Readings in O BHEAL 15/10/07

These were read by me in O' BHEAL - above the long valley on Monday 15/10/07

Enough Said

It seems that there is a mystical answer
Buried somewhere
And I am compelled to ferret them out

And running in stillness
While shouting for silence
Or moving like tree's would move if their roots were on fire
Or dropping a cat from the roof of your house
To tease out the secrets of landing well
All have failed to yield up an answer
And I have lost the ability
To formulate a good question
Something I had a singular gift for
At the tender age of three.

And I have tried moving my lips like a toddler
Or creaking my hips like an octogenarian
But to little or no avail

Perhaps a possible answer might be
To learn how to fail with grace
To wear the egg on your face
As a dandy might wear his favourite cravete
Or a bald man might sport a skin textured hat
The colour and shape of his own cue ball head

And accept that nothing you've done in this life
Is at least half as valuable
As everything you've said

And live defiantly so.


The state of the housing market

There were four nails
In my tin roof
Four nails
When the thunder struck
And the lightening crashed
And the wind bellowed.

And I stood in my quivering room
As the advanced shelving system splintered
“Four nails”, I said to myself
“Should be more than sufficient”

I had done all my calculations
Measured the length, breadth and height
Of every possibility
Estimated to three decimal places
The angles of declension
The rates of dry wall water retention
And the atomic weight
Of an optimistic attitude.

And I was correct in my calculations
My tin roof
Remained over my head
And I watched it sail
Into the inky blank
To be swallowed by a moiling cloud.

And it comforted me, that I was correct
As I, my leather bound, self massaging three piece suite
My flat screen DH LCD
My state of the art septophonic home cinema system,
My four paper walls
And whole novels thick with computations
Slowly ascended
And headed towards the moon.

“Sure, that’s all you need these days”,
I chuckled to myself
“Your own roof
“Over your head”.

A non-linear history of civilization

Many many ago’s
After ages of little more
Than rubbery floppers
Flipping in marshes
A solitary hand
Thrust out of the mud
Heaved up and stood
Naked and hunched
Blinked its eyes
And had itself an industrial revolution.

Then, many claim,
Came the Sixties
And your manno's wearing loon pants
And he glows in the dark
And talks in strange tongues
To his girlfriend
Name of sunshine.

And in between
There were various Leonardos, Michelangelos and Pablo Picassos
And numerous Martin Luthers
Hammering their papal bullshit
To church doors and burning crosses
While sundry Pope's, sternly forbade
Then broke their own rules
Like schoolboys stealing apples.

And there were valiant knights
Sweating in their armour
And a plethora of maidens
To rescue them from monsterous rust
In China they flew kites
Invented the bomb, the rocket, mathematics,
Chairman spring sprong and his Paddington Bear eyes.

And over there
Not more than a hop, skip and cancerous lump on your neck
Were the Greeks, Australians and Japanese
Dogs as pets, the atom bomb
TV dinners and supermodels.
There were gameshow hosts
And ticker tape parades
And medical miracles
And late night spirituals
A couple of million corporate Torquemada’s
There were kings advisors
And queens with sunvisors
Prancing down carnival streets
Putting the elite off their appetisers
There were a number of wars to end all wars
And a couple of just for the hell of it all’s.

Now in topless bars the world over
The needy are stripping
For the eyes of the seedy
Who flip their ten cents into the fanny pack
Of the ugly man with the heart attack expression on his face
Hiding behind the curtain to the read of the stage.

And let us not forget
The hungry and thirsty
Someone once said,
”Blessed are they”
But I've ever never stood
On legs thin as needles
So I can't answer for them.

And there's too much
And there's not enough
And there's never enough
And there's never too much

And the Babeling tower reaches up
To tickle the toes of the absentee landlord
Who found the whole spectacle a bit too hilarious
And left to visit a more respectable establishment
While back on planet granite
A whole species of…
Not philosopher kings
Nor poets engineers
But something altogether more mundane
Like bricklayer accountants
Sit like food before the information
That flickers like some weird hi tech campfire reflection
On our tribesman-like faces
As we listen to stories
Of mud and blood and distant suns
And dreaming new random points in space to aspire to.