Moulting

Moulting July 2021   The young man had got up more than once and I too had rehearsed my farewells. Yet, together we lingered over our labour for such a parting as ours is inevitably a death, Where the sharpness ...

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Descending Into Myself

Descending into myself Meditation for the Fool Written 2001 – 2020 I I read somewhere that solitude is being alone done well. I’m trying. But I’m not doing it very well. My tiny, watery soul against The vast night sky ...

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this One will live yet

I wrote this piece while working on The Boy Jumps Ship. It helped me keep focused on and distil the essential drama, narrowed down to the personified dynamics of the Stinger and the Stirring; the former representing the outer manipulating ...

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Bits and Pieces of the Soul

Bits and Pieces of the Soul January 2018 There, on the floor, sits a boy in silence staring at a heap of shards and splinters. He stares as if his life depends on it. And it does. For he thinks ...

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The Death of the Human Situation

The Death of the Human Situation in a concrete maze of loneliness lit by the neon light of midnight labour (where one hundred thousand live next door, and no-one is a neighbour,) in a shattered window on the 50th floor ...

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Out of the World, Into its Middle

Written in May 2004 for my first-born son

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My Gallows Star

I am welded to some distant realm – unknown and unknowable, perhaps – through a rope of light let down to me by some wretched star immersed in utter darkness and this darkness that makes it shine also is the ...

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I Am Your Vessel, Not Your Captain

for my son on his birthday “to a world that once was mine and now is yours — may you make it someone else’s” The universe sent out its stream of grace to travel through my river bed of time towards another ...

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Promise of a Man

Not quite the hero I’d expected Just a story-telling reptile Still, a miracle perhaps, but So much lizard In the moment Underneath the tailcoat You’d be forgiven For not seeing in between Stretched out over a whole lifetime So short ...

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There are things we cannot do on our own

Written on 13 February 2016.

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The Little Man Dancing in My Heart

Perhaps God comes after us. Perhaps we make God with every day of our lives. This poem is one of the first expressions of this experience. Like most of my poems, I work on them for a long time. This ...

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The Masterpiece of Art

The Masterpiece of Art Written 1998-2000   Artists we all are born, in ourselves being art, destined for the one objective to shape the soul and body of our being following the toilsome path to beauty by listening to our ...

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