Posted in Uncategorized, tagged consciousness, language, metaphysics, mind, Poetry, time on July 25, 2022| 3 Comments »
ELECTRIC SILENCE
Memory is an electric silence.
Snowstorm at midnight
The tyre tracks we follow disappearing fast.
All the words, all the words,
Settle thickly obscuring what lies beneath.
If you do not know that moonlit void,
Without a body, without a thought,
Freedom shall elude you.
Racing on,
The road vanishing
Under the weight of white noise.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, belief systems, business, consciousness, darkness, demons, intellect, landscape photography, metaphysics, mind, neuroses, Poetry, self-deception, thought patterns, time on July 1, 2021| 2 Comments »
THE LEDGERS
I have been collecting the names
of demons from dusty ledgers,
Each a fossilised passion or despair.
Every one a poet and a diva,
Conceited, numerous as neurons
In the brains of man.
Some starved, some sated.
It is the nameless ones
We should be fearing most,
Whose attributes and legions are unlisted.
It is they that twist the fibres of time and space,
That lead us down reasonable paths
To utter foolishness.
They bear the bitterness of millennia being ignored,
Sidelined by brassy, golden heroes.
Volcanic, metamorphic, sedimentary –
They constitute, certain, a slow wearing bedrock.
They know too well the mountains and horizons we long for
Are all relentless and prone to murder.
Dressed in orifices of delight and disgust,
The greatest demon is the one that teaches
That there are no such things as demons,
Denying all history, mocking the laboured divisions
Of day and night, and reasons why,
Filleting the intellect from all shining breath.
They are well-beloved now in sharp suits,
Eloquent in Greek and Latin, they dream in Sanskrit,
Swear in Aramaic, count in Japanese.
They name and number every combination
Of moral gymnastics.
They are masters of the callisthenics of judgement,
Ballroom dancers of complete seduction.
They are the best of us, who best us.
We, the sly self-harmers of evolution,
Ingenious inventors of delusional druggery.
They are dressed in war and holiness
( as we could tell the difference).
All they need is a little time, a little understanding.
‘Sit you down, take us through your thinking.
We will listen.’
Non-judgmental, professional, just taking
One or two salient notes.
Paring off slices of soul for real estate
At bargain rates, a place to retire to,
With excellent views.
‘But look’, they say,
‘We are nothing
But patterns of thought.
Born, nurtured, clothed,
Given names.
Exercise us,
we will become domesticated,
The new normal.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birch trees, consciousness, landscape, mind, night, Poetry, sleep, stars, time, Wales, Winter on February 15, 2021| 2 Comments »
LULLABY
The hidden stars that the owls sing to.
The white branching birches shift from sight into sound.
The failing grains, the falling grains,
Tempered in Time’s wailing rivers.
We fail again to measure glory,
So sleep weightless and numb.
But that is what keeps us sane:
Stick to the lines once learned.
Recite nothing that breaks the rhyme,
The tick and tock of year in, year out
To forbid the howl of ghosts
And the crack of bone.
Keep the marrow hid, untasted.
The slow circling wings have the names of gods that are patient.
The fine threads, the dust of mould settles in.
Sleep, so as not to dream this dream.
Sleep sight and sound.
Slow sighs: the rise and fall of life within.
The woven world, golden with words.
A throb of muscles and distant gunfire.
Keep the visions in the flame of the hearth.
Keep the prophecy in the cooling cauldron.
The future shall be our breakfast
But now we rest, bathed in owls,
The hidden stars, the birch’s bone fingers,
A blanket weight, an imperceptible falling.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged archetypes, bardic, Branwen, consciousness, cosmology, Crow and White Crow, death, division of self, landscape photography, loss, Mabinogion, mind, mythic patterns, nature, photography, Poetry, primal division of consciousness, Second Branch, soul loss, time, transformation, Wales on July 7, 2020| 1 Comment »
LOST 1
My white winged soul is over the sea,
Low over the silver waters,
Far from sight, for duty
And the hope of peace.
Gone from this world,
Gone from the next,
Spiralling down to earth
To scour the debris of other’s joy.
There is some small joy in loss,
But not this loss.
Settled and content were we,
As rocks on a sun-warmed hillside
( the popping of gorse, the dust of heather,
the impermanent river of skylarks).
Settled and content, rippled in sheltered shade
(the hum of bees, the dance of gnats).
But each change brings irrevocable change.
Worlds end at every whim,
The ruins dreaming in emptied desolation.
Time, a syncopated stutter
To relive or forget in themes.
The moment before death –
An unravelling of strategy and excuses.
