Marco Polo

I was never more at home than when abroad.

Never more at ease than in some hectic venture,

Perilous to body and soul.



In my Genoese prison

I make the walls my curious listeners,

Attending whatever tales I conjure

From life’s exotic embassy.

Thus tedious captivity becomes a Cathay

And a prisoner in rags the Great Khan!



Quick, scribe,dip your pen into an ocean

Of ink, for I will make you a discoverer

Under sail on chartless seas!

(This book shall be for us both

As Kublai Khan’s golden tablet,

Firman supreme that opens all roads!)



Venice,my nocturne of secrets and conspiracies,

My death-spinning silkworm!

Dank cloister of erotic traders

Misted in isolation and slence,

Plague rats gnawing the piles beneath their feet.

Bewildered and beauty-sticken,

I took my compass from the winds

And set myself free...



We found no barbarians there,in the East,

But a people courteous,curious,eager for trade,

And a ruler greater than any on earth,

Magnificent beyond the paltry courts of Europe!

What lies our rulers tell us, as if we were children

To be cozened with fairy tales!

The truth is wrapped in a Persian carpet

And trampled by horses

Like the defeated Caliph of Baghdad.



The visions witnessed in deserts and mountains

Walk with me yet,half-here,half-there,

Never satisfied with my eyes’ representations,

Which seem such poor imitations

Of some sublime beyond.

Still I hear spirits calling, good and ill,

In the Venetian calle, as in the Desert of Lop,

Messages as precious as white mares’ milk.

Rudolf II, 1606

Cold! Cold! All heaven’s winds chase through this castle,

But cannot unseat it from its rock...

To pace the Kunstkammer corridor, that is my delight,

Whatever the wars and machinations of the day.

Let no evil insinuate itself between me

And my black Spanish cloak!

Why should I travel the world

When I can gather the world to me

And arrange it all here, at the very centre,

To bolster my powers with talismans?

How old I feel! My hair gone and my beard so grey,

My body flabby and weak from excess.

Each day now I come here to this sainted canvas,

The Feast of the Rosary, from Dürer’s hand,

That I so long coveted and pursued

With guile and patience and infinite care,

And had carried over the Alps from Venice;

Hour after hour, I contemplate the majesty

Of the Madonna, in blue robe, as she crowns

With roses my great-great-grandfather, Maximilian,

Kneeling before her and the infant Lord.



They accuse me of inaction, of indifference,

Who little comprehend the soul’s means

Or the methods a seeker must adhere to

If he would prosper in the dark.

The curve of a comet or a woman’s thigh

Occupy me equally in this necromancy,

Conjuring talismans, infused with my breath,

To blazon the planets’ will to man.

Questions, questions, riddles to bedevil me,

Conundrums of human behaviour and fate!-

How to act for certain good when every action

Entails too many consequences, too many ills?

Give me the magic to untie that knot!

In the meantime, let us allow things to happen,

And scry their entrails as best we can.

I have made all believers welcome,

Hoping that together we may find the one truth,

And for that I am damned by the Vatican

As a devil-worshipper.



Sometimes I feel my reason, like a ship

In a tempest, smashed against rocks,

Masts splintered and sails shredded,

Desperate to anchor anywhere, even

On cannibal shores!

Jew and Muslim, Protestant and Catholic,

Let us join as one in natural magic.

The fires we build shall be not pyres

Of martyrdom, but watchmen’s torches

To burn a path through the night.

Nature, will you one day reveal to me

Your essence, and consecrate my labours

With the Philosopher’s Stone?

Though fools call knowledge heresy,

It is the jewel in the serpent’s head.

I must have solitude and peace, the only freedom

From intrigue, suspscion, the half-heard word

Muttered behind walls and curtains,

The masterful dissembling of supposed friends

And ambassadors’ suave tergiversation.

I’ll gird myself with ceremony

And make authority’s pageant my shield,

Renamed Augustus, under Capricorn.



Black Prague, citadel of the Great Work,

Perilous threshold of the invisible,

Observatory at the world’s hub,

Infuse me with visions and wonders!

