Wednesday Metaphysics

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

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

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

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

Silent Partner

Badfingered boy
With a pocketful of menaces,
I stalk and lurk
In cobwebbedorridors
Past doors with windows
Of frosted glass.

A death full and rounded
As the life it contains,
That is what –if a genie
Should appear from this bottle
Of wine-I would ask for.

Blessed and cursed,
I consecrate myself each day
To the vow I first made as a boy,
To mine life deep and true.

(To fix experience
In a passable manner,
That will do,
And is probably more
Than I can manage).

I am the keeper of manuscripts,
In love with a dark quatrain;
Contradiction and distraction
Divide me with fierce glee,
Lost twin seeking home.
The angelus of other days
Tolls its summons,
But I linger under arches
And silently wait.

Chaotic Orbit

January crowns me with snow,
Moulds me in cold molten sunlight and holds me,
The ground beneath straining like a whale’s back
Shrugging up from the waves.
O God, unclench my core,
Gather the skies into myself,
Crying freedom, freedom, freedom…

When a young wandering scholar I was, slovenly and caprylic,
Sniffing musty books like fine wines,
Shagging imaginary tarts in the heart’s knocking-shop,
I brokered dodgy deals with time,
Master of insider trading.

It’s my round,
What are you drinking?
The top shelf,
From left to right.

To Shakespeare I present a lily,
To Byron a rose;
Which of them, I wonder,
Had the bigger nose?

Tiny Earthquakes

Playing cards whirl in the autumn wind.
Embedded fossils hoard their primal capture
In pockmarked suburban facades.
Strangers ooze automatic venom,
Squint through windows they long to smash,
And watch the evening fall on television.

The physics of history entraps us
In action and reaction,
Wars, earthquakes and avalanches
Occurring with similar patterns,
The tiniest actions reverberating
With immense unforeseeable results.

(And,for my next trick,
I might catch kuru
And turn into a cannibal,
Giggling myself to death).

Oh me and my wonderful career:
To swallow the mercury of irksome labour
And scrape like a mouse in the wainscot
Of the moneymaker’s lair…
To handle the excrement of money
And lose the happy leisure soul demands,
The vagabondage dear to human growth.
Economic conscripts, we parade and march
To the drum, and shine our caps and buttons
Till the cannon cut us down…
Bile’s quicklime sears the gullet,
As I make neat piles of ash, day by day,
And pray for a minor promotion, a little more cash.

I sit and practise my card tricks:
Four Burglars,
Invisible Deck,
The Acme of Control.
This viciousness within me
Revels in cruelty and assault,
Apt to torture and flay any foe
For the least slight.

Petrus Ramus,after fifty books on logic,
Was murdered in the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre,
His fine blackbearded head lopped off
And tossed into the Seine.

Grail Kings

Dragons among men,the truth-sovereigns
Reign in crimson mantles,
Sceptred with bold knowledge and prosperity.
With golden goblets they toast the sun,
And feast on all the world’s delicacies,
While silver lyres play eulogies
To these twigs of the great tree.

Gift of the black Dragon Queen,
The Mark of Cain, a cross within a circle,
Protects the quarters of the realm;
She lifts the Dew Cup in salute,
The Venus orb brimming with blood royal,
As the line spirals through generations,
Under the moon’s red authority.

Hail the swan I have loved all my life,-
White fire of land,sky and water united-
Under whose wings hide eternal ideas!
Thirty-three degrees of knowledge
Burn in my brain’s nectar, red gold
Of the pineal gland,-come,scarlet woman,
Bless me with the lily in your hand!

Ontology

To die like Montesquieu, in the arms of his lover,
An unfinished essay on taste by his side;
Having lived to some purpose,
Learned a little, and cherished the good.

Can we carry our questions with us
Over there, whence they seem to come?
Or will they remain here, gloating like ghouls,
Richer and more powerful than we ever were?

As Hegel said, dying of cholera,
“Only one man ever understood me...
And he didn’t understand me...”

Ask what is human, what is me;
It is the grief, the separation....

How I envy Julius Canus,
Who, condemned to death by Caesar,
Was playing draughts when the executioner came.
Counting the pieces, he smiled at his companion,
“See that you don’t falsely claim after my death that you won,”
Then calmly rose and walked out through the door.

Cantor Dust

Patterns of weather
Like the bark on a tree,
Like lichen boulders tumbled in glacial landscape,
Like swallows scattering over the fields...
Inside the beehive,
I live the unpredictable,the irregular,
The tiniest factors
Coalescing in each act.
The universe exploding,expanding,
Swirling gases and star fields,
Ever more detailed the closer you peer...
And,as twin foetuses grow in the womb,
The cells migrate into different patterns,
So alike,yet distinct...
Another leaf is dropping into the stream,
A pebble starts to roll, an avalanche triggered...
The branching of a fern
And the shape of a thunderstorm
Dance in the cracking of ice on the springtime river....
I hold up my hand
And it turns into a shark’s fin,
An oriole’s wing,
A feather.
The transformer is transformed,
As one word is changed in the poem,
One brushstroke on the canvas.
Monstrous grace of the furiously inelegant!
The rhythms of enzymes and viruses,
The actions of the brain,
The dizzy percolation of rain through rock,
Microscopic macrocosmic beauties,
Endless forms recurring and transmuting,-
Lunatic world- delight,
Irregular as a ginger root!
See the compositions of starfish,
Washed up on the shore
By fabulous chance.
Here,in my niche,
My opportunity for evolution,
I revel in geological folds of time,
Sine curves of emotion.
Minute as a mite in a bee’s trachea,
I linger in the jagged ragged world.
How many grains can one add to the sandpile
Before it collapses with a sigh?
What happens on the moons of Jupiter
Happens in my front room;
It is all such fun,
Collapsing neutron stars spinning madly,
Supernovas bursting like spider eggs full of new stars,
Suns vomiting magnetic storms across the void...
From the coasts of my mind
I can see the deadly ocean,
All maelstroms,wrecks and ghosts ships sailing by.
I was born to curving country roads
And crumpled hills.
The progress of a forest fire
Or disease through an apple orchard-
Bizarre wonders branch into the eye
And out through the fingertips.
Dark swarms of prisms whirl through me,
Egyptian pyramids of love and fire;
Moonrise finds me skulking
Like a scorpion under a touchstone.
A seed crystal is falling through the atmosphere,
Its hexagon growing at the dizzy boundary,
Combining chaos and order in flight.
Frankenstein’s monster of time and weather,
I plunge into the badlands,
Happy as the spiral in a firefly’s eye,
Noting the whorls and scrolls
Of chemical reactions,
The first signs of life on earth.
Heart attacks,tsunamis, a sudden waterspout erupting
From still seas,-from an absolute coalescence
Of conditions, the unforeseen arrives,
Storming the fortress of the blind.
The crossroads calls me to its gallows-
Which way now?

Mozambique

The mask and the dance are yours
And you belong to them.
This is Africa,
Where death is just a slowing
Of time.
Malaria trawls the blood,
Plotting a fever chart
Of deaths and resurrections.

Gold trader of words,
Smelt your life
In the sunrise;
The Indian Ocean
Commands you,
Calls you down.
Remember:
Nobody knows where the names come from.

The living are hopeful and the dead are very patient.
Placid as dugong grazing sea grass shallows,
I breathe water, earth’s memory,
Alchemist in a laboratory of dreams.

Barefoot up the mountain
To the humpback whale herds of clouds
Where forbears’ voices cascade,
Zambezi,
Limpopo.

Hours and Minutes

Tomorrow is a shrug of the shoulders,
A coin lost down the back of the sofa.
Time is all I have learned and am learning.
So much happens
When nothing is occurring,
Trillionfold incident and accidence
On the peripheries of the senses,
Rhythms too subtle
Except for music.
One hundred trillion cells,
Clocking their destinies,
And the suprachiasmatic nuclei
Pulse with invincible precision,
Even as the corpse decays.
All I know of time is movement,
Ravel’s Bolero in my head,
A single repeating melody and rhythm,
Volume and timbre changing,
From whisper to fortissimo,
Sublime monotony.
The beating of a mosquito’s wings
And the malaria of time
Penetrates the bloodstream;
A tenth of a second-
Is that a moment?
It is all I can grasp...
Bewildered as those medieval theologians,
Trying to calculate the exact time
Christ’s resurrection took.
The so few times,the so few experiences
Of a lifetime(how many more moonrises
Might I notice, let alone see?)
Coded and migrating through the mind,
The alchemical apparatus of the brain...
(Lightning in the locus coeruleus,
Up and down, stimuli of emotions)
Neurons and dendrites
Jungle the spaces I move through,
Ridiculously human,alone and conjoined,
Expert in thresholds
And sad at some point each day.
“Before” and “after”,”earlier” and “later”,-
Bedevil my mind-and the childhood
Ahead of me, behind, all around...

Florentine Alignments

Scalding hot cioccolata con panna
At the Caffé Rivoire on the Piazza della Signoria,
On a damp clinging winter day,
With so very little to hold onto,
So very little in the world…
Yet this richness thrills me,
Burning a hole in my tongue.

