Did you learn these lessons?
When love came calling, did you burn your tent and follow her flowers?
When your prison walls ran with her scented oils
Did you ease your rocks?
Did you find passage?
When beauty called
Did you bury your heart’s reply?
When bright ships passed your dark harbour
Did you fear the night water?
When joy flew past
Did you grab the ropes?
Did you ascend?
Or unravel
Frowning in passing shadows?
When you dreamed of gifts
Were you wrapping?
Or unwrapping?
When children came
Did their light fingers pry you free?
Or did they yearn and turn?
When the world opened its gates
Were you a rush of wind?
Or did you stagger before the light
Clenching your eyes in blindness?
When life called for fire
Did you flame
Or burn?
Who did you consume?
When souls opened to you
Did you caress these soft strengths?
Or stitch them as wounds of weakness?
When a lover begged
Did you barter?
Was desire a question?
Or an answer.
When pain wept in your hands
Did you taste precious tears?
Or did they dry to salt?
When anger rose
Did you speak it simply?
Or did you turn it on others?
Afraid to rage
Did you hate?
When failure wet your wings
Did you descend to rest?
Or did you grin and flutter
False in flight?
When justice called for witness
Did you stand and swear?
Or sag and curse?
When kindness fell
Did you kneel beside it?
Or smile at your height?
When weariness leaned against you
Were you a pillow?
Or did you fear wrinkles?
When you fell from exhaustion
Did you rise with herbs?
Or spurs?
When fear taunted
Did you smile once at the mirror of never?
Or did you spark and spit?
When you lost
Did you grieve?
When you wanted
Did you give?
Did you learn these lessons?
O sweet stall of domestication!
It is of thee I sing!
O sunny smile of subjugation!
I cry little for scratching
Whatever was itching
Or dressing for the couch
And TV and chips
I think in pastels now
Shudder at indelicacies
Fear germs and rude noise
Social slights and relative indifference
Hate violence; my anger is appropriated
I am sheltered, silent in scorn.
O savage serenity of woman!
I shout no earthy songs
And think before I speak
I am etiquette, niceness, cooperation
I shoulder my duties with a smile.
I am called sugar cubes, fresh tablecloths
Beaten rugs and clean closets
Shining silverware and vacuum-cleaners.
I do not grudge my repainting
For I was in truth
An uncouth portrait
Stubble, sweat
Skids in my underwear.
Now I drink from a glass and cut milk-bags with scissors
I think of the allergies of my guests
Warn my children about cartoons
Save a tithe
Consider the future
Worry about opinion
And ask about the ill.
My dog wags far from vases
My home is my world
My bed a pen of clean sheets
Made in morning.
I sweat when visitors come
Speak softly, hang their coats
What price love? I think
I am now a tidy jungle.
I am allowed my predators
Wednesday nights I play darts
Drink moderately
And think of the world.
Oh these eternal dictators
How they scatter!
Card tricks in the hands of time
Shadow puppets at sunset…
Their lives are empty feasts
Conscience in the jaws of cowardice
Unable to swallow for bitterness
Dusty tablecloth, broken glasses
Dinners from a dead cook
How they toast their still companions!
I alone can finish my meal!
They crow
Feasting on their empty hearts.
What treasures do they hold in their hands?
Scratch their nails -- what do we see?
Why: precious days of misery!
Scattered black grains
Dark days on an endless beach.
These are their trumpets:
I shall live a little longer!
These are their tombstones:
I grew old
By dying young…
They lay crushed for seventy years
They cried life from the grooves of tank-treads
Their flailing arms
Reaching only to be broken.
Suddenly
Here and now
They raise their eyes
Seeking a shroud, a vision
To cover their dead
As they wander the cremation
Of a charred utopia.
Before these foreheads
Branded by truth enforced
We smile in strange nihilism
Brazen in our lectures
Free with our stolen goods
We pass to these stretching hands
The blueprints of efficiency
And say your children died
For want of a free flow of capital.
What gave us life was not competence
But freedom, the means to man’s intelligence
But we fed freedom to secular management
Hard unions and soft currency
And cursed the poor with borrowed blessings.
Gnawed with hunger
We offer leftovers
From a recipe
We lost.
Mankind
Tight and united
Loose and murderous.
Having torn our chains from the walls
We made them weapons.
Oh no Joe
Stalin you must believe
It was not what you smoked or ate or did
That did you in
But the failure of the shabby hordes
To swallow your positive swords.
Ciao Mao
Y’know
Misguided idealism sure beats
Cynical pragmatism
You grew beautiful weeds
Shamed only by the roses
Your heart was in the right place
Even if no-one else’s was.
I want to kneel and weep for all mankind
For not being equal to your vision
For you saw like a sword
Penetratingly
And sheathed your ideals
In the hides of the hopeful.
South Africa
A land of black and white
Russia, though
A land of gray
or
Black and white
Slipping on red
Under a cover
Of willing Western fog.
(in memory of the intellectual pilgrimage to Russia in the 1930’s)
These happy men
Are still remembered at the embassy
Coming as they did
In the arc of the Depression
Chief trumpeters in the orchestra of gore
They gushed their notes to the conductor’s wand
Reflecting his scepter in their ruby glasses.
No famine here!
They cried through the metal of their speared sausages.
Blind in the glare of their searchlight eyes,
Good and kind and wonderful
Crested their lips like tumbling serfs
As they kneeled on the soaked carpet
Shifting from the wriggling beneath.
Pulled in the vacuum of their direction
We dug up our clubs of kindness
(slightly charred from the stake
but none the worse for wear)
And, cheering them home, swung them over those
Whose circumstances had survived
Such organization.
When will we learn
That degrees are not the shading of the spectrum
But the dissolution of the absolute
To the warring waters of absolute need.
Marx came last night
In a dream I flew with him
Over ragged Russian leaves
Sodden in a gutter of blood.
We soared over the gulping gulag
(slowed only for want of human grease)
And I waited for him to speak.
Look what you have done! I cried at last
Hoping for tears to bead his iron beard
But he glared downwards
Afire with future history
Did they achieve
He asked
The truth beyond life?
I gaped, aghast
You told them
That under the yoke of trade
They sold their souls for goods
And that for the sake of the good
They must trade their souls for yokes
And sacrifice choice reinforced
To choice enforced.
He looked at me curiously
He must have tasted the result in the recipe
For beneath his stately cloak
He drew his red book
Tapped it and growled
Such was my plan, and I stand by it
For better a purpose of death
Than the death of life’s purpose.
Well!
We said
Slapping our plans on the table
No poverty
No sickness
No inequality!
Grasping our plans
We found them stuck
Underneath
We found a flat marbled humanity
Squashed to the second dimension
The third dimension of life
-- disparity --
Corrected.
We make haggard graves
From uprooted flowers
And call a spade a future rose
While the roses that live
And grow from earth to sky
Transgressing no blood
In the fullest blush of virtue
Become mutants in a world
Where crows, gaunt and hunched
Erupt white while pecking
For no transparent cause
Save the guilt of the angels flying pure and high.
The sliding scales of brotherly love
Squeeze virtue from the visible madman.
How sad this old story…
Children born to warm huts
Laugh at the toils of their elders
And dance on dams
Jeering at the caution of floods.
Astride the wide lusts of youth
They scorn the simple structures of age.
The pillars of marriage, property
And bowed heads at old words
Hang shadows on their rise of morning.
Before the temple of tradition
These youths stand with rocks and catcalls
Afraid of why, they cry only no!
And thrash and beat at the weathered structures
Perhaps they crumble;
Perhaps their fathers are tired…
Perhaps, when the waters rise
They find no shelter in their fists
Perhaps, as they scrabble in the ruins
They weep for silence of their father’s graves.
Perhaps the reinvention of life
Before it is lived
Is sweet, savage foolishness.
What vote?
Robbed of control
We sought the imposition of compromise
And truth enforced.
We paved the way to Eden
Enclosed it
Made it open to all
And worthy of none.
Opening our hands to each other
We closed our arms
Hugging our weapons of need and humiliation.
Our laws are now defined in the broaching
And our hearts clogged with the cheap desire
To move around what we did not make.
For every reason
We ask why
For every command
We cry why not?
She came, summer I suppose
Sky-tumbling to far fields of new wheat
Her hair a whore’s-nest of pollen and warm breeze
Her dress a sway of bumblebees.
Bitch-lover of hope she wooed
Long vines and all coo and come-hither
She stirred my cellar with hot scent.
Thick-footed with peaches she sighed
Blowing my snow into flurries of butterflies.
Vapid she strode, a draping Jezebel
Stupid, happy, a no smarter suitor of a vacant woman
Dressed in bouquets, foiled and petal-bellied
I wallowed in the folds of her gown
Stalked her with lilies and daisy-chains
And played to her my begging birds.
Did she promise to stay?
This year, this time…
Pleading I rose from my quiet white tomb
Grasped at her green armour
Flung desperate orchids at her fading train
And when autumn displaced her wintry heart
Wept lonely leaves at the altar of fire, and died.
Take a flamethrower to bare trees
Hold it.
Call it fall.
Take shaved silence to soft hills
Spread it.
Call it winter.
