Repeated Conversation

text © John Mingay 2000 - images © Boris Mingay 2000

Sadness, by means
of synonym, glistens
on what is within nothingness;
 
the whisper of time, distilling
from sound, the unknown around you.
 
Another conversation, in your language,
and laughter circles this moment;
 
every vision a twisted echo.
 
We invent occupied air,
(the kind without words to repeat),
and dream up
this fiction of mistaken tradition.
 
 
The rain is what you find,
confirming our need to talk
of belief in idiom and of
how we replenish the words
repeatedly invented
in the poetry you travel.
 
 
From the chaos of diction,
tranquility achieves
a distinct dialogue
of solitary sound.
 
We air the ambition
to believe in repetition
and are free of expectation.
 
This time is what
the innocent demand of sanity.
 
 
The longer we dispense with memory
the more emptiness remains,
watching our grasp
on each lateral truth dwindle
and every beginning we bring about die.
 
Without words to repeat,
forever is the shallow
history of bedlam.
 
 
You balance affinity
as far as passion for the nature
of within allows
and realise the moment
is how we unravel being:
 
outside is far and near,
jagged, yet seductive -
 
domain of the tongue.
 
 
We stretch belief in consistency
to prove our inadequacy
in abstracting words
from the echo-filled breath of life;
 
words to hope are there,
to end this beginning
and cast what is created
into the world you meet.
 
 
Muddled intuition
is what survives of faith
where the unknown
promises another past:
 
your future buried
in assumption that
the present is why
we gather without purpose;
 
everywhere and always,
awakening possibility
and trusting the spontaneous
to drift towards reason.
 
 
Pure history exists
to make our world understood,
to bestow the instant with intent.
 
The end is always there,
determined by accident
and fashioned by desire.
 
 
I answer your words
with cadences of transition,
every sound poured
from passionate language.
 
I answer, always beyond
the absolute of angles,
but through with
what is poetry of reason.
 
 
Sorrow is the doubt-thorn
of weakness you choose,
your eloquence and thunder
unbroken while the one image
we hold of truth
is sabotaged by questions.
 
You have the right to carry on.
 
 
You are the now
I obscure in words
and greet with incertitude;
 
the present diluted
by the tide of empty promises
made while stillness slumbered.
 
 
The difference between
what exists of meaning
and what there is
of inexhaustible breath
is direction - invariably
obscure and out of step,
it is the impetus you confront.
 
 
The experience of time
continues to prove
our death unfeigned;
 
a twisting dialogue
of caprice and allusion,
of obscure consequence
wholly expected.
 
How we confess is the deceit.
 
What is always there
must come about
to contrive ambiguous wisdom;
 
the simplest word
concealing desire.
 
 
You belong to where illusion
abandons words and sound
weaves the coming season,
each intonation summoning
faint motion, pleading unequaled
knowing, yet forevermore
keeping to the path preserved.
 
 
You achieve symmetry of purpose
from swearing you are the emptiness
your confession contains,
every beginning consumed
by the sterile clarity
of thinking near and always
are how this madness is grasped -
 
you have the poetry you travel.
 
 
I move on, finished but breathless,
with the ritual fiction of sense
forming without lasting, final yet infinite.
 
Consonances are there,
tangible, if only in relation
to life remembered.
 
The time is now.
 
 
 
written 9.2-7.4.00
Dunfermline

A Raunchland Publication
2000
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