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I

Out of the little chapel I burst
Into the fresh night-air again.
Five minutes full, I waited first
In the doorway, to escape the rain
That drove in gusts down the common’s centre
At the edge of which the chapel stands,
Before I plucked up heart to enter.
Heaven knows how many sorts of hands
Reached past me, groping for the latch
Of the inner door that hung on catch
More obstinate the more they fumbled,
Till, giving way at last with a scold
Of the crazy hinge, in squeezed or tumbled
One sheep more to the rest in fold,
And left me irresolute, standing sentry
In the sheepfold’s lath-and-plaster entry,
Six feet long by three feet wide,
Partitioned off from the vast inside—
I blocked up half of it at least.
No remedy; the rain kept driving.
They eyed me much as some wild beast,
That congregation, still arriving,
Some of them by the main road, white
A long way past me into the night,
Skirting the common, then diverging;
Not a few suddenly emerging
From the common’s self through the paling-gaps,
—They house in the gravel-pits perhaps,
Where the road stops short with its safeguard border
Of lamps, as tired of such disorder;—
But the most turned in yet more abruptly
From a certain squalid knot of alleys,
Where the town’s bad blood once slept corruptly,
Which now the little chapel rallies
And leads into day again,—its priestliness
Lending itself to hide their beastliness
So cleverly (thanks in part to the mason),
And putting so cheery a whitewashed face on
Those neophytes too much in lack of it,
That, where you cross the common as I did,
And meet the party thus presided,
“Mount Zion” with Love-lane at the back of it,
They front you as little disconcerted
As, bound for the hills, her fate averted,
And her wicked people made to mind him,
Lot might have marched with Gomorrah behind him.

II

Well, from the road, the lanes or the common,
In came the flock: the fat weary woman,
Panting and bewildered, down-clapping
Her umbrella with a mighty report,
Grounded it by me, wry and flapping,
A wreck of whalebones; then, with a snort,
Like a startled horse, at the interloper
(Who humbly knew himself improper,
But could not shrink up small enough)
—Round to the door, and in,—the gruff
Hinge’s invariable scold
Making my very blood run cold.
Prompt in the wake of her, up-pattered
On broken clogs, the many-tattered
Little old-faced peaking sister-turned-mother
Of the sickly babe she tried to smother
Somehow up, with its spotted face,
From the cold, on her breast, the one warm place;
She too must stop, wring the poor ends dry
Of a draggled shawl, and add thereby
Her tribute to the door-mat, sopping
Already from my own clothes’ dropping,
Which yet she seemed to grudge I should stand on:
Then, stooping down to take off her pattens,
She bore them defiantly, in each hand one,
Planted together before her breast
And its babe, as good as a lance in rest.
Close on her heels, the dingy satins
Of a female something past me flitted,
With lips as much too white, as a streak
Lay far too red on each hollow cheek;
And it seemed the very door-hinge pitied
All that was left of a woman once,
Holding at least its tongue for the *****.
Then a tall yellow man, like the Penitent Thief,
With his jaw bound up in a handkerchief,
And eyelids ******* together tight,
Led himself in by some inner light.
And, except from him, from each that entered,
I got the same interrogation—
“What, you the alien, you have ventured
To take with us, the elect, your station?
A carer for none of it, a Gallio!”—
Thus, plain as print, I read the glance
At a common prey, in each countenance
As of huntsman giving his hounds the tallyho.
And, when the door’s cry drowned their wonder,
The draught, it always sent in shutting,
Made the flame of the single tallow candle
In the cracked square lantern I stood under,
Shoot its blue lip at me, rebutting
As it were, the luckless cause of scandal:
I verily fancied the zealous light
(In the chapel’s secret, too!) for spite
Would shudder itself clean off the wick,
With the airs of a Saint John’s Candlestick.
There was no standing it much longer.
“Good folks,” thought I, as resolve grew stronger,
“This way you perform the Grand-Inquisitor
When the weather sends you a chance visitor?
You are the men, and wisdom shall die with you,
And none of the old Seven Churches vie with you!
But still, despite the pretty perfection
To which you carry your trick of exclusiveness,
And, taking God’s word under wise protection,
Correct its tendency to diffusiveness,
And bid one reach it over hot ploughshares,—
Still, as I say, though you’ve found salvation,
If I should choose to cry, as now, ‘Shares!’—
See if the best of you bars me my ration!
I prefer, if you please, for my expounder
Of the laws of the feast, the feast’s own Founder;
Mine’s the same right with your poorest and sickliest,
Supposing I don the marriage vestiment:
So, shut your mouth and open your Testament,
And carve me my portion at your quickliest!”
Accordingly, as a shoemaker’s lad
With wizened face in want of soap,
And wet apron wound round his waist like a rope,
(After stopping outside, for his cough was bad,
To get the fit over, poor gentle creature
And so avoid distrubing the preacher)
—Passed in, I sent my elbow spikewise
At the shutting door, and entered likewise,
Received the hinge’s accustomed greeting,
And crossed the threshold’s magic pentacle,
And found myself in full conventicle,
—To wit, in Zion Chapel Meeting,
On the Christmas-Eve of ‘Forty-nine,
Which, calling its flock to their special clover,
Found all assembled and one sheep over,
Whose lot, as the weather pleased, was mine.

