new works

Signed in as:

filler@godaddy.com

Account

poem for carrie bradshaw

Written after Hera Lindsay Bird’s ‘The Friday Poem’

O Carrie,

If your touchingly girlish irreverence and compulsive

speculations about love couldn’t save you,

I can’t help but wonder: what hope do the rest of us have?

We who are tottering on the stiletto tips of conditioned

white knight complexes, analysing the equation

of relationships in our 30s too.

Carrie, what an impossible person you were:

sleeping in an underwire bra,

wearing ball gowns inappropriately to places,

buying Vogue instead of food,

somehow never going into debt over all those shoes,

making an actual living as a writer in New York City in the 90s,

being a writer who doesn’t back up her computer (????).

In many ways, I want to let you off the hook

for just being a complex human:

harebrained and unfocussed, allowing space

for flights of fancy and chance encounters,

never self-conscious about your splashy love of beautiful material things,

and keeping your charming blind faith in unwritten possibilities.

The reason for this poem isn’t to condemn you for
mistaking volatile chemistry for genuine compatibility… over and over and over.

Neither is it to say I don’t believe you were satisfied being married to Big (eventually).

It’s just that I don’t think it’s rational.

Because at some point, we’ve all had to find a way

to stop forcing things that were simply wrong for us.

Carrie, I just kind of wish you’d known when to say when

and noticed you were stepping on the small wise part of yourself

that never made you earn its love.

after Tove Jansson’s ‘The Island’

Moving through this singular life, one will encounter a spectacular number of concerns:

The flimsy architecture of existence. Incomprehensibly beautiful things streaming in and out of sight. The anticipation of suffering and the irrepressible urge that follows to build monuments of devotion on plates that are already on the edge of movement.

But there’s a cost for this abstraction.

With no warning, the Earth breaks apart and slides sideways down slopes. One loses grip on oneself, loses grip on histories.

Fortunately, one just needs to stand at a little distance back from the mountain of life to see that only three things matter:

First is the stretch of flat wet sand between where the body stands and the expanding sea. Here on the edge of everything, the tide rises and falls but never runs out.

Standing quite still, an awareness of distance reveals itself, then comes a noticeable sweeping out of self-concern.

Next, start walking. Count the exact number of belly breaths it takes to fill the spit lengthways. Fall into step with knowing that an endless chain of moments to begin again is available. This is the perfect continuity one seeks.

On this beach, troubles deflate on the sand like clear dried-out bodies of blue bottles. Solitude brings forth a greater intimacy than once imagined; the realisation that one is never alone in the company of one’s own vastness.

Way out there, the waterline is a tidy underscore for a wide open sky, which hovers like a gargantuan breath waiting to be taken.

The third thing, then, is to look beneath for the invisible current sweeping back and forth with possibilities.

Those silent undercurrents that encourage waterborne souls, shell shards, small stones and sparks of sand to shift and regather; forming and reforming.

Know that all the earthborn are invited to rest their feet here in the tides of change too.

Beneath the water, the ghosts of shipwrecks sleep on the floor. Whole ecosystems are excavated for the plate. Crabs hermit inside bottle caps. Yes, human self-destruction brings unfathomable grief to many.

But the sea is a powerful force for regeneration. When left to heal, rough edges are smoothed imperceptibly by slow waters and new life forms.

Know that the technique outlined here is by no means confined to the sea.

There’s no better method to arrive at one’s eventual safekeeping than to become friends with depthless bodies of water. To peer out at the great expanse and bear witness to where one is in this moment.

Light streams forth into shallow water, reflecting back one's own immutable power. And here, the rest of life is revealed.

kirtan meditation

She seats herself on the floor, crossed-legged on a cushion, between a drummer with a gently shaved head and another young man holding kartal hand-cymbals in his lap. A net of fairy lights surrounds them. The room is warm and dim, and we are all in socks. When she lifts the first notes from her harmonium, the room falls still. When she begins to sing, the air glimmers and thickens. Tasmai Shri Gurave Namah. The drum and cymbals bloom, then on her instruction, the rest of us raise our weaker voices to be with hers. I feel mine in my body, the strange words moving through my chest into the space. The whole room palpitates and I’m thrumming from some un-located place inside me. I notice some discomfort at hearing my own voice too closely in my ears, but I find that I can let that go by focussing on the better-feeling sound outside myself. Afterwards, a meal that she prepared is passed around on paper plates and we share it seated on the floor, talking together. I drive home in the dark, clear-eyed, feeling like something that went missing under the bed has been recovered.

waiting for my cat

Waiting for my cat to come home each night,

hearing his faint voice behind the door

reminds me how exquisite it feels

to be person someone comes home to.

Some people never learn how to admire the cat’s natural self-reliance.

But when you understand that a choice could be made

between coming home and not coming home

the action of coming home start feel like an affirmation.

I hold the door and in he slips,

his striking white socks, the whole day on his back.

Hello, I say, take a load off.

He says meow to me, which is his way.

At his food bowl he looks up at me with resonant optimism.

I oblige. Of course, I oblige.

poem for carrie bradshaw

after Tove Jansson’s ‘The Island’

kirtan meditation

let the light in

waiting for my cat

This website uses cookies.