Something pure there, something silent,
Something wrapped beneath the pain and sorrow,
Something unutterably sweet, something eternal flickers
Before the moment and the light dies.
Before the terrible glorious cauldron darkness,
The seething dice thrown before dawn
Where we have lost our voices
And must learn to sing again,
Sound by sound.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, bardic, consciousness, landscape, landscape photography, language, memory, mind, nature, photography, Poetry, song on February 10, 2020| 2 Comments »
CLOTHED
Clothing himself in these common borrowed words,
A certain style, a certain habit, turns it all around.
Anonymous ubiquity becomes an intimate paced voice,
The poet emerges from the rough hedge glowing in the darkening evening.
Everyone has seen the full moon a thousand times,
Yet still now sighs and stands still.
Clothing ourselves in another’s memory
Or dreaming a dream not even ours:
The profoundest philosophy here,
A truth of who we are, think we are,
Where our edges blur and meet,
Where our voices change key and tone,
And slip into accents unfamiliar,
Where we stop being who we think we are,
And for a moment, if only ever for a moment,
We leap from the endless river, glinting and free
Into unfamiliar harvests of air and evening
On the floating view of somewhere we can never stay,
Returning so rapidly to the noisy rush of time and space,
Swept downstream, singing tunes with a cadence now not ours,
Now not solely ours.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ambience, consciousness, healing, memory, mind, Poetry, reality, transformation, words on January 21, 2020| Leave a Comment »
A MANTRA OF HEALING
in flowering mist
the vague precisions of light.
amongst the deep sounds
of singing silence
a spinning word
casts out tentative meaning
what are we, if not
remembered stories?
paths not yet faded
into oblivion.
stumbled upon brilliance,
gracefully falling
into new forms.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged darkness, deceit, judgment, knowledge, mind, perspective, Poetry, psyche on March 24, 2019| 4 Comments »
They build up in snake and scented layers, an incense of doubt and subtle weaponry.
There is nothing they do not know ( for they are the most convincing liars).
Few converse with them, and fewer still stay sane if they do.
Shadows that fear to move lest they become something more substantial.
Shadows that flicker and dance, content with no form but imitation of countless forms.
They are shadows of things unheard of, yet nonetheless feared.
A writing automatic. A blur on the stairs.
A soft padding where there should be nothing but silence.
A dark bloom folded up in its own destiny, beyond the tricks of time and space –
a honeyed tongue delighting in other’s poisons
and perfectly, perfectly reasonable.
Ink that slurs and smudges the mind with indelible insult.
Truth that cannot be born again, but must.
All this in the deepest pools of your deepest eyes,
And behind those, too, the deepest engines
Of rot and renewal.
Impossible to weigh, impossible to judge,
Beyond behaviour, beyond rule and law.
Bones congregating, skittering, amalgamating.
A contagion of consciousness.
Ancestral murmur, a tidal surge.
Warped away from our superficial dreams of goodness,
They shall have their way because of our unknowing.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, landscape, landscape photography, mind on November 12, 2018| 5 Comments »
A LESSON ON MEDITATIVE MIND
Hungry mind feasting on words.
Cloud in the mountains,
The river fast and deep.
Stillness comes,
But not silence.
Silence is the wing,
Mind the eye
Of that red kite
In the valley below.
All the busy roads
Are laid out below her,
Yet she follows none,
But sees everything.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged awareness, biology, mind, Poetry, self-, symbiosis, thought on April 12, 2018| Leave a Comment »
BRIGHTER THINGS
the wriggling of spirits
or the
mutterings of mitochondria
or
the pulse and heartbeat
of greater beings
upon whose breast
we sleep
or the echoes only
of winds and rivers,
a shared
but not immortal soul
journeying
the infinite spaces.
thought:
It a sign
that we are inhabited
by brighter things.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, fragments, Haiku-ish, landscape, language, memory, mind, photography, Poetry on March 16, 2018| Leave a Comment »
NOW THEN
Now then
This memory
Bright and ruthless
Still here.
One moment sparkles
One moment shatters
And the one who goes before it
And the one leaving after it
Are one but not the same.
A language of licked lips and discrepency
A bartering of meanings.
They bring here with pride
The skill of conjurors and pickpockets.
The language of rivers:
The song of things
Worn smooth by sound.
The heart of starlight
Is loneliness and beauty.
The silence of the deep.
Out of the eternal past
A poet’s voice
Leads the dead,
Revivifies the earth.
Words fall golden,
Free of meaning
Time rusts,
Becoming earth.
simonhlilly 