Such melancholy I suffer that no doctor

Can cure me,-my twisted guts spew

Fear then boredom then disgust.

Beloved Kunstkammer, unicorn’s cornucopia

Of monstrous marvels! This encyclopaedia

Will grant me the cosmos entire

As my theatre; its secret virtues

Are my only bezoar, carried next

To my heart.

The rare and extraordinary are dear to me;

An hour spent with scientists and artists

Is worth more than any minister’s blather.

In the sanctity of my universal treasure-chest,

There is peace, harmony unachievable

On earth, amid the petty quarrelling

Of inferior beings. Within these walls

I perceive a unity beyond corruption,

And boundless enquiry, without prohibition

Or prejudice- a route, I pray, back to God.

These intermarried objects are my Cabala.

In the workings of these planetary clocks

Creation’s immense will acts out the centuries

Minute by minute.

The soul demands observation and experiment.

I wait, and wait, patiently allowing events

To work through their own repercussions,

And, by the subtlest checks and moves,

Hold the bedlam earth in balance.

Let the Pope say I am bewitched-no matter!

It is my own mind I must hold fast

Against dintegration. Europe divided

Will never make peace with the Turk.

Baleful times! An ominous conjunction of stars

Bodes malaise. Night panics place a dagger

In my grasp-how shall I use it?

Born under Saturn, I sweat morbid fevers,

Closer, ever closer to irredeemable despair.

My brother, my enemy! That horned viper, Matthias,

Would spit his venom into mine and my kingdom’s

Veins,-yet I shall scotch him underfoot,

My magic is far greater than his.

Night is falling, night is falling again...

The wild moon calls me to her service.

I can hear the mandrakes scream.

Sanity

Call the alienist: see can he locate any aliens.

Must madness always be savage

Or might it have some kindness in it,

Some curious promise?



The sound and the unsound,

Count them together.

They are brothers,

Like it or not, bewildered all,

In various ways.



Disreputable are the truth-tellers,

Not entirely to be trusted.

Sanity is dull and reasonable,

Measuring effects without histrionics,

Achieving limited aims

For the placid commonweal.



Suspicions are the sum of us.

The territory has no vocabulary;

It is all potential.

If names you need,

You will have to invent them,

Fashion devices suited to your ends.

The indescribable is where we live.

Fascinating spectacle of ourselves!-

Extraordinary animals shaping death

On our tongues, we observe the symptoms

Of being.

Exorbitant appetite calls the dance.

Feelings and sensations so acute

Are life itself, which, even as it generates,

Undoes.

Resist the irresistible?

The more and the other confound

Diminutive designs.

To torture and be tortured is delight

In love’s perverse cult.

Time to avenge

Childhood’s horror in cruel victory.

Time to break the rules and suffer.



Slow murderers,alchemists of separation,

Your violence brings you home.

Can you recover from yourself,

Make progress,prosper and be whole?

Empty cash in your pocket,

You gamble on the wish-market,

Imagining ever more objects of desire,

Self-thwarted, self-betrayed,

Shopping for nothings.

The fear, the danger is too much:

Heart’s desire too monstrous to admit,

So hide it, fool, deny it.

Swimming Pool

In cafes,in parks,in apartments,in the street,

People meet, faces talk.

Doing things,making decisions,

Yes, that occurs, occurs all the time,

But it’s the thinking about it, the discussing,

That makes it almost real.

All these abstractions, these conversations,

“He said this and I said that,”

Myriads of details disappeared...

Tragedy sells few tickets these days:

Don Juan has no chance of damnation,

No black reward for his sins.

Can it be the dead are all alike?

Collectors all, banal and jaded,

Our sufferings too light for solace,

We forget the glory, the terror.

Too long lying by the pool!

Why not jump in now and have a swim?

Sad Economist

A German pimp

In an Italian suit

Is selling Russian prostitutes

To Turkish johns.



The age of illusionists and swindlers;

Ponzi scheme on Ponzi scheme.

The money-trance is working day and nght,

Buying shares in the unreal.

