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Oscar Wilde  Jul 2009
Panthea
Nay, let us walk from fire unto fire,
From passionate pain to deadlier delight,—
I am too young to live without desire,
Too young art thou to waste this summer night
Asking those idle questions which of old
Man sought of seer and oracle, and no reply was told.

For, sweet, to feel is better than to know,
And wisdom is a childless heritage,
One pulse of passion—youth’s first fiery glow,—
Are worth the hoarded proverbs of the sage:
Vex not thy soul with dead philosophy,
Have we not lips to kiss with, hearts to love and eyes to see!

Dost thou not hear the murmuring nightingale,
Like water bubbling from a silver jar,
So soft she sings the envious moon is pale,
That high in heaven she is hung so far
She cannot hear that love-enraptured tune,—
Mark how she wreathes each horn with mist, yon late and labouring moon.

White lilies, in whose cups the gold bees dream,
The fallen snow of petals where the breeze
Scatters the chestnut blossom, or the gleam
Of boyish limbs in water,—are not these
Enough for thee, dost thou desire more?
Alas! the Gods will give nought else from their eternal store.

For our high Gods have sick and wearied grown
Of all our endless sins, our vain endeavour
For wasted days of youth to make atone
By pain or prayer or priest, and never, never,
Hearken they now to either good or ill,
But send their rain upon the just and the unjust at will.

They sit at ease, our Gods they sit at ease,
Strewing with leaves of rose their scented wine,
They sleep, they sleep, beneath the rocking trees
Where asphodel and yellow lotus twine,
Mourning the old glad days before they knew
What evil things the heart of man could dream, and dreaming do.

And far beneath the brazen floor they see
Like swarming flies the crowd of little men,
The bustle of small lives, then wearily
Back to their lotus-haunts they turn again
Kissing each others’ mouths, and mix more deep
The poppy-seeded draught which brings soft purple-lidded sleep.

There all day long the golden-vestured sun,
Their torch-bearer, stands with his torch ablaze,
And, when the gaudy web of noon is spun
By its twelve maidens, through the crimson haze
Fresh from Endymion’s arms comes forth the moon,
And the immortal Gods in toils of mortal passions swoon.

There walks Queen Juno through some dewy mead,
Her grand white feet flecked with the saffron dust
Of wind-stirred lilies, while young Ganymede
Leaps in the hot and amber-foaming must,
His curls all tossed, as when the eagle bare
The frightened boy from Ida through the blue Ionian air.

There in the green heart of some garden close
Queen Venus with the shepherd at her side,
Her warm soft body like the briar rose
Which would be white yet blushes at its pride,
Laughs low for love, till jealous Salmacis
Peers through the myrtle-leaves and sighs for pain of lonely bliss.

There never does that dreary north-wind blow
Which leaves our English forests bleak and bare,
Nor ever falls the swift white-feathered snow,
Nor ever doth the red-toothed lightning dare
To wake them in the silver-fretted night
When we lie weeping for some sweet sad sin, some dead delight.

Alas! they know the far Lethaean spring,
The violet-hidden waters well they know,
Where one whose feet with tired wandering
Are faint and broken may take heart and go,
And from those dark depths cool and crystalline
Drink, and draw balm, and sleep for sleepless souls, and anodyne.

But we oppress our natures, God or Fate
Is our enemy, we starve and feed
On vain repentance—O we are born too late!
What balm for us in bruised poppy seed
Who crowd into one finite pulse of time
The joy of infinite love and the fierce pain of infinite crime.

O we are wearied of this sense of guilt,
Wearied of pleasure’s paramour despair,
Wearied of every temple we have built,
Wearied of every right, unanswered prayer,
For man is weak; God sleeps:  and heaven is high:
One fiery-coloured moment:  one great love; and lo! we die.

Ah! but no ferry-man with labouring pole
Nears his black shallop to the flowerless strand,
No little coin of bronze can bring the soul
Over Death’s river to the sunless land,
Victim and wine and vow are all in vain,
The tomb is sealed; the soldiers watch; the dead rise not again.

We are resolved into the supreme air,
We are made one with what we touch and see,
With our heart’s blood each crimson sun is fair,
With our young lives each spring-impassioned tree
Flames into green, the wildest beasts that range
The moor our kinsmen are, all life is one, and all is change.

With beat of systole and of diastole
One grand great life throbs through earth’s giant heart,
And mighty waves of single Being roll
From nerveless germ to man, for we are part
Of every rock and bird and beast and hill,
One with the things that prey on us, and one with what we ****.

