John Milton

English obstinacy and Latin extravagance

Behind the pale prim face;

Emotions’ polity exercised his guile.

What was freedom,after all,

That it could so pain and kill?


To read was to act; ungovernable truth

Founded wild Americas

In his garden,among the wet roses

And hidden snakes;solitary there,

He recalled lost friends,the touch

Of men,that dangerous scripture

Delicately censored in the dark.

Neither God nor nation could keep

The heart from self-destruction.


He translated with his hands the fire

Of New Troy;the Tiber flowed

Into the Thames; Athens now was London;

The ancient world’s battles were re-fought

In muddy northern fields.

Appetite had his head on the block,

A laughing regicide in the republic

Of desire.Eden’s painted savage

Englished into a civil man.


Saturn presided over the masque;

Centaurs’ hooves beat the bounds

Of his verses,singing out psalms

To devious concupiscent Jehovah.

What trespass had he committed

That God had confiscated the light

From his eyes? Nonetheless he parsed

The signs in nature and attended

That secret parliament within.

The covenant,unbroken, authored

Immense designs from memory

And hope.Like a troublesome daughter,

Language tyrannised the old man,

Horned viper words envenoming

His veins,under the evening star.

Where else but in hell could he feel?

Could It Be You're Already Dead?

Feel the solar system drifting through the ellipsis

Further and further away from the core,

The earth’s orbit, tilt and wobble

Through magnetic fields and seasons of fire;

Time’s rhythms and cycles are working

Through you, through me,

A zodiac of possibilities.


Space,time and dreams are distorted;

Body-minds warp with the fields;

I feel,in an instant,all the forms, the calligraphy of God-

Geometric spendour of a virus,

And the sandripples on the beach,no two identical,

The logarithmic spiral of a mollusc shell,

Honeycomb of bubbles in a saucepan of boiling water,

Spiral waves in the heart,like the patterns in banded agate,

The vortices in a colony of bacteria,

The hierograms on a jaguar’s pelt,

The signs,vivid as Russian Easter eggs,of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction,

The exoskeletons of radiolarians and coccolithophroes,

The bifurcations and segmentation in my arm bones,

The arboreal phyllotaxis of my lungs, the Burning Bush,

The crystalline metal branch conjured in electrodeposition,

The cracks and ridges of the San Andreas fault,

The fractal network of the Paris metro.

Activator-Inhibitor

Rooms.I live in rooms.Different rooms.

Each with its character and function.


Sinister technologies are ours to practise.

Time, spiralling, folding and pleating,

Compressing and rarefying,

Works me over with its torsion.

Change and chance are the ventures I invest in;


Meticulous Masorete of my own Bible,

I eke out letters with agonized love.


Unhappy and defiant,

Restless for God knows what,

I thrash about through anxious days,

Wondering what it all adds up to,

And what the balance sheet will read in the end.

Diffidence and indifference

Are the lead in my shoes.


I find entrances to Hell

On ordinary streets,

Rusty old doors, open pipes and manholes,

Fence-holes and disused wells

Cemetery crypts and grafittied city walls…-

Their secret names cry out to me,

Their powers lead me in.


And when you die

People will ask: how did you live?

With what spirit and passion and pride?

Private Garden

Some kind of order there has to be;

Refuge from history and philosophistry.

I try, if I can, to avoid the Medusa’s head.

I prefer the bearable, the beautiful,even.

In spite of everything,I cultivate

A small plot,a place of healing.

The Isles of the Blessed;Epicurus’s School;

You can keep them.The weather still falls,

All the same.

My hands are my vocation: what they feel

Is true.


Gilgamesh found his way to Dilmun,

Beyond the seas and mountains,

But immortal life was denied him;

The world still had work for his hands.

This soil I crumble between thumb

And finger is all the nations and cultures

Ever to root in the earth.

Nothing here is meant to last,

Transience its glorious quintessence.

And yet there is slow ceremony;

Enchanted recollection fixes me

To the spot,connected, alone.


The hunter-gatherer’s ritual persists:

Art is this,which cannot be captured

Or accommodated,life’s pure excess,

Too various to keep hold of,

Bright mercury changing state.


Here I can befriend my weird self,

Peasant-prince in an endangered dominion,

Revisiting stories in my head.

To see what is right before you:-

The mission, the gardener’s tools.

Full Body Burn

When the others are turning right,

Turn left.

Duck and dodge.

Disappear.

Throw your pursuers off the scent.

It wasn’t working,

Whatever you were doing,

So try something different.

Find a place where no one knows you,

A place you do not understand.

Make others’ talents your own.

Superb technologies are at hand.

Be assured:

Curiosity did not kill the cat.

If he is dead, he must have killed himself.

Tattoo Girls

The scars of bad character,

The criminal symbols:

Ink.

Here,at the border,danger and excitement

Whisper:nothing is sacred,

Everything is sacred.

Touches and traces

Merge with the gaze

In the skin-game.

Looking is wanting,

Lacking,

Locking.

The tattoo girls invite you to the fair:

Come see the fire-eaters,

The freaks and daredevils,

The mythical animals in cages.

The needle stitches pure events

Into the flesh.

Miracles.

Monstrosities.

The tattoo girls refuse all categorisation.

They dictate the spectacle,

Disrupt the show.

And the voyeur’s eyes are turned back,

Repelled with Amazon force.

Mondrian's Trees

In the immaculate white studio

Stands a vase

With a single artificial tulip,

Leaves painted white.

Silent in his laboratory smock,

The artist, pale and calm,

Peers through his glasses

At the latest experiment.

He loathes the colour green,

Cannot bear to look at trees.

Once he painted them,

Singular,isolated,

Architectural oddities.

Watchtowers.



Tree:

Shellburst

Of twisting torments

Surging outwards

In ecstasy.

Rapt.

Titanic evolution

In an instant.

Concentrated

Agonisingly,

Held together

Against all odds.

Lines of force:

Branches, twigs.

Ferocious tension

Of equations,

Pluses and minuses

Battling.



All objects are monstrous.

They hurt you

With separateness,

Doomed.

Ottoman Arts

After noise,heat and dust,an enclosed garden,

A place of contemplation, cool, serene,

With watersound and treeshade to delight;

Austere exteriors hide glorious flourishes,

The sudden rich glow within grey walls.

Remember the Karatay Medrese in Konya,

The patterned porch of rippling stone

And then the interior,the pyrotechnic dome

Shimmering with stars and suns in a heaven

Of turquoise and black tiles,supported

On four fanning bursts of squinches.

The Sultan Han portal’s pounced and fretted

Framework of carved stone,its zigzag pillars

And stalactite niche,fantastical vision

After a day’s hard journey,the caravan

Arriving safe at last from perilous roads.


The small simple Hacı Özbek mosque

In Iznik,built in the reign of Orkhan,

A dome raised on a rectangle,quintessence

And oracle of Ottoman futures in stone.