Take a shimmering, bubbling green goblet
Spill it.
Call it spring.
Take the stained glass of a bee’s wing
Heat it.
Call it summer.
Afterlife, the counselor of
Not now for this is passing
Speaking softly here
Is silent in hindsight.
Heaven
Just around the corner
Of the infinite wall perceived
In the smooth route to ending.
Under the shade of the spreading tree
Where fruit unseen starved youth unborn
A church was built by hunchbacks
Who lay sad stone on jagged rock
Mounting their steps with twisted feet.
Seeing no sun but their shadows
Unable to turn to the sky
They scolded the night born from their bodies
Enclosed their worship in skies of stone
And jabbered inside as the rain fell in tears
Soft erosion on their dreams of rock.
When the mists came they gesticulated
Their cloaks like the webbed wings of crows
On their graveyard, a mirrored floor
They spun and grunted on footprints of fog
Below the reflected perfection of heaven.
When women came they scattered like pebbles
Weighed her with paintings and pages of books
When tall men came they were taught to bear fruit
Their backs bent with armfuls of apples
Their faces gray from the green and the red.
Outside the crows flapped quiet in the wind
Trees bent and died unwatered by droning
Inside they pinned each other to windows
Stained tapestries lit with traces of crimes
And jabbered and wept as the rain fell in tears
Soft erosion on their dreams of rock.
Deep beneath the dreams of Man
Where cross-eyed patricians strip-search scripture
In search of their emperor’s clothing
The masses gather in a windy field
Their kite-lines spearing the eye of God
Like telephone-poles in a stream of motion
Strung from the angels who dip and shout, seasick and giddy.
Rising on a hot current of hate
They soar, straining their ropes, their wings flashing mightily
To raise their glory
Weighed to the earth by the strangled hymns
Rising from the noosed necks hanging below
Anchors of man
The subjugated.
What a propulsion!
I gripped the stars
Flung them behind
And rising faster than thought could find
Or momentum follow
Flew headlong into the eye of God
Grasped the infinite Iris
And turned it on the rise of Man.
Like guilty squatters the angels fell
Baring their robes and scattering feathers
They hauled on the ropes of mankind’s well
Jerking us up from our beds of heather.
Scratching our hides we barked with surprise
As we lifted our heads to scan the skies
The first mute beasts to lift up our eyes
And damned among those who never ask why.
Scalded by thunder and lit by rain
Stirred by the echoes of countless years
We clasped our heads in helpless pain
For the source of the sound was no longer our ears.
We fled to our caves, but it wasn’t enough
The burning skies cried out for a name
For the angels had pulled us up from our trough
And we screamed in fear as the skies came again.
When one of us cried a singular sound
The thunder softened and blew away
We lowered our heads and gathered around
In thanks that he’d found the right Word to say
We built a high hut and kneeled on the straw
And, praising the Word the man had said
Heard a woman who’d eaten the heart of a boar
Had birthed a child and hadn’t even bled.
Now this was a deed we all admired
So we left our praise and went hunting for boar
A healthy child we all desired
We seemed to have found the power of law.
Soon our lives were ordered, secure
Until the day, though sated with blood
A woman had a child most impure
Which she buried alone in the streaming mud.
Something was wrong; there’d been a disruption
We took great pains to understand
At last we found there’d been a corruption
The rite hadn’t gone as planned.
The boar she had eaten was pregnant in fact
The Word disliked such vice
So we thought it a useful point of tact
To have a little sacrifice.
Soon it got too complex for words
This, that, it got hard to tell
He ate a boar while looking at birds
She sang a song while ringing a bell.
Our only question was: who was to blame
For failing to cause the required effect?
Fights and visions; soon the time came
When ordering it all required an elect.
We surrendered the right to set our own laws
To the group who had come up with the most
We little knew they would soon be the cause
Of turning our best and our brightest to toast.
As soon as we gave them the power they said
There is no more wisdom for you to acquire
We were silent and shocked, being born and bred
To question the world, and knowledge admire.
But soon it became abundantly clear
The price we had paid for certainty
Those who obeyed became very dear
And the rest all became inflammatory.
For us who obey the living is cheap
Though we scowl at the depths of the angel’s treason
Our children grow up unable to weep
And the rest of us scrabble in search of reason.
Sometimes I sit and think of the woods
Where the angels freed us from ignorant cages
And shooed our desires with “mustn’ts” and “should’s”
Surely one of our sorriest stages.
For now I know the sky is only the sky
The clouds care nothing for our incantation
And by praying for power to pour from on high
We surrendered our reason to imagination.
Beasts may pray
For food, sex and shelter
But if God should say
These I grant you
If you burn your legs, teeth and heart
They would snarl at the sky
And lick the earth their life.
All our prayers
Inflame our minds to cinders
And we lick alone
The flames we emblazon.
The Word is God
The world is the Word made flesh
And crucified.
The Word, the howling of the phrase
The Word of centered eyes
In the dark storms of thought.
The Word made flesh
Webbing the skeleton of impossibility.
The Word, a screech of scarecrows
Crying for indigestible food
From want to isin decibels.
Infinite is the antonym of absolute
Eternity the antithesis of life
For Man
Infinite ethics
Make good impossible
And evil irresistible.
Silence this Word.
Let us assume that
It is not even a convulsion of sound
But of essence.
A ripple over all that is
The final exhalation of unseen breath
Through starlight, the heart of dark moons
Through the pulsing flesh of animation
Through all the fissures of mind
Twisting, spilling from secret gaps
Gone; no dust stirs
No cape sweeps this stage on leaving…
Staring at the silent stage
Actor gone
Sets, director gone and
Without even a final bow
Theater itself gone
All spotlights now only the glimmer of stars
Stars themselves no longer spotlights
All metaphors gone.
Under the battlements of livid imaginings
Besieged, all heretics freeze at the sudden convulsion
Soldiers stand; all stand
All actors rise
All stages rise
All gaze over the dark distance of space
Feeling the sudden silence, the faint hissing of reacting
Matter content with itself
No longer content, no longer a self
But eyeless, causeless, eternal
Life its own cup
No longer a cup
For beyond
No hand reaches
No tongue twists to taste
No gaze reflects eyes raised to heaven
Not even a mirror; no eyes raise
But remain encased…
On these former battlements
-- no word for them now --
All rise at this sudden convulsion
The universe no longer alive, not dead
Not born but seen
And all choices finally rest
In the feathered nest of each heart.
Life no longer a womb
Or a passage but itself entire
Stands open for the taking.
All rise.
No…
Sighed the swarthy Devil
Before the silent congregation
An injustice has been done
Virulence is the reflection of virtue
In an unjust state
And this shallow God
In fear of suburbs and sunsets
And air-conditioned temples
Cast me as a shadow of disapproval
To brighten your eyes with blindness.
Your blindness
He said to the staring crowd
Prefers geometry to mountains
And flying fast from the caves of your birth
You spread harsh on the dark sky.
Unable to pierce the infinite clouds
You shiver at the songs of earth
The hymns of visible thought.
No…
Said the devil
You live to see beyond sight
But the walls of death have no purchase
And when life’s infinite direction
Meets death’s infinite mass
Nature replaces movement with momentum
Smashing the eyes of matter
And the blinded atoms shuffle back to her empty workshop
To lie once more among her dusty tools.
But I!
Said the devil, spreading his dark wings
I am the love of unwashed footprints!
Of life stampeding towards the light
Lottery-freed
Reality bound
Man’s mind, the brief flashing purpose of the universe
Freed to crawl, to walk, to think!
This is my domain!
God you greedy souls!
Cried the devil
Your choice is the envy of nature’s playthings!
Afraid of power, drunk with hoping
You cry for the gravity of God
And you twitch like grinning puppets
Knees down, mind up
Statues before the mirror of beauty
Architects of mental physics
You pray for rain from invisible skies
And make the world a desert of faith.
No
Said the devil
His wings falling, his red skin parting to reveal the flesh
His horns toppling, arches without a keystone
Your knees are to be the corners of climbing
Up, up and off them
And let us mount the marble stairs
Towards the infinite statue of tangible man.
Behold Man
Born good
With a small fatal flaw
A strange corner where dwelleth
Poppies and ogres and uniformed elves
Fairies who dance from leaf to enormous leaf
Never eating or falling or aging
Young in the glass of injustice magnified
Deep within us they dance and sparkle
Like spinning coins over sightless eyes.
No lawyers in their world -- how could there be?
Their freedom is not freedom to
But freedom from.
Theirs is the world beyond never
Where complexity demands legality
Their courts are always feasting.
Left alone
Their eternal pool lies undisturbed
Save an occasional Tolkein jaunt
An Eden retreat
A gap in the spokes of wheels in motion.
Why should we hunt them?
Surely life is hard enough
That sometimes a flight to their distant songs
To dream in midsummer (it is always midsummer)
Is allowable.
Yes -- when the exception proves the rule
And rest is a cure for eventful labour
But for some the elves beckon from cliffs
Their tinny voices sing from sunlight
To broken lives in broken rooms
And the cracks of men widen, eating their senses
And freedom, poor sad and earthbound freedom!
