EXILED
I see a light
As it gleams through smoke and haze
Dark is this night
Darker still through history's gaze
Move only forwards
Never think of up or down
Your greatest triumph of the age
Wears a charred and bloody crown
Take all you can and run away
Push down your death another day
Disquiet dwells like a thorn in your eye
Exiled beyond sight
Where the greyness gnaws away
All hope and fight
Now the sun picks at my brain
The ocean's menace and its roar
And its sweeping unwalled maze
Rather I had its terror now
Than these endless dying days
You are alone in your skin
In the hush a howling din
No matter what you do or say
The hate won't go away
Your legacy unto us all
Is to teach is how to fall
Yes, somewhere even within thee
A dying heart longs to be free
BURNING POEMS
(for Charles Buckmaster)
Only young, not twenty-one
He hitched across the Nullabor Plain
His face was brown and broken down
As he looked for the summer rain
And when he got to the western land
He found the same old pain
So he walked around to the north of town
Where the road took him again
And he saw his freedom
Like a moon escaping from the clouds
He saw the fragments of the light
As they fell upon his arm
He heard the singing of the dawn
In its crowning golden psalm
He felt the ice of winter
And the shadows in the night
He could taste the ash of a burning world
As his soul prepared for flight
And he saw his freedom
Like a moon escaping from the clouds
And he saw his freedom
Like fire returning to the sun
The ghost of the past came crowding down
Put the mist before his eyes
Obscured the sun and everyone
Who was listening to his cries
Inside he felt the hour
And direction of his fate
So he marched towards his meeting with
A beauty that awaits...
HOLDING PATTERN
Your pain so plain to see
for the brother in me
Is this why you turn away?
To yesterday
Before the grief compounded
and mutiny sounded
A discourse in your blood
an empty flood
Feel
something in this holding pattern
circling you
Feel
nothing in this holding pattern
circling you
A bouquet to the sun
and everyone
Disquiet in your eyes
is paralyzed
An anger for the kill
tempered still
Turns itself around
to demon ground
And I will still maintain
a brother's refrain
Misaligned and still to find
us scared and blind
The wind and scouring sand
of time and land
Will grind away the reticence
the evidence
The Anecdote. Words, Stories, Mystery