Igraine
They dance, the nine korrigans,
Crowned with flowers, robed in white,
About the fountain, in moonlight.
The three Fates work their distaffs and spindles,
Twisting the thread through their fingers,
One to spin, one to weave, one to cut.
Who seeks the counsel of the fay?
Three times three is their power.
Throw some more wood on the hearth-fire,
And watch for visions in the smoke.
From the Queen’s castle the hero sets out,
The lost son, whose journeys will be arduous,
Whose fate will be the sufferings of a king.
Who but she holds my life in her hands?
My ship sets sail from the shores of her eye,
And disappears into the mists.
Three initiations await the seeker:
To be conceived of his mother’s womb;
To lie with a daughter of the moon;
To enter the enclosure of the Goddess.
In the great hall of the Castle of Maidens,
She sits enthroned, surrounded by her female court,
And wild unearthly music fills the air:
“Stranger, you are welcome for the night:
I ask only that you give me one night’s dreaming,
That I may send you vision and understanding…”
Guinevere
O joyful power that moves all wheels,
Beyond comprehension and control!
Ecstasy of rising,rising,crying the tears of an angel!
Lovers true and false converge from all directions
To court and win the sovereign soul.
The combat commences in the meadow,
The two knights clashing from opposite poles,
Watched by the summer sun and the winter moon,
Till the May Queen lifts her crowned head to the stars.
The gates of the Summer Country are open
For all acts of love and pleasure, without guilt;
Open for the visitations of the fairies,
Abductors of the beloved prize.
Beware the hidden thorns, drawing blood
Before you know it; and the devilment
Of the twin sisters in one body,
The false queen and the true.
Strife is her delight: setting one against the other,
Bringing her rival suitors to blows,
Skilled in cruel deceptions and torments.
Many tests are set, many blows are struck,
Judgment is pronounced in the courts of love,
And the hunters of the white hart spur their steeds,
Chasing their quarry through the forest.
Oh, the sound of pipes among the trees,
And the dancing of fools and jesters!
Hang your wishes on the hawthorn tree,
You, the cuckoo in the sun’s nest…
Morgan
She is the raven to the carrion,
The dark interrogator, pulling from her sleeves
Terrible questions, too long avoided.
In the apple orchard she appears to you,
Speaking strange words in your ear:
Beware when you pick these fruit,
For some are poisoned and deadly.
O, weaving waters, about the Island of Women,
Bless the voyager and the ship.
The hounds are baying:
Here is the ford where champions fight,
And lovers fall into embrace.
The severed head speaks from the tower,
The hag sits at table in the place of honour.
She who makes the wound can heal it,
Herbalist and astronomer, dark and slender,
Mistress of seduction, all her senses engaging,
Her sweetness and her anger equal in force.
What will come of these Enchanted Games?
Prepare yourself for the beheading.
The Lady of the Wheel must have a man in her power,
To which end she will use any spell.
Argante
Be fierce and tender, this is kindness to yourself
And goodness to the world:
The guardian of the doorway wants you for her own.
The jewel in the ring reveals a lake:
In this land there can be no guilt, only love,
Here lovers conjoin without sorrow or shame,
And the mother lets her son go forth without hindrance,
Well-fostered in courage and arms.
Through the deer forest, by the lake, she rides,
In a tunic of white samite and ermine mantle,
And a veil before her face,
Bearing the sword to the worthy one.
Her eyes are silver, catching the tints of the sky,
Leading you into the birch grove,
Where the trees dance around your head…
Look into the well, the water is cold ecstasy,
Myriads of shimmering droplets,
Sparking,glinting,alive with iridescent fire,
Dancing and changing so quickly, in such intricate patterns,
That your senses cannot grasp more than a fraction.
Nimuë
The doors will be opened, the ways will be opened,
New ways and new determinations.
The Lady will imprison you
Beneath a stone, in a sarcophagus, in a hawthorn bush,
In a prison of glass, a moulting cage,
Though you met her at the fountain
And conjured an enchanted orchard for her,
And summoned knights and ladies to dance for her,
And promised to share the stars with her.
Here I am, in the treetops, perching on branches,
Flying from tree to tree, in my cloak of feathers.
In the sunhouse of the glass castle,
The women weave and embroider,
Watching the centuries pass in silence,
Outside their windows, all the follies of men.
This is the triple death chosen:
To fall from your horse from a high place,
Catch yourself in a tree during the fall, and be hanged,
And drown with your head submerged in a river.
Here is the keeper of the forest:
The huntress in her chariot drawn by wild deer.
On with the venery,the sport of the brave!
Enid
Three robes she will wear,
The white, the red, and the black.
Her patience and forbearance
Will temper the fierceness of men.
She will not rest until you are delivered,
Until every burden is lifted, every grief effaced,
And you enter into boundless compassion,
Transfiguring all pain into rejoicing.
She has tasted the bitterest poison and survived,
She has suffered death’s lesson and triumphed,
Triumphant in vivacity and love.
Have you seen the white hart among the trees,
Stately and proud, alone of all his kind?
These lands are dangerous out of season:
What you learn here you must teach others,
And do not linger too long, lest you forget
Your mortality and humility,
And lose your way on the twisting forest paths.
Soon the horn will sound to summon you
Home, through brambles, nettles and thorns.
Kundry
Measure your destiny’s pattern, wise to the limits,
And learn from the circling of the hawk.
Loathsome in her hood of turtle-doves,
She speaks of the movements of the seven planets,
The Black maiden, wedded to her work.
The beauty of blackness is visible to those
Who know the true worth of the soul,
Who have ever sought the dark over the light.
Ah,see the Wheel of Fortune turning,
With the king on top and the beggar clinging
To the bottom, and the others scrambling
To reach the top and not fall to the bottom.
She comes with a riding whip for her mule,
Summoning knights to adventure,
Lamenting that she will never know joy
Until her mule’s lost bridle is returned to her,
And crying out for a champion to serve her,
To seek and find the bridle, and win her love.
Pas beneath the church’s western door,uder the relief
Of the sheela na gig, ugly hag squatting akimbo,
Opening her cavernous cunt for all to see and touch.
Friend, who would be wise, keep a snake at your table,
Feed it on morsels, and listen when it speaks.
Dindraine
Here is she who pursues her course
With dedication and aplomb,
In a country filled with terrors and distractions,
This land of thick forest, rivers and springs.
How many times must you venture to the river,
Before you dare to build a bridge?
No one told the water to flow freely,
No one had to teach the trees to be still.
In the cemetery is the sound of laughter,
And ghostly knights with flaming lances.
She sits on her throne, surrounded by beer and wine,
And asks: “For whom should I pour the cup?”
She offers her guest three draughts,
The white, the red and the black.
The brother and sister arrive together,
Standing on the prow of the ship,
Sailing down the river to the castle,
The White Queen and the Red King,
Opening the ways of grace,
Showing men how to navigate.
A flash of silver in the trees:
The unicorn swiftly passing,
It wants to help you but will not approach.
At the well you fill the golden cup:
Look into the water-what do you see there?
Pour it out to heal the wounds of the world.
Ragnell
Shape-changing is our human play,
The sport of the enchantress, of life on the hoof.
Comes a lady riding a beautiful palfrey, richly caparisoned,
Carrying a lute across her back,
Her face, when she turns towards you,hideous,inhuman,
Like the owl of evil omen, flitting across the moon:
“Place your life in my hands, and I will save you.
I alone can give you the answer to the question…”
Friday, July 06, 2007
Brittany
Mirages and sunsets of the Bay of Mont-St-Michel…
My secret violence breeds a universe,
Of stars and planets revolving,
Nebulae whirling, meteors jetting,
Black holes and wormholes gorging themselves…
The dolmen of La Roche-aux-Fées:
Its opening aligns with the rising sun of the winter solstice…
In the sacristy of the Abbey of Paimpont
Is a silver arm joined with gold nails
Holding a book encrusted with precious stones,
Containing a finger of St Judicaël.
In the Forest of Brocéliande, in the church
Of Tréhorenteuc, a sparkling mosaic
Shows flaming red and haloed wolfish lions
Surrounding a white hart bearing a cross on its necklace.
By Lake Comper, gazing into its waters,
I think of Merlin conjuring in its depths
A fantastic castle for Viviane, beguiled by her wiles,
And where she dwelled as the Lady of the Lake
And reared the foundling Lancelot as her own.
Will I ever, ever give up the hard demented struggle
To understand the world and myself?
Oh if I could, if I could!
But always, like a half-remembered tune,
Some figment of my past will rise like vomit,
And black conquers white.
Walk across the heather moors above the cliffs to Cap Fréhel,
The cliffs and islets of schist and pink sandstone and porphyry,
With guillemots, gannets and petrels overhead,
And then to the dunes and pines beyond…
The music of my life, I am still trying to hear it, to play it, to sing in tune,
-But do my ears deceive me,
Do they baffle me with distortion and hallucinations,
Wrong notes of an untuned mind?
The Ankou stalks the streets of Morlaix,
Tristan Corbière, black corsair of the sky,
Slashing at shades with his rusty cutlass,
Tormented by love and arthritis.
At the chapel of St-They at the Pointe du Van,
The spirit of the saint,they say,used to rign the bells
To warn ships away from this deadly coast,
Yet still so many ships were wrecked here
In the Bay of the Dead; the voices of the drowned
Seem to rise in the wind; from this headland
They transported dead druids to the isle of Sein,
Passing from one world to the next,
Where dwell nine virgin priestesses in seclusion,
Fomenting tempests, and metamorphosing
Into wild beasts, curing diseases and telling the future.
In Nantes, in the Musée Thomas Dobrée,
I gaze upon the golden reliquary for the heart
Of Anne de Bretagne, last duchess of Brittany,
-What strange tricks history plays
To amuse its twisted mind! -
That she should be revered as a saint,
When in life she was a stubborn self-serving politician,
And a spendthrift wedded to pleasure!
On the isle of Gavriinis:
The signs of the Goddess :
Vulvas carved into rock,
Totems of the Mother’s womb,
The crease in the cowrie and the wheat-grain,
The natural fissure in the rock,
The inward-conducting cleft.
Black granite rises and flows :
The temple walls are swirling vortices,
Whirlwinds of vulvas,
The midwinter rising sun
Penetrates through the low entrance
Deep into the darkness.
My secret violence breeds a universe,
Of stars and planets revolving,
Nebulae whirling, meteors jetting,
Black holes and wormholes gorging themselves…
The dolmen of La Roche-aux-Fées:
Its opening aligns with the rising sun of the winter solstice…
In the sacristy of the Abbey of Paimpont
Is a silver arm joined with gold nails
Holding a book encrusted with precious stones,
Containing a finger of St Judicaël.
In the Forest of Brocéliande, in the church
Of Tréhorenteuc, a sparkling mosaic
Shows flaming red and haloed wolfish lions
Surrounding a white hart bearing a cross on its necklace.
By Lake Comper, gazing into its waters,
I think of Merlin conjuring in its depths
A fantastic castle for Viviane, beguiled by her wiles,
And where she dwelled as the Lady of the Lake
And reared the foundling Lancelot as her own.
Will I ever, ever give up the hard demented struggle
To understand the world and myself?
Oh if I could, if I could!
But always, like a half-remembered tune,
Some figment of my past will rise like vomit,
And black conquers white.
Walk across the heather moors above the cliffs to Cap Fréhel,
The cliffs and islets of schist and pink sandstone and porphyry,
With guillemots, gannets and petrels overhead,
And then to the dunes and pines beyond…
The music of my life, I am still trying to hear it, to play it, to sing in tune,
-But do my ears deceive me,
Do they baffle me with distortion and hallucinations,
Wrong notes of an untuned mind?
The Ankou stalks the streets of Morlaix,
Tristan Corbière, black corsair of the sky,
Slashing at shades with his rusty cutlass,
Tormented by love and arthritis.
At the chapel of St-They at the Pointe du Van,
The spirit of the saint,they say,used to rign the bells
To warn ships away from this deadly coast,
Yet still so many ships were wrecked here
In the Bay of the Dead; the voices of the drowned
Seem to rise in the wind; from this headland
They transported dead druids to the isle of Sein,
Passing from one world to the next,
Where dwell nine virgin priestesses in seclusion,
Fomenting tempests, and metamorphosing
Into wild beasts, curing diseases and telling the future.
In Nantes, in the Musée Thomas Dobrée,
I gaze upon the golden reliquary for the heart
Of Anne de Bretagne, last duchess of Brittany,
-What strange tricks history plays
To amuse its twisted mind! -
That she should be revered as a saint,
When in life she was a stubborn self-serving politician,
And a spendthrift wedded to pleasure!
On the isle of Gavriinis:
The signs of the Goddess :
Vulvas carved into rock,
Totems of the Mother’s womb,
The crease in the cowrie and the wheat-grain,
The natural fissure in the rock,
The inward-conducting cleft.
Black granite rises and flows :
The temple walls are swirling vortices,
Whirlwinds of vulvas,
The midwinter rising sun
Penetrates through the low entrance
Deep into the darkness.
Provence
Steep forested hills, sudden eruption sof rock,
Warm scent of pine and eucalyptus
And wild herbs, absorbed through the skin;
Brilliant lizard in a wave of light,
I kiss the thighs of each moment,
Twist out of my body on mimosa sprees.
I feel like the first Greek ashore,
Planting figs and olives, cherry trees and vines,
Looking out for nymphs at every spring.
The white horse, born black,
Turns to snow in his fourth year
And the myriad blues of Mont Ventoux
Ceaselessly swarm and mutate.
Old towns, tight mazes
For the blindfolded lover,
Winding stairs up to the castles
And a glimpse of heaven,
Hot breath behind green shutters
In the silent hour.
Actors in a Roman theatre,
We romp like children through the latest farce
Then nip backstage and don the tragedians’ masks.
Oh to have been in Avignon
In the days of the wicked Popes,
With all the scholars, heretics and hustlers,
When all the vices flourished
In the monstrous palace,
The fat feuding cardinals in bed with their mistresses,
Draping them in jewels and furs
Purchased with the Devil’s bribes,
Musicians, chefs and artists
Fighting for patronage and honour,
Riotous banquets, secret orgies,
Machiavellian intrigues.
Glimmering violet rocks,
Translucent sea,
February mimosa blossom,
Golden chestnuts in autumn,
Reddening vines…
Phosphorescent beaches,
Dark shade of pines and oaks and eucalyptus,
Chestnut-forested hills…
We speak the language of birds,
The troubadours’ code,
Dark on dark, capturing the light,
Homing it ever inwards.
These are the mercies of your body:
Olives and garlic,
White peaches and muscat grapes,
Melons and strawberries,
Almonds and sweet chestnuts,
Basil and wild thyme.
Taste the lavender in the honey,
The tinge that makes the whole…
Here – a purple gentian,
A lover’s token;
Place it in your bosom,
Keep it there.
In the cathedral cloisters at Fréjus,
In a scented garden, around a well,
The slender marble columns rise,
Supporting a wooden ceiling
Painted with monsters and mermaids,
Satyrs’ bacchanalia.
In the depths of caves
Prehistoric painted handprints glow;
Horses running into the dawn sun,
Bison and deer with the sad eyes of humans
Accepting the hunter’s spear.
Flamingos on the marshes,
Black bulls sizing up the horizon,
White horses running free,
And the gypsies arriving from all directions
For the feast of their patron saint…
Caesar’s bastards,
We have our own empire,
Our own dark tongue
In which to hymn
The marriage of Christ
And the Magdalene.
Sunlight on the slopes,
Honeysuckle and immortelle,
Quickness and stillness
Of lizards on the rocks,
Vines and cherry orchards
Stretching into the haze…
We breathe the distant snows
Of sacrificial mountains,
Walking into the waves,
The tide of light…
Warm scent of pine and eucalyptus
And wild herbs, absorbed through the skin;
Brilliant lizard in a wave of light,
I kiss the thighs of each moment,
Twist out of my body on mimosa sprees.
I feel like the first Greek ashore,
Planting figs and olives, cherry trees and vines,
Looking out for nymphs at every spring.
The white horse, born black,
Turns to snow in his fourth year
And the myriad blues of Mont Ventoux
Ceaselessly swarm and mutate.
Old towns, tight mazes
For the blindfolded lover,
Winding stairs up to the castles
And a glimpse of heaven,
Hot breath behind green shutters
In the silent hour.
Actors in a Roman theatre,
We romp like children through the latest farce
Then nip backstage and don the tragedians’ masks.
Oh to have been in Avignon
In the days of the wicked Popes,
With all the scholars, heretics and hustlers,
When all the vices flourished
In the monstrous palace,
The fat feuding cardinals in bed with their mistresses,
Draping them in jewels and furs
Purchased with the Devil’s bribes,
Musicians, chefs and artists
Fighting for patronage and honour,
Riotous banquets, secret orgies,
Machiavellian intrigues.
Glimmering violet rocks,
Translucent sea,
February mimosa blossom,
Golden chestnuts in autumn,
Reddening vines…
Phosphorescent beaches,
Dark shade of pines and oaks and eucalyptus,
Chestnut-forested hills…
We speak the language of birds,
The troubadours’ code,
Dark on dark, capturing the light,
Homing it ever inwards.
These are the mercies of your body:
Olives and garlic,
White peaches and muscat grapes,
Melons and strawberries,
Almonds and sweet chestnuts,
Basil and wild thyme.
Taste the lavender in the honey,
The tinge that makes the whole…
Here – a purple gentian,
A lover’s token;
Place it in your bosom,
Keep it there.
In the cathedral cloisters at Fréjus,
In a scented garden, around a well,
The slender marble columns rise,
Supporting a wooden ceiling
Painted with monsters and mermaids,
Satyrs’ bacchanalia.
In the depths of caves
Prehistoric painted handprints glow;
Horses running into the dawn sun,
Bison and deer with the sad eyes of humans
Accepting the hunter’s spear.
Flamingos on the marshes,
Black bulls sizing up the horizon,
White horses running free,
And the gypsies arriving from all directions
For the feast of their patron saint…
Caesar’s bastards,
We have our own empire,
Our own dark tongue
In which to hymn
The marriage of Christ
And the Magdalene.
Sunlight on the slopes,
Honeysuckle and immortelle,
Quickness and stillness
Of lizards on the rocks,
Vines and cherry orchards
Stretching into the haze…
We breathe the distant snows
Of sacrificial mountains,
Walking into the waves,
The tide of light…
Notes of a Virtual Man
1
Black-bearded polychrome Byzantine,
I walk in blue shimmer;
Candle-glamoured icons glow around.
