Song of the Fearful Avoidant
And other poems
Thought I’d try a poetry post this week. I’ve left the more personal of the bunch, ‘Song of the Fearful Avoidant’, till the end. The other poems are inspired by the modernist rhythms of the Beat movement and explore one of my favourite lyrical topics, the natural elements. Enjoy!
SONG OF THE ELEMENTS
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EARTH
Suck on your teat smoke your ashes and work you till our hands bleed, rise up in you and sink down into you again, dust to dust shame to shame and life to life, angry torrent of blood sweat grit and soil, pulsating-churning life-giver and life-taker, O horrible beauty, mothering monster, green in leaf and branch and red in tooth and claw, cradle us rock us wow us hold us thrill us kiss us kill us, give us the juice, take every sinew and nerve we have to give, work our bodies clear our minds and write on our bones, turning our organs inside out once again, until this mad rollercoaster ride shudders to a stop and we’re thrown onto or under the next waiting track, now dazzle us afresh in your glittering samsaric finery, until all form and sense and longing and becoming is satisfied and there’s nothing left to experience, when the only thing left to do is level up, into a whole other world of form and beauty and experience and pain and heartache and longing and loathing and touch and intrigue and never let us forget we’re always always always exploring because there’s just so much to
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AIR
Soar up and up and up and up and up and up into the whirling shivering rushing frenzy of sightless possibility, because it’s an ill wind that blows nothing out of the ordinary, and it’s an ordinary wind that blows nothing at all, because the content’s what we decide until we decide we’re content, so speak wind listen wind sing wind dance wind, whip me up up and away and away and up up to the secret vantage point where the veil of ignorance comes down, and everything is finally revealed in its naked splendour, there are no secrets left, and the desireless zephyrs have torn down time - when we are finally free to bounce and prance around the nerve endings of the glittering skyway, so blow down whatever can’t remain and lift up whatever will endure, lending your invisible hand to right the wrongs and tip the balance, raising us up up up on Persean wings until our Andromeda takes us in and we carry her up up up into the further up now into the
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FIRE
Sweet Shiva dance your psycho dance, now burn baby burn, tear down rip down strike down murder down, you psycho passion that consumes itself first and leaves its friends dry, because there’s no higher high than killing us to keep yourself alive, and you only exist as long as we don’t, so seek and destroy, tear down everything that isn’t holy, give us all that sanctifying purifying vilifying splendour, blaze it really blaze it, light it up and love it all away, eat and lick and suck it up until you’ve absorbed every last bit of it into that thing which is never stable never solid never ours to grasp, really flaunting your unreality, now this now that now there’s nothing left of what we thought we were before but the maddening embers that flicker and whirl in the yesteryear, but yesterday is no good to you, only the future will do, it’s time to move on before tomorrow strikes, asserting your there-ness in every new instant, recreating yourself in that eternal universe-flash, striking out with the fullest force against all right or wrong or us or them or up or down, in that essenceless world without fixtures or fixes, where the only thing that is is movement and the nameless fury that will never be satisfied as long as there’s something tarnished to burn my sweet Shiva my
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WATER
Primordial tease, creator of the world, that primal One now sea now sky, Tiamat my mother, hinting but you don’t let on, none of us really know who you are, I don’t think even you know who you are, and you know what I don’t think you want to know, you’re too busy having fun because nothing is or could ever be more fun than you, and nothing is more holy than fun, so now solid now run now fly now swirl now gush now bubble now fizz now circle now square now pour now drip now scald now paralyse now bash and thrash-crash now caress and tease O you eternal tease, cover and enter me until there’s none of me left to resist, until I forget I have a body because you’ve taught my body how to feel, fanciful Oedipal goddess, enveloper of the world, home of the deepest-laid memories of the great-grandparents of our furthest ancestors, who came to me in my dreams and imagined me into being, who taught us the dance of the weightless, the ecstatic rush of the mountain to the sea, the condensing-cycle of eternal recurrence, melting in our hands and sucking us one and all into the strangest vortex where pronouns dissolve and barriers break, until all-for-one-and-one-for-all is made truly concrete again, the most prosaic statement of haitch-too-oh fact, so rush on your run until we all feel like Jesus’ sons, you tease you tease you
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AETHER
The aether that can be named is not the eternal aether, O Nameless and Formless closer to us than our jugular vein, in whom we live and move and have our being, fill without entering and empty without leaving, the only movement that is still and the only stillness that moves, lover of all and knower of nothing, the silent Word that speaks nothing into nothing, surround us now, take us home, send us here, take us there, let us know who we really are, show us where we’re really you, until we’ve sunk into the void from whence we came, staying wholly, completely awake, liberate us once and for all without doing a thing,
without doing a,
without doing,
without
SONG OF THE FEARFUL AVOIDANT
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The things I love about you are the things I love about myself.
The things I reject in you are the things I reject in myself.
The things I both love and hate about you are the things I both love and hate in myself.
Watch as they push and pull while I feverishly work out who the hell I am.
I exasperate myself. So of course everyone else exasperates me too.
I wish you were the exception to that rule. I suppose I want a lot more drama than I think I do.
You haven’t brought me rest, and you haven’t ended my questioning. I just ask different questions now, and they’re multiplying by the day.
I’m tired.
I feel good when you’re near. I worry about who you are when you’re not.
When you’re near I have a body. When you’re not I’m alone with my mind.
I don’t love you, yet. But I’m practising.
It’s much smarter to see you as a pattern than a person. No pattern can fool me.
When I see you as a person my own patterns break.
When I see you as a person my body says its first words.
You don’t frighten me. But you remind me how afraid I am of myself.
So I’m choosing anxiety over depression.
You make me feel unsafe. The promise of safety is the least safe thing of all to someone who’s used to being unsafe.
If you let me down, I’m let down again. If I let you down I let myself down as well. Either way I’m let down.
I’m curious. I’m disconcerted. I’m trying to be hopeful.
Don’t rush me. It’s hard to know where to draw the line when you never draw a line under anything.
I’ve made my peace with the crumbs from the table and now you’re throwing a platter of food at me.
I’ve only known the shallowest of pools and you’re offering me the sea.
I’m grateful, I really am. You don’t know how much.
But please, don’t rush me.
It’s cold where we live.
You can’t learn to swim in the sea until you learn how to stand in very very cold water.