A tale of migrations,
A history of skins.
Feel the clay being shaped
In the potter’s hands,
And words like cowrie shells
Passed from brow to brow.
Curve of bronze and wood,
This is life itself.
Can you read a gorilla’s fingerprints
And decipher the turaco’s cry?
The fat world crouches in water,
A lone goliath frog.
On the black sands beneath the mountain,
Naked wrestlers tussle.
The sky poises on a whim,
An orchid from the lava.
“Come,” says the mountain’s protector ,
“But take care not to remove anything”.
All the birds of Cameroon
Take me up in their wings;
The white-breasted nigrita
And the chattering cisticola,
The olive-bellied sunbird,
The red-vented malimbé...
Come,brown illadopsis,
Shining drongo,
Mountain boubou,
Willcock’s honeyguide
And Bonelli’s warbler!
Come, variable indigobird!
Sunday, February 07, 2010
The Hitler Salute
Rapidly, all too easily,
The ritual became obligation.
A salutation. A stab at salvation.
“Hail” and “heal”.”Close” and “mend.”
That craving to obey had the upper hand.
What now in place of custom and love?
How could they communicate
But through the destroyer’s jargon?
Face to face, they shared the void.
So weary of science and reason,
They wanted to believe again
In something, anything,
So they held out their hands in the air
To take the mysterious gift.
Always out of reach.
The ritual became obligation.
A salutation. A stab at salvation.
“Hail” and “heal”.”Close” and “mend.”
That craving to obey had the upper hand.
What now in place of custom and love?
How could they communicate
But through the destroyer’s jargon?
Face to face, they shared the void.
So weary of science and reason,
They wanted to believe again
In something, anything,
So they held out their hands in the air
To take the mysterious gift.
Always out of reach.
The Fatal Mountains: The Austro-Italian Front,1915-18
The high alps
the bone mountains
we kill each other coldly
for the nameless are not real
we cannot read the letters tucked next to their hearts
Anonymous
we share the void
death is our brother
we live in the vertical
Italian infantry on the attack
scramble over rocks,over corpses,
screaming,brandishing their rifles uselessly,
as the Austrian machinegunners above
annihilate rank on rank.with ease,
until,at last, even the Austrians are sickened,
and call out, “Italians!Stop!Go back!
We don’t want to massacre you!”
D’Annunzio bellows swooning blood-incantation
over the heads of the masses;
the adolescent superman
his greyhounds in Hermès livery,
wears war like a carnation in his buttonhole.
the empire of the ego his to expand
Rock.Wind.Rain.
The horned viper’s hunting ground
You could scrape with your spade
for a hundred years
and not make a dent.
How will you even dig your grave here?
“Attack, you cowards, you stupid dogs!
Battles are not won from the trenches!”
General Cadorna rants at his troops.
He remembers his father dying,
raising a clenched fist.
Advance,advance,always advance,
with will and energy to conquer all;
it is the age of action as wisdom,
violence as religion.
General Conrad assures his Italian mistress,
“I much admire your people’s racial characteristics”
Yet hers is a lesser race, the congenital foe,
to be crushed.
The empire is doomed, he knows,
but better to perish honourably
than surrender without a fight.
A hopelss struggle,but it must be pursued,
for an ancient monarchy
cannot perish ingloriously.
The weather:
the third army
the legions of the dead
The Italian soldiers know an attack is imminent
when the military police mount their machineguns
behind the trench,
ready to shoot down their own countrymen
if they loiter when the battlecry “Savoy!” goes up.
Decimation for “deserters”.
Ten men chosen by lot
Against a cemetery wall.
Skylarks above the maizefields.
The firing squad aim.
Smell of thyme on the limestone ridges
snow gleaming blue under the moon
constellations overhead
the ecstasy of war
never more alive
than in death’s mountains
the bone mountains
we kill each other coldly
for the nameless are not real
we cannot read the letters tucked next to their hearts
Anonymous
we share the void
death is our brother
we live in the vertical
Italian infantry on the attack
scramble over rocks,over corpses,
screaming,brandishing their rifles uselessly,
as the Austrian machinegunners above
annihilate rank on rank.with ease,
until,at last, even the Austrians are sickened,
and call out, “Italians!Stop!Go back!
We don’t want to massacre you!”
D’Annunzio bellows swooning blood-incantation
over the heads of the masses;
the adolescent superman
his greyhounds in Hermès livery,
wears war like a carnation in his buttonhole.
the empire of the ego his to expand
Rock.Wind.Rain.
The horned viper’s hunting ground
You could scrape with your spade
for a hundred years
and not make a dent.
How will you even dig your grave here?
“Attack, you cowards, you stupid dogs!
Battles are not won from the trenches!”
General Cadorna rants at his troops.
He remembers his father dying,
raising a clenched fist.
Advance,advance,always advance,
with will and energy to conquer all;
it is the age of action as wisdom,
violence as religion.
General Conrad assures his Italian mistress,
“I much admire your people’s racial characteristics”
Yet hers is a lesser race, the congenital foe,
to be crushed.
The empire is doomed, he knows,
but better to perish honourably
than surrender without a fight.
A hopelss struggle,but it must be pursued,
for an ancient monarchy
cannot perish ingloriously.
The weather:
the third army
the legions of the dead
The Italian soldiers know an attack is imminent
when the military police mount their machineguns
behind the trench,
ready to shoot down their own countrymen
if they loiter when the battlecry “Savoy!” goes up.
Decimation for “deserters”.
Ten men chosen by lot
Against a cemetery wall.
Skylarks above the maizefields.
The firing squad aim.
Smell of thyme on the limestone ridges
snow gleaming blue under the moon
constellations overhead
the ecstasy of war
never more alive
than in death’s mountains
The Millennium of Doctor Faustus
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Saddle their steeds and ride.
Tales are heard of monstrous births,
Downpours of blood and milk,
And a triple moon appears in the German skies.
Pestilence decimates Europe,
A thunderbolt strikes the Vatican,
Knocking the Pope from his throne.
War and insurrection
Laugh through the bones of the soon-to-be-dead.
The Devil’s agents are everywhere.
And the Prince of Necromancers appears among men,
To turn earth into water,water into air,
Air into fire,-and see the crow’s head,
The ashes of Hermes’ tree.
Haloed with the planets’ orbits,
He strolls in a castle garden,
Blooming in winter
And plots invocations
For the victory of his Emperor’s armies.
Saddle their steeds and ride.
Tales are heard of monstrous births,
Downpours of blood and milk,
And a triple moon appears in the German skies.
Pestilence decimates Europe,
A thunderbolt strikes the Vatican,
Knocking the Pope from his throne.
War and insurrection
Laugh through the bones of the soon-to-be-dead.
The Devil’s agents are everywhere.
And the Prince of Necromancers appears among men,
To turn earth into water,water into air,
Air into fire,-and see the crow’s head,
The ashes of Hermes’ tree.
Haloed with the planets’ orbits,
He strolls in a castle garden,
Blooming in winter
And plots invocations
For the victory of his Emperor’s armies.
Titian's End
No longer did he finish anything;
Day after day in the large draughty studio,
Reworking the canvases over and over,
Never quite completing a single one,
Terrified to end, to let go.
For months he would leave a painting,
Scarcely even glancing at it,
Then return to the battle,
Glaring with mortal rage,
Digging in with his fingers.
He had outlived them all, his so-called peers,
There was no one left to defeat now,
No-one to work for but himself;
Eyes failing, but his spirit savage,
Desperate against the darkness,
Spewing paint like blood.
(A young bravado’s lust still, tempered
By an old man’s guile, he knew
Precisely how much truth to mix
With untruth on his palette.
Curse the world for forcing him
Into venal conniving and grovelling
To vainglorious patrons, who disdained
To pay on time for his precious labours
So that he must whine and importune
With magniloquent flattery to wheedle
His dues from those avaricious hands).
Blackclad and monk-gaunt,
Gnarled, feisty, skullcapped and hook-nosed,
He toiled on, while burning corpses’ stench
Fogged over the Venice Lagoon,
Mingling with shit-reek and slime;
Ceaselessly, the plague boats called
From house to house, along fetid canals,
Hired brutes smashing down doors
To pillage the rooms of the dead.
God was visiting his wrath upon the city
For inveterate sins; as parents abandoned
Their own sick children, husbands their wives,
And Titian raised his brush once more
To cut another stroke into the scene;
Marsyas was hanging upside down,
Accepting his punishment serenely,
Initiated into the highest heavens of pain;
Where diagonals connected in a star.
Day after day in the large draughty studio,
Reworking the canvases over and over,
Never quite completing a single one,
Terrified to end, to let go.
For months he would leave a painting,
Scarcely even glancing at it,
Then return to the battle,
Glaring with mortal rage,
Digging in with his fingers.
He had outlived them all, his so-called peers,
There was no one left to defeat now,
No-one to work for but himself;
Eyes failing, but his spirit savage,
Desperate against the darkness,
Spewing paint like blood.
(A young bravado’s lust still, tempered
By an old man’s guile, he knew
Precisely how much truth to mix
With untruth on his palette.
Curse the world for forcing him
Into venal conniving and grovelling
To vainglorious patrons, who disdained
To pay on time for his precious labours
So that he must whine and importune
With magniloquent flattery to wheedle
His dues from those avaricious hands).
Blackclad and monk-gaunt,
Gnarled, feisty, skullcapped and hook-nosed,
He toiled on, while burning corpses’ stench
Fogged over the Venice Lagoon,
Mingling with shit-reek and slime;
Ceaselessly, the plague boats called
From house to house, along fetid canals,
Hired brutes smashing down doors
To pillage the rooms of the dead.
God was visiting his wrath upon the city
For inveterate sins; as parents abandoned
Their own sick children, husbands their wives,
And Titian raised his brush once more
To cut another stroke into the scene;
Marsyas was hanging upside down,
Accepting his punishment serenely,
Initiated into the highest heavens of pain;
Where diagonals connected in a star.
The True Cross
Into the Holy Sepulchre they process,
The Franciscan monks, then the Armenians,
To sing their chants in rivalrous polyphony.
In the hushed chapel they celebrate Mass;
Below their feet is the bare rough crypt
Of silent prayer and meditation,
Hewn from Golgotha’s rock,
Where the Empress Helena,her long journey
Blessed at last,breathlessly seized
The wooden fragments of the True Cross,
The tree grown from the seed cast in Eden.
The old Empress, cantankerous, implacable,
Stood, holding the trophy in her hands,
And ecstasy possessed her ailing limbs
And guilty mind, as the years of sinful struggle
Fell away in eternal victory and endless empire.
History and faith conspire
In places, memories, eyewitness reports,
In us, seen and touched
By what we see and touch,
Taking religion into the body
As if knowledge and belief could be one
In the city of the real invincible symbol
Where map and compass are offered
To the wanderer, if he will only hope.
The Franciscan monks, then the Armenians,
To sing their chants in rivalrous polyphony.
In the hushed chapel they celebrate Mass;
Below their feet is the bare rough crypt
Of silent prayer and meditation,
Hewn from Golgotha’s rock,
Where the Empress Helena,her long journey
Blessed at last,breathlessly seized
The wooden fragments of the True Cross,
The tree grown from the seed cast in Eden.
The old Empress, cantankerous, implacable,
Stood, holding the trophy in her hands,
And ecstasy possessed her ailing limbs
And guilty mind, as the years of sinful struggle
Fell away in eternal victory and endless empire.
History and faith conspire
In places, memories, eyewitness reports,
In us, seen and touched
By what we see and touch,
Taking religion into the body
As if knowledge and belief could be one
In the city of the real invincible symbol
Where map and compass are offered
To the wanderer, if he will only hope.
Gabon
The words of a traveller:
The words of every man who went before him.
Africa had been waiting for me
All along, menacing, absurd.
That moment when Paul du Chaillu
Came face to face with a gorilla,
The first white man to do so,
Standing transfixed in awe
At the monster so long imagined,
Raising his rifle only when the beast
Approached too near
And throwing its head back
And beating its chest
Quaked the forest with its roar.
He killed it with a single shot.
In 1861 British readers hastened
To purchase his book,and fold out
The frontispiece etching
Of the gorilla,his genitals covered
With a fig leaf to spare female readers.
The gorillas steal local women and girls
And molest them, the people swear.
Gorillas mate but once a year,
Sometimes face to face,embracing
Like humans, tenderly, alone in the forest.
Friend, come near, share my simple meal of words.
I will trade you my misfortune for yours.
Is not one sorrow worth another in the end?
We are nightbirds all in this forest.
Every man before you has felt it,
This same dread, scouring out the heart,
In the night-time, forbidding sleep,
So you can only sing the lullabies
Your lost mother taught you.
There is no quinine against this evil,
As even the gentlest are tempted
Into violence and degradation.
Explorers,missionaries,followers of rivers,
They lost their minds here,one by one,
Minds and bodies finally exhausted,
Seeking not to find.
In the forest,far from the eyes of men,
A circle of naked women dances
Lewd and glorious around a catfish,
Singing in praise of the penis and vulva,
Until the young maidens must kneel
And lick between their elders’ thighs
As the teacher-mothers chant
“Eat the poison!Eat the poison!”
Before the white men came,
The Fang used to make a mask
With four faces:father,mother,
Son and daughter;
Life and suffering,birth and death;
Spinning, interchanging as they danced.
The words of every man who went before him.
Africa had been waiting for me
All along, menacing, absurd.
That moment when Paul du Chaillu
Came face to face with a gorilla,
The first white man to do so,
Standing transfixed in awe
At the monster so long imagined,
Raising his rifle only when the beast
Approached too near
And throwing its head back
And beating its chest
Quaked the forest with its roar.
He killed it with a single shot.
In 1861 British readers hastened
To purchase his book,and fold out
The frontispiece etching
Of the gorilla,his genitals covered
With a fig leaf to spare female readers.
The gorillas steal local women and girls
And molest them, the people swear.
Gorillas mate but once a year,
Sometimes face to face,embracing
Like humans, tenderly, alone in the forest.
Friend, come near, share my simple meal of words.
I will trade you my misfortune for yours.
Is not one sorrow worth another in the end?
We are nightbirds all in this forest.
Every man before you has felt it,
This same dread, scouring out the heart,
In the night-time, forbidding sleep,
So you can only sing the lullabies
Your lost mother taught you.
There is no quinine against this evil,
As even the gentlest are tempted
Into violence and degradation.
Explorers,missionaries,followers of rivers,
They lost their minds here,one by one,
Minds and bodies finally exhausted,
Seeking not to find.
In the forest,far from the eyes of men,
A circle of naked women dances
Lewd and glorious around a catfish,
Singing in praise of the penis and vulva,
Until the young maidens must kneel
And lick between their elders’ thighs
As the teacher-mothers chant
“Eat the poison!Eat the poison!”
Before the white men came,
The Fang used to make a mask
With four faces:father,mother,
Son and daughter;
Life and suffering,birth and death;
Spinning, interchanging as they danced.
Danton Awaiting Trial, 1794
Unless a man will overstep the mark,
He might as well stay at home.
Call me Gargoyle, Cyclops, Tatar,
Call me what you will, but this monster
Has the measure of the world,
And, like a crafty tailor, cut my suit
To fit. How else should a captain
Of revolution impress the world
Butt through the boldest action?
Insurrection is man’s very nature.
It is ogres such as I buy your freedom!
No pettifogging clerk ever won the mob.
My only sin is to love France too much,
Reckless in her service,
Risk all for her, even reason itself,
Because I had to hold her up
When she fell, and carry her free;
Whatever the loss of blood.
And now the loud bull is led out
To slaughter, too rich a prize to miss!
All I am is a voice, a voice in the night.
Should I condemn myself for excesses
Committed in good faith, for all?
Seeking to do justice, I have welcomed
Injustice in the door; fighting tyranny,
I have made myself its dupe.
The fear I scorn and abhor within
I have turned upon the world.
In the end I am sick of it all,
Sick of men and their passions,
Sick of liberty itself, our mistress,
Furious and impossible in her demands,
Goading us till we are traitors
To ourselves; there is no happy end
To this harvest we have begun.
