GHOST BLOOMS
BY BARRY VAN-ASTEN
2009
O give me thy hand and thy heart;
O give me thy lips and thy brain.
By sweet sensual suspension – depart!
At thy shadow of love – I am slain!
The poems in this collection were mostly composed during my years as an undergraduate at Froebel College, Roehampton Institute, University of Surrey from 1996-99. It would be over a decade later before the poems were published in 2009. Dear old Froebel College; it was in my first year at the distinguished university that I was politely or rather forcibly asked to leave Halls through some silly misdemeanour of which I was thought to be a very wicked and deplorable fellow indeed! This of course had nothing to do with the naked streak around Old Court that I performed to my fellow students, something that should have become an annual event for freshers! Through my own ingenuity I was able to remain as an undergraduate! But petty matters aside, it came about that I took a place in Paddington and worked diligently in my studies! That many of those studies were far removed from the curriculum is nobody’s business but my own and I had a thoroughly enjoyable time under the enchanting spell of the usual, and sometimes unusual, meanderings into the splendid world of vice and narcotics attributed to youth. Partly under the pseudonym of Lucien Taylor, the dreamy character from Arthur Machen’s novel The Hill of Dreams (1907) for I was young and of a romantic air, I indulged my passions for ceremonial magic, playing the guitar in a band (I was taught in Birmingham by two great guitar players: Steve Makin of Slade and Rik Sandford of UFO) and learning to play the piano, studying chess and Russian language, to name a few interests while also studying for my degree which I attained in 1999. Throughout this time I was also witnessing much paranormal activity and endured ‘otherworldly’ repercussions which slowly diminished in their severity over the next seven years.
This first collection of verse is permeated, I believe, with this dark energy that surrounded me at the time together with the wilderness and myth of ancient times which for so long had been a part of me; of spectre-haunted woodlands which also repeat throughout my future poems. An extraordinary desire for love and a sense of belonging which echoes through every line like some viral ache in a distorted love song governs beneath every word and every sound.
Many of the poems feature my own escapades such as my obsession for science in The Resurrection of the Butterfly in which I recall an actual experiment I carried out in trying to revive a dead butterfly as an adolescent. The poem Lost Hearts (titled after an M. R. James story of whom I am an enthusiast) has the name of the dedicatee within its verse and The Heather Garden came about from a recurring dream based on an actual place near where I lived as a young boy; the woods within the poem are the same woods I wrote about in my later published poem In Wake Woods and I did indeed visit those woods one July day and was certainly ‘invisible’. From the ‘pages filled with thunder’ (a reference to Anna Akhmatova; I was reading her Selected Poems) to the ‘buried monks in the playing field’ which alludes to a myth attached to a local Victorian School built in the Gothic style, there is a sense of real devotion which continues beyond life. It is a place, along with its surrounding area that is forever in my heart!
Barry Van-Asten. London. 2009
WYCH ELMS
Beneath the stones, shallow hearts press
The hours into their starry margins,
And the irregular tide of time turns
The years that are passing away.
The shadows in the swept gardens shake and cease,
Winding a heart in as it repeats.
And beyond the boughs, those remembered things,
Where childhood's ghost is interposing
Its secret world: bones of Roman loneliness
Root with slow life and remain;
Signposts in the green hush, where magnolia's
Lose their language and waste away
In dumb reserve... storm's electric menace,
Winding along the lanes again,
Under the cross-hum of pylons
As the steel-ribbed sun is setting.
Wrists of ancestors make a wilderness
Under the pale beam where we wander,
And in the dark woods something dreadful sleeps,
As love careers into view and slips away.
AGAINST US
What strange apostle of wisdom comes
From the hermitage, filled with fear?
He of old pagan enchantment, drawn,
To wear the wild ways beneath his skin;
With history hidden in fingertips:
A seasoned man, forever touching
Love's last seduction...brain-stepping...
And what appalling strength is this
Glut of desire upon us bringing?
The blood-air about us ringed: we kissed
To the cycle of ceremonial sighing!
Yet there was a time once, when song
Was glad in our souls...we listened;
We heard love's language linger long,
As we mouthed the words, not comprehending
The sorrow in the songs we sung.
And beneath the West wind, the end was falling;
We sipped at moon poison and passed into nothing.
My deeds, still dark with worshipping:
I knew, in those degrees of intimacy,
With my blood-lips on your scented skin;
The death-flowers of your craft, in me,
Shall remain, monstrous and stupidly human!
HOPELESS PERPETUAL
Taide
I wandered through your gentle craft
In the twilight of remembered things.
Yet behind the veil of loneliness
An infernal beauty brings
A strange, destructive force within,
That in our hearts will stay.
You read Kafka in your musical Spanish
And each fearful shadow rolled away
As the sun poured in at the window.
We fanned our faces in the heat;
Your head resting on my shoulder,
Yet still our hopeless lips could not meet.
Trapped in the meteor silence of the bed,
I looked deep into your haunted eyes
And saw dark regions passing in Spain
That looked on where the sea-world cries.
But the night had left it's magic still,
Till the day brought with it stupid things:
Your painted toe nails in the sun,
And my foolish heart that always clings
To the embers of that first encounter,
Manipulated by memory;
That great mystery of age, worlds between us -
Lost to you and lost to me.
THESE THINGS WE FORGET
Man, in the prose of life,
Where only memory can contain
The fragments and fibres of our ruin;
The importance of dates and their meaning.
Where the impressions of song gave us something;
Of horoscopes, of twilight, of dreaming,
Like the passing into that which we have known.
And I followed a pathway through the marsh
Describing things in the language of her birth:
Ravens, cow-parsley, buttercups...
Love's universal tongue never stops.
But feelings then were something secret
And only in memory do I find her now
Amongst the echoes of the past I used to know.
