She sent it to me as a text message, that is an image of a quote in situ, a piece of interpretation in a gallery. Saturday morning and I was driving home from a week in a remote cottage on a mountain. I had stopped to take one last look at the sea, where I usually take one last look, and the phone bleeped. A text message, but no text.  Just a photo of some words. It made me smile, the impossibility of it. Epic poems and tapestry weaving. Of course there are connections, in that for centuries the epic subject has so often been the stuff of the tapestry weaver’s art. I say this glibly, but cannot name a particular tapestry where this might be so. Those vast Arthurian pieces by William Morris to pictures by Burne-Jones have an epic quality both in scale and in subject, but, to my shame, I can’t put a name to one.

These days the tapestry can be epic once more - in size and intention - thanks to the successful, moneyed contemporary artist and those communities of weavers at West Dean and at Edinburgh’s Dovecot. Think of Grayson Perry’s The Walthamstowe Tapestry, a vast 3 x 15 metres executed by Ghentian weavers, a veritable apocalyptic vision where ‘Everyman, spat out at birth in a pool of blood, is doomed and predestined to spend his life navigating a chaotic yet banal landscape of brands and consumerism’.  Gosh! Doesn’t that sound epic!

I was at the Dovecot a little while ago, but the public gallery was closed. The weavers were too busy finishing Victoria Crowe’s Large Tree Group to cope with visitors. You see, I do know a little about this world even though my tapestry weaving is the sum total of three weekends tuition, even though I have a very large loom once owned by Marta Rogoyska. It languishes next door in the room that was going to be where I was to weave, where I was going to become someone other than I am. This is what I feel - just sometimes - when I’m at my floor loom, if only for those brief spells when life languishes sufficiently for me be slow and calm enough to pick up the shuttles and find the right coloured yarns. But I digress. In fact putting together tapestry and epic poetry is a digression from the intention of the quote on the image from that text - (it was from a letter to Janey written in Iceland). Her husband, William Morris, reckoned one could (indeed should) be able to compose an epic poem and weave a tapestry.  

This notion, this idea that such a thing as being actively poetic and throwing a pick or two should go hand in hand, and, in Morris’ words, be a required skill (or ‘he’d better shut up’), seemed (and still does a day later) an absurdity. Would such a man (must be a man I suppose) ‘never do any good at all’ because he can’t weave and compose epic poetry simultaneously?  Clearly so.  But then Morris wove his tapestries very early in the morning - often on a loom in his bedroom. Janey, I imagine, as with ladies of her day - she wasn’t one, being a stableman’s daughter, but she became one reading fluently in French and Italian and playing Beethoven on the piano- she had her own bedroom.

Do you know there are nights when I wish for my own room, even when sleeping with the one I love, as so often I wake in the night, and I lie there afraid (because I love her dearly and care for her precious rest) to disturb her sleep with reading or making notes, both of which I do when I’m alone.
Yet how very seductive is the idea of joining my loved one in her own space, amongst her fallen clothes, her books and treasures, her archives and precious things, those many letters folded into her bedside bookcase, and the little black books full of tender poems and attempts at sketches her admirer has bequeathed her when distant and apart. Equally seductive is the possibility of the knock on the bedroom / workroom door, and there she’ll be there like the woman in Michael Donaghy’s poem, a poem I find every time I search for it in his Collected Works one of the most arousing and ravishing pieces of verse I know: it makes me smile and imagine.  . .  Her personal vanishing point, she said, came when she leant against his study door all warm and wet and whispered 'Paolo’. Only she’ll say something in a barely audible voice like ‘Can I disturb you?’ and with her sparkling smile come in, and bring with her two cats and the hint of a naked breast nestling in the gap of the fold of her yellow Chinese gown she holds close to herself - so when she kneels on my single bed this gown opens and her beauty falls before her, and I am wholly, utterly lost that such loveliness is and can be so . . .

When I see a beautiful house, as I did last Thursday, far in the distance by an estuary-side, sheltering beneath wooded hills, and moor and rock-coloured mountains, with its long veranda, painted white, I imagine. I imagine our imaginary home where, when our many children are not staying in the summer months and work is impossible, we will live our ‘together yet apart’ lives. And there will be the joy of work. I will be like Ben Nicholson in that Italian villa his father-in-law bought, and have my workroom / bedroom facing a stark hillside with nothing but a carpenter’s table to lay out my scores. Whilst she, like Winifred, will work at a tidy table in her bedroom, a vase of spring flowers against the window with the estuary and the mountains beyond. Yes, her bedroom, not his, though their bed, their wonderful wooden 19C Swiss bed of oak, occupies this room and yes, in his room there is just a single affair, but robust, that he would sleep on when lunch had been late and friends had called, or they had been out calling and he wanted to give her the premise of having to go back to work – to be alone - when in fact he was going to sleep and dream, but she? She would work into the warm afternoons with the barest breeze tickling her bare feet, her body moving with the remembrance of his caresses as she woke him that morning from his deep, dark slumber. ‘Your brown eyes’, he would whisper, ‘your dear brown eyes the colour of an autumn leaf damp with dew’. And she would surround him with kisses and touch of her firm, long body and (before she cut her plaits) let her course long hair flow back and forward across his chest. And she did this because she knew he would later need the loneliness of his own space, need to put her aside, whereas she loved the scent of him in the room in which she worked, with his discarded clothes, the neck-tie on the door hanger he only reluctantly wore.