III

I very soon had enough of it.
The hot smell and the human noises,
And my neighbor’s coat, the greasy cuff of it,
Were a pebble-stone that a child’s hand poises,
Compared with the pig-of-lead-like pressure
Of the preaching man’s immense stupidity,
As he poured his doctrine forth, full measure,
To meet his audience’s avidity.
You needed not the wit of the Sibyl
To guess the cause of it all, in a twinkling:
No sooner our friend had got an inkling
Of treasure hid in the Holy Bible,
(Whene’er ‘t was the thought first struck him,
How death, at unawares, might duck him
Deeper than the grave, and quench
The gin-shop’s light in hell’s grim drench)
Than he handled it so, in fine irreverence,
As to hug the book of books to pieces:
And, a patchwork of chapters and texts in severance,
Not improved by the private dog’s-ears and creases,
Having clothed his own soul with, he’d fain see equipt yours,—
So tossed you again your Holy Scriptures.
And you picked them up, in a sense, no doubt:
Nay, had but a single face of my neighbors
Appeared to suspect that the preacher’s labors
Were help which the world could be saved without,
‘T is odds but I might have borne in quiet
A qualm or two at my spiritual diet,
Or (who can tell?) perchance even mustered
Somewhat to urge in behalf of the sermon:
But the flock sat on, divinely flustered,
Sniffing, methought, its dew of Hermon
With such content in every snuffle,
As the devil inside us loves to ruffle.
My old fat woman purred with pleasure,
And thumb round thumb went twirling faster,
While she, to his periods keeping measure,
Maternally devoured the pastor.
The man with the handkerchief untied it,
Showed us a horrible wen inside it,
Gave his eyelids yet another *******,
And rocked himself as the woman was doing.
The shoemaker’s lad, discreetly choking,
Kept down his cough. ‘T was too provoking!
My gorge rose at the nonsense and stuff of it;
So, saying like Eve when she plucked the apple,
“I wanted a taste, and now there’s enough of it,”
I flung out of the little chapel.