The Revolution must punish dissent,
And one day we all become dissenters.
Enemies to be eliminated.
Now the fools make a religion
Of the nation, an idol of the people!
If they had my balls, they would not feel
The need of such pure souls!
He might as well stay at home.
Call me Gargoyle, Cyclops, Tatar,
Call me what you will, but this monster
Has the measure of the world,
And, like a crafty tailor, cut my suit
To fit. How else should a captain
Of revolution impress the world
Butt through the boldest action?
Insurrection is man’s very nature.
It is ogres such as I buy your freedom!
No pettifogging clerk ever won the mob.
My only sin is to love France too much,
Reckless in her service,
Risk all for her, even reason itself,
Because I had to hold her up
When she fell, and carry her free;
Whatever the loss of blood.
And now the loud bull is led out
To slaughter, too rich a prize to miss!
All I am is a voice, a voice in the night.
Should I condemn myself for excesses
Committed in good faith, for all?
Seeking to do justice, I have welcomed
Injustice in the door; fighting tyranny,
I have made myself its dupe.
The fear I scorn and abhor within
I have turned upon the world.
In the end I am sick of it all,
Sick of men and their passions,
Sick of liberty itself, our mistress,
Furious and impossible in her demands,
Goading us till we are traitors
To ourselves; there is no happy end
To this harvest we have begun.
The Revolution must punish dissent,
And one day we all become dissenters.
Enemies to be eliminated.
Now the fools make a religion
Of the nation, an idol of the people!
If they had my balls, they would not feel
The need of such pure souls!
Innamorata
A world of gestures-
an amorous world-
cloud chamber of collisions.
I am the absent one;
you are the absent one;
someone must always leave;
someone must be abandoned.
The Adorable will destroy
you
eventually.
A sudden agony
from a trivium,
a nuance
that does not fit the ideal,
an imperfection in the model…
These anxieities and injuries-
passion’s contingencies-
can only flee me
away to where I am.
Who loves
loves love,
not love,
and does not love.
The Unclassifiable,
the Sui Generis,
she is my Socrates
of sex.
It is all about waiting.
Hiding.
Riding out the catastrophe.
The asteroid strike.
What hope have the ravished?
The gift is doom itself.
Infinite desire,infinite possibility!
I want so much to understand,
to feel the truth
And be compassion.
No-one in my life
has ever baffled me with so many questions,
impossible futile questions
even Einstein cold not solve.
A flayed hide tells its own story.
My eyes are heralds of pain,
Forever importing fresh miseries.
Secret rites
and votive actions
I dedicate to you
in this age of scientific superstition.
Sentimental-obscene,
a connoisseur of tears,
I practise the voodoo
of uncertain signs.
an amorous world-
cloud chamber of collisions.
I am the absent one;
you are the absent one;
someone must always leave;
someone must be abandoned.
The Adorable will destroy
you
eventually.
A sudden agony
from a trivium,
a nuance
that does not fit the ideal,
an imperfection in the model…
These anxieities and injuries-
passion’s contingencies-
can only flee me
away to where I am.
Who loves
loves love,
not love,
and does not love.
The Unclassifiable,
the Sui Generis,
she is my Socrates
of sex.
It is all about waiting.
Hiding.
Riding out the catastrophe.
The asteroid strike.
What hope have the ravished?
The gift is doom itself.
Infinite desire,infinite possibility!
I want so much to understand,
to feel the truth
And be compassion.
No-one in my life
has ever baffled me with so many questions,
impossible futile questions
even Einstein cold not solve.
A flayed hide tells its own story.
My eyes are heralds of pain,
Forever importing fresh miseries.
Secret rites
and votive actions
I dedicate to you
in this age of scientific superstition.
Sentimental-obscene,
a connoisseur of tears,
I practise the voodoo
of uncertain signs.
Jokers
I tear a hole with a serrated joke.
Jest. Gag.Blague.
I could be happy,
If it wasn’t for reality.
If it wasn’t for the expectations.
There is always another world to prefer.
Laughter is my prayer,
In which case I am quite religious.
Always feel I am watching myself in a film.
A B-movie.
And such a bad actor.
I wouldn’t buy a ticket to see this.
Scaramouche,
What is there
When the laughter dies away?
The giggling,the chuckling,
The sniggering, the tittering,
The belly laughs,
The guffaws?
Ventriloquist’s dummy
Of a mischievous Creator,
I belch and fart
The Infinite.
Jest. Gag.Blague.
I could be happy,
If it wasn’t for reality.
If it wasn’t for the expectations.
There is always another world to prefer.
Laughter is my prayer,
In which case I am quite religious.
Always feel I am watching myself in a film.
A B-movie.
And such a bad actor.
I wouldn’t buy a ticket to see this.
Scaramouche,
What is there
When the laughter dies away?
The giggling,the chuckling,
The sniggering, the tittering,
The belly laughs,
The guffaws?
Ventriloquist’s dummy
Of a mischievous Creator,
I belch and fart
The Infinite.
Spanish Guitar
It is a question of distance and touch.
Fingertips and fingernails
Palping the timbres and tones,
The breath in the wood,
From dolce to ponticelo.
Holding without clinging
To the body of the world.
Right hand, left hand,
Swimming through sound.
I live in the curve,
Interaction of two waves.
Fingertips and fingernails
Palping the timbres and tones,
The breath in the wood,
From dolce to ponticelo.
Holding without clinging
To the body of the world.
Right hand, left hand,
Swimming through sound.
I live in the curve,
Interaction of two waves.
Mayakovsky Square
To the man who hated monuments
They built a monument.
From the man who despised idols
They manufactured an idol.
How many deaths can a man die
(Not counting the least one,
The death of his body)?
Bearded priests-
Deaf to the gospel
Of the thirteenth apostle-
Charged the red corner
With broken mirrors
Tore a man from his name
And sold a caricature,
Turned poetry
Into headlines and slogans.
And a pistol shot
Drove its full stop
Into the April evening,
Into the bull elephant’s heart.
To the man who hated monuments
They built a monument.
From the man who despised idols
They manufactured an idol.
They built a monument.
From the man who despised idols
They manufactured an idol.
How many deaths can a man die
(Not counting the least one,
The death of his body)?
Bearded priests-
Deaf to the gospel
Of the thirteenth apostle-
Charged the red corner
With broken mirrors
Tore a man from his name
And sold a caricature,
Turned poetry
Into headlines and slogans.
And a pistol shot
Drove its full stop
Into the April evening,
Into the bull elephant’s heart.
To the man who hated monuments
They built a monument.
From the man who despised idols
They manufactured an idol.
Afternoon in Vilnius
Who decides what is to remembered
And what is to be forgotten?
Who distinguishes the significant
From the insignificant?
Who authorises history
And sanctions reality?
Who says what is true or untrue?
Here there is no history,
Only histories,
Words one writes
Without needless hope,
Fruitful misunderstandings.
Have you confused your memories
With knowledge?
In the court of Europe
Another speech is being made,
Another prosecution
And defence.
East and West
Are not exactly where you expect
To find them;
But everywhere,
Everywhere.
And what is to be forgotten?
Who distinguishes the significant
From the insignificant?
Who authorises history
And sanctions reality?
Who says what is true or untrue?
Here there is no history,
Only histories,
Words one writes
Without needless hope,
Fruitful misunderstandings.
Have you confused your memories
With knowledge?
In the court of Europe
Another speech is being made,
Another prosecution
And defence.
East and West
Are not exactly where you expect
To find them;
But everywhere,
Everywhere.
Sunday, January 03, 2010
Marco Polo
I was never more at home than when abroad.
Never more at ease than in some hectic venture,
Perilous to body and soul.
In my Genoese prison
I make the walls my curious listeners,
Attending whatever tales I conjure
From life’s exotic embassy.
Thus tedious captivity becomes a Cathay
And a prisoner in rags the Great Khan!
Quick, scribe,dip your pen into an ocean
Of ink, for I will make you a discoverer
Under sail on chartless seas!
(This book shall be for us both
As Kublai Khan’s golden tablet,
Firman supreme that opens all roads!)
Venice,my nocturne of secrets and conspiracies,
My death-spinning silkworm!
Dank cloister of erotic traders
Misted in isolation and slence,
Plague rats gnawing the piles beneath their feet.
Bewildered and beauty-sticken,
I took my compass from the winds
And set myself free...
We found no barbarians there,in the East,
But a people courteous,curious,eager for trade,
And a ruler greater than any on earth,
Magnificent beyond the paltry courts of Europe!
What lies our rulers tell us, as if we were children
To be cozened with fairy tales!
The truth is wrapped in a Persian carpet
And trampled by horses
Like the defeated Caliph of Baghdad.
The visions witnessed in deserts and mountains
Walk with me yet,half-here,half-there,
Never satisfied with my eyes’ representations,
Which seem such poor imitations
Of some sublime beyond.
Still I hear spirits calling, good and ill,
In the Venetian calle, as in the Desert of Lop,
Messages as precious as white mares’ milk.
Never more at ease than in some hectic venture,
Perilous to body and soul.
In my Genoese prison
I make the walls my curious listeners,
Attending whatever tales I conjure
From life’s exotic embassy.
Thus tedious captivity becomes a Cathay
And a prisoner in rags the Great Khan!
Quick, scribe,dip your pen into an ocean
Of ink, for I will make you a discoverer
Under sail on chartless seas!
(This book shall be for us both
As Kublai Khan’s golden tablet,
Firman supreme that opens all roads!)
Venice,my nocturne of secrets and conspiracies,
My death-spinning silkworm!
Dank cloister of erotic traders
Misted in isolation and slence,
Plague rats gnawing the piles beneath their feet.
Bewildered and beauty-sticken,
I took my compass from the winds
And set myself free...
We found no barbarians there,in the East,
But a people courteous,curious,eager for trade,
And a ruler greater than any on earth,
Magnificent beyond the paltry courts of Europe!
What lies our rulers tell us, as if we were children
To be cozened with fairy tales!
The truth is wrapped in a Persian carpet
And trampled by horses
Like the defeated Caliph of Baghdad.
The visions witnessed in deserts and mountains
Walk with me yet,half-here,half-there,
Never satisfied with my eyes’ representations,
Which seem such poor imitations
Of some sublime beyond.
Still I hear spirits calling, good and ill,
In the Venetian calle, as in the Desert of Lop,
Messages as precious as white mares’ milk.
Rudolf II, 1606
Cold! Cold! All heaven’s winds chase through this castle,
But cannot unseat it from its rock...
To pace the Kunstkammer corridor, that is my delight,
Whatever the wars and machinations of the day.
Let no evil insinuate itself between me
And my black Spanish cloak!
Why should I travel the world
When I can gather the world to me
And arrange it all here, at the very centre,
To bolster my powers with talismans?
How old I feel! My hair gone and my beard so grey,
My body flabby and weak from excess.
Each day now I come here to this sainted canvas,
The Feast of the Rosary, from Dürer’s hand,
That I so long coveted and pursued
With guile and patience and infinite care,
And had carried over the Alps from Venice;
Hour after hour, I contemplate the majesty
Of the Madonna, in blue robe, as she crowns
With roses my great-great-grandfather, Maximilian,
Kneeling before her and the infant Lord.
They accuse me of inaction, of indifference,
Who little comprehend the soul’s means
Or the methods a seeker must adhere to
If he would prosper in the dark.
The curve of a comet or a woman’s thigh
Occupy me equally in this necromancy,
Conjuring talismans, infused with my breath,
To blazon the planets’ will to man.
Questions, questions, riddles to bedevil me,
Conundrums of human behaviour and fate!-
How to act for certain good when every action
Entails too many consequences, too many ills?
Give me the magic to untie that knot!
In the meantime, let us allow things to happen,
And scry their entrails as best we can.
I have made all believers welcome,
Hoping that together we may find the one truth,
And for that I am damned by the Vatican
As a devil-worshipper.
Sometimes I feel my reason, like a ship
In a tempest, smashed against rocks,
Masts splintered and sails shredded,
Desperate to anchor anywhere, even
On cannibal shores!
Jew and Muslim, Protestant and Catholic,
Let us join as one in natural magic.
The fires we build shall be not pyres
Of martyrdom, but watchmen’s torches
To burn a path through the night.
Nature, will you one day reveal to me
Your essence, and consecrate my labours
With the Philosopher’s Stone?
Though fools call knowledge heresy,
It is the jewel in the serpent’s head.
I must have solitude and peace, the only freedom
From intrigue, suspscion, the half-heard word
Muttered behind walls and curtains,
The masterful dissembling of supposed friends
And ambassadors’ suave tergiversation.
I’ll gird myself with ceremony
And make authority’s pageant my shield,
Renamed Augustus, under Capricorn.
Black Prague, citadel of the Great Work,
Perilous threshold of the invisible,
Observatory at the world’s hub,
Infuse me with visions and wonders!
Such melancholy I suffer that no doctor
Can cure me,-my twisted guts spew
Fear then boredom then disgust.
Beloved Kunstkammer, unicorn’s cornucopia
Of monstrous marvels! This encyclopaedia
Will grant me the cosmos entire
As my theatre; its secret virtues
Are my only bezoar, carried next
To my heart.
The rare and extraordinary are dear to me;
An hour spent with scientists and artists
Is worth more than any minister’s blather.
In the sanctity of my universal treasure-chest,
There is peace, harmony unachievable
On earth, amid the petty quarrelling
Of inferior beings. Within these walls
I perceive a unity beyond corruption,
And boundless enquiry, without prohibition
Or prejudice- a route, I pray, back to God.
These intermarried objects are my Cabala.
In the workings of these planetary clocks
Creation’s immense will acts out the centuries
Minute by minute.
The soul demands observation and experiment.
I wait, and wait, patiently allowing events
To work through their own repercussions,
And, by the subtlest checks and moves,
Hold the bedlam earth in balance.
Let the Pope say I am bewitched-no matter!
It is my own mind I must hold fast
Against dintegration. Europe divided
Will never make peace with the Turk.
Baleful times! An ominous conjunction of stars
Bodes malaise. Night panics place a dagger
In my grasp-how shall I use it?
Born under Saturn, I sweat morbid fevers,
Closer, ever closer to irredeemable despair.
My brother, my enemy! That horned viper, Matthias,
Would spit his venom into mine and my kingdom’s
Veins,-yet I shall scotch him underfoot,
My magic is far greater than his.
Night is falling, night is falling again...
The wild moon calls me to her service.
I can hear the mandrakes scream.
But cannot unseat it from its rock...
To pace the Kunstkammer corridor, that is my delight,
Whatever the wars and machinations of the day.
Let no evil insinuate itself between me
And my black Spanish cloak!
Why should I travel the world
When I can gather the world to me
And arrange it all here, at the very centre,
To bolster my powers with talismans?
How old I feel! My hair gone and my beard so grey,
My body flabby and weak from excess.
Each day now I come here to this sainted canvas,
The Feast of the Rosary, from Dürer’s hand,
That I so long coveted and pursued
With guile and patience and infinite care,
And had carried over the Alps from Venice;
Hour after hour, I contemplate the majesty
Of the Madonna, in blue robe, as she crowns
With roses my great-great-grandfather, Maximilian,
Kneeling before her and the infant Lord.
They accuse me of inaction, of indifference,
Who little comprehend the soul’s means
Or the methods a seeker must adhere to
If he would prosper in the dark.
The curve of a comet or a woman’s thigh
Occupy me equally in this necromancy,
Conjuring talismans, infused with my breath,
To blazon the planets’ will to man.
Questions, questions, riddles to bedevil me,
Conundrums of human behaviour and fate!-
How to act for certain good when every action
Entails too many consequences, too many ills?
Give me the magic to untie that knot!
In the meantime, let us allow things to happen,
And scry their entrails as best we can.
I have made all believers welcome,
Hoping that together we may find the one truth,
And for that I am damned by the Vatican
As a devil-worshipper.
Sometimes I feel my reason, like a ship
In a tempest, smashed against rocks,
Masts splintered and sails shredded,
Desperate to anchor anywhere, even
On cannibal shores!