In the church of Santa Felicita,
I slip the custodian a tip to switch the lights on
And there is Pontormo’s Deposition, revealed,
All vivid pinks, greens, ochres and blues,
Christ’s body swooning in death’s dream
As he is lifted and hefted down,
Wondrous and weird.

In Peter Bazzanti and Son’s bottega,
Among reproductions of ancient Roman bronzes,
Fauns, satyrs,gods and goddesses, Socrates and Homer,
Antinous and Mithras, and all the rest,
I ponder my own ersatz antiquity,
Northern barbarian in classical garb,
Polishing my rhetoric in provincial accent.

In the Museo La Specola, I wander
Among the waxworks of human bodies,
Serene exquisite anatomies,
Dissected, disembowelled, skinned, decomposing,
Gazing out with open expressive eyes.
That fierce speculation of the Florentines
Has inspired me all my years.

Searching out the masters’ Cenacoli,-
Ghirlandaio’s in San Marco and Ognissanti,
Andrea del Castagno’s in the nunnery of Sant’Apollonia,
Perugino’s in the Convent of Sant’Onofrio,
Andrea del Sarto’s in the church of San Salvi-
I almost hear the deep music of Europe,
(As a boy I dreamt of astonishing the world,
All would hail me a universal genius,
Supreme in my every endeavour,
Surpassing all rivals with divine ease and grace).

In the Laurentian Library’s vestibule,
I thrill to the organised expansion of space,
The monolithic columns soaring,
The staircase of giants ascending
To princely celestial heights,
Just to mount these steps is to swell
With regal pride, the puissance of art
To fashion worlds beyond the common mind
With elegant force, brooking no mean restraint,
No petty taxation of the spirit.
See here how space is bent and forged
On the mind’s anvil, heated to fury,
Folded, mirrored, turned inside out,
With a will to dazzle and beguile,
These worshipful walls calculated to retain
The duke, their centre and focus.

In the sotterraneo of the Sagrestia Nuovo,
I scan the drawings, sketches and doodles
On the walls, made by Michelangelo,
Hiding from the Spaniards
During the siege of 1530,
In the darkness and silence,
He took some pitch from a wall torch
And, to forget his fears,
Covered the walls and ceilings
Of this tiny cave with images from his mind.

Sicilian Vespers

I cherish the early mornings,
The smell of coffee and warm succulent bread,
As the sun saunters in like Cagliostro,
Promising riches and eternal life.
Death, like almond blossoms,
Smells sweet and falls on my head.
(Frutti alla martorana in the pasticceria window:
Perfect marzipan imitations
Of peaches, oranges and prickly pears…)
And I think of Goethe fleeing fame
And the dark skies of Germany,
Under a false name, over a barrel,
Nodding at the Masonic handshake of time,
Seeing Venus in every chambermaid’s rump,
Measuring Greek statues with ponderous delight.

In the Galleria Regionale in Palermo
The fresco The Triumph of Death:
In the centre Death the Archer
Rides a ghostly horse with ribs protruding
As he plucks off bishops, kings and ladies,
While all around the elegant people
Entertain themselves, oblivious,
Playing music, chatting, riding out to hunt,
And only the poor and diseased
Are aware of Death’s presence
And turn to him, entreating release
From earthly misery.

In the Oratorio del Rosario di San Domenico
The allegorical statues of the Virtues
Saucily model the most opulent fashions,
While all over the walls anarchic putti
Ride piggyback on one another,
Mischievously yanking each other’s willies.

In the Convento dei Cappuccini
The mummified corpses of thousands
Hang on the catacomb walls
According to their earthly station,
Dressed in their everyday clothes,
So many children among them.

I walk though the Villa Palagonia in Bagheria,
Like Ferdinando Gravina
Under the sign of his coat-of-arms,
A satyr holding up a mirror
To a woman with a horse’s head;
(Vicious jealousy as he spies on his young wife,
Every twist of her body and mind
He must possess,and deny to others,
Every glory of his own madness
He must force upon the world)
The stone monsters in the garden,
Leering, writhing, sneering, snarling,
And the house fitted with strange distorting mirrors
And furniture made of broken teapots,
And chairs with spikes hidden under the cushions.

In the ruins of Motya
I stand before the tophet
Where Phoenician women would sacrifice their firstborn
To the goddess Tanit;
In the museum stand hundreds
Of burial urns and funeral stelae
For the infant victims.
And here are the tiny ornamental braziers
Used by Phoenician ladies
To burn myrrh and spikenard.

The Torre di Federico II in Enna,
High among the mountain clouds,
Absolute centre of Sicily:
The Emperor built this octagon
To mark the hub of the Trinacria;
Ascend the spiral stairway
To the top,and grasp the entire isle
With the mind,believing in one
Geomantic design,submitting
All earth to the heavens.

Uncanny light of Strómboli,
Melancholy abandoned isle of weird musings:
Climb, climb the volcano ,
Red sparks flaring up from the firefountain
As the god rumbles below;
Your dreams’ smouldering magma
Will light up the night.

Charles Fort

Pay close attention to the patterns
And leave the spaces blank.
I will apply my own scientific method
To the wildness of things.
My intention is to play the game without cheating.
A snippet from a newspaper
Tells me more than Plato or Descartes.

All kinds of things fall from the sky:
Different-coloured rains, yellow, black or red.
Blood.Fish.Frogs.Hailstones the size of cannonballs.
Giant spiderwebs float down and cover the countryside.
Some folks will understand, others go insane.

That day when the boy next door
Told me, grinning, that Santa didn’t exist,
That he had seen his dad putting the presents under the tree.
I could not believe it-
All that splendour untrue!-
Surely he must be lying?
But I thought about it, and thought about it,
And the doubt slowly grew.

I collect and arrange things in order,
And re-order the order,
Adjust it a little,
Then start again.
What need is there of petty invention?
The facts themselves are all too beautiful, too much.
Fiction and truth are equal strangers to me.
It is the patterns, you see, that matter,
The shapes in the sand.

That ghost city on the horizon
That never grows any nearer,
That is where I am headed.
In a few weeks, when Mars is once more in opposition,
We may witness more peculiar events occurring.
Everything, I find, is hyphenated,
Oxymorons from top to bottom.

At the end of each day,
I jot down a plus or minus sign in my diary,
Depending on whether, in my opinion,
Life has been worth living.

I have invented a new board game,
A more accurate representation of war,
The troop movements, manoeuvres, ambuscades and feints.
Why, when I explain the rules,
Does no-one understand?

I speak, but do not believe,
Like a weeping statue of the Virgin Mary
Or an earthquake after a meteor.
Comedian or scientist? Which am I?
Beware the quiet men with watchful eyes;
Some of them have strange ideas.

The Last Khan

Baron Ungern-Sternberg,1885-1921,White Russian General and Last Khan of Mongolia

The blood of the Teutonic Knights
Yells through me-Mongolia’s warrior-king,
Cutting down enemies with the sabre
As I gallop over fiery horizons
In yellow silks,astride a white mare.
No mere man, but the God of War himself,
I live to slaughter the unclean,
Purge the world of the Bolshevik virus
And the evil stench of the Jew!
With a wave of my hand, I can raise
Armies, legions of devils to ride
West against the proletarian scum,
A Golden Horde is mine to command!
I am Genghis Khan reborn,
And all Asia will become my empire,
Under the yellow flags of Lord Buddha,
In this crusading age of Shambhala.
Heaven shall see the monarch restored.

Barechested, hung with bones and charms,
Smeared in filth and blood,
I ride my nightmare like a shaman,
A monk whose worship is the kill.
The angry gods, skull-garlanded,
Trampling corpses in their dance,
Demand tribute in the temple’s gloom,-
Lords, accept the generous sacrifice,
Flayed skins of our foes,
From my bloody hands!
I keep my men about me like wolves,
Packs that feed at my hand alone,
And chase down any quarry for fun,
Tearing flesh down to the bone.
Wretches, traitors, hear the name
Of Great Star Mountain, and tremble!
I bow to no man, true scion of my clan,
(Did not my ancestor, ambassador
To Ivan the Terrible, have his hat
Nailed to his head because he would
Not doff it to the tsar, or any man?)
Since the first fire of consciousness
Ignited in me,I have fought a war
Against the world,my puny inferiors,
The craven, the ignoble,the weak.
Truly, these are the Last Days,
The battle for order and the world,
When the ungrateful peasantry,
Corrupted by their Jewish leaders,
Rise up against their God-given masters.
(What,Jews,rule the world,will you?
Ruin nations and races from within?
The blood of Zion is rising
Amid earthquakes,famines,plagues,
And the sword is whetted for battle,
Angels and demons on horseback clashing!
The toxic seed I shall exterminate;
The snake I shall crush with my boot).

