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."

Audio Version | Song Credit: The Earth Prelude by Ludovico Einaudi

I was thirteen
When she first
Let me touch her

Years of torment
The dark veil
Came knocking early
On this hearts door

Something about scales
Of deserving
About babies
Who weren’t born equal

​Incessant whispers
Sewing invisible tapestries
Of guilt and shame
Into the nucleus
Of every cell

Year upon year
It Corrodes the heart
Displacing everything
And everyone into
A head so fucked up
And desolate
No creature would
Ever wish to live there

Reduced to a macabre circus
Of circuits and patterns
This body
Moves about landscapes
Here but not here
There but not there

Yet some small pocket
Of it
Still Longs for
Still craves for
The divine

Like a seedling
Buried deep in the soil
This ravaged
Bodily architecture
Is searching
for the light

It comes by the side
Of the M15
In the belly
Of a fluorescently lit
Medic van

Everything
And everyone
Completely quiet
Caught for a tiny moment
In their infinitude

Heart holding it all
She reaches out
And strokes my hand

A tunnel
A light
So bright and soft
It could cut a path home
For every star
in every galaxy

The absence of wrong or right
No need for good or bad
Just pure
Everything

A vessel filling
and filling
And filling
with the thing
It was always missing
But never knew
Until it is time
to come back

To find a way to live here
To find a space
free from pain
In the land of
Being alive

Audio Version  | music credit: I Love You by Riopy
The day that
Time was strangled
Bark unfurled itself
From ancient trees
And the moon
Turned black

Breath caught
In barbed wire
Lost to the lungs
That birthed it

In a few words
Child becomes adult
Heart squeezed
Into a conscious
Kind of oblivion

Soft young body
Now rigid and old
Hands white knuckling
Their way, away
From home
Or was it ever really?

Look through windows
At faces of other children
In homes of other families
But always…Remember to Forget

Then let the elements
Become your eternal guardian
As birds fly backwards
In fifty-two shades of purple sky

As nothing becomes everything
As dreams and reality
Switch places
And all the colours
Sing their long goodbyes.

Fingernail moon
Floating high on
Charcoal sky
Illuminating
Life’s fragility

D'you ever
Imagine
What it’s like
To live down here?

The sound
Of a thousand
Treecreepers
Is waking up
A long, hot
Aching Spring night

Someone is
Duelling with
The shadows
Of himself
In a dark
And forgotten
Alley

While someone else
Takes out the trash
For the
He’s-lost-count
How many time

A child
Tries to sleep
On a rough
Street curb

While a mother
Tries to
Work out
How she’ll feed
Everyone

A farmer
Tries to make
Peace with the
End of rain

While a sister
Hasn’t heard
From a brother
In she-doesn’t-know
How long

A tree
That gave shade
To a hundred people
Is being uprooted
From its home

While a baby just
Opened its lungs
For the very first time

Someone
Got kissed
Again

While a seedling
Pushed its
Head above the soil

A wave
Crashed hard
Upon the land
Again

While an egg
Cracked open
And let something
Living out
From its inside

It’s complicated
Living down here
On the ground
Sometimes

Noisy, messy
Beautiful, dirty
Tactile, heavy
Heartfelt, confusing
​
And so
I wonder
What you see
From up there
Through the glow
Of your thin
And perpetual light

Death stirs thickly
As the faces
Of unborn beings
Encapsulate
My mind

So many hands
Reaching out
For a help
That doesn’t exist

Clutching
Gripping
Grasping
Gasping

The self
That wants to save us
And the self
That knows it can’t

Tonight
They meet
Beneath the light
Of a blood red moon

They duel
And they dance
They cry
And they fall
In sadness
And in surrender

In the distance
Children scream
Mothers hope
Landscapes burn

All around me
Babies
Humans
Love & Fear

Death stirs
It digs
And it strangles

While the self
Goes into battle
Surrounded
By moonlit fire

Death is all
Around me
Before me
Inside me

I cannot beat you
But my
Hands can fight
My heart can love
And my head can pray

I cannot beat you
But I can walk beside
All those who
Fall in your shadow

Walk beside them
Never leave them
As we enter
The future of flames.

Fresh
Smelt the day
You were born

Heavy
The day
The earth’s suffering
Took him away

Too many feelings
The autopsy said

Or a world
Which just can’t
Hold that much pain?

Your tiny heart
It beats so fast
Almost as fast as his did
In those dreadful final hours

I hear your hearts
Beat together
Waking us up
To the breath
Of every child

Feel, little one
Don’t be scared

He felt like you too
Yet nowhere
Was brave enough
To receive it

I know this world
Will break your heart
But a messy, collective love
Will piece it back together

I can hear
Your future crying
Will help you
Grow gardens
From the tears

Can feel your
Future body tensing
To the realisation
Of what is happening
Am ready to
Rock you in my arms

Stay, little one
We can make something
You want to live in and for

Raw but fresh
Tragic yet beautiful
Heartbreaking yet
Lovingly interwoven
A world brave enough to
Hold everything you feel.

Remember the fire
Inside your heart?
Flames and flesh
Can’t co exist
Smoke should
Never meet chest

Today’s so still
It cuts silence
Through bush
Sets motionlessness
Through water
Freezes minds
In harrowed longing
For something
Simpler and easier
Than all This

Flocks of black birds
Circle endlessly
Through residual
Tiny pockets
Of untouched blue
Trying desperately
To break open the sky
So we can all heave
A collective sigh
Of relief

I know this silence
Hear it
Ringing in my ears
The foretelling
Of an impending
Heated Hurt

I feel this silence
And how it stretches
From me
To you
To out beyond forever

Oh force of heat and heart
D’you know how much I fear you?
Yet how ready I am to meet you
With all of my love
And all of my rage?

I hear the future
Whispering
Howling
Sobbing
Hoping

​Sometimes it’s screaming
Sometimes it’s standing right beside me
Sometimes it is me
And my hot and heavy heart.