Athene

Athene Polymetis,

Fierce and crafty,

Full of guile and acumen,

She who threw down the flute

And took up the battle-trumpet!

Athene Glaukopis,

Snowy owl on a Palaelithic cave wall

In Provence,

Baleful eyes

That penetrate any soul,

Olive tree leaves in the zephyr,

The voice that says

Now I see…

She knows what is fated

And what can be changed by man;

Only a fool dares act without her counsel.

Without her foresight and discrimination,

Her measure and rule,

No transformation can prosper.

On the ruins of the Acropolis

Bloom feverfew,

The ancient parthenium,

Friend of wombs,

Regulator of menstruation,

Proof against melancholy and migraine.

Energy of air, earth, water, thunder,

Throbbing, pulsating,

Lady Bird,

Lady Snake,

Ivory figurine in red ochre peplos,

Round and pregnant,

Etched with triangles,

Zigzags,

Circles,

Spirals.

The Minoan goddess

Holds high a snake in each hand,

Triumphant.

On the Acropolis

Athene suckles the giant serpent

At her breast.

This is the Age of Kali:

Horror,

Strife,

The losing throw of the dice.

The third hand of the goddess

Gestures “Fear not!’

Power and intellect

Play through the vortex,

Intertwining;

So radiant this flaming,

It can kill.

Sarasvati plays the universe into being

On her vina,

Playing the sounds of the Sanskrit alphabet;

Kali’s garland of skulls

Is the number and notes

Of the Sanskrit letters…

Perseus brings to Athene

The Gorgon’s head

And two phials of her blood,

One drawn from the right arm,

The other from the left.

In the clefts of trees,

In rivers,

The Black Virgin shines,

Queen of the South,

Queen Sibylla,

Goose-footed high priestess,

Enthroned in Toulouse.

Gerbert of Aurillac

Watches the golden fleeces

In the river of his city,

He who will become

Pope Sylvester II

In the year 999.

He had met, in his studies,

A beautiful woman,

Meridiana,

Who offered him her body, wealth and wisdom,

If he would trust Hera,

And so he did;

Thus did he achieve the Magnum Opus,

Introduce Arab numbers to the West,

Invent the clock,

The astrolabe

And the hydraulic organ,

And in his darkened chambers

Conversed with a thaumaturgic talking head.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938)

Dark bravo and devil-may-care,
Sucking the fire from his cigarette,
Feline Egyptian god face
With opium smoker’s night eyes.
In studio gloom naked bodies
Dance, among African fetishes
And Japanese prints, with the smell
Of sex and danger, whores’ cabaret
Cavorting in the mind’s round.
Nervous chaos of the city,
All sabres and absinthe,
Sensation’s iridium scorching through,
And the summer lovers would escape
To the lakes, swimming and painting
Nude, male and female blending.
The bloody carnival unhinged him,
Panic in the veins, till the moment
When he placed a pistol to his heart,
And settled the question.

Melanesia

Black volcanic soil erupts with banana, manioc and taro…huge papaya hang from high stems…banyan trees cast giant shadows, twisting their roots down in cascades…a flying fox shoots overhead… rooting pigs ravage the ground…

The missionary wakes sweating in the dark, sensing Satan close by; the Fiend has possessed these heathens and set them to do his work,-surely the Last Judgment will not be long now?

Mana is flowing, currents are flowing, through everything, through the air, through objects, through actions, through people, though you, through me, for good and for evil, ancestors speaking,- can you catch it, channel it, make it work?
Spirits howl through the night, and sometimes in hidden banyan groves reveal themselves to the worthy…

Alvaro de Mendaña landed at Guadalcanal, believing he had found Ophir; but when his men paddled ashore to find water the tribesmen slaughtered them, cut them to pieces, cut off heads and limbs, cut out eyes and tongues, broke open their skulls and ate the brains…

The dying man whispers: I shall return by sea and the people watch for a shark’s fin in the lagoon.
The shark caller wins his ancestor’s favour and calls him to shore; to herd schools of fish into the net; to capsize his enemies’ canoes and devour them.

This is the sweet-mouth magic: rub a chicken feather on the special stone and repeat her name four times and after four days she will come to you, follow you everywhere, belong to you…

They wait for John Frum to arrive on his great white ship of precious gifts, from far, far across the ocean…they will wait forever, forever, they will never lose faith…they build wharves and warehouses to receive the plenty; they get drunk on kava and dream of the new age about to begin..

Has a sorcerer stolen my footprint and cursed me? Do invisible hands sow poison in my food? I walk among broken stones, cities of ghosts in the coconut groves. Man and woman danced till the spider made death. Church bells’ sobbing seeps into my bones.

Malinowski writes his diary by lamplight in a hut, head full of sea snakes and Trobriand women: “I watched the muscles of her back, her figure, her legs, and the beauty of her body, so hidden to us whites, fascinated me…I was sorry I was not a savage and could not possess this pretty girl.”

Supine on the bed, staring up into the ceiling fan’s hissing revolutions, I fall into the constellations,and the stars break up, meteors streak across the night sky, islands burn like fireflies, I open the big black Bible of the sea and read from the waves, archipelagos of words…

Pyramid Text

To discern reality, there is the thing.
What a trick, if you can pull it off.
Would you make yourself a reader of hieroglyphs, a builder of pyramids? You are bold indeed. Or foolhardy. The distinction need not detain us.
The messenger of the gods brought mankind hermeneutics; natural, supernatural, human and divine. Another blessed curse, another fruitful burden.
None of this, of course, will deflect you. To you every warning will be worthless, every counsel of caution insincere.
Each finds his other’s idiom, if he will.
Perhaps you are hoping for the Third Empire of the Holy Spirit, foretold by Joachim of Fiore, when vision will replace this shoddy word-morass, this onanistic efflux of text? Then we shall hear once more the paradisal tongue, which calls all things by their quintessence, and elucidates all mysteries at last. Old Joachim knew a thing or three.
But for now we must make do with Babylonian grammar. So I hand you the rebus and retreat.
Queer commerce Hermes enjoins upon us, pressing his finger to his lips.Sly old dog!
I found this parchment in an attic, you know. Correction: in a secret cubbyhole in my bedroom wall. There it was, like a mermaid’s purse.
Here is a likeness.Yours or mine,who can say? It may in time acquire the powers of a talisman.
I have, at various ominous junctures, desired to call myself a gnostic, a neoplatonist, a Cathar, a druid, a suburban yogi…all slipshod fancy, of course,but perhaps, in my lazy way, I was laying stones across the stream.
I am, in truth, but a small poodle, sniffing at the dog’s bottom of knowledge.
Two suns shine upon this enterprise. We are dealers in fire.
Dissolution and coagulation, distillation and condensation, systole and diastole will guide the process.
Quicksilver and brimstone are the tools to hand.
Quick shadows spider through my mind, and weird voices crying to and fro.
Will you come into the serpent’s circle of Saturn? It is time you must overcome.
The game begins in springtime,under the horns of the Ram,when the corpse decaying in the ground shows disconcerting signs of life.A finger twitches, an eyelid flickers.
Follow the octave –music is the order of your soul.
Take your compass and navigate between the two poles of the Work, the twin pillars of the Temple.
Remember the hermetic pilgrims who trod the Milky Way to Santiago de Compostela, walking the tightrope, surrounded by water and fire, picking up Jewish and Arabic secrets along the way.
I read somewhere the tale of a boy born blind who grew up self-assured and clever; but when he was fifty his sight was restored; he became fascinated by mirrors, and preferred to look at the world in their reflections rather than to see it directly; but to his own face in the mirror he could not become accustomed; he rapidly became self-conscious, lost his nerve and died.

The Tattooed Lady

Like a pilgrim
Commemorating Loreto,
She bears this talisman,
This amulet on the skin,
At the boundary.

Like a Marquesan
Wearing the gods
Inside-out,
Pricked and stamped
With the stigmata,
Branded
For the purposes of the heart.

She carves her scrimshaw dreams
From the narwhal’s horn
Of plenty,
And the voyage continues
Who knows where…

Like a Thracian maenad
On a lekythos,
With a deer on her arm,
As she takes the sword to Orpheus.

Like a Celtic saint,
Skin-scriptured with graces,
Becoming a folio,
A palimpsest.

The occultist etches himself with sigils
To beweird the world,
Drawing down the planets
With their hands.

The thoughts of the skin
Are deep beyond measure,
Fathoms and fathoms,
South Seas for all.
So welcome the veil,
Honour the hymen,
Like the messmates on Cook’s second voyage,
Who, admiring the warriors
Of Bora Bora,
Banded together and blazoned their bodies
With a star on the left breast,
And dubbed themselves
The Knights of Otaheite.

Like a convict in Van Dieman’s Land
With an anchor on his arm,
Praying for safe return home.

Out of the pain,
The transforming wounds,
She arises,
All self and soul,
Playing with secrets,
Forced to make her own face.

Spooks

I am a man,
A corpse that speaks.
Well I know the properties of fear,
The mortal meanings throwing shadows on the wall.
This is the land of doubles,
The mirror-maelstrom.
History’s ciphers are mine to employ,
Not always for utter good.
Be as vigilant as you like
To distinguish truth from lie,
But the task will undo you.
How much of me is knowledge, how much instinct,
I cannot say;
By devious twists and violations
I serve the state.
The just and the unjust are one blood.
Why is it that I love only the invisible and the hidden,
That nothing else can thrill me?
Polyglot reality tries out disguises,
Tricky to a fault,
Relishing the chase.
Dying is easy,
But how hard it is to dispose of one’s own body.
And memories, of course, are as bad as bloodstains.
Murders and intrigues we shall call by other names,
Deploying words as engines of war,
Fabulously matter-of-fact.
Be sure, it does not end here,
No, it never ends,
Not as long as desire persists.
Consider this life neither real nor fake,
But something in between.
Wounds are precious,
And what they portend I may in time divine;
I act to postpone my own death,
Hastening others, if I must, to theirs.
Mathematical probabilities hedge me in,
As I wager my way by hazard;
Soon enough the bill will arrive,
The punishment will be delivered.
What I know is so little, so unreliable,
Queer phantasms in the head,
Guilty wishes cloaked as facts.
It is all just whispers in the dark.
Marked faces foreshadow destiny,
Gestures and silhouettes accumulate
And the time comes for another disappearance;
For all the doctors’ boasts, I know
Afflictions which can never be cured,
And syndromes still unnnamed.

