8/ 30 More Fire!

How much more love do we really need?

Does it look like more stable marriages and less divorcees?

More faith to find a way though we disagree?

Should there be less tantrums about our wants and needs?

Is it about acceptance instead of accommodation?

Is it a contract without an escape clause .

Is it enjoying the meal in spite of the waiter

How much more love do we really need?

If it truly starts with you and me….

Is self-love a missionaries position?

Is there a bible?

What’s the core values of this religion?

Are the different types of love denominations?

How do we get to more love if some loves seem hateful?

When love shows its face why can’t some fall for it?

Mass produced in many ways, is it cheapened by brand disloyalty?

 

Your love and my love should have some common ground.

When and where can this so called more love be found?

Is it in the 18 years you stayed for the kids

Believed in second chances while refusing to forgive

Refusing to forget and let he or she live

What’s love if you’re going to act like ….well I love you too much to use you as an insult

It is uncaging, reincarnating, composing without imposing

More than doting on your yes men

It’ll give you more exposure than a naturist at a winter clothing convention

Yes!  Full of foibles, fantasies and awe-inspiring flaws

Love is adding a rug, unafraid to be naked when you open the door.

Out of love we go to war and in love, we find peace.

If love makes the world go round, it takes your will just to be.

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Blooming Marvellous

This week has been an inspiring one, full of themes and quotes that I could build poetry from. My favourite quote has been “Follow the contour of the road”.

The context was a driving lesson where my mind was over-thinking and I took a straight line through a couple of lanes.

Many times we embark on a path only to crash or come to a dead end because we want it to be a straight line. If we want to go into a different room of our house we have to turn a corner at some point.

It’s like life is a colouring book given to us with every colour Crayola could offer, yet we choose one and use it on every page. Not only that, when that colour runs out we try to re-create that colour and feel stressed because the other colours aren’t it. Let your beach scenes be just that!

For me following the contour of the road, like my perception of my writing, acknowledges that which is behind me whilst concentrating on that ahead.

I was moved to anger and sadness having recently learned, through a documentary, that my surname was given by British slave masters in Jamaica. That said, Positive Reflection has sandwiched the joy of my birthday and other accomplishments the last 7 days.

Confession time…I rarely use the word happy in conversations about myself. Perhaps it is a blessing and a curse at times that like my father, I’m a perfectionist at heart. Yet from passing my driving theory test to the surprises from my wife, my side of my family, and even from my team at work have made feel happy. I cried tears of joy a few times on my birthday, having felt a forceful combination of joy and contentment. I was happy.

A brownie cake baked by one of my team.

Maybe you’ve lived your whole life to the fullest using every part of your brain’s capacity, or maybe like me, you’re steadily realising where you’re at and beginning to make it better than it’s ever been.

The words Attitude and Commitment sum up my last 12 months and will be the backbone of the next 12, and the 12 beyond that. I left 32 knowing with an outline of the scenes I want to add colour to throughout my 33^rd year.  Perhaps the biggest challenge and change in this part of my life is committing to commitment.

If it helps, write down the new places you’ve been, things you’ve done that you didn’t do before. You might realise very quickly how much you have lived, learned or even want to do!

I love rhythm, find yours and Smile!

5 day Poetry Challenge Day 4 – Making It

This particular poem was written circa October 2004. Having discovered and fully embraced spoken word in 2003, it is one of my earliest spoken word pieces.

Realistic is talent to deal with harshness

Faith when you’re stuck in a camp like Auschwitz

You’re proud when it’s over but then you get a blessing

For you held on to grainy faith

Though you were at your wits end.

You may want to help the world…may never happen

Only way to live your life is like a lantern

Lighting others pathway

Just keep your head high don’t ever be trampled

And be a classic song…not a beat sample

5 day poetry challenge Day 3 – The Dawn

White sands fell between them

The morning tide kissed their foreheads

New palms bowed and curtsey in turn

Clouds yawned for the first time as the sky opened its eyes

The wind smiled like a new-born after its first feed

Time had walked the shortest distance from their wrist to their hands

Steady as the drizzle of summer rain, they breathed

Whispers tiptoed from their lips into the oxygen

Like hydrogen they ignited as understanding embraced

Good Morning,

Good morning to love said the flame

Finding their soul frequency retinas roared

Detonated heart beats battling soon soothed to an echo

Atlas had become compass in a blink

Yet this was Eden and it would be human to think

So they admired

The apple of their eye was a fruit of their spirit

They’d given lives to acquire the rights to the orchard

Merely breathing was deemed eating of the moment and

Building a city of roses required appetite so apple blossom became staple diet

Welcome,

Welcome to life said the Middle Tree

5 day poetry Challenge Day 2: Halogen

If vision is a picture of the future that produces passion, why not be a part of the camera?.