O,age of polymaths,
Let the gold be smelted!
Illustrated manuscripts fly in the wind;
The radiant city rises from the Flood.
2
That succulent vivacious body
Trances me anguished to bliss;
Lightly, black eyes profess
The quantum mechanics of love.
Up to our eyes in ridiculous ardour,
We raid the skies for innocence,
Fortune’s angels, turning the wheel
With all our trembling strength.
3
I haggled, hoarded, truckled,
Competed for every prize;
I hid my fear ,and never,
Never looked life in the eyes.
4
Sad in a strange way, though summered in blue welkin whiles, and cloud-drift,I,a ghost on earth, disillusioned and dreaming, here and not here. Was I ever so bizarre?
So it goes. As if these words had meaning and could heal. Yet there seems some haunting mercy in all this, working its charm in the midst of grief, guiding me beyond the trees’ cascades, could I but trust the moment.
5
Love’s linguist,syllabled in semantic revrie,aching with hermenutics,in dread of fathomless silence, I parse my way through trouble’s syntax, words of fate in Indo-European sky. continents drift and clash; mountains thrust upward; oceans seethe; and here, in my cell, I follow the motions of the stars .
6
Life, queasy farrago of boredom and fear, wallows in brain and guts, deepening narcosis.
Who goes there. A doppelganger. Woe to the automatic slack-jawed citizen, slumped in his mrchair,chewing regurgitated cud.
Enter the beautiful bureaucrat in shiny shoes and well-creased suit, processed data marching across his monitors, applying the formula to everything in sight. the appropriate forms for all occasions shower from the sky.
“Progress!” cries the Decent Man,steepping over the cliff.Homo sapiens, toddling upright, sniffs the air and teeters forward with crooked gait. What fun we shall provide for the archaeologists of the future.
7
Attenuated mannerists, chiaroscuro vituosi,anxiously angling for perspective, we disappear up our own arses with consummate ease. Self-mortified withmathematcs,we sing the integers and irrational numbers of myth. Distraction is our theology.Infinite speculation and sophistry ensue.
8
Inexplicable, all too human,
What a strange creature I have turned out to be,
Half-genius, half-moron.
I crown myself Emperor of the Banal;
What it all adds up to, I cannot tell.
Twists and puns, enough for everyone,
Bitter aphorisms by the bushel;
All this I offer to the Lord of Heaven,
And pray He will see the joke.
9
On the outskirts of Now,
Stricken into perception,
I trade chance for chance,
Destroying and creating.
10
Love, the musical twins’ knack, solving problems in fluid mechanics, comes at things from all angles at once, running and leaping at the sky. Happiness? Without theories or conclusions, and no demands to satisfy?
Charivari shudders under the skin, shimmerings in the rain.
11
This is my house
That I have built form nothing
From wandering daydreams
And terror in the night;
This is my destiny,
My most secret will.
12
Citizen of an imagined state, statistic in freefall, I enter the neutral zone. Through binoculars, I watch the world destroy itself. It is so quiet here, one can almost hear oneself think.
13
Living subtle fictions, I anticipate myself;
Spun from the vortex, memory’s creature,
Inquring,changing,a process, not a thing.
I carry a vagabond theatre on my back,
Through storms bred on the desert horizon,
Toward the ultimate clarification of dreams.
14
Raucous voices dwindle to whispers;
Lines and perspectives fade;
Only the nights are the same as ever,
The Milky Way like a chloroform mask
Closing down on my face.
Distrusting crude sanity, the mind withdraws,
And the planet stalls, bewildered, spent;
Trapped in a room with cracked walls,
I calculate some attenuated survival,
Whatever the moment can afford.
15
In the caverns of our laughter
Whispers drip.
16
The people process to the dried-up riverbed, bearing human skulls aloft on poles, to lay upon the barren stones, and call down rain from the mountains.
The bull’s head carved in rock glowers with sombre power. Bare trees blacken the sky. this is the land of the wandering dead, where rainbows evartaret in quavering song, and snakes dance and copulate, bringing forth the dawn.
17
Clench your teeth,
And scream like an ape,
Beautiful lunatic,
Coprophiliac!
Shine your shoes,
And walk on air,
Think without thinking,
Planet breathing.
18
In the season of beginnings, I gather herbs under the moon. The island throbs with animal energy. Born between a rock and a tree, baptised in a green mountain river, I walk towards the glint of sunlight in a spider’s web.
I have quarried a sepulchre in the air .The dark one, my brother, comes to slay me in the ravine. his sword is a streak of fire in the heavens.
In the deserted citadel, in a candlelit chamber, the pages of the book of prophecies turn by themselves.
19
At my potter’s wheel, I watch the Pleiades rise. My sibman hands me the jade mask and I fall through the floor.
Shoals of stars swim about me, as I lie on the golden reef, drenched in symphonies and silences.
20
And then I drank the water from the rock. Sunrise streamed through me; I became the rainbow.
Is this the planet of destroyers, the conjuror’s sad trick?
21
He comes, the man with the sardonic smile, talking of home and freedom, accustomed to the company of chimerae,wise to their tricks, his amber eyes gleaming with tall tales of the true.
“You are so proud of your blindness,” he laughs, “Close your eyes, and all will be clear.”
22
I am the pontifex,the mountain’s reflection in the lake you have never seen. What snake-eyed burlesque! Who is that, tiptoeing to the grave?
These pigeon-toed pretensions I dedicate to the day after tomorrow, the day of coming clean.
23
The mouth yawns open
And spews unholy clichés
Filling the awkward spaces
For a while,
Fending off the void.
I have my tricks, my sleight-of-hand,diversions,fantasias,call it what you will.
I study the behaviour of wasps in my dreams, imagine the plunge of the sting,-and then what?
I scrabble in the dirt, stuffing handfuls into my mouth. One just wants to feel full.
What is that noise in my head?Tinnitus of being,carillons,carillons.
I cannot retrace my steps. I have come too far.
Come and Go came and went.
The mouth yawns open
And a herd of cattle
Stampedes over the plains
And vanishes
Over the horizon.
24
Draw a circle in the sand,
And begin at the end;
It is the time of coming together,
It is the time of falling apart.
25
Memories: only the shooting stars, only the rivers, the trees in your mind, as you reach out to grasp what is no longer there.
These winter days are dark fire. Frost glitters with the passion of Nothing.
When I at last somehow relinquish,
Will the earth shine as never before?
26
Black ink, you taste of riddles
And the death of stars;
What stratagem will save me
From losing my mind?
27
We have learned to breathe poison and crave destruction. Our lives ,it seems, can live without us. On the Stock Exchange of the damned, stocks and shares in nothingness change hands amid bedlam and frenzy.
Oblivion is here and now, the moment that evaporates, undiscovered, unloved.
28
Baptised in sleep,
Picking locks with my tongue,
I lose my heart
To the highest branches of the forest,
Praying to be made whole
By the glittering sky;
Everything out of reach
Rushes into me now,
Conceived in here,
Drawn toward perfection;
With all my strength,
I must test the dream
Beyond all limits
And prove it true.
29
The clouds are beyond me,
Nothing I can say about them makes sense,
Nothing approaches them, nothing encompass them,
They are simply themselves, drifting by…
My language is mad of sticks and stones,
Pieces of string of differing lengths,
Ink or grease smudge don the fingers,
And the window that you only dare to open in summer,
When the sky’s chrysalis bursts open.
30
What will you find
In bluebeard’s castle?
The key to the locked room
Is in your mouth,
In the well.
31
Passion’s precipates, colours of death and renewal! the beautiful dragons come. the particles are singing, if only you could hear them. Sell your bones for a skiff to glide downriver. Descending is ascending. Time to eat your words.
Language flickers on the wave crests, under the deaf-mute moon.
Everything begins again, from a slightly different point.
32
Bodies collide,
Destinies crumple into each other,
The sperm and the ovum devour one another,
In an ecstasy of recognition,
Three hundred and sixty degrees of truth.
The difficult homecoming calls you,
Looking upward holds you to the earth,
Paradox crackles in your fingertips,
Whichever way you inspect the situation
It is always the opposite, the other.
33
I like to swallow stones;
I like the way they hold me down;
These cool dark stones
Are good for my fever.
34
I measure her body with prayers,
Captured by the wings of bats and doves,
At the heart of the compass rose.
How will it end? With two mangy dogs
Licking the puddles on tumbledown streets,
In a city without honour, without love?
35
Explorers in a wilderness where names fall to earth like shooting stars, we move forward with animal energy, mapping the vastness ,possessing to dispossess.
From the first intention universe explodes.
We paint our nakedness with patterns, and dance in circles. from horizon to horizon, we become a new language, a mystery shared.
36
How can I face the world and not destroy myself with rage?
Yet still there is contemplation in this sun-tranced garden,
Ants doodling mystical patterns at my feet,
As I savour earth’s rich melancholy aroma .
Intoning the sonorous occult names of shrubs-
Stephanandra,euonymus,helianthemum-
I cling to this small portion of almost-paradise,
This sanctuary that is everywhere and nowhere,
Where the fruit trees answer to my voice.
37
My dying father’s eyes
In dream’s ritual seeing
Bless dark with inception;
Merciful grief phosphoresces
On spring’s giddy boughs,
And love, on the high ground,
Whinnies and bounds, self-amazed.
38
The sun cartwheels overhead,
Over the nomad plains of the beginning;
The current flows through the rock,
The seas turn over,
The shaman’s drum beats out the dance;
A meteorite plummets,
An oak tree rises from an acorn,
Lovers meld in cloudburst
On the first day.
39
Travelling players, roaming from place to place,
Performing tragicomedies for your pleasure,
Our masks are humble, but precious.
We have long since forgotten our real names,
We exist only in the act;
We are your silhouettes, your necessary demons,
Disturbing the order of things, as we go,
If only a little, and only for a while,
Somehow holding the earth together.
40
This gaunt peninsula reverberates with doom. Here, skeletons are bleached and transfigured.
A delicious spring gushes from a cleft under a fig tree, high over the bay. Snakes shimmer in the cataleptic heat. Nothing moves in the mind.
Why have I come here? What am I seeking in the raven-nested ruin sof abandoned
churches, and in the kraken’s caves?
I touch hot throbbing rocks with my silence. Amid the olive groves, invisible spirits draw me on.
41
The most hideous things, the truths that could kill me, I must suffer them and pass through.
February flays me raw with sacramental whips. Winter’s initiate, I grow wrinkled with insight.
Be still, and what wonders may find you!
42
Malingering behind my eyes, I inherit the void.
The spider knows what he needs to know.
And I am a spider.
43
A man and a woman playing chess: “Your move,” says the man.
Towers topple. Seas ebb and flood.
The witch doctor casts the bones across the dust. Nuclear reactors chant hymns to the apocalypse.
Tricks with mirrors and trapdoors proliferate. In the blue castle, the mad seigneur leads his guests in a mazurka. The music box starts up again.
A man and a woman playing chess: “Your move,” says the woman to the man.
44
Our bodies
moored together
sway with the sway
Tarot cards
spread out on the table:
the tower struck by lightning
Love
spirals up and down
instantaneous
unending
The Aeolian harp
recalls us
to the Garden
45
Apparitions cross the bridges
Over auriferous rivers;
The sleepwalker speaks in flame.
There is no clarity here,
No light to love by,
Only mandolin moments,
Travesties and transgressions.
Drift and transmute,
Let involuted time become
The sum of our errors,
Folding in on itself
In catastrophic origami;
When the end arrives,
Will we even recognise it?
Apparitions cross the bridges
And meet themselves, coming back.
46
Most secret felicity
Exquisite to the point of death,
Anagram of paradise!
Our minds touch, our bodies cling,
As if we could keep one another from falling,
Falling from grace with the day.
We share our pain so secretly,
It glows in the dark, when only the moon is looking.
My mouth on your mouth,
My spirit in yours,
Dragonflies at twilight,
We glitter and die.
47
Began with a wolf-howl. Began as bawling galaxies begin. Entered a body, stood upright,stretched,looked around. The bone moon taught my hands to work. Shadow came and showed me how to die.
Now I follow the ghosts of animals across the plain.
48
These sentimental fictions, how we need them to survive!
At year’s end, watching the sun spiral down into darkness, I feel again the sacred wound that makes me human.
Thus I plunge into the cauldron of another year, to witness, if only for an instant, the earth shine anew, reborn at the source for all.
49
Stupefaction dulls the air; the horizon tilts; definitions implode, as far as ever from the truth; reason twists the rope till it catches fire. Confusion insinuates itself into every crack. This strange return to apalce we never knew. What now?-Information without knowledge, knowledge without hope. and then,perhaps,the reckoning.
All is shifting,formless,unsayyable.This is my opium, a wasting asset.
Life, my favourite calembour!The brinkmanship of thought caracoles for its own perverse pleasure.
What category are you in? What name do you answer to? God’s bureaucracy is working day and night; we exist only to serve.
50
If not these words, then others. But words, always and only words. Spoken and unspoken. Connections and short circuits.
Magical grammar, invest me with truth! Order me with the stars. Remember the forgotten, reassemble the scattered.
At the toll-booths of time, I pay my dues.
I am torn down the middle, and no one can see the tear.
51
I say to myself:
Watch your head! Don’t lose it!
Destiny?Pah?
Just get on with it1
Let the whip fall,
Let the sky fall, for all I care!
I like the smell of cemetery flowers,
The damp earth after rain;
Suburbia suits me,
A spiral galaxy.
I say to myself:
What if ?If only!
Such mild insanity,
Pure perversion…
The same old words come round again,
The same old thoughts…
Now take your medicine, and be a good boy.
Clutching my lottery ticket,
I pray to the heavens,
Round-shouldered little beggar that I am,
Always treading on tiptoe,
Sucking up to the Big Man.
But I must, at least, confess to a little sin,
An unaccountable predilection
For killing flies and spiders, as many as I can,
No that it gives me any pleasure…
52
The wolf is coming! The wolf is coming!
And then the three brothers came to a castle
Where everyone had been turned to stone,
And only they could undo the spell
By completing three tasks.
I want to eat up the gingerbread house,
But the witch will get me and eat me alive!
I dream of the kingdom
Of which nothing is known.
Three drops of blood in the snow,
And a golden chalice in the hand:
Little Red Cap filled the wolf’s belly with stones,
And when it woke it could not jump away.
What did the white horse whisper in your ear while you slept?
Tell me, what became of the youngest son?
What became of the simpleton?
53
It is the time of murderers and pathologists, of technologies and disguises. Plenty of work for everyone!
I dedicate my life to the study of ellipses. I delight in a tenuous self, a unique curve vanishing into the distance.
Beautiful pariahs, have faith in the desert sun. The stars are all in place, and the earth knows its mission.
We, who uncover the brilliance of bone, will prosper in death’s reward.
54
When you tell those lies,
The moon is eclipsed;
When you wrench my bones so,
The sea turns cold,
And black blasted trees
Fly through my head,
And the only sound is a heartbeat,
No one’s, nowhere.
How should I begin?-
I have come too far,
Only growing in foolishness,
And seldom in wisdom.
Yet here I am still,
In the flesh, in the moment,
Phantasmal, absurd,
But not insignificant.
And you, my Otherness,
Can you hear me?
When you tell those lies,
The good stone cracks,
And not a thing can be built.
55
Keep your secret, kept it well,
For what else do you possess?
More,more,always more of everything,
To make you real, or less unreal,
Then nothing, nothing at all.
This fatal appetite hates itself.
Annihilation is its game.
56
Don’t look in my eyes for the truth:
There’s nothing there but sorrow.
Don’t tell me what I need,
Don’t show me where to go,
Don’t ask me to come clean;
There’s nothing left but time.
57
Solitary captain,
Hunter of the narwhal,
Man of ice and fire,
Gulls be your pallbearers,
And the ocean your shroud;
Your spindrift story is in the wind;
A mermaid’s haunting,
By barren shores.
58
I see you riding along the sands,
Green-eyed girl, hair blown by the wind,
Who will never belong to anyone in the world.
59
I have seen a flight of dragons
Over the mountain,
And heard a woman’s voice
From the bottom of the well.
The moon that is nearly full brings good fortune.
A spring wells up in the forest,
Where the stricken deer lies down.
The passes are closed to the horseman,
But lightning opens the sky,
And the lame man grasps the moon.
World always beyond me, world in itself,
Will you ever show me the key?
60
The lion left and the spider came,
The invisible people turned against each other,
There was nothing in the sky
But a single cloud, shaped like a sword.
Pierced through by a nightingale’s song,
The ornithologist turned with a sad smile
And walked away slowly across the meadow
Strewn with shining fossils and bones.
61
Among truncated cones of thought,
Suspended by my feet,
I interrogate the earth.
Shooting stars outrun my mind,
As I rummage for ominous stones.
The world brings gifts and questions
To the upturned tree at the end.
62
Nomads of love, we traverse from well to well, placing our faith in the earth, pitching our tents in the spaces between words.
The flint knife casts a noonday shadow, gnomon of the killer’s heart.
We turn our faces skyward, and march into the storm.
63
Blue Italian eyes, body sleek as a cat’s,
Sinuous smile saying Yes to the world,
Coolly you reflect the midday heat,
Long shadow haunting the mind.
Stay with me; why wander away?
We can be feline together,
Slumbering safely inside one another,
Stray cats in a Tuscan hill town.
Even the Pope longs to be pagan:
Take the Fisherman’s ring from my finger,
Hurl it like a meteor into the deep.
64
I feel them, hard within me:
Inoperable tumours of doubt.
Agony on agony is measured
By the dripping of a tap.
65
Two halves of a pantomime horse,
We canter back and forth,
Lumbering,lurching,out of step,
Solitudes rubbing each other threadbare.
What a performance!Bravo!Encore!
Heavenward we ascend on wires,
Winched up by applauding angels,
And a tattered majestic curtain descends.
66
Autumn the stranger
Awakens me gently,
Shivering with premonitions,
Marked for sorrow.
Level with death,
I harvest abundance,
Seeing Rembrandt
And hearing Chopin.
Breeding fantastic
In nuclear frenzy,
Cognition’s enigmas
Eerily sing.
67
Flickering screen of rain:
Stare into nothingness, hypnotised,
Dissolved in the world’s dissolution,
Apotheosis of absence,
Incommunicado, and gone.