Nasca

We are builders of mountains,
Walking the lines,
Golden spiders
Weaving water-webs.

From the valleys to the heights,
We climb inside ourselves.

Water flies up out of the ocean
Into the sun,
Carried by the starry llama on his back
Into the Milky Way,
The llama who sups every night from the waves
Then mountains down in storms by day,
Down on the dancing women,
On the thirsty earth.

In October, when waking toads emerge from their holes,
And mate with crazy passion,
The dark toad constellation rises before the dawn sun,
Climbing higher into the heavens with each day.

Spider spiral,
Lizard zigzag,
Show me,
Show me.

Stone rivers of the pampa,
In you I bathe naked,
And swim, swim through the sky.

These words are spoken
By a shrunken trophy head,
With eyes closed
And lips sewn shut with thorns.

The Body of Eurydice

Where is she,
The absent one
Whose death
Is my birth?
Orpheus at the prow
Sings the cosmogonic hymn
As the Argo lurches out;
A green-gilled sailor,
Hugging his lyre.
Here stands the pure man,
The father of culture,
Offering sacrifice
And salvation,
Guarding the teletae.
To hell with woman,
Mother of suffering,
Lactating the black milk of seasons!
Philosophers, kind death is pleased to teach you what it can,
And be the heavy ballast to your ships.
Who loses and what is lost?
This trance lasts forever
On the mountainside at night,
And the black dog’s mouth
Howls globes of silence.
Pray, do not drink the waters
Of Lethe; nor forget
The light you witnessed in the dark.
Somewhere a woman, invisible,inaudible,
Rules the secret hours and the land
Across the river, the current and the end.

Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Provence

Cherry orchards of the Tricastin in spring,
White blossom thronging, and vines sullen, shorn;
Purple of lavender plantations;
Wan yellows,oranges and greys of the soil;
Château Lourmarin,ghostly sulphur pyre
Choiring in clairvoyant twilight;
And Bonnieux, abandoned to autumn mist,
Absorbed in pale tangerine sky.

Now the dragonfly summer has come,
Winter’s torrents are dusty river beds;
The almond trees on the Plateau de Valensole
Are dark green splashes against the mauve.
Across the Camargue, entrance to Hades,
Herds of white horses sweep through the swamps,
And a black bull stares towards the horizon,
His heart a gathering thundercloud.

Renaissance

Beautiful Europe of endeavour,
Inexhaustibly conversing with the past!
The dream will not perish
Of sublimity and order,
These buildings, books and pictures,
These songs will draw us on.

In Ferrara, Ariosto sits in chiaroscuro,
Amphibious diplomat of worlds,
Filling his quill with all the humours,
Nonchalantly soaring on a hippogriff to the moon.

The portico of Corinthian columns
In the Foundling Hospital in Florence:
Mathematics of shadow and light
Interpenetrating, shifting in the mind
To stimulate new designs.
So Brunelleschi made to balance
His life in stone,and will a good world
Into being, against all afflictions.

In the palace on Urbino’s crag,
Castiglione sits writing his treatise,
Adumbrating the mysteries of court,
Where life depends on word and gesture,
On some divine indefinable grace,
Rough politics and brute desire
Disguised as the congress of angels.

Francis I stands, a bearded lady,
With sword upheld,and caduceus
In hand,the King and Queen
Of France,and,amid the forest
Raises Fontainebleau’s gold chalice
To the sun.Among the trees,
Diana fondles her subdued stag,
Fixing the observer with a wink.
On Cellini’s silver salt cellar
Venus and Vulcan, pleasantly weary,
Recline in intellectual equipoise.

Grignard

Remote control in hand,
I zap from image to image,
Alone in the unreal.
I have no interest, no attention to give.
Overabundance only makes me unhappy.
I see people suffering
Yet cannot believe in their pain.
Still they are selling utopia,
Flogging delusion to the masses,
Sophisticated cretins, ever greedy for a bargain.
Technology is salvation, I am told,
But I, for my sins, do not expect to be saved.
What is this coming out of my computer?
Ectoplasm of nightmares.
My eyes are weak,my mind is weak,
All bored and distracted.
“Do you know what really destroyed the Roman Empire?
It was the pewter in their drinking vessels;
The alcohol in their wine dissolved out the lead
And so they were poisoned, generation after generation…”
All these chemicals are turning me into a woman,
My penis is shrinking,
My tits are getting bigger.
In the pharmacy I browse the razorblades,
As keenly as an art connoisseur;
Single edge, double edge or triple edge,
With or without lubricating strip,
Fixed or moving.
War,conspiracy and menace fire the air with fantasies,
And we call it entertainment
But everyone just wants to kill the pain.
The beauty of our weapons
Exceeds other considerations.
Sit back and watch the show;
The acts of strangers, banal and erotic,
Will be staged for your aesthetic appreciation.
And yes, there will be sex, lots of it,
Fornication and fucking of every variety,
Endless hopeless transactions of the flesh,
Enough to poison you,
Enough to destroy you.
In the airport bookshop my hand reaches
For a self-help manual,
Grimoire of platitudes.
I want to believe in the exponential curve,
But all I see is boom and bust.
Japanese riddles twist the air into lemniscates,
I think I may be a man from Japan.
The fake is so much better than the real;
He will have his penis enlarged
And she will have her breasts enhanced,
And they will live happily ever after.
Religiously, I sit and make Top Ten lists
Of everything, watching stocks rise and fall.

Looking for Rilke

Useless to look for you in cities and biographies,
You are nowhere, nowhere to be seen.
But I can know you in a moment,
Catch your eye and take your hand,
You, the weightless hypnotist,
Always beyond, yet right here, in the centre,
Everywhere invisible and overwhelming,
The world, entranced, gravitating towards you.
It has to be you,
This emptiness that suffocates and absolves us,
So supple are you, so earnest and intangible,
Pure, fluid, volatile consciousness
Wrestling to the strangest victory
That nonetheless is only a hint.

Sinai

Yellow scrub, harsh sand, purple peaks far off across the plain:
Battlefield of millennia, hallowed by countless armies’ blood,
Littered with burned-out tanks and trucks, barbed wire, shell casings, jerry cans.
High on its sandstone plinth stands Serabit, temple of Hathor,
Sanctuaries, pylons, porticoes, altars, steles and walls, still intact,
Untouched since the ancient Egyptians abandoned the turquoise mines
Where Semitic slaves hunched, hacking for their lives..
There, on the rock face, their inscriptions survive,
Primal alphabet, etched in faith and suffering,
The Word made manifest, mothering peoples and worlds.

Phantom white sun through haze and dust,
The gathering khamsin’s harbinger;
Solid heat reeks of death and despair,
Black flintstone glowers to the drifting horizons.
Piles of bleached stones guard the oasis stream,
Graves of Bedouin who ride now in death’s dimension,
Under tamarisk and acacia, where desert larks woo.
Little man, would you learn forbidden things?
The vulture killed and buried for forty days and nights,
Then boiled to the bone, will foretell the future;
The first white bone will summon a rushing genie
To reveal the secrets of nature to his ward.

Isolate in immense night, owl stars countless all around,
You are nothing but a fallen star, all dust and dream.
A flaming meteor streaks suddenly to earth,
And the brute sun shoulders over the world’s brink,
Firing the brush with partridge cackles.

Against the sheer granite at the foot of Mount Sinai,
St Catherine’s monastery is a tiny cut diamond refracting the sky.
Inside, in the airless ossuary, myriads of jumbled skulls and bones
Confabulate in the gloom. Archepiscopal crania
Brood like Celtic totems in niches thick with dust.
A skeleton cowled and resplendent in purple embroidered robe
Sits, propped up on the qui-vive, cocked head shyly questioning,
Finger-bones clutching a staff and rosary,
Feet-bones protruding from under his hem;
The remains of Saint Stephanos, who once dwelled here alone,
Examining each hopeful pilgrim for piety,
His posthumous honour to guard these precious bones.

Catullus on Lake Garda

A sleek yacht dallying on iridescent unpredictable waters
That can turn in an instant into high rearing waves
When the ambushing wind swoops down from the Dolomites;
A man among friends, laughing, swapping gossip and bon mots,
Mercurial Catullus holds court in the bathtub of the gods.
Deftly he tacks round in circles under butterfly sail,
Now tender, now vicious, with a sly rascal’s grin,
Tearing at life with sharp teeth and fingernails,
Looking for the cracks in mighty statues.
Taking his pleasures with a sniff of disgust,
He sucks down the oyster with barely a gulp
And tries on new clothes with a yawn and a sneer.
There is nothing more frivolous than seriousness
And nothing pettier than grandeur,
But what is a man if he does not yearn
For the unattainable, the ultimate bliss?
Poetry is folly, but more noble at least
Than the games of politicians and the lies of priests.
Out there on the water he is in his tricky element,
Away for a while from the pompous world’s pretence,
Squinting like an augur into the shifting light,
To shadow the moon day and night with quick guile,
Or perhaps, after all, just to fall in season and be still.

The Arctic

Across the tundra the caribou are on the move,
Golden plovers’ eggs glow in their nests with eerie light,
Snowy owls drift like smoke at evening.

Sunlight burns like phosphorus on your cheekbones.
Caribou prance across the river, kicking up
Fanfares of crystals across the vesperal sun.

The dustless air is supernaturally clear,
Edges sharp enough to cut your bones.
Slowly you begin to notice the details;
Here and there, spots of brilliant red, orange, green,
Among the monotone browns of the tundra.
Always the sense of impending events
Tantalizes in the vastness.

Occasionally, you stumble on some isolated sign:
Animal tracks, owls’ castings, a patch
Of barren ground willow nibbled by hares…
Sandpipers scatter before you, screaming in Inuit.
In a creek somewhere you might find a mammoth tusk,
Or a cryptic ring of stones, undisturbed,
Laid out by a hunter thousands of years ago
To hold down the edge of his tent.