Back to epic poetry and its possibility. Even on its own, as a single, focused activity it seems to me, unadventurous poet that I am, an impossibility. But then, had I lived in the 1860s, it would probably not have seemed so difficult. There was no Radio 4 blathering on, no bleeb of arriving texts on the mobile. There were servants to see to supper, a nanny to keep the children at bay. At Kelmscott there was glorious Gloucestershire silence - only the roll and squeak of the wagon in the road and the rooks roosting. So, in the early mornings Morris could kneel at his vertical loom and, with a Burne-Jones cartoon to follow set behind the warp. With his yarns ready to hand, it would be like a modern child’s painting by numbers, his mind would be free to explore the fairy domain, the Icelandic sagas, the Welsh Mabinogion, the Kalevara from Finland, and write (in his head) an epic poem. These were often elaborations and retellings in his epic verse style of Norse and Icelandic sagas with titles like Sigurd the Volsung. Paul Thompson once said of Morris  ‘his method was to think out a poem in his head while he was busy at some other work.  He would sit at an easel, charcoal or brush in hand, working away at a design while he muttered to himself, 'bumble-beeing' as his family called it; then, when he thought he had got the lines, he would get up from the easel, prowl round the room still muttering, returning occasionally to add a touch to the design; then suddenly he would dash to the table and write out twenty or so lines.  As his pen slowed down, he would be looking around, and in a moment would be at work on another design.  Later, Morris would look at what he had written, and if he did not like it he would put it aside and try again.  But this way of working meant that he never submitted a draft to the painful evaluation which poetry requires’.

Let’s try a little of Sigurd

There was a dwelling of Kings ere the world was waxen old;
Dukes were the door-wards there, and the roofs were thatched with gold;
Earls were the wrights that wrought it, and silver nailed its doors;
Earls' wives were the weaving-women, queens' daughters strewed its floors,

And the masters of its song-craft were the mightiest men that cast
The sails of the storm of battle down the bickering blast.
There dwelt men merry-hearted, and in hope exceeding great
Met the good days and the evil as they went the way of fate:
There the Gods were unforgotten, yea whiles they walked with men,

Though e'en in that world's beginning rose a murmur now and again
Of the midward time and the fading and the last of the latter days,
And the entering in of the terror, and the death of the People's Praise.

Oh dear. And to think he sustained such poetry for another 340 lines, and that’s just book 1 of 4. So what dear reader, dear sender of that text image encouraging me to weave and write, just what would epic poetry be now? Where must one go for inspiration? Somewhere in the realms of sci-fi, something after Star-Wars or Ninja Warriors. It could be post-apocalyptic, a tale of mutants and a world damaged by chemicals or economic melt-down. Maybe a rich adventure of travel on a distant planet (with Sigourney Weaver of course), featuring brave deeds and the selfless heroism of saving companions from deadly encounters with amazing animals, monsters even. Or is ‘epic’ something else, something altogether beyond the Pixar Studios or James Cameron’s imagination? Is the  ‘epic’ now the province of AI boldly generating the computer game in 4D?  

And the epic poem? People once bought and read such published romances as they now buy and engage with on-line games. This is where the epic now belongs. On the tablet, PlayStation3, the X-Box. But, but . . . Poetry is so alive and well as a performance phenomenon, and with that oh so vigorous and relentless beat. Hell, look who won the T.S.Eliot prize this year! Story-telling lives and there are tales to be told, even if they are set in housing estates and not the ice caves of the frozen planet Golp. Just think of children’s literature, so rich and often so wild. This is word invention that revisits unashamedly those myths and sagas Morris loved, but in a different guise, with different names, in worlds that still bring together the incredible geographies of mountains and deserts and wilderness places, with fortresses and walled cities, and the startling, still unknown, yet to be discovered ocean depths.

                                    And so let my tale begin . . . My epic poem.

                                                 THE SEAGASP OF ENNLI.
       A TALE IN VERSE OF EARTHQUAKE, ISLAND FASTNESS, MALEVOLENT SPIRITS,
                                                AND REDEMPTIVE LOVE.

