PSEUDOEPIGRAPHIES (a poetic anthology)

JUMP

Jump

Into the space

Between

Your thoughts

And seize

The dream

That plunders

Your flame

RISE ‘N SHINE

...Waking up early in Rome

Cries of defiance

Rise from the Aventine

In a sparrow’s glide

And break the blue sky

Echoing ripples of memory

Then falling swiftly from the air

The fragments of this fragile image

Ring on the choiring cables

And jangle gently in the wind

Like a quiet piano string

The waking blood

Now floods the apprehensive silence

Fearing the heart may quicken

And start to romp against the rib

Soft and insistent as a secret bell

Under a latinate cupola

Then life will have to begin.

APPRAISING HOME

Through stalled air,

Unshadowed light,

A few leaves fall

Of their own weight

My woods oppressive,

The sky gray.

It begins in mist

Almost at the ground

And rises forever.

The poplars file silent,

Almost natural

But not quite,

Almost eternal

But not quite.

Here is what

Has always been.

Here is what

Will always be.

Even in me,

The eternal quest

Returns in rest,

Even to the slightest of

My interrogations,

A brush of wind now

Licks my face and answers.

My head is loud

With the labour of words.

My tongue hungers

For the sweet of speech.

But it is in silence

That my hope is,

And my peace.

A song whose lines

I cannot make or sing

Sounds Nature's quiet

Like a millennial root.

RETURN

As I feel myself reappearing

From the profound rapture

Of the core,

I question, momentarily,

The value of returning.

For an instant

I am tempted to remain

In the place of infinite beauty,

But I begin to think of the interest

That life in the world holds -

Music, books, art, people:

A different kind of pleasure

Than the other,

And I let myself rise

To the surface of consciousness.

What would happen

Next time

If my joy in the world

Is not quite so strong

And I yield

To temptation?

I HAVE BEEN WATCHING EVENING ARRIVE

I have been watching evening arrive

The shades of black and blue

Cover the burst of flames

The sun has left behind

And some vital part of me

Being sanctified.

My eyes nailed to the dark

I melt into a murky sea

And some part of my soul

Tears its flanks apart

As I lay down alone in regret

And consume the night.

My fishing heart

Has craved itself vain

Its thumping folds cracked open

In hunger until they became

Two wings and held up

An ocean of longing.

Yet I can scribble invisible words

And perhaps you appear near

The night forcing an embrace upon us

The smell of our communion

alluring every sense and

Sweetening the sinews of this life.

MIND'S SURPRISE

I am the wind that blows o'er the sea;

I am the wave of the deep;

I am the bull of seven battles;

I am the eagle on the rock;

I am the tear of the sun;

I am the fairest of plants;

I am a boar for courage;

I am a salmon in the water;

I am a lake in the plain;

I am the word of knowledge;

I am the head of the battle-dealing spear;

I am the god who fashions fire in the head.

I am the thought.

-Amarigen, a poet of the Goidelic Celts

Word within the word,

The unheard melody,

The spirit ditties of no tone.

The spiritualisation of the senses,

A restoration of the unsullied

Sense-activity of man in paradise.

The word in ecstasy,

The void in creation,

The ecstasy of nothingness,

The creative word.

Get the nothingness

Back into words.

The aim is words

With nothing to them;

Words that point beyond

Themselves rather than

To themselves; transparencies,

Translucencies, empty words.

A word constricted as a Black Hole,

With infinite gravity,

Attracting time, light and speech,

Corresponding to the void in things.

Through the word of words,

To dissolve the solid meanings,

And find the true significance.

To dissipate the empty gravity

And enter the total gravity,

To let the light not on but in.

To illuminate and ventilate,

Let words be filled with Light and Air.

Let there be Light,

Let there be superconsciousness

Through creative ecstasy,

The spiritual, noetic, pneumatic,

Airy body, filled with nothing

But ecstasy; takes flight,

For heaven, for the Universe.

A pregnant emptiness.

Object-loss, world-loss,

Is the precondition for all creation.

Creation is in or

Out of the void; ex nihilo.

Creation is out of nothing:

The unreal awakens me

Out of the sleep of reality.