The turn of the swastika
Decides the evolution of men;
My blue eyes are starting to see,
To penetrate and manipulate minds.
The Hidden Masters of the World
Guide my hand,clenching the Cossack blade!
(Sitting alone with my playing cards,
I always draw the ace of hearts.
What,by God, does it mean?
Is the omen good or bad?)
Now the triumphant East will rise
In wrath against the doomed West,
And set the pyre of history ablaze!
It is the time of the wild horses,
The cavalry charge into the cannon
Of time- dust devils of the frontier,
Ride with me through the very gates
Of Hell!-my horse’s ears prick
At the hints and inklings of nature,
My wolfhound teeth rend each moment
Like the tenderest meat.
Break out the vodka-drink
To the white fever,and show us
The visions in the opium cloud.

Rage is my joy, my insurrection:
To cross the endless grasslands-
A sword at my hip,a gun in my belt-
And see no human sign,no excrescence,
Is the highest pleasure,driving oneself
To exhaustion,and beyond,becoming
The land and sky,invincible,
Ragged and scarcely human any more.
Every torture the gods inflict on mortals
In Hell, we shall enact them here on earth,
Scourge the base and wicked without mercy,
With ice and fire and savage beasts,
In these wastes,where every tree is a gallows,
For flayed hides to dangle from.
Joyous war:-epic fruition of man!
In these days the essence of life is uncovered,
The false and mundane annihilated,
The unity beneath screaming out.
Wolves follow hard on our battles,
Feasting on the feet of the dead,
Strung up from branches along the roads.
Sweet beasts,my friends and brethren,
How I admire your simple purpose
And skill,-stay at my sides,I will feed you
On carrion kind unworthy to live.

Out here I need no home,no possessions
Save my opium-pipe,in whose clouds
I scry the shapes of destiny,unfurling
With infinite ease,so clear to me.
What news do the soothsayers bring me?
What prophecies for my troops?
Let the scapulimancer do his work
And the bones set the date of battle.
I know –it is foretold-I shall perish out here
When my time is come,but my victory
Will survive me,-so bury me with my horse,
And be done!

Benin

O, Dahomey,
Spawned from the leopard’s loins,
Your kings have all turned into trees.

Meet me at the mouth
Of the River of Death,
Where the crocodile
Waits in welcome.

The lion sits in the long grass, dreaming;
The leopard hauls his prey up into a tree;
The honeyguide flits above the ratel,
Leading him to a sweet hive.

The male weaver bird selects
A place to build his nest,
At the end of a thin hanging branch,
He strips it of leaves
And then flits back and forth,
Carrying material blade by blade in his beak,
Hanging his nest from the branch end,
Interweaving grassblades into the frame,
And finally when completed
He shows it off to his mate
And if she disapproves she will tear it all apart
And make him start all over again.

Slowly, slowly,
Creeps the chameleon,
Moon-eyed spectre,
White as death.

Every gri-gris at the market tempts me,
The féticheurs’ promises all convince :
A love charm or a travel talisman,
Or a cure for any sickness…
Look: a crucified baboon,
The empty eye sockets
Of a dozen monkey skulls…

The female anopheles comes to feed…
Fever, shivering, headquake …
What are these nightmares?
Despair claws my face,my heart,
Hyena in the dark,
Eyes and ears are in panic,
Heart stops and starts…

In the python temple of Ouidah,
Spirits mount the bodies of the entranced
And dance them to exhaustion,
Speaking through their bones.
They awake in Haiti or Cuba or Brazil,
Among the living dead.
The snake coils and uncoils,
Swallowing its own tail,
The rainbow appears out of the mist,
Flames of running water
Chase behind my eyelids,
This world is a spiral of smoke,
A jackal in the waving savannah grass.

The last road of the slaves-
After they had circumambulated
The Tree of Forgetfulness
And the Tree of Return;
After they had sat in the dark dungeon
For months, till their spirits
Were broken, disorientated and too weak
To struggle or resist
As they were packed into the ships-
Ends at the beach, at the Gate of No Return,
There the slaves, hobbling in shackles,
Emerged, at the edge of the abyss,
Where the Revenants waited to welcome home
The souls of the departed returning one day.

In Abomey
Paths lead through twisted alleyways
Past bright fetish temples
To the palace, and So, the god of thunder, on the wall,
A red ram with lightning shooting from his mouth,
And two axes at his side,
And in the throne room all the kings’ stools
And their personal banners,
With the emblems of their strength and pride;
Thee kings sat on thrones
Adorned with their enemies’ skulls,
And festooned the walls of the city
With the severed heads of enemies,
To relax they had a harem of thousands,
And each night would choose the girls
He wished to spend the night with;
For sport they expanded their kingdom
Through constant war, and sold the prisoners
As slaves to the Europeans;
Occasionally they would perform
A human sacrifice, in times of crisis,
By throwing the victim off the city walls
Where the mob below would finish him off
With rocks and clubs, then the blood
Would be smeared on the city walls.
Proudly he reviewed his army,
Especially his regiment of Amazons,
Half-naked, the Amazons muster for war,
Drilling with rifles and bows,
A regiment of thousands,
The most ferocious and skilled warriors,
The king’s own bodyguard,
Striking fear into the bravest men…

In the Djêho Temple-
Built by King Glélé to house his dead father’s spirit,
With the blood of forty-one slaves,
Golden powder, pulverized velvet,
Silk, pearls and alcohol,-
The sacrificial knife is raised,
Ready to honour the gods.

Of all the kings of Dahomey
The thirteenth, Adandozon, is held in abomination
By his people, as a madman and traitor,
They dread to even speak his name
Lest his evil spirit be conjured up,
For he loved to castrate men and feed them
To hyenas, and slit open the bellies
Of pregnant women to use their foetuses
In black magic, and worst of all he wanted
To end the slave trade, and cease
The duty of unending war.

At the crossroads stands Legba the trickster,
With huge proud phallus ever-ready,
Smirking at the prospect of some fun.

The diviner casts the Fa stones,
Scries how they fall;
The Father of Mysteries
Listens to the air.

I see the first men and women
Descending to earth from the branches of the iroko tree,
Here, where the chicken’s throat is cut.

Out into the crowd
The Egungun is escorted,
Bright-robed and horned,
In seashell mask,
And speaks high-pitched
In inhuman voice,
The counsel of the gods
To lowly men,
Beware, his touch is death,
Seek not his eyes
Behind the veil,
They are death.

Hitchcock's Blondes

The love of beauty makes men cruel.
The self is never sated,
Feasting on fancies and precisions,
And from suffering conjures new worlds.
The lover’s and the strangler’s hands
Work the material into motion,
Torturing sensual pride until it breaks.
Some vital irrelevance will start the hare
And set emotions hunting,
Across tangled country, in hard weather,
Triumph of the English winter.
Shades of dread arraign the hours:
Separation is the hallowed rite
That weds the priest to silent grief.
No friend but the darkness,
He nominates demons and waits
For the next possession, eager
To study its miraculous stigmata.

Turkmenistan

In a drop of water
All the suns of the universe
Burn;
Barchans of the Kara Kum,
Flat clay desert and gnarled saxaul trees...
The sun makes Zoroastrians
Of us all.

If the stone rotates
On the pilgrim’s fingers
No sin has been committed.
From the conical oven
A round loaf is born,
A new sun.

Purge the air with burning yuzaerlik,
Over a girl’s breast
Hangs the triangular silver tumar,
Charged with Koranic text.

Weave the seasons into your carpet,
Weave the elements and lay it out
For anyone to sit upon,
Human on the earth.

At the Ak Ishan shrine
Pilgrims peer into the well
For a glimpse of the moon,
Their wishes’ grail.

Like a goldencoated Ahal Tekke,
Lean, longlimbed and indefatigable,
The heart crosses great distances
And does not give up.

Materials for a Life

This glass of water in my hand:
Still. So still.
No. Pandemonium.
Armageddon of atoms.

Between two mirrors,
I watch the reflections
Recede into infinity,
Each image a Russian doll
Of riddles.

I is I,
The only thing that matters,
The myself itself,
Me me me.
Symbol of symbols,
Figure-of-eight.

Words, associations, episodes.
God and goblin,
I believe and disbelieve,
Sovereign-stupid.

Bolivia

Mountains of the divine potato-
Smelting-furnace of coups d’états!
We are mining the future
In the altitudes of Indian eyes.

Ice-beguiled by Mount Illimani,
I survey the shanty slopes of La Paz,
Ramshackle lives not to be extinguished
Without some true commemoration.
In the Witches’ Market I buy paraphernalia
For appeasing unkind spirits,
Something to keep life at bay,
Where bowler-hatted Aymara women
Stand behind the stalls,
Babies strapped to their backs.
Mandrake roots of language
I pull from the air;
Spanish,Quechua,Aymara.
In the museum,I look upon
The mask whose wearer once had
To dance till he dropped dead
To guard the year from drought and disease.
Weird beauties, elongated skulls
Of the ancients, trepanned
To let the gods in, and exalted
Like mountaintops!

At Tiwanaku Viracocha stands
Above the Puerta del Sol,
Haloed with the puma sun,
Snakes and condors at his beck,
As he strides forth with staff
To climb the mountains of man.
The blood of the beheaded
Pours into the earth at his feet.
The lightning-struck man
Releases rain from his hands.