In the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent,

The Iznik factories developed tiles

Never equaled in splendor,on fire

With a new viscous red,the wild tulip,

Shining out against white backgrounds,

Everywhere a new confidence

Possessed the arts; the surfaces of jugs,bowls

And plates flame with curling stems

Of carnation,hyacinth and tulip,

All supple line and exuberant hue.

Paradisal rooms designed with such skill

And intricacy that the baffled eye

Can scarcely comprehend it all,

As it jolts across walls,doorways,windows,

Never exhausting the patterns and tones,

The clambering and cascading plants

And flowers,green,red,black and blue

Against white gleam,supernatural forever.

The age was tensed like a bowstring;

Like the sultan’s calligraphic monogram,

Taut sweeps of the pen laying down lines

With delicate spiraling webs of tiny blooms

Around and between,executed with bravura,

Demanding blank space to resonate in.

In Venice a stupendous gold helmet

Was created for Süleyman,flaunting

Rubies,diamonds,emeraldsand pearls,

Topped by a multicoloured aigrette,

A wonder of uninhibited ostentation.


The Green Mosque in Bursa- a new style,

A new accord! Its designer,Ali,had been

To Samarkand,and studied its buildings;

On his way home he had stopped at Tabriz

And recruited craftsmen to execute

The ceramic glory of his planned masterpiece,

A grand concept, of harmonious proportion,

Its mosaic kiosks exuding luxurious repose,

Geometrical patterns composed like music,

And the mihrab’s shimmering expanse

Of vivid faience,like a Persian pavilion,

The blues,whites and yellows of the tiles

So intermingled in hallucinatory richness

That the eye can barely trace the motifs.

Up the steps, higher on the hillside, sits

The Green Tomb,where the Sultan’s coffin

Stands on a platform ablaze with blue

And yellow inscriptions,while the lamp

Hangs between twin tapers, the soul

Of Mehmed the First in state,imparadised

Amid profuse blooms,and pillared silence.


In Bursa Murad II built his garden-cemetery:

His stark creamcoloured tomb,open

To the sky,inviting rain to replenish the earth

In which he lay,surrounded by half-wild gardens,

The other tombs like open summerhouses,

Gracious amid cypresses,planes and oleanders,

Tangled shrubs and late-flowering roses.

In afternoon sunlight.


The four minarets of Edirne Mosque,

Each different in height and patterning

Of chequerwork,lozenges and twisting

Strips of reddish-pink stone,thrusting

Higher skyward than any building before,

Staking out the courtyard,its red and white arches

Reached through high exhilarating doorway.


With percipient eye,on Istanbul’s crests,

Mehmed the Conqueror,as judiciously as armies,

Set the domes and minarets of his capital:

In the grounds of the Seraglio Point palace

Stands the Tiled Kiosk,sensuous and elegant,

The warrior sultan’s secret oasis expressed

In bright rooms with high-arched windows,

Contrasted with dark glazed walls of tiles

Alternating blue and black,tone and undertone.


Carpets of rich luminous colour combined

With restricted angular motifs;prayer-rugs

Suggesting the lamp-lit mihrab niche;

How bold and simple the carpetmakers

Fashioned their works,lit from within

By deep lambent colour,a world away

From the efflorescence of the Persians.

So,too,with the miniatures made for Mehmed III,

Factual and earthy,full of harsh wit,

So unlike the Persians’ poetic refinement;

The pages glow bold,brilliant and direct,

Favouring nature over rarefied fancy.


The Süleymaniye mosque on high

Above the Golden Horn-colossus of Islam,

Supremely self-assured,never out of sight,

Four hundred domes ranged around

The central one,-from a military architect

Throwing bridges across rivers,

Sinan had come to this-the sheer cliffs

Of greywhite masonry,the austere

Courtyard so immense,and the doorways

So thrillingly lofty to walk through,

To enter the vertiginous plain void

And disappear at the centre

Of all things.

Yet never did Sinan build anything

Finer than the Selimye mosque

In Edirne:that warm yellow sandstone,

The fluting of the needle-thin minarets,

The tiers of light many-windowed walls,

And,inside,the pinkish scintillating light

Washing through,a titanic wave

That carries you up,exulting,

To the very dome,surrounded

By a serene crystal sphere,-

Tiles shimmer all over,from zigzags

To forests to individual trees,

Leaf and blossom exploding

In triumph,the entire profusion

As calculated as any single tile.

Minoan Crete

Seismic island-

A kosmos, a genesis, a muster of men!

Mazy palaces, centrifugal-asymmetrical,

Chiaroscuro of light-wells, porticoes and courts…

Long corridors lead to sudden epiphanies,

Vivid frescoes in bright spacious rooms,

Where man and nature unite-

The veins in a rock;

The details in birds’ wings;

Blue apes playing in gardens;

Flying fish above the waves.

The octopus’s ecstasy

And the dolphin’s shout of joy!


Painted on a limestone sarcophagus:

An animal tethered for sacrifice.

Three longrobed women approach

From the left, to the sound of the pipes;

A priestess in animal skins places

Her hands on the altar of fruit and libations.

A tall pole rises, surmounted by labrys,

Upon which perches a bird,

And nearby a shrine with sacred tree

And horns of consecration.

On the other side, a dead man stands

Before his tomb, receiving offerings

-Two calves and a model boat.

The lyrist plays, and two women

Pour libations into a vessel.


A bull’s head rhyton in black serpentine,

Carved in one piece, intricately etched

By those with the wisdom of snakes,

Able to engrave microscopic scenes

Into precious stones


The moon drops poppy dust into her eyes.

The huntress.The dancer.

Bangkok

Great City of Angels,

Supreme Repository of Divine Jewels,

The Great Land Unconquerable,

The Royal Capital Full of Nine Noble Gems,

The Divine Abode of Reincarnated Spirits…



Tiny,on his mighty pedestal,

The Emerald Buddha presides over the cosmos,

Lightning-born and glowing with stormclouds,

While myriads of nagas swim through the air

And the right hand calls down rain,

The left is cupped to catch it.



Male and female kites

Chase across the March sky,above crowded parks,

Trying to snare and wrestle one another

To the finishing line.



Avalokitesvara,

Bronze bodhisattva,sinuous and sublime,

Outliving the Srivijayan empire,

The grace that human hands

And imperfect human minds

Can wrest from darkness.



Under the whirling planets and years,

People kneel and offer flowers

To the lak muang,

The lotus-crowned tree

Rooted in the city’s birth,

The fruiting horoscope.



Tiny amulet of a tamarind seed

Around a girl’s neck,

Silver case inscribed with a yantra.



In Chinatown’s dark alleys,

Funeral shops sell paper replicas

Of houses,cars,clothes and money

To be burned with the dead

And equip them in the afterlife.



At Erawan shrine

People buy captive finches

To see them released from their cages,

Shedding merit from their wings.





Patpong after dark:

The neon go-go bars

And the dead-eyed sirens cajoling passers-by

While inside fluorescent girls dance onstage

For the bleary eyes of men,

Slumped over their drinks,

And upstairs the curtain rises

On another sex show.