Apollo’s wrath to man the dreadful spring
Of ills innum’rous, tuneful goddess, sing!
Thou who did’st first th’ ideal pencil give,
And taught’st the painter in his works to live,
Inspire with glowing energy of thought,
What Wilson painted, and what Ovid wrote.
Muse! lend thy aid, nor let me sue in vain,
Tho’ last and meanest of the rhyming train!
O guide my pen in lofty strains to show
The Phrygian queen, all beautiful in woe.
  ’Twas where Maeonia spreads her wide domain
Niobe dwelt, and held her potent reign:
See in her hand the regal sceptre shine,
The wealthy heir of Tantalus divine,
He most distinguish’d by Dodonean Jove,
To approach the tables of the gods above:
Her grandsire Atlas, who with mighty pains
Th’ ethereal axis on his neck sustains:
Her other grandsire on the throne on high
Rolls the loud-pealing thunder thro’ the sky.
  Her spouse, Amphion, who from Jove too springs,
Divinely taught to sweep the sounding strings.
  Seven sprightly sons the royal bed adorn,
Seven daughters beauteous as the op’ning morn,
As when Aurora fills the ravish’d sight,
And decks the orient realms with rosy light
From their bright eyes the living splendors play,
Nor can beholders bear the flashing ray.
  Wherever, Niobe, thou turn’st thine eyes,
New beauties kindle, and new joys arise!
But thou had’st far the happier mother prov’d,
If this fair offspring had been less belov’d:
What if their charms exceed Aurora’s teint.
No words could tell them, and no pencil paint,
Thy love too vehement hastens to destroy
Each blooming maid, and each celestial boy.
  Now Manto comes, endu’d with mighty skill,
The past to explore, the future to reveal.
Thro’ Thebes’ wide streets Tiresia’s daughter came,
Divine Latona’s mandate to proclaim:
The Theban maids to hear the orders ran,
When thus Maeonia’s prophetess began:
  “Go, Thebans! great Latona’s will obey,
“And pious tribute at her altars pay:
“With rights divine, the goddess be implor’d,
“Nor be her sacred offspring unador’d.”
Thus Manto spoke.  The Theban maids obey,
And pious tribute to the goddess pay.
The rich perfumes ascend in waving spires,
And altars blaze with consecrated fires;
The fair assembly moves with graceful air,
And leaves of laurel bind the flowing hair.
  Niobe comes with all her royal race,
With charms unnumber’d, and superior grace:
Her Phrygian garments of delightful hue,
Inwove with gold, refulgent to the view,
Beyond description beautiful she moves
Like heav’nly Venus, ’midst her smiles and loves:
She views around the supplicating train,
And shakes her graceful head with stern disdain,
Proudly she turns around her lofty eyes,
And thus reviles celestial deities:
“What madness drives the Theban ladies fair
“To give their incense to surrounding air?
“Say why this new sprung deity preferr’d?
“Why vainly fancy your petitions heard?
“Or say why Caeus offspring is obey’d,
“While to my goddesship no tribute’s paid?
“For me no altars blaze with living fires,
“No bullock bleeds, no frankincense transpires,
“Tho’ Cadmus’ palace, not unknown to fame,
“And Phrygian nations all revere my name.
“Where’er I turn my eyes vast wealth I find,
“Lo! here an empress with a goddess join’d.
“What, shall a Titaness be deify’d,
“To whom the spacious earth a couch deny’d!
“Nor heav’n, nor earth, nor sea receiv’d your queen,
“Till pitying Delos took the wand’rer in.
“Round me what a large progeny is spread!
“No frowns of fortune has my soul to dread.
“What if indignant she decrease my train
“More than Latona’s number will remain;
“Then hence, ye Theban dames, hence haste away,
“Nor longer off’rings to Latona pay;
“Regard the orders of Amphion’s spouse,
“And take the leaves of laurel from your brows.”
Niobe spoke.  The Theban maids obey’d,
Their brows unbound, and left the rights unpaid.
  The angry goddess heard, then silence broke
On Cynthus’ summit, and indignant spoke;
“Phoebus! behold, thy mother in disgrace,
“Who to no goddess yields the prior place
“Except to Juno’s self, who reigns above,
“The spouse and sister of the thund’ring Jove.
“Niobe, sprung from Tantalus, inspires
“Each Theban ***** with rebellious fires;
“No reason her imperious temper quells,
“But all her father in her tongue rebels;
“Wrap her own sons for her blaspheming breath,
“Apollo! wrap them in the shades of death.”
Latona ceas’d, and ardent thus replies
The God, whose glory decks th’ expanded skies.
  “Cease thy complaints, mine be the task assign’d
“To punish pride, and scourge the rebel mind.”
This Phoebe join’d.—They wing their instant flight;
Thebes trembled as th’ immortal pow’rs alight.
  With clouds incompass’d glorious Phoebus stands;
The feather’d vengeance quiv’ring in his hands.
     Near Cadmus’ walls a plain extended lay,
Where Thebes’ young princes pass’d in sport the day:
There the bold coursers bounded o’er the plains,
While their great masters held the golden reins.
Ismenus first the racing pastime led,
