When is a poem?

If a circle is not closed, what is it?
What is roundness when it is irregular?

There is always a gap between what we see and what we can describe.

Composing is wrestling what I hear onto paper –
with a similar gap. And into it flood my demons,
the voices that tell me I'm no good:
that the attempt to communicate is hopeless:
that what I write is, in any case, irrelevant.
In essence, that I'm a nowhere man,
making nowhere songs for nobody.

My creative powers are thus like a millimetric sperm
swimming on the world's egg, looking for an opening –
both aware that for fertilisation a loss of self-possession is required.
The intimacy of the process matched only by its impersonality.

My mission, which I chose to accept before I had any idea how hard it was to be,
to bring a certain vibration of spirit into the world,
a spiritual hum /om if you like – whose defining quality
lies in its unique apropriety to its environment and time.

Each room has a sympathetic resonant frequency.
Sounding the space requires that we identify it
and then glory cascades from the ceiling,
the walls disappear and we are in faery land.
So it is with humanity.
On hearing the right note we become our true selves,
and the barriers to all our possibilities disappear.
(Oh dear, how much the Judaeo-Christian concept of sin has to answer for!)

The challenge in each moment to Be Here Now –
when we would rather be anywherelse:
the past: the future: with someonelse:
anywhere but Here. Now.
And into this solitary unaloness we cram
the radio. the ipod, the committee meeting,
shopping – you name it.
Anything to be a busy body.
It's like living next to a spring
but drinking only bottled water.

The only thing that makes sense of life's chaos
is if we allow its spiritual harmonic to emerge
and attune to that note, realising its chord in our lives.
To find the sweet spot where everything makes sense,
and all our possible dreams come true in living reality
we need to study exactly where we are now.
The freeze frame - one 25th of a second.
There! That's it. Now I am truly present.

The challenge: can we unfreeze that frame
and live in the present 1500 times a minute,
90,000 times an hour?
Of course not. It doesnt work like that:
we have to take the dynamic of motion for granted,
allowing key frames to inform us
and trusting the bits in between.

Yet as an orchestra must tune to a common A,
so we must find our note by listening both
to human and spirit beings, detecting
the common note with sharpness of ear
if we are to play our single gong stroke
right in the world's gamelan.

Intunity is the perpetual now.
Now is a perpetual intunity.

And this, this circularity, is it a poem?
If it is not, what is it?