Scarlet Church

from a collection entitled Letters To God

So I'll tell you something 'bout religion

The church of truth is built on love, inclusion, free food, as much ear as you can get and a warm genuine smile straight from the heart

You couldn't make it up

All religion is beautiful because it reaches out and touches

Media, slating religion, is the antithesis of that

Media takes

Religion gives

Unconditional love

Buy in or don't

We're not bothered

We've been chewed up and spat out more times than you'd care to imagine

Yet we're still here; the glorious default; the foundation of good; the heart of love

And you can get lost and cut loose

Your mind numbing ignorance is no excuse

Best not interpret my love as weakness

Easy for magnanimous me when I'm in and you're cast out in your bleakness

In the end we win

You think you do as you please

Yet sooner or later you're all on your knees

Your status doesn't count because you bought it

Learn the lesson or you will be taught it

Next Time

(for Gemma)

Sated states of carnal ubiquity

You dangled these in front of me until, parched with the salty skin of temptation, I made to grab

Lurched, more like

May be you didn't

May be I imagined the whole thing 

Anyway, so there's me all lip-smacked and drenched  in a quivering hunger

Turns out you were just playing games

This new deep need of you written all over my face

And all you're chasing is the chase

I scratch it up as an extra wrinkle and notch it down to experience

A lesson learned, hormones churned; a false corner turned, or was it ?

You see, now I can't switch it off and nor would I wish to

I missed you

This time

Green light

You don't listen

You talked through all your food, eating none of your words and I sat opting out of the moment, skirting through all Thursday, Friday and half of the weekend

Dancing with poised gait and intention through a sequinned string of golden promises

Yet you weren't asking me to walk through waterfalls

You were asking me to listen

My turn

I would have but I didn't know

See, I wasn't listening

I didn't mean to leave you

In my head I was never letting you go but he walked in and the room span

That said, nothing is beyond my control so don't fool yourself

Life is a cavernous hall of free choices perched high up in the gated safe-house of living

There is room to move in the prison

Room enough for us to shoulder the burden of responsibility for our choices

But not room enough to mirror, signal, manoeuvre off

You can't choose to unlive

You can only die and that's not the same.

Irrevocability doesn't make for considered behaviour

It's only a real choice if you can make it and then unmake it later, yet not do so always knowing you could

It's how we get our best lessons - you've got to go there to come back

Yet try dying for a day or two and then mirror, signal, manoeuvre back into the old routine

Enough try but none make it

Oh you're listening now

An Articulation of Friday

from a collection I wrote called "Spit Mancunia"

Wandering aimlessly is my first sign of summer

Heat-flecked coffee house tables across a half dozen urban village enclaves of city centre quarters

Bohemia threading the shadow of retail malls

Adjacent detached

Newly hatched like last year never existed

A persistent sense of novelty despite fresh memories of the last lap

Happy illusion

Trapping an inkling of total inclusion

So I am at one with the place

In time with the race of it's myriad concerns

My need for fresh anticipation churns my belief

That being here is a seat worth having

And I feel unwashed relief that simply by existing I am kissing the heartstone

And just missing out on ever feeling alone or worse

The over-arching throb of facile boredom that is often known

For robbing friends and friends of theirs and others of a purpose for throwing off the covers and running headlong into the curtain-breached daylight to greet what awaits

The unknown known at the gates

And the realisation of the trick comes later

As is such with the un-hard lessons of age 

Un-hard since they are forced and consequently come easy

Mandatory lessons are breezy since we don't have to try, think or know why

And the sense that this right now

Right this second right now

Is all that we feared it would be not

We hit perfection

The rub of the hub of the sweetest aspect of the centre of the very best part of the sweet sweet-spot

Which, looking back, was always a time when things were real good yet it was that coupled with a lucid nerving pulse of pure anticipation that so much more good was coming

It wasn't

But the pipeline delusion worked

The sweet spot was real.

Due to the aforementioned combination the prize took form and lurked

Long enough to suffer my exposure

Branding on me the lesson that heaven is a place where composure is so low on the list it barely pretends to exist

Since in that realm the essence is feeling

Not looking or doing

Just feeling

In that state just being is so hectic

That the internal state is the metric

Then ...

Time elapsed and we turned off at the junction

Where life took on a more normal form and function

Yet we were there

I was there

And that journey forever permeates my soul

Informing the ageing man

Such that the ride, in the wider sense, is never over

Perpetual four leafed clover


I wouldn't go back if I could

Today is the town and my hut here is fine

Built from yesterday's sticky slung mud

The hearth is where the mud hut heart is 

The doormat threshold braced for all tomorrow's parties

 ...........

 gk 05:05:12