Contents
- Elixir of Late Morning
- The Rising Tide
- The First Born Dead
- Untitled
- Blue Sky
- Camomile
- Easter Sunday
- Puberty
- After Eight
- Freesia
- A Decision
- Absence with an Advantage
- The Death of Jealousy
- A Wasteland
- Icon
- The Fearless One’s
- Salt
- A Voyage
- Winter
- Ice
- Ecdyses
- Sunflowers
- Tragic End
- The Will to Touch
- Remembering Caravaggio
- Disclosing Realisation
- Words
- Just Say
- The Bittersweet Trajectory of Stasis
- Strange Fruition
- Ode to Ted and Sylvia
- I Remember Nothing
- The Only Home
Elixir of Late Morning
A room that bore a sick child’s mind,
Breast-fed by tragic fantasies,
Then made to feed from the earth,
Drink the sun,
And fuck just wind.
Memories of living unconscious days,
Well hidden in a cocoon called body;
Days now have made their quick stroll
And mothers eagerly await the death of their sons –
For what’s been done cannot be undone
(Then they blame God for such fantasies).
Past days are unfolding quickly,
Each one reassuring a state of more stable consciousness.
So, be quick.
Make your move.
Go kill?
The rising tide
Covers me up to the neck;
The foam congeals on my wrinkled face,
Leaving marks of black and blue.
The rising tide
Is covering us all in white;
The bridal veil must be cast aside
And the way prepared for that saintly death.
I know I spoke of the brooding sea
And those ill-fated shining stars,
But now it’s time for the rising tide
To cover me up to the neck and us in white.
To the subject that never was –
There is really nothing much to say:
You were born in a seashell
And have stayed resounding
Inside the cochlea of my ear
For the past eternal year.
That’s the irony.
That’s all.
You wage war on yourselves
Whilst I garland my forehead with roses.
Go on. Don’t mind me.
They make fine blooms these days.
The sea heaves its heavy blanket,
Just like a quilt being aired
In the early morning sunshine.
“Wake up!” it tells me, “your love has come!”
They stared, out, at the sea in front of them.
At yellow flowers in lilac skies,
The self erupts: the self in rapture.
To be staring (so far away from you) at a vacant sea,
When all I need is your nearness…
Thistles round my head
Burst into crimson flowers.
Say all I need is you
And I’ll lie down and cry like a dew-covered flower.
We slept in the same cradle, so to speak,
And those scant feelings have remained
Amongst the many that were lost.
To those that survived!
After chasing Daphne, Apollo had to be contented
With crowning himself with laurel.
Thus is the reason why I am a poet,
Because I love you.
Wondering about my fascination with bows?
It’s because you are my past, present and future.
It’s a sign on my forehead:
Together we must let my barren womb die.
If taking your love away
Is what seems necessary now,
I will hide behind this closed door
And wait till you knock again.
This time you gave me,
Absent as I am from your life,
I will use for my benefit, to learn,
From these rose petals, how to love you more.
Lovers you’ve had many,
And many suitors bid for your hand,
Yet I forsake them all,
Knowing my love for you is dearer.
These shoes are filled with tears,
Trudging the lonely way to you.
If this be mud and loneliness my fate,
I’ll hold on forever to these flowering seeds.
Every step I take in your direction
Makes you distressed and you flee.
If only you’d look behind you
You’d see that you carry me along.
To look at the sky,
And witness its enormity,
Then look at you, in all your greatness,
And not wince, is to be brave.
Inside of me a bitter sea of tears,
Dying to escape the confines of my insides
And reach the sunny shore
Where you lie waiting. Waiting…
Up in your detestable heights
My poor name is duly forgotten.
But why should I settle for less
When there is warmth in Amsterdam?
The trees are now bare – it’s winter.
So too my love loses its outer form
That by springtime it may emerge
Shinier and stronger.
Riddled by all kinds of sickness,
I forget to perform love’s rite.
So I am yearning to purge,
That my mindlessness may be restored.
As the year dies,
The cold winds blow stronger on us.
Yet let me just lisp your sweet name
And that is enough to rescue me from hell.
“I love you, I love you not, I love you…”
So is my love in this robotic age.
Some look down on my work as if meaning to say –
I smile and continue: “I love you, I love you not…”
Now that I have seen your face again,
My hope like the rose blooms.
The symbol gets stronger by the day.
I fear I cannot retain any longer – I must! – I love you!
Untouched by either stone or firmament,
Steamy vapours or mystic hallucinations of the departed,
Our love remains a burning fire,
Not to be diminished by streets or a factitious faction.
Stay with me for a while,
Just a little while,
For songs never last long,
And there is still so much to be sung.
