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Goodbye Routemaster

The iconic (damn, I swore I’d
never use that word..)
red London bus
was designed by the lively minded
for the active lively – those who
take a few chances with life,
look for a little excitement,
test their limits, enjoy
– the French have a phrase for it –
the little happinesses, sweetnesses, or
good fortunes, it doesn’t
translate quite so well –
let’s say, exhilarating moments?

viz.:

the back platform, a step
nearer the ground, is open; rubber-floored;
a central vertical bar,
wound with a grip-fast plastic,

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poem by Michael Shepherd
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I'm Learning to Dance With Eclipses

I’m learning to dance with eclipses
and the outmoded ecologies of the sword-rattling windows
weeping rivers of acid rain that hang
like the ragged lace of abandoned curtains
or the tentacles of protozoic jellyfish. My life
is a rock too hard to sweet-talk the larks and swallows,
and the wolf that came once a week
to teach me to sing underwater grew old
and died like the piano he was buried in at sea.
I don’t know what I want from the walls
I’ve designated heritage battlefields
with an array of awards and degrees
and the pitted impacts of meteor-coloured earwigs,
but everything I ask for seems to make
terrorists of the lamps
and the single moth
knocking himself out trying to crash into flames
against the vanilla fez of the shade
is two fanatics shy of immolation. What does it matter
my eyes have congealed into a still-life

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poem by Patrick White
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Full Moon Day Third Lunar Month

One candle is a light unto itself.
One hundred candles
illuminate a room.
In a room,
one candle is
a light unto itself.

Uposatha day at Wat Katum,
seven old ladies and one old man
taking eight precepts
for a day
to keep the Niraya fires at bay.
'I undertake
to observe the precept
to refrain from
killing living beings.
'I undertake
to observe the precept
to refrain from
taking things not given.

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poem by Brian Taylor
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Decide Against Stereotypes - 1294 - Current Version

Decisions take, nor hesitate nor bide
Excessive time awaiting from outside
Comprehensive answers coveted.
Independant mind must coincide
Directly with the will to win, not hide.
Existence is too short - life soon is fled.

Decades dovetail to centuries beside
Entrapped spectators, waiting on the side,
Challenge refusing, witless walking dead
In fear of fear, refusing to decide.
Dare! Few remain who answers seek inside
Earth's soul? Most stillborn seem brief hour sped!

Distrust that moment Fortune's tide
Entwines ambitious greed, feeds fears inside,
Cause, Effect confuses, Fate's fickle thread
Identified as true cue. Conformist thread
Dark homage pays 'authority'. Most slide,
Endure life's strife stings, by siren songs misled.

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poem by Jonathan Robin
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How Rare That Anyone

How rare that anyone prefers the real,
fire that can drown, water that burns;
the whole of the night sky
form-fitted to your face like a skin
of translucent cellophane
that takes your breath away.
My heart marches like a little drum in a vast darkness
toward a war
it is important not to win.
The stars are strewn like white sweet clover
along the roads of brave men in masks,
but the true holy wars are faceless
and the martyrs always die alone
like leaves without names,
like a species that went extinct
before it was discovered
to be the only known antidote
to terminal literalism.
Follow your thoughts far enough into delusion
and they'll fray like ropes,

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poem by Patrick White
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And Though It's Dark And Cold Now

And though it’s dark and cold now
in this ice palace of broken windows
that don’t know whether to bite their lips
or cut their wrists like a suicide
that took it one step too far
like an eclipse that went into exile
I remember the swell and release
of your breasts in moonlight,
rising and falling like a lunar tide.
I remember coiling my finger around
the soft chestnut tendrils of your hair
as if I were dialling a long distance call
to someone I knew light years from here
who was living her dream
like the black sheep of a shepherd moon
she was giving her life up to.
You were an atmosphere on the nightshift
on the intensive care unit of a hospital
applying a cool poultice of moonlight
to the volcanic burns

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poem by Patrick White
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Not Again, Tonight, These Fin de Siecle Blues

Not again, tonight, these fin de siecle blues
that subsume all my blossoming overviews
into the mystic specificity of concrete things
I stub my heart against as if I'd just had
a head on collision with the moon. Impact.
Emotional meteor showers, the Virginids, perhaps,
I'm being stoned by my own congenital radiants
as if I were being driven out of somewhere
like an extinct species. Bad memories, lifeboats
that didn't make it back to shore, things I've tried
to mythologize like a shipwreck in coral on the moon.
Subtle childhood fears that run my tongue along
the shadows of their blades, when I was scared and young,
and the words would come out like drops of blood
sliding down the length of the stargrass I grazed upon
alone as now in my high wide starfields.
The same ones that are seeking me out tonight
like a rogue planet that's never quite known
where it's belonged, or with whom, if anyone
or where at all. Looking for an exit sign

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poem by Patrick White
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Tribute to A Poet Saint

Oh Swami Muktananda Paramahansa that bliss of liberation you attained
by Guru Nityananda's grace emancipation in this very life you had gained.
You were a representative of the lineage of poet-saints that had gone before
showing how easy it was, by chanting the name of God, to meditate for sure.

You stressed the importance of repeating the mantra 'Om Namah Shivaya'
and that if done with love would bear fruit regardless of who was the sayer.
There was so much energy about you that one could feel, like an ever present force,
the supreme blessing of Guru Nityananda was with you always being its very source.

You were a living embodiment of chitishakti or divine power-knowledge-bliss
and most of all those who came before you could also easily experience this.
It appeared at times you were unapproachable if one was by your presence overawed
and that you were on the constant lookout for any sincere aspirant who was not bored.

You also emphasized and revealed the true nature of the guru-disciple relationship
stating in plain modern words what was expected of one like in an apprenticeship.
Many secrets of the inner path you divulged and laid bare in all your writings and talks
saying the receiving of Guru's grace was what made a difference on the path one walks.

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poem by George Krokos
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The Serpent

The serpent sits enthroned
at the top of its own stairwell,
helically reposing in its own empyrean
like an August hawk
coiling up its own thermals;
its fangs, a stargate
to an unknown afterlife, emancipation,
and the jewel of its head,
the first stone thrown,
a small planet without
the eyelid of a sky,
a nugget of mystic uranium,
looped in a turban of orbits,
a sacred arrowhead
that flys from itself like a bow
drawn back long before the wind
knew its first feather.
Lethal healer,
the sword that kills is the sword that saves.

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poem by Patrick White
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Sad To See How We Bait Our Mind-hold Traps With Our Hearts

Sad to see how we bait our mind-hold traps with our hearts,
put all we are on the line, just for a little love, a kiss, a touch
an embrace that doesn't snap shut like the jaws of a great white
we put our trust in not to draw blood at the first bite.
I take people's faces off the shelves as they pass by
like second hand bookstores, and casually browse
their life stories only to find whole chapters ripped out
and sometimes the eyes, so you can see clear through
to the other side of what there was in the way of a view
to look back at you, that someone despised, and cut out
like a number two, twenty pound, book paper death mask,
black holes like the eye sockets of a skull,
slowly eating what was left of a face that yesterday
was the peer of the stars, the great seal of the sun,
the imprimatur of moonlight on the waters of the lake.

And I know those who love love for love's sake
more than they ever have the topsoil of an erosive human,
or the bedrock and watershed of their darker depths
where the fish, like ghosts, or fireflies and stars

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poem by Patrick White
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