“The Dutchman“

As we journeyed through the night
Over on the western side
Off among the northern lights
   Searching caves by candlelight

Calling from beyond the hills
Deep into the midnight chill
We took a seat to take our fill
   And hoist one for the Dutchman’s will

Somewhere down that mountain road
The Dutchman struck his winner's pose
Standing with his *** of gold
   Seems he’d found the mother lode

Between what is and what’s been told
Far inside those peaks so bold
The Dutchman waits to show the road
   That leads us to his hills of gold

But

   Victories with winners die
They drift off in the western sky

Yet

   Dreams live on with wings to fly
You only must believe and try

As we journeyed through the night
Over on the western side
Off among the northern lights
   We searched the caves by candlelight

You've got memories, I've got ghosts
And I can't forget, hard as I try
I could map all the words you ever spoke
Like constellations in the sky
Second to the righteous and straight on 'til mourning
Like men lost at sea while soul searching
The repeated prayers were wasted breath
Used to **** time while we waited for death

The salts in the air and the ocean breeze
Burn the cracks in our skin and make it hard to breathe
While the remarks and past that cast our sail
Are lost from our lungs with each exhale
Hope and courage course through our veins
Trust and faith is all that remains
With defeat and pride guiding the waves
We set a course for better days

Onward to mystery
To make our mark in history
When clarity becomes a cloud
everything starts to let you down
I am the Flying Dutchman
searching for better ways
I  am an undead crew
longing for better days
If you see me on the horizons
just let me be
I'm trying to find value
in a calm at sea

a spirits' ship

    cutting through the stormy mist



a cold wind blows

    up upon her



crossing souls

    off the Dutchman's list



just another human

     to become a goner

How quiet is the rolling breath
Of foam upon it’s seeping death
The grey winds taken from the shore
As sand and rock are left no more
For life will not tally beneath the sail
Of crisp white linen, slashed by rusted mail
No more, no more the bell will chime
Upon the passing winds of time
The dead are sailing upon quiet seas
Their hopes are scattered in the breeze
Far from home and far to go
These unquiet souls lie below
Cursed forever, to sail and roam
This Flying Dutchman will hold no home
No port awaits this journey’s end
No harbour sits around the bend
It sails through twilight, night and day
The bow holds its course, the star leads the way

Sands traverse oceans to envelop me
within the coercion of a dream of Egypt
as I search the turquoise of the medallion in my hands
to match the gray-blue of his eyes.

Too long have I willed for him
to sail the Atlantic,
stride through the door,
and sweep me from haunting this view of London.
But for now I am left
to my own image and a pane,
so I muster the meat of my palm
within this sleeve of lace
to brush it across the glass for a clearer look,
yet my efforts have revealed
no more than engorged eyelids reflected…
manacles of me.

Behest of self,
maniacal I am slated
to perform involuntary tedium,
hopeful to unlock deeper meaning
within each hieroglyph,
once so purposefully etched in a semblance of bronze.

I long to surrender
to the warmth of the taste of iron
caught in his sights over a tomb blanketed in gold.

I will come for you, Daughter of Heaven and Earth.

Spontaneous peristalsis of phrase
connects with the drop
gurgling through the candid quiet
and I wonder
if the image that now reflects would indulge him,
or if he might ****** the lock of dark hair
that he cropped from my neck with the skill of an assassin
when our paths first crossed in Cairo.

Time has softened the image I hold of him;
his eyes are satin,
burning like a flag still waving
as his army advances over our forbidden dig.

There is something
sensation-like in downfall…
copious saline embodies the fractal curve.

I found no scrolls of the Book of the Dead.

Here in my olive skin I rot like a peach
that’s been left in a satchel
forgotten to dust of the ages
disturbed by picks and axes
that strike with the determination of discovery.
A peach, never to be savored;
never to nourish or to pleasure,
or be trampled by insects
and carried off in pieces
to the hollow of the ant queen.

My eyelids are hard to turn like wet pages
forced to envision a river that is not the Nile
where I am held within the binds of propriety,
corsetted, bustled, and locked out of Egypt
dammed from the salvation
of even an intermittent Dutchman’s finger
by dunes and shores and footfalls
to find words that stream in liquid resonance
where firm succumbs to self and
I can feel passion writhing through my intangibles.

Thusly, clouds form over a city that blackens and distorts
the way a river's reflection of my face
would ripple from the plunging body of a dove,
belly-up, encased in wings,
and two thousand miles from him.

Arousal is a moccasin seethed in spasms
of peristalsis and musculature
toward the beckoning pulse of breast.

Any hope for contact collapses into flesh,
venom sheathes each corpuscle,
and a woken neck flails in judgment
before the truth in his eyes
under the shadow of the Great Pyramid
where Ramses II lies supine
across the Turin Papyrus.

