Poem: Graveside Vigil

People never really die

Perishing in the vapour of thought,
A tracery of phenomena,
Resonance of words, actions,
Attributing to the infinite
The loitering of incense, trailing
Never-ending transience

From that cold church in Pembroke,
Where, bloody-robed, the curse of Cromwell,
Wet his blade
In the font of my throat,
Witnessed by roods screens and statuary

Now everywhere I see The Virgin,
Clutching her wheat sheaf star,
From the cliffs of thrift,
Along the coast,
Reflecting wave-worn Icelandic spar

The body of the butchered giant,
Is the oak without arms or legs,
Offering hope to all the fallen
Who must now starve or beg

Poem: Feathered Lands

Feathered lands settling on sunset skies,
Blackbirds whispering codes
Well-versed in melodic intrigue,
Prickled all over
By broom-blossom belle-dames,
A net of nerve-endings
Emanating from a nervous system
Incapable of forgetting

From chords strung on moon-bent harp,
The host of Venus on ecliptic string,
Puppetry of stars, jarred by serenity,
Dial tones of birds on the wing

Poem: Putting Out Branches

I see you in everyone,
And everyone in you,

Tracing back along goddess roots,
The mycelial strands of love
Tapped into the forest floor,
Of hair curled, unstraightened,
Twisted into a wealth of loamy
Soil for my hands to cradle
The soft fertility of dreams

With each magnetic pulse,
Each flick of an electric book’s pages,
I’m taken back to The Dreamtime,
To the frozen geometric history,
Where colour therapy, coffee cells,
Thaw on The Event Horizon

Black Holes eat Space
As well as Time.
Those hungry maws
At the centre of the Universe –
Who knows what other dimensions
They consume to feed
The Saturnian Godhead?

Along dusty rings
And other corridors of space,
There are always more thoughts to furrow,
Dreams to till in the emptiness,
The free-flowing fields of magnetism,
The Doppler Effect of chasing sirens,
And V-Formations overhead

Everyday, I put out new branches,
Rooted in eternity’s bed.

II.
I’ve been a slow-mover, yes,
But these branches are just beginning
To find their purpose,
Their desire-driven osmosis,
Disordered, disfigured by time,
Diluting things in a homeopathic
Deluge

Some people have internal orbits,
Moving quickly as moons,
Mercury’s 88 days,

But, I, a Kuiper-Belt Object,
Erratic, far-flung,
Eccentric, elliptic,
Not moving over years, but lifetimes,
Offering injections of impetus
To scattered generations,
Yet so dilute, unfocused, in my own –
A scattered disk,
A nebular pulse,
An asteroid belt of fractured intentions,
Hanging loose around a solar waist,

Somewhere, I reside in an intergalactic monastery,
Meditating in the interstitial fluid of the cosmos,
A vista of infinite horizons, milking the follicles
Of the blue-skinned, unbending,
The Aether-God and his pregnant hollow,
His amniotic wombs of sky,

Yet, here, I loiter in coffee shops,
Rain-soaked valleys,
Clinging to rocks
Like lichen on the faces
Of megaliths, grounded and hoary,

Frenetic, yet as limping,
As slow-moving Kronos,
Who carves out limitations,
The birth scars of The Finite,
The exit and entrance points
Of equinoctial abrasions,
Where the crushed cells,
Haemorrhage into purpose,

III.
Then the rush of blood,
The Uzi-burst of aggressive adrenals,
The restlessness in the night,
The sudden awareness of extravagant grandeur;
Of all the ambitions to be compressed
Into lunations and bone-crushing cycles

Eventually, the private must become public,
The abstract must be fished with the scales
Of practical, earthly, lead, even if silvered
With the mineral veins of panspermic
Meteorites, venturing to add lives
To barren rocks; the trees that form
The Jungles

IV.
The minimal albedo of rain-mirrored cobbles,
Reminds me this all began with musings
On your pillow-stormed hair –
The post-coital look you detest so much –
But which filters like coffee grinds
In my cafetiere idleness,
Keats would’ve lauded
As Romantic Indolence;
A state to be venerated
As sacred petals,
Hawthorn blossoms, over-eager,
In March’s love-lust and excitable anger

There’s no resolution to something as searching
As a mistle thrush’s melismata

 

Poem: Vulcan’s Furnace

 

All words give birth to time,
Carving timelessness out of river-moulded
Landscapes, each frisson of syntax, sifting
The soils, harvesting memories, beleaguered,
Unburdened

What fruit will come out of this
Terrible furnace?
This word-mess of torches,
Emptying pity into mouths of sickness,
Clawing through caverns of unbearable thickness

Each second explodes in a radial pattern,
Symptomatic of a cosmos
Forged in a furnace,
Pounded on an anvil
Of microbial brilliance,
The stardust and starlight
Of a nebular uterus

Kicking Kronos in the teeth,
I chew on his dentures,
And crumble the shards
Into compendia of learning,
A thousand libraries,
All built from the incisors
Of a devourer too old to consume

Time ravels and unravels again,
While Penelope sits at her loom

Poem: Father of Hallucinations

 

