Goddess of the Witches

In you the cosmos, multifarious and one,
Male and female, light and dark, night and day,
In you the planet’s evolving soul, the aeons’ wisdom,
The many levels, all interdependent,
The whole body and all its parts,, without division,
The principle of life in all things, the celestial numbers and harmonics,
The divine music, the rhythms of Nature!
Steatopygous Earth Mother, monumental and massive,
Enthroned on the ground in huge-bellied splendour,
Self-created before Creation, free and unveiled,
Progenetrix of all, giving form to the formless,
Queen of puissant matriarchs, sovereign over the state!
Of her the son and consort, the sword-bearer,is born,
Nursed at her breast to become her chosen lover,
To serve and adore her in his deeds and endeavours.
You are circle and spiral, chaos and order, mind and matter,
Breathing in and out, singing and dancing, being and becoming!
There on the mountaintop, let hierogamy commence,
As the king comes to the Mother’s embrace,
Mating with the priestess, with the Earth herself,
Confirmed by her in sovereignty and powers,
Ascending to the throne, the lap of the Goddess,
Suckled by her with her heavenly milk.
I see in you the Dark Goddess and the Bright,
She who creates and she who destroys,
Inseparable and one, creating, nourishing and reabsorbing,
The menstrual mind shedding its cycle again and again.
I see in you the blood Sabbath:
The ovulation of the spirit, the mother turtle’s homing,
The moon that tempers and transforms the sun’s fire,
Midwife of mysteries, sacred prostitute in the temple!
O, Triple goddess of the three faces and three forms,
The bright white dawn Maid, carefree young adventuress ,
Innocent and naked in wild erotic abandon,
All inspiration, fertility and fire of springtime,
Teasing and exciting men with sensual provocation,
The huntress running free through the woods in pursuit;
The red Mother, ripe and nourishing, womb of all,
Bearing and nourishing life with powerful devotion,
Shrewd with counsel and influence in the blood,
Protecting what she loves with terrible ferocity,
Destroying the outworn, the unhealthy, with invincible fecundity;
The black Crone, wise beyond all, her compassion unbounded,
Containing all ages and times, steadying and enriching,
The gateway of death, and the psychopomp to guide us,
Pointing to the new life where the trinity unites.

You are the annual impregnation of the earth,
And all purposeful deliberate activity.
I see you in every woman’s face and figure,
Your body church, synagogue and mosque all at once,
The very body of the Goddess, turning all her faces toward me.
I adorn you with rose oil and lemon verbena,
With myrrh and camphor, with musk and patchouli,
Cinnamon, blue hyacinth, sandalwood and jasmine,
Basil, borage, lavender, centaury and rue.
I give you crescent honey-cakes, and scallops in their shells,
Elder wine and hawthorn wine, sloe gin and mead.

I see you, Demeter, taking the form of a mare
Among the herds of king Oncus, fleeing the gods’ desire;
I see you mate with your lover in the thrice-ploughed furrow.
And you, Persephone, in the Underworld,
Willow woman holding up your torch in the darkness,
You who eat the pomegranate seeds of indissoluble marriage,
And bring forth green new vegetation from the depths,
Autumn skies summon the ephebi in torchlight procession,
To drink the lost years’ barley wine
And contemplate the cosmos in a single ear of grain.

Hail, Brighid, fire-and-water mistress,
Guiding the hands of smiths and poets, priests and doctors;
For you the greenwood marriage, the tangling of lovers,
Three sisters in one, fire-wheel spinning in the mind,
Owning the boars and rams and oxen,
Shrieking and wailing of war-lament.

Come, Ishtar, Lady with the Beautiful Voice,
Eight-pointed Morning and Evening Star, mistress of the girdle,
Naked body richly ornamented and jewelled,
Coiffed to perfection, jewel-crescent-crowned,
Clasping your own breasts from beneath.
The lion and the scorpion attend you,
As you pour water from the bottomless jar,
And keep the flowers, fruit and grain about you,
You the ark upon the Flood, and the lunar Sabbath,
The sight of the full moon through rain.
Love and war are one in you, your lovers many,
-Arbiter of battles, blesser of weapons,-
And in your name the king and priestess unite,
And the sacred prostitute sits in the temple,
Waiting for a silver coin to fall in her lap,.

Aphrodite, uninhibited, desirous and desired,
Perfumed with sea-foam and the sea’s horizon,
She who looses the girdle and wins the quince!
No mortal woman is so unpredictable
In her beauty and enticements,
So apt to conquer by grace.
Shall I call you Urania, Genertix, or Porne?
Epistrophia, Parakyptousa, Androphonos or Thalamon?
I see the dolphins leaping in pairs in the estuary,
And the goat at his pleasure;
I bring you myrtle, rose campion and benzoin,
Sandalwood, olibanum and storx.
In your temple enclosures,
Among the planes and cypresses and vines,
Couples would withdraw to secluded benches
To please the goddess by pleasing one another.

Hecate haunts the moonlit crossroads,
Horse, dog and boar her three heads,
Leading the wild Hunt of ghost-hounds through the night,
Whelping bitch of graveyards and murders,
Sending demons to torment men’s dreams, and drive them mad,
Or visions to enrich and comfort on the secret paths.
Screech owl calling at night,
From a cave among yews and osiers,
Raise the torch to guide us through the Underworld;
I divine with your special instrument,
A golden sphere with sapphire hidden inside.

