The silent ones, the survivors,
With catatonic stares...
Red taboo is on their hands.
Memory is working them over
Brutally, thoroughly.
Too many ghosts walk among the living,
Reminding ,accusing.
Tics and tremors and convulsions
Quake the sobbing days
And every shadowed street is no man’s land.
All these corpses-
Do you call it murder or fate?
Dr Caligari stalks the asylum,
A charlatan-messiah
Who can hypnotize the absent
Back to life.
Use all your science, all your intuition,
This world will leave you guessing anyway.
F.W.Murnau sits reading letters
From his dead love
And Nosferatu’s shadow creeps across the wall.
The séance of cinema
Commences in the dark.
Fever dream documentary
Records the voodoo rat scampering
And vanishing through the moon’s trenches.
Murnau,his mind like a Balkan castle,
Stands observing a painting
By Caspar David Friedrich,
The solitary figure with back to the viewer,
Absorbed in a vast emptiness.
It is the age of the dybbuk,
Somnambulists’ paradise.
The envious dead wreak their frustration on the living,
Warriors lie impotent in their marital beds.
Slowly, implacably, the Venus fly trap closes.
As archaeologists uncover the ruins of Babylon
And reconstruct the Tower of Babel,
Fritz Lang- pirate’s eyepatch covering
The lethal glare of a heathen god-
Sketches designs for Metropolis,
The revolutionary mob rushing onward
To pull down the citadel.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Chinese Calligraphy
The Xuan paper sucks the black ink deep inside,
Each magic square drawn
From the heart’s grimoire,
Black and white harmonies
Balanced on a rabbit’s hair brushtip.
Dots and strokes
Dance to secret rhythms;
Water and air are married
In the flow of the hand.
One comes to love the spaces between characters
More than the characters themselves.
Lei Jianfu of the Song Dynasty
Learned how to move his brush
By listening to the sound of running water
And letting his hand swim
With the waves.
Su Shi said that to write
Was like playing a game of chess
With the strokes.
Each magic square drawn
From the heart’s grimoire,
Black and white harmonies
Balanced on a rabbit’s hair brushtip.
Dots and strokes
Dance to secret rhythms;
Water and air are married
In the flow of the hand.
One comes to love the spaces between characters
More than the characters themselves.
Lei Jianfu of the Song Dynasty
Learned how to move his brush
By listening to the sound of running water
And letting his hand swim
With the waves.
Su Shi said that to write
Was like playing a game of chess
With the strokes.
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Cosmetic Surgery
Disfigured.Imperfect.
Intervene in destiny
And change it before it’s too late,
Before you lose everything-
Love and money and success.
Look in the mirror-
Where the voodoo begins.
The cutter has come
To make blood flow,
To correct the damage nature has done.
Does he love or does he hate?
Do his hands heal or attack?
Beauty’s dispute takes the soul for prey.
Bodies are just bits and pieces-
Who owns them,in the end?
A doctored smile in a magazine
Is suddenly discarded, crumpled, in the bin.
All the bumps and scars and anomalies
Of my weird geography
Terrorize my waking dreams.
Between ugliness and splendour
Is a mere fraction.
This body is nothing
But the image of what it might become.
I am an impersonator,
Never off the stage.
More real is the photograph,
The beloved monster
I serve and emulate.
The inescapable spectre.
All those mug shots on the police station wall.
All those movie star pin-ups.
What will emerge
From this face-cocoon?
Another mask.
New life,bruised and swollen.
The scalpel’s kiss
Tells me I am loved.
Laid out again on the operating table,
I wait for the cold hands to manipulate me
And annihilate the unwanted;
The morphine of anguish
Puts me under once more;
Sailing like a pharaoh on his solar barque
Through the underworld,
To meet my birth-star,
I struggle up again,reborn, victorious;
I turn to face the mirror,
And try to interpret
The stranger
Risen like a volcanic island
From chaotic seas.
Intervene in destiny
And change it before it’s too late,
Before you lose everything-
Love and money and success.
Look in the mirror-
Where the voodoo begins.
The cutter has come
To make blood flow,
To correct the damage nature has done.
Does he love or does he hate?
Do his hands heal or attack?
Beauty’s dispute takes the soul for prey.
Bodies are just bits and pieces-
Who owns them,in the end?
A doctored smile in a magazine
Is suddenly discarded, crumpled, in the bin.
All the bumps and scars and anomalies
Of my weird geography
Terrorize my waking dreams.
Between ugliness and splendour
Is a mere fraction.
This body is nothing
But the image of what it might become.
I am an impersonator,
Never off the stage.