Jew and Muslim, Protestant and Catholic,
Let us join as one in natural magic.
The fires we build shall be not pyres
Of martyrdom, but watchmen’s torches
To burn a path through the night.
Nature, will you one day reveal to me
Your essence, and consecrate my labours
With the Philosopher’s Stone?
Though fools call knowledge heresy,
It is the jewel in the serpent’s head.
I must have solitude and peace, the only freedom
From intrigue, suspscion, the half-heard word
Muttered behind walls and curtains,
The masterful dissembling of supposed friends
And ambassadors’ suave tergiversation.
I’ll gird myself with ceremony
And make authority’s pageant my shield,
Renamed Augustus, under Capricorn.
Black Prague, citadel of the Great Work,
Perilous threshold of the invisible,
Observatory at the world’s hub,
Infuse me with visions and wonders!
Such melancholy I suffer that no doctor
Can cure me,-my twisted guts spew
Fear then boredom then disgust.
Beloved Kunstkammer, unicorn’s cornucopia
Of monstrous marvels! This encyclopaedia
Will grant me the cosmos entire
As my theatre; its secret virtues
Are my only bezoar, carried next
To my heart.
The rare and extraordinary are dear to me;
An hour spent with scientists and artists
Is worth more than any minister’s blather.
In the sanctity of my universal treasure-chest,
There is peace, harmony unachievable
On earth, amid the petty quarrelling
Of inferior beings. Within these walls
I perceive a unity beyond corruption,
And boundless enquiry, without prohibition
Or prejudice- a route, I pray, back to God.
These intermarried objects are my Cabala.
In the workings of these planetary clocks
Creation’s immense will acts out the centuries
Minute by minute.
The soul demands observation and experiment.
I wait, and wait, patiently allowing events
To work through their own repercussions,
And, by the subtlest checks and moves,
Hold the bedlam earth in balance.
Let the Pope say I am bewitched-no matter!
It is my own mind I must hold fast
Against dintegration. Europe divided
Will never make peace with the Turk.
Baleful times! An ominous conjunction of stars
Bodes malaise. Night panics place a dagger
In my grasp-how shall I use it?
Born under Saturn, I sweat morbid fevers,
Closer, ever closer to irredeemable despair.
My brother, my enemy! That horned viper, Matthias,
Would spit his venom into mine and my kingdom’s
Veins,-yet I shall scotch him underfoot,
My magic is far greater than his.
Night is falling, night is falling again...
The wild moon calls me to her service.
I can hear the mandrakes scream.
Sanity
Call the alienist: see can he locate any aliens.
Must madness always be savage
Or might it have some kindness in it,
Some curious promise?
The sound and the unsound,
Count them together.
They are brothers,
Like it or not, bewildered all,
In various ways.
Disreputable are the truth-tellers,
Not entirely to be trusted.
Sanity is dull and reasonable,
Measuring effects without histrionics,
Achieving limited aims
For the placid commonweal.
Suspicions are the sum of us.
The territory has no vocabulary;
It is all potential.
If names you need,
You will have to invent them,
Fashion devices suited to your ends.
The indescribable is where we live.
Fascinating spectacle of ourselves!-
Extraordinary animals shaping death
On our tongues, we observe the symptoms
Of being.
Exorbitant appetite calls the dance.
Feelings and sensations so acute
Are life itself, which, even as it generates,
Undoes.
Resist the irresistible?
The more and the other confound
Diminutive designs.
To torture and be tortured is delight
In love’s perverse cult.
Time to avenge
Childhood’s horror in cruel victory.
Time to break the rules and suffer.
Slow murderers,alchemists of separation,
Your violence brings you home.
Can you recover from yourself,
Make progress,prosper and be whole?
Empty cash in your pocket,
You gamble on the wish-market,
Imagining ever more objects of desire,
Self-thwarted, self-betrayed,
Shopping for nothings.
The fear, the danger is too much:
Heart’s desire too monstrous to admit,
So hide it, fool, deny it.
Must madness always be savage
Or might it have some kindness in it,
Some curious promise?
The sound and the unsound,
Count them together.
They are brothers,
Like it or not, bewildered all,
In various ways.
Disreputable are the truth-tellers,
Not entirely to be trusted.
Sanity is dull and reasonable,
Measuring effects without histrionics,
Achieving limited aims
For the placid commonweal.
Suspicions are the sum of us.
The territory has no vocabulary;
It is all potential.
If names you need,
You will have to invent them,
Fashion devices suited to your ends.
The indescribable is where we live.
Fascinating spectacle of ourselves!-
Extraordinary animals shaping death
On our tongues, we observe the symptoms
Of being.
Exorbitant appetite calls the dance.
Feelings and sensations so acute
Are life itself, which, even as it generates,
Undoes.
Resist the irresistible?
The more and the other confound
Diminutive designs.
To torture and be tortured is delight
In love’s perverse cult.
Time to avenge
Childhood’s horror in cruel victory.
Time to break the rules and suffer.
Slow murderers,alchemists of separation,
Your violence brings you home.
Can you recover from yourself,
Make progress,prosper and be whole?
Empty cash in your pocket,
You gamble on the wish-market,
Imagining ever more objects of desire,
Self-thwarted, self-betrayed,
Shopping for nothings.
The fear, the danger is too much:
Heart’s desire too monstrous to admit,
So hide it, fool, deny it.
Swimming Pool
In cafes,in parks,in apartments,in the street,
People meet, faces talk.
Doing things,making decisions,
Yes, that occurs, occurs all the time,
But it’s the thinking about it, the discussing,
That makes it almost real.
All these abstractions, these conversations,
“He said this and I said that,”
Myriads of details disappeared...
Tragedy sells few tickets these days:
Don Juan has no chance of damnation,
No black reward for his sins.
Can it be the dead are all alike?
Collectors all, banal and jaded,
Our sufferings too light for solace,
We forget the glory, the terror.
Too long lying by the pool!
Why not jump in now and have a swim?
People meet, faces talk.
Doing things,making decisions,
Yes, that occurs, occurs all the time,
But it’s the thinking about it, the discussing,
That makes it almost real.
All these abstractions, these conversations,
“He said this and I said that,”
Myriads of details disappeared...
Tragedy sells few tickets these days:
Don Juan has no chance of damnation,
No black reward for his sins.
Can it be the dead are all alike?
Collectors all, banal and jaded,
Our sufferings too light for solace,
We forget the glory, the terror.
Too long lying by the pool!
Why not jump in now and have a swim?
Sad Economist
A German pimp
In an Italian suit
Is selling Russian prostitutes
To Turkish johns.
The age of illusionists and swindlers;
Ponzi scheme on Ponzi scheme.
The money-trance is working day and nght,
Buying shares in the unreal.
Mistress Decay wears a mink coat
And gold rings on her fingers.
I would love to draw maps
But cannot find boundaries anywhere.
This is the devilish West,
The formulation of a theoretical model,
The marketing of ideals.
Fiction and fake are the miracle-machines,
Servicing the freedom of slaves.
Hypocritical and capricious,
The gods of Olympus look down,
Playing games with myths.
In an Italian suit
Is selling Russian prostitutes
To Turkish johns.
The age of illusionists and swindlers;
Ponzi scheme on Ponzi scheme.
The money-trance is working day and nght,
Buying shares in the unreal.
Mistress Decay wears a mink coat
And gold rings on her fingers.
I would love to draw maps
But cannot find boundaries anywhere.
This is the devilish West,
The formulation of a theoretical model,
The marketing of ideals.
Fiction and fake are the miracle-machines,
Servicing the freedom of slaves.
Hypocritical and capricious,
The gods of Olympus look down,
Playing games with myths.
Just Looking
Do you know where there is?
It is different from here.
Somehow.
Running in the egg and spoon race
From Monday to Friday,
Mind you don’t trip over yourself.
Between the seen and the unseen,
I stake my mind.
On a whim.
In the zoo, man and animal
Stare at one another,
Uncomprehending.
Metaphors for each other.
Smearing their hands with animal blood,
The first artists set to work.
Count me in.
Count me out.
It is different from here.
Somehow.
Running in the egg and spoon race
From Monday to Friday,
Mind you don’t trip over yourself.
Between the seen and the unseen,
I stake my mind.
On a whim.
In the zoo, man and animal
Stare at one another,
Uncomprehending.
Metaphors for each other.
Smearing their hands with animal blood,
The first artists set to work.
Count me in.
Count me out.
The First Novelist
He would serve the many-breasted goddess
With romance and comedy;
Enter the labyrinth with a clew of words.
A story rose like a dolphin from the deep
To rescue him from drowning.
He wore the actor’s mask,half-on,half-off,
Plotting positions across the stage,
An image frozen on a Pompeiian mosaic,
A clay doll fashioned for the gods.
An unheard tale of Alexander was beginning;
A secret history would be revealed.
Incidents, distractions and dangers
Concocted the rites of initiation;
Words would bring the dead to life.
The author. creature of marsh and shore,
Builder of ships to be wrecked,
Must fall, warring with love and time.
The one who breaks will have to mend.
With romance and comedy;
Enter the labyrinth with a clew of words.
A story rose like a dolphin from the deep
To rescue him from drowning.
He wore the actor’s mask,half-on,half-off,
Plotting positions across the stage,
An image frozen on a Pompeiian mosaic,
A clay doll fashioned for the gods.
An unheard tale of Alexander was beginning;
A secret history would be revealed.
Incidents, distractions and dangers
Concocted the rites of initiation;
Words would bring the dead to life.
The author. creature of marsh and shore,
Builder of ships to be wrecked,
Must fall, warring with love and time.
The one who breaks will have to mend.
Digital Man
Burgling the future to fill today’s houses,
Bankrupting posterity and ourselves,
We are the rapacious, the dissatisfied.
Autists without art.
There is only the endless mediocre present;
No utopias, no ideas.
Intimacy, reciprocity,
No thanks.
Don’t feel much empathy,
Don’t read much any more.
Solitude is so sweet and sympathetic.
Don’t touch me.
Leave me in silence.
Cities engulf;
Cameras track every step.
Lights and noises disurb.
Companies are updating,restructuring,retraining;
Someone somewhere is losing his job.
You have to fit in,
Be “co-operative,” “flexible”, docile.
I just want to repeat the same actions over and over,
Cataogue my memories,
Stay at home, in my museum.
All this talking, chatting,socialising,bonding...
I can’t stand it.
I need the deep, remote.
Everything is in the shops;
Nothing can survive without being sold.
But I am uncommercial,
Irreducible,
Incurably real.
Every idiot’s opinion must be heard and respected
In this world without knowledge or sense.
They sneer at facts and grammar,
Discredit reason and truth.
Superstition and conspiracy are all they believe in,
The frivolous, the ignorant, the empty,
Also known as “normal”.
Who do you pretend to be?
What do you choose to purchase
With your life’s credit?
What they call freedom
Is merely choice;
Their happiness is self-congratulation.
Indulge your preferences,
Alone, at the computer,
Sharing nothing, communicating nothing.
Pragmatic relationships come and go.
Virgins and teetoltallers need not apply.
All forms of consumption
Have their place in the market.
Only abstinence is taboo.
Everything on earth is beng reinvented
For commerce and use.
There’s no thinking any more,
Just eating and excreting.
I’m obese,anorexic,addicted,conventional,
No home, no community,no city,no country,no self.
Bankrupting posterity and ourselves,
We are the rapacious, the dissatisfied.
Autists without art.
There is only the endless mediocre present;
No utopias, no ideas.
Intimacy, reciprocity,
No thanks.
Don’t feel much empathy,
Don’t read much any more.
Solitude is so sweet and sympathetic.
Don’t touch me.
Leave me in silence.
Cities engulf;
Cameras track every step.
Lights and noises disurb.
Companies are updating,restructuring,retraining;
Someone somewhere is losing his job.
You have to fit in,
Be “co-operative,” “flexible”, docile.
I just want to repeat the same actions over and over,
Cataogue my memories,
Stay at home, in my museum.
All this talking, chatting,socialising,bonding...
I can’t stand it.
I need the deep, remote.
Everything is in the shops;
Nothing can survive without being sold.
But I am uncommercial,
Irreducible,
Incurably real.
Every idiot’s opinion must be heard and respected
In this world without knowledge or sense.
They sneer at facts and grammar,
Discredit reason and truth.
Superstition and conspiracy are all they believe in,
The frivolous, the ignorant, the empty,
Also known as “normal”.
Who do you pretend to be?
What do you choose to purchase
With your life’s credit?
What they call freedom
Is merely choice;
Their happiness is self-congratulation.
Indulge your preferences,
Alone, at the computer,
Sharing nothing, communicating nothing.
Pragmatic relationships come and go.
Virgins and teetoltallers need not apply.
All forms of consumption
Have their place in the market.
Only abstinence is taboo.
Everything on earth is beng reinvented
For commerce and use.
There’s no thinking any more,
Just eating and excreting.
I’m obese,anorexic,addicted,conventional,
No home, no community,no city,no country,no self.
Viruses
Mind-viruses evolve me.
Thought-infected,out of control,
I attack myself with ideas.
Philosophysics.
Distinctions,strategies and associations
Baffle me through
The half-truths,the double-dealing.
Crippled through with horrors and miracles,
I reel back to “It depends...”
The syringe pierces the skin;
The virus penetrates the cell’s defences.
Bad advice is my favourite kind.
Gambling on the long shot,
Taking cheap insurance,
Playing the streaks,
Playing against the streaks,
I back my hunches to collapse.
Cat’s cradle of kluges,
The human eye.
I imitate
The spider’s ritual.
Thought-infected,out of control,
I attack myself with ideas.
Philosophysics.
Distinctions,strategies and associations
Baffle me through
The half-truths,the double-dealing.
Crippled through with horrors and miracles,
I reel back to “It depends...”
The syringe pierces the skin;
The virus penetrates the cell’s defences.
Bad advice is my favourite kind.
Gambling on the long shot,
Taking cheap insurance,
Playing the streaks,
Playing against the streaks,
I back my hunches to collapse.
Cat’s cradle of kluges,
The human eye.
I imitate
The spider’s ritual.
Exposures
Not guilty, I reply,
But do not believe it.
Not really.
Not now.
Beauty and suicide are so close.
Everything is almost something else.
This image that takes you over
And becomes a cosmos,
Is just grain and tone and artifice.
Two dimensions.
Just when you think you have learned all there is
About loss, something will arise to remind you
How little you truly know; another inflection,
A novel- for you-permutation,
A nuance that takes time to parse.
But do not believe it.
Not really.
Not now.
Beauty and suicide are so close.
Everything is almost something else.
This image that takes you over
And becomes a cosmos,
Is just grain and tone and artifice.
Two dimensions.
Just when you think you have learned all there is
About loss, something will arise to remind you
How little you truly know; another inflection,
A novel- for you-permutation,
A nuance that takes time to parse.
Scientist
Prokarya and eukarya,
Here we cling,
The one per cent,
Not yet extinct.
Some shrill voice inside me,
A hundred million years old,
Screams I am dying,
How will I pay the bills,
What about the planet?
I will bark at you,and bite you,
You,in my way,
Enemy with my face!
The chimpanzee’s yawn
Is my yawn.
I myself am the asteroid
Rushing towards this planet.
Think of the ants,
Unchanged for aeons,
The most warlike creatures on earth.
I sit with my retrospections
And prospections,
Neither matching the actual.
Oh do not give me information,
Let me imagine...
A mitochondrion is not alive,
But the system has properties we call life.
This is the principle of the bicycle.
What is taking shape in the Petri dish?
What we term particles do not exist.
Every atom around me I postulate,
In order to feel alive.
One atom with another:
That relation seduces and bedevils.
Could I grasp it, I would sire myself on nature.
Here we cling,
The one per cent,
Not yet extinct.
Some shrill voice inside me,
A hundred million years old,
Screams I am dying,
How will I pay the bills,
What about the planet?
I will bark at you,and bite you,
You,in my way,
Enemy with my face!
