"bacchic" poems
i admit to 'male' --
'female' strikes me low
curving
concupiscent hips (of Venus swaying so)
the one who places,
caught bathing in her morph
to mar
her goddess innocence (Peleus grasps her so)
her evergreen paradise-
apple spraying scruples,
while the sun
dries forgiveness **** (on Eve's fragrant *******
in other Edens
Lilith simply leaves him blind
to lust
for unknown Didos (craving **** or suicide)
the limping god
nets love and war, olympicly
to smith
a mortal death (from Vulcan jealousy)
foresight's fire-gift
leaps obedience
to lie
far falls the divine (in ******* he defied)
potent swan of sky,
what judgement?
for a girl
you laid in that white rush, (virginity unfurled)
immortal ****
fates sails of progeny,
raging
poet-birthing strife (for temple priestess' cries)
fated nation-death swoons,
shares beauty's scale,
and Aphrodite's foam (caresses history's thighs)
Trojan tensions mix
the modern mind to heights of doubt
of mythopoets' truth ( -yielding blindnesses)
lonely walk the earth
with guiding wisdom lacking
all the pawns of fate (forget love's darknesses)
sphinxine hunger asks
the soul of destiny
of hubris, tragic sight (and orgiastic nights)
of unknown woman
man struck down
sickly city safe
and burning, yearning (nymph and satyr sating Bacchic rites)
Jun 26, 2012
Jun 26, 2012 at 8:56 PM UTC
When shall we learn, what should be clear as day,
We cannot choose what we are free to love?
Although the mouse we banished yesterday
Is an enraged rhinoceros today,
Our value is more threatened than we know:
Shabby objections to our present day
Go snooping round its outskirts; night and day
Faces, orations, battles, bait our will
As questionable forms and noises will;
Whole phyla of resentments every day
Give status to the wild men of the world
Who rule the absent-minded and this world.
We are created from and with the world
To suffer with and from it day by day:
Whether we meet in a majestic world
Of solid measurements or a dream world
Of swans and gold, we are required to love
All homeless objects that require a world.
Our claim to own our bodies and our world
Is our catastrophe. What can we know
But panic and caprice until we know
Our dreadful appetite demands a world
Whose order, origin, and purpose will
Be fluent satisfaction of our will?
Drift, Autumn, drift; fall, colours, where you will:
Bald melancholia minces through the world.
Regret, cold oceans, the lymphatic will
Caught in reflection on the right to will:
While violent dogs excite their dying day
To bacchic fury; snarl, though, as they will,
Their teeth are not a triumph for the will
But utter hesitation. What we love
Ourselves for is our power not to love,
To shrink to nothing or explode at will,
To ruin and remember that we know
What ruins and hyaenas cannot know.
If in this dark now I less often know
That spiral staircase where the haunted will
Hunts for its stolen luggage, who should know
Better than you, beloved, how I know
What gives security to any world.
Or in whose mirror I begin to know
The chaos of the heart as merchants know
Their coins and cities, genius its own day?
For through our lively traffic all the day,
In my own person I am forced to know
How much must be forgotten out of love,
How much must be forgiven, even love.
Dear flesh, dear mind, dear spirit, O dear love,
In the depths of myself blind monsters know
Your presence and are angry, dreading Love
That asks its image for more than love;
The hot rampageous horses of my will,
Catching the scent of Heaven, whinny: Love
Gives no excuse to evil done for love,
Neither in you, nor me, nor armies, nor the world
Of words and wheels, nor any other world.
Dear fellow-creature, praise our God of Love
That we are so admonished, that no day
Of conscious trial be a wasted day.
Or else we make a scarecrow of the day,
Loose ends and jumble of our common world,
And stuff and nonsense of our own free will;
Or else our changing flesh may never know
There must be sorrow if there can be love.
5.1k
As holy Bacchic rituals
float vague across my mind,
I look ahead and twiddle
my thumb with one behind.
As pagan prayers of Christians
are recited in my head,
I look up and feel a droplet;
I wish that I was dead,
for as pagan Bacchic rites
form paintings before my eyes,
I can’t help but let one trickle;
this was not my planned demise.
Mar 19, 2012
Mar 19, 2012 at 8:33 PM UTC
a servant of Dionysus
drunk on such a draught
that influence never can fade
O, put tenderness in such a melody
to ease of this parade
which marches like a venom through the vein
O, sing to me a lover's tune
that i may not remember
and loveliness sit in my heart
january through december
Jul 20, 2010
Jul 20, 2010 at 7:54 PM UTC
Orpheus crawled from the ground upon his hands and knees,
His days he faced in bitterness without Eurydice,
He wiped the bloodstains from his face, coughed up gravedirt and leaves,
And tore the music from his throat, resigned to silent be.
Surrendered to the quiet, he deprived the world of song,
Without her harmony, he thought, the melody was wrong,
Perverted echoes tried to sing but they were never strong.
When silent in a violent world, where then could he belong?
Returned then to their wedding bed, alone he lay and wept.
Moonlit air betwixt his wretched, ragged sobbing crept.
His weary lungs began to slow, and at birdsong he slept,
Dreaming, saw a horde of women, manic and godswept.
Her melancholy wails resonated throughout Hell.
Sat upon his throne there reigned the King that knew them well.
Under the crooked back of grief the riot could be quelled,
For dangerous is Orpheus and his melodic spell.
The maenads came for him as prophesied within his dream,
Tore his body limb from limb, a cloak ripped at its seam,
A mad and Bacchic frenzy blinded the infernal team,
From witnessing his dying smile, as if at last, redeemed
Two lovers’ outstretched hands reach now across the murky water,
Drowning out the souls who shout in mourning for their slaughter.
The bridge of years they passed apart was, in an instant, broken,
They did not trust themselves to sing, so ‘I love you’ was spoken.
Aug 12, 2019
Aug 12, 2019 at 1:21 PM UTC