Event Horizon

This is where things get tricky- no, impossible.
The boundary. The edge.
Look- do you see that object falling towards it, falling forever, never quite reaching it, somehow slower and slower, as the redshift increases to infinity, and the intensity diminishes to zero, and you, you receive the doomed object’s last photon yet will never see it cross the horizon.
Or perhaps you yourself are willing to fall? To plunge over the edge, into the blackness, to the centre? And suddenly the mass of the hole has increased; the electric charge and angular momentum have changed.
And nothing escapes. You are not coming back.

Harbour City

Hydrofoil streaks a foamy curve
Across the harbour, out to sea,
Towers gleam and windows flash,
I am breathing blank light,
Seeing the world though glass,
And voices echo from far away
Right next to my ear.

Complexity, my awkward muse,
Bedevil me how you will,
And I will turn the pain to glory.
This age of unreason adulterates us all;
Smirking swindlers set out their stalls,
Peddling deception to make a killing.
Superstition wears the imperial purple,
Wields the scepter with mad abandon,
Promoting its minions to every office.
Long live the three-card trick, we cry!
Like a bored girl bewailing dreary fate,
The world is always eager to be taken,
Seduced by some flamboyant rake,
Used, abused, debauched and abandoned.

The soul needs long journeys to breathe in,
Long hard journeys all across the map,
To all kinds of places, a thousand points in time,
From creation to destruction and back again.
What time is it? What time is it?
Suspended in liquid, I congeal into globules.
Wherever I am, I am passing through.

Is the answer at the bottom of a beer glass
Or on some mountaintop?
The root of every impulse is pain.
Affinities and affections
Are the measure of my days.
I miss my friends even before I have left them.

I was born of the sun’s largesse,
A pharaoh doomed to die,
At midsummer’s behest.
I spend my lifetime building a pyramid high.

Freefall

When the aeroplane explodes at thirty thousand feet,
I want to be the one who falls to earth in one piece
And sits up in a hospital bed,
Modestly recounting my story to the press.

Newtonian forces aid my descent:
Spread-eagled at terminal velocity, I fly home,
The ground coming at me so hard, so fast,
I aim to make a perfect five-point landing.

Rational World (Written on a MacDonald's Napkin)

Choose your life from the menu
And join the queue.
This is Paradise,
And you are paying by the minute.

Do not disturb my clean safe world,
My perfect simulation.

I am hungry,make me full.
Now.
And no mistakes,
No surprises.

In the shopping mall
I walk through light and music:
Life sells life,
I want it all.

No time.
No emotion.
Press the button
And move on.

You buy,
You eat,
You toss the trash,
And run.

I pick up the phone,
Dial the number,
She speaks,
My pornographic robot,
Word-perfect.
“Sorry, tiger, but your dream girl has to go now…
Call right back and ask for me.”

French Polynesia

All I know is floating,
Green and blue, blue and green,
This world and I,
Symbiosis of clownfish and anemone.
High islands and atolls of the mind,
Westward-drifting into the dying sun,
Show me your volcanic secrets…
Mana from under my feet,
And at my fingertips,
And on my eyelashes,
Every breath is freedom…
Pearl farmer tending oysters with meticulous love,
Rearing black pearls in the lagoon,
I tattoo my spirit on the sky,
In waves and spirals,
At one with the god of thieves and sailors;
I see my own death
And my bones,my laughing skull
Set among the banyan roots
Along with a conch shell.
The basalt eyes of the tiki
Watch over all:
Lay no hand upon us,
Disrespect us at your peril.

Love Bites

Twenty-four surprises in your eyes,
Skies on your lips,
Mountains on your fingertips,
Lightning up your spine!
Let’s laugh our way around the world,
Before the bogeyman can catch us.
The whole earth is revolving
In the palm of your smile.
With every kiss you give a twist
To life, a stab at joy.

And so we lie on our stomachs on the carpet
And face one another over the chessboard:
Your move!
I watch your fingers hover
With tactical finesse.
J’adoube.

Galaxies collide:
Smashing together, spirals
Explode into massive plumes
Of stars, gas and dust,
Writhe and twist
In elliptical agonies,
And their centres coalesce
Into one core.

Atomic Theory in New Mexico

In an old adobe church
In the Sangre de Cristos Mountains,
Christ writhes galvanized on the cross,
Bleeding from the gashes in his chest,
The nail holes in palms and feet.
The grinning skeleton La Muerta
Rides by in a cart, shooting his bow and arrow.
In shuttered village houses
Catholic penitents flagellate themselves
And torture their bodies and minds
In the Christ-trance,
And, shouldering the dead weight of Good Friday,
March, march, tottering under crosses,
Lacerated, lashing one another with whips.

The spark from my finger to a doorknob,
The lightning flash across the mountains,
The pull of a compass needle.

My mind:
Deep as the atom,
No up or down,
No in or out,
Just there.

I invent the universe
I wish to live in,
Conjure the spaces,
Clock the times,
And move,
Move through it all…

The random disturbances
In a pattern of crystals,
The flaws in a salt cube.
Occasionally a piece of quartz
Will crystallize with almost perfect hexagonal faces.

Atop Tsankawi Mesa,
With the wind and the crows,
On the bright southern side,
Carved on the cliffs,
Glimmer Tewa petroglyphs:
Among them a man
Pressing a flute to his lips.

At Fiesta in Santa Fe,
In the evening darkness,
A seductive fire dancer
Lifts up her torch
And the giant effigy
Writhes and groans
As it flies into fire.

Looking heavenwards at night
The Navajos see First Man and First Woman,
Dancing round the North Star.

Zeugari

1

The dark eyes, and the long fall, the long night, - whatever it offers of pleasure and loss, and foul truth.
Insatiability-the necessary curse. Voices assail me, instruments out of tune, and I lose my feeling for music.
Perversity, perversion-both can own me, invert me and create. I render falsity true.

