At 26 With a hole in my writing hand and no shoes to walk my poems in I thought I was Jesus. I slept in a dry creek-bed and spoke to the trees I found a pine plantation where they stood in perfect rows and I walked between them, speaking like a General to his soldiers, tellin those pines trees to stand up straight keep breathing drop the needles Back then I stitched patches onto the sky to stop it from falling I sat among the cedars and she asked me if I’d kiss my favourite poet Khalil Gibran before her I said yes but told her I’d get a tattoo of her on my rib cage in case I felt this caged in again I never did it, and you can’t tell even when I'm rolling in the dirt there’s a patch of clean skin on my body for everything I’ve ever been through I stitch myself back onto myself when things fall apart. At 27 I realised that dirt is the least dirty substance on earth I learned this while I was trying to dig myself out of a hole and bury the old me at the same time I guess it’s lucky I’m exactly 6 foot So when I stand in a grave I’m always half in and half way out All I need to do is tell the grave digger to go fuck himself pull him in by the shovel sprinkle some dirt say a prayer It was him or me He was the old me At 28 I walked into the abyss of depression with an Owl wisdom on my shoulder And as I did that Owl would sometimes feel like a wolf howling at me in the mirror or a fig tree bearing fruit once a season or a river, twisting around me, trying to drown me Eventually that Owl became a monument bronzed in the centre of my city with all of life’s architecture growing block by block from her Acropolis Now I sit on her shoulder and whisper metaphors into her ear and if I'm lucky she tells me she likes them At 29 I discovered money isn’t the root of all evil We are the square root of our own equations We calculate life by adding blame take offence multiply it by never wanting to talk about it ever again We're all so divided we forget to carry the one And I realised that Albert Einstein once said “If you can’t explain something simply, then you don’t know it well enough” I guess E=MC2 is the evidence I sold everything and became a reductionist With the money I paid off the ferryman He tipped his hat and let me pass And I like to tell people how I never looked back But of course I have we always do The next year I was so scared of turning 30 that I pretended I was still 29 for the first half or already 31 for the second It was my leap year – I loved a woman but told her it wasn’t enough I beat myself up longer than she did, until I realised that there are many languages in the world that don't have a word for guilt And while most people say "I think", and point to their heads I say “I think” and point to my heart I went with my heart – and for that there is no a apology But I realised why they say our hearts are the size of our fists, I used mine in self-defence, every time we made a connection, it felt like something connected. Karate for Karma Sutra Now I use that fist for clutching more pens and drawing much better conclusions. At 31 I quit everything saw my insides under a microscope I found out the answer to most of my cravings is a glass of water, a deeper breath, or a moment alone I moved to the ocean and spent hours with the planets I did what poets talk about: I became more simple A king in jeans. A kid who just really likes words Nothing more. Nothing less Eventually I threw a grandfather clock off a cliff to see time fly Because I realised it would anyway And I realised that our words don’t need to be heavy to hold weight it depends more on how you make them fall And I realised I’m no longer writing poetry, I’m setting up good silences I’m leaving space for you to fill in the gaps Every time I step on stage I spend less time speaking and more time listening to you listen to me In-between my words there’s the poem you were writing when I wrote this Just by living your lives - like we all do from moment… to this moment