I imagine the other side of me
and where she might reflect when
all that there is in such a study
contributes to my wanting
to wreak my bellied freedom
beneath crevices that sink as crevices do
in downward angled layers
to withstand the ages.

Dark hair gleams in contrast,
more for strip of scalp
than the trickle of red down my back.

Breached like sugar that candid—
starburst wings of Monarchs dripping ancient like sunsets
over magenta and milky mauve in the reeds—
my ankles revealed and inverted to the sky they glean, yet...

his arrival is delayed
when the pistol ***** three times.
The still of my breast compounds
with the steady union of the dark, and
somewhere denial flows with the sands.

So cycles change, like a fable for Eternal.

“Daughter of Heaven and Earth,” written by Dionne Charlet, appears in print in Cairo by Gaslight, the second anthology in the By Gaslight Series from New Orleans small press Black Tome Books.  Books in the series include New Orleans by Gaslight (ISBN 9780615801186) and Cairo by Gaslight (ISBN 9781516961528).  Both collections feature poetry by Charlet, under the pseudonym Dionne Cherie. Look for the upcoming anthology Paris by Gaslight, which will feature a poem of the same title by Dionne.

Dear Night;

The day breaks like a child's neck,
And there she is -
Like a fresh sand hills beckoned seductively
By childish poetry that
Rings off the fingertips like marshmallows
Burnt from too much *****

A cradle erupts:
Two deaths turning into one,
A turning sensation of philosophers timid to experience
We are what?
We are the writhing fiends caught on
By electricity sought upon by
The high priests of a no man's land
Billy the Kid

Tragic care giving fiends telling tales
Of naturality that grow like figs neath virgins
And we share the fragrance of foreigners
Dancing neath' their dead bodies for we
Are the store fronts of the epileptic rich

Sharing nothing, we forgive the dead angels that
Share in nothing but their own salvation
And we the nation hold their hands as they are handed
Their medals that shine and beat against innocent
Sun where we - Good Humans - will always feel inferior

I take thee for my own prisoner
Let's go and check out the sun for mine own
I said I was having sun...asleep
Mine own mind was bent, crooked, doomed
Warranted evil will of course be put to light

Teller tell me what I wish to know
You tell me the secret
You wish to hold, oh' you wish to keep
We are the children you asked for
But you are so unwilling up accept

But the press is something that is intangible
They are spread spearers that are accepted as they are:
A good german; a fair dutchman; a funny Chaplin;
Genius moving with insecure marijuana.

But she presses her own soul on the glass
Never lasting - a pure bread horse
There she stands, like an egyptian statuette incarnate
Breaking through the clouds like a pillar
Bent only for salvation and glory

A cool informant next to Hemingway that breaks
The next vinyl that's hot mixed with devil sweat
Someone breathes something on my neck and I'm soon
To wonder what the next place I need to be is
So...I wonder...Myself is the one to take care of this mess?

Here we are - stagnant - like a tombstone,
Wondering what we are meant for and wondering
Where we are not supposed to go.
We have our labels.
We have our names.
And, yes, we have our jobs that were
Given to us by companies that have no face,
Only a name and yet we obey...

Too push a confidence you have to ask me
What I wish to know for the assignment that no one cares about
After I get what people will listen too
What the truth is a very thing
I love the hash that beeps like a dead hyena on the road side
Howling like a lost lover without someone to love

I feel somehow that they have mislabelled you

Perhaps just penned you in the wrong ink...

I'm not sure

It seems when I try to describe you, the idea goes sailing away and never anchors home

Slippery one might say...

As the man crawling out from beneath the wreckage of a rolled-over vehicle, slathered face to shins, in blood and *****

And the words that had beckoned to him
Now thoroughly lost...

Nothing more then a few gruelling moments in agony before it was just a memory and a phrase that didn't quite seem to fit...

Unreal. What did that word even mean?

It felt insulting.

As though the momentary terror that had consumed your reality was nothing more then a passing storm -- No more then a ghost or a Flying Dutchman...

But could the same not be said for it all?

Is any of this really what we came here for?

The choice alone is too much for me not to waste it and I fear if I leave it for too long that the choice will inevitably make itself...