Yet, what passions still might fall
As we distance ourselves once more in speech?
Between the remembered and the forgotten,
Where only the necessary shall remain...
And this dark momentum of past destroyed,
Where life unresolved, and for all that,
Time accepted now will stay.
But what simplicity has begun
To lie only in memory's broken beams?
Am I to remain here, dismantled and dumb
With love always to mean more than it seems?
And what awful hour nears? Time's honour!
That in lighter moments and calmer days
Finds all things gone which once were ours.
And these things we forget,
Like the instances between us,
Governed by love's viewless ways
Where the noise of time bleats, bleary-eyed,
Devouring the chronicles and space
Between pleasanter moments and measures:
Sees itself, yet beyond can't pass.
TELESCOPE DREAMING
This eye-glass on Byzantine worlds
Of our own mythological fate,
Locked upon some distant star
Like Gullivers' gulping on dead space.
A penetrating lens that strays
Beyond those satellites that sing,
To pause on the past and make
A flash in the sky our everything.
As if looking on the microscopic
Where seasons are big things unknown
To single-cell abominations
Content to let big things alone.
A distant supernova detector
Viewed by voyeurs of light years,
Where we are but an eyelash in the soup
Straining at things too far away.
But our little world of telescopes dreaming
Of space...infinite space,
Can't tell us that we're not alone
In a universe of illusion that remains
Content to let big things unknown.
ALWAYS
I looked in the cool of an autumn
As shadows dripped from her white dress;
Remembering the brush of her hair
Against my face as we kissed.
We laughed in the crimson madness
As I pushed into her hand, a charm:
Some green-sparkling glass, of no value,
Except a gypsy once kept it warm.
And together we walked by the shore;
She, with her white dress flapping
As the salty sea breeze was drifting
Over the wet sand, and keeping
Secrets from the wind, and knowing
That the feelings found in those first days
Will be kept like some sparkling glass charm
That remains in our hearts for always.
THE NAME HELEN
The utter darkness, the hopeless pull,
Spun through brains and approaching dawns...
There I stood, like stone Saint John,
Devoured by the night's dark assumption.
And coming in from time, I awoke
To the white walls and half words
That shifted to and fro between us
In the tiled glow of the hospital wards:
This is all of it, I thought, and I have seen
The hollows of your language and the wickedness there.
But I believe in her, in this wilderness,
Though my soul could harbour no Gudrun:
My veins - streams of poison,
My heart - swims with passion,
My brain - the unknown god
That dwells without span or spoken reason.
We are towers that reach into the sky,
Each sinking into different hells.
And if you knew, that within my frame,
Packed away into little cells,
I am the hills and meadows that wander
Far away and touch no one.
Then my God, think of me and do not shout,
For it is something fearful that brings me here.
I am the years and I am alone,
Like an invisible phoenix in memorial glass -
I rise only to find your name and nothing else.
Her dual nature, fixed with the stars,
And timeless, I ache for the meaning of love,
But life is impossible and too cold to stay
In the vain hope of knowing its indifferent ways.
I heard the golden throng of woman
Give musical magic to her name, and then
She fell to the fear of the wretched blue silence
And shut away all hope of change:
My eyes won't open on this world, she said,
My sorrows grow great where shadows remain.
But it's no use my speaking from the heart,
I can never release the hurt inside that I feel.
And an angel stooped near to her and whispered:
We have drank our souls dry and come through,
Time now for you to live again.
But night of many wonders - birth,
Is revolved along the dim-worn waves;
Concealed by the fringed mystery that rages...
You're wasting your time in meaningless things,
(And frightening me) for I am dumb;
Locked away...rotting away...
Paled by the war-weary turn of the moon.
I heard the lonely song of man
Echo over the haunted lawns, now forgotten.
But we cannot return, no, nor look back
Upon the past and all that's been said before.
There is too much dark matter come between us
And afterall, I must name things, always name...
For evermore.
And these hopeless lips that will never kiss
Or speak another name but this,
Will forever be still, though inwardly uttering:
This despair within our hearts is drear,
Yet we said nothing, damned nothing!
For something ceased in her dimension
Like so many shapes in the frozen waste.
Her sweet tones, now dull beneath the boughs
Said nothing more than dreams could say
When I realised the adventure was too far away.
SOMETHING WILL BE DONE
I live by the power of the amulet;
Of stones and consecrated objects.
Kept in an iron place, I no longer hear
The oracle of sickness: love's undoing.
Between elbows - signs of conjuration
Performed in my anatomy.
A talisman holds you in my sphere;
A goddess in flames: love's ruin.
Let me breathe in your existence
And define the perimeters of love;
To feel the workings of your skin
And the softness of its touch.
But the plague of youthful adoration
Drifts like ribbons on the sea,
Fearful of the ocean guardian
Between the ceremonial waves again.
And I destroy myself by constellations
Where memory's a museum of my love.
We are guided by astronomical phantoms
To intermingle, blood with blood.
But my body is an almanac
Bruised by the morning sun,
And for all these crafted calculations
Something will be done.
CAPRICORNUS
A model of pure reason,
He bounds to the glory of the day,
Awake, with a galaxy of imagination
That corrupts and conquers in his way.
Upon his noble brow - distinction,
Creases with time where horizons play;
Immortal in the dawn's expansion
That looks on the crimson waste, to pray
As he struts aflame through every nation -
Vile, the tongue that speaks his name.
It is but one to him: religion -
They are but mirrors of the same.
And in his abysmal trail of devotion
He can compel each heart to shame;
Extreme upon extreme abstraction,
Curled by the blasphemy of his frame.
His torso, a war-engine of destruction,
Monstrous in his will to pursue;
His brain: a trigger of perception
Sees the cosmos streaming through
To stride the elements of perfection
And sing, as lover to lover, will do;
Where the wide accelerated passions
Lies weeping in the glistening dew.