And rul’d the fury of his flying steed.
“Ah me,” he sudden cries, with shrieking breath,
While in his breast he feels the shaft of death;
He drops the bridle on his courser’s mane,
Before his eyes in shadows swims the plain,
He, the first-born of great Amphion’s bed,
Was struck the first, first mingled with the dead.
  Then didst thou, Sipylus, the language hear
Of fate portentous whistling in the air:
As when th’ impending storm the sailor sees
He spreads his canvas to the fav’ring breeze,
So to thine horse thou gav’st the golden reins,
Gav’st him to rush impetuous o’er the plains:
But ah! a fatal shaft from Phoebus’ hand
Smites thro’ thy neck, and sinks thee on the sand.
  Two other brothers were at wrestling found,
And in their pastime claspt each other round:
A shaft that instant from Apollo’s hand
Transfixt them both, and stretcht them on the sand:
Together they their cruel fate bemoan’d,
Together languish’d, and together groan’d:
Together too th’ unbodied spirits fled,
And sought the gloomy mansions of the dead.
Alphenor saw, and trembling at the view,
Beat his torn breast, that chang’d its snowy hue.
He flies to raise them in a kind embrace;
A brother’s fondness triumphs in his face:
Alphenor fails in this fraternal deed,
A dart dispatch’d him (so the fates decreed:)
Soon as the arrow left the deadly wound,
His issuing entrails smoak’d upon the ground.
  What woes on blooming Damasichon wait!
His sighs portend his near impending fate.
Just where the well-made leg begins to be,
And the soft sinews form the supple knee,
The youth sore wounded by the Delian god
Attempts t’ extract the crime-avenging rod,
But, whilst he strives the will of fate t’ avert,
Divine Apollo sends a second dart;
Swift thro’ his throat the feather’d mischief flies,
Bereft of sense, he drops his head, and dies.
  Young Ilioneus, the last, directs his pray’r,
And cries, “My life, ye gods celestial! spare.”
Apollo heard, and pity touch’d his heart,
But ah! too late, for he had sent the dart:
Thou too, O Ilioneus, art doom’d to fall,
The fates refuse that arrow to recal.
  On the swift wings of ever flying Fame
To Cadmus’ palace soon the tidings came:
Niobe heard, and with indignant eyes
She thus express’d her anger and surprise:
“Why is such privilege to them allow’d?
“Why thus insulted by the Delian god?
“Dwells there such mischief in the pow’rs above?
“Why sleeps the vengeance of immortal Jove?”
For now Amphion too, with grief oppress’d,
Had plung’d the deadly dagger in his breast.
Niobe now, less haughty than before,
With lofty head directs her steps no more
She, who late told her pedigree divine,
And drove the Thebans from Latona’s shrine,
How strangely chang’d!—yet beautiful in woe,
She weeps, nor weeps unpity’d by the foe.
On each pale corse the wretched mother spread
Lay overwhelm’d with grief, and kiss’d her dead,
Then rais’d her arms, and thus, in accents slow,
“Be sated cruel Goddess! with my woe;
“If I’ve offended, let these streaming eyes,
“And let this sev’nfold funeral suffice:
“Ah! take this wretched life you deign’d to save,
“With them I too am carried to the grave.
“Rejoice triumphant, my victorious foe,
“But show the cause from whence your triumphs flow?
“Tho’ I unhappy mourn these children slain,
“Yet greater numbers to my lot remain.”
She ceas’d, the bow string twang’d with awful sound,
Which struck with terror all th’ assembly round,
Except the queen, who stood unmov’d alone,
By her distresses more presumptuous grown.
Near the pale corses stood their sisters fair
In sable vestures and dishevell’d hair;
One, while she draws the fatal shaft away,
Faints, falls, and sickens at the light of day.
To sooth her mother, lo! another flies,
And blames the fury of inclement skies,
And, while her words a filial pity show,
Struck dumb—indignant seeks the shades below.
Now from the fatal place another flies,
Falls in her flight, and languishes, and dies.
Another on her sister drops in death;
A fifth in trembling terrors yields her breath;
While the sixth seeks some gloomy cave in vain,
Struck with the rest, and mingled with the slain.
  One only daughter lives, and she the least;
The queen close clasp’d the daughter to her breast:
“Ye heav’nly pow’rs, ah spare me one,” she cry’d,
“Ah! spare me one,” the vocal hills reply’d:
In vain she begs, the Fates her suit deny,
In her embrace she sees her daughter die.
   “The queen of all her family bereft,
“Without or husband, son, or daughter left,
“Grew stupid at the shock.  The passing air
“Made no impression on her stiff’ning hair.
“The blood forsook her face: amidst the flood
“Pour’d from her cheeks, quite fix’d her eye-*****
  “stood.
“Her tongue, her palate both obdurate grew,
“Her curdled veins no longer motion knew;
“The use of neck, and arms, and feet was gone,
“And ev’n her bowels hard’ned into stone:
“A marble statue now the queen appears,
“But from the marble steal the silent tears.”

