Archipelago of Consciousness
Geneva
I'll never remember
the day I was born.
The day I first walked,
I'll never have in mind,
or make it a memory
I can track back through time.
My first day of school,
the first smile on my face,
the surprise, fear and joy
of discovering a whole new world,
all these are lost to my consciousness.
And yet these first moments have made me
who I am, what I am.
They have been the ground
of my conscious self;
they have been the soil
of my imaginary worlds;
they have fertilised my mind
like a pollen of the soul,
and like the rain after a drought,
they have imbued my world
with a vivid sense of life.
Mission
Here lies the dirt that's made me.
Here stands the house that loves me.
Here dwells the soul of the mountain--whose
hair the forest,
limbs the torrents,
eyes the snowy peaks,
and breath the valley's wind--
watch over me as I erode
my way into life.
Carouge
Where the spirits go round and round
under the moonlight,
where the beauteous stars twinkle
in dissonant dances of destituted youths,
there I grow into a tree
and find my mythic voice,
and begin telling the stories
behind this my life choice.
Barrie
Becoming a young man
far away from home,
on another continent
that looks like another planet,
this was scary at first
and then became formative.
I lost my friends
and won them back.
I lost my self
but that one I never got back:
my sense of scale had exploded,
and a whole new universe had offered itself
to my curious mind.
I left as a child, and came back as a man.
It's cliché but that's what it was.
Limerick
In a community where languages
no longer separate but bring together,
I learned to live with others,
to drink with them,
to laugh with them
and play with them
until my words would evaporate in my mouth
before I could even speak them.
The Irish language is still a mystery to me,
despite my immersion in its home country.
And yet I cannot but think that some of its essentiality
has tainted my eyes shamrock green
and my blood guinness brown.
Grand Saconnex
Here I have found independence,
where I thought none existed.
I have found amour à deux,
which is like mass to gravity:
something that exists in the abstract language
of concrete thinking.
Here the dimensions of my self
have grown manifold.
My prospects have grown deeper
and deeper
and deeper
until the tunnel vision of the landscape of life
became a vibrant thread of immaterial matter.
Canberra
An exile.
A journey into the mechanics of introspection.
A walk through the forest of thoughts that populate the ecology of my mind.
A solitude that lets me feel
the vibrations of each and every cluster of life
wherein meaning shimmers into sight,
wherein voices of the world echo the voices inside.