In the market hawkers sell fake watches,

Fake designer bags and T-shirts,

And prostitutes slouch at café tables,

Faces weary from boredom,drugs and disease,

Penniless country girls earning more in one night

Than a month in the rice fields.



The masseur uses hands,feet,knees and elbows

To press upon the body’s acupuncture points,

Unblocking the channels,the flow,

Stretching the limbs into yogic postures,

Balancing fire,earth,air and water.

Vodou

Brother slaves, we are going home.

Serve the spirits, and be happy.

I stand before you as Saint Gerard,

Among skulls and lilies,

Holding thunderstones.

Dahomey, the slave ships are leaving,

The kings sell their people for weapons and booze.

Brother slaves of Africa,

I am Fon and Yoruba,

Serve the spirits,

Be good like water, like earth.

This is Ginen,

The realm of the dead,

On the far side of the world,

Where souls attain their purity,

Made immortal and all-knowing.



Poor mortal, take guard.

Which spirit crouches on your head, fool,

And watches with big eyes?

Beware, who seeks to enlists evil spirits:

Though they may be flattered and cajoled

And assist the sorcerer in his works,

As suddenly will they turn on you

And devour you alive, without mercy,

Sucking the life from your flesh.



Danbala the serpent

Glides into my dreams,

Whispering omens,

And a rainstorm falls from the trees.



At the beginning of time,

The Great Serpent protected the earth

From sinking into the waters

By twining itself around the earth and into the sky,

And scattered stars,

Pushed up mountains,

Hollowed out riverbeds.

From its deepest core it released rain

To seed the earth,

And as the first showers fell,

A rainbow lit up the sky,

And the Serpent took her as his wife.



The black goat’s blood

I pour over your altar,

I am Baron Samedi in the boneyard,

Raising the dead with a cackle,

Putting my key in the door of death.

I caper like a goat

In top hat and frock coat,

Smoke tobacco with the spirits,

Shake my walking stick at the sky.

I change men into animals,

Make zombies of the living.

From the coffin of my phallus,

From the black cross of my body,

From the moon of my skull,

I come forth.



On All Souls’ Day black-and-purple people

Crowd into the graveyards,

Bringing victuals and tobacco for the spirits,

Pouring libations of rum and coffee

At the feet of their family crosses,

Adorning them with marigolds, candles and skulls.

Devotedly, they kneel and clean beloved tombs,

Swill rum and carouse with abandon,

Chanting lewd songs and dancing like lunatics,

Horses mounted by laughing spirits,

Ridden to exhaustion, round and round.

Spirits strut and jig around the boneyards,

Hurling bawdy jokes and ribald gestures,

Flirting and cursing and pranking,

Brandishing wooden phalluses,

As they rub themselves with lust.



The thunderstone speaks.

My finger traces a vever in the ground.

At the cemetery gates sits Baron Samedi, grinning,

In frock coat and tails and top hat,

Eyes hidden behind sunglasses,

Twirling his walking stick

And blowing smoke rings out through his ears,

“You want to make a zombie, yes?

You want to change into an animal?”

Roman Afternoon

In the city of women

I too worship.

Look:

An Etruscan perfume bottle,

Recovered from a tomb,

Perhaps still a hint

Of the scent,

Commending souls

To the gods.

In the Museo delle Anime dei Defunti,

I mark the interventions of the dead,

Prayer books and scraps of cloth

With fingerprints burned into them,

Made to prove their souls’ existence

And drive us sinners to Mass.

Pray for us,pray for our souls

To be released from Purgatory!

And I step outside onto the riverside

To the bars and cafes

And the beautiful women.

Secret Police

They may come by night,

They may come by day,

In a quiet spot, or in a crowded street.

When your time has come,

They will appear.

No-one will even notice you are gone,

It will all be over in an instant,

No witnesses,

No questions asked,

As if it had never happened at all.

No-one will think or feel anything,

It will all be quite normal,

Simply routine.

And your fate will be decided

Like a parking ticket,

Torn off

And added to the pile.



And then there will be nothing

But the eye at the peephole,

The black hood

And the torturer’s clubs:

“Liberty”, “Democracy”,

“Constitution”, and “Human Rights”.

Ready yourself for unfamiliar sensations:

The broken bottle shoved up the arse,

The heated brand,

The ingenious variations of beating,

The lighted cigarette applied to the skin,

The ice room,

The tiny dark box,

The dogs attacking,

The drugs, and no sleep,

The electric shocks,

The crucifixion,

The revolver in the mouth,

The screams of other prisoners,

The fastening and unfastening of door bolts,

The walls,

The noise, the intolerable noise,

The rapes,

The firing squad with rifles levelled,

The squatting for hours in impossible positions,

The drowning in shit,

The burning with acid,

The pliers brusquely extracting your teeth,

The lies, the lies, the incessant all-pervading lies.

Perverted Clowns

Lugubriously they love and serve

The invisible zero,

The hidden void.

They believe,and do not believe,in sin.

They are faithful,but have no faith.

The art of annihilation is their carnival.

There is no consummation,

Only festivals of pain

And sad siestas.



You are here.You are not here.

You are alive.You are not alive.

The sailors returning,

Older and stranger,

Report that the earth is, once more, flat.

Kiev in January

High above the Dnieper, titanium Motherland towers,

Raising the sword in her right hand,

Classical goddess on the heathen steppe.

Vladimir I, washerwoman’s son,

Took Kiev by treachery and fratricide.

Winter burns with a terrible fire

No summer can match,

A peppery draught of horilka,scalding the throat.

The taxi driver grins, teeth missing:

“You want women? Very beautiful.And clean.”

Out on the frozen river, a lone fisherman

Stares down into his little ice-hole,

Waiting, waiting..

Clothed Nudes

Chaste flesh,

the African fetish.

All we have is curiosity.

Apophatic shiver,

Ripple in a puddle...


Luxurious and hopeless,

Bodies that are touched

but undiscovered,

taken and discarded

for the hell of it.


What kind of knowledge is possible

for the affluent and ignorant

whose suffering is venal,

whose minds are avoided by thought?


Which is more truthful,

The presence or the absence,

The body or its memory,

The object or the word?

The Ornamented Woman

I never saw colours before I saw you.

I never saw light.

Love is so precise;

It misses nothing.


All before was mere pastiche.

And now is viraha

To the sitar player.

Rapture breaking up

Into absolute loss.


The fact that you are wearing

Glasses somehow changes

Everything,

Accentuates it

With ineffable nuances.

And there is so much

Playing with time,

Prolonging pauses,

Manipulating hesitations-

Pulses of an exotic music

To which the ear must be attuned-

Like hearing Persian hymns

For the first time.


You have stepped out

Of a Rajput miniature

Into the crowded

Oblivious street.

Stance,gesture and speech

Are one mystery;

Desire is the teacher,

Laughing behind its hands.

Cinephilia

The sad do not write about sadness.

The deaf-mute goes about her business,

That compassionate sister at your shoulder,

The keeper of secrets

Who teaches philosophy.


Distance was always my mistress,

Approaching and receding

With comical inflections.

