Karl Finch

poetry, short stories & anything in between Slowly getting back in to the groove after a long hiatus so excuse the level of output/quality for the next while. Thanks to all who’ve been following me over the years—much love. Lots in the pipeline so check back sometime... karlfinch.com / personal site, portfolio leftfield.cc / side project, mainly non-fiction & satire bruegelsweatlodge / detox journal & more personal alt.

[karlfinch]

[Intermission]

I’m still alive, or so my heart rate tells me.

I’ll be posting on this new blog for the time being—it’s still me, but it won’t be the usual stuff—which will be either of some or zero interest to you. I’m not abandoning this blog by any means, though, and I’ll be publishing again on leftfield.cc in the nearish future.

Till next time...

[karlfinch]

On Change

Generic haiku: a moment of Zen. Today: changed priorities.

[karlfinch]

Whirling Dervish

Rebirth: a lone cosmonaut crashed on a planet sufficiently familiar yet rightfully alien to leave any mind asunder.

Beauty: revelations triune, wholly bonded, caught in suspended moments, crystallised fireflies among chandeliers: divinity, absurdity.

Madness: is the one aware of their own lunacy the one with wisdom? Across such deserts of insanity, to leave voluntarily—what then?

Exit: months of wandering the zone departing, delving, departing again, as light is nothing without dark and dark nothing but for the light.

[karlfinch]

What the Trees Heard

I’m wandering again but know just where I am with the two-humped hill to the west in last light of a day in January and that lonely mound east already cloaked in twilight.

I walk with my father among the pines where we share words, the only sound in these woods. We talk without speaking. I’m not a good dad, he says. It falls no heavier than our footfall in the muddy ground we trudge. Side by side, we’re miles apart.

Back along the path, like that groundless one we tread and retread, the road takes us west towards the sunset’s inviting glow with the onset of dusk to our backs. Am I to take meaning from this? The brave buds already emerging upon their trees are eager, premature.

To know just where I am to the point of feeling bound to this land, body and soul, I ask myself how many times trees hear fathers and sons talk to one another without speaking at all.

[karlfinch]

Mud and Malice

I watched the sweeping of the ape / from tree to bush, earth roofed by canopy / and then by sky with its naked stars / who, like their gazers, had stories to tell / and paths to go.

There was the clearing of the land, / forest giving way generously, the laying of stones, / towers and walls rising as one man came / and then another, until the youngest child / lay dead in mud, in malice.

There was the tumbling of stones, / monuments falling into pits of ruin, / a nest for the phoenix of granite and iron, / a bed for impure birth— and again fledging, / soaring, in a moment beautiful, / in the next terrible.

There was the bird of broken nature / humbled only by faltering, losing its skyward hold / and with it the grace found among clouds: / grace and lightning strike to follow each man, / his triumphs remembered, his tragedies repeated, / until none was left to take his place.

I watched the wheel formed / and set turning, broken and remade, / its every part changed, a circle perfected: / but always the same wheel.

for Theseus

[karlfinch]

Disbelief

Oblivion seems the destination as I strain through hours that in turn strain me with no sun or stars above to tell of passing time.

All that moves are black waves unseen but felt as they roar in the tempest running its course in wait to pull me under a final time for the long and dreamless sleep.

Then comes the other, first in flashes, blades of light tearing down a dead sky as lightning strikes chaotically, but with some purpose like gods on chariots riding across the firmament.

In between treading water thick and salty, all’s afire, now a glow gone supernova. The rushing warmth building, blanketing my skin dry calms the fathoms, replaces them as it wrenches back the tide.

The devourer is devoured.

Behind blind eyes welded shut by white heat now I make outlines of futures and find a new fear: what could not be known instead of where before was only what could not be fought.

No resistance now, no need for struggle; no darkness except by edges of the map now laid out. Air stolen from lung no more, breath again, deeper than imagination’s best attempt, deeper than any sea of dread.

[karlfinch]

Cut/Paste (Just an Idea)

With measured tenacity and humility so arrogant we meet failure face to face, welcoming with open arms and not a little hope for the unsaid promise of lessons ________that make a superior being. Over every ________sound, word and motion, agony without ________guarantee and in spite of all profit is this ________youth, minds battlegrounds wired for ________________light, third eyes golden with sheer chaos, ________________dangerous thoughts and foolish ideas, ________________no wardens for personal vision to make ________________prisoners of mind or soul. Fending off ________hunger and all distraction, in captivation ________taken in by obsession and flow—the feeble ________body prone to wither and die now struck off, ________given to the wayside—then, where old ________________walls once stood, bricks are laid haphazardly ________________with nothing more than the cement of good ________________intention, no rules but that of thirds, no ratio ________________but that of the spiral, and it’s divine: to be ________unafraid of piercing skies to reach for some ________ceiling existing only in description, a mere ________stage curtain torn aside to meet suns ________with which to collide and become fireballs, beautiful starry sacrifice. Products of some imagination strange as the heads of their hosts that can only hope to be true to the vision of that mind’s eye as orgies of thought ________move down the pen whose ink dances dirtily ________across the page over all boundaries, a lit fuse ________bright enough to blind, to go bang or die in a ________smoky tendril: an idea is the greatest gamble.

[karlfinch]

Friend?