South through the open door
Of a Potosí church, look
Towards the devil’s cone,
Cerro Rico, bleeding red
And yellow,-these stones
Are mortared with the blood
Of slaves who mined
The Mountain of hell,-
Their souls corralled
And flogged into obedience
As their poisoned bodies
Fell into the earth.
The hands that dug silver
Carved suns and moons and sirens
Next to Christ and his saints
On these walls, and the Virgin,
Triangular Andean peak,
Reigns over all.
And here, over the doorway,
Is an archangel in the garb
Of a Spanish soldier,
Armed with sword and shield.
These streets are narrow
And crushing as the mineshafts
And corridors of the mountain,
History’s mercury destroying
The newborn’s blood.
All must pay tribute
To the leering Devil, king of the mines,
His engorged cock raised
In brazen salute,
Greedy for booze and coca.

The winged toad and the puma-headed bird
Roam the underworld of monsters
Where the horned devil reigns,
Back and red design
On a mountain woman’s shawl.
On a church pulpit:
A portrait of Francisco de Aguirre,
Rich mine owner who renounced
His life of power and vice
To become a priest;
He holds his heart in his hand,
Surrendering it to Christ,
While stepping on prostrate Cupid,
Ignoring the calls of erstwhile friends
Eager to lure him back to debauchery.

Across a sheer rockface
Thousands of dinosaur footprints,
Laid down in the Cretaceous era,
On a flat mudbed covered by shallow water
Then covered by volcanic ash;
Predators chased down and killed
By legions of scavengers.

On the outskirts of Vallegrande
Lies the pit where his executioners
Laid the corpse of Che Guevara;
In these low scrubby mountains
He chose his proper end,
Stopped at last, a man who never knew
When to stop,
Surrounded by enemies,
Abandoned by friends,
Ignominy transformed into tragedy,
A dog’s death into martyrdom.

The Jesuit mission church at San Javier
Built by forest hands that had never known stone:
Domus Dei et Porta Coeli,
Baroque plaster facade
And in the courtyard the belltower
Supported by massive carved tree trunks,
Inside the church the retablo
Shows St Peter crucified upside-down
Surrounded by black-robed Jesuits
Being martyred by native warriors,
While other tribesmen are led off
From a burning mission
By armed European slavers;
Priests play piano and violin
Along with a Chiquitano choir,
While others teach the Indians
To write in the sand.

The Critic

Sad contrarian, each day is a history of reading,
A study of the roots of words.

Whenever I see a spider just have to kill it.
It cannot be allowed to share my space.
Big or small, it has to go.

With each day, each year,
The plucking of nasal hairs
Occupies more and more of my time.
The world, as usual, is in a most unsatisfactory state.

My life’s fugue,
Carousel of themes,
Roundel of out-of-tune voices.
Wherever I turn,
The insufficiency of literature confronts me.
I remain however, hungry for the next text.

According to the Romans,
The Holy Spirit proceeded from both the Father and the Son.
The Byzantines, on the other hand,
Maintained that its only author was the Father.
I, however, cannot sleep,
For thinking about the lost library of Alexandria.

Another book absorbed into me,
The sudden aura of fate and death
Transfixes like a medieval miracle,
A halo round the sun.

A walk in the woods will cure most ills
For a bachelor betrothed to words,
Constantly postponing the marriage.

Virgil the Grammarian,
Mad Irishman from Toulouse,
Describes how the rhetoricians Galbungus and Terrentius
Debated for fourteen days and nights
The supreme question,
The vocative of “ego”.

I, more than anyone,
Would wish to find the key to my symbols,
The symbols of a life.
Or will the whole damn thing
Turn out in the end
To be an allegory instead?

What is the style of my existence,
The hidden authority that selects and informs?

This document counts its half-life,
Biding its time,
With Prester John’s letter,
And the Donation of Constantine.

Drawing Things

Experiments of hand and eye
Tool the seeker-
To drill for truth
Into the void...
The boundaries tempt me
To dream of beginnings,
Making marks,
Joining up dots
In homage
To invisible horizons...
Can I thus read
The motion, direction,
Depth and duration
Of life?
Innocent bliss
Fires in this play.
Drifting and steering
On the waves,
My ship in a bottle
Heads for unknown ports-
Oh to touch the world,
Or at least something,
A passion, a sensation,
And call it real!
Furiously I grapple
The slipping scene,
Track the prey
With nystagmus...
The peripheries
Hypnotize me with blur,
With possibilities
Trembling on the verge-
Pioneer frontiers
Where everything
Is coming into being,
In suspension-
Can I witness
And not explain?
There is no explaining,
Only the tentative effort
To see, to breathe.
Darks and lights
Pleasure the mind,
Directions to go in,
Ways to feel.
Stereopsis
Of the lonely one,
Groping for likenesses
To live by!-
Here, at the pencil-tip
Is the moot.
Always return
To the sources
And drink.
Gouge a journey
In space,
Blurring through
Saccades,
King of interruptions.
The whispers
Are filling out
From the inside,
The nucleus
Is igniting a supernova....
Into the nameless,
Come undone
If you can,
Loving the danger,
The silence.
There is no finish, ever,
No final point and line.
Face to face with the world,
My fusiform gyrus
Inflamed,
And, my hands,
The hands of everyone
Who has ever lived,
Shape the fires
Of thalamus
And hippocampus.

Symmetry

I

The vision in the inkblot,
The Botticelli composition.
The molecular equation
Governs science and art.

The palindrome
In the Y chromosome
Copulates with itself,
Laughing ouroboros.

My life, Diophantine equation,
Bedevils me with xs and ys,
Holding out the promise
Of solution.

II

Twenty years old,
Évariste Galois lies dying,
Wounded in the stomach
On the duelling ground.

Mathematical papers
Wait on his desk,
A doomed man’s offering
To the god of symmetry.

The revolution starts
From one man’s misery;
A republic of ideas;
A tyranny of love.

III

I pace the room, straightening crooked pictures.
Fear writhes in the amygdala.
The butterfly’s wings are full of warning.

The righting of imbalances, the introduction
Of structure and proportion in just measure;
Therein, perhaps, lies freedom.

Treasure-hunting in Ecuador

Electrical storms fulminate
Above the Volcano of Seven Mouths,
And fear clings like a golden funerary mask
To your face, as you hack through tight ravines
And jungled bamboo sharp as arrows,
Quicksand bogs and bone-breaking slopes,
As endless rains fall on the black lakes
And white fogs close over.
Your finger traces contours and paths
On maps that may be hoaxes;
Cryptic words and phrases
Tantalize the imagination.
Are you seeking the treasure
Or is the treasure seeking you?
A day in the mountains is a hundred years on the plain.
Any day now, by God, any day now
You will find it, the cave, the cave of riches,
It could be here, or over there,
Victory is near, very near.
The more preposterous the proposition,
The more likely it seems.
You have studied it all in the library of secrets,
And secrets are something to believe in.
Compass in hand,
You know, at least, where North is.
At night the Southern Cross
Sets its seal on your brow.

Water in the Western Desert

Arizona-Colorado

A conquistador dying of thirst,
I stick out my tongue for a drop of light-
I could swallow the oceans of the world
And float away....
The mind home like a dragonfly
To the glint of water,
Among canyons, arroyos, washes and ravines.
Water out of rock, fish out of rock,
The only truth in the world-
The philosopher’s stone!
The water beetle dives
With Olympic finesse,
Daring you to swim with him,
As flash floods of wonder
Burst from dead animals’ mouths.
Dip your hands into the glow,
Dip your head,
Submerge and emerge,
It is holy...
This water comes to change you.
Wade into the brightness,
Read the petroglyphs
On the walls.
Hot stones will heal,
And in the midst of drought
You will learn the language
Of water.
Ephemeral, immortal,
Follow the omens and rumours
In the air,
Track the smell of life
Like a burning coyote.
Luckless bones disintegrate
Into gravel and sand,
There is hoodoo here,
Secret as beehives.
Death gives you directions,
Precise as a Jesuit map
Or the desire for gold;
It s fitting you for a black cassock,
A midnight Mass.
Nothing is more patient,
More vigilant than the desert,
Nothing outlasts it;
It resolves all confusions.
The rains are rich in organisms,
In atmospheres,
Streaming and steaming
Down toad-holes,
Happy as dice on the roll.
These are the words of water
That timbre through the ear’s
Ravines, curved and cadenced
With innumerable nuances,
Inventing itself.
There is nothing else like it.
It is full of the deaths of comets
And the wildness of space.
A lifetime seeking sources,
That is my blessed curse,
Drawn to the silence
And enchantment,
Before the next abandonment.
Scent the unseen,
And navigate the blood;
The land wounds you
Into knowledge, urges connection
At all costs,as your pulse
Clocks the currents
And occasions of loss.
Through hard walking
You might learn economy,
To think with the senses
And feel with the intellect.
There is no answer
To an Anasazi handprint
On a sandstone cliff
Except you own hand.
Thorn and cactus
Keep your secrets;
The rattlesnake treats you
With exquisite courtesy.
Do you want to be pure?
Do you demand the torment
Of that devilish idea?
But, of course, you are human,
Carrying all that medicine and taboo
In a small bag at your throat.
You can never be as simple
And purposeful as the fireflies.
Poor little womb-swimmer,
Make an offering of your life!
As shale and sandstone do.
I just keep on walking
Into the fire,for I hear these tales
Of an old sailing ship stranded somewhere
Out there in the middle of the desert,
High and dry on the sands.

