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.
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