Bored by the limits of cruel creation
He broods on a world, unable to forget
The grind of the axle to every motion;
The sacred scratchings of the prophet.
Thick and rounded, this dimension
Strains to express the course that's set
Through the lower regions of comprehension,
And the perfected beauty of woman. Yet,
His eyes are flames of satisfaction,
Bristling with strength and vibrant with lust,
To redeem the madness of evolution
And crush a universe into dust.
THE OCCUPIERS
I
She keeps a warm place in her heart
Where the ghosts of children cry;
She has buried her principles in filled graves
And there she lets the secret lie.
The sordidness of life makes her sick
As she breathes the chemistry of the bed.
Lost in the preciousness of skin, she prays
For the resurrection of the dead.
In the evening's half-way light she sat,
Like an empty purse on the kitchen floor:
Useless, utterly useless, she cries
Between bashing her brains against the door.
There, in the dying of the old year,
Still directionless and dumb,
She cements the circles of her sex
In a broken line between thigh and thumb.
The love inside is dead, she said,
Let its bug-eyed flame rest eternal.
And a crown of thorns between her legs
Still weeps for the Christ, maternal.
Seized in the white laughter of suspension,
A rhapsody of whispers calls her name,
And faces lie crumpled in the cushions
Where the experimental ape became
A carousel for Newton's physics;
A secret hid behind a door,
Committed in the name of science
And spread across the kitchen floor.
Her dry brain sips at cartomancy,
To turn the Lovers her heart yearned,
Yet in the extension of the grave,
Death was the only card she ever turned.
II
He says the need within him hammers
Obscene patterns on the pillows;
And in the folds of his cardigan - Niagara,
Wheezes through truncated bellows.
Why should he speak of the moonlight?
He knows its monster power sucks
Life from lemons and tobacco dust
And rips the bindings of his books.
He said his universe is upside down;
Pulled inside out about his home -
The minuscule smudge on the mantelpiece is
A little bit of Paris and a little bit of Rome.
With a broken heart and a broken throat,
Consonants and vowels were easily spread
Across the feared carpet inhabitants
And the old songs of the dead.
Like an ancient oak among the stones
His magpie sex was crucified.
With wicker bones and thorny thighs:
Here was Christ identified.
Smoking between secrets and astrology;
The long hours roar like pipes full of wind,
Where he is discharged by torchlight
Into the Manx-lipped wunderkind.
He is a bathroom grotesque
That stares through misty eyes of green
To see beyond the measure of skin
And the inch-thick waste that lies between.
He keeps a map of the world on his wall
Where he plots journeys near and far.
But he knows he'll never leave this cruel
Circumference that governs what we are.
RESURRECTION OF THE BUTTERFLY
In kamikazic state and crisp,
Steered and wrenched from soft illusion;
Terrible, its fragile, dust-blown shape
That carried its fat world within -
A sarcophagus tick, hear it crack
With sunlight spooned upon its back.
A Cinderella slipper; the Cutty Sark
Sailing between the earth and moon.
Precision filled waste - an engine of love,
Clumsily ripped its world apart.
Nightfall and O how everything's changed:
Nature and dimensions, re-arranged.
But unlike the stink crazed filth obsessed fly,
That celebration of the Gothic:
There are no songs, there are no buzz ballads;
No embarrassing moments and no bad manners,
Which is why the fly finds it difficult to get
Into butterfly circles and butterfly etiquette.
Yet behold! Pharaoh and his aphrodisiac
Filtered by moon powers
Into a gossamer-sighing Icarus,
A testament of beauty's charm,
Soured by the need to explain
The difference between sacred and profane,
As some 'dressed up' doctor with sulphurous eye
Sat under the stairs by a dim bulb to break
Sachets of sea salt and stare through glass jars
Of bright coloured inks, and investigate
Nature's larder of breathless experiments
And the periodic table of the elements.
And in attempting the cathode resurrection
With veins sighing for Frankenstein,
I saw those wings beat once, and no more
One Summer's day to the song of a lawn mower.
Yet life sat blinking far away, and Colin Clive
Was as silent as the grave:
There was no 'It's alive! It's alive! It's alive! '
But life's intrusion will wound it still
Soldiering over the centuries
To flicker like Caligari's ghost;
To sigh, measureless at moon's kiss
And yawn beneath some superior pulse
That beats full stops and nothing else!
THESE SIMPLE THINGS
Because she keeps me young and foolish
And does not ask for explanations,
We go, towards the one world that we know
With lips poised and pressed upon secrets,
Unstoppable in our own absorption.
But in all her craft - dull tenderness
Is consumed by this unchanging passion
That blots the world out with a stare
As we turn love's corpse inside out,
Only to worship at its feet once more.
And unable to focus on what we have,
It is only the simple things in which we care.
But still I keep a little something near
Which I warm between fingers and thumbs,
Like some saintly relic or astral shrine
That looks back on our strange art that wove
Delights unfathomable to our love.
And with these simple things we feel
How this existence grinds us thin -
Love's minstrel without vocabulary,
That silent enemy in the veins again
Which overshadows what we have and
Transfigures what we can't sustain.
For something monstrous now has grown
To find its strength with agile steps,
While somewhere, a couple, falling to bits,
Fall from inside - do you see?
Sighing and falling inside,
Were outside falling to bits.
And I want you in my world again
As I go thumping and shaping life.
I'll do what I'll do and go, I said,
If only these simple things would remain.
But dearest, we have said awful things,
And I will never leave you while there's
Still hope within.
THE MYTH OF MASKS AND ORIGINS
With half a mind for metering,
We all must wear the same mask here.
Where sorrows mapped upon our faces
Are lines written on our hands.
