What do i want out of this? What am I really getting at here?  What is my agenda, my deal?  Let me confess.

I want to destroy your hope, every last ounce of it. I want to utterly deflate you, put a brick wall in front of your face.

I want to murder your belief in a secret spiritual element of yourself that can escape the tide of things.

I want to leave you utterly desolate, stranded, isolated and cut off from all salvation, momentum and dynamism.

I want you to feel the bare earth beneath you, to drag you down to my dark level, the very lowest place, where nothing moves.

I want you in defeat to touch this patch of damp ground hidden underneath the heavy stone of your despair

And to recognise that this is where you belong.

This, between you and me, is an ultimatum

Our own private crisis in which I hold you hostage

There is no room for negotiation here

This is too vital for agreement, let alone disagreement

There is no flexibility for your interpretation of this

This is too central, too crucial to be about something

So don’t…don’t you dare move to understand this

This is only an impulse without a point

A grenade of voice, a violent expression of love

Exploding across your mindscape

A ringing in your inner ear

And now…now, it is done.

I have only 2 things to say right now, both of which are completely redundant and without any objective foundation.

a)      This entire universe and everything beyond it arises out of nothing into now.

b)      Whatever you think of this arising, in the first instance, it is an unconditional gift.

Enlightenment doesn’t happen on Sundays; you’ll have to wait until tomorrow at the earliest.

A wood pigeon calls out

Everything he thought he’d understood

Everything he thought yet constrained him

Gone

A pair of mums, a pair of daughters and a pair of fluffy dogs, all six heading off over the parkland just before mid-morning, still a sleepy coolness in the air, a misty sunlight throwing weak shadows over the grass.  How simple, he thought. How perfectly simple.

Up in the night, a restless moonlit night, he woke from the dream of life into a world in twilight play.  He stood undressed at the window, the garden plants engrossed in a noisy midnight meeting, unaware that he was eavesdropping.  And then, suddenly, the unmistakable sounds of laughter from a group of girls carried over on a gentle night-breeze, idling not far away.  He watched and listened from the curtain’s shadows, dead to it all, intoxicated by the scent of insentience.

Waiting to be picked up by his wife (they only had one car and she had taken their son to the park while he was with a client)

He stood by a busy crossroads he had never seen before, a self he had never been before,

In a rough part of town, outside a Kia dealership.

None of what I say can leave this room.