Homer, Father of Hallucinations,
Standing before the masses,
His words punching holes in reality,
Each one, a spasm of fractals,
A quaff from The Sea’s wine darkness

His sightless eyes, blind as Tiresias,
Or the injured Polyphemus,
Are infected with the meat
Of Olympian cloudscapes –
The offal and fodder
Of sea-swept kings,
Rent from a homeland
That never existed

His age-stained robe barely covers
His quaking flesh, feverish with the pulse
Of Memory’s maggots; every scene he’s witnessed,
A scar upon his nervous systems,
He can open and extend
Into infinite pictures

He remembers not just his own life,
But everything from now,
Until Year Zero
Unless he recalls it,
It never happened
His recollection is the backbone
Around which reality pieces
Sinew and flesh-scripts

II.

Now, The Bards are all silent,
No cerebellums tumbling from the mouths
Of ancestors – cobwebs linger,
Bereft aught of meaning, but the meat
And mildew of song-maddened spiders

He has attendants to feed him wine,
Laertes-like, to soften the relation
Between current experience and recollection,
Each cup bought to his parched lips,
A thigh-bone sacrifice to a galaxy of poetry

He could lose every slave, every spear,
Every garment – but poverty,
The only poverty,
Is the loss of his speech’s continuity,
And he would sooner bake in The Aegean Sun
Than hear silence descend on his verse

Memory is a psychedelic opiate
When Life is an inelegant nurse

Poem: Penelope and Melinoe

For so many years
My husband has been a phantom,

Each day, I weave him anew
Out of the threads of memory,
The turbid shadows Mnemosyne
Has been kind enough to lend me

My loom – the factory of my thoughts,
The creativity and monotony
Of demon-harbouring hospitality –
Has kept me upon the threshold
Of sanity’s crisp fragility

But then my phantom grew strange,
Poisoned by its own illusions,
Its pearly outlines fleshed
As though to disprove them

His face took form
Out of the scratches on the wall;
His voice bled from the screams
I’d sent down the hall

His skin was the bedsheets
I’d ground to a powder,
My hips – the millstone
Of eternity’s power

Now, his voice is mine,
Encaged in my ears;
It sounds like the secrets
Time tells The Years

Poem: Three Nights

The first night I slept alone
The Ocean sang me its fever,
My moorings were lost in the turbulent heat –
The arms of the gentle deceiver

The second night, my bed untamed,
Chewed me with its awnings,
And all around, the promontories choked
With writhing, lovesick warnings

But, the third night, with sick delight,
Gave freely of its reasons:
I was to decay; grow; wax and wane
In accordance with its seasons

And now alive, no more to writhe
In bedsick, homesick languor,
I see the hope of stars conjunct –
The lighthouse in the harbour

Poem: Disgusting Future

We dreamt of our disgusting future,
Bug-eyed, with bleared lenses,
We scoured the edges
Of the tonal diamond –
The untasted limits of the epiglottis,
Strained to the bit
In the revels of Dionysus

I could not see your eyes then –
Only the marble beads
Of woods in darkness;
Artemis in the corridor
Of ecstasy’s snow-blindness

What is your history?
What leisures of Pain’s imagination
Have your stars spangled?

Unable to answer,
I drank beyond the horizon,
To the Arctic distance of Orion,
Chased by Procyon

It could not taste better:
The dance and the dusk-dream,
The ravages of monstrosity
All curdled like cream

But the goat-chief remembers,
Balked by Baphomet’s cold warning:
The elasticity of pleasure
Is the miracle of mourning

Poem: A Necessary Mess

A necessary mess,
All the coordinates of oblivion,
Enacted in stereo;
Mutated soundscapes, jagged and jarring,
The crumpled-up waveforms
Of transcendent madness

Intoxication is the heart-rate of violation,
The fulfilment of ecstatic trespass,
Overstepping the sacred barrier
Between meat and the soul it encases

Turned out into the strangest places,
The churchyard, garbage piled into mountains,
We searched among the carcasses,
All the futile fruition,
To find the cancer of abundance
Hanging from the branches

How could I have wrought this?
With the whiskey still aging
In oak barrel livers,
And the disjointed footsteps
Of over-extended limbs
Cavorting in agony –
The skull-trophy churches

Then lurching into the dawn,
And the unwatered hope
Of despair-nurtured kisses,
We found union in the trespass
Of corpse-fingered ditches

To twinkle in the star-spilt
Novelty of riches,
Rendered potent by the raving
Word-birth of witches

Poem: Heart of Pan

Fire, fire, keep your heart,
Stoked on beauty’s memory,
Weeds and narcissi interchoke
The lost pages of ephemera

Dazzled by the sparkling earth,
In which our hearts were buried,
Vine on vine tests the girth
Of rivers, untamed, unferried,

But bears no malice to the ford,
Of spells, uncast, unchallenged,
Bitterness fed on bitter dregs
To meet your mind’s trepanning

Yet still on darker days beset,
All hollow notes winnowing,
The music of time’s idle regret
When the pipes of Pan are blowing