Poetry of Life

All forms of society-building sprawl out of some kind of positive, moral principle. I will try to illustrate this point using four popular models as examples: the American Dream, the Close-knit Religious Community, the Buddhist Monastery and the Mediterranean Lifestyle.

Poetry of Life

Although travel is exciting, home comforts are hard to beat. My daily morning ritual involves making coffee, feeding the starving cat, opening the balcony doors, sitting down to read or write a poem. The repetition of these tiny acts have brought a sense of calm and purpose to my life.

Poetry of Life

The highest currency of change is song. The ocean, for all her perils and charms, breathes her music into us. Her manifold realities are fraught with songful dreams and dangers.

Poetry of Life

It’s been there since birth, that little voice inside me, singing, or shouting, or wailing, me first, me first, me first. The rudimentary mantra of existence.

Poetry of Life

Human life is composed and regulated by a seemingly infinite series of stages, of spectacles that breathe meaning into our invented worlds.

Poetry of Life

The meaning of this personal story lies in the excavated depths, where frequencies invent whole worlds then lie submerged within them. The end of the transformational road is the ineffable image of the seven-pointed star, a symbol that pertains neither to me nor anyone.

Poetry of Life

If Paris had seen the fall of Troy in the theft of Helen, he might have left her well alone. Regret is an echo of former blindness murmuring in the present. Remorse is self-awareness pointing out a role you might have played in disaster.

Poetry of Life

What bliss and dread to know that nothing comes to anything in the finale of our days: we breathe and breathe again and then, before the look has scarcely touched the hour, we fade into another dream, a different fragment of a different star.

Poetry of Life

Desire, the indefatigable disrupter, the sweet enemy of civilizations, the creator of worlds, the destroyer of philosophies, the pulse behind variety, the naked, animal essence, intensely alive, unwilling to negotiate with reason; desire, the pure current of the ego, the usurper of the heart, the piercing and poisonous arrow. How many names are there to bless desire with?

Poetry of Life

The history of philosophy can be reduced to a hypothetical conversation between the structure builder, Plato, and the artifice destroyer, Diogenes.

Poetry of Life

The fifth element is the most mysterious of all the elements. It is the missing link that crowns and completes our earthly knowledge.

Poetry of Life

Words themselves are empty: hollow draughts of spit encasing air. In Tarot cards, the element of air is defined by swords that cut both ways. Words foster clarity or wreak havoc and self-harm. We should be careful how we use them.

Poetry of Life

As the yearly heat begins again, the city comes to life. With lockdown eased, the roads pulsate with cars, and the terraces of bars are brimming with drinkers and diners. Those eerie days of March, of emptiness and birdsong-haunted avenues, have started to recede. Perhaps all this will be a memory soon. How much normality will be restored, if any?

Poetry of Life

The month of May belongs to Aphrodite, the mother goddess, famed for love and beauty. This year the city seems to bless her more than other years. The shops, silent behind their steel shutters, announce a different kind of place: all sense of being in a hurry gone; nothing to buy, just days to live, without the noise and fuss of all those small invented worlds, the markets, schools, and mausoleums, competing for space with Mother Earth.

Poetry of Life

In Barcelona, they say the spring begins when orange blossom fills the cloisters of the old monastery, just off Calle Hospital, in the old town neighbourhood of El Raval. This year, no such initiation. The gates are locked, the library closed. Only birds frequent that fragrant desolation.