IV

There was a lull in the rain, a lull
In the wind too; the moon was risen,
And would have shone out pure and full,
But for the ramparted cloud-prison,
Block on block built up in the West,
For what purpose the wind knows best,
Who changes his mind continually.
And the empty other half of the sky
Seemed in its silence as if it knew
What, any moment, might look through
A chance gap in that fortress massy:—
Through its fissures you got hints
Of the flying moon, by the shifting tints,
Now, a dull lion-color, now, brassy
Burning to yellow, and whitest yellow,
Like furnace-smoke just ere flames bellow,
All a-simmer with intense strain
To let her through,—then blank again,
At the hope of her appearance failing.
Just by the chapel a break in the railing
Shows a narrow path directly across;
‘T is ever dry walking there, on the moss—
Besides, you go gently all the way up-hill.
I stooped under and soon felt better;
My head grew lighter, my limbs more supple,
As I walked on, glad to have slipt the fetter.
My mind was full of the scene I had left,
That placid flock, that pastor vociferant,
—How this outside was pure and different!
The sermon, now—what a mingled weft
Of good and ill! Were either less,
Its fellow had colored the whole distinctly;
But alas for the excellent earnestness,
And the truths, quite true if stated succinctly,
But as surely false, in their quaint presentment,
However to pastor and flock’s contentment!
Say rather, such truths looked false to your eyes,
With his provings and parallels twisted and twined,
Till how could you know them, grown double their size
In the natural fog of the good man’s mind,
Like yonder spots of our roadside lamps,
Haloed about with the common’s damps?
Truth remains true, the fault’s in the prover;
The zeal was good, and the aspiration;
And yet, and yet, yet, fifty times over,
Pharaoh received no demonstration,
By his Baker’s dream of Baskets Three,
Of the doctrine of the Trinity,—
Although, as our preacher thus embellished it,
Apparently his hearers relished it
With so unfeigned a gust—who knows if
They did not prefer our friend to Joseph?
But so it is everywhere, one way with all of them!
These people have really felt, no doubt,
A something, the motion they style the Call of them;
And this is their method of bringing about,
By a mechanism of words and tones,
(So many texts in so many groans)
A sort of reviving and reproducing,
More or less perfectly, (who can tell?)
The mood itself, which strengthens by using;
And how that happens, I understand well.
A tune was born in my head last week,
Out of the thump-thump and shriek-shriek
Of the train, as I came by it, up from Manchester;
And when, next week, I take it back again,
My head will sing to the engine’s clack again,
While it only makes my neighbor’s haunches stir,
—Finding no dormant musical sprout
In him, as in me, to be jolted out.
‘T is the taught already that profits by teaching;
He gets no more from the railway’s preaching
Than, from this preacher who does the rail’s officer, I:
Whom therefore the flock cast a jealous eye on.
Still, why paint over their door “Mount Zion,”
To which all flesh shall come, saith the pro phecy?

