
they are the roots of this tree. A fertile death encases them,
a writhing transmutation of tired old flesh, heavy with experience,
happy to be sadly sunken to the bottom of the pile. A grimacing smile.
My face is contorted in a beautiful agony. It is a mask of light
milked by shadowy fingers. I understand Gargoyles.
I am wrathful Hindu-deities of fire frozen as sculpture.
I am an electric spider with needle-fine feet teasing apart
the Celtic knot of my deoxyribonucleic heart. I am rapt
in the rainbow roots of the sacred tree,
staring upwards with damp eyes,
solemnly. Perceiving the great trunk that turns
in magnificent melancholy, revolving slowly -
the perfect pace of a body in space.
This graceful column of great strength,
this twilight length. This holy night,
naked before the billion eyes of the stars in its sky.
Stars which are light penetrating the dark density
of its fractal canopy – spaces in space.

The Whirling-World-Tree-Wheel
we all huddle under. Its tips
loop back to its roots. We are
all on the floor of the same roof.
We are angelic clouds of exploding stars
spiralling black-hole tears through
supple veins in the puzzle-solving muscles
of the same giant face, each wrinkle a river
of infinite expressions in the time of space
it takes to see
a vision of
The World Tree
…

I am revived.
I go outside, gingerly stepping around
the silhouettes of psychedelic scouts
in sleeping bags. I feel the welcome chill
of a clear autumn night. Smell the spider-guarded
Rosemary near the ghostly white roses glowing
in the ambient light. Look into the fullness of the spaces
between the shifting leaves of a young sycamore tree,
playing peek-a-boo with the belt of Orion,
pissing gratefully onto its roots.

Cyril comes out for a smoke, his eyes aglow
and his voice a burbling spring of kind excitement,
this is an animated conversation, alive with sound,
expressive strings of syllables bypass the usual channels
to fill the space between known words with
the resonance of similar instruments.
He is glinting cosmic happiness, a gem
from a far off continent of astounding variation,
a glinting jungle-Buddha, a flowering snake-man
weaving a picture of myself as a tall bearded druid
recharging atop a grassy pyramid
up which a spiral of water flows.

He is showing me something – his arms embrace the universe
and slowly work it into a smaller and smaller ball until
it sits in his palm. He peers at this tiny thing,
takes it between finger and thumb, tilts back his head
and drops it through the door of his third eye. It expands again
inside his mind, only to be coaxed back to a point, stretched between
two hands and snapped free, shooting each of us in turn with blessings.
The final arrow is sent straight up and gracefully arcs back
smacking into the floor and filling the world with light.

A buzzing machine enters the sky and increases in volume towards us,
a helicopter trying to get under our heavenly skin, an evil droning thing.
I frame the twinkle of its false star in a column of smoke, hoping
to blow it away. Cyril laughs and says we should remember
there are people inside and have compassion, think with love:
May they get home safe with a lesson, and let their folly rust
back into the earth from which it came.

We listen to the silence. Cyril says he can hear
the insects talking – I can’t dissect the embodied quiet:
the near nothingness of an ocean of blood roaring through
my veins, the feint words of a still night’s wind caressing the trees,
the slight subsonic creaks of meditating buildings shifting positions.
I can feel the insects talking, on the edge of an awareness I have lost
or am yet to possess, the calm surface of
my audio-imagination is agitated by them.

Cyril tells me of a certain Brazilian cicada,
sings the praises of its high intelligence and beautiful design,
it has pink, blue and green armour around its third eye -
I tell him the ones I’ve seen are like massive ugly flies,
but he says this one is different – my vivid imagination
is inclined to agree. Cyril says that when it sings
it is emanating, like a resonating chamber that contains
the sound of the shape of its environment;
its song is its sight.

As soon as we decide to enjoy the quiet for a time
the garden door opens and John comes grinning out,
“Man I felt like I was dying. Phew. I was turning inside out!”
He goes to piss on the tree, laughs a joyous relief,
takes a deep breath, and becomes as honest as
an interested child under the stars. Their light
and his face are one and the same. The fire
in his eyes is the music of his laugh.

“How’s Lee doing?”
“He’s good man, think he just had a little purge.”
“Really? Cool! He’s really impressed me, I gave him a big cup for
his first time, he said he had some stuff to deal with
and he’s just laid back and gotten on with it.”
“I haven’t purged actually. Feel like I’m making
a big smelly-belly present for mama in the morning.”
“You didn’t have a second cup?”
“Couldn’t even comprehend the question!
got everything I needed from that first cup anyway,
really powerful stuff!”
“Yeah, he knows what he’s doing -
puts all sorts of influences into his tea,
I’m hoping one day he’ll teach me. But c’mon guys,
we were doing so well with our silence tonight!”
“You can talk!”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t you remember last session you were trying
to get everyone to shut up? And then twenty seconds
later you were like: Wow guys, check this out!”
“Ha! I don’t think so. I think it was you that kept talking -
anyway let’s be quiet now.”
(laughter)
“I’m serious! Listen!”
(sniggering)
“Alright you asked for it!”

John good-naturedly protests as Cyril clambers onto his back,
locks his head in the vice of his arms and silences him with his hands.
He clamps on hard and John resists but soon they both relax,
silence snuffs out their friction like a match starved of oxygen.
Silence speaks without saying a word,
we understand without forming thoughts…
In focusing on what is barely there,
our deep selves become more distinct.

We return to the welcoming warmth
of our faithful cocoons. Lee gets up
and does a circuit of the room, his face
beaming as he thanks us each in turn.

John brings up the idea of one last cup -
it amazes me he can take so much.
Cyril warns him it could leave him feeling drained
but you can see he’s going to drink it all the same,
Lee wants another cup too, and so I end up
having a drop just to keep them company:
“Bless your journeys.”

While they ready their ships for inner-spaceflight
Cyril and I twirl prisms of different configurations
before our eyes, making the candlelight stretch
into six, eight and twelve-pointed stars. Zooming
in and out, angling this way and that, overlapping lenses
to animate kaleidoscopes of light. We ponder this beautiful
recurrent fracturing of sight, like trying on for size
the eyes of a giant fly. Then the music carries us away,
we wrap ourselves in thoughts like digestive juices that,
fizzing slowly, reveal the bones of our experiences…

When a problem is answered
in the continuation of the same thought
the content can be forgotten, because
the change has already occurred.

Perfectly comfortable, satisfied
to the centre of my soul,
I close my eyes -
the events of the night
begin to codify, becoming
symbolic elements
in a visual design;
changes in my body
wrought by changes
in my mind – and all thanks
to the mediating influence
of a magical vine!

Cyril tings the Tibetan cymbals
and whispers his gratitude
to all that make this possible.

As night turns to dawn
a contented yawn echoes
the ceremony’s close.