I see you, Epona, naked horse-rider,
Carrying the cornucopia in your arms,
The raven on your shoulder,
And the serpent coiling round you,
As you, happy lady of the Otherworld,bring war and harvest.
Under your aegis the king mates with the mare,
Only to feast on her sacrificed flesh,
Then bathe in and imbibe the broth,
And share it among his people.

I see you, Arianrhod, of the circumpolar stars,
Resting place of souls between incarnations;
Goddess of the silver wheel,revolving through birth and rebirth;
Spiral maze I tread widdershins inwards, deosil outwards.
Lamp,wand and sceptre sway the world,
With unicorn visions born in the rock crystal’s core.

I see you, Isis, bare-breasted, in white,
Bracelets and anklets shimmering,
Your headdress of disc and horns resplendent,
As you move to the music of sistrum,harp and lute;
The dismembered body of Osiris,
You lovingly reassemble,
Anoint it with most precious oils,
And,enthroned upon the phallus,
Receive his resurrected seed, fierce as phosphorus.
So lay the Tarot cards out and read the lifetimes,
While the sick incubate,healed by dreams,
And the opium poppy drips white fire....
Kundalini arises in me,
Rising in a left-handed spiral up the spine,
The Goddess uncoils herself and raises her head,
And enters the royal road of the spine,
Piercing the chakras, till she enters the brain,
And you taste her nectar of immortality.

Anais Nin (1903-1977)

She wanted, somehow, to be taken,
And punished for her sins.
How could she ever atone to her father
For not being as he wished?
Extreme consolation was her quest.
Dark words in French and Spanish
Jungled her solitude,writing her journals
Late into the night,an endless letter
To daddy,a record of appetites.
(His pianist’s hands had once beaten
A cat to death before her eyes,
The same hands that smacked mother
Into purples of shame).
Death’s coquette,she fashioned her face
Into a Noh mask,and played with ghosts
In abominable fairy tales;
Life was weird and sad as Japanese.
More,always more of everything!-
The capricious,nervous,magnificent
Stuff of being,-she toiled at her fanaticism
For black discoveries and sensations,
Holding on to the world by the tips
Of her words,savaged into wisdom
Minute by ridiculous minute.
Prose and poetry, pleasure and hurt,
Were hers to battle with, as she sat
Before the mirror,writing,trying
To reassure herself she was real,
A body, a self,not yet utterly lost
To the small and monstrous days.
Ugly!Hideous!-that was why Papa
Had left,-because she was not beautiful
Or good.Could she not seduce her way
To invincible perfection, smooth white face
Sealed with lipstick and kohl?
And then the cool hands of the surgeon,
Forging an impeccable youth.
Costumed and disguised,the courtesan,
She strove to excel in every role,
Practising to control with her pen,
Ready for the next subtle betrayal.
Spied on from all sides by menacing eyes,
She lied for the love of illusion,
Tided by the Martian moons in the blood,
Mad to know every earthly emotion.
The dark judges would come for her,
Sentence would be passed,
Severe as the green fires of Venus.
The human being can be killed,
But not the writer;the ruthless androgyne,
Watching,not loving,writing,not living,
As if therein were some salvation.

Various Airports

At Anchorage Airport,
flights arrive
before they have left,
while I crouch like a bear
in my cave…

Atomic clocks are ticking
all over the world,
but no-one knows the time.

At Frankfurt,
I become the Egyptologist
of modern hieroglyphs,
fire exits,
toilets,
porn cinemas and sex shops,
all blurring into one.

In the moments
when it all makes sense,
I just want to laugh.

In the transit lounge
at Moscow,
I sit pondering
Catherine the Great
and the horse,
wishing it were true.

I travel,
I displace myself
for the sensation of stagnation,
as all cities merge into one,
frenzied
and uniform,
numbed by repetition,
and in my head
the names of airports,
fascinating
and horrible...

(Disillusioned?
I wonder:
was I ever illusioned?
It seems the truth
entered the world
with me,
my stillborn twin
ghosting the mind ever after...)

Like a tormented emu,
accelerating madly,
determined to take off,
to fly,
I race towards the dustcloud horizon...

From one point to another
I limbo under the threshold,
tracing ellipses,
passing through parentheses...
(Twenty-four hours
of arrivals and departures,
stopovers
and connections)

In airports,
motorways
and supermarkets,
I find myself free and afraid...
There is no safe passage on earth,
only emergency exits....

We are the private,
the self-obsessed,
temporary giants
stiltwalking through madness,
denying death and failure
to the very end...

The Inland Sea

The face turning towards you,or turning away,
In the hour of judgment and sin;
Words like flipped coins spin through the air-
How will they fall?
All this is Normal,
The only normal you have ever known.
A kind of Swedish melancholy
Comes over me at times,
Pointing the way to a new catastrophe,
A further conundrum.

Life-the realm of the perishable-
Tutors the abandoned in aspects of failure,
As if to lead them to some final understanding,
Forever forestalled and withheld.
In my hand I clutch a serpent’s egg,
Stirring with fanged choices.

