Clarity.

The phone, the phone,

The bloody phone didn’t wake me,

So now I am late for a job I hate,

Working, always bloody working,

Making money for someone else,

Putting cash away

For their retirement,

Whereas I will end up

Living in a demountable

In a caravan park

In bum-fuck nowhere.

Got to get my head straight,

Got to concentrate,

See things clearly.

There has to be a way

Out of this maze.

There has to be a way.

If I could just float up a little,

Get a bird’s eye view,

See the path clearly,

Then I wouldn’t be down here,

In the shit,

Running around blind,

Butting up against walls,

Swamped by bills, bills, bills

And credit card debt,

Credit card debt, credit card debt:

Never have so many owed so much

To so few…

Theta state, theta state,

Bring up all the food you ate.

Fuck it, if I could just

Get clear of these voices

Crowding my mind,

Telling me I am a shit dad,

That I was a shit husband,

That I am a shit earner,

That I am shit, shit,

Worse than shit,

The lowest of the low,

If I could just get clear

Of these voices and

Find a clear space,

Where I can reach through

To a higher ground of calm,

Make peace with the past

And stop letting it kill me,

Slowly, ever so slowly,

Then I think I might be alright,

Yeah, I might be alright.

I might be alright.

Deep breath in,

Deep release out.

I am…

Alright.

 

 

©Shaun Green 2023

Chaos Theory.

I want the world to be ordered,

Separated into neat categories,

But it’s all butterflies and bears

And once in a hundred-year storms,

Polar ice melting, sea level rising,

Forests burning, people killing people

Over land, religion, whatever.

And when I look inside, I see my own mind

Running a hundred miles a minute,

Calculating a risk I will never face,

Voting down autocrats whose names

I will never know,

As I blindly swerve through streets

Designed by engineers well versed

In making the impossible seem possible,

Only to arrive at a destination

Preordained to not be the one

I was aiming for.

Who knew

That in the maelstrom of information

Swirling about the ether,

There are codes to make sense of things,

But not to us – we who suffer and strive;

No, this intelligence belongs to

The shadow world or marketers

And large corporations who mine our data

Like it was iron ore,

Our values, our interests,

Our preferences, our clicks on Pinterest,

Every desire, perversion, quirk or love,

Converted to zeros and ones,

Chucked into a digital tumbler

And spat out as spam,

While the world outside spirals

Into an insane whirlwind of war

And aggression, as if we have gone

Back in time 50 years!

What have we become?

We are children of chaos,

Our merely being here

A coincidence of egg meeting sperm,

Which required the dinosaurs to die

And mammals evolve,

Thanks to a random meteor strike,

Hitting that sweet spot between

Total annihilation

And partial species extinction.

We still look to the skies,

In fear another rock might

Peek out from behind the Sun

And due to Gravity’s eternal return

Smash us into oblivion.

We seek order in a disordered universe

That doesn’t hear us and doesn’t care.

So, we are going to have to learn

To live with chaos.

It seems to rule,

And it is everywhere.

 

 

©Shaun Green 2023

Tick, tock.

Seconds into minutes,

Minutes into hours,

Words into sentences,

Sentences into paragraphs,

All narrative reversed

While meaning is sucked

Down the plug hole

At the end of the universe.

 

Tick, tock…

 

Time is and always will be 

A perverse engine of creation

And dissipation,

Destroying the past,

Promising a future

Which does not exist,

Guaranteeing the present

Only for a moment

With words which cannot last.

 

Tick, tock…

 

Language is time’s slave,

Full of tenses without meaning,

Each and every syllable 

Forged as a pin

To trap the flapping wings

Of temporality,

To slow the flow,

To stave off mortality.

Who were you yesterday?

Who are you today?

Who will you be tomorrow?

 

Tick, tock…

 

You will be you 

In time effervescing,

Rising toward demise,

Just as language is doomed to die.

Time is outside our prison

Of distinctions, pronouns, 

And prepositions.

Just as the wind and water

Carve the rock, grind it to sand,

So shall our alphabet

Be reduced to dust,

And every word ever spoken

Or read or heard

Will be as atoms to the wind.

 

Tick, tock….

 

 

©Shaun Green 2023

Eulogy #23.

Truth left this morning,

Unsnaking an arm, gathering clothes,

Sneaking out the back door,

No thank you or goodbye.

This is how we die.

 

Love left this afternoon,

Coming home drunk, punching my face

Leaving me with a split lip

And a black eye.

This is how we die.

 

Youth left this evening,

Slamming the bedroom door,

Climbing down the trellis,

Getting into a car with some guy.

This is how we die.

 

I am alone tonight,

With white wine, chips and TV,

Too invested in MAFS,

Too diabetic to cry.

This is how we die.

 

 

©Shaun Green 2023

Sirens.

Sirens in the distance

Signal another night of harm

Emergency vehicles rushing

Along roads like corpuscles

Lights flashing red and blue

On multiple HiVis vests

Turning cops, ambos and fieries

Into beautiful hideous beetles

Scurrying through the wreckage

Scanning the carnage

 

This is a broken town –

Broken up, broken into, broken down

 

With a dire persistence

Sirens in the distance

Turn the night into one long alarm

Ensuring there will be no sleep

While forgone children break and enter

Running rampant as the night is theirs

Broken homes and broken families

Poverty and insecurity

Spewing out crews of little delinquents

Stealing and crashing cars

 

Is the answer to put them behind bars?

Prison does produce a better class of criminal…

 

Meanwhile sirens pierce the night

Echoing along with red and blue light

As the diurnal chase begins

Trying to catch the race card

Despite the fact it never wins

While the government makes moves to

Funnel damaged youth away from jail

Already bulging at the seams

Businesses are groaning

Residents are fuming

Enough is enough is enough

 

This is broken town –

Broken into, broken up, broken down

 

©shaun patrick green 2023. 

The Trick of Time and Distance.

Am I myself? I am not myself,

Belonging to the night, addiction

And transcendence.

I used to remember a child

Full of energy, excitement and promise.

But I lost him in the crowd of years,

Abducted by adults without purpose.

Now I have my own child

And I try to teach her and fail

Because my way is dark,

Littered with the debris of trauma.

As she blooms, the days grow longer

And I get weaker, not stronger.

Is it a trick of time and distance

That flicks the switch

Of selective remembering?

Why do I present myself to her

As I am not now?

Why do my rose-coloured glasses

Never fog as I step from

Airconditioned sterility

Into the tropical heat of reality?

Why is my best self always behind me?

In constantly dismembering the past,

I create my own monster

In the looking glass

Who is thinner, kinder, more talented.

This is the lie I present to my offspring,

Like the Tooth Fairy or Father Christmas.

It’s what my teachers taught me.

It’s what my father would have wanted.

 

©shaun patrick green 2022

First Kiss.

It was like you

Stabbed me in the face,

Somewhere below the nose;

A hot, sucking sensation

Of oral penetration

As your tongue sought

The back of my throat,

Lips clamped over mine

Like a fire hose,

Heads mashed together,

Nostrils sucking in air,

Both of us slowly suffocating.

I did not ask for this.

I wanted something tender,

Heartfelt, more captivating.

This is NOT how I imagined

My first kiss.

 

©shaun patrick green 2022