Imagination is a better artist

Than imitation;

For where one craves only

What she has seen,

The other craves what

She has not seen.

HYDROGEN CRUCIBLE

...OPEN YOUR ARMS AND TAKE IT ALL IN!

Why do the nations rage,

and the people meditate so foolishly?

--Psalm 2:1

Stranded on the shore of my inventiveness,

I'm feeling the strain.

Have I peaked my life,

From now on descending?

Unless I expand

I may fall in on myself.

All that is created

And is therefore individual

Has a beginning and an end,

But there is no universal

Beginning and end.

My universe may fall in on itself,

The red shift change to a blue.

All universes may be like

An expanding and contracting heart,

With the spores of humanity

Growing in the cool spaces

Between stars

Then withering in the autumn collapse;

Or they may expand eternally

A phoenix infinity or

An infinite expansion.

Suns must grow in heat and

Finally consume

Their planetary systems.

Look out of the window:

Everything you see

Is frozen fire in transit

Between fire and fire.

Cities, equations,

Lovers, landscapes:

All are hurtling towards

The hydrogen crucible.

If a cosmos is infinite,

It has no end.

If it has no end,

There can be no end

It is serving.

Its only end must lie

In its means.

It exists in order to exist.

Only one process allows

All conscious beings

To have equal importance:

An infinite one.

If there were any end

To which evolution was tending,

Then you and I would be

Slaves of a pharaoh,

A builder of pyramids.

But if there is no end,

And only in an infinite universe

Can there be no end,

Then you, from whatever world or

Age you come, And I

Are equal.

For both of us the slope

Is the same,

And reaches as far ahead

And as far behind.

 STANDING AT DAWN

The moment

That counts most

For me

Is the one

That precedes

Sunrise

When my gaze

Eats the horizon

To discern

What is outlined

In the distance

And perceives

The Sun

But only sees

First light.

WAR WOUND

I tense my limbs

My shoulders lift

And as I strain

To raise my head,

The weight of nausea

Descends on it.

I reach my arm out,

Seeing a wild sight -

A thin white sprite

Sucking up my life.

READING LOVE

Lovers reading

Each other's bodies

Differ from

Reading the written pages

Of a Lover's book.

Not linear,

It starts at any point,

Skips and repeats itself,

Goes backward,

Insists and ramifies

In simultaneous and

Divergent messages,

Converges again,

Has moments of irritation,

Turns the jasper leaf,

Finds its place,

Gets lost.

A route to an end

Tending toward climax,

It arranges rhythmic phases,

Metrical scansions,

Recurrence of motives.

But climax is not the end:

It is the race to it,

Contrasted by another drive

That works in the opposite direction,

Swimming against the moments,

Recovering time.

Every episode

Is a three-dimensional model,

Perhaps four-dimensional

Or no model at all:

Every experience

Unrepeatable.

Lovemaking and reading

Open within magical

Times and spaces,

Yet deviate from measurable

Time and space.

In the confused improvisation

Of the first encounter,

The possible future together

Is read.

Today

Each of you

Is the object of the other's reading,

Each reads in the other

The unwritten story.

Tomorrow,

If you are together

If you lie down in the same bed

Like a settled couple,

Each will turn on the lamp

At the bedside

And sink into his or her

Book;

Two parallel readings

Will accompany the approach of sleep.

Returning from separated universes,

You'll turn out the light

And find each other

Fleetingly in the darkness

Where all separations

Are erased,

Before differing dreams

Draw you again,

One to one side

And one to the other.

OH EAGLE!

Crudities

Under duress

Prepare the soul

To cope with veracity

Yet offending beyond

The normality

Of pain…

No -

Stop philosophising,

No meandering!

I hurt so bad:

I feel like breaking

My heart is rending

And my spirit

Burns.

The eagle approaches

Her talons out

She claws my lungs

I lift away

I scream my joy

And halt my sorrow

I soar to Elysium

Until tomorrow.

ENDS WITH A KISS

Transience is so immense,

We pass in a flurry of being,

A beautiful moment

In all its suddenness,

Arising in love, or enchanted

In the contraction of work.

And you I possess, however time may

Wear you away.