The chimpanzee’s yawn
Is my yawn.
I myself am the asteroid
Rushing towards this planet.
Think of the ants,
Unchanged for aeons,
The most warlike creatures on earth.
I sit with my retrospections
And prospections,
Neither matching the actual.
Oh do not give me information,
Let me imagine...
A mitochondrion is not alive,
But the system has properties we call life.
This is the principle of the bicycle.
What is taking shape in the Petri dish?
What we term particles do not exist.
Every atom around me I postulate,
In order to feel alive.
One atom with another:
That relation seduces and bedevils.
Could I grasp it, I would sire myself on nature.
London in the 1890s
Is this the inception, the tremulous threshold,
The coming of a grand and lovely age,
Apogee of science,religion and society?
All is decay and senescence:
Generals draw up battle plans,
Hampered by hidden fear;
The batsman walks out onto the cricket pitch,
Knowing he is not up to it any more.
Heavily,in slow motion,empires fall.
The race is becoming degenerate.
Suicide is all the rage.
It’s the same the whole world over,
It’s the poor what gets the blame
It’s the rich what gets the pleasure,
Ain’t it all a bleeding shame?
Fellowships and societies debate,
Envisaging the changes to come;
Utopians,socialists and anarchists alike
Dream the world’s transformation
While the unemployed stand begging
On hopeless moribund streets.
At the premiere of “Arms and the Man”,
The entire pit and gallery break into laughter
Until,suddenly, they begin to realise
That they themselves are being mocked
And sit there,dumbfounded,bitter
And angry at this upstart author Shaw
Who dares to satirize their world.
Oscar Wilde returns from America,
His hair curled just like Nero’s
In the Louvre bust.
Salome dances like a flame,
And stoops to kiss the severed head
Of Jokanaan.
Lord Tennyson lies on his deathbed,
A copy of Cymbeline placed in his hands,
Opened at the page with his favourite lines,
Moonlight streaming in through the oriel window
To bear him away to Avalon.
All across Engand,from church pulpits,
Ministers lament the passing
Of an immortal, the conscience of the age.
I’ll sing thee songs of Araby
And tales of fair Cashmere,
Wild tales to cheat thee of a sigh
Or charm thee to a tear.
In the music hall darkness, night after night,
Arthur Symons sits,watching,thrilling
To the painted lascivious dancers,
The louche artifice of whores and ballet girls,
Oh so wicked, so alluring...
Then he strolls the promenade
And chooses his fancy,
An experience, a poem-to-be.
A flight from the dragons and harpies
Marching on Pariliament,demanding
Suffrage and equality.
After the ball was over,
She took out her glass eye.
Stood her cork leg in the corner,
Hung up her hair to dry.
The Importance of Being Earnest
Opens at the St James’s Theatre,
Dandiacal epigrams strutting
Through Uranian voids,
Feigning and doubling
With the glee of the doomed.
The author dines at the Savoy
With another rough young man
While at home Mrs Wilde is reading
The children a bedtime story.
I’ll sing thee songs of Araby
And tales of fair Cashmere,
Wild tales to cheat thee of a sigh
Or charm thee to a tear.
The coming of a grand and lovely age,
Apogee of science,religion and society?
All is decay and senescence:
Generals draw up battle plans,
Hampered by hidden fear;
The batsman walks out onto the cricket pitch,
Knowing he is not up to it any more.
Heavily,in slow motion,empires fall.
The race is becoming degenerate.
Suicide is all the rage.
It’s the same the whole world over,
It’s the poor what gets the blame
It’s the rich what gets the pleasure,
Ain’t it all a bleeding shame?
Fellowships and societies debate,
Envisaging the changes to come;
Utopians,socialists and anarchists alike
Dream the world’s transformation
While the unemployed stand begging
On hopeless moribund streets.
At the premiere of “Arms and the Man”,
The entire pit and gallery break into laughter
Until,suddenly, they begin to realise
That they themselves are being mocked
And sit there,dumbfounded,bitter
And angry at this upstart author Shaw
Who dares to satirize their world.
Oscar Wilde returns from America,
His hair curled just like Nero’s
In the Louvre bust.
Salome dances like a flame,
And stoops to kiss the severed head
Of Jokanaan.
Lord Tennyson lies on his deathbed,
A copy of Cymbeline placed in his hands,
Opened at the page with his favourite lines,
Moonlight streaming in through the oriel window
To bear him away to Avalon.
All across Engand,from church pulpits,
Ministers lament the passing
Of an immortal, the conscience of the age.
I’ll sing thee songs of Araby
And tales of fair Cashmere,
Wild tales to cheat thee of a sigh
Or charm thee to a tear.
In the music hall darkness, night after night,
Arthur Symons sits,watching,thrilling
To the painted lascivious dancers,
The louche artifice of whores and ballet girls,
Oh so wicked, so alluring...
Then he strolls the promenade
And chooses his fancy,
An experience, a poem-to-be.
A flight from the dragons and harpies
Marching on Pariliament,demanding
Suffrage and equality.
After the ball was over,
She took out her glass eye.
Stood her cork leg in the corner,
Hung up her hair to dry.
The Importance of Being Earnest
Opens at the St James’s Theatre,
Dandiacal epigrams strutting
Through Uranian voids,
Feigning and doubling
With the glee of the doomed.
The author dines at the Savoy
With another rough young man
While at home Mrs Wilde is reading
The children a bedtime story.
I’ll sing thee songs of Araby
And tales of fair Cashmere,
Wild tales to cheat thee of a sigh
Or charm thee to a tear.
Country Paths
Bend of a lane,bow of a hill,
The why of fields and hedges,fractal,multifarious,
The dogwood days never seen again,
The eachness of counties,self-same and distinct...
This pollen in the air is the placenames
Ancestors etched in wood and stone;
These boundaries have held,will hold,
Parishes trodden out and breathed on,
Vills,hundreds and wapentakes,
Shadow-shire of beaver,wolf and aurochs,
Where I coppice my rooted tongue.
Nightingale woods of spring
Laugh oxlips and anemones into thickened air,
Thousand-year light and shade
Chequered into a woodman’s sigh.
Frith and spinney, copse and thicket
Weave me into their etymology;
I reave the geometrical land,
Axing through mind-acres gladly.
Strange country that I thought I knew!
Uncanny tree I fruit from!
The why of fields and hedges,fractal,multifarious,
The dogwood days never seen again,
The eachness of counties,self-same and distinct...
This pollen in the air is the placenames
Ancestors etched in wood and stone;
These boundaries have held,will hold,
Parishes trodden out and breathed on,
Vills,hundreds and wapentakes,
Shadow-shire of beaver,wolf and aurochs,
Where I coppice my rooted tongue.
Nightingale woods of spring
Laugh oxlips and anemones into thickened air,
Thousand-year light and shade
Chequered into a woodman’s sigh.
Frith and spinney, copse and thicket
Weave me into their etymology;
I reave the geometrical land,
Axing through mind-acres gladly.
Strange country that I thought I knew!
Uncanny tree I fruit from!
Grids
Cities of industry and embattled order,
Mind-grids of rational madness,
Interconnected buildings and beings!
A world is being produced, transported and traded.
Hands in ancient Mesopotamia
Roll mud into bricks, stacking,constructing
Ziggurats,metropolises,maps
To measure time and space,
Reniassance perspectival paintings,
Moveable type and vast machines,
Architecture of all eras,
The Internet.
Bureaucrats in ancient Thebes
Draw up plans for new cities;
Alexander the Great unrolls a map
Of Persia, his finger tracing conquest;
Monastic choirs raise their voices,
Flowing with the notes on the page;
Medieval merchants open their chapbooks,
Filling the pews like figures in a ledger.
Electronic cuneiform flickers across my sight,
Star-grain scattered in the breeze,
Babylonian astronomy for the modern world,
Astrology to arrange my fortunes.
I am a maker and breaker of tablets,
Pyramidologist of days,
Seeking the hidden chambers and tunnels
That destiny intimates.
Pacific islanders crouch in their canoes,
Constructing wave-maps from palm fronds,
Weaving grids that their bodies test
Against the winds and sway.
Through the crosses-and-circles of cathedral cities,
Through seasons and circadian rhythms,
I pace my own Jerusalem,beating the bounds,
As the Milky Way’s drum resonates C major.
I hold up my guidonian hand
To orchestrate music in the whirlpool air.
Am I looking at or through the screen?
(The veil that trains me in optics).
Northern Protestant and/or Southern Catholic?
Sometimes I am not sure which Bible to read.
Anyhow, I am in the frame,
Silent cinema’s furious hero.
My hands are those of a prehistoric fisherman,
Weaving flax into nets.
Force vectors firework their arcs about me,
As I bumble through this tumult
Of chaos becoming order, order becoming chaos,
Angel-translator of intelligences,
Fool for knowledge and love.
Mind-grids of rational madness,
Interconnected buildings and beings!
A world is being produced, transported and traded.
Hands in ancient Mesopotamia
Roll mud into bricks, stacking,constructing
Ziggurats,metropolises,maps
To measure time and space,
Reniassance perspectival paintings,
Moveable type and vast machines,
Architecture of all eras,
The Internet.
Bureaucrats in ancient Thebes
Draw up plans for new cities;
Alexander the Great unrolls a map
Of Persia, his finger tracing conquest;
Monastic choirs raise their voices,
Flowing with the notes on the page;
Medieval merchants open their chapbooks,
Filling the pews like figures in a ledger.
Electronic cuneiform flickers across my sight,
Star-grain scattered in the breeze,
Babylonian astronomy for the modern world,
Astrology to arrange my fortunes.
I am a maker and breaker of tablets,
Pyramidologist of days,
Seeking the hidden chambers and tunnels
That destiny intimates.
Pacific islanders crouch in their canoes,
Constructing wave-maps from palm fronds,
Weaving grids that their bodies test
Against the winds and sway.
Through the crosses-and-circles of cathedral cities,
Through seasons and circadian rhythms,
I pace my own Jerusalem,beating the bounds,
As the Milky Way’s drum resonates C major.
I hold up my guidonian hand
To orchestrate music in the whirlpool air.
Am I looking at or through the screen?
(The veil that trains me in optics).
Northern Protestant and/or Southern Catholic?
Sometimes I am not sure which Bible to read.
Anyhow, I am in the frame,
Silent cinema’s furious hero.
My hands are those of a prehistoric fisherman,
Weaving flax into nets.
Force vectors firework their arcs about me,
As I bumble through this tumult
Of chaos becoming order, order becoming chaos,
Angel-translator of intelligences,
Fool for knowledge and love.
Russians
I cower from the Moscow avenues,
Crushed by their gargantuan breadth,
Murderous traffic speeding towards me.
“Two Romes have fallen,and the third stands,
And a fourth there shall not be.”
Fateful August raises a dangerous sun.
In the underpass a shabby busker
Plays a mournful ballad,
The same song every day.
People walk around St Petersburg,
Talking to themselves,
Muttering,grumbling,groaning to themselves,
Disconsolate and all-too-human,
Hugging their sorrows close.
A dusty little town on the Volga.
One remembers the Germans lured out here
By Catherine the Great
With promises of fertile lands, houses and livestock,
And they came, they came in their thousands,
Excited pioneers of a new European civilisation,
Only to find nothing, nothing but the steppe,
And the spears of Tatar raiders.
In her decaying flat, Vera lives with hunchbacked thoughts,
Eating black bread with them,
Sharing her vodka with them,
The forest demons who must be appeased.
She walks down by the willow river
Through the floating poplar seeds,
And catches the yellwgreen flame of an oriole’s flight
On her fingertips,
Balances the plash of a swimming rat
On the end of her nose.
Wary and defiant, her dark eyes
Sometimes fire with amusement and joy.
The past is bad medicine,
So bitter, so foul.
Who knows how to be free?
Slavery is so familiar, it seems right.
Who knows how to make a new beginning
When endings are all we ever had.
Somewere,perhaps,a few true souls are gathered
Like the last colony of Old Believers,
Hidden in some remote Siberian forest,
Praying for the world.
Siberian summer evening.
Dust-tracks covered with apple blossom.
Outside a house once inhabited by a Decembrist
An apple tree surges up in full bloom.
What will the New Jerusalem look like?
Will it be a village of wooden huts
Where the men and women bathe naked together
In a river of laughing fish?
Slowly, suddenly, a wind stirs and rises
Far away, and gusts through the trees,
Shedding its riches of rain.
Crushed by their gargantuan breadth,
Murderous traffic speeding towards me.
“Two Romes have fallen,and the third stands,
And a fourth there shall not be.”
Fateful August raises a dangerous sun.
In the underpass a shabby busker
Plays a mournful ballad,
The same song every day.
People walk around St Petersburg,
Talking to themselves,
Muttering,grumbling,groaning to themselves,
Disconsolate and all-too-human,
Hugging their sorrows close.
A dusty little town on the Volga.
One remembers the Germans lured out here
By Catherine the Great
With promises of fertile lands, houses and livestock,
And they came, they came in their thousands,
Excited pioneers of a new European civilisation,
Only to find nothing, nothing but the steppe,
And the spears of Tatar raiders.
In her decaying flat, Vera lives with hunchbacked thoughts,
Eating black bread with them,
Sharing her vodka with them,
The forest demons who must be appeased.
She walks down by the willow river
Through the floating poplar seeds,
And catches the yellwgreen flame of an oriole’s flight
On her fingertips,
Balances the plash of a swimming rat
On the end of her nose.
Wary and defiant, her dark eyes
Sometimes fire with amusement and joy.
The past is bad medicine,
So bitter, so foul.
Who knows how to be free?
Slavery is so familiar, it seems right.
Who knows how to make a new beginning
When endings are all we ever had.
Somewere,perhaps,a few true souls are gathered
Like the last colony of Old Believers,
Hidden in some remote Siberian forest,
Praying for the world.
Siberian summer evening.
Dust-tracks covered with apple blossom.
Outside a house once inhabited by a Decembrist
An apple tree surges up in full bloom.
What will the New Jerusalem look like?
Will it be a village of wooden huts
Where the men and women bathe naked together
In a river of laughing fish?
Slowly, suddenly, a wind stirs and rises
Far away, and gusts through the trees,
Shedding its riches of rain.
Justinian and the Fall
An empire is a poem of ideas..
Under a mosaic of Bellerophon fighting Chimera,
Justinian sits alone in a gilded chair,
Religiously dreaming of the glory,
A new Rome worthy of his name.
His hands grasp the bread and wine,
The liturgy of power and pretence,
Each hour’s ceremonial his burden.
Now rash,now indecisive, he coddles
His own impurpled arrogance for all,
And laughing barbarians invade the borders
Of his dreams, his words, his realm.
Under a mosaic of Bellerophon fighting Chimera,
Justinian sits alone in a gilded chair,
Religiously dreaming of the glory,
A new Rome worthy of his name.
His hands grasp the bread and wine,
The liturgy of power and pretence,
Each hour’s ceremonial his burden.
Now rash,now indecisive, he coddles
His own impurpled arrogance for all,
And laughing barbarians invade the borders
Of his dreams, his words, his realm.
Shanghai
In the howling slipstream of the future,
Faces pinned back in clownish grins,
The myrmidons eat and shit their way
To riches.Glory.Ever more desire.
Death is the empire,
Time the frontier.
New fashion, new technology!
Delirium of money and action,
Ecstasy-terror of jazz-architecture!
Into the outstretched hand of a shoeshine boy
The loose change of fortune is dropped,
Sure as oracle bones.
Red and gold moon of tigerish spring,
Blood’s calendar tolls like a temple bell
Through sunlight-mist-blossom-drift.
Autumn,too,invites premonitions
And words as subtle as women.
Bastard entrepot of sacrificial suns,
Born from opium-cloud waters,
Bluster your warlord ways into the sky!
Scavenger,enter the neon netherworld
With a ghost’s crooked steps,
Greedy to grab whatever you can,
A knowledge as precious as tea.
Beheaded lives, impaled on factory spikes,
Line the high walls of tomorrow
And love, poisoned with midnight’s mercury,
Burns itself out in diminishing profits.
