Fantastical Bodies

Poetry and science
Unite in this skin
Revolution now

Can I change the world
Through my body
As the world changes me?

From evil and perversion
I learn wisdom
And transform death
Into endless life

Awaken the dead
And bring them back!

Between pain and pleasure
Reason and delirium,
We live

Strong sensations
I must feel-
And overcome
I must mark myself
With visions
To sustain me
For the journey
Mutilate and deform

Amphibian of worlds
I invent new deaths
For myself
Just for the beauty
Of surviving
Not myself,
Not myself at all

This body is given to me
For exploration and play
For fearless voyaging

I come to pierce the world’s clitoris
With my mind
To dance the Sun Dance
Like a Sioux brave

There is no centre but the edge

Accumulating magical force
Electricity through the wires

Contort
Constrict
Deprive
Encumber
Burn
Penetrate
Suspend

The sadhu stretches his penis
With weights
Or tucks it up inside his body
Aroused all the time
On the verge of orgasm all the time
Yet never coming

Honour the penis
Pierced with ampallang
Dydoe
Apadravya
Or Prince Albert
Torching the world
With joy

Laughing skull
Fill the world with mirth
I tattoo myself
With sorcerous armour
Parallel universes
In each molecule of ink

The Mayan nobleman
Pierces his penis with stingray spine
Offering sacrifice of blood
In a world of almighty puns
And the Vision Serpent coils up
Out of the smoke

Scarify me
Let each cut
Be a blood-key
To open a door in the sky

These are my signs
My flights
Night pilot of metaphors

Archduke Franz Ferdinand
Falls dead
The assassin’s bullet
Passing through the head
Of a snake tattooed
On his right hip

Queen Isabella of Bavaria
Comes with dress
Open to the navel
Nipples rouged and exposed
And pierced with gold chains
And diamonds

Kubrick in the Dark

Perfection in this lifetime
In an image
A single frame
Line and motion and colour
In highest harmony

The meticulous and compassionate research of humanity
In all its permutations
May yield the occasional insight
Not to be despised

Each day
I move though the world
Stumbling on
And selecting angles
Using all kinds of devices
And chance circumstances
As viewfinders
To compose
Satisfying images
And scenes

Amid furious transience
I scrabble for control
Fighting a war
I can never win
Continually refining
My peculiar violence

Marcel Duchamp Plays Chess With The Cosmos

Erotic chimeras of the mind, mythical and mundane, perform your peculiar arcana for the delectation of the adept. What sport-all this metaphysical farce! Play for your life, with all the mad indifference of a Pierrot.Death delivers puns of infinite complexity into your mouth.
How to live without repeating oneself? Experiment by experiment,with sly simulations of science.The dry chuckle and the sly snigger will penetrate even steel.This is life: half-masterpiece, half-hoax.The mage and the charlatan are brothers, equally busy.
None can excel me in mockery; the master of ceremonies, expert in cruel research. Possibilities’ hieroglyphs materialize in the air, desires content to remain permanently unfulfilled.
Crossings-out, revisions,corrections,unfinished and unfinishable thoughts:these are the chameleons on the glass.King and Queen divide the chessboard according to their whims, as the pieces exult in their doomed manoeuvres, rich in strategies and gambits.
Guarded and watchful,the child contrives his own candour,inventing new names for things.The allpowerful idea stakes out territories with ruthless joy.
What acrobatics freedom extorts from us,what ferocious exigencies!Fabulous negation fearlessly remakes the world, as the passionate and the dispassionate pursue their equal goals.The hidden physics of the least thing serves to entertain the droll connoisseur.Call it erotic comedy, this delicate pursuit of the indelicate.The beau cavalier extends a wry smile,and sardonically insinuates himself into the event.Perfecting an absolute neutrality.He keeps his life, what little there is of it, in an old trunk under the bed; a few photos, a few cryptic notes.

Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472)

A bureaucrat! Could anything be more accursed
Than this thankless drudgery blurring the mind
And drying the heart out in respectable monotony ?
Reluctant servant of the Papal Curia,
Alberti counts the hours till he can take his leave
And get back to his architect’s drawing board,
Though knowing all too well that many devious patrons
Hire him only for political advantage,
Thinking of their dealings with the apostolic chancery;
Cunningly they seek his good offices
By playing on his passion for the uses of stone.

What joy and relief to shove aside mean duties
And swim in the skies, envisaging miracles in stone!
His swift pencil etches the impeccable vision,
Then, like an indifferent god, he withdraws,
Leaving to others the vulgarity of construction,
Absolved in advance of their clumsy mistakes.

Wherever magnificent edifices loom,
He is there with sketchbook and measure in hand,
Venerating these shrines to the maker’s mind,
Making all beauty and majesty his compass.
He will talk with artists and artisans of all kinds,
Slyly playing the ignorant, the better to spy out
Their skills and secrets for his own employment.

Cursed from birth, bastard son of illustrious exiles
Banished from the sacred circle of Florence,
He must live as a perpetual stranger,
Forcing him not to desire, not to grieve,
But to treat the whole world as a mere pied-a –terre,
Seeking no nest, no place to mistake for his own.
Yet how can the heart not yearn for its origins,
And the man not crave the child’s home?

Harmony, serenity…the higher we reach for them,
The more thwarted and mocked we become…
Seeking relief now in thought, now in action,
Citizen of the intellect, condemned to the breach,
Alberti teases out his restless anguished solitude,
His very gifts the greatest danger and vexation,
Divided and distracted by his polymathic mind.
Literature and philosophy are the elixir of immortals,
Like the sticky buds opening in spring,
Pure beauty and gladness, the mad exhilaration
Of galloping on horseback over the hills!
At night, he lies awake, barred from sleep
By superhuman visions and unrealised projects,
Designing exquisite buildings in his head,
Every column and cornice elaborated in detail,
And imagining the ideal patron, generous and wise,
Refusing no time and expense to create perfection,
To conquer the ages with monuments to man,
Embodying the soul of stone, noble and austere.

No one knows better than he the pliability of patrons,
How to fascinate, educate and persuade them,
Ridding their minds of unworthy convention,
Exciting them with monuments to majesty and virtue,
As if to say, “Why, this is what you wanted all along…”

In Rimini, he marries the Christian and the pagan
Without contradiction, for the priest is Ideal Form,
And their offspring the synthesis of human knowledge.
SANCTE DICATA TIBI HAEC AEDES ET CONDITA SOLI:
In the Chapel of the Planets the boatman looks back
Over his shoulder, alone in his turbulent crossing,
The far shore barred by dread monsters.
The Sun moves out of Cancer to its zenith,
The doomed ruler’s ephemeral high summer,
And subtle Mercury brandishes his caduceus,
Pointing the way for the souls of the dead.

Roman and Etruscan, mythological and actual,
His promiscuous spirit lusts after any inspiration
To clarify the obscure and purge the corrupt.
Abhorring the dangerous confusion of men’s minds,
He corrects superstition with reason, chaos with order,
For only stone is right and true, outlasting the madness.
This world is all confusion and disappointment,
Where the honest man must struggle to survive.
Was it not so in Ferrara, where he went with high hopes,
Lauding Lionello d’Este as the perfect enlightened patron,
Only to find his state a vipers’ nest of conspiracy
Where menace and violence stifled reason in the womb?
And there he faced failure, deluded in his determination
To marry the classical and the medieval in one,
Left beaten and dejected, only a mere man after all.
Once again, he fled from people and their strife,
Desperate for the countryside to cure his sickness,
To chase the horror away on long days in the saddle,
Leaping over streams with complete control.

Life should be as foursquare as the Palazzo Rucellai,
Sober, strong and compact in pietra forte,
With channels and pilasters to conceal the joints,
And the stone façade crafted with meticulous freedom.
In Rome, he paces the streets with naturalist’s eye,
Piecing together the workings of this vast organism,
And lending his art to the restoration of buildings,
Resolved to resurrect the authentic city order
To stand in rebuke to corruption and unreason.

In marshy Mantua, loud with the croaking of frogs,
Peasant corvees labour for the Gonzagas’ pleasure
To build their glory in stone cemented with blood.
“I have had a dream,” announces Duke Ludovico,
“I must build at once the church of San Sebastiano.”
Here Alberti refines his ideal to its strangest purity,
Austere and perfect beyond the ken of lesser minds,
Standing silent with the bewildered crowd of Gonzagas
Till at last the good Cardinal Francesco speaks,
Scratching his head in undisguised perplexity:
“What is it? A church, a synagogue or a mosque?”
Here Alberti dies, dreaming even on his deathbed
Of one last perfect structure, his own Etruscan temple,
Quintessence of proportion, volume and light,
To vindicate the native tradition at its roots,
But even before the foundations can be laid,
He closes his eyes, entering through its great doors.

The Travel Writer

Where he was was not where he thought he was,
And not where he belonged, where he wanted to be;
Unhappy among the ignorant, the unenlightened,
He craved the most arduous journey, the strictest ordeal,
The true initiation into the kerygma,
The secret gospel of the hooded saint within.
The Other was his twinland, his origin and destination,
Where arrival and departure were as one,
And looking was a kind of death and resurrection,
The starburst of freedom in the eye of God.
He became the Adam of semantics, the namer of things,
The bridegroom in white linen at the altar,
And the hierophant in the secret shrine’s gloom,
Lighting the final candle to witness the revelation;
Jealous of the earth he trod, he hallowed his own footsteps,
Denouncing rivals as fools and impostors
To whom the true religion was forever denied,
While he, the ghost beside the empty sarcophagus,
Had come so far only to read his first footstep’s glyph.
Was adventure not the brother of understanding?
Was hardship not the witness of truth?
It was time to write his own story in blood,
To imagine himself as he had always yearned to be,
To sacrifice coarse flesh to the astral body,
And wend to the centre by the spiral of days.
His life became the lost hours’ rebellion,
The stranger’s sermon at the waterfall in the oasis,
The desert horseman’s gallop into the dying sun;
In his clenched fist he brought home a pebble
To show the foreigners at his native hearth,
A phoenix feather snatched from the whispering air.
The fatherland was sick with nameless disease,
But he might be the cure, the unicorn’s horn
Applied to the wound, if he could find himself first,
If he could find the crystal castle and be admitted;
His ancestors would teach him forgotten wisdom,
And stand him at the circle’s centre once again,
Where up and down and inside and out were one.
Thought and action were the bread and wine
Of the Holy Mass, the transubstantiation of time,
As restless passion carried him outwards and on,
Ever seeking the strange, the undiscovered,
In danger of losing his compass and coming adrift,
Lost beyond his despairing mother’s sobbing call;
Only he who had squared the circle would survive,
And make his old age the throne and sceptre
Of the perfect man, the hero crowned for his endeavours,
Uniting mind and body, art and science, life and death.
Dream and contemplation were his guides beyond,
As he learned the methods of memory to roam at will
In the infinite, living whole centuries in an instant,
Revisiting past incarnations in distant space and time,
To purge lingering evils and turn matter into spirit.
Now there was no safety in the senses, no illusion,
But signs and symbols of the divine, in every quarter,
And beyond the mountains, on the scented isle of birds,
The golden child on the seashore laughed and sang