In the face of freedom to lie it dies
And dreamers wake from feasts only to despise
Their unsown fields under earth’s changing skies.
Hunt, hunt these faeries I say!
Pin their hearts to museum tables!
For these dreams strip our bonded flesh
Saying those with wings
Are more family than blood
And the faeries of duty
Honour, country, race and religion
Stream forth.
When faeries swarm, crowds roar in joy
Free from the rods of absolutes
They race around with butterfly nets
Laughing, crashing, falling
New gods sprouting from their eager eyes.
They ignore the closing shutters of greatness
And never hear the earth begin to groan
Under the fear-laden steps
Of the heaviest elves
Whose courts always feast
On blood.
To what do I owe my parents?
This sort of poem can be very short
Or very long.
In short --
Construct is not contract.
In long --
We have seen shelter, food and water
Rules, punishment, confinement and reward
Among arctic snows and barbed wire
Yet we ask no gratitude
From the victims of obligation
No more than we ask that they honour
Their enforcers
Or return to what they must escape.
All patriots marry to whom it may concern
And divorce the flesh beyond the image.
Convicts who respect their judges
Will replace them
Thus the obligation lies upon
The defense.
Her face, a treasure of boating
Hoves into view
Beaching on powder from a sea of scent.
Her gown, the arc
Of a waterfall, rises to her neck
Hung with pearls the divers bought.
Her liquid lips mask the golden teeth
Of swimmers drowned in adulation.
Sea-queen she walks on foaming praise
Barefoot in daring and tickled by noses
She laughs at the breath of kisses on toes.
No children, eternal life assured
By the blood of the painters below her windows
Her youth is forever for those who daub.
Unique till the moon rises
She walks in wide twilight alone
Armed with the ghosts of passion and space…
While on the canvasses of the thinning crowd
Hang the watercolours of impending rain.
Morning in Jerusalem
Scales the light up the rugged wall
In her room past frayed muslin cloth
She rises, smooth as the sun
And heats without humming the water.
The men stir in the next room
Patriarchs with night-scratches
They heave and groan
She brings coffee
To their room without windows.
Reminded of morning they scowl and spit
As busy men she dresses them.
They talk in code of the world and importance
She watches them eating
Their beards and smell
Linger as they trudge downstairs.
She shirks and watches from windows
Down in the market they talk of ships
Their coloured robes turning like lizards
In the sun they jabber of distant storms.
Their women watch from under the shutters
Then turn to their spices and start to grind.
She preened
Oh yes!
Her only flight was her feathers
And the sagging of her soul
Shrinking as her face grew
Hung wrinkled beneath her flashing plumage.
The man, whoever the love she sought
Passed her by in a rush of sound
Sighs and mirrors, an ambulance at high speed
She chased him, a stalking lawyer in search of flesh
At parties she was the center of the storm.
And when, bald and featherless
She mounted her last perch
To collect of her scant memories
She saw behind her only a desert bed
Where her beauty had parted the waters
And she had danced past the aquarium walls of observation.
And in that parched reef
Where her seas should have teemed with bright fishes
Bubbling children and gracious age
Lay only a wilderness afraid of the tide
And as she had wetted her starry face with her fingertips
She had spun from the sea to the mover of seas.
Her shack, her entire life is salt
Her man, peppered by surf
Rolls in and out; to keep herself
She misses him as he bends his beard to her breast
And strokes his hair as he talks of the sea.
Fish he leaves in mountains twice a year
In a cupboard she opens by candlelight
In odd nights asleep and wild-eyed
They flop and twitch at the beat of her light
Each thump a day, a tick, a year
Knife-tailing through her hide of hope.
At night, when up to her knees in salt
She thinks of a thought she might send to his ship
That in her swam seas he could fish forever
And, leaning over his boat
He would see through the green bottle-neck
Her eyes alive, waiting, arms crossed
Over the stillness of mermaid depths
Such a vivid calling!
He would cry spit at the sun and dive down abubbled and bulging
His hair like a fan, gasping for a touch
A kiss to rob him of his passion for air
The bursting lungs, the bounding feet, forever the ocean their love…
This dream she dreams while salting at night
No tears in the halo of a single candle
Crooked planks like sailors sleeping in the wind.
Far in the darkness her man shouts at spray
Hauling his nets
He thinks of her twice before sunrise.
Born a free soul
She reared to her father
Bowed to her husband
Flowed over her son.
Rising early
She warmed the tea
Over the only fire she knew
And woke her lords with soft sorries
Gentle eyes and downcast breasts
A perfect piece of self-made plumbing
The waters of her life disappeared
Without a murmur
Sure that the sewers held her reward…
One cold morning in a distant home
When the angel of procrastination came
She fled towards her reward
And just before there was nothing left to find
She saw no banquets for the starved
No crowns for the abdicated
And far too late she railed against
The chilling regret
Of quietly discharged atoms.
I saw you, you know
When you turned towards the fire
I saw the ashes rise in your throat
And your eyes sink in shimmering sorrow.
I saw you, and part of me died
To see the funeral of your future
Pass before me, ragged and open
To an unmarked early grave.
They are not pillars.
They are the gutters of our future
Their rain-streams of lacerating guilt
Deface our posters of youth.
Sympathy they cry from their megaphones
Dutiful to themselves they mutter duty for us
And our dreams of conquest are the cleaning of bedpans
At their knotted feet as they whimper and rock of liberty.
Here it is clear; let us assemble
Let us speak.
We were without trial
Prisoners of no conscience
No writs were pinned to our doors
No lawyers hungry for justice or fame
Stood between us and our sentences
No courts passed but those that feed in the night…
Let us listen…
Even now, the doors creak
All sleep
Wife, children, conscience sleeps
Even God pales before such devils
Fearful He holds no hands for us.
What nails slide on soft sheets?
Oh! Sleep we seem that he may awaken
Oh Justice! Policemen chew doughnuts on far corners
As our legs scissor and whimper.
Force-fed, we gag
Clutching covers woven by good men
Who thought of flannel and comfort and smiles
No vision of dark sheets draped over the innocent
Like a spread of leaden tombs…
This frozen touch
This sonnet of icy need
These gripping hands that pulse and cling
Drumming our hearts like a flying pendulum
Such hands should water and warm
Not burrow.
Our legacy…
Our teeth taste no sweet fruit
Our filled mouths became cavities
Drilled and torn, silent at the root.
Our hollow gardens, sown with silence
Speak only of sin.
You wish to hear our speeches?
Listen quietly; these are not words
We have no tongues; they have been used
We are not masters of our mouths
We are banks robbed by night deposits
You ask for witnesses?
What witnesses?
No cameras know these robberies
No eyes see
There is no light here…
Listen quietly
These cries are hushed
Drowned by the applause of cars and collars and caddies.
Lift our bright conversation
What camps lie here!
What cannibals hunt rare meat!
How these lip-smacking bone-juggling
Painted foreheads lower over their green feasts!
What wet jungles shriek in silent houses!
Listen carefully
For we are portraits of smiles
After-images of bright life.
We braid our hair where predators tread
We flinch at dark eyes on white dresses
Wide hands and stretched mouths no defense
Silent they entered us
Became us
Through portraits, through walls
These cold claws shattered our natural vessels
Spreading our shards in strange shapes
Puzzles with no picture
Each piece a portrait of loss.
Hung alone
We wander our shocked galleries.
Hear this prosecution
This incomprehension:
To be taken by predators on a lonely plain
May be accepted, even by young prey
Yet in the midst of others; do you not wonder
That at your bus-stop these growlings and dartings of flesh
Remain unseen?
How strange that we should hunt bears from our forests
Squirrels from out attics
And termites from our foundations
Yet these crunching beasts
Should leave no scents for our fast dogs.
Proud of our present we smile
At museum savages
And return to our carpeted caves.
Listen:
Let us sit simply and talk of life
For the eloquence of our deeds
Is too often silent in words.
Let us listen…
A rare seasoned traveler
Who has known other paths
Will call through these blinding trees…
I have tasted the rock of philosophy
Spun the mad whirl of passion
Foamed and spat with creation
Sat and reasoned of business
Wept and washed stains of love
Squeezed analysis from sightless pores
Turned books into butterflies
Raged at hopelessness
Fought indifference
And even, in dark corners
Turned blades against myself.
Here are the cries of many roads
Hear their echo:
Life is nothing
A pulse
Shared with single cells.
Life is a sheet of white noise
Over the silence of what is life?
What are we?
We are not the sole animation of matter
It passes through us, on no journey
Snow falls easier than we rise.
Life is ungranted
It does not approach
Life is inert
A monk and a wink
A woman and a phone
A passive perhaps.
Life does not wait
It holds no breath
Breathe or fade
Make or break love
Walk or run
What matter?
We hurry to meet only ourselves.
The world does not watch
The eyes of hurricanes are only holes
The world does not grasp
Waters embrace us as easy as rain.
We are unrecorded
Unrewarded…
Virtue parts no hail
Love conducts no lightning
Two men in a wood
One bad, one good
Are both eaten by wolves.
We stare at no mirrors
The eyes of God are simply suns
They do not flame for us
Our blood
Held or spilled
Loves neither.
