BIRTH OF A MEDIUM

I wonder when you'll finally realize you've been chosen by Spirit?
Still, now, you appear to be the person I first met,
yet something has undeniably changed.
There is an air of expectancy about you.
I keep feeling my vocation is that of midwife,
that my sole purpose at this stage in my life
is to ease the passage of your re-birth, your transition into my world.
But you are not quite ready yet.
The strain of a protracted labour
is clearly visible in the gauntness of your features
and the dark circles beneath your eyes.

It is admirable how you've managed to cope:
the endless mood swings, the voices in your head -
misdiagnosed as schizophrenia - that make you
appear saintly one minute and then diabolic the next.
Which will you eventually become?
I sometimes fear the latter, when you are in the grip
of one of your self-harming frenzies:
"I AM WEAK, USELESS, PATHETIC, HATEFUL!" you scream,
as you bang your head repeatedly on the garden wall in frustration
until both it and the concrete path below
are splattered with blood.
Then you crawl, exhausted, into bed and sleep for days.

I'm often afraid you'll never recover from these assaults,
that your brain may have been gravely damaged
in those carnal vs spiritual battles for supremacy
over your Soul. Yet the Dolorous Blow
you inflict upon yourself seems to expiate
all perceived unworthiness.
You appear suddenly happy, immersing yourself
in everyday chores as if nothing has happened.
At those times, it is as if you've awoken
from a nightmare that you have no recollection of.
You hum an uplifting tune, smile at everyone
and throw lavish parties for the entire street.

But I know how it frightens you...
how what is trying to come through frightens you.
It's just too inconceivable for you to contemplate
and yet you want it with your entire being.
All your past lives have been preparing you for this.
And so the midwife patiently awaits
the dilation of the Veil's cervix,
eyes fixed on your aura, hands scanning chakras, ears
listening intently for those messages
that will soon inevitably come through.

I attempt to assuage your fears
by guiding your brain into deep meditation
until you achieve heightened awareness,
in preparation for the Spirit Guide
who is gradually descending into your sphere...
Now sudden blinding whiteness
floods through the barriers of the physical realm,
significantly raising your vibration.
Even I am thrown off balance,
am totally engulfed in pure Celestial Light.
The Spiritual waters have broken at last.

In this whiteout of merged dimensions -
me transfixed in it's power - I glimpse
your past lives, all of them simultaneously
as if watching a thousand movies at once.
But I am no casual observer. No such luck.
I feel them all...and none of them
have been happy-go-lucky fairy tales.
You have suffered for your calling -
really suffered - the excruciating torment
of the perpetual mourner, have lost
loved ones...over and over and over again.
And all those lost voices have been calling you until,
finally, the pain has become too much.
That last bereavement, in this lifetime,
has hit you hardest of all.
The loss of your first-born child is the ultimate catalyst...

I bring you out of your trance and you remember
it all, the never-ending rawness of it.
A haunting cry rises up from the depths of a Spirit
torn apart by grief. There is an irresistible longing
to override the finality of physical death.
I begin to wonder if it will ever end - it is
like a stylus caught in the groove
of an old scratched vinyl...
then your Spirit Guide slips in through the sound
to reunite you with all those you have lost.
Your muscles visibly relax. The tension drains
from your face...is replaced by an expression of sheer bliss.
In awe, I watch as the Veil's birth canal gradually expands
into a broad Rainbow Path. And I smile.
My work is done for now.
A medium is born.

EMISSARY

Northern hemisphere winter:
stasis in ice
and feather-patterned windows.

Parched
alabaster skin, cracked,
numb, circulation impeded.

Nature's abandonment -
how forsaken we are!
Blue fingertips and nose. Concrete walls

disintegrating: sand regressed
to molecular rock
from warmer times I cannot reach

when sun rose high,
had warmth
and short shadows.

Lungfuls of air were painless then,
just invigorating.
Something stirs

within Earth's core -
an excitement, anticipation.
Inexplicable.

And so I
dig deep, find Creation's impulse.
Evolution's call

is in the blood
and I
am the emissary:

the tiny green shoot
that splits the rock-hard soil
to speak

of life eternal.