MacBeth at Loch Leven

None but a cuddy would covet such a mare’s nest
As this accursed country, this well-laid wolf trap!
Come, lying bards, and praise your matchless king,
This handsome red war-hound, puissant and proud!
There’s no glory in all this, that much I understand,
Only blood, bitter black, and raven-ravished bones.
Ah, prince’s truth makes the winter earth bloom;
Giddy orchards sing with fruit; gyring corn-spires
Adore the bright welkin ; cows’ udders overflow;
Streams teem with glittering ; women’s wombs
Bear fair sons and daughters to the crowing sun.
What lures me back so often to this sainted water?
Rome itself could not so calm my angered soul,
Nor mend the world, and marry heaven and earth.
Fierce August tracks me with a lion’s purpose,
Raking the air with golden claws, drawing blood
From sullen moments, alone in an isle of bone,
Seasoned for the kill, wise to weird and weal.
This God-graced sanctuary is a place of healing,
Equal to any pain, a hermit’s cloister, angels’ nest
And promise of swan-winged bliss, beyond care.
Since I sat upon the Stone of Destiny at Scone,
And pledged myself, heaven-wed with the crown,
Enthroned on Moot Hill, in a castle of clouds,
What boons have I ill-used, and suffered from?
Still the bard is singing in my ear my pedigree
Of ancient kings, from the womb of Scota sprung,
Reminding me of honour and duty, and the boasts
Of battles won, and evil exorcised by the just hand.
Here, to this Culdee isle, I come to pay due honour
To eremitic virtue, and the life of contemplation,
Whereas I myself have lived by fire and sword,
Destroying what I could not understand or appease;
This monastery I endow, trading money for prayer,
Begging holy indulgence for my sins, that God
Might forgive any error, and bless my bones withal.
Many a time I have envied these monks their way,
Their solitude and silence, enwombed in waters,
Far from the world’s affray, the wicked scheming
Of men, bent on boundless selfishness and greed,
Yet I, though I kneel beneath the high cross, cannot
Renounce the world, nor my ambitions within it.
O,beloved Moray, doom-bound behind the Mounth,
Will you that bore and shaped me be also my grave,
When time and fate turn against their ill-starred son?
Your rich earth ,I think, will soon fill my mouth,
And your stones hold me down, in the darkness;
Here I run like the wild boar, hunted from birth,
Whose tombstone will be a birch, a pillar of fire.
For what was I named “son of life”,” righteous man”,
If not to stand among the saved, at Judgment Day?
My deeds,then,must be heaven’s will fulfilled.
Still, in dreams, I see my father fall before me, run
To ground, torn to pieces by the hounds, clutching
At my body, as if I were life itself, the high tower
That all men quest for; no greater warrior ever lived,
Than he, who reared me as his lion-cub, to fulfil
A high king’s part ;hell-spawn they were, my cousins,
Who slew him , usurped my throne, and forced me
To flee my own kingdom like some devilish curse;
Revenge was all I dreamed of in those sere years,
And when at last I licked their blood from my fingers
I rejoiced in God’s justice, come home in triumph.
Proven in war and intrigue, was I not the true elect?
The path I took had long been marked out for me
In blood, from generations past, jealous of their dues,
And when a false king won the throne of Scotland,
I saw my perfect right to undo wry fate’s mistake,
And take his place, poor Duncan, neither warrior
Nor statesman, whose weak hands let slip the crown
As if relieved, as the August sun attained its zenith
And fell, bleeding fogs across the shadowed land;
I saw in his eyes as I killed him some strange sign,
Whose doubtful meaning has troubled me ever since.
In Loch Leven’s waves I see visions and dreams,
This pilgrimage holier than that I made to Rome,
Where I scattered silver coins to the scrabbling mob,
And prayed at high altars, beseeching the Creator
For absolution, and though priests and cardinals
Danced attendance upon me, I knew no revelation,
And felt no contentment, smelling the fox’s reek.
Have I, perhaps, already hanged myself, like a fool,
By letting enemies live, not destroying them at once,
Too eager to show myself magnanimous and wise,
When true wisdom is in cruelty, in murder and rapine?
August is the death of kings; I fear this sere season,
When the scythe sweeps, and lays brown fields bare;
War cries roil the air, and all around is blossom’s rout;
Sunset shines through the sockets of a horse’s skull.

The Electronic Lounge

Always the search for rituals,
Groynes against the drifting sands,
Mirrors reflecting back death:
Here, in my cave, I paint the walls
With deer and bison, and ,beating the drum,
Sharpen my arrows for the hunt.
Airs and perfumes tease the senses,
Harmonics infiltrate the mind,
Tints and tones ineffable, exquisite,
Omens absorbed into the skin.
Whale-songs echo through the ocean,
Javanese music filters through the rain,
Reverberations of the gamelan,
Of South Seas sailors beached in dream.
In the gardens of the water castle
A dancer moves at the flute’s command,
Seahorse lilting over coral.
Perhaps the world has already ended,
And nobody noticed, just carried on.
Weightlessness is the game,
Picking up sounds from radios and satellites,
Egyptologist of the soul,
Deciphering hieroglyphs in the night.
We are in the realm of spooks:
The rock gong resounds in the still,
The voice in the spider’s egg whispers,
The African mask booms and hums.
Koi carp in a Japanese garden,
I turn restless circles in my pond,
With the chanting of the sutra,
With the blowing of conch shells.
Minute is the sound of the water chime:
Through the bamboo listening pole
Hear the pure sparse bell tones of random drips
Ringing in their underground chamber.
Your mind is walking on rice paper,
Making not the slightest tear.
Sea sounds are interstellar dust storm,
The sound of mosses and lichens thinking,
Chinese calligraphy emerging from the white.
I fly like a bat through confusion,
Sounding the cavernous depths,
And the lutist’s strict fingers compose
A crane dancing in a deserted garden.
Walking on the singing sands,
Seduced by green reflective sea,
You are the vanishing nightingale,
The Mozart of the Amazon.
Eerie hoots of gibbons, echoing across river gorges,
Gregorian chant rising in the cathedral,
Reverberations in the railway station,
Fill the lunar desert of a mercury drop.

Trieste

Here is the watchtower of my soul,
Besieged between harsh mountains and sea;
The limestone oracle riddles in underground streams,
In my bandit head, in sleep’s quarantine.
Here I can refine and perfect my solitude,
Slavonic sky’s remittance-man.
What passions and terrors are my burden to sing ?
Hazy bay hallucinations beguile me,
Archduke of rain-drenched thoughts,
Continental drifter ever distant and distracted,
But not lacking in a certain grace and guile.
I like to loiter on the margin of things,
Strolling these streets while ridiculous history
Prances and pratfalls in its circus ring, elsewhere.
On a steep stone staircase I pause and look back
Over the autumnal city, crepuscular and quiet,
As a ferry siren sounds across the water
And the white castle rises alone in my mind.
Call me the plagiarist, the thief of memories,
Stealing into foreign bodies, other lives,
Making their imperial pretences my own,
Figments of the vortex, the continuum.
The dialect of the air is sibilant slur,
And, far away in Mexico, hapless Maximilian
Writes ordering two thousand nightingales
To be sent to him from his beloved Miramar.
Ah, to make happiness your life’s ambition,
Is that not the surest promise of grief?
Better to trust in uncertainty, and wander on.
At night, with the lights of the fishing-boats
In the bay, stilling the heart for a while,
One holds the ancient questions close and dear,
As if, indeed, they were all one truly had.
Winter’s bastard, the bora saws my bones
And grinds my teeth, blackening my blood
With fantastic afflictions, that only suicide
Might purge,- I sit like a poisonous toad
In the undergrowth, as cracked bells toll in my head.
Tall, skinny and myopic, in buttoned tweed suit
And straw hat, smelling of booze, tapping the ground
With his cane, James Joyce strolls the streets,
Dreaming up masterpieces and get-rich-quick schemes,
Dropping into churches, pubs and brothels,
Staggering sozzled through the night streets
To his favourite brothels, La Chiave d’Oro
And Il Metro Cubo, praising God in the synagogue
Of the word, in the exile of his restless eye.

The Art of the Third Reich

“You artists live in great and happy times. Above you the most powerful and understanding patron. The Führer loves artists because he is himself one. Under his blessed hand a Renaissance has begun. Oh, century of artists! What a joy to be part of it!”
Dr.Joseph Goebbels


To fulfil the noble mission they perfected the lie,
Gave their souls in tribute to the state for resurrection,
Hearty farmers, happy workers, soldiers armed for the ultimate crusade,
Once again feeling the ancient gods in their blood.
In a paradise of thatched rooves and folk dances
Proud naked bodies reached out to the swastika sun,
Glad for a while to be relieved of freedom,
Bewildered lives justified, their thinking done for them,
The promise of greatness to make good every sin.
They would exorcize the demons with flaming swords,
Offer sacrifice at their ancestors’ altars,
Purify the earth and air, purge their homes of evil.
Clean beauty would banish the scrofulous imaginings
Of aliens and degenerates infected with foreign ideas,
Money-lust and machine-life, Babylonian corruption.

In the squares of small towns never visited by theatre
Jackbooted actors erected stages under the sacred flag,
Performing the mystery plays of the God-King.
The Enchanter conjured pageants, autobahns, arenas;
Every event was grand opera, ecstasy for the masses,
Chaos ordered by architecture, with flesh for stone,
Each petty life commanded to become a monument.
Immaculate kitsch adorned executioners’ offices,
Art that asked no questions and did as it was told,
Marching in uniform, expressionless, in step,
A kef of frozen gestures and vacant calm.
The tight-lipped mouth said “purity”,”harmony”,”truth”,
Then bared its teeth in a masterful cinematic smirk,
Biting the silver bullet of so many clever lies,
Spelling eventual death to the werewolf’s heart.


They crowded the galleries with classical male nudes,
Olympian conquerors immune to suffering, striking forced poses,
Stunned by their own inhuman perfection.
Their women were all flawless, smooth-skinned and ripe,
Hallowed mothers of the Master Race, vestal whores,
Their bellies the barrows of Teutonic kings.
Massive ashlars uplifted by will to crush all opposition
Conjured imaginary cities of austere majesty,
Blank cathedrals of power, built by rote,
Obliterating every small human gesture’s challenge.
Plutonic in his necropolis, the Master of Ceremonies
Dictated the obligatory virtues of culture;
The smallest artefact must embody the whole,
The ideal family clustered around the Father,
Technically perfect, the detail obsessive, minute.

Wagnerian puppets, they strutted brave in costume,
Making the Bavarian Alps their son et lumiere;
Playing with toy soldiers in the nursery,
They fended off Mongolian hordes in the dark.
Throwing giant shadows with the sun at its zenith,
They exulted in their destiny, their genius supreme,
Till the chisel slipped, carving the face of God,
And the wolves raced out of the fairy-tale forest.
Their castles collapsed. Their rhetoric choked on bones.
Reality wrung the swan-like neck of style.
Floral still-life turned into dead soldiers’ boots.
Crucified on their T-squares, the future’s architects
Arranged their smug delusions into a final pose,
Their glamorous uniforms the booty of collectors,
Their antique dream shipped to the auction-house.

Otto Dix

After the war each night was the same;
Shocked awake, shaking, in a cold sweat.
His smile was barbed wire, his speech bullet-holes,
Everywhere he looked, he saw grotesques.
“Attack” was his watchword, his salvation;
Battlefield priest in soldier’s hairshirt, he confronted
The ludicrous world, ramshackle ghost train,
Nursery of the stupid bourgeois, strutting his mediocrity.

Skinny dandy in sharp suits, with slick blond hair,
Arrogantly cruising bars, charming seducer,
Dancing passionate tangos with hungry women,
He made the circus and the brothel his own,
Phantom of the fairground, pointing an accusing finger,
Harsh laughter turning the forbidden inside out.