Eighteen months ago a simple message shared. Didn’t say a word to you since. Were my reasons good enough? Health complications, a good man dying young, is all I know. Didn’t say a word to me either. I’ll always trust your reasons more.

for Eddie

[karlfinch]

Rebirth

Northern sun hangs low as I nurture foetal flames beneath the skin of this tent where kindling grins orange, filling dark chamber with smoke harsh but welcomed— bleary eyes now: I could weep for the relief that fire returns. Let it burn; let it keep on rising.

[karlfinch]

Edison

Damn the calm glow from the bulb under which pen in hand basks, reigning over the night as it does while motivation lies scuppered and inspiration’s nowhere to be found.

Curses on the pool of white-blue ceaseless screens bathing the same hand hanging over keys like the victim of a spiderweb contorting in fear, then limp, lifeless.

I wait impatiently for a date some thousand years from now when maybe no diode, coil or filament can smirk with light that taunts me to relay every emotion in flight from a soul that screams for the rest darkness brings, mind’s inhalation of fresh air as marauding thoughts are laid to sleep.

[karlfinch]

Party of the People

There’s an ease in seizing what’s already in place. Others will forge your fortune by sweat or suffering. You could say it’s the way of the world you take every desperate effort to hold in place.

You’re the vulture so upright though lacking a spine. Overhead, all else beneath you, circling now until that time your flighty principles leave you again impatient to create your own carrion: the weakest of your own kind.

In shrill birdsong droning of prosperity and integrity you return to lofty nests built of lie and deceit, the gore of cowardly plunder still painting your face.

What a legacy to have to reduce a rich land to desperation, union to alienation from a House of jesters and crooks in the finest suits.

We can only wish it part of some greater plan and not the wallowing in the pigsty of power play at the expense of progress.

Have your words: the world looks on at this pantomime. Have your way: the only good citizen is a hopeless one.

12 December 2019

[karlfinch]

Rester

Through sunless winter days you sleep. On the short nights in summer you look for a place to rest a heavy head. Here and there on the pendulum swing of the passing year you cry without cause as if only to remember the sensation of tears.

The demons of the day— and you can’t count the days— immobilize you (so much force from something without form!) The weight of it— a mass of chaos and contradiction, furious, roiling— breaks you in an ending without closure.

In this featurelessness thoughts wander further only to return with words and the breath for you to carry them. (A long time ago some people believed that speech itself was magic, that words were spells.) You return to what crushed you, encircling it to find a misshapen face, expression fixed in soundless scream. It’s ancient, and you’re still young.

Even pushing against it slowly with your back to empty space, no response. Gravity speaks instead. In a world of push and pull you’d forgotten your own hands, lay down in a nauseating stillness while around you whole seasons passed, leaving their mark like the heavy things that crushed you.

[karlfinch]

Absent One

I’m impatient, but you’re late. The sky once naked is now clad— suggestively, somehow—in clouds unbroken by what the air itself seemed to promise. Days go by. You let me down. Every evening passing without growling thunder, without the baked earth ringing with the percussion of heavy raindrops, that tyrannous sky still the colour of cold sapphire, untouched by sweet stings of lightning strike— all because you chose not to come. I give up.

[karlfinch]

Another Admission

I’m defective. Let me join the old horses ready for rending, not out of self-pity (although I am guilty of this) but pragmatism. I am worth most as my weight in glue. Maybe, in a future form, I can bind small, disposable books written by a very specific demographic written for no one at all. Please, spare the argument; talk is cheap but glue is not.

[karlfinch]

Cicada

Seems we agree: the best time for anything is a summer night. You’re out with purpose, though, while I walk here with only half a reason. You talk almost without pause, but for my part I’m silent, content to listen— not even that— I’m just content.

It’s a tide, but one that only comes once in a while. For a moment I’m awash in that seafoam peace—the still air warm as kisses, the last of the lights— and your chatter. This is all my senses need.

I’ll miss it all the more, knowing what waits on the other side, and with it the thought of exchanging there for here, but I’m fine with it. You’ll be here, but the place could be anywhere as long as it holds this feeling.

[karlfinch]

Feels Like Home

Some grooves are so natural that they beg the question of whether you made the mould or the mould made you. Something of such smoothness seems only to invite the idea, exciting, foolish.

My envy is for the ones in temples made of certainty by architects of pleasing truths. It’s nothing short of bliss to walk beneath the dome before, in time, the weight of reality comes breaking through the roof, carried without coincidence by the light of day that carves up shadows and demands the petty sanctuary be rebuilt.

Out here I live to the sound of water settling in black earth, near enough to smell it, so close I sense (beyond heaviness or lightness) the weight of potential: the percolation of thought, a splitting seed splaying fragile-fingered roots down into the richness, while above, pushing past the safety of its soil, it finds the world where the great struggle lives as does the truth of being.

This talk of wide openness and such closeness to all that’s natural is only a temple of a different design, another monument to ego made of beliefs masking iniquity, a kernel of reality in a husk of ignorance.

[karlfinch]

Memories from the Summit

The heavy orange of the sun's farewell makes silhouettes of the hills pacing to where land follows sky. In this escape from day, formlessness and shade taking over in the steady march of dusk, the figure upon one particular hill falls into sight. He turns to look back your way, capturing your own gaze in his—though you couldn’t be sure, uncertain as you are that the distance between where you each stand could neither be closer nor farther apart. It could be dream or delusion if not for your own self standing there, the man on the hill, looking back at who he was.