Page 9

Cry

A gymnasium.
Twenty people sitting on the floor.
Enter the Instructor.
‘Stand up. Today we are going to practice the
routine for not getting shot.’
Everyone stands and moves; walking, jogging,
sprinting – backwards and forwards, ducking, diving,
crawling, leaping, filling the whole space.
A bullet crashes through the widow and ricochets
off a steel cupboard.
One woman falls dead.
A man, pointing to where the body lies:
‘Before the exercise I was sitting there! It would
have been me!’
A woman standing by the man:
‘Before the exercise she was sitting here. She would
not have been shot!’
They both cry.

Not insomnia

Not insomnia.
Just lying in my warm bed
thinking of poems.

Nothing

I see myself as
body and mind, thinking of
mind as my feelings,
perceptions, predilections
and general consciousness.

Thinking of myself
as some sort of permanent
fixture, I forget
my body changes cell by
cell and will go back to earth.

I cannot rely
on my feelings either as
fixed entities
for they come and go, are pain
one minute, pleasure the next.

Then come perceptions.
Surely a kaleidoscope
of dancing colours,
shapes, textures, sounds, aromas
and tastes. Nothing lasting here.

My predilections -
my likes and dislikes, the things
I decide to do
or not do, are inconstant,
changing, unreliable.

Consciousness, ever
part of my mind, changes from
second to second,
seemingly impossible
to pin down or keep focussed.

Looking at myself
from childhood to the present
or from morning to
night, I see no fixed me or
selfhood in body or mind.

Nothing permanent,
everything mutable.
The only constant
is the name I am known by,
all the rest is transient.

Better if I see
myself as a confluence
of streams with body
and mind just flowing along,
ever changing, never still.

Time to reassess
why I am hanging on to
this special me, this proud self
that has no fixedness and can’t
be pinned down in time or space.

This imagined self
consuming much energy
for its protection -
a mere thought-made image
that is founded on nothing.

Moment

A circle of light perceived
from a dancing incense stick
has no reality, just points
of light joined up by the mind.

Looking at cat, my mind joins
a snapshot sequence into
a movie, making cat seem
a persisting entity.

My ever-changing body,
rivers of feelings and thoughts
solidifying into self
by an egocentric mind.

On my

On my bench reading.
Better to discard the book
and read the garden.

Scraps

Scraps of nothing come
together to make a being
with eyes and ears.
Scraps of what is perceived make
me, forgetful of no-thing