...how each rose grows on a shark infested stem

EPHPHATHA!

2007-10-27T13:05:00.000-07:00

Splitting the Logos
Into a million
Concepts
Engenders pain
Through the semantics
Of Life:

Speak one Word
And create
The Universe.

______________________________

Mark 7:34 (King James Version):
And looking up to heaven, he sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, 'Be opened'.

~It is that sigh which astounds me...

______________________________

PARASITES

2007-10-08T13:03:00.000-07:00

Objects
become junk
as soon as they are
separated
from their owner
and their past

Our possessions
will outlast us -
we'll desert them
in the end

My ashes will still be
in their urn
at the charity shop.

BURDEN

2007-10-02T12:49:00.000-07:00

Carry me home
to you

Carry my soul
to enter your heart

Carry me home
to you

Carry my heart
to merge with your mind

Carry me home
to you

Carry my body
to the grave of your loss

YES, POETRY

2007-09-28T13:02:00.000-07:00

Even a first line
can produce
a tightness
behind the eyes

To do its noticing
and judging

Poetry
balances itself
on the pinprick
of the moment

JAMESIANISM

2007-09-27T13:31:00.000-07:00

On forgetting a word or name
a tantalising
empty space
remains

almost but not quite
defining
the idea
it once contained

even as you struggle
against the numbness of poor recall
you know precisely
what the forgotten thing
is not

RETURN FROM THE DEAD

2007-09-26T12:04:00.000-07:00

Lazarus, come forth!

Nobody
asked Lazarus
to speak of
his experience
while he was
dead

Why?

A missed
chance... Imagine

Lazarus, what was it like - being dead?

But on this great occasion
nobody asked - and he never said

What if
he was recalled
from Hell?

But he had
no burns

He traded secrets
with worms and stars,
he'd heard the harmony
of immortal souls,
the impossibly perfect
music

And he never said.

GOOD MOOD

2007-09-25T13:11:00.000-07:00

Distorted euphoria,
a chemical accident
sustained somewhere
in me -
something like
a spilled tray of drinks,
prompting dopamine-like receptors
to initiate a kindly cascade
of intracellular events.

CREATION MYTH

2007-09-24T13:49:00.000-07:00

An unimaginable sweep of time,
numberless generations
spawning by infinitesimal steps
complex living beauty
out of inert matter,
driven on by the blind furies
of random mutation,
natural selection
and environmental change,
with the tragedy of forms
continually dying,
and lately the wonder of minds
emerging
and with them morality,
love, art, cities -
and the novel bonus
of this story
happening to be
demonstrably true.

Evolution:
my god.

EVEN FISH FEEL PAIN

2007-09-23T13:39:00.000-07:00

The growing complication
of the modern condition,
is the expanding
circle of
moral sympathy.

The trick,
as always,
the key to human success
and domination,
is to be selective
in your mercies.

For all the discerning talk,
it's the close at hand,
the visible
that exerts the overpowering
force.

And what you don't see...

WARM NIGHT AND DAY

2007-09-22T12:29:00.000-07:00

Cellos
hundred of cellos
and I will glide
with them
in the moonlight,
pirouetting
in the black swan dance
and kiss her head
and nod to the willows
and bow to the night
and she will grace me
they will grace us

they will grace us
and the lake will grace us
and smile
and the moon will grace us
and the mountains will grace us
and the breeze will grace us
and the sun will gently rise
and its rays will stretch
and spread
and even the willows will lift their heads ever so slightly
and the snow will grow whiter
and the shadows will rise from the mountains
and it will be warm

yes, it will be warm

...the shadows will stay
but the moonlight will be warm
(dance now dance now dance now)
the moonlight will get warmer

hold me
love me
just dance and love me
just love me

but fields of flowers
are so lovely
in the sun
in the bright flooding sunlight
warm and brilliant
and the tall grasses flow and part
and the colours burst
and small drops of dew glisten
and it is all russet and violet and amarant
and green and white

...yes white
and gold and blue and pink, soft pink
primary hues
and see the fireflies
like flowers of the night
o yes, yes flowers of the night
soft little lights
lovely little lights you can snuff with two fingers

o I'm so cold
yes, yes my darling - so very cold
love you
your mouth, lips, are so warm
d'amor si muore
o see how the stars soften the sky
yes, like jewels
let's dance some more
how beautiful
as the moon follows us
see - for us
see, she sashays along to our melody
shimmering into daylight
the Queen of birds.

BANG SHUT

2007-09-21T13:07:00.000-07:00

The door closed.
A hundred times.
Closed.
Even as it swung open
I heard it bang shut.
Closed.
Closed.
Dozen of doors
like many pictures
jerkily animated by a thumb,
tumbling mistily like shadows...
and the click,
click,
the goddamn click click click
of the latch
and it banged shut.
SHUT.
Again and again and again it
BANGED SHUT.
A thousand miserable times.
BANG BANG. BANG.
Always banging shut.
Never a knock.
Think it. Force it.
A knock. A knock. Please, please.
O Jesus a knock. Make it a knock.
Make it someone knocking.
To come in.
Why can't it be a knock.
To come in

into my life.

BEGOTTEN VISION

2007-09-20T13:19:00.000-07:00

If I hold really still
and forget myself,
I feel the mist of my father's
seed
in my mother's pulse,
can sense myself passing bodiless
between them,
my face erupting out of
nothingness,
my tiny mouth hungry for a voice,
and I can see my first dream
shiver
through the veins
in my almost transparent eyelids.
The first dream -
that's what I want to know.
I want to remember the first dream
I ever had.
And then I'll use that
knowledge
to ransom my ghost
from the lightning.

MATERNITY

2007-09-19T14:35:00.000-07:00

I look at the hill
and the little slice of rising moon.
I see the broad hump,
the more tempered ridges of the hills
in the background
telling me the story
of the slow and drowsy rousings
of my beloved Earth,
who stretches and yawns,
making and unmaking blue plains
in the dread flash of a hundred
volcanoes.

My Earth
just her yesterday
just million years past,
she turned in her sleep
and traded one surface for another.

Where ammonoids once fed,
diamonds.
Where diamonds once grew,
trees.
The logic of moraine,
of landslip, of avalanche.