Come along with me and I will show you
Things you’ve never ever tried:
Together we shall traverse this desert,
And arrive at a place where mosquitoes,
Inebriated by wine,
Make love to dahlias that sway in a
Cool, blind light.
Let me show you the infernal abyss that is my heart,
Where festering corpses sing requiems for unlived loves,
Where mirrors can’t tell the old from the young –
A place where illusions forfeit their trust!
And when the old blot comes,
With his mouth full of praises,
And paraplegic stiffening in his thighs,
We’ll look at each other in the eyes
And say that is was good.
As I clear the tables and set aside the forks,
The chess pieces come tumbling to the ground.
No more hiding games, I say: the battle has been won!
Pages are your walls,
Covetous of your black matter.
Tightly pressed they swallow whole every chink.
You have spent days in the darkness,
Your matter dissolves in the shadows,
You cannot do without light.
“Oh, to be a tiny atom in a little sunlit crevice!” you say.
When I set forth to peep inside you, book,
It’s then that your mischievous soul mates
Start playing their wicked dance again,
Making my ogling eyes ooze.
So for today you shall remain shut!
(though I lie)
Never Never
Just say it!
For I will never love you any more;
And at that I heave the greatest of sighs,
For I am unable to love you any more,
Loved as you are already.
…though I lie,
Never Never
Whisper my name
In your sweet nocturnal delights with the moon,
But let instead its soft rays
Gently erase me from your map,
Lest the shackled world imprison your heart and mine.
Though I lie,
Never Never
Say you don’t hate me,
For I have to perish without title:
Not a mother,
Not a father,
Not a lover,
Not yours.
Never Never
The Bittersweet Trajectory of Stasis (as it changes in flight)
SEE another me
see me another
ANOTHER me see
another see me
ME see another
me another see
Planets whirling in a danse macabre,
Exiting and entering strange stratospheres –
I guess it’s down Death Lane.
See how I’ve been crucified:
They cure my healthy sickness –
With drugs and potions they come.
The streets are always bare,
And I walk them alone naked,
Begging for more love-begging balls.
My entire existence boils down to this:
To love and be loved in return,
But the dogs hurl all kinds of abuse
And the blind have lost their blind eyes.
…When all I need is to love and be loved in return…
Passé
“Which way?”
“I guess it’s down Death Lane.”
You both knew how to
Seek revenge on this ghastly life!
(Rimbaud taught me how)
Die, oh yes, like Ophelia you wanted to die
And get buried deep within your own prophecy.
THE-GAP-BETWEEN-US-AND-THEM
THE-GAP-BETWEEN-YOU
In grief, extraordinarily, you found solace,
But you came to reject that God,
The Christian god,
With his silver antependia, gold chalices,
Coral and filigree ostensoria, and
Those four evangelist liars
(they who started all the fuckin’ hype).
Believer now on the brink of atheism
– suicide (who is the weakest link?)
Love is?
You challenged convention
and brought about an apocalypse.
Infernal pains, eternal anguish, childless births
Followed your suicide.
You left them empty, as your father
Had done when he ransacked your pockets
And took all he found.
(Verlaine testifies that there was just one button.)
The dove (come off it, bastard!), still content at
Pecking at your image (he even rebuked your poetry!),
Later found the job vain and headed to your hole,
Your locket…
Your grave…
You were both cruel to the very end – to us?
Who cares!
Up inside the lunar glove,
Two doves are making love.
You speechless, restless mob,
You will never be anything but moss.
Two bumblebees buzzing,
Hovering, in orbits, over
The enamelled splendour of a grave,
Bedecked with shards of a shattered stained glass window.
Roses in hot perfume,
Showering the liquorice eyelid
With essences of hot stew
And mulberry juice.
Circumvents, the omnipotent eye,
That deserted ground,
And regally looks up to heaven’s boudoir,
In search of those two punks,
Who now lie entwined in each other’s buns.
As my parched newspaper of a body
Lies sprawled on the sill of my bedroom window,
What always lies before my eyes
Is the tall, lean house, with its
Three windows – one on every floor,
Sandwiched between a relic of a house
And a block of flats – a pigsty.
I used to talk to the house in my
Sing-a-long days.
I even used to scream at it,
Thinking the blocks that held it in shape
Were my listeners.
I didn’t care a jot about its inhabitants:
Their stories held no interest to me.
Just like St. Barbara, I felt a longing
To occupy the house.
I would walk past its front door
And ring the doorbell:
– Hey you, what are you doing?
– No, nothing! Calling on the dentist.
– No dentist lives here! Fuck off!
So there I waited, waiting to be called in,
Like a beggar at an almshouse.
Now the house does not greet me anymore
With that glint in its eye.
Gone are the days of holy communion between us.
Torchlight flickers, now and then, through the windows,
As if the house of prayer is being robbed and silenced.