I do not understand people

Who claim they do not like films.


Emotions in quarantine,

I study the effects of separation.

A grief is calling me

To merge.


Death five million times a day,

Each instant

Unmourned.

I take the world in my arms,

Bewildered,

Desperate to love it all

Before it is gone.

Afraid to lose

What is already lost,

I keep my vigil

Before the screen

And take these signs

Into my body.

Syria

Springfire and the air is dizzy

With jasmine and damask rose.

I carry my lives about with me,

Fossil molluscs from under the Thetys Sea,

Scattered across the desert.

Stare into black basalt’s grains,

And know that the world is nothing

But a donkey’s droppings.


The hurried perish, and the patient endure.

After forty years the Bedouin took revenge,

Remarking, “I have been quick about it.”

Eagles circle over the Cities of the Dead,

Over abandoned houses and churches,

In the limestone ghost-hills,

While waterwheels on the Orontes

Turn and turn, ploughing the river.

Thirty-six years the Stylite roosted

On his pillar,among the pines,

Meticulously counting each prayer

Offered to the magnesium sky.


What does the head of John the Baptist-

The head of Al-Hussein-

Prophesy,buried in the Great Umayyad Mosque?

Temple of Jupiter, Temple of Hadad,

Continuity of sacrifice,

Suras in stone and flesh.

(Can that day be far off when Jesus

Will descend from his watchtower here

To do battle with the Antichrist?)

Through Paradise itself the Barada river

Flows,through orchards and groves,

With bridges and pavilions built

By Byzantine and Syrian craftsmen.

There lies Saladin in his tomb,

That man of honour and justice

Who never fought unless he had to

And accumulated no fortune for himself.

No sooner was his body in the grave

Than his empire was squandered, divided,lost.


In the Medical Museum,observe

The hanging pipes whose soothing sounds

Were used to pacify the lunatics;

What tune will you play upon Al-Farabi’s lute?

From which mountaintop will you launch yourself

In Ibn Firnas’s flying machine?


Mosaics from Apamea,

Wondrous as the five hundred fighting elephants

Who were slaughtered,all of them,in the end,

As part of a peace treaty :

Socrates presides over his own Last Supper,

Six disciples seated round him

As he holds up his right hand to bless;

Amazons on horseback gallop,

Hunting tigers with superb élan.


Krak des Chevaliers.Walls never breached

But taken,eventually,by trickery.

Ages of ingenuity, labour and faith

Invested in conquest and war!

Saracen and Christian, exchanging blood,

Sacrificed to the same God,

Yehovah, Allah, Baal, Shamash.

On Some Drawings By Seurat

Just what the hand can gesture at, not grasp,

The always-escaping tantalising line,

Bare and pure...

The artist, left to his own devices.

The solitary pencil.

What can four fingers and a thumb

Cut out of the air?

Hand, shaper of flints,

Spear-launcher,

Feeling, appreciating

Nothingness.

This is devotion.


Stroking and honing

Light to dark to light,

Working with the paper’s tooth,

The texture of shadow.

Figures coalesece, emerge

Out of the black whiteness,

Tone on tone,

Without edges,

Modulating a music

Finer and lighter than life.

A Möbius strip.


Particles colliding in space,

Substance shading out...

Is this evidence of substance

Or emptiness?

Marks on paper,

Waves in water,

In sand.

Portbou

A small unassuming place to make an exit.

A cuckoo’s nest of histories.

A tunnel into the sky.

The dead of Europe, who can count them?

To each a reason, a fate.

At the border, lots are drawn,

Destinies negotiated.

So many secrets in unmarked graves.

The shell game never ends.

The living have one duty:

To lay stones on the graves of the dead.

Who now holds the anxious fortress?

Besiegers and besieged

All post their prayers to the same sky.

There is no-one on this earth without a name.

French Leave

To every man a country of the mind,

a realm that can never be definitively mapped,

a truth you feel absolutely or not at all…


In the choir of St-Denis Cathedral,

caught like a spider under glass

in the vast windows’ glow

I thrill to the pointed arch

like a tuning fork,

the ribbed vault and half-column shafts

rising from pillar to roof,

a new Atlantis

breaking the waves…



The cemeteries of the Somme:

tens of thousands

of identical crosses,

name, rank and regiment

or no name at all…


In Charleville,

during the festival of puppets,

I stand at Rimbaud’s grave,

quayside of his childhood’s paper boat-

here he is,

after all his voyages,

back in the place he most hated

but could never escape,

the farmyard of human mediocrity.

Out in the forest

wild boar,proud as Celtic chieftains,

root through mushroomed undergrowth

above the twisting river,

while stupid hunters hack about,

desperate for something to shoot at…


Winding among the Carnac menhirs,

With the spirits of the land and sea,

I compass a snake-way to the stars,

Lighting mind-fires for the dead.


In the gloomy château of Angers,

The Tapestry of the Apocalypse is spread:

The Whore of Babylon appears,

Mounted on the seven-headed Beast,

As the Word of God rides out to challenge her,

Galloping his horse into battle,

Chasing Satan’s legions into the fiery lake

That Jerusalem be established anew in heaven.


Canoe-plashing river-drifting light-and-shade summer days on the rivers of proud slow artful France, mushrooming sun-blasted cloud-castles of verse into the atmosphere,as blue fire skis over your face and skin, and sculls into the blood.Sensuous intellect, essay another adventure!Hilarious passion, dragonfly on the…
Like the duc de Condé, I expect to be reincarnated as a horse.

Sweeney Todd

On the Temple Bar boundary,

Where the monarch stops in his progress

To perform the ritual of the pearl-handled sword,

The sacrificial altar becomes a barber’s chair.


Depraved diseased despicable murderous drink-sodden London,

My poxy old prison tart!

How many times,as a boy,

I would visit the Tower

To watch the lions feeding in the zoo

And stare at the torture instruments,

The rack and thumbscrews, the iron gauntlets

And the Scavenger’s Daughter.

The city tried to kill me

But my cunning and resource were too strong.


Fleet Street, with its gibbets and freak shows,

And the savage giants of St Dunstan’s clock,

Striking the hours with their clubs;

The crook and the writer

Foster their wits here;

The killer and the bookseller

Practise their trades.

At Mrs Salmon’s Waxworks

You can look in wonder

At the execution of Charles the First,

The rites of Moloch

And the Turkish Seraglio.


A razor of the finest steel

Fits so snugly in my hand;

It calls to me like God.

Cut, cut, cut…

In the kitchen

Love is busy making pies….

The Cult of the Serpent

Ruined Adam, red man blooded in war

And ignorance, not the perfect creature

First released from Yahweh’s hand!

It is man, the winged serpent, the devious seraph.

Subtle is the Arch-enemy, so wily

As to corrupt rather than obliterate faith,

So that in the battle between truth

And error, man’s mind might be utterly

Confounded and debased,

Venerating what it should abhor.

Allegiance divided,we call both good and evil divine,

-Hail the Babylonian serpent,

Symbol,talisman, oracle and god!



