two weeks ago in japan i sat on that Mountain
the bald young monk explaining zazen meditation
the release from past and future
and the silence of engyoji temple
teaching me the here/now
and here and now we sit in The Vales
a silence broken
by the eternal happiness of hi-5
on a blaring tv
which is everlasting
you my balding father
hair stolen not by time but radiation
you sit on the bed in your tracksuit pants
bulging with the incontinence nappy
below your buddha belly
your corporeal form shapeless as a toddler’s
i ask if you need anything
you don’t
all your physical needs met
in this daily malignant shallowness
the blastoma has excised your past
and your future is inoperable
you don’t remember who came yesterday
or what you ate for breakfast
you have achieved a kind of benign transcendence
only those around you
feel the eternal depths of sorrow
but you
are in the perpetual
Here and Now.
© rob walker.
First published in Friendly Street Poets’
After the Race (ed. Janine Baker & A. M. Sladdin.)
Also in tropeland (Five Islands Press) 2015
Also remixed as an audio-poem at