Begin poorly.
Begin with the messy first pass.
Begin when it feels like an unresolved and unresolvable farce.
If I humbly come before you now
It’s as servant to warriors
As transcendence-seeker, a mystic.
I wanted something to resolve the pain of living for me
anything, a psychedelic, a spiritual retreat,
some shaman or guru or podcast
maybe another course or qualification
Something - anything - to allow me
To arrive, free from my anxiety and doubt.
I rode two wheels, wobbly and supported, round my driveway at first, up and down,
Then to school, then all over my hometown, through all its forests, then everywhere.
My curiosity always out-paced my stride,
Only ever satisfied with the steady-cadence of the two-wheeled strokes of push, and pull.
I rode two wheels around capes, around islands, around continents.
Delight in my amazon fortune,
Awaiting ships down mighty rivers as the jungle rains come.
The port hums the coloured boxes stack
And the harbour lies wide with arms that
Do not care.
Nothing has changed
Since you caught me in your unfurled sail
Like a shifting trade wind
Sending you across to a warmer ocean.
I tended the fresh wounds from losing my Father in Lyttelton.
Watching the tugs turn huge forces in the harbour, like magic,
Rugged up and clutching tea on the verandah, brave against the southerly.
The smoke of a Great Fire
Stoked with fat, and glory, talk.
In the cold break of day
Was a country awash only in grief.
All these things I say to myself, calling out from within the wisest place of me, calling out to be heard by the quietest place in me:
I got my first hint of it in a secondhand bookstore in Hawaii when I was naive but in love with everything,
Flicking through musty pages in a captivated fever,
Findings and empirical trajectories promising the back-of-the-book answers to my
Incessant coffeeshop journaling questions.
I tell myself stories, stories, stories, all kinds of stories in all kinds of everyday genres.
Hey young man with your life all ahead and that sparkle,
You can’t know me but I know you,
Where you keep all the doubt & the hope shut away,
You'll have to live your way here without me
But hear this if you can whispered down through the decades.