Apollyon, Abaddon,

The battle standards of Assyria

Fly the dragon through Asia,

And the ensigns of Persia,

The sign of the serpent,

Governor of the universe.

Two fanging serpents contend for the world-egg,

Standing upon their tails.

In the netherworld,scorpions and snakes

Attack the feet of the damned.

8

At the fire-altar the god sits enthroned,

A serpent girdling his waist.



Circles and serpents of the landscape

Avebury

Stonehenge

Ophite hierograms in stone

Ophel

Apollo



In the caves of Hindustan

The god Sani stands,encircled by two snakes,

Their heads meeting over his,

Saturn’s ring.

On a rock by the Ganges

Vishnu reclines on the coiled serpent,

Sleeping between two worlds.



Parvati, come,

Snakes about your neck and waist!



Egyptian hieroglyph:

Two serpents intersect at right angles

Upon a globe

Solstitial colures

Drink the snake’s blood,

Eat his heart and liver,

And gain his wisdom.



The adder,

druid minister of the great god Hu,

the dragon-ruler of the universe

watches the sun slough across the sky

reading its helix

like the sons of Canaan



the serpent’s kiss

for an Ophite

the blessing of the eucharist

and the mysteries of Bacchus

snakes carried in baskets

with cakes and bread for the votaries



Cneph

the architect of the universe

the serpent with the egg in its mouth

seventh letter of the alphabet

sign of Thoth



The asps of Isis

come to drink from her chalice



the Egyptian gnostics of the school of Basilides

with their abraxas amulets

graven with the snake



the Tau-cross marked on my brow

the hawk-headed serpent



The divining cup of Joseph

its lid engraved with snakes



The serpents of Ouidah and the Congo

slide through the temples

possessing the will and imagination



Europa Europa

the solar serpent

Cadmus and Harmonia did not die

but were changed into vipers



Spiral line on the omphalos

spiral line on the megaliths of Newgrange

the serpent’s coil



the tripleheaded serpent on the breastplate of Agamemnon

and the viper shield of Menelaus



the Pythia of Apollo at Delphi

pronounces the oracle

seated on her tripod

the tripleheaded serpent of brass



the serpent’s fountain in Palestine

and the priest of Apollo’s stream atColophon,in Ionia,

and the holy stupefaction in the cave of Trophonius...



the fire in the dragon’s mouth of Mexico

burns also in the fields and villages of Britain



Enter the dracontium

the snake-stones’ avenues

leading to knowledge

to death

Argentina

Through a horse’s eyes,

Mournful horizons curve into themselves;

Thunderous distances drum creole

Into the Atlantic mariner’s reverie.

Death can gain no purchase here

Against sheer heights of pride.



In the Museum of Natural Science,

Megafauna skeletons

Glum obscenely in glass cases;

Gliptodon, megatherium,toxodon,macrauchenia.

Fantastic superbly designed lords of creation,

Production lines cancelled and abandoned

Three million years ago,

No longer economical, alas.


The fearful face of an Inca child

Sacrificed and mummified,

Knocked dead with a blunt weapon,

Then abandoned on a peak.



Words, Jesuit missions

On the savage pampa,

Work to reduce the wild.

Black priest of the Vatican,

I plant a peach orchard

Under the alien sky.

The Despot

That was a long time ago, his father’s frown:

What difference could it possibly make now?

All the medals on his chest,

The palaces, aeroplanes and yachts,

And fawning courtiers ready to kill for him.

Stepfathered by poverty and shame,

He must punish the enemy,

Avenge the beaten child.

Uncertainty was the killer,

Cruel to a fault, refined through pain,

Homing in on resentments and fears

To exploit for purposes of state;

As if his madness could purge

The mundane madness of all.

Was he not an artist in his field,

His restless hands crafting the masses

Into a voodoo doll?

No-one could touch him now,

Least of all himself.

Utamaro

In 1804, at the height of his success, the artist Kitagawa Utamaro was put under house arrest for fifty days for making prints of the military ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi enjoying the pleasures of the “floating world.”


A lifetime’s diligent study

Will not suffice the lover or the artist.

We speak not of lust and commerce,

But of glamour,romance and desire.

The movements of brush and fan

Nuance the night with mysteries;

Which touch is more tender,

The geisha’s or the painter’s?

As a dragonfly’s clinging to a stalk,

So a courtesan’s motions I study.

All things are imagined,

Or they do not exist at all.

Midnight is the hour of the rat,

When a lighted taper in the hand

Throws shadows on a screen;

The red folds of the silk

On an outstretched arm

And the sake cup, deep and dark.

The long stem of a narcissus

Leads the eye to the petals;

Then devotion’s gestures sway all

Until the dawn bell’s call.

In the hour of the dragon,

When the daylight world awakes,

The night people gladly retire,

Weary,and always a little sad.

Cameroon

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!

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Marco Polo

I was never more at home than when abroad.

Never more at ease than in some hectic venture,

Perilous to body and soul.



In my Genoese prison

I make the walls my curious listeners,

Attending whatever tales I conjure

From life’s exotic embassy.

Thus tedious captivity becomes a Cathay

And a prisoner in rags the Great Khan!



Quick, scribe,dip your pen into an ocean

Of ink, for I will make you a discoverer

Under sail on chartless seas!

(This book shall be for us both

As Kublai Khan’s golden tablet,

Firman supreme that opens all roads!)



Venice,my nocturne of secrets and conspiracies,

My death-spinning silkworm!

Dank cloister of erotic traders

Misted in isolation and slence,

Plague rats gnawing the piles beneath their feet.

Bewildered and beauty-sticken,

I took my compass from the winds

And set myself free...



We found no barbarians there,in the East,

But a people courteous,curious,eager for trade,

And a ruler greater than any on earth,

Magnificent beyond the paltry courts of Europe!

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

To be cozened with fairy tales!

The truth is wrapped in a Persian carpet

And trampled by horses

Like the defeated Caliph of Baghdad.



The visions witnessed in deserts and mountains

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

Never satisfied with my eyes’ representations,

Which seem such poor imitations

Of some sublime beyond.

Still I hear spirits calling, good and ill,

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

Messages as precious as white mares’ milk.

Rudolf II, 1606

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

But cannot unseat it from its rock...

To pace the Kunstkammer corridor, that is my delight,

Whatever the wars and machinations of the day.

Let no evil insinuate itself between me

And my black Spanish cloak!

Why should I travel the world

When I can gather the world to me

And arrange it all here, at the very centre,

To bolster my powers with talismans?

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

My body flabby and weak from excess.

Each day now I come here to this sainted canvas,

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

That I so long coveted and pursued

With guile and patience and infinite care,

And had carried over the Alps from Venice;

Hour after hour, I contemplate the majesty

Of the Madonna, in blue robe, as she crowns

With roses my great-great-grandfather, Maximilian,

Kneeling before her and the infant Lord.



They accuse me of inaction, of indifference,

Who little comprehend the soul’s means

Or the methods a seeker must adhere to

If he would prosper in the dark.