The Ant-killer

Those boyhood afternoons
When I would so casually so maliciously
Incinerate pismires on the patio
With a magnifying glass
- That was evil, pure and simple,
The coldness of the psychopath....
For that I deserve
To be attacked and torn to pieces
By some giant mutant ant,-
That noble species
Ought to wreak a dire revenge!
Forgive me, ants, for my stupidity,
For thinking you inferior to me...

This is my life, it happens, that’s all,
And I try to make of it what I will,
Losing, losing, lost...
Selfishly I torment myself
With philosophical questions
When two-thirds of the planet
Is fighting every day
Just for something to eat!
What a luxury it is to be unhappy-
All those who have never found,
Never understood,
Their reason for existing,
Their purpose on earth...

The science and religion
Of others, no less ignorant than I,
Mean nothing to me now-
I think for myself,
Live for myself...
Glancing back over my life,
Every period and incident,
Major or minor,
It all seems so beautiful
And improbable now...
Why should I try
To fit all that in a box
And label it in block letters?
Only what cannot be understood
Interests me.

But look, it's obvious-
Life has had me by the balls all along,
Half mad with arrogance and folly!
Alas, Heaven and Hell
Appear equally tedious-
Perhaps the absolute is not for me.

Aberration of Starlight

Curious and anxious, always have been, always will be, I potter through the days, muddle through, get by(well, maybe you have had your day already, nothing more or better to come, and maybe all your self-betrayals and calculated delusions are coming home at last to roost, and though you may persevere with handy “of courses” and “all the sames” a precise and timely reckoning is working its way through your blood and marrow, to be meted out very casually one fine day, it happens like that to pretty much everyone, doesn’t it, and why, why should you be any different?....) and make the best and worst of things, ticking imaginary boxes...
Wonder how did it how will it what the hell.
This writing thing can send you over the edge.
Think less, drink more.

Hollywood Stars

The dirty secret, the evil scandal,
The fantastical fake-
And the ghost of Marilyn Monroe
In the hotel room mirror...
The entertainment of the masses
Proceeds with technological skill
And vacuous dedication.
Who is fucking whom?
Is there anyone present
Who will not suck the Devil’s dick
Just to gain a small advantage?
The science of happiness
Is offered for a price,
The cult initiates a new acolyte.
Most beautiful, most unfortunate,
You too could be immortal,
Or end up on your knees in the shit.
Whatever you want, you can have-
Anything except the truth.

Doodles on the Wall

I

Poetry is heresy,
Weird as any Mennonite doctrine
Or Ophite sect.
Such is my ceremony:
Beholden to no-one,
Sharing with anyone.

The life you live-not yours-
Is yours.
You write what you write.
No doubt.
Whatever remains will stay.

Nothing and no-one,
No relationship on earth,
Will ever match this marriage with words.

II

The first man in this skin,
The first and the last,
I machine vast engines of creation and destruction,
Plot graphs of increase,fluctuation and decline,
And work at my words
As my words work at me,
Hoping to get home.

Find a nice bridge to jump from,
A perfect cantilever,or a well-made suspension,
Aesthetically pleasing to death.
The mathematics of your jump will be fantastic,
With no effort on your part.

Poetry is a kind of euthanasia:
Gently gradually putting yourself to sleep,
With understanding,with love.

Room Temperature

I

Whatever enlarges experience and wisdom,
I love;whatever transports me from here to there,
The fast slow big small long short way.

And if it doesn’t make sense,
It doesn’t have to make sense.
I shall not demand compensation.

Are you ready for another collision?
Just as well.
Hold on tight.
Try not to be ill.

Here for a while,
Mulling things over,
Then nixed.
That’s the routine.

Analyze.Criticize.Philosophize.
End up repeating yourself
Just a little too often.

Einstein’s Theory of Subjectivity
I have never properly understood.

II

Last night, watching an old film on television,it suddenly occurred to me that my experience of this film would be very similar-though not of course identical-to that of every other person who had ever seen it;and that therefore,alas,I was not truly unique,not really all that special,and could perhaps be replaced by another body,another consciousness,without any disturbance, any loss,to the peculiar combination of forces in that situation.And,should another homo sapiens be unavailable to fill the position,the task could be satisfactorily fulfilled by a mannequin or some other form of dummy.

III

It is time.
But time for what?
Time for time.
Light another candle
For the evening.
Let it burn down.

The risks under my eyelids,
The probabilities,
Accumulate a cosmos,
A chaos.
Where do we go from here?
One has to be somewhere at all times,
Somehow.

Day trader,
Watching the market
Climb and fall,
I invest in moments,
In thoughts,
In words.
How much can I afford to lose?

IV

Checked my pulse,checked my blood pressure.Everything in order,I trust?Rude health and continued respiration.
In that case,I think I will proceed a little further and see what develops.

Notes on His Own Existence

I

It’s another docile Friday
To do with
Or be done with;
It’s another calendar date,
And language is killing you,
Slowly,
Expertly.
It’s another tepid moment,
Another excuse
For not truly being.
To hell with all the Fridays,
To hell with me.

Did I steal someone else’s life
(A worthier and better life)
To enter this world?
Was my birth some unforgivable crime?

A murmur,
A whisper,
A howl;
Sometimes it comes to that.
You end up,
Rigid and frozen,
Peruvian mummy
Bolt upright in an Andean cave.

II

Human nature:
The nature of waiting.
Understand it,
Can you?
the infinite and the infinitesimal,
The long and the short.

Always feel like an uncouth yokel,
Invited to a royal banquet,
Not sure which knife to use.

III

I suppose I will have to spend a lifetime or two
Just learning to tell the truth,
Learning to listen.

Each day I set out
From the left-off,
The fearful source,
Desperate to return,
To something pure.

These missions I set myself
I hardly understand-
But they drive me anyway
With unbearable urgency,
Drive me to distraction.

Like a one-armed pianist
Determined to play
A perfect symphony.

IV

Lutheran or Catholic?
I love the bare
And the sumptuous
With equal annoyance.

I was raised in a church
Of unanswerables,
Ordained a whisky priest
To the world.

Defrock me if necessary,
But leave me,please,
A few bright trinkets
For my personal rites.

V

I am the skeleton
At the Feast of Fools,
The peasant
With St Vitus’s Dance.

Births,deaths,marriages
Pass through me;
My caravan journeys on
To the Mountains of the Moon.

VI

Some believe in fate,
Some do not,
But events keep coming,
Anyway.

Death is preaching its sermon
Through my eyes
And my busy fists
Grasp handfuls of nothing
Every day,
Every day.

Do you weep for the man you once were,
The man you might have been
Or the man you will never be?

VII

Indo-European
On this peninsula of words,
I erect shrines
To anthropomorphic deities.

Black acids of culture
Break me down,
Raven’s nigredo,
Swirling with code.

Truth:snowfall of light;
Peacock’s tail at summer’s end;
This chaos I fight through,
Humming favourite tunes.



VIII

Debatable Friday,
Wishbone of contention,
The only place where I can presently be.

My own life’s archaeologist,
I root for evidence
And mark my territory with scholarly papers.

Another day
In which to refine my poetics,
To devise new strategies
For self-creation,
Falling slowly
Into the abyss.

I love the traps too much,
-Beguiled,
Ready to be caught,
To see what will happen,-
The delicate traps,
Exquisitely engineered.

Now Sinbad the Sailor is weighing anchor.
Robinson Crusoe is building a fire.
Sherlock Holmes puts his deerstalker on.

Wing Chun

The solitary meditation,
The sensitive balance,
And the hands weave
Forces.
The small defeats the large.

Feel the direction and force of the attack
And turn it against your opponent,
Occupying the centre,
Wedged against the brunt.
It takes so long to understand
The power of the simple.
What is the reason for each movement?
Turn the onslaught aside
And watch it undo itself.

Triangulate energies
Through the tetrahedron,
The interconnecting pyramids
Of your body,
Till,as subtle as a spider,
Sensing motions along the web,
You become the other.

Portonovo

Green wavelets folding slowly noisily over white pebbled shore: I slump on a sun lounger, ungainly as ever, furtively eyeing the girls around me, pretending to read a pocket history of the Renaissance.
Is this the acme of Europe? My cold northern blood chases unnamed quarry. Civilisation has left its wolf-prints on me, its clawmarks on my soul.
Another museum, another gallery, and then some more: celestial tour guides escort me through brilliant corridors, reciting the accepted versions.
To each there will be the martyrdom of the self, the price for marvellous invention and order. To each there will be a Vatican of lies.
My south, your north: middle-man of universes, I trade Phoenician-style in disparate wares. That which men deem precious judges their own blood.
A continent of nomads, settling on the shores of their own lost causes.