From lower cells of waking life we pass
To full perfection; thus the world grows old:
We who are godlike now were once a mass
Of quivering purple flecked with bars of gold,
Unsentient or of joy or misery,
And tossed in terrible tangles of some wild and wind-swept sea.

This hot hard flame with which our bodies burn
Will make some meadow blaze with daffodil,
Ay! and those argent ******* of thine will turn
To water-lilies; the brown fields men till
Will be more fruitful for our love to-night,
Nothing is lost in nature, all things live in Death’s despite.

The boy’s first kiss, the hyacinth’s first bell,
The man’s last passion, and the last red spear
That from the lily leaps, the asphodel
Which will not let its blossoms blow for fear
Of too much beauty, and the timid shame
Of the young bridegroom at his lover’s eyes,—these with the same

One sacrament are consecrate, the earth
Not we alone hath passions hymeneal,
The yellow buttercups that shake for mirth
At daybreak know a pleasure not less real
Than we do, when in some fresh-blossoming wood,
We draw the spring into our hearts, and feel that life is good.

So when men bury us beneath the yew
Thy crimson-stained mouth a rose will be,
And thy soft eyes lush bluebells dimmed with dew,
And when the white narcissus wantonly
Kisses the wind its playmate some faint joy
Will thrill our dust, and we will be again fond maid and boy.

And thus without life’s conscious torturing pain
In some sweet flower we will feel the sun,
And from the linnet’s throat will sing again,
And as two gorgeous-mailed snakes will run
Over our graves, or as two tigers creep
Through the hot jungle where the yellow-eyed huge lions sleep

And give them battle!  How my heart leaps up
To think of that grand living after death
In beast and bird and flower, when this cup,
Being filled too full of spirit, bursts for breath,
And with the pale leaves of some autumn day
The soul earth’s earliest conqueror becomes earth’s last great prey.

O think of it!  We shall inform ourselves
Into all sensuous life, the goat-foot Faun,
The Centaur, or the merry bright-eyed Elves
That leave their dancing rings to spite the dawn
Upon the meadows, shall not be more near
Than you and I to nature’s mysteries, for we shall hear

The thrush’s heart beat, and the daisies grow,
And the wan snowdrop sighing for the sun
On sunless days in winter, we shall know
By whom the silver gossamer is spun,
Who paints the diapered fritillaries,
On what wide wings from shivering pine to pine the eagle flies.

Ay! had we never loved at all, who knows
If yonder daffodil had lured the bee
Into its gilded womb, or any rose
Had hung with crimson lamps its little tree!
Methinks no leaf would ever bud in spring,
But for the lovers’ lips that kiss, the poets’ lips that sing.

Is the light vanished from our golden sun,
Or is this daedal-fashioned earth less fair,
That we are nature’s heritors, and one
With every pulse of life that beats the air?
Rather new suns across the sky shall pass,
New splendour come unto the flower, new glory to the grass.

And we two lovers shall not sit afar,
Critics of nature, but the joyous sea
Shall be our raiment, and the bearded star
Shoot arrows at our pleasure!  We shall be
Part of the mighty universal whole,
And through all aeons mix and mingle with the Kosmic Soul!

We shall be notes in that great Symphony
Whose cadence circles through the rhythmic spheres,
And all the live World’s throbbing heart shall be
One with our heart; the stealthy creeping years
Have lost their terrors now, we shall not die,
The Universe itself shall be our Immortality.
Larry Potter Aug 2013
You are the systole to the diastole
Of my four-chambered cavity
You are the pulmonary rhythmic control
That fills air to my capillary.

You are the Pituitary Gland
That drowns my bloodstream in dopamine
You take my brain to a wonderland
Drunk and overdosed in Seratonin.

You are the only Mitochondrion
That powers all cellular activity
My Cytoplasms are in motion
For the sexiest Golgi Body.

You are the ultimate synapse
In my every granule of neuron
That gives an involuntary prolapse
To both my dendrite and axon.
Aleister Crowley  Oct 2010
Logos
Out of the night forth flamed a star -mine own!
Now seventy light-years nearer as I urge
Constant my heart through the abyss unknown,
Its glory my sole guide while space surge
About me. Seventy light-years! As I near
That gate of light that men call death, its cold
Pale gleam begins to pulse, a throbbing sphere,
Systole and diastole of eager gold,
New life immortal, warmth of passion bleed
Till night's black velvet burn to crimson. Hark!
It is thy voice, Thy word, the secret seed
Of rapture that admonishes the dark.
Swift! By necessity most righteous drawn,
Hermes, authentic augur of the dawn!
Dana Pohlmann Feb 2012
Have your eyes always had the scattered look

of a woman scanning the room for exits,

with
no time to consider the precious intimacies
of skin

or the softness of faces in repose,

the vulnerable sacraments of open hands...