Dislodge one pebble,
by chance,
it becomes restless,
rolls down,
in its descent leaves space,
another pebble falls on top of it,
and there's height.
Surfaces.
Surfaces upon surfaces.

The wisdom of the Earth,
my Earth.

When life,
surface upon surface,
has become completely encrusted
with experience,
you know everything,
the secret, the power, the glory,
why you were born,
why you are dying,
and how it all could have been
different.
So you are wise.
But the greatest wisdom,
at that moment,
is knowing that your wisdom
is too late.

You understand everything
when there is no longer anything
to understand.

The wisdom of the Earth,
the stirrings of my Mother.

2007-09-18T13:46:00.000-07:00

THE MIND IS A FULL MOON RISING IN A WARM SPRING RAIN

SUPERSTITION BRINGS BAD LUCK

2007-09-17T15:00:00.000-07:00

...and the problem with suicide
is that sometimes
you jump out of the window
and then change your mind
between the eighth floor
and the seventh...

SPLAT!

CTRL+ALT+DEL=GOD

2007-09-16T15:03:00.000-07:00

My screen is a galaxy
of thousands and thousands of asteroids,
all in a row, white or black,
red or blue,
and I have created them myself.

Fiat Lux, Big Bang,
seven days, seven minutes, seven seconds
not seven times, but seventy-seven times
infinity
and a universe is born
before my eyes,
a universe in constant flux,
where sharp lines in space and time
do not exist.
No constraining law of thermodynamics.
The letters bubble indolently
to the surface,
they emerge from nothingness
and obediently return
to nothingness,
dissolving like ectoplasm.

It's an underwater symphony
of soft linkings and unlinkings,
a gelatinous dance of self-devouring moons,
like the big fish in the Yellow Submarine.

At a touch of my fingertip
the irreparable slides backward
toward a hungry word
and disappears into its maw
with a slurrrp,
then darkness.
If I don't stop,
the word swallows itself as well,
fattening on its own absence
like a Cheshire-cat
black hole.

NO, PERHAPS NOT

2007-09-16T14:21:00.000-07:00

A plot,
if there is to be one,
must be a secret.

A secret that,
if we only knew it,
would dispel
our frustration,
lead us
to salvation.

Or else
the knowing of it
in itself
would be
salvation.

Does such
a luminous secret
exist?

RESIDUAL ORDER

2007-09-15T14:27:00.000-07:00

I should be at peace.

I have understood.

Don't some say
that peace comes
when you understand?

I have understood.

I should be at peace.

Who said that peace
derives from contemplation
of order,
order understood,
enjoyed, realised
without residuum,
in joy and triumph,
the end of effort?

All is clear, limpid -
the eye rests on the whole
and on the parts
and sees how the parts
have conspired
to make the whole;
it perceives the centre
where the lymph flows,
the breath,
the root of the whys...

I should be at peace.

SETTING THE SCENE

2007-09-15T11:59:00.000-07:00

...for Matthew Arnold

Summer moonlight,
the sea is still and
at high tide,
the air scented
in a final glow
of sunset.

I call to you:
come and see,
look or, rather,
listen to the scene.
Hear the surf roaring
on the pebbles,
the sound of profound sorrow
stretching right back
to ancient times.

You tell me
you think there was
another instance,
even further back,
when the earth
was new and
the sea consoling,
and nothing came between
man and God.

But this evening
we hear only sadness
and nostalgic loss
in the sound of the waves
breaking and retreating
from the shore.

Turn to me and kiss,
as there is no peace
or certainty
in this ebb and flow
of human misery,
when the breath of
the night wind strokes
the vast edges and
naked shingles
of the world.

DESCENT

2007-09-14T12:17:00.000-07:00

Sleep's not a concept,
it's a material thing,
an ancient means of transport,
a softly moving belt,
conveying me
to oblivion.

REARVIEW

2007-09-13T12:32:00.000-07:00

Afternoon dusk
a single slab of red

in the western sky

almost rectangular
an emblem
of the natural world

of wilderness somewhere

out of sight
fading slowly

ENGULFMENT

2007-09-12T12:41:00.000-07:00

Rare moments
of musical wonder
when musicians together
touch something sweeter
than they ever expected
beyond the merely collaborative
or technically proficient
when their expression
becomes as easy and graceful
as friendship or
love

This is when
they give me a glimpse
of what I might be
of my best self
and of an impossible world
in which I give
everything I have
to others
but lose nothing of
myself

EXCEPTION

2007-09-11T13:11:00.000-07:00

I will still be diminished
by whipping a man
on his way to hell

The moment I won't
I'm in hell

Contrapasso

2007-09-11T12:51:00.000-07:00

Your tongue
tastes salty
my arousement
is liquid
yet far below
my desire
lying like
a granite rock
on the sea floor
is my exhaustion

ASHTRAY

2007-09-09T11:45:00.000-07:00

Had enough
of my visions

Known enough
of my noises

One step of yours
and the new me
raises from the ashes
to go with you
everywhere
since you have come
from all time

ALCOHOLIC ACCORDION

2007-09-08T12:06:00.000-07:00

Poison runs into
my brain as
intoxication
creates
new terraces of the temple
with pathways rough
and sewers at
my side

Perhaps there are
pits of azure
and wells of fire
where moons and comets
seas and fables
meet

And in my stupor
I do imagine
saphire and metal
lights
where reality vomits
its thickness
of the globe

END SEASON

2007-09-07T12:15:00.000-07:00

I have tried to invent
new stories
for my incomplete destiny,
my skin eaten by
cannibal moths and pink
subcutaneous worms.

I have attempted
new lives
in rotten rags and spent tongues,
lying among empty beasts
and dead minds
galore.

Where shall I go next,
before my winter comes?

FIRST WORLD

2007-09-06T12:57:00.000-07:00

We are the colonists
and in order to sustain
our amazing images of ourselves
as God's gift
to the vast majority
of the starving human species
we have to interiorise
our violence
upon our children
and mystify our
Self

ULTIMATE REASSURANCE

2007-09-05T13:03:00.000-07:00

There's nothing to be afraid of?

Take anything
and imagine its absence,
being and nonbeing,
a guilty verbal arabesque
of terror.

I am afraid.

Afraid to approach
the fathomless and bottomless
groundlessness
of
everything.