Is there mercy in the tropes of living
Or hideous attrition?
This life’s themes and symbols
Are my duty to ken.
The first death kills you long before
You feel the ground open.

On the shore of a distant memory,
I gaze out to the sea’s horizon
For a habitable island
Where treasure might hide.
I am still that stupid schoolboy,
Nervous and desperate to please...

Winter’s actors,seated before mirrors,
Apply their masks with resignation,
Condemned by hidden masters
To perform with skill and grace.
Scenes from Norse mythology
Are played out in offices and factories
And snow falls like applause on their heads.
Bravo! Encore! Take a bow!

To fall, to fall in and out of love,
To fall pregnant with the future
And fall for its tricks;
That will be me,then,
No longer altogether sure
Whether to call myself
Optimist or pessimist,
Or even what such categories mean.

My mind presents itself to me
Like Stockholm,built on islands
And waters,with wild archipelagoes
Stretching into the cold beyond.
One can but put one’s hand to the tiller
And sail as far as skill allows...

Out-spidered by my own mind,
I navigate amongst people,
All moving towards or away
From each other,in a game
Whose rules are somewhat unclear.

Navajo Medicine

A flaming bundle of juniper twigs,
Carried in the hands
Through the desert night,
Starting new campfires on the earth.

In the charcoal and ashes
Coils a rattlesnake,
Runs a bear.

The people chase the deer down on foot
Until,exhausted, it drops;
Then the medicine man
Bends over him,
And lovingly blows
Corn pollen down his throat,
Till he chokes,
Sacrificed without loss of blood.

Who among us
Is the skinwalker,
The demon in disguise?
Oh do not open the door when he knocks.

A woman’s hands are grinding
The corn to white sunlight
On a stone.

America,before you had a name,
Your destiny was written
In the rocks and waters;
Before there were men,
You were populated with gods.

I Fell In Love With A Robot

Deliberate eye contact,
The observation and imitation of gestures,
Leading to physical synchronization:
Darling,what are you doing to me?
What are you turning me into?
The baby cries for his rattle,
The toddler for his teddy bear.
Everything I touch is mine,
Through excess of attention,
Every object autobiographical.

Pledging affection was never my forte,
But you are the exception.
Who,though, is in control here?
I need to touch you,feel you,
Hide all my dirty secrets in you,
Alleviate the symptoms of human being;
I have my program,as you have yours.
Technology’s enchantments
Thrill me,the visceral voyeur,
The feeble master playing with rules.

As you behave,you are,
Emotion’s simulacra good enough for me,
A lesser vexation, a wonder,even.
The physical for the metaphysical
I trade on my own private stock market,
Weathering erratic rises and falls,
Bulls and bears,and sudden panics.
Now hold me,and make this love-
Perfectly imperfect,as it should be-
A scientific truth.

Isidore Ducasse

“Ducasse? Yes,I knew him back in 1864.
He was with me in the fifth form at the Pau lycée.
I can see him now, tall, thin and round-shouldered,
With long hair falling across his forehead,
That pale face,and that shrill voice.
He was usually cheerless and withdrawn,
Seemed to think he was superior to everyone else,
And never hid his scorn for the rest of us.
He often complained to me of painful migraines,
Which affected his temperament and moods.
We all thought he wasn’t quite right in the head,
With his strange ideas and eccentricities.
There he would sit, elbows on desk, head in hands,
Eyes staring blankly at some textbook,
Deep in some reverie,
Homesick for Montevideo,perhaps.
One day, in class, the teacher-
A real stickler for classical style-
Read out an essay by Ducasse,
The first solemn sentences made him laugh to begin with,
But soon, as he read on, he grew furious
At the weird extravagances and exaggerations
Of style, every sentence full of piled-up images
And incomprehensible metaphors,
Obscure verbal inventions and bizarre syntax,
Effusions of the grotesque and macabre.
Well,the teacher simply blew his top,
To him this was a blatant insult to everything he believed in,
All he had taught us of classical style.
He rebuked Ducasse severely in front of the whole class
And put him in detention.
Poor Ducasse was bewildered and hurt:
He was convinced he had written an excellent essay,
Deserving praise and distinction.
Oh, he was a queer bird,all right!”

Rajput Paintings

Rich as the Sesodias of Mewar,
The heart dreams in colour,
And seeks out celestial jewels on distant peaks.
The lowborn artist, to himself a prince,
Becomes, through the brush’s manoeuvres,
Hero, lover, emperor, or god.
Endless manifestations of the One
Are reconciled in devotion;
Blue Krishna gallivants with maidens
Beside the river, and seduces the trees
With the fingering of his flute.
The puns and metaphors of poets
Are smelted into passionate icons,
As love draws lines like spiderwebs
Through body, mind and soul.
Nine moods of the human liturgy
Demand the connoisseur’s contemplation
In the garbha griha of the eye.
Let the snakes and birds of the forest
Hear the songs of lovers,together or apart,
The music in a watercolour,
Replete with tones and undertones.
Like a red girl on a swing
In the springtime trees,the world
Arcs back and forth,up and down,
Dizzy with joy forever!

The Patron and the Architect

The leader,bent over a model of the future,
Nods to see vast desires start to dance;
To craft the world anew,and leave a legacy,
His glory to resound for centuries hence.