V

But wherefore be harsh on a single case?
After how many modes, this Christmas-Eve,
Does the self-same weary thing take place?
The same endeavor to make you believe,
And with much the same effect, no more:
Each method abundantly convincing,
As I say, to those convinced before,
But scarce to be swallowed without wincing
By the not-as-yet-convinced. For me,
I have my own church equally:
And in this church my faith sprang first!
(I said, as I reached the rising ground,
And the wind began again, with a burst
Of rain in my face, and a glad rebound
From the heart beneath, as if, God speeding me,
I entered his church-door, nature leading me)
—In youth I looked to these very skies,
And probing their immensities,
I found God there, his visible power;
Yet felt in my heart, amid all its sense
Of the power, an equal evidence
That his love, there too, was the nobler dower.
For the loving worm within its clod
Were diviner than a loveless god
Amid his worlds, I will dare to say.
You know what I mean: God’s all man’s naught:
But also, God, whose pleasure brought
Man into being, stands away
As it were a handbreadth off, to give
Room for the newly-made to live,
And look at him from a place apart,
And use his gifts of brain and heart,
Given, indeed, but to keep forever.
Who speaks of man, then, must not sever
Man’s very elements from man,
Saying, “But all is God’s”—whose plan
Was to create man and then leave him
Able, his own word saith, to grieve him,
But able to glorify him too,
As a mere machine could never do,
That prayed or praised, all unaware
Of its fitness for aught but praise and prayer,
Made perfect as a thing of course.
Man, therefore, stands on his own stock
Of love and power as a pin-point rock:
And, looking to God who ordained divorce
Of the rock from his boundless continent,
Sees, in his power made evident,
Only excess by a million-fold
O’er the power God gave man in the mould.
For, note: man’s hand, first formed to carry
A few pounds’ weight, when taught to marry
Its strength with an engine’s, lifts a mountain,
—Advancing in power by one degree;
And why count steps through eternity?
But love is the ever-springing fountain:
Man may enlarge or narrow his bed
For the water’s play, but the water-head—
How can he multiply or reduce it?
As easy create it, as cause it to cease;
He may profit by it, or abuse it,
But ‘t is not a thing to bear increase
As power does: be love less or more
In the heart of man, he keeps it shut
Or opes it wide, as he pleases, but
Love’s sum remains what it was before.
So, gazing up, in my youth, at love
As seen through power, ever above
All modes which make it manifest,
My soul brought all to a single test—
That he, the Eternal First and Last,
Who, in his power, had so surpassed
All man conceives of what is might,—
Whose wisdom, too, showed infinite,
—Would prove as infinitely good;
Would never, (my soul understood,)
With power to work all love desires,
Bestow e’en less than man requires;
That he who endlessly was teaching,
Above my spirit’s utmost reaching,
What love can do in the leaf or stone,
(So that to master this alone,
This done in the stone or leaf for me,
I must go on learning endlessly)
Would never need that I, in turn,
Should point him out defect unheeded,
And show that God had yet to learn
What the meanest human creature needed,
—Not life, to wit, for a few short years,
Tracking his way through doubts and fears,
While the stupid earth on which I stay
Suffers no change, but passive adds
Its myriad years to myriads,
Though I, he gave it to, decay,
Seeing death come and choose about me,
And my dearest ones depart without me.
No: love which, on earth, amid all the shows of it,
Has ever been seen the sole good of life in it,
The love, ever growing there, spite of the strife in it,
Shall arise, made perfect, from death’s repose of it.
And I shall behold thee, face to face,
O God, and in thy light retrace
How in all I loved here, still wast thou!
Whom pressing to, then, as I fain would now,
I shall find as able to satiate
The love, thy gift, as my spirit’s wonder
Thou art able to quicken and sublimate,
With this sky of thine, that I now walk under
And glory in thee for, as I gaze
Thus, thus! Oh, let men keep their ways
Of seeking thee in a narrow shrine—
Be this my way! And this is mine!

VI

For lo, what think you? suddenly
The rain and the wind ceased, and the sky
Received at once the full fruition
Of the moon’s consummate apparition.
The black cloud-barricade was riven,
Ruined beneath her feet, and driven
Deep in the West; while, bare and breathless,
North and South and East lay ready
For a glorious thing that, dauntless, deathless,
Sprang across them and stood steady.
‘T was a moon-rainbow, vast and perfect,
From heaven to heaven extending, perfect
As the mother-moon’s self, full in face.
It rose, distinctly at the base
With its seven proper colors chorded,
Which still, in the rising, were compressed,
Until at last they coalesced,
And supreme the spectral creature lorded
In a triumph of whitest white,—
Above which intervened the night.
But above night too, like only the next,
The second of a wondrous sequence,
Reaching in rare and rarer frequence,
Till the heaven of heavens were circumflexed
Another rainbow rose, a mightier,
Fainter, flushier and flightier,—
Rapture dying along its verge.
Oh, whose foot shall I see emerge,
Whose, from the straining topmost dark,
On to the keystone of that are?