Careful not to lose your face!
You are the swarm, the bedlam.
The information uniforms you,
Drills you, sends you out to fight.
Bowl up to the stock market,
Place your bets!
There are monsters in the water.
Counterfeit coins in the bribe-hand.
Bronze cauldron city of zigzags and dragons,
Cook the ritual feast for voracious ghosts!
The bamboo speaks in riddles
In the gardens of carp pools and pavilions
And in the temple, serenely enthroned,
The Buddhas of past,present and future
Watch the red lanterns sway.
Faces pinned back in clownish grins,
The myrmidons eat and shit their way
To riches.Glory.Ever more desire.
Death is the empire,
Time the frontier.
New fashion, new technology!
Delirium of money and action,
Ecstasy-terror of jazz-architecture!
Into the outstretched hand of a shoeshine boy
The loose change of fortune is dropped,
Sure as oracle bones.
Red and gold moon of tigerish spring,
Blood’s calendar tolls like a temple bell
Through sunlight-mist-blossom-drift.
Autumn,too,invites premonitions
And words as subtle as women.
Bastard entrepot of sacrificial suns,
Born from opium-cloud waters,
Bluster your warlord ways into the sky!
Scavenger,enter the neon netherworld
With a ghost’s crooked steps,
Greedy to grab whatever you can,
A knowledge as precious as tea.
Beheaded lives, impaled on factory spikes,
Line the high walls of tomorrow
And love, poisoned with midnight’s mercury,
Burns itself out in diminishing profits.
Careful not to lose your face!
You are the swarm, the bedlam.
The information uniforms you,
Drills you, sends you out to fight.
Bowl up to the stock market,
Place your bets!
There are monsters in the water.
Counterfeit coins in the bribe-hand.
Bronze cauldron city of zigzags and dragons,
Cook the ritual feast for voracious ghosts!
The bamboo speaks in riddles
In the gardens of carp pools and pavilions
And in the temple, serenely enthroned,
The Buddhas of past,present and future
Watch the red lanterns sway.
Argentine Tango
All that wealth and beauty,
Squandered, reduced to this!
Argentina.
Have you seen the old man dancing,
The fat ugly poor man dancing,
To whom all the beautiful women
Gravitate,like moons around a planet?
In the eye’s empire
We move to the sound
of joyful disillusionment
and carnival despair.
Go, dance with beauty,
Take splendour in your arms
And dare a simple tango in the dark.
Better to be lucky than good.
In the ballroom hundreds of couples
Slowly rotate around the vast floor, two by two,
The young and the old, the plain and the beautiful,
The men proudly puffing out their chests
And holding their partners close,
The women leaning into their embrace
And tracing lemniscates with their gams
Through the syncopations
Secret Africa contrives
Squandered, reduced to this!
Argentina.
Have you seen the old man dancing,
The fat ugly poor man dancing,
To whom all the beautiful women
Gravitate,like moons around a planet?
In the eye’s empire
We move to the sound
of joyful disillusionment
and carnival despair.
Go, dance with beauty,
Take splendour in your arms
And dare a simple tango in the dark.
Better to be lucky than good.
In the ballroom hundreds of couples
Slowly rotate around the vast floor, two by two,
The young and the old, the plain and the beautiful,
The men proudly puffing out their chests
And holding their partners close,
The women leaning into their embrace
And tracing lemniscates with their gams
Through the syncopations
Secret Africa contrives
The Rembrandt Fanatic
Ten o’ clock in the morning,
Freezing cold under the Oude Kerk,
The bells pealing every half hour
Over the sex shops and tattoo parlours...
(Inside, among the grim grey stone,
Devoid of Catholic flimflam,
No chalice to call a grail,
No candles to light for the dead,
Cold echoes roll over me,
And the ghost of Rembrandt’s wife
Bares her nipple for my mouth...)
I walk up the street, past West Indian whores
Sitting in the red light windows,
Their eyes tired and dead.
In the Rijksmuseum, I stand with a swarm
Of pilgrims before the “Night Watch”,
Reverently pointing out details,
Verifying this reproduction
Of the original in their minds;
Precarious as the fortune
Made and lost on the price of a tulip.
In Rembrandt's house on Jodenbreestraat ,
On black and white marble floors,
Up the steep twisting stairs,
I track the man of shipwrecks
To his drowned treasure.
Here he lived and died more than once,
Worked and raised a family,
Held wife and children dying in his arms,
And bankrupted himself
Till the furious creditors came
To empty the rooms of everything,
Paintings, furnishings, and books,
The collections of seashells and coral,
The Javanese shadow puppets.
Freezing cold under the Oude Kerk,
The bells pealing every half hour
Over the sex shops and tattoo parlours...
(Inside, among the grim grey stone,
Devoid of Catholic flimflam,
No chalice to call a grail,
No candles to light for the dead,
Cold echoes roll over me,
And the ghost of Rembrandt’s wife
Bares her nipple for my mouth...)
I walk up the street, past West Indian whores
Sitting in the red light windows,
Their eyes tired and dead.
In the Rijksmuseum, I stand with a swarm
Of pilgrims before the “Night Watch”,
Reverently pointing out details,
Verifying this reproduction
Of the original in their minds;
Precarious as the fortune
Made and lost on the price of a tulip.
In Rembrandt's house on Jodenbreestraat ,
On black and white marble floors,
Up the steep twisting stairs,
I track the man of shipwrecks
To his drowned treasure.
Here he lived and died more than once,
Worked and raised a family,
Held wife and children dying in his arms,
And bankrupted himself
Till the furious creditors came
To empty the rooms of everything,
Paintings, furnishings, and books,
The collections of seashells and coral,
The Javanese shadow puppets.
Thursday, November 05, 2009
Shapes
Stripes of the angelfish,
Stripes of the zebra,
Undulations of sand dunes,
Branching of trees and rivers,
Rococo shapes of radiolarians,
Dinoflagellates and coccolithophores...
Spiral waves and concentric rings of Belousov-Zhabotinsky reactions,
Exquisite transitions of Liesegang bands...
My heartbeat:
With each pulse an electrical wave
Surges through the tissue
From out of the sinoatrial node,
Opening up tiny molecular channels,
To let charged ions flow through the membrane
And the muscle contracts.
The sperm joins with the ovum
And waves of calcium ions
Pulse over the surface of the egg,
Priming the explosion.
The prey and the predator,
The parasite and the host-
Oscillations synchronized
With mathematical beauty.
Ants are building cemeteries,
Disposing of their dead with neurotic orderliness,
Compelled by mechanisms they do not understand.
Buckles and ridges of my fingertips,
Wrinkled like seed pods, like butterfly eggs,
I am still the foetus of that goetic hour,
Wombed in my mother’s devotion.
Stripes of the zebra,
Undulations of sand dunes,
Branching of trees and rivers,
Rococo shapes of radiolarians,
Dinoflagellates and coccolithophores...
Spiral waves and concentric rings of Belousov-Zhabotinsky reactions,
Exquisite transitions of Liesegang bands...
My heartbeat:
With each pulse an electrical wave
Surges through the tissue
From out of the sinoatrial node,
Opening up tiny molecular channels,
To let charged ions flow through the membrane
And the muscle contracts.
The sperm joins with the ovum
And waves of calcium ions
Pulse over the surface of the egg,
Priming the explosion.
The prey and the predator,
The parasite and the host-
Oscillations synchronized
With mathematical beauty.
Ants are building cemeteries,
Disposing of their dead with neurotic orderliness,
Compelled by mechanisms they do not understand.
Buckles and ridges of my fingertips,
Wrinkled like seed pods, like butterfly eggs,
I am still the foetus of that goetic hour,
Wombed in my mother’s devotion.
Flow
Leonardo,
starting little, and finishing even less,
all those plans made and never realised
taunted by nature wherever he turned,
-he sits and contemplates water,
and the water contemplates him.
How could he not feel its vortices
in his own?
Upstream,
Downstream,
I hardly know where I am,
Just watching the eddies,
Minute by minute.
See the microcyclone
disappear down the plughole;
the tornado gyring across the prairie.
Other weird formations may appear
Like the dunes on Mars.
Swirling of interstellar gas and dust.
Convection of a lifetime:
Some uncanny order
Conjuring itself
From turbulence,
Shaping the flow.
Writhing boggling chain
of water from a tap;
insoluble equations,
too much going on.
starting little, and finishing even less,
all those plans made and never realised
taunted by nature wherever he turned,
-he sits and contemplates water,
and the water contemplates him.
How could he not feel its vortices
in his own?
Upstream,
Downstream,
I hardly know where I am,
Just watching the eddies,
Minute by minute.
See the microcyclone
disappear down the plughole;
the tornado gyring across the prairie.
Other weird formations may appear
Like the dunes on Mars.
Swirling of interstellar gas and dust.
Convection of a lifetime:
Some uncanny order
Conjuring itself
From turbulence,
Shaping the flow.
Writhing boggling chain
of water from a tap;
insoluble equations,
too much going on.
The Tears of Odysseus
Why did he weep,
the tough old soldier,
the voyager who had seen so many things,
hiding his face with his cloak
out of shame?
Why did he sob
as the bard sang of Achilles,
in the court of King Alcinous,
one night far from home?
Only the crushed can be so tender,so strong,
the dead so alive.
Can you breathe at all,
are you still here,or there,
in the place we call the world?
You have only come
so that I can lose you;
that is your purpose,
all ends and endings,
sensed without comprehension
till the silence has its way.
the tough old soldier,
the voyager who had seen so many things,
hiding his face with his cloak
out of shame?
Why did he sob
as the bard sang of Achilles,
in the court of King Alcinous,
one night far from home?
Only the crushed can be so tender,so strong,
the dead so alive.
Can you breathe at all,
are you still here,or there,
in the place we call the world?
You have only come
so that I can lose you;
that is your purpose,
all ends and endings,
sensed without comprehension
till the silence has its way.
Jesus in the West Country
A builder’s hands. A sailor’s hands.
Crowned with the bull’s horns of Albion,
He walked into the druid wind
All over the western hills’ circles,
Mining the sky for minerals.
Their ship anchored in the Camel’s mouth,
Jesus and his uncle stepped ashore
To touch the white island’s stones.
Israel, your son has come home!
Oracular, the Mendips swallets
Groaned into his soles, all the underground streams
Full of the voices of the dead and unborn
Crying out from the ox-skull-hills,
The star-shafts tonguing carillons
Into the whirlpool of Sheol.
Stonehenge labyrinth drew him in,
Flogged by the sun’s bull-pizzle
In the season of horses and love.
The cows womb birthed him into wisdom,
Stepson of the boneland,
Across the chalk plain’s altar he came
To the bull’s eye, the place of killing.
Demons’ and giants’ dancefloor,
Signed by the royal axe,
Governed by spectres and shadows.
He came,and shooting stars
Flew to destruction over Salisbury Plain.
He came, to lay down like Jacob
With his head upon the stone.
The ministry of rain,stone and sky
Baptized him in the western retreat;
A sermon in the marrow would grow
To an oak tree’s stormy height
And fall as rain on Palestine.
Crowned with the bull’s horns of Albion,
He walked into the druid wind
All over the western hills’ circles,
Mining the sky for minerals.
Their ship anchored in the Camel’s mouth,
Jesus and his uncle stepped ashore
To touch the white island’s stones.
Israel, your son has come home!
Oracular, the Mendips swallets
Groaned into his soles, all the underground streams
Full of the voices of the dead and unborn
Crying out from the ox-skull-hills,
The star-shafts tonguing carillons
Into the whirlpool of Sheol.
Stonehenge labyrinth drew him in,
Flogged by the sun’s bull-pizzle
In the season of horses and love.
The cows womb birthed him into wisdom,
Stepson of the boneland,
Across the chalk plain’s altar he came
To the bull’s eye, the place of killing.
Demons’ and giants’ dancefloor,
Signed by the royal axe,
Governed by spectres and shadows.
He came,and shooting stars
Flew to destruction over Salisbury Plain.
He came, to lay down like Jacob
With his head upon the stone.
The ministry of rain,stone and sky
Baptized him in the western retreat;
A sermon in the marrow would grow
To an oak tree’s stormy height
And fall as rain on Palestine.
Turin and the Gates of Hell
No-one believes in Hell any more,
Except the exorcists.
And no-one but his demons believes in the Devil.
Walking narrow streets beneath anguished stone heads,
On the Forty-fifth Parallel,
I hold in my hands the two triangles, black and white,
The intersections of occult cities,
The benignity of Turin-Lyon-Prague,
The malignity of Turin-London-San Francisco.
Two-hearted city, battlefield of angels and demons:
I am walking over the grasping hands of the dead,
Hearing the white heart of Piazza Castello beating,
And the black heart of Piazza Statuto.
So you come to Satan’s Door,
Brass goat’s head two-tongued with intertwining snakes;
Baroque bank of ill thoughts and intentions.
“Money,” comes a whisper, “is the rubbish of the Devil.”
Between two rivers, the Po and the Dora Riparia,
The male and the female,
A son of Isis founded this city,
Temple of the sun.
In Piazza Statuto,
I am in the black heart,
The vallis occisorum
Sacred to executions and burials,
Baleful west of the setting sun,
Gallows of the soul;
Here -the entrance to the sewers,
The Gate of Hell….
In Piazza Solferino –
You come to the Fontana Angelica,
Said to be the Gate of Infinity:
In the space between the two male figures
Is a magical door
To an unknown dimension,
A realm that holds the solutions
To the alchemical mysteries of the world.
Piazza Castello, white heart of the city,
Empowered by the Holy Shroud,
In whose linen the four elements are mingled--
Grail of enlightenment,
Baphomet of the Templars!
Give proof of God,
We need miracles and signs,
Cry the faithful,
Desperate for the spectre
Of divine man,
Their Christian cult demanding
Both too little and too much,
Bewildered into sophistry
By a child’s questions.
Lucifer,prince of this world,
Most beautiful of the angels,
Has fallen past the Alps
Into a Turin square.
Devils are coming out of the walls,
Straining their chains to break free.
They are everywhere, the possessed,
Spewing curses and ancient tongues,
Levitating and falling back.
While Satanists rob churches of the Host
And hallowed bones,
To desecrate in Black Masses.
At the foot of the steps
Of Gran Madre di Dio church
The statue of Faith stands holding
A chalice in her hand,
As she gazes towards the hidden location
Of the Holy Grail.
Except the exorcists.
And no-one but his demons believes in the Devil.
Walking narrow streets beneath anguished stone heads,
On the Forty-fifth Parallel,
I hold in my hands the two triangles, black and white,
The intersections of occult cities,
The benignity of Turin-Lyon-Prague,
The malignity of Turin-London-San Francisco.
Two-hearted city, battlefield of angels and demons:
I am walking over the grasping hands of the dead,
Hearing the white heart of Piazza Castello beating,
And the black heart of Piazza Statuto.
So you come to Satan’s Door,
Brass goat’s head two-tongued with intertwining snakes;
Baroque bank of ill thoughts and intentions.
“Money,” comes a whisper, “is the rubbish of the Devil.”
Between two rivers, the Po and the Dora Riparia,
The male and the female,
A son of Isis founded this city,
Temple of the sun.
In Piazza Statuto,
I am in the black heart,
The vallis occisorum
Sacred to executions and burials,
Baleful west of the setting sun,
Gallows of the soul;
Here -the entrance to the sewers,
The Gate of Hell….
In Piazza Solferino –
You come to the Fontana Angelica,
Said to be the Gate of Infinity:
In the space between the two male figures
Is a magical door
To an unknown dimension,
A realm that holds the solutions
To the alchemical mysteries of the world.
Piazza Castello, white heart of the city,
Empowered by the Holy Shroud,
In whose linen the four elements are mingled--
Grail of enlightenment,
Baphomet of the Templars!
Give proof of God,
We need miracles and signs,
Cry the faithful,
Desperate for the spectre
Of divine man,
Their Christian cult demanding
Both too little and too much,
Bewildered into sophistry
By a child’s questions.