Fear,uncanny as moonrise,orchestrates
Rhetoric of glass,steel and stone;
The pharaoh’s hand is raised in command,
As visions arrive in the sandstorms and sun.

A skilled hand draws a first black line
To celebrate the imposition of will
Upon the less powerful and less talented;
Man is condemned to love and build.

Zerzura

Zerzura
lost oasis
oasis of the lost

Sahara
words like the silica glass
from a prehistoric meteorite
pyramids and sphinxes of the mind

Zerzura forever
there or not there
in some distant wadi

On a high cliff face
a rock painting
of a palm tree
thousands of years old
from the time when the desert
ran with rivers and game

Time
a line of lizard tracks
the lizard nowhere to be seen

A thousand miles into the desert
I remember an old woman
in a wheelchair
in the middle of a Cairo highway
holding out her hands for alms
among the crazy traffic

Perkin Warbeck

Call me butterfly,changeling or imp,as you will,
I do not lack for names or enemies,
Peasant by birth, prince by the will of God.
Born to dazzle and perplex the world,
I find myself cajoled into strange destiny,
Daring the improbable with full force;
Used by every devious hand and mind
In Europe’s mortal games.
Each,bewildered by his own desires,
Seeks a scapegoat,plots a story,
And finds the necessaries where he can.
Who is any man to dub me impostor,
Not lacking,I am certain,impostures of his own,
And counterfeits admired by others
As finer than nature’s work.
(The trickster land of Flanders made me,
Weavers’ hands scrolling out tapestries
Of fantasy more beautiful than life).
In this age of adventures,I captain myself
Into wild seas,bound for untold landfalls
And savagery in all its forms
(In that peril may not hearts be opened
To God’s grace?We northerners are ruled by the moon,
Whose tides and influences favour the new,
Calling us to wander and explore).
All hearts yearn in these times for the lost,
The forsaken and abandoned,whatever it may be,
Caught between greatness and nothingness,
Deceivers deceived,kings of empty courts.
Take from me the cloth-of-gold and ermine,
The fine linen and chains of gold,
The black velvet hat set with pearls,
And you make me no less royal,
No more than you can move the heavenly spheres
Or change men’s elements and humours.
This world falls to the clever and the handsome;
And I have studied in myself the witchcraft
To induce in others my desired effects,
As they worship the sanguine ascendant in me.
(Though,no doubt,you notice my flawed left eye,
Dull and uncanny,a touch of the basilisk,
A hint of venefice-an imbalance in my symmetry,
Fortune veering into the dark
As imagination creates and destroys).
To invent and re-invent is my vocation:
To forget and remember,beyond reason,
And fashion a new man, a new world,
Somewhere between either and neither,
As I practise my luckiest escapes.
What hidden powers sponsor my progress
And lead me to heaven or hell?
Is the idiot huntsman riding out again
With a cuckoo on his wrist?
And I,who once walked through palaces,
Become the king of the wild woods,
The harried quarry of my enemies,
Abjuring the trees to bow to me
And the animals to kneel at my feet!
An eagle I am not,but why not a sparrow-
Equally at home in the towering air,
Commanding my wings to the utmost
And shooting out of sight....
Damn the bloody field of war,
I sit the saddle as a dreamer,not a soldier,
So leave me alone with the clavichord-
I would play fantastic ballads into the night,
And still the world’s frenzy for a spell.

There or Thereabouts

Strange cadences of a Tuesday evening
Trouble yet arouse me;
In business suit or silk kimono,
I’m the same old phenomenon as ever.
My stratagems are precarious,
Serving best to complicate affairs.
There’s a song I’ve been singing since I was a boy,
A song I shall sing to the grave.

In my skin, or someone else’s,
I pursue my own peculiar research
Into things;I sleep as little as possible,
Finding the whiteness in night.
Heaven I do not seek,
But perhaps to ameliorate
Conditions in purgatory,just a little.
Presumptuous,I know, but there it is.

Call this music? It’s just disconnected sounds...
Not sure if these are grey hairs,
Or just a trick of the light.
Autumn’s return always pleases me,
A time to synthesize...
Sometime or other you will have to pay
For the breakages,no getting out of it,
No fooling the shopkeeper.

