I'm Charlie. Human. Facilitator. Activist. Therapist. Student of Life.
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When I feel I know nothing
When I feel both Nothing and Everything I go down To the lowest parts of myself I go down To the lowest part of the river They say that peace stirs Most gracefully here Where I can hear My own heartbeat And every note That cicadas sing With such polished clarity That the confusing haze Of my own life Melts into sweet amber honey That drips off tree branches And meets river water Like a gift from the gods Feet planted firmly amidst Glossy river stones Stood amidst the quiet hum of life Deep in the low parts of Everything I see the sky watching over me Feel a hand gently holding mine And everything that stirs in my chest Watch leaves swim towards Then away from me And with them My need to know What happens next...
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The time before sunrise
Draws me gently toward it That quietest breath of morning Singing to me like a white bellbird With a song that dances quietly Through the spiral of All Time Air so full of potential Wanting nothing Save the quiet company Of my troubled soul We sit in silence The sky and I Moved only by lungs, heartbeat, Clouds and breeze As everything fills slowly With sunlight And my spirit fills slowly With ease. They say that when two souls
Who’ve always known each other Meet for the first time Everything stops Even time itself The depth of connection Too strong for Life To keep on, keeping on The Poets have tried and Almost always failed To describe this Love For it really can only be felt Something like the sky Returning to itself Or the sun seeing its own shine Or the heart feeling its own beat Or the wind feeling its own breath Something like seeds from the same tree Traversing oceans over millennia Only to wash up next to one another On the very same shore Something like the youngest, most tender Part of us being held in a way It was never, yet always meant to, be held Something about suffering And rugged self-reliance Meeting its final resting place So a softer way can be born And the rightness permeates Every cell of your being And the love floods The totality of your heart Until at some point The pain comes knocking at your door The ache of never having had this before Of never being loved in this way The settling for less The mucky familiarity of harm The fear of loss and losing yourself The “what if this cannot last?” And for awhile it seems You must drift apart In order to return to this Thing that You Always Deserved Oh the familiarity of Aloneness Has an irresistible pull As souls calibrate to The tender yet terrifying Place of Real Love They say that We’re drawn to those Who bring alive The parts in ourselves That were never allowed To be born Sun to seeds that have always Laid dormant beneath Layers of pain and generational harm When those shoots see Their first light It can feel too blinding The dark quietness of being Unseen pulls us back down, down, down But when I sit on the balcony In the soft light of dawn The sky speaks to me She reminds me how The first balm on a wound stings Oh it stings So Much That you curse the balm And wish you’d never found it She reminds me How much healing can hurt They say that when two souls Meet for the first time The sky explodes And tries to push you apart But if you can close your eyes and remember How the world stands still when you hold each other How the shoots eventually grow into sunflowers, Facing, tall and proud, the light that they Were never allowed And despite war, and suffering, And the inevitability of pain You have each other But most of all In this tender, loving place You finally have yourself Whole, fully loved and always always free. My first poem breathed herself through me
When I was just six years old Soft faced and bright eyed I hardly knew that many words then Yet she didn’t seem to care Like the first time your lover kisses you It was everything - silent, loud, electric, eternal. You know how beautiful thoughts Pass through you But sometimes you just can’t hold them Maybe you’re too busy waiting in line For someone to tell you to go to another line Or on hold to a tune that you wished you never had to hear Or maybe there’s just too much pain inside For them to even safely land. Dyou ever feel your life Should really be set to music And the whole world Is watching you and waiting for you To Say something Like how fucking magnificent and weird is being a human?! Or like one part of you Wants to be held for the longest time While another wants everyone to Get The Fuck Away?! Some times I wish I didn’t know About the world So I didn’t feel the need To save it Need someone to tell me - You can’t save it anyway So please, let yourself Be a gardener Or be still So you can catch the thoughts