KINDNESS four commandments and a caution

I
To be kind you must turn into a tree, and live very long.
Allow your roots to hang down into the air,
allow pecking and nesting,
the tying of prayer strings and the dying of paper kites in your branches.
Allow women to hug you, men to piss on you, lovers to carve their initials on your skin.
You must bear every act of insult, love or injury with the same unruffled expression.
You must have a hollow inside for those who need a place to keep their secrets safe.
And you must grow and grow and grow
until you are a book that anyone can tear a leaf from and turn into a boat.

II
There must not be premeditation.
You cannot hunt down the proposed victims of your act.
You cannot unfurl a map.
There must not be a ‘must’ behind your act.
But there must be an act.
A thought won’t do.
You must act, kindly, without premeditation, or artifice or hauteur,
without the consciousness of kindness,
you must be spacious and natural
as a meadow hidden behind a high-rise.
No asbestos sheets must shut out the trespassers on your time.
Every claimant must be a trespasser
and you must be guilty of love.

III
You must understand kindness.
Not confuse it with courtesy or charity, self-righteousness or vanity.
You must see kindness for what it is: abstract until committed,
pure unseeable surge of interior light.
You must leave it naked, not clothe it in your cast-offs nor seal it in a box.
You must face its terrible demands, watch the face it puts on in a crowd.
You must accept that it is mute, and eloquent, and unarmed.
Having seen its defencelessness in the face of greed
you must make your body its armour.
You must not reserve it only for the stranger.
You must let a gnarled, familiar hand take it between her claws and clasp it tight,
as if squeezing blood, or honey, from a stone.

IV
You must remember:
It is not an art.
Not performance poetry or stand-up comedy, open-mic or rap.
It’s a series of can’ts.
Can’t be hyper-linked, can’t be video-installed, curated, exhibited, animated, projected
or auctioned for brutal sums of cash.
You can but you mustn’t construct it with your consummate incandescent skill.
You mustn’t turn it into an artefact best seen in a certain light
in a heat-controlled corollary where the priceless things are stored.
It is priceless, yes, but for all the inflammable reasons.
Neither edgy nor immoral nor decadent,
neither amoral nor minimal nor surreal,
neither modern nor post-modern,
neither colonial nor post-colonial,
neither Marxist nor feminist, neither consumerist nor capitalist,
all it is … is … unlearnable, expressible, impossible, doable,
each time a different animal, alive and muscular and warm.

You must beware:
Kindness may be mistaken for pity, may be rudely rebuffed,
an old man refusing a stranger’s umbrella out of pride.
Suspicion: what does she really want?
Fear: you might pinch the lady’s purse as you help her dodge the cars.
Prepare: you may be punished.
There may be tears, extortions, retractions, accusations.
Who does she think she is? Mother Teresa?
All the world’s ignominy may be yours.
How then will you keep the kindness growing?
You won’t. You’ll break, you’ll stutter, retreat.
You won’t you must you may you will.
You will return, with another bowl filled to the brim
and you will wait for another passer-by to give you the grace of receiving,
and so, repay your debt.