And here, I find, I will be wandering
Those dark and silent corridors,
Holding on to girlhood's pigtails
And touching her bronze limbs once more,
That quickly turn to powdered chalk
Beneath my wild and roving hands
That draws death nearer with each stroke
To smudge over our yesterdays and our origins.
Yet her lullaby lips would not say yes
To my chosen words - those foolish things.
And I look towards the mirrored doom
To see my own soul shown in selected time,
As the hawker in the cosmos climbs
Behind some womanly vision,
Like a gold and ever flowing stream
- A Xanadu of imperfection
Vanishing down the long gardens
Into the passage of time,
To scribble this mess of life away
And write the damned lot from my brain.
Years later,
The bitter ring of puzzled myth
Stopped me loving someone.
And through my own unnatural vigour
I thought: why can't I be free;
Free from one's own cellular making
Where we are preludes of invented
Evolution's mockery?
Free from this thick ether we breathe
And free from one's dreams, forever.
I
Under correct lighting, she is
Venus in trouble;
Thrusting herself into opposites
By the green light that glows.
Within her lips a universe:
A chapter-house of indecision.
Dimensions change and ghosts listen
To the jet boom and march of pensive time,
As crossed Demeter, by broad meadows,
Matchless in her unstoppable decline,
Turns over her cosmos and dreams once more
Of some Hercules at the coal-face, again.
And there, by the rivers of sharp time,
A day of words, worlds away
Along the red rush of madness, where I find
I am under eternity's watchful eye
That cannot see past dawn's perfection,
Or this intrusion that cannot love or die.
Cathedrals groan with a sea-ward glance
Where words repeated softly chime.
I make this mask my own, and find
I juggle the sun and the moon through space
That whistles through my afterlife -
A delicate obsession in its prime.
Yet her rose hath bloomed in womanhood,
Cyclones away...so far away...
Sculpting herself under daydreams
Where through our eyes we are exchanged.
But the black woe of the tide has called me:
Movement of the Seine.
These hours locked in solitary ways;
Stung in animal death (come soon)
Have spared me. And by degrees
Nothing changes, or so it seems...
You're worlds to me -
You're worlds away.
II
In artificial light, he is
Adonis - adorable,
Flinging himself into opposites.
Upright in Arcady,
One sees oneself and retreats
Into a Northern vale, and poison.
Seducing under my skin, eels glisten
In this jet age where early mother's blooming.
Between the light, I fall away
Into a day of black suspension
Held by a devil with a slow hand.
And in my anguish I grasped passing time...
Like angels in swansong darkness, I find
The winter trees and I glow.
In the grandeur of our dreams, we are there,
Yet who sits with me but cannot know
That a machine has declared itself our god,
And we are dreams, dreaming there?
The life I lead bleeds me dry and fire
Beneath an altar warms a jar,
Changing my dimensions within;
Singeing nerve-endings and soft tissue:
You keep me always ruined, I said,
Wrapped inside this endless skin.
In his sterile, easy slumber -
He wants me: thief of beauty.
Dead inside, he has drowned me
In the wide orbits of his cobalt eyes.
He whispers and wants all of me:
Movement of the Thames.
My living tree - genealogy,
Holds secrets of statues and stones.
And to the changeless tide, I will go,
Because I cannot stay, I know,
In this mask always and look on you
Worlds and worlds away.
III
How I am damaged by the afternoon's light
Where larger worlds than this resist
To crease in the depths of love and death.
Yet, through the laws of alchemy,
I am a blue monkey and I glow
Like a torso full of gypsy rhythm.
And I am gold and I flow through the midsummer fires
That engulfs the head's accumulation of lifetimes.
And at the stroke of midnight - a vermilion swan
Is wrenched from purple veins that rot;
Concealed within a moated mausoleum -
I hear them signalling under my skin.
And in baroque splendour - Death,
Is snorting in corners and dunging,
Shuffling by sorrow's robe of regret.
While a eunuch in the monument is searching
The darker regions. Nothing sleeps -
A violet panther through the midnight creeps,
Shaping itself by the light of this room.
Here, Behemoth's squat frame dangles wax fingers,
Dripping like sodium candles aflame.
There, in macabre rutting, a red bristling pig,
Its eyes broken in the morning sun,
Performs staggering routines by outside force.
And in antique times - Babalon,
Is transfixed by the light of the moon,
Longing for the kiss of madrigal lips,
Only to look on Sodom's pink gaze again:
Am I dimensions dreaming in your skin,
Where this black owl's flight weaves its bygone days?
Watched Hector, cold, like Sunday morning death,
Hiding family secrets in every crease...
I must unravel time and go beyond this wilderness;
Beyond the governable by instruments and iron marionettes,
Where womanhood has tumbled to activate in me,
Response, as we hunger through the centuries.
BLUE INTERLUDE
Frail, iridescent star
In the cosmic green of man:
She has fled our bournes and brooks now,
Too cruel to understand.
But imagine a time of not knowing;
Of seasons measured in fingernails,
Where a theatre of mistakes, unwinding,
Still dowses after death, and fails.
Where someone keeps the hours, someone
Still listens for womanhood's corrosive call,
Into a silence that leaves its listener cold,
Longing for birth tracks, and that is all.
But here, the glass tower's dreaming
Under time's hooded flow,
Where the innocence of love falls, is falling
Into a world we do not want to know.
And there, waiting at the gates of the lodge
According to her habit,
A woman wept to see us still
Defying time and not changed by it.
For my heart reflects your sadness,
And changeless - sings, but sees
No love of life, nor love for us,
Nor love of mortal things.
Yet something animal in its nature;
Something cold and magical
Is born in us, and programmed to lure
The tide of man's sorrow to worship still.
But will time beat out this tragedy
Between our souls that sigh?
Two unshaken blossoms, that
Each side of a woodland lie.
Frail, iridescent star
In the cosmic green of man:
She has fled our bournes and brooks now,
Too cruel to understand.