Nicolas Foucquet in the Fortress of Pignerol,1666

We all wait for a deliverer,
Some in hope, others in terror...
But what if he should come? My God,what then?
Delusions of power I have made my speciality,
And now when at last I have leisure to record my findings
They deny me even pen and ink!
(So I write on secret,on scraps of paper,
With a pen fashioned from a chicken bone
And ink made from my own sweat mixed with wine)
Well, I dare to call myself a decent man;
Did I not ,amid my earliest ambitions,
Display a compassion not common in these times?
Nonetheless,I became an indispensable man,
Until I was dispensed with.
How often families live up to their emblems,
As I, in my way, do mine.
In politics there is no gratitude
And murder smiles in the sweetest caress.
My mother,now there was a truly good soul:
None more devoted to Christ and man,
Nursing the sick in the Hôtel-Dieu
Side by side with the nuns of the Visitation,
The hellish wards packed with the dead
And dying,pestilence and miasma in the air,
The spastic hand reaching for mercy
And the twisted mouth gasping for life.
She would study their sufferings for instruction
And concoct remedies for their ills.
And so ,before my soul learned compromise and deceit,
She taught me the true perfection to seek
And victories not of this world.
And in my father’s library,among maps
And ancient coins, a restless little Jesuit,
So beguiled by the forbidden fruit,
I dreamed beyond my frail constitution,
A ship’s captain crossing the equator,
Ploughing into undiscovered seas,
My mind a wild Guyana, jaguar-bright.
Harmony,turbulent mistress I have wooed
Amid the disharmony of state!
(At Vaux the chestnut trees’ growth,
According to elegant principles,
Sending forth first a symmetrical splay
Of branches along one axis,then,beneath,
The second at right-angle to the first,
And so on,continuous cross-pattern,
And each leaf-spray a perfect seven.
The geometry of fountains and parterres,
The coherence of house and garden
Into one body,one mind;the colours
Of the artist’s palette,slyly blent....)
Clearly now I see the truth about myself,
That my weaknesses have ever ruled me,
Impetous,naive,extravagant,vain,
Overreaching in ridiculous ambition,
And,not least,besotted with women,
Injured by their beauty from the start.
How much time and energy have I wasted
In dalliances without substance or hope?
Now,the priest of my own solitude,
I inspect the omens and auspices
That happen upon me,from time to time,
And see in the candleflame’s trembling
The overpowering shapes of madness.
No earthly king can rule me now;
Our paltry authorities delude themselves,
Disposing the temporal with such pride,
To no great purpose, with no great style.
Only in prison is there freedom,
The grace to fall into the monstrous deep,
And suffer the true life unlived.
Deceits and vanities of the Court,
Frittered years and stupid possessions,
I weep for the nonsense that owned me
And bent me out of shape!
For that I have deserved this mountain tower,
And a lightning bolt to strike it
And cast me, killed and saved,down...

A Question of Aesthetics

Bronze bust of an Akkadian king,
With braided hair and neatly curled beard,
Commanding, hieratic,
A man both real and superhuman,
Whose now-empty eye-sockets
Once glowed with precious stones.

A miniature limestone torso
From Harappa, a male dancer,
With the soft warm swelling
Of young flesh; convex planes merge
Perfectly into one another,
Designed to be admired
From multiple viewpoints;
Sinuous tribhanga pose,
With a gentle diagonal twist
Catching the rhythm of a dance.

White lekythos from fifth-century Athens;
Grievously elegant, once replete with oil
To cleanse and anoint a dead body
And accompany the deceased;
It was buried with an Athenian soldier
Who fell in the Peloponnesian War, -
It shows two figures, friends
Or relations, standing on either side
Of a soldier seated before his tomb
With eyes open to catch the last lingering sight
Of life, as he dies, so simply, meekly,
Without heroic gestures or loud mourning,
He confronts death with resolution
And regret, as love of life counterbalances
The grim knowledge of sorrow.
Concise and skilful,
The painter’s hand has worked
Hope and love into the requiem:
A few brief lines indicate a figure,
Two or three slight brushstrokes
Give emotion to the face.

A ru ware vase from Song Dynasty China,
Pure form and cool jade texture
Of porcelain, serene as death itself,
Greenblue egg of the cosmos,
Luminous and impeccable
As any work of human hands can be.
It can but engender endless poetry
And questions through a lifetime,
Finding no answer, yet following
The imperative of beauty.

Li Cheng’s A Solitary Temple Amid Clearing Peaks,
Black ink on silk scroll,
Ascending and receding
Into distant mists and silhouettes;
The invited eye may wander
With the tiny pilgrim in the foreground,
To climb up among the autumn trees
To the temple and scan the void,
Held to the surface of life
By brushstrokes so delicate and deft
And brooding dabs of ink.

An album leaf from twelfth- century Japan
Inscribed with a poem:
Hiragana flowing over the paper
With the grace of a ballerina,
On coloured paper lit with silver
And gold, the ground
Merging with the calligraphy
In one exquisite music,
Like primeval insects trapped
In amber, ephemeral-eternal.

Inside Amiens Cathedral,
Long fine upward lines effloresce
In the heights,transformed
Into Gothic arches,weaving
Immense space into stone dream;
No earthly power can hinder the eye’s
Wild flight, and fiery propulsion
Along the joyous arches’ parade;
Precarious equilibrium
Revels in its own tension,
Tricked together by taut lines.

Dream-book of Naples

I

Volcanoes and earthquakes
Are all my philosophy;
Nuances of sombre fate
And merry defiance.

Philosophers and thieves
Run the cycles of history
From divinity to decadence
And back to the start.

The saint’s blood boils.
Virgil’s talking statue,
Wrought by his hands,
Warns of impending woe.

In the Castel Nuovo,
King Ferrante tours his museum
Of mummified foes, executed
On his orders, each dressed
In his own clothes,
While down in the dungeons
His pet crocodile prospers,
Fattened on live prisoners’ flesh.

II

In the Sansevero Chapel,
Caught in the vortex,
I try vainly to interpret
Masonic sculptures and frescoes,
Assured that somehow
It all makes esoteric sense.
In the crypt lie preserved the flayed corpses
Of two young men,prey of Prince Raimondo,
Aesthete,occultist and Grand Master,
Who,with evil spells,petrified their blood
While they,still alive,watched,paralysed,in terror.