Lucifer,prince of this world,
Most beautiful of the angels,
Has fallen past the Alps
Into a Turin square.
Devils are coming out of the walls,
Straining their chains to break free.
They are everywhere, the possessed,
Spewing curses and ancient tongues,
Levitating and falling back.
While Satanists rob churches of the Host
And hallowed bones,
To desecrate in Black Masses.
At the foot of the steps
Of Gran Madre di Dio church
The statue of Faith stands holding
A chalice in her hand,
As she gazes towards the hidden location
Of the Holy Grail.
The Bullfighter on the Beach
An old man is fighting an invisible bull
Down on the deserted beach,
Making passes with his invisible cape,
Pointing his invisible sword
Like a wizard’s wand.
Once again,his old body moves
Like a young man’s,
And he hears the acclamation
Of the crowd
Above the sound of the sea.
The bulls are running in his blood;
Wherever he goes, he can never escape them.
Does one have to be ironic and detached,
Observing life with a cynical smirk,
Ready always to say “I told you so”
Or “I never really cared that much anyway”?
So cautious and apprehensive,
Afraid to live, afraid to die…
From my seat in a Seville cafe,
I watch the barman, so bored and grumpy,
Polishing glasses ,one after another,
With the stuffed bulls’ heads behind him on the wall.,
Each with a plaque announcing its name,
The weight and breed,
And the day of its death,
And the matador who slew him.
Cry the fear and poison out of your blood,
Weep over the bones of your parents and brothers,
They are gone, gone, gone!
And yours is the fate of every soul that ever lived,
Born into suffering, loss and dismay,
With only dreams to ward off suicide.
In the bullring the matador,
Straight and tensed to the bone,
Draws the wounded bull in ever closer,
Its dark blood sweating onto the sand;
Can fate truly be so commanded?
Can skill and courage
Redeem the usual folly and waste?
No bull’s horns ever hurt a man
As much as the attacks and lies
Of venal lovers and false allies.
The sun aims its fine bright sword
Directly through the heart.
Evening falls over the deserted beach.
The old man stands quiet, exhausted,
The invisible bull dead at his feet.
He turns and trudges back across the sand,
With his sword and his cape.
Down on the deserted beach,
Making passes with his invisible cape,
Pointing his invisible sword
Like a wizard’s wand.
Once again,his old body moves
Like a young man’s,
And he hears the acclamation
Of the crowd
Above the sound of the sea.
The bulls are running in his blood;
Wherever he goes, he can never escape them.
Does one have to be ironic and detached,
Observing life with a cynical smirk,
Ready always to say “I told you so”
Or “I never really cared that much anyway”?
So cautious and apprehensive,
Afraid to live, afraid to die…
From my seat in a Seville cafe,
I watch the barman, so bored and grumpy,
Polishing glasses ,one after another,
With the stuffed bulls’ heads behind him on the wall.,
Each with a plaque announcing its name,
The weight and breed,
And the day of its death,
And the matador who slew him.
Cry the fear and poison out of your blood,
Weep over the bones of your parents and brothers,
They are gone, gone, gone!
And yours is the fate of every soul that ever lived,
Born into suffering, loss and dismay,
With only dreams to ward off suicide.
In the bullring the matador,
Straight and tensed to the bone,
Draws the wounded bull in ever closer,
Its dark blood sweating onto the sand;
Can fate truly be so commanded?
Can skill and courage
Redeem the usual folly and waste?
No bull’s horns ever hurt a man
As much as the attacks and lies
Of venal lovers and false allies.
The sun aims its fine bright sword
Directly through the heart.
Evening falls over the deserted beach.
The old man stands quiet, exhausted,
The invisible bull dead at his feet.
He turns and trudges back across the sand,
With his sword and his cape.
Prisoner of Bangkok
Pandemonium and rot of the city:
Sweating nightwalker rummaging the moon’s juju market
For treasures I cannot keep,
I breathe the river’s green putrescence
With melancholy relish.
Lust-grief is my one true bedmate.
No Buddhist am I, for all my bullshit.
Too prone to the 108 known passions of mankind.
Ugly beauty, beautiful ugliness-
City of the self-exiled, the abandoned!
Insidious languor takes me over,
And a wheedling voice in my head:
I am not a pervert, I am not a pervert…
This is love, whatever the experts say,
Amphetamine compassion of skin and bone,
Offered in witness and hope.
The preserved corpses of serial killers,
In the Forensics Museum
Float along the fetid canals of my mind;
The condemned man stands,
A flower placed between his bound hands,
And a single bullet directed
Through a hole cut in a length of silk
Transverberates his heart.
Has a tiger sympathy?
Has a gecko loving-kindness?
To be happy in unhappiness,
Neither this nor that,
Content with mere pleasure-
That is the trick.
Like the dogs that hang around the river temples at night.
All these houses and yards in ruins,
Waves breaking underneath,
And the reek of sex,food and decay.
The mysterious ritual with hookers,
Always the same, yet different,
Simple, fantastical and sad.
A self without a self.
Alone but never alone.
A mind that only exists
In connection with other minds.
Suffering, all suffering.
I will look to my own salvation, as the Buddha said,
And try not to live as a puppet any more.
Amuse yourself, amuse yourself among the sham.
Drink down the scorpion wine.
At the beginning of the world
There was a man, a woman
And a hermaphrodite,
And the hermaphrodite slew the man
Out of jealousy
When he saw the woman loved him.
All of us, having been the three sexes,
In different bodies, different times.
Your pride,your confusion…
The sucker at the table.
At the stadium you watch
Two Muay Thai fighters
Batter each other bloody,
Preferring death to defeat.
Sweating nightwalker rummaging the moon’s juju market
For treasures I cannot keep,
I breathe the river’s green putrescence
With melancholy relish.
Lust-grief is my one true bedmate.
No Buddhist am I, for all my bullshit.
Too prone to the 108 known passions of mankind.
Ugly beauty, beautiful ugliness-
City of the self-exiled, the abandoned!
Insidious languor takes me over,
And a wheedling voice in my head:
I am not a pervert, I am not a pervert…
This is love, whatever the experts say,
Amphetamine compassion of skin and bone,
Offered in witness and hope.
The preserved corpses of serial killers,
In the Forensics Museum
Float along the fetid canals of my mind;
The condemned man stands,
A flower placed between his bound hands,
And a single bullet directed
Through a hole cut in a length of silk
Transverberates his heart.
Has a tiger sympathy?
Has a gecko loving-kindness?
To be happy in unhappiness,
Neither this nor that,
Content with mere pleasure-
That is the trick.
Like the dogs that hang around the river temples at night.
All these houses and yards in ruins,
Waves breaking underneath,
And the reek of sex,food and decay.
The mysterious ritual with hookers,
Always the same, yet different,
Simple, fantastical and sad.
A self without a self.
Alone but never alone.
A mind that only exists
In connection with other minds.
Suffering, all suffering.
I will look to my own salvation, as the Buddha said,
And try not to live as a puppet any more.
Amuse yourself, amuse yourself among the sham.
Drink down the scorpion wine.
At the beginning of the world
There was a man, a woman
And a hermaphrodite,
And the hermaphrodite slew the man
Out of jealousy
When he saw the woman loved him.
All of us, having been the three sexes,
In different bodies, different times.
Your pride,your confusion…
The sucker at the table.
At the stadium you watch
Two Muay Thai fighters
Batter each other bloody,
Preferring death to defeat.
Arcana
Ziggurats of Europe -Monte d’Accoddi on Sardinia, and the hill of Ulaca in Spain-I climb you like a five-sunned Aztec, recalling the Peak of Arar in Iran, its roots binding the waters below and the sun above; Yggdrasil, nourished by the well of Urd, and tended by the Norns, but perpetually gnawed by the giant rodent Ratatosk. One day, Yggdrasil will topple, and with it the world.
Where Mt Torro rises at the centre of Menorca, taula sanctuaries were hefted up to invoke the Horned God, huge megalithic Tau-pedestals rising from the isle of tornados and torrents,where the bull’s life-force throbs through the world; from the Horns of Consecration at Knossos to the Grampian stone circles’ horned altars; and in the bullrings of Spain the matador prances, crowned with the Phrygian cap of Mithras.
At the Roche aux Fées in Brittany, hunched in grand sullen reverie, mythical beast skeleton, in this landscape of architectural rigour, signed by stone axe and shepherd’s crook, I feel the music in the hands of the avital builders who loved and understood and collaborated with this land. Here stands the prehistoric maker I am, the lover of life and the world!
Among the graves at Lindholm Høje in Jutland, the crossing-place,the ford of souls,with the dead in their triangles,squares, and ovals, their ships on whatever voyages the night brings,I tread a path of my own,and that is all.
Where Mt Torro rises at the centre of Menorca, taula sanctuaries were hefted up to invoke the Horned God, huge megalithic Tau-pedestals rising from the isle of tornados and torrents,where the bull’s life-force throbs through the world; from the Horns of Consecration at Knossos to the Grampian stone circles’ horned altars; and in the bullrings of Spain the matador prances, crowned with the Phrygian cap of Mithras.
At the Roche aux Fées in Brittany, hunched in grand sullen reverie, mythical beast skeleton, in this landscape of architectural rigour, signed by stone axe and shepherd’s crook, I feel the music in the hands of the avital builders who loved and understood and collaborated with this land. Here stands the prehistoric maker I am, the lover of life and the world!
Among the graves at Lindholm Høje in Jutland, the crossing-place,the ford of souls,with the dead in their triangles,squares, and ovals, their ships on whatever voyages the night brings,I tread a path of my own,and that is all.
Mary, Mother of God
The little girl
dancing on the Temple steps,
too joyful to stand still.
Beloved little hands
that I see ageing through the years,
compassionate indefatigable workers,
weavers of the veil,
-my mother’s hands!
Mother,
my Constantinople,
my Rome!
My ancient little church
on an Irish shore,
cold black sea breaking below.
Candlefire procession
through Cistercian cloister-
the rose garden calls
monk and troubadour.
In the skull castle
chessplayers battle
while nightingales sing
through the valley below.
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
The Hurricane Season
On a Cuban Beach
We have flown a thousand miles to find the beginning.
The pirate treasures we did not locate, the blue marlins we did not catch.
In the hotel there are too many mirrors; wherever you turn, you confront that queer familiar apparition. Just you. Alone. And the same themes as a billion men before you.
Some time, maybe, I will make my peace with life. But not soon. Not yet.
Cinnamon scent of piña colada: Debussy sonata riddled with Golden Sections and impossible melancholy.
The hotel lobby: aquarium of circling souls. Exotic animals,all dangerous glamour and banality, when will you exhaust your appetites?
No more tales of Hemingway and Old Havana; no more drinking stories;no more jeep safaris; no more lies by the swimming pool; no more mojitos and daiquiris; no more weary conversations in the cocktail lounge; no more “paradises” and “perfect days”; no more revolutions,reforms or status quo...
A hurricane is coming, across the Atlantic;feared and craved in equal measure;an avenger, born on the African coast, its huge centrifuge starting to turn, its uncompromising Wheel of Karma.
And I’m left here, a Christian Muslim Jewish Buddhist pagan atheist son of a bitch. A pair of eyes in the dark.
The brighter the light outside, the darker it is inside me. A day without fear, what would that be like? Serpent’s kiss of the tropical sun, send us another Eden to spoil.
We have flown a thousand miles to find the beginning.
The pirate treasures we did not locate, the blue marlins we did not catch.
In the hotel there are too many mirrors; wherever you turn, you confront that queer familiar apparition. Just you. Alone. And the same themes as a billion men before you.
Some time, maybe, I will make my peace with life. But not soon. Not yet.
Cinnamon scent of piña colada: Debussy sonata riddled with Golden Sections and impossible melancholy.
The hotel lobby: aquarium of circling souls. Exotic animals,all dangerous glamour and banality, when will you exhaust your appetites?
No more tales of Hemingway and Old Havana; no more drinking stories;no more jeep safaris; no more lies by the swimming pool; no more mojitos and daiquiris; no more weary conversations in the cocktail lounge; no more “paradises” and “perfect days”; no more revolutions,reforms or status quo...
A hurricane is coming, across the Atlantic;feared and craved in equal measure;an avenger, born on the African coast, its huge centrifuge starting to turn, its uncompromising Wheel of Karma.
And I’m left here, a Christian Muslim Jewish Buddhist pagan atheist son of a bitch. A pair of eyes in the dark.
The brighter the light outside, the darker it is inside me. A day without fear, what would that be like? Serpent’s kiss of the tropical sun, send us another Eden to spoil.
Surinam
To travel too much can only make you sad.
Escape exacts a revenge.
A capuchin monkey in the rainforest-
Me in my head.
Nature is so full of its own obscenity,
Vicious superlatives hunting you down,
Fighting,fornicating,rotting away,
Accursed jungle ready to kill you
And shrink your head into a trophy.
Nature thinks only of itself,
Perfecting its means in herbal dreams.
The deeper you penetrate,
The more the curse infests you,
Sticking parasitically to your blood and bones.
A Maroon sits under a tree,
Cutting the skin of his gnarled penis-root
And inserting little balls
To boost his manhood and please his woman.
Nearby, a forktailed woodnymph
Alights on a starfruit tree.
Blue and venomous as the okopipi frog,
I sit with a drink,
Knowing that everything happens soon enough,
It happens in its own time,
Happens when it happens.
A deed performed three hundred years ago
Is as potent as anything this moment,
Dark chigger lodged under skin.
Avital wrongs howl through the blood,
Demanding to be avenged.
Mercury rains blow across the earth.
In a rotting shack,
With a few chickens and pigs outside,
And mangy dogs lying in the sun,
Mr and Mrs Lopez proudly sell their teenage daughters
To drunken diseased gold miners,
Every Friday night.
Escape exacts a revenge.
A capuchin monkey in the rainforest-
Me in my head.
Nature is so full of its own obscenity,
Vicious superlatives hunting you down,
Fighting,fornicating,rotting away,
Accursed jungle ready to kill you
And shrink your head into a trophy.
Nature thinks only of itself,
Perfecting its means in herbal dreams.
The deeper you penetrate,
The more the curse infests you,
Sticking parasitically to your blood and bones.
A Maroon sits under a tree,
Cutting the skin of his gnarled penis-root
And inserting little balls
To boost his manhood and please his woman.
Nearby, a forktailed woodnymph
Alights on a starfruit tree.
Blue and venomous as the okopipi frog,
I sit with a drink,
Knowing that everything happens soon enough,
It happens in its own time,
Happens when it happens.
A deed performed three hundred years ago
Is as potent as anything this moment,
Dark chigger lodged under skin.
Avital wrongs howl through the blood,
Demanding to be avenged.
Mercury rains blow across the earth.
In a rotting shack,
With a few chickens and pigs outside,
And mangy dogs lying in the sun,
Mr and Mrs Lopez proudly sell their teenage daughters
To drunken diseased gold miners,
Every Friday night.
Debussy in the Bois de Boulogne
Raindrops puddleripple,
Detonating miniature ground zeroes…
How many musics the rain has gifted me!
Pleasure and instinct walk with me,
Like twin poodles, coiffed and jacketed!
A soul is not a soul that is not secret.
My tale is all memory and sighing regret,
Too little manly action in the world-
For what is real to me? What is actually there?
A devilish collector of passions am I-
Always charging towards the next frustration,
The next refinement of disappointment.
Only art has saved me from frivolity
In this shabby shoddy world;
And only frivolity has saved me from art.
What has saved me from suicide, I don’t know!
(I confess, I freely cheat at cards…
No need to be a loser, in order to suffer-
I do that well enough as it is!)
The hours consumed in spacing a chord,
Seducing obstinate vastness into shapes,
Relieves me from the devious selfish coward,
The self-pitying cantankerous swine.
The unresolved, the unfinished,-
That is my bizarre seductive Orient!
Disintegrate: is that my vocation?
The promise of crisis works through me,
Achieving occult ends in the world.
I forget nothing- such is my curse!
None are so ferocious as the timid,
Charged with the horned god’s burden.