Enormous eyes of a solitary seal,
Dark brown, glistening in a grey feline head,
Motionless, surfacing in absolute still,
Out at the edge of the world.

Fogs and snow showers come and go.
The head of a polar bear glides across black glass;
Suddenly, in a single majestic motion,
He clambers up onto a floe and shakes
Off a whirlwind halo, then flows away
Into the whiteness, part of the sunlight and ice,
Only the subtlest hints of lemon and apricot yellow,
Of cream buffs and straw whites,
Betraying his fur in the snow.

Plosive gurgling in the silence,
Warm mist, then the sudden white tip
Of a tusk spirals out of the water,
Among the ice floes. A narwhal,
Bemused eyes, tapering grey body,
Marbled skin taking on variegated hues,
From deep sea green to ethereal blue,
Floats peacefully, all strength, grace and knowledge,
Composed and alert in his waking dream.
Beneath the silence the sea is all sounds;
Crackles and moans, booms, barks and yelps,
And the singing of whales in celestial chorus,
All clicks, trills, tones and harmonics,
Whisper of shifting sediment on the sea floor,
Grinding ice floes’ whine and roar.

Snow geese fly against stormy sky,
White against black in the mind.
Colliding with a headwind in unison,
Gently they fall to earth in their thousands
In graceful parabolas, then rise again like smoke,
In great swirling currents, higher and wider
Than the swooning eye can compass.
One curved sweep of ten thousand threads
Through the spaces in an oncoming flock;
Beyond and beyond, vast lattices intermesh
Until the whole sky is a limitless blur.
At night their high-pitched barking swells;
Single cries coalesce into a rousing cheer
That rises, rises, the falls away,
While storm clouds scud across the moon.

Eerie drift and suspension of time;
Rhythms, patterns, the energy coursing through it all;
Silent arrival of a herd of caribou;
Sudden ferocious surge of a placid iceberg;
Pistol-cracks on the river in spring.
In the pure light you can hold the whole story
Of man, like a stone in the hand,
The comings and goings, the breathing in and out…
This place has its own intricate algebra.
Here, death is the mother of all.

Icebergs, monastic creatures of light,
Whose beauty is a kind of terror:
Self-absorbed, they drift in a kef of tints and tones,
Pocked and faceted, abraded and streaked,
Flushed with blues and greens.
At twilight they take on the sun’s dying beauty;
Rose, reddish yellow, watered purple, soft pink.

First sunrise of spring, carmine and red,
Fading to crimsons, yellows and saffrons,
Shining through washes of rose and salmon,
Pale cyan, apricot, indigo.
The weird air conjures coronas and fata morganas;
Beauty and madness merge, singing. Evanescence wins.
We are angels of the aurora borealis,
Rippling translucencies, all dancing colours,
The teasing wonder of the universe at play.

Vaclav Havel

That wry smile kept its secrets with sly mischief;
Even at the moment of greatest danger,
He would throw in a smoke bomb, a joke,
A man in the crowd, no vaunting Messiah,
Yet somehow untouchable, remote.

He felt an impostor on his newfound throne;
Any moment, surely, They would come for him again,
Strip him bare, throw him back into prison,
Laughing like hyenas at their brilliant trick.

A scruffy nondescript bohemian fellow,
Rumpled and nervous, fiddling with a cigarette,
Noting his thinning hair in the mirror,
His voice a rasping monotone through clenched teeth,
He shyly yoked his staunch heart to the cause.

Surrounded from birth by lies and disguises,
Astronaut of the Unreal, cast adrift in space,
Only the truth could bring him back to earth
And fill his shrivelled lungs with oxygen.

Bemused, he looked life shyly in the eyes,
A lone diver befriending a dolphin in the deep,
Embracing with surprised love, holding on
To a miracle, a moment, a transformation.

Each word on the page cost a lifetime’s effort;
He went to the stage as Jan Huss to the stake,
Offering all for the moment of communion,
Pointing through the walls to freedom.

He saw the true faces behind carnival masks,
The damned souls meeting in awkward dances,
The laughter choking into sobs in the dark.

Man must make his stand here, in the sad heart
Of Europe, rediscover the marrow in the bone,
The meaning of love, responsibility, trust.

Self-doubt was the hound to his fox;
Many times he died and came to life again,
Astonished to find himself invincible.
Slowly realizing the rules of the game,
He turned the tables on despair.

Suddenly all the skulls were laughing,
The skeletons were dancing in streets and squares,
The church bells were ringing, the clocks were striking,
The sun was rising over the bridges.

Raffish Chaplin tripping with jaunty zest,
He opened his loneliness out into space
And watched the birth of galaxies, chuckling.

Lopsided at an angle to the norm,
He revelled in singularity, sneaking through checkpoints,
Tearing up yesterday’s identity card.

Modestly, reluctantly, he assumed the crown
And entered another theatre, unsure of his lines,
Determined to make this new role his own,
No man’s puppet, cutting the strings.
In the end there was the language in his mouth,
The roots of words to be rediscovered,
The bridges to be reconstructed,
The hands reaching out for his hands.

Serial Killer

Murder is the drug, the ritual, the orgasm;
I stalk the streets, a hunter on the scent,
Driven by some force I cannot comprehend.
I am the grinning skull beneath the mask,
Moving among you, in secret, unsuspected,
Your nemesis, invisible in the crowd.
You, perhaps, are the one I am seeking,
You, perhaps, possess what I most need.

Plotting, stalking, cornering the victim,
Springing the trap with animal relish,
I feast on the agony, the terror,
Then disappear again into your mind.
Send out your dogs, your police, to catch me,
I will taunt them and lead them astray.
My mission is no man’s to hinder,
As God is my witness, my employer,

I live from one werewolf moon to the next,
A travelling player born to the stage,
Rehearsing my fated role over and over.
Time slows; sounds and colours intensify;
Odours excite me; my skin is on fire;
I am changing, melting, it is starting again.
Soon I must consummate this dread lust;
The order is given. I must obey.

Primed for action, I await the signal;
A certain face, a certain voice, a certain air,
That begs to be seduced and conquered,
Longing for my gift, my healing touch.
God wants to see them writhe and plead,
To savour the terrors of hell in their eyes.
He needs their blood to make him stronger,
Their sacrifice to satisfy his pride.

That moment of triumph, when the prey
Goes still in my hands, a perfect work of art;
Revelation ignites me, a pillar of fire,
I am fearless, invincible, whole.
The demons cannot hurt me any more.
All the anguish is turned to bliss.
But no, too soon the fire is all ash,
The angel falls screaming into the abyss.

I am damned, dismembered, alone, no escape.
Can no one reach me, heal me, and love me?
That which I try to kill is killing me,
The pain within, the blank face in the mirror,
That lost unhappy child with no friends,
Who started fires just to watch the flames
And skinned his pets alive for pleasure,
To see what madness throbbed beneath.

Catch me, I beg you, make me confess,
Skin me alive, make me suffer, make me feel,
Exorcize me with your grimoire.
My magic does not work any more.
I cannot breathe here among the dead,
The earth is cracking, the stars imploding…
Reach out, take my hand and save me,
Release me from this bad dream.

Occitania

In the papal palace in Avignon
I muse on all the sorcery practised here
Among whores, charlatans, libertines and speculators,
The intrigue and debauchery,
The masterful corruption:Pope John XXII, from Cahors,
Owed his election to a magic knife
That enchanted the conclave of cardinals;
Through alchemical expertise
He filled the treasury with gold,
And used magic to protect himself
Against his many enemies,
Forestalling the hands of assassins
As they mixed for him ashes of spiders and toads
Or manufactured diabolical homunculi.

In the Musée Renoir in Cagnes-sur-Mer,
I stand, caught,
Where the artist toiled his last years’ dark web,
Agonized by rheumatoid arthritis,
Yet roiling on, fighting to enforce
His visions, to the end,the very end;
He painted with brushes strapped to those bent crippled hands,
Thrashing out paintings more voluptuous than ever;
Here stands his empty wheelchair,
His empty easel,
And the light of the olive grove.

The Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence,
Every detail designed by Matisse:
An old man using long bamboo poles
To hold his brushes as he hunched in a wheelchair;
The culmination of a life
Consecrated to the search,
The religion of line and light.
On the west wall blooms The Tree of Life,
All blue, green and yellow leaves glowing,
Which the sun slants through
And replicates across the stone altar.

In the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence,
Fifteen embalmed Celtic heads sit in array,
And the sculptures of heads, made to replace
Real trophies that had mouldered away;
These ancestors the Celts would sleep with at night,
Beseeching oracular counsel.
In the church of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine,
Midway the Triptych of the Annunciation,
The angel Gabriel, winged with owl feathers
As a bird of ill omen, kneels in the porch
Of a Gothic church, decorated with bat and dragon,
While from on high God transmits in a golden breath-stream
A cruciferous foetus, just missing a monkey’s head;
And a slender vase sports noxious belladonna.

In the Vallée des Merveilles,
Beneath Mont Bégo,
I wander, scrying scratched symbols:
Human figures, bulls and serpents,
Circles, spirals, ladders, and chequerboard patterns,
For eight hundred years
People came here and carved on the rocks.

The seven-sided church of Rieux-Minervois,
Virgin star,
Bethel of Sophia:
The central heptagon around the altar-
Four pilasters and three columns-,
Celebrates the marriage
Of foursquare world
And triangular heaven.
Midsummer sunrise fires its line
Through the altar’s prism
And out through a window,
Linking chapels across country.
She to whom the Sufis and troubadours
Sang their devotion
Is here, here still,
Weighing all suits,
To bestow or deny.