That want to land in you And write poems That help the world save itself But then she keeps creeping back Like a stone in the lowest part of a river Growing heavier and larger in the depth of my soul Pulling me down to a Place Where I can never forget… Moral Duty Oh, Moral Duty, yes! I feel you, but sometimes I just want to Dance! To scream and to cry And to run through the mountains Like you had never met me nor touched me so young Like I never knew your name or felt your stare Out in the paddock beneath heavy moonlight I stopped in my tracks And wept as I realised That the best and the worst of Everything Will never be rendered Never really ever wholly captured in its Beautiful Tragic Essence Think about that Words can’t hold The Full profundity Of the human experience Not even poetry And I sat And I cried In a way that Can never be described And Duty made her bed As the Tao looked on Taking notes in its ancient note book And the moon held the heaviness And the air stood still As beautiful thoughts quietly Filled up the sky. Some days I wish my mind
Was a cave, not the cosmos Its naked rawness seems to know no end Tentacles to the trillion unspoken vibrations That exist in all the spaces in between Cataloguing every item On every supermarket shelf Every foot step on every side walk Hearing the cries of Faceless beings that never had a name Have you ever sat in a room And listened to the sound of All the heartbeats? Or pretended this was all a big joke Wandered through a city and Imagined every square of land Before All This? I wonder what we all look like From the Karman line Or what it might feel like If we didn’t know about climate change Or war, or religion, or time? I can’t see people without seeing Them as babies, or old people, or angels Can’t feel things without colour or sound Like how sorrow drips 81 types of dark blue To minute 1:41 of Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight” Just where the violas come in Do you ever wake in the middle of the night To the screams of the children in Gaza And the sound of the earth crying? Then cover your ears and your eyes And your mouth Till all you can hear Is the sound of your heart And your breath And all you can feel Is tears dripping Down your soft, raw face. Out beyond the horizons
of This Place Is Another Place I’ll take you there The gentle emptiness that visits you right before sleep Mixed with the softest awe of a midnight sky Time that has no edges Love that knows no bounds To be held in all of your personhood To be known by all of your names The breeze here moves so softly You’d barely know it was real Memories and heartbeats Mix with dreaming and teardrops Standing here beside you I love you For all that you are All that you were And all that you ever will be You know that feeling
Of stillness That can hold Anything She visits me often These days As the world heaves And seasons turn The stillnesss stills Like a gift from some Non-religious heaven Perhaps nothingness Is Everything. I wake at 4
To the sounds Of the earth crying Poetry brewing Like the day’s First cup of tea A single eagle Circles silently The final chapters of A blackened night sky The sea floor bubbles As steam rises From pavements And parking lots Rain drops fall On the surface of A midnight blue sea Tears returning To whence they came Soon, sunrise Will make dry Of everything Another day of Trying to Make Sense Working While wondering I listen to my heart beat Feel the whisper of my breath Trace the fine grain of my palms Taste the salt of tears on My just-woke cheeks And let us be held By the poetry of it all This Spring,
A sycamore tree Taught me That sometimes To love, is to let go I watched its seeds Blow far and free To places Where no seed’s light Could make shadows Of any other That sycamore tree Taught me To be still With the love And the pain Of this indescribability The way, in the dead of night The heart tugs at Reunion Yet the soul knows The wisdom of Separation Piano notes tinkle distantly Tears trickle down cheeks Candles burn their final wax Children leave parents Parents leave children Geese fly in V-formations On mystery lilac skies And the sycamore tree Just breathes As its seeds Let each other go With love A flicker of light
Tracing a silhouette of you Against the sparkling night sky Sadness, yes sadness But not just that Vastness, like the cosmos Stillness, like the core of a Redwood Love, rich and deep like… Everything A flicker of light tracing The wholeness of you Onto the wholeness of me Beautifully together and Lovingly apart Hands touching In the quietest Breath of night Without words We step out Into the woods. |
Charlie WoodHuman. Activist. Facilitator. Therapist. Student of Life. Trying to do my bit to build a kinder world. Archives
February 2026
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