Perhaps it was King David

Cats on the hill

Mary had been reading a new book called,” The Path” by Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh.To her surprise, she saw it reviewed on her phone where she read the guardian news.She had decided to get out of bed on the other side just to start.
When she awoke the next day, she remembered her vow.Unfortunately, she forgot she was inside a fleece sleeping bag with a zip on one side only.Should she get some scissors and cut her way out on the other side?Or  was that a foolish  idea since nobody but she would know she had failed her to keep her first new promise.
She heard a noise and them her friend Annie came in wearing a long satin nightgown and a  green velvet trench coat.
How do you like this, she asked Mary?
Mary was very red yet silent
What is wrong, with you Mary?
I need to pee but I can’t get out of bed on the wrong side.
You have no choice, said Annie.You must not wet the bed or die from a burst bladder.
But I feel a failure on my first day.
Maybe that is your lesson.Accept you can’t  do it and get on with your day.
Mary ran to the bathroom.What a relief passing water can be to poor ladies who suffer afflictions in these regions.
Annie went down to the bijou yet complex kitchen and began to make some toast and boil some eggs.She gazed at the peach walls and melon cupboard doors unable to decide if she liked them.Maybe kingfisher blue might have been better.Too late now.Mary could not afford a new kitchen even if this one was really old.At least it was not orange as was common in the 70’s.
Mary came in with her golden hair standing up on end like candlesticks from the Synagogue.
I just got a shock,  she said
I can see your hair is standing on end.Was it the electric socket?
No, there was a man looking into the window and I was naked in the bath.
Perhaps it was King David, Annie joked.Why don’t you have frosted glass?
Stan said it would frost itself in the winter.He was the least practical man in the world.
Maybe we could glue artificial frost onto it?
Who was the man, asked Annie her cheeks pinker than her perky pink lipstick by  Licumb ; those lips which were  so thick and sensual with a lovely curve.
Mary tore her eyes away from these lips.I didn’t have my glasses on, she said.Maybe it was a man from a hot air balloon?
Maybe someone fancies you at last,saidAnnie.
Do you think I’d  go out with a man who does things like that?
No, you could stay in with him, Annie joked, as tears of mirth made her green eyeshadow and red mascara stream down her cheeks like rain after a nuclear explosion.No wonder men ran after her in the street.
You could succumb to his charms,Annie whispered.
I think I’d like a man more sensitive than that, Mary screeched.
Well, Mary, you are so lacking in knowledge the art of flirting you only notice men when they do something really wild or unusual
Like what, asked Emile who had just munched up a bowl of dried cat food and was full of energy.
Well, Stan kept pretending he loved reading Newton’s original writings which he bought from some unusual website thinking it would impress Mary. However as he failed O leve; maths 5 times he could not understand it.He sobbed and cried in the public library and Mary was moved by his grief.Later on, though, he became  angry at her intellectual talent and took me as his mistress to get back at her.She never even noticed!
I don’t see how having a mistress is a revenge  on  poor woman who was given her genes by God, said Emile.
Don’t be daft, she buys her  jeans from TK Maxx, Annie answered.
And so do all of us.

I can’t write any more right now!

It’s a full emptiness

Held in your arms
I gaze into your face
See the present and the past
layered in there,
Your face is many faces;
all the selves  that you have been
You are my sweet onion
I can peel back in my imagination
each layer of your being
rejoicing in each one.
You show me these faces all together
And I love each face, each facet of you.
Inside is the sacred,
The private place
where no-one but God
is present.
It is not nothing like inside the onion.
It’s a full emptiness
A space of music, of verse.
There you receive
intimations of truth and joy.
And I know this because
in that place we are all connected;
we are all one in the place
both private and entirely whole.
Shall I say holy?
I have a book
Holiness is wholeness.
But it’s not that I am whole
We are all whole and a unity
Communicating through deep feeling.
The noise of today cuts us off
from our depths
and so from each other.
Out alone in the high mountains
we are closer than in a busy Mall.
Distance is not a concern here,
Time travel really happens.
You are nearer to me when I am alone…
Until I see your sweet lined face
Shaped by concerns into a beauty not genetic
but formed by your feeling life
When I see you it’s like the first time
when I both knew you and didn’t know you at all.
That’s the enchantment of our being,
And of nature and love.
The winter is here
Yet then your shape is clearer
and your path towards me dearer.
I look into your eyes
Green and blue.
We live in love, the ocean;
We swim like fish turning;
fish joyful
in the deep dark sacred places
where few may venture except in dreams.
You are my own dear onion.
My multi-layered man.
Your eyes shine with a light
I never saw before.
Like the holy candle burning in the dark night
I love that sight.

Boundaries of the inner and the outer

Standing together,
We lean forward touching foreheads lightly
Eyes closed for a moment
Tenderly we respect
The other’s boundaries.
Yet I feel your heart beating too,
As it it were me.
We lean for a few more moments like this.
Wordless.
Holding the broken places, with love.
Then we turn and walk away
Such moments last forever
In the eternity that Love creates
Foreheads touching,
Skin to skin.
Boundaries of the inner and the outer
You are another
A real human person
Wanting nothing; wanting everything
I  remember your smile.
You were with me once
And now we go our ways
Our own difficult journeys.

One meeting of souls
Creates its own symbol

May you be blessed
May the fire not burn you
Nor the water drown you
May the Lord keep you always near him.
May He protect your spirit.
May he give you strength always.

The Nightmare Complex

To write a poem I dream an undreamed dream
The woods in France  where float the dead young men
A nightmare complex in its perplexed themes

In our dream the narrative has means
To  make those killed communicate again
To write a poem I dream an undreamed dream

Later, in another war, trains  steamed
To take the insect Jew, no longer man.
A nightmare complex in its evil themes

The little pearls we half see  as we scheme;
The evasions we ignored but which remained.
We read a poem,  we dream an undreamed dream

Who we are and who we might have been
At 4 am  in isolated pain
The Nightmare Complex,  come to share our screams

Can any see the woods as Dante aimed
To recreate the paths where we might change?
To write a poem embodies  soldiers’  dreams
Nightmares dark  with piercing warlike themes

For someone non-existent, God has power

For someone non-existent  God has power
To wreck the world he learns from every  hour.
He is not here or there or where at all
And yet we do have evidence of Fall.

Why  must men be angry as they boast,
They can prove there is no Holy Ghost?
No benediction, blessing, nothing good
No meaning, nothing sacred, never Love.

For who is zero,  who’s in the empty set?
God  seems ever harder to forget
Men argue with red cheeks and suffer strokes
While God sits back, enjoys an evening smoke.

While Nothing shall remain and  nausea  sighs
Let’s enjoy the  madness and the lies.

 

A hundred years and still the forests bleed

We, human, learned the power of words and signs
For economics, fighting and parlay.
We loved, in abstract, symbols strange, malign.

There is wrought beauty, patterned in design
Yet to see the  actual one is how we pray
Which humans saw the power of disguised signs?

We like  the half familiar,  the foreign
For we were nomads once and  we’re unnamed.
The move towards abstraction , why malign?

We love each unique person unconfined.
We cannot love “mankind” although God may.
We, human, feel the power of words and signs

The  tree has roots and God is unresigned
So  begins the knowledge in his clay
The abstract tree bears fruits rich and malign.

When God smiled, she said the seventh day.
Is  one on which each little child should play
Despite  that humans saw the  power of sign
And cultivated woods for wars malign.