The waves are rushing, breaking on the rocks
but seas are still inside,
completely silent.
Expectant.
Category: Poetry
-
Summer Day
Dried tears of rain
streaking the window.
Tired late train
slogging through the dusty landscape.
Long summer day
dragging into the past,
unheeded. -
Sleeping Beauty
With gratitude to a friend and a poet, Yana Kane, who asked this question – and inspired so many others.
White monolithic marble
slowly flows into
blue, where curling spires,
gradually exhausted,
fade into sky and vanish.
Tracing intricate movement,
my gaze, under its enchantment,
takes me away and out
where there is no sound,
colour or time – just spaces
still but containing movement.
Somewhere in these spires
there’s an enchanted princess
sleeping a hundred years
and one.
And then?
[question from the audience]
What happens
In year one hundred and two?
And then…
When a miracle happens it gives you a choice –
it defies the prediction’s imperious voice.
If the prince failed to show and give you a kiss
you can give happy ending a miss.
You can stay in your own unchanged universe
and ignore the fairy’s presumptuous curse.
You can stick middle finger to human endeavour –
Sleeping Beauty, enchanted forever. -
Snide comment
Oh, if the world made sense!
Unfortunately, my wishes
in the survival race
go, sleep with the fishes.
Our present form
is but a crude romance
of survivable norm
and insensible chance. -
Tsuren’s Sonnet
Like wilted leaf it falls upon my soul –
this day that wearied me before its start:
interminably slow as a whole,
unmemorably fast in every part…
This day is full of empty conversations,
of actions I repeat without thought,
of petty, unimportant irritations
that cause no pain, of deeds that come to nought.
But in the evening burning leaves begin
to raise the flames to empty skies, like prayers.
I smell the acrid smoke through my skin
with clarity and sharpness of nightmares.
Contorted, twisted, dry, as black as coal,
the burning autumn leaves subsume my soul. -
On the Nature of Poetry
Trying to describe the indescribable
is a mug’s game.
There are no stories
beyond the power of words,
for stories are words.
As we try to get at the magic of experience,
the enchantment that can transcend facts
and transmute reality,
…it turns into a story
born of words
and limited by them.
It rhymes and writhes,
but artifice of language
only hints
at possibility
of something deeper;
it makes your reader work,
inventing meaning,
while losing your experience forever
and making you redundant…
What a pity!
Poor poet –
forever betrayed by your tools
turning experience into stories,
visceral into abstract,
dreams into – what? -
Some thoughts on self-improvement
Dedicated, with gratitude, to Yana Kane, who inspired this poem
You set off on a difficult journey –
the journey of self-improvement.
You read books and attend lectures.
You meditate and practice.
You work on your self,
but it stubbornly refuses to improve.
It remains self-same,
immutable safe-same,
for if it changed –
how would you feel yourself?
With no you and no self –
tricky!
… but you do,
of course you do,
moment by moment,
experience by experience,
creation by creation,
with or without a journey,
you fashion your self
out of current patterns
and imagine that it was
and that it will be.
You cannot improve
on something that never existed,
but you can always change a story
you just made up.
