MichaelAitken

A light – golden

A light – golden

A light – golden
more golden than the eye can detect
Follows you in, is one of you
Are more than you!

A light older than the earth
Its energy, pure, refined like love
Happiness, greater than time
Yet it is such a minor light, a little light

A feeling felt, sensed of this light
Of happiness, love bound up, glowing

Following you as you go in
But seems unseen by everyone
Invisible, is too much light to be seen by you
The secret part of light, the heat of light
Another light, a guiding fleck of light
I almost saw the form of a man
Much later, as I remember
The feeling the light had
Of guiding you, like two blind men
“At last, about time, got you here”
Not seeing it, presenting me to you

Then left or seemed to leave
Vanished into the night, hurrying away
Bowed out un-noticed by you

You stepped through the doorway
Full of yourselves, smiling professionally
You’d just about made it here not knowing why or how
And you walked in the door without a goodbye

A long-time empty in my mind

The tear has travelled a long way
A long way home to find
The heart was a long time empty
A long-time empty in my mind

Down the roads across the skies
Who knows how many times?
It lost its way and began again
A long-time empty in my mind

I miss the love I thought I knew
I miss the life I had
Like a train can lose its carriage
And rolls on feelings bad

So you cut a hole into my life
And staked me to the ground
There is no freedom in my heart
When you’re not around

The tear has travelled a long way
A long way home to the town
The shadow that I left behind
With the knife stuck in the ground

Insanity has grown in me

Insanity has grown in me
Dumb as dead dogs on broken stars

Someone filled my heart with bangers
Then closed the wound with a spiders thread

I sense my mind getting small and alone
A perpetual machine of inner war

The bit between my teeth pulls tight
I eat my screams and latch shut a smile

Is there any way back to the broken home
With the balsam of love and laughter

The broken home held together

For the sake of the children

How Could I Not Have Known?

Help for Partners of Sex Addicts

I’ve just started reading Malcom Gladwell’s recent book “Talking to Strangers”. Amongst other things, this book looks in depth at how top agents can work for years beside other agents – with amazing reputations – only to discover that they’re really double agents.

How can this be? How could they be deceived?

Gladwell would argue that we shouldn’t be surprised. And here are some reasons he cites for this:

1.Gladwell says that we all function in a truth-default mode. That is, we are wired to believe that we’re hearing the truth. Hence, even if something seems to be a bit off, we generally quieten our apprehensive thoughts as we’re primed to believe the reassurances we get. This is simply a function of being a flawed human. A suspicion or some doubts will not be enough (and we may well be suspicious and be plagued by many doubts).

2. Indeed…

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The soap opera

The soap opera

You sit and watch the small screen every day
There is no memory of you or me there
Not in Coronation Street, not in East Enders.

And you religiously watch them day by day but beware
There is no memory of your life in them
And when you die they will carry on, cruelly not remembering you

I watched you hopping over the grass

I watched you happing over the grass
Flapping your ominous jet-black wings
There is bleak loneliness, do you wait for the night
A godlessness, do you dislike yourself
As if your first ancestor passed on sin to you
And for all of your generations, you had to represent death
Unloved bird, tragic creature, the fearful shadow of a dream.

The puppets talk to each other

The puppets talk to each other

The Puppets talk to each other
As they are taken out of their boxes
They are brought together on stage

They have so much fun together
Pointing their wooden fingers at each other
Laughing like parrots at the gangle of days

See them in the pub on a Friday night
Sitting at tables in the scoured moonlight
Tangled up in rope-dreams

Talking about Mr. Polly and swinging their clubs
Strangling Mr Policeman and breaking their mugs
While I sit alone all-day-long under a star

It might have rained

It might have rained a little
The blackbirds would be singing
The moon would be like a large shiny eye

A couple might have been arguing
A cart might have passed me by
A teenager drunk on wine singing

And there I stood, outside the window
Looking up, trying to catch what was being said
Glimpsing their shadows cast by the lamps onto the ceiling

I am backtracking

I am backtracking through my mistakes
To my days of innocence
I am backtracking thru the darkness
To my days of naivety

What a great forest I find myself in
How lost I am in my own mistakes

I want those days of innocence
When normal life was possible
When my heart was whole
When love was just one day away

Those six-sided days of childhood
That became twisted out of shape like a rubric cube

My blood does not compare to the sea

There is a hole in my wrist
The waves lap all around me
My blood does not compare to the sea
It could never fill the ocean

I will build a red sandcastle
I will build its walls around me
I will fill its moat with my blood
So that no more harm will come to me

Now here is my own river
Flowing from my heart into the sea
On either side, weeping willows grow
As you sail your ships into my dreams

I am the flood of truth

I am the flood of truth flowing along with the seaweed
Looking for a weakness in your defensive levees

Oh, big city of pillories where do you hide your mistakes
The binocular eyed seagulls fly over you
The dolphins hear your conspiracies

Yesterday, the rain filled your streets
There, at last, is the full moon
The levee wall is breached
The floodwater fills your ministries