He relished the gargoyles’ solemn self-regard,
The devils who thought they were angels,
The dead who thought they were alive.
Always the outcasts were his special love,
Horror and comedy his twin companions,
His painter’s smock a surgeon’s gown
As he probed the bloody mess with forensic compassion.

Surfaces were beautiful for what they concealed;
That monstrous energy beyond human judgment,
Endlessly creating and destroying with abandon.
His fierce eye exulted in each sensual detail,
Crying “Yes” in the face of death and destruction,
Drawn to the beast beneath the civilized veneer.

He had to see with his own eyes, to verify
The ugliness and extremity, the orgasm of war,
Foraging and fighting on the mind’s front line,
Funambulist treading fine above the abyss,
Between contradictions, turning fear into grace,
Kasper Hauser in the city, a black shining crow.

Judas Iscariot

The twisted old olive tree calls me
To come with a noose for my neck,
To close the circle at last.
I who was born on a stormy night
So long ago in Kerioth,
Among the hills where lightning shrieked,
Will dangle now from a wrathful cloud.
The Day of Judgment has come.

Silver burns a hole in my palm.
A vixen cries mockingly in the field.
My mind is blank, I understand nothing,
Nothing now can save me from myself.
Lord, Master, I loved you as a brother!
Would that I could kiss you again,
And you would know my faith.

Was this my fate ordained by God?
Was it for this monstrous purpose I was born?
To be the very lowest of the damned?
I shall never see Jerusalem uplifted,
My face will not be among the blessed;
O, let the fires consume me all in all,
And leave not a single foul speck!

Lord, I only wished to serve you,
To herald the Coming, unshackle the enslaved,
That all might cry allelulia to the heavens,
A nation once more, proud and whole.
What voice guided me, God or the Devil?
Now sentence is passed, without reprieve,
This barren acre bought with blood
Will be my grave, unvisited, except by the wind
That scourges this earth to the bone.

The Yanomami

Cold shadows of thunderclouds over the forest,
Forest and river blur together all grey
In the sizzling rain that sweeps in torrents,
Purging the overheated earth.

Red howler monkeys pierce the dawn mist with shrieking,
Baritone clarions carrying across the treetops.
White butterflies dance like stars
Over the black river’s flood.
Silver sunlight on the leaves.
The earth is a blackened pot over a murmuring fire.

Bitter manioc venomed with prussic acid,
Black honeycomb oozing delight;
Light and darkness battle in the forest,
Maggots breed in the monkey’s corpse.
The monkey, the anteater, the lizard
Are our brothers, our shadows on the move.

The storyteller lives inside his story,
Becoming all the characters, speaking in their voices,
Enacting their fates with his own breath.

In the time when people were animals
The Alligator discovered fire
And tried to keep it for himself alone.
While everyone else ate their meat raw
He cooked his food in secret,
Keeping the precious flames hidden in his mouth.
But one day two hummingbirds
Flew down and circled round him,
Round and round so merrily
That the Alligator laughed with delight;
Instantly the hummingbirds darted in
And snatched the embers from inside his jaws,
Then flew off at once to bring this gift to man.

A lone man dances in the rain, arms outstretched,
Singing and shrieking, running through the forest,
Sudden laughter bursting from his mouth,
His mad head rocking, his body shaking.
He runs in circles, then falls on his back
And his wide eyes watch the rain falling
As he giggles with delight.

We breathe the dream-stuff into our brains;
Weightless, we ascend and fly,
Leaping from branch to branch in the forest
To sing our own song in the sky.
Silently, music appears in our mouths
And fills the emptiness.

The white men bring evil spirits;
They dig up disease from the earth.
The shouting sky begins to crack;
All must fall and die.

Birth and death incessant,
Germination and decay;
New leaves of bright lime or dark red
Unfurl at the tip of every branch,
The first green fruits hang from the palms.
Purple flowers open for bees to pollinate,
Flocks of parrots cry across the brown river,
Honey is sweet in the comb,
Catfish dawdle in the shallows.

A lone figure dances in the clearing in the moonlight,
A shadow turning and jumping,
Waving his arms with shouts and groans,
Snatching flaming logs from the fire
And hurling them through the air;
Sparks fly in the darkness
As he fights the invisible one.

Rain falls,
And the water is people,
Immense dreams falling, drenching the earth.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1960)

In everything there was the end of things,
And the sacred lake glittering all summer,
Until he was too tired and bitter to care;
He spent his life staring down the barrel of a gun,
Cursed by some beautiful hunter’s moon,
Little Huck Finn crying “’Fraid of nothing!”
The hunter’s ritual, the fly fisher’s poise,
Made him the horned god on the hoof,
He dreamed that he had Cheyenne blood,
Blessed by the dark sun of the dead.
The drab suburban days wielded a razor,
The beast was already tracking him;
A cruel traitor lived in the dutiful son,
And a femme fatale in the brother’s skin.
The young ambulanceman picked up the limbs
Of shattered bodies, male and female confused,
Headless corpses, strung-out intestines,
Just hunks of meat in a butcher’s shop;
Soon he too would die and feel his soul
Leave the body, so easily, with stars bursting
Overhead, and drifting downward in a dream;
That was when his second life began.
Love was in the leave-taking, the failure,
Biting the bullet with a crooked smile,
Valorous in the lost cause, double-crossed,
Turning back, afraid, to the company of men.
Who was he fighting, in the end, but himself?
To play against the odds: that was the game.
Parisian safari filled his copybooks with wildlife;
He painted his own Cézannes in café corners,
Shadowboxed the future, walking in the rain;
History went to ground in cheap rooms,
Observing its own reflection in a cracked mirror;
Truth attained the deep authority of dream.
He had the knack, and no end of good luck,
Until his luck ran out; then the matador’s sword
Went in between the shoulders, piercing the heart;
He used up everything, and got used up.
Memory’s rat trap snapped up a world,
And chewed its bones with sly exactitude;
The brave man and the coward both knew
Their sinfulness, behind the brag and bluster,
Each an impostor, a double, on manoeuvres.
He wanted it back: that old sense of immortality,
As he played Russian roulette with the days,
Algebraic gambler, spooked, and losing his mind.

Lazio

Something of the Etruscans is in us,
The music of their flutes in hunting and lovemaking,
The splendour of their tombs;
Or so I feel, running my hand over you,
Trying to grasp you before you disappear,
Reciting talismanic words:
Travertine, serpentine, porphyry, peperino.
Fantastical Tarquin with the heart of a wolf,
I want to paint you, to sculpt you, sublime,
To fashion your totem in terracotta,
And bring the hills to fruition.
You make me a builder of roads and bridges,
A god from the east, come into his temple,
The king of the golden grove at Nemi,
Awaiting the usurper’s approach.
The blood of the white bull flows
Into the furrows of speech,
A serpent steals up from underground
To lick the quicksilver sweet.
Oh, popes and Caesars, make your plans,
But take care in whom you trust!
As for me, just give me a bottle of wine,
And a plate of pappardelle al cinghiale.
Woman, I love your Etruscan smile,
Bringing out of Asia Minor
Thalassocracy and divination,
And, for me, this strange vocation,
Haruspex inspecting the sheep’s liver,
Observing the flight of birds.
Bronze she-wolf suckling gods and men,
Come with mirrors and perfume burners,
And we who saddle griffons
Will honour you with gold filigree.
The winged horses of Tarquinia
Shall draw your golden chariot;
And leopards attend your feasting,
Dancers cavort in your tomb.
See, the dead go to their new life
With masks and laughing jewels,
Making death seem nothing more
Than a painted ostrich egg;
Vanths and caronti escort the procession
Of souls to the underworld,
And from the waters of volcanic lakes
The drowned arise on horseback.

Serge Gainsbourg ( 1928 -1991)

Regarde cette cigarette. Bien sûr ça me ronge les poumons. Qu’est-ce qui peut me donner un climax physiologique pareil qui se renouvelle toutes les cinq seconds, toutes les cinq minutes ?

Serge Gainsbourg

Out of the shtetl of a childhood refrain,
Out of the jeering broken mouths of whores,
Out of the sky’s golden piano,
He stumbled, spitting black tobacco dreams,
Branded with the sun’s yellow star.
Attack me, kill me, do your worst,
But I will sing the fury of a man…
Why is this one saved and this one damned ?
God has such a crooked smile…
Alone in the Russia of a girl’s thighs,
He could see Greek statues and dazzling seas,
And hear the old music prancing
Across the warm sands as the timid little urchin
Looked up from play, humming his delight,
And beheld a goddess hovering before him,
Shimmering with sunlight and sea-breeze…
Nothing on earth can destroy me,
The universe is music, and music is love…

That was his museum of memories,
A tiny house with a black front door,
All black inside, impeccable, serene,
Everything in its place, under control,
And no mirrors anywhere,
A vampire shrinking from his own reflection;
Black walls, black ceiling, black marble floors,
Black furniture, black piano, black front door,
And a black uniformed valet to answer the door;
No messy daylight was allowed to enter,
He removed all the glass from the windows
And installed tiny panes of bubbled crystal
That let no light in at all.
How could he, with such disorder in his head,
Tolerate the slightest disorder around him,
That would be madness…

His prancing ear punned on women’s bodies,
And clowned in the circus ring,
As the green wolf ran through the Russian taiga,
Howling at fairy-tale moons;
Bring on the next adventure !
Instead of killing ourselves,
We shall revel in the mess !
Drunkards, lovers, mummers, jesters,
We shall inherit the earth…
Nothing is forbidden,
And the joy is to shock, to disturb, to amuse…

Savage pride twisted its blade deep inside him,
As he shrank from the mirror like a vampire,
Hating his naked body,
“Come back when you’re old enough !” the whores used to shout,
And so he picked the ugliest old whore he could find
To lose his cherry to,
On a grubby mattress in a grubby room,
So disgusted that he could not even come…
When he played in bars and nightclubs he was so terrified,
So unable to remember the words of his own songs,
That he would write them down on paper,
And when his hands shook too much he would roll the paper up
Into a little ball and chuck it at the audience
And they, the chic and soigné, would applaud,
Thinking it part of his act…
Out of his mouth came the cruelty of lovers,
The simplicity of sinners,
The sadness of men;
There are no rules, only possibilities,
No taboos, only truth.

Fantastic scandal of life off the leash,
Words on a spree, jumping the barriers,
Exulting in their own bravado !
There he was, Parmigianino’s Cupid-Jesus,
Holding up a red rose to his sexy mother…
He stuck his nose and tongue into everything,
Smelling and tasting the fecund shit…
I will cut you with my hooligan knife,
Make you bleed the waters of life…

Bleary bandido of fame,
Rumpled as a whore’s bedsheets,
He newspapered over the cracks in the sky,
And crawled like a gecko over giant women’s breasts,
Trapped in their glass horizons…
He was the gargoyle bursting out from the tower,
Spurting water from his screaming maw,
Pissing on the heads below…

Black coffee nights, by the light of a cigarette,
He worked his heart out, fast as a car crash,
A saturnine imp two thousand years old,
Sticking his tongue out at the stupid world,
Licking beauty’s arsehole with relish,
Playing with his own caca.
I can do whatever I want,
Just you try and stop me!
Life was a big red balloon, bought on the street corner,
Slipping out of his grasp,
Soaring away over the rooftops…
The air was a dizzy America of sounds,
The world’s bazaar, inexhaustible and free;
Liberty was his laughing perversion,
Turning somersaults and swinging from the trees.
His wry lips bit on dark jokes and cruel wit,
And caressed the Whore Goddess,
Spinning puns like plates on sticks…
Tradition was the Madonna and the Whore;
He could light tall candles before her,
Then turn her round and screw her up the arse…

Bloodshot daylight writhed in agony,
Sweating second chances,
While evil moons stuck pins in the voodoo doll.
Everybody loved him now :
When he tottered down the street, leaning on a cane,
People came up to him, young and old,
Just to smile and say hello,
Scrying in his purblind eyes…
He died in his sleep, alone, in the middle of a dream,
Stretched out on his bed, hands clenched into infantile fists,
Conjuror of a logical conclusion,
His face like an African mask.
This is the joy they call despair,
The cigarette’s Zoroastrian fire…
He had thought that death would somehow overlook him,
Preserve him as a stately ruin :
Surely that was not too much to ask ?