UNCOILING SPIRAL

2007-09-03T13:13:00.000-07:00

I want you to taste me
and smell me,
touch me,
want to be palpable,
to get under your skin,
to be an itch in your brain
and in your guts
that you can't scratch out
and that you can't allay,
that will corrupt and destroy you
and drive you mad.

Watch me doing it,
and remember your hands have blood
on them,
don't shout about,
don't think you're going to get away
with it,
don't make excuses.

Remember -
there's not much time left,
the flood and the fire are upon us,
the dance begins,
ants underneath fingertips,
tongues beginning to pulse,
heartache and mental flegm.

Out of step, we are
and out of key,
each their own tempo and rhythm.
Slowly, connexions
lip to lip,
heart to heart,
finding self in other,
dreadfully, tentatively, burningly...

Notes finding themselves in chords,
chords in sequence,
cacophony turning to polyphonous
contrapuntal chorus,
a diapason of orgasm -
librating waves of fluent highs
and lows of mouths and nipples,
fingers, spines, thighs, laughing,
intertwining,
intermingling,
fusing and copulating -
somewhere touched,
an ultimate joy and gladness,
lovely lightful life
diffusing an ever newer fiercer
freshness.

Don't panic.
Impossible to go above or beneath,
to run away,
to get round to left or right.
Tidal wave, tsunami of senses
moving at speed of light.
Let be and penetrate me,
like a flame with iridescent flares
in the fleshy sky of darkness,
a just still feasible tact,
if I could turn you on,
if I could drive you
out of your wretched mind,
if I could tell you
I would let you know.

FIGMENT

2007-09-02T13:49:00.000-07:00

Wandering morbid
Suddenly I come upon
One of my many childhoods
Preserved in oedipal forgetfulness
For this moment
When it was most required
Untouchable happiness
False in its memory

BAY OF NAPLES

2007-09-01T13:05:00.000-07:00

Ordinary voices,
screams,
come faintly up
from the bay.
The present erodes
the past,
as Poseidon,
perfect majesty
because perfect control,
perfect health,
perfect adjustment -
stands flexed
to his divine sea.

Gulf eternal,
the never-fathomed,
the bravest because
the clearest,
under a volcanic hand,
cinders barely
extinguished -
beauty divine
but past.

ROTTING FOWL

2007-08-30T13:14:00.000-07:00

Silent
Sailing words away
Silence
She is now silent
She'll never speak
Never forgive
Never reach a hand
Never leave this frozen
Present tense.

All waits
Suspendend
Suspend the autumn trees
The autumn sky
Anonymous visage.

A blackbird
Poor fool
Sings out of season
From the willows
By the lake of her memory
A flight of pigeons
Over my house
Mixed with braver seagulls
Fragments of freedom
Hazard
An anagram made of
Flesh
And somewhere the stinging smell
Of burning leaves.

DRIED UP

2007-08-29T13:42:00.000-07:00

Broken link,
biological dead end,
an eternal withdrawal
from reality,
a once complex object
has now dwindled,
dwindled,
left nothing behind
except a smudge
like a fallen speck of soot
on a blank sheet of paper.

Her death detracts,
will forever detract,
from my own life.

Each death lies
a dreadful charge of complicity
on the living;
each death is incongenerous,
its guilt irreducible,
its sadness immortal;
a bracelet of spent brightness
around the bone.

I do not pray for her,
as I have no god;
I do not cry for her,
or for myself,
as I have no liquid reservoir;
but I sit in the silence
of this leaden night,
this infinite hostility to man,
to permanence,
to love,
remembering her,
memorising her,
something too sweet
to mourn -
the very word archaic.

WORDS IN MUSIC

2007-08-28T13:48:00.000-07:00

I believe
in the power of incantation
and my poem
is as neural as
love,
the rut of rhythm
that veers
the mind.

Hunger for sound
is for me as sharp
as desire,
as if one could honour
every inch of flesh
in words
and so
suspend time.

A word
is a home in desire.
No station
of the heart
is more full of solitude
than desire
which keeps the world
poised,
poisoned with beauty,
whose only permanence
is loss.

CELTIC HEATHER

2007-08-27T13:53:00.000-07:00

To remain with the dead is to abandon them
I feel at home
in these Celtic hills,
with broken icons
of heather
hovering over
every crag, every valley,
the spirit looking back
upon the body.

The magnetic pole
pulls my blood,
the thumbprint of night sky
in my inner eye.

When you are lost
to ones you love,
you will face south-southwest
like a migrating bird
and at certain hours
your body will be flooded
with instinct,
so much of you
having been entered,
so much of you
having entered them.
Their limbs
will follow
when you lie down,
a shadow against your own,
curving to every curve
like Hebrew alphabet
crossing the page of your soul,
bent with carrying absence,
cargoes from distant ports,
the power of stones,
the sorrow of those
whose messiahs have made them
leave so much behind...

In the early winter darkness
of these Celtic hills,
I raise my hands
to my face and smell heather
in my palms.
I long for memory
to be spirit,
but fear it is only skin.
I fear that
knowledge becomes instinct
only to disappear
with the body.
For it is my body
that remembers them,
and though I try to erase
my dead
from my senses,
try to will
my dead
from my listless sleep,
this will
amounts to nothing.

BREACHING

2007-08-26T14:31:00.000-07:00

No one
is born
just once

In time
you will emerge
again
in someone's arms
or wake
when the long tail
of terror
brushes the inside of
your skull

ÉMIGRÉ

2007-08-25T14:39:00.000-07:00

In a foreign landscape
a man discovers
the old songs

He calls out
for water
from his own well
for oranges
from his own orchard
for the moscato
from his own vine

What is a man
who has no landscape?
Nothing but mirrors
and tides

CONTRAST

2007-08-24T07:33:00.000-07:00

Light is the rain now,
Darkness is not knowing,
Light is delicious,
Darkness is not dreaming
day after day,
Light is the flight
of an albatross,
Dark is the colour
of the enemy,
Light is seeing
purity in love.