Mistress Decay wears a mink coat

And gold rings on her fingers.

I would love to draw maps

But cannot find boundaries anywhere.



This is the devilish West,

The formulation of a theoretical model,

The marketing of ideals.

Fiction and fake are the miracle-machines,

Servicing the freedom of slaves.

Hypocritical and capricious,

The gods of Olympus look down,

Playing games with myths.

Just Looking

Do you know where there is?

It is different from here.

Somehow.



Running in the egg and spoon race

From Monday to Friday,

Mind you don’t trip over yourself.



Between the seen and the unseen,

I stake my mind.

On a whim.



In the zoo, man and animal

Stare at one another,

Uncomprehending.

Metaphors for each other.



Smearing their hands with animal blood,

The first artists set to work.



Count me in.

Count me out.

The First Novelist

He would serve the many-breasted goddess

With romance and comedy;

Enter the labyrinth with a clew of words.

A story rose like a dolphin from the deep

To rescue him from drowning.

He wore the actor’s mask,half-on,half-off,

Plotting positions across the stage,

An image frozen on a Pompeiian mosaic,

A clay doll fashioned for the gods.

An unheard tale of Alexander was beginning;

A secret history would be revealed.

Incidents, distractions and dangers

Concocted the rites of initiation;

Words would bring the dead to life.

The author. creature of marsh and shore,

Builder of ships to be wrecked,

Must fall, warring with love and time.

The one who breaks will have to mend.

Digital Man

Burgling the future to fill today’s houses,

Bankrupting posterity and ourselves,

We are the rapacious, the dissatisfied.

Autists without art.

There is only the endless mediocre present;

No utopias, no ideas.

Intimacy, reciprocity,

No thanks.

Don’t feel much empathy,

Don’t read much any more.

Solitude is so sweet and sympathetic.



Don’t touch me.

Leave me in silence.

Cities engulf;

Cameras track every step.

Lights and noises disurb.

Companies are updating,restructuring,retraining;

Someone somewhere is losing his job.

You have to fit in,

Be “co-operative,” “flexible”, docile.

I just want to repeat the same actions over and over,

Cataogue my memories,

Stay at home, in my museum.

All this talking, chatting,socialising,bonding...

I can’t stand it.

I need the deep, remote.



Everything is in the shops;

Nothing can survive without being sold.

But I am uncommercial,

Irreducible,

Incurably real.



Every idiot’s opinion must be heard and respected

In this world without knowledge or sense.

They sneer at facts and grammar,

Discredit reason and truth.

Superstition and conspiracy are all they believe in,

The frivolous, the ignorant, the empty,

Also known as “normal”.



Who do you pretend to be?

What do you choose to purchase

With your life’s credit?

What they call freedom

Is merely choice;

Their happiness is self-congratulation.

Indulge your preferences,

Alone, at the computer,

Sharing nothing, communicating nothing.

Pragmatic relationships come and go.

Virgins and teetoltallers need not apply.

All forms of consumption

Have their place in the market.

Only abstinence is taboo.



Everything on earth is beng reinvented

For commerce and use.

There’s no thinking any more,

Just eating and excreting.

I’m obese,anorexic,addicted,conventional,

No home, no community,no city,no country,no self.

Viruses

Mind-viruses evolve me.

Thought-infected,out of control,

I attack myself with ideas.

Philosophysics.



Distinctions,strategies and associations

Baffle me through

The half-truths,the double-dealing.

Crippled through with horrors and miracles,

I reel back to “It depends...”



The syringe pierces the skin;

The virus penetrates the cell’s defences.



Bad advice is my favourite kind.

Gambling on the long shot,

Taking cheap insurance,

Playing the streaks,

Playing against the streaks,

I back my hunches to collapse.



Cat’s cradle of kluges,

The human eye.

I imitate

The spider’s ritual.

Exposures

Not guilty, I reply,

But do not believe it.

Not really.

Not now.

Beauty and suicide are so close.

Everything is almost something else.



This image that takes you over

And becomes a cosmos,

Is just grain and tone and artifice.