More real is the photograph,
The beloved monster
I serve and emulate.
The inescapable spectre.
All those mug shots on the police station wall.
All those movie star pin-ups.
What will emerge
From this face-cocoon?
Another mask.
New life,bruised and swollen.
The scalpel’s kiss
Tells me I am loved.
Laid out again on the operating table,
I wait for the cold hands to manipulate me
And annihilate the unwanted;
The morphine of anguish
Puts me under once more;
Sailing like a pharaoh on his solar barque
Through the underworld,
To meet my birth-star,
I struggle up again,reborn, victorious;
I turn to face the mirror,
And try to interpret
The stranger
Risen like a volcanic island
From chaotic seas.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Consumers
“The richest 1 per cent of the world’s population
Owns 40 per cent of the planet’s wealth.
The richest 10 per cent own over 85 per cent of the world’s assets,
With over half the world’s population
Owning barely 1 per cent of the global wealth.
This is a world in which over 800 million people
Go to bed hungry every night.”
I register the statistics then go back to my business,
The routine art of transformation,
My thoughts as luxurious and superfluous as billionaires’ yachts,
My suburban life a private Caribbean island
Designed to my own blueprint.
Spaces,lifestyles,relationships,identities,bodies,
All mutate in my hands,
As my dying flesh dreams of ever vaster sensations,
Ever greater proof of itself, of God.
Maintain, repair,improve your body, your life:
Turn yourself into a deluxe product.
A life on credit,
Overstretched.
The zero game of freedom
Snares me in machines.
Seduce me, manipulate me,
Turn me inside-out.
We are the wasters, the destroyers,
Used up as we abuse.
Excess is our damnable pleasure,
Puritan libertines.
From ecstasy to anomie,
I plot the graph.
My unimaginable death reinvents itself
As games,art,religion and war.
On with the tournament,
The carnival of fools!
Everywhere I turn I see masks and costumes:
On the streets and in the shopping centres,
I take my fantasies for a stroll,
Random memories striking like asteroids,
Battering me into a derelict Mars.
Arts become industries,
Objects become photographs,
Reality’s hallucination is screened on my solitude,
Rich in false intensity.
How could I survive without these fictions?
Under the surveillance cameras’ eyes,
I toy with self-control,
Observing without being observed,
Excited and blasé.
History means nothing to me now
And I still prefer the Old Testament to the New.
I will never be part of the Universal;
I do not have heroes any more.
Schizophrenic, can you join the dots
And call it truth? A child’s drawing,
With stick-people and massive suns.
Mysterious oppressive fragments of time
Fall from your fingers,-
Did you break your toys again?
Everything breaks down in the end;
Disappointment sets in early.
I can’t understand the world but I know it hurts.
I like to look at objects from a distance,
Without judgment or taste.
Depth and perspective are superfluous now.
The most beautiful people are actually circus freaks.
Take me to the fair, take me to the theatre,
Show me the monsters,
Let me live again!
The dandies are in charge now,
If anyone is.
Owns 40 per cent of the planet’s wealth.
The richest 10 per cent own over 85 per cent of the world’s assets,
With over half the world’s population
Owning barely 1 per cent of the global wealth.
This is a world in which over 800 million people
Go to bed hungry every night.”
I register the statistics then go back to my business,
The routine art of transformation,
My thoughts as luxurious and superfluous as billionaires’ yachts,
My suburban life a private Caribbean island
Designed to my own blueprint.
Spaces,lifestyles,relationships,identities,bodies,
All mutate in my hands,
As my dying flesh dreams of ever vaster sensations,
Ever greater proof of itself, of God.
Maintain, repair,improve your body, your life:
Turn yourself into a deluxe product.
A life on credit,
Overstretched.
The zero game of freedom
Snares me in machines.
Seduce me, manipulate me,
Turn me inside-out.
We are the wasters, the destroyers,
Used up as we abuse.
Excess is our damnable pleasure,
Puritan libertines.
From ecstasy to anomie,
I plot the graph.
My unimaginable death reinvents itself
As games,art,religion and war.
On with the tournament,
The carnival of fools!
Everywhere I turn I see masks and costumes:
On the streets and in the shopping centres,
I take my fantasies for a stroll,
Random memories striking like asteroids,
Battering me into a derelict Mars.
Arts become industries,
Objects become photographs,
Reality’s hallucination is screened on my solitude,
Rich in false intensity.
How could I survive without these fictions?
Under the surveillance cameras’ eyes,
I toy with self-control,
Observing without being observed,
Excited and blasé.
History means nothing to me now
And I still prefer the Old Testament to the New.