The Two Christs

You will read the apocrypha
And understand a little
And begin perhaps to mason
The keystone of the mind’s arch.
Christ hangs upon the tree,
And at the open door,
Under the angel’s calm gaze,
Mary and Elizabeth embrace,
Each moon-bellied
And haloed for doom.
Two fishes in the water
Curve a cathedral’s bent.
Witness the cross of light
In the skull; intersection
Of celestial equator and ecliptic;
Highest threshold of the eye.
In the crosshairs of the sun
Glares the lion’s hide
Of Palestine, where two
Christ-children born together
Body forth the stars.
Souls in streams of bolides
Shoot earthward through
The gates of Cancer
Into sublunar trial.
Crab-clawed Venice
Grips the secrets
Of mariners and glassblowers,
Silvering the mirror
With progenitive death.
Which way points the compass
Of Porphyry’s eye?
Read the heart in letters of Greek fire;
How pale life is even now
Turning into a pharoah’s death mask.
Deny neither the priest
Nor the king,equal in majesty
And rite;the dexter hand holds
The lily, the sinister the sword.
The twin saviour reigns
With Byzantine smile.
Genealogies real and fictional
Stir like seasnakes in the blood;
The unborn and the dead
Share one missal.
Around the wrist
The midwife ties a scarlet thread,
The first sly weft
Of robe and shroud.
At the tip of the sceptre is a star.
The Virgin’s hand
Cradles a radiant wheatear,
Beacon to night ships,
Toiling home.
Leaf and tree, our sins
Feed on the deep dark,
Photosynthesizing
As they fasten on the sun.
Over the manger
Ox and ass stand sentry,
While Mary kneels praying
At her son’s feet,
And Joseph,at his head,
Holds a candle.
On a full moon night
The bull is slaughtered,
A dagger shoved into the neck;
St Luke sits before his easel,
Limning the Messiah in pigments
Scraped from the earth;
Clutching the hem of the goddess
Stands the man with ass’s ears.
Caspar, Balthasar and Melchior
Compass their road
By the seraph star’s needle,
Homing in on the lion throne
Of Solomon,where the Virgin
Sits with babe upon her lap,
In a Renaissance palace.
The Mass attains its climax:
The Egyptian seed-cake consumed
In the god’s honour,
Reviving as the black alluvium
Of the risen Nile.
The peacock unfolds his tail
And the eyes of the blind
Become fountains of light.
Witness the vesica piscis,
Birth passage between worlds,
Mandorla of the adept!
What do the fire-philosophers
Keep under their Phrygian caps?
A spark falls into the water;
A fire starts in the heart.
Up from the dark crypt
The worshippers of Isis
Cary up her wooden statue,
Brow sealed with a cross,
And circumambulate the temple
Sevenfold, hymning her newborn Aeon.
Barefoot in the Temple,
Young Jesus sets his feet
Upon two bright star-swimming fish,
Parting in opposite directions;
See his heels disappearing
Into the clouds!
Unite the two Adams,
The man of heaven
And the man below,
And give the man-woman
Dominion in the peacock garden.
Let us celebrate the age
With water,wine and blood!
The pristine sea still calls.
Warm mother’s milk the twins
Suck from Mary’s breasts.
At the Last Supper, Judas,
Conjuring some diversion,
Steals a fish from the table,
Sneaking it beneath the cloth.

Continuity

Life: a history of vacillations…
Sharp tang of onions being peeled in the kitchen
Itches my scalp. On the radio
A requiem Mass groans and soars.
I inhabit the margin, undescribed,
As I seek a place among the living,
Searching the situations vacant
In their eyes.
I am never anything other than in between,
With the daily prose, the repetitions,
Exfoliations, memories, uninterpreted dreams.
A curious business, to be sure.
I improvise, become what writes me.
I decide not to pretend any more
Then go on pretending. Pretence, I venture,
Is my vocation. A jobbing actor, then, like all the rest,
Hoping my art will be appreciated,
My toil justified.
Sitting with an empty teacup,
I call for the right to be banal.
Unredeemed, unredeemable even, I languish,
Sometimes seeing beyond the day’s news.
This pleasure in thinking convinces me
That a masochist I am.
The fact is…the fact?- the fact is…
I parody myself in living,
Perfecting imperfection to the end.
Autumn again, and I fill up spaces
With anything to hand. Things happen
And happen, as they will, sufficient
In themselves, forming patterns, maybe even fates,
Delicate changes rippling on.
I examine the veins in my hands,
Bulging slightly- and a sudden fear
Hits me-what if my heart is already doomed,
Choked by cholesterol and stress?
I am forever treading on memory’s landmines,
Blowing myself to pieces, then reincarnating,
Slightly modified, and not certain of anything
Before or after, anyway.
Hats off to the solipsist,
Fingering worry-beads;
His quarrel is our own.
History stops here, in this domestic destiny,
Played out against headlines and “rhubarb, rhubarb…”.
What now? Ah yes, time for dinner-
Excuse this borborygmus…I get it all the time…

Rorschach Test

I lurch through darkness,
Like a sailor in the port of Manila,
Eager to find the spinning basket trick.

And you said you would not move on again…
You said you would settle,
Be normal,
Do as others do.
All kinds of nasty worms are in you,
Weeviling under and through…

I have sat on the steps of cathedrals
In miscellaneous cities,
Pondering and watching the crowds,
All the nameless people I will never meet,
My brothers and sisters.

In ten million years, the scientists say,
Men will become extinct.
Their chromosomes were defective all along.

From the Devonian and Carboniferous oceans
The shark has swum relentlessly on
Through millions of years, voracious, unstoppable,
While other species have perished all around,
On and on he cruises, seeking prey,
Cannily improving his design,
Nostrils tuned to the scent of blood, however minute,
The ampullae of Lorenzini under his snout
Detecting the far-off struggles of a wounded fish
Or the subtle respiration of a crab.

When does the next ship leave?
You know I will be on it,
Leaning off the taffrail, spitting into the wake.

Probably Not

All this needless beauty wounds me,
Tears me apart.
Between me
And the facts-such a chasm!
The phantoms of the daytime
Do me more harm
Than those of the night.

Entropy is catching up with me,
Physics plots the invisible graph…
(I reserve the right
To discontinue my existence
By any means,
At any time).

Head cocked, attending
The tintinnabulation of the spheres,
I check my hairline in the mirror
And sketch another fantasy world.

Behold the paramecium,
Shooting forward and recoiling,
In a one-dimensional tunnel…

Why maul my soul with wrenching woes,
Cursing and condemning myself
For this, for that,
For the man that I am,
And not someone better, something more?

Someone pass me a trumpet,
And I’ll play a high note
With all the breath I have left.

Dead Man's Hand

I’m done
But it takes so long
For the soul to separate
From the body.

I’m done
But it takes so long
For the tongue to realize
And be still.

Never was I one of the glad ones,
The happy-go-lucky, trusting in life,
Willing to be taken for a ride.

Mine are the doubting spider’s eyes,
Staring down the barrel of despair,
To catch its silver bullet between my teeth.

What is time and why does it want to kill me?
What is this godhood so inscrutable and malign?

Here to tell lies and make up stories,
Here to live and think and die,
Here to scheme and plot revenge against my enemies,
Here to scratch my arse and pick my nose,
Here to be here.

Too sensitive, too selfish,
I cringe at life’s slimy innards,
Terrified by everything,
Biting my soul down to the quick.

Happiness?
Is that all you think about?
Take what you want and pay for it,
As the Spanish say.

Here to orchestrate and conduct the celestial choir,
Here to pull tricks and attempt stunts,
Here to discriminate between phenomena,
Here to kick stones around on the beach.

The Horned God

In a gust of musk and honeysuckle
And rotting leaves,
The Green Man appears,
Tawny-gold and piercing
His animal eyes,
Tendrils branching and coiling
Out of his mouth.

The Horned God bears the New Year in on his antlers,
The Black Goat with a candle between his horns.
Now is the time between the times,
The seasons’ key turning.

The Godstone and the Hagstone
Stand in nuptial union against the sky.

The white stag wends through the wildwood,
Collared with a silver crown,
Luring the dazzled knight on and on,
Deeper into darkness.

The Celtic sorcerer assumes the Crane Stance,
Standing on one leg with right hand behind his back,
And right eye closed,
Intoning incantations and imprecations
Against his foes.

The Wild Hunt gallops across the heavens,
The witch slips her body’s leash
And flies by night,
Sending forth the fetch
Along ghost roads
To the midnight sabbat,
The hexentanz.

Instantly the Law of Misrule
Turns all upside-down and inside-out,
In infinite regression
Back to the womb of death.
The sun has entered Capricorn
And Saturn is overhead,
Lovers feast on each other,
The ass is offered in sacrifice.
The Christmas Fool, in animal skins,
Dances through the streets
With sword-dancers and morris-men.

The Devil lifts his pitchfork up,
The three tines white, red and black:
Creation, preservation, dissolution.

The red skeleton is rising,
The firewheels are burning, turning,
The black bull’s pizzle pricks the clouds.

Stripped to his crystal bones,
The shaman runs with the laughing stag
Through winter’s testing fire.

Cast a hex-star on the skull
And hearken to its babbling oracles,
The waters of memory’s well.

On stormy nights when thunder and lightning
Eviscerate the sky,
And rough winds rage through the boughs,
The gnarled host of woodwoses
Stampede forth out of the wildwood,
Raging through the oaks and pines,
Raising their eldritch voices
Amid the charivari,
Shaggy with ivy, leaves and moss,
Some mounted on deer and unicorns,
Brandishing leafy staves in their hands,
And at their head rides the Horned Wildman
Mounted on a stag, waving his oak club,
And beside him, on a unicorn,
Dame Wode, his queen.

Horsemen, smiths and shepherds
Assemble at Azazel’s whim,
Venus rises above the horizon,
Forge of the hidden man.

Celtic Landscapes

Land of the soul, earth I tread in hermeneutic trance,
Where the word roams everywhere, marking out shrines;
I walk the acres and gather them into me,
Communing with their memory and emotions,
Following the ancient tracks and paths of the spirit.
I am the man of the crossroads and the ford,
Will o’the wisp over water, churchyard and marsh,
Floating globe of fire and pillar of light.

See the moves upon the chessboard,
And the geomancer marking out the patterns of cities;
If the land is in order, right order will prevail among men,
Peace and plenty will be assured.
Her gods and goddesses enact their cyclic fates;
I am the man of the wild wood and the sacred grove,
I am the red wolf beneath the moon;
The wind in the hilltop grove is a sea of voices,
Prophesying in arcane tongues and riddles;
I am the man of the apple orchard,
To whom the summer’s juices are most sweet;
Always I have the blackthorn and the rose bush;
My word are the many-branching wood of night and day;
I am the traveller who sleeps in the branches
And dreams what dreams the fairies send.