Die Blaue Stunde

September
And the slow drift
Towards destruction,
Leaf-lilt and sky-tilt,
Longing beyond description…
Memory’s mulch
Will make a pretty bonfire.

And, after all, this loneliness
Is what you were born for;
You chose it,
Or it chose you.

Too much the night:
All these things I fear to see,
Fear to know….

Into the top of autumn’s kerotakis
I pour mercury, sulphur and arsenic
And heat them with fire
So that the vapours rise,
Attacking and transmuting the metal at the top,
Then condense and run down the sides
And the cycle recommences.

Basel

We move with measured rhythm,
Regulated, constrained, discreet;
We do not like surprises.
Money, at least, we understand,
And see no evil in it;
Are we not honourable men?
Stealthy hands go about their work,
Counting riches, treasures untold,
And the dyer is become the chemist,
Trapped inside the glass.
Mad dreams lurk in the banker’s eyes,
And crimes beyond comprehension or forgiveness,
Secrets steeped in blood and offal,
Buried in quicklime, in the dark.
Under the bland facades are lysergic dreams,
Visions form the fungus, other dimensions,
Parallel universes spinning,
Angels and demons, ecstasy and despair.
Who are you? Merchant, philosopher, emperor, bishop,
The masked fool reciting satirical verses,
The demon in the carnival parade.
The Wheel of Fortune turns above the doorway
Of the Münster, where the angel sounds a trumpet
To wake the dead, and elephants bathe in the Rhine.
The wild man, the lion and the griffon
Dance on the bridge, to the sound of a drum,
Picking out the steps with ritual precision.
The Tongue King at the bridge-gate
Rolls his eyes and sticks out his tongue
To greet each traveller entering the city.
In the tapestry The Garden of Love,
Two lovers play cards in a summer pavilion:
He slaps down his card, anticipating defeat-
“That last card of yours was a good one!”-
And she, holding victory in her hands,
Smiles, “And it’s won me the game!”
Crowds of people join the Dance of Death,
All heading for the charnel house,
Men and women of all sorts and trades,
Obeying the music, moving as one.
What lies do you tell? What vows do you break?
What supercilious glories do you forge?
Silent thief, see the coinage in your palm,
The gold teeth of skeletons, glinting.

Bruges

Winter’s afternoon,
Cold eerie fog suffuses the city,
Stone bridges over still canals,
Phantom spires and towers.
Loitering in the square
I explore geometry
With a cone of chips,
Dipping the slim hot crispy gold
In mayonnaise.
With this world in my head
I can never go lonely
Nor fall too far
From the tower of my voice.
I think of the left emanation,
The ten sephiroth of Satan,
Unholy and impure,
Unleashed when Judgment,
The fifth sphere,
Breaks away from the others
And turns destructive.
In the Groeningemuseum
I stand before Gerard David’s The Judgement of Cambyses:
The corrupt judge Sisamnes being flayed alive
With surgical precision by knaves,
While the Persian king and his court
Stand around, nonchalantly looking on.

Hypnagogia

Shot from a cannon
Into the circus ring,
I perform my life
For dark faces.

Insight, hindsight, foresight:
Triplet hounds
My hand unleashes
In the hunt!

O, little whirling suns,
Iridescent bubbles,
Waves, clouds, diamonds,
Points and streaks!
Faces, faces,
Out of the darkness,
Some hideous, some sublime,
Moods and emotions
Flashing forth!

Snapping my moorings,
I drift away
Into the sea,
The Sea of Tranquillity.
I am the baby,
Dream-mothered,
Touching and sucking
The everything.

O, curves and spirals
And blossoms of fire!
The rainbows are brightest
In a blind man’s dreams.
Microscopic eyes see through
The grain of your skin.
Who is that, calling my name?
I hear a voice from the unseen,
And blue flames of music,
And churchbells in the night.
Your fate lies upriver,
Beyond the waterfall.
Smell the rose
Whose scent is sweeter
Than any rose could be.

Electricity zigzags
Over my skin,
Shocks and spasms
Rend me from within,
I miss my foothold on the ladder
And fall back into the blue.
I am running, running forever
Towards a closing door.

Contemplate the fascination,
Meditate upon your mountain,
Walk alone through silent gardens
To the ever-shining fountain.

I am my mind,
Diffuse yet absorbed,
Ranging meridians
For what it may find.

The glass is moving
On the ouija board,
Spelling out words
As the sleeper stirs.

“Do not disturb my circles”
Pleads Archimedes
To the Roman soldier
About to spear him.

Edison, dozing in his chair,
Vexed by some problem,
Lets the steel balls drop
From his hands,
And as they clatter
Into pans on the floor,
He wakes with a start,
Inspired by solutions.

Pineal gland,
Cone of light,
Caduceal sceptre-head,
Buddha’s topknot.
Death, deliver me secrets,
Render me powers
And resolve.
All worlds, all times
Are one here,
One energy,
One mind.

Death on Television

Turn on
And watch the killing;
Murder, disaster, accident and war.
Prime entertainment.
The way things really are.

Let the mystery play begin.
Someone else’s misfortune
Whores my illusion
As reality is manufactured,
Advertised and sold.
Come, titillate the appetite,
Confirm the prejudice.

Show me evil
In diverse forms,
Carnival freakshows
And horror divine,
Electric shocks
To goad the blood.
My cupidity, I wager,
Is not so strange to you.
Are we not equal witnesses,
After a fashion?
History, it seems to me,
Is but knowledge of pain,
And events our true instruction,
As the soul, in lust for profit,
Speculates.
How cruel we prove,
And add such vices to our credit.
Whatever suffers has currency.

Give me action and destruction,
Some sudden rage to gawp at,
The bloody sacrifice
For Aztec fun.
And is it wrong
That by disorder
I may be ordered
And cleansed?

You will always want the danger,
The blood and dirt,
Animal omens, noises in the dark.
The judge must don the black cap
And solemnly condemn.
The butcher’s knife works without pause.

It is the hour of Thomas the Twin
Poking his finger into the holy wounds;
Nails from the True Cross,
Portraits of Christ.
Now, separate the saint from his head
And describe the crime scene.

Learning Curve

If it takes a lifetime
To bring dreams to fruition,
Then to hell with common sense.
My labours forever begin.

What do you know
Till you know you are wretched,
And in that very misery
Rise with the fall.

All things assist us
When we attempt to love,
Body's every bone is blessed
When we start to feel.

Bizarre, how fiercest ordeals
Tease out finest beauties,
Ceremony from cruel hands,
Music born out of war.

We are men,yes, not gods,
Yet born to emulate the heavens.
And in the pupil’s abyss
Ignite a universe.

Reflections in a Raven's Eye

Hwaet!
Strange things creep over the land;
Something ends and something starts
As the adder sun sloughs another skin.

Where now are the bones
Of Wayland the Wise,
That goldsmith
So glorious of yore?

Wayland the steadfast warrior knew what it was to be banished; he suffered miserably, his only messmates sorrow and heartache, and exile in the wintry cold. This was after King Nidhael had prisoned and pined him, had bound with supple sinew bonds a far better man.
But that passed off, and so may this.

Hamstrung Wayland limps over the barrow-land,
Sky-flamed his middle-earth smithy.

The Saxons came to a land all covered with trees,
And at once began to chop and clear,
And to break the heavy virgin soil of the valleys with ploughs;
Doom-hearted they viewed the giants’ strongholds,
Stone-built cities decaying in the rain,
Bleak home to frogs and bats,
And the straight paved roads, no work of man.
Wyrd had laid the mighty waste
For dishonouring the Mother.

Have you looked to the hills and seen a stalking stranger,
The bearded one in his long cloak, lost in low cloud?
Have you met him at the crossroads gallows?
Have you seen Old Grim glancing from under his hood,
Piercing your soul with his one good eye?
Have you seen a pair of ravens tumbling,
And heard wolves howling in the wood?

The adder came crawling and struck at none. But Woden took nine glory-twigs, and struck the adder so that it flew into nine parts.

This, our hearth, is Middle-earth
Girt by endless ocean
Wherein swims the almighty serpent
So huge he encircles us
And bites his own tail.
And in the sea’s edge mountains
Groaning giants dwell.

Wisdom falls from yew tree’s boughs;
Catch it in your hands and mouth.
Elfin old tree,
Be my witness;
Bless these runes as they fall.
Stout and swirling,
Riddling and gnarling,
Show your honeyed heartwood,
Full of bulls and horses.
Your thousand-year dreams
Are the roots of man.

Wood-web, tree-craft,
Weave breezes into words
And make me wise.
Woods of yore
Biggen the year.

Badger’s foot and weasel’s claw
Wear the greenwood track
Stoat’s eye and hare’s ear
Harrow the still.
Bracken’s quiver
Is moss’s creep
All shadow and shade.
Open the beech-book
And read.
The truth-tree blooms
For you and me.

Ash-tree,
Fly into the sky,
Look around
And stand your ground;
Wizard’s horse,
Ride the blue,
No storm shall fell
Your straight pride.

Maiden ashplant,
Whip the horse to gallop,
Whistle up brisk spirits in the air,
Keep horse and rider one.
The merest twig cocnbtains the tree.
Conduct the lightning
Down through me.
Evil ghosts try to unhorse me,
Their foul hands grapple
But cannot pull me off.
Maiden ash wand,
With you I draw a circle
That can bind snakes,
In you I trust
Against the sore bite,
Against the grim word,
Against the great dread
And against all evil that enters this land.

Swanskinned birch
Lovely-rough to the touch,
Witch-queen of the wild!

This cave or crossroads,
This mound or beck,
Marks a dragon’s lair.
By night the water
Seethes and hisses
At Grendel’s mere.
Drakes and wyrms
Infest the land,
Keepers of the edge.

Do you seek the wyrm-bed,
The treasure mound?
Follow earth’s kennings
To the word-hoard,
Dragon’s galdor.

Dawn to dawn,
Summer to summer,
Aeon to aeon,
The snake lives and dies.

Hallow your eyes
By the elf’s moonglow,
Wiser than life,
Than death.

What breathings are those
From high on rocks,
Flitting in treetops,
Stealing through undergrowth?
Chuckles and whistles,
Creatures of mist.

Be you shot in the skin,
In the blood
Or in the bone,
By god, witch or elf,
I shall heal you.
With vervain and henbane,
Wormwood,harewort and leek.

Mugwort, oldest of herbs,
Mighty against thirty and three,
Mighty against venom and elfen,
Mighty against the vile She who stalks through the land.

Through bones and dreams
I reckon moons
And in red dusk
My soul I trust,
For love is the lighting of fires.

