bursting intensity

There is a bursting intensity emanating from my soul.

What is my soul?  That which knows all.

What is my body?  That which is desirous of all.

My body lurches and throbs and pulsates.

It exalts in misery and joy.

And my mind?  It is anxiety; doubt.

In a room full of strangers,

in which we have shared proudly with honesty and openness,

I want to engage

but I am ignorant of how to chatter

and forget which face I'm supposed to be wearing.

I want to grasp you in my hands,

forcefully, gently, tenderly.

I want to look you in the eye.

Our arms wrap around, our chests move together, our eyes close

and the room does not exist.

Together we leave space-time and enter instead the aura of each other's bodies.

For an eternal moment we rest in the peace of togetherness.

This familiar feeling.

I know this smell.

Perhaps this is how it felt before we were incarcerated in our individual bodies.

Perhaps this remembrance of peace can only be fully experienced together.

Even two so-called strangers in a room full of people

can transcend time and space, anxiety and alienation,

for one imperfect moment that we can't entirely commit to,

but that we defiantly attempt and share.

Like every morning, we wake up in our own body

with the infinite potential of what to do,

who to be, how to move through space and time.

Alone in my body all day

I try to find ways to communicate,

to reach across the veil of my tortured intellect,

to reach humbly across my throbbing passion,

to step out of the divine moment, to look at it,

to calmly observe with my damaged, lonely and fierce mind,

to laboriously translate the keenest subtleties of my observations into something I can share,

to step into a pre-planned space, an organised moment,

overwhelmingly populated by stunning, terrifying, delicious, intoxicatingly intense, brittle, gentle and pretentious fellow humans,

and to re-enter that long-ago moment,

that I was too self-conscious and civilised to experience

but which I now recreate, as best I can,

inside out,

in which, this time, I am not alone, I am not isolated,

because every thought, every emotion, every vibration

is a word coming from my mouth

and these beautiful humans who I am too scared to talk to and touch

are listening to me, are hearing and understanding and appreciating.

Regardless of their clicks or lack-of-clicks I can feel them hearing me and knowing me and loving me

and I can beg them,

with all the desperation and desire that I'm too scared to express,

to violate me, to consume me, to desire me, to grasp for me.

I'm full of love and I know my stupid useless boundaries.  

I respect your boundaries all too well,

but I want to violate them.

I demand you confront me with your desperate intensity.

Maybe right outside the door there is concrete and carbon monoxide and paranoia and uniformed minions of institutionalised violence.

But we have found something,

flimsy and linguistic though it is,

and here we are,

another night,

having manifest another moment,

having emanated an atmosphere of safety and inclusion

amidst the unbearable pulverising insanity.

And here we are.

My god,

here we are

together.

We make sounds with our mouths and this somehow means something.

It’s not just cultural cues,

it is something else.

The world out there is made up of something,

something creating little prisons of meaning.

"You are under arrest," they tell us, and we are hypnotised.

We are hypnotised by the slogans of soft drinks, life insurance, socialists and multinational charity organisations.

We call it advertising and shrug it away.

In the past they called it black magic, the curses of petty tyrants, jealous witches and greedy merchants;

spells of weaving, spells of binding, spells of concealment and diversion.

So what the hell are we doing, gathering in rooms,

carefully composing and projecting delicate combinations of words?

Casting new and better spells to embed ourselves deeper into the illusion?

Surrounding ourselves in an unlikely new cushioned dogma to protect us from the world we refuse to understand?

Or are we spell-breakers?

Are we perhaps not creating a secular new age religion of inclusion and globalisation?

Are we instead destroying illusion,

undermining the pious and politically correct,

ridiculing each other's petty projections and then hugging each other's warm healthy bodies?

Are we destroying the linguistic and ideological infrastructure that caused our parents and our grandparents to give up in despair?

Is this real?

Am we really destroying the barriers that have divided us for centuries, since our villages were invaded and colonised?

Can I stand up here and speak to you and destroy the generations of violence that allowed us to invade and colonise this land?

Have we always been this powerful?

So we refuse the hypnotism, and then what?

We're still in this room, the weeds are only just pushing up through the concrete, only a few national economies have collapsed.

I found my rural paradise and I lived there in peace for years.

I understood; and I spat in the face of patriarchy.  I healed myself of paranoia and got bored of anger.

I stopped reading the news though I still cared deeply about the fate of our silly little species.

I lost faith not just in domesticity, authority and entertainment,

I lost faith in hope, I lost faith in startling global upheaval, I lost faith in the all levels of human organisation.

My mother died and of course I grieved the life of the human whose frail body formed the foundation of love my entire terrestrial existence is based on,

but then I found myself

fully present in my body.

I felt into my body and found it to be strong and beautiful.

I felt into this warm self-regulating masterpiece of sensitivity and strength.

I turned 30 and I found greys in my beard and I discovered I was hornier and more confident than ever.

I go to the best possible places, where the humans are loving and free, and I look around for one whose eyes engage my own, whose beauty calls out to me across the room, I approach him, I wrap my arms around him and together we transcend time and space for a wonderful imperfect moment.

Listen to audio recording of my performance of this poem at Voices in the Attic, Ferdyduke, Melbourne, 2015-05-12.