The curve of a comet or a woman’s thigh

Occupy me equally in this necromancy,

Conjuring talismans, infused with my breath,

To blazon the planets’ will to man.

Questions, questions, riddles to bedevil me,

Conundrums of human behaviour and fate!-

How to act for certain good when every action

Entails too many consequences, too many ills?

Give me the magic to untie that knot!

In the meantime, let us allow things to happen,

And scry their entrails as best we can.

I have made all believers welcome,

Hoping that together we may find the one truth,

And for that I am damned by the Vatican

As a devil-worshipper.



Sometimes I feel my reason, like a ship

In a tempest, smashed against rocks,

Masts splintered and sails shredded,

Desperate to anchor anywhere, even

On cannibal shores!

Jew and Muslim, Protestant and Catholic,

Let us join as one in natural magic.

The fires we build shall be not pyres

Of martyrdom, but watchmen’s torches

To burn a path through the night.

Nature, will you one day reveal to me

Your essence, and consecrate my labours

With the Philosopher’s Stone?

Though fools call knowledge heresy,

It is the jewel in the serpent’s head.

I must have solitude and peace, the only freedom

From intrigue, suspscion, the half-heard word

Muttered behind walls and curtains,

The masterful dissembling of supposed friends

And ambassadors’ suave tergiversation.

I’ll gird myself with ceremony

And make authority’s pageant my shield,

Renamed Augustus, under Capricorn.



Black Prague, citadel of the Great Work,

Perilous threshold of the invisible,

Observatory at the world’s hub,

Infuse me with visions and wonders!

Such melancholy I suffer that no doctor

Can cure me,-my twisted guts spew

Fear then boredom then disgust.

Beloved Kunstkammer, unicorn’s cornucopia

Of monstrous marvels! This encyclopaedia

Will grant me the cosmos entire

As my theatre; its secret virtues

Are my only bezoar, carried next

To my heart.

The rare and extraordinary are dear to me;

An hour spent with scientists and artists

Is worth more than any minister’s blather.

In the sanctity of my universal treasure-chest,

There is peace, harmony unachievable

On earth, amid the petty quarrelling

Of inferior beings. Within these walls

I perceive a unity beyond corruption,

And boundless enquiry, without prohibition

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

These intermarried objects are my Cabala.

In the workings of these planetary clocks

Creation’s immense will acts out the centuries

Minute by minute.

The soul demands observation and experiment.

I wait, and wait, patiently allowing events

To work through their own repercussions,

And, by the subtlest checks and moves,

Hold the bedlam earth in balance.

Let the Pope say I am bewitched-no matter!

It is my own mind I must hold fast

Against dintegration. Europe divided

Will never make peace with the Turk.

Baleful times! An ominous conjunction of stars

Bodes malaise. Night panics place a dagger

In my grasp-how shall I use it?

Born under Saturn, I sweat morbid fevers,

Closer, ever closer to irredeemable despair.

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

Would spit his venom into mine and my kingdom’s

Veins,-yet I shall scotch him underfoot,

My magic is far greater than his.

Night is falling, night is falling again...

The wild moon calls me to her service.

I can hear the mandrakes scream.

Sanity

Call the alienist: see can he locate any aliens.

Must madness always be savage

Or might it have some kindness in it,

Some curious promise?



The sound and the unsound,

Count them together.

They are brothers,

Like it or not, bewildered all,

In various ways.



Disreputable are the truth-tellers,

Not entirely to be trusted.

Sanity is dull and reasonable,

Measuring effects without histrionics,

Achieving limited aims

For the placid commonweal.



Suspicions are the sum of us.

The territory has no vocabulary;

It is all potential.

If names you need,

You will have to invent them,

Fashion devices suited to your ends.

The indescribable is where we live.

Fascinating spectacle of ourselves!-

Extraordinary animals shaping death

On our tongues, we observe the symptoms

Of being.

Exorbitant appetite calls the dance.

Feelings and sensations so acute

Are life itself, which, even as it generates,

Undoes.

Resist the irresistible?

The more and the other confound

Diminutive designs.

To torture and be tortured is delight

In love’s perverse cult.

Time to avenge

Childhood’s horror in cruel victory.

Time to break the rules and suffer.



Slow murderers,alchemists of separation,

Your violence brings you home.

Can you recover from yourself,

Make progress,prosper and be whole?

Empty cash in your pocket,

You gamble on the wish-market,

Imagining ever more objects of desire,

Self-thwarted, self-betrayed,

Shopping for nothings.

The fear, the danger is too much:

Heart’s desire too monstrous to admit,

So hide it, fool, deny it.

Swimming Pool

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

People meet, faces talk.

Doing things,making decisions,

Yes, that occurs, occurs all the time,

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

That makes it almost real.

All these abstractions, these conversations,

“He said this and I said that,”

Myriads of details disappeared...

Tragedy sells few tickets these days:

Don Juan has no chance of damnation,

No black reward for his sins.

Can it be the dead are all alike?

Collectors all, banal and jaded,

Our sufferings too light for solace,

We forget the glory, the terror.

Too long lying by the pool!

Why not jump in now and have a swim?

Sad Economist

A German pimp

In an Italian suit

Is selling Russian prostitutes

To Turkish johns.



The age of illusionists and swindlers;

Ponzi scheme on Ponzi scheme.

The money-trance is working day and nght,

Buying shares in the unreal.

Mistress Decay wears a mink coat

And gold rings on her fingers.

I would love to draw maps

But cannot find boundaries anywhere.



This is the devilish West,

The formulation of a theoretical model,

The marketing of ideals.

Fiction and fake are the miracle-machines,

Servicing the freedom of slaves.

Hypocritical and capricious,

The gods of Olympus look down,

Playing games with myths.

Just Looking

Do you know where there is?

It is different from here.

Somehow.



Running in the egg and spoon race

From Monday to Friday,

Mind you don’t trip over yourself.



Between the seen and the unseen,

I stake my mind.

On a whim.



In the zoo, man and animal

Stare at one another,

Uncomprehending.

Metaphors for each other.



Smearing their hands with animal blood,

The first artists set to work.



Count me in.

Count me out.

The First Novelist

He would serve the many-breasted goddess

With romance and comedy;

Enter the labyrinth with a clew of words.

A story rose like a dolphin from the deep

To rescue him from drowning.

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

Plotting positions across the stage,

An image frozen on a Pompeiian mosaic,

A clay doll fashioned for the gods.

An unheard tale of Alexander was beginning;

A secret history would be revealed.

Incidents, distractions and dangers

Concocted the rites of initiation;

Words would bring the dead to life.

The author. creature of marsh and shore,

Builder of ships to be wrecked,

Must fall, warring with love and time.

The one who breaks will have to mend.

Digital Man

Burgling the future to fill today’s houses,

Bankrupting posterity and ourselves,

We are the rapacious, the dissatisfied.

Autists without art.

There is only the endless mediocre present;

No utopias, no ideas.

Intimacy, reciprocity,

No thanks.

