One more poem stemming from PTSD from 1982, as with This Raven and A White Oar, this one was first in a selection called East Media, and will be in the new Sledgehammer Collective book

Yellow Window

 

 

do your work

you call it work

breathe life into stone

carve it all the way to art

see it perched there

brave and unfinishing

in the clean mathematic air

 

breathe onto canvas

matrix spectrum chess

 

one ordinary light year

feeds into

one ordinary day

 

a green rose blooms

at the yellow window

blooms

an arcane pulse

Two Poems of Mine from 1982: This Raven and The White Oar/ concerned with the impact on consciousness of post traumatic stress disorder/will be in the upcoming Sledgehammer Collective book

This Raven

this natural world
this need delivering need
this time in its keeping
this graphite sky
this certain projection.
this raven pitched in black scape
this only colour
is its sound.



..........................................


A White Oar

drop your warmed heart here
in the svelte tide
a full kiss
upon the tired lips
of your treasure map.

your veins are courting harbours
highways, dells
where loaded cows
topple from
steep serious slopes of a rickety imagination.

linguism of poetry
hieroglyphic and phantic
as printing
and all the
endless, endless, ending love.

all power to you.
I caress the rabbits
in your magic hat of a head
and swim
to your mythic boat
as you leave the sonar harbour.

the rollicks ache with rhyme
and a white oar rolls in anthracite space.

A Quote from R D Laing from the book: The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise

if anyone...begins to realise he is a shadow of a puppet, he will be wise to exercise the greatest precautions as to whom he imparts this information...

Poem : Songs, for Sally Martin, 1975, from the upcoming Sledgehammer Collective poems of John Fitzpatrick

Songs

 

 

songs hid themselves

 

like small bright birds

 

a ripple of lyric

 

in the green kinesis of the trees

 

we wandered the mountain path

 

fearing

 

to jump

 

more than to fall

A Poem of Mine, unpublished, from 1994 Enlightenment & the Orange Gate/was from a selection called Blonde Sand, and will be in the upcoming tome: Sledgehammer Poems by John Fitzpatrick

Enlightenment & the Orange Gate

Love has come to an end
so many times
its end implies genesis
is signed by lights in cold skies
that point not to locus nor power
but to points themselves
on a line recurring
recurring
as if to say:
learn more to forget more.

A caucus of lights
a clattering of sentience
a softened pearl necklace
around the throat of oblivion.

Days break open
like ampoules of spring rain
in the fold of green winter hills
in the yellow scent
of a temporal promise
and for a moment
the ordinary is glowing.

On Beauty and Rendering

I believe Sinead O'Connor's singing of Oh Danny Boy, (I have the clip here, just below), with the added lines of a good Irish Republican, is the most profoundly beautiful rendering of this song I have ever heard. It makes me so proud and so breathlessly 'human'. Her singing of this song is a wonderful achievement on Earth.

Patrick White was chased out of the Zen garden in Osaka, by the gardener with a rake, for messing up the lines of perfect sand by kicking them.

On the crowded train back to his hotel he kept hearing the mantra of the Buddha in every sound of every machine and in every person. He said 'yes, yes, I know it is the truth, but I will not go that way.