VII

This sight was shown me, there and then,—
Me, one out of a world of men,
Singled forth, as the chance might hap
To another if, in a thu
PYTHAGORAS planned it.  Why did the people stare?
His numbers, though they moved or seemed to move
In marble or in bronze, lacked character.
But boys and girls, pale from the imagined love
Of solitary beds, knew what they were,
That passion could bring character enough,
And pressed at midnight in some public place
Live lips upon a plummet-measured face.
No! Greater than Pythagoras, for the men
That with a mallet or a chisel" modelled these
Calculations that look but casual flesh, put down
All Asiatic vague immensities,
And not the banks of oars that swam upon
The many-headed foam at Salamis.
Europe put off that foam when Phidias
Gave women dreams and dreams their looking-glass.
One image crossed the many-headed, sat
Under the tropic shade, grew round and slow,
No Hamlet thin from eating flies, a fat
Dreamer of the Middle Ages.  Empty eyeballs knew
That knowledge increases unreality, that
Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show.
When gong and conch declare the hour to bless
Grimalkin crawls to Buddha's emptiness.
When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side.
What stalked through the post Office? What intellect,
What calculation, number, measurement, replied?
We Irish, born into that ancient sect
But thrown upon this filthy modern tide
And by its formless spawning fury wrecked,
Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace
The lineaments of a plummet-measured face.
April 9,
Amir Apr 2010
arboreal
capitulation
to the last saw;
just lying there,
rusting and dull,
a senile serial killer.

a dirt water droplet
circlestalks the sun
like a vulture.


wild flowers
split the concrete
like jackhammers and
the vines hang low
over city streets,
while unmaintained
botanical gardens
shrivel and decay,
breeding mushy immensities.

bears hibernate in subways
and deer flock in herds
and oh, the birds..
the birds.

spiders hang webs
from ancient clock towers
while moth returns
to chasing moon.

dams crumble,
the water flows,
sea reclaims the shore.

but the
eldest
trees
still weep
when memory pains,
and so surrender
to the saw,
however harmless
out of hand.
© Amir 2008
Lindsay Alley May 2013
Fluorescent flickers illuminate the stained cement floors of the hallway. Your slippered feet music an uneven pad and scuff. This ***** city is home, whatever that means. This ***** city holds you like you're someone else's child. A burst of joy and music reaches for you through the window; someone bangs a door and you turn on the tap. As water sputters onto your toothbrush you catch a whiff of Dakota Jim's racist southern drawl, a puff of his ketamine breath.

You walk to the window, toothbrush dangling.

[Oh London, I know you love no one, but nights like this I feel your heartbeat in your embrace.]

History swells beneath your feet. Your eyes land on a seated figure, his grand headdress of feathers overpowering the tableau, his gaze calmer than the other mad happy swirls that make up the crowd. It makes you wonder what he sees. Probably nothing. You will learn that when he seems profound it is usually an accident. You are penned in by jagged skyline hieroglyphics. History swells. Your heavy hearted story is a speck consumed in all this history. All the history you were taught in school was death, you remember your mother bemoaning this war generals and battle dates history. You wonder at how much death this place has seen, how many lives the city has birthed and eaten, hungry mother staving off starvation.

We all write our stories on other people's bones. Of course the greatest cities would leave the greatest scars. And what did you come here looking for anyway?

[Hello Momento Mori city. I see you. I see your rooftops straining to **** stars. Do you mourn for your dead? Are they heavy in your belly? Are you going to eat me, too?]

But now, if you drag your little mind back from the immensities, everything around you is alive. Everyone is dancing, happy to be caught in her belly. Or her womb. Not one of you knows which, but there you are. In the courtyard, the small, steady figure of Freddie Stitz brings a lit cigarette to his lips and smiles up at you in the window.

Wipe that toothpaste off your face, you look ridiculous. Go back to bed.
i am vis-a-vis
with the wuthering truth:
perhaps,
why
we are flourishing,
we are colossal
in our
dream
is because
our realities are
small
and that our frailties roar,
bludgeoning us to our
minuteness.
it is our fate:
in the dungeons of sleep we
burgeon!
    -- as though we do not wish
   to wake up to what bitterness
     rises with us in waking.
Usque incorruptibiles aeternum vivet in aeternum
                                         (356-323 B.C.)

