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Posts Tagged ‘definition’

The Stones Of Words In The Rivers Of Meaning

‘Sacred’

Is the most precious thing.

That which is unpartitioned.

That reaches roads longed for.

That unfurls sky landscapes unbounded.

That is the most precious.

That fills and empties and makes whole possible.

That wraps meaning in glory and silence.

That goes beyond meaning to mean more.

That flows beyond edges still singing.

That is utter silence enfolding, accepting.

That swells and feeds and gives succour.

That cannot be defined by limitations.

That is beyond and within.

The engine of breath,

The longing to exterminate failure.

To awaken, to sparkle, to feel more, to perceive more.

To stand on the edge of a precipice,

To leap and let go and not care.

To recalibrate, to forget.

To sing eternally.

To be welcomed home.

To be unsullied.

To become the story.

To be magnified.

An infinite expanse of meaning,

A means to go beyond here.

The awen – an inflowing and an outflowing.

Exhilaration.

It can possess but cannot be possessed.

That which carries us away.

Exponential expansion of fractal geometries.

Everlasting metaphor.

Edge of the mysterious void.

Extinction of destruction.

Edges dissolve

And we expand

Into the sacred more.

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WHAT IT SHOULD BE

Does it, (pay attention,) does it,
Even when become a stream continuous and downward,
Does it lope back to steady prose, pedantic, precise, nonedescript ?
Or else might it wend songly and weirdly woven
Painted true but in madman’s colours, seen from mirror’s view,
Haunted, glanced at the corner of the eye,
Dancing words, rolled, roiling words,
Words that spurt fountains unbidden but shaped from
The lips of stone gods.
We are all here short moments in the moment of time
Gliding darkest matter on pools of spinning light.
We are voiceless until breath finds shape.
Voiceless until we sing sprouted feelings.
The heart, it is not a steady thing.
It is a giddy thing, a butterfly, birdsong thing,
A river thing losing itself babbling wilder gestures.
That it makes no sense, that it fills itself to bursting,
That it runs hands full and scattering meanings,
That it reaches and fails and reaches and finds something else,
That it is not music, that is is not is not music,
A tamping scuffling rhythm in dust, a dance becoming,
A mouth dance, a tongue drum, a skirl, a pibroch, a lament,
An imitation of storms in the mountains,
An imitation of the mist cleared by slow spreading sunlight
An imitation of the meld, the mix, the utterance, the name.
A dipping down to the roots of water, to the mud, to the squirming.
Entangled. Neither one this, nor the other, that.
Turning inside out to find to find what brings it all together.
What enables utter forgetfulness of edges, renames the names.
It is what prayer should be, what gods recognise as their own spark,
Generation unto generation, world without end.

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THE ART OF SILENCE

folded breath
a volume of murmurs
that is all

an understanding
discarding options
so as to mimic peace

to sleep, dream or wake.
to turn away from friction –
a wishful free flow

to harmonise, to disappear.
the River of Milk,
our mother’s beneficence

for this dream
the old man, the prince,
the returning journeyman,
rise quietly in the night
to gaze at the moon

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CHAPTER SIX , TOWARDS EQUINOX

As if to remain
Were the price.
Time tips
And we tumble.
Vessels pouring into vessels,
Our sounds hollow,
Certainties measured,
Strangely vague.

All and nothing,
We stand rocking,
Drunk on swaying decks,
Seeking horizons.
Waking, dreams dissolve.
Sleep, and schemes fold inwards.

We name and name all things
Yet the Nameless still remains.
I shall hollow the wood,
Discover the bowl, round, knotted.
The receptive is the valley spirit,
Mother of all things.
It cannot fail, it is a veil,
A mist at dawn, a sigh,
A flight of silent birds heading west.
Leaves spin open, stretch green
Into dewy morning.
The air, still cold, substance
Slow moving.

The solace of hawks,
The solace of sparrows.
Clouds from the south pour light.
Moon-cooled, the blue west:
A line of hills none
Can see beyond.
It is as a veil, barely breathed,
Valley spirit holding, not holding,
Vast, the tip of the tongue,
A taste of spring,
A dream of summer.

For a moment,
Everything seemed perfect,
Before moving on.

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AN INSTANT OF MIDNIGHT

Fragments of midnight
Drip.
Fears congeal.
But wait and watch,
Hold,
Turn not away.
See them stretch
Long shadows,
Return to only
Small knotted memories,
Hopes lost, misplaced,
Strategies discarded.
The grooves of tears
Gnawing cascades
Down ravines
To the slow, dark plateau,
The lake of now
An instant of
Midnight.

****

Move past the words
And there is just
The pumping songs of blood.

Down velvet streams to pools
Where washed cells
Glow golden in caves
Of pleasure,
Delighting in organic dance.

