Verily! 'Tis Not A Pump

... but a doorway. A portal between worlds. A poem.

Laying down your head,

After a long day’s work,

Unable to find calm and

caught in anxiety’s grip,

You take the measure of your hearts beating.

Recording it with the legalistic exactitude of a religious dogma,

The creed of a purpose filled life.

Indistinguishable from the strategies and tactics

Of war.

As if the bloods procession of your body

Is a military march,

Rather than the whirling dervish dance of torrential flood waters.

Keep time!

Keep time!

Do your work and fail me not.

Dear friend, a man with a regular heartbeat is as dead as the man with none.

You think the heart is a tool of industry?

You think it is on the clock?

Thou fool!

Keep watch and see how it rides upon murmuring wings.

Dances atop ocean waves in the cool light of an October full moon.

Curls and twines and twists at the fingertips of a vine

feeling its way through the forest undergrowth.

It strains not.

It finds no honour in deeds.

It is its good pleasure to sing sweet serenade songs

Of crimson passion to arterial rivers,

Whose blushing waters carry the soft scent

Of blooming red roses.

Memories of dreams that the body forgot

In its waking.

In its own marching

To the spirit of daylight.

Cursing sleep and the moon and the night

For its lack of purpose.

But the blood never ceases to dream.

The Blue Flower colours its streaming return,

Blue with a yearning that arose from such dreamings,

And wanderings upon Venusian pathways.

A yearning for the hearts warm embrace.

For the outstretched arms of Tannhäuser Gate.

See now?

See how you have turned the temple over to bankers and business men?

Who declare that time is money.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

Keep time!

Keep time!

Do your work and fail me not.

The living temple has become a lifeless factory.

Concrete walls, stale air,

And the putrid stench of death-grey smoke that

Chokes and wilts and siphons life.

And you? You slap haplessly at an alarm clock

That sets your heart racing at double time.

Rubbing the haze from smog filled eyes you realise that

another night has passed

in which you did not dream.