The Regressive Legend tells that this good piece of muscular meat and brain too, was born to write his entire story dying with the blood of Etruscan Steeds, each one had golden piercings on the internal hanging of their six paranasal sinuses, to seal life by this blood-tightness. Franciscan timeless swordsman, so that with his last four molars it would give way to amalgamated crystalline light and overflowing from the gums of the period that soaked blood in the equestrian fields. With which from the ventral turbinate he would be in the first row giving pendency to the Troops of the Great Darius, from where his Alikanto Horse, dressed in degrading dust, changed his Etruria marble saddles with his paranasal attributions, and his brain roots of the hypothalamus pillar who gave them super alchemical excitements and compulsions, super powerful attack to arrive at Tel Gomel 7 days before, supported by the elixir of the Fires of the reinforced steel legs of his Alikanto, with whose entity they came out in droves looking like when they ran at great speeds pretending to be more than a thousand equine Etruscans escaping from the Culture of the Vulture war in a rectilinear scourge of speed in an inordinate trajectory by the Gaugamela tapestries.

Vernath; in one of their lives he was aware of broker comments. Along the long avenues there were countless soldiers who had taken possession of their regression! Many spoke loudly through the pavilions of their stateless conscience. After putting their good feeling of great good sufficiency, they called to him to loud voice which with little will he could hear. Then he heard himself say saying ...; They talked about me? Sooner or later I will be with my therapist, she says that before going to her office she was already dictating to approach her great Christus Martial test in Gaugamela. From the six strings of his devotional he came, taken with both hands with great force, to bend from the eyelids of his intruding Sibyl, to travel through the minimum must of the Solstice to reach the point of apogee closest to his epic, which I rescued with Eternal Life an obese arm from wars won by the peaceful Death, in the Way of oblique perpetrated committed soldiers that from Mosul swept him swirling with high bravery mounted in his Alikanto, before arriving at the low meadow forest of the Lid.

If it was a boy ... it was a Man. If he was a Man ... he was an offender of the fortress. If he was leisurely unfolded he always carried his sword, he never left it. Even his reconciling dreamed would be damaged if he deported him from his daily Christian offices. Vernath, is a living survivor precedent to the resurrected Alexander the Great, after 323 BC .. But when they breathed the same glorious air, both looking at each other, brandished cutting the sharp rudeness that divided them with the 6 Golden swords, from 6 angles of strategic fords to die. several times to challenge the pain that surpasses all life the golden strings with blood "Hexachordia Caelestialis Mortuorum", From the musical scale of agony of the sheep plains that are prey to the melodies of the scythes strengthened by the fear of the trembling of the charismatic migrant .

Vernarth was raised as befits a Greek prince, with heroic tales from Joshua de Piedra's epic poetry. He was part of a culture that demanded that great men despise personal danger and take risks to gain experience. His genealogical ancestors came from Sudpichi, near the Talamitense / Chile reign.
He also received teachings from Kalavrita's Etrestles himself in philosophy and science (Kometerium Messolonghi / Editorial Palibrio - Bloomington USA). Since childhood he was a charming guest for the guests of the court. Etrestles was named their teacher, largely to control recklessness and aggressiveness by at least tempering them with more philosophical and civilized values, far from all insomniac excess.
In this he did not achieve complete success, because his obstinacy led him to run around the world barefoot and without clothes. Vernath, far from obeying his parents. He would go out at night and chase the Moon pregnant with pale Solar light on foot to attack it and tame its silver enclosure on its Etruscan steeds, exuding the naused locked in its loopholes.

He learned a great deal from his tutor and became a highly scholarly man watching for Messolonghi and a keeper of the confines of the Kalavrita macro heavens. But he remained essentially the brave boy who spat too blasphemous atomic alcohol on the Cyclops, who wanted to be Hercules surrounded by himself without parallel. Alexander's inspiration was Etrestles; Homer's accounts of his exploits inspired Vernath in his general attitude of putting his books beyond his memoirs and bibliographic insights.

It is likely that he was seen as a brand new version of the classic Greek heroes with divine blood in SudPichi ..., good piece of muscular meat and brain. To a large extent, this was true more than her own Sibyl lying in her lived regression in the decadent heights of Gaugamela's flushed proximity.