SPOON BENDING
The house is empty and seems so cold;
Rooms are dying, winding down, all through,
Where childhood thumbled* long ago.
And in seclusion, I dummy death,
With fingers touching, still content
To draw stars and circles in the air.
Here, lion-crouching or war dancing;
Test-monkey sitting and laboratory squatting,
Waiting, expectantly, as if you would come in.
Round and round, without touching
Floors and walls or appliances:
These interiors have become your Himalaya's, you said.
And in my hunchbacked morality - I hypnotise...
Corners are head-shaped and I fit in.
Both as giant and insect, table-drowning,
Wanting to hear your voice, but then
Electric socket dreaming and spoon bending
Have taken you from me once again.
*this poem was written in the company of my dear friend Laura Gouldbourne who given the choice between the words 'tumbled' and 'thumbled' chose the latter and chose wisely!
IS THIS MADNESS OR JUST DARK STUFF?
With our monster heads in trouble
We talked of everything and willed matter
As my clumping, cavalier love rushed in
To see something not there and never there.
It's the little things you do, I said,
That drains me of this utter absolute.
Unwholesome in love, these senseless strategies
Lead us deeper into extreme measures
Where beauty can't find its natural release.
And I don't hurt you, is that what's wrong?
Is that why we crash through our dreams
Into this Caligula of things not done?
This is sick, you say...I know;
This cathedral of little things I give,
Labelled and kept like icons, locked away...
But there's something sinister in love, I said.
Not that I know of, you sighed;
We make time for the good things in life.
And time is on your side, you said;
Nothing's changed, your heart is just the same.
But time's on no-one’s side, I said.
And this is a dangerous game we play
For love will fold its arms with fear
To sit, zombie-eyed in a magazine stare.
And when no one's there, something
Stirs the substance of our ruin,
Yet we elevate above these things
To find love is nothing more, or less
Than some antique devotion, where
We are lunatics with arsenic breath.
LOST HEARTS
But for a shared moment, long ago...
Your voice is painful to me now;
There has been too much said and done between us
And I have shrunk from the world I used to know.
And there are no simple words, just stupid
Things that we said in the past;
Now an impossible cosmos of hurt feelings
Where two hearts had won and lost.
But it's awful how we dream, somehow,
Of sorrow's wickedness in the heart,
For I made a Pompeii of my love
And buried the whole damn lot.
And you will pass as in some dream
Where echoes of those far off days
Shall murmur, winter-thick and constantly:
Love and us remain always.
But my mammoth love was cooled by Severn
Since long before your birth, I said.
Yet still the soft voice whispered near:
Give our unbroken love delight.
And I am obsessed with dead time
And other things shall follow soon.
I do not know of love or its ways
Because of unnatural reserve, nothing evolves.
But like ancient stones we'll stand,
Labouring under some misplaced spell
That will tick us to the end of time,
Into its blue-lipped oblivion.
FINDING ORPHEUS
Under love's not sleeping,
We turned our backs upon the wind
And made a picture book of symbols
From dry leaves and feathers and things that
We'd found.
And we whispered softly into bird madness
Which gave less dread of volume.
Herded like cattle over ley lines;
All night we sang sorrow's tempest is done,
Spun of the fairest years, now flown;
Flung back to a braver and radiant realm
To give the death's-head force of nature form.
But a memory of love persisted
Where meanings in broader mysteries cling,
Through this simplicity, drawn
Like a dark veil over everything:
A watery voice; an echo of time's arrows
That murmurs softly from afar,
Blowing its visceral night ballads that roll
Through easeless age and what we are.
But now, a Macbeth in the heart
And a Caesar in the brain
Have given meanings to symbols, and thoughts
Are the beginnings of speech - silent again...
With the spirit's core, we erode our past
And find its obscure language dead;
As dead as the Latin word that seems
A thumping Caliban of things once said.
Still with eyes closed, we feared to look
Upon the eve of another day
Where evolution leaves us sick again.
THINGS, SHAPE AND CHANGE
Not one atom of her do I know -
It makes a Tartarus of my pains. I'll go,
Quick and crooked as a grey ghost in rhythms
That boom to the beating of brave decisions.
And the things that we said yesterday
Will return in their own unstoppable way
To shape this devotional act of ours;
To haunt us with words that creep through the years.
And in the seven world, she is the wind
Where I am the other world's calling.
But I cannot see past my twenty-ninth summer
Or the flicker of the old world's glamour.
While stammering through my introspection:
I am dumb in my disappearing origin.
And love will blood, where it has tumbled
To the great mechanism of the dead,
Gazing like Narcissus at the watering hole
To find love a shadow of his own soul
And the calamity of passion too much to bear
On one so young that lingered there.
Yet, we dreamt beneath the deep and dark meandering
While inside our hearts the universe was falling;
Locked in strangeness, surprised in our skin:
We are minuscule in our momentum within.
But history is awakened and made for twisting -
My heart sleeps in the fold by the lake's light, drifting.
And smiles of alabaster return lipless grins
Stretched over dreamt isles - asleep in our skins.
THE MAYFLY HATCH
Indifferent to change - I'm electric,
You're electric too, I said,
Oscillating and reflecting.
And by these fruits we suffer,
Yet neither of us more than the other.
And I yearned for all this in my youth:
A space among divine flesh, and summers;
A device to calm the sorrowful breast
Gripped by the neutrality of woman and universe.
Still, I hoped for better things to come:
Things said and not said,
Things done and not done.
But behind the north wind - Avalon
Still draws the line of her descent
To clamber and fall with colossal fear again.
Dawn, swans and aeroplanes...
I awoke to your Saturday morning cough
And found it impossible to face myself.
I tried to recapture love in semi-solids,
But when the hour came, I was Golem,
And not some clean-shaven Adonis
I could never be. And so
Remembering the old ones in words and ways
I found myself in her circumference of skin.