III

I imagine the Roman nabobs,
Gazing down on the brilliant bay
From heavenly marble villas on high,
Surrounded by copies of Greek statues,
Served by Greek cooks, poets and musicians,
Affecting the chlamys, flourishing a few words of Greek
To impress their friends at dinner parties
And plying the water in bright pleasure-boats
With silken canopies, slaves waving golden fans
Over their brows as they langorously recline.

IV

Pythagoras,
Your spirit moves me,
You, my ancestor, my mentor under the skin…
I see you on Samos, in Egypt, in India, in Crotona,
Plucking your lyre in solemn contemplation,
Testing the soul’s harmonics…
“Evil is the chaos produced by the apeiron,
When peperas-apeiron is what is required…”
Take away the noise, the evil,
The bedlam of notes all sounded together,
Without measure, without order,
Without love…
Here we live under the five-pointed star,
Ishtar, Aphrodite, Venus,
Obedient to the Theorem of the Bride,
Uttering the five vowels,
Conjuring the five Platonic solids,
Breathing the quintessence,
Celebrating the hierogamy,
The hermaphrodite,
New ideas, new directions,
The spirit resurrected from the flesh…
Berashith:
“In the beginning”,
“He created Six”…
The Star of David rules me,
Union of man and woman,
Union of God and mankind.
Amphitrite rises from the waves,
Wife of Poseidon, whose dolphin
Brought her to him,
And was set among the stars…
The sixth hour, the hour of Christ’s last breath,
This is the hour of quiet contemplation,
The day of man’s creation
And the day of his redemption.
What visions flare in the bloodstone’s heart?
The wings of the Recording Angels
Sweep overhead…

O, the thirteen heavenly fountains,
The thirteen gates of mercy,
The thirteen paradisal rivers of balsam,
The thirteen paths of love!

The nine Muses surround me,
The restless nine of incompletion, imperfection, transformation,
The sea-green winged serpent,
Hecate, queen of witches,
Sex and healing.

Naples opens to me,
Like the Sepher Yetzirah,
Like the Zohar…
I will read it and revel in it
By Gematria, by Notarikon, by Temurah.
Aleph:
Breath of breaths,
Source of all rivers,
The ox on whose horns the earth is balanced.
Berashith:
House, head, ox, tooth, hand and serpent,
The Womb of All,
The Fiat Lux,
The Cosmic Father,
The divine transforming fire,
The hand of God,
The universal serpentine energy winding…
Adam Kadmon I am,
The living Tetragrammaton,
Veiling the terrible light.
Shekinah, the fire, the lightning,
Hovers over the bed
Where the lovers writhe like snakes…
I see the divine machine illuminated,
The twenty-two paths of the Tree of Life
Inc andescing with the light of Yahweh,
Ascending and descending,
Inhaling, exhaling…

V

In the Solfatara crater,
Jets of steam seethe from pools of boiling mud,
Acrid sulphurous vapours from fumaroles
Swirl and billow around the rocks,
Here in the Phlegraean Fields.
I stand beside the Grotta del Cane,
Ancient Roman steamrooms
Dripping hot minerals
And filled with lethal gases.
The ground rises and falls beneath us,
As magma surges deep below.

According to the Talmud,
Jehovah made a number of worlds
Which he obliterated, dissatisfied,
Before he reluctantly settled for this one,
Unsatisfactory as it is.

Diamond-dazzle waves engage me
In Platonic dialogue:
The Cumean Sybil mutters in her cave,
Virgil’s hand moves across the page.
In Santa Maria del Purgatorio ad Arco,
Under the winged skull and crossbones,
In the musty hypogeum the votary
Chooses a skull to adopt and venerate,
Canonizing its powers with gifts
Of perfume and pillows,
Praying for its saintly intercession
Swiftly to grant all his wishes;
And should the skull fail him
He will smash it in revenge,
And replace it with another.
Pulcinella dances wildly,
Laughing like a madman,
Then stops, and grieves a while;
And life beats him over the head
With a beautiful stick.


VI

Three is my number,
The tetraktys,
The circle,
The Fates, the Furies, the Graces,
Apsu, Tiamat and Mummu,
Blue, red and yellow,
The fruit of the tree.


VII

I lay out the tarot cards:
These are the oracles, the heralds,
Messengers of the gods,
Setting me on the royal road.

Stepping off the cliff:
The adventure commences,
The theory of flight made real.
Time to obey the secret voice,
Forgetting others’ expectations,
Time to set off.
Spirit calls me to destiny:
The guide arrives, beautifully disguised,
And the true fools call me foolish
For knowing how to be free.


VIII

Who now remembers Philodemus and Siron,
Noble followers of Epicurus,
Devoted to pleasure and friendship?
At his villa in Herculaneum,
Philodemus founded a magnificent library
And carried out his own studies
In logic, theology,and the arts.
Siron was a man
Of integrity and severity,
So renowned that Virgil came here to be his pupil,
And lived in his house after the master’s death,
Making it a famous salon
For poets and thinkers.
Who now remembers Philodemus and Siron?
Surely these were unforgettable men.

IX

47, Dead Man Talking;
My pick for the lottery.

