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.