Hooked like a lead ball about her heart:
A weight to weigh her emotions with.
To navigate the nucleus, and begin
Observing the cycles of motion and rest:
A universe in a chemical system
Turned by moon tactics over centuries.
But still I hoped for better things:
For this thing between us to unfold;
For this thing between us to evolve.
Yet we retreated into a world of old bones,
Into the cold, grey tombs of the minster,
Afraid of TV's and telephones -
Gripped by the intensity of man and world.
And I hide epileptic secrets, I said,
Like pathway gates locked shut.
But as past masters of the broken heart,
We will always be scum devouring scum.
NOTHING ADORED
This our dream of man, upturned
By frantic cycles, by reason formed
Into his minor art - his brain
Will suffocate nature once again.
Stripped of senses, he will come
To gaze on multiple man, knocked dumb.
But what fiend slips its infernal rest
To strut in Sunday morning best
And shuffle in its eyelid dance
And wade ear-deep in elegance?
Wretched at the invisible kiss
Of nothingness into nothingness,
He investigates the opposite sex
With a pencil, a mirror and a cardboard box.
This, the dark side of his reputation;
The poison in his marrow's infatuation.
His favourite armchair was a veiled gateway
To love's adoration where passions play
Speechless, in courtesan charm and wit
Till Death with his soul-catching net
Sat grimacing over knife and fork
To lure the silent one into talk.
But teatime came and went so quick
Like some effortless magic trick;
His screw-eyes searched for resurrection
As he fisted the air with a perilous question,
But nothing in the question was worthy of an answer.
On his feet, blisters, the size of Alaska,
But he saw sweetness in most things:
His blisters weren't blisters, they were his wings
And this is the tragedy, half concealed
By grim anticipation and love's shield
That has revealed the infinite light,
Cup 'n' saucered through the night.
But in looking back there was no art
To hide the Romaness of his heart,
Prized of all emotion, bent
Upon the workable structure of his element.
Yet some talk of twilight, some of Queens and Kings,
But he squirmed at empty words, darting at nothings;
Audible thoughts were painful to his ears
And he wished them silent for all his years,
For there were no words that could express
The nothingness of adorable nothingness.
DRACULA'S COUSIN
Dracula's cousin
Lives in a suburb of Birmingham,
Lisping after the severity of flesh:
His only weakness and his sole outlet.
A bachelor of modest needs
With divination roots that thread
The immemorial sleep of day
Like dancing sea-shore feet,
As faces collapse like dropped buds
Between the sunrise and the dead.
His fingers black with printer's ink
Leaves yesterday's headlines on drained necks.
But no stranger to enchantment, no,
He courses as some satellite,
Steering his blue-shadowed skin that shakes
And sinks into beauty without regret.
And in his most brilliant of moments, one finds
No hesitation, no awkward talk, none,
Just spontaneous in thought and outspoken
On things he's not seen and not done.
But it matters to him, this world of nothing,
This 'creating symbolic magic' by hand.
Yet he was nothing but dead apologies
For a world he could not understand.
MOON BREATHING DEEPLY
TO LAURA
Under the moon's slant grin, we rushed,
Howling in the rain like Neanderthals;
Storming through an avenue of pink roses
That seemed to climb the skies outer reaches.
With electric heads in blooms - we stumbled,
Like two Frankenstein monsters fleeing
A mad professor's dynamo menace.
Beneath the rose archway, it struck suddenly
As our whispers became sledgehammer thuds.
And I studied the lips on your singing mouth,
While above, the stars, in silvery-timbred boredom,
Eased back into their snug soft pockets
And looked on...we gasped,
Under night's snoring cauldron, knowing
Something had walked away from us;
Something unreal without a word.
I was at the mercy of your tra-la-la,
As your chin doubled with excitement.
Is this all there is to what we are?
Are there no new horizons breaking?
Won't You tell me of love's pensive ways?
I want to dwell in the groves of its pain.
Tonight, by the zodiac, all iron and zinc,
I want to feel love in the curves of your sleep.
Reveal by the wrappings, a world unseen
Where oceans are born and tides quickly turn.
Where a life-force stares like a great solar lion
Back upon this obscene creation - earth.
The heave of time's momentum swings,
Shoved around a sunlit room where it finds
A history lingering in your clothes.
With bedroom veins in slack suspension -
Circuits are probing the unforeseen.
About the room, things sit and listen,
Monitoring the awkward silences again.
Outside, the sun's all pain today:
The nemesis of external change.
Sat like Buddha - this is pain,
Ruled by symbols...My rejected torso
Seemed as old as the pyramids again.
We both collapsed on a cigarette
After totalling the wounds on our arms and legs,
As we paused to capture the necessity of now:
Must we destroy and re-build everything in our way?
Must we shape history to our own desires?
The hours passed, I watched them pass;
Pass strange into that dream idyll,
Where there is words in tears, afterall,
To leave me with the traces of your faith still.
I saw how we fell to the glance and gloom
Of another April's boomerang dance.
And it's terrible, I thought, this obsession in the heart,
Always looking for the place you've been coming from.
But perhaps the concrete dark sun of August
(That omen of ends and beginnings)
Will earth us in this great nothingness;
Or perhaps some inner star sign will show
Internal change is change too late, for us.
SOMETHING SUPERNATURAL
H.V.K.
At twilight, I imagine her as before,
Assembled from posted fragments, gathered
Into an alphabet of her ways and more,
Until the female form is covered -
Girlhood's expanse, recurring somehow...
But her eyes only show the reach of dreams
Cutting through the hallway's glow,
Concealed by something more than she seems.
And yes, it's terrible, how she will never say
Those words I need to hear the most.
