A Collection of Thoughts over Time

(in no particular order…)

Gary Townsend
 1994

On My Way Home

You are so warm and real

Unlike when I had to close my eyes
To bring you closer to me

I have seen places people dream of

And I've touched and felt things
That people sell their souls for

But nothing compares to you

Not the warm pulse of the Camden
Nor the cool breeze of the Hudson
Or that crystal god-like Erie
Can match what I feel looking at your warm sleeping face

Your hand wrapped so perfectly into mine

Sealing my divine contribution
I look at you with unbearable love
Impossible commitment and
Total sacrifice

And I don't ever want to have to dream again

To make you real
 1994

And You

I so often want to reach out and touch you

Like I know you

You rescued me twice

Fed me a breath of life
Simply by what you gave me

I forgive your stumbling

And admit my careless understanding
But I know before YHWH
That if I had another life
I would deal with it more preciously
Except for its two constants
Only you could produce

Thank you so much for our Seer

And my Jewel of the Nile
And you
 August ’97

111 & 4th – NY.NY

Think of that quaint loft often

And how you filled it that October
As we sat in her window
Looking down on an endless stream of lights
That both of us vowed would never touch us

I felt secure as I loved you that night

And as I reclaimed your eyes
With everything that makes it shine

Read all your letters once again

Almost as if I deserved only thoughts of penance
I must have lit a million candles in my head
Since that fateful August day

I only now understand that it’s the painful things that time heal

While the curse, it seems, is the warmth I can’t forget

Xian, I believe, could so easily have had

The Turtle bear the Yin-Yang instead of the World
But it couldn’t
Because, for just one moment,
There was no other way…
 30 November 1993

Infantile Seer I

You the apple, the centre of my light

My brave warrior
Seer

I wish I could match your timeless patience

And unconditional love

Like some ancient truth you gave me back my life

By your very existence
And as your namesake and more
You compensated

I remember so much comfort in your voice

And those three letters stuck to a crate

I can still hear your tiny voice pulse out each question and answer
Till you lay with that curly head stuck to my chest

That brown cot and those pots

And those lids
Always pointed like some beacon to your island
Where you’d sit for hours just thinking your thoughts

I look at you now as I looked at you then

With so much love and respect

And when I came so close to losing you

You spoke to me in my waking moments
And in my sleep
And like an angel you insisted I never give up

And like the seer you are

You where right again
 Infantile Seer II

You, the apple

The centre of my light
Brave warrior
Seer

How you kept me focused

Even when you were jolted from my side
With a strength so well beyond your years
I still need to understand

And when God gave you back to me

I took your eyes and your smile
And carefully handed it back to Him
As I promised I would and,
As He promised, never to let it happen again

And as I watch time carefully move us away from it all

I so often have to pause
And look at you

To realize just how much He meant it - like I did

When my hollow heart, and swollen eyes
Were all I could offer Him

You will always shine like His light in me

Consume my thoughts
And make loving so worthwhile

My apple
The center of my light
My brave warrior
Seer
 02 December 2000

Infantile Seer III

You, the apple

The centre of my light
Brave warrior
Seer

All I have left in me know is a prayer

So typical of someone raped of all choice
In this dull and cold place

I never dreamed that your Faustian choice

Would hurt as much
Or your time alone, away
Would dull the Seer in you

And here I am again, so close to losing you

No longer to some tangible
That I could physically restrain and destroy
But rather some disembodied, odourus, pungent intangible

Please speak to me in my waking moments

And in my sleep
And let me help you smile again

I still look at you now as I looked at you then

With so much love and hope

You will always shine like His light in me

Consume my thoughts
And make loving worthwhile

My apple
The centre of my light
My brave warrior
Seer
 23 June 2009

Infantile Seer IV

You the apple, the center of my light

My brave warrior
Seer

I remember how you voice comforted me

I remember when God gave you back to me and how

I carefully handed you back to Him

I remember how your Faustian choice broke the will in me to carry on

And when I came so close to losing you again

You spoke to me in my waking moments

And in my sleep
And like an angel you insisted I never give up

And like the seer you are

You where right again
 12 August 1998
Mickey

I saw you so clearly in the shadows

With the blossoms and the mangroves
And your warm tones

And when I least expected

You came along and made me take
A sudden leap of faith

Like something spiralling

Meaningfully upward
You, quietly and deliberately, forced away the moonlight
And let in only yourself

Just like I always dreamt it would be…

And then, you left as well…

In your famous victim blue raincoat

So here’s to the appellation you’ve callously wrapped around my neck: “If you want a lover, I’ll do anything
you ask me to. And if you want another kind of lover, I’ll wear a mask for you. If you want a partner, take
my hand. Or if you want to strike me down in anger, here I stand. I‘m your man.”

04 February 1994
A Letter for You Dad

Daddy I'm dead in my centre since you left

I felt so strong and assured on that day
That your lifeless body
Drew us together

I sat in your room

While you lay in a box
In the room that you lived in and
Breathed in and
Made me feel strong in

I miss you so much

And my mother’s tears and your wife’s broken heart
Seems to break more and more as your memory fights back

And when I looked at my son on that cold lifeless day

I saw through his eyes what my dead body could
do while my daughter, your flower, only saw angels
flying and God softly speaking and Jesus and mommy and everything clearly except for that cold lifeless
box
In your room

Then they took you away.