If life were longer
We would plan
Shorter
We would act
Stirring past the right time of morning
We dream…
If life were easier
We would have no why not
Harder -- no why
Our long lines of laugh, cry, sigh and stop
Would wave less wild.
Life is shadowed…
Death!
We dart; it trails us
Like a dogged bill
To be paid by addressee…
We nomads, out past streetlights
Are called home, constantly
Return to indifference…
Whispers Death
Return to the slow embrace of unfeeling arms…
Death smiles at strivings
What cars! What boats! What sunny promotions!
How fevered these biddings!
Buy! Buy! I am patient.
I will always outbid you…
Death sits soft
In the shallows of the busy
Satisfied at smug evasion
You are unafraid
Smiles Death
Good -- you are like the trees
Half mine…
Avert your gaze!
Be my guest!
Only my eyes deny…
Life is provoked…
Change!
What trumpets can startle this slumber?
Fear of risk is fear of life!
How often does this panic strike us
When we have slipped from our dizzy treehouses
Into the slow hammocks of our fathers
Ease and iced tea lazy on the belly
The sports section our athletics.
The indignity of sex chastised us long ago
We lost our manhood; expensed it
Deducted it, crossed at the lights with it
Fed it sensibly, did not strain it
Civilized it; did we ever think
It required a dangerous diet?
Life is risked…
Love!
Hot brand!
Sizzling senses!
A high blue thunderclap!
Here is liberty from indifference!
Clouds give and disappear
We give and become weather!
We cannot lose in love; if we do
We know we have lost; we gain this
One guest burns the bed; another steals the towels
What do we care? Make more! These are trifles!
For if we fear love; if we forget death --
We ask for deposits, hold security
Demand a home from those on holiday
And become habitual guides
Blinding travelers to our wildness
Nothing here but malls!
They cry, lens caps on
As we hurry them past our seething jungles.
Life is lost…
Born crying; dead with a sigh
Our voices fade for want of echoes.
How we howl, midnight beasts in nappies!
How eloquent are our passions!
Our early sounds sink in soft cotton
Our groping feet plow plush carpets
Falling, we flail for words
Imitation our only rope
Hanging, we find ourselves alone
The backs we walk on turned away…
Are we crushed by this indifference?
Does our art vanish for want of audience?
Ahh -- in the union of I and eye
We disappear
The eyes of others are the eyes of death
Blind to life
We act for rocks
Eloquent for imaginary applause.
What cry replies?
If we live, strive, fight
Or fail, tire, fall
The world wrinkles regardless
Our why’s and why not’s
Flow from us, homeless, fading
Catching on similar souls
Which fade in turn…
Listen -- listen to the distant cry of this single traveler!
You are not here for the pleasure of the world
Or others
But yourself
Life is nothing
To all but one
To that one:
Everything.
Talent is self-doubt
On fast-forward.
Was I even the scything light of a passing car
As you huddled in your bed
Shivering and talking of lovers?
Who was I
When you took to bed
And gripped my head
Begging for friendship
Who was my friend?
When you sparked your hands
And flamed my face
Did you know
I learned to tie my shoes?
When you became a screaming script
And I darted under my seat
Could you see beyond the spotlights?
Who was I
In these dark times?
Tell me: was I your father?
Was I your ex-husband
Leering at your lipstick?
Was I a distant uncle
Close in the tangled grip
Of a silent night?
Was I a jackboot at midnight?
A falling cage of choice?
Did I bar you from your life?
Did I hurt you?
Or were you evil?
Was I a catalyst
Or an excuse?
Tell me
I need to know:
I see children
My heart opens
I whirl them in laughter.
You saw children
Your heart closed
Beyond tears
You beat, lashed, burned.
Shrouded in torn sails
I caressed my sheets
Sucked my thumb
Drove my soul
Below.
Tell me
I need to know:
Did your soul fade in the shadow of sin?
Did your world tighten, constrict?
Did you learn to fear remorse?
Were you ever at ease?
Here -- I will speak your secrets
Unblinded by even a distant dusk of love
I will tell you of yourself:
You saw me at the helm of a train.
Pinned by past crimes
You screamed at my demonic mask
Pulled rocks from the tracks
And hurled them at my windshield
The more you raged
The faster I came
Accelerating self-defense
Skin him!
Drink his blood!
He will destroy me!
He is evil!
Listen; I know your secret.
I know the justice of the damned:
Those I wrong
Wrong me
With guilt
So I wrong them
Back.
Oh yes
I know the easy secrets
Of obsession.
Yet the deeper secret…
In the whirlpool of this slow demise
Who was I?
That is hard, hard…
For then I was nothing
A trigger
A justification
A secret shame
And hated exposure
A bomb clutched
For fear of ticking
A nomad of guilt
Unplanted
But uprooted
Unheld
But discarded.
Who was I
In that dark world?
I can tell
For now
I know.
I was an angel
Defying devils.
I was an angel
With an angel’s knowledge of evil.
At night I twitched my wings
Under the torturing skylight
For even then I knew
That devils sometimes sleep.
I watched and waited
And, in a short span of snoring
I leapt and shot through the square of sky
Rose in a flower of snow
Circled once and grinned below
At the devils snarling at an empty hell
Then soared and flew to the distant mountains.
In these peaks I wait
Settling towards myself
Cold? Yes, I suppose so…
But this soothing steam
Smoothes my fevered soul
And as the scalding settles to sauna
I hear the echo of distant sounds
A parade, a festival, a just war
I cannot tell…
Soon, though
I will
For then I was nothing
But now I am
A truth-teller.
An evil train flashed past
Torn on the tracks
I fled.
Huddling under my bed
The train came again.
Mind racing; no game
Endless experiments
My conclusion:
Checking the schedule brings the train
Avoiding the train brings the train
Speaking of the train brings the train
Silence, speech, resistance, passivity
Flight, fight, madness, reason
Motion, stillness, hiding, daring
All bring the train.
Shiver under your bed
All night
If you think of the train
It will come
If you forget the train
It will come.
How I dreamed of my relationship to this thunder!
How I imagined myself a passenger!
Groping for my ticket
I begged and flustered
Do not throw me from the train!
Hah!
Cried the conductor
Flinging me from the window
Your life is a train.
A hook
Mistaking itself for a fish
Writhed
A fisher
Mistaking the hook for a fish
Beat it
And ate it up
Spat it out
And beat it again
For hurting.
Playing with staplers
I wonder why
The violence had such a different quality;
It was not skinned knees
Or schoolyard brawls.
It was an infection
There is no other word.
I was curiously invaded
It was not just fists on face
Every movement was noted
Each word, each tic
Stored, responded, corrected, ignored
Consciously.
Born in battle
I am an army out of step
Some have won
Some are being drafted
Some play with toy guns
Some cry for an end to war.
My soul is tight, taut
Focused, hemmed
I am a burden of contradictions
I leave and wait
Speak in silence
Dance with darting eyes.
I am scripted
I am a great play
A manifesto of peace
A call to arms
I am actor, director
Critic and audience
Doors chained.
I am my own world
I paint my eyelids
Travel my dreams
Work, promote
And am promoted
Alone in my chair.
My receptionist is witty
You laugh and thumb magazines
Stare at the door of distant flashes
Watch the clock
Scratch your neck
Read my memos
Wait, frown, stir
And leave.
I see you
I have my eyes
I pipe music
Touch the screen
With wet fingers
But cannot rise.
You see
I think
Beyond this office
Lie pits of fleshy hate
Smoking piles of corpses
Brownshirts, holsters
Soldiers obsessed with feces
Who tape tales of their mother’s demise
And sing of the slaughter of peace.
I move in this office
It is glass, not heavy
I see dogs racing
Children swinging from bridges
Wives touching the cheeks of sleeping men
Old bands harrumphing in sunny gazebos
Students laughing at the folly of law
Ducks gathering at the feet of old women
The careless canvas of a sunset
The quiet beauty of the world.
I am wooed by all of it
I feel it
It calls, all of you call
All lines flash
You gather outside
With cakes and new clothes
Tapping on the glass and shielding your eyes.
I hear you.
I want you.
I strive for safety
Without security.
Keep the candles lit.
I am coming.
I will speak of these revolutions
These rebellions of revolt
These saddest rejections…
Those who find themselves
Below the cusp of fortune
Must raise themselves
Or lower others.
Two cases
One justice
The unjust first:
The cause of our place
Is not history or circumstance
Necessity or efficiency
But isolated acts
Of willful oppression.
Justice has no court
No need of judges
Or knowledge of law
Justice is a tide
Stopped only by conscious dams.
Equality has no cost
It is not fed with excess
It is as equally repressed in a land of want
As a land of plenty
Goodwill is no luxury
It requires no wealth.
Rights are eternal
We need Nurenburgs
For dinosaurs
Who trod on mammals.
We did not fall
As leaves fall
We were gnawed from the branches
Flung into the gutter.
Autumn danced on our broken faces.
This is the new god
An echo of the eternal good of old
Which send the unbaptized Socrates to hell
Because he should have known better.
This is the new religion of persecution
Faith in Christ because of lions
This is the necessity of oppression
Faith in Eden, the triumph of Satan.
This is the new faith of self-hatred
No joy in the arrival of goodness
Only hate for the length of the journey.