Two dimensions.



Just when you think you have learned all there is

About loss, something will arise to remind you

How little you truly know; another inflection,

A novel- for you-permutation,

A nuance that takes time to parse.

Scientist

Prokarya and eukarya,

Here we cling,

The one per cent,

Not yet extinct.

Some shrill voice inside me,

A hundred million years old,

Screams I am dying,

How will I pay the bills,

What about the planet?

I will bark at you,and bite you,

You,in my way,

Enemy with my face!



The chimpanzee’s yawn

Is my yawn.

I myself am the asteroid

Rushing towards this planet.

Think of the ants,

Unchanged for aeons,

The most warlike creatures on earth.



I sit with my retrospections

And prospections,

Neither matching the actual.

Oh do not give me information,

Let me imagine...



A mitochondrion is not alive,

But the system has properties we call life.

This is the principle of the bicycle.



What is taking shape in the Petri dish?

What we term particles do not exist.

Every atom around me I postulate,

In order to feel alive.



One atom with another:

That relation seduces and bedevils.

Could I grasp it, I would sire myself on nature.

London in the 1890s

Is this the inception, the tremulous threshold,

The coming of a grand and lovely age,

Apogee of science,religion and society?

All is decay and senescence:

Generals draw up battle plans,

Hampered by hidden fear;

The batsman walks out onto the cricket pitch,

Knowing he is not up to it any more.

Heavily,in slow motion,empires fall.

The race is becoming degenerate.

Suicide is all the rage.



It’s the same the whole world over,


It’s the poor what gets the blame


It’s the rich what gets the pleasure,


Ain’t it all a bleeding shame?



Fellowships and societies debate,

Envisaging the changes to come;

Utopians,socialists and anarchists alike

Dream the world’s transformation

While the unemployed stand begging

On hopeless moribund streets.

At the premiere of “Arms and the Man”,

The entire pit and gallery break into laughter

Until,suddenly, they begin to realise

That they themselves are being mocked

And sit there,dumbfounded,bitter

And angry at this upstart author Shaw

Who dares to satirize their world.





Oscar Wilde returns from America,

His hair curled just like Nero’s

In the Louvre bust.

Salome dances like a flame,

And stoops to kiss the severed head

Of Jokanaan.



Lord Tennyson lies on his deathbed,

A copy of Cymbeline placed in his hands,

Opened at the page with his favourite lines,

Moonlight streaming in through the oriel window

To bear him away to Avalon.

All across Engand,from church pulpits,

Ministers lament the passing

Of an immortal, the conscience of the age.



I’ll sing thee songs of Araby


And tales of fair Cashmere,


Wild tales to cheat thee of a sigh


Or charm thee to a tear.



In the music hall darkness, night after night,

Arthur Symons sits,watching,thrilling

To the painted lascivious dancers,

The louche artifice of whores and ballet girls,

Oh so wicked, so alluring...

Then he strolls the promenade

And chooses his fancy,

An experience, a poem-to-be.

A flight from the dragons and harpies

Marching on Pariliament,demanding

Suffrage and equality.



After the ball was over,


She took out her glass eye.


Stood her cork leg in the corner,


Hung up her hair to dry.



The Importance of Being Earnest

Opens at the St James’s Theatre,

Dandiacal epigrams strutting

Through Uranian voids,

Feigning and doubling

With the glee of the doomed.

The author dines at the Savoy

With another rough young man

While at home Mrs Wilde is reading

The children a bedtime story.



I’ll sing thee songs of Araby


And tales of fair Cashmere,


Wild tales to cheat thee of a sigh


Or charm thee to a tear.

Country Paths

Bend of a lane,bow of a hill,

The why of fields and hedges,fractal,multifarious,

The dogwood days never seen again,

The eachness of counties,self-same and distinct...

This pollen in the air is the placenames

Ancestors etched in wood and stone;

These boundaries have held,will hold,

Parishes trodden out and breathed on,

Vills,hundreds and wapentakes,

Shadow-shire of beaver,wolf and aurochs,

Where I coppice my rooted tongue.