O, Sacred Triad, immanent in all!
All things are threefold, all in process;
I make the invisible visible and honour the souls of places;
Stones, springs, mountains, islands, trees,
I recognize and salute them;
In them are heaven’s mind, inspiration and healing.
Harmony is of me, through me and for me;
The power of making and singing, binding all as one.
The nurtured earth blossoms; flocks and herds prosper;
Fields and orchards bear fruit; good will thrives between men;
The wind breathes joy into all quarters;
Tides ebb and flow; night and day live in each other;
The gyre lifts all in its thrall.
I, the soul’s astronomer, keep vigil by night;
Dragon’s servant, I cleave to the winding path;
Human and animal, mortal and immortal,
I create myself by thought alone,
Flowing with the cosmos, merging with all things.

The first woman was a rowan, the first man an alder,
And at death we enter the trees once again;
All trees are sacred to me, heaven’s rivers of light,
Conducting the lightning of our veins,
Striving ever upward, and rooting downward,
Praying and singing in the elements.
O to see the tree sprout from the seed
And thrust upward, outward, thrive and expand, leaf and bloom,
Cast its seed on the wind, wethaer the seasons, the years, with courage,
Gather its beautiful death, its climax, into itself,
The very order of the cosmos folded into its shape,
Nature and circumstance conspiring its destiny,
Twisting its character to suit the god within.

I see the oak struck by lightning,
The thunderbolt cutting a spiral through its trunk;
Rocks and stones are manna to my fingers,
I read in them the footprints of heroes and gods;
In my rock-hewn throne on the hilltop,
I contemplate and command,
Charged with visions and annunciations,
Transfigured by the circling stars.
My heart is the womb-stone at the world’s centre,
The axis of the universe and all its worlds,
The hearth where the first fire is lit,
From which all other fires are ignited.
I see the sun shining through ice-crystals,
Diffracted into the cross and circle,
And I roll the sun wheel round the heavens.
I am the rocking-stone of heaven and earth,
That speaks when the wind blows across the moon.

Pilgrim on the way, I build a cairn of prayer-stones
Wherever I stop, on the way to the shining mountain;
I read all arts and sciences in the stones of memory,
And cherish the green stones that save men from drowning.
I draw water from the holy wells,
And sleep by the well of secrets with the night sun,
I am the omniscient fish in the well,
Shimmer of iridescence in the darkness.
The sunrise in my eyes makes my skull the well of heroes.
I hear the singing of birds in the weird cave,
The noises of demons and monsters in the woods;
I feel the earth breathing, and the voices of women
Sound like the voices of the dead.
This music in my veins will surely kill me!
Have you glimpsed the Western Isle in the misty sea?
Sometimes at sunset its dark silhouette appears
In a second horizon above the distant waves,
But before anyone can reach it, it is gone

Event Horizon

This is where things get tricky- no, impossible.
The boundary. The edge.
Look- do you see that object falling towards it, falling forever, never quite reaching it, somehow slower and slower, as the redshift increases to infinity, and the intensity diminishes to zero, and you, you receive the doomed object’s last photon yet will never see it cross the horizon.
Or perhaps you yourself are willing to fall? To plunge over the edge, into the blackness, to the centre? And suddenly the mass of the hole has increased; the electric charge and angular momentum have changed.
And nothing escapes. You are not coming back.

Harbour City

Hydrofoil streaks a foamy curve
Across the harbour, out to sea,
Towers gleam and windows flash,
I am breathing blank light,
Seeing the world though glass,
And voices echo from far away
Right next to my ear.

Complexity, my awkward muse,
Bedevil me how you will,
And I will turn the pain to glory.
This age of unreason adulterates us all;
Smirking swindlers set out their stalls,
Peddling deception to make a killing.
Superstition wears the imperial purple,
Wields the scepter with mad abandon,
Promoting its minions to every office.
Long live the three-card trick, we cry!
Like a bored girl bewailing dreary fate,
The world is always eager to be taken,
Seduced by some flamboyant rake,
Used, abused, debauched and abandoned.

The soul needs long journeys to breathe in,
Long hard journeys all across the map,
To all kinds of places, a thousand points in time,
From creation to destruction and back again.
What time is it? What time is it?
Suspended in liquid, I congeal into globules.
Wherever I am, I am passing through.

Is the answer at the bottom of a beer glass
Or on some mountaintop?
The root of every impulse is pain.
Affinities and affections
Are the measure of my days.
I miss my friends even before I have left them.

I was born of the sun’s largesse,
A pharaoh doomed to die,
At midsummer’s behest.
I spend my lifetime building a pyramid high.

Freefall

When the aeroplane explodes at thirty thousand feet,
I want to be the one who falls to earth in one piece
And sits up in a hospital bed,
Modestly recounting my story to the press.

Newtonian forces aid my descent:
Spread-eagled at terminal velocity, I fly home,
The ground coming at me so hard, so fast,
I aim to make a perfect five-point landing.

Rational World (Written on a MacDonald's Napkin)

Choose your life from the menu
And join the queue.
This is Paradise,
And you are paying by the minute.

Do not disturb my clean safe world,
My perfect simulation.

I am hungry,make me full.
Now.
And no mistakes,
No surprises.

In the shopping mall
I walk through light and music:
Life sells life,
I want it all.

No time.
No emotion.
Press the button
And move on.

You buy,
You eat,
You toss the trash,
And run.

I pick up the phone,
Dial the number,
She speaks,
My pornographic robot,
Word-perfect.
“Sorry, tiger, but your dream girl has to go now…
Call right back and ask for me.”

French Polynesia

All I know is floating,
Green and blue, blue and green,
This world and I,
Symbiosis of clownfish and anemone.
High islands and atolls of the mind,
Westward-drifting into the dying sun,
Show me your volcanic secrets…
Mana from under my feet,
And at my fingertips,
And on my eyelashes,
Every breath is freedom…
Pearl farmer tending oysters with meticulous love,
Rearing black pearls in the lagoon,
I tattoo my spirit on the sky,
In waves and spirals,
At one with the god of thieves and sailors;
I see my own death
And my bones,my laughing skull
Set among the banyan roots
Along with a conch shell.
The basalt eyes of the tiki
Watch over all:
Lay no hand upon us,
Disrespect us at your peril.

Love Bites

Twenty-four surprises in your eyes,
Skies on your lips,
Mountains on your fingertips,
Lightning up your spine!
Let’s laugh our way around the world,
Before the bogeyman can catch us.
The whole earth is revolving
In the palm of your smile.
With every kiss you give a twist
To life, a stab at joy.

And so we lie on our stomachs on the carpet
And face one another over the chessboard:
Your move!
I watch your fingers hover
With tactical finesse.
J’adoube.

Galaxies collide:
Smashing together, spirals
Explode into massive plumes
Of stars, gas and dust,
Writhe and twist
In elliptical agonies,
And their centres coalesce
Into one core.

Atomic Theory in New Mexico

In an old adobe church
In the Sangre de Cristos Mountains,
Christ writhes galvanized on the cross,
Bleeding from the gashes in his chest,
The nail holes in palms and feet.
The grinning skeleton La Muerta
Rides by in a cart, shooting his bow and arrow.
In shuttered village houses
Catholic penitents flagellate themselves
And torture their bodies and minds
In the Christ-trance,
And, shouldering the dead weight of Good Friday,
March, march, tottering under crosses,
Lacerated, lashing one another with whips.

The spark from my finger to a doorknob,
The lightning flash across the mountains,
The pull of a compass needle.

My mind:
Deep as the atom,
No up or down,
No in or out,
Just there.

I invent the universe
I wish to live in,
Conjure the spaces,
Clock the times,
And move,
Move through it all…

The random disturbances
In a pattern of crystals,
The flaws in a salt cube.
Occasionally a piece of quartz
Will crystallize with almost perfect hexagonal faces.

Atop Tsankawi Mesa,
With the wind and the crows,
On the bright southern side,
Carved on the cliffs,
Glimmer Tewa petroglyphs:
Among them a man
Pressing a flute to his lips.

At Fiesta in Santa Fe,
In the evening darkness,
A seductive fire dancer
Lifts up her torch
And the giant effigy
Writhes and groans
As it flies into fire.

Looking heavenwards at night
The Navajos see First Man and First Woman,
Dancing round the North Star.

Zeugari

1

The dark eyes, and the long fall, the long night, - whatever it offers of pleasure and loss, and foul truth.
Insatiability-the necessary curse. Voices assail me, instruments out of tune, and I lose my feeling for music.
Perversity, perversion-both can own me, invert me and create. I render falsity true.

2

Tenderly touched, with the force of night, a searching power in the lips and fingertips, to discriminate, discover and enjoy. Celebrate the slow plunge into oblivion, the sudden wisdom, the impossibility of things.
Yours is the curvature of the earth, calling to ships in port.

3

I am learning to read. Greedily, I translate and traduce.
Cryptographer of days, I befriend my own secrecies.
Let living be the prayer that holds the stars to their promise.

4

My moment passes. And only the spider notices.
Head under blanket, I clinch deals with the darkness.

Pushkin's Erotica

From a book of Mexican magic:
To seduce a girl,
Carry a dead hummingbird in your pocket
And slip powdered human skull into her drinks.
I wonder:
Should I give it a try?

Teach me with your mouth,
I am willing to learn.
Elucidate the mystery
Just a little,
Not too much.

Spring is on a spree
And the sun is melting
Golden syrup
On your skin.

Flies of the species Serromiya femorata
When mating embrace as if kissing
But,finally, the female
Sucks out her lover's innards through the mouth.

The eleven-year cycle of the sun’s magnetic field
Accounts for sunspots, solar flares and the aurora borealis.
But it does not account for us.

The German Summer

I prowl the summer streets
And down by the river,
Bristling with will and lust,
Storming the skies
With mindfire,
Razing whole cities
And charging on.

Morning,
And the street is full of saints,
Sun-haloed and glowing…
Our bodies’ laughter
Is lightning back to the sky.
True blondes and false,
I love them all,
Nature and artifice
Equal delights.