Enwrapped,
Swing upon the breast of being itself,
Resting in motion
The way a leaf belongs
The way a star belongs
The way a moment belongs.

In eternity
Held forever.

****

The names of night
Are scribbles
Within its own darkness.

Scattered fragments
Of midnight
Glint, investigating
Endless variations:
One pattern, one sound
A horizon to hollowness
An edge, slurred, smudged,
Scumbled.

Each form extruded
Attempting definition.
Continuous recitation
A rope between emptinesses.
Each, despairing, spins
Vanishing to void.
Choosing a new name,
A new path,
Emerging, bubbled into being,
A roar of foam,
White noise of silence,
Ocean vastness
Vast, holy darkness,
Rumbling hum.

****

one thousand
And eight names
Of returning night.

****

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AND I DON’T KNOW IT

I would prefer,
So as not to cause offence,
Nor to sit on one,
To be thought
A wonderer,
A wanderer in wonder.
A wondering, a thundering,
A sundering.
A carver of,
A catcher of thought.
Poet,
A nasty word,
A little po-faced word.
Bard is resonant
And hard or soft,
A yearning, longing strength,
But smacks of nostalgia
And trying too hard.
I wander,
I wonder,
I scribble
And weigh words
With meaning.
A wandering mind.
A mind that wonders
And wanders,
Sometimes thrums
And thunders.
A shape in space
For sound
To form in.

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moss cave

11

The tasting of edges

Here is how it is,
How it was:
From the vastness of sleep
A coagulation, a gravitation
Towards the poignant edge.
The bliss of voiceless silence
Shaped and constrained:
Electrical motion, remembering, defining
The surge of emotion, the
Tumble of language, the assertion
Of primacy, constraint, neural nets
To catch and take hold, own,
Possess, reject, disown, demean.

The walls of this house,
Our house,
Sure against the gale,
Black and warmed.

Here’s the truth of it:
This language is not my own,
Not my words, not my syntax,
Not my thoughts, nothing new.
History: the reiteration
Of the forgotten blood
Still roaring changeless
Down the rivers of the years.

Here we are:
Rooted, belonging,
Our right,
A place to return to,
Warm in the soot-blackened darkness
(The winds screaming, battering, squeezing
Sound from tumbling dust).

A silver flash on the black waters,
Leaping fish way beyond the heron’s gaze.
The tawny glen, its tawny sides
Closing in as day’s end darkens.
Where are the fires?
Where are the voices?
The footsteps of those returning home,
The yawns of babes
Turning in belly-filled sleep?

The roaring tide has left.
Its sound diminishes.
The white, wheeling gulls
Are silent specks, the dark horizon.

We are left at a peace
We do not want,
Wordless sorrow for the misplaced.

I’ll tell you of the purest emotion,
Feeling that is free of judging,
Free of qualification.
It is the only language of the heart.
Music, the language without definition,
The summoning of tears and smiles,
Our greatest blessing to the universe.
A song, wordless and unequivocal,
A language universal, sublime,
Fearful, shaking the roots of things,
A net for the Almighty’s scatterings.

(I would barely trust one
Who could not find a tune
With nimble fingers,
Who could not speak verse
As if it were his own heart talking,
Whose words stay cowled behind
Heavy drapes of seemly logic,
Whilst inward, seethes and rails
Against opinion not his own.)

It is not here
In the dream of standing alone.
It is not here
In the upright light of independence.
Uprooted, it is not possible to find a place,
Poor and worthless, it is not possible
To find gold or glory.
It is the same voice
As it ever was:
The clever words well-weighted,
Reasonable.

The rain on the roof,
The wind at the door.
We huddle
Holding the weaving of stories,
The paths telling how we got here,
The choices, the turns, the betrayals.
Cold draughts sweep abandoned corners.

The water does not fight the rock,
It tunes its song and flows around.
It is neither this nor that.
The stepping stones in the flood –
Not the only way to cross.

This house of trees –
It is a house of despair,
A house of howling winds.

This house of trees –
It is a bounty of bright life,
A re-population of delight.

This house of trees –
It is a signal to all
The tyranny of the past has fled.

This house of trees –
It is a plight of bitterness,
An empty, starved gesture of despair.

Delight and despair –
Sunlight and shadows on the hills.
Holding firm is not the way of life.
Freedom and independence, not
A way to understand life.
The making of edges
Is the sound and silence of the tune,
A convolution of anticipation.

Each edge, though,
Neither this, neither that.
We define too closely,
Barter truth for surety
Miss the paradox,
Hold too tightly.

The bright edge is a sword
That severs as the sunlight is a sword
That blinds the sight.

Coming over the hill –
The sharp curtain of the Cuillins,
The still waters of Ord.

