A Brief History of Lightning.

Brighter than day the flash
Remade the room, the wall
The open door that Allen left
That Will Blake forced
Through the word storm of pitiless
Ceaseless cant of terror
To gut & fillet the blue horizon
The faithless minion roped you with.

A shortcut privilege,
Golden ticket used as a bookmark
Like an extra page with no writing on it;
You preferred it at first
Until you saw what it really means:
That you are as much a prisoner
No, more so, more a prisoner
Than they ever were:
So cut off their water supply.

Wage war on rhythm of truth
Project your operations beneath the shadow
Of the wall of lies that creepy
Bunch of infiltrators nailed him to
Not realising that he could,
Would, actually, breath through the holes
Punched by arrows, grape shot & dum-dums
With exploding tips.

There was a bindweed vine found its way in
Sought light between, pushed unseen outward
Against that closet door, bursting rusty old nails:
An ancient technique, not quite parasitism
The chemical musculature of the tendril,
Just a sort of  infantile self belief
& if it rhymes,
It lies.

Crazy Synaesthesia

Crazy Synaesthesia I

Green field, lone man
Dark path-line, waist high.
Sky spike, blossom tuft
Horizon rail in Bicester.

Cloud-wind, window smear,
Small flower below me.
Age crust, out crop
That same old story emerging.

That ancient ocean teemed with life. You are just a photon caught up in Indra’s net; one speck of muspel-light plankton seen through Nightspore’s window. Sometimes you have to run.

Wall light, hedge flight
Crow, gull, magpie, rook & wren.
Eye-like orbit window pair,
Each set off from the other.

Dead street heat
Warmth & smell removed.
Cars, cars, cars, cars;
Cars, cars, cars & bridges.

Electric blue root singularity; one green leaf upon the tree cannot hold it. It could even pass through the centre of the Earth. It is no longer dark underground.

Ivy on the grave yard wall,
Legs flashing bright.
Washing on the line,
Walking down the road.

Klarwein colours & textures, like a Salvia-dream;
Jamais vu tobacco stain cutting.
Like watching the dance
From a balcony with the Lady Mayoress.

So let us not begin to anticipate & fear the Winter’s coming just because Summer is here. Let us not hide from the sun either.

Let us sing the songs of life in reed beds, upon hillsides, in sea wind,
Through train windows.

Crazy Synaesthesia II



The texture of experience
Rucked up like a blanket spread on
A wooden floor
Nerve woven & shining with
Patterns that cannot quite be grasped
By a consciousness built out of ideas,
Has naturally fallen
Into a shape which reminds us
Of the ocean floor,
Or the surface of the sun.

Pareidolia however, fails
To capture it’s taste, smell
Or proprioceptive crinkling
& a blanket cannot turn itself inside out,
Eat itself
Or give birth
To that glorious hermaphrodite
Who is, at this moment, dancing
In the meadow.



The Secret City

His angle of departure
Cuts the city's gravity well
With arc of intention,
Death posture magus
Has seen the stories
Self-liberate,
The archive burn with words,
The music thrash
Itself with chords,
The beat, beaten.

Walking the borderland,
Against the lines of force,
Across the morphic field,
A contradictory power
Upon a transgressive path
Among dim trees
Along unseen hedge lines
Inward, onward
Into the movement,
Contrarily agnostic,
Counter clockwise.

The crazy synaesthesia
Hits him seductive
Sway of boundary
Fringe petticoat
Looms life low
As seething tiny freedoms
Burst out from
Green veins to
Caress the stem brain in
Clasp spasm seizure;
Tag lined, hazy
Luminous script
Read only by initiates.

The secret city
Is not a city;
The unbounded wall
Self referenced
Reflected illusion light;
The story is not a story, it's
An archaeology,
A geology
Of meaning & pain
Into which we fell,
With which he has fallen
In love for ill good.

Sigh distance haze
Through leaf limb waving,
Tragic romance of
Summer's odour
& streets' lines,
Of tangled scent
Will place a kiss
Upon your brow,
Pave the secret layer
With seal of leaf fossil
Sleep imprint,
Word shouted by an ecstatic
At the corner's end game.

