Peanuts in shells

I grew up in a world where peanuts were in shells:
you had to do the work to get them out,
share with squirrels in the Company Gardens,
then take the train home,
and walk the necessary steps
to your family door.

I have tried to shell my computer,
but nothing's inside
there.

The data's unbelievable, really,
hardly makes sense.

And there's little to bite into.
If you can smell a single peanut
in that forest of mumbled trees,
good luck to you.

They told me a black cat meant
bad luck. I tried licking that tongue-
twister.

I'd sit down with a real person, if I could
find one, and shell a few things, with that
special one, and find a taste that belongs
to us.

You can screen a candidate but not
a friend.
And I will never accept that the loving things
in living
can be computed.
And now I go to make a sandwich
the content of which
you will never guess.

I'll share it with a friend, as I once did,
long ago
in the shadow of a telescope
glancing up at a night sky,
while I bit into a hunger of
chutney and cheese.
At two in the morning, that's not bad.

But now I'm thinking all the way back to
peanuts, unshelled,  and my life's story-teller,
on the train back home.
I remember, she hurt her finger in a
slammed train-door, steel on skin.
And I hurt, too, for that finger,
all these years later,
wanting to get that inner thing out
in a world that no longer
separates the work from the wonder
of that inner thing,
even if it's a
peanut.

Before the beginning

I've been forced often enough to test
my thinking mind.
Even after trying hard, I can't say I understand
much.
I've been made to feel my feeling mind in cruel ways,
and encouraged also, in kindness.
I learnt about the bridge between body and mind
in that kindness, and I still have the key.

I have a confession:
my body believes
nothing,
yet knows that
before its conception
the heavenscape we call God
was, and still is home.

When death baffled me completely,
I asked Christ for truth,
and learnt that Logos has little to do
with language, and that most of us
miss meaning almost entirely.

What moves us is something we can't
say.

Before the beginning,
I Am.

The scales of biological basics inform me
each morning that my percentages of
bone, tissue, water and density
declare what I seem to be alone in
saying to the other side of skin:

we sense beginnings, and endings, they're
important.

But even more telling is the truth of what goes on
before the beginnings and after the endings.

We don't really have to wonder, because we've been to
these stations, and the fear of them
isn't necessary.

Tomorrow morning, before we make coffee,
'and after the final mouthful,
let's go the whole way,
weep for humanity,
and try again.

When the body speaks.

The language I speak is seldom from the heart because
no-one taught me that.
Neurons are tuned to current news
as soon as they are born. 

There are two languages that speak through me:
the formal one my brain and tongue conspire,
together with a history,
and one other private one
that's me.

When the body speaks,
it's not brain and tongue,
larynx and voice-box
echoing idioms and idiots.

The body hungers, aches, angers and
pleasures each season and circumstance,
and lives joylessly, or carelessly,
or seeks the secret we call
love.

The heart is the one
real place,
reflected in the face,
no matter how good a liar
you are.

When the body speaks
it's different to the
patter and purpose of others.
It knows not something,
but everything.

We don't go there, easily, because the heart has something to say about
living and dying.
It's a language few want to learn.

When my body speaks,
I am surprised to learn that
the heart is feared more than the tongue's
temperature.
The two-edged sword isn't wanted
in a world of swirling words.

If humans have one heart that beats for all,
as I was taught,
and I think that this is true,
I look carefully at each and every face,
and consider how the core of you
goes on.

Some could easily toss this aside,
and say it doesn't add to anything real.
But I would say that when the body speaks,
that what you feel
has a way of hurtling through  heart,
past brain, tongue, langauge, learning
to places 
intended to heal.

Beacon

Within each one of us there's a
signal. Some will be tuned to it,
others not.
Sometimes it's a brightness,
sometimes an
ache.
The soul is
what it is.

The beacon of what I know and
love
is sure,
and recently I have found the black water of
knowledge to be a
better reflection
of the facts against the
fictions.

I was told about so many truths that turned out to be
rippling waves, carrying
your beacon.

And when I asked who you were,
and how to meet you,
the sea said something in the language of
itself,
and the travelling light spoke in
silence.

Yet I am filled with your signal,
the mother of every message,
and I wonder why my heart is filled with
so much missing
when you are close.

Referee

He stamped his foot, raised his hand and called
"That's it!"
and in that split second
something quite else
was decided in me.

The game went on, quickly,
but something in my universe was
changed,
my neurons knew that
I would catch up with this
impatient image.

How suddenly a ball can change
direction!

O taste and see

Is the surface wet? my friend always asked.
He lived on the slopes of a high mountain from where
he gazed at the ocean of our home.
He had a condition that immobilized him
there. I admired his house, it was extravagant, yet comforting
to him, and also me.

It's not really a question, I'd reply.
If you touch it, you enter it,
you can't avoid wetness when you're
that close. And the surface isn't what
it seems. It just looks like that.

But he was never satisfied. He'd gaze and ponder,
wondering what the actual feeling was.
Here, I'd say, put your hands under the tap,
you know what that's like.
Not the same, he'd mutter,
that's my own water.
I want to feel the ocean.

We spoke of swimming, sharks, seals, dolphins and
currents with their causeways of cold and warmth
circling our planet, having made it what it is. Crabs, seaweed,
wrecks, rocks and deep things we'll never see for ourselves.

And always his question:
is the surface wet?

We saw shimmering dawns, gleaming sunsets,
days of dreaming and nights when city lights were stars
against the moon's speech, uttering some mysterious thing
onto that surface of which he required something
I couldn't answer.

I had always wished for ways to take him down to
find out for himself.

Is the surface wet?
Exasperated, I'd say, if you plunged in,
you'd know the difference between surface and
sea.

But that was unkind, he had a condition whereby he
couldn't leave his home.
And I liked his home, too.

When I now walk the beaches, and look towards where
his house has been,
and feel spray dart against face, eyes, and ears,
and I open my central self
to his question, and oceans turn so many ways
within,
I am tempted to swim out as far as I can go
as an answer to
the surface of his query.

It's easy if you've been there,
but difficult to explain.