Spendthrift sailor of precarious voyages,
Given to shipwrecks and marooning,
And exotic liaisons on South Sea isles,
I prove myself another Columbus,
Doomed to discover accursed shores.
All Paris, like a Javanese dancer,
Sways before me to the gamelan’s rush,
Balanced with hummingbird poise.
O, water-sprites, full of rainbows,
Transport me with shades and timbres,
Your cascading eddying tones!
Detonating miniature ground zeroes…
How many musics the rain has gifted me!
Pleasure and instinct walk with me,
Like twin poodles, coiffed and jacketed!
A soul is not a soul that is not secret.
My tale is all memory and sighing regret,
Too little manly action in the world-
For what is real to me? What is actually there?
A devilish collector of passions am I-
Always charging towards the next frustration,
The next refinement of disappointment.
Only art has saved me from frivolity
In this shabby shoddy world;
And only frivolity has saved me from art.
What has saved me from suicide, I don’t know!
(I confess, I freely cheat at cards…
No need to be a loser, in order to suffer-
I do that well enough as it is!)
The hours consumed in spacing a chord,
Seducing obstinate vastness into shapes,
Relieves me from the devious selfish coward,
The self-pitying cantankerous swine.
The unresolved, the unfinished,-
That is my bizarre seductive Orient!
Disintegrate: is that my vocation?
The promise of crisis works through me,
Achieving occult ends in the world.
I forget nothing- such is my curse!
None are so ferocious as the timid,
Charged with the horned god’s burden.
Spendthrift sailor of precarious voyages,
Given to shipwrecks and marooning,
And exotic liaisons on South Sea isles,
I prove myself another Columbus,
Doomed to discover accursed shores.
All Paris, like a Javanese dancer,
Sways before me to the gamelan’s rush,
Balanced with hummingbird poise.
O, water-sprites, full of rainbows,
Transport me with shades and timbres,
Your cascading eddying tones!
Beauty
This quality permits no indifference.
Beauty demands its due.
A paragraph from Chekhov,
Simple and right.
I show and control,
A lover of witchcraft,
An actor.
My mortal folly
Contains its own remedy,
Anti-venom
To the viper’s bite.
Dante sits writing a letter
To Can Grande della Scala,
Explaining the levels of allegory
In his Commedia.
Above his head, in the night sky,
The Pleiades spark into sight.
The last movement
Of Beethoven’s Eroica-
Silences.
Stillnesses.
It moves
Yet does not move.
To lose all,
That is the game.
Beauty demands its due.
A paragraph from Chekhov,
Simple and right.
I show and control,
A lover of witchcraft,
An actor.
My mortal folly
Contains its own remedy,
Anti-venom
To the viper’s bite.
Dante sits writing a letter
To Can Grande della Scala,
Explaining the levels of allegory
In his Commedia.
Above his head, in the night sky,
The Pleiades spark into sight.
The last movement
Of Beethoven’s Eroica-
Silences.
Stillnesses.
It moves
Yet does not move.
To lose all,
That is the game.
Exorcist
Fools, you have opened the door to demons,
Again.
The Old Adversary, once he gets his toe in,
Is not easy to evict.
It requires a bailiff of extraordinary force and guile.
A man pure in heart.
For what did Lucifer and his angels fall?
For believing they could be as God,
For believing they could win eternal joy through their own will.
Do not, in your fear, overestimate the Devil’s might:
He, too,was created, and limited, as we are,
His miracles but the facsimile of miracles,
His psychic powers merely superior observation.
He can do only what God allows him.
Bestial growls and curses fright the air,
And savage hate bruises my mind,
But I hold onto the crucifix, I do not let it drop.
Mary stands before me,
Face half-veiled in gold and white,
Her eyes filled with tears.
I adjure you, Satan,deceiver of the human race,
Know the Spirit of truth and of grace,
Who drives off your snares and confounds your lies,
Depart from this creature of God.
And this,
This haggard visage in the glass,
Grey with exhaustion and dread,
Having looked too often
Into the Devil’s eyes,
Is this I?
How far now from that laughing child,
Longing to dress up in a priest’s vestments
And strut about the puppet theatre
With censer in hand.
Again.
The Old Adversary, once he gets his toe in,
Is not easy to evict.
It requires a bailiff of extraordinary force and guile.
A man pure in heart.
For what did Lucifer and his angels fall?
For believing they could be as God,
For believing they could win eternal joy through their own will.
Do not, in your fear, overestimate the Devil’s might:
He, too,was created, and limited, as we are,
His miracles but the facsimile of miracles,
His psychic powers merely superior observation.
He can do only what God allows him.
Bestial growls and curses fright the air,
And savage hate bruises my mind,
But I hold onto the crucifix, I do not let it drop.
Mary stands before me,
Face half-veiled in gold and white,
Her eyes filled with tears.
I adjure you, Satan,deceiver of the human race,
Know the Spirit of truth and of grace,
Who drives off your snares and confounds your lies,
Depart from this creature of God.
And this,
This haggard visage in the glass,
Grey with exhaustion and dread,
Having looked too often
Into the Devil’s eyes,
Is this I?
How far now from that laughing child,
Longing to dress up in a priest’s vestments
And strut about the puppet theatre
With censer in hand.
The Murders in Florence
The hills are my hunting ground.
I am out there, a fox among the trees,
So stealthy you never see me approach,
Never hear me breathing.
You look for my face?
It is every face you pass in the street.
Only those in the know have power;
The keepers of secrets,
The dealers and doers.
Whatever is visible and obvious
Cannot be the truth.
The sun is setting over the hills;
Church bells toll the hour,
Honeysuckle carries on the twilight air.
The dying day carries secrets to the grave.
Winter. The Arno boils over,
Carrying trees, cars,dead cattle,
Into the streets,
Invading the buildings,
Leaving all covered in muck.
The palaces are streaked with damp,
The cobbled streets stink of shit
And grim walls forbid the eye.
Our speech is sick,
And no-one listens.
Can no-one hear my soul
And acknowledge its cry?
I blackmail the silence with blood.
When the damned scream,
It is my voice screaming.
The bodies of fornicators
I lay at my altar;
The diabolical vulva
My Eucharist.
The sacrifice most pleasing
To the demons
Is at the moment of orgasm
When power is released.
So I cull the depraved
As they spew their lust,
Avenging virtue on vice.
Seeing her bare her left breast
For her lover,
I strike.
A young girl,
A wicked beauty.
The smell of blood draws more evil;
The clever,the ambitious,the beautiful
Rush to dabble their hands and make their mark.
Rumour and accusation
Hex the city.
The dead stand denouncing the living.
Perseus holds aloft
The Medusa’s head,
Blood pouring from the neck.
I am out there, a fox among the trees,
So stealthy you never see me approach,
Never hear me breathing.
You look for my face?
It is every face you pass in the street.
Only those in the know have power;
The keepers of secrets,
The dealers and doers.
Whatever is visible and obvious
Cannot be the truth.
The sun is setting over the hills;
Church bells toll the hour,
Honeysuckle carries on the twilight air.
The dying day carries secrets to the grave.
Winter. The Arno boils over,
Carrying trees, cars,dead cattle,
Into the streets,
Invading the buildings,
Leaving all covered in muck.
The palaces are streaked with damp,
The cobbled streets stink of shit
And grim walls forbid the eye.
Our speech is sick,
And no-one listens.
Can no-one hear my soul
And acknowledge its cry?
I blackmail the silence with blood.
When the damned scream,
It is my voice screaming.
The bodies of fornicators
I lay at my altar;
The diabolical vulva
My Eucharist.
The sacrifice most pleasing
To the demons
Is at the moment of orgasm
When power is released.
So I cull the depraved
As they spew their lust,
Avenging virtue on vice.
Seeing her bare her left breast
For her lover,
I strike.
A young girl,
A wicked beauty.
The smell of blood draws more evil;
The clever,the ambitious,the beautiful
Rush to dabble their hands and make their mark.
Rumour and accusation
Hex the city.
The dead stand denouncing the living.
Perseus holds aloft
The Medusa’s head,
Blood pouring from the neck.
The Elders of Sardinia
Over the fields and mountains they come,
The old ones, the great ones,the unbeaten,
Watched over by the nuraghe on the hilltops,
To drink deep from the springs and fountains
Of blazing water and thunderous red wine.
The old gods love and fight in their blood;
Carrying hundreds of years on their backs
Like sacks of potatoes, they hold the earth
In their hands,brethren to boar and bear,
Fearing no grave and forgetting no pleasure.
In tumbledown villages on mountainsides
They sit and play cards in dusty cafes,
Oblivious to the busy bewildered world;
Or herd sheep over stony gnarled slopes,
Small dark gnomes, wise without instruction,
Wearing black poverty as a widow’s weeds,
With earned grace.No less than at youth’s
Festival, they are lovers, dancers, fighters,
Gathering the wild herbs of the heart
From under the spiky wind’s crow-beak.
Wormwood isle of the sardonic! Stout souls
Who loved the Sunday dance after church
As their true Mass! They revel in an Africa
Of memories and songs,conquering all
Conquerors with the force of their eyes.
This aura has been with them since birth:
The sage and myrtle and juniper charisma
Of the macchia,where witches’ houses
Guard the sources of dialect in their rocks,
Words, as rich and various as bread.
The old ones, the great ones,the unbeaten,
Watched over by the nuraghe on the hilltops,
To drink deep from the springs and fountains
Of blazing water and thunderous red wine.
The old gods love and fight in their blood;
Carrying hundreds of years on their backs
Like sacks of potatoes, they hold the earth
In their hands,brethren to boar and bear,
Fearing no grave and forgetting no pleasure.
In tumbledown villages on mountainsides
They sit and play cards in dusty cafes,
Oblivious to the busy bewildered world;
Or herd sheep over stony gnarled slopes,
Small dark gnomes, wise without instruction,
Wearing black poverty as a widow’s weeds,
With earned grace.No less than at youth’s
Festival, they are lovers, dancers, fighters,
Gathering the wild herbs of the heart
From under the spiky wind’s crow-beak.
Wormwood isle of the sardonic! Stout souls
Who loved the Sunday dance after church
As their true Mass! They revel in an Africa
Of memories and songs,conquering all
Conquerors with the force of their eyes.
This aura has been with them since birth:
The sage and myrtle and juniper charisma
Of the macchia,where witches’ houses
Guard the sources of dialect in their rocks,
Words, as rich and various as bread.
Between My Ears
“Wash your mouth out with soap and water,”
That’s what my parents used to tell me
When I was a kid.
I never did.
I never did.
I carried on cursing
And I still love to curse.
Monday to Friday
I take my mind for a walk
Like a man with his dog,
Tossing sticks and balls to chase,
Barking commands.
I love to disappear.
One minute I’m there,
The next I’m gone.
And nobody knows where.
I’m a man not easy to find,
Not easy to grasp,
Should you wish to find me,
Should you care to grasp.
Go on, go on,
Keep travelling.
You will find a Lithuania of the soul
And there, under rocks, hills and rivers,
Uncover what you will.
That’s what my parents used to tell me
When I was a kid.
I never did.
I never did.
I carried on cursing
And I still love to curse.
Monday to Friday
I take my mind for a walk
Like a man with his dog,
Tossing sticks and balls to chase,
Barking commands.
I love to disappear.
One minute I’m there,
The next I’m gone.
And nobody knows where.
I’m a man not easy to find,
Not easy to grasp,
Should you wish to find me,
Should you care to grasp.
Go on, go on,
Keep travelling.
You will find a Lithuania of the soul
And there, under rocks, hills and rivers,
Uncover what you will.
Cosimo de' Medici
The taciturn one,his few words pithy and cryptic,
Cosimo shuns the ostentatious, the indiscreet,
For the secrecy of profitable purpose.
His dead twin stands behind him in the mirror,
Watches as his hand signs another document,
Ambition and caution equally immense.
Born with the soul of a hundred-year-old,
He takes the diamond as his emblem,
And patiently prudently crafts a domain
Physical and metaphysical, eternal and doomed.
He makes money as shamans make rain.
Accused of tyranny,avarice,usury and all,
Of seeking to turn republic into princedom,
And elevating his dynasty above the city.
He sits and thinks, in his fortress palazzo,
Never troubling to defend himself,assured
That he is loved as much as resented,
Indispensable father to a fractious brood.
Can the world be healed with florins and ducats?
The excellent qualities of money are such
That it can work miracles and teach in parables
And even, with right ceremony,raise the dead.
To God Himself the banker lends with interest,
Trading marble and mosaic for salvation,
The humble black-clad rider on a mule,
Half-hidden in the entourage of the Magi.
Beauty’s commodity serves all in different kinds;
The patron,making play with piety and glory,
The Church gladly counting its receipts.
Gold pays for prayers;for talismanic magic,
Precious and rare as the rhinoceros horn.
Old,sick,crying out in gout’s hell at least touch,
Cosimo sits propped up in his private chapel,
Alone in candle-haloed dark,hearing Mass
Beneath the altar with its costly art and relics,
And the secret tunnel to escape down
Should some audacious assassin dare strike.
There is still time to commission a translation
Of Plato, and buy,perhaps, a little more life,
Do a deal,reach a compromise,strike a bargain.
Cosimo shuns the ostentatious, the indiscreet,
For the secrecy of profitable purpose.
His dead twin stands behind him in the mirror,
Watches as his hand signs another document,
Ambition and caution equally immense.
Born with the soul of a hundred-year-old,
He takes the diamond as his emblem,
And patiently prudently crafts a domain
Physical and metaphysical, eternal and doomed.
He makes money as shamans make rain.
Accused of tyranny,avarice,usury and all,
Of seeking to turn republic into princedom,
And elevating his dynasty above the city.
He sits and thinks, in his fortress palazzo,
Never troubling to defend himself,assured
That he is loved as much as resented,
Indispensable father to a fractious brood.
Can the world be healed with florins and ducats?
The excellent qualities of money are such
That it can work miracles and teach in parables
And even, with right ceremony,raise the dead.
To God Himself the banker lends with interest,
Trading marble and mosaic for salvation,
The humble black-clad rider on a mule,
Half-hidden in the entourage of the Magi.
Beauty’s commodity serves all in different kinds;
The patron,making play with piety and glory,
The Church gladly counting its receipts.
Gold pays for prayers;for talismanic magic,
Precious and rare as the rhinoceros horn.
Old,sick,crying out in gout’s hell at least touch,
Cosimo sits propped up in his private chapel,
Alone in candle-haloed dark,hearing Mass
Beneath the altar with its costly art and relics,
And the secret tunnel to escape down
Should some audacious assassin dare strike.
There is still time to commission a translation
Of Plato, and buy,perhaps, a little more life,
Do a deal,reach a compromise,strike a bargain.
Empire
In Hispaniola, things went not well:
Precious little gold for all our efforts;
The natives idle, barbarous and dull.
Between love and fear, we choose fear.
The Empire takes,controls and destroys,
Installs cruel hierarchies everywhere.
How would we survive without the dominators?
Our angry masters hold the universe together.
They teach us all human knowledge and culture.
These tales of greed and violence
Are our pride; but,haughty one,remember,
In Hispaniola, things went not well.
Precious little gold for all our efforts;
The natives idle, barbarous and dull.
Between love and fear, we choose fear.
The Empire takes,controls and destroys,
Installs cruel hierarchies everywhere.
How would we survive without the dominators?
Our angry masters hold the universe together.
They teach us all human knowledge and culture.
These tales of greed and violence
Are our pride; but,haughty one,remember,
In Hispaniola, things went not well.
Melancholia
I weather the evenings,writing a field guide
To the forms of melancholy,
My pen a raven’s feather
Charged with noxious ink.
There is always another poem to befriend me.
A handful of sunflower seeds.
I find myself in a country like Tibet,
Supping purest blue from the sky’s skull-cup.
The philosopher’s disease has cursed my blood
Since the coils of adolescence.
A shapely ingenious spirochete.
There is no vaccination against it.
No proof against the woeful wanderings
Of a mind unsatisfied with itself.