68
Deliciousness of simple functioning, nothing to question, no need to think. No drug could be cheaper. No need for hope or despair, no sense in deviation. Cut-price nirvana for all!-This suave democratic oppression; a straight line to the terminus, cattle-trucks disguised as a luxury train.
69
Invited or not,
I am the phantom guest,
Feasting with strangers
Until all is lost.
70
So it ends:you,lying there, a shrunken effigy,
Small, dutiful hands crossed across your chest,
A fragile red rose placed there in token.
You never shirked your fate,or yearned
For some impossible heaven beyond your ken;
Now the white fires will burn you true,
And purge the momentary years’ eerie sorrow.
71
How often the pen slips, accumulating errata.
So many disjointed phrases,mutterings,asides,
Telephone conversations with angels,
Tremulous stupidities that plot a remarkable graph.
72
Some arrogant contrition is the human trick.
We are devious enough to survive, but not to win.
Praise it, ennoble it, stick medal on it: then pour the quicklime over, and be done.
73
Spider mortal, edged on the sly, speaking in glints and glowers, weird with longing for impossibles, the most you can do is inhabit your downfall with some grace.
Gravity’s booby, clowning on the underside, you fabricate the finite from the infinite, the infinite from the finite.
What fun you have had, in this transit camp for the bewildered!
74
My video recorder throbs, warm with desire.Rewind,fast forward,pause.time stops and starts as I will it. This playful universe, boxed and sold, exists to please me.
Hypnotist of solitudes, I extend my authority into shimmering infinity.
The drug runs dark in these veins, hallucinating Me.
75
How well I appreciate the precision of a delicate lie. The truth is so restricting: it lacks insight.
White dazzle in a glass of vodka: Chinese whispers in the head.
Evening comes on like a fever, monstrous with possibilities. Paradox is the Big Bang, the Crucifixion at the core of every moment.
76
With a room full of bird-masks and an altar made from junk pray to the gods who destroy me. I want to fly: they say it is never too late.
Malleable and light, our aluminium madness glimmers in the sun and never rusts. It easily adapts to many uses. We like to build the highest towers we can.
Subtle villainy streaks across my brain. It picks locks and triggers avalanches. It invents political schemes.
77
Suns and empires lived their graphs. Ideas ignited and consumed themselves. the newborn’s howl, the senile gasp. And here, in the mind’s inmost caves, the paintings glowed.
Skin-clad hunters stalk through the grass. The sorcerer’s head seeds the earth’s belly with lightning. Bison are mating, deer are running. The small blue planet sings on its axis.
Makers’ potlatch swells the many-breasted earth. The chosen flint is honed to its ultimate magic.
78
Sprawled naked across the bed, on her stomach,laughing,eating a peach, the girl with the sun in her hair floated on summer’s tide. Kittenish with the air, playing with the moment, she glowed with her own ineffable passing.
A kiss on her behind, then , a homage to ripeness. Let the sunlight hold her fast a moment more.
79
I hardly knew her,
Yet she left her trace
Here, in me,
Secret, inexplicable;
Not love, of course,
But something bizarre,
Beautiful as only
Perversity can be.
80
Jules Laforgue,
Black-coated figure,
Funeral director
On a unicycle;
Poor little orphan,
Where did Mother go?
Did the black spider
Steal her away?
All your self-mocking,
Your irony’s fireworks,
Burst skyward
In harlequin bouquets.
There is only this,
This mudball planet,
And the phthisic sun’s
Gorgon glare.
81
Your green eyes know,
Your green eyes, and the sea:
Your green eyes at sunrise,
And in the silence.
82
You know the signs, but your hands are tied. with silk.
These little deaths in black and white, are they merely part of the pretence?
Exquisite ambivalence thrills you through.Oh,these riches, these sorrows! Madness always sticks to the facts.
Beware, Your Eminence, the demons have no end of tricks.
83
This cool bright water sings with drowned stars.I,born of its shimmering, die in its belief.
84
August sunlight on my face, some fateful music pursuing me through the fields, through the high grass, over the dunes, to the shore. I was born on a lopsided day in the distance, somewhere out there, or even ahead.
August turns to September in my eyes. The sound of galaxies collapsing.
85
Your August-blue eyes foretold it all:
Doom-blessed, they caught the dream,
And saw just where your life’s meaning
Would tumble and come to rest.
86
The black thread and the white,
I honour both, in equal measure:
Without their perfect weaving,
Heaven and earth are torn asunder.
87
Fleeing the evil news of man,
I hide in a flickering cherry-tree,
A torch lit by the Celtic sun.
No one,surely,will find me here,
And ,out of the heart of silence,
Dreams will spiral and sing.
88
Callipygean mistress
When you bend over
My throat is dry with hopeless lust
O,I would do such things
With prick and tongue
That the sun would shout
With violent delight
89
Ask one question, and a thousand more rise before you:
Bewildering labyrinth, luring you inward and on,
To places unknown,alone,through hope and despair,
Finding your way,haphazardly,only to lose it again.
90
A blackbird showed me
How to fly
And I flew to the moon
To fetch elixir,
To live forever,
To give to everyone,
I flew around the world,
Siren stars were singing,
Trying to tempt me,
But I was true
And could not fall.
91
Little by little, I inherit myself,
Studying clouds
As they form and disperse.
Walking barefoot over sharp rocks,
I bathe my wounds in the sea.
92
Cosmologies arise in me, burn themselves out,implode.The universal equation eludes me. I am left at last with crude useless methods that once seemed so refined.
93
Homeless,
Touched through the veil,
I flow out into the unseen.
My slow destruction invents a world.
A head falls, severed,
And a signal flare shoots up.
My face in the glass
Is a perfect unlikeness.
94
Stranded in space-time, I exist on algebra:
Love’s astrophysics throws out equations faster than I can think.
There is no reason in this, no formula,
It takes me by storm in the night.
Pulsars and quasars sing like whales in the ocean.
Terror whirls in the singularity’s blackness.
95
The jealous heart knells in the rib-cage. Distorting mirrors at every turn.
A crazed leer, and the Winter King reels in a scarecrow fit. Frenzy uproots the trees, diverts the rivers.
96
The shame of the all-too-singular
Is acid in the soul:
Expert in self-deception,
You die with the utmost discretion.
No one will know your secret thoughts,
Or what beguiling monsters ride you
Down to merry hell.
97
Faithful to the night,
I am living crystal,
Pulsing with candour,
A madman’s desire.
98
They call this Sunday,
This wretched gap, this amnesia
In the suburbs of my mind,
Where loneliness masturbates
Its filthy glitter.
I want to plant a bomb
Under the whole world
To celebrate this meaninglessness!
99
History can fuck itself! All I want is a bottle of wine.
Crisis is an art, and I fancy myself an artist.
Underground, we are more ourselves, after all.
The curtain has not yet fallen on this show.
What will you do when you have used all your three wishes ?
100
Serpentine and cruel, I move among distractions,
Living on truth and untruth, making ambiguous gestures,
Reading secret messages discovered in crannies,
Achieving now and then a kind of grace, or oblivion,
A subtle detachment, world returned dto itself,
As the sunlight shifts, and nuances vary.
Accidental or predestined, the universe continues
As my senses endlessly probe and recoil;
There are arguments,theories,points and lines,
Actions arising, perspectives to be lived through,
Answers that tremble like mirages in the air,
And the ceaseless urge towards serene completion.
Transparent clichés expand to fill the spaces
Left by explosions, and consciousness mocks itself,
For fear of its own multiplicity, while the dance
Spirals inward, as things coalesce or dissolve.
101
102
O,human progress! Destiny of nations!-
Diagrams and explanations,
Statistics in the name of reason,
Skyscrapers darkly gleaming,
Occam’sr razor stropped on cue
To cut the suicide’s throat.
Computer programs flash across my eyes,
Tabulated in this decomposing body;
Buried under rubbish, a disembodied hand
Reaches upward, clawing at the heavens.
Old newspapers blow across scabrous pavements.
Medieval monsters leer out of the torn pages of fashion magazines.
The politics of everything
Scuttles to and fro with a sneaky simper,
Shaking hands and signing autographs.
Facts and figures flounder in all directions,
Caught in a hurricane started by a butterfly’s wings.
Tantara!War trumpets at dawn:
All the proud cavalry trot out in line,
Ready to be gunned down.
Quizzical eyes
Gaze in the interglacial,
Trapped in lost words’ moraine.
What is this strange complicity?
The art of wasting away.
Horizon:
Mouth turned down at the corners,
All its oracles absurd.
Tried and found wanting. Seen and not seen. The ankh falls form my hand.Suprernal fiasco agitates the atmosphere.Fuitle crescendo.Galctic dust-clouds swirl in paranoid eyes.
Yours is the castle of trapdoors and false walls, of hidden stairways and corridors, and two-way mirrors.
103
My fish-mouth burbles underwater:
Time rushes through my gills.
I am the coelacanth of future days.
104
You burrow into marble,
Hide your smile in a tabernacle,
Mocking everything you hold sacred.
The sun sees through you,
The moon is full of scorn.
Keep going till ugliness and beauty
Are one, and contradictions merge
Into a kind of bliss.
Keep going till you find your city,
Your place of safety, or happy illusion,
In this age of broken violins.
105
To work without hope, or disappointment,
To give oneself to the unattainable,
Disciple of failure, murdered with mirrors and candles;
Thus, one learns the secret will.
O,this drunken sensation of falling,
Spread-eagled in stellar darkness,
Towards the brilliant planet.
106
A star falls into the fountain
And the garden blooms.
The seed sprouts in the sepulchre.
What fresh image forms now in the opal?
107
Summer’s orphan runs towards the sun
Singing in a brilliant shroud,
And the just-named river celebrates
With a festival of swans.
108
Curve of the possible:
I tally the days on my bones.
My mirror-mouth glitters in the night of peacocks,
The almond tree mines the earth for light.
The owl’s flight joins the dying stars.
I disappear into the faintest smile,
Voided at reason’s extreme.
The hour arrives and passes,
With hidden consequences.
Another hard day of boredom,
Drowning kittens in a sack.
Skimming stones across the water,
See them silhouetted against the sky.
O,purity of day polluted
By weird banalities!
No warning can keep you
From testing the poisonous thorn.
109
I turned around and expressionless faces
Stared at me out of the dark:
I quickened my pace, could not escape,
Relentless menace hard at my heels.
I woke somewhere in a strange room,
All the doors and windows locked,
Unable even to remember my name,
And a hollow voice boomed in my head:
Be still, and see, the time has come,
When dragons couple and kill.
110
So casulaly,left to my own devices,
I inhabit the unreal,
Nervous system attuned
To the inexpressible,
Days adding up
To some bizarre destiny.
111
Walking in a field of diamonds,
Walking in a dream,
She is nothing but herself,
With nothing to prove.
She draws the skies to her,
Flies like a sparrowhawk;
Pregnant with star-seed,
Gives birth to auroras.
Everything begins with her,
The seven hills’ Madonna,
Walking in a field of diamonds,
Walking in a dream.
112
Lovers without foresight,
Entranced, we merge,
Turning to Gregorian chant,
Wild as the purple mountains.
Vagrant dust of solar storms,
Ravishing the atmosphere,
We assume a tortuous shape,
Time’s figure-of-eight.
113
A burst of light, then nothing. a black pebble placed in the mouth.
Winter-transparent, I float over crow-winged fields.
I am a dark bacillus in the bloodstream of the year.
Human speech comes slowly to me: I discover odd syllables inside geodes, rooting through ripe shattered rocks. I cover my nakedness with thoughts.
114
Transcendence is just another word
Too long and pompous to be used or heard:
Benumbed, we sometimes ache a little
With unspeakable pain,suppressed,ignored.
Our minds, our lives, are not our own:
We struggle on, bruised slaves resigned
To oppression, scarcely able any more
To ask ourselves: “What does it mean?”
115
On wood and stone, I make these marks,coelbren and coelvain,metaphors for the invisible. I can read the rocks and speak the language of birds.
Is the heart of the labyrinth evil? Or ultimate good?
My fist,unclenching,revelas,a small incomprehensible stone.
116
We are the carnival, the ceremony, the perpetual migration.
Our fire forges metals, our water bathes wounds.
New violence comes through us, extreme and exact. Protean desire vibrates with electromagnetic geometry.
This is my parabola: to surpass myself in self-desrcution,attaining a rigorous grace.
Sumptuous indifferent memory consumes me. the virgin skies concentrate in beautiful crisis.
117
I have passed beyond words into stones,
Into the meteorology of a moment.
The meaning? There it is, between the lines,
-Can you see it?Oh,it’s gone.
Drifting in the streets, in the air,
Magisterial, insubstantial ,
Something of me exists without me,
Or so it seems.
Move along now, no loitering here!
118
A fine old rigmarole, and no mistake.
A devilish mess, no two ways about it.
What nonsense is this? Utter bullshit.
Master of ceremonies, take a bow!
119
My sleeves full of ruses,
I roam the scarecrow days,
Telling stories for children and madmen.
120
You ,in the future, piecing fragments together,
If it us you seek, then look in the mirror.
121
Into the night,
With hands full of fire,
Eyes torn from their sockets,
I vanish into nebulae,
Intoxixtaed by death;
Divine jokes burst about me,
Apocalyptic laughter.
Now everything becomes its opposite,
Retuned to the source.
To leap the chasm,
To conquer the void!
Emissary to the mountains,
I watch for shooting stars,
And gather the earth
Into my solitude.
I cast my stones
And kiss the sacrificial altar,
Black meteorite whose magnetism
Starts multitudes walking across the desert.
122
I feed on polymorphous fantasies bred out of turbulence, out of anger.
Experimental self, which do you prefer-order or disorder?
123
Coffee and croissants, daydreams in the afternoon sun,
Differences of opinion with one’s apparent destiny,
The languid disillusionment of the European soul…-
Connoisseur of rococo decomposition,
Forever on the verge of dissolution,
You await the end with studied indifference,
Your pale desire a repertoire of postures and complaints.
Ironical beauty tempts you to presume:
Some cryptic derision squints back from polished surfaces,
The syntax of ambiguity manipulates your tongue.
How many false premises enter into the commerce?
How many venture find fruition only in going astray?
Empty now, the coffee cup stands sullen in the void,
As if to say: Why ask too much? Sit back, enjoy the view,
Time is your own, and the swallows will soon be returning…
124
History’s dynamiters move in a trance. Silent explosions ripple outward. The embryo capitulates.
Dreams;mutations;geological displacements; one theory succeeds another; the primal syllable resounds;homo sapiens stands up on two legs and screams.
125
In my illuminated bestiary, I study the dipsas,the kraken, the manticore .
I read until my candle dies, and I fall back into the lake of rainbows.
The unicorn’s horn is hidden in the folds of my habit. The moon comes to rest in my hands.
126
What am I doing here, making maps of distant countries, accustoming myself to what may or may not exist?
All the signs point to a sleepwalkers’ Sabbath, a rendezvous with No-one in the cupboard under the stairs.
127
I flow with the crowd, anonymous, stupefied. Swarming faces blur into one mask. We speak no language, possess no soul. I take what I am given, strangely grateful. This is an exclusive club.
128
Always you expected evil, the stigmata of the damned, sniffing the air for foul emanations, for hints of horror disguised as beauty. Ravished by dread, you embraced the abyss. Where else could you be yourself, without effort, or fear of rejection?
What it is to be human, to thrive on the sun’s decay!
129
O,world of the unsatisfied!- those who fear the dark or loneliness or crowds or heights; those who dwell under stones or in the cracks in walls; those who writhe in their beds and wake in a cold sweat; those who mutilate themselves with knives; those with weak hearts and poor circulation; those who spy for paranoid gods; those who live in boredom and delusion in the suburbs of the soul; those on committees who bicker and repine; those who conquer other because they cannot conquer themselves; those who watch the clock but never know the time; those who sit bewildered in premature dotage.
My soul, it is time to acknowledge delusion, to cast off the dark hood and tear the cloak to shreds. Kiss the naked body of silence! Be one with the earth-star, one with the void.
O,pulse of rainbow light! I am life itself.
The fire has done its work:
These ashes are to remind us
To live in perfect meditation,
Believing only what birds’ wings
Write in the laughing sky.
130
This subversive tomfoolery, this tiger-snaring,chicken-pluckign art!
You there, you sidling grumbling shadow,alwas retreating into another haughty evasion, never any closer to the truth, what do you think you are doing?
This is the place of ejaculation under torture. What you cannot throw away, you will have to use.
131
Rain, cool delicious rain! A Mayan priest delivered of the sacrifice, I imbibe heaven’s milk and dissolve .I am weighless,selfless,disembodied,without north or south. I spiral irresistibly inward, toward the heart of the cosmos.
132
Ah,the smiling imbecile, Argonaut of idiocy! Pentecostal gibberish flames from his mouth. Miracles spill out of his threadbare pockets.
Where has he gone now? Has he fallen through a trapdoor in the mind?
133
The myrmidons assemble to hear the Leader speak. Their ears flap in the oracular wind, a convincing imitation of applause. Their eyes gleam with fanatical devotion at all the appropriate moments. Everything is going according to plan. Grave-faced surveyors are plotting out the Promised Land. Soon the Exodus will begin.
Onward, illustrious myrmidons, onward to glory! Dirt-cheap Paradise for all! Just follow the signs, and keep to the road, and complete the requisite forms without delay.Yur dream home awaits you, fully furnished and transparent.
134
Irony, my belladonna, how faithfully I have loved you! So many billets-doux in the form of bitter jests,Pantagruelian fanfares played on tarnished old trumpets, and mincing little airs on a tinker’s whistle.
Lead me, I beg you, to a cosy well-made grave, lined with white satin, and made to measure. Ply me with placebos and anaesthetics; lead me in the goat-dance of days.
135
Did you think you were the master? Did you think life was yours to manipulate?
The mirror blurs and invents another version of You. A beautiful monster, thriving on the unattainable, essence of this now-and-never world.
Failure is your vocation, your way to greatness.
A myriad distractions amount to a world.Rootless,the mind wavers in peril. Only the impenetrable can shine.
Tightrope-minded and malign, I dwell in lostness,for the love of no-one. The leper-bell thousand a soft voice croons a lullaby for the world.
Sterile Genesis programs infinities of artificial worlds. Cause and effect operate without a hitch, and no black cats are ever seen.Three cheers for the technicians, the titanium heroes!