Vernath was an extremely aggressive commander who considered any type of defensive preparation as a sign of weakness, so he dared to speak out in opposition to Saint Augustine; The personality of Saint Augustine of Hippo was iron and it took very hard anvils to forge it, attributing to her apathy not to proceed with the courage of the great Maker, for her encyclopedic fervor and scientific rigor. Perhaps in cowardice, for not facing the mysteries of the word of the present Gods. He was therefore encouraged, rather than dismayed, when the Persian army rallied behind the Gránico river, forcing him to stun across it in front of his predicted opposition, like a sovereign crusader. It is the cross of the plain that in oblique route, can rescind the old word task of the ritual punishment of the sacrilegious Pharisee death that lacks.
Vernath with more than 180,000 faithful followers, declared that the ******* did not have confidence in the victory of the greatest affront, and they counted on the pronounced banks of the river to restrain the intensity of their attack enough so that the Persian cavalry defeated him by accumulating centimeters, to gain deadly meters. He launched his cavalry across the river at the point where the enemy seemed strongest brooding, degraded soldier, and after a fierce skirmish he succeeded in driving the Persian cavalry absent from twilight elixir value alongside the extermination of the voiceless I neither sing nor sing.
The second Persian line expired, the Greek mercenaries, held firm, but was slaughtered in less than five variations of the Sun as a declaring manifesto. Depleted of jubilant water resources, the Granicus established the moral dominance of Vernath's army over his enemies and forced Darius to adopt an even more attitude. Local populations Halicamaso, a nearby port moved their lines more than 5 kilometers in their retreat retreated, before the victorious siege since he was awarded by the natural immensities of the forests of Sudpichi, together with his beloved father Bernardolipo, after consonating suspicious corners from the Osho Tarot, when he drew his sword and upright lunge on the first card, on the instep of the undefeated and naive ignorant warrior, versed strenuous mercenary.
VERNARTH ETERNAL LIGHT
Jimmy Solanki Feb 2014
Capsized
My heart has sunk again
As a crimson iceberg struck
Bittersweet disdain
by the Gods above
Realizing I got stuck

In a starry sea
Under moonlit remains
We met in a hurricane
Capsized
My heart has sunk again

The moon whispers soliloquies
Legends and tales of eternal love
Mysteries and Immensities
Legends and tales of you and I

In a fiery haze
Under the silent refrain
of the crackling of fire
Our eyes met again
Nothing else made sense
Nothing else mattered
Nothing

Capsized
My heart has sunk again
Don't save me
From love's domain
SN Mrax Nov 2014
I am
the balance point
at the center of
a vast universe—
whooping with complexity
and groaning with emptiness.
And how absurd to see me
standing there,
powerless in an excess of power—
my only fulcrum
within me as I take a deep breath
and whisper, implore, reason, soothe
the great, uneven immensities
to be calmed,

and I dissolve my consciousness
into placelessness
so that I may place myself at the center of each
zone of complexity, each expanse of emptiness,
and center each millimeter within itself,
so that all this universe is a universe of balance,
continuously shifting yet continuously balanced,
her foot in absolute certainty on the path,
her body all containing,
the void her nourishing heart,

the enormity neither ordinary,
nor frightening,
nor any one thing,
but to see the consciousness in formlessness—
looking back at me—
all creating,
(and yet created, reflecting,) and yet
giving me
such power.
Teodora Pavel Jul 2017
No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put at just the right place.
                      Babel’s maxim

Freezing inside golden jars,
They’re trying to recover their senses
Within bluish immensities of solitude
Nothing can escape this intensity,
a buzz of nothingness among
deaf animals trying to escape,
to recover their senses
they die, they sleep, they laugh, they weep
but no one can see them,
no one can hear them
Fatigue encircles them in a sunny cage
made up of trillions, and trillions of jars
they cannot die, they cannot sleep, they cannot laugh, they cannot weep
Tell me if you have something to say
when plain breeze revels in your innermost self

plain breeze upon delicious icy rocks,
killing every whisper, every lie
And this windy torment you cannot deny
as the snowy season nests inside
There are musicians dying all around
Complaining about the absence of all sound
I know, they are the worst of all,
Disbowelled, with dry limbs, they climb and fall