Pianist,play the minor chords for me;
Stroke the twilight body of autumn
Like a lover hurt into praise and scorn.
Saturn’s cycles regulate my ill-starred days.
I need blood and warmth to counter the darkness.
Or maybe I should draw the square of Jupiter.
The discontented temper that drives me
Defines the human in these shadowed eyes.
Disposition or disorder? One can only surmise.
The disproportionate is my element,
Acedia and tristitia my monastic sins,
Prone as I am to witchcraft and wordcraft.
A dire star presides over the shore,
Dark ocean waves riding over the driftwood day
And loveliness in the changing light.
And so to dance a Finnish tango
Beneath the Northern Lights, without a smile
Or word,-only music, sorrow, truth.
To the forms of melancholy,
My pen a raven’s feather
Charged with noxious ink.
There is always another poem to befriend me.
A handful of sunflower seeds.
I find myself in a country like Tibet,
Supping purest blue from the sky’s skull-cup.
The philosopher’s disease has cursed my blood
Since the coils of adolescence.
A shapely ingenious spirochete.
There is no vaccination against it.
No proof against the woeful wanderings
Of a mind unsatisfied with itself.
Pianist,play the minor chords for me;
Stroke the twilight body of autumn
Like a lover hurt into praise and scorn.
Saturn’s cycles regulate my ill-starred days.
I need blood and warmth to counter the darkness.
Or maybe I should draw the square of Jupiter.
The discontented temper that drives me
Defines the human in these shadowed eyes.
Disposition or disorder? One can only surmise.
The disproportionate is my element,
Acedia and tristitia my monastic sins,
Prone as I am to witchcraft and wordcraft.
A dire star presides over the shore,
Dark ocean waves riding over the driftwood day
And loveliness in the changing light.
And so to dance a Finnish tango
Beneath the Northern Lights, without a smile
Or word,-only music, sorrow, truth.
Versions of Shangri-La
Me and the other mythomaniacs,
Reeling from the altitude sickness of words…
There has to be some force in the atom
To midwife me a second birth.
Where the maps end, the journey begins.
The only evidence is in my heart.
The absence of desire.
I am walking,taking step after step,
Towards the neither-here-nor-there,
Certain never to arrive.
My goal is that hidden valley
Where men live young and free forever,
Miraculous plants and animals thrive,
And all drink wisdom from the streams.
A place inaccessible to all but the pure in heart,
Unrevealed until the propitious hour.
In this age of Kali, so far from God,
Under the tyranny of unrighteous rulers,
Avaricious, cruel and corrupt,
When brother is set against brother,
And man against the earth,
I look to the Himalayan mountains,
For exhilaration and hope.
Seven peaks are my constellation:
Rakaposhi,Kailash,Kangchenjunga,
Chomolhari,Kawakarpo and Jambeyang.
And Chomolungma.
The light mulling over the mountains and forests,
The wind stalking the lakes of Yading;
Smell of pine,larch and cypress,
And the mind’s blue glaciers, advancing and retreating…
Hunters climb to the alpine grasslands in spring
To dig up the caterpillar fungus
That remedies all ills.
The three white bodhisattvas hold me in their gaze,
And autumn trees glow red, yellow and green,
Prayer scarves of fog swathe the monastery,
Suspended on time’s edge,
And placid yaks graze in scarlet meadows
Where golden barley undulates in the breeze.
Cold lucent water cupped in my hands,
All the energy,wisdom and compassion in the cosmos
Burns in your molecules,and feeds me…
My eyes are full of tears,
The eyes of the thirteenth Dalai Lama.
Reeling from the altitude sickness of words…
There has to be some force in the atom
To midwife me a second birth.
Where the maps end, the journey begins.
The only evidence is in my heart.
The absence of desire.
I am walking,taking step after step,
Towards the neither-here-nor-there,
Certain never to arrive.
My goal is that hidden valley
Where men live young and free forever,
Miraculous plants and animals thrive,
And all drink wisdom from the streams.
A place inaccessible to all but the pure in heart,
Unrevealed until the propitious hour.
In this age of Kali, so far from God,
Under the tyranny of unrighteous rulers,
Avaricious, cruel and corrupt,
When brother is set against brother,
And man against the earth,
I look to the Himalayan mountains,
For exhilaration and hope.
Seven peaks are my constellation:
Rakaposhi,Kailash,Kangchenjunga,
Chomolhari,Kawakarpo and Jambeyang.
And Chomolungma.
The light mulling over the mountains and forests,
The wind stalking the lakes of Yading;
Smell of pine,larch and cypress,
And the mind’s blue glaciers, advancing and retreating…
Hunters climb to the alpine grasslands in spring
To dig up the caterpillar fungus
That remedies all ills.
The three white bodhisattvas hold me in their gaze,
And autumn trees glow red, yellow and green,
Prayer scarves of fog swathe the monastery,
Suspended on time’s edge,
And placid yaks graze in scarlet meadows
Where golden barley undulates in the breeze.
Cold lucent water cupped in my hands,
All the energy,wisdom and compassion in the cosmos
Burns in your molecules,and feeds me…
My eyes are full of tears,
The eyes of the thirteenth Dalai Lama.
The Summer of 1911
Music cartwheels across country house lawns
And the susurrus of lemonade poured over ice
Promises another phosphorus day to come
And,perhaps,by late afternoon, a thunderstorm.
Champagne flutes are raised to the light
By pallid ladies under white parasols
And strawhatted beaux reclining in hammocks;
Breathing the smell of roses and verbena,
They chase one another round temples and grottoes.
The cricketers stroll out and take their positions.
A child floats,drowned,in the village pond,
Lured there by the Aztec sun.
Gentlemen lounge all day at their London clubs,
While ladies consult with the cook over the dinner menu,
Arranging eight courses with care.
At 10 p.m.,in Mayfair houses,sweet musk of lilies
Censes the candlelit hallways,where polished guests
Indolently ascend grand staircases in regal pairs,
Angels on a Jacob’s ladder of lies.
Young Winston Churchill stands at the fireplace,
Holding forth to a salon gathering,
Addressing himself in the mirror
With grandiloquent periods and rehearsed bon mots.
The buccaneer. The wild card. The traitor.
From ball to ball she dances,Lady Diana Manners,
Now a black swan, now a Spanish infanta,
Afraid to stop for a moment lest the daybreak
Catch her and turn her to stone.
Eighteen and beautiful, everyone’s darling,
She drinks the pink champagne of life
And scandalizes the staid with rebellious excess.
Boredom and unease afflict the indolent,
Waiting,longing for something to happen,
To break the routine of wasted days
Between the tennis court and the Ouija board.
At Covent Garden Nijinsky leaps
And stops mid-air,the six-year-old boy
Chucked into the river by his father
To learn to swim;choking, drowning,
He saw a light above leading him home
Through the murk, and,surging upwards,
Shoved the water downwards around him,
To break through the surface and breathe
Grantchester. Rupert Brooke and friends
Saunter at midnight down the dusty lane
And across the meadow to the old mill pool;
Breathing the reek of wild peppermint and mud,
They strip and jump naked into the cool
And bask in the moonlight and the smell
Of freshmown hay.The sun is love,is truth.
And a glorious harvest is swelling.
And the susurrus of lemonade poured over ice
Promises another phosphorus day to come
And,perhaps,by late afternoon, a thunderstorm.
Champagne flutes are raised to the light
By pallid ladies under white parasols
And strawhatted beaux reclining in hammocks;
Breathing the smell of roses and verbena,
They chase one another round temples and grottoes.
The cricketers stroll out and take their positions.
A child floats,drowned,in the village pond,
Lured there by the Aztec sun.
Gentlemen lounge all day at their London clubs,
While ladies consult with the cook over the dinner menu,
Arranging eight courses with care.
At 10 p.m.,in Mayfair houses,sweet musk of lilies
Censes the candlelit hallways,where polished guests
Indolently ascend grand staircases in regal pairs,
Angels on a Jacob’s ladder of lies.
Young Winston Churchill stands at the fireplace,
Holding forth to a salon gathering,
Addressing himself in the mirror
With grandiloquent periods and rehearsed bon mots.
The buccaneer. The wild card. The traitor.
From ball to ball she dances,Lady Diana Manners,
Now a black swan, now a Spanish infanta,
Afraid to stop for a moment lest the daybreak
Catch her and turn her to stone.
Eighteen and beautiful, everyone’s darling,
She drinks the pink champagne of life
And scandalizes the staid with rebellious excess.
Boredom and unease afflict the indolent,
Waiting,longing for something to happen,
To break the routine of wasted days
Between the tennis court and the Ouija board.
At Covent Garden Nijinsky leaps
And stops mid-air,the six-year-old boy
Chucked into the river by his father
To learn to swim;choking, drowning,
He saw a light above leading him home
Through the murk, and,surging upwards,
Shoved the water downwards around him,
To break through the surface and breathe
Grantchester. Rupert Brooke and friends
Saunter at midnight down the dusty lane
And across the meadow to the old mill pool;
Breathing the reek of wild peppermint and mud,
They strip and jump naked into the cool
And bask in the moonlight and the smell
Of freshmown hay.The sun is love,is truth.
And a glorious harvest is swelling.
Footprints in the Snow
The Taoist master
picks up his brush
and writes the Way:
First, two dots,
two eyes,
male and female,
sun and moon,
then,underneath,a line,
the whole,
enfolding the self,
within the body,
walking,
wandering
around oneself,
around the world.
MARCUS JULIUS AGRIPPA, HEROD AGRIPPA II, LAST KING OF THE JEWS
Since that day when I sat upon the alabaster throne,
Crowned the Messiah, I have served you, Judea;
Elevated on the podium, I accepted the mission,
When Sirius spiralled high out of the invisible
And ordered the Nile to flood.
With me came the new Law, for Jew and Gentile alike.
Venus conjunct with the Sun marked my birth:
The red star rose in the halo of dawn; spring began.
That a renegade prince of a despised clan
Should be chosen to be his people’s saviour-
How else but by God’s will could this occur?
Berenice, my sister-wife, when has the East
Seen your like? When fate combines such beauty
With ambition and guile, then the world should wait
Upon wonders.
As Osiris and Isis, we rule
The two realms; through us, all may approach
The divinity within. Let this land be one, at peace,
Where every heart may search its own belief.
For every name and number in the world
The cipher is hidden.
Bull,man,lion and eagle-I am all.
Now is the time for new covenants,
For the noblest philosophy to guide the state
And reveal to humankind its true nature.
To that end, I will bend my actions hard
And force enlightenment upon the unwilling.
The sacrificial ram stands ready
Beneath the tamarisk tree, fruiting with letters
And numbers, and the four rivers flow
Through a new Eden’s cube.
Crowned the Messiah, I have served you, Judea;
Elevated on the podium, I accepted the mission,
When Sirius spiralled high out of the invisible
And ordered the Nile to flood.
With me came the new Law, for Jew and Gentile alike.
Venus conjunct with the Sun marked my birth:
The red star rose in the halo of dawn; spring began.
That a renegade prince of a despised clan
Should be chosen to be his people’s saviour-
How else but by God’s will could this occur?
Berenice, my sister-wife, when has the East
Seen your like? When fate combines such beauty
With ambition and guile, then the world should wait
Upon wonders.
As Osiris and Isis, we rule
The two realms; through us, all may approach
The divinity within. Let this land be one, at peace,
Where every heart may search its own belief.
For every name and number in the world
The cipher is hidden.
Bull,man,lion and eagle-I am all.
Now is the time for new covenants,
For the noblest philosophy to guide the state
And reveal to humankind its true nature.
To that end, I will bend my actions hard
And force enlightenment upon the unwilling.
The sacrificial ram stands ready
Beneath the tamarisk tree, fruiting with letters
And numbers, and the four rivers flow
Through a new Eden’s cube.
Hunger
So ravenous,
I could eat the world
And everything in it!
I always need something
To get my teeth into.
And you,
Dear stranger,
I could eat you alive,
A little hors d’oeuvre.
It’s dinner time again.
Knife,fork and spoon
My poet’s wands.
Pile the plate high,
Let the heat invade me…
From the first cry of need
To the last desperate sigh-
The human void…
Animal pangs
Of the mind that consumes me…
Sucking at mummy’s tit,
Bawling for pleasure,love,sex,power,
Possessions,meaning,and esteem…
Eternity belongs to bacteria:-
Precambrian Dreamtime’s
First surge of appetite.
A single slice of bread
Lies on my plate-
Immense.
My hand upon it
Is a thousand hands.
All I am
Is words,imaginings,
Stories of desire.
Possibility is the only thing
I cannot live without.
Oh please don’t let me die
On an empty stomach.
I journey towards ideas of experience,
Greater than experience itself.
The never-quite is my painful element.
I can never,never,never arrive.
Around the world,millions are starving.
But ,for me, the dinner bell tolls once again.
Give me a smile. Or a frown.
But give me something.
I could eat the world
And everything in it!
I always need something
To get my teeth into.
And you,
Dear stranger,
I could eat you alive,
A little hors d’oeuvre.
It’s dinner time again.
Knife,fork and spoon
My poet’s wands.
Pile the plate high,
Let the heat invade me…
From the first cry of need
To the last desperate sigh-
The human void…
Animal pangs
Of the mind that consumes me…
Sucking at mummy’s tit,
Bawling for pleasure,love,sex,power,
Possessions,meaning,and esteem…
Eternity belongs to bacteria:-
Precambrian Dreamtime’s
First surge of appetite.
A single slice of bread
Lies on my plate-
Immense.
My hand upon it
Is a thousand hands.
All I am
Is words,imaginings,
Stories of desire.
Possibility is the only thing
I cannot live without.
Oh please don’t let me die
On an empty stomach.
I journey towards ideas of experience,
Greater than experience itself.
The never-quite is my painful element.
I can never,never,never arrive.
Around the world,millions are starving.
But ,for me, the dinner bell tolls once again.
Give me a smile. Or a frown.
But give me something.
Venice in Winter
Looking for somewhere to kill yourself?
A nice cosy place to kill yourself?
You could do worse than Venice.
It’s all a blur,out there,in the rain,
As I sit beneath a cafe awning
With my caffé corretto,
My shivers and reveries...
Strange comfort there is in dissolution.
From every country in Europe they come,
The tasteful suicides,choosing their end
With aesthetic refinement,
Drawing the correct conclusion.
Another high tide, another falling back
Into the lagoon, the green slime;
The old are shuffling to destruction
Through another sickly season,
Markets are closing,
Doors are shut.
Mist and darkness hold the balance;
Unseen bells in hundreds
Peel and echo off the walls;
Silent silhouettes vanish
Down twisting alleyways.
Winter is a feast of fancies,
Candelight procession
From bridge to bridge;
Guises of murder and treason
Are now commedia dell’arte,
Death-masks of revellers
Making love to their lost,
Imagining abandon
Through blanked-out names.
Black cloak,black tricorn,
Whitegloved hands
And a stick to prod
And turn the patient over,
The plague doctor comes
With inquisitive beak,
To diagnose your sorrows.
A nice cosy place to kill yourself?
You could do worse than Venice.
It’s all a blur,out there,in the rain,
As I sit beneath a cafe awning
With my caffé corretto,
My shivers and reveries...
Strange comfort there is in dissolution.
From every country in Europe they come,
The tasteful suicides,choosing their end
With aesthetic refinement,
Drawing the correct conclusion.
Another high tide, another falling back
Into the lagoon, the green slime;
The old are shuffling to destruction
Through another sickly season,
Markets are closing,
Doors are shut.
Mist and darkness hold the balance;
Unseen bells in hundreds
Peel and echo off the walls;
Silent silhouettes vanish
Down twisting alleyways.
Winter is a feast of fancies,
Candelight procession
From bridge to bridge;
Guises of murder and treason
Are now commedia dell’arte,
Death-masks of revellers
Making love to their lost,
Imagining abandon
Through blanked-out names.
Black cloak,black tricorn,
Whitegloved hands
And a stick to prod
And turn the patient over,
The plague doctor comes
With inquisitive beak,
To diagnose your sorrows.
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