She sits there with her hair left flowing,
Staring out to the sea all knowing.
Singing till the last light breaks,
And darkness comes and claws and rapes.

Lamenting and sad her tears they fall,
Upon her tail and waist so subtle so small.
“Love me forever please the land of men,
For in the sea my heart is spent

Retell my tale but with a happy end,
Where my lover did not bow and bend.
To the whims of another lover,
Who raptures better beneath the bedcover

Whisper lover across the sea,
But stranded here my tail will keep me.
You had your chance to love and hold,
But to the sea my heart you sold."

A mermaid that now is not so little,
Damaged by a man so vain and fickle.
She languishes in perpetual beauty,
Never to forget her punishment and duty.

For if her tail does touch the ocean,
Her heart will falter from that accursed potion,
And to the sea she will fall prone,
And turn to nothing more than the seas soothing foam.

they want me to be serious, to take it seriously. To look at sunrises calmly and seize coals and watch over red-blooded, man-fueled wars about bravado, integrity, and land. To look at money, a simple representation of labor, and see what it drives other to do, to do for me.

to crush cigarettes and testicles under my boots,
to crawl through mud and barbed wire, smiling

with grit in my grimace
salt rolling, sweaty brows
twisted locks of dark hair
tobacco-brown spit, ground
and filthy, caked in mud
teeth bared like an animal
white eyeteeth crunching

Scorching earth where my feet touch down.
A cigarette put out on a tongue. No more talking.

They want me to see and that, in the dark of the night, in the light of the day, when the sun rises and sets, there is pain, always, elsewhere and everywhere. So I will not tarry or joke or be frivolous with the battered souls of others and to think, to think about applying anything I know, to run along with the vigorous social constructs they ask me to dissect and then revolutionize, because I am young, and I will sprint faster, against accusations, and only briefly.

They want me to look at the world like a runner looks at the red track,
with their toes and sinews coiled as hard as steel, a pinnacle of human
at the height of athleticism and possess the ruthlessness of a rabid dog
drool rushed into foam and mad from dehydrating, my brain swelling

with my hormone driven
red, hazy, athletic rage,
gunning my ambition
for some organization.

No.

I will fight, yes, but I will not fight for a name on a card, shield, or building.
I will fight for the sake of fighting because I am contentious and I am wrong.

I side against hero and villain, because I am the ambiguity,
that languishes, resides in no-man's land, antagonizing both.

Being disliked in purgatory is sometimes more easy than chomping at the bit,
for blood and the power of cracking a black bull whip, so I can avoid this terrible avarice and corrupting beauty that comes with working hard, especially for the greatness
                        that I did not ask
                                       to be ****** upon me, while I wished to remain enigmatic.

Lived on one's back,
In the long hours of repose,
Life is a practical nightmare--
Hideous asleep or awake.

Shoulders and *****
Ache----!
Ache, and the mattress,
Run into boulders and hummocks,
Glows like a kiln, while the bedclothes--
Tumbling, importunate, daft--
Ramble and roll, and the gas,
******* to its lowermost,
An inevitable atom of light,
Haunts, and a stertorous sleeper
Snores me to hate and despair.

All the old time
Surges malignant before me;
Old voices, old kisses, old songs
Blossom derisive about me;
While the new days
Pass me in endless procession:
A pageant of shadows
Silently, leeringly wending
On . . . and still on . . . still on!

Far in the stillness a cat
Languishes loudly.  A cinder
Falls, and the shadows
Lurch to the leap of the flame.  The next man to me
Turns with a moan; and the snorer,
The drug like a rope at his throat,
Gasps, gurgles, snorts himself free, as the night-nurse,
Noiseless and strange,
Her bull's eye half-lanterned in apron,
(Whispering me, 'Are ye no sleepin' yet?'),
Passes, list-slippered and peering,
Round . . . and is gone.