Don’t feel much empathy,

Don’t read much any more.

Solitude is so sweet and sympathetic.



Don’t touch me.

Leave me in silence.

Cities engulf;

Cameras track every step.

Lights and noises disurb.

Companies are updating,restructuring,retraining;

Someone somewhere is losing his job.

You have to fit in,

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

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

Cataogue my memories,

Stay at home, in my museum.

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

I can’t stand it.

I need the deep, remote.



Everything is in the shops;

Nothing can survive without being sold.

But I am uncommercial,

Irreducible,

Incurably real.



Every idiot’s opinion must be heard and respected

In this world without knowledge or sense.

They sneer at facts and grammar,

Discredit reason and truth.

Superstition and conspiracy are all they believe in,

The frivolous, the ignorant, the empty,

Also known as “normal”.



Who do you pretend to be?

What do you choose to purchase

With your life’s credit?

What they call freedom

Is merely choice;

Their happiness is self-congratulation.

Indulge your preferences,

Alone, at the computer,

Sharing nothing, communicating nothing.

Pragmatic relationships come and go.

Virgins and teetoltallers need not apply.

All forms of consumption

Have their place in the market.

Only abstinence is taboo.



Everything on earth is beng reinvented

For commerce and use.

There’s no thinking any more,

Just eating and excreting.

I’m obese,anorexic,addicted,conventional,

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

Viruses

Mind-viruses evolve me.

Thought-infected,out of control,

I attack myself with ideas.

Philosophysics.



Distinctions,strategies and associations

Baffle me through

The half-truths,the double-dealing.

Crippled through with horrors and miracles,

I reel back to “It depends...”



The syringe pierces the skin;

The virus penetrates the cell’s defences.



Bad advice is my favourite kind.

Gambling on the long shot,

Taking cheap insurance,

Playing the streaks,

Playing against the streaks,

I back my hunches to collapse.



Cat’s cradle of kluges,

The human eye.

I imitate

The spider’s ritual.

Exposures

Not guilty, I reply,

But do not believe it.

Not really.

Not now.

Beauty and suicide are so close.

Everything is almost something else.



This image that takes you over

And becomes a cosmos,

Is just grain and tone and artifice.

Two dimensions.



Just when you think you have learned all there is

About loss, something will arise to remind you

How little you truly know; another inflection,

A novel- for you-permutation,

A nuance that takes time to parse.

Scientist

Prokarya and eukarya,

Here we cling,

The one per cent,

Not yet extinct.

Some shrill voice inside me,

A hundred million years old,

Screams I am dying,

How will I pay the bills,

What about the planet?

I will bark at you,and bite you,

You,in my way,

Enemy with my face!



The chimpanzee’s yawn

Is my yawn.

I myself am the asteroid

Rushing towards this planet.

Think of the ants,

Unchanged for aeons,

The most warlike creatures on earth.



I sit with my retrospections

And prospections,

Neither matching the actual.

Oh do not give me information,

Let me imagine...



A mitochondrion is not alive,

But the system has properties we call life.

This is the principle of the bicycle.



What is taking shape in the Petri dish?

What we term particles do not exist.

Every atom around me I postulate,

In order to feel alive.



One atom with another:

That relation seduces and bedevils.

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

London in the 1890s

Is this the inception, the tremulous threshold,

The coming of a grand and lovely age,

Apogee of science,religion and society?

All is decay and senescence:

Generals draw up battle plans,

Hampered by hidden fear;

The batsman walks out onto the cricket pitch,

Knowing he is not up to it any more.

Heavily,in slow motion,empires fall.

The race is becoming degenerate.

Suicide is all the rage.



It’s the same the whole world over,


It’s the poor what gets the blame


It’s the rich what gets the pleasure,


Ain’t it all a bleeding shame?



Fellowships and societies debate,

Envisaging the changes to come;

Utopians,socialists and anarchists alike

Dream the world’s transformation

While the unemployed stand begging

On hopeless moribund streets.

At the premiere of “Arms and the Man”,

The entire pit and gallery break into laughter

Until,suddenly, they begin to realise

That they themselves are being mocked

And sit there,dumbfounded,bitter

And angry at this upstart author Shaw

Who dares to satirize their world.





Oscar Wilde returns from America,

His hair curled just like Nero’s

In the Louvre bust.

Salome dances like a flame,

And stoops to kiss the severed head

Of Jokanaan.



Lord Tennyson lies on his deathbed,

A copy of Cymbeline placed in his hands,

Opened at the page with his favourite lines,

Moonlight streaming in through the oriel window

To bear him away to Avalon.

All across Engand,from church pulpits,

Ministers lament the passing

Of an immortal, the conscience of the age.



I’ll sing thee songs of Araby


And tales of fair Cashmere,


Wild tales to cheat thee of a sigh


Or charm thee to a tear.



In the music hall darkness, night after night,

Arthur Symons sits,watching,thrilling

To the painted lascivious dancers,

The louche artifice of whores and ballet girls,

Oh so wicked, so alluring...

Then he strolls the promenade

And chooses his fancy,

An experience, a poem-to-be.

A flight from the dragons and harpies

Marching on Pariliament,demanding

Suffrage and equality.



After the ball was over,


She took out her glass eye.


Stood her cork leg in the corner,


Hung up her hair to dry.



The Importance of Being Earnest

Opens at the St James’s Theatre,

Dandiacal epigrams strutting

Through Uranian voids,

Feigning and doubling

With the glee of the doomed.

The author dines at the Savoy

With another rough young man

While at home Mrs Wilde is reading

The children a bedtime story.



I’ll sing thee songs of Araby


And tales of fair Cashmere,


Wild tales to cheat thee of a sigh


Or charm thee to a tear.

Country Paths

Bend of a lane,bow of a hill,

The why of fields and hedges,fractal,multifarious,

The dogwood days never seen again,

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

This pollen in the air is the placenames

Ancestors etched in wood and stone;

These boundaries have held,will hold,

Parishes trodden out and breathed on,

Vills,hundreds and wapentakes,

Shadow-shire of beaver,wolf and aurochs,

Where I coppice my rooted tongue.

Nightingale woods of spring

Laugh oxlips and anemones into thickened air,

Thousand-year light and shade

Chequered into a woodman’s sigh.

Frith and spinney, copse and thicket

Weave me into their etymology;

I reave the geometrical land,

Axing through mind-acres gladly.

Strange country that I thought I knew!

Uncanny tree I fruit from!

Grids

Cities of industry and embattled order,

Mind-grids of rational madness,

Interconnected buildings and beings!

A world is being produced, transported and traded.

Hands in ancient Mesopotamia

Roll mud into bricks, stacking,constructing

Ziggurats,metropolises,maps

To measure time and space,

Reniassance perspectival paintings,

Moveable type and vast machines,

Architecture of all eras,

The Internet.



Bureaucrats in ancient Thebes

Draw up plans for new cities;

Alexander the Great unrolls a map

Of Persia, his finger tracing conquest;

Monastic choirs raise their voices,

Flowing with the notes on the page;

Medieval merchants open their chapbooks,

Filling the pews like figures in a ledger.