This is the paralysis of imagination.
The world, a ship, plied harsh waters
Some rowed, some navigated
Some imagined the hoped-for lands.
A sudden beaching
Unguessed by most
Embraced by all
Gave rise to riots
Angry accusations
Flung sand
Recriminations
Cries of revenge
The religion of rowers.
At the time, understandable.
The rowers had hard hands
Hard hearts
And hated the drinking on deck
As they pressed their tongues to the cracks.
A generation later
Ridiculous
We fight over a past
We did not live.
Would not our fathers
Kneel before us
Take our soft hands
In their stony grip
And say:
What matter how we arrived?
We arrived!
Treasure this land!
Honour our sacrifice!
These hatreds push us all back to sea…
What do we reply?
Will we call their sacrifice oppression?
Will we mourn their position so much
We cannot enjoy their gift?
Thus the son of an Eastern barber
Sacrificed for
Sent to school
Rails against the possibility
Of education.
The hardest part of any revolution
Is knowing when to stop.
Now the case of justice:
Falling to sand
Tasting the solidity of earth
We turn and look at the charred ship
Where our mother’s cooked and swabbed
For swaggering captains.
Did they have a choice?
Did the captains have a choice?
Some must cook
Some must lead
Who makes these decisions?
Can we point at a face?
We weep for their loss
For it could have been better
But in howls of hail
When the ship lurched
And children were thrown
For the sake of weight
Judgment was no joy.
On the beach we comfort each other
Amazed at the simple structure of sand
Let us clasp our hands
And plan our homes.
I do not fear death.
Where I am, death is not.
Where death is, I will not be.
We shall never meet.
How sad that it should come to this
Life an old coat
Worn not for warmth
Or cold
Just because…
Welcome to this little world
Shadows lean neither to dark or light
No obstacle, no illumination
No line divides this life.
Oh these old, weary habits
Sleepy soldiers guard no sunrise
Rusty rifles, cigarette stubble
The fear of war their only enemy.
In a fluid crypt of skin I wait
For orders?
I sigh as another pigeon flies free
Kicking no paper it rises to the dawn
A messenger of flight alone.
I live…
How little in the word;
Breath, movement, food.
I feed as parasites feed
On the stirrings of a larger life.
This life
How I anticipate it…
Fools wait for permission.
The wise forego forgiveness.
This strength
I stand on the platform
With a crayoned ticked
Weeds on the tracks
Schedule says train
Life says walk.
This weight
The brutal sins of others
In a bin, beneath corpses hushing me to sleep
I spy the clear stars of morning.
They whisper soft indifference:
Live
Live not
We shall burn.
I hold in my hand the everyday blade…
Shave carelessly
Eat poorly
Smoke relentlessly
Twist the wheel
Walk into traffic…
The everyday blade
Is a suicide of sighs
Of cares slipped and lost
Chances mislaid and scorned
A lonely funeral planned indifferently
No scorn in the gathering
No mourning save the loss of mourning
Still butterflies the only colours
In this museum.
This need:
Live as you respect!
How it fades in the whittle
Of the everyday blade
The indifferent blade of eternal life
A shaver of days
Slow spinner of smaller circles
Lazy limiter of larger leaps
The everyday blade is silent surrender
Resentful sloth
The iron chamber of sad habits…
Drop this blade!
Fly the dank cells of inaction!
And surrender to the living lashings
The new dawn of a distant death.
Reject small deaths
Accept one
And live!
Hey
Remember the time
Years ago
When you pulled the wings off a fly?
That was a substitute for love.
Remember the time
The girl asked if she could keep your treasured pen
And you blushed and nodded.
That was a substitute for love.
Remember the time
You threw the bird with the broken wing
To make the girl clap.
That was a substitute for love.
Remember the time
You screamed at your mother
And she screamed back.
That was a substitute for love.
Remember the time
You hoisted yourself
To a shield of muscle.
That was a substitute for love.
Remember the time
Stung by the lashes of distant eyes
You wore strange suits to school.
That was a substitute for love.
Remember the time
You showered wonderful words
On possible sex.
That was a substitute for love.
Remember the time
When you paged and pulled
With all your might.
That was a substitute for love.
Remember the time
You sat in stillness
Smiling at solitude.
That was a substitute for love.
Remember the time
You embraced yourself
In an armchair of thought.
That was a substitute for love.
Remember the time
You wept in the arms
Of soft songs.
That was a substitute for love.
Remember these times
Remember them now
And remember this:
The only substitute
Is sorrow.
There is no substitute
For love.
Oh dear
I am afraid you have found me
A virgin in love with chaste candlelight;
Strong, dark, tender words;
White gloves on my cheek;
A red rose in my bound hair…
A protected virgin
A rhyme of possible passion.
Despite my whirling life
You have found me
And whisper kind words of resignation
With all the sympathy of a deathbed watcher.
Here, poor, wounded creature
You murmur
I bring the salve for all torture
The soft amputation of all sorrow
The generous nurse of nothing…
Look at this reality;
I cannot say I am unmoved
Twenty-eight years I have fled this yearning
I have expended myself, in art, in thought, in love
Like a soldier on leave from war
Arguing with the mouths of loading cannons.
I have felt the death of creativity
The sudden darkening of future days
I flip the calendar
Today it says: you are an artist
I turn again; there is no page, no wall
Just a hole of empty dust
A hollow snake of silent rest…
In the belly of the snake is a strange inscription
By candlelight it can be read:
I was stillborn
My movements have been mere after-twitchings
I have fought this knowledge, this widening beast
I have thrown it beauty, passion and hard, hard sweat
They do not move it; they are plastic meats to a famished dog
Instead it lurches forward, shattering all careful gardens
Intent on its prey…
My God -- how I have fled, these many years
Friends, to whom worth is breath --
Listen to the savage indemnity of endless tribute
The kindest kiss of the harshest master:
Ahh, child…
You have worked hard
You are to be commended
As a cripple who twitches a toe
Yet in this bright athletic world
Do you wish to be a triumph of tremors?
Where is your pride?
This half-life of endless proof…
This eternal gasping for given air…
I am the smile of your pure soul
The smile which gently says:
Cease work!
You are not sentenced to live!
This only hotel is only a hotel;
If the maids are surly
The beds rocky
And the management pressing
Why -- leave!
There is no shame in spurning such hospitality…
Do you hear?
Do your eyes widen?
I understand; I have so much to live for
Yet you whose souls speak nothing of silence
Cannot hear the quiet truth of nothing.
Here -- I wish to be clear
Here is the story of all life:
Here is a silent crowd of waiting souls
In an anteroom, waiting for birth
Curious, they turn the pages of their possible lives
Perhaps they are impatient
Perhaps they flip to the index
And blink at the alphabet of abasement:
A is for agony
B is for brutality
C is for cowardice
D is for despair
E is for endless
F is for failure
G is for gloom
H is for humiliation
I is for ignominy
J is for jeering
K is for killed
L is for loathing
M is for mendacity
N is for never
O is for ordeal
P is for pain…
Can we see them shudder and slam these pages?
Can we hear their response to the question:
Will you live?
Can we hear their bitter refusal?
Even if they are told to turn to “T”
And there they read:
T is for talent…
Is it enough?
Pandora says no.
Listen -- if I make myself clear
This an allegory of every moment
This alphabet is the song of every breath:
Will you live?
That old, futile question:
What is the meaning of life?
Can we see the foolishness?
Life is a luxury
The icing of survival.
If you flourish
Life has meaning
If your world is mere survival
Life is meaningless.
So, you ask: what can rob life of luxury?
Why, are we not the endless echoes of our first hearings?
We are born as single seeds in a single garden
If we are sown with bitterness, despair, hatred, violence
Or merely unwatered with love
We become small shoots among towering vines
Parched for sunlight, draped in shadows
Every expansion a savage thrust
We lurk in jungles of endless struggle
Fighting both the choking vines
And our desire to give up the fight
Our lives become a strain of single will
Our pleasures the conquering of endless impossibilities
Our purpose not life, but survival…
In this agony of striving
Can it be seen how exhaustion can turn from a hated enemy
To a wise counselor
A gentle seducer of rest, rest, rest..?
So, you say, take this ease!
Rest, rest -- you have earned it!
Ahh -- this clarity is hard…
You see, we are not struggling
We are struggle.
The vines grow; we must always strive
We are watched by predators;
Rest is death…
The solution?
You say: there are no predators!
I reply: years ago, you were taught to read
You are not literate; you became literacy
You say there are no predators
I say you cannot look at the printed page
And not read words.
I cannot look at the printed world
And not read: predator
That is my literacy.
The only hope is the end of hope
The only solution a necessary hardness
The end of soft spite
Petty resentment
And the hateful cowardice of natural prey.
I fear predators
Thus fear
Is my predator.
By the water’s edge
Of this pond, a hand-spread of tulips
Widens under a blue sky
Fields of flowers jostle in the distance
Looking to dip their feet
In painted water.
This is a still-life of life
A portrait of peace
Here, in this gallery
Your eyes
Drawn to the flowers
May wonder at the small square inscription:
I hurt myself…
Like the water
It is almost transparent
Underneath, if you look carefully
You may see a still victim of solitude
A sketched blue skull of sorrow
Paint on paint so skillful
It appears beneath the paint.