Sleep comes at last--
Sleep full of dreams and misgivings--
Broken with brutal and sordid
Voices and sounds that impose on me,
Ere I can wake to it,
The unnatural, intolerable day.

a bitter exhaustion grips you by the throat
fear languishes your bones like lead upon your skin
a dark cave dripping numb from within

do i dare to look up again?
do i dare to give my heart as the bargain?
are you gonna break my fall,
or will you tell me you can't handle this all?

i dont want to start new anymore than you
for loving, feels like the flu
but maybe you’re the vaccine
ill take a shot of you, hoping then         i would feel              brand new
tell me, do you feel like this too?

There can be
Little said about
The hearts desire
amidst the bustle
of waking life
as the sun
scorches the sky
and burns a hole
in her confusion.

A lazy, discontented
lover strangled by
words that stick
in his throat languishes
in the heat as she
cools off in the breeze
of his indifference.

Exposed, alone in a
translucent ocean of
discontent, she floats on
the surface of indecision
and ambivalence

When at last the
changing tide sweeps
him off to another shore
leaving her free to dive
deep for her pearl and

Much more… much more.

water's gravity
moors me to this dome's prison.

washing me to plush blue
is the dream of hands
that puts me out of my sleep's premises.

the bane of existence tingles
the flesh and the suds rise
altogether with the squalor
of its own meaning.
my old hue languishes into
a burgeon of slosh and no friction
nor word could rupture me anymore.

and the scent dangles
mid-air, where all perfumes are born, with sorry fountainheads
peaking through the ordeal
of this sonata.
water makes music with skin
as froth takes to sea, the exhaustion of brine -
all disquiet in foreword
and finality

hung clean, in the backyard
of ordinariness, of consummate asepsis and its breakable concepts,
  ready to be worn out
by a day's grime and back to
its fate once more, all of us.

I made a blog that no-one wants to see.
I might as well have stripped and posted ****.
I should’ve baked a chocolate cake for tea.

I twittered, face-booked, tumblred, endlessly,
but still it languishes in quietude.
I made a blog that no-one wants to see.

I promised video with poetry;
no cliché, hackneyed rhyme or platitudes.
I should’ve baked a chocolate cake for tea.

My blog is but a trickle in the sea
A place of literary solitude.
I made a blog that no-one wants to see.

I treasured all my followers, all three;
and yet, with heavy heart, I must conclude
I made a blog that no-one wants to see.
I should’ve baked a chocolate cake for tea.

Unexpectedly he has been cracked



Squarely across his dainty skull



Inevitably to his knees he languishes



Supplemented by a concussion



Havoc is illicitly wreaked upon the delicacy



Of this young man's psyche



As another swift, sucker punch is executed



Stylishly into his jawbone



Followed by an unforeseen series



Of frenzied jabs to the nose



The anguish screams through the brooks



Of crimson oozing from his nostrils



While a dangerous haymaker



Shockingly arises from thin air



Sinking fiercely into his cornea



Rupturing the veins in his eyeball



A circular crown of black envelops



The entire surface of his left eye



Oh, the gruesome consequences of



Applauding the eminence of nonexistence



A truculent knockout that will truly



Abduct one into an eerie coma



And rightfully deliver them back to



The portion of reality where they belong

I.

A beat pulses through the song
rising like a plume of smoke
across the ridge.

The night rolls on.
A love languishes.

I can't help but
self-destruct.

The scattering clouds.
Heart-beats to the head-song.

Do you even exist?

II.

Arms upraised like those of a
tote bag. I surrender. Fold
up, like a gunny sack.

Not this, not this.

Stars flicker mourning my
slow disappearance.

You must, when I ask like this.

Dead man's procession. Every
***-holed road is a graveyard
of dogs. Dead, unsung.

III.

Milk spreads in the tea cup,
shooting out, widening,
tentacles, like fear.

IV.

Why is your voice this feeble?

My face, flatter than is usual
in this mirror?

You mean, you are me too?

I mean, does that even like
supposed to
mean something?

V.

I'm an Olympic hero. All of us.
Hubbub. Throb, to
the music-plume.

Mysterious plume.

Alone,
Alone with nobody,
I walk down the gilded path
Of the moon
Snuffing out every hopeful star
Like those so far away
They blink in and out of existence.

Sorrow bleeds my mind,
I lament in soliloquy
Like a forgotten friend.

The dark night of melancholia
Spilled like a confession,
A dream grieved
Under the languishes of existence.

My heart adorned with memory
And tears suspended from time,
Her scent faintly in the air.

Oh the sorrows
In the Grey hours of solitude,
They slither like snakes
In cold Autumnal gardens.

I turn out the lights,
My hands stirring the pen
As I write the aloneness and her
Virtues at the delicate lips of night:

May Poetry understand
The beauty of sorrow.......

