Sutra

The following prose poem came out in one go. I asked myself what I needed to write, and suddenly there it was.  This is rare in my writing life.  Having said that, there are elements - images and ideas - in it which I was aware had been 'brewing', so I don't want to give the impression that it was totally spontaneous...  It's truer to say perhaps that the writing down and the collaging of these elements was spontaneous.  Think I'm calling it 'sutra'....


There's a gap under the pulmonary aorta, left of the, right of the brain.  Like that rock-shrine under Nottingham Castle, sealed in 1535, where an alabaster Virgin weeps tears which may or may not have been milk.

Where?  Where?  Where is it?

There's a lacuna between the hemispheres of the brain, left of the, right of the pelvis.  A vacuum, a silence, like that snow-cave in Annapurna.  The last Yeti sat at the entrance to it and chanted a sutra.

Where?  Where?  Where is it?

There's a grotto even Freud can't reach, where you run out of the words to cure yourself - you spin the same old story till the point of it wears a hole in the universe.  You're like a grey-haired spider, creeping near the plughole, near the vortex of emptying bathwater.

What?  What?  What is it?

Call it the vertigo of Subatomic Space.  Or the chill of Deep Space.  Or Nothing.  Or Death.  Or Wordlessness  Or the Illusion of the Self.

Lightning can crack out of it, left of the, right of the

Don't even think of monogamy, or politics, or religion,  till you've knelt like a blubbering child at the edge of it and paid your dues.