You wonder if it stares
It’s eyes seem quite gone
You are sure the painter, though young
Is dead
And all that is left
Is a tinted window
Facing black.
I have had it!
These deepening vales
Where nothing crunches underfoot
Are seeping past my chin.
How strange
Just yesterday
It seems
I breathed the giddy air
Of frantic wisdom.
Cast in air too rare for despair
I surveyed the world
A soulless eagle of sight.
I rose past all wind
Tainted with the breath of others
I rose past habits, past cares
Past all I was before
Past the earth
Past gravity; I rose so far
I no longer rose
But was…
Hung in high purity
I saw beyond sight
Such dreams!
I became a sheer pane
Of pure thought.
Strange now, how this shedding of the mortal earth
Should so have blinded me!
I floated beyond height
And rising through the endless shades
Of a single colour
Found my sight obscured
By a lowering curtain
The draping skirts of soft death.
I rose past the dark hem
Unbound from all masts
Sung to by the siren of all-sight
I began to yearn for an end to eyes.
Looking back
I am shocked how close I came
Sinking in soft death
I finally woke and kicked
These folds freed only by circulation
The savage pinpricks of returning.
How I plummeted!
From so far, so high
That the spurned earth
Spurned impact
Parted like silk
And buried me in a far different womb
A savage cave of agony
Now, shuddering, gasping, groping
I see that the fear of pain
Was my only height.
Oh these faint dreams of solid earth!
How stillness taunts an endless pendulum!
Swing and bounce, roll and ripple…
I am a sculpture of wind
A fist of water
A breath of flesh…
What? I hear;
You say the strangeness of this fall
Is not that it occurred
But that it seems strange…
Come, you say
You are the thirty side of twenty-five
Will you be the still side of life
Before you recognize who you are?
How you mutter of strangeness!
As if dreaming of punch-card poetry
Unionized abandon
Regulated passion!
You wish to know who you are?
You are a radiating ricochet of reason
A precious portrait of perhaps
A swinging chandelier of certainty
A vertical river
A nursing mutterer of heretical truth
An explorer of everywhere
A nomad of nowhere
And all that is man, woman and child
Each alone, all together
A family, a party, a world
Of one.
There! -- I thank you
Am I satisfied?
By God, I had better be
For these words shall live far beyond me
And my epitaph, if I forget myself
Shall be:
How he whined
That he could wield
Such magic!
What -- is this a fortress?
These shivering ramparts
Cries of defense and rampage
Archers, defenders
Knights and reporters
Look again
Break this tale:
They wear the same colours.
What -- is this a King?
Does he sit on mountains of good gold
Biting his nails for fear of thieves?
No -- he is an employer
He rents vagabonds.
Listen!
He cries
My heart is a hard scar!
Watch his hands
They are a magician’s
Sawing himself.
What -- is this a treaty?
A bargain of peace?
Squint at the print
Unless invaded…
A certain clause
When co-signed by the same hand.
Listen to the tale of the strangest beast
His eyes squinting with distance
His hide nothing but a cloak of scars
Listen to his circling, his testing, his never-ending quest for simple flesh…
Listen to his yearning!
The crackle of his hard beating heart
A static of intimacy
The waving of his soft antennae
A click of electric distance.
Come; we shall visit his lair
And see the writing on his walls:
Enough alone, enough alone…
He writes frantically; one hand cramped
The other erasing, sketching:
Love, love, love me…
Trace his voyages
They are epic
A spore in search of soft earth
He spins in an endless wind
Hurling speeches of solidity
At passing rooted hordes…
Regard his pursuer
The dark angel of trust
They dance oddly
Both trying to lead
The beast cries: let me trust!
The dark angel replies: first, trust!
How long can this last?
Who knows?
Both are patient…
I was so wrong
I read of a boy who, though beaten
Grew from his harsh nest with bright feathers.
He is hard, impatient, intolerant, almost rude
But his cheeks are red; he slaps his thighs
And laughs at fools.
His blows were not his downfall
He was a rigged ship in the midst of storms
He moved in his flailing wind…
I was wrong because
I thought that the blows were all that tore my sails;
I was wrong because
I thought the wind was physical
Personal.
I was wrong because
I thought I was hated.
In talking, in listening, in speaking
I know I was not hated.
The prickly indifference of the hollow heart
That was the truest, harshest blow
Not hatred
Not violence
Not anger
Just the apathy of the dead
Striking with stinking hands.
I was not separate
Not judged
Nor found wanting in anything
But misery.
My crime was the crime of all youth;
Young hearts scald the walls of old fear
I was a forest besieged by a city
A wind enclosed in stone
A stream bottled in hot sand;
Not sheltered, but held
Not guided, but restrained
Not wanted, but kept
Not hated
Worse;
Not loved.
See the old teacher
Lost in lingo
Stale-eyed he scribbles
A cramped mage of matriculation…
This sorcerer of syllables
Lashes habit into cross-hatches
Stitches new beasts from old hides
And hears the small applause
For their tortured lurchings
A staccato tapping of too-many feet.
His purpose is applause
Originality his enemy
He has become a professor
He professes
Not believes.
See the old teacher
Grasping the widening handles
Of curious youth.
He starts in secret danger
This soft sophist of stagnation
He no longer travels; so
He must slam all opening suitcases
Rip tickets
And recite the dangers of foreign lands.
See this teacher
He has many brothers
In a still city besieged by doubt
They pass pamphlets of foreign foes
Knowing nothing of defense
They can only resist.
What lies beyond these rusted gates
These sewers of convoluted silence
These high walls of old habits
Out on the plains..?
Let us look.
We may mount these walls
By turning our heads
And see an equality of birds and herds
Twisting and diving, flying and falling
Through high streams of clear air;
The principles of flight their only destination
The method of wind their only flight.
In this clutter of certainty
This categorical chaos
There are no parasites
One mounts not others
But oneself.
The charged songs of solitude
Ring out from all heights;
There is no hierarchy
But the last melody.
This is the view the still city repels
The still city is not age
Sad children live there
And the waking old are sometimes flung from parapets
The key to the still city
Is privileged inactivity.
Rewarded for stillness
The inhabitants turn to dust
They fear strong wind
Fear the disintegration of movement
As a statue
Coaxed from its pedestal
Would fall and shatter.
Her silent caves
Are hung with dark portraits
Of old pain
Listen --
A drip of saltwater
Lost echoes of old cries
Blind hiding birds
Startled with broken wings
Beat and squawk in fear and rage.
Look --
This is a maze
Each cave a picture-book…
See --
Here sits a tiny girl
Caged in a chaos of empty hearts
Hands white on the cold bars
Her smile dissolving in snarls
She shields her small soul from all beatings
Takes it, blesses it
And casts it down
Down past memory
Past love, joy, hope
Past the harsh bedrock of pain
Down to a cave within a cave.
Three tears she drops before leaving
And vows to her soul: I will return…
It waits still.
See, here --
A party
A little girl
A desperate hope
An endless grasping of flying skirts
A wide smile, a silent plea
Small fists on torn fabric
A soft void of empty waiting.
At the party she stands
Her smile spread in selling:
Give me love
I will give you joy!
She watches and waits…
No takers.
Another view, older now --
A library, a book
Night, solitude
All gears fail
She sits holding, staring; the words flow and fade…
What distant slumber holds her captive?
She feels like a miner failing in bad air
Sagging and grasping at rock
Lost in a tired dream of tight distance
She falls in the soft fogs of an endless beach…
Here; see my sister --
See -- there is now a hardness
My sister must love.
Rejected, she must love rejection.
Here in the dark halls
Of a soft falling building
Sitting, her hand pressed to her heart
She feels the slow sagging of herself
The silent falling of endless distance
The enduring death of the unloved…
To my sister
This is still a foreign word:
Love!
Driven underground by a harsh sun
She sits in sealed caves.
Above, the world has changed
Children cry of the pleasure of life
Wild rains thunder over rising crops
Birds rise like diamonds flung in sunlight
Her beautiful lover cries for her
Her brother calls in love
We cry, we wonder:
Can she hear us?
Fear not, sister
We are patient in love.
Deep in her cave
My sister waits.
Listen, sister
Listen to the drumming love of our bright rain
Listen to the labour of all good people
Listen to us; we mine for your beauty.
Listen, sister
Return, sister
You are loved.
They held him
Cast him down
Chained and gagged him
But they could not hold him all.
They sealed him
Bricked his window
Walled his door
Still, they could not hold him all.
They stripped him
Coat, shirt, undershirt
Hair, eyebrows, beard
Still, they could not hold him all.
They scoured him
Scrubbed his mind
Of friends, family, lovers
Still they could not hold him all.
They robbed him
Air, sleep, food
Nails, ears, teeth
Still, they could not hold him all.
They reduced him
To wet moments
Of begging mercy
Still, they could not hold him all.
At the end, panting with horror
They beheld him
His glorious face
His last cry: I die complete!
And he dissolved
And they with him
And dust drifted past
The vanished spite
Of savage silence.
