Moscow Metro

Attention, the doors are closing.

                                          Announcement on the Moscow Metro

The metro map floats through the deep sea trenches of my mind, neon amoeba.
Every station is another opening and closing of doors, grim grand babble in our heads.
Faces, nameless faces, I need your foreignness to stimulate me, to lead me astray, to tantalize and torment.
My dreams are no grander than the next man’s, but I hold them oh-so dear. Everything continues without me: it is all Out There and I In Here.
Versed in courtesies of fear, I court the stillness, the stillness in the rush. Passions play blind-man’s-buff down here. Soft slow oneiric gloom beats my pulse down into trance. I am the fat priest adoring icons in the dark glass, fashioning the moment’s liturgy, with these shaman’s words about me like an ermine stole round a ballerina’s neck. Eyes coincide and glance away, cat’s cradles of intimate strangeness.
And is it true that when slaves are offered their freedom, some refuse in dread?
The quickening chaos, the pullulating mass, the protoplasm…swerve and dodge, defend your territory, hurry, hurry…and then the escalators’ stately purgatorial glide, and the faces jousting up and across, and the faces jousting down and across, licensed to stare, to wonder, to seek…each face for a second or two, no more, then gone, gone, and the sad trance surfs its own wave.
There, in the tunnel, stands a girl with her notice: Please help, my mother is dying. Beside her, another: Diplomas for sale.

Osmosis

The night owns us all, who make believe we own the night. And whatever those shadows are, they outrank us.
I too desire the prize supreme, knowing how scarcely I deserve it. Does love denied become a viper’s fangs?
Life, or whatever you call it, has its own designs on us, but…toil as you will and believe in the real.
All my life I have been compiling strange words, tracing roots, inventing languages. So why still tongue-tied?
The moment of meeting my own eyes in the mirror: courage, you have it, and more, no matter the falling.

Is This Seat Taken?

I don’t see you, but you might be there. Like electrons. Like protons. Like Bavarian castles in the air.
Please, if you don’t mind, let’s not argue whether black is a colour, or whether a tomato is a fruit. The living is in the dying. And tenderness, I pray, is not only a word.
My fingertips know more than I will ever know. So let them.

Irradiated

A life off the cuff, a scribbled crib for cheating in the exam, and so it staggers on, this suburban passion play, bad acting and all.
Do you feel a little queasy, a little out of sorts?
You could be out in the snows of Siberia, hunting wolves and swigging peppered vodka; you could be fishing from a little boat on Lake Baikal.
No deposit, no return.
Beauty’s believers have nowhere to hide but themselves. And so we run, we run and hide. Until a sad strange voice calls us home.

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In a warm place, in another world, the rainbow always wins.
Alone in my room, I grow a tree of silver. This is my experiment, my raison d’être. Mercury infiltrates the silver nitrate solution: a nun’s veil billows, then glittering crystal forests sprout from the druidical bubble.
The trituration of a moment is a delicate and lengthy process.
The roulette wheel is spinning.Are you playing Scobe’s Wager again? And you know the house will grind you down in the end,it always does, to everyone.
You will chase those losses, I know you will. You will play the chameleon, and lose again.You will stand and watch the ball spin on the backtrack and slide down the bottom track and bounce off the wheel head and into a pocket, but not the pocket you chose.
The tenderest delusion points me toward another black door.
Winter’s witness, I blunder among the birches, searching for something under the snow…I know it’s there, it must be there…

Tsaritsyno in Autumn

Who will tell of the architect’s tears?
Poor Bazhenov, the desired child born under an ill star, all his grand endeavours lost, ruined or destroyed.
I trudge through rain and mud, past stray dogs fucking, over the fairytale bridge, into the empress’s cancelled dream.
In this city of crooked walls and girls whose bums I’d like to bite, what fears and fancies are already taking revenge on me?
Certain conundrums trouble me in the small hours of the mind…effects without apparent causes…(I found a dead fly in the corner of my room last night, but never have I actually seen one die).
I know that I was born one day, one ordinary day, long ago, in a place far away, and that is all I know, or all I will admit to. The rest, of course, is theory and conjecture.
They say that all of Russian literature comes out of Gogol’s overcoat. Well, all of English literature comes out of my left trouser pocket.
I recite the names of demons, half-hoping for a visitation: Belphegor, Leviathan, Tenebrion, Arachula. Faculties, virtues, powers and spirits-all my being suffers silent changes.
Moscow, hunchbacked courier of sorrows! The skyline’s pouting frown adjusts my soul. I feel I am waiting- but for what?
And something will come-but not that. Something will happen-but not that.
My soul shrinks back, mourning lives unlived.
What has beauty loaned me for an hour? The knowledge of a smile. The Ark.
Once, once I believed, or thought I believed, in stars and wonders, in ineffable splendours …until the spider stole over me in the night.
The night gone, and the day gone, and what remains?
The stranger speaks with my mouth, gestures with my hands. What he is here for, no-one knows or dares say.
A killing kindness lives in love, a paper crown you place upon my head. And who are you to inaugurate reigns and invoke the holy auspices? Well, God, of course, the God of broken things.
Must every tale contain a moral? Is every skull a sign of death?
I loiter on a stray moment’s corner, offering myself for hire, waiting for someone to pay me for doing nothing…and then my destiny will be complete, my folly vindicated.
Scholars fash and fret over the origins of Russian roulette…but I know where the game was invented…right here in a backroom of my mind.
Another entertainment-and I know I won’t be satisfied for long-another world to conquer and destroy, and then a little song.
Life will be the death of me.
And still the Golden Fleece has not been found. Pray, read, work and discover.

kamakala

Kamakala is a Sanskrit word meaning "essence of desire","the yoni of the Goddess",and,by extension,"creation."

my poetry

I have created this site as a place to publish my poetry and receive comments on it.