Nightingale woods of spring

Laugh oxlips and anemones into thickened air,

Thousand-year light and shade

Chequered into a woodman’s sigh.

Frith and spinney, copse and thicket

Weave me into their etymology;

I reave the geometrical land,

Axing through mind-acres gladly.

Strange country that I thought I knew!

Uncanny tree I fruit from!

Grids

Cities of industry and embattled order,

Mind-grids of rational madness,

Interconnected buildings and beings!

A world is being produced, transported and traded.

Hands in ancient Mesopotamia

Roll mud into bricks, stacking,constructing

Ziggurats,metropolises,maps

To measure time and space,

Reniassance perspectival paintings,

Moveable type and vast machines,

Architecture of all eras,

The Internet.



Bureaucrats in ancient Thebes

Draw up plans for new cities;

Alexander the Great unrolls a map

Of Persia, his finger tracing conquest;

Monastic choirs raise their voices,

Flowing with the notes on the page;

Medieval merchants open their chapbooks,

Filling the pews like figures in a ledger.



Electronic cuneiform flickers across my sight,

Star-grain scattered in the breeze,

Babylonian astronomy for the modern world,

Astrology to arrange my fortunes.

I am a maker and breaker of tablets,

Pyramidologist of days,

Seeking the hidden chambers and tunnels

That destiny intimates.



Pacific islanders crouch in their canoes,

Constructing wave-maps from palm fronds,

Weaving grids that their bodies test

Against the winds and sway.

Through the crosses-and-circles of cathedral cities,

Through seasons and circadian rhythms,

I pace my own Jerusalem,beating the bounds,

As the Milky Way’s drum resonates C major.

I hold up my guidonian hand

To orchestrate music in the whirlpool air.

Am I looking at or through the screen?

(The veil that trains me in optics).



Northern Protestant and/or Southern Catholic?

Sometimes I am not sure which Bible to read.

Anyhow, I am in the frame,

Silent cinema’s furious hero.

My hands are those of a prehistoric fisherman,

Weaving flax into nets.

Force vectors firework their arcs about me,

As I bumble through this tumult

Of chaos becoming order, order becoming chaos,

Angel-translator of intelligences,

Fool for knowledge and love.

Russians

I cower from the Moscow avenues,

Crushed by their gargantuan breadth,

Murderous traffic speeding towards me.

“Two Romes have fallen,and the third stands,

And a fourth there shall not be.”

Fateful August raises a dangerous sun.

In the underpass a shabby busker

Plays a mournful ballad,

The same song every day.



People walk around St Petersburg,

Talking to themselves,

Muttering,grumbling,groaning to themselves,

Disconsolate and all-too-human,

Hugging their sorrows close.



A dusty little town on the Volga.

One remembers the Germans lured out here

By Catherine the Great

With promises of fertile lands, houses and livestock,

And they came, they came in their thousands,

Excited pioneers of a new European civilisation,

Only to find nothing, nothing but the steppe,

And the spears of Tatar raiders.

In her decaying flat, Vera lives with hunchbacked thoughts,

Eating black bread with them,

Sharing her vodka with them,

The forest demons who must be appeased.

She walks down by the willow river

Through the floating poplar seeds,

And catches the yellwgreen flame of an oriole’s flight

On her fingertips,

Balances the plash of a swimming rat

On the end of her nose.

Wary and defiant, her dark eyes

Sometimes fire with amusement and joy.

The past is bad medicine,

So bitter, so foul.



Who knows how to be free?

Slavery is so familiar, it seems right.

Who knows how to make a new beginning

When endings are all we ever had.

Somewere,perhaps,a few true souls are gathered

Like the last colony of Old Believers,

Hidden in some remote Siberian forest,

Praying for the world.



Siberian summer evening.

Dust-tracks covered with apple blossom.

Outside a house once inhabited by a Decembrist

An apple tree surges up in full bloom.

What will the New Jerusalem look like?

Will it be a village of wooden huts

Where the men and women bathe naked together

In a river of laughing fish?

