It is clearly beyond the limitation of language to capture or express the reality out of which words, spoken or written, emerge as attributes of that primordial reality. Poetry, however, has the potential to elegantly point beyond the rational conceptualising mind as a reminder, or expression, of the ungraspable nature of life in its phenomenal manifestation and its transitory nature, which, when really seen, allows a release from all the pressures, conflicts and confusions associated with misguided notions that there is anything to get, anywhere to go or anything to become.
To say what’s really so –
If you have to.
And why in God’s name wouldn’t you?
utter it – as a dog goes on
barking, half-heartedly, at
something and nothing in particular
in the night’s dark dead hours
without really knowing what it’s barking at
or being really bothered but just so it can.
Do your wittering
blathering
clarifying
jabbering
expostulating
analysing
opinionating
discriminating
blarneying
It’s fun – in a way.
But who is the story-teller
when the tale is told -
and you run out of the verbiage
watching the audience slip away
their backs to you
without a second glance
into neon lit side-streets?
Have you not noticed the hollowness of it all?
that waits patiently to serve you a lawsuit
for the charge of missing
the wordless Silence of things
that is the surround
the centre
the essence
and its purest simplicity
The tree, the air, the grey washed sky
Utterly still
No discernible moment
But total seeing
The tree, the air , the grey washed sky
As if its all waiting for no one to turn up
We’ve all arrived
Not a thing out of place
And none of it
A second early
Or a nano second late.
Let go all beliefs
sacred notions
spiritual memes
What the Hell? they only keep you
shackled in the dry-lands
and doomy depths of a
personal and private purgatory.
Where impatience and ignorance sustain
all denizens of those grubby states
Where would I end up then?
The frisky, feckless ‘me’ demands.
In the infinite no place
and no space of
Heaven’s grace