I will never be part of the Universal;
I do not have heroes any more.
Schizophrenic, can you join the dots
And call it truth? A child’s drawing,
With stick-people and massive suns.
Mysterious oppressive fragments of time
Fall from your fingers,-
Did you break your toys again?
Everything breaks down in the end;
Disappointment sets in early.
I can’t understand the world but I know it hurts.
I like to look at objects from a distance,
Without judgment or taste.
Depth and perspective are superfluous now.
The most beautiful people are actually circus freaks.
Take me to the fair, take me to the theatre,
Show me the monsters,
Let me live again!
The dandies are in charge now,
If anyone is.
Monday, June 14, 2010
The Love Hotel
One after the other, they enter the love hotel:
An old man with a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl,
Ready for a quick commercial exchange;
A middle-aged couple darting inside, guiltily hiding their faces;
A teenage couple sauntering in as if it were a fast food restaurant.
Every illusion is doubled in the rational society,
Hallucination of capital and form.
Is this the “floating world”? Or just a reference in a book?
City-collage, metropolis of scattered symbols,
We go through the kata,
Medieval futurists and conservative anarchists,
Looking for strongpoints to be.
I am a backstreets man,
Making knight’s moves to swerve into other dimensions,
Drifting with aleatory pleasure,
Negotiating convoluted entrances and exits.
The street slows and focuses
As the maze leads you in
To the Shinto shrine,the moated castle,
Through decisions and dilemmas
Of pleasure and prayer.
Out here is the edge,
An infinity of edges,
And whatever paths you find around them.
This is my riverbank,my trading post,my graveyard,
Asylum for a vagrant soul,
Exploring its own rituals and forces.
Confusion is my district:
Mapping it is my profession.
Choose your room and enter:
The forbidden chamber of fairytales,
A fantasy, but no happy-ever-after,
A sense of incompletion, not closure.
Now you will play and masquerade
For secret deities, as if to ease unease
And neutralise dread.
Please pay close attention to the instructions
As to correct use of toys and equipment,;
And vacate the room at the allotted time,
So as to allow the professional cleaning team
To prepare it for the next customers.
An old man with a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl,
Ready for a quick commercial exchange;
A middle-aged couple darting inside, guiltily hiding their faces;
A teenage couple sauntering in as if it were a fast food restaurant.
Every illusion is doubled in the rational society,
Hallucination of capital and form.
Is this the “floating world”? Or just a reference in a book?
City-collage, metropolis of scattered symbols,
We go through the kata,
Medieval futurists and conservative anarchists,
Looking for strongpoints to be.
I am a backstreets man,
Making knight’s moves to swerve into other dimensions,
Drifting with aleatory pleasure,
Negotiating convoluted entrances and exits.
The street slows and focuses
As the maze leads you in
To the Shinto shrine,the moated castle,
Through decisions and dilemmas
Of pleasure and prayer.
Out here is the edge,
An infinity of edges,
And whatever paths you find around them.
This is my riverbank,my trading post,my graveyard,
Asylum for a vagrant soul,
Exploring its own rituals and forces.
Confusion is my district:
Mapping it is my profession.
Choose your room and enter:
The forbidden chamber of fairytales,
A fantasy, but no happy-ever-after,
A sense of incompletion, not closure.
Now you will play and masquerade
For secret deities, as if to ease unease
And neutralise dread.
Please pay close attention to the instructions
As to correct use of toys and equipment,;
And vacate the room at the allotted time,
So as to allow the professional cleaning team
To prepare it for the next customers.
Tuesday, June 08, 2010
The Bukovina Frescoes
Thirty-six battles King Stephen the Great
Fought against the Ottoman Empire,
Winning all but two,
And after each victory he built churches
Among the wooded vales.
His bastard son Petru Rares, ruling after him,
Commissioned artists to fresco their walls,
Small Gothic churches in brilliant colours,
Covered all over with paintings
To catechize the illiterate.
Teams of four or five-
Men whose names are now forgotten-
Would even out the rough stone walls
With mortar,then smooth on a fine layer
Of lime plaster mixed with straw,
And then they had just a few hours
To paint with quick sure hands,as one ,
Before the plaster dried out.
So they laid on pigments mixed
From rare clays,semiprecious stones
And minerals, that soaked in and fixed.
In the Last Judgment,heaven-homing souls
Wear embroidered Bukovinian cloths;
Announcing angels sound shepherd's horns;
And King David plays a cobza,
Calm, beatific figures are being burned alive,
Dragged behind horses,
Thrown over castle walls,
Strangled, boiled and beheaded.
By tormentors dressed as Turks.
