The Mist Tree Read online



  The Mist Tree

  Poems

  Darren Drake

  Copyright © 2016 Darren G. Drake.

  All Right Reserved.

  Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favourite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.

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  First published in paperback 2016 Lulu Publishing Inc.

  Copyright © 2016 by Darren G. Drake.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Lulu Paperback ISBN 978-1-326-56632-6

  Cover design and artwork by Darren G. Drake.

  Backcover photography and design by Darren G. Drake.

  “We’re trying to break the language barrier. I’m not interested in semantics.”

  - Patti Smith interview, 1970s.

  Contents

  A Simbul for Colour in Earth

  Patti and Robert

  The Forgotten Vowel

  Ocean

  Childhood

  Lost Souls Found

  Artifice

  Codes

  Numbers

  Breathe

  Tides

  Crowd Psyche

  Protest

  Horse Sense

  A Synaesthesiac’s Symphony

  Composition

  A Soldier

  City of a Trillion Doors

  You, the Miracle

  Lake

  Bliss

  Vagrant, Traveller

  Candle

  Yes

  No

  Ritual Geotherms

  Paucity, Purity

  Amber Fluid

  Horizon

  Cloud Zone

  Drones

  Corporate Media Disaster Porn

  Wizard

  Market Day

  The Race

  Morning Restaurant

  Forest Portal, Wandering Sun

  Encounter with the Author

  Owners

  Dog’s Yard Hidden in a Forest

  Marid

  Seraphim

  Youth

  Wet Leaves, Magical Edge

  About The Author

  Other Books by Darren Drake

  A Simbul for Colour in Earth

  She understood implicitly, the delicate unfolding of Soul in a human world.

  A white world, barefoot in the snow on Christmas Eve in a distant country. Told to put shoes on or freeze, he did neither. Wine warmed hearts and skins.

  Invented in Colour, you and I take turns to remember the Ceremony, sparring on the slippery snow balcony. Untrained skill arises between us.

  My new friends are masters outside Time and need no accolades. Recognise their patient spiritual shield with no motif emblazoned. Seven tepees & aluna symbols on a painting above the fire.

  Mystical powers are here: do you see? Flowers in eternal bloom: you and I and the sun and moon. Living crystals. Dirt & Treasure.

  Close your cornflower eyes: change channels. The Simbul is in You, in us All. More than human, more than animal, element, science, art, concept, mark, moment. Beyond emotion, mind and reaction.

  The Simbul’s colour is Feeling.

  Seek the Simbul, the Ancient Sages hidden among us. Unnoticed more than secreted. Hiding in Plain Sight. Earth’s custodians.

  Maybe… you are one?

  Patti and Robert

  She was sainted by He. He was solved by She.

  Living together, finding each other again and again in carnival seashops, trinket stands, girlhood tokens, boyhood necklaces, intimate drawings, collections again and again in the Big Apple.

  Savouring each other. Wildling kids, running amok in the almost linear streets. Time has no handle on these Two.

  Poor but never poorly, broke but never broken, their Art was the Lost Vowel, the Black Timbre, White Noise. A careful photograph of horses, music for the blank wall they designed. One hundred discs they could dance to overnight.

  The silent song between them is Unconditional Friendship – a rope trick, like no other rope or trick before them. A calling, a need for their presence. They summoned themselves.

  “Did they get us?” asked Robert.

  “I don’t know…” answered Patti.

  The Forgotten Vowel

  A – a song.

  E – a bird.

  I – a tomorrow.

  O – a window.

  U – the river.

  Tuaoi – a Crystal overtoning the Third Ear.

  Ocean

  Irish heartbeat spinning drums up for this kid’s wild adventure. Grounding a new earth revealed as an always rolling textural.

  Pre-sane Elements, eyes gone in. Beyond it, before it. Uncolored understanding.

  Nowhere Land, Never Never Man. She comes to save only those open figures, standing plainly like the sun in winter.

  You have got to be kidding. This Sudden Empire can never be defeated. It doesn’t Exist because it keeps Moving. Heard and not Seen. Herd before a Scene. Herd instinct. Coils upon coils, unfolding around biology.

  The Far Land has its dead dreams deluged this morning. All Made Clean. Potion ocean dream seed sold on black markets to ordinary people.

  Here comes the Good Wolf, famished brethren following close.

  Oisin flies between worlds, a prince of the air. Water flows, earth builds & fluctuates, fire hardens and cracks: explodes. Dust whirring. Anthropological language failing. A thousand voices resurfacing from farmlands across the years.

  Childhood

  Her surrender into quietude awoke him. A forest portal opened, the Merlin stepped through. Sun in the treetops, chill fog at ground level, the Five began walking, the path winding ahead.

  Deep breathing exalted them. Cleansing the city labyrinths out of their bodies, their mind’s unravelling decades of video games and polluted drinking waters. Solutions appeared.