Signs and Veils

At first
I thought the face was behind the veil
But no
The veil was the face
What is the sign
The sign to lead me home?
Whose is the face
Beyond the mirror’s surface?
Only know am I learning
That to know
Is not to know
Only now am I learning
To laugh
Do the beautiful
And it will be right
Do the beautiful
With body
Tongue
And heart
Between Mercy
and Wrath
I breathe my life
All is now as it was
All is now
We are Shahadah
You must see everything
In the east and the west
My soul feels through
Its stations and states
And finds the names
The names
I see myself in the mirror
And the reflection
Recognizes me
We are Nothing
Fool I am
Forever asking
Who and what and where and when and why
All I know
Is that my last breath is still in me
Lord
Take my life
And give me a face
The face
To be Adam
The first man
Pronouncing all the names
For the first time
Out of memory
I am prophecy
You can only know love
By its taste
Do I hear the signs?
Do I hear them and see them?
Do I join the music
And dance?
So begins the spiral return
Hierogamy
Of sperm and ovum
Veil on veil
Light on light
The cosmos
Calls me in
To confuse me
And if I seek to lift the veil
That too is the veil
And I myself
Am the veil
The veil of veils
And the face

Safety in Numbers

Bring me dead horses
To flog,
My whip’s ever ready,
And one has to amuse oneself
Somehow.
Please do not mistake me
For a real person
Or anything as vulgar as that.
I might have been a librarian
Tiptoeing round the shelves
Through rainy afternoons
Caressing the tomes
With masturbatory fingers
Sighing over exotic adventures
And sordid thrills.
What a strange and worrying creature I am,
Mythical and mundane,
Neither fish nor fowl,
A limerick scrawled across the sky.
I perfect my perversions
In redbrick reclusion
And tickle sly fancies
Till kingdom come.
In swinish filth
I find more truth
Than in all the world’s
Philosophy,
Politics
Or art.
A diva of suburbia,
Hitting the high notes,
I shatter the dusty wineglass
Of a Tuesday afternoon.
We,
The shy and inoffensive,
Demand our right
To storm the sky,
Building barricades of words
To aim our toy guns from.
From a boy’s bedroom,
Monte Cristo’s cave of cursed jewels,
Comes this torn treasure-map
You hold in your hands;
So let the pirates sail,
Let the skull and crossbones fly!
One day you may well read
Of my secret life
Of debauchery and scandal,
One fine day, perhaps…
Ah, but my head is so enormous,
How would I ever find a hat to fit,
If I ever chose to wear a hat, that is?
Who needs heroin,
Who needs cocaine,
When everything is so wild and lovely anyway?
I lie on my bed,
Sweating tertiary fevers,
A thousand years old or more,
And no-one and nothing
Can save me
For I do not wish to be saved…
This loneliness
Will be with you always;
Do not fool yourself
That the future will be better,
That people change
And all wounds heal.
All your life
You will feel
Like a fat ballet dancer
Toppling over
When you dare a pirouette.
In the trite lines
Of pop songs
I once glimpsed salvation;
In pin-ups and centrefolds
I beheld holy icons.
O vacuous decades
I have mooched through,
A golden mooncalf
-And when I die
Write on my tombstone:
Killed by common sense.
I hiss at myself:
“I will have my revenge,
I will have my cold cruel revenge
On you!
You infamous villain,
You laughable poltroon!”
Then I turn to my face in the mirror
And declare:
“I’ve got plans for you.”
Life
Was thrust into my hands
Like a greasy bag of chips.
Inside me that petulant little brat
Is still bawling at his parents
“I didn’t ask to be born!”
Apostle,
Apostate,
Choose your martyrdom:
Would you rather be torn apart by lions
Or crucified upside-down?
Or you could just
Kick the world in the balls
And run.
Every night
I go to bed
With famous corpses
And dream of God knows what…
I think I may be
The greatest grave-robber,
The happiest grave-robber,
in history.
This sickness
From which I have suffered all my life
Is the weapon to set me free…
The damned still dance,
Only now, it seems,
they no longer believe
in Hell.
I was my own Pope
In childhood’s Vatican
And excommunicated myself
And cried: Burn the heretic!
Bring me his ashes!

Sunstead

Naked, and the skin blooms, dreaming,
Four compass towers revolve round the sun,
As lion-light undulates through walls
And bones, and the mind reposes
Like a lily on a pond.
The black north is a wild boar,
Moon-tusked and capricious,
The white south shines in a cypress wand.
Deflagrated zinc of the bladed air!-
Windows, dusted like sleepers’ lids,
Flicker into the reptilian brain;
The strutting world fans a peacock tail
And the treetops shed slow rainbows.

Agnostic

What will it come to, this passion,
Restlessly querying and questing
To vanishing point?
To understand the nature of falling,
That, at least, I can attempt.
Dark matter, not to be observed,
Fluctuating quintessence
That my life craves,
Can it be that the finding
Is in the missing?
The algebra of each day
Tests me to disintegration,
The physics of each moment
Is my voodoo.
Turn to any page
In the Book of the Dead
And seek an oracle;
It is the hour of reason and prayer.

Opera Buffa

Scowling from the battlements of his soul’s castle at the world below,
At the savage mob clamouring to invade his solitude,
Retreating, with a toss of the head, into sovereign silence,
He mystified the real with curmudgeonly grace....
Melancholia in the blood,yes,some people are just born that way, and can never be rid of the facts, whatever their yearnings and attainments....and of course there is no final resolution, only a fool would expect that,and,whatever else this boy is he is not a fool...
Accept so as to reject, enquire so as to enquire again, with a different form of words, that is the best you can do...
Least alone in the alone, capture what you may, and let the sometimes harsh decisions fall. Such is your inheritance, which you, in turn, in time, will shed into other hands.
Pirate, dilettante, plunder the high seas of cargoes, and bury secret treasures on scattered isles. The parrot musing on your shoulder is the oracle of the world.

An Evening With Constantine Cavafy

In an apartment above a brothel
In a narrow Alexandrian street,
A middle-aged man lights a candle
In the twilight.
The walls are green, red and mauve.
Tonight, quite possibly,
He will venture out to the usual place
And find a brief companion-
One of those penniless busboys
Who will sell their bodies for a few coins.

Beauty and death divide the hours.
He knows as well as anyone
What failure means;
And how all things end.
But in history, as in life,
There are moments, few, but precious,
When revelation almost cancels out despair.

African Music

This love you must experience
but can never know
the curves of a melody
the timbre of a moment
lives lapping and overlapping
voices of Africa
melisma of the Maghreb
yodelling of Pygmies and Bushmen
Muwashshah
circles round itself
repeating
the snakecharmer
and the snake

The zumbara flute plays
as the Galien nomad sings
crossing the Sudanese night

Vibrato chants of the Fellashas
rise from Lake Tana
eliding and sliding microtonal inflections

The bull roarer hums out
in the hills of Mali
voice of the first man to die

The drummer
stares into the eye
of the atumpan
all poems and praises

The kokokyinaka bird
taught the Ashanti to drum
crying
kro kro kro kro ko
kyini kyini kyini kro kyini
ka ka ka
kyini kyini kyini kyini ka

The blue horse rides you
into the skies
stone chimes
sound the rainy season
of prayers

Misogyny

What dread and madness
twist the hearts of men
that they should torture
their mothers, sisters, wives?

Helpless love
becomes vicious hatred,
Lust becomes
the urge to crush and kill....

O, you majesties,
you darlings,
you worthless cunts,
you whores....
-humiliation,
punishment,
death!

Over aeons and millennia
through cataclysms
and the death of empires
after every revolution
political
philosophical
scientific
still it is here
with us
within us

Amazonomachy
everywhere in Athens
on temples and vases and drinking bowls
the male warrior with sword raised
hauling a woman off her horse by the hair
stabbing and clubbing her to death
as her tunic slips
to expose a breast
and her short skirt rides up to reveal her thighs

Baby girls abandoned
on the rubbish dumps of classical Athens
to die of starvation
or be raised as prostitutes
while Aristotle sits writing
of women’s inferiority

O, Messalina
whoring herself in Juvenal’s mind
as he thrashes his horrified lust
into furious verses
and under the arches of the Coliseum
after the Games
while blood oozes from the gladiators’ bodies
prostitutes service the excited fans

Yahweh
smelling blood
broods on his next revenge
against the lawbreakers
the sinners

And in the Jewish ghettoes
the women are stripped naked
and driven through the streets
with riflebutts and jeers

The Polish Bridesmaid

Europe
east-west
peninsula of words
witches’ Sabbath of myths

Now to take the bull by the horns!
Curiosity and industry
drive the herds
crossing the Danube within

Shifting boundaries
arbitrary maps
are my only aid
in the war with space

Greeks and barbarians
battle tongue against tongue
lines are drawn
and statues sculpted

