(written with Lesley Dean)

Enveloped in the ring of glowing green squidfisher boats
Fluorescent extra terrestrials skim the horizon
Wizard oil pastels seep into the ink well sea

Alien robot man and honeysuckle lady
Two artists fabricating Maya on a pilgrimage

The crystal mermaid invited us to follow the path to serenity and beyond

Blood red sun sinks beneath wisps of carebear clouds
Concentric arcs slice the water in an elongated wifi pyramid

Floating over the globular ocean of Solaris
Heading towards heaven on a ship of faith
Ahab’s goin’ fishing

The earth rises to hold us on a platform of hardened lava
A temporal beacon of light

Beneath the gentrification, something of the island’s magic remains

Frankenstein’s monster constructs his DIY rehabilitation clinic,
offering breathwork and abundance seminars

Too much voltage in alien robot man is a symptom of a cancer,
Malignant fear that needs to be excised immediately

Honeysuckle lady rolls around in digital ferns,
At peace with the gross, decaying mass of slime and sludge

Together they compose the cyborg songs of interconnectedness,
Inspired by Queen Mab’s fiddle at the seed of dreams

John Coltrane kicked the heroin habit to find a love supreme
So do we, through rolling saxophone medleys, free ourselves of fixation
Rationalizing about meaning is useless unless you feel it
Saint Jerome’s lion needs to go walksies

(written with Lesley Dean)

When the voice hits
the resonant frequency,
the glass collapses into
harmonious formlessness

Life is irregular and inconstant
friction
Death is regular, constant
and smooth

I am excessively alive
Fear of death is blocking life from flowing
Allow death to happen?

Nirvana is death-in-life
Death is non-duality
Beauty is non-duality

Solidity is the life of the snog
The very constraints give it its shape
Ejaculation is the little death

Life is polarity
Death is singular

Yoga beads and snake charm
Wild and ethical
Polyamorous and true
Zappa and Renay
Rose and Pietro
Work and play
Safety and adventure

(written with Lesley Dean)

Blooming biophilia
Vivid green
Calm reflection of powder blue sky
on the surface of the sea

Sun-drenched rainforest
bursting at the seams with life
Fragrant plumeria
A splattering of honeysuckle

Two golden cane (arepa) palms frame the view
A squirrel hops from branch to branch
Distant drilling hangs in the air
filtered through syrup of humidity

A guard dog barks below
scared and in pain

Graceful dangling tendrils of feathers
waft past on the tail of
an iridescent tropical drongo

Survival adaptations
create accidental beauty,
enhancing the experience of life

Nature is sustainable,
propelling itself effortlessly

The world hangs together, by love
It’s amazing how the forms hang together
even though they are changing/empty.
Love halds it all together,
even when there is hurt
It includes the pain

Cavernous breathing in the beehive
Tiny alien robots performing menial tasks
these bees are onto something,
meditating through the mundane

A shivering dysregulated weasel stands on the beach
facing the discomfort of cowardice
alienated from nature’s flow

The strong hold the hands of the weak
so that the weak can become strong,
so that the strong can hold the hands of the strong.
The weak are not always devoured

Crispy clouds of mangosteen

Spinoza… Dispenza

Rapping, tapping, at the chamber door,
the drongo whispers “nevermore”

(written with Lesley Dean)

Soreness, tenderness, tightness
Restricting the expansion of ribcage
Preventing the full, deep inhalation

Feeling neglected without the teacher (Itamar)
The untutored student
Abandoned, alone, on her own
At fault for not being able to breathe properly
Blaming herself
“Flushing money down the drain”
“Breathworks workshop a waste of time”
“I’m too clenched”

In the anguish, she begins pulling herself:
twisting, stretching,
manual manipulation of the mortal coil,
through which breathing begins to expand.
Sea-change

Without conscious thought or volition,
a long, slow, deep exhalation
a deflating balloon
Accordion bellows kick into high gear

A force field of electric, vibrating prana billows outwards
Leonardo De Vinci’s flying machine takes off
Van Gogh’s blue and gold sunflowers
under a sad, haunted sky

Blue and gold pulsating orb
transformed by a rolling wave of breath
into a blanket of blue diamonds

Golden sierpinski gasket
with that golden force, power is endless
inverted magical triangle

Wormlike tips of mimoids crawling
at the bottom of Tarkovsky’s gelatinous ocean

Vines, leaves, mud, creepy crawlies
lizards and gheckos
Chris is reluctant to look up at the sky

After her long exhale, Lesley finds it difficult to breathe in again,
but the bellows push through the lung clamp
Sighing and crying through the final half hour

Chris’s clenching is a mirror to Lesley’s more subtle clenching
she’s climbed a mountain,
reached a high plateau,
but she’s not going to leave others behind
She’s going to throw a rope

Her pinched nerve is a physical manifestation of clinging
Within her ocean of calm, there are still whirlpools of clinging
The rescuer is not a finished piece of work

Wanting to share her release with mother and father
Generational clenching
Fear played out in the 80s too

Chris flashes back to a festival in 2021
Where he dismissed two guys with him as unimpressive
But the moment Mandy hit, he saw their holiness
And compassion flooded his mind

Implicit in the comparison mindset
is a ranking tendency.
Implicit in the ranking tendency is clenching.