Digestion slowly errods the
Stagnant life
Line, the pulse which
Absorbs
Blow upon,
Blow upon,
Blow upon.....
Open your ******* mind, focus
On that irresistable
Smile & forget
What lies beneath. Deception
Rots the feeble skeleton
Which languishes under
Heavy skin.
Carpe diem!

Rather seek a mad climate:
happy, peaceful, elegant.
By brilliant abstractions lit.
A revolution must occur
in the people's minds
years before
the Revolution occurs.
Plant a seed. Pray for rain.
Life languishes
where usury pervades,
ignorance doth flourish.
The arts a septic sewer.
The marketplace a God.
Carcasses for sacrifice.
Remove base appetite
and this generation dies.
Send them on their way.
Flush the bankers.
Lose all interest. Live
to write another day.

~mce

deep with kissing easy trees Spring
wells like blood between the imminent
corpse of day where pennyeyed kittens
and ladybugs mingle with the deliberate
breath of the earth a flower meagerly strives
fragile homely limp and flush Spring languishes
an instant collected warmly into the salient brush
of ******* tingling abruptly pricking a loose cotton
with marble hard ******* round rosey cheecked apple
blossoms in Spring hang briefly like youth without youth
Spring i draw your quivering uglywonderful mouth to my
mouth and creep into your winsome shrill maw my blood

this poem
took aim
to be the best poem
in the world;
it had no purpose
but to win the title
and so only got worse
and became verse
and descended into prose
which in turn became toast
and today it languishes
in the pages of cyberspace
lost, floating like a ghost
wandering like a goat
neither here nor there
neither this nor that;
and pundits
who took a while
their noses off their obsessions
put on their expertise
and have now declared this poem
with very grim looks
the worst:
a sort of outcast to live outside of Parnassus,
an untouchable
to serve King Midas

Torture wreaked havoc with his mind’s sanity
The anguish just chilled me to the core
As the beatings continue to reduce him
He is scared he’ll not take too much more.

Again the water washed over and woke him
The bucket clanging as they threw it back down
Once again he was taken to the table
‘Waterboarding‘ I thought with a frown.

He was laid on his back and then tied down
They put towels over his mouth and his nose
They poured and they poured water on him
Once again in his chest panic rose.

A reporter who’d been caught in the crossfire
There was no information he could tell
No amount of hard beatings and torture
Could make him give secrets he’d not held.

Beaten and bloodied he is taken
Back as before to his cell
He’s told them all that he ever could tell them
But he still can’t escape from this hell.

He languishes in his cell I am certain
He cries out for mercy from each pore
I know that they still give him more beatings
I see him as he hobbles past my cell door.



©JRW2014

Exceeding the passion of these most love torn dreamers
he languishes in the glow of his millionth Sunset
then vanquishes the dreams of his millionth soul
a paradox
lover of night
taker of life
Nosferatu
walks silent and alone
living not by minutes, days or years
the pros and cons
of never-ending life on earth
the ecstasy and the terror of immortality
to never die
to never love
for to love a mortal
is to watch her succumb to the ravages of time
and human time
is but a blink
she curls into a quiet sleep
and dreams of Sunrise
he kisses her upon the cheek
and cries to the moon

The timeline of absence of me
Extends in the space that my heart
Languishes in hollow feelings.
I don’t feel presence of anything
And I do nothing but to exist,
Extending the countless seconds
That I don’t feel the word love
Burning my chest in a whirlwind of emotions.
I deeply breathe looking for answers
To questions I haven’t done
And that insist to long in the bed of my mind.
I fill my thoughts of banal occupations
Trying to mask the empty I am.
I insist, I persist in the resignation
To this uncomfortable way of being,
But wherever I go, I see a bit of me
Dissolve in to inactivity.
Words drains through the wall trying to find me,
But I don’t know where to put them
And I lose the verses, the stanzas, the poems.
The passions I once felt are dying
And the loneliness where I get
Don’t sustain enthusiasm in that something
Can really change.
And this is the way I live
In the deep need that solitude got me into.
I don’t run away from the verb to love
I just don’t know where else I can find it…

[I am asked if I'd like to go for a walk,]

Speaking freely & feeling speechless
aren't really distinguishable.
                  - One languishes with language
                  full of angst (or even anguish) -

[ while, sandwich in hand, I sit on the floor of the kitchen, ]

Liberally flaming the fires of self-blame
creates pain inextinguishable.
                    - Cough up money often
                    to soften up your coffin -

[  The toaster-oven's timer ticks.  ]

'til the illness is cured, I'll endure symptoms, sure;
This sick still feels relinquish-able.
                      - I'd be remiss to admit
                      that I'd sooner just quit -

[    Let me sit for a while, then we'll go    ]

My shadow is full of moonlight.
I caught it in a sunbeam, stashed it beneath my floppy hat.
Tis the light of my life.
My my how it shines.
Because it's mine.
It doesn't mind, it doesn't matter.
By the power of the densest winter, I'm just the mad hatter.
My diverse shadow is happy, as he languishes under my hat.
(C) LIVVI

An old fairy-tale book molders silently
in a cardboard box, in my airless attic.
A coat of dust has stolen its grandeur,
the pages are dog-eared from generations
of small, sticky fingers.