A polite note: I am not neurologically synaesthetic, "Crazy Synaesthesia" is a term I use for a meditative experience in which the senses all contribute to a feeling of an instant, intense, spacious texture.

The Forests & Rock Pools of the Mind

 Max Ernst La joie de vivre 1936, National Gallery of Scotland

Perhaps, through a recognition of beauty, any beauty, which has shed its baggage of memory & association, we might sense our deepest nature, the root of our being. Our inner world, that inner life of sensations, thoughts & emotions which we inhabit, is an ecology just like the apparently outer world. Contemplating the complexity & paradoxical simplicity of our own inner life is not unlike peering into a rock pool, taking a walk in the forest, or watching the birds who visit our garden.

Our thoughts & feelings are complex textures, multi-valent patterns of relationship; constellations that constitute the cosmos of our experience, the moment by moment, hour by hour, day by day sensations of being in the world.

Can we step back from the field of meanings? From all the ideas that we have about ourselves? Can we experience our thoughts & feelings as modalities of sensation? Witness them as textures & patterns instead of fixating upon what they seem to say? Can we quietly watch them grow & clash, feed one another & upon one another? Give birth to each other or die? It becomes like watching an opera in a foreign language which we don’t understand, peopled by unfamiliar figures whose real motives are obscure to us. Yet despite all the obstacles to our comprehension, we can relate to its harmonics & its rhythms so that it doesn’t matter if we cannot understand every word, we can still appreciate its beauty.

If we are serious about meditation, about discovering our deepest nature, we must allow ourselves a panoramic presence that takes this all in & keeps walking. When we truly experience this we discover an amazing thing, that we are privy to an incomparable vision; our inner world is also a deep & ancient place, shining forth all its dimensions in splendour. There is geology here, deep structures formed in darkness beyond memory. There are whole landscapes, landscapes! Vibrant, diverse communities which we once called a self. There are forests with deep roots that drink in secret, unseen places, supportive structures; stems, trunks & branches exploring space; all kinds of leaves & flowers, fruit & seed beyond normal knowledge or belief.

All manner of strange & wonderful creatures live in there, dressed in dream colours & their voices & perfumes fill the air. The strangest thing of all is this: that you can know it in a minute, you don’t need to sit down; you don’t need to close your eyes; life is itself a profound state of trance, the so called alteration of consciousness is not necessary. It is only necessary that you open yourself; that you make yourself vulnerable to the world that you are. When you do this, how can you not be in love with it all?

But you call it hope. You call it fear. You call it desire. You call it suffering. You call it pain, you call it pleasure. You are often embarrassed or disturbed by it. You call it a person; you make it a kind of object, but it is a dynamic, ever changing wave pattern, not a lump of particles stuck in the mud by the side of the road.

It's like looking into a drop of pond-water with a microscope for the first time & seeing all that life; all those creatures swimming about, hunting & engulfing one another; watching the pulse of a contractile vacuole as some tiny little being pisses out the excess water which would make it explode. Then one little, hairy thing swims across the field of view in a tightly spiralling trajectory, on a quest of some kind. We see a droplet, it inhabits an ocean. When I see such a creature, I feel kinship with it, for all that it is just a single cell & my body is a universe of billions like it. Take a look through a microscope. Do this for yourself. Allow yourself to see these things, to feel these things.

It's like looking into the deep sky with a reflecting telescope; seeing those fields & fields & fields of stars & galaxies, planetary clusters & nebulae; countless worlds, more than we can even begin to imagine. Who cares if we can prove that there are earth-like planets out there or not? When we get a direct sense of this vastness & complexity for ourselves how can we doubt it for even a moment? & yet. & yet this is, again, a reflection of the cosmos of uncounted tissues & immeasurable forces that we ourselves contain. Take a look through a telescope. See these things for yourself & allow your feelings free reign.

A cliché is in the mind of the beholder. Nothing is banal & everything is happening. Invoke, don't banish. Then you will become stronger; strong enough to look yourself in the eye & see what many have called God looking back at you.

If you enjoyed this, here is a worthy read:
http://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/the-phenomenology-of-the-self/