Germania-
Black honeycomb…
Terra obedientiae,
Smiled one medieval pope.

Mining the sun
With the tip of my tongue,
I saunter with the summer,
A damascene prince.
Not bones, but words, outlive the death of stars.

Shining, dying,
Supernova,
Her haloed belly-mountain,
The pregnant woman
Nude on the beach,
And the bright lake adoring her,
The sun caught in her blonde hair.

Wherever I turn
The clean, severe and pagan face,
Sun-minted and shining,
Arrests me.
Severe commands arise
And force me to revolt;
I draw the runes
In fear and expectation.

Doors Close Soon After the Melody Ends

Did I tell you about a friend of mine?
One day he jumped into a lake,
And when they found his body,
He was curled up like a baby,
With a big smile on his face.

We know when dinosaurs roamed the earth;
How long it takes for radioactive isotopes to decay;
When our hominid ancestors branched off from apes;
The dates of lunar and solar eclipses far in the future;
We know, we know it all…

Come to the encounter,
Make of it what you will,
In this world of copies
That we dub beauty,
Layer on layer
Of commodities,
Signs…
Technology is the mystery
And we its sounds;
Take what you want,
Give what you need.
Here I sit,
Scribbling and crossing out.

My mind:
Silurian reefs in the Welsh Borders, the hilltops of Wenlock Edge:
White limestone mottled with coral colonies,
Some miniature spiderwebs, others little chains,
Stromatoporoids, trilobites and brachiopods,
Bryozoans, snails and sea lilies…

And I stand here,
Like a man struck by lightning,
All his innards ravaged,
Yet not a mark on his skin.

Learning on the Job

I have seen so much of noon and midnight, seen so many silhouettes on walls.
What is the end account? To balance the books: a noble endeavour, but, alas, not a skill I have ever acquired.
I am what I have destroyed, the nothing I tried to annihilate. In the joyous beginning I already perceive the grievous end.
But we must let the music go its own way.
The days are coming for you, coming again, you can count them, if you like…unpredictable obventions bait your mind for the kill…
To live by accrementition, to inspissate routine and procedure, to become the idle fabulist of one’s own times…me too!
Remember those ice-cream summers of not so long ago, when the sun king crowned you prince of park and shore, and you galloped round the oak tree fifty times, playing kiss chase with the sky? You believed the Bible stories, you wanted to be Jacob with his ladder. Dragons alighted and fed from your hand.
This is the clearing-house of dreams, the warehouse of spices from distant isles fought over and since forgotten.
What do I trust in now? Not Fate, but a good hand of cards. And if a rainbow should happen in the air again, I will dash out to see it.

Chocolate Nooses

Autumn eyes-
Why so mournful?
No Arabian horse
Is more exquisite than you.

I draw the Pythagorean pentacle on your skin
With my Sumerian finger:
Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, Saturn and Venus;
Water, Earth, Air, Fire, and Spirit.

In the sensual time
Will you free your secrets
For the taking?
Will joy reveal itself,
Simple as a glass
Of water?
Pleasure’s edge
Is a place of doom,
Vertiginous
And sheer.

And after you are gone,
The sun will still rise,
Apples, as always, will be either sweet or sour,
Dogs will still run after sticks.

Meditation in a Nightclub

She dances for herself
And no-one else,
No-one else but the sound;
And she moves the energy,
Becomes the current;
Sound is her element,
By will and whim.
She shapes the air,
Sculpts the moment,
Electromagnetic
Then gone.

In the clear Arctic waters the sea is teeming
And pulsing with organisms:
Tiny copepod crustaceans beat in myriads
Through the surface waters, feeding on plankton,
And jellyfish of every size and hue
Drift in throbbing millions, swirling
And beating against the tides,
Dilating and constricting
In obedience to the currents.

Are you waiting for a giant asteroid to strike,
Or for deadly viruses to wipe us all out?
Super volcanoes might erupt in their dozens,
The poles might shift,
And tsunamis sweep the earth…
Surely it’s time for aliens to invade and conquer,
Time to be fried by a mega nova,
Or shall we just let wars and famines do us in?

Meanwhile,
I am here, in the dark,
Like a snake with four penises.

Where Does It Hurt?

Is there absolution in music?
Or does perfection invest the silence?
No right have I to claim the office of a lover,
Nor deem myself a good and kindly man,
For fierce importunate lust drives me on,
Crashing through barriers,
Battling all-comers,
Without satisfaction or end.

Irony’s empire extends its frontiers further
With every iffy day.
And here is a token,
A bent coin,
A conversation overheard.

I offer no axioms,
Make no prophecies,
Do nothing save breathe.

Proud words,
Lofty impertinences,
Idiosyncrasies of the air!

Sad translator,
Solitude’s rabbi,
I slyly parse the world.

I claim no special gift:
Winds, rocks and dunes can also sing.

Mathematical proofs are not my forte.
Take me, or not, on trust.

Adventures on Other Planets

Climbing Mount Olympus on Mars,
Freezing in carbon dioxide wind,
I look out over the Tharsis Dome,
Across the tops of gargantuan volcanoes,
While Phobos speeds across carmine sky
And dust storms scorch the plains.
Traversing Venus, Earth’s infernal twin,
Under brimstone clouds, I fight through
Thick mephitis, as the devious crust
Shifts over roiling furnace fires below,
Across volcanic clines, faults and ridges,
In Ishtar’s spiderworld, with twisted eyes.
I stumble around grave Mercury’s craters,
Under endless giant cliffs, staring into
Perpetual black skies, dragged ever down
Under the weird horizon, watching atoms
Sputter off the surface, driven by solar wind,
Cosmic rays and micrometeorites.
Descending through Jupiter’s thunderheads,
Lightning-struck, stifled with poisons,
I plunge into hydrogen twilight ocean,
Whirled in maelstrom firestorms,
Ice-crystal-bright, endlessly mutating,
Drowned in the voracious maw.
Through Saturn’s icy rings reflecting,
I hurtle, deep winter’s snowman sacrifice,
Past icebergs and snowballs in flight,
Into the dream-blizzard, dancing the dazzle,
As deep harmonics resonate in space,
Maintaining delicate mass in place.
Uranus’s waters call me to set sail
On ghost-blue voyages to invisible shores,
My compass whirled by its queer core,
Through extreme seasons, rotating
Backwards among millions of moons,
Giddy with fatal elixir.

Eidolon: Sophia Prounikos (Sinistra)

I move through the Egyptian temple,
Lifting the heavy door latches
With keys in the form of ankhs.

Sister-wife,
The serpent of light
Devours us both.

I am the honoured one and the scorned one.
I am the holy one and the whore.
I am the mother and the daughter.

I am the maker of gods,
Worshipping their creation.
I have come to light the torches in the bridal chamber.

Baptized in water and light,
I wait for the perfect reflection.

Give me the strength to keep faith with life,
Knowing that all is well.

Mnemosyne (Memory Theatre)

This Venetian glass keeps its secrets,
On pain of a little death.

I am the scholiast of my own soul,
Studying to classify.

These talismans I have charged
With the power of the stars.

Saturn rules my skulking days,
With the wolf, the lion and the dog.

Wheels within wheels,
To conjure demons and angels.

Angelic grammar of the intellect,
Build bridges and stairs.

Souls descend through Cancer
To drink the cup of forgetfulness,
Then ascend back to the heavens
Through Capricorn.

The Foundation Stone

Back to the Tree ! Here and now. No more words like sin and redemption ; just breathe.
This life is mine and now.
Come to Mother, come under her skirts.
Leaves,branches,roots : it is all yours.Fire,water,air and earth.
Mystery I need, strangeness I crave : to question, to puzzle, to explore.
Bring the heavens down, earth the heavens through your body, with your feet planted square and your backbone straight.
Everything is telling you to act from the heart, all these energies want to be reconciled, all these moments want to be seen in the round, instantaneous, eternal.
To receive is to reveal.
In your hands is the map of the universe, the union of inner and outer, the rainbow bridge, the means to converse with angels and spirits, the mother of symbols and connections, the essence of forms, colours and sounds.
What is the purpose behind the reason?
This is what maintains me, all my bones, blood, tissue, muscles, lymph and marrow, sensations, thoughts, feelings : the attraction of the earth, the sun, the stars and planets; the attraction of every dust-mote in this room; the resistance of the floor and the pressure of the air.
I spell the universe, sounding the depths with my tongue, ringing out the bells to the limits of time. This is unity, this is love.
O, spheres of the Self, inexhaustible sources! Here am I, above and below the Abyss. Ten magnets attract and repel, masculine and feminine, positive and negative.
I will draw you the symbol of myself, using the dot, the circle, the crescent, the arrow, the horizontal line, the vertical line and the cross.
I am the man of seven altars, seven angels, seven rams, seven trumpets, seven seals, seven deadly sins, seven stars, seven days, seven notes, seven colours, the seven-pointed star.
This is my body, the world. This is the Kingdom: touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing. Now my eyes are open, now they are closed. Everything is happening, all at once. Everyone, even you, must one day pass through the Gate. The Royal Vulva calls you, the Bride awaits her groom.
Let not discrimination and scepticism turn to inertia and avarice.
Your feet feel the earth, your anus tenses.
Blue child, see the splendour. Osiris sits enthroned in the sun.
Feel the unbalance, the disharmony of energies, the grief of the suppressed. It is you who must create yourself and the world. Release and transform the unbalance, and increase knowledge, understanding and wisdom. What will you find on the dark side of the moon ?
I am there for the waxing and waning of the moon, the full moon and the invisible moon; I am there for sunrise and sunset, for midday and midnight. I must fight my way forth to independence, else fall into sloth and stagnation. The penis erect, the clitoris erect ! Pure intelligence sees through to the innards of the cosmos, to the core.
Incense billows with memories, emotions ; the scent of the ritual self. O, astral light, substance of dreams !
I am of the farthest star and the nearest mote.
Connect your heart with the heart of the sun.
You must learn the words, names, verses and spells of magic. The art of mind is my passion. The sounding of each letter of the alphabet vibrates in space. See how the different notes resonated through iron filings draw them into different patterns. These powers, used with love, bring the blessings of the universe; used for ill, they wreak destruction.
What will the chalice pour out for you ? I see Mars in Leo, and Venus in Scorpio, the Moon in Aquarius, and Saturn in Taurus. How you suffer,brwteen unselfishness and lust ! It is wisdom to surrender, to walk around and look at what is there. Enflame yourself, exalt yourself in prayer, in meditiation,,to clarify, control and direct the forces of your very birth. And then you will call the simplest thing ecstasy.
O, beauty, harmony ! – I am the sun at the core of the swirl, the heart around which all revolves. I must seek the balance of attachments, the dancer’s poise. All that matters is devotion to the Great Work, the fulfilment of the True Will, the dialogue with the Holy Guardian Angel.
I am Adam, the first-born, the first blood, the radiant hermaphroditic child, the venerable old king in the shadowy palace. In my hands I grasp the victory of pleasure, the science of success.
Who is this I, ever changing, never sure ? Everywhere I turn, I see reflections, reflections in reflections, reflections of reflections, everywhere. Opening, rising, I begin to sense the pure,permanent,immutable,indestructible self beyond.
Now, this instant, a lightning flash illumines the universe entire,simulutaneous, all dimensions.
Love under Will is the lion whose mane is constellations and whose claws are fire.
Between polarities, I seek the third place, to create the higher triangle.
Witness the head of the serpent spiralling up the Tree, seeking out the crown, unable to break through the veil of the Abyss, reaching no further than Knowledge. You are here at the demon-guarded gate, between the real and the illusory, the ideal and the actual, the potential and the manifest. Above the Abyss all opposites are reconciled; below, all is duality, confusion, horror. There, in the Abyss, dwells the great demon, the disperser of false knowledge, the consumer of consciousness. Beware the demons, the harlots, the shells, the vampires, the ghouls, the destroyers.
The caduceus is given to you : will you choose to ascend or descend? Which will you choose : mysticism or magic?
Seven ways invite the soul : will, love, action, beauty, science, devotion and ritual.
The waves of the Great Sea silently break over me. Saturn and Neptune rise in the heavens, controlling the tides, and my long-dead mother walks towards me in the garden, proffering the lily in her hand. The cup and the wand are yours to wield. The myrrh of the yoni intoxicates me. The Queens of the court come black and mournful. This is your path, to trace the shape of the vesica piscis.
Here is the cup into which you must drain every last drop of your blood, before you may cross the Abyss, and enter the City of the Pyramids.
White brilliance of the Crown, swastika revolving, thousand-petalled lotus, Macroprosopus at the end of Time !
Now the union of the god and goddess, -desire, grace and reality as one, ad the moment of orgasm when the Holy Spirit enters the celebrants.
It is the Veils that clarify and train our eyes.
What do you see under the electron microscope? Only yourself, and everyone.
When you are healed, you will become a healer.