We are left with nothing but memories of blind man’s buff. And yet we have our season, our sad desire’s small chance.
Black-bearded polychrome Byzantine,
I walk in blue shimmer;
Candle-glamoured icons glow around.
O,age of polymaths,
Let the gold be smelted!
Illustrated manuscripts fly in the wind;
The radiant city rises from the Flood.
2
That succulent vivacious body
Trances me anguished to bliss;
Lightly, black eyes profess
The quantum mechanics of love.
Up to our eyes in ridiculous ardour,
We raid the skies for innocence,
Fortune’s angels, turning the wheel
With all our trembling strength.
3
I haggled, hoarded, truckled,
Competed for every prize;
I hid my fear ,and never,
Never looked life in the eyes.
4
Sad in a strange way, though summered in blue welkin whiles, and cloud-drift,I,a ghost on earth, disillusioned and dreaming, here and not here. Was I ever so bizarre?
So it goes. As if these words had meaning and could heal. Yet there seems some haunting mercy in all this, working its charm in the midst of grief, guiding me beyond the trees’ cascades, could I but trust the moment.
5
Love’s linguist,syllabled in semantic revrie,aching with hermenutics,in dread of fathomless silence, I parse my way through trouble’s syntax, words of fate in Indo-European sky. continents drift and clash; mountains thrust upward; oceans seethe; and here, in my cell, I follow the motions of the stars .
6
Life, queasy farrago of boredom and fear, wallows in brain and guts, deepening narcosis.
Who goes there. A doppelganger. Woe to the automatic slack-jawed citizen, slumped in his mrchair,chewing regurgitated cud.
Enter the beautiful bureaucrat in shiny shoes and well-creased suit, processed data marching across his monitors, applying the formula to everything in sight. the appropriate forms for all occasions shower from the sky.
“Progress!” cries the Decent Man,steepping over the cliff.Homo sapiens, toddling upright, sniffs the air and teeters forward with crooked gait. What fun we shall provide for the archaeologists of the future.
7
Attenuated mannerists, chiaroscuro vituosi,anxiously angling for perspective, we disappear up our own arses with consummate ease. Self-mortified withmathematcs,we sing the integers and irrational numbers of myth. Distraction is our theology.Infinite speculation and sophistry ensue.
8
Inexplicable, all too human,
What a strange creature I have turned out to be,
Half-genius, half-moron.
I crown myself Emperor of the Banal;
What it all adds up to, I cannot tell.
Twists and puns, enough for everyone,
Bitter aphorisms by the bushel;
All this I offer to the Lord of Heaven,
And pray He will see the joke.
9
On the outskirts of Now,
Stricken into perception,
I trade chance for chance,
Destroying and creating.
10
Love, the musical twins’ knack, solving problems in fluid mechanics, comes at things from all angles at once, running and leaping at the sky. Happiness? Without theories or conclusions, and no demands to satisfy?
Charivari shudders under the skin, shimmerings in the rain.
11
This is my house
That I have built form nothing
From wandering daydreams
And terror in the night;
This is my destiny,
My most secret will.
12
Citizen of an imagined state, statistic in freefall, I enter the neutral zone. Through binoculars, I watch the world destroy itself. It is so quiet here, one can almost hear oneself think.
13
Living subtle fictions, I anticipate myself;
Spun from the vortex, memory’s creature,
Inquring,changing,a process, not a thing.
I carry a vagabond theatre on my back,
Through storms bred on the desert horizon,
Toward the ultimate clarification of dreams.
14
Raucous voices dwindle to whispers;
Lines and perspectives fade;
Only the nights are the same as ever,
The Milky Way like a chloroform mask
Closing down on my face.
Distrusting crude sanity, the mind withdraws,
And the planet stalls, bewildered, spent;
Trapped in a room with cracked walls,
I calculate some attenuated survival,
Whatever the moment can afford.
15
In the caverns of our laughter
Whispers drip.
16
The people process to the dried-up riverbed, bearing human skulls aloft on poles, to lay upon the barren stones, and call down rain from the mountains.
The bull’s head carved in rock glowers with sombre power. Bare trees blacken the sky. this is the land of the wandering dead, where rainbows evartaret in quavering song, and snakes dance and copulate, bringing forth the dawn.
17
Clench your teeth,
And scream like an ape,
Beautiful lunatic,
Coprophiliac!
Shine your shoes,
And walk on air,
Think without thinking,
Planet breathing.
18
In the season of beginnings, I gather herbs under the moon. The island throbs with animal energy. Born between a rock and a tree, baptised in a green mountain river, I walk towards the glint of sunlight in a spider’s web.
I have quarried a sepulchre in the air .The dark one, my brother, comes to slay me in the ravine. his sword is a streak of fire in the heavens.
In the deserted citadel, in a candlelit chamber, the pages of the book of prophecies turn by themselves.
19
At my potter’s wheel, I watch the Pleiades rise. My sibman hands me the jade mask and I fall through the floor.
Shoals of stars swim about me, as I lie on the golden reef, drenched in symphonies and silences.
20
And then I drank the water from the rock. Sunrise streamed through me; I became the rainbow.
Is this the planet of destroyers, the conjuror’s sad trick?
21
He comes, the man with the sardonic smile, talking of home and freedom, accustomed to the company of chimerae,wise to their tricks, his amber eyes gleaming with tall tales of the true.
“You are so proud of your blindness,” he laughs, “Close your eyes, and all will be clear.”
22
I am the pontifex,the mountain’s reflection in the lake you have never seen. What snake-eyed burlesque! Who is that, tiptoeing to the grave?
These pigeon-toed pretensions I dedicate to the day after tomorrow, the day of coming clean.
23
The mouth yawns open
And spews unholy clichés
Filling the awkward spaces
For a while,
Fending off the void.
I have my tricks, my sleight-of-hand,diversions,fantasias,call it what you will.
I study the behaviour of wasps in my dreams, imagine the plunge of the sting,-and then what?
I scrabble in the dirt, stuffing handfuls into my mouth. One just wants to feel full.
What is that noise in my head?Tinnitus of being,carillons,carillons.
I cannot retrace my steps. I have come too far.
Come and Go came and went.
The mouth yawns open
And a herd of cattle
Stampedes over the plains
And vanishes
Over the horizon.
24
Draw a circle in the sand,
And begin at the end;
It is the time of coming together,
It is the time of falling apart.
25
Memories: only the shooting stars, only the rivers, the trees in your mind, as you reach out to grasp what is no longer there.
These winter days are dark fire. Frost glitters with the passion of Nothing.
When I at last somehow relinquish,
Will the earth shine as never before?
26
Black ink, you taste of riddles
And the death of stars;
What stratagem will save me
From losing my mind?
27
We have learned to breathe poison and crave destruction. Our lives ,it seems, can live without us. On the Stock Exchange of the damned, stocks and shares in nothingness change hands amid bedlam and frenzy.
Oblivion is here and now, the moment that evaporates, undiscovered, unloved.
28
Baptised in sleep,
Picking locks with my tongue,
I lose my heart
To the highest branches of the forest,
Praying to be made whole
By the glittering sky;
Everything out of reach
Rushes into me now,
Conceived in here,
Drawn toward perfection;
With all my strength,
I must test the dream
Beyond all limits
And prove it true.
29
The clouds are beyond me,
Nothing I can say about them makes sense,
Nothing approaches them, nothing encompass them,
They are simply themselves, drifting by…
My language is mad of sticks and stones,
Pieces of string of differing lengths,
Ink or grease smudge don the fingers,
And the window that you only dare to open in summer,
When the sky’s chrysalis bursts open.
30
What will you find
In bluebeard’s castle?
The key to the locked room
Is in your mouth,
In the well.
31
Passion’s precipates, colours of death and renewal! the beautiful dragons come. the particles are singing, if only you could hear them. Sell your bones for a skiff to glide downriver. Descending is ascending. Time to eat your words.
Language flickers on the wave crests, under the deaf-mute moon.
Everything begins again, from a slightly different point.
32
Bodies collide,
Destinies crumple into each other,
The sperm and the ovum devour one another,
In an ecstasy of recognition,
Three hundred and sixty degrees of truth.
The difficult homecoming calls you,
Looking upward holds you to the earth,
Paradox crackles in your fingertips,
Whichever way you inspect the situation
It is always the opposite, the other.
33
I like to swallow stones;
I like the way they hold me down;
These cool dark stones
Are good for my fever.
34
I measure her body with prayers,
Captured by the wings of bats and doves,
At the heart of the compass rose.
How will it end? With two mangy dogs
Licking the puddles on tumbledown streets,
In a city without honour, without love?
35
Explorers in a wilderness where names fall to earth like shooting stars, we move forward with animal energy, mapping the vastness ,possessing to dispossess.
From the first intention universe explodes.
We paint our nakedness with patterns, and dance in circles. from horizon to horizon, we become a new language, a mystery shared.
36
How can I face the world and not destroy myself with rage?
Yet still there is contemplation in this sun-tranced garden,
Ants doodling mystical patterns at my feet,
As I savour earth’s rich melancholy aroma .
Intoning the sonorous occult names of shrubs-
Stephanandra,euonymus,helianthemum-
I cling to this small portion of almost-paradise,
This sanctuary that is everywhere and nowhere,
Where the fruit trees answer to my voice.
37
My dying father’s eyes
In dream’s ritual seeing
Bless dark with inception;
Merciful grief phosphoresces
On spring’s giddy boughs,
And love, on the high ground,
Whinnies and bounds, self-amazed.
38
The sun cartwheels overhead,
Over the nomad plains of the beginning;
The current flows through the rock,
The seas turn over,
The shaman’s drum beats out the dance;
A meteorite plummets,
An oak tree rises from an acorn,
Lovers meld in cloudburst
On the first day.
39
Travelling players, roaming from place to place,
Performing tragicomedies for your pleasure,
Our masks are humble, but precious.
We have long since forgotten our real names,
We exist only in the act;
We are your silhouettes, your necessary demons,
Disturbing the order of things, as we go,
If only a little, and only for a while,
Somehow holding the earth together.
40
This gaunt peninsula reverberates with doom. Here, skeletons are bleached and transfigured.
A delicious spring gushes from a cleft under a fig tree, high over the bay. Snakes shimmer in the cataleptic heat. Nothing moves in the mind.
Why have I come here? What am I seeking in the raven-nested ruin sof abandoned
churches, and in the kraken’s caves?
I touch hot throbbing rocks with my silence. Amid the olive groves, invisible spirits draw me on.
41
The most hideous things, the truths that could kill me, I must suffer them and pass through.
February flays me raw with sacramental whips. Winter’s initiate, I grow wrinkled with insight.
Be still, and what wonders may find you!
42
Malingering behind my eyes, I inherit the void.
The spider knows what he needs to know.
And I am a spider.
43
A man and a woman playing chess: “Your move,” says the man.
Towers topple. Seas ebb and flood.
The witch doctor casts the bones across the dust. Nuclear reactors chant hymns to the apocalypse.
Tricks with mirrors and trapdoors proliferate. In the blue castle, the mad seigneur leads his guests in a mazurka. The music box starts up again.
A man and a woman playing chess: “Your move,” says the woman to the man.
44
Our bodies
moored together
sway with the sway
Tarot cards
spread out on the table:
the tower struck by lightning
Love
spirals up and down
instantaneous
unending
The Aeolian harp
recalls us
to the Garden
45
Apparitions cross the bridges
Over auriferous rivers;
The sleepwalker speaks in flame.
There is no clarity here,
No light to love by,
Only mandolin moments,
Travesties and transgressions.
Drift and transmute,
Let involuted time become
The sum of our errors,
Folding in on itself
In catastrophic origami;
When the end arrives,
Will we even recognise it?
Apparitions cross the bridges
And meet themselves, coming back.
46
Most secret felicity
Exquisite to the point of death,
Anagram of paradise!
Our minds touch, our bodies cling,
As if we could keep one another from falling,
Falling from grace with the day.
We share our pain so secretly,
It glows in the dark, when only the moon is looking.
My mouth on your mouth,
My spirit in yours,
Dragonflies at twilight,
We glitter and die.
47
Began with a wolf-howl. Began as bawling galaxies begin. Entered a body, stood upright,stretched,looked around. The bone moon taught my hands to work. Shadow came and showed me how to die.
Now I follow the ghosts of animals across the plain.
48
These sentimental fictions, how we need them to survive!
At year’s end, watching the sun spiral down into darkness, I feel again the sacred wound that makes me human.
Thus I plunge into the cauldron of another year, to witness, if only for an instant, the earth shine anew, reborn at the source for all.
49
Stupefaction dulls the air; the horizon tilts; definitions implode, as far as ever from the truth; reason twists the rope till it catches fire. Confusion insinuates itself into every crack. This strange return to apalce we never knew. What now?-Information without knowledge, knowledge without hope. and then,perhaps,the reckoning.
All is shifting,formless,unsayyable.This is my opium, a wasting asset.
Life, my favourite calembour!The brinkmanship of thought caracoles for its own perverse pleasure.
What category are you in? What name do you answer to? God’s bureaucracy is working day and night; we exist only to serve.
50
If not these words, then others. But words, always and only words. Spoken and unspoken. Connections and short circuits.
Magical grammar, invest me with truth! Order me with the stars. Remember the forgotten, reassemble the scattered.
At the toll-booths of time, I pay my dues.
I am torn down the middle, and no one can see the tear.
51
I say to myself:
Watch your head! Don’t lose it!
Destiny?Pah?
Just get on with it1
Let the whip fall,
Let the sky fall, for all I care!
I like the smell of cemetery flowers,
The damp earth after rain;
Suburbia suits me,
A spiral galaxy.
I say to myself:
What if ?If only!
Such mild insanity,
Pure perversion…
The same old words come round again,
The same old thoughts…
Now take your medicine, and be a good boy.
Clutching my lottery ticket,
I pray to the heavens,
Round-shouldered little beggar that I am,
Always treading on tiptoe,
Sucking up to the Big Man.
But I must, at least, confess to a little sin,
An unaccountable predilection
For killing flies and spiders, as many as I can,
No that it gives me any pleasure…
52
The wolf is coming! The wolf is coming!
And then the three brothers came to a castle
Where everyone had been turned to stone,
And only they could undo the spell
By completing three tasks.
I want to eat up the gingerbread house,
But the witch will get me and eat me alive!
I dream of the kingdom
Of which nothing is known.
Three drops of blood in the snow,
And a golden chalice in the hand:
Little Red Cap filled the wolf’s belly with stones,
And when it woke it could not jump away.
What did the white horse whisper in your ear while you slept?
Tell me, what became of the youngest son?
What became of the simpleton?
53
It is the time of murderers and pathologists, of technologies and disguises. Plenty of work for everyone!
I dedicate my life to the study of ellipses. I delight in a tenuous self, a unique curve vanishing into the distance.
Beautiful pariahs, have faith in the desert sun. The stars are all in place, and the earth knows its mission.
We, who uncover the brilliance of bone, will prosper in death’s reward.
54
When you tell those lies,
The moon is eclipsed;
When you wrench my bones so,
The sea turns cold,
And black blasted trees
Fly through my head,
And the only sound is a heartbeat,
No one’s, nowhere.
How should I begin?-
I have come too far,
Only growing in foolishness,
And seldom in wisdom.
Yet here I am still,
In the flesh, in the moment,
Phantasmal, absurd,
But not insignificant.
And you, my Otherness,
Can you hear me?
When you tell those lies,
The good stone cracks,
And not a thing can be built.
55
Keep your secret, kept it well,
For what else do you possess?
More,more,always more of everything,
To make you real, or less unreal,
Then nothing, nothing at all.
This fatal appetite hates itself.
Annihilation is its game.
56
Don’t look in my eyes for the truth:
There’s nothing there but sorrow.
Don’t tell me what I need,
Don’t show me where to go,
Don’t ask me to come clean;
There’s nothing left but time.
57
Solitary captain,
Hunter of the narwhal,
Man of ice and fire,
Gulls be your pallbearers,
And the ocean your shroud;
Your spindrift story is in the wind;
A mermaid’s haunting,
By barren shores.
58
I see you riding along the sands,
Green-eyed girl, hair blown by the wind,
Who will never belong to anyone in the world.
59
I have seen a flight of dragons
Over the mountain,
And heard a woman’s voice
From the bottom of the well.
The moon that is nearly full brings good fortune.
A spring wells up in the forest,
Where the stricken deer lies down.
The passes are closed to the horseman,
But lightning opens the sky,
And the lame man grasps the moon.
World always beyond me, world in itself,
Will you ever show me the key?
60
The lion left and the spider came,
The invisible people turned against each other,
There was nothing in the sky
But a single cloud, shaped like a sword.
Pierced through by a nightingale’s song,
The ornithologist turned with a sad smile
And walked away slowly across the meadow
Strewn with shining fossils and bones.
61
Among truncated cones of thought,
Suspended by my feet,
I interrogate the earth.
Shooting stars outrun my mind,
As I rummage for ominous stones.
The world brings gifts and questions
To the upturned tree at the end.
62
Nomads of love, we traverse from well to well, placing our faith in the earth, pitching our tents in the spaces between words.
The flint knife casts a noonday shadow, gnomon of the killer’s heart.
We turn our faces skyward, and march into the storm.
63
Blue Italian eyes, body sleek as a cat’s,
Sinuous smile saying Yes to the world,
Coolly you reflect the midday heat,
Long shadow haunting the mind.
Stay with me; why wander away?
We can be feline together,
Slumbering safely inside one another,
Stray cats in a Tuscan hill town.
Even the Pope longs to be pagan:
Take the Fisherman’s ring from my finger,
Hurl it like a meteor into the deep.
64
I feel them, hard within me:
Inoperable tumours of doubt.
Agony on agony is measured
By the dripping of a tap.
65
Two halves of a pantomime horse,
We canter back and forth,
Lumbering,lurching,out of step,
Solitudes rubbing each other threadbare.
What a performance!Bravo!Encore!
Heavenward we ascend on wires,
Winched up by applauding angels,
And a tattered majestic curtain descends.
66
Autumn the stranger
Awakens me gently,
Shivering with premonitions,
Marked for sorrow.
Level with death,
I harvest abundance,
Seeing Rembrandt
And hearing Chopin.
Breeding fantastic
In nuclear frenzy,
Cognition’s enigmas
Eerily sing.
