Tragedy is always an obituary. It takes a full life and reduces it to death.
Tag: metaphorisms
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The Art of Walking on the Beach
The beach is a special place, a narrow path
between heights and depths, created by water.Precipitous cliffs on the right – concrete, huge, looming
their weight makes them feel acute and real, like pain.
It’s often said that life is pain – it is,
but lasting pain is only an illusion
created by the myth of lasting self.
But so too is happiness – same logic
applies.
Avoiding one and chasing after other –
a looser’s game.
You stop the chase and acquiesce to pain.
It lays quiescent
and underpins your joy.Enormous sea on the left – deep, silent, inchoate,
seamlessly transforming into sky.
Three container ships in undifferentiated sea-sky,
like ducks over the fireplace.
Familiar, ridiculous and safe,
creating anchor point
for frightened gaze
that’s lost in space and finding you in time –
the time of progress.So you progress –
you walk along the beach,
twixt depths and heights,
abandon and despair,
between deficiency and excess,
the middle way, the golden mean of Greeks.
Temerity-timidity
not much
to choose between –
one consonant, two vowels.
The trick is not to chose or compromise
but merely to tread between the two,
not enter the extremes,
keep in the middle,
create the path anew with every move.What you really need is a thin line of firm sand,
between loose dry and slippery wet,
easier to walk on.
Someone to hold by the hand,
to not have to look down for solid footing,
to see all that beauty.Extremes are always ugly,
beauty is
in golden mean,
in-sink
and in-between,
a pattern in complexity, a path
that unifies variety and us. -
Canterbury tales
When age is but a litany of loss,
your life reduced to sorting through the dross
of past achievements,
when the age is grim,
the time is to become a piligrim.Pligrim-age, a chance to re-assess
priorities, to re-address the mess
of habits and regrets and to redress
the wounds inflicted on yourself and others
by you and mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers –
the loved and hated ones,
the ones who form you
and whom you shape.
The people who will mourn you
day in and out,
as you live and breathe
they mourn who you were and what is.
What might have been…
one can but disappoint
while one is living.
Death creates a point
of no return,
no future and no past.
No possibility of loss at last.
Woebegon – for woe to be gone
we stop the clock at death and then move on.Obituaries are but tales that bend
realities into the shape of stories
including start, the middle and the end
that banishes not sadness, but the worries
and when the last uncertainty is gone
piligrimage is finished.
Life is done. -
Choices
Choices are difficult.
You choose life and passion –
of course you do!
But there,
in the centre,
in the shadows and folds,
death lurks.
Decay of complacency,
lack of emotional investment today
breeds the boredom of tomorrow,
black mold overgrowing your passion,
smothering it in a soft, furry blanket,
killing it through comfort,
illusion of safety,
abdication of control…
To keep life
you have to keep choosing it
every day,
every hour,
every minute.
And you do –
of course you do –
until you tire
and let the mold take over. -
Wound
The open wound is laughing at me.
Scarlet lips, glittering teeth of bone deep inside,
streaks of blood dulling as they congeal…
I laugh back at it, mouth open wide –
loudly, victoriously, triumphantly.
It is only a flesh wound –
I can master it,
I can manage it,
I can thrive in spite
and feel stronger for it.
Not like the other ones –
dull and habitual aching I feel –
the wounds I can’t reach,
the wounds I can’t heal,
they have nothing they teach –
deep under the skin,
the wounds closed over. -
Who are you?
First you figure out who you are not;
then you figure out who you are;
finally, you figure out you are not who. -
My Love
“Oh my Luve is like a red, red rose” – Robert Burns
My love is like a red, red rose
the flowers and thorns combined.
The vivid beauty intertwined
with sharpness. There is no repose.
The colour of the velvet petals
Evokes blood, subsists in blood.
Ambivalence that never settles
existed there from the bud.
My love is like a red, red rose
it’s in my blood least petals dry.
In me, with me, as me it grows
and if it dies the I shall die. -
London
The difference between art and ornamentation is provocation. If it provokes thoughts, feelings, actions, opposition – anything but indifference – it is art. (Me, personal communication)
London is art.
I wander around the city,
from pillar to post,
from juxtaposition to juxtaposition.
It has a lot of pillars and posts –
old and contemporary,
pretentions and utilitarian,
faux Greek and real concrete.
I peel it layer by layer:
Shiny facades concealing ruins,
ruins prepared to be reorganised,
rebuilt, repurposed,
reabsorbed into nostalgia for the past
or hope for the future.
Only dead cities are immutable –
monuments to past hopes of individual success
and current delusions of national grandeur.
Gravestones.
Living cities have to consist of ruins,
it is a process of recreation,
flux and flow of people and things,
moving between loss and hope,
provoking innovation and outrage.
London is art. -
Of Rainbows and Fairness
We long for answers. For a way to clear
the shadows of doubt from the mind.
We want uncertainty to disappear,
confusion and complexity – unwind
onto the straight and narrow – a pier
above the murky waters of the mind.
The only way to go. Nothing queer.
No thread of Ariadne to unwind.
We wish for clear weather, warm and dry,
but clear thinking quickly makes it clear
as wind sweeps all the clouds from the sky
the rainbows will also disappear.