And when the feminine part inside falls away
To the flood of grim September's ghost,
I won't leave the room, instead I'll wait;
Time won't tell but time will pass,
With my lens fixed to the iron gate
To see its shadow fall across the grass.
For something supernatural keeps her near,
Where desire, dying under dream's wing
Is something sealed that our hearts' won't hear:
Too involved in ourselves to love, and ending.
METAMORPHOSIS
Love's sweetness calls,
Through the nothingness, curled
To those words that grooved me
And kept me from the physical world.
Reduced to the beating of chemistry
In the wheat field's dreaming dawn
Where beauty's native soul is born.
Time's angel knocks,
Where change was longed and won by man,
To weave over this spinning age to stray
Upon his astronomical glance
That crashes and drops and looks away,
Glimpsing the history of love's oblivion
That's torn by the lamb and loved by the lion.
Man's beauty falls,
And eternity's cruel device
Will speak of love no more and fade
And gaze no more on the sacrifice
Of midnight lips that often strayed
Upon fair Ganymede's sweet allure
That sought the Baphomet obscure.
Death's spectre raps,
To measure the sweep and curve of experience
Found within this awesome frame.
He is sipping over the heart's expanse
With the promise of an immortal name,
In search of molecules more than mine
And a structure harder to define.
THE HEATHER GARDEN
I dream of a garden I don't know,
Its mystery blossoms through the seasons.
And here, I wander where the unknown root grows;
Where pathways are words written over hills and streams.
I
DARK JOURNEY
O dark witch of my heart, retreat
Into your fabled land of dreams,
Where I await your icy mythology
Galloping through this emptiness of skin.
Come out and speak of your Northern past
And the tales that have been handed down.
Come out and weave for me, my love,
For here in the heartland I don't want
To be folded away by the garden gate
And unable to see beyond the glass
Where a roomful of cat-magic lies within,
Undisturbed in a grey-powdered mist.
I know her and she will not wait;
She has promises that she cannot keep.
But I imagine her always close to me,
Thinking in secrets while she weeps.
Veiled Aurora - unfathomable,
And changeless where sorcery sleeps.
With hair as dark as the dreamless grave
And crystal orbs glowing from the seventh sphere
Show shades of an incredible past. I know
We will embrace in the fiery red planet's wake
For the first time and the last;
We will walk through the midnight garden,
Through its silhouettes and shades
Till our voices no longer strain to utter
All the hurt that love no longer hides.
But unknowable in her lamplit gloom,
She desires the forceful sway of the sea:
Perhaps she was born of its foamy spray
Somewhere in a Northern bay? But
Winter brings new ordeals and sadness
Like a visitor, flowerless and unwelcome,
With a fist pushed firm into your mouth.
And from her dark room she gazes out
To the broken railings round the pond;
To the black remains of the mill, and beyond,
To the sunlight on the silver stream
That reveals the mayflies breaking free:
How I envy their short lives, she said,
Dreams on Neptune's weary wave...
A trout twists and spins in the pools of shade,
Drawn to a dry-fly in the sun's haze;
Magnified by a ghostly fish eye,
Snatched from dimensions of black sanctuary, again.
Two figures stood gazing into the pond:
He loved her once...long ago, one said,
Like something beyond the living and the dead.
And now, she won't leave the house, she won't leave,
And death has become a recurring theme
Now that there is blood in words once again.
A white mist has descended upon the house
Like a blanket spread over its awful hold,
And I can't see beyond the smoky glass.
But I imagine her cocooned inside, somehow,
Wrapt up tightly as a moth,
Awaiting the end of her labyrinth of sleep
And the end of her wordless universe.
Yet the garden remains to her tender touch;
Full of love, though dark as the night.
She is the whispered wind in the swaying boughs
And the autumn leaves upon my face.
She's there in the gentle air that soothes
And sweeps across this lonesome place.
But no memory of sleep nor its release
Can give these pale bones what they need.
For I am lost because I cannot keep
The one that I desire inside, the most.
Come and embrace the darkling wound
That you have wrought upon my flesh.
It glows in the interminable shame of night,
In the brightness of these sufferings.
Yet who is it that walks in the garden
By night and remains unseen?
Who is it that hurts my endless heart
When each night I awake to find
That love has walked with nothing more to say?
Seen from the mill pond, nothing moves;
The old gate hangs on its rusty hinge.
Yet the dark windows speak of lives
Falling away...forever away, inside.
And a presence lingers to be loved
Where the riddle of the garden soothes.
A tree grows across its dim threshold,
And here will be an eternity, I thought,
Now that the spell is cast.
II
CONIFER DREAMING
Black witch of all my days, afraid
To come out of the house again.
Trapped between the threshold and
The surface of the skin.
A darkness through which we cannot pass,
Closes around and over us;
An immense mass, pushing forwards,
Separating our frontiers into afterlife,
Where nameless, we shuffle closer to the grave.
Heel me into the disused summerhouse
Where I can become part of its genealogy,
Living among the dry seeds that hang
From the wooden struts like rococo beams.
There, amongst the old papers and rusting tools
With the smell of sawdust, oil and wood preserver
Rushing like alchemy through my nostrils.
I shall see the house from this dwelling place;
See when lights go on in rooms:
Is that your spectre descending the stair
Like a mannequin in tears?
Behind the fence, I'll stretch and sigh
And straighten my crooked, mossy fingers
Upon the cracked glass of the window pane,
Warmed by the early morning sun.
But here, I won't grow beyond the glass,
I'll dissolve into new constellations
That are forever looking back.
Alone, I'll lie beside the lavender path
Where you will forget me in time, I know...
But still I'll listen for the sweep of your dress
Brushing past in the night like a great lunar wing.
In the long summer evenings, I will sigh
Because I will not hear you come,
Saddened by the drone of bees
Blundering through the undergrowth,
To map the last regions of heart and brain,
Soon honeycombed into a perfect chamber
That makes a snug home for a fat queen.
