life – 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

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

It is night

It is night, in the drizzle the street lights shine
The river writhes through London from a mountain of brooding sky.

Everything is silent in the town
A breeze, a wind; the moon peeks from behind a column of smoke
There are bridges, the bridges of London.

Tonight I have crossed every one
Drifting like a cloud from some far sea;
Legs, rain and street lights are jumbled
On the great treacle black back of the Thames.

I carry a sleepy eye over the humped back bridges
As the river slides beneath like a slow black cat.

I awake from sleep under the thin winter sky
Sparrows of cold air flit by me.
The morning sands of humanity pour across the passes
Like the Persian army at the pass of Thermopylae.

The road went underground

The road went through a subway of bad dreaming
Cars came to a final end and love lost all meaning.
Time became a spectre that crossed from life to death
Time seizes control of your travels, to recompense its loss.

Were you wrong in what you said? Were you out of depth?
Who speaks up for you? Was there anything left?
The thread of sinister shadow reaches in with lacerations.
Perils have crossed over you, led by accusations.

Cruelly you lived long enough, surely you asked why
The secret arose over you, why were you meant to die?

The contestants are gathered in the town.

The contestants are gathered in the town square somewhere on the Midwest plains. The master of ceremonies arrives.

Years before the game began the beginnings of long strips of coloured plastic tape were laid down into the square that stretched for miles out across the land and into the Rocky Mountains. Each tape chose its contestant by a secretive whisper that only they could hear. Sometimes more than one contestant was chosen and sometimes a contestant chose more than one tape. Each tape represented a pathway of life for them o follow, an ideal, a philosophy or a plain command that would appeal to their senses, their needs for something to follow in life. Year after year new tapes representing new ideas were laid down from the town square and off into the wide distance until the thinkers had exhausted every avenue of possibility. And no on this spring morning the game would begin.

The stating whistle blew. Out of necessity quite often, the solo contestants joined together to form teams to follow the tape. in other situations but one individual would choose but one tape. In other instances some tapes got no takers and one tape led the hapless contestant in a loop back to where he began.

What philosophy, belief or practice would win? Perhaps no one would win, perhaps in the end the tape ended on the top of a mountain with nowhere else to go; or into a whirlpool of rapids where it shook nervously in the abyss. Some contestants having reached the end of the tape carried on across the Rocky Mountains into California. Some contestants returned to the town to find an unused tape.

From the sky a traveller would see a huge rainbow coloured trail stretching for miles across the land like a modern Nazca line. At the end of the year the tapes were blown by the wind and wrapped themselves around the mountains.

The master of ceremonies gathered his fees and left town but before he disappeared he gave a speech in the public square which began, “I have something to say to America”, and ended with “farewell”.

THE PAIN OF NAKEDNESS

The pain of nakedness
In the Mediaeval morning
Bitter as the sweet dew
Where heartbeats flower
From the amnesia of clothing
In the single heartbreak
In the honesty of morning air
Yearning for affection

The pain of nakedness
True as unexpected tears
That walks through a park
Made of the scenery of dreams
The tingle of the flesh
The tight vulnerable skin
The unprotected fantasies
The darting red deer of lust

The pain of nakedness
Its eternity through night and day
The never ceasing longing
To touch the pain of nakedness
To be touched and kissed
To be loved and caressed
Oh why do people run away?
Why do they bury their nakedness?

Isn’t there a Saviour?

The pain of nakedness
Born into a cradle of tears
Dying in the shrouds of anxiety
With the flesh turning to rags
The heartbeat silenced
The unsatisfied years disintegrating
The spirit like lightning strikes the ground
But goes out like a candle flame

The pain of nakedness
A game of endless patience
On an empty kitchen table
And now sleep and night and death
Often cuts short the winning hand
So often severs life’s fulfilment
Or separates the pleasures like oceans
Around the pain of nakedness

Jan 16th 98

You are under license

You are
Under license
To the big corporation
You can use
Your life freely
But there are rules

If you are
A lone wolf
In the snow covered mountains
You still
Must respect
The herd

And if you are
In a herd
Moving as one
Across the earth
You still must
Behave as one
And respect the wolf

Another day in the darkness of mankind

Another day in the darkness of mankind
Whose love is the scraps of torn paper sheets
On which I cling like an unwanted survivor
Straddling the oblivion between groups of people

And picking dirt out of an unbandaged wound
Is like picking love out of the darkness of mankind
Every day the demon wind sows seeds of malcontent
Pulling the blanket of the sun from under our feet

Only a child can glimpse what love can be
Whose summer holidays are the bond of sun and water
And every day is a dream come true
Fed and clothed and sleeping under the stars

Not knowing pain or tears or old age
Until the careless world breaks them away

It’s significant

It’s significant; the eyeless marble white statue of Homer was in my bed last night.
I woke up, and I was his statue, plying a saxophone in the street.

The search for his eyes began by cutting shapes out of the wind and burning the wind in an oven until a baby appeared.

I am that baby, I cannot talk or see now until you snap a shaft of sunlight out of the sky and pierce my heart with it.

It’s definite, that poet gypsy had stolen me with promises of healing, and I wander down a wind tunnel in the clouds like a flaming white horse.

The quest now centres on the sin of Adam that burns in my liver like a flaming heart.

This great blot on my spirit is as ripe as an exploding apple filled with crude oil and has a life of its own, and has lived longer than I have.

I see the words of man disappear into a whirlwind in the sky wherein a stranger appears to be eating every word ever said by the whole of humanity; words that have been, and words that will be – devoured.

A red carpet appears at my right side and I fall. The blood red miasma of a stranger kind of love, sweet as the nectar of wild flowers, clings to my side.

In the Early Days of Dance

And the shadows became flesh
And sacrificed to their god
And their god was a dancing god
And their dancing god lived in the mind of man
The Beatmaster – Nom-Nom
And the shadows that became flesh slept during the day and danced at night
And during the day you could not find where the shadows slept
But during the night they partied
And you could hear their voices shouting to the Beatmaster
And you couldn’t see the shadows dancing in the night
Until the lights shone in the room that they danced in

But then in the winter months the shadows that became flesh
Became snow that fell upon the ground and they died
And their whiteness covered the earth and made them shiver
Until the dancing god appeared
And the dancing god said to the Beatmaster “where are the dancing shadows”
And the Beatmaster said the snow appeared and they died
And the dancing god said that to beat death they should dance
And so they began to dance and the sun came out and they lived again
Dancing to the beat of the Beatmaster who lived in their heads
And during the day they slept in the shadows where no one could see them
And during the night they danced all winter and then they continued to dance all summer
Until some of them grew old and died
But some of them never grew old
And these became the famous dancers of olden days
Who lived in dance town, dance time UK
And they danced until the mountains crumbled into the sea and the moon flew away forever

But another tribe of shadows had a different dance
Thy loved to dance in the daytime
They were the winds
They copied the flow and the grace of birds with their hands
They followed the dance steps of the big red deer in the spring
They danced in the fields where they worked
And they were happy in their work and they also sang as they danced
And at the end of the harvests they would sing and dance
And they formed groups and they danced and they invented dances
And all this took place during the daytime and the evening
And they would eat and dance
But then they would sleep through the night
And their music was found in the wind blowing through the night
And the shadows would hear the music and sometimes steal it

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