Out with the lies and deceits
In with the seaweed and the sewage
Now the rivers will be freed
Now the clock tower will be silenced

And all the northern people
The ones who you intimidate
Will look down from
On how you were dealt with and recrimination

The college photocopier

The college photocopier

The college photocopier opened its green blinking eye
On its back was a ton of photocopier paper
Bowed under the weight it ate but it did not digest
All its lifeblood was spread across those pages

The college photocopier
Bolted through the doors into the night
It ran with rats through the city drains
It followed foxes through the woodlands

A posse of teachers ran after it brandishing staple guns
The college was in uproar
Students demanded handouts
The engineer came but knew nothing of photocopiers in the wild

Now it would live the rest of its life
Concealed in the undergrowth like a small deer

If I live to be a thousand

If I live to be a thousand I’ll never understand the hollow people
The ones you see right through; the ones camouflaged with normality.
They talk about themselves and it all seems fine
But their words are like spades digging out you soul

A loved one in need

A loved one in need feeds on your blood
Leaves you anaemic, your marrow like mud.
The one you love best, sweet anarchic child
She’s drunk on your blood; it makes her go wild.

The more that you give her, the wilder she gets
Her teeth cut deeper…. into your neck.
It’s daytime at last, you sit by her grave
Your tears fall like rain – for a love – you can’t save.

You chased the scaredy-cat

You chased the scaredy-cat around, quite a funny sight
But it was hard to see you in the thickness of the night
The animal was a dream thing; it appeared out of the blue
And vanished like a frozen wish leaving not a clue.

You searched beneath the bamboo, you ran around the shrubs
Your smiling face was glowing near the flower tubs.
Another great performance lost to history
Performed without a spotlight but acted out for free.

Here is a picture of a long lost friend.

Here is a picture of a long lost friend. He is aiming a spear at a woolly mammoth. He comes walking out of my brain like a stick man and sits on the floor. He starts a campfire and spreads his belongings in front of him. The smoke is rising up towards a cluster of stars.

Here is a picture of a woolly mammoth. It has a placard around its neck. It is trapped in the Thumb of Michigan by fires. Hunters are running towards it as it makes its protest. Save The Wooly Mammoth. One of the men is a long lost friend, how did he get there?

I thought he had died long ago, but he rode the dragonfly back into this past world. Next summer I will look for the magic dragonfly that can fly me back into his ancient world.

The magic dragonfly is as big as a lion. It flies into the bus stop at West India Dock Road between when the sun disappears and the stars open their windows. It is a brief enclosure of nothingness from where you can travel backwards into the ghost world.

You can tell that my friend is a ghost man from the picture on the stone wall. It is strangely lacking in light and shadow and the days are heaped up into mounds rather than weeks. Here is a mound of ten thousand years ago. The lake waters were alive then and told stories and all the woolly mammoths, after their appetites were sated, would sit down and listen to its haunting noise.

The experience was different from what it is today, days were longer, the air was fresher, and all the year round was summeresque.

In the thumb of Michigan, the mammoths have gone to sleep. The hunters are men and women now and are smiling at one another. A great flock of birds and a herd of deer take up residence by the singing water. A shower of meteorites goes across the sky.

I can only get two legs

I can only get two legs in my trousers
Sometimes I try to get all four.
I can only get two arms into my shirt sleeves
And wings just don’t fit anymore.

I try to get two heads inside my hat
But they argue and always fall out.
And I try to get two hearts together
But one is always left out.

Une fois qu’ils se sont enfuis dans la nuit

Once they hurtled off into the night
Regardless of the distance or the time it took.
Two hundred miles along the motorway
To a town near Paris in the night.

Finally they reached their destination
But the Lou Reed concert was over.
They laughed driving back to Villefranche
To continue picking grapes in the vineyard

Une fois qu’ils se sont enfuis dans la nuit
Quelle que soit la distance ou le temps qu’il a fallu.
200 milles le long de l’autoroute
À la ville près de Paris dans la nuit.

Enfin, ils ont atteint leur destination
Mais le concert de Lou Reed était terminé.
Ils ont ri en revenait à Villefranche
Continuer à cueillir des raisins dans le vignoble

Beware the ebullient souls

Beware the ebullient souls saying
“We’re glad you came, welcome, we’ll call you” but they never do.
Look behind you, they’ve gone haven’t they,
As if they never even existed and I think . . . .

Good friends, someone to talk to –
They seemed to understand! We seemed to have things in common! Wrong!
They let you down; their phone was off the hook.
It was a subtle condescension, a sweet lie.

Here is the remnant of the broken mirror

Here is the remnant of the broken mirror; try to move it and it becomes smoke.
I take it into another room, it refuses to reflect my thoughts and cries like a baby.

My temporal imaginary mind would not exist without it – it would become insane.
Desperately I stare into it – a starving orphan putting a hand into a barrel of water.

Anywhere else and it becomes mad, red embers glowing in the darkness of a cell.
After seven years do I get it back whole; my heart as young as a baby bird?

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