Belonging or not belonging:
I borrow my breath
From the exhalation of sparrows
I borrow my sight
From the sparkle of waterfalls
I borrow my heart
From the song of dust and worm
I borrow my words
From the whispers of the dead,
From MacLeod under the sky,
From the white bones, the bleached bones.

I am nothing
But a continuance
Nothing but a path
Made by those gone on before
A house of trees
A house of birdsong
A house of utterance
A forever
Dreaming of a walled instant
Of peace.

BlackCuillins Ord

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Well,
I just started to put down a few ideas that have been floating around for a day or two and this came out! Its not supposed to be anything than a stream of notions and a seasoning of spleen.

A rant I suppose against the self-congratulatory busybody know -it- alls who have always plagued mankind with their cleverness.

A good argument is like a good wine – it doesn’t last for long before it begins to go off. Eloquence is not a sign of wisdom – its just a melody with a catchy tune that sticks in the brains of the listener. Wise words only indicate where wisdom once settled, not where it now dwells. History is the evolutionary struggle of stories. The past tells us what is going to happen next (again!). Language does constrain how the world is seen and understood……

Pythagoras and Empedocles were riddlers and poets, regarded as political and military assets, terrorists and subvertors of the State, depending on who was paying their bills at the time……

As soon as we learned to put our memories down on paper we began to forget the true tales of who we were and where we came from. Now we are relying on an invisible spirit world of waves and photons to keep all our memories and identities what shall we be in danger of losing?…..

Muttering like Issa, wandering like Wang Wei, Ranting like Blake… A roar of white noise…..A memorable fancy…

Demons of gravity, angels of disease.
The invisible
The unseen
As the hidden worlds of spirit.

A spell is
A song
With intention,
A formula for chemical
Reaction.

It pulls the invisible worlds
Of sound
Image and meaning,
Ciphers for understanding,
Weaving them
To urgent eloquence.

A new faith invents
A new vocabulary
Of damnation.

Truths become lies,
Angels become devils,
Natural becomes blasphemous.

In the construction of Christ-
Saviour of the Empire,
Slayer for Peace
(the peace of bureaucrats),
music and dance died.

To define the new as new,
The old is damned.

Song, dance, smiling, drumbeat –
The offering of exuberant energy
As a sacrifice to feed life,
Becomes anathema.
There can be no more priestesses
Wild with drums and wine and rattles
No more pipes in the fields,
No more whispered prayers
To the herbs of healing.

Authorised, sanitised, regulated
Prescribed,
This is now
That,

Now we have found it:
The one formula
Of existence,
The equation of righteous power,
The excuse we have been looking for
To topple the walls
To break the chains
And reforge them in
A bright- edged delineation
Of certainty.
A sanitary prison.

Such was ever the past,
Ever the present,
Ever the future.
The invisible spirit
Resolves under machines
Of magnification-
No more than worms
And waves,
Fields and flux,
Sparks and shadows.

Because the language of mathematics
Can be demonstrated at every level
Of Creation,
The Universe is based on
Mathematical structures. All simply
Equations, no need for souls,
No need for mystery.

yeah! Right!
Can anyone spot
An error of logic here?
When will the fierce laughs
Of ridicule wake these
Small creatures….

The arrogant fantasists
Dwelling in the temples
Of nuclear power,
The myopic academic
Backslappers,
Patronising intellects,
Waspish with jargon.
Doctors of dust and death:

Your stories are the stories
Of the old priests
New-dressed in pious fashion
For the amnesiac, somnolescent
Herd.

Your pronouncements:
Equal to the ravings
Of acid-tongued
Loathers of life,
Chastisers,
Dust mouthed prophets,
Desert thugs of dogma…….

Ancestral bacteria
Dwelling nonchalently
Along with us still.
Unconcerned
With our new definition,
With pushed boundaries,
With enlightened approaches,
With educated guesses.

Warming their hands,
Blooming, flowering
A cultured approach to living.

And beyond them
Their own ghosts,
Wisps of virus,
Memory of hunger,
Longing to remain.

Beyond them,
Small whispers of death,
Prions
Insistent angel messengers….

The old sages,
Disruputable, shaggy browed,
Retired civil-servants,
Disgusted, tired, exasperated,
Leaving the towns
For the silent mountains-
They saw
The return of the swallows,
The lascivious tongues
Gulping in green light on
Every branch,

Ten thousand things
Collapsing to dust
And reforming on the
Warm breezes of Spring.

They spoke in riddles
In song
In poetry
In the truth of paradox,
In the light, sparkle-eyed humour
Of the clear souled.

There was a beginning
There was a beginning of a beginning
There was an anteriority
Of the beginning before the beginning.
There was an anteriority
Before that anteriority……

This is not a new song
This is not a new song
This is not a new song.

This is an old song
With new words
And a new tune.

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