2

Tenderly touched, with the force of night, a searching power in the lips and fingertips, to discriminate, discover and enjoy. Celebrate the slow plunge into oblivion, the sudden wisdom, the impossibility of things.
Yours is the curvature of the earth, calling to ships in port.

3

I am learning to read. Greedily, I translate and traduce.
Cryptographer of days, I befriend my own secrecies.
Let living be the prayer that holds the stars to their promise.

4

My moment passes. And only the spider notices.
Head under blanket, I clinch deals with the darkness.

Pushkin's Erotica

From a book of Mexican magic:
To seduce a girl,
Carry a dead hummingbird in your pocket
And slip powdered human skull into her drinks.
I wonder:
Should I give it a try?

Teach me with your mouth,
I am willing to learn.
Elucidate the mystery
Just a little,
Not too much.

Spring is on a spree
And the sun is melting
Golden syrup
On your skin.

Flies of the species Serromiya femorata
When mating embrace as if kissing
But,finally, the female
Sucks out her lover's innards through the mouth.

The eleven-year cycle of the sun’s magnetic field
Accounts for sunspots, solar flares and the aurora borealis.
But it does not account for us.

The German Summer

I prowl the summer streets
And down by the river,
Bristling with will and lust,
Storming the skies
With mindfire,
Razing whole cities
And charging on.

Morning,
And the street is full of saints,
Sun-haloed and glowing…
Our bodies’ laughter
Is lightning back to the sky.
True blondes and false,
I love them all,
Nature and artifice
Equal delights.

Germania-
Black honeycomb…
Terra obedientiae,
Smiled one medieval pope.

Mining the sun
With the tip of my tongue,
I saunter with the summer,
A damascene prince.
Not bones, but words, outlive the death of stars.

Shining, dying,
Supernova,
Her haloed belly-mountain,
The pregnant woman
Nude on the beach,
And the bright lake adoring her,
The sun caught in her blonde hair.

Wherever I turn
The clean, severe and pagan face,
Sun-minted and shining,
Arrests me.
Severe commands arise
And force me to revolt;
I draw the runes
In fear and expectation.

Doors Close Soon After the Melody Ends

Did I tell you about a friend of mine?
One day he jumped into a lake,
And when they found his body,
He was curled up like a baby,
With a big smile on his face.

We know when dinosaurs roamed the earth;
How long it takes for radioactive isotopes to decay;
When our hominid ancestors branched off from apes;
The dates of lunar and solar eclipses far in the future;
We know, we know it all…

Come to the encounter,
Make of it what you will,
In this world of copies
That we dub beauty,
Layer on layer
Of commodities,
Signs…
Technology is the mystery
And we its sounds;
Take what you want,
Give what you need.
Here I sit,
Scribbling and crossing out.

My mind:
Silurian reefs in the Welsh Borders, the hilltops of Wenlock Edge:
White limestone mottled with coral colonies,
Some miniature spiderwebs, others little chains,
Stromatoporoids, trilobites and brachiopods,
Bryozoans, snails and sea lilies…

And I stand here,
Like a man struck by lightning,
All his innards ravaged,
Yet not a mark on his skin.

Learning on the Job

I have seen so much of noon and midnight, seen so many silhouettes on walls.
What is the end account? To balance the books: a noble endeavour, but, alas, not a skill I have ever acquired.
I am what I have destroyed, the nothing I tried to annihilate. In the joyous beginning I already perceive the grievous end.
But we must let the music go its own way.
The days are coming for you, coming again, you can count them, if you like…unpredictable obventions bait your mind for the kill…
To live by accrementition, to inspissate routine and procedure, to become the idle fabulist of one’s own times…me too!
Remember those ice-cream summers of not so long ago, when the sun king crowned you prince of park and shore, and you galloped round the oak tree fifty times, playing kiss chase with the sky? You believed the Bible stories, you wanted to be Jacob with his ladder. Dragons alighted and fed from your hand.
This is the clearing-house of dreams, the warehouse of spices from distant isles fought over and since forgotten.
What do I trust in now? Not Fate, but a good hand of cards. And if a rainbow should happen in the air again, I will dash out to see it.

Chocolate Nooses

Autumn eyes-
Why so mournful?
No Arabian horse
Is more exquisite than you.

I draw the Pythagorean pentacle on your skin
With my Sumerian finger:
Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, Saturn and Venus;
Water, Earth, Air, Fire, and Spirit.

In the sensual time
Will you free your secrets
For the taking?
Will joy reveal itself,
Simple as a glass
Of water?
Pleasure’s edge
Is a place of doom,
Vertiginous
And sheer.

And after you are gone,
The sun will still rise,
Apples, as always, will be either sweet or sour,
Dogs will still run after sticks.

Meditation in a Nightclub

She dances for herself
And no-one else,
No-one else but the sound;
And she moves the energy,
Becomes the current;
Sound is her element,
By will and whim.
She shapes the air,
Sculpts the moment,
Electromagnetic
Then gone.

In the clear Arctic waters the sea is teeming
And pulsing with organisms:
Tiny copepod crustaceans beat in myriads
Through the surface waters, feeding on plankton,
And jellyfish of every size and hue
Drift in throbbing millions, swirling
And beating against the tides,
Dilating and constricting
In obedience to the currents.

Are you waiting for a giant asteroid to strike,
Or for deadly viruses to wipe us all out?
Super volcanoes might erupt in their dozens,
The poles might shift,
And tsunamis sweep the earth…
Surely it’s time for aliens to invade and conquer,
Time to be fried by a mega nova,
Or shall we just let wars and famines do us in?

Meanwhile,
I am here, in the dark,
Like a snake with four penises.