MOVING ON

I tore them up, being weary
of the hold those old
letters had over my emotions
every time I sat at my writing bureau.
What was that power they possessed?
Word-by-word they perpetuated
vain hopes of dreams unfulfilled
that incarcerated me in a place of torment.
I never was aloof.
I habitually gave my all: love, heart, body and Soul;
but you tired of the emotional drain of reciprocation.
Your passion paled to indifference.
So my life became defined by red bicycles
and the smudged black ink of postmarks.

The flames inside were consuming me:
touching what you'd once touched,
my fingers could imagine something else -
something warm and living.
Aah, such exquisite torture!
And that last one ever written,
still stark black on yellowing paper: Love's death warrant.
Well at least it will be safe territory now, the bureau.
At least I'll no longer be lured there daily
to be caught up in an endless loop
of grim masochism,
of clinging to a rainbow's end
while slowly drowning in the murky depths
of a long-abandoned wishing well.

So I gather up the shreds and hold them over the bin.
They are more precious than a handful of diamonds,
have long been the only lifeline
to what once was - and blindness
has been my captor, just as dumb delusion
has bred a foolish complacency.
I brought it on myself.
My foot is on the pedal now.
The lid rises and my fingers release their grip.
I watch the strips fall and come to rest
between the baked bean cans and chocolate wrappers:
futureless in refuse land,
futureless as a condemned man on death row.
And now your name is there too: shredded, discarded,

like the hopes and dreams we once shared,
so forlorn
on its nest of dross, abandoned -
yet still able to twist my guts!
Cold rain pounds the window, heightening melancholy.
My blood rages through me like fire.
Tigers are ripping the antelope of my heart to pieces.
This is how it feels - the inner tearing
of a Soul from it's mate. And the bleeding doesn't stop
with acceptance
and it's dead expression, but goes on
hurting, hurting:
paper strips telling the odours in the bin, the trash, the putrid moisture
what moving on is. It is nothing but a lie.

LADY OF THE LAKE

Restlessly I'm searching high and low -
oh why does Dozmary* draw me so?
Please, I beg you, Lady of the Lake
won't you tell me the reason for sanity's sake?
For I'm certain these things I should know.

So at pool's edge I wait straining my ears
throughout the night, overcoming fears.
I open my mind
but only to find
there's a brick wall inside.
Oh Merlyn of Camelot
is it really my lot
to thwart my own destiny tonight?

It appears not, for through Arthur's memory I'm shown
the Battle of Camlan that stole His throne.
And since then the wasteland has been upon us,
endlessly oozing spiritual pus.
Oh please Lady, finish the story tonight...

Well the visions come to me at dawn in a flash
of blood, gore and sword's clash.
Then Arthur's body being transported away
across the water to Avalon's bay,
where the Ninefold Sisterhood began healing his wounds.
And there in Otherworldly time He'll remain
until England's dire need calls Him home again.


* Dozmary Pool, Bodmin Moor, Cornwall, England.

HYACINTHS

The hyacinths are over-optimistic - we are in the dead of winter.
Outside everything is white, still, frost-bound.
I am chilled to the bone, huddled here beneath my duvet,
while the cold morning light streaks the walls with pale blue.
I am diminished, have lost connection to the outside world.
My vitality languishes with my clothes in the wardrobe
and clear reasoning is lost to confusion.

My head is burning and throbbing on the pillow
like some grotesquely distorted Christmas light: flashing, flashing, feverish red.
Ridiculous brain, why do you insist on trying to function?
People keep bringing me water to drink.
They are out of focus, blurred and featureless,
constantly plumping my pillow and mumbling gibberish.
Oh I wish they would go away and leave me alone!

I am as an infant to them. They attend to my physical needs
like new mothers: fussing and constantly checking
that I am still alive. It is driving me crazy.
I just want to sleep and escape this pain and discomfort
that invading microbes have mercilessly inflicted.
Inside me a battle rages, mirroring the state of my outer life.
All the discord and disarray is finally taking it's toll.

I am a sail-less yacht adrift upon an uncharted ocean,
stubbornly clinging to a name and address back on land.
Being so infectious has robbed me of lover and friend.
Afraid and alone in a suddenly unrecognised room,
I desperately seek something familiar for reassurance.
But there is nothing, just bare walls and bland furnishings.
I have become a non-entity: a stranger's absurd dream.

