Before the afterlife

Gradually, as seconds passed,
The crowd began to still,
The voices became whispers
As voices always will

In truth, we all acknowledged
There was little left to say
A baby slept, a few held hands
Some bowed their heads to pray

There was little movement
Beyond the wall ahead
From somewhere came the pleasing smell
Of freshly baking bread

We waited there, of course, afraid,
To be ushered in
One life done and over
Another to begin

Not one of us was certain
What waited for us here
So we stood in silence
At this last and best frontier

The ones in front were moving
And we strained ahead to see
But what was there was hidden
Too far away from me

But steadily we move along
Afraid, but hopeful too
And what I saw then made grin
But wait, I must go through

Cats don’t have a deity

Cats don’t have a deity
They know all that is bunk
And the Gods of yesterday are simply
Ancient culture’s junk.

Cats are an authority
And aware it’s all a joke
Being worshiped once themselves
By superstitious folk

Cats don’t have a deity
They’re simply unperturbed
And thoughts of cosmic bully boys
Leave them undisturbed

Secure in divinity
They watch with half closed eyes
As human beings genuflect
To imaginary guys.

My Cat

The little birds
They hate my cat
And abuse her
From on high.
She is content
To sit below
And dream of blackbird pie.

At our birth

At our birth we tumble in
A lifelong sentence to begin
Borne on blood and water’s tide
Our precious ark now cast aside,

We struggle daily to make sense
Of a world bent on offence,
And when it wounds us, bitter tears
Are our companions through the years,

Fleeting, does all beauty fade,
Both natural, and all that’s made,
And love itself will surely fall,
The greatest wounding of them all;

Chance and fortune both are blind
And neither gentle nor unkind,
But heedless as a teeming sea
On fragile craft who try to flee

But casts some up upon the rocks
While others voyage safe to docks;
There is no justice, no design
No judgement seat, no plan divine

That sets our course and watches o’er
Our destiny, an answer for
All that whispers in the night,
The ghosts of those who shared our plight

Til at our death we shuffle out,
Still confused and full of doubt
But grateful for the silence deep
And lowered down to dreamless sleep

As a pencil

As a pencil makes its mark
It must be diminished,
The consequence of its communication
A loss of self,
An emptying

As words flow
In carbon’s greasy streak,
Little by little,
A pencil gives of itself
Until it is spent

And so we carve our lives
Upon the fabric of time,
A cursive script
In blood and pain
Until we too
Are empty

Once

Once,
I thought there was an I,
I thought I was an I,
A seperate, cosmic dot
Distinct and different from
All the other cosmic dots

And we were all alive,
We all possessed our unique portion
Of life,
And life was the sum of us,
And we all captains of our own small craft,
Streaming this way and that
As was our will,
Constrained only gently
By the subtle forces of the wind.

But now
I know that I am no captain,
That I am no small craft,
That my will is an illusion,
That my every move
Is tied to and determined by
The movements of all else,
That I draw my cherished ‘identity’
From the mutual relationships
From which all other identities are drawn,
That there are no seperate ‘identities’,
That I am not alive
That I do not possess a life
But that I am life expressing itself
That I am
Life
Living itself
For the shortest of times
A swell upon the ocean
But the ocean still