Now Wash Your Hands

However much we wash our hands to clean them
they remain dirty. As the above shows
our choice comes in measuring the dirt
 and aspiring in our awareness to choose the level
of dirt we can live with. 

A Man Died Today

(one of many), he lived with locked-in syndrome.
After a court refused him an agreeably
mutual and personal way to end his life
he starved himself and died of pneumonia.

For thirty years I had a friend and mentor
whom I knew only through phone calls
and letters. She did not do e-mail.
For having the urge to share
I wrote much more than her,
and I was happy to give away
my ideas. Even now, so soon after she has gone,
I forget how the stories poured out of me.
I was told after she died how she took her life
by self starvation and pneumonia.
Her closest friend (not her husband)
told me how on her last night she was taken
to hospital, was almost ritually bathed,
and had her final rest in the comfort
of crisp clean hospital sheets.

She too was locked-in, by marriage
and family, not considered to be a person.
More used as property without respect.

The quieter the sense of loss, the less recognised it is,
the more courage we need to exit on our own terms.    

Discomfort Is Inevitable In Life.

The older we get the more sure
we can be that it will arrive.
Often it obscures itself,
in how it comes to us.
What matter most
is that we learn from it.
Given that it is inevitable
I would prefer the pain
to come from the clarity
of honesty more than
the pain of misremembering.

The Primrose Path

of evangelical zeal
seems unshakably real
to those caught up in it.
But seen from the side
their journey is more 
a self righteous blindness
towards the choices of others,
denying the conditionality of reality.

The Oldest Of All Human Tools

Take your pick and don't shovel too hard with it,
 it is highly self limiting for everybody
to live in sexual monocultures.

 

In/Tolerance

Why does tolerance so easily
come to feel so repressive?
Because as we seek acceptance,
the tolerance that we are given
marks the line between acceptance
and rejection for who we now are,
which before we were newly 'tolerated'
seemed arbitrary and over-defined. 

In The Darkest Place

The smallest light casts the most contrary shadows.
Most of us don't want to know about these places,
or where they are, we are scared of the change
that comes from, even briefly, living there.