67
Flickering screen of rain:
Stare into nothingness, hypnotised,
Dissolved in the world’s dissolution,
Apotheosis of absence,
Incommunicado, and gone.
68
Deliciousness of simple functioning, nothing to question, no need to think. No drug could be cheaper. No need for hope or despair, no sense in deviation. Cut-price nirvana for all!-This suave democratic oppression; a straight line to the terminus, cattle-trucks disguised as a luxury train.
69
Invited or not,
I am the phantom guest,
Feasting with strangers
Until all is lost.
70
So it ends:you,lying there, a shrunken effigy,
Small, dutiful hands crossed across your chest,
A fragile red rose placed there in token.
You never shirked your fate,or yearned
For some impossible heaven beyond your ken;
Now the white fires will burn you true,
And purge the momentary years’ eerie sorrow.
71
How often the pen slips, accumulating errata.
So many disjointed phrases,mutterings,asides,
Telephone conversations with angels,
Tremulous stupidities that plot a remarkable graph.
72
Some arrogant contrition is the human trick.
We are devious enough to survive, but not to win.
Praise it, ennoble it, stick medal on it: then pour the quicklime over, and be done.
73
Spider mortal, edged on the sly, speaking in glints and glowers, weird with longing for impossibles, the most you can do is inhabit your downfall with some grace.
Gravity’s booby, clowning on the underside, you fabricate the finite from the infinite, the infinite from the finite.
What fun you have had, in this transit camp for the bewildered!
74
My video recorder throbs, warm with desire.Rewind,fast forward,pause.time stops and starts as I will it. This playful universe, boxed and sold, exists to please me.
Hypnotist of solitudes, I extend my authority into shimmering infinity.
The drug runs dark in these veins, hallucinating Me.
75
How well I appreciate the precision of a delicate lie. The truth is so restricting: it lacks insight.
White dazzle in a glass of vodka: Chinese whispers in the head.
Evening comes on like a fever, monstrous with possibilities. Paradox is the Big Bang, the Crucifixion at the core of every moment.
76
With a room full of bird-masks and an altar made from junk pray to the gods who destroy me. I want to fly: they say it is never too late.
Malleable and light, our aluminium madness glimmers in the sun and never rusts. It easily adapts to many uses. We like to build the highest towers we can.
Subtle villainy streaks across my brain. It picks locks and triggers avalanches. It invents political schemes.
77
Suns and empires lived their graphs. Ideas ignited and consumed themselves. the newborn’s howl, the senile gasp. And here, in the mind’s inmost caves, the paintings glowed.
Skin-clad hunters stalk through the grass. The sorcerer’s head seeds the earth’s belly with lightning. Bison are mating, deer are running. The small blue planet sings on its axis.
Makers’ potlatch swells the many-breasted earth. The chosen flint is honed to its ultimate magic.
78
Sprawled naked across the bed, on her stomach,laughing,eating a peach, the girl with the sun in her hair floated on summer’s tide. Kittenish with the air, playing with the moment, she glowed with her own ineffable passing.
A kiss on her behind, then , a homage to ripeness. Let the sunlight hold her fast a moment more.
79
I hardly knew her,
Yet she left her trace
Here, in me,
Secret, inexplicable;
Not love, of course,
But something bizarre,
Beautiful as only
Perversity can be.
80
Jules Laforgue,
Black-coated figure,
Funeral director
On a unicycle;
Poor little orphan,
Where did Mother go?
Did the black spider
Steal her away?
All your self-mocking,
Your irony’s fireworks,
Burst skyward
In harlequin bouquets.
There is only this,
This mudball planet,
And the phthisic sun’s
Gorgon glare.
81
Your green eyes know,
Your green eyes, and the sea:
Your green eyes at sunrise,
And in the silence.
82
You know the signs, but your hands are tied. with silk.
These little deaths in black and white, are they merely part of the pretence?
Exquisite ambivalence thrills you through.Oh,these riches, these sorrows! Madness always sticks to the facts.
Beware, Your Eminence, the demons have no end of tricks.
83
This cool bright water sings with drowned stars.I,born of its shimmering, die in its belief.
84
August sunlight on my face, some fateful music pursuing me through the fields, through the high grass, over the dunes, to the shore. I was born on a lopsided day in the distance, somewhere out there, or even ahead.
August turns to September in my eyes. The sound of galaxies collapsing.
85
Your August-blue eyes foretold it all:
Doom-blessed, they caught the dream,
And saw just where your life’s meaning
Would tumble and come to rest.
86
The black thread and the white,
I honour both, in equal measure:
Without their perfect weaving,
Heaven and earth are torn asunder.
87
Fleeing the evil news of man,
I hide in a flickering cherry-tree,
A torch lit by the Celtic sun.
No one,surely,will find me here,
And ,out of the heart of silence,
Dreams will spiral and sing.
88
Callipygean mistress
When you bend over
My throat is dry with hopeless lust
O,I would do such things
With prick and tongue
That the sun would shout
With violent delight
89
Ask one question, and a thousand more rise before you:
Bewildering labyrinth, luring you inward and on,
To places unknown,alone,through hope and despair,
Finding your way,haphazardly,only to lose it again.
90
A blackbird showed me
How to fly
And I flew to the moon
To fetch elixir,
To live forever,
To give to everyone,
I flew around the world,
Siren stars were singing,
Trying to tempt me,
But I was true
And could not fall.
91
Little by little, I inherit myself,
Studying clouds
As they form and disperse.
Walking barefoot over sharp rocks,
I bathe my wounds in the sea.
92
Cosmologies arise in me, burn themselves out,implode.The universal equation eludes me. I am left at last with crude useless methods that once seemed so refined.
93
Homeless,
Touched through the veil,
I flow out into the unseen.
My slow destruction invents a world.
A head falls, severed,
And a signal flare shoots up.
My face in the glass
Is a perfect unlikeness.
94
Stranded in space-time, I exist on algebra:
Love’s astrophysics throws out equations faster than I can think.
There is no reason in this, no formula,
It takes me by storm in the night.
Pulsars and quasars sing like whales in the ocean.
Terror whirls in the singularity’s blackness.
95
The jealous heart knells in the rib-cage. Distorting mirrors at every turn.
A crazed leer, and the Winter King reels in a scarecrow fit. Frenzy uproots the trees, diverts the rivers.
96
The shame of the all-too-singular
Is acid in the soul:
Expert in self-deception,
You die with the utmost discretion.
No one will know your secret thoughts,
Or what beguiling monsters ride you
Down to merry hell.
97
Faithful to the night,
I am living crystal,
Pulsing with candour,
A madman’s desire.
98
They call this Sunday,
This wretched gap, this amnesia
In the suburbs of my mind,
Where loneliness masturbates
Its filthy glitter.
I want to plant a bomb
Under the whole world
To celebrate this meaninglessness!
99
History can fuck itself! All I want is a bottle of wine.
Crisis is an art, and I fancy myself an artist.
Underground, we are more ourselves, after all.
The curtain has not yet fallen on this show.
What will you do when you have used all your three wishes ?
100
Serpentine and cruel, I move among distractions,
Living on truth and untruth, making ambiguous gestures,
Reading secret messages discovered in crannies,
Achieving now and then a kind of grace, or oblivion,
A subtle detachment, world returned dto itself,
As the sunlight shifts, and nuances vary.
Accidental or predestined, the universe continues
As my senses endlessly probe and recoil;
There are arguments,theories,points and lines,
Actions arising, perspectives to be lived through,
Answers that tremble like mirages in the air,
And the ceaseless urge towards serene completion.
Transparent clichés expand to fill the spaces
Left by explosions, and consciousness mocks itself,
For fear of its own multiplicity, while the dance
Spirals inward, as things coalesce or dissolve.
101
102
O,human progress! Destiny of nations!-
Diagrams and explanations,
Statistics in the name of reason,
Skyscrapers darkly gleaming,
Occam’sr razor stropped on cue
To cut the suicide’s throat.
Computer programs flash across my eyes,
Tabulated in this decomposing body;
Buried under rubbish, a disembodied hand
Reaches upward, clawing at the heavens.
Old newspapers blow across scabrous pavements.
Medieval monsters leer out of the torn pages of fashion magazines.
The politics of everything
Scuttles to and fro with a sneaky simper,
Shaking hands and signing autographs.
Facts and figures flounder in all directions,
Caught in a hurricane started by a butterfly’s wings.
Tantara!War trumpets at dawn:
All the proud cavalry trot out in line,
Ready to be gunned down.
Quizzical eyes
Gaze in the interglacial,
Trapped in lost words’ moraine.
What is this strange complicity?
The art of wasting away.
Horizon:
Mouth turned down at the corners,
All its oracles absurd.
Tried and found wanting. Seen and not seen. The ankh falls form my hand.Suprernal fiasco agitates the atmosphere.Fuitle crescendo.Galctic dust-clouds swirl in paranoid eyes.
Yours is the castle of trapdoors and false walls, of hidden stairways and corridors, and two-way mirrors.
103
My fish-mouth burbles underwater:
Time rushes through my gills.
I am the coelacanth of future days.
104
You burrow into marble,
Hide your smile in a tabernacle,
Mocking everything you hold sacred.
The sun sees through you,
The moon is full of scorn.
Keep going till ugliness and beauty
Are one, and contradictions merge
Into a kind of bliss.
Keep going till you find your city,
Your place of safety, or happy illusion,
In this age of broken violins.
105
To work without hope, or disappointment,
To give oneself to the unattainable,
Disciple of failure, murdered with mirrors and candles;
Thus, one learns the secret will.
O,this drunken sensation of falling,
Spread-eagled in stellar darkness,
Towards the brilliant planet.
106
A star falls into the fountain
And the garden blooms.
The seed sprouts in the sepulchre.
What fresh image forms now in the opal?
107
Summer’s orphan runs towards the sun
Singing in a brilliant shroud,
And the just-named river celebrates
With a festival of swans.
108
Curve of the possible:
I tally the days on my bones.
My mirror-mouth glitters in the night of peacocks,
The almond tree mines the earth for light.
The owl’s flight joins the dying stars.
I disappear into the faintest smile,
Voided at reason’s extreme.
The hour arrives and passes,
With hidden consequences.
Another hard day of boredom,
Drowning kittens in a sack.
Skimming stones across the water,
See them silhouetted against the sky.
O,purity of day polluted
By weird banalities!
No warning can keep you
From testing the poisonous thorn.
109
I turned around and expressionless faces
Stared at me out of the dark:
I quickened my pace, could not escape,
Relentless menace hard at my heels.
I woke somewhere in a strange room,
All the doors and windows locked,
Unable even to remember my name,
And a hollow voice boomed in my head:
Be still, and see, the time has come,
When dragons couple and kill.
110
So casulaly,left to my own devices,
I inhabit the unreal,
Nervous system attuned
To the inexpressible,
Days adding up
To some bizarre destiny.
111
Walking in a field of diamonds,
Walking in a dream,
She is nothing but herself,
With nothing to prove.
She draws the skies to her,
Flies like a sparrowhawk;
Pregnant with star-seed,
Gives birth to auroras.
Everything begins with her,
The seven hills’ Madonna,
Walking in a field of diamonds,
Walking in a dream.
112
Lovers without foresight,
Entranced, we merge,
Turning to Gregorian chant,
Wild as the purple mountains.
Vagrant dust of solar storms,
Ravishing the atmosphere,
We assume a tortuous shape,
Time’s figure-of-eight.
113
A burst of light, then nothing. a black pebble placed in the mouth.
Winter-transparent, I float over crow-winged fields.
I am a dark bacillus in the bloodstream of the year.
Human speech comes slowly to me: I discover odd syllables inside geodes, rooting through ripe shattered rocks. I cover my nakedness with thoughts.
114
Transcendence is just another word
Too long and pompous to be used or heard:
Benumbed, we sometimes ache a little
With unspeakable pain,suppressed,ignored.
Our minds, our lives, are not our own:
We struggle on, bruised slaves resigned
To oppression, scarcely able any more
To ask ourselves: “What does it mean?”
115
On wood and stone, I make these marks,coelbren and coelvain,metaphors for the invisible. I can read the rocks and speak the language of birds.
Is the heart of the labyrinth evil? Or ultimate good?
My fist,unclenching,revelas,a small incomprehensible stone.
116
We are the carnival, the ceremony, the perpetual migration.
Our fire forges metals, our water bathes wounds.
New violence comes through us, extreme and exact. Protean desire vibrates with electromagnetic geometry.
This is my parabola: to surpass myself in self-desrcution,attaining a rigorous grace.
Sumptuous indifferent memory consumes me. the virgin skies concentrate in beautiful crisis.
117
I have passed beyond words into stones,
Into the meteorology of a moment.
The meaning? There it is, between the lines,
-Can you see it?Oh,it’s gone.
Drifting in the streets, in the air,
Magisterial, insubstantial ,
Something of me exists without me,
Or so it seems.
Move along now, no loitering here!
118
A fine old rigmarole, and no mistake.
A devilish mess, no two ways about it.
What nonsense is this? Utter bullshit.
Master of ceremonies, take a bow!
119
My sleeves full of ruses,
I roam the scarecrow days,
Telling stories for children and madmen.
120
You ,in the future, piecing fragments together,
If it us you seek, then look in the mirror.
121
Into the night,
With hands full of fire,
Eyes torn from their sockets,
I vanish into nebulae,
Intoxixtaed by death;
Divine jokes burst about me,
Apocalyptic laughter.
Now everything becomes its opposite,
Retuned to the source.
To leap the chasm,
To conquer the void!
Emissary to the mountains,
I watch for shooting stars,
And gather the earth
Into my solitude.
I cast my stones
And kiss the sacrificial altar,
Black meteorite whose magnetism
Starts multitudes walking across the desert.
122
I feed on polymorphous fantasies bred out of turbulence, out of anger.
Experimental self, which do you prefer-order or disorder?
123
Coffee and croissants, daydreams in the afternoon sun,
Differences of opinion with one’s apparent destiny,
The languid disillusionment of the European soul…-
Connoisseur of rococo decomposition,
Forever on the verge of dissolution,
You await the end with studied indifference,
Your pale desire a repertoire of postures and complaints.
Ironical beauty tempts you to presume:
Some cryptic derision squints back from polished surfaces,
The syntax of ambiguity manipulates your tongue.
How many false premises enter into the commerce?
How many venture find fruition only in going astray?
Empty now, the coffee cup stands sullen in the void,
As if to say: Why ask too much? Sit back, enjoy the view,
Time is your own, and the swallows will soon be returning…
124
History’s dynamiters move in a trance. Silent explosions ripple outward. The embryo capitulates.
Dreams;mutations;geological displacements; one theory succeeds another; the primal syllable resounds;homo sapiens stands up on two legs and screams.
125
In my illuminated bestiary, I study the dipsas,the kraken, the manticore .
I read until my candle dies, and I fall back into the lake of rainbows.
The unicorn’s horn is hidden in the folds of my habit. The moon comes to rest in my hands.
126
What am I doing here, making maps of distant countries, accustoming myself to what may or may not exist?
All the signs point to a sleepwalkers’ Sabbath, a rendezvous with No-one in the cupboard under the stairs.
127
I flow with the crowd, anonymous, stupefied. Swarming faces blur into one mask. We speak no language, possess no soul. I take what I am given, strangely grateful. This is an exclusive club.
128
Always you expected evil, the stigmata of the damned, sniffing the air for foul emanations, for hints of horror disguised as beauty. Ravished by dread, you embraced the abyss. Where else could you be yourself, without effort, or fear of rejection?
What it is to be human, to thrive on the sun’s decay!
129
O,world of the unsatisfied!- those who fear the dark or loneliness or crowds or heights; those who dwell under stones or in the cracks in walls; those who writhe in their beds and wake in a cold sweat; those who mutilate themselves with knives; those with weak hearts and poor circulation; those who spy for paranoid gods; those who live in boredom and delusion in the suburbs of the soul; those on committees who bicker and repine; those who conquer other because they cannot conquer themselves; those who watch the clock but never know the time; those who sit bewildered in premature dotage.
My soul, it is time to acknowledge delusion, to cast off the dark hood and tear the cloak to shreds. Kiss the naked body of silence! Be one with the earth-star, one with the void.
O,pulse of rainbow light! I am life itself.
The fire has done its work:
These ashes are to remind us
To live in perfect meditation,
Believing only what birds’ wings
Write in the laughing sky.
130
This subversive tomfoolery, this tiger-snaring,chicken-pluckign art!
You there, you sidling grumbling shadow,alwas retreating into another haughty evasion, never any closer to the truth, what do you think you are doing?
This is the place of ejaculation under torture. What you cannot throw away, you will have to use.
131
Rain, cool delicious rain! A Mayan priest delivered of the sacrifice, I imbibe heaven’s milk and dissolve .I am weighless,selfless,disembodied,without north or south. I spiral irresistibly inward, toward the heart of the cosmos.
132
Ah,the smiling imbecile, Argonaut of idiocy! Pentecostal gibberish flames from his mouth. Miracles spill out of his threadbare pockets.
Where has he gone now? Has he fallen through a trapdoor in the mind?
133
The myrmidons assemble to hear the Leader speak. Their ears flap in the oracular wind, a convincing imitation of applause. Their eyes gleam with fanatical devotion at all the appropriate moments. Everything is going according to plan. Grave-faced surveyors are plotting out the Promised Land. Soon the Exodus will begin.
Onward, illustrious myrmidons, onward to glory! Dirt-cheap Paradise for all! Just follow the signs, and keep to the road, and complete the requisite forms without delay.Yur dream home awaits you, fully furnished and transparent.
134
Irony, my belladonna, how faithfully I have loved you! So many billets-doux in the form of bitter jests,Pantagruelian fanfares played on tarnished old trumpets, and mincing little airs on a tinker’s whistle.
Lead me, I beg you, to a cosy well-made grave, lined with white satin, and made to measure. Ply me with placebos and anaesthetics; lead me in the goat-dance of days.
135
Did you think you were the master? Did you think life was yours to manipulate?
The mirror blurs and invents another version of You. A beautiful monster, thriving on the unattainable, essence of this now-and-never world.
Failure is your vocation, your way to greatness.
A myriad distractions amount to a world.Rootless,the mind wavers in peril. Only the impenetrable can shine.
Tightrope-minded and malign, I dwell in lostness,for the love of no-one. The leper-bell thousand a soft voice croons a lullaby for the world.
