FLANDERS, the name of a place, a country of people,
Spells itself with letters, is written in books.

"Where is Flanders?" was asked one time,
Flanders known only to those who lived there
And milked cows and made cheese and spoke the home language.

"Where is Flanders?" was asked.
And the slang adepts shot the reply: Search me.

A few thousand people milking cows, raising radishes,
On a land of salt grass and dunes, sand-swept with a sea-breath on it:
This was Flanders, the unknown, the quiet,
The place where cows hunted lush cuds of green on lowlands,
And the raw-***** plowmen took horses with long shanks
Out in the dawn to the sea-breath.

Flanders sat slow-spoken amid slow-swung windmills,
Slow-circling windmill arms turning north or west,
Turning to talk to the swaggering winds, the childish winds,
So Flanders sat with the heart of a kitchen girl
Washing wooden bowls in the winter sun by a window.

1
Faerie, fey, in a windless stride
Along the verdant wood and wild
Beasts, so are, here do abide
Yet this urban life, maxims beguile.
So true, the only beast is man
Though he’s born of claw, the tooth
By birth it’s of the haft
Dagger, gun, and perfidious craft.
Apart, I see only one
Together, sparks to bring, undone
Me, for this, I dare not stand.
Such impropriety, a fellow’s creed
Rich are all in my mother tongue
Speak volumes for their egotism,
And seemingly endless greed,
Divest from it, with righteousness,
With acts they before shun.
Bah! To clean air and streams to follow
Network of the aimless vein
Blood for the vindicated!
Whilst they proceed to their empty smog
And free wills ever truncated
Marching headlong and abreast
To Hell they step in tow.
Never mind those evils done
My cure is in anathema, unchained
The inner man, the wild!
Autonomy, dumb, and pure!
I am the center of starry pull
I’m the individual, in me all is whole
I am the blot, the rebel, and the Wife of Lot!
A mark upon the cosmichead
My material exists, destined to rot
But, this death, it shall be free
Unlatched from this society.
No more shall these orchestras
Be condemned to prune as sighs
Now to high monastic chants
To venerate this life of mine.
Every corner of this brick and mortar
Keep us penned, like cattle adorned
In slacks and ties, agendas several miles high
This Fetish-Messiah, Banality
Makes sweet the cuds of humanity
None of this impurity can exist beneath
The canopy, foundation’s wrought of Ego’s dust
Pretense, a star, of foundry of the Heaven’s cusp.
#2
**** this, i have returned
the scwl of the citi
So litle and worthless
Huge slabs of grey metal
--failed of my conviction
i’m knowing in the sense
of Tao (dao), mute and confused
Tying to remove it
farce and utopia!
This cow is really low
Munching on—now, I know
As the faeries said
“At cross, betuta, moss”
What mean, all nonsense. All!
#3
The city was always upon my soft palms
That chaffed when I struck for a flame
The vanity hung in loose little threads
When my sleeves fell tattered, the same
It was through my teeth, my fellows did breathe
Strangers upon the tongue
I saw in the water the face of them
And heard them in my curses  
A stranger voice said “we” and “them”
Had genesis’d these verses.
It was those about me who birthed the world
As I had done for them
Momentum! Be quick! For fellow man!
As I am
As you are
The other’s cosmic order
I’ve built the structure I can deny
But with undeniable mortar.

Memories of my  beautiful Summer
walks down Blendennis lane with
my Mother Brug, Aunts  Kate and Maggie
and my beloved  sheepdog  Shep.
The smell of the new mown hay
cornfields reaching maturity,
the whiff of wildflowers and heather everywhere,
breathtaking on a late summers evening.

Never to be experienced, anywhere in the World
Those were the bygone days, past the bog of bulrushes,
the cattle chewing their cuds in the fields beyond.
I wish my Shep could race and meet me  now
like he did on my  way home  from school
when I appeared at the white  spot in the  Lane.

I once scrungled a tungus, dubbed Binglo Bungus,
Whose cungles were trungly, and cuds cumpily cunk.
But his drungles did fungle, so sadly he bungled,
And without hesitation, he glunked.

Four fingles he fangled, when, biggaly bangled,
Approached not a crowd, but an army of glimps.
And they clinkled his binkle, as he chinkily changled,
But The Bungus stopped not for the bimps.

He dringled those hob-glimps! Their ****** was drompled!
Their pebuses, feeble, buckled under the frung.
And he chungled their drungles, with fury he plungled.
To this day, not a glimp stands to cung.

But his fangling, untrungled, was far from the fringus,
And he fangled on forward another five flinks.
On the fifth flink, he bebussed, as his fangle was pepis,
So he humpled the drumpling ****.

Sir Bungus fangled homeward, his blumpus was tungled.
His drungles rejonked, for the fungling was done.
They erected a frangus to plingus The Bungus,
And the drumpling **** that he'd won.

Ancient are the wrinkled lines embedded deeply on the face
As ancient as the sands of time adrift across the shadowed dunes,
As ancient as a deep abyss which spirals sand to windblown grace
A hidden place of time eternals' grace where texture looms.

Those looms of fibre, richly hued, in textures from forgotten time
Where hawkers clad in dusty robes in alleys shrilly called their trade
Of fabrics woven, coarse and tight, in sepia’s arresting rhyme,
To angled shards of golden light spearing evening’s satin shade.

As lantern light of haloed glow throws comfort small to dying day,
While nearby camels amble by, aloof to all but masters call,
Now chewing cuds of nonchalance, oblivious, which is their way,
Shadows grow to velvet night where diamond starlight distils all.

Ancient are the wrinkled lines embed deeply on this face
Of time eternal’s passage here imbued with passing ageless grace.

M.
17 April 2016