Re-Assemblage

When the damn thing breaks

She sings

And me, on the grass, I listen

On the grass and the leaves and the coal

Drawing orange light from the Power Source

The True Warmth within

This is not snake oil

This is Kundalini

A rising and release

Motion questing for expression that this language can not hold

This ones for a deeper plane

A higher place

Bathed in your love

I can only find it in a disjointed and glorious

Re-Assemblage

Light Breath Dance Be

Francis Bebey meets Dawn Chorus

The forest is waiting for you, my child

Singing in all our languages

Known and Unknown

Named and Unnamed

Solid Melting

The Groundless Ground

Greeting Dawn

This poem is what I have

Out at night

A light, burning bright, naked bulb

Over the road

Detainees held terror-style

Cameras aimed at our yard pointlessly

Invade this space without meaning to

Unintended violation, Invisible bodies

Up over there

A million watts gets done

Showing off perfect visions, luxe attainment, coat cut close

Looking up a pinnacled pyramid

To the stars of Shangri-La

Down on the street, we bounce tax credits

To the mini-shard

Inter-Continental flow built on a story of up liftment

Free of the gaze of the state

I, knowing the names of 9 Billion

Stay up to watch the sunrise

Wishing for a darkened sky

To greet it 

Not Writing at Dawn Bears a Late Harvest (aka Another Day. Another Cup of Tea.)

Since my resolution to try writing at the dawntime I haven’t written a word between 4.30am and 6am.  I got as far as turning the computer on at 5am on one day, but then the baby woke up again and all bets were off.  He’s been poorly too and the nights have been rough.  So I’m sitting with some questions.  Is this a failure? Is this a manifestation of resistance (the baby is sick…. I’m so tired…. so I can’t write).  Well.  Yes! All of the above.  But that’s not the end of the story.  Because I may not have written a word, but I have been ‘turning up’.  At dawn, I wake up, and even as I regret not writing, I have in the past week been present with my work at this time.  My thoughts have been fermenting ideas, though it’s been hard to see what the fruits of it would be when I couldn’t follow through with the dawn writing I wanted.  Instead, the fruits have appeared at other times of day, when the writing does happen.  Today, I gave a lecture titled ‘What makes us human?’  I was terrified by my lack of concrete preparation, it’s also been a very long time since I spoke publicly.  It rained and rained in the morning.  Getting us all out the house left me soaked to the skin… crouched under a broken umbrella.  But once I’d dropped my daughter at school and my son with a friend, the hour before the lecture was there.  Stretched open and ripe to pick.  Resistance wanted me to ‘wing it’ as I so often do, but instead I allowed the percolations of the dawn time to get their space.  The lecture that emerged was cool…. it had life and substance, imperfect yes, and also full of questions and the dynamic of the conversation that makes us think about being human in the first place.  I delivered it to all of four 17 year olds on a university taster day, and a couple of their teachers.  There were no great accolades or rewards here, just the satisfaction of a job done, and seeing the shift in their faces as some of those questions got through and resonated.

Afterwards,  I went to a greasy spoon cafe and got a full English and a cup of tea.  Soaking up the beans and fried tomatos with a buttered slice, washed down with the golden brew, I sat with the sense of satisfaction that comes when you’ve done the work.  It passes.  That’s cool.  I’ll fight the battle again.  And continue to turn up at dawn.  Whether I write or not, it’s the showing up that counts.