Sterile Genesis programs infinities of artificial worlds. Cause and effect operate without a hitch, and no black cats are ever seen.Three cheers for the technicians, the titanium heroes!
We are left with nothing but memories of blind man’s buff. And yet we have our season, our sad desire’s small chance.
Friday, May 18, 2007
Charles Dodgson/ Lewis Carroll
Stiff-backed in a train carriage, smiling across,
The kindly gentleman opens up his black bag
To coax a little girl into puzzles and games,
Her laughing mother looking fondly on.
Pert cherubs, an ever-enlarging harem
Of prepubescent mademoiselles, all his own!
Meticulously fussing in his college studio,
He poses another darling for the camera.
Seductive visions, collected to be cherished…
Malarial fever of perverse invention,
Gadgets and improvements, sophic sleights,
Self-patented methods of being a self.
Stammering nonce, vestal virgin of the word,
He catalogues monstrous hoards of letters,
Each trophy arranged by precise protocol,-
‘Explanatory”,”advisory”,”diverting”, “offended”.
Walking acrostic,the player and the game,
Salvaging shipwrecks from sleepless nights,
Knotty paradoxes,delicious freaks of logic,
He savours the biblical violence of puns.
Rowing on the river, by Elysian meadows,
The exultant reverend extemporizes a tale
To bright little Alice, rapt as she coxes,
“Promise, Mr Dodgson, to write it all down!”.
The kindly gentleman opens up his black bag
To coax a little girl into puzzles and games,
Her laughing mother looking fondly on.
Pert cherubs, an ever-enlarging harem
Of prepubescent mademoiselles, all his own!
Meticulously fussing in his college studio,
He poses another darling for the camera.
Seductive visions, collected to be cherished…
Malarial fever of perverse invention,
Gadgets and improvements, sophic sleights,
Self-patented methods of being a self.
Stammering nonce, vestal virgin of the word,
He catalogues monstrous hoards of letters,
Each trophy arranged by precise protocol,-
‘Explanatory”,”advisory”,”diverting”, “offended”.
Walking acrostic,the player and the game,
Salvaging shipwrecks from sleepless nights,
Knotty paradoxes,delicious freaks of logic,
He savours the biblical violence of puns.
Rowing on the river, by Elysian meadows,
The exultant reverend extemporizes a tale
To bright little Alice, rapt as she coxes,
“Promise, Mr Dodgson, to write it all down!”.
The Venerable Gnome's Remarks
Laconic light says everything,
Blent with every place and time;
Thesaurus earth’s imagining
Lives by synonym and rhyme.
The cherry stone’s a batholith,
A planet’s magnetic core;
Fruiting flesh cleaves to pith
And grows into its contour.
The gardener by his occult art
Prunes a necessary end,
Grafts a cutting from his heart,
Some stunted growth to mend.
Mountain stumps muster heights
Of land long-weathered;
The farmer’s goat protests, fights
But stays fast-tethered.
Grit has edged into the shell,
Reserved beneath deep sands;
Above, a ship rings its bell,
Summoning on deck all hands.
Silence in the mouth is rolled,
Savour of ruins, forgotten kings,
And men who murdered all for gold
And envied birds their wings.
Blent with every place and time;
Thesaurus earth’s imagining
Lives by synonym and rhyme.
The cherry stone’s a batholith,
A planet’s magnetic core;
Fruiting flesh cleaves to pith
And grows into its contour.
The gardener by his occult art
Prunes a necessary end,
Grafts a cutting from his heart,
Some stunted growth to mend.
Mountain stumps muster heights
Of land long-weathered;
The farmer’s goat protests, fights
But stays fast-tethered.
Grit has edged into the shell,
Reserved beneath deep sands;
Above, a ship rings its bell,
Summoning on deck all hands.
Silence in the mouth is rolled,
Savour of ruins, forgotten kings,
And men who murdered all for gold
And envied birds their wings.
Wild Card
I can see through you,
Read the cards in your hand.
I am here to take your money.
Do you believe me to be the strongest, the best?
Well, then, I am, I am.
I scrutinize your every mannerism,
As you give yourself away;
Be you timid, or aggressive,
I catch the false notes.
There you are, stripped bare,
The unsuspecting loser,
Thinking yourself oh-so clever
Even as you throw the game away.
I will step aside to watch you fall in slow motion,
Then kick your corpse with pleasure.
I will mesmerize you; bend your will
to my own
Drive you to suicide then show you
That you held the winning hand after all.
I live for my opponents;
I con them, manipulate them, get them where I want them,
Wait very patiently
Then deliver the killer punch.
What fun to misplay a few hands on purpose,
To bluff and counter-bluff.
Who is the sucker here?
You think it is me?
With a raise too aggressive
Or a call too timid,
With the tiniest gesture,
Sooner or later
You will give yourself away;
Sure that you alone
Can defy the odds,
You will overplay your hand.
We are the night’s assassins,
Men who like to win,
Edging towards the showdown,
Ready to go broke.
Here you need your sixth sense to survive.
Look into the others’ minds,
See their agonies and delusions,
Feel the whims of fate.
At times you almost feel divine,
Letting the energy flow through you,
Taking over your thoughts and decisions,
Guiding you serenely one way or the other,
Until you just know that you are going to win,
If only you listen to the voice within,
Your hand steady, your patience absolute,
Doing everything for a reason.
There you are, always keeping score,
Counting your money,
Keeping your show on the road,
One day a millionaire, the next day broke.
Do you have the nerve to back your own instincts,
To take your life in your own hands?
Believe in no one and nothing,
Wage silent war with all your ingenuity,
Superstitious and cruel.
Out of a myriad possibilities,
I am dealt a single hand,
A single combination of chances.
I take my life to the table
And play.
I am the businessman juggling figures,
The politician telling lies,
The cheating spouse,
The manipulative child.
Sometimes, it seems, I want to, I have to, lose,
The agony makes me happy for a while,
In this foul world that only pleases fools.
Read the cards in your hand.
I am here to take your money.
Do you believe me to be the strongest, the best?
Well, then, I am, I am.
I scrutinize your every mannerism,
As you give yourself away;
Be you timid, or aggressive,
I catch the false notes.
There you are, stripped bare,
The unsuspecting loser,
Thinking yourself oh-so clever
Even as you throw the game away.
I will step aside to watch you fall in slow motion,
Then kick your corpse with pleasure.
I will mesmerize you; bend your will
to my own
Drive you to suicide then show you
That you held the winning hand after all.
I live for my opponents;
I con them, manipulate them, get them where I want them,
Wait very patiently
Then deliver the killer punch.
What fun to misplay a few hands on purpose,
To bluff and counter-bluff.
Who is the sucker here?
You think it is me?
With a raise too aggressive
Or a call too timid,
With the tiniest gesture,
Sooner or later
You will give yourself away;
Sure that you alone
Can defy the odds,
You will overplay your hand.
We are the night’s assassins,
Men who like to win,
Edging towards the showdown,
Ready to go broke.
Here you need your sixth sense to survive.
Look into the others’ minds,
See their agonies and delusions,
Feel the whims of fate.
At times you almost feel divine,
Letting the energy flow through you,
Taking over your thoughts and decisions,
Guiding you serenely one way or the other,
Until you just know that you are going to win,
If only you listen to the voice within,
Your hand steady, your patience absolute,
Doing everything for a reason.
There you are, always keeping score,
Counting your money,
Keeping your show on the road,
One day a millionaire, the next day broke.
Do you have the nerve to back your own instincts,
To take your life in your own hands?
Believe in no one and nothing,
Wage silent war with all your ingenuity,
Superstitious and cruel.
Out of a myriad possibilities,
I am dealt a single hand,
A single combination of chances.
I take my life to the table
And play.
I am the businessman juggling figures,
The politician telling lies,
The cheating spouse,
The manipulative child.
Sometimes, it seems, I want to, I have to, lose,
The agony makes me happy for a while,
In this foul world that only pleases fools.
War in the Labyrinth
The eye on manoeuvrres
Constructs a terrain,
A battleground of souls.
Is it true we can escape
From rooms full of knick-knacks,
The tyranny of hollow objects
And “good taste”?
Shall we return to ourselves in triumph,
Skeletons singing?
Mother Hell has borne another litter.
Look; a man, so tiny,
A frightened rabbit running,
Fleeing the earth’s upheaval,
Clinging to the ground,
Crying out to God,
Whom he suddenly believes in.
Wolfskinned, bearskinned,
Exiled from humankind,
The warriors, the neophytes,
Breathe fire.
Buried alive,
Speechless corpses,
They are heaved
Into a ditch.
Do we only dream them,
The unseen foe?
Men, like us,
Small, earth-coloured,
Startled from under rocks
And bushes.
On the edge
Of never-having-been,
We dwell in severance,
With severance to come.
Stripped of prideful skin,
Blindfolded,
Branded,
Maimed,
We make nowhere home.
The Ice Age crushes us
With glaciers.
Superstition slithers under the skin;
Rumour’s voodoo rides us.
Welcome to the trance.
Do you too wish to pledge your heart
To the pyre,
To be burned transparent?
Stuttering, mute,
The dismembered
Huddle, blindly staring,
In the hospital grounds,
Demonic spasms quaking
Their puppet bodies,
Their white-knuckled hands
Clenching nothing.
Blood of the slain
Runs off through the proper channels.
Horses turned to glue.
Someone somewhere
Lights a cigar.
And the loveless sleep in their own arms,
Unable to trust what they might reach.
Constructs a terrain,
A battleground of souls.
Is it true we can escape
From rooms full of knick-knacks,
The tyranny of hollow objects
And “good taste”?
Shall we return to ourselves in triumph,
Skeletons singing?
Mother Hell has borne another litter.
Look; a man, so tiny,
A frightened rabbit running,
Fleeing the earth’s upheaval,
Clinging to the ground,
Crying out to God,
Whom he suddenly believes in.
Wolfskinned, bearskinned,
Exiled from humankind,
The warriors, the neophytes,
Breathe fire.
Buried alive,
Speechless corpses,
They are heaved
Into a ditch.
Do we only dream them,
The unseen foe?
Men, like us,
Small, earth-coloured,
Startled from under rocks
And bushes.
On the edge
Of never-having-been,
We dwell in severance,
With severance to come.
Stripped of prideful skin,
Blindfolded,
Branded,
Maimed,
We make nowhere home.
The Ice Age crushes us
With glaciers.
Superstition slithers under the skin;
Rumour’s voodoo rides us.
Welcome to the trance.
Do you too wish to pledge your heart
To the pyre,
To be burned transparent?
Stuttering, mute,
The dismembered
Huddle, blindly staring,
In the hospital grounds,
Demonic spasms quaking
Their puppet bodies,
Their white-knuckled hands
Clenching nothing.
Blood of the slain
Runs off through the proper channels.
Horses turned to glue.
Someone somewhere
Lights a cigar.
And the loveless sleep in their own arms,
Unable to trust what they might reach.
Egyptian Baraka
You, who drink tea in the date palm’s shade,
A few steps and you are in the desert,
With the Nile running south to north
And the sun chasing east to west,
And you at the crossroads,
Always at the crossroads.
Stones, sand and dust are your birthright,
Where wild dogs and jackals patrol
And the mountainside caves
Are filled with bits of ancient bones.
Can you hunker down, sit still
And live with the gods?
We are dead men in the house of life,
Praying for the river to rise to sixteen ells,
The number of abundance.
In the hands of Osiris,
In the hands of Jesus,
Are the crook and flail.
Cut me a coffin from a sycamore tree
And I shall float downriver,
Lying on my back.
Mother, light a candle for your son.
A few steps and you are in the desert,
With the Nile running south to north
And the sun chasing east to west,
And you at the crossroads,
Always at the crossroads.
Stones, sand and dust are your birthright,
Where wild dogs and jackals patrol
And the mountainside caves
Are filled with bits of ancient bones.
Can you hunker down, sit still
And live with the gods?
We are dead men in the house of life,
Praying for the river to rise to sixteen ells,
The number of abundance.
In the hands of Osiris,
In the hands of Jesus,
Are the crook and flail.
Cut me a coffin from a sycamore tree
And I shall float downriver,
Lying on my back.
Mother, light a candle for your son.
Gods and Men
Some say the gods are with us still,
That they never even left us,
They are here in our letters,
Seldom glimpsed,
But not to be denied.
Mercurial is the word for it,
The way they evanesce,
These presences,
Outliving liturgy and rhyme.
Are the gods displeased with us?
Does our literature offend them?
When Ajax Oileus
Saw Calchas walking
He knew just from his gait
That it was Poseidon in disguise.
Perhaps you know the feeling.
Carefully the gods select
Those to whom they appear.
They judge their effects most shrewdly.
Centaurs are still needed,
Grazing among the trees,
Subtle as apostrophes and semi-colons.
Socrates was proud
To call himself a nympholept;
And who knows but drowning
Made Hylas wise?
What you scry in the water
Is yours to work with,
That quivering dazzling force.
The spider’s lexicon will trap you
Just like any other fly.
The offices of sound allow you this:
A puissant gesture, a winning glance.
The gods, too, were mortal once.
That they never even left us,
They are here in our letters,
Seldom glimpsed,
But not to be denied.
Mercurial is the word for it,
The way they evanesce,
These presences,
Outliving liturgy and rhyme.
Are the gods displeased with us?
Does our literature offend them?
When Ajax Oileus
Saw Calchas walking
He knew just from his gait
That it was Poseidon in disguise.
Perhaps you know the feeling.
Carefully the gods select
Those to whom they appear.
They judge their effects most shrewdly.
Centaurs are still needed,
Grazing among the trees,
Subtle as apostrophes and semi-colons.
Socrates was proud
To call himself a nympholept;
And who knows but drowning
Made Hylas wise?
What you scry in the water
Is yours to work with,
That quivering dazzling force.
The spider’s lexicon will trap you
Just like any other fly.
The offices of sound allow you this:
A puissant gesture, a winning glance.
The gods, too, were mortal once.
Goth Girl (Moonflower)
Ah the scary Egypt of her skin!
Black Madonna,
I will light a candle for you.
This twisted romance
Exalts its victims.
The moonflower blooms only at night.
Always the strange one,
The shadows’ favourite,
She knows imagination
To be true revenge.
Only those with pennies on their eyes
Can truly love life.
Black, red and white,
She sees Venus rising
In her silver skull-ring.
At home among headstones
And stone angels,
She wanders,scrying epitaphs.
“Drink wine with the dead,” she says,
“Black wine…”
With black wax she seals
A black-edged letter
And covers the mirrors,
Sets lilies in a vase.
She fingers a spider’s web rosary of skulls,
And sleeps in a coffin of words.
Her hands are full of red ankhs,
Looping questions.
Always the crossroads,
The decisions of art,
Holding on, contemplating, patiently,
Bearing the tension,
To see what emerges
From sperm and ovum.
She loves the taste of wormwood,
And the green fire of death.
She balances
The perforated spoon over the bulbous glass
And, drizzling water over the sugar cube,
Watches the seagreen turn milky.
In her garden
She grows monkshood and digitalis.
Someday, she whispers, I will find the black rose.
And in the meantime
There are black tulips, black sweet William,
Ace of spades.
And now let us dine
On black truffle with white asparagus,
And toast the night in ancient red wine
From a bottle sleeved in cobwebs and dust.
Black Madonna,
I will light a candle for you.
This twisted romance
Exalts its victims.
The moonflower blooms only at night.
Always the strange one,
The shadows’ favourite,
She knows imagination
To be true revenge.
Only those with pennies on their eyes
Can truly love life.
Black, red and white,
She sees Venus rising
In her silver skull-ring.
At home among headstones
And stone angels,
She wanders,scrying epitaphs.
“Drink wine with the dead,” she says,
“Black wine…”
With black wax she seals
A black-edged letter
And covers the mirrors,
Sets lilies in a vase.
She fingers a spider’s web rosary of skulls,
And sleeps in a coffin of words.
Her hands are full of red ankhs,
Looping questions.
Always the crossroads,
The decisions of art,
Holding on, contemplating, patiently,
Bearing the tension,
To see what emerges
From sperm and ovum.
She loves the taste of wormwood,
And the green fire of death.
She balances
The perforated spoon over the bulbous glass
And, drizzling water over the sugar cube,
Watches the seagreen turn milky.
In her garden
She grows monkshood and digitalis.
Someday, she whispers, I will find the black rose.
And in the meantime
There are black tulips, black sweet William,
Ace of spades.
And now let us dine
On black truffle with white asparagus,
And toast the night in ancient red wine
From a bottle sleeved in cobwebs and dust.
Apparently Not
I kiss the globe of silence. It is the season of mimes. Our bodies reinvent us.
The thorn tree flowers for the dead. Tangerine sunset flows under the bridge.
Your smile: puppet theatre spinning through space.
In phantasmagoria,cinema of semblances, I strike another lightning, a bargain, a choice.
Transcontinental pollen travels unseen on winds of speech.
Superstition of habit contains me.
Snowy promises are melting, and all is hesitation.
One by one, the tarot cards are laid.
Tribunals in attics and basements reckon the river’s rise,the apple’s fall.
Lying mouth,have you tasted the sweetness of ash?
Silence after anger. A subtle poison distils drop by drop.Grating metal, and blizzards at the poles.
Every moment’s threshold arraigns you. Doubt falls upon you with a thrush’s beak.
Truth rises overhead, stars seen in daytime from the bottom of a well.
Anemophilous mind, what will the next wind bring?
I must walk forever the tightrope between Here and There.
Every day I perjure my essence.
The antipodes are mine.The glass globe whirls with intermingling reflections.
A moment ago, it must have been, I sucked in the insufferably sweet tang of apple juice, cool from the carton.
The mind reclines like a bored sultan amid silken pillows. I extemporize a self from sensation,intuition,contemplation,decision,velleity,
volition,action,absorption,contrition.
“I see,” says the dark sad voice.
Peek-a-boo world, now you see me, now you don’t.
Too much lassitude and misunderstanding.
Life in parenthesis becomes us. All our meanwhiles evaporate in the sky; perhaps they return as rain.
Notes of a slow sad music arabesque on the stave of night.
The thorn tree flowers for the dead. Tangerine sunset flows under the bridge.
Your smile: puppet theatre spinning through space.
In phantasmagoria,cinema of semblances, I strike another lightning, a bargain, a choice.
Transcontinental pollen travels unseen on winds of speech.