Diaspora of souls
caught by gravity
we all fall towards
the Day of Atonement

African Healing

Science of the stones and wells
and man
red language of the earth
that my body must learn
Apprenticed to trees
I suffer the radiation of magic
and when I remember
I heal
Uttering
is nostalgia
pained longing for home
-can I reach the source
of meaning?
The old man
in the bush
at the edge
turns death
into hope
I am here in the world
forever seeking water
smelling out hidden springs and wells
and building mounds of rocks
to mark the way
I love
what comes from below
what is under my feet
Everywhere is grief and tears
rage and frustration
It is time to build a boat
and launch it on the river
to the laughing crying sea

Tree

We are all of us standing
under the tree
pyramid
ziggurat
stupa
(Can I reach back
to the centre
the source?
I am sworn
to the sphere
and the cube
This is
‘alam al-mithal
the world of the image
intermediary
between intellect and senses)
Energy of the snake
soul-sap
swirls in the immortal tree
honey-mead
firewater
amrita
Yggdrasil
the three Norns sit at its foot
watering its roots
passing the shuttle beween them
and Odin
wielding the valknut
binds and looses
In the Siberian taiga
beside the lake of milk
the White Youth comes to the tree
smelling its sweet perfume
seeing the light flowing through
drawn by a woman’s voice
a white horse
Djed pillar
sacrum of Osiris
seat of virility
root-chakra
where Kundalini pulses
Pine tree of Attis
decked with the violets of his blood
where he castrated himself
for Cybele
the dancing priests
wail and lament
and cut off their genitals
to be planted in the ground
Through the centre of the corn-plant
up the blessed pollen-path
the Navaho twin heroes
ascend through the heavens
to the sun
and undergo the trial
by fire and water
then return to earth
to teach men the sandpainter’s art
Onto the sandpainting
the sick man is placed
into the Axis Mundi
and they cover him in sand
heal him with sand
plunge him into the vortex
into the seed-time
to be re-integrated
Witness all the worlds
in the inverted asvattha
its roots in the heavens
its boughs to the earth
the force of creation
descending
Gold of the menorah
blossoming almond
tree of Mesopotamia
seven orbits of the planets
around the sun-shaft
from the serpent’s mouth
Eve takes the fruit
Upon an altar
beneath the banyan tree
Sakyamuni sits
rooted
to the earth’s core
he who was born
under the sal tree
In the sun lodge of the Sioux
eight breast-tethered braves
dance their blood out
for Wakan-Tanka
around the cottonwood tree
and the twenty-eight spokes
of the wheel
Aqua permanens
courses
through the Philosophical Tree
its branches spreading
throughout the world
veins in the body
Astride Burak
Mohammed flies
into the heavens
to the Garden of Paradise
the trees of pure gold
coral
and nacre
and at the centre
the Celestial Tree
four rivers flowing from it
water
milk
honey
and wine
See the tripartite tree of history
thrusting upwards
outwards
inwards
down
each millennial shoot emerging
out of the one before
each stage germinating
the next
seed from fruit
fruit from seed
(Joachim of Floris
a deer in the forest
sundappled
supping from the stream)
It is the other
I love
and fear
the horns of lightning
the rainbow’s curve
Under the kadamba tree
upon a lotus throne
Lord Krishna
sustains the universe
with his music
drawing all hearts towards the centre
Winged doors
of the kekayon
in the Javanese shadow theatre
epicentre of the battle
between demons and gods
through which we must pass
in fiery flight
The tree-pillar
of Emperor Akbar
in the Diwan-i-Khas
at Fatehpur Sikri
on which the Moghul
sat presiding
over ecumenical debate
between leaders of all religions
Marcel Duchamp
sets a Parisian bottlerack
in place
Celestial Tree
Pole Star
Piet Mondrian
strips the tree
down to the bone
the knot
and then just the equilibrium
of forces
In muddy ponds
for six months
the nagakals are immersed
soaking up the energy
then to be set up
beneath a tree
by women praying for a child
At Golgotha
the navel of the world
Jesus is lifted up
on the cross
on the very spot
where Adam was born
and died

Trans-Siberian

Trans-Siberian Express,
Uniting East and West,
Celebrating distance
With the liturgy of time!

Trans-Siberian Express,
Buryat shaman’s breath,
Full of sunlight and snow
And millions of lives!

In life there is so very little
I truly cherish,
Truly love…
But I,
For all my faults-
Dare I say it?-
Am not a bad man.

Trans-Siberian,
Trans-Siberian Express,
From Moscow to Vladivostok,
From this world to the next!

I suffer the same perplexities
As many a man before
Yet stand before the mirror
A would-be pioneer…

The train speeds on,
Heart’s seismograph,
Church organ of solitudes,
On and on,
Singing the distances,
Sucked into the black hole
Of vanishing point…

Life,
the perilous adventure,
the quest without end!

From the grand adventures
Of so many great minds
Came chaos…

Hour after hour,
Lying on the bunk,
Far, far, very far,
Alone with time,
Part of time,
On the map and off the map,
Imperceptibly changing…

Eleven time zones,
Eleven clocks in the head,
Embraces,
kisses,
Hello and goodbye,
Shudder of movement,
Pulling away,
Away…

Milestones,
Milestones,
They flash by in a blur…
Pulled into the gravitational field
Of Siberia,
Into the orbits
Of lonely thoughts,
Into the mysteries
Of thirty nationalities…

Pharaonic mummies
of the Tagar dead
buried with their horses
lightning skeletons

Clay death masks
of the Tashtyks
griffin-eyed faces
of demons

Remember the future
stellar vortex of past lives
into which you plunge
swirling
boiling

Land of the knout
and the stake
exiles mining
the salt of despair
under Aztec suns
and skull moons

Men
good and bad
built this railway
with nothing but shovels
prisoners of the line
pouring their blood
into the iron

The samovar is bubbling
athanor of the soul
fired with blue flames
from the deep earth’s caverns
and the wolfish tang of tea
enchants
like a fairytale

Blood rituals
of Yekaterinburg
sainted bones
of the unsaintly
and Anastasia’s dog
flung howling
down the mine

Irkutsk-
Golden Horde of young beauties,
Ballerinas of the streets,
Electric with style,
Innate aesthetics….

I remember the words
Of Vladimir Rasputin,
Who said:
“I need a bottle of a vodka
and a young girl
every day
or I cannot create.”


Baikal shore-
On a sandy beach
Childen sport
And a brown muscleman
Works out on parallel bars
While his fabulous girlfriend
Behind sunglasses
Stretches out her dancer’s body
In bright bikini
To the pulsating sun
And waterskiers rise up
On mighty arcs of spray

And the far horizon
Floats in the air above the lake
Ghosts whisper in the sand

From a prehistoric hunter’s hand
a Rubenesque Venus
carved in mammoth tusk

Oldest deepest purest Baikal:
each time one enters its waters
adds a year to life-
ah,no creature here more bizarre
than you!

On the empty beach lies the skeleton
Of a seal
Beautiful as a Calatrava bridge.

Are these the shores of Heaven?
The waters of Eden?
Summer and winter
absorb you into the absolute.
Vertiginous lucidity
fathoms the forever
eerie waves of light
sweeping over you


Out there
If you lose your way
In winter
And fall asleep
You will be turned into an ice statue
Till you reappear again
With the snowdrops
In spring…

Here I am on my bunk
Like a Carmelite
Keeping total silence
And sleeping in her own coffin

The distances teach you
To trust no-one and fear all;
Violence will be done today
Injustice will once more win;

Our glorious rulers have their snouts
In the trough;
Thieves prosper,
the honest will be forever poor.

The tsar ensures that misery
Is equal for all;
Praise him and be grateful
For his heavy fist.

Russia,
Land of martyrs,
Bearing witness-
Now the kairos,
Easter in the soul…

Than the force of gentleness
There is no greater power on earth,
And no-one is more powerful than the compassionate.

What terrors of surrender
Await you in your exploits unto God?

It is the hour of Boris and Gleb;
Their brother comes to kill them,
To take the throne of Russia for himself,
And they refuse to fight,
And are slaughtered,
Bend their heads to his sword,
Sacrificing themselves
To avert war.

O, brothers, brothers,
Love one another,
As you love your forefathers’ land…

Khan of dreams,
I walk through golden snows,
Friend to wolf and raven;
I am the frog
That dwells in three elements,
The bear with the voice of a man.

This is my life
Of magic and science,
In a land created in men’s minds.

Cyprus

Bright waves shade with long strokes into shore,
Sea-sky hazes in the distance,
Stationary shimmer, out of time.
Gold-citron light Gregorian-chants
Over the mountains,
Cyclamens and anemones
Glitter the hillsides, swaying.
Sherbet of desire
Irradiates your veins as you gaze
Down tremulous coastline.

To violin and lute,
She dances,the bride, in white silk gleaming,
All glistening hair-coils, white-rose-twined,
Laughing with voluptuous mouth.
The moon’s elect, she trips, exalted,
Lissom and light on her feet.

In Aphrodite’s Temple the women
Once waited to be chosen,
Offering passion in sacrifice.
Now the House of the Goddess lies shattered,
Fluted stumps thrusting where columns once stood,
Ruined walls tussocked under stunted trees,
Bereft of all lush groves.

On avital Greek tombs,
Simple epitaphs bespeak those unknown lives
Now hopeless souls gibbering in the Underworld.
On funerary steles the figures stand in still farewell,
Embracing in familial love, hands touching,
Heads bent in communion.