And have you, too, misread the calming waters

perhaps misjudged their depths?

Have you ever, daydream laden or heavily burdened

startled at finding your self, now,

this moment

gaze cast intently

beyond the bounds

of too frail a body

perhaps through your car window

for the broad pause a stoplight can fill,

perhaps in the rain

contemplating bright reflections

aberrant red

and introspective green

through the timpani
of falling water,

feeling the unfortunate gravity

of some unquantified source

at an undisclosed distance,

reaching without knowing

to release
the restraining belt

while, beneath the various
and distracting chatter,

you strain to hear the systole
at the heart

of the music you know could be found

if only you were free to follow?
TomDoubty  May 2021
Diastole
TomDoubty May 2021
Beating heart blush out my blood
Then rest then rest then rest then rest

Cresting waves crash on my shore
Recede recede recede recede

Howling gale you lash at me
Then breathe then breathe then breathe then breathe

Universe you stream away
Return return return return

In life we fill then die away
In darkness our constricted iris widens

Our life , like a time-lapse nature film plays out:
We grow, we wilt
We bolt and quiver to life
Then stagger back to earth
Eaten up to live again

Everywhere this motif
As humble as the bloat in the frog's throat
Systole, diastole
Our beating hearts our gasping breaths
Onwards, always, our lives lived outwards
Filled at rest
Lawren Jan 2013
The heart listens
Beat after beat
Encapsulated by the lungs
Who resonate with the sound of the breath
In and out
Without which no sound could be spoken
Or heard
Hearing and listening
Separated by automatic or conscious thought
My ears hear
But I must listen
Listen, focus
A connection is made
Through sight, touch
So we beat together
Connected by an invisible spider’s web
Thin but strong
Direct and iridescent
Systole, diastole
Open and close
No words needed
A rhythm unspoken
Warming our souls
Alone but together
Shared
No sentence
No phrase
No beginning
No end
Just love
And that is
The language of the heart.
Gigi Tiji  Mar 2015
breath
Gigi Tiji Mar 2015
The once plump
****** blister is
now a deflated ego

a portion of identity
lays separated,
slightly detached and

peeled back -
there is another layer
also dead

and peeled back -
there is raw skin
feeling fresh air
for the first time

It is stinging cool
from the soft breeze
from the swinging of the arm
at every tick tock

and the soul is swinging
from the tips of my fingers

I feel my heart rolling down
the sleeves of my shirt as
centrifugal and gravitational
forces pull blood towards the
surface of my skin and I feel
the rhythms of my systole
diastole tension and release and

the ocean leans in
for a kiss and
leaves fish stranded
on the sand

in it's parting, the ocean floor
seems to be shallower here

but it must be deeper
somewhere else
and after all

when one door shuts
another opens
when one light goes off
another goes on and
when one universe contracts
another expands
Mystic Ink Plus  Mar 2018
Cycle
Mystic Ink Plus Mar 2018
She asked, ”when were you born?”

I get life
On every systole
And prepare to get a new life
On every diastole

I keep on
Being born
In every single beat

A vicious cycle
Repeats
Genre: Clinical abstract
Theme: Real Time Echo
[Note: Diastole is the time when the heart refills with blood. Systole is the time when heart contracts pumping blood.]
irinia  Dec 2023
random
irinia Dec 2023
witness to this quiet life
certain thoughts understand the soul of birds
there are different orders of truth
order is just the unseen dream of messiness, a flower of chaos
systole and diastole of breathing in strange beings
contradiction intrinsic in all things
I need the anti-me for rhythmic change
perhaps the destiny of the eye is the tear & life
a history of losses, of blocked cycles of pain
a chronicle of laughter, an impression of the light,
a formless night
a mysterious entelechy of
randomness
TheMagicalHoe Apr 11
I sit alone in all my flooded decks,
Folded, split, humid and unrecognizable,
Severed across the planes of my being,
I never saw myself in a mirror anyway;

My chest thumps painfully,
The echoes of systole and diastole,
The sound of life, I remain,
Your voice plays in my head too,

Home is never far away,
Will you hold me through the dark?
I see the shore yet I cannot stand,
Will you sacrifice me, my love?

Burn away all my old ways,
Reflect your light into my veins,
Will you call me your own?
Claim me away from the unseeable?

— The End —