Inside, a castle succumbs
to ten years of neglect.
The knights slip into apathy,
leave their armor unpolished,
and start to ponder
a change of career.
An empty-headed princess
languishes in her tower
among yellowed love letters,
with no hope of the rescue
promised to her
in twenty pages or less.

There isn't anyone left
to fight the dragons, nobody wants
to believe in them anymore.
The children averted their eyes,
and slowly built up
each palisade guarding
the magic left in their heads.

just so! many hours to sing!
poet take your chance

while the muse languishes
-in your heartfelt love.

I’ll always recall the day you left me here to die
I can change I said, let me try
But instead you chose to fly
Your words of rebuke, how they made me cry

I am sick; it’s no contrived cliché
My mind is in disarray
My heart languishes in decay
But you don’t see it that way
To you it’s all made up; a sick game I play

Already it’s been over a year
I’m all but forgotten, I fear
You are far, no longer near
But, though I lie, I love you dear

You’ll always be my brother
We come from the same mother
I loved you like no other
But with me you won’t bother
It reminds me of my father

FESTINE LENTE FESTINE LENTE

Up the Green Road
under an arch of sunlight & leaves

I travel through Time & Space
mastering speed.

Balance still a little odd
as I try to...cycle faster...keep up with my Dad

who is forever far ahead
calling: “Come on, Donall – that’s the lad! ”

All that time I am
that eternal summer

always

struggling to learn

how to do

7 x Tables
(tie my shoe)
master bicycles.

Down the Green Road
under an arch of Time & Autumn

I cycle faster with the wind
behind me...calling to the man

who languishes forever
far behind me:

“Come on, Dad...”

“Take it easy, Donal lad! ”

*
Festine Lente is the Latin for Hurry Slowly!

Speaking in esoteric patter
Allen implores the crowd to hear
His curious, most enchanting natter
Perceptions shake and start to shatter

Initiated in to the mysteries
Allen’s words bring them to life, with a
Voice that transcends time and history
That brings his cosmic joy and bliss to me

Words sear with a frightening power
That startles, overwhelms the crowds
Allen’s visions start to flower
Allen’s visions start to tower

He harbours an inquisitive, roaming soul
Which languishes in mystic climes
Enchanted by creation whole
Allen assumes the bardic role

Sapient and wise as the owl
Attuned to magick of the night
He conjures heaven, fathoms hell
Harnessing the wildernesses’ howl

I am so weak, who should be blamed?
unless my cry was deserving.
The fairest  wind languishes
and still pick her spoils far deeper,
more injurious than moribund life.
This jaded ideal, sprang from the tyrants pass
this  earnest clanging,  this inarticulation.

Silent she slips in
Resolute the new day
Steps of eiderdown
Path rendered muted echoes
As sparkled snow sugars tongues of lovers
A petaled hand extended
Fragrant cherry blossoms
The blush
The rush
Will cupids lacquered eros wax
When the breeze of romance
Roars ferocious
Lions prowl on taloned claws frigid
Before the frail Paschal lambs
New birth awaits the cadence of spring rain
And jonquiled mornings pregnant with dew
Little girls skip minuets
Plait the maypole
Festive in buttered eyelet, whispered taffeta and crisp dotted swiss
Dreaming of castles and gilt armor
Bind this heart of mine in gold and champagne roses
Love and gunfire burst on the palette of the night sky
Sonic color settles shrieking freedom
The haze of summer days
The wind warm, your breath warmer
She languishes heavy lidded
Pine pitch fragrant in her hair and sweet strawberries in her mouth
Fireflies flit teasing
Tepid water waits for stain glass wings to grace the surface
Taut the day holds her breath
As rumbling thunder promises the cool monsoon
Chase away the dog days when the atmosphere clings heavy
Sleepless nights of croaking toads and the drone of mosquitoes
Breathless for the heady patter of rain
Herald the skies of burning blue
Above a cacophony of color
Cottonwoods in petticoats sunflower yellow
Crimson maple and dusted ash
Dance beneath the harvest moon
Thankful
Life is a gift to be unwrapped
Surprise exquisite
Like the first star sparkling on your horizon
At the end of the day.
TL