HOPEFUL LINEARITY

2007-08-23T07:43:00.000-07:00

There is a desire
that is not human
and belongs to no self

A desire
that travels into the world
without a desiring self
mindless therefore

It is the line of my thought
and it journeys through my
self
but it comes from elsewhere
and travels on
as light passing via a lens
is reconfigured
and every lens the lightline traverses
reconfigures it again
a dream no one owns

It is what time becomes
when it gives up
becoming
what we become when we give up
sovereignty
over the world and the
self
stitching its way
through space and time
binding the rent fabric of the
universe
into what it has not yet
become

HEAT SEEKER

2007-08-22T08:09:00.000-07:00

I want the peace and happiness
that I have felt
only moments ago

I am my soul,
my mind,
as if I may grow
beyond the size of my body,
as if I may move outward
from me,
carried on the waves of music,
passing through the gate of wisdom,
and the wall of love,
and the veil of compassion,
and moving yet even farther outward

So tell me
who I am and what
I am to do

FATHERING STARS

2007-08-22T07:54:00.000-07:00

Father
I am your child
I am in you
As I am in the embrace
Of the earth
As I am in those
Who love me
No matter what the thought
Or the understanding
I am your child
Father
Of the very stars
My fear is gone

TRAZOMMOZART

2007-08-21T08:31:00.000-07:00

The huge sound
electrifies me
as the music erupts
in the glory of the moment

I abandon myself
to the charging waves of sound
surrendering to genius
not trying to guess
where he will take me
tumbling after him
like a fish
in a mountain stream

The music
speakes to me
telling me: you are so little
you have nothing to fear

And yet I know now
that I am at the very heart
of all
I am both unimportant
and entirely involved
in the crescendo of notes

My experiences have not after all
been random

Just as the melting harmony
is finding its way back
to the home key
so for me too
there is a plan unfolding
and my task is to travel my road
to the end

I too have longed
for glory
I am the hero of an adventure story
but I am not the author
and as the haunting melody
penetrates the spiral of my cochleas
I follow it
tugged by the fragile skein
of liquid sound
up into a high and far empyrean
where simple beauty floods
my senses

I am ravished by the sound and
while such beauty possesses me
nothing hurtful
can come to pass
as I listen and grow
in power and lightness
as I expand to the size of clouds
to become as vast and empty
as the sky
I see at last what has been happening to me
in the course of my strange journey

There are more rooms in my house
than I inhabit

The divine spirit made flesh
the ineffable force of music
my fears and longings
my memories
all the matter of my mind
and the edifices of my dreams
all things visible and invisible
are taking off
with sound

I am awakening
I have more power than I ever knew
I am on my own
forgive me

SPECULAte

2007-08-20T10:56:00.000-07:00

and reflect: for me
every thinking activity
implies mirrors.
The soul
is a mirror that creates
material things
reflecting the ideas
of the higher reason.

Maybe this is why
I need mirrors
to think.
Only humans comprehend
reflections:
it's the sign of reasoning.

I cannot concentrate
except in the presence of
reflected images,
as if my soul needs
a model to imitate
every time it wants
to employ its
speculative capacity.

It is my image
that I want to multiply,
but not out of narcissism
or megalomania,
as could all too easily
be believed:
on the contrary,
I want to conceal,
in the midst of
so many ghosts of myself,
the true me,
who makes them move.

These lines I am writing
should transmit
a cold luminosity,
as in a mirrored tube,
where a finite number of figures
are broken up and
turned upside down
and multiplied.
From mirror to mirror
the totality of things,
the whole,
the entire universe,
divine wisdom could concentrate
their luminous rays
into a single mirror.

Or perhaps
the knowledge of everything
is buried in the soul,
and a system of mirrors
that would multiply my image
to infinity
and reflect its essence
in a single image
would then reveal to me
the soul of the universe,
which is hidden
in mine.

God Himself, who cannot be seen
either by the body or by the soul,
allows Himself to be contemplated
in a mirror
~Porphyry (234-305AD)

WISHING A BRIDGE

2007-08-19T12:12:00.000-07:00

I look
through the spaces
between the iron steps
at the colourless flow
of the river
down below,
transporting chunks of ice
like white clouds.

In a distress
that lasts an instant
I seem to be feeling
what you feel:
that every void continues
in the void,
every gap,
even a short one,
opens onto another gap,
every chasm empties
into the infinite abyss.

BIBLIOMACHY

2007-08-18T12:24:00.000-07:00

Yes,I would
Yes, I would fling my book on the floor.

Yes, I would
Yes, I would hurl it out of the window,
even out of the closed window of my oppressive room,
through the slats of the Venetian blinds:
let them shred its incongruous quires,
let sentences, words, morphemes, phonemes
gush forth, beyond recomposition into discourse;
through the misty panes,
and if they are of unbreakable glass
so much the better,
hurl the book and reduce it to photons,
undulatory vibrations,
polarized spectra;
through the wall,
let the book crumble into molecules and atoms
passing between atom and atom
of the reinforced concrete,
breaking up into electrons, neutrons, neutrinos,
elementary particles more and more minute;
through the telephone wires,
let it be reduced to electronic impulses,
into flow of information,
shaken by redundancies and noises,
and let it be degraded
into a swirling entropy.

Yes, I would
Yes, I would like to throw it out of the house,
out of the block,
beyond the neighbourhood, beyond
the city limits,
beyond the state confines,
beyond the national community,
beyond Western culture,
beyond the continental shelf,
beyond the atmosphere,
the biosphere,
the stratosphere,
the field of gravity,
the solar system,
the galaxy,
the cumulus of galaxies,
to succeed in hurling it beyond
the point the galaxies have reached
in their expansion,
where spacetime has not yet arrived,
where it would be received by nonbeing,
or, rather,
the not-being which has never been
and will never be,
to be lost in the most absolutely
guaranteed undeniable negativity.

Merely what it deserves,
neither more nor less:
my book.

But no. I seek a pattern,
I need my book and the route
that must surely be there
and the direction it will surely carry me,
my book:
the opening of an abstract and absolute space
and time in which I can move,
following an exact, taut trajectory -
and yet, when I now seem to be succeeding,
I am here to realize I am motionless,
blocked, forced to repeat everything
from the beginnig.

2007-08-17T10:46:00.000-07:00

* * * * * * * * * V * A * M * P * Y * R * U * S * * * * * * * * *

BORGESIAN

2007-08-16T11:32:00.000-07:00

The order
we see
in the universe
may not reside
in the universe
at all,
but in the paradigms
of thought
we bring
to it.