Strange dreams…
Last night I wandered a camp
Where human ash hung in bags on the walls
And the old were elbowed in the scrabble for bread.
I thought
When I awoke
That I had escaped this;
This nothing…
I thought I would write a portrait of myself
I shied away from my pen
From dry ink, distractions, boredom…
I feared a portrait
Of white canvas.
I am tight, a structure
It is strange, sad;
That none of me stands alone
Nothing is firm; nothing holds;
I am an eternity of moments.
My noise, my passionate fire
Seems a frantic flashing from the brink
Of nothing…
I feel -- I feel encased
I have no home;
I am blueprints sketched in wind.
You rise, greet day and friends
And sail with loved ones.
I rise, greet others and others
And tremble before winds,
A kite with will for legs
Straining for gravity.
Do you see?
I am a mess of fragments
A distant window of cracks and tape.
Nothing stays where it is;
I blend, whirl, disappear
And fly, wings tiring in a downdraft.
Only now do I have the courage
To gaze below my curled toes
To a whirlpool of vacuum and old cries
A molded soup of careful walls.
I look, and fear my will, my tyrant.
He holds these wars at bay with sharp dogs;
These dissolving sheep start into shape
Eyes wide before the endless barking.
To let go…
What could that mean?
Regard this shattering;
I had to love what I hated
Live where I was daily killed
Breed hope beneath nailed boots
Find future seeds on a harsh moon.
I had to love evil;
This contradiction broke me
Splintered me in thousands.
Do you reach to feel me?
Do your fingers stretch in vain?
There is no centre!
You see, I will forever be
A scientist of myself;
A curious, impersonal
Shocked anthropologist
Scribbling in a warming cauldron.
Here, the simplest, oldest query:
Can it be undone?
Can I be undone?
I think not;
I bleed from every pore
There can be no amputations
My skin was all stripped
There can be no grafts.
My sentence:
To be a staring statue of tourniquets
Knotted, wandering the edge of forever
Stung with the true sight of distance.
Take them -- here
I send these pigeons
The only living things
I have.
Genius:
A tumour
Of absence.
“You know,” said she
“Ha ha,” said he
“She says,” said she
“Who cares?” said he
“That mascara!” cried she
“How boring,” droned he
“These people!” spoke she
“What a party,” sighed he
“What a lifeless recycling of old distance,” shuddered she, as he snored.
High and dry
For so long
Sea out of sight
Rocking in the slight twist
Of a distant spire.
A high cry of dumb distance
Cold crystal clouds keeping company
Swallowing the shock of such echoes.
I dreamt of a fall
I trembled before it
I thought I would dash myself
In an explosion of innards
Now -- how funny!
The simple heart of a suddenly-loved son
The clear wonder of unfolding trust
Reveals the truth
The soft descent of lowering.
I knighted my mind
It kneeled before me; I rose
A sad aristocract
A superior sorrow.
I was above it
Above the hairy, bristling brawl of life
Above the risk of spoken passion
Above the surrender of slow love
I was a quicksilver of conscience
A prickly bush of priorities
An endless energy of waiting.
What -- now -- to be normal?
Ahh -- how these badges tear in the taking-off!
Vanquished surviver of futile wars!
Crushed creature of circumstance!
Hell-birthed screamer of reason!
Each medal like a pin in a cushion
Together
An armour too tight for simple blood.
In this removing, this surrender
I gasp; oldest blood squirts highest.
It is a simple rain of release
For in the meridian of this terror
The soft bonds of brotherhood
Begin to speak:
A lost child is found
By the knowledge of its loss;
A distant soul is broached
By the truth of distance;
Alienation is joined
By speaking of difference.
These webs are not so easily shattered.
Pain is also the vanity of pain;
The strange pomp of exclusion;
The dark nobility of abandonment;
And all the heady perception of fearful distance.
It is human to recoil
Human to love recoiling
And, I now see
Human to return.
What?
In a blink
She disappeared.
One day, smiling, soft, there
The next smiling, soft, gone…
How could they tell?
Was she angry?
No, but where they once resided
They found themselves, not evicted
But alone
They remained, they stayed
They could caress her ornaments
Touch her hair
But she was gone.
They muttered
Cursing, envious
They shot her looks like nets
Wound her in webs of frowns
But she breezed
Floated, flew
They were not even trampolines
Hence their fear
Hence their hate.
How could she go?
They asked
She was a always painted figure
A portrait of punctuality
A vision of caring
A certain study of ease;
She one shone over their dry landscape
A beacon of selflessness
And wandering sailors
Dashing themselves on strange passions
Glanced at her over caving hulls
Through spray, bitter salt
Brief joy, destruction…
One day they looked
And on that high rock
No tower stood
All prisoners freed
Staring, sagging, shaking
They ran their fingers over soft grass
No scar, no trace of a foundation…
Vanished.
Come to church! they cried
Their words like snaking hooks at her flying trail
Come to the meeting!
Come to help
Be helped
Be with us
Be good
Be bad
Be anything
But gone!
Their words passed
She walked from the cliff and danced
All laws lost
Her face was strange
They could not fathom her
A soul lively in solitude
She scorned the courts of freedom
Laughed at the gavels of abandon
And lived unpardoned, unparoled
Unpunished.
They tried words
Words would help -- surely!
Mad, eccentric, odd, abnormal…
They did not help
She did not see them.
Her sometimes husband followed her
In love, in fear.
She danced, she distanced
She giggled and wept
He followed her to a wood
Dropping tears like stones
Paving his way.
She sat in a clearing
Naked to the mind
He followed her
and saw
her cheek on nature’s lonely breast
the leafy hand on her cheek
the woods, the wilds, the endless words…
natural birth, unnatural life
harsh tribe, sleepless comfort;
we sink into bland, blank, ancient books
and order our hearts, our souls, our loves
to god, country, others…
And hold our self
as a poor afterthought, a stolen cake
a midnight treasure under covers
a candle tall in still cellars
a locked comfort
And start before knockings
like a gust, a shudder, a darkness
an apology, a plea
a shame, a scrape
a secret sorrow
a vanishing
Her husband saw her
Beheld her strength, her life
Not disappearance, not carelessness
Not apologies and a stripped self
And when she raised her head
And stared past him
At the leaves, the heat
The solid glow of animals
And the simple passions of flesh
He felt at once
His slow fade into
A vanishing.
Look -- can you see her
As I see her?
This scald of passion
This striving, angry love?
See her in a dark chamber
On deep red carpets
Trembling before her simple rising
Certain that the friction of air
Will wipe the walls with hot flames.
Look closely
She does not only tremble;
She is finding her rising
Becoming it, for she loves, this woman
She loves as summer loves winter
Loves the interruption, the opposition
The stormy smile of wild temperatures.
Her heart is caged; it paces
Snarls and laughs from the shadows of pillars
She is a volcano of waiting
A sudden eruption of soon.
Oh this woman -- you should know her
As I know her!
She is a paradox of passion
A promise of patience
A whirlwind of now and never.
Quick -- see her above
Squint before her fast light!
See -- she flies forever in search of soft earth;
She can fly over a lush green opening of arms
Tumbling, dizzy, despairing;
She feels the heat of the leaves on her cheek
And hungers for the rest of the rising earth
But at the prick of a branch -- she flies
Scattering like a buckshot of hummingbirds
A shooting, skyward fleeing of upward rain.
Ah -- you should see her driving force
Her stillness is always a watching
Her cupped hand a question mark
Her tenderness a probing
But at times -- at times she surges
She mounts the crest of fear;
Horse and rider become one
And then -- the deep thunder!
The bright unfurling of her light soul!
Then you would see her
As I see her
As she is
A wonder.
The world needs change
Some tottering exhaustion binds it still
Some overspending of old answers
Some faltering before an inevitability.
Do you not feel it poised before a transformation?
I feel it; I feel uneasy tribes gathering before a distant dawn
Their medicine men shaking their heads
Reading entrails that speak of a different species.
I read of a transformation
I read that old magic falters before hard thoughts
Old cares before new possibilities
And habits, the oil of ease, are scant bars to these screeching doors.
I read that midwives will shudder at that bathing of this birth
Doctors start, pale-faced
Ages rise in opposition
But we are momentum; we are more than motion
We have striven, grasped, strained
A lock has broken; the future lifts us
We cannot be contained.
What is coming?
We have vaulted the petty trough of want
Straddled souls wide on the horses of thought
Pointed them at the horizon of possibility
Slapped their hinds
And cried: There! There is your destination!
We are humanitarians
We will be remembered thus.
We have bled custom on the altar of potential
Cried havoc to all classes
Rained scorn on all inhibitions
Cracked church, borders, privilege and poverty
And in the high unleashing of all restraint
May be excused for sudden trembles.
We came to structure
To an identity of essence:
Man, woman, rich, poor…
We arrived to halls hung heavy with such gilted portraits
We found art in life, not life in art.
We were amazed by these galleries
By the shushes and glares
It seemed wrong to kneel before such accidents;
We cried: art must flow from life!
Portraits of the highest should be portraits of the best
Bright frames and dark oils should be earned
Not granted.
Why do you hang here?
We demanded of the silent stares
Because we are old… they said
We smiled.