But now I have these flowers. I never believed
I could be anything but emotionally barren.
Yet how euphoric I feel. You cannot imagine -
the empathy is so overwhelming it stuns you.
And they ask nothing in return, except a little earth and water.
I imagine this must be what it's like to die:
a joyous flowing back into pure Universal Love.

The hyacinths are so pink and full of life, it hurts.
Even through the gift wrap I could hear them breathing
gently, as I still can now they are fully exposed
and at the mercy of all. They have become my lost babies.
Their pinkness calls to my heart in a language
not quite understood. It responds fluently:
I would willingly die to protect such heart-rending fragility.

I was merely tolerated before. Now I am truly cared for.
The hyacinths lean towards me, and the window beyond
where each day the light floods in then fades back to darkness.
And I am a lifeless thing, caught between
the brilliance of the sun and the perfection of the hyacinths:
such an ugly thing that I want to efface myself.
Both sun and hyacinths are so beautiful in comparison.

Before they came I was coping with the influenza,
slipping in and out of consciousness without much fuss.
Then the hyacinths filled the room with their intoxicating scent.
Now the air and I are drawn to them like moths to a flame:
the air and I bewitched and enthralled.
They have captivated my attention, that before was content
to simply drift between trivia, reverie and oblivion.

Even the walls seem to be warming to pink.
The hyacinths should be reclassified as Spiritual Gurus.
They are opening up, transforming into passageways to paradise
and I am aware of being inexorably pulled in,
while sheer healing energy flows through and around my ravaged body.
The water the humans feed me once flowed through those sacred stems,
and I already feel my fever lifting...

ORACLE

Every morning you pounce on the newspaper
and thumb through it to the horoscope section - that oracle
of your aspirations, your life map, where the planets
whisper in their prophetic language of symbolism
like a Shaman's feverish mutterings. How you fear
the very thought of ignoring their promptings -
of incurring harsh retribution
should you fail to correctly interpret them.
It seems these printed prognoses have taken control.

Yet you have no need to fret so
in trying to calculate the ascendant degrees
of Saturn in Aries and it's implications for you personally. It is
no more than the Sun's gravitational pull
on fragments of rock. But you are in denial.
Saturn implies death - or at least some equally unpleasant personal disaster.
And so you vow to stay indoors, at least for the coming week.

If only you could re-frame astrology
as no more than an ingenious metaphor
plucked out of past experiences and close observation,
or out of cloud formations, or Moon phases, or tides.
Is it not a plausible possibility
that your grandparents, parents, siblings and I
just might be the true shapers of your destiny?

A BEACH OUT OF SEASON

Fierce waves batter a deserted beach,
almost drowning out the mournful cries of gulls
lamenting the loss of summer.
Nothing is as it was then.
Two crows fight beak and claw
over the meagre contents of a litter bin,
their black eyes glittering
with murderous self-survival.

Clumps of seaweed lie strewn about an empty car park,
the spoils of recent storms. There is a stench of decaying vegetation.
Parking meters have been removed for the winter
and the funfair stands abandoned and partially dismantled
like the skeletal remains of some gigantic alien being.
A lone powerboat carves the misty seascape in two,
as the Isle of Wight slowly disappears
in the grey coupling of sea and sky.

Shivering, I turn my attention to the locked and barred beach huts.

Blue, and red candy stripes conjure up the spirit of summer:
crowds and excited voices of children;
ice cream kiosks and shellfish stalls;
sugar rock batons with "Hayling Island" through the middle;
and rainbow-coloured candy floss...
aah, the power of nostalgia: I can feel
the scorching July sun burning my fair skin!

The sharp pain of wind-burned ears
shocks me back to the present. Pulling hood up,
I gaze once more out to sea. Huge ocean liners
loom spectral on the horizon like barely discernible ghosts
of last summer now trapped in a shadowy region between realities.
Then a sudden shaft of sunlight pierces the gloom:
a tiny splinter of Heaven that fulfils my longing
for an omen of the spring to come.