life

Capital

you reach out a hand to pull sky down
the stars, yes the heavens themselves
are but bread to you, so break it,
break it all upon the ground, shake this
broken universe until it begs
for release
from the ungodly bass
of your voice; your ego polishes its own
brass to trumpet a truth that none can
fail to recognise, once they are
dead and behind you (the wild wonderings
of a world which did not want
to be owned flash brilliantly, widely
once
and are gone) for you desired
More.

c. Kate Gough  11/5/19

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Realism.s

My own particular brand of bleak
is firm, and unambiguous enough
to recognise our dark as a basic truth:
the world-rending fire of the human soul
is fearsome, yet only another face of the
death seeded so deeply within us.

But bleak is neither black nor white,
only barren — and what is barrenness
but testament to another aspect of all-
extant life?
child, richness, burgeoning and love
are never-not, always
drawing changes toward
fullness and bursting and
birth ~

If you are a realist in
any real way, these things cannot
completely escape you
except by prejudice, ignorance
or despair.

Future is not future, per se,
it does not fix,
or justify,
or do-it-better-this-time-around;
it belongs to none
today, but only to itself, for who
can live in it, truly?

Future is Faith,
no more,
no less.

c. Kate Gough

2/5/19

Potent.ial

at the end of days
all days, including today,
I am terrified of tomorrow, as if
every sleep is a death, a
dreamless, black hole that will
drain away and shadow all future
colour and
life ~

I know it not to be so, but
there is knowing and there is
knowing, and until I find the peace
to face this most elemental, daily
change
all my dreams will be grey and
formless, trailing away like the final
thrashing tail of my hurricane psyche
lost, mad, howling in grief
for things never born,
for the changeless,
barren,
void
~

c. Kate Gough

1/5/19

Pores

The world gets into our pores
and writes on us

lines with the clay of
earth, warmth of sun
bite of wind caress ;

sorrow & joy clog our faces
with our insides, the experience of
our lived Grind:connected.

Existentially, we are slow-born sculptures
that tell of a daring hand
a fiery eye, laced with Power and Love

Why hide it?
you can tell a lot by the face of a man
who hasn’t washed it all away.

c. Kate Gough

Grey

 

I’m still in this place. Sometimes it seems I never leave.
*

Gallery, 2014

Imagine, if you will
a gallery piece
installed,
a row of plants at progressing
stages of growth, lined up in
pots and flash-frozen in time, breathing cold puffs,
crystalline
almost synthetic.

Imagine also
the moment the exhibit
starts
to disintegrate, freeing
gouged and frozen cells one by
one by one by
one in
unwilling surrender to Death
nutrient-free, famished, value
less.

Imagine, if you will
our lives, taken
out of sine, cosine, curve:

motion
less.

 

~ KG

*

Everything Unresolved

—
“…I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
—
–Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903 [Letters to a Young Poet]