Once all reports

Once all reports,
expositions

and files

are submitted

and the last lecture delivered,

once the final scholar

completes their notes

and the final textbook has its boast,

once all theories

and methods

are keenly noted down

and all the conference comes to town,

the same conclusion shall remain:

to live by love

for nothing’s changed.

It's 5am

It's 5am
and light has already

stretched across the plains of Kazakhstan.

I trip out a double bed I’ve shared with two

into a living room now furnished by a

chorus of rising snores

from a Kazakh, Uzbek and Russian circle

that’s brought me in.

Two are still awake

and we share a laugh about the night we’ve just

torn through.

Those that have crashed here,

who lie sleeping in this apartment,

are couch surfers, hitchhikers,

friends.

It’s like I’ve just stumbled through

my old sharehouse

—like we’ve all just made a night in Adelaide.

Sometimes,

the best thing about home

is feeling like you’re travelling

and the best thing about travelling

is being reminded

of home.

It'll get me too

It'll get me too
like it gets us all.

I might get old

or just unlucky

but when the blackness finally does

come flooding in

and my breath begins to wane

I suspect I’ll remember

the nights as a kid

when mum would scratch my back

—her nails marking the path

to sleep;

I’ll remember running out with you to lunch

in years 8, 9 and 10

—my life feeling fresh

as the light ideas

floating in and out our eyes;

I’ll remember my first kiss

in the room I’d nabbed that night from my mate

—the darkness, her softness, the posters

and everything still

bar the motion of her hand across my knee;

I’ll remember New Zealand

when we’d chuck the ball along

the highway to each other,

awaiting our next ride

—no one was around

and when I’d throw the ball to you,

it’d feel like I’d thrown it across

the entire country;

I’ll remember the nights we’d pack the car

with the whole sharehouse

to nail Mount Osmond

or Lofty

just to get a look

on the city we ruled.

In short,

when the blackness finally does

come flooding in

and my breath begins to wane

I suspect I won’t be remembering

my life

so much as remembering

ours. 

Life

Life:
a total mess

where the more we try to get

that perfect partner,
perfect job
or hold that perfect conversation,
the more life unravels;

where the best approach

seems giving life a hug

and saying,

“That’s ok life.
I accept you for being a mess;
in fact

I kind of like it.”

Perhaps there is no clear path

Perhaps there is no clear path.  

So get married

or stay single,

have kids or don’t,

go meditate for 30 years up some mountain

or head to the pub.

Whatever.

Perhaps it’s all bullshit

and all wrong.

Perhaps being truly awakened has nothing to do

with how much gluten you refuse to eat

like it’s nothing to do

with how much money you make

and all to do

with accepting the tragedy of life itself

yet choosing to live life anyway.

For no matter the extent

of your readings of Eckhart Tolle,

you’ll always be fighting that feeling

that something is missing

and the reality that death is just around the

corner.

So perhaps our greatest battle

is not with any government

or illness

but with the intrinsic futility of our lives

and enlightenment is a measure of

how happily you can

still

sing and dance your way to the grave

—how well you can laugh at it all

anyway.

Grandad

When I spent two nights
on Grandad’s couch,

in Grandad’s village,

in Grandad’s language,

he and I were a drive from Warsaw

and at least

two lifetimes

from Australia.

He’d raised mum in that place.

The seas had been high

—crashing east from Germany

then swamping west from Russia—

but he and nan had raised four kids

in their dinghy made of grit

and magic.

Since then,

mum had flown to Australia and

made a mostly-functioning family.

Really, it’s been as if she’s

seized a tonne of pearl with pocket nets

dipped in on feel

and intuition.

Poland, meanwhile,

broke the shackles of Russia

to fall within the chains of freedom,

but by then Grandad was weary

of the old chorus of change.

He stroked his cat, had the odd visit,

pissed in the outhouse and fell in love

once more.

In the swelter of Aussie Xmases,

we’d sit around the polish food

and through landlines speak with him

and the myth he represented in my child’s heart.

Now,

here was I the adult on Grandad’s couch

in a village

that mightn’t recall that thirty years before

mum had felt the urge to set the wings

of her whim on a flight to

Australia.

I tied my shoes

in likely the room

mum had learnt to tie her own.

I felt the thread of time

come flutter through my fingers

as I worked the laces.

Grandad rested on his seat.

Mum thinks he keeps his story to himself.

Maybe.

Or maybe we ourselves are Grandad’s story

—a story of a love he bore

that threads throughout our lives,

that’s thundered through Poland to Oz

and throughout his children’s children,

whilst he himself has hardly left his village home.

Grandad’s tale is of a love

that lives on

like the wind

and in that way

Grandad is immortal.

You sang the body electric

You sang the body electric;
we sing the body sinful.

O greybeard, O Walt,

to talk of the white-blow and delirious juice,

the jets of love hot and enormous,

the woman and man,

would at one time cause storm,

now it causes politics.

O father of America, O poet of the body,

how would you observe us?

We who’ve turned flesh to words

and words to wars between

woman and man, between

body and soul, between

history and culture, between

sight and desire.

O Walt, O song of the fires and rains,

the black and the white,

the organ and spirit,

what flag would you raise in the culture war?

I’d think the flag of a Taoist Americana;

a lucid flag

—no, a translucent towel of a Taoist Americana

you’d set upon the sands of the Golden State

to get brown on;

sunbathing, naked, your beard, your masculinity,

the air, the animals, the women and men,

singing the body electric

and soul electric

whilst beyond the world destroys itself

with words

and politics.

O greybeard, O Whitman,

uniting the states of being

in our world of severance.

The world would likely reject you now

with that beard and masculinity,

your body electric,

your body alive

and unapologetically free,

in brazen love-grip with a soul in love with life.

O Walt, O rugged individual,

accountable as much in love as in hatred,

loving love as much as hating hatred.

O wind and rain and surf and saliva,

O sun-bleached body,

O woman, O man, O human soul,

O joy of love-grip and the juices of life.

Your redwood, Walt, my red gum;

your moose, Walt,

my dead dry blazing sky;

your deserts, your canyons,

my Banksia, Walt,

as we all embark on that numinous path

that none can wander for us.