Bamboo dominoes in the cafe, afterwards,
Reflected in the stainless knife,
warping and bending,
dripping and melting
rolling and tripping

The coffee cup is flowing into every other object
The coffee cup is flowing into the table
like trickling oobleck

Chris asks Lesley to tell her about her breathworks experience.
“We must capture it”, he says
Lesley replies: “so you want to bottle it?”
“We need to pour the experience onto paper.”
Lesley: “pour it where? It’s already everywhere.”

Clouds, mountains
Lungs, capillaries, veins
Branches of a tree
Shells – golden ratio/spiral
Sunflower seeds
Spokes of a wheel
Snow flakes
Bosco Verticale
Milan Cathedral
The antennas of cell phones
Solar panels
The novatrope

Irregular, ecological shapes

Fractals: self-similarity: zoom in and the structure repeats itself.
Infinite detail, there’s always more structure at smaller scales

Mandelbrot Set reveals endless complexity, no matter how far you zoom in.

The complexity of ecology goes into the infinite. It exceeds the ability of the mind to comprehend it, but that does not mean it is unintelligent.

We can connect to ecology in an embodied way, before we’ve had a chance to analyze and understand it

When Lesley and I talk about wildness, or rewilding, what we are aiming for is not a kind of raw, Dionysian frenzy, nor total abandon, so much as a more flexible and open intelligence – the kind of intelligence which is demonstrated in ecology.

Loose togetherness, playing in the pocket

We want to create musical patterns which are empty of inherent, independent existence, yet exist through interdependence

What could be more ecological than music?

The grounds of Adhisthana,
a little age of sensibility:
tea, biscuits,
voices held in porcelain

An English garden
with sunken pond
Sangharakshita might have sat here,
content in the arrangement of things

Monks tend the magnolia against the wall,
pruning each urge to wander

The gravel path divides;
grass forgets the line
Foxglove fingers press through
lattice reigns

I circumambulate the burial mound
This geometric model
mimics the natural order
obscured to the mind

Raw reality writes
hieroglyphs within the land
The script of roots in river clay
Spiral shells upon sand

The sun sets over English fields,
impressing wisdom into my being

Let the wildflower meadows
encroach on the country house
Welcome in the untamed weasel
To stretch out and unwind by the fire

The Woodcock blasts praise to the creator
Its warbling unfiltered,
expressing the holiness within

I glimpse a nymph at twilight,
her hyperbolic circles swirling
Myrtle-scented,
echoes of nirvana

Like Persephone, moving between
death and bloom,
holding both.

And I remember,
in Berlin,
you spoke of wildness quietly,
as if it were already here

“The total mass of human-made materials (dominated by concrete) now exceeds the mass of all living biomass on earth”

Houses without names
Houses without rooms
Churches without doors
People without accents
People without stories
People fidgeting on trams
Petrograd
Communism knew concrete
The Berlin wall, too, heaved in concrete politics
Religion does not get much further in secular society than ideas

If there are talisman, how do they feel?
What future are you holding?
As you walk through the city
Waterloo Bridge
National Theatre
Hayward Gallery
Barbican
How did concrete and art become bedmates?

Castle with no keep
No glass
No wood
No stone
Civilization without people
Souls without words
Faces without mouths
Sounds trickling into silence
Sounds absorbed into concretes sponge
A dumb thud
A mute inertia
Monk without the scream

A church drawn from your pocket
An imaginary city, uninhabitable,
Where Elon Musk roves,
lifting his leg to concrete, and taking a piss
Is concrete alive?
Does it feel our piss?
Does it know the acid rain?
Can concrete grow like a cell, putting out feelers into the air to feel the acid which threatens it?

Peter Thiel
Sits as an abbott
In a concrete hall,
Seeking immortality
Floating, libertarian city states on the sea
Lights glisten on the foreshore
Peter Thiel gazes into his palantir
What future is prophesised there?

Unrooted churches
Anywhere, nowhere
Is concrete strong or weak?
Like a worm
It doesn’t see itself
Listen not to the abject

What does it stand for?
Kafka is forgotten
The octopus forgets to grow arms
A vociferous material
Which speaks to the tectonics of the modern
The tectonics of a Roman viaduct

An urban fox jumps out at me from behind a concrete wall
The cosmic crow lands on it
What would Ted Hughes make of concrete?