Hidden in my breast is a black root
That spears through my heart and shoots,
To spiral ever downwards, through
Spine and soil, where blood becomes clay.
Trapped in the watery wheelbarrow tracks:
My life flows in these rivers of rain,
Where the garden has held me, spellbound,
But there are things in this place I cannot say.
In the woods as the sun went down,
I came here to remember her:
A July day...
Walking through the dark rooms
Where other worlds come close and listen.
Inside, the atmosphere's electric,
It crackles under my inspection.
And so I slipped out, unable to turn
Those pages filled with thunder.
I thought: Am I an invisible intruder here?
Does no one see I have come to this place?
They sit so close, yet do not see.
They don't see me. There is no answer.
But I have come here often, yes,
Many times I have come here before death,
And so I almost think it a shrine for my pilgrimage.
Nearby the buried monks in the playing field ache
To hear the close woods call to them;
I know that call and I know that ache
And it's insufferable.
As the years pass I am wrapt in the wild ways;
Streams cut through my inside
And I become part of its flow.
Nettle and laurel seed from my palms
Towards the sunlight I fear now.
The rain, with its ancient anger, stirs
And hammers on my brow again.
For here, no one can know the ache of the grave
And the crime that lies so deep within.
I hear the wind whisper and I wake,
Thinking your soft lips are near;
I call out and suddenly I remember
Only sad things whisper here.
A winter night and in the wood
A fire is burning down below
The steep bank that meets the road.
Figures are flickering in the flames
And far-away voices, laugh and shout.
Smoke is rising up the bank,
Winding through the broken fence,
And the air is damp with woodland smells.
Do you look at me and think of the wild places?
I am as ancient as all the world and all its sorceries.
Beneath the rolling acres - beyond,
Corpses have no time to command;
They listen to the crumbling hearts, like mine,
And laugh beneath the decaying woodland.
But your face looks out from the window pane
With its ghostly mask, devoid of life.
Those eyes are afraid to look on the world again,
Or perhaps they just died too long ago.
In the green pools of the bog
Those corpses gasp and remember death,
As the sunlight shifts above their heads,
Skimming over the water's surface.
At night between the trunks, they walk,
Crisp, to the snapping of twigs;
Between the submerged mass of roots,
Caught in the striking yellow light
Upon the shallow water's shoots:
A story is unfolding of my youth.
I opened my heart's sadness, and thought:
Here I will wander for eternity.
There are no names, there are no stones,
But lives have fallen to the wayside woods.
III
WALKING THROUGH THE WHITE WIRE
Witch of all the world, awake,
The woods have rung, but it's too late
To rid me of this elegiac imprint
That reduces me to the furniture of the grave.
There's a dance of death between the boughs
That calls her name and winds away...
You're here, and you're here now, to stay,
Not even my silence will turn your heart
From loving me for all eternity.
And I saw all the centuries and celebrations pass,
Marching before me, yet I turned away,
Wanting only to see the one who leaves me
In the final moments of the year.
I did not summon you, yet you came,
And all those dreams...I let them go,
Like afterthoughts weaving through my veins
Only to glimpse - Ulysses, in female form.
I remember those long, sleepless nights
When through my tears I ached for you:
Nothing seemed impossible, I thought,
I'll weave my flame into your heart
And make a universe of your name.
Seen in the garden is spectacled Death,
Not quite whole, but sure to manifest
His loathsome shape in the nothingness.
In the space of his predatory motions
His vaporous step is incomplete.
Between thumb and forefinger, I measure his pace:
Four days to reach the end of the fence.
While in the woods a darkness grows
Around the limitations of my heart.
My intestines drop from the trees in coils,
Bronzing in the morning sun.
And here I have widened the margin of love
To include the garden that's wrapt in death.
My insides are clay, and I am dumb;
My lungs are ballooning in my breast.
My eyes which once sparkled, are now dull
And lie at the bottom of a dry well,
Inside a half-buried porcelain pot:
Its cracked spout is my telescope
Where I'm blinded by the language of the stars.
Come to me, this dark evening,
Now that December's ghost is near;
I have fallen to pieces inside with thinking
Of your soft flesh and this divide,
In the garden's winter beauty, where
I weep in the place where love has died.
But love is a ghastly business,
It corrodes one's soul from the inside,
Depriving one's self of the entity within.
My body shall yield to spring blossoms,
To cover acres in its wide search.
But my sick heart will always remain
Locked in the sentences of your dreams.
But your heart is darker than buried bones,
And I can do no more than pass through time
Singing of the name I love.
This is how I imagined the end:
You cannot cross and I cannot leave;
Between shadow and light, unable to release
Our hold upon the worlds we know.
Still, the wind tells me of all you used to be,
And the dark house hides what you are now.
Perhaps she won't stay, but the garden remains
True to her identity, and I can never leave
This place where we were parallel in our make-believe.
But how can she not say what's in her heart
When I am sick with thinking of love?
While passion's ghost is fleeting, I know,
To be near her now is all of my world.
Across the water, words pass
Down the silent waves of change,
But I am beyond reason, and less of man,
Drilled into the hillside once again -
I am nothing in nature's infinite way.
And Death has won his timeless reign,
But I turn to the dark secrets of the house
Where the whispered heart has turned to stone
And the love it held has turned to dust.
I hear the voices that I dread,
Speaking of the past again -
They are a bridge to worlds unknown.
And here, the white lines of death are near,
Constant and caged by the twilight oaks;
A storm is gathering with cathedral fear
As the intricacies of sleep unfolds
The stages of our lives, retold.
Embrace me in the confusion of white death;
I linger on in after-worlds,
Bound only by the starry perimeters
And its soliloquy of dreams, that yields
A space for dying. I heave with seasons:
You are part of my world,
And I, yours, for always.
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