Drawing Things

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

Symmetry

I

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

III

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

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

Treasure-hunting in Ecuador

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

Water in the Western Desert

Arizona-Colorado

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

The Ant-killer

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

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

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

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

Aberration of Starlight

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

Hollywood Stars

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

Doodles on the Wall

I

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

Room Temperature

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

III

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

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

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

IV

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

Notes on His Own Existence

I

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

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

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

II

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

IV

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

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

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

V

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

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

VI

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

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

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

VII

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

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

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



VIII

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

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

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

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

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

Wing Chun

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

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

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

Portonovo

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

Signs and Veils

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

Safety in Numbers

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

Sunstead

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

Agnostic

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

Opera Buffa

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

An Evening With Constantine Cavafy

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

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

African Music

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Misogyny

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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