How would Christopher Wren judge concrete?
What would Giotto think?
Maybe his frescos would look pleasing on concrete walls
A concrete cathedral built by romantic worms
There is *only* interiority
Locked in minds
Locked in concrete selves
Spinning in self-referential loops

In concrete hedonism or science?
George Monbiot and the ecomodernists would love it here
Less so Chris Smaje
The organic grower in Frome
Who proposes a small farm future

Did you know
The Romans invented concrete
Then the recipe was lost for 2000 years
But before them were the Greeks, with marble
Bring back the Eleusinian Mysteries
where the Apollonian and Dionysian balanced each other
What moves our lands?
Persephone rises and in her steps
The earth remembers the pulse of life and death

Vacuous echoes in the concrete hallways of London
Spectral presences
More equality in the oaks of the forest?
Fake hierarchies, fragmented conformists
How will the human spirit relate to and speak through concrete?

What is concrete in a postmodern century?
Anonymous yet strangely warm
Cracked cement in polished Tate Modern flaws
Barbed wire on concrete walls
The concrete divide and barbed wire aggression
Timothy Morton’s eye glistens amidst the oil rigs of Houston
Which sits on concrete undergirdings

Roots of a tree break through the concrete
Like a quiet wingbeat opening the sky
If there is something that could break barbed wire,
Wouldn’t that be a thing?
Moss has no concrete complex, nor does lichen
The lichen is slow but tough
It is neither fungus nor algae but both
This is concrete’s virtue
It hosts life
Concrete covered in life’s slime – the future?
In time concrete is part of life it just doesn’t look like it
Let us plant trees

In study group, when discussing maha metta,
the experience of non-duality clicked again.
Silapiya explained: “while metta involves self-reference,
maha metta is when generosity
spontaneously pours out of you,
because you no longer experience the person
sitting across from you as separate,
and you help them as you would help yourself.”
His supra-human eyes probe. He continues:
“you no longer experience yourself as a separate being –
but intertwined with all life.”
Every now and then it clicks:
the unconditioned,
medicine prescribed by the doctor,
a soothing relief.
“It’s just a ride” – Bill Hicks

Listening to “Home” by Maribou State
the subject of “home” is on my mind

“Varkala” by Maribou State played at Frances’ funeral

Re. “Home” by Maribou State,
what does it mean to build a home in these times?

Heidegger’s concept of “dwelling” –
 a mode of being that involves a harmonious relationship with the cosmos

Is “home” the source? The mother?
My whole life I have been seeking the feminine, a return to the mother,
as if I was cut off, homeless, alone in the universe,
told to forge ahead as an isolated phallus!

Alan Watts anecdote:
an astronaut returns from space and is then asked about God –
the astronaut replies, “she is black”

Morton is skeptical of the notion of “home”
because it entails sealing oneself off,
embedding oneself in a specific place,
sealing “human” realm off from the “nonhuman” realm –
denying interconnected, entangled reality

Does any of this relate to climate change and the ecological crisis?

Morton and Zizek say that it’s a false narrative that we are cut off from Mother Nature
they call deep ecology proto-fascist
there is no Big Other, according to Zizek
so why then, in myself, am I continually seeking out the lost mother figure?

I have a hard time embracing negativity,
as Zizek and Paul Celan do
(by negativity I mean thelack or gap that is inherent to human subjectivity) 
I never recovered from the mirror stage of human development.
Am I indulging in naive sentimentalism? Delusion?

Everything I do:
music, yoga, mushrooms, romantic relationships, wild swimming, writing poetry,
is an attempt to reconnect to… what?

A “lost intimacy”, Morton would call it – not lost wholeness or lost mother or lost nature

Rose is keen to connect to a (pristine?) nature
which is prior to/beyond human construction

I am more sympathetic to this view these days –
especially if nature refers to
the free, creative spirit, within and without
 “ocean of pure, vibrant consciousness”

Lesley pulled me back to centre.
As she cares for me, I care for her.
The feedback loops of care
develop both our capacities for self-care.

Friendship is a great thing
but romantic love is red hot –
thereby it has greater potential for healing?
(while it burns)

I spent three years learning all the concepts regarding “healing”,
without healing;
with Lesley, healing happens in practice.

When I come back to centre,
it is as though there is a plug hole in my belly,
and skittish, nervy waves of anxiety
drop down it,
like a waterfall through my belly
to the sacrum and hips,
where tension crashes and splashes.

When the anxiety spikes, let it spike.
keep still and silent – let it spike
To “stay in touch” in times of dissociation
requires my greatest level of strength