I
I recall in tranquillity
Fever-dive hours.
Once I saw a sailboat listing
Upon a great-waved sea
The sea was I and so was the boat
I could not see any stars
For the blasts of ocean-spray
In what quiet cove can I go hiding from a storm
Blasting up the cartoid artery and flooding through
The cognitive estuaries, over-spilling memory’s tributaries?
Tell me where I might make my stand against my wrath?
Might a clever present play the future off against the past?
Am I to live only in the lacunae between foretelling & recollection
In the times between guilt and dread when, exhausted of mental flight,
Whether backwards or forwards, the mind drifts in easy content?
We shall build a tower
let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth
II
Behold, a shattered glass bowl that held doubts
They multiply in shattering
As each beam of light
Crosses every glass splinter
It breeds a new splinter
And a new lance of light
Fecund heresiarch
Absolute clarity lies within
That lit glass rubble but the trouble
Is that so does everything else
As in Borges’ library up in that tower
III
Do you know where your right hand is? Walking through a shop and not knowing whether you’ve assaulted someone heedlessly. Analysing each moment of your past like a sicko prosecutor. The fears iterate by sinister Darwinism, seeking cognitive blind-spots. Did I mutter threats of violence to that child? Did I insult that shop attendant? Mixed memory and aversion form a rancid bin-juice born decaying.
IV
I came to the stairs
There was a wobble in her voice
By each step her voice rose higher
So I rise to her and she calls with greater urgency
And I rise to her with greater urgency
She and I can only meet after escalation shatters
Past the horizon of panic and further-
Past the sea rock of worn defeat
She and I must be one.
I sprint.
V
Imagine that someone came to you in the middle of the night, stepped into your mouth and began to grow through your capillaries. They were not content merely with habitation, their constant insistence was that you must keep grafting dead organs and limbs onto yourself. You become a born-again Frankenstein (don’t be a pedant) with all the zeal of a convert to an undead lifestyle. The new limbs are heavy, and stink, and burn up your flesh with septisemic fire and ****-flood, but the man who stepped inside your mouth begs you stitch on more.
VI
The inside of a head becomes lonely as it becomes crowded
The only things that elbowed through those crowds
Were other hauntings
Brief dune-sedge love in salted ground
Warring wrath against money made world
Twin engines of raging-love and loving-rage
Racing for diversion and the exaltation of rebellious motion
Circulation round the track kept my blood in motion
Rammed down winds to bellow my lungs
Political contention, war, courtship, frenetic study
Vain dreams of greatness, discontent
Which gave me a little contentedness
To declare permanent war or endless love
And so to terminate surrender in unutterable resolution
“Optimism of the will!”- clenched hands, though they wobble
In the obsidian lands where resistance gave no comfort
Resistance still gave sustenance
Just as all the previous Sugatas
VII
Life is so long. Are you so innocent? You are tired. You dream of a gentle place. You saw it as anyone might imagine it- holy light on wild-flowers, easy with its comforts, free with its joys. To be such a place it had to be distant from this world and sealed against you.
VIII
Maybe I just wasn’t ******* often enough?
Victorian life is better novelised than lived
Hysterical, neurotic, guilty, phantasmal
Maybe I wasn’t drinking enough?
A friend called me the Ayatollah
In respect of my beard and sobriety
Hume and the Buddhist sages pronounced that persons are aggregates without greater unity. I find myself a bundle but there is no liberation here. The parts rub against each other like cans in a grocery bag bruise fruit. Or perhaps I am the curate’s egg.
IX
Give me a seabird’s wings
On the cliffs, about forty meters over the crab pools
I dream of ascending with the gulls, but higher
Diving and again rising in alliance with wind
What waves perturb the gull are brief
And if it is to end by hawk, that too is brief
Yet I would rise higher still, till I sat on a perch
Overlooking time and the jolting succession of moments
Above the waves of kings, ministers, exchequers
Yet if I am not to reach that exalted perch
I will be low enough to observe the bright net
Of refracted sun that plays upon the hills of water
Give me a seabird’s wings
X
Easier perhaps to talk of the accoutrements of terror and the reflections it invoked. Easier to do that then to photograph medusa. Yet I do remember being confused as to whether I was more guilty or more afraid. It seemed important that I be more guilty than be afraid, but it is hard to feel guilt while facing knives. Consequently, I felt supplementary guilt at my thin guilt.