But I held on like only your strength would allow me
But it pains even more now that time tries to heal

And when mommy asked me to hold on by looking

I knew, like my son and my brothers and mother, that
nothing as lifeless and cold as that box in your room
would deny me my memory of you on that warm Sunday morning when you looked like I know you
and spoke like I hear you
and laughed like we still laugh around that square table each Sunday forever

Last Sunday I sat with your wife and my mother

And both of us cried in our hearts as our eyes let
us down as we spoke of your right to have been
at that table with us
Not some hole in the earth

You see dad it's alright now, I think, because

Jade knew to tell me that one day
When Jesus, runs out of people to go home to see Him
He'll find it in His heart to “bring” us to you
 31 August 1988

DOG

Through what we give to life

We try to find that one small optimism

That would help us free ourselves

From ourselves

And in so doing, if possible,

Help to assess and

Judge Him

This is for you Mac…

 27 August 1992

For Seth and Jade

I have to keep those stars flowing from your eyes

I vow never to compromise your faith and trust in me
All I need the two of you to know is that I really
need your love to keep me strong

I only believe in your love

I only trust your love
Wherever we go in time
However we reach that place

I promise

I will need nobody else but the two of you

I will do anything for the two of you
Give up my share of eternity just to be with the your
laughing, smiles, sadness, warmth, trust, fears, ...
I want us to simply fly away from everyone
But I'm bound by the pain that would bind the two of you to your womb
I feel we have been chained to our freedom
But I'll do it for the two of you
 1993

yIN yANG

It feels like shades of something

When I look into your beads of light

I grow reluctantly as I confuse your warmth

I have never known how to submit with pride

Until I met your proud submission

You rattle without shaking

While my fears turn you on

You are so ambiguously needed

You siphon even while you refill

I see my cloud

And my silver lining

 27 September 1992

Nerak

You see these are the lies and the shades of truth

I am sure you shelter a part of a fallen creature in that heart of yours

Even when you touch on the truth
I feel that hidden numbness inside you filter through
While all you conjure up is you
And for you and by you and to you

Your claim to love is as self-centred as a junky living it up to die

You live the lie

You cast the shadow
You promise clear skies and then rain
You look at status and not the heart
You look at a husband not a friend
You look at children not an extension of your love
You look at a house and not a home
You look through me and never at me

Most times you don't even look at all

As a South African in the early 1980’s I would have been imprisoned had I insisted on being at my son
Seth’s birth. This broke my heart immeasurably. Jade, my eldest daughter, was born just after the Mixed
Marriages Act was repealed allowing me to share the experience of her birth and in many ways, purging
me of much of the bitterness. At a conscious level I wrote these words for Jade but somewhere woven into
them was the hope that my country’s liberation would happen for the sake of Seth, Jade and now Jessica
and Simon. It happened in my lifetime.

15 October 1992
Nina
When I saw you force your way into this world
I grew a million times
My mind thought clearer
My heart beat stronger
My love was perfected

Every day I watch you grow into this wonderful person

I only have to look into your eyes
And listen to that violin-like voice
To know I love you

Your little body houses a legion of privileged angels

Who frantically rush around to help you laugh and talk and see and love

But only you can say "Daddy I love you" the way you do

I love you more each day girl

I love you when the rain comes and the sun shines
I love you when the tears flow and when there's
Laughter in your heart

I love you when you touch me with those tiny hands

I love you when you sleep and your soft breathing

Heats my skin

I love you when you dream and share it with me and the night

I even love you when I love you

 1991

Tin Man

Winter is much colder this year

Even the poplar has broken her yellow-green promise
Heat from old rays glow in this darkness
So damned empty

Take many years and think it away

Sprawl through suburbia with the mask of an experience
And confidently wallow in gullible eyes

Was I as strong to recreate matter from words and thought

I would conjure up peace as well
Or maybe some frightening truth ...
A spectres shadow

This open silence only bedevils

Its poles shift constantly
Colliding, convenient guilt

Ultimately it's easier to give up than fight.

Triad

Whatever happened to the simple

One plus One
An imploded paradigm
A total miscalculation
I concede.
I have tried to quantify the impossible
I do not have that capacity...
I have a greater capacity
To shift a paradigm to a
One plus One plus One
 27 November 1993

The Fine Art of Wine

Two heads and a GRAND piano

One severed at the chin
The other faceless
It's the palm
I think
That sees
But outside
It's warm and quiet
And inside...
Even warmer and quieter

This is for you Trix…

 10 August 1992

Little Wing

There are shadows on this hill

So many dark rimmed clouds
But the sun must be out there somewhere
Please don't let me sleep before the clouds dissipate
You need a house on a hill
With a stream and a bird
You need to sacrifice
For the world and love's sake
You need to be free
From love to find love
You need to find what you have
Away from what you have

No one has ever touched me quite the way you have

`Little Wing’ please don't fly away...

11 February 2002

The Chad

If you’ve ever looked into a storm

You’ve seen my baby
Only scarred by life’s choice…
She keeps tearing around
As she chooses to scatter her warmth
In sequences and colours
And variegated self
Only because they can’t
And simply because… she can

If you’ve ever tried touching a cloud

You’ve touched my girl
Only real by her choice
As she floods everything in quite tones and jarred contrasts
And ever insisting self

Only because they can’t

And simply because… she can

If you’ve ever tried seeing an angel

You’ve seen my baby
Always healing by her choice
As she clears out the clowns…
Ever cautious and deliberate…
And with usual flare…

Only because they can’t

And simply because… she chooses to