Electronic cuneiform flickers across my sight,

Star-grain scattered in the breeze,

Babylonian astronomy for the modern world,

Astrology to arrange my fortunes.

I am a maker and breaker of tablets,

Pyramidologist of days,

Seeking the hidden chambers and tunnels

That destiny intimates.



Pacific islanders crouch in their canoes,

Constructing wave-maps from palm fronds,

Weaving grids that their bodies test

Against the winds and sway.

Through the crosses-and-circles of cathedral cities,

Through seasons and circadian rhythms,

I pace my own Jerusalem,beating the bounds,

As the Milky Way’s drum resonates C major.

I hold up my guidonian hand

To orchestrate music in the whirlpool air.

Am I looking at or through the screen?

(The veil that trains me in optics).



Northern Protestant and/or Southern Catholic?

Sometimes I am not sure which Bible to read.

Anyhow, I am in the frame,

Silent cinema’s furious hero.

My hands are those of a prehistoric fisherman,

Weaving flax into nets.

Force vectors firework their arcs about me,

As I bumble through this tumult

Of chaos becoming order, order becoming chaos,

Angel-translator of intelligences,

Fool for knowledge and love.

Russians

I cower from the Moscow avenues,

Crushed by their gargantuan breadth,

Murderous traffic speeding towards me.

“Two Romes have fallen,and the third stands,

And a fourth there shall not be.”

Fateful August raises a dangerous sun.

In the underpass a shabby busker

Plays a mournful ballad,

The same song every day.



People walk around St Petersburg,

Talking to themselves,

Muttering,grumbling,groaning to themselves,

Disconsolate and all-too-human,

Hugging their sorrows close.



A dusty little town on the Volga.

One remembers the Germans lured out here

By Catherine the Great

With promises of fertile lands, houses and livestock,

And they came, they came in their thousands,

Excited pioneers of a new European civilisation,

Only to find nothing, nothing but the steppe,

And the spears of Tatar raiders.

In her decaying flat, Vera lives with hunchbacked thoughts,

Eating black bread with them,

Sharing her vodka with them,

The forest demons who must be appeased.

She walks down by the willow river

Through the floating poplar seeds,

And catches the yellwgreen flame of an oriole’s flight

On her fingertips,

Balances the plash of a swimming rat

On the end of her nose.

Wary and defiant, her dark eyes

Sometimes fire with amusement and joy.

The past is bad medicine,

So bitter, so foul.



Who knows how to be free?

Slavery is so familiar, it seems right.

Who knows how to make a new beginning

When endings are all we ever had.

Somewere,perhaps,a few true souls are gathered

Like the last colony of Old Believers,

Hidden in some remote Siberian forest,

Praying for the world.



Siberian summer evening.

Dust-tracks covered with apple blossom.

Outside a house once inhabited by a Decembrist

An apple tree surges up in full bloom.

What will the New Jerusalem look like?

Will it be a village of wooden huts

Where the men and women bathe naked together

In a river of laughing fish?

Slowly, suddenly, a wind stirs and rises

Far away, and gusts through the trees,

Shedding its riches of rain.

Justinian and the Fall

An empire is a poem of ideas..

Under a mosaic of Bellerophon fighting Chimera,

Justinian sits alone in a gilded chair,

Religiously dreaming of the glory,

A new Rome worthy of his name.

His hands grasp the bread and wine,

The liturgy of power and pretence,

Each hour’s ceremonial his burden.

Now rash,now indecisive, he coddles

His own impurpled arrogance for all,

And laughing barbarians invade the borders

Of his dreams, his words, his realm.

Shanghai

In the howling slipstream of the future,

Faces pinned back in clownish grins,

The myrmidons eat and shit their way

To riches.Glory.Ever more desire.

Death is the empire,

Time the frontier.

New fashion, new technology!

Delirium of money and action,

Ecstasy-terror of jazz-architecture!

Into the outstretched hand of a shoeshine boy

The loose change of fortune is dropped,

Sure as oracle bones.



Red and gold moon of tigerish spring,

Blood’s calendar tolls like a temple bell

Through sunlight-mist-blossom-drift.

Autumn,too,invites premonitions

And words as subtle as women.



Bastard entrepot of sacrificial suns,

Born from opium-cloud waters,

Bluster your warlord ways into the sky!

Scavenger,enter the neon netherworld

With a ghost’s crooked steps,

Greedy to grab whatever you can,

A knowledge as precious as tea.

Beheaded lives, impaled on factory spikes,

Line the high walls of tomorrow

And love, poisoned with midnight’s mercury,

Burns itself out in diminishing profits.



Careful not to lose your face!

You are the swarm, the bedlam.

The information uniforms you,

Drills you, sends you out to fight.

Bowl up to the stock market,

Place your bets!

There are monsters in the water.

Counterfeit coins in the bribe-hand.

Bronze cauldron city of zigzags and dragons,

Cook the ritual feast for voracious ghosts!



The bamboo speaks in riddles

In the gardens of carp pools and pavilions

And in the temple, serenely enthroned,

The Buddhas of past,present and future

Watch the red lanterns sway.

Argentine Tango

All that wealth and beauty,

Squandered, reduced to this!

Argentina.



Have you seen the old man dancing,

The fat ugly poor man dancing,

To whom all the beautiful women

Gravitate,like moons around a planet?



In the eye’s empire

We move to the sound

of joyful disillusionment

and carnival despair.



Go, dance with beauty,

Take splendour in your arms

And dare a simple tango in the dark.

Better to be lucky than good.



In the ballroom hundreds of couples

Slowly rotate around the vast floor, two by two,

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

The men proudly puffing out their chests

And holding their partners close,

The women leaning into their embrace

And tracing lemniscates with their gams

Through the syncopations

Secret Africa contrives

The Rembrandt Fanatic

Ten o’ clock in the morning,

Freezing cold under the Oude Kerk,

The bells pealing every half hour

Over the sex shops and tattoo parlours...

(Inside, among the grim grey stone,

Devoid of Catholic flimflam,

No chalice to call a grail,

No candles to light for the dead,

Cold echoes roll over me,

And the ghost of Rembrandt’s wife

Bares her nipple for my mouth...)

I walk up the street, past West Indian whores

Sitting in the red light windows,

Their eyes tired and dead.

In the Rijksmuseum, I stand with a swarm

Of pilgrims before the “Night Watch”,

Reverently pointing out details,

Verifying this reproduction

Of the original in their minds;

Precarious as the fortune

Made and lost on the price of a tulip.


In Rembrandt's house on Jodenbreestraat ,

On black and white marble floors,

Up the steep twisting stairs,

I track the man of shipwrecks

To his drowned treasure.

Here he lived and died more than once,

Worked and raised a family,

Held wife and children dying in his arms,

And bankrupted himself

Till the furious creditors came

To empty the rooms of everything,

Paintings, furnishings, and books,

The collections of seashells and coral,

The Javanese shadow puppets.