Maytime and the thorn tree by the well,
Heavy with white blossom,
And scores of vivid ribbons and rags
Hang from the branches,
Crying for aid, for blessing.

The wizard
Spies into the well,
Whispers in the water’s ear,
Begging answers to his questions.
I have stared
Into the Well of Wyrd,
Listened a long while
At the High One’s door.
This is what I heard.

Magpie and jackdaw
Dive after glint;
Rook, crow and raven
Tear corpse-flesh to bone.
The air is thick with slaughter;
Kaah kaah kaah…

Huginn and Muninn
Fly back to Odin’s shoulders,
Bringing the world’s news
From flying an orbit.

Hear the crow’s omen
When he alights in your tree.
Does he sing of life
Or death?

Shapeshifter,
Shed your human pelt,
Don the boar’s helm,
The bearskin,
The horns of war.
Bear and boar
Divide the spoils.

Where fares your fetch
Dark sleeper
And what does it find?
Burgrune and scrying
Own the night.
In black hood
And bird-cloak
Carrying her staff
The seeress sits
Upon her high stool
To work with feather and stone.

Ents, orcs and thyrs
Walk the hills and valleys;
Their long shadows
Reach over all.

Out of Ymir’s flesh
Of fire and ice
The earth was fashioned
And from his gore the seas;
Mountaintops from his bones
Sky from his skull;
And from his brows the gods
Built Middle-earth;
And from his brains clouds.

Would you bind the wolf
Who likes so little to be bound?
With gossamer,
With gossamer.

A spider by night
Will take you in her web
To bridle and ride you
Beyond the moon.

Parallax

Quizzical stranger,
I live here in the corner of your eye
Where you throw your dead.
Catch me in a slanting summer ray,
In an icicle’s dark glint.

People I have known, no longer around,
Places visited, places where I have slept,
And scowled, and laughed, and looked at my watch-
What does it mean any more?

My country, my asylum!
Come, show me to my cell.
Irony hammers bent old nails
Into the condemned man’s hands.

The road so narrow,potholes all over;
Everything to question,nothing to know.
Look there: a gallows at the junction.
Hats off to Mister Crow!

What’s this? A world on the retina,
Inverted. Can you-do you want to-
Turn it the right way up?
My world, my bubble, lovingly maintained,
All mine, this petty hell.
You find me a wanton destroyer,
Quite banal.

Pastimes

Every day I start over,
Describing myself to myself.
Wednesday. Clammy hands,
Humid mind,
Chinese whispers all around …
Reverie’s secretions thicken their ooze.
What can a man with a mouth ulcer
Make of philosophy and theory?
Footnotes usurp the text.
Ragged, impromptu, impossible man,
So inventive in your miseries,
Keep trying on different hats.
A knock on the door…
Why not let the killer in?

A blind old dog farts in the corner
Where a spider draws out magic from its belly.
Be happy; every day has a name and number;
And only glass can shatter.

The idiots in the orphanage
Flap their arms, trying to fly,
And drink from the dogbowls so thoughtfully laid out for them.

The mad old bird has fouled its nest.
The house stinks like a corpse.
A soldier’s helmet pierced by a bullet
Sits on desert sand.

Peccatimania

Apprehended again in flagrante dilecto,
Intricate trespass my shame,
I stand condemned and perjured
By every breath I take.
Single-minded evil runs like a black dog
In the street.
Frendent purgatory of impulse and action-
I fall into crevasses
In the tablets of stone.
What certainty is there
But this thick collateral ash
That smothers every errant thing?
Trapped, ever weakening, in decadent fictions,
I thrill to my poison glands’ gathering pressure,
A scorpion in the hourglass sands.
Shudders of infringement,
Will you cancel me at last?

Shall I always be an outlaw,
A border bandit,
Slitting the throats of itinerant whims?
A teratism in the womb,
I grew like a black pearl.
Never was I intact,
Sufficient to the task.
Irredeemable mistake of seed,
I sprawled into the world’s cloaca,
Painted in my natal slop,
That no christening can ablute.

Nodding coward, prodigal of excuses,
I hobble with all the nowhere-pilgrims,
In the scapegoat’s waterless waste.

Erotomania

Dragon rising…
Intuition of beautiful murders,
The pomegranate earth dehisces,
Spilling a myriad seeds.
The black honeycomb
Oozes sweetness.
Flammable self
Swills volatile liquors
Distilled from spring rain
In alchemic conduits.

Floating in vestments of purple and gold,
I spy through holes in palace walls,
Vanish down secret passages.
Absorbed in mythic gourmandise,
I flirt with perfect objects in the mind.
The cat’s eye mesmerizes me
In my midnight vigils.

Sacred epilepsy:
The sacrifice to emptiness
In a shudder of time.

Unmask the masker,
Disrobe the teasing world.
Here, take this smile,
Whose horns will gore you.

Kenophobia

Inexhaustible absence
Overcomes me,
Unanswerable Nay.
Beyond this emptiness
Is emptiness again
And the increase of emptiness
At every instant.
Here I am vanishing,
Blended with blankness,
A stain dissolving,
Soon forgotten,
Redemption none.

Universe imploded,
Stars disembowellled
And silently screaming.
Perfect non-existence.
Plenitude of never-being-born.

Impenetrable, indivisible,
No questions asked.
It begins where it ends where it begins.
Ever more transparent,
I stammer to speechlessness,
Anonymous eunuch,
Nondescript.
On a clockwork planet
Winding down,
I undo,
Undone.

Carpocratian Affections

Hail Lucifer,
The paraclete!
Illumine mind and soul,
Open up the body
To light.

The Messiah
Is the number of the snake,
The snake of light.

The priestess
Anoints her priest
With holy oil,
It is time for the crossing,
The orgasm of vision.

In the Temple of Jerusalem
Two Cherubim stand,
Male and female,
Embracing,
Carry them out in procession;
Let the people fornicate!

O, logos spermatikos!
To suffer every experience,
High and low,
To penetrate and ken
The whole!

Roadster

How they haunt me, all the great drives:
The Pacific Coast Highway, from Los Angeles to San Francisco,
Four hundred miles, living on hamburgers and iced coffee,
Past forests and mountains and the glittering waves,
Looking for a change of climate;
The Amalfi coast, cruising mid-sky,
Along serpentine vertiginous roads,
Zigzagging the hairpin bends with a grin,
The lemon smell of happiness in my head,
And Parsifal soaring out over the sea;
The Grande Corniche, from Nice to Menton,
Piloting a convertible round the crazy curves,
Challenging the sea and sky with raffish bravado,
Heart spinning like a roulette wheel,
Wondering what my next card will be;
The Great Alpine Road in summer, top down, sunglasses on,
From Geneva to Milan, eight hundred and forty miles,
Lush meadows, granite peaks, wildflower scents,
Wandering up among the pines,
Stopping to eat at mountain huts,
Regal as a Hapsburg emperor;
The Pan-American Highway, from Anchorage to Santiago,
Seventeen thousand miles, riding my wheels like a cowboy,
Eating and breathing the wild roads,
Swallowing mountains, oceans, deserts, forests, cities, villages, rivers, lakes, skies,
To stagger into a café in Chile like a madman
And order a mote con huesillo;
The A303 from Basingstoke to Ashburton,
Humming through Hampshire, Somerset and Devon,
Squashing hedgehogs under my tyres,
Till I find my way to Dartmoor and walk
Into elfish Wistman’s Wood, all dwarf oaks
And lichen-scrabbled boulders.
And other routes, so many, on and off the map,
Each with the potential to be a work of art,
A movie without a script.

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)

He heard in harp music the soul’s mathematics ,
The veiled bride’s murmurs of rapturous love,
Saw in the candle flame reason’s revelations;
Lonely passion drove hard bargains with the night,
As he fought himself to standstill, thwarted, pained.
To hell with his inferiors, all those idiotic professors
Of philosophy, and their worthless scribbling,-
“The ignorant are always the most ready to write!”-
He alone could correct their errors and confusion,
And right disorder, in accordance with the divine.
He flyted fools with sarcasm, provoked into contempt
By any impudent challenge, outraged by stupidity,
And damned inconstant feebleminded womankind.
The child saw his dead mother’s face on the pillows
Of the great red-curtained bed and her coffin loaded
Onto a canal-boat and towed to the cemetery

In his poor monkish room, he set spiders fighting,
Delighting in their battles, laughing out loud,
Then returned, thin black hidalgo, to his desk
And microscope, to grind exquisite lenses,
Painstakingly calculating the optimum angle
For bending parallel rays to the focus.
Cursed heretic, renegade, synagogue’s excommunicate,
Questioning dogma with calm relelentles insolence,
He secretly worked into the night by lamplight,
Reason’s spy, sure of ultimate solutions,
Disdaining the trivial superstitious minds
Of other thinkers, starving his body as he fed
His mind. Peering rapt into a microscope,
He tussled with algebra and vexed lust,
Unsettling beauties parading before him
Like the flaunting whores of Amsterdam.

Roman Interiors

I walk, I wander
To penetrate the hidden:
Champollion of platitudes
In the Egyptian room of the Palazzo Massimo,
Amid crocodile pharaohs, sphinxes without riddles,
My scarab beetle mind rolling dungballs with delight,
Over hieroglyphic desert horizons,
While the secret tunnels and chambers
Of palm trees and pyramids
Initiate me into death;

Mine, too, the Casino di Pio IV in the Vatican gardens:
Sumptuous pavilions, a pope’s retreat,
A place to pace out
Rosaries of thoughts and ideas,
And dally with imaginary nymphs.
Never doubt the ringed hand’s machinations
And the devilish powers beneath a cardinal’s hat!

Door handles in the form of aeroplane wings,
Propeller-style ceiling lights,
And astronomical murals:
This is the Palazzo Aeronautica.
The basement wall is frescoed
With aviators’ paradise,
Fallen Fascist heroes seated amid the clouds,
Playing chess and drinking capuccino.

The Loggia in the Villa Madama:
Raphael’s luminosity
From wandering the ruins of the Domus Aurea,
Memories and visions commingled,
To illuminate the occult day.
The European man am I,
Anxious and audacious,
Taking whatever I can get.

There was a moment, whimsical and free,
Just before the days of war and dogma,
With the trains departing for the coast
From here, the Stazione di Porta San Paolo:
These walls bright with crabs and scallop shells,
Mermaids and sea beasts cavorting...
Trains that pulled away and never returned,
Disappearing into a permanent vacation,
Children building sandcastles
On the shore of a wishful smile.

I pace the walls
In the Museo Capitolino:
Sixty-six Roman emperors’ busts,
Arranged in chronological order,
The empire entire
Like a stamp collection.
Between creation and curation,
The world subsists.

In the Albergo degli Ambasciatori
The frescoes on the walls of the salone,
Veronesian and Tiepolesque,
The beau monde of the nineteen twenties,
Illuminated from below
By theatrical footlights,
And lo, a likeness among the faces
Of Mussolini’s mistress, Margherita Sarfatti,
An innocent faux pas by the painter,
That caused the angry duce
To order the picture draped and hidden.

The walls of the great swimming pool
In the Foro Italico
Boast titanic mosaics
Of virile sportsmen baring their bodies
In the performance of stupendous sporting feats,
Amid mythical sea monsters
And likeminded Greek heroes.
But what possessed Mussolini
To allow in his personal gymnasium,
A Cubist floor mosaic,
He,who so detested the avant-garde?