Fought against the Ottoman Empire,
Winning all but two,
And after each victory he built churches
Among the wooded vales.
His bastard son Petru Rares, ruling after him,
Commissioned artists to fresco their walls,
Small Gothic churches in brilliant colours,
Covered all over with paintings
To catechize the illiterate.
Teams of four or five-
Men whose names are now forgotten-
Would even out the rough stone walls
With mortar,then smooth on a fine layer
Of lime plaster mixed with straw,
And then they had just a few hours
To paint with quick sure hands,as one ,
Before the plaster dried out.
So they laid on pigments mixed
From rare clays,semiprecious stones
And minerals, that soaked in and fixed.
In the Last Judgment,heaven-homing souls
Wear embroidered Bukovinian cloths;
Announcing angels sound shepherd's horns;
And King David plays a cobza,
Calm, beatific figures are being burned alive,
Dragged behind horses,
Thrown over castle walls,
Strangled, boiled and beheaded.
By tormentors dressed as Turks.
Molotov's Library
In a grand Moscow apartment,late into the night,
Amid Persian carpets,Chinese jades
And sentimental gilt-framed genre paintings of peasants,
The round-headed imperturbable killer
Sits, reading and annotating books,
Diligently cataloguing thousands of works,
From his rich eclectic private library,
Studying his beloved Chekhov with particular passion,
And opening signed first editions by authors
Whom one day soon he will send to the Gulag.
There is always another title he must have:
He reads constantly, methodically, slowly,
Making endless notes in the margins,
With the same pen that signs death warrants,
Careful to limit his poetry-reading
Lest the love of dreams and beauty seduce him
Away from the discipline of fact and prose,
And the perfect society to come.
“The best filing clerk in Russia”,Lenin dubbed him,
And still the jibe hurts;his enemies will not laugh long,
He will outmanoeuvre and outlast them all;
Until they,too, are reduced to footnotes.
Amid Persian carpets,Chinese jades
And sentimental gilt-framed genre paintings of peasants,
The round-headed imperturbable killer
Sits, reading and annotating books,
Diligently cataloguing thousands of works,
From his rich eclectic private library,
Studying his beloved Chekhov with particular passion,
And opening signed first editions by authors
Whom one day soon he will send to the Gulag.
There is always another title he must have:
He reads constantly, methodically, slowly,
Making endless notes in the margins,
With the same pen that signs death warrants,
Careful to limit his poetry-reading
Lest the love of dreams and beauty seduce him
Away from the discipline of fact and prose,
And the perfect society to come.
“The best filing clerk in Russia”,Lenin dubbed him,
And still the jibe hurts;his enemies will not laugh long,
He will outmanoeuvre and outlast them all;
Until they,too, are reduced to footnotes.
Piero's Province
The quiet church, the stillness and the cool,
And the Battle of Heraclius and Chosroes,
My eye being cleverly conducted
Through the packed composition
By the angle of a horse’s head,
The tilt of a shield,a speartip...
All this order I struggle to encompass.
Outside, in the piazza, a young couple
Stroll past,kissing, eyes closed in kef;
They stumble yet stay upright.
On a hotel veranda in Sansepolcro,
As twilight seeps through,
I see Renaissance paintings emerge
From the landscape,and fade back-
Geometryand chaos in continual battle,-
And remember the pregnant Madonna,
Young beauty,eyes downcast,
So timid and sombre her mien,
Her fingertips lightly brushing
Her swollen belly,bearing her destiny
With exquisite resignation.
And the Battle of Heraclius and Chosroes,
My eye being cleverly conducted
Through the packed composition
By the angle of a horse’s head,
The tilt of a shield,a speartip...
All this order I struggle to encompass.
Outside, in the piazza, a young couple
Stroll past,kissing, eyes closed in kef;
They stumble yet stay upright.
On a hotel veranda in Sansepolcro,
As twilight seeps through,
I see Renaissance paintings emerge
From the landscape,and fade back-
Geometryand chaos in continual battle,-
And remember the pregnant Madonna,
Young beauty,eyes downcast,
So timid and sombre her mien,
Her fingertips lightly brushing
Her swollen belly,bearing her destiny
With exquisite resignation.
Qualia
The properties of objects, the nature of the given-
Sensations and perceptions I am,I am,
Private detective sniffing out the clues...
How can I tell you what red is?
It is all so implausible, the real.
Before the melody ends I can sense its wave,
The square root of minus one.
I only know what I think I know.
What does hurting? It is,was,will be,that’s all.
Changes,all changes,the day,the hour, the minute-
Oh so clumsily I express my expressions,-
Where is the information?