Tongue is hand is head is path.
Three triangles encipher me, creature of spheres.
I discard the shells and shadows of things, monster of knowledge in the brilliant forest.
Return to the centre: be the sun of the cosmos, shining through everything with joyous splendour and forgiving.
Have you not sensed the purest harmony, the simplest serenity, beyond all this confusion?
Time to come to your senses.
These are the secrets of angels, from the first time.
In your breathing, unite fire and water.
The lightning flash zigzags through the spheres, through the numbered order of creation. The three pillars usher you in. You are the spider’s dream.
You will suffer the mysteries of the body, heal yourself and overcome inertia; Venus will shine on your shoulder, where you awake. The painter’s hand moving is waves of music; the sun transfuses all with soul and beauty. Through the agency of shadows and rainbows, you comprehend the plan. Silence and secrecy are your true friends ; dying thus is but the increase of wisdom ;the inner quest; the amplification of spiritual energies and the revelation of divine inspiration.
The Abyss exists to summon us to love.
So many necessary veils! Into the deep.
Archangels gather in the empyrean of your eye. Honour the temple and hallow the ground: set your feet upon the rolling globe, foursquare under the heavens. Then you can raise a monolith of light.

Anatomy Angel

Disgown the fraudulent scholar; defrock the corrupted priest;
Unseat the bad king, traitor to his vows.

You look for my meaning, my biography?
Then look into the noonday sun.

I read you only to re-read you,
Baffled by hermeneutics,
Scrabbling at the bones beneath,
To suck the marrow’s sweet.

Beauty severe and belligerent
Strikes lightning at my tree.

I mark the changes, the seasons of Me,
Lusting for the purest blue.

Laughter is bold as love itself,
Penetrating walls and bones.

What violence have I done to myself,
Thinking my way to be true?

Eccentric’s just another way of saying
That the centre is not where you think.

Up there is down here to me,
In is out, with is without,
Yes is no is maybe,
Echoing in the head.

I beg the wind: show me the new direction,
Include me in your perilous designs.
I am the man whose breaking
Makes a new world whole.

Black Devotions

The age of saviours,
The age of barbarians:
Vows are made,
Demons are invoked.

Mystify the blood,
Romanticize murder,
Elegise terror,
Exalt apocalypse.

Who are these intruders,
Vile faceless tribes-
Well-poisoners, cattle-rustlers-
Who would steal our fire?

Glove and jackboot,
Hidden eyes:
The black skull grimaces
A killing joke.

Black magic,
Left-handed tantra:
The idiots make cruelty
Their alchemy.

Philosophers and thugs
Join hands and march,
Singing the hymns
Of the clenched fist.

Uncanny and unholy
The killers recite
Their liturgy of blood
For darkling moons.

They speak of evil powers,
Dark forces, secret rites,
And the brute hand falls
With absolute simplicity.

The raised hand flashes
A death’s head ring,
Striking black lightning
Into bedazzled eyes.

In praise of the wolf
The outcasts gather
To turn fear and hatred
Into fabulous worlds.

The Ring and the Grail

See the cross within the ring,
The Holy Grail, the Dew-cup, the sovereign seal;
The Pendragon sups from the chalice of days,
Anointed to die in his time.
The blood of the succession
Glows in the Grail Queen’s womb.
Who will quest for the ring of justice,
And keep the throne’s foundations square?
Kings of Sumeria and pharaohs of Egypt,
Kings of Israel and Persia and afar,
Merovingians and Britons,
He who would misuse the Ring’s power
Will be himself destroyed.
To the Fisher King the faithful
Bring gold, frankincense and myrrh;
Drink the blood from the chalice,
Molten starfire on the tongue.

The Shining Ones return, the mortal angels,
Fairies and elves of the human way,
Winged dragons of the heart.
The king rides in his scaled armour,
Bearing the serpent’s blazon,
Beneath his swan-feather cloak.
The lily’s nectar sustains him;
And the Ladies of the Fountain sing his name.

The lost bride wanders in the wilderness,
The guardian plummets from the lightning-struck tower;
Where then is the underground stream
Whose waters you hear in dreams?
Black bishop, raise your hallowed robe,
Show the world what you conceal.

Sister Mary, Scarlet Woman,
Bless me with the scallop shell;
I will meet you beside the quiet pool.
Dragon Queen, mistress of the deep,
I ,the keeper of the nine rings,
Light my fire from your torch.
Twin serpents coil heavenward
Around the winged staff;
Thus the Swan, commanding the skies!
The bride anoints the groom,
And crowns him king and god.


The Serpent Lady waits in the wildwood,
Among the broom and willow;
The green stag runs among the trees;
The lily and the rose are bound.
Ah, food of the gods, from the womb of the black goddess,
First matter of the alchemists,
Music of the matrix,
Seasons, periods and cycles!
Out of lunar darkness comes the voice,
Storm of white light, purest gold,
And through the mind marches
A torchlight procession of thoughts.

Northern Spain

Rain, elixir of the rising spirit!
A star appears in the Milky Way
And shoots towards the west;
Lord of Thirteen, live the zodiac,
Egypt of the spiral soul.
It is time for the Goose Game,
For the bridge, the inn, the dice, the well,
The labyrinth, the prison, the gateway, and death.
Isis, bless the way!
Before the revelation is the tomb.

Dust blows round the half-finished cathedral;
Blood shines on the sword.
The giants whirl in a minuet,
Kings and queens with swirling skirts,
And a rocket goes up as the first bull is loosed;
At night fireworks burst over the citadel
And the maddened fire bull chases children down the street.
Midnight is a candle in the hand
And a sad song’s consecration.

The damned laugh, and Christ looks on with subtle smile;
The three Marys hold hands beneath the Cross;
Judas hangs from a fruitful branch.
The Master Carpenter comes to build a church
In the name of Lazarus, nailing his love to the sky.

The wolf waits on the hillside.
On the day of the spring equinox a sunbeam
Strikes the womb of the Virgin of the Annunciation.
We shall build a cathedral of stone and light.
One morning, listening to the song of a bird,
The monk fell into ecstasy
And saw into eternity,
And though to him it seemed but a moment
When he awoke many centuries had passed.
O,five stars and a crescent moon!-
A stone serpent coils in the font,
The naked woman suckles serpents, with lions on either side,
The twins hold hands beneath the rainbow.
The triple spiral staircase rises,
Granite stairways interlacing in a single tower,
Each leading to a different door.

Western Alchemy

Consider these signs:
That which dissolves is spirit,
That which coagulates is body.
A spirit can enter a body
To attenuate and clarify.

Sulphur and mercury,
Two substances with one essence,
The serpent with wings
And the serpent without,
One holding in his mouth
The other’s tail.

Sophic fire
Penetrates and destroys all things,
Transmutes the feculent
Into perfect spirit.

O water, true spirit,
Illuminating and sweet,
Bitter and obscure,
Strengthen us until the day of death.

In the caverns of metals
Is hidden the bright stone,
A mind sublime,
An open sea.
The king and queen
Bathe together in the fountain.

How many times
The philosopher’s ship
Is dashed against the capharean rock,
Wrecked and lost forever!

White is from black,
Purity from corruption.
The vulture and the toad
Are magisters both.

Purge yourself
With degrees of fire,
See true whiteness
Shining like a sword.

The green lion may devour
The sun, but you bide
With stars and seasons,
Coming into your own.

From a Hotel Window (The Operative Fiction)

Black angel of routine,
Cover me with unholy wings.
I am guilty and impure,
Absolve me.