Superstition of habit contains me.
Snowy promises are melting, and all is hesitation.
One by one, the tarot cards are laid.
Tribunals in attics and basements reckon the river’s rise,the apple’s fall.
Lying mouth,have you tasted the sweetness of ash?
Silence after anger. A subtle poison distils drop by drop.Grating metal, and blizzards at the poles.
Every moment’s threshold arraigns you. Doubt falls upon you with a thrush’s beak.
Truth rises overhead, stars seen in daytime from the bottom of a well.
Anemophilous mind, what will the next wind bring?
I must walk forever the tightrope between Here and There.
Every day I perjure my essence.
The antipodes are mine.The glass globe whirls with intermingling reflections.
A moment ago, it must have been, I sucked in the insufferably sweet tang of apple juice, cool from the carton.
The mind reclines like a bored sultan amid silken pillows. I extemporize a self from sensation,intuition,contemplation,decision,velleity,
volition,action,absorption,contrition.
“I see,” says the dark sad voice.
Peek-a-boo world, now you see me, now you don’t.
Too much lassitude and misunderstanding.
Life in parenthesis becomes us. All our meanwhiles evaporate in the sky; perhaps they return as rain.
Notes of a slow sad music arabesque on the stave of night.
Accidental Man
Shapechanging shiver-world,
Whirlpool of innumerable destructions,
Irresistibly I wish my self into place.
Poised in descent, fortunate shadow,
Something decides me,
Precipitated from the turbulent solution.
Sodden clothes drip on the washing-line.
Grass, meek and invincible, pulses.
My father stands pruning his favourite apple tree.
All things, in time, return to the root,
And tremble again with mysterious commission.
The damp black soil smells of feeling
Caught from a pigeon’s wings.
An appletree’s shade, sly fusty savour,
Tickles, yeasts the doughy mind
And quizzical sensation startles
The moment’s tendril-ends.
Tunnelling through days,
I sacrifice to a preternatural precision,
Sworn to read the inner stranger’s palm.
How to master the correct technique
To seduce each obstacle’s singular gift,
Absorbing until absorbed?
The mysteries of equilibrium
Hold us ransom-
Rich bewilderment,
Feminine sensuality of thought.
Self-swindlers, proud of the mastered trick,
We limp through the amateur theatricals
Of lopsided men.
Evening’s apocalypse tempers me
Where I lease desire,
Husbanding the world under flesh.
Hesitations on the stairway,
Fumbled exchanges…
What feeds the underwater flame?
The self cannot be paraphrased
Or translated,
Or banished to parenthesis.
The philatelist proudly scrutinizes
A triangular stamp;
The butterfly collector scrambles
After a twinkle of wings.
Whirlpool of innumerable destructions,
Irresistibly I wish my self into place.
Poised in descent, fortunate shadow,
Something decides me,
Precipitated from the turbulent solution.
Sodden clothes drip on the washing-line.
Grass, meek and invincible, pulses.
My father stands pruning his favourite apple tree.
All things, in time, return to the root,
And tremble again with mysterious commission.
The damp black soil smells of feeling
Caught from a pigeon’s wings.
An appletree’s shade, sly fusty savour,
Tickles, yeasts the doughy mind
And quizzical sensation startles
The moment’s tendril-ends.
Tunnelling through days,
I sacrifice to a preternatural precision,
Sworn to read the inner stranger’s palm.
How to master the correct technique
To seduce each obstacle’s singular gift,
Absorbing until absorbed?
The mysteries of equilibrium
Hold us ransom-
Rich bewilderment,
Feminine sensuality of thought.
Self-swindlers, proud of the mastered trick,
We limp through the amateur theatricals
Of lopsided men.
Evening’s apocalypse tempers me
Where I lease desire,
Husbanding the world under flesh.
Hesitations on the stairway,
Fumbled exchanges…
What feeds the underwater flame?
The self cannot be paraphrased
Or translated,
Or banished to parenthesis.
The philatelist proudly scrutinizes
A triangular stamp;
The butterfly collector scrambles
After a twinkle of wings.
Under Neptune
Redeem me,
I would buy back my soul…
Sometimes eloquent,
Sometimes mute,
The daimon aspires
Towards the divine…
Dissolve,
Merge,
Forget aloneness
And death…
The waters,
The warm blue waters,
I have never ceased to dream of them…
Now come the false messiahs
And the true,
The dreams of the foetus
And the teratism
In this age of drowning.
O, Melusine,
Melusine…
No need of gods
And heroes
And monsters,
Man is mystery enough…
Does the right hand know
What the left hand is about?
Floating in my bathtub,
Archipelagoes of skin
Breaking though the surface,
Warm sheen slithers over me
Deliciously,
Soothes the aches,
Seduces, lulls, protects…
This immersion
Is both enchantment
And terror-
Drops and oceans,
Can you really make me new?
The baby is emerging,
Blood-and-water-slimed…
Nammu,
The sea,
You are essence and fate,
And my life is water,
Sperm,
Fish.
This is the world of illusion:
Rain, sap, semen, milk and blood,
Circulating
Through the endless succession
Of created worlds,
Each of which is swallowed
By the ocean whence it rose.
Fantasies, longings, nightmares and unknown powers
Roil me from the source,
Rich in imagination
And deception.
Pharaoh of desires,
Are you ready to die?
Lie down in the sarcophagus,
Embark with the sun.
Osiris stands before you,
With his phallus of clay.
The addict cries for release
Yet one hand reaches still
For the redeemer’s black gift,
The bewitching poison
That vouchsafes paradise.
In the baptismal font
I scry strange shadows
Moving in the ocean;
Will the Holy Ghost
Invest our Mass,
Or will death be the only fusion?
This is the séance
Of the mind
And flesh,
When phantoms intrude
And ectoplasm revels.
Are the planets out of kilter?
Emotions run amok,
Quaking the world’s womb
With black hysteria.
The mesmerist’s hands
Lift ritual in the air,
Invoking elementals;
Chant, beat and dance
Steal beneath the bounds
For the liturgy of waves.
Pleasure’s martyr, invite the whip
For your suffering will be
Salvation, as you expiate
Sin in fierce penance;
The empress, fate,
Means to hurt you
And by fierce blows
Draw the venom out.
In the mirrors
The faces and bodies
Of lover and beloved
Interchange;
Perfection breaks its acolytes
With a ruthless sneer
As they fool themselves
With glamour.
We will be Caesars of the invisible,
And transform state and spirit
As one, with one flourish,
Serving new devotions
Where passion and compassion meet.
I would buy back my soul…
Sometimes eloquent,
Sometimes mute,
The daimon aspires
Towards the divine…
Dissolve,
Merge,
Forget aloneness
And death…
The waters,
The warm blue waters,
I have never ceased to dream of them…
Now come the false messiahs
And the true,
The dreams of the foetus
And the teratism
In this age of drowning.
O, Melusine,
Melusine…
No need of gods
And heroes
And monsters,
Man is mystery enough…
Does the right hand know
What the left hand is about?
Floating in my bathtub,
Archipelagoes of skin
Breaking though the surface,
Warm sheen slithers over me
Deliciously,
Soothes the aches,
Seduces, lulls, protects…
This immersion
Is both enchantment
And terror-
Drops and oceans,
Can you really make me new?
The baby is emerging,
Blood-and-water-slimed…
Nammu,
The sea,
You are essence and fate,
And my life is water,
Sperm,
Fish.
This is the world of illusion:
Rain, sap, semen, milk and blood,
Circulating
Through the endless succession
Of created worlds,
Each of which is swallowed
By the ocean whence it rose.
Fantasies, longings, nightmares and unknown powers
Roil me from the source,
Rich in imagination
And deception.
Pharaoh of desires,
Are you ready to die?
Lie down in the sarcophagus,
Embark with the sun.
Osiris stands before you,
With his phallus of clay.
The addict cries for release
Yet one hand reaches still
For the redeemer’s black gift,
The bewitching poison
That vouchsafes paradise.
In the baptismal font
I scry strange shadows
Moving in the ocean;
Will the Holy Ghost
Invest our Mass,
Or will death be the only fusion?
This is the séance
Of the mind
And flesh,
When phantoms intrude
And ectoplasm revels.
Are the planets out of kilter?
Emotions run amok,
Quaking the world’s womb
With black hysteria.
The mesmerist’s hands
Lift ritual in the air,
Invoking elementals;
Chant, beat and dance
Steal beneath the bounds
For the liturgy of waves.
Pleasure’s martyr, invite the whip
For your suffering will be
Salvation, as you expiate
Sin in fierce penance;
The empress, fate,
Means to hurt you
And by fierce blows
Draw the venom out.
In the mirrors
The faces and bodies
Of lover and beloved
Interchange;
Perfection breaks its acolytes
With a ruthless sneer
As they fool themselves
With glamour.
We will be Caesars of the invisible,
And transform state and spirit
As one, with one flourish,
Serving new devotions
Where passion and compassion meet.
Cybernaut
To enter the Heavenly City,
Radiant with sapphire, emerald, amethyst and chrysoprase,
Floating on clouds…
I sit before my computer,
Seeking a home for the soul.
New technologies of desire
Call the fallen in,
Beyond the Primum Mobile,
Into the Empyrean.
Dante Alighieri is setting out,
His guide a man dead for a thousand years.
He is paper and a voice.
One reader after another
Draws up intricate maps of Dante’s Hell,
Complete with precise measurements and cartographic projections.
In the nave of the Arena Chapel in Padua,
Gabriel kneels, announcing to Mary a son,
And our eyes reach through the wall
Into the space beyond.
Out there, my journeys cannot be measured,
In my perfect body,
My body of light.
Radiant with sapphire, emerald, amethyst and chrysoprase,
Floating on clouds…
I sit before my computer,
Seeking a home for the soul.
New technologies of desire
Call the fallen in,
Beyond the Primum Mobile,
Into the Empyrean.
Dante Alighieri is setting out,
His guide a man dead for a thousand years.
He is paper and a voice.
One reader after another
Draws up intricate maps of Dante’s Hell,
Complete with precise measurements and cartographic projections.
In the nave of the Arena Chapel in Padua,
Gabriel kneels, announcing to Mary a son,
And our eyes reach through the wall
Into the space beyond.
Out there, my journeys cannot be measured,
In my perfect body,
My body of light.
Thangka of Tibet
Stone, stone and scant soil,
Dragons of heat and cold lashing the body,
Summer squalls of lightning
Blows sandstorms and hail,
Avalanches of light sear the mind,
Thunder chases across the grasslands,
Only 40 million years ago
All this was under the Sea of Tethys.
Black, white or red, the serpent spirits
Coil electric about precious stones;
The demoness lies supine across
The land, naked, knees raised
And splayed, vulva exposed,
And rock-ogresses
Stalk after human prey.
Nail the earth down with daggers,
With words, tent pegs, mountains.
The sixty years of Jupiter’s solar orbit,
The five periods of twelve years,
The auspicious conjunction of every twelve years
Call us to purification.
All-penetrating and embracing light
And emptiness; within it is vision;
And within the sphere of vision
Is constantly transmuting illusion
Of appearances in the world.
The master pierces a rock with his staff
And clears a path for the willing.
Outward resounds the concentric circles
Of the seed-syllable of the goddess,
Out of emptiness, to be invoked.
The chakras of the earth call you
To explore the energy, the current
And discover in yourself the same.
Approaching for the first time the cave
Of power so long sought, through hardship
And peril, the pilgrim becomes a giant,
Senses heighten; colours are brighter;
Shapes more focused; hearing is keener;
Smell, taste and touch all on fire;
He feels weightless, floating,
Thoughts drift in and out, free
Of attachment; time stops in bliss,
And the signs of the new life
Arise in his path….
They carry the broken corpse
Up the mountainside into the sky;
And at dawn the butchers shear the hair,
Open up the body, eviscerate the organs,
Amputate the limbs, cut up the flesh
Into small pieces and pound the bones
To powder with a rock; then the pieces
Are spread around and the vultures
Are summoned, and fall upon the feast,
And what they leave the dogs will take.
Dragons of heat and cold lashing the body,
Summer squalls of lightning
Blows sandstorms and hail,
Avalanches of light sear the mind,
Thunder chases across the grasslands,
Only 40 million years ago
All this was under the Sea of Tethys.
Black, white or red, the serpent spirits
Coil electric about precious stones;
The demoness lies supine across
The land, naked, knees raised
And splayed, vulva exposed,
And rock-ogresses
Stalk after human prey.
Nail the earth down with daggers,
With words, tent pegs, mountains.
The sixty years of Jupiter’s solar orbit,
The five periods of twelve years,
The auspicious conjunction of every twelve years
Call us to purification.
All-penetrating and embracing light
And emptiness; within it is vision;
And within the sphere of vision
Is constantly transmuting illusion
Of appearances in the world.
The master pierces a rock with his staff
And clears a path for the willing.
Outward resounds the concentric circles
Of the seed-syllable of the goddess,
Out of emptiness, to be invoked.
The chakras of the earth call you
To explore the energy, the current
And discover in yourself the same.
Approaching for the first time the cave
Of power so long sought, through hardship
And peril, the pilgrim becomes a giant,
Senses heighten; colours are brighter;
Shapes more focused; hearing is keener;
Smell, taste and touch all on fire;
He feels weightless, floating,
Thoughts drift in and out, free
Of attachment; time stops in bliss,
And the signs of the new life
Arise in his path….
They carry the broken corpse
Up the mountainside into the sky;
And at dawn the butchers shear the hair,
Open up the body, eviscerate the organs,
Amputate the limbs, cut up the flesh
Into small pieces and pound the bones
To powder with a rock; then the pieces
Are spread around and the vultures
Are summoned, and fall upon the feast,
And what they leave the dogs will take.
On Mount Athos
A ladder hangs down the cliff face to a hermitage high on a sea-gazing rock;
Monks have clambered down these rickety steps for millennia,
Renouncing the world to praise God,
Lowering baskets on pulleys for the alms of passing fishermen.
On these cliff paths you cannot free yourself,
Unless you face the worst evils within
And see through them.
Long shadows of cypress trees trammel the hill
And ravens gyre overhead.
This is the Garden of the Virgin:
Chestnut and fir and holly oak,
Monasteries with terraced gardens, olive groves and vineyards,
Thirteen days behind the rest of the world.
Read, if you can, the chrysobuls of time.
Here you must transfigure the passions
To recover the essence,
The truth of yourself and the world.
Three times the monk circumambulates the courtyard,
Striking the semantron on his shoulder,
Summoning the faithful into the church’s ark.
To be vigilant is all,
To practise the goldsmith’s attention,
The iconographer’s love.
A narrow path above the sea,
A bridge of prickly pears and purple irises,
The air nectar-sweet, the cliffs broom-yellow,
Sparrows flitting in the olive groves...
This is your way.
Wake and pray;
Thereby engage the world,
Putting one foot before the other, time and time again,
Onward into liturgy, service and grace.
And, after all,
All you are doing
Is walking.
Monks have clambered down these rickety steps for millennia,
Renouncing the world to praise God,
Lowering baskets on pulleys for the alms of passing fishermen.
On these cliff paths you cannot free yourself,
Unless you face the worst evils within
And see through them.
Long shadows of cypress trees trammel the hill
And ravens gyre overhead.
This is the Garden of the Virgin:
Chestnut and fir and holly oak,
Monasteries with terraced gardens, olive groves and vineyards,
Thirteen days behind the rest of the world.
Read, if you can, the chrysobuls of time.
Here you must transfigure the passions
To recover the essence,
The truth of yourself and the world.
Three times the monk circumambulates the courtyard,
Striking the semantron on his shoulder,
Summoning the faithful into the church’s ark.
To be vigilant is all,
To practise the goldsmith’s attention,
The iconographer’s love.
A narrow path above the sea,
A bridge of prickly pears and purple irises,
The air nectar-sweet, the cliffs broom-yellow,
Sparrows flitting in the olive groves...
This is your way.
Wake and pray;
Thereby engage the world,
Putting one foot before the other, time and time again,
Onward into liturgy, service and grace.
And, after all,
All you are doing
Is walking.
Mandala
Now the ripening:
Cultivating and rehearsing death,
Becoming the right sacrifice,
Finding the light that shines
At the moment of death;
Germinating and growing in the womb,
Developing into infant, child and adult
With conscious care.
Forms, feelings, perceptions, volition and consciousness
Whirl me about in this world.
Everything begins and ends at Mt Meru;
Climbing phantasmal slopes into the sky’s circle,
Through winds and rainbows and lightning,
The cravings and agonies of the overmighty self.
Can I use the inner and outer wheels of time,
Matching my mind and body to their spin?
Winds from all quarters course through me
About the zodiac, the riding planets,
And all is waking, dreaming, deep sleep or bliss –
Cleanse the winds and know emptiness,
Creating your mandala, taking control…
Purify with incense and saffron water
The crystal vase of pacification
And the gold vase of submission
And the silver vase of increase.
The offering fire melts and boils
All the old impurities in the skull-cup
Until they turn the colour of the moon.
Closer and closer to the centre,
Approaching, ever more clearly you behold
The void, most excellent and sublime;
When this mandala is done,
When we are Buddhas of the world,
We shall annihilate the image,
And pour it into the river,
Watching the concentric circles vanish.
Cultivating and rehearsing death,
Becoming the right sacrifice,
Finding the light that shines
At the moment of death;
Germinating and growing in the womb,
Developing into infant, child and adult
With conscious care.
Forms, feelings, perceptions, volition and consciousness
Whirl me about in this world.
Everything begins and ends at Mt Meru;
Climbing phantasmal slopes into the sky’s circle,
Through winds and rainbows and lightning,
The cravings and agonies of the overmighty self.
Can I use the inner and outer wheels of time,
Matching my mind and body to their spin?
Winds from all quarters course through me
About the zodiac, the riding planets,
And all is waking, dreaming, deep sleep or bliss –
Cleanse the winds and know emptiness,
Creating your mandala, taking control…
Purify with incense and saffron water
The crystal vase of pacification
And the gold vase of submission
And the silver vase of increase.
The offering fire melts and boils
All the old impurities in the skull-cup
Until they turn the colour of the moon.
Closer and closer to the centre,
Approaching, ever more clearly you behold
The void, most excellent and sublime;
When this mandala is done,
When we are Buddhas of the world,
We shall annihilate the image,
And pour it into the river,
Watching the concentric circles vanish.