AVIAN SLEEP

2007-08-15T13:01:00.000-07:00

When the vultures rise
it is a sign
the night is about
to end

I can hear
the heavy wings
flapping in the dark sky
and I can see
their shadow obscure
the green stars

It is a toilsome flight
not immediately breaking free
of the earth
of the shadows in the
elms
as if only airborne
do the feathers
become convinced
they are feathers and not
prickly leaves

When the captors
of my dreams
have flown off
the stars reappear
gray
and the sky green

It is dawn
and I am riding along
the deserted road
of my nostalgia

CHOOSING THE EDGE

2007-08-14T05:11:00.000-07:00

I now have infinite choice
and I choose

Consciousness
feels like the middle
and not like the edge

There is no time
any more
but a wavy line crackling
around the whole

It's like being on the edge
of a cliff
but my edge is thinner
than any cliff I've ever seen

We've made love at the edge
of consciousness
stuck on the head of a pin
and the void not just below us
but all around us
and it's impossible to turn back
because there is no back
and no forwards
backwards
up or down

If I have infinite choice
if we have that together
then we must walk together
you and me into the edge
as all the choices are in front of us
presented like a garden
into which we step
together
the most perfect garden
ever seen since Eden
with myriad trees and a river
shimmering like a mirror
down the edge of it

I think it makes sense
for consciousness
to have begun in a garden
because consciousness evolved from plants
after all
and there is a Tree
in front of us
standing by the river
and we walk towards it

And that's our choice

COSMIC SURPLUS

2007-08-13T06:25:00.000-07:00

What if
Life on Earth
Is the only life
There is?
What if
We really are
Alone
In the universe?

Why then
All this intergalactic
Show off?
To make us feel
Solitude expanding?

LUCA: Last Universe Common Ancestor

2007-08-12T06:30:00.000-07:00

I'm starting to collapse
and creating the cracks of chaos
out of which my folly
will emerge.

Now I almost desire
some kind of violence
to live, to die,
just for the experience of it.

I'm so hyped up
suddenly
that I want to fuck the world,
or be fucked by it.

Yes,
I want to penetrate all
with the sharpnel
of my million explosions.
I want to see my own blood,
I want to die with everyone:
the ultimate bonding experience,
we becoming forever,
a collapsing wavefunction
of violence.

On days like this
I think about being cursed
and all I can think is
Now.

QUANTUM SUPERIMPOSITION

2007-08-11T13:58:00.000-07:00

For Scarlett Thomas

No clear reality
but a smear of particles -
and different
probabilities
at once
if not observed

All exists
in a state
of all differences
until
the outer Observer
collapses
the smeared wave
that becomes
our universe

Out of all
probabilities
the Observer
fixates the original
particle
into
one reality: ours

Reject that
and you're left
with infinite worlds
and no externality
and no collapse:
all probabilities then
exist
out there and
every possible universe
is parallel
to ours

GULPING BACK

2007-08-10T07:52:00.000-07:00

I think
I'm on my own.
In fact,
I know
I'm on my own.
I don't think
I've ever been
so alone
in my life.
My eyes
are filling
with tears,
but I don't want
to seem unbalanced
when,
and if,
someone opens
the door.

When
did I last cry?
I didn't cry
after
my universe
crumbled.
I didn't cry
when
I left my soul
at the gates
of hell.
But now,
standing here
in the early twilight,
in the cold air,
with seagulls squawking
above me
and the stars already
beginning to prick
the sky,
I want to cry
more than ever
have before.

KISSING SHOCK

2007-08-09T08:02:00.000-07:00

What's happening?
This kiss is
a million kisses.
This kiss is
every kiss.
Our lips seem to press
together
with the force of
ten thousand hurricanes,
and when our tongues
meet,
it feels like
the softest electricity:
a million-volt shock
happening in slow motion,
one electron
at a time,
where each electron
is the size of the sun.

And in the sky
there is lightning.
The rain starts to hammer
the sizzling ground,
but I can't feel it
as I pull her down
onto the grass.
As we close our eyes
simultaneously,
I can see tornadoes
everywhere,
but I can't even feel
a breeze.
All our clothes have gone.
We are so naked
it's as if we don't even
have skin.

And when he enters me,
it's as if I'm being turned
inside out
and the whole world
is penetrating me
and that means
I contain everything.

MIDDLE STANCE

2007-08-08T12:52:00.000-07:00

I wonder
Whether
Language
Distances us
From things
So much
That we can't
Believe
In them
Any
More

FEAR LIST & NIGHTMARES [restricted +18]

2007-08-07T13:22:00.000-07:00

Epiphany of visions and
strobing representations of
money burning
someone raped
toys blaspheming
being strapped
aliens probing
nuclear war
a child drowning
chocking on fish bones
lung cancer
doing drugs
coughing blood
bowel cancer
brain tumours
breast cancer
spiders crawling
penis cancer
how much cancer can one get
leprosy then
a prolapsed uterus
sleep apnoea
and suffocation
eating shit
rats and cockroaches
in a trail of mucus
plastic bags
and sulphurous pollution
agoraphobia
heights and claustrophobia
flying blind
planes crashing
towers collapsing
trains derailing
ghosts and corpses
terrorism and murder
crowds erupting
bloodsmeared dentists
acid cubes
dentures rotting
Father Christmas
and Baby Jesus
paedophiles
goddamnit
alcohol
HIV needle
sodomized
then castrated
schizophrenia
oven gassed
genocide
extermination
suicide jump
shot in the head
burnt skin
brains dripping
smoke soot and grime
knives and guns
redundancy
unemployed
being late
being early
being naked
being stupid
being tied
being poisoned
being tortured
being kicked
being punched
being eviscerated
just lying there
unconscious
guts spilled out
blood everywhere
cruelty and sadism
unable to protect yourself
against the world
while accordion music
exits
your sphincter

BLADE INWARD

2007-08-06T12:53:00.000-07:00

M'écouter, mon ami

Hurled to the ground
By unjust blows
Plunging him far ahead
In life,
Toward future years
When no one
Could make him bleed.
Like the small shrub
That draws succour from roots,
Clasping bruised branches
Against its resolute core,
He backed away mute
Into what he knew
And into his innocence.
Finally freed and filled
With sovereign joy,
He fled to the meadow
And reached the trembling wall
Of dry reeds.
He cajoled the mud
To rise up.
What was noblest
And most enduring
On earth
Seemed to adopt him,
As if to make amends.
And so it would start again.
He knew one day
He would hold his ground,
Attentive and standing tall
Among men —
More at risk,
More resistant.