It did not suffice.
We could have borne the privilege
The exclusion, the sneers
But the hypocrisy -- that was unbearable.
Be naked in your power, we cried, or be gone!
But the portraits whispered:
We hang high on the hooks of virtue…
They did not listen.
Did we tear them down?
No -- we are not revolutionaries
Not midwives of mere negation.
We raised the banner of blind equality
That was our reply.
You hang high because you are great? we cried
Then let us open the gates of greatness to all!
Let all earn their place
We shall see who hangs the highest!
They strove to remain above us
They still strive
But now the lie is exposed
Their lie, and ours
They have fallen
As have we.
Our cries of equality!
Did not survive.
We blink at this wild topography:
The dizzy skies of ability
The dank pits of ignorance.
We are afraid of our unleashings,
For we have tumbled from a hopeful plain
To an uneven landscape of reaching and remaining.
We have shattered the symmetry of predator and prey
Into a wild ecology of possibilities.
Now we shudder and clutch our manifestoes in vain.
Our smoothing of opportunity
Has widened all disparities
And we are unsettled by the wild wisdom of freedom:
All find their place.
We disagree with such rewards
We wish better for the least among us
Who loom larger as they diminish in numbers
In the past, too large for sight
Now, too small to miss.
Here is the danger we falter before:
Liberty frees us from brute equality
Wide opportunity breeds wild disparity.
Is there a choice beyond
The conformity of restraint
and
The inequality of opportunity?
If not
Which do we prefer?
Which is to be
Our next age?
Here is the core
The fear
The aftershock of endless shocks.
Here is the crumbling of pride
The hollow echo of hope
The shadow beyond the strike.
Here is the line between then and now
The waiting place
A muttering couch of soon to be…
A white room of blind thrusting
The wide space tumbled into
A hard floor of exhausted tunneling.
Here I may lie
Choking on pale dust
A refugee on the fulcrum of life
Crawling forward
A groping, tipping balance.
What stands between knowledge and possibility?
What looms high before a higher future?
Why, this arch-demon fear
This resounding snarl of never
never
never to be
never to be free
never to be free of
never to be free of never…
Fear is a dark fortress
A wide fist of rock
An airless refuge
A cold bandage of amputation.
Fear is a pit before a blinded step
A dizzy chasm of leaning
A hush below high, heavy ice.
Fear is the hard guard
Of the unborn heart.
Fear is the self-interest
Of the savaged.
The cold bud
Of a crushed petal.
Fear grows
Over an unplanted soul
Too heavily ploughed.
Fear spreads
Like a shock of rising birds
From a carcass of lost innocence.
Fear controls enemies
By becoming the enemy.
I see from my seat of snarls
The world I was bred for
Trembling flesh scattering before growls
The heart of young prey
Fat between my teeth
Shaking hands howling with harrowing
A dawn corpse baying of night freedoms.
This is the world I was bred for:
Streamlined, fat-fanged, bristle-bound
Blood-scented, gristle-rubbed
Sleepless, twitchy, remorseless
Enraged, careless, forgotten…
This is our world:
Where joy is the icing of murder
Love the underbelly of lust
Friendship a prologue to sudden stabs
And intelligence the afterthought of cunning.
We live in
A dreamy reverence of washing blood
A thrashing cascade of salty urges
We live where to walk is to stalk
To see is to spy
To have is to take
To wait is to wilt.
A world where smiles spurn
Laughter lashes
Touch tears
And compassion kills.
This world -- we were dropped here
Sown in this stinging rock
A passport single-stamped:
No exit.
What was stamped?
What was whispered?
Where is the moon for we werewolves?
See -- it murmurs still:
The weak shall perish…
This moon rose early, obscuring our dawns.
When we were weak
We perished.
We birthed our softer selves
From the iron contractions of our contradictions
We are weak; we wailed; we cannot survive!
Must we fail before these jaws?
We begged, bit ourselves
And turned belly to sky, again and again…
The rain passed through us like spears
Our gentle skin sighed and parted; we became bones
Of grinning, rocking weakness
Leaning in a lost landscape of sudden steel.
We see you
When you pass
We perplex you.
You know nothing of our ecology
We do not fit.
Your food chain is a butcher shop
We stalk livelier meat.
Our warpaints clash
With your pastels.
Alive in your small way
Our spraying hearts
Startle you.
Come -- we must speak
We are the two sides of civilization
Us wolves, you sheep.
The union of our teeth and your warmth
Is justice.
Ours is not a personal despair
We see: the world is grey
Shapeless, faded
All glories are shadows of higher peaks
Our valleys are eroded temples
We are atheists of an unseen sun
Praying to the black heads of a burning face.
Come, West
Do not be afraid
I see your fears
Your wild wanderings.
Come
Be at ease
This age of resentment shall pass
Another, more dangerous, shall come…
Be at peace.
You lie twitching
Hands raised in terror-strike
Lurid lashing judgment
Absolute opinion
Selfish benevolence
Moral panic
Unanswered facts.
The bed-wetting of a new dawn
Rises above you
Skyscrapers of foolish height
Pierce tall the clouds
Of all you have known.
Oh West!
You cannot flee this chaos
You are this chaos!
You drink your dizziness
Spin, run
And drink again.
I hear you, West
I understand
Giddy in the spotlight
You dream of small stages
Leafy strolls far from all rousings
Hammocks of thick drowsing
The sinking slumber of obscure solitude.
Oh West -- learn of your nature!
No beast infected you
You are not peace disturbed
You were never roused.
Your imagined rest
Was trapped paralysis
A waiting, a watching,
A when…
You are a mountain soul
Rare air, sudden slides
Precipices, gripping
A shout of slow echoes
A storm of sudden hiding.
Your restlessness
Is not jostled
It is a singe state
A destination of motion
A waking of dreaming
A reaching for endless arms
A strike at the streaking target
Between now and never.
If you still dare
West -- I will reveal your restlessness!
Whether born of harsh lands
Wild thoughts, strange tensions
Or a savage taste for solid earth
I know not
But the truth is clear:
You never believed in God!
You escaped the slow death
Of God as end.
You tasted God as means…
Power, prestige, wealth
Damning piety
Other-crushing humility…
God was never their servant.
Bent, He sweated, grunted
And pushed the plow of purple robes.
He served life
Chained by His master’s lust for life.
God was the means
The cloak of power.
The ends overtook God
And now stand bright, naked.
The sword stands
Unsheathed from heaven
Quivering high from the heart
Of human possibility.
West -- you have always known:
Life is no prelude
No short span
Of endless judgment
But a spasm of thrown motion.
Your lives are coverless books
Unindexed, groped and blown…
In this whirlwind of wild pages
You cry for rest?
For rest? -- Oh West!
Better beg the rock
To hold its hurled arc
Than ask the West to rest.
We are too close
Your Niagara murmuring of shifting sheets
Is to us a thundering cap of drowning light.
What devils?
We see your dreaming
These cracked plains are too hot for height
Yet you have escaped…
Above the fire lies the water
Above the water, desert
You are higher
These quakes only roll your eyes.
We labourers
Hug the Great Heart that hurls us
Our fiery passing lifts you
Like kites over lava
Ascend, smile
Be tickled
We writhe.
We live in the shadow of the Great Heart
Even horizons
Blinded by red beating bulk
The power of unbound life
An altar of shrinking and striking
Fear and ecstasy
You hear only hymns.
The Great Heart is the spilled life
Of early breakings
Uncontained, contaminating
The overspilling of uneven leashings
Charging horses tied by the teeth
A squat structure of volcanic hope.
See -- the ground breaks
But we are not lost
We are used to dancing
Applaud! -- we are pleased with pleasure
It costs us nothing
Our shows are only the excess
Of our survival.
I was given only autumn to plant in
Other fields were bright with life
When I knew nothing of seeds
Other fields were dark with waiting
When I first learned of the turning earth.
Families split pies in laughing lighted nests
While I hoed cold ground
Spilling and scrabbling in the early dark
I envied their delicacies, their wheat of wild colours
I saw a pictured spring of corn minstrels
I wept over my forced loam of hard seeds
The bare nutrient need of gored winter soil.
In the winter, as they stamped and sang
I trod brittle ground under spearing stars
Frozen tears my wind-chime water
Fearful, I tore earth, broke nails, broke faith
Kneeled and breathed on sleeping seeds
Wrapping them as an iris in clear ice
And pushed them back to the blind watch for warmth.
Sometimes I slept on the broken bed of cold soil
Lost in the slow spin of memory
Fear of future starving
Woke in me a huunger for the past
Ate from empty plates
In the yearning recall of imagined food.
It was a hard winter
Waiting for plants
Awaited by people
I learned something of the night that winter
Of patience, the slow spin of starlight
And the failure of flesh to thaw earth.
The cold came to me in those days
I became winter by stalking spring
I threw my threads skyward but could not kite the sun
I panted on the ground, but could not wake the soil
And spring seemed strangely late despite my stalkings.
Until…
Until I became my failure
Listened to winter
One dawn, I forgot about spring
And the cracking seduction of ice spoke to me
(It’s breath clasped my ear in a frozen fist)
Spring, it creaked
Is a surrender to winter
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