We shall build a tower
let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth
XI
The future is boundless, not only ahead but sideways
The patterns of your inferences only ever ape
The subtle causal chains which bind the forward momentum
Of the world whose surface you cling to
The mind is stretched between times and possibilities,
Beyond any accommodation by mental sinew and bone
The heart successively roars and fizzles
XII
I came to the living room
And it was filled with ash
Though I never smoked
Or sat by fire
I made an ink of that ash
And began to write these verses
upon my arm
XIII
He is there, and I smile into his oblivion
He never loved you, so ideas of romance
Had the character of Banach-Tarski’s sphere
He is gone now, other suburbs, other worlds
I do not miss him, except on special occasions
My affections were never lost, except perhaps at the first moment
Dead on arrival
Yet still worthwhile
It is right to rebel against most things
But not you, oh sweet tyrant
It’s good odds you kept me breathing
IXV
We do not sit upon heaven’s throne
Nor are we the rebel, cast down like a slash of lightning
We are the flesh that raised our gaze
Half wondering, half begging
The dance is ending, where is the bridgegroom?
XV
How rash are those who clamour for justice?
(I have been among them)
Life is wide, deep and changing. We are excesses
Of identity, act, motivation.
Of miscalibrated judgement and selfish grasping.
Do you think you would be clean under heaven’s eye?
Were there a book that contained each numbered thought and small deed
Of yours wouldn’t you shred it, burn it and eat the ashes?
I wouldn’t. I would give you that book. Press you to read it.
I do not think you would like me, but my terror is to be misunderstood
I fear that you will think I am a different kind of monster than that I am.
So I give you my promise, that should an angel scribe that book
I’ll give you a copy.
And I promise that if you ever give me a copy of your celestial biography
I’ll try to shut the my eye of judgement and open that of mercy
It’s simple self interest. Chesed pro chesed.
XVI
Can we remember pain? In our mind’s eye we might
See rose fluids or, under that, a startling glimpse of pearly white
Laid open by a scalpel. We shudder back. We peer forward.
But who has the pen by which to bind agony?
“Sharp”, “dull”, “throbbing”, “irritating”, “intense”
Wholly feeble, as if a snake tried to wander with its vestigial leg bones
But that is where we find ourselves- thirsty for conveyance in a desert of names
We can only hope to articulate pain through our inarticulateness
Just as, by chance, static on a television set captures a snowstorm
I remember wandering the streets, sobbing and calling for divine fire to **** me and all the other wicked. As I wept I listened to pop on half smashed headphones. What would it take to make you march through city streets weeping and calling the fires of an unknown God?
XVII
I ascended to the attic
To store, retrieve, invent
A mnemonic parade
Without volition my hands
Raise the dust in small incantations
How does one dislodge a fake memory?
Or terminate the routine of shuddering
I see
He and she are here, interlocked eye-beams
I am not in either eye
In this attic I lay in the pattern of my veins
I am sinews. Whether these gobbets
Be thought or flesh I am in neitherway free
I am chained by my own substance
Above me powers contend in the air.
XVIII
Think now
Life has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering trepidations,
Guides us by vanities.
After such knowledge what forgiveness?
Forgiveness after such knowledge what?
What forgiveness after such knowledge?
Knowledge what forgiveness after such?
Such knowledge what forgiveness after?
IXX
In metamorphosis the tissue is not merely subtracted from and added to inside the pupae, rather the whole flesh devours itself, save for microscopic clusters (imaginal bodies), becoming a soup of cells. What unites both life-stages is scarcely more than a double-helixed teleos. Yet memory persists.
We shall build a tower
let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth
**
If I could but seize the wax of Icarus
The tailor of Ulm’s fabrics
Etana or Bladud’s crown of feathers
If I could but fly, I could seize the sun’s silver
Forge a mirror by which to demonstrate
The storm that rends the head
Of some shivering soul you know
Forgive a thief that stole for you and
Shelter all, for you cannot see their weather
XXI
To find a point of collapse at which
loss and victory die.
And that sea is now
A vast lake that
Night or day
Forms a perfect twin
To the sky
Over the stones of the tower
Drift currents and sweet, lazy fish
The waves will dance again
But I might hope to dance
With them
Afterword
This poem is allusive to the point of plagiarism, and past that. My purpose is to convey an experience with all that I have and I’ll gladly steal words for that. Given the greed with which I have pilfered the words, I thought a referencing system was needed. Passages in italics are more or less lifted wholesale from elsewhere. There’s plenty of references, parallels and allusions which aren’t italicised. Since italics aren't visible on this platform you can see them here: https://deponysum.com/2020/05/10/deadwater/
The debt to T.S. Eliot is obvious, even in the title. The debt to the Aiken’s Tetelestai and the Romantics (including Eliot perversely read as a romantic) is less obvious. It’s very much a poem about me, and I apologise for that vanity. My story is not unique. My particular kind of OCD based on a fear of harming others is quite common. Yet few talk about it for fear of seeming like a dangerous ******. It is an inherently self-concealing form of mental illness. Especially as I’ve gotten older, I’ve tried to avoid the narcissism of self-display even in an anonymous form, but I want to show you this story, lest it be scattered everywhere among the nameless like me, and forgotten.
For those who have loved me.