What should I do?
Saddle up and ride across Mongolia
In search of Agartha
And the King of the World;
Stumble round Paris with a guidebook,
Root out the rue Nicolas Flamel
And search for signs…

Do you see him,
The serpent Nechushtan,
Coiled about the Tree,
His tail in his mouth?

How can the mind’s restless energy
Comprehend the stillness of bliss?
“You’re welcome,” grins the Devil,
“The first lesson is free.”

This loneliness
Is like missing someone I have never met
Or perhaps met only once
And briefly.

A Lick and a Promise

Shoot your wad, roll over, fart and fall asleep.
That was the acme, the efflorescence
Of life, the best of the flesh and its follies.

There you go again,
Like a chimpanzee poking a stick
Into a bees’ nest
To get at the honey.

Red or blue?
Home or away?
Bus or train?
Up or down?

I can neither cure the sick
Nor heal the lame.
But I can love you,
I think I can love you.

Separation,
Have you come for me again?
Absence,
Do you favour me so much?
Other moments,
Other days,
Wait for me somewhere.

The Girl and the Goldfish

Once upon a time there were three little goldfish,
Voyagers in a murky sea:
Desdemona, rightly, was the first to die,
Flushed down the toilet with scarcely a sigh;
But then Iago, forgetting his role,
Stepped out of turn and surrendered his soul;
That left Othello, bewildered and lonely,
Burbling fishy soliloquies
Through figures of eight.

She was telling herself the same old stories,
Alone in her head, with the same old stories,
Adding new details now and then,
Not wanting those stories to end.

“You wouldn’t even think of buying tomatoes now,
Not at this time of year,
Not in Poland,” she cried,
“I thought that was my home.
I thought he loved me.”

One summer’s day,
She stripped down to her underwear
And swam like a platypus
In the shining lake,
Quite drunk.


Winter came
And the Snow Queen
Rode her golden sleigh
Across the sky,
Wrapped in ermine
With jewels on her fingers.

She was chanting, dancing,
Whirling in the crowd,
Invincible Catherine Wheel,
Martyr to light and sound.

Some days she painted her fingernails.
Some days she did not.
The shade was always chocolate brown.
On her wall
Were a dozen museum tickets
Pinned up like butterflies.
On the dressing table,
Doubled in the mirror,
Lay a broken-backed Jane Eyre.

Othello swam on for a year or two,
Then he too vanished down the loo.

The Practice of Mirth

I will paint your face
Into my fresco,
Sacra conversazione
In black and gold.

Who believes in saints these days?
Who puts their faith in angels?
I, holy fool
With unholy fingers.

Confusion’s riches win
The sky’s abyss;
The anti-pope’s damask
I don with a grin.

Rimini

Tempus loquendi,tempus tacendi

Inscription in the Malatesta Temple,Rimini


Will the elephant tell his secrets, out of the east?
Will the circling stars devolve their powers upon us?
Fortune-teller, turn the next card.
Here comes Gemistos Plethon, the noble Byzantine,
Smuggling wisdom and magic under his cloak,
Thrice-great as Hermes himself;
Ficino and Mirandola are as his familiars,
Two black cats walking on tiptoe.
I see them all walking in the streets of Rimini:
Moses, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato and Christ,
Commanding stars, stones, plants, symbols and places.
The artist makes his heart a talisman,
Conjuring spirits, good and ill, into matter,
Fashioning models of the universe.
The Temple is a mystery that the soul
May solve at last only in solving itself;
Dreams and doctrines lure you on,
Apotheosis or anathema your destination.
Cults and sects muster their faithful for the reckoning,
False prophets stalk the streets, crying their wares,
The hidden hand makes moves on the chessboard.
See Sirius rising over the Adriatic:
Philosophers and artists, like the Sabeans of Harran,
Build pyramids of images to the stars,
Pharaohs on golden barques ascending.
Sigismondo Malatesta returns from Greece, defeated,
To his bankrupt city, surrounded by foes,
Having lost his last chance to save himself,
Bringing home the dug-up body of Gemistos Plethon
To bury him with honours in his Temple,
Beneath the claws of the Crab.
These stones are a zodiac unto itself,
Grand enchantment for initiates’ eyes,
Drawing me as a bird to a snake,
To fathom the fathomless, trusting to find
In history reason, in death resurrection.
How many ghosts infest this weird city,
Parading their torments and terrors through the mind,
Running wild in the streets’ grimoire?
By day the sun burns like a witch’s pyre,
Like Eucharist on an excommunicant’s tongue;
Then shadowed moon presides over a séance,
Speaking in the mingled voices of the dead.
Night’s fool, I seek the Muse in bodies,
Intoxicated by the smell of women and the sea,
Dancing in a carnival crowd of skeletons,
Till dawn melts my bones down to mercury
And drips me onto mirrors, into the abyss.

Addict

Let me suffer and come clean,
Let me confess through my skin, through the pores,
Break through the bad dream.
Suffer for purity, for love, for compassion,
Suffer to feel, to sense, to know,
And be wise, as you once were,
Before you had ever heard of wisdom.
This pain you complain of
Is the laughter of the gods,
This pain means you are human.

Hello Again

Wherever you are now, I am with you still,
Up to my old tricks, eager to learn new ones…
Maybe there are higher forces after all!
To hell with life!-I’m unrepentant, unreformed.

From you I somehow never recovered;
The virus was treated, yet inexplicably lingers on,
Evolving new strains to perpetuate the dream
That might have even made me a better man.

Ciao, Bella!

Black cats, lithe and slender, how proudly
You prance, the dazzled streets your habitat,
Flouncing through life with immaculate grace,
Elegance your weapon against misfortune.

Commedia dell’arte of the teeming piazza!
Columbine’s wiles turn the world on its head.
Superstition seethes under the paving stones
Whereon new shoes execute the passegiata.

No surface escapes the mirror’s verdict;
The will to be beautiful squeezes every purse;
Mannequin poses arrange the world thus,
Magnetic fields of attraction and repulsion.

Above and Beyond

Let the vision arrive,
And go free.
Who desires to repress and ridicule us?
Who demands our incarceration?
Who sends out the troops to kill us?
Who wars against the truth?
I claim my medicine, my adventure,
the peril and the exaltation of my birth,
I invoke the way of angels and demons,
I rescue myself from the deep.
Whatever is the world,
I will see it with my own eyes,
The ineffable, the unknown.
To be a man, not a ghost,is my ambition,
To know, not to believe,
To live, not merely exist,
To be and not to have.
Let the spirit fetch and guide me,
Explore and transform me,
Annihilate me and bring me forth.

Spiralling plant forms and geometries dancing,
Auroras of music,
Miracles of memory theatre!
I follow myself from conception
Through simultaneous dimensions of being,
Self-shapes, ever-growing, ever-changing,
Endless revelry of forms.
Supreme intelligence
Courses through me,
All my bones, tissues, organs, nerves and processes,
Scanning and correcting errors, repairing the damage,
I watch my mind’s nuclear reactions,
Subatomic explosions and drifting clouds,
The functioning of the machine.
O, spirit, have you come to show me
My destiny,
The destiny of the world?

Hieroglyphs, patterns swarm in the air,
Pharaonic gateways to other realms,
The terror,the majesty
Of spiralling outward and inward
Into alien space,
All spirit matter pulsing with harmonics,
Pure mathematics, pure language.

Túcume, Peru

Spirits and demons infest the red hills
Where shamans, good and evil, contend;
Dead men’s incense clouds the sunset
Conquerors’ hymns fuel the high pyres.
Great city of pyramids, I come in peace,
With lapis lazuli and spondylus shells,
Where great balsa rafts catch the wind
And sail out to sea along royal canals.
The potter’s hands contain a universe,
Emptiness the substance they shape.
When pest and deluge blight the land,
The last Inca lord’s bright skull will sing
With prophet’s tongue,among the sands,
And his giant shadow walk in the storm.
What power have empires and thrones
Against the true word well spoken?
We come to this place to be reminded
Of what our hearts have always known.
The sacred stone tilts true on its axis
At the city entrance,in the solar temple;
My own dead bones I bury there, clad
In rich cloths, out of mercy and sorrow,
Then turn away through the bright gates,
Out into the desert, into the man to come.

Vermeer (1632-1675)

See what appears within the camera obscura:
A silhouette, a man, somewhere off to the side,
Not too well defined.
He is watching,
Patiently attending the light.
The moment is anticipated,
It drops by,barely noticed,and sidles off.
And all is quiet.
Meticulous hands are sifting,crafting,
Spying the unseen.
This watery business called living,
Might it not be,actually,all optical effects,
An angels’ fanfare on the retina?
The rapt eye knows no rest,
Adjusting shapes and sizes
To make them fit.
We need only atmospheres
To give ourselves airs,
Ineffable yearnings,and the like.
Tones and nuances
Tincture the soul,
As if there could be radiance
Suddenly,silently.
It is all in the light,
Or it is the light,
Those ultimate discretions
Whose filigree limns us,
Oblivious to time.
We find ourselves refracted and reflected.
This composition you live in
Turns out to be a mood.

Against Salvation

“Why do you strive against your own salvation to find death in love?”

Pseudo-Titus


Some do not want to be saved,
But to feel the night on their skins,
And the cowled moon,
Telling the rosary of the blood.
You may know us by our wounds:
Pain, the mason’s mark,
Seals our hearts’ Etruscan tombs.
So let wry flautists serenade
The symposiasts of the afterlife,
Reclining on scarlet couches
In the cypresses’ dark shade.
Husband will be laid with wife,
Alabaster mummies etched
True to the love they embodied,
The dance they dared in life.

Meeting Natasha

Mercury falling,
Red dragon streak,
Ice-splinter
Piercing the heart.
Moscow crouched like a jaguar
Under the Amazon’s eyelids,
Sweating rainbows.
We sat in the café,
Opposite sides of the table,
Chess players plotting our moves
To the beat of the clock.
“Where is the sense?” she said,
“Where is the meaning?”
I stirred my tea
And stared into silence.
Her coat hung on the hook behind me,
A giant vampire bat
Dreaming upside-down,
And we talked,
We talked about life,
As if it was something we could change.