From I to you

Goes the command

Of infinite space to be assumed

In a single radiating emotion.

Every terrifying angel

Invokes the deadly birds of your soul

Disguising essence made of ecstasy,

Scooping up the finery of beauty

In streams from your upturned face

And gathering it back into themselves.

But I, moved by deep feeling, evaporate

In the mist of want,

And breathe myself out and away

Incapable of retaining your heart,

Splinters of sorrow

Perforating my basic reality.

You’ve entered my bloodstream,

Lover untenable,

The whole springtime

Perfumed with your jasmine flesh

Dissolving my senses in its taste.

Do angels really absorb the tension of love?

So you promise eternity,

From the embrace to the moment of kiss,

At each other's mouth and your lips on mine,

Osculating delight in astonished attachment

To touch one another this potently,

The gods involved in the excess.

SONG OF THE APROSODIC BARD

I love delicate softness:

For me, love has brought the brightness

And the beauty of the sun,

Often you say

Making a mark in the earth

With your heel near the wild black rose

Untamed seemingly made only of dew,

You say

The whole sea and the whole sky

For a single victory of childhood

In the country of dance,

Or better

For a single embrace in a silent corner

Going to the devil with desire on a bridge

Or better yet,

For a single timorous word

Such as must be said while gazing at you

By a blood-stained moon whose music goes far from tree to tree

And keeps going in and out among a hundred birds of snow:

Clouds of memory where it is nice to rest,

And when you say it

The whole sea and the whole sky

Scatter like an ensemble of fairies

At the touch of the wizard’s wand

After whispering the magic phoneme: /L/

___________________________________ 

NOTE: A 'phoneme' is the smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a language.

VANISHING ACT 

First, you cleansed me,

arriving as fire, as savage flood.

Next you tore me,

your cougar tooth,

your griffon claw,

limbs scattering like grass

in the garden of a great wind.

Then you made love to me,

night after night of unendurable

agony and passion.

Ruined by your beauty,

I have vanished,

fled into the nothingness

of who I am.

MYSTERY UNRESOLVED

You came into my life

like a wing of fire,

possessing and possessed

by something not seen.

When you first spoke

my books turned to clay,

and my throat closed

around a lost sonnet.

Your eyes burned over me,

leaving scars of rapture,

my spirit became a field

swept clean by flame.

Can you think how it was

that morning I woke first,

and found you,

an unbound mystery

by my side.

The air here now holds only emptiness,

a little dust stirring.

I think there will be wind tonight,

and owls will hoot

to distress my solitary sleep.

CURETTED FURY

For a thwarted intention

For an unfulfilled expectation

For an undelivered communication

Anger arises in me

And I am terrified,

The mental shudder reverberates

And enrages my fibres,

Fulminating my mind’s eye.

Words malform

Like cement mixers

In my parched mouth,

Nothing I say comes out

Like I think I mean.

I feel anguish and

I blabber insensate nonsense,

Spouting out restlessness

And claustrophobic curses.

Denial and acceptance

Are chaos in my depravity,

Unquenchable and furious

In the maddening thoughts

Of glory and forfeit,

A lost cause in a valiant battle

Forever seeking closure and release.

Forgive!

I screech my primal scream

Tearing my heart apart.

MORTUARY

Decomposing

Four minutes after death

My encapsulated life

Now acquires

Its final metamorphosis.

I begin

To digest myself,

Cells dissolving

From the inside out,

Tissues turning to liquid

Then to swell gas.

I am feast immovable

To bacteria and flies:

Skin rippling infestation,

larvae hatching in my flesh,

Now nutrient broth of

Expired lies.

__________________________________

NOTE: It is a forensic fact that the human body begins its decomposition exactly 240 seconds after death.

OUTAGE

Every time a thought is born

I am born

When the thought is gone

I am gone -

No permanent entity in me

But my thought.

What I look for

Does not exists:

The beatific vision

Of my radical transformation

Is the bewitching state

Of my conjured phrases.

My natural state

Is to escape

The enchanted ground

Of illusory senses

And silently express

My own true humanity.

(from: https://www.facebook.com/notes/284333245015901/)