I Didn’t Ask

my family had a tradition 
about birthdays
when we turned 10 years
we would have a birthday 
party with friends
when I was coming to my 
10th birthday I didn't
relish the idea
I went along
with the expectation 
so when my mother
came to me 
one day
and asked, 
"what do you want?
for your birthday"
instead of telling
her
what rose in my heart
what filled my chest
my stomach
and my head
I scanned the world
for what a real boy
should have
for his birthday
instead of asking 
for the impossible dream
instead of asking
what I really wanted
forget all the friends
forget all the gifts 
what i really wanted
was my mother to spend
a day with me
just me just us

fifty and more years later
what I didn't ask
lives as a loss
more powerful than 
the night
my mother passed

at ten I didn't ask for us
at ten I asked for a cricket bat
at ten her eyes grew wide
as she repeated incredulously
"a cricket bat?"
and I her bookworm son
caught out 
pointing so far away
from my desire
unable to hold her eye
keeping a strong grip
on my heart, replied,
"yes a cricket bat"

I didn't ask for us
at 10
and as I railed
from other heartaches
at her hand
I didn't care ask 
for us again.

There is (No) Time

I never told you
“I am fond of you
I found solace in your
life,
solace being part of the team
that picked rocks off your paddock,
sorted the seed maize.
ate corn-beef sandwiches for lunch
and that you asked me,
when I was 11,
to join your card group
to make up the numbers for
a monthly saturday night
of 500 or Canasta,
that you were my father’s
best friend
and farmer companion
you at ours
we at yours
and always machinery
books out on the dining table
you both mulling
and discussing how to fix,
re-engineer, or make,
a solution.
and after that,
talking about social things
with my mother.”

you never married
settled in your isolation
attentive to your neighbours
attracting select visitors.
it just seemed
the natural thing,
after my father died,
to cook food and
rally my mother
and go to your place
one unplanned
New Year Eve.

I last saw you,
sitting at lunch
in the nursing home
as I marched
my brief contracted time
and thought,
“I’ll come back another day
and have a yarn to Clive”.
and you died during your shower
the next morning.

Now, 5 years later,
amidst my disappointment
with myself
failing the solace of a memory
of a last conversation,
I am still given to believing
there is time.

ANN J is PASSING AWAY

The whiteboard schedule,
tuesday,
Ann J is passing away.
Written as a friend rang me with the news.

Anne J
I saw her a couple of months ago
walking hunched and stiffly
along the footpath in the nursing home.

I walked hurriedly to intersect her path
avoiding surprising her by appearing too quickly
out of the silent world
deafness had given her.
A deafness that frustrated her agile mind
and, at 92 years of age, 
had her look at me piercingly
and wryly offer, 
"I’d like to die,
 I’m useless.
even to myself, and no one here to talk to."
And, I thought, no one that she could hear.

Then, she had pointed to the black and white photo
on the wall, 
a cargo ship, 
an ugly bucket.
Those were the best years of my life,"
she said,
"working as a 20 year old on that boat.
Trading between Africa and Sweden.
Once nearly breaking apart in a Mediterranean storm."

Now, at 94, she has told her son,
I don’t want visitors
and stopped eating.

Who Am I?

“You’re not a very good Baha’i”, she said,
“you get angry at the slightest disrespect,
and are openly disgusted by the disarray
of human madness, including your own,
that goes for a modern society.”

Baha’u’llah is Baha’u’llah
and Owen is Owen

Baha’u’llah strode through a world
of poverty and ignorance
hard men and war,
murder and suffering,
with steadfast grace
goodwill, forebearance,
vision, and vitality.
He is the Creator.

Owen is Owen
and Owen is from Eoghan
or Eochaidh, Ancient King of Ireland
youthful Warrior,
guardian of her holiness
of the Yew, the everlasting tree.

Owen is the descendant of a slaver,
not Eochaidh, the slaver of Roman-Brittany,
rather an Elizabethan
enjoying the upper middle class
through the African trade.

Owen is a rough speck that got stuck
to His shoe, as He passed by,
and then flung off behind,
trajecting a perspective of awe
trailing in the wake
of magnificence.

Owen is the tide of the past
and the language of names
going out,
and the gravity of Baha’ullah
dragging onward.
Owen flits in the wake of
illumination,
restless in the madness
of all that had brought him here,
and the desire to be there.

I am the follower.

A Response to Devon Price on Existentialism

(In view of the Colorado FlatIrons)

He writes of 19th and 20th century existentialists
as proponents of
“life is material
humans are not special
consciousness just happened
reality means nothing
there is no God
there are no souls
the world does not make sense
we create God(s) and morals
and standards and other false selves
as a judgemental hell of other people.

I am only authentic
when alone and private
to be the true slob I really am,
a liberation that eventually
feels like being dead.

Purposes are meaningless,
higher values can’t be embodied,
we can’t escape death so
we live in low key dread
devoted to immortality projects
like babies, tombs, marathons,
afterlife, trophies, sick tricks,
checking off lists, all
a burning need to keep going.
Order results in absurdity.
Artful absurdity can provide comfort
when life is a lot like death,
so it is just another immortality project.
We keep thinking we’ve got shit
figured out,
filled with power and usefulness
and most vibrantly alive
as we slip into the flow.
I am the universe’s chump
chipping away
at the big decaying nothing.
It is absurd.
It will never bring me peace.
I am alive for now, and
I do something with the time
I have left.”

Apart from the dishonesty of believing
one can truly judge life as material
or immaterial, or determine man
created God, or I can know who
I truly am without butting up against
a whole universe, or that
19th and 20th century society is the
proxy of human life over
the past 200,000 years
and the next 200,00 years,
and not just a few hundred poxy
years of transition from the
agricultural age to another age,
or that dead is a dread
because it occurs like a moment
of all our sufferings compressed into one
severely painful destructive event
rather than the blissful relief of complete
rest.

Apart from that, the existentialists
have turned to show the other side
of the coin to the side that shows
the bust of Moses, Krishna, Zarathustra,
Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, and
Baha’u’llah whose simple mantras
“You are living life as if what you see
is real, and you see so little of it.
To see the rest learn to be love,
to find a contribution to each other,
to make everyone’s life better,
and that’s your business
so go mind it.”

Not so that you will see the rest
of it, but that you will see,
like the existentialists, the bullshit
of your immortality projects just as at
the same time, they are access to your
highest values, and, as they comfort you,
they might show you that the edges
of the mortal room are simply heavy brocades
taunting your curiosity, just as the art
on those same brocades testify that a
grammatical mind is unable to penetrate
the gloom and a whole new consciousness,
something prayerful, sincere, loving,
and absurd is required