In Larnaca stands the bust of Zeno,
his saddened face hardened against grief
With indomitable self-control, passions suppressed
So as not to unbalance the cosmos.

On the floor of a Roman villa:
Dionysus rides in triumphal procession,
Straddling a leopard-drawn chariot,
One hand clutching the thyrsus, the other
Pointing at his own ivy-crowned brow
To proclaim his divinity, his right to rule,
While all around a suite of dissolute acolytes
Gambols, playing cymbals and flutes.

St Neophytus fled to the barren hills,
Abandoning a bewildered family and a jilted fiancée,
And burrowed a cave in the rock with his own hands
High in the cliffside, reached only by a ladder
Which he would pull up after him to exclude the world.
This cell still contains the stone bench and table
Where the saint sat and wrote a furious diatribe
Against the island’s last Byzantine ruler.
Above the hermit’s sepulchre, hollowed out with his own hands,
Christ of the Anastasis smashes Hell’s gates underfoot
And pulls dead Adam back into the light,
And looks down with severe compassion
On the bones of Neophytus, awaiting resurrection.
Frescoes shine out from the grotto walls,
Neophytus carried to heaven by goldenhaired angels,
Flying between them with hands crossed on his chest,
Supported in their arms.

Amid a jungled gully glade,
The Fontana Amorosa bubbles up;
Whoever drinks from it will fall in love.
For here Aphrodite wedded Akamas, son of Theseus.
Hosts of butterflies jitter amid the vegetation,
Running water sounds faintly above the hush,
Glimmering between the eucalyptus trees,
Cascading from cliffs,
And fig trees plunge their roots into the pool.

Almond and cherry bloom in the Troodos mountain valleys,
Voluptuous humped bulks fading into sulky distance,
Invisible steams chatter down precipitous glades,
Salamanders scuttle among the trees.
Beneath the plane trees in a quiet village,
We sit drinking ouzo as evening anoints the radiant cornfields,
Bread is baking in a dome-shaped oven,
And a mandolin’s mournful whine haunts the air.
Eastertide at the Makheras Monastery: the congregation
Waits, bowed and dazzled by the towering iconostasis,
While the abbot sits ,enthroned, clasping the pastoral stave
While through the incense-laden atmosphere
His acolytes move about him, in saffron and yellow gleams,
Chanting, chanting in hypnotic rhythm
At midnight the abbot emerges through the Gates of Heaven
With the Holy Fire, and the crowd surges forward, excited,
As the incantation quickens: “Christ has risen!”
The lights go out. Only the tall candle in the abbot’s hand,
Held high above his head, glows with the fire of resurrection.
As he lowers it, a host of tapers jostle forward in tremulous hands,
Touching and mating, passing the flame from one to another,
As the flames move and multiply, everyone smiling
And greeting one another, “Christ is risen!” “He is risen indeed!”

Kalopanayiotis. In the valley chapel
Of the monastery of St John Lampodistas,
Renaissance murals painted by Italian hands shine out from the walls,
Worldly angels alighting in Tuscan courtyards on errands,
Urbane apostles posed against geometric landscapes,
Flamboyant Magi, worldly statesmen, straddle supple eager horses,
Trotting back to Babylon, that crenellated Umbrian hill town.
Here, among Byzantine abstraction, the vivid scenes palpitate,
Carnal opulence with a human heartbeat,
Not the mystical severity of the Greeks.

At Asinou Our Lady of the Pastures
Crowns a hillock, the little church in eucalyptus shade,
Russet stone against pine-dark hills;
Inside, the founder kneels over the south door in fresco,
Presenting his basilica in miniature to Christ,
Donating it in memory of an unknown woman
Who kneels behind him in jewelled diadem.
“Having been blessed in life with many things,
By you virgin, I, Nicephorus Magistros, a pitiful supplicant,
Erected this church with longing, in return for which
I pray that I may find you my patron on the dread Day of Judgment.””
Inside, a thousand saints swarm up the walls
In dour splendour, every arch, lintel and pendentive
Fierce with scowling inquisitorial faces,
Fingers raised in admonition, striking terror into the sinful,
Saints militant and ascetic, cunning theologians, monastic fathers,
Emaciated anchorites, stylites, bishops, martyrs and sages,
Whole legions soaring through the cosmos,
While above the sanctuary Christ the Pantocrator
Looks down in stern benediction, eyes staring away.

The Kyrenia mountains’ crags erupt into sky,
Razor-pinnacled and castellated,
Among lemon groves the Bellepaix Abbey ruins loom,,
On the hillside where wheeling swallows cry into the blue.
Cypresses rise in the deserted courtyard,
Cloister arches unfurl flamboyant around delicate tracery,
Harmonious and light,
Corroding in alchemical heat.
Yellow fennel bursts from fallen clumps of masonry,
The narthex in which Prometheus brought fire down from heaven,
And swallow-nested eaves breathe echoing sighs.
The monks fell into decadence, revelling in wealth and pleasure,
Even taking wives and quarrelling amongst themselves,
Forcing successive popes to intervene.

At Salamis stand the ancient Achaean tombs,
With their sacrifice of horses and slaves,
The small swift chariots and horses’ skeletons still in harness,
Swords, shields, spears and standards in array,
The cremated remains of warriors, ashes mixed
With jewellery and treasures from Egypt and Assyria,
Imported by this rough semi-barbarous tribe.
Ferocious summer heat trembles the sky,
The earth seems almost to be cracking apart,
Even the cicadas cease their shrill chorus,
As time stops dead, stunned into submission.

My apricot, my pomegranate, my fig, my melon, my peach!
The spring breeze tastes of lemon blossom;
The sea’s cradling motion works into your blood,
As peacock blue evening lulls the valleys.
The sea bursts among caves with dull reverberation
And scrabbles at the beaches with monotonous rhythm.
Tear a branch from a carob tree and you will see
A red wound the colour of human flesh.
I think of the flayed skin of Bragadino, heroic defender
Of Famagusta, whom the Turks betrayed,
Breaking their word that they would give him safe passage
After he at last surrendered the fortress.
They stuffed his skin with straw and paraded it round the fallen city.
It is now the languid autumn of ripened figs and grapes,
When snakes and lizards emerge from the stones;
Loud gnawing of silkworms in the mulberry leaves
Disturbs my mind. In forest fires, the worms
Perish with dreadful crackling and sobbing.

Improvisation on a Theme from Debussy

As if, by sound, the mathematics of a life, a soul, could be adumbrated, the x, y and z of one man breathing on the earth...
Who would have thought that delight could be so cruel?
Follow, if you can, the logarithmic spiral of an intuition, wherever it is going, and let some beauty find you.Let it break you down to the root.
All these approximations, these emotions,their hidden mathematics portends some true humanity yet unheard.The music of the Golden Section measures us in its cabbala.

Minor Celebrity

1

The triple magic of a story
Draws me into its purpose,
Oscillating between the poles
Till climax and release-
With these powers
I ebb and flow,
Constricting
And expanding,
To bring forth
From this chaos of life
By mighty efforts
The essence I was born for.

2

Escape, escape the state,
That administers you out of existence,
Herds and milks you, for its own profit,
Wastes half your money and steals the rest,
Knowing you to be stupid, placid and weak.

3

I wonder,
Will I end up in heaven,
Playing table tennis with Mozart and Cary Grant?
The days down here are bleak, absurd.
I spend too much time
In the company of shitheads and cunts,
All hiding themselves,
Blathering, pretending,
Barely human, really,
Barely real.
And I am no better than them, no better.
No better.

4

Cross-stitching of birdsong in the tree-tips,
Whistle-quake and sistrum-throb,
Quivering seismograph lines...
Walking the meadow,
I revolve the world around me

5

Before they plant me in the ground,
I should live, I should live a little.
Before they cover me up and forget me,
I should take a chance or two.

6

From that first triumph of eukaryotic cells,
Ingesting other species of cells,
Assimilating their powers,
And turning into solar engines,
Wheeling with fiery glee,
We are come into our skins
To lose and find our minds...

7

My land is the sombre unnatural north,
Of the perverse laugh and porcupine spire,
All Gothic grotesques and schisms,
To which, with a grim snicker,
I’ll raise a pint of dark beer.
The south, well, of course, I crave it,
Feigning enjoyment with gauche pretence,
But, patently, I don’t belong in the light,
Only shadows show me at my best.

8

The unseen and the unheard,
Are coming for you,
The evil in politics
Marches against you,
All the poisoners and thieves
Of the creeping state...
The hidden hand
And the all-seeing eye
Entrap you everywhere,
Every hour of the day...
Long before you see
The beast in the dark,
You will feel its breath,
Sense its movements...
Murderous money
Plots ingenious farragoes
And pleads the law
In hell’s name.

9

I burrow deep
Into routine,
Inventing freedom
In the core of the quotidian.

At some point
A thought breaks off
From itself,
Strays into the void,
And dangerously blossoms,
Out there,
Out on a limb.

Feet on the ground:
Albatross flights of the mind.