Death, golden, frozen, with no music
Exposed a hidden harmony through the immensity
of that transparent garden, covered with snow
Following the image of every prayer,
Useless objects, that used to be human-animals
spell their own despair upon skyless
roofs, an offer that no one would recognize,
a blaze of glory for immortal eyes

But who am I to turn to these dry bones,
a coronation of a sacred simphony
That would be heard, repeted, played for all eternity
If only some lost angel found his name, or found his rose.
Frankfurt, 21.10.2016 (Friday)
Julio May 2019
The loose notebooks
they walk around here and there,
taken out of hiding.
As the syndrome of Estolcomo

I see white walls
almost empty, almost
the free space
even within the walls,
I like space.

Light plays with the smoothness of the painting
tersuras of the picture, that I love,
that I saw him born,
smooth, creamy

The sounds come from above,
I put them there.
The hammock on the curtain.
The head of the condor in its place.

 And January Quetzal dominates everything,
before the mysterious look of the ebony slave,
on the corks of a thousand amazing wines.
 
And the universe according to the Tafi,
in the center of everything,
stars, the Moon,
under a round of fused hands.

All the bones are,
antlers, horns,
breastplates, fangs,
teeth, breastplates, tails.

Stones, rocks,
shells, conches,
scrapers,
more stones,
Eternal stones!

Compasses with watches,
the Russian chronometer,
ready as always,
the alarm clock of Churri.

While the notebooks enjoy their freedom,
and they come and go
And I do not draw anything

A beautiful female in her dresser chair,
who always turns his back on me,
yearning and fearful,
always beautiful.

How many beaches,
how many roads,
hills, mountains,
open immensities,
and traveled páramos.

Life does not stop!
Michael Marchese Oct 2020
And then the impending
Defensive maneuvers
The people I meet on the ground
As intruders
Are suddenly welcoming
Heightened of sense
Intellect, kids I haven’t seen since
I was drenched
In immensities
Too difficult
To control
Then I see her again
And I know
Who I am
Who I was
Isn’t was
Who she now
Didn’t plan
newborn Apr 2023
you were whisked away on a ship, bound for the treasure of the hidden world

i traveled to a desert
sweltering heat and cracking blisters
called your name as dry sand filled my esophagus
an oasis sprouted in the middle of the sandcastle civilization
running water, blue and hopeful
sprinting like a madman, i trekked towards my salvation
but when i came across its beckoning entrance
the mirage collapsed
the betrayal
my eyes had deceived me
in my consuming exhaustion, i had forgotten the illusions, smoke and mirrors the desert plays on you
and in being so crushed beyond belief
sandstorms came from under my feet
and, you know, the mirage became some
solidified reality
and
i
ache for it
with all my bones.

if only i were a crew member
aboard your ship to the galaxy
i was seconds away from boarding
five steps away
so close i could smell the saltwater as it caressed my cheek
waving goodbye to your face, decorated with sunlight
sun-kissed and golden.

the navigator of the seas
traveler with a sense of abandonment, on a sailboat gliding over waves,
glowing, evolving, flying
the sunset disappearing beyond the horizon,
where you chase the possibility of its various immensities
a rhythmic beauty, hung up in galleries, watching the waves lap against the shore
hands on her chin as she sits cross legged,
feeling the sand swirl around her  
she cups up the sand, as it vanishes slowly underneath her palms
sobbing into a pile of grief, so confined in a state of helplessness
she tumbles on the sand, silky hair falling to her sides under crescent moon design
and
she
aches for refuge
with all her bones.
for my old best friend. hopefully you haven’t forgot about me. read these words and understand that i want to be in your presence again. i miss you so dearly.

in the end i switch up the way i refer to her, as she and i have gotten less and less close over the years. the ‘she’ is used because i do now know her by the end, so instead of using ‘you,’ a more definitive term, i used ‘she’. do with that what you will

4/20/23

— The End —