There is a trick to this whole enterprise-
ask any moth who sizzled on that lamp
a thousand times. I can’t stop speaking
truth but those concepts insist on piercing

your eye. There’s a lighthouse in the east.
Ask Rumi, Christ, any one of a thousand
saints what has to be released, how each
prisoner is already free yet loyal to ideas

& demons who prepared a way only for
themselves, unaware it’s just the stuff of bodies
and bodies have to die. That’s all the mind
ever brought you, a glitter ball of dead sugar

to fool even the…

So this is the drill when you say
you know a little astrology -
can plant stars in their therapy
to make things a little richer -
add frisson and zing, some light
canapés before the
main event when life can
really turn to dark water

as Freud said, the return of the
repressed not a song many will sing-
and even though you don’t draw charts
or gaze relentlessly at stars
they want the magic act
before setting to work & learn
how ugliness can be beautiful again.

It turns out, we’ve all broken
endless priceless vases
mistaken the rope…

Skinless
and white, I do not
diagnose conditions
yet feel every word
hear each bite

I am not from here
yet came to test the
temperature of
the average
human being

By the side
of the road
I sit, carding
before knitting the
broken hearts
of men and women

I was thrashed
clean in the church
of believers
long before you came

I am the Atticus Finch
of dreams,
down in the cellar
and on my knees

When your tongue is
ripped out at dawn,
as it surely will be,
I will lay out the map
and handle your shame

My gift will come and
go again, a tinder to ignite
your being, this jewel
I carry, a meteor to come
round once
every thousand years

COPYRIGHT Simon Heathcote

The tongue is in the teeth of some
whiter than a lampshade in heat
lit by the language of others
a palate to place
food on, litmus test
for the health of the lying

How many are now
one-eyed, don’t need
the tongue to hold a fork
just a policeman’s mind to ward off
the inconvenient glare -

there is no home here
Selfhood beware — the gutters are
filled with failed ideas

stillbirths in this age of unreason
trapped in the kernel of the throat,
a knot, a stone, finally
this dead zone

Most let the clouds pass by…

I remember the root and the ruin.
It slips into quiet moments
when I think I’ve forgotten,
curdles like a summer’s day, takes me
back to my beginnings.
The curse of love is unrelenting,
loss runs through it,
an unwanted vein.

When God and nature mate, the soul
comes into being. I feel its cruelty
and look back to the waiting.
My errors are still unwritten,
my shape unmade. I ask for one thing,
beg for his return, but my father
never came. I was force-fed Pluto’s gifts:
hell is colder than you’re taught.

I learned its language like a…

‘Staying in the Self by one’s efforts is like training a raging bull by offering him luscious grass and tempting him from straying.’ Ramana Maharshi

How is the world made and remade? By winning hearts and minds.

The fork is in the road, the bend right at the edge of the river. Many are those apparent souls who make choices, each incomprehensible or at least puzzling to the other. Karmic accounts have reached a full stop, each one a mirror to themselves. ‘This is where I am now at the turning of the tide.’ So be it.

Perhaps the true…