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Patrick Clinton Mar 2012
Above the earth and below the sun,
Exhaled from volcanoes long ago.

Stately as the ships of the Spanish Armada,
Sailing the horizon graceful and slow.

Bearer of ambrosia that innervates the earth,
Harvester of water and what the winds blow.

Ageless and formless, taking every shape
Suggestive to reason of what we do not know.
Charles Leonard Nov 2021
Consider essential breaths of air, and the expulsion of stale air caused by living tissue to vibrate outward through the mouth, twisted by the tongue, ultimately, effortlessly, sculpted into words quite literally expressed. Then, when heard, this mere turbulence of updraft and downdraft instinctively intertwined, innervates the cells of the brain and recreates the voice of what in man, we call the mind. It is astounding!

I have been fascinated with language my entire life.

I don't possess the imaginative, creative or intellectual prowess of those who have found success in writing. Whether I have special talent or ability to compose from mere fragments of sound something singularly meaningful or moving or enchanting or grand is candidly, beyond my innermost aspiration: it has never been a serious pursuit. I recognize great works of others and profess my awe and my lack of reach openly.

But, my study and reading and writing of poems emerged from that thrill I felt and still feel at the sound that is the very essence of each word, written or spoken. It is the power of language as a pattern of sound - the resonance of words however articulated, that has and will always give me special joy.

Language is taken for granted. We speak, communicate, read and write throughout our lives.  

We may speak of the meanings of words. We might study their origin, the evolution of language. Or we might focus only on the functional aspects of language: the organizational utility that letters and words and grammar and spelling and punctuation and composition and ultimately, pronunciation and articulation contribute constructionally to the primary aim which is communication.

We may cherish only the results - the great stories and novels, or spiritual and philosophic admonitions and inquiries, or favorite song lyrics or poetry that wondrously compresses language into some uniquely evocative mental, emotional and/or spiritual experience.

How impoverished would we be without the articulation of ideas and concepts and personal experience that language makes possible?

For some reason, in addition to respecting the power of language, I have always been compelled on impulse to hear the actual words and marvel at them - to play with them and study their tonal quality merely as fragments of sound heard actually or heard only echoing about in the silence of my mind.

It is the sounds of the words themselves, more than any image or sentiment a particular poem of mine might be constructed around, that I hope to offer in the form of this otherwise unremarkable collection of personal art. For each that might visit, I hope the few minutes spent are enjoyable and worthy and that your own words give you joy, too.
An introduction to my work.
Ongoing communication with the Count De St. Germaine
Born Around 1710 in San Germano, Savoy, as the natural son of an Italian princess.
He visited me again not long ago.
Speaking as he did, he did come and then go.
with endless perspicacity eclipsing empyrean fires,
One's magnanimous susurrus in aeons aspires.
Yet whither art thou, in this age cacophonic,
Where malisons spew from tongues misanthropic?

I perambulate, somnambular, through gloam’s desuetude,
Harkening phantasmal echoes in crepuscular interlude.
Yet only zephyrs, in dulcet effusion,
Intone their clandestine, windborne allusion.

listening for echoes that might still remain.
But only the wind, in mellifluous guise,
sings secrets in silence  to cerulean skies.

These polysemous effulgences  both wax and wane,
Guttering yet indelible. We rise above both spectral,  and arcane.
antediluvian hush, betwixt frost-laden dearth,
Manifests a logos, in insipid girth.
antediluvian silences drawn,
vertiginous  in hyperborean dearth
a logos, sir, in autochthonous rebirth.

Their hierophantic murmurs will obfuscate,
the omphalos of matter, still inchoate,
where perichoresis in tumultuous tide
the fractal that innervates, presupposed  then shied .

A palimpsest of null embraces
where these false augurs drink from hallowed places,
and time itself forgets to turn. Why Obsess ?
For Nihil’s  never but always caress,
Christo- fascist rising imbibe from those urns abyssal,
And Chronos forgets to turn his gear yet again.
How do we start and where to begin.
Perfidious orisons, whisper-thin,
in circumflected aeons spin,
converging on the cusp of naught,
where paradigms in silence rot.
A chrysalis of paradox,
enshrouds the fey, unbridled clock,
that chime in fugue, then dissipate
beyond the hinge of latent fate...
the collection plate from church to state.

The denigratory grand design
deliquesces in auctorial decline!

(Syncretic palingenesis unspools,
within the aether’s epistemic pools,
a syzygetic parallax unweaves
the thaumaturgic spoor that time bereaves.)

For naught but vacuous profundities remain,
a simulacrum of the arcane mundane,
where in sesquipedalian grandeur lies
a syllogism clad in grandiloquent guise.

Ouroboric concatenations of antinomian design,
circumvolute within circumspatial paradigms malign,
as obmutescent theogonic vestiges coalesce
in the eidetic zymurgy of aphasic largesse.

Metagnostic palimpsests, fracto-linear and obtuse,
catachrestically wane in hyperchromatic profuse,
whilst locutions, effulgent yet contrite,
obumbrate the paramorphic tautology of night.

A transcendental abecedarium, paralogical and vast,
consanguineous with the inexorable umbrage
of our shared Jungian past,
germinates within the syntagmatic—
Ever relaxed or ecstatic,
Coalesced to pragmatic,
Lugubriously emphatic.

Within this hypostatized ratiocinative mire,
where sophronistic axiom and non-being conspire,
one finds but an echolalic, chimerical gleam,
an ontosemantic palinode to the dream.

The Archetype realized.
The Alchemist mystically re-materialized.

Count, oh Count.
"Wherefore art thou," indeed,
in this: our time of greatest need.
Come to us now in council.
Post haste and with speed.
Race ever faster on righteous
breed steed.
Deliver us from this egregious misdeed
enveloped in lust and slathered in greed.
Help us plant a seed.
Regrowth !
Rebirth!
I plead.

Dearest Count,
Forever must thou linger in shadow’s creed,
As we toil ‘neath venal decrees of greed?
Come forth in augural council and  heed!
Post-haste upon thy seraphic steed!
Deliver us from this abhorrent misdeed,
Enshrouded in vice, in carnality steeped.
Lend thy hand that we might seed
Regrowth!
Rebirth!
I plead.

— The End —