Pry Open A Word

Let it sit ethereally on the tongue.

Yield to the absolute idea of it.

Praise its glinting particulates.

Let its resonance pour out.

Applaud its consonance.

Rediscover its poignancy.

Breathe deep its spirit.

 Celebrate its liberty.

Archived Proofs

L  I  S  T  E  N  I  N  G…

With an incessant patience

nothing appears.

B  U  T    T  H  E  N    A    S  P  I  L  L…

. . . . .

A sweetness of colour

with traces of ablution

ignites a perfumed air.

Polished tones of inquisitiveness loosen

as a vision, teeming with virtuosity, inflects;

immaculate whites,

ripe wines, satiny yellows,

and generous weights of

forest green and black.

A    F  L  O  W  E  R

Its fragile tips lain open,

its palpable centre of identity exposed.

Another world commencing,

exquisitely coming into view,

in its own indigenous way.

. . . . .

It is what I yearn to paint,

pursuing the bold notes

of its petal-soft language.

Anchored To A Type Of Conclusion

Drawing attention toward the medium of itself –

a strand of tree protrudes from the muddied water.

Its reflection promenades in an elongated fashion

beneath everything uniformly exhibited up above.

A text blends with the adored imagery of thought,

hypothesizing on the timber's inevitable finality.

Yielding To Something Unseen

Unnaturally fast, the eyes scurry, like a mouse, across the surface of old barn boards and darkened windows too, until a gust of wind sends them sailing midst an airy sky. Without difficulty they drop ever-so-softly onto a magnificent pasture of green flecked in gold, white and pink. Surely it is not the fullness of the view that has drawn them in. It must have more to do with a curiosity of the mind in what is lacking, in what, over time, has been phased out. At will the imagination gracefully re-patterns one's thoughts, producing a swell of inspiration that gives rise to a voice that tries to speak of how the eyes, feeling liberated, foreglimpse a poem coloured in the heavy red and weathered silver that extends into the shadows of the barn whose blackened windows mirror the starkness of a depthless dark night, where quite possibly dreams arise, midst the invisible light.

A Sky Landscaped In Tones Of Sad

One's soul inwardly braids,

beyond it, the familiarity of sky,

so well lathered with shades of gray.

Clouds weep an effervescent rain,

flooding the dampened heart.

A flash of thunder rumbles,

effectively articulating everything

the soul is unable to say.

Midst These Spare Hours

Ascent, Drift – Away, Away, Away…

AND, 

when you wake,

if by chance,

you look out

into the winsome world

AND

it stirs you,

make note, 

on a piece of paper, 

its suggestive power.

It Was Painted Small Like A Flower

When you look at something, anything, 

remember that everything has a story,

but is sometimes apprised of a narrative

postured in a timeless speechlessness.

Little By Little A Return To Self

When she is old, at play in her mind – configuring, 

what of her heart's emotional heft will linger?

What in its rediscovery will she try to savour,

there in the metropolis of her soul and its frantic precincts?

Will a mind, still hers, pry open, shifts at a time,

faint images suppressed behind unacknowledged interludes?

Will a poetry pull her voice forward, away from boredom,

inciting her pulse to twitter as it occupies various positions?

With Deliberation Your Voice Moves In A Parade Of Black

Lost in thought, I stare off into space where time seemingly lay hidden and indistinct. But then my eyes are averted to a wall, and immediately I begin to contemplate the different circumstances that have altered photos taken years ago, hanging in silence – a silence broken only by a smile lit up on your face. As the golden-yellow glow of the sun quietly slips into the room, its placid light flares against the black and white of each photograph’s skin. My mind assumes the posture of an affected observer as your words begin to speak the first part of your book I’ve pulled from the shelf in your room. Even in rest, in the sweet dream of sleep, your voice, in its honest plain-spoken style, gathers strength.

Long before you began to write your life – a life more remarkable than the story’s translation suggests, you knew how its pages would unfold. And now, fingerprint by fingerprint I press into each thought, feeling the heave and release of your breath at each turn of phrase. Flooding my waking mind are the incidental details of your journey represented by the weight of the words carefully arranged on the page. Clearly your heart and soul ached to explain everything you witnessed traversing life’s omnipotent terrain.

Painfully shy in the beginning, you meditated on the various experiences that resonated deep inside, and little by little you began to confide how you felt you were nothing more than a speechless traveler passing through time, bereft of voice and breath. After a while, anchored to life’s multidimensional moments, vivid flashes of memory weighted with diverse forms of expression, gave birth to wider angles of thought. I listened intently to your speech sweeten as you took delight in articulating the revelry of your youth. As your confidence flourished, you took pride in reflecting on those colourful hours, capturing each exhilarating moment held in that frame of time.

As the years continued to pass, you expressed how rainbows of joy and clouds of sorrow hung above your every thought. Storms of the heart created by ominous winds that tore loose, wreaking havoc within the elemental niches of your soul severely changed your world.  Fatigued, surges of longing and its aching scent of absence became a new part of the measure of your life. I felt the dread pinned to your face as your pen and its inky inundations overflowed with words that surfaced midst those turbulent moments where you felt caught, circling life’s deepest end. Yet even as you spoke of the frightening parts, of years bathed in a stone grey anguish that pressed up through the crevices of your psyche like some impending projection of mountainous terrain, you boldly fought to snatch the light as the days arduously shifted from one season to another.

Conscientiously you worked through the conflicts and configurations of the seconds that ticked at the forefront of your thought while drawing out the intangibles that lay hidden in the secret corners of the mind’s domain. There was an arc of curiosity as I discovered something of your past that you had previously neglected to tell. Something of your character was revealed as you delved into and exposed that hidden aspect of yourself. Naming it there on the page, your words fulfilled the highest expression of your art by beautifully portraying your spirit’s limitless dimensions.

At its end, I caught a glimpse of an older person's face, who’s lines of text, lumped against this word and that, inhabited a world of grace. Negations and affirmations of life’s mystery carried a tremendous presence as I concentrated on the message of your story. I enjoyed the strangeness of motion as your memory reverted back and forth, caught up in the milieu of time. In its unveiling, your words gently refined themselves in the juxtaposition of each paragraph. Subsequently, your history became a rare pleasure as I felt your pulse lit by the soul of your mind through self-revelation as you laboured to translate your memories to printed text.

As light slowly vanishes from the open window, my mind lingers a little while longer, invested with depth and insight, promoting a new turn of mind. Faithfully reproduced with intensity and soul, together tonight, you and I have silently passed through the elemental teachings of your life – a life rooted deep in the product of thought. With a cry of love and appreciation, a kind of mourning paints the night still. As this pain of separation surges, the world tilts evermore towards the light of a new dawn.

 . . . . .

I think people are often quite unaware of their inner selves, their other selves, their imaginative selves, the selves that aren’t on show in the world. It’s something you grow out of from childhood onwards, losing possession of yourself, really. I think literature is one of the best ways back into that. You are hypnotized as soon as you get into a book that particularly works for you, whether it’s fiction or a poem. You find that your defenses drop, and as soon as that happens, an imaginative reality can take over because you are no longer censoring your own perceptions, your own awareness of the world.

– Jeanette Winterson

Culminating With A Degree Of Intimacy

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody

has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.

– Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

Sleepwalking With The Moon

Bleary and a little dim, 

salient details visit me

shortly after waking.

Copied in the mind,

satisfying shades of grey

solemnly address the soul.

. . . . .

Eyes press deep into a canvas stripped of colour.