With his teeth
He seizes life
Upon the knife of his youth.
With his lips today,
With his lips alone...

Briefly come,
Bloom of the slopes,
Lucifer’s star
Has reappeared.

THROW

2007-08-05T13:30:00.000-07:00

Thus I exist,
molded by the best
and the worst,
by all I have loved
or fled,
acquired or lost,
cast by seconds at
the mercy of seconds
as life drains
away.

INFANT CHANT

2007-08-04T12:03:00.000-07:00

Above the child
An unseen angel
Beats his wings,
And the oblivious Self
Runs laughing
In the sun
Companioned
By the wind,
Conversing
With the cloud.
Along the highway
To the Cross
His song is heard
And the bright Spirit,
Following him,
Weeps aloud.

RESPOND

2007-08-03T13:11:00.000-07:00

On the desert island
Of my love
I am afraid of being
A branchless tree
And what I most regret
Is having no flower,
Leaf, or pulp
For the worm of
My despair.

Never let me
Lose the wonder
Of your aqua eyes
The solitary rose
Of your lips
The hidden treasure
Of your heart.

You are my cross,
My dampened pain,
And if I am a dog,
And you my mistress,
Never let me lose
What I have gained,
And whisper the accent
Of your fragrant breath
On my cheek
Tonight.

EPITAPH

2007-08-02T13:14:00.000-07:00

All is finished.
The rain penetrates my mouth.
The air, as if mad,
leaves my sunken chest,
and Love, soaked through
with tears of snow,
warms itself in my last
aortal blood.

A stenching silence settles down.
My body is laid out
but fades away,
with a pure shape drawn
by nightingales
now being filled
with depthless holes.

Who creases the shroud?
Nobody sings here,
nobody weeps in the corner,
nobody pricks the flesh,
nor terrifies the serpent.

I want a lament like a river
with sweet mists and deep shores,
losing itself in the melancholy night
without song of fishes
and in the white thicket of frozen smoke.

Don't cover my face with any veils
that I may get used to the death I carry.

GERMINATE

2007-08-01T13:46:00.000-07:00

I sow your steps.
And I think, I speak for you.
I choose and cadence.
For I am writing
and you are the wound.

Abandon yourself to
rhythm
and momentarily
cease positing
the existence of
the surrounding world...

Rhythmizing
consciousness thus
emerges
as a fascinated soul,
subject to a fatal,
horizonless future.

WASTAGE

2007-07-30T12:37:00.000-07:00

In the ravine
Haunted by wolves and mongrels
I throw my seed away
As a virus eats the ventricles
Out of my mind’s heart
And the ulcerated passion
Rolls without remorse
In the dust of a last
Traitorous embrace

I can’t seem to find my way

2007-07-29T12:42:00.000-07:00

I can’t seem to find my way
And as I love
So I dissolve
Into the nausea
Of nothingness

ENEMA BLUES

2007-07-28T06:27:00.000-07:00

I feel my understanding
of the world
start to shift,
as if it's only now -
now that I know about
the truth -
I can allow myself
to commence answering
all the questions
I have:
to begin revising
my experiences.

I realise I know
because we all potentially
know everything
about what other people
are thinking
and doing.

We all potentially
have access
to one another's thoughts
and the mysterium of truth
is hovering less than a particle
away from me,
perhaps in another dimension
I enter only
some of the time.

I am suddenly sure
the moment I catch
someone's eye
the mind connects
and truth is there
to be loved.

NIGHT VERSES

2007-07-27T13:46:00.000-07:00

Imagine this midnight forest
Where something else is alive
But my soulless heart.
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering my loneliness:
Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
An owl’s wing touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now
Sets neat dots into the immaculate
Whiteness, between trees, and
Across clearings.
The window is starless still;
The clock ticks,
The poem lingers between
My trembling hands.

GUSTS

2007-07-26T13:47:00.000-07:00

Wind stampedes the fields in sight
Floundering black astride and blinding wet
Till day rises;
Then under an orange sky
The hills possess new places,
And wind wields
Luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

Once I look up
The clouds quiver, the skyline grimaces,
At any second to vanish with a flap
From the anxious image
Of my mind, just as
The wind flings a magpie
Away.

PAGIS PAGE

2007-07-25T11:26:00.000-07:00

Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car:
Here in this carload
I, Eve,
with my son Abel.
If you see my older boy,
Cain, the son of man,
tell him that I
~D.P.*

Interrupted scrawl –
Sunlight of water, velvet of sea-breeze, marble of foam:
My sepulchre.
You can die once, twice, thrice,
Even seventy times seven,
But you can't die a myriad times.

Oh, but I can.
My underground cells
Reach everywhere.

As the rain awakens the smell of wood, and
Even in darkness the leaves go on opening,
How intimate I grow with objects in rotting solitude.

I am alien and clear amongst you all,
I am cold, dicing with my eternities -
You envisage your image
In mine.
In vain.
I will leave you no memory,
You have never been part of me.
A mirror against a mirror against an enchanted mirror
I reflect in myself the earth.

With one shake of my skeletal hand
I shatter your day into a nightmare.
Flickers of light
Are the core of my soul – I have no fear.
I shall not die
In vain.
I shall not die
At all.
I seek no compromise.

______________________
* Dan Pagis (1930-1986), Israeli poet and Shoah survivor.

INSURGENCE

2007-07-24T13:55:00.000-07:00

I am adventure keeping clear its eye
I am women who are shining forth with language
I am death beautiful in your hand as a lyre bird plumage
I am the subterranean passage that
through its own genuflecting
gathers a wealth of eyelids fiercer than caterpilarsI am the wonder all grist and fire to the nimble mill
I am the vigorous night bloody killing a speed of pure organisms
I am the hive for bee-like stars stringing the sky of brightest glow

And the sound of my heels fills up the space and
draws up the other way round the face of TimeWhere the rainbow of my words
is in charge of joining Tomorrow to HopeAnd Infant to Mother.