In the Convento di Santa Trinità dei Monti,
The anamorphic fresco in a passageway,
Painted in acute perspective:
From either end, Saint Francesco di Paola is clear to see,
But when you confront the work directly,
The phantom vanishes from sight,
Replaced by a mountainous Calabrian landscape
Stippled with miniature figures,
Enacting scenes from the saint’s life.
In the Stanza delle Rovine, by Clérisseau,
I am inside a trompe l’oeil
Of an ancient Roman chamber,
With exposed timbers, disintegrating masonry
And holes in the walls and ceiling
Providing views of the sky and an imaginary landscape;
This once served as a bedchamber,
Commissioned by a scientist-monk,
And contained a suite of furniture
In the form of architectural ruins.

In the church of Santa Maria Antiqua
I survey eighth-century frescoes,
Executed by artists from Constantinople
Who had fled to Rome in troubled times
Of iconoclasm in their native city;
Here, in the west they carried on
Their eastern tradition, indomitable
In the faith and love of images.

The Villa Berlingieri,:
All the grandiose affluence and optimism
Of the years just before the Great War,
Self-besotted, self-doomed;
Weird gilt and marble glister
Irradiates you, luxury out of control,
Surfeit of detail and dazzle,
Just about to tip into apocalyse.

In the Palazzo del Quirinale
The elliptical spiral staircase with coupled Doric columns
By Mascherino:
Looking down is vertiginous,
Down through repeated ovals, twisting the eye,
Whorling the sense through whirlpools,
Willing this to be infinite,
Exalted and sickened,
Down to the egg of light far below,
The white eye,
The empty mirror.

A Bit Like Helsinki

Reckless in pleasure,
We held the nights close to our skins,
And fell with the seasons
To the deep core of the moon.
Fathomless tides overtook us,
Carried us far, far from shore,
Into the Ocean of Storms,
Masochists of love, anarchists of fear.

The wild and the human
Hold the dark in common;
Your face is a moon to steer by
In the midnight fury
And your heartbeat
Will lighthouse me home.

Oblivion’s minx,
I spidered the corners of your world
And wove little stars
For the void’s entertainment.
Death sang lullabies
Into the cot,
And nursery rhymes
Appeared in our fists.

To Whom It May Concern

Dearly I miss you in the deeps of a moment,
So far from my best days’ home
-Have I yet used up all my three wishes ,
Or will you please grant another? -
Haplessly I pine
In this void I call vocation,
This priesthood of sighs,
I can almost breathe you,across a thousand miles,
Telling myself how lucky I am
To have “known” you.
Did you ever-I think not-understand me?
Was there perhaps just a moment or two
When something holy
Broke free and broke through?
Or was it all the same confusion,
The vagaries of insubstantial hope?
I wanted you, and in a kind way,
My soul’s happy sister
Sent on a mission.
I wish you all good fortune,
The grace of days,and all your heart deserves,
But think of me sometimes,
And smile.

Tantrika

Ananda said to the Master, “Half of the holy life, O Lord, is friendship with the beautiful, association with the beautiful, communion with the beautiful.”
“It is not so, Ananda, it is not so,” said the Buddha, “It is not half of the holy life; it is the whole of the holy life.”

Samyutta Nikaya (V.2)

To be in the flesh,
To act,
But to transform flesh and action
Into spirit, into evolution,
That is the mystery, the vocation.
Not to renounce,
Not to withdraw,
Not to shrink from life,
But to open and embrace and accept
Every desire, every situation,
And offer it up as prayer.
Not to discover the unknown
But to know the known.
The Sanskrit root tan
Means to expand:
Through science and experiment
To open the mind.

Looking at a terracotta figurine from Harappa,
I recognize a yogic asana:
How ancient and primeval
Is this wisdom, this science,
Already there
At the source of civilisation.

Shiva-Shakti,
Purusha-Prakriti,
To make the two one.
Shakti mounted upon her lover,
Enthroned on the corpse of Shiva,
Closing the circuit,
Resurrecting him.

Woman,
Kinetic energy of the cosmos,
From you the world is born
And into you is dissolved.
Do you laugh to be called a goddess?
But you are.
Prime mover,
Womb of the world,
Eternal virgin,
Smiling hermaphrodite,
Universal yantra,
Substance of all.
To me you are infinite joy,
The liberator,
The queen.
I anoint you
And charge you
With mantras and mudras,
I become the poem,
The music,
The world.

Sattva:
Centripetal ascending,
Cohering
Towards unity,
Towards liberation.
Rajas:
Revolving,
Creating.
Tamas:
Centrifugal descending,
Decomposing,
Annihilating.
When the three are unbalanced
This is evolution,
The ceaseless cycle,
The world created anew,
All the forces
Combining and recombining,
Projecting the universe
In waves
Until it all begins
To revert to equilibrium.
Tamas, rajas and sattva
In balance:
No motion,
No manifestation,
No flux,
Only stillness,
Perfect stillness.

10 billion brain cells,
Each connected with 25,000 others,
More connections
Than there are atoms in the universe;
100 billion sensations a second,
5,000 signals a second.
And I feel the planets attracting,
The earth revolving,
The seasons calibrating,
The elements colliding,
The deep vibrations.
I am inside and outside,
With and without,
Here and there
And everywhere,
This and that
And nothing.
Serpent of light, arise,
Spiral god arise,
And realize,
Energize.

I rise as I fall,
Cartesian diver of the stars.
Through pleasure
To bliss,
I cling to my lover,
Stripping her down to the bone,
Climbing out of my skin.
Electric animals,
Demon-angels in the dark,
We separate the subtle
From the gross.

A:
Creation,
U:
Preservation,
M:
Dissolution.

Brahmanda,
The egg,
Salagrama,
The globe,
Shiva-linga,
The phallus.

I should like to gather
From the bed of the Narmada River
A perfect Brahmanda,
A stone egg
Sculpted and polished
By the currents,
Auspicious to the mind’s touch.

Her body
Is the yantra,
(The Sri Yantra,
To be contemplated for a lifetime
Until you become the yantra,
The total revelation)
Composed of point, line, circle,
Triangle, square and lotus,
Juxtaposing, combining, intersecting,
Repeating again and again,
Space and time, sound and energy
Expanding from the first vibration
From the first desire.
She I make my study
In cymatics,
Waves, vortices, hexagons, rectangles,
Overlapping patterns.
And at the center
The bindu,
The ultimate point
Beyond which there is nothing,
The seed of the cosmos
Into which all is condensed.

OM HRIM PRTHIVYAI HUM PHAT

OM HRIM ADBHYAH HUM PHAT

OM HRIM TEJASE HUM PHAT

OM HRIM VAYAVE HUM PHAT

OM HRIM AKASAYA HUM PHAT

When the divine life-stuff
Is about to put forth the universe,
The cosmic waters
Grow a thousand-petalled lotus
Of pure gold
Radiant as the sun,
The mouth of the universal womb.

A painting from 18th century Rajasthan,
Gouache on paper:
Kali the destroyer stands on Rati and Kama, the naked lovers,
Who lie entwined beneath her feet,
Copulating in a bed of flames,
A giant lotus rising from the waves,
Their lovemaking the primordial desire
Which gives rise to all Creation;
About her neck Kali wears
A garland of human heads,
About her waist a girdle of hands
Signifying Karma,
She sticks out a crimson tongue
Signifying the kinetic force
Which gives rise to all actions;
In one of her four hands she wields a sacrificial sword
And in another a severed head,
Symbols of dissolution and annihilation
Directing the sadhaka to shed his ego.

All life, all breath, all thought, all motion,
Is Prana,
From a speck of protoplasm
To the mind of Brahma.

Thai Islands

Look through me;
What do you see?
Sea anemones,
Gobies and whale sharks,
Golden seahorse among the corals,
Shining nudibranchs,
Stingray in the sand,
Moray eel in its coral cave,
The stealth and strike of the scorpionfish,
Yellow mask angelfish,
The manta ray’s imperious glide.

This life is play, and dignity,
Laughing faces of the now-reborn,
The subtle and the indirect.
Thus speaks a monkey in a cage,
A shadow-puppet.

Bone to bone, muscle to muscle,
Breath to breath, the masseur
Racks and wrings me on the anvil,
Till the nerve-ends flower
And meridians sing,
And the waves turn to incense.

I write your body in Pali,
Suttas of flesh, muscle and bone,
Anointed your bhikkhu,
The new moon’s servant.
Why, even in the midst of desire,
Do I yearn for the extinction of all desire ?
Take this as another offering
Of lotusbuds, incense and candles.

Dance on the beach,
Crying : I am the Emerald Buddha !
Execute your old life, like a king deposed,
Beating it to death in a velvet sack
So that not a drop of blood touches the ground.
Clownfish, angelfish, butterflyfish,
I am any fish I choose to be,
Grazing the word-reef.
I am a hawksbill turtle
Under the waves’ Thai script.

Guatemala

I sit with my drink in the gloomy cantina,
Climbing volcanoes in my mind,
Thinking of Pedro de Alvarado, crushed to death beneath his horse,
Weary in the end of so much conquest and glory,
Disappointed with the plunder, arraigned by his own people,
Maddened into ever greater brutality.
He ruled this land as his personal fiefdom,
Desperate for adventure and wealth,
Enslaving and abusing the natives without mercy,
Crushing their rebellions with savage repression.
Was his God the same as ours?
And still the people eat shit and stones,
And are scorned and tortured for their pains,
And cast into unmarked graves without hesitation.
That is the way things are done.
The rich, after all, have their interests to protect;
To let a few peasants and troublemakers spoil the fun
Would be bad for business, bad for everyone.
And the bodies of the poor, at least, make excellent manure,
So their lives serve some purpose after all.

On the city streets rat-children scavenge,
Begging, thieving, selling their bodies for a few coins,
Numbing the hunger and despair with drugs,
Fleeing the guns and clubs of the police
Who beat and kill them as vermin,
And torture them with glee.
In air-conditioned shopping malls elegant ladies
Sip coffee and swap frivolities,
And crystal pyramids soar above slums.
On the outskirts stand the earthen mounds
Of Kaminaljuyu, which have yielded
A few nobles in their fineries, covered in cinnabar
And girt by human sacrifices and treasures,
Jade masks and fine pottery, quartz crystals and obsidian,
The stingray spines they used to draw their own blood,
Piercing penis, ears and tongue
To summon and placate the gods.

Why should the poor learn to read and write,
Just to read the lies in newspapers and books?
Better that they die in ignorance,
Educated by the boots and bullets of soldiers.
Once their forbears ruled this land with heaven’s blessing;
Now bats possess their ruined cities
While flocks of parakeets wheel around,
And howler monkeys holler across the treetops,
As dawn mist steams up from the forest.
A few quetzal birds still somehow survive,
Seeing the forest felled around them:
Caged, they pine for freedom and soon perish,
Preferring death to captivity, dreaming till their hearts break.

Fiesta: fireworks shatter the sky,
Swirl of marimbas, flutes and drums,
As drunken dancers whirl into oblivion,
Swaying and staggering, tumbling over each other,
Laughing and passing out.
I wade through mangrove swamps of reverie,
A glass of aguardiente in hand,
And hold my little life up to the light
Like the fabulous golden-green feather of the quetzal.
This world is wild tobacco smoke,mushroom’s flesh:
Spirits assail me,wherever I turn,
As I trail my totem animal, my blood brother, through jungle,through darkness,
To find whatever destiny decrees.