Slowly, suddenly, a wind stirs and rises

Far away, and gusts through the trees,

Shedding its riches of rain.

Justinian and the Fall

An empire is a poem of ideas..

Under a mosaic of Bellerophon fighting Chimera,

Justinian sits alone in a gilded chair,

Religiously dreaming of the glory,

A new Rome worthy of his name.

His hands grasp the bread and wine,

The liturgy of power and pretence,

Each hour’s ceremonial his burden.

Now rash,now indecisive, he coddles

His own impurpled arrogance for all,

And laughing barbarians invade the borders

Of his dreams, his words, his realm.

Shanghai

In the howling slipstream of the future,

Faces pinned back in clownish grins,

The myrmidons eat and shit their way

To riches.Glory.Ever more desire.

Death is the empire,

Time the frontier.

New fashion, new technology!

Delirium of money and action,

Ecstasy-terror of jazz-architecture!

Into the outstretched hand of a shoeshine boy

The loose change of fortune is dropped,

Sure as oracle bones.



Red and gold moon of tigerish spring,

Blood’s calendar tolls like a temple bell

Through sunlight-mist-blossom-drift.

Autumn,too,invites premonitions

And words as subtle as women.



Bastard entrepot of sacrificial suns,

Born from opium-cloud waters,

Bluster your warlord ways into the sky!

Scavenger,enter the neon netherworld

With a ghost’s crooked steps,

Greedy to grab whatever you can,

A knowledge as precious as tea.

Beheaded lives, impaled on factory spikes,

Line the high walls of tomorrow

And love, poisoned with midnight’s mercury,

Burns itself out in diminishing profits.



Careful not to lose your face!

You are the swarm, the bedlam.

The information uniforms you,

Drills you, sends you out to fight.

Bowl up to the stock market,

Place your bets!

There are monsters in the water.

Counterfeit coins in the bribe-hand.

Bronze cauldron city of zigzags and dragons,

Cook the ritual feast for voracious ghosts!



The bamboo speaks in riddles

In the gardens of carp pools and pavilions

And in the temple, serenely enthroned,

The Buddhas of past,present and future

Watch the red lanterns sway.

Argentine Tango

All that wealth and beauty,

Squandered, reduced to this!

Argentina.



Have you seen the old man dancing,

The fat ugly poor man dancing,

To whom all the beautiful women

Gravitate,like moons around a planet?



In the eye’s empire

We move to the sound

of joyful disillusionment

and carnival despair.



Go, dance with beauty,

Take splendour in your arms

And dare a simple tango in the dark.

Better to be lucky than good.



In the ballroom hundreds of couples

Slowly rotate around the vast floor, two by two,

The young and the old, the plain and the beautiful,

The men proudly puffing out their chests

And holding their partners close,

The women leaning into their embrace

And tracing lemniscates with their gams

Through the syncopations

Secret Africa contrives

The Rembrandt Fanatic

Ten o’ clock in the morning,

Freezing cold under the Oude Kerk,

The bells pealing every half hour

Over the sex shops and tattoo parlours...

(Inside, among the grim grey stone,

Devoid of Catholic flimflam,

No chalice to call a grail,

No candles to light for the dead,

Cold echoes roll over me,

And the ghost of Rembrandt’s wife

Bares her nipple for my mouth...)

I walk up the street, past West Indian whores

Sitting in the red light windows,

Their eyes tired and dead.

In the Rijksmuseum, I stand with a swarm

Of pilgrims before the “Night Watch”,

Reverently pointing out details,

Verifying this reproduction

Of the original in their minds;

Precarious as the fortune

Made and lost on the price of a tulip.


In Rembrandt's house on Jodenbreestraat ,

On black and white marble floors,

Up the steep twisting stairs,

I track the man of shipwrecks

To his drowned treasure.

Here he lived and died more than once,

Worked and raised a family,

Held wife and children dying in his arms,

And bankrupted himself

Till the furious creditors came

To empty the rooms of everything,

Paintings, furnishings, and books,

The collections of seashells and coral,

The Javanese shadow puppets.