For having insulted my God
For having bemoaned my Fate
For having shouted calls at my Love
For having entreated Wolf and Jackal

My rebellion stands.

SIKELIA AETNA*

2007-07-23T13:59:00.000-07:00

I am watching smoke
Rushing ahead like a wild horse
On the foreground fires for one instant the lava
In its frail peacock's trail then tearing
Off its shirt of a sudden
And open its breast
To mimic islets of jagged rocks
Melting together little
By little into the lucid sea of air
Where all prophetic bathing
Is phantom

___________________________

from Gk. Sikelia, Lat. Sicilia = SICILY - island off the southern tip of Italy.

Aetna (Etna) is a volcano in Sicily, from an indigenous Sicilian language: aith-na "the fiery one," from Proto-Indo-European: aidh-na, from base ai- "to burn."

MY JOURNEY

2007-07-22T13:01:00.000-07:00

I travel through the invisible country
I create a world which submits to no laws
Save the shadowy dictates of my own feelings
As I suffer a lost humanity

ONLY

2007-07-21T12:22:00.000-07:00

There is but one world
Only
There are many worlds within it,
For it exists in more than one way at once
And these different ways
Cannot be translated into one another.

Like poems.
You cannot translate.
You can only make other poems.

BODY ODOURS

2007-07-20T13:10:00.000-07:00

Perfumes,
Orphic hymns,
civets in the first
and second meanings...

Here
you smell of sardonyx.
Here of chrysoprase.
Here,
wait a minute,
here it's like parsley
but just a hint,
a small piece
lost in chamois skin.

Here
your own smell starts.
How strange really,
that a woman cannot
smell herself
the way a man can.
Here
exactly. Don't move,
let me.
You smell of royal jelly,
of honey in a tobacco pouch,
of seaweed
even though the place
might make it topical.
There are so many kinds
of seaweed.

Yes,
you smell of fresh seaweed,
pulled up by the sea's
last surf.
Of the wave itself.
On some days
the smell of seaweed
becomes mixed up
with a thicker cadence,
then I would have recourse
to Palatine perversion -
that of a seneschal
surrounded by nocturnal obedience -
and bring my lips
up to yours, touch
with my tongue
that light pink flame
that flutters encircled by shadows,
and then I would slowly
separate your thighs,
hold you a little to one side
and breathe into you
interminably,
feeling how your hand,
without my asking,
would begin to break me up
the way a flame
begins to pluck its topazes
out of a wrinkled newspaper.

Then the perfumes
would stop miracolously
and everything is taste, biting,
essential juices
running about the mouth,
the fall into that shadow,
the primeval darkness,
the hub of the wheel
of origins.

Yes,
in that instant of the most
crouching animality,
there the initial and final figures
are sketched,
there in the viscous cavern
of your daily relaxation
stands the trembling Aldebaran,
genes and constellations jump,
everything becomes
alpha and omega,
millennium, Armageddon.

The silence of your skin,
its abysses
with the roll of emerald dice,
gadflies and phoenixes
and craters -
the scent of life
catapulting me through
the Universe.

APPLEBUD

2007-07-19T12:26:00.000-07:00

The bud of the apple is desire
And I taste at the root of the tongue
the unreal of what is real.

To hell with reality!

I want to die in music and poetry,
not in reason or futile prose.

Language is my skin
And it trembles with desire,
Intangible arrows quiver
and stick in the heart of things:
Whom will the wind address?

SIMILE

2007-07-18T13:00:00.000-07:00

Spread of water sparkles
Under a lascivious lightning
My azure and black thought
Walks around the forest of blood
Pallid trees scented with sperm
You dwell into an instant
Incandescent ruby
Drop of fire
Set into the night
Unlimited body
In a diminutive alcove
The sea shoots you up to the whitest scream
As the ivy of tears drives nails into my neck
I break you apart ripping the hymen away
Tower of sand crumbling
Your cries explode and vanish
Formless birds
Sing your death and your resurrection
Over the seared woods
The sun passes with its axe

IMPALPABLE

2007-07-17T13:07:00.000-07:00

Poetry lets us touch the impalpable (O.P.)

No land is my land
But the world is my focus.
I am a man
And little do I last
While the night is enormous.
As I lift my face
To the stars
The stars sing.
Unknowing I understand:
I too am sung,
And at this very moment
Someone writes my final note.

ANOTHER YOU

2007-07-16T14:50:00.000-07:00

When was life ever truly ours?
When are we ever what we are?

When I am
I am another,
My acts are more mine
When they are the acts of others,
In order to be
I must be another,
Leave myself,
Search for myself in the others,
The others that don't exist
If i don't exist,
The others that give me
Total existence,

I follow my raving, rooms, streets,
I grope my way through corridors of time,
I climb and descend its stairs,
I touch its walls and do not move,
I go back to where I began,
I search for your face,
I walk through the streets of myself
Under an ageless sun,
And by my side
You walk like a tree,
You walk like a river,
And talk to me like the song
Of a nymph.

ÍKAROS ENVISIONING

2007-07-15T12:19:00.000-07:00

Up high here
the air is clearer,
the centre of the sky
darkening to cobalt
as the pellucid sky
above a desert does,
and the reticulated mountain
ridges
are sharply cut and clear
to him.

This far from earth,
he apprehends not sights
so much as meanings,
imports, symmetries and
discordances,
and apprehends them
the more intensely
the further he gets
and the darker the air grows:
as though he goes progressively blind,
and meaning,
like a flavour he tastes,
grows that much stronger
to his senses.

Stars are visible.
And he is visible to them.
His vault has pushed him
to escape velocity,
and now he travels
with undiminishing speed;
but there is not, or
does not seem to be,
an infinity to travel in.
The vastness resolves itself
into nested spheres,
like the wings and drops
of an old-fashioned stageset,
containing him and
constraining his flight.

There are spheres
of air and fire;
beyond the spheres
of the Seven Archons
coming and going
like mechanical racehorses
in their tracks.
Beyond them, arm in arm
like intertwining scrolls,
twelve vast figures
girdle the topless and bottomless heavens,
Æons,
six of them below the horizon and
six above, the six
who have seen him leap.