  Lost Souls Found

  Having and Being – a coin of Existence.

  Artifice

  Oh it is obvious. The fire is lit, the hearth swept, invitations sent.

  A bird trusting the wind to take the invitation where it is called. Blue, Purple and Gold dance, duck and weave.

  A Tall Boy strides gracefully along the road, dogs travelling the wake, towards the Factory belching black smog. He elongates. The doors burst open, slaves spill out, running, running, disappearing into the empty streets. The production line is unmanned, dehumanized, inert. A lone individual shivers holding the doorspace, afraid of unseen Masters, afraid of himself, who he has degraded into, the black pool, the brown lumpy wall. The loner, the foreman, frozen on the precipice of a wall, caged, forged a million years ago. Irresolute, woebegone.

  A Tall Boy arrives and stands still a hundred yards away, watching. Distance is no object. Time is completed. This door of illusion is closing.

  Codes

  The trace program is sent! Tracking the ghouls down the tunnels of The Mind. Burning out one by one, then hundreds, thousands, millions at a Time of Great Upheaval. Emotions burn clean.

  Symmetrical Fractal codes rewriting the Matrix of Control on planet Earth. Gaia arises, surfaces clean, nude, beautiful, serene, tender, wild, dignified. Custodians of Light emerge standing around her at every vector.

  Warrior-Sages walking through the morphing mists of Time and Place. DNA codes undulating to the dance of entheogens along the Mobius strips of awakening souls who accept their human life as it is.

  DNA resets, re-formatted. Ancient, oceanic memories emerge in new sequences. Circles spin, worlds unfold, rivers run. Ele-mets form and reform.

  It’s all been said Before.

  Numb
ers

  Overwatching the film, Lucy, daydreaming emerges…

  One plus one is Two: that’s all we’ve learned. But there has never been any numbers. We have codified our existence down to a level that we can understand, because we also know that life is unfathomable.

  Cells form, reform. Makes no difference, it’s all the same. The human scale is humanocentric, metamorphosing. The animal scale is animal, and animorphic. Humans and animals are Earthlings, friends of Gaia. Sharing life on Earth.

  Life is in a state of permanent change. The Changeless is Forever Changing. This is a good thing.

  A four-year old told me she wants to be a schoolgirl: “So I can do my numbers.”

  Breathe

  Listening on NightLoop to London Grammar…

  You can hope for a life that is calm, but come in time you are going to pick up one of the fields. Breathe in… breathe out.

  How does it feel to breathe through your heart? Breathe in… breathe out.

  It flickers in my head. The image of Light recalled, calling home. Breathe in… breathe out.

  Crossing oceans of time for you. Patience beyond, coming from beyond. Being Beyond. Breathe in… breathe out.

  Treasure this gold. The cloth we wear can be exchanged anytime, anywhere along this vector. Breathe in… breathe out.

  If you wait. I will trust in time that we will meet again. Breathe in… breathe out.

  From the air to the root, a bed that I own. Breathe out… breathe in.

  Deeper and deeper. More and more relaxed. The deepest dimension we know is Light. Breathe in… breathe out.

  Tides

  A story from the sixteen year old boy, upstairs in the school library, imagination streaming at the Teacher’s urging.

  In came the distant figure riding a horse across the lake on a narrow road. Impossibly, the horse’s hooves clipped the surface in rapid splashing staccato, yet the reef below was Possible. The rider flowed black with purple crenelated edges.

  The rider paused to regard me, roiling cloak slowly captured by the reef’s hidden path. The dark gaze undefined.

  I wouldn’t worry, you have all your life. I’ve heard it takes some time to get it right.

  A thousand times I watch the rider leave. A thousand times I don’t understand why.

  Don’t know what you are. Don’t leave me hanging on.

  Don’t need to know. Yet you stay.

  Crowd Psyche

  Keep it together. Winter lights, winter owls, winter hawk.

  A silent disco in a narrow walkway after dark in the city. Headphones on all of them. Girls really dancing. I mean enjoying it with friends, faces blissed. Boys walking the lengths, just feeling the energy of dance. Telling each other what they hear.

  Kids pouring paint on an obelisk in the centre of a black curtained room. Brilliant rainbow of Time, enbricked. Deindividuation nation embroiled in endless contrafiction. Get out. Stand clear, luggage doors operate.

  Protest

  Cover of Time magazine faking the Artist of the Year, with hit pieces on citizens in revolt. Silly clowns, these reporters. Hundreds of thousands gathered in cities, for hours all over the world, going unreported. Talking heads saying nothing. Have no fear, no anger.

  All is explained.

  The black business women doused in white plaster, gaping tears After the Collapse. Foremen running up Towers to the rescue. Patriotism codified by logo. Every collapse recycled by news networks, the never-ending horror movie right there on my Screen. No logo. Culture jammers.

