POEMS AND SCRAPS.

1. Between longing and loss,
Suspended in illusion.
Love no longer, perhaps never to be.
Reality beyond knowing,
Image beyond grasp.
Love cannot know
But be.

2. Longing and loss;
Love, where are you?
Do you exist?

3. Pregnant cloud,
Drops dispersed
On open wound of land and being;
Healing.

4. Space compresses
Head, tree, water and mountain.
Suspended,
Only the necessary remain.
Tensed,
Before the mask is born.

5. Pre-form existence
Fleeting shadows resist definition
Images turn fast on their axis.

6. No bitterness, only sorrow;
Sorrow is supple, bitterness brittle.
Alone with sorrow, movement stirs,
The stillness turns.
As grey to silver,
As brown to gold

7. Death, they say, is a transformation.
But to light or endless night?
Life, held in balance by a vulnerable heart,
Blessed by wounds.
Sink not,
Return to move again,
Once again return.

8. Frozen fog on a still lake
Of tears,
A ripple of love parts the veil
Watching, listening, aching, longing.
The veil closes and the moment has gone.
Where are you now? Can you ever be seen?
The primal cry is silenced.

9. Touching a weightless shadow
Waiting on being and form,
Listening and watching,
Longing,
An original cry splits from below.

10. The hand holding the brush,
Chameleon like,
Becomes a wave of water,
A rigid rock.
No depiction, no description.
A distillation of living forms.
Pure in essence,
Suspended presence.

11. A head, before feature or face,
Takes its place with rock, water, wind and mountain.
Becoming a vessel to receive, empty, to contain
A space, to host great nature’s trace.

12. Now lost in this world
Unknown, unknowable.
Then to wonder about origins,
The essential life of beings.

13. A stagnant pool
A ripple
Suddenly an essence bubbles
The mask slips.
A glimpse.

14. To paint as if to tell
In whispers,
What has been witnessed,
What has been heard
Of that first voice.

15. Touching space,
A mountain cannot be reached through the barbed wire.
Barbed wire bars the way to the mountain
You thought was yours by right.

16. Beneath the pigmented veil,
A pulse of whispering images
Of pigments’ power permitting fleeting shadows,
A temporary residence.
Is this what painting is?

17. Space laps at the shadows of being
And surrounds the fragmented dream we call life.
A tear drop echoes in the emptiness
A weeping witness to suffering’s plea.

18. Frail, fragile friend,
You cast a long shadow over our small reality.

19. Painting gives temporary residence
To fading shadows, held only
In order to watch their vanishing.

20. Eavesdropping on fleeting shadows
On life’s uncertain image;
Who is it who cares or knows?
Who can face this eternal mirage?

21. Lost edge,
Form wrapped in space
Between illusion and disillusion;
A pause from prison,
A time to listen.

22. Edge of being, compressed by space
On the cusp of dissolution;
If mind is all illusion.
Where then is Nature’s trace?

23. Layer upon layer of solitude
Echoes of an ancient memory
Of a time before masks.

24. A knot of space clots into being
Clotting, unclotting
Uncaring who or what we are.
Where is identity’s purpose
In this perpetual motion?

25. Compressed notes of nature
Dropped into liquid space;
You are our narrator
Our pain and our emptiness.

26. Bewildering fact of being
Mystery of seeing and perceiving;
What face behind the features?
Aloneness.
Tangible space, intangible form,
Space within form,
Emptiness, fullness.
What is known? What is void?
Origin’s silent cry.

27. A question of pain
Yes, what a strain,
If only you knew
How much of a stew
You put me through.
But then it doesn’t matter
It’s just food for chatter
For the restless mind
With its endless grind.

28. Longing for that indefinable something
Hesitating to give it a word.
Being born was troubling,
Never so awkward.
So what now in this pointless charade?
No point looking skyward or inward
I am the pivot, balancing the weight of nothingness.

29. Overwhelming emptiness,
Never to be filled.
Hopeless, helpless, loveless, childless
Your field never was tilled.
Was it for this that you were born?
A void throbbing with longing,
Filled with endless becoming.
Icicles forever dropping.