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…