The maps are full of errors.
There are no ifs or buts,no maybes
Here in Maybeland.
I must maintain philosophical equilibrium.
I must keep to principles, whatever they are.
You cannot explain all this away.
You cannot explain me away.
That grey squirrel in the branches outside
Is the square root of minus one.
Sensations and perceptions I am,I am,
Private detective sniffing out the clues...
How can I tell you what red is?
It is all so implausible, the real.
Before the melody ends I can sense its wave,
The square root of minus one.
I only know what I think I know.
What does hurting? It is,was,will be,that’s all.
Changes,all changes,the day,the hour, the minute-
Oh so clumsily I express my expressions,-
Where is the information?
The maps are full of errors.
There are no ifs or buts,no maybes
Here in Maybeland.
I must maintain philosophical equilibrium.
I must keep to principles, whatever they are.
You cannot explain all this away.
You cannot explain me away.
That grey squirrel in the branches outside
Is the square root of minus one.
The Forest Philosopher
As Nietzsche -in the sudden clarity of madness-
Threw his arms around a horse’s neck
And would not let go,
So must he cling to the world.
Walking, talking and dressing
Like some country bumpkin,
The philosopher-king,
From his simple hut on a Black Forest hillside,
Gazed out across the valley to the Alps beyond.
His tools were all around him,
As he walked the wooded paths,
Through glades and clearings,
And skied downslope in winter.
Alone with his books and the nightstorms,
A Pre-Socratic, crabbed and hungry
For the sources, the roots of things,,
He built,like a voyageur his canoe,
A mountaindweller’s dialect all his own.
He must remember what the world had forgotten,
Work like a woodcutter at his task
And give no quarter to fools.
Forking and reforking, the path
Led through dark firs,on Death Mountain,
Where a sad and sovereign intellect,
Refusing the world’s interference,
Could run to its own cruel limits
Pretending that knowledge was love.
Threw his arms around a horse’s neck
And would not let go,
So must he cling to the world.
Walking, talking and dressing
Like some country bumpkin,
The philosopher-king,
From his simple hut on a Black Forest hillside,
Gazed out across the valley to the Alps beyond.
His tools were all around him,
As he walked the wooded paths,
Through glades and clearings,
And skied downslope in winter.
Alone with his books and the nightstorms,
A Pre-Socratic, crabbed and hungry
For the sources, the roots of things,,
He built,like a voyageur his canoe,
A mountaindweller’s dialect all his own.
He must remember what the world had forgotten,
Work like a woodcutter at his task
And give no quarter to fools.
Forking and reforking, the path
Led through dark firs,on Death Mountain,
Where a sad and sovereign intellect,
Refusing the world’s interference,
Could run to its own cruel limits
Pretending that knowledge was love.
Wednesday, June 02, 2010
Celts and Romans
Rain dripping from a leaf is the history of the island.
A good place to pick a fight and win a useful war: so the Roman emperors calculate, delightedly sticking pins in maps and juggling the exotic names of tribes.
The eagle-bearer of the tenth legion takes shape under Caesar’s pen, a vivid cartoon; that boar-tusked name Casivellaunus- a handy chimera-struts onstage with barbarian flourish, stinking of uninhabitable forests and revolting customs.
Words-gold coins engraved with wild boars and horses-weapon the hand-to-mouth storytellers.
Facts: hillforts to be taken by storm, by the discipline of imagination.The victorious shall reside in fancy villas,painted with mythological frescoes, enjoying imported wines and costly delicacies.
Cunobelinus poses for his coins,in imitation of Augustus,clean-shaven and laurel-wreathed in Roman tunic,flattering his foreign patrons and absorbing their power, as his chariots race across country to force rival tribes to their knees.
A good place to pick a fight and win a useful war: so the Roman emperors calculate, delightedly sticking pins in maps and juggling the exotic names of tribes.
The eagle-bearer of the tenth legion takes shape under Caesar’s pen, a vivid cartoon; that boar-tusked name Casivellaunus- a handy chimera-struts onstage with barbarian flourish, stinking of uninhabitable forests and revolting customs.
Words-gold coins engraved with wild boars and horses-weapon the hand-to-mouth storytellers.
Facts: hillforts to be taken by storm, by the discipline of imagination.The victorious shall reside in fancy villas,painted with mythological frescoes, enjoying imported wines and costly delicacies.
Cunobelinus poses for his coins,in imitation of Augustus,clean-shaven and laurel-wreathed in Roman tunic,flattering his foreign patrons and absorbing their power, as his chariots race across country to force rival tribes to their knees.
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