Like taking a stranger’s picture in low light, your flash can be a highlight or a lifetime acquaintance..

A memory of a moment that changes the album because it released with its capture.

An aperture for insight like a ramp to a mountain giving the taker a higher definition.

Are we open to being shutters? Quicker than Usain Bolt off the blocks

Sometimes our heads seem so big yet we’re quick to chop

When trouble comes our gift shop has the quickest shutter speed

We forget that we’ve got to be light to allow light to be

Being light there are days when we have dark nights of the soul

Sometimes we darken ourselves,

(And) Although our black hole can be vacuum packed with anarchy

Being light isn’t about being right, it’s doing right

It’s not an act, performance or blind conformance

You can be the torch that’s picked up in the time of a power cut.

A sense of direction for a friend or foe down on luck

Yet we are more than street lights

As sure as your light is not your light and life is not a bed of roses

Why burn for exposure when your wick, stand or circuitry may expose you

Are we too busy posing in the spotlight to realise this is our space to be a Mars Rover?

Seek light knowing good is to take flight,

A window to the soul might need a skylight

You can help a lightweight lift heaviness with a candlelight

Who doesn’t like being around a light

What we feed on can stop us being light headed

We might be matched up to burn so someone can say they found a light

Are you light headed

I write not as a head light but as a highlighter

Seeking to bring light to those think they’re light proof

Reading to make richer bigger pictures

In truth

I just want to play my part and make the load light

Seasons determine if I’m to be a floodlight or a flashlight

With the time I’ve left I know I’ll be alright

So that when mine goes out they can cover me with Matthew 5 14 and 16 to say

I was light

End of Season Wrap

Welcome to my end of year wrap, by the time you read this, it may well be 2015 where you are. If so, blessings of the season to you.

For me 2014 has been the punchline to 2013, a season of reaping and new seeds sewn.

On July 27th 2013 I got engaged, like the obligatory red rag to a bull, the creator in me was fully immersed in all creative aspects other than the wedding dress. Feel free to read the story of the engagement and see highlights of the day.

Late on 2013 I also realised that I’d been in a creative hole topically. In order to rediscover my creativity, I made the decision to mine something other than my relational past for poetry. The feeling of emptiness and reduced output was short-lived as I dipped into the 52 week challenge, a Facebook led year of weekly prompts. Although the ghost of relational past made a brief appearance with “19 stone smile”, I was able to dip into childhood and cast an eye on nature amongst other things. In the 2 months, I also returned to my early topical roots with Oscar Pistorius, Mike Brown and Eric Garner being referenced.

With the wedding planning being my 24/7 occupation, poems such as “The Invitation” and “Ivory Blues” were born.

Knowing that friends and family would expect poetry to feature in my subsequent speech, I wanted to craft one of my best ever pieces. Having resisted the urge to use lines that came to me on poems that could turn out to be the new “Dear Caramel” or “Inception”, it seemed to go well. I’ll post the text of the full 20 minute speech and some of the audio in another blog.

I hope you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read this year and hope you continue with me during the next.

I leave you with two words that encouraged me today “Be purposeful”

Adrian

The Journey (52/ 2)

With one hand I can count my roots.
What have I left? Who is right?
It seems day’s dressed as night
Isn’t the sun meant to be, The Christ?
Like an atheist crusade in Saudia Arabia, a cloud switched off the light
Where am I going?

If every paths been beaten, by walking them, am I adding to the torture?
These taut virtues taste like battery acid
It burns to speak in tongues in the temple of my thoughts.
So I make melodies from metatarsals and meditations
Striding alongside the reservoir of motivations
I bear my cross along side man made war
To weigh stone cold silences mistaken for peace
My ears swallow to make a sum of my failures
Where am I going?

From the mourning comes englightening
If hades is broad statements, paradise seems narrow minded
I drink the colours from the sky and define me.
Is it called insight when you’re blinded?
I know, If I turn left, I’ll find right again,
I know I’ll find my fight just when I write without aversion
Without purpose, two feats don’t make a legend
It says walk with me

Sure as some steps forward feel like blessings full of curses
Perseverance is more than a purse of verses
Sometimes I want to turn every cyclist into the Icarus of the Trent and Mersey
Disperse them to permanent immersion with a note that says, Today you received mercy
Yet smiles and saluations from strangers dispense these urges
The grass is only greener when my circuits start e-merging
Although I stumble dividing colour because this trip it seems so purple
I AM Going
To work