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