One night in the year, at Monterrico beach,
The turtles, compelled by the moon, emerge,
Haul their juggernaut bodies up the sand
And, toiling desperately against time,
Excavate nesting holes with their flippers,
Push their eggs out, bury the treasure,
Then race back like pirates to the waves,
Never to see their own eggs hatch,
And the tiny dinosaurs dig to the surface
And dash for the water, desperate to survive,
Swooped upon by ravening beaks in massed attack.

Lake Atitlan shifts through
Multifarious blues and greens as the sun traverses the sky,
Surrounded by steep hills and massive volcanoes,
In the morning the surface is calm and translucent,
But by afternoon the xocomil wind blows in,
Churning up dark turbulent waves.
Inside a little church on the shore,
Smoke and incense drift in the hush,
Amid the myriads of burning candles,
Drunken men and cigar-smoking women
Worship before San Simon,
And tearful whores come to beg his forgiveness,
Embracing his effigy, offering cigarettes and rum.
In Holy Week pilgrims take him down from his stand
And carry him in honour down to the shore,
Bathe him and dress him in Western clothes,
With a jaunty felt hat, and cigar stuck in his mouth,
And praise him for protecting the poor from their oppressors,
Praying that their suffering might at last find its reward.

The Man Who Wouldn't Dance

Today I feel so ill, so out of sorts,
Not coming out to play.
I appear to be sweating dark poisons.

Bone-delirious,
Goosepimples on the brain,
Shudder and shiver
You weird little imp!
Nothingness is yours
For the taking.

“In a lifetime the average person
spends the equivalent of a year on the toilet…”
A year, a year of my life
With my trousers round my ankles
Huddled on the pot…!

I am here,
The Count of Monte Cristo in his dungeon,
After God knows how many years,
And you, dear reader,
Is it you that makes that scratching noise
On the far side of the wall?

Scream, little baby,
Scream into the sky,
Breathe in the world
And scream.

Collapsed dead drunk the other night
Almost knocked some sense into myself…
My head still hurts,
But I’m no wiser.
The truth slips from my fingers
And dissolves
Like soap in the bath…

Can you feel
The unseen dimensions of time and space
Which distort gravitation,
The weird darkness somersaulting
And nonchalantly practising legerdemain?

Strange blue light
Irradiates
From the Andromeda galaxy’s core,
Where frenetic blue stars by the hundred
Race around a black hole's tiny circuit,
All hot, fierce and young.

Erik Satie at Le Chat Noir

The turn of a head,
The gesture of a hand,
Is mathematics,
A slight vibration resonating with the earth,
With time.
What is a human being?
And why does it exist?
Black waves of Normandy,
How many children have raced along the shore,
Skimming their lives like stones across the deep?
Sounds;
Modulations of a life,
Waves-
True to themselves.

A theatre set of massive chestnut benches,
Stained glass windows, pewter mugs and wrought-iron lamps,
The customers with glasses in hand, singing, yet mourning
Their lost illusions, sliding into mdness, suicide or despair.
It is the end of a century:
Morality wanes, crime flourishes, cretinism increases.
Statistics demonstrate the decline of society and the downfall of man.
And men with troubled sleep, troubled digestion, bad circulation, fatigue, neurasthenia,
Jaded palates and worn-out livers,
Melodrama holds the stage,
With shipwrecks, avalanches, volcanic eruptions;
Enervation, lassitude, physical degeneration, corruption
Spread through the water supply.
Boredom runs cockroach races for thee masses
Who place their debts with yawning gusto.
Strange maladies, new drugs are in fashion,
New forms of locomotion.
All the creatures of the coral reef battle for survival.
Society ladies congregate to exchange morphine injections,
Jewellers do a thriving trade in gold-plated syringes,
Mystics and charlatans reign,
In stained-glass hothouses of missals and lilies, black masses and black silks,
Crystal balls and ectoplasm.
On feast days villagers vie with one another
To be the first to kill, with a well-aimed stone,
A tethered fowl hung upside-down;
Others, for a few sous, bite rats to death.
People batter one another to death in rages,
With frying pans, hammers, sticks and spades;
Children kill their parents and throw them down wells.

The shadow theatre silhouettes
Act out comedies,tragedies and epics
In fine gradations of a single tone;
Satie sits numbering the bars of Gymnopédies,
Governed by the Golden Section.
Tobacco smoke and cabaret songs…
Everyone competing to be the most audacious, the most outrageous, the most avant-garde,
All the pranks and stunts, and disputes,
The wild irreverence…
Take it or leave it,
The puns and pranks that make a life,
The esoteric dressed up as the mundane,
The nonsensical aphorisms of truth and wisdom,
The shaggy dog stories of sublime beauty and delight…

Greenwich Observatory

Midwinter, the days short and dark,
And here, on this druidical hill, the star-citadel
Beacons to the city and the world beyond,
Calling all to the prime meridian of the heart.

Occult science drives initiates onwards
To reckon heaven and earth for men’s good,
As the gimbals planet turns revolutions
That map the void we all are falling towards.

Wise London knew me in my youth
And knows me now; as the calendar clocks,
And ships set out to sea or home into port,
I vow myself to the precious days left, so few.

Friends, have I honoured your generosity?
Family, have I served our altar with true faith?
See, the eternal flame burns here to guide us;
Its green bolt streaks across the night sky.

Romantic Fool

Pain of me, thrust of me,
Into the deep womb of destruction;
Writhe of me, the risk, the inner crisis,
Ecstatic astride the dolphin in flight,
Vaulting electric-blue horizons!
Limb-locked in the moment supreme,
Lashed in mutual crucifixion,
Juddering with cosmic power,
Down and down we spiral, up and up!

A word in your ear, my love:
Envelop the seed,
Enshrine it in the dark hearth,
Make it grow.

The mercy of your thighs,
That you welcome e in
And I enter,
Stray dog sweating night-hunger
For everything.

Deep, so deep, where the dance is,
I murder myself, torn to the bone,
In frothing streams of blood.
Flesh is death, but the dream has no end;
Come, celebrate on the mountain,
Release the clenched earth.

Flesh for flesh: our hands uphold
The chalice at the horned altar’s height,
This world-wiving pride of rearing and taming
In bloom-frenzied fields where underground rivers hum.

Along the Niger

Sinews of the brawny brown river, flexing and stressing,
Bending back and forth, around and about,
Churning back on itself at the edges,
Big blocks of water rushing past each other, upstream and down...
You seek its source, the watershed of a dream.

Phantasmagorical Africa,
Common portents everywhere in the light of day,
Weird as the white eyes of the river-blind...
The diseased body cohabits with its parasites,
Worms and viruses that fly by night
And home into the bloodstream...

Drums quake the earth, and women swim
Through you, pour over you, soak you to the bone,
Thrusting and swaying, the mellifluous orbs
Of their buttocks rub you up and down,
Their bodies flow over your stones.
The moon rises, wet and dripping,
And the women’s strong feet pound the ground
In the fateful rumba of life.

The river eats men,
Black whirlpools swallow everything,
Whatever is thrown into its jaws will vanish forever.
From a little jetty, village lads
Line up and hurl themselves in, naked and glistening,
Lauging with wild abandon,
Heedless of danger.

To be the hunter or the hunted; you choose.
The jungle is nothing but movement,
And you must tap its power, its breath, flow wht it,
Through branches and roots,
Believing in victory, in survival,
Before the ultimate inevitable defeat.

Desert Elephants of Namibia

Silent and synchronous,
The herd take flight as one, for no obvious reason,
Or simultaneously raise their ears, frozen in their tracks,-
The air is throbbing with weird secret thunder,
Infrasonic rumbles across the distances,
And the mastodons’ brows vibrate in communication.

No sooner does a female come into oestrus
Than males converge from all directions and surround her,
Fighting and rutting,
Drawn by her irresistible song,
Her slow deep rumbles, gently rising,
Ever stronger and higher in pitch,
Then descending again into silence.

Proudly the desert elephants follow their ancestors’ voices
Over gravel plains and anfractuous mountains,
Across dunes, and down sere riverbeds
To the ancient wells that call them,
Led by the matriarchs of fabulous memory,
To dig and drink the nectar, as their forefathers did.

Tusks torn out by poachers lie in dust,
Emptied of immemorial experience,
Nothing remains but little white carvings
In ladies’ jewel boxes, anointed with lush scent.

Bloomsbury in Autumn

Up steep steps to the portico’s gloom,
Corinthian pillars of a Hawksmoor:
Inside, the solid compression of space,
Cast like bronze in Roman stoic order.

Green squares’ wet gloss; tree-flicker;
Black branches dripping in winter;
Pharaonic terraces parade their fronts,
A literary Valley of the Kings.

Behind its iron cage, the British Museum
Crouches like a colossal Assyrian bull,
As the world’s scenes writhe and evanesce
In the obsidian of Dr Dee’s scrying glass.

Andalucia

Gazing out across the blue waters from Algeciras to Gibraltar,
The bay is crowded with ferryboats, cruise liners and tramp steamers,
Fishing boats with felucca sails lean against the wind and current;
Once these straits were the western limits of the world,
And the Phoenicians were the first to pass through them,
And trade in the mineral riches of Tartessos;
For centuries they safeguarded their monopoly with mystery,
Their mariners telling tales in the harbours of the Aegean,
Warning of the terrible dangers beyond the Pillars of Hercules,
Describing the whirlpools round the sunken isle of Atlantis,
The impassable Sargasso weed choking the channels,
The deadly sea monsters lurking everywhere.

I sit outside a café, sipping sol y sombra, under stellar orange trees,
Absorbing the street scene, the incidents becoming dramas,
The striking of attitudes with histrionic sprezzatura;
O, Andalucia, vast peacock’s tail of light!
The jasmine-scented air reeks of joy and melancholy,
And to drink water here is the finest art and pleasure,
Directing a thin stream through the air into the mouth from the bota,
Savouring the delicious taste, a little at a time and slowly,
Lingering as one does over everything most loved.
The roses bloom all year round in Malaga,
Geraniums cascade from balconies, carnations and freesias shine,
Easter lilies appear among the olive trees and date palms,
And in the evening the whole turn turns out for the promenade,
Laughing couples, happy families, beautiful girls.
Here you will be as the dead stick thrust into the earth
That flowers against its will, overpowered by life;
You will ask for so little, and cherish it beyond price,
Sitting with friends over a glass of wine,
Talking for hours, forgetting everything of no account,
Relishing the bite of sardonic humour.
Walk along the beaches, and watch the catch being hauled in,
The boats drawn up on the sand with the magic eye on their prows,
And the fishermen grilling sardines over driftwood fires;
Ancient heaps of murex shells have been found here,
Remains of the dye-works where they made the tyrian purple
For the togas of the Caesars, the colour of the mountains at sunset,
And of the blood of the people dragged from their beds and shot
In the Civil War, when men became werewolves,
And all night there came the sound of gunshots in the darkness,
And in the morning dead bodies lay where they had fallen.
But listen to them now, the carefree peaceful citizens,
Blithely indifferent to politics and all that nonsense,
Burying bad memories in unmarked graves.
Peacocks cry on the Alcazaba’s battlements,
And the scent of hibiscus makes me dream,
The fig trees are sprouting and in a few weeks
Wild oleanders will cover the hillsides with white and pink blossom;
Orange and lemon groves cover the vale,
Wild mignonette, wild irises, conflowers, violets,
Rosemary, cistus, periwinkles, mallows, thyme, vetches,
Wild garlic, harebells, orchises, muscari, chionodoxas,
Gentians, borage, marjoram, alyssum, mesembryanthemum,
Wild ailanthus, scillas, heliotrope, peonies.
They say the malaguenas are the most beautiful girls in all Spain,
With their golden faces and the moist gleam of their eyes,
And something of the sea in their allure,
So graceful and vivacious, nonchalant and proud,
Shooting passionate glances from under their eyelids.
In a tavern room the guitarist sweeps the strings,
And the singer launches himself into cante jondo,
Eyes closed, oblivious to all else but the notes
As they form themselves spontaneously in his mind.