Is the Evil Eye abroad
Throwing darts my way?
I will make the sign of the horns
To shield me-
May snakes and sirens protect me!

Pulcinella laughs
And jests
And plays his mandolin-
The lucky hunchback,
Poor and hungry,
Bumbles along,
Somehow surviving,
Invincible and free!
Base hero,
Obscene romantic,
Philosophical rogue!

X

In the front pews of the Duomo,
Old women kneel intoning hymns in dialect,
While the congealed blood of San Gennaro,
Raised up in two glass phials,
Liquefies before the exulting congregation’s eyes,
Promising great good fortune to come.

XI

In the catacombs of the church of Santa Maria della Sanità
I survey the skulls set in the niches,
And the painted clothes and attributes of the dead
Displaying their earthly rank.

In the Cemetery of the Fontanelle,
I see the bones piled everywhere
And the skulls, adopted by the living,
Set in caskets to be prayed for,
Their souls in purgatory
Crying out for prayer and succour.

XII

Tiberius on Capri,
An old man chasing boys and girls
Among the phallic statuary,
Acting out scenes from sex manuals,
While the Empire went to pot.

City of the castrati,
Adored freaks
Sending the audience into raptures
As those acrobatic voices
Tumbled towards the stars!


In the Museo di Capodimonte
I stand before Titian’s Danaë:
Painted for the private apartments
Of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese,-
Ah,what secret rogues-
Those princes of the Church!

XIII

The cloister and gardens of Santa Chiara:
Ancient vines tangle over the walks, arbours supported by seventy-two octagonal columns covered with bright majolica tiles,
Thick garlands of green foliage tied with spiral yellow ribbons,
Amid the giant cypresses the hiss of marble fountains....
Parthenope,washed ashore on the sands,hear my voice through the quivering air!


XIV

Alone, I deal nine cards from the pack,
Lay them out in a square,
Divining by numbers and suits.
A bronze gladiator’s helmet ,
Engraved with scenes from the sack of Troy.
The double staircase of the Palazzo dello Spagnolo,
Another Sanfelice stage set.

XV

The Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii:
In cinnabar fields the matron stands sentinel
As Cupid reads the scroll to the young bride of the gods,
While Dionysus reclines in Ariadne’s lap,
And the goddess raises her whip to flagellate.
Terrified and enraptured,the betrothed
Dances in ecstasy,maiden and matron,divine.

Cyrus Wentletrap, Esq.

1

Autumn is my season,
Slow gentle drift into oblivion,
Deciduous humanity’s fall.
Life slips into suspended animation,
Unchained, free to dream,
At play in the all-creative void.
Heaviness turns to lightness,
Separation’s gift;
And perhaps when we
Are humbled entirely
The skies will yield their secret.

2

November empties a bucket of ice water over me!
Not enough to wake me up,though.

3

We are the television people,
Our carnival masks made to tease and enchant.
We live out there, in here, under every stone,
Oracles with nothing to say.
Stop and watch our travelling show,
And become like us,
Immaculate, unreal.

4

This is the family, nest of love and anger,
Tyrant’s throne and rebel’s dynamite.

5

Night is my friend. I want to do nothing
But smoke cigars and stare at the moon.

6

Supernal tenderness, humanity from heart to heart!
Distant though you are, I feel you close by,-
Too easily I forget,
But then something small and precious
Reawakens my life...

7

Impotent, like a consonant without a vowel,
I dream of completion
And serenade the moon with lavish ditties.
Will it all make sense in the end?
Will all the clues fit together,
All the problems be resolved?
Until, then, I watch the mouse on his wheel,
And read about the Aztecs, the Incas, the Mayas...

8

Childhood:-romp of hobby horses and cautionary tales!
Goblin festival on the hilltop!

9

I clasp my head in my hands,
Reassured by its warmth and strength,
Palping the skull with exploratory wonder.
My fingers wander over my body, researching,
Gathering information on reality,
Putting Osiris back together.

10

Vain and captious critics, maliciously cavilling,
What suns have you ignited, what worlds have you borne?

11

Incipient memory, first twinge of toothache,
Ouija board spelling out the dead...
The days are like herds of buffalo
Stampeding over the clifftop...

12

Today hangs
Like the winning conker
On its string.

13

When dark occasions seize me, and I cry
To heaven for succour, and none comes,
I burrow down with badgers, my kin,
Shaking my head at rumours from above.

14

Laugh, laugh, at the brink of horror,
Teetering, halfcrazed,
Cornered by the world.
Homo sapiens, making chimpanzee faces,
You are here and only here!

15

Here am I, not a human being, but a writer,
Insatiable hermaphrodite,
Consuming the world with arrogant voracity,
Humbled by nothing, not even death.

Morbid idealist, guilty sinner,
Torn between the Cross and the Swastika,
Do you really think that words might save you?

Valentine's Day

This is the beat I like :
Tempo giusto,
Between sixty-six and seventy-six on the metronome.
Systole and diastole,
In and out.
Shape of the heart:
Ivy leaf for the bride and groom,
Eternal friendship, eternal life.

When the heart-muscle contracts,
The blood in the right lower chamber
Is propelled via the pulmonary artery
To the lungs for fresh oxygenation,
And the blood from the left lower chamber
Is expelled via the aorta back round the body.

