Final Photograph

It is in the eyes

The eyes are where I see

The formation of what strikes me now

As vulnerability

I suppose I could say

That the whole body language

The entire persona reflects

What I see, both within, also behind the eyes

Yet it is the vulnerability

Of the soon to be decisive

It is the bathing in that place

From which the strength to act will build

Just as hate is fuelled by love

Then so the vulnerable

Are able to grow, to explode

To allow themselves to find life

Just as pulling back the catapult

Gives energy to the missile

Then so having been confined

Gives extra force to the eventual release

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Skill Set

A Friday afternoon

In the hairdressers

At the bottom of Beaumont Hill

A pleasant summer’s day walk

Down the unadopted lane

From Mon Plaisir

I was taught how

To scrunch my hair

Whilst I blow-dried it

This, by the young woman from Liverpool

Who also asked

Where it was that I was going that evening

In this way, one with one

May become a twosome

Or the twosome already

May recoil to one away from one

I don’t remember where the dance was

Or if we ever did make it

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Actions; As Spoken

The poem as I remember it

Is not the poem as he wrote it

Indeed it is a poem about a plant

Whereas I thought it was a poem about a person

I had it in mind that truth

That truth, with belief, were side by side

In those clear moments of experience

Also that love, with beauty, had played their part

I acknowledge, willingly

That this was not chant, nor response

These were not the sounds of a silent

Monastic order; or were they

Was the whole conversation 

Not a means of reaching

A point of common ground

A place for both to move on from

The relationship, as I remember it

Is not the one as she lived it

When it was extended periods of doubt

Whereas I thought it was nigh-on certain

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Ring Back

I would not have worried you

Had the telephone not rung

Liz on the line, from Lincolnshire Life

Actually what I say is not entirely true

For I had thought of you earlier

When writing of self-help books

Samuel Smiles Self Help in particular

Purchased in the Antiquarian Bookshop

One Saturday morning in St Helier

That I have ever been in need of self-help

Is self-evident from this morning’s writings

First in my Morning Words, now in my poetry

How my path then has followed paths of guidance

Even our first meeting, often thought to be happenstance

Was led to, by my thinking of my own self-help study

First to become a chartered engineer 

Which turned into a search for a self-actualised man

In turn to be fuelled, or felled, by psychology, by love

I answered the phone, thinking that it might be

In response to my scan results; perhaps a date

A date for consultation, a date for operation

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Repetition

Out of the blue

In the depths of meditation

No desire for clue

To love’s indebted accreditation

One breath in

One breath out

One verse read

Of the Night Prayer

In to the new

Sidestep the contemplation

No path or shoe

To love’s indebted accreditation

One bell sounds

One bell decays

One thought happens

You peaceful soothsayer

That new or blue

That breath of meditation

That surprise of truth

To love’s indebted accreditation

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