In Córdoba, I sit on a roof garden, looking out over the city at sunset,
Like Emir Abderrahman I surveying his new capital,
Having won a western throne for the Omayyads,
And suddenly the sun has disappeared behind the Sierra,
And the Guadalquivir flows slowly past Moorish water mills.
Entering the great Mosque, I scan the grave reflective gloom,
The myriad columns of porphyry, jasper and coloured marbles,
Built from the ransacked ruins of Carthage, Nimes and Seville.
In the days of the Caliphate the mosque was open to the courtyard
And the long rows of orange trees continued the lines of the pillars
And carried the presence of Allah into the open air,
Perfumed with the aromatic oils of four thousand lamps,
And forty thousand worshippers knelt here at Ramadan
While from the mihrab the Imam recited from the Koran.
Once this was the greatest city in all Europe,
Prre-eminent in size and splendour, wealth, art and learning,
Where the Moors ruled Spain with tolerance and wisdom,
Fusing the genius of Iberian, Visigoth, Jew and Arab
To create a new civilsation, magnificent and unique.
And west of the city I wander the ruins of Medina Azahara,
Built by Abderrahman III to celebrate the Glorious Caliphate
And to gratify his favourite wife, al-Zahra, the Orange Blossom;
Almond trees and pines grow out between broken marble pavement,
Bougainvillea tangles spread purple over crumbling walls;
A third of Andalucia’s revenues went to build the Flower City,
And ten thousand workmen laboured for twenty-five years;
The Great Hall’s walls and ceilings were sheathed in gold,
Its eight doors of gold and ebony were framed by crystal pillars,
And there hung from the ceiling a fabled pearl,
While down the middle ran a pool of quicksilver in a porphyry basin,
And when the Caliph wished to impress a foreign guest
He would have a slave agitate the quicksilver
So that dazzling reflections danced up and down the walls;
Here within this palace he would retire to his harem
And find there always among the thousands of beauties
His beloved and most cherished al-Zahra, most beautiful of all.
Yet this city stood for less than a hundred years,
Sacked and looted when the Caliphate fell;
Now I sit and contemplate the wild irises growing
Out of ruined pavement, as the wind sighs in the cypresses.

With the snowy Sierra Nevada behind, and the sunlit plain,
And the hilltops around crowned with Moorish castles,
Granada stands, and the Alhambra spreads out on its ridge
Against the snows, as the sun moves across the heavens,
Infusing the marble and alabaster stucco with light,
As innumerable rills course all over the majestic hill,
Through the woods and gardens and into the palace courts,
Cool, clear, brilliant water, the wine of enlightened souls,
Precious element that the Arabs could conjure from nowhere
With the magic of djinns, turning desert into paradise.
Here among the lightness and delicacy and surprise
A noble of the court, with pointed beard and hennaed fingernails,
Reclines on cushions, idly watching the jets of water
Sparkling in the sun, his eyes dark with the languid melancholy
Of knowing the transience of all this beauty;
In the distant Yemen his ancestors wore rough camel-hair,
While he wears silk and dwelt among houris and djinns,
Breathing the fragrance of mimosa and myrtle;
Putting out his hand, he caresses the slave-girl lying in his lap,
And, gazing at the sky, dreamily plucks his lute,
Reciting the names of its five magic strings,
Alziar, alchanzar, almetina, almithleta, albonzar…
This is the kingdom of the silkworm,
The mushrabiyyah of the soul,
The dice box of blue protective words,
The blind guitarist’s vision.
Light of my eye, you make me an oculist of dreams…
My retina is a rose window shattered by the dawn,
A noria turning in the light,
The saeta transverberates me,
The sebka of sounds draws me into endless mazes…
Who is the seneschal of this castle, your heart,
And whose eyes scan from the watchtower ?
I will hide under the skirts of Our Lady of the Snows,
Whose white fires burn my hopes to the bone,
Whose heart is the mihrab of aeons…

In Ronda, I look down from the bridge across the chasm
Into the river in the sunless channel far below
And think of how many have thrown themselves to their deaths
From this very spot, and in my heart I am the bull
Staring at the sword point’s killing star, and the matador
In his suit of lights, priest of the bread and wine,
Tracing the signs of sacrifice in the sand.
The procession enters to the sound of the paso doble,
Two constables on horseback, followed by the matadors,
And their teams of picadors and banderilleros;
Then comes the suerte de picar, when the picadors
Drive their lances into the charging bull’s neck,
To weaken and tire him, and make him drop his head,
While the black beast tries to gore the blindfolded horses
Whose vocal cords have been silenced
To prevent any terrified cries from alarming the crowd;
Then the banderilleros attract the bull’s attention,
And deftly place their barbed darts in the victim’s shoulders,
Then finally the matador appears to try his skill,
Using his cape to attract the exhausted animal,
Seeking to drive his sword between its shoulders
And pierce the heart with a single noble thrust;
But more often he will miss, and resort to a second sword
To cut the spinal cord and cause instant death;
Or perhaps, to his shame, he will even fail in this,
And instruct an assistant to drive his dagger into its nape
While the disgusted crowd whistles its derision.

Inside Seville Cathedral, they perform the Dance of the Seises:
The procession approaches the chancel in a cloud of incense,
Ten young boys led by the priests, dressed in opulent suits
Embroidered in white, red and gold, led by the priests,
And stand before the altar, carrying white hats with red plumes,
And turn to face each other in two lines,
And the orchestra strikes up an ancient air,
And the Seises don their hats and begin to dance a slow minuet,
Bringing their feet together at the end of each step
And rising on their toes, then, backi n line,
They finish each sequence with a sudden pirouette,
And at the climax the dancers produce their castanets
And complete their ritual to their staccato accompaniment,
Back in the land of Tarshish, in the kingdom of the bull.
The Feria is coming: even the blind man selling lottery tickets
Taps a flamenco rhythms with his white stick on the pavement,
And spring has arrived overnight, the squares on fire with roses,
And I sit beneath the orange trees, white bloosms falling on my head,
And in the evening amid the scent of jasmine, roses and orange-blossom,
The moon and Venus hover over the city,
The Giralda stands up against scudding clouds,
And the distant throbbing of castanets grows louder every day,
And the town-of-six-days is being constructed,
The avenues festive with fluttering banners and paper lanterns,
Five hundred bright pavilions are appearing out of nowhere;
At the fairground, streams of people ride and walk in the sunshine,
The senoritas in flamenco dresses, flounced and embroidered,
Flowers in their dark hair, as they stop here and there
To dance with impromptu passion on the pavement,
While their sweethearts strike up a tune on the guitar;
Endless cavalcade parades up and down the avenues
Under the acacias’ scented white blooms,
The men in black cordobes hats, frilled shirts and short jackets,
Their girls behind them in flamenco dress, sitting sideways
On the croup, holding them around the waist,
Guitars slung across their saddles, as they move in the rhythm;
A lissom gipsy girl dances in the pavilion, hand on hip,
Striding haughtily around, loosing gay burlerias,
Giving all she has, proud and sensual, exciting the crowd,
And in the casetas men and women dance the sevillana,
The splendid women turning and weaving, skirts swirling gracefully,
Arms twisting sinuously above their flowered heads,
In their ears the crescent moon of Astarte,
As they restrain their voluptuous vehemence to breaking,
Moved by the duende in their limbs,
And the blissful crowd swarms from bar to bar, nibbling tapas,
Washing it down with sherry and kisses,
And nobody sleeps for a week, dreaming on their feet like horses,
All sharing the same dream, the same paradise.
In Holy Week, everyone is on the streets carousing,
Great crowds follow the holy images, to dirges and drumbeats,
Andaluzas in tall combs aaand black lace mantillas,
Penitents in purple and white hoods, carrying a cross in their midst,
And banks of glittering candles process through the dark,
The Virgin sits beneath a canopy, in gold crown and jewel-encrusted robe,
Her dark blue velvet mantle embroidered with gold ands silver thread,
Her float borne on the shoulders of her sweating acolytes.

At Whitsun, for the Romeria del Rocio,
They bring the Virgin out of the church at Triana,
And install her in her portable shrine, decked with flowers,
The ox-drawn wagons move off, and beneath their decorative awnings
Groups of flamencas click castanets, exchanging witticisms
With the young men following on horseback,
And all along the country road they are joined by people
Coming from the villages, converging with the stream,
Until they stop and bivouac among the umbrella-pine groves,
And round the campfire they sing and dance
And pass the bota round from hand to hand,
And amorous couples stray into the depths of the pine forest;
And in the early hours of Pentecost Sunday,
When the revellers are staring in mystical frenzy
Or lie prostrate in inebriated stupor,
The statue of the Virgin is paraded before them.
In the Sierra Morena you will visit the Virgin’s shrines
Remote among chestnut orchards and forests of cork oaks,
Where black pigs graze on the fallen acorns,
And cold springs, hallowed since the days of the shamans
Who gathered the fly agaric from the woods here
That they might shed their skins and fly,
Still bubble up from the underworld.


At Arcos de la Frontera vultures circle above their nests in the cliff,
And the running of the Brandy Bull has come;
The main street is in uproar, pavements, balconies and roofs crowded,
Young maletillas showing off their prowess with an old red cloth on a stick
While a boy charges them with a pair of horns;
Young men serenade the pretty girls on the balconies,
A great roar goes up, when the bull is released at the bottom of the hill,
And charges all and sundry, knocking down maletillas trying to play it,
And bold girls try to get in right behind it
And touch its sacred testicles, to be blessed with fertility
And bear many sturdy children in the years to come;
But when the beast has reached the hilltop
He is already exhausted by the shouting ruck around,
And by the time they get down to the bottom
All the fight has gone out of him,
And in the bullring he is slaughtered, and its flesh
Cut up and sold by the butchers of the town.

Drinking fino at a tapas bar, I admire the pretty girls passing,
And you (you know it is you) are most beautiful of all,
Delicious as pears in wine with cinnamon;
I give you the shadows behind iron convent grilles,
The sweets made by the hands of nuns!
I give you saffron and raisins, and everything precious,
The silver of Tartessos, even, whatever you desire!
All for the scent of jacaranda and the moonlight on your skin!
Horses are galloping along the luminous white beach,
And the fierce light sings its saeta in the skin;
I feel like al-Mu’tadid himself, that pure poet,
Enlarging the Alcazar to house a harem of eight hundred women,
Decorating the terraces with flowers planted
In his decapitated enemies’ skulls.
Will you open to me the camarón?
Will you cense me with the mist and cloud of the sierras?
I bow to you as the mudejar to his Christian queen,
Worshipping my own desert God in my heart.
Come with me to the carnival of Cadiz,
That city of sad limestone crumbling in sea air,
And white marble Phoenician sarcophagi releasing their ghosts,
While musicians parade with lutes, guitars and mandolins,
Singing satirical songs about the famous,
And we, disguised in costume, will kiss in the swirling crowd,
Drunk on sangria, happy as wild horses.