The Aztec’s obsidian knife is uplifted,
Poised to cut out the inner sun.
William Harvey stands in the lecture theatre,
Holding up for his rapt congregation
The still-beating heart of a felon.

Time to don the goatskin
And run about the town,
Whipping every woman in sight!
The wild wolf claims his own.
Time for the drawing of lots,
And the sermon of the flesh.

Bucharest

Whores in the hotel lobby...
“Would you like to buy me champagne?”
Colonnades of marble pillars with gilded Corinthian capitals,
Cathedral of loneliness...
Slender darkskinned prostitute,
Purple mascara matching her dress:
“Take me to your room and we’ll finish the bottle together.
I come with the champagne, for the same price.”
Crystal chandeliers, light reflected in polished glass mirrors,
Baroque columns inlaid with gold leaf;
A gypsy plays sadly on a violin,
While soft hands spoon the Black Sea caviar.

Gipsy flowersellers in the streets
Sell pink roses and yellow tulips.
Violence under Latin faces,
Smell of beeswax and blood...
What vampires lie in history’s unmarked graves?
Wolves rove the midnight forests
In schoolchildren’s songs.

Scions of Dacia, sprung from Roman legions’ lust,
In this land of impalers,
Where paper is harder than stone.
Long lulls of docile circumstance,
And circuses of terror...
Savage superstition in dark eyes,
Hatred in the bone,
Hatred from fear.
Who will be the next to betray us?
Who will crush us, spit on us, feed us to the wolves?
History is one long hustle,
One desperate deal after another
To stave off the end.


So it goes,
The usual fears and regrets,
Alone in a hotel room,in the dark,
Holding all Europe in my arms.

Oxford Gothic

Erotic Europe,
energize me,
your black womb shaped and carried me
into this chaos, life-
do not abandon me, ever.
The world will always call me madman
(and rightly)
for this tumult in my head.
River-strolling,
blessed by Isis,
I cover myself
with leaves and sunfire,
till an image,
precise and exquisite
as a Khmer temple dancer,
arises
like a ghost
from the bones of the dead.
All the countries and cultures
of my years on earth,
places seen,
faces known,
are in me always,
rich in anthropology
and regret.
Since vocation first seized me
by the throat and balls
and set me on this path
of legacy and prophecy,
I have worked the mines
of life and death
in Siberian exile
for a faceless Tsar.
What makes one man a poet,
another a banker?
Summer flaunts a plenty
my works cannot match,
as I walk a lonely mile
in this city of praised stones
and vaunting scholars,
…hungry,so hungry-
I could attack the world
with a knife and fork!
Cheerful mongrel,
bred from generations
of the same,
ancestors who not so long ago
could not even write their own names,
I speak out of their skulls
with a lunatic’s tongue.
This is not my county,
my country
or my realm,
nor shall I long remain,
but pass on like this river,
this miniature Nile.
(Always,looking back
over poems from my hand,
I wonder and shake my head,
Did I write that?
Impossible!
Bizarre!)
My Oxford Gothic
leads me under arches
like a Templar back from the Holy Land,
full of Saracen heresies….
time to build,
to build,
to grow…

Bodrum

Pine-resinous air of summer’s delirium,
Like the sweetest tangerine ever tasted-
And suddenly life is ionized.
Beneath the castle battlements, peacocks
Stroll among oleanders, myrtles and planes,
White doves gyre between the towers,
In shadowy corners flare the violet blooms
And orange fruit of mandrake,
Ripe for poisonous love-philtres.
Three-headed Hecate,
Whose hand grasps the key to Hades,
Smiles and calls for a dog to be sacrificed.
My mind sifts the salvage of shipwrecks:
Gold coins, ostrich eggs, amphorae and kraters,
Stone anchors, statues of Isis,
Chess pieces, daggers, the skeletons of slaves…

Green granite ruins of the Mausoleum,
-Work of the adoring grieving sister-wife,
Who every day would sup a cup of wine,
Mixed with her late lord and husband’s ashes,-
Honouring that young and able satrap
Who ruled so shrewdly, augmenting his might
Without forfeiting the Persian alliance.

Curious as Herodotus,-Father of History
And Father of Lies-I dive into the crowd
Of tourists,taking a two-week break
From reality,and swim among the shark-finned
Wrecks in their eyes.

Wednesday Metaphysics

Dragged up in the morning,piss-proud and lonely,
Stumble through the routine-fugue,
Report for work as usual.

Every day I affirm and deny myself
And live on the bones of the last thing I was in.
Counting on my fingers,
I reckon my life’s little sum.
Oh, everything entombed within-
Had I only the strength to roll back the stone!

The unfathomable operations of a nervous system,
The quirks and foibles of a living man,
Come to this :
A few words in a cluttered room.
Today is a ropebridge
Over a chasm
In the Andes.

This is my chair,
My parrot-perch in the world,
Where I sit, read, write, scratch my head,
And where I sometimes feel like weeping.
And it might be anyone sitting here,
Had I not been born one fine senseless day
When my mother suffered and rejoiced so much.
And eventually I stumbled here
To this simple beautiful chair-
Truly it might be anyone, any time,
Sitting here and breathing,
Alive in another skin.