Washing Our Feet

Is there anything as pointless
As talking about wisdom?
You cannot make love without lovemaking
Or bread with nouns and verbs.
Wisdom feels about words
As the sea feels about bottled water:
The tiny cousin who took a bad road
Long ago and came into trouble.
Shall we talk about the sunset?
About the sensation of breathing
As we stand in the waves
And the sea crashes in
All about…

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Friday, June 24th, 2011 – 9:59 am | By Tom | Posted in Poetry | Tagged , , , | Comments (8)

Four Lines Worth

I don’t know anything about holiness;
I thought I knew plenty -
I saw the high star to aim for:
It was bright as an angel.
I polished my wings and leapt towards it and
Dived into a crevasse in the Earth.
It was not Heaven,
But a blessed loss of grandeur,
Though it tore apart my wings.
Not sanctity,
But a prayer of gratitude
That comes near extinction:
For this leaf in the frosty morning,
The heron’s flight over the river
And this breath after the other
And this and this.

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Monday, October 25th, 2010 – 12:25 pm | By Tom | Posted in Poetry | Comments (6)

Milk and Stars

I forget.
I remember and forget
and remember again.

One day,
When all the mystique of idiocy
Has rubbed off life
Like gold lacquer from oak,
I’ll forget so wholeheartedly
(Or remember so completely)
That I will forget to not dance
And remember my home
Beyond memory and forgetting
- the place where you are waiting
With your hands of milk and stars.

I know you are waiting…

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Thursday, September 16th, 2010 – 3:40 pm | By Tom | Posted in Poetry | Tagged , , , | Comments (5)

Jack Swift :: Enter Jo-Ab

The green bus pulled around the corner, squealing on its wheels like a Formula One courgette on steroids. To the attentive eye, it was visibly pulsating with the effort of holding its psychedelic cargo from bursting out onto the street, threatening to detonate like a fractal explosion in a spiral warehouse and cover the city in squirming astral day-glow debris. It spluttered to a stop outside a shoe shop and…

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Monday, July 5th, 2010 – 12:15 pm | By Tom | Posted in Jack Swift, Prose | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (4)