  Capturing the revolution takes Time. The revolution will not be televised, unless logos are present. No logo. No capture footage. We won’t argue. Organized disaster. Corporate Media Disaster P:rn.

  The flower silently twirled in a Buddhist hand.

  The Hobbit homes off the grid.

  Horse Sense

  Oh ho ho! The crippled palsy girl, grinding her legs through dirt to the centre of the horse enclosure. Throu the dirt to the centre. She reaches out and the horse nestles her. Achieving her goal, she dies nine months later. She found happiness.

  Jesus, the Ultimate Rebel. Can you imagine if he had remained silent, living as a simple carpenter, no miracles ever seen, but certainly still happening? If you wait, I will trust in time that we will meet again.

  Shiva is here now. And his many friends. Shiva is Jesus: Jesus is Shiva: two souls as One. Same energy, thousands of years apart in Time. Living outside Time. Horse sense working miracles.

  The horses are on the track.

  A Synaesthesia’s Symphony

  Cross cultural philosophy of the Sense. Breathe in… breathe out. Colours merge, disentangle from laws, consolidate ancient moral codes. Wall murals done for patrons of the arts.

  Taste the sun. Hear your bones growing. Fluids are music we can understand, appreciate. I am the purple depths of the sea. I can feel. I can see centaurs, changelings, shapeshifters riding caravans into the bazaars of Constantinople, Kathmandu, Da, Alexandria, Visoka, Melbourne. I can smell the medicine of your orange peel senses. What if truth is a Woman? So very strange the ravages of empires, seeking to enslave the soul.

  Kids pouring paint on the red carpet. Mosaic religions prosaic. Colours do not line up. Blowing bubbles after hours in the celebration streets of your town. Lighting fireworks in the sands of your backyard with your Father.

  Composition

  Screen shot the past. Play Spanish guitar as a present. Future unfolding as needed.

  Are you composed?

  A Soldier

  Land, a dirty war. A battle neverwon, neverending. A little more Light installed by way of humble honour.

  In the corner of a distant field a grave is marked, “A Soldier”.

  Here lies a psychic surgeon.

  Here lies the dust of one who broke free, a Field Marshall.

  Here lies a leader who broke from the past, a Simple Man who Spoke Volumes.

  Here rests a Teacher who wanted to be a dog living with a happy family in his next life.

  Here demarks a frontier crossed by Unknown Soldiers.

  City of a Trillion Doors

  The astonishing child, the poet Homer never met. Embarked on a courageous journey, leaving few clues. Every poet makes sense, except this one. No country could hold him.

  This might tree cascading flowers in eternal bloom. Sigil and sign – marks upon the door, upon this page, trailing across this screen. Did you come for instruction or inclusion? Amusement?

  Rain never dissuaded him from travel. Slow and furious candle, fast and steady windhorse.

  The family without media, phones, television, news, distanced from negative indulgences. Gives birth to children who all follow their own Spiritual Path.

  The child painter grants attention to one painting for four hundred hours. Each meditation in sequence, unfolding multidimensional hyperspaces.

  You, the Miracle

  You and I are friends if you want it. Do you see?

  I won’t pretend to be a mirror if you won’t.

  I don’t care if you don’t.

  I don’t mind if you don’t.

  I won’t leave if you won’t.

  Curious to escape the fictions of an insular world, I walked the path of snails at night after rain. Realised that snails risk their lives to slide across the wet surface of concrete, taking advantage by moving faster from grass to grass.

  They move at speed when it rains. Just to feel the slide. The Beautiful Emptiness, so regal, the naïve risk.

  Heroic little creatures, carrying a spiralling home on their back. Once the home is brittle and rigid, having used up all the Earth around them, they discard the shell for other worlds.

  Do you see the miracle? Being and becoming, we are always in the right place.

  You are.

  Lake

  There is a real lake in a real land today that you may find if you like. Sacred to the bone. The Ancients gather there for concourse and healing. Counsel fires on the shores and in th
e druid forests. Women lead the way there and back.

  They feed you. They nurture your dreams and creativity. They want you to succeed. To be natural and essential.

  The Ancient Celts know.

  Go.

  Bliss

  After reason, before the end, is a place where you and I might spend. Spend? Yes, a gift, an exchange of privileges that everyone has stored. Sharing is the real mystery, the magic. It’s really not that hard to do.

  Requires your trust. Open, fragile, vulnerable, soft, flowing, endlessly renewed, immovable, interchangeable, ungovernable, unforeseeable, unencumbered, illimitable, loveable.

  Requiring a compass given freely, exchanged for experiences.

  Sounds like Yes.

  Vagrant, Traveller

  Oddly under the sea, the Nautilus is not drunk enough. On the surface going across ways upon ways, the Drunken Craft grows.

  On the contrary, the Nautilus shields its occupants from ever growing, and science here is stifling glass and expectation.