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.

Something about sadness
Something about stains all over your face
Then something about stardust
Yeah…
Stardust that sticks itself to every crack inside your soul
Like a chorus of angels
Trying to hold the wholeness of your Everything
Through the Everything of It All

The world inside my heart is sobbing
Often, for it doesn’t know what
A fleshy piece of the universe
Beating inside a cage of ribs
Trying to Love and be Loved

The sky broke itself apart last night and it was fucking magnificent
Shimmering, exploding and pulsating into every corner of itself
Beautiful messy debris shooting through the rib bars caging my heart

The soft incandescence of moonlight stirred
As the sky sang songs that only the sky can sing
And the stars told stories about times when we let everything be
And the clouds breathed
Yes the clouds just breathed

​And I stood beneath it all and let myself be not understood
And I let myself not understand
As soft rain of the sky’s love met my sadness
And held me in all that I am

Thrown down
Sea foam suffocates
Eye of a storm-fuelled wave

Out here
I am no one
No thing
Held only
By The Absence

The cold wind
Strips me bare
Til I am reduced
To a grain of sand

Left to sit
For eternity
Until at long last
The forest
Calls me

To sit among
Its understory
Carpeted in blue bells
Dripping in afternoon light

A place where my grief
Can become
The sun that
Warms my back

​And the moonlight
That shows me
A path home.

I was out in the world
With lanterns
Looking for myself
When you found me

Dragonflies everywhere
The summer before your call
Harbingers for transformation
Thick in the Egyptian blue sky

Daily, the poetry of my heart
Swept me out of my home
Singing tales of a love
So deep
You’d have to swim
To the depths of yourself
Before you ever made it to the ocean

What is it about searching
For something
That we’ve never even had?

For years
I walked and walked and walked some more
Listening to the poets
Sweating, troubling, enduring
Navigating the landscapes of my soul

Until my spirit whispered: “let go”
Told me to break my heart right open
Til I could put it back together
With songs and hands of healing

Creating new ecosystems
Inside of my skin
Without having to go to
The trouble of dying

And then
As I was learning to follow butterflies
Letting moonlight send me to sleep
Giving my shame back to the earth
Watching tiny creatures traverse tree bark highways

You found me
And the most beautiful part
Is that I wasn’t even looking
When I finally realised, you were always there.

Audio Version | Backing music: Kyndir by Gabríel Ólafs
Long ago
I threw my heart
Into the ocean
Then decades later
Found it floating
Among the stars

Woke
To find beauty
And devastation
Sleeping side by side
In a bed of white roses

Cried
Til the tears dissolved
Every fibre of wood
In the ring fences
Containing my joy

Watched
Someone destroy
The only soul
They ever really
Cared to love

Hoped
For a place
Where hate
Could dance
All night
With love
Til it surrendered
Its form
And became the sun

Played
Piano songs
Atop mountains
Til creatures whose
Voices had never been heard
Wandered out of forests
And valleys
Singing

Found
My sadness
Sitting quietly
Bathed in sunlight
Forever knowing
It will never be alone

Audio version | Backing music: Sea of Love by Austin Farwell
There’s a column inside of us
So still and calm
You can hear a single drop fall
On the surface of the ocean

So quiet and peaceful
That cicadas lower their hum
In thoughtful reverence
A place where you can hear the sky think
And feel the earth turn

It's somewhere that torment goes
To bathe for a million years
And return as a bird of paradise

A space where fireflies sing
Of long lost lovers
And times when light was not a thing
​
Where trees sway in the breeze
And time is a timeless quality
Not a construct of scarcity

All our columns are connected
Invisibly by a web of breath
Like a sea of wind chimes
Playing a silent symphony to the stars

You can hear them playing
Only when you stop trying to listen
Feel them
Only when you stop trying to feel

Last night, mine visited
As a black swan that swam
Beside me
Beneath the golden moonlight
Of a nascent night sky

Then woke me
In the early morning
As its soft notes
Played an ancient tune
That gently strummed my ribs
Like the strings of an angel’s harp
It said....

“I am the space
That caught your fall
The pit you thought was your prison
I made your tunnel of light
Back to a life that wanted you

I am the other
You never had
To hold you
The love
You never thought
You deserved
The heart
That kept on beating
When it should have gone flat

I am the emptiness
The stillness
The dreaming
That kept you here
The trees that let you breathe
I am the quiet moonlight that strokes
Your face each night without you ever knowing
The life that eternally calls your name
With every sunrise roll call
Because the universe meant you to be here

I am love
And you are me."