The whizzing gears of heaven.
But he knows well enough
that heaven does not stop
with them,
that beyond them are spheres
they themselves have not heard of
and cannot imagine,
every one lifetimes wide,
containing lifetimes of labour
and errantry and laughter and tears
to cross before the next
can be reached.
He would put each one
inside him as he crosses it,
growing larger, growing toward
his own infinitude,
until at last he meets
his infinitude
coming this way to meet him.

But not yet.
He has not even reached
the first sphere of fire,
where who knows what awaits him.
He has ceased to speed
outward,
and only floats,
vertiginous and suddenly
heavy.

Afraid. Yes,
afraid and uncertain.

There is a name
for each of those powers
he must pass by, and the spheres
they make,
the Æons that compose them,
the suffering they occasion -
all one thing.
Once he remembers the name
of the first,
and has a voice to speak it with,
he would begin to cross.

But not now.
Already he is falling back,
the weight of his heart
tugging at him,
knocking at his iron ribs,
and he tumbles backward
out of the air,
head over heels,
onto the wax labyrinth
of his burning mind.

POSSIBILITY

2007-07-14T13:29:00.000-07:00

Whenever the world turns
From what it has been
Into what it will be,
And thus earns a different past
And a different future,
There is a brief moment
When every possible kind of universe,
All possible extensions of Being
In space and time,
Are poised on the threshold
Of becoming,
Before all but one
Pass into nonexistence again;
And the world is
As it is
And not as it was,
And everyone in it forgets
That it could ever be
Or has ever been
Other than
The way it is.

CUPS

2007-07-13T11:40:00.000-07:00

Speak, memory,
that I may not forget
the taste of roses
nor the sound of ashes
in the wind;

That I may
once more
taste the green
cup of the sea

PRICKLY MAGNET

2007-07-12T11:49:00.000-07:00

If I now lack the power
to articulate
or remember
all of my desires,
then a magnet
of divine ire
shall attract decades
of sperm
dammed up behind
the floodgates of fear
and frustration,
and none but
the lonely prick
shall know
my anguish.

REVERSION

2007-07-11T12:02:00.000-07:00

I hide my belief
in history,
I bury my voice
in time and place,
and like the Bay of Portugal
have an unknown bottom.

I am ever unquarrelsome,
even abject, you'd say -
still begging
each treacherous friend
to spare me
some crumbs of love.

I am a reversion,
if you like,
and a regression,
back to the sucking dung
that has clung to me
and from which
I long to escape.

CORTÈGE

2007-07-10T12:13:00.000-07:00

A man's last journey
is infinitely moving.
Death itself can be terrible,
traumatic, tearful, tragic,
or merely trite -
a non-event.

But the cortège is particularly touching
when the body is carried
past those sights and scenes
and through the memories
it nourished.

Mine is a simple enough passage:
they carry me among alders and limes,
my ears deaf now
to the lapping of the river wave
and the rustle of swans.

ALMOST THE SAME

2007-07-09T11:51:00.000-07:00

Like a mirror
shaken in a storm,
in the time of passage
memory shivers
what it reflects
into unrecognisability,
and then,
when the storm is past,
restores it.

VAST COLONIES

2007-07-08T11:56:00.000-07:00

Cada um de nós é varios, e muitos, é uma prolixidade de si mesmos. Por isso aquele que despreza o ambiente não é o mesmo que dele se alega ou padece. Na vasta colónia do nosso ser há gente de muitas espécies, pensando e sentindo diferentemente.

Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways.
~Fernando Pessoa, Livro Do Desassossego

Nous sommes tous de lopins et d'une contexture si informe et diverse, que chaque piece, chaque momant, faict son jeu. Et se trouve autant de difference de nous à nous mesmes, que de nous à autruy.

We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.
~Michel de Montaigne, Essais

I am sure
there are hidden depths
and abysses
in me,
where unimagined things
could break out
and sweep me
away.

Nuestras vidas son los ríos
que van a dar en la mar,
qu'es el morir
~Jorge Manrique

FORKED PAINTING

2007-07-07T13:11:00.000-07:00

Tanta è l'oscurità e l'ignoranza,
tanta è la malafede e la testardaggine
che mi circonda,
che a forza di faticare, di cercare,
di frugare, di osservare, di leggere,
di pensare e ripensare,
di ordinare, di filtrare,
di emulsionare, di unire e separare,
di aggiungere, di interrogare,
di guardare e riguardare,
di pesare, di bagnare e di asciugare,
di sperare, di disperare e risperare più di prima,
riesco finalmente a qualcosa di meglio,
un’estatica sorpresa mi fa tremare
di pura e vivida gioia,
perché sento che quello che ho trovato
mi permetterà di creare

Pittura tessuto,
sapiente sovrapposizione di tinte
paragonabili ad antichi tappeti orientali,
tanto belli e tanto pregiati,
pazientemente intrigati da abili artigiani.
Sento e capisco questo -
allora si innalza la gioia,
specie di gioco ideale,
divina distrazione:
provare e riprovare,
cercare e sperimentare continuamente
per progredire sempre
nella mia arte.

~ * ~

Such is the obscurity and ignorance,
Such is the hypocrisy and obduracy
Surrounding me
That
By struggling, seeking,
Stirring, observing, reading
Thinking and rethinking
Ordering and filtering,
Emulsioning, uniting and separating,
Adding, asking,
Seeing and reflecting,
Weighing, wetting and drying,
Hoping, despairing and hoping again and more,
I finally succeed in something better,
An ecstatic surprise makes me tremble
With pure and vivid joy,
For I perceive
What I found
Will enable my creation
In a divine distraction
To progress
My art.

SEEDING

2007-07-06T13:20:00.000-07:00

Chi mi tradisce con l’urlo del Terrore?
Chi mi insemina con l’angoscia della Morte?
Il cielo si apre affranto sulla mia esistenza
E nulla più mi turba
Nello squallore dell’Uomo
Mentre le ferite che squarciano le possibilità
Di speranza
Finiscono immonde nella cloaca
Delle vostre perversioni.

~ * ~

Who betrays me with Terror's embrace?
Who inseminates me with Death’s torment?
Heaven opens bleeding onto my existence
And nothing more agitates
In Man’s squalor
Whilst the wounds tearing apart
Possibilities of Hope
Terminate festering into the cesspit
Of your perversions.