But perhaps maybe that in turn is the choice

--The freedom to be or not...

sometimes a private message on the sly
outlasts a poem,
i'm no quack - my prescription list
if a bunch of theories,
i can't the Hippocratic oath even if i wanted to,
which also means a theory here,
or a theory there can't hurt -
it's levitating as a chanced choice of consideration,
in terms such stated, there are
the questions of consolidating the problem
socrates faced as to how confront a unity
of particulars and universals -
well, a mathematical impression
with the prime expression of division would be
a start, a comprehension of units
akin to millimetre, centimetre and mile
would be due a referencing to.

i hardly know what to call the cartesian
subsequence equation -
sartre tried to invert it -
let's say that thinking is an *essence
and being is existence -
drag in newton's causality and einstein's
lack of causality - i do believe
descartes is pivotal in terms of causality
and what existentialism suggested
via sarte: that existence precedes essence
or vice versa - causality i should think -
but if the itemisation of space
as divided enduring placebos of millimetre
and centimetre with each point
as the Freudian id to divide is loosely estimated -
i understand Sartre's argument when
being a revisionist via Descartes -
existence does indeed precede essence -
you learn from your mistakes -
first can existence example itself
before thought (essence) begins its learning process -
indeed it can't be otherwise, intuition
does exist to a cloning zenith reached by animals
who're only vociferous via the medium
of onomatopoeia - ferrous sounds -
but among men there are more enzyme-related
processes to create the Enlightenment from
the Renaissance - the latter an artistic progress
the former the scientific -
study chemistry or physics and philosophy becomes
a playground - biology for some reason
has too many octopus tentacles attached to
obvious things - mutations of Chernobyl to mind -
and history, **** sake's the stone age and the
17th century will deviate far between on the spectrum
of analysis - there is much more bureaucracy from
the 17th century than crude cave drawings from the stone
age - i'm hardly saying it's not plausible
but the time-scale leveraged with boiling a cup of tea
is the worst kinds of distraction - scout's honour,
cross my heart and count to 20 in under 10 seconds.
anyway, for the majority, people are hardly
innovators, a few can claim to be a pure res cogitans
(a thinking thing), since such a being would require
an id scale of division, not necessarily a scale of division
akin to the majority of people, with their
9 to 5 working days, monday through to sunday,
january through to december -
with the latter list of exemplification we're talking
about a res narro / a narrative thing - alt. include
res transloquor (a thing talking over -
a loss of etiquette when talking over older people)
etc. -
           since i find that thinking is primarily
about innovative feats - but most of the time what we
call thinking is actually narration -
a book never written, an idea never materialised -
and the existence of the Buddhist "mindfulness" /
simply not thinking, a full cartesian sum embodiment,
akin to driving a car, a bike, whatever you like.
or i could have written about the news review
articles from sunday: the boo! that's Broadmoor,
the lush living conditions in blocks 2 & 5
and the squalor in blocks 1 & 6...
names include the murderers:
jonathan lowe (aged 52) writing a letter about
the Ritz hotel like conditions in 1898,
croquet and cricket, tea weak beer and gambling,
tobacco luxury and servants via the lesser
fortunate inmates,
william chester minor's addition to the inaugural
edition of the oxford english dictionary (ex-military
surgeon he was),
chippendale bookcases, bathed once a week,
shaved three times a week,
(now you can understand my fascination with
Ezra Pound) - thomas harry a would be assassin
of the p.m. Gladstone of 1893 walking about
the asylum gardens mentioning Gladstone's
last plea with a smile akin to the eager buds of
may appealing to harry's sense of "remorse",
a dutchman who attacked his wife with a mallet
pleading to renter the lunatics' Ritz circa 1895 -
a jack the ripper suspect amongst them -
dr. richard brayn hardly ***** burroughs' dr. benway -
a madman had never so much luck under **** brayn -
but the less fortunate remarked:
'my name is T Perkins, i have been murdered here,
by those that know not what they do,
because they have ether in their heads!'
i'd guess ammonia to add to such a confession,
or skunk ***** to mind the least.
thomas cutbrush was the ripper suspect.
jimmy saville wetted his ***** in the female wards...
can't complain with ******* adolescent girls
why complain about ******* crazed chicks -
Michael Meyers in the room? i thought so,
democracy is the ideal export, people know
jack the ******* by compliments from the toilet's
perfumery as described: strawberry scented,
mm hmm - Kentucky tattooed on my left buttock's
cheek. but boo! a.k.a. Broadmoor is closing,
pristine lunatics on the street - mind you
in the news review they had an article about
seymour hersh - what he called
dum-dum and darth vader of the galactic empire
surround fashion trends of 9 / 11...
joy uu bushy and st. francis cheney -
prior to this poem looking at russian sables in
fur farms going berserker over the size of the cages,
a lynx rummaging in a theory of geometry
walking out lemniscate treading on its own faeces,
and i felt good for the jews
not wearing leather on Yom Kippur -
in their orthodox black attire walking into a
synagogue wearing trainers -
yep, lived next to a synagogue for several years,
a flat above an estate agents...
but of course weddings and mazel tov a rekindled
happy event!
scurrying like rats in an area not allowing pride -
apologies for the comparison,
but Gants Hill wasn't exactly Golders Green,
well the Hanukkha did stand proud at the roundabout,
but then the social project took over
and subsequent evictions proceeded -
Bangladesh came over - and half of Pakistan.