Yantra
So you build, conserve and finally dissolve
Forms, working with square, circle, triangle
And point; welcome to the spider’s web,
The seed-sound’s expanding contracting vibration,
An atom,
A star.
This is your revelation, your instructions,
These charts to navigate by,
And now you are inside the sacred enclosure,
Inside the body of the god,
The pilgrim maze.
The earthenware jar sits spherical and auspicious,
Filled with water, with the universe,
The nectar of immortality.
You are here to translate, to transform,
As best you can, in confused times,
Making a circuit
From star to star.
Out from the nucleus
Force-lines radiate outwards in concentric circuits
And dissolve at the outer limits.
Dissolve the gross in the subtle;
Multiple powers rouse you within the yantra,
Towards wisdom and perfection,
Divine, heroic, terrifying, demonic or peaceful,
Stripping reality to the bone,
As out of contradiction and paradox
Harmony struggles to achievement.
Forms, working with square, circle, triangle
And point; welcome to the spider’s web,
The seed-sound’s expanding contracting vibration,
An atom,
A star.
This is your revelation, your instructions,
These charts to navigate by,
And now you are inside the sacred enclosure,
Inside the body of the god,
The pilgrim maze.
The earthenware jar sits spherical and auspicious,
Filled with water, with the universe,
The nectar of immortality.
You are here to translate, to transform,
As best you can, in confused times,
Making a circuit
From star to star.
Out from the nucleus
Force-lines radiate outwards in concentric circuits
And dissolve at the outer limits.
Dissolve the gross in the subtle;
Multiple powers rouse you within the yantra,
Towards wisdom and perfection,
Divine, heroic, terrifying, demonic or peaceful,
Stripping reality to the bone,
As out of contradiction and paradox
Harmony struggles to achievement.
Dancing the Rumba
The world sits on a woman’s hips.
The face, impassive, eyes staring high
Is an African mask,
As the bodies, ruled by rhythm,
Shake and rotate,
The hymn of the virgin and the whore.
The woman hardly moves her feet,
Concentrating on contortions
And shuffling within a small square;
While the man circles endlessly round her,
Showing off with cocky flair,
Sometimes charging in at her,
Without ever touching,
Only to retreat, defeated by her power,
Till eventually she feigns
Surrender to his gestures,
Catching the kerchief he tosses
To throw it coquettishly back.
The moment when navels meet;
That is the source,
The transaction of life for death,
The lethal snakebite,
A fiery fall
Into the Congo’s currents.
Never was the low so high,
Nor the high so low;
Nor truth and lie so close;
Nor the open so closed
And the closed so open;
In this consecrating desecration,
This beautiful revolt.
The face, impassive, eyes staring high
Is an African mask,
As the bodies, ruled by rhythm,
Shake and rotate,
The hymn of the virgin and the whore.
The woman hardly moves her feet,
Concentrating on contortions
And shuffling within a small square;
While the man circles endlessly round her,
Showing off with cocky flair,
Sometimes charging in at her,
Without ever touching,
Only to retreat, defeated by her power,
Till eventually she feigns
Surrender to his gestures,
Catching the kerchief he tosses
To throw it coquettishly back.
The moment when navels meet;
That is the source,
The transaction of life for death,
The lethal snakebite,
A fiery fall
Into the Congo’s currents.
Never was the low so high,
Nor the high so low;
Nor truth and lie so close;
Nor the open so closed
And the closed so open;
In this consecrating desecration,
This beautiful revolt.
Dashiell Hammett (1894 – 1961)
Tall sword of a man in a dark suit,
Intense eyes staring out suspiciously
From under a soft felt hat,
Slender-fingered gambler’s hands
Playing no one’s game but his own,
He never lied and never faked,
Walking proudly with maverick grace.
He preferred the honesty of silence
To the casual corruption of words,
Sifting truth from lies, trusting no one,
Turning from the random godless world
To alcohol, women and cards.
All was chaos and injustice,
But one brave man alone with his conscience
Could shore up the walls of civilisation
With small decent actions, futile, of course.
He eked out some precarious order
In terse astringent prose, sinews of thought
Bruised in the pugilistic onslaught;
There was a kind of honour in that.
Shadow man stalking the criminal streets,
Switchblade glint in his suffering eyes,
He had witnessed every kind of evil,
Had moved among thugs and racketeers,
Psychopaths and elegant con men,
Treading warily in a world of deception
And treachery, of sudden crazy violence.
Cynical loner in clever disguises,
He revelled in the cunning manhunt,
Tracking his prey from town to town,
Patient, resourceful, excited by danger.
He never believed in any kind of permanence,
Carried his life in a false-bottomed suitcase,
Out there in the real unromantic America
Where the good and the gentle got killed.
Intense eyes staring out suspiciously
From under a soft felt hat,
Slender-fingered gambler’s hands
Playing no one’s game but his own,
He never lied and never faked,
Walking proudly with maverick grace.
He preferred the honesty of silence
To the casual corruption of words,
Sifting truth from lies, trusting no one,
Turning from the random godless world
To alcohol, women and cards.
All was chaos and injustice,
But one brave man alone with his conscience
Could shore up the walls of civilisation
With small decent actions, futile, of course.
He eked out some precarious order
In terse astringent prose, sinews of thought
Bruised in the pugilistic onslaught;
There was a kind of honour in that.
Shadow man stalking the criminal streets,
Switchblade glint in his suffering eyes,
He had witnessed every kind of evil,
Had moved among thugs and racketeers,
Psychopaths and elegant con men,
Treading warily in a world of deception
And treachery, of sudden crazy violence.
Cynical loner in clever disguises,
He revelled in the cunning manhunt,
Tracking his prey from town to town,
Patient, resourceful, excited by danger.
He never believed in any kind of permanence,
Carried his life in a false-bottomed suitcase,
Out there in the real unromantic America
Where the good and the gentle got killed.
The Creaking Chair
In silence
The high sound of my nervous system,
The low sound of my circulation.
The world is all murmurs and alarms in my blood.
A displacement of air,
A periodic vibration.
I dwell among shades.
And weather the body’s long audition,
The séance of noisy spirits.
Feel the earth-hum,
Free oscillations too subtle for the ear;
All is atmosphere.
The echoing drip of a kitchen tap
Expands my mind
To the size of the universe.
In ancient China
A musician plays the ch’in,
Reserving for his subtlest touch
Just the motion of his bloodstream.
The high sound of my nervous system,
The low sound of my circulation.
The world is all murmurs and alarms in my blood.
A displacement of air,
A periodic vibration.
I dwell among shades.
And weather the body’s long audition,
The séance of noisy spirits.
Feel the earth-hum,
Free oscillations too subtle for the ear;
All is atmosphere.
The echoing drip of a kitchen tap
Expands my mind
To the size of the universe.
In ancient China
A musician plays the ch’in,
Reserving for his subtlest touch
Just the motion of his bloodstream.
Las Vegas
Reek of money and cigar smoke,
Ceaseless prestidigitation
Of dealers’ hands,
And baleful eyes watch
From every wall and corner…
Fiery cauldron in the darkness,
Headlights streaming in along the highway
And weird lights in the sky,
And all those nameless bodies
Buried out in the desert…
Early in the morning, exhausted gamblers
Slump over green tables,
Marooned in light-puddles,
Wan dummies in tuxedos and glittering dresses
Sit mummified, playing ghostly baccarat,
And pallid hookers linger on sidewalks,
Lined with gimcrack wedding chapels.
The weary Paiutes trekked across the valley
And pitched their tents here;
They gathered seeds, sweet sage and wild celery,
Camas and caraway,and the bulbs of the sego lily,
And ate, with relish, locusts and rattlesnakes;
They hunted elks and bears in the mountains,
And smeared their bodies with red paint;
They thrived in this desert, and buried their dead
With eagles, under the killing sky.
When the Spaniards arrived, they took one look
And went the long way round, afraid to venture in,
Leaving a blank space on their maps.
Needs, desires; - in the end, who can tell the difference?
Only think the thought and the appetite appears.
You don’t even know you’re alive!
Load your gun with golden bullets
And fire them into the sky;
Here you can lick up the drunkenness of life
Like champagne off a showgirl’s behind.
There you are, standing in the nuclear blast,
Grinning skull gangster with neon skin,
Gambling it all on the dice-throw,
On the turn of the roulette wheel.
Drive the golden spike into the heart of life;
Study the cards at the blackjack table;
Ghosts move through the gilded mirrors
In the hotel of laughing corpses.
The heat is a white tiger on your back.
Time to make a killing and get out.
Bugsy Siegel slumps on the couch
In a Beverley Hills mansion,
Three well-aimed bullets in his handsome face,
One of his eyes shot out.
That was how the movie ended.
As he always said:
“We only kill each other.”
Right up to the end,
He still thought he could win,
Out of luck and out of his mind,
Doublecrossing everyone, even himself,
Blinded by the desert.
He himself always loved to kill,
To hear his victims scream and beg;
He had to be the one to pull the trigger,
The Angel of Death, manicured and suave,
Careful not to get blood on his suit.
This, the kid from Hell’s Kitchen,
Who had dropped waterbombs
On passing cops’ heads,
Snatched purses
And stole from blind men’s cups.
Ceaseless prestidigitation
Of dealers’ hands,
And baleful eyes watch
From every wall and corner…
Fiery cauldron in the darkness,
Headlights streaming in along the highway
And weird lights in the sky,
And all those nameless bodies
Buried out in the desert…
Early in the morning, exhausted gamblers
Slump over green tables,
Marooned in light-puddles,
Wan dummies in tuxedos and glittering dresses
Sit mummified, playing ghostly baccarat,
And pallid hookers linger on sidewalks,
Lined with gimcrack wedding chapels.
The weary Paiutes trekked across the valley
And pitched their tents here;
They gathered seeds, sweet sage and wild celery,
Camas and caraway,and the bulbs of the sego lily,
And ate, with relish, locusts and rattlesnakes;
They hunted elks and bears in the mountains,
And smeared their bodies with red paint;
They thrived in this desert, and buried their dead
With eagles, under the killing sky.
When the Spaniards arrived, they took one look
And went the long way round, afraid to venture in,
Leaving a blank space on their maps.
Needs, desires; - in the end, who can tell the difference?
Only think the thought and the appetite appears.
You don’t even know you’re alive!
Load your gun with golden bullets
And fire them into the sky;
Here you can lick up the drunkenness of life
Like champagne off a showgirl’s behind.
There you are, standing in the nuclear blast,
Grinning skull gangster with neon skin,
Gambling it all on the dice-throw,
On the turn of the roulette wheel.
Drive the golden spike into the heart of life;
Study the cards at the blackjack table;
Ghosts move through the gilded mirrors
In the hotel of laughing corpses.
The heat is a white tiger on your back.
Time to make a killing and get out.
Bugsy Siegel slumps on the couch
In a Beverley Hills mansion,
Three well-aimed bullets in his handsome face,
One of his eyes shot out.
That was how the movie ended.
As he always said:
“We only kill each other.”
Right up to the end,
He still thought he could win,
Out of luck and out of his mind,
Doublecrossing everyone, even himself,
Blinded by the desert.
He himself always loved to kill,
To hear his victims scream and beg;
He had to be the one to pull the trigger,
The Angel of Death, manicured and suave,
Careful not to get blood on his suit.
This, the kid from Hell’s Kitchen,
Who had dropped waterbombs
On passing cops’ heads,
Snatched purses
And stole from blind men’s cups.
Francois Couperin at the Court of Louis XIV
I
Simple at the clavecin, he sits,
Fingers touching love itself…
What precise melancholy
Proceeds from monstrous life!
Young Apollo excels at the masked ball
And the billiard table,
Serene master of the world.
His daydream is the people’s missal.
Letters from Bach used as lids
For jam-pots; sly under his perruque,
The courtier smiles ironically,
Turning a waspish bon mot.
II
And the gallantry of His Majesty,
And the coquetry and deportment of the ladies,
And the frivolities of the fête champêtre,
And the streets’ commotion,
And the soldiers parading,
And the antics of saltimbanques and players,
And the geometric strolls in summer gardens
And the carrolling of hydraulic organs in grottoes…
The spiders of civilization
Toil their webs with finesse,
Fabricating stellar dentelle
For minds to caress.
Now sensibility
Reaches true acuity,
Pressed by self-control.
What desperate sympathies inform the hour,
The hour of man’s undoing?
“Remain gay and lively,”
Said Bussy-Rabutin to Mme de Sévigné,
Both old and counting their ailments,
“Take nothing too seriously
And then you will live another thirty years, at least!
And I will wait for you in Paradise.”
III
After victory, defeat;
After glory, corruption;
The elegant and magnificent
Fall to tenderness at last.
And the wistful hours compose their melodies.
What remains is an atmosphere,
Appeals of a ghost in an empty corridor.
Love, simple love, keep me in your good graces,
Point me the way by moonlight through the woods.
IV
Merry company,
This man you cannot do without:
Black-robed in the corner,
Mouth turned down,
A thousand choice sorrows in his eyes.
V
May we now both please and purify the soul:
Ferocious puissance polishes its claw
In rondeau, chaconne and sarabande.
This age of wonted deaths
Will be rejuvenescence.
We have no climate but the airs and movements of time.
Let sound befriend the lonely
And save of them what it can.
Deny no grace or cadence
To carry you home.
This life, so glad and grave,
Is all devotion.
Restless music fights to a final hush.
God, truth, man:
It is all in the fingering of a phrase.
These falls and rises educate us in poise.
To the noble, the slightest token is illumination.
To be civilized, that is our malady and pride.
Who knows what keeps the funambulist in the air?
Study the sinuosity of the cat,
And render your life as supple.
VI
The suspension of a semiquaver,
The measure of an interval:
From such choices
Is a world composed.
Dumbly he ponders
In a blue room,
Less the Sun King
Than the Man in the Moon.
Simple at the clavecin, he sits,
Fingers touching love itself…
What precise melancholy
Proceeds from monstrous life!
Young Apollo excels at the masked ball
And the billiard table,
Serene master of the world.
His daydream is the people’s missal.
Letters from Bach used as lids
For jam-pots; sly under his perruque,
The courtier smiles ironically,
Turning a waspish bon mot.
II
And the gallantry of His Majesty,
And the coquetry and deportment of the ladies,
And the frivolities of the fête champêtre,
And the streets’ commotion,
And the soldiers parading,
And the antics of saltimbanques and players,
And the geometric strolls in summer gardens
And the carrolling of hydraulic organs in grottoes…
The spiders of civilization
Toil their webs with finesse,
Fabricating stellar dentelle
For minds to caress.
Now sensibility
Reaches true acuity,
Pressed by self-control.
What desperate sympathies inform the hour,
The hour of man’s undoing?
“Remain gay and lively,”
Said Bussy-Rabutin to Mme de Sévigné,
Both old and counting their ailments,
“Take nothing too seriously
And then you will live another thirty years, at least!
And I will wait for you in Paradise.”
III
After victory, defeat;
After glory, corruption;
The elegant and magnificent
Fall to tenderness at last.
And the wistful hours compose their melodies.
What remains is an atmosphere,
Appeals of a ghost in an empty corridor.
Love, simple love, keep me in your good graces,
Point me the way by moonlight through the woods.
IV
Merry company,
This man you cannot do without:
Black-robed in the corner,
Mouth turned down,
A thousand choice sorrows in his eyes.
V
May we now both please and purify the soul:
Ferocious puissance polishes its claw
In rondeau, chaconne and sarabande.
This age of wonted deaths
Will be rejuvenescence.
We have no climate but the airs and movements of time.
Let sound befriend the lonely
And save of them what it can.
Deny no grace or cadence
To carry you home.
This life, so glad and grave,
Is all devotion.
Restless music fights to a final hush.
God, truth, man:
It is all in the fingering of a phrase.
These falls and rises educate us in poise.
To the noble, the slightest token is illumination.
To be civilized, that is our malady and pride.
Who knows what keeps the funambulist in the air?
Study the sinuosity of the cat,
And render your life as supple.
VI
The suspension of a semiquaver,
The measure of an interval:
From such choices
Is a world composed.
Dumbly he ponders
In a blue room,
Less the Sun King
Than the Man in the Moon.
Athene
Athene Polymetis,
Fierce and crafty,
Full of guile and acumen,
She who threw down the flute
And took up the battle-trumpet!
Athene Glaukopis,
Snowy owl on a Palaelithic cave wall
In Provence,
Baleful eyes
That penetrate any soul,
Olive tree leaves in the zephyr,
The voice that says
Now I see…
She knows what is fated
And what can be changed by man;
Only a fool dares act without her counsel.
Without her foresight and discrimination,
Her measure and rule,
No transformation can prosper.
On the ruins of the Acropolis
Bloom feverfew,
The ancient parthenium,
Friend of wombs,
Regulator of menstruation,
Proof against melancholy and migraine.
Energy of air, earth, water, thunder,
Throbbing, pulsating,
Lady Bird,
Lady Snake,
Ivory figurine in red ochre peplos,
Round and pregnant,
Etched with triangles,
Zigzags,
Circles,
Spirals.
The Minoan goddess
Holds high a snake in each hand,
Triumphant.
On the Acropolis
Athene suckles the giant serpent
At her breast.
This is the Age of Kali:
Horror,
Strife,
The losing throw of the dice.
The third hand of the goddess
Gestures “Fear not!’
Power and intellect
Play through the vortex,
Intertwining;
So radiant this flaming,
It can kill.
Sarasvati plays the universe into being
On her vina,
Playing the sounds of the Sanskrit alphabet;
Kali’s garland of skulls
Is the number and notes
Of the Sanskrit letters…
Perseus brings to Athene
The Gorgon’s head
And two phials of her blood,
One drawn from the right arm,
The other from the left.
In the clefts of trees,
In rivers,
The Black Virgin shines,
Queen of the South,
Queen Sibylla,
Goose-footed high priestess,
Enthroned in Toulouse.
Gerbert of Aurillac
Watches the golden fleeces
In the river of his city,
He who will become
Pope Sylvester II
In the year 999.
He had met, in his studies,
A beautiful woman,
Meridiana,
Who offered him her body, wealth and wisdom,
If he would trust Hera,
And so he did;
Thus did he achieve the Magnum Opus,
Introduce Arab numbers to the West,
Invent the clock,
The astrolabe
And the hydraulic organ,
And in his darkened chambers
Conversed with a thaumaturgic talking head.
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