At 26
with a hole in my writing hand and no shoes to walk my poems in I thought I was Jesus

I slept in a dry creek bed and spoke to the trees

I found a pine plantation where they stood in perfect rows
and I walked between them
speaking like a general to his soldiers

telling those pine trees to

stand up straight keep breathing drop the needles

Back then
I stitched patches onto the sky to stop it from falling I sat among the cedars
and she asked me if I’d kiss my favourite poet Khalil Gibran before her
I said "yes"
but promised her I’d get a tattoo of her on my rib cage in case I ever felt this caged in again

I never did it
and you can’t tell
but even when I’m rolling in the dirt
there’s still a patch of clean skin on my body for everything I’ve ever been through:
I stitch myself
back onto myself
when things fall apart

At 27
I realised that dirt
is the least dirty substance on earth

I learnt this while I was trying to dig myself out of a hole and bury the old me at the same time

I guess it’s lucky I’m exactly 6 foot
So when I stand in a grave I’m always halfway in
and halfway out all I need to do is tell the gravedigger to go fuck himself

pull him in by the shovel

sprinkle some dirt
say a prayer

it was him or me He was the old me.

At 28
I walked into the abyss of depression
with an owl of wisdom perched on my shoulder And as I did
that owl would sometimes appear like a wolf howling at me in the mirror
or a fig tree
bearing fruit just once a season
or a river
twisting around me
trying to drown me

Eventually though
that owl became a monument bronzed
and in the centre of my city
with all of life’s architecture growing block
by block
from her Acropolis

Now
I pray at her alter
and climb onto her shoulder
and sometimes I whisper metaphors into her ear and if I’m lucky
she tells me she likes them

At 29
I realised that money is not the root of all evil
we are the square root of our own equations
we calculate life by trying to
add blame
take offence
and multiply it by never wanting to talk about it ever again

We’re all so divided we forget to carry the One

And I realised that Albert Einstein once said

If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t know it well enough

I guess E=MC2 is the evidence
I sold everything and became a reductionist
and with the money
I paid off the ferryman
he tipped his hat
and let me pass
and I’d like to tell people how I never looked back but of course I have
we always do

The next year
I was so scared of turning 30
that I pretended I was still 29 for the first half or already 31 for the second

It was my leap year

I loved a woman but told her it wasn’t enough
I beat myself up longer than she did until I realised that there are many languages in the world that don’t have a word for guilt

And while most people say I think and point to their heads
I say I think
and point to my heart

I went with my heart and for that
there is no apology

But I realised why they say our hearts are the size of our fists
I used mine in self-defence
every time we made a connection

it felt like something connected

Karate for Karma Sutra

Now I use that fist for clutching more pens and drawing
much better conclusions

But I realised why they say our hearts are the size of our fists
I used mine in self-defence
every time we made a connection

it felt like something connected

Karate for Karma Sutra

Now I use that fist for clutching more pens and drawing
much better conclusions

At 31
I quit everything and saw my insides under a microscope
I realised the answer to most of my cravings is a deeper breath
a glass of water
or a moment alone

I moved to the ocean and spent hours with the planets
I did what poets talk about
I became more simple

a king in jeans
a kid
who just really likes words

nothing more
nothing less
 

eventually
I threw a grandfather clock off a cliff just to see time fly
because I realised it would anyway

And I realised that our words don’t need to be heavy to hold weight - it depends more on how you make them

fall

And I’ve realized that I’m not longer writing poetry I’m setting up good silences

I’m leaving space for you to fill in the gaps
when I step onto a stage I spend less time speaking and more time listening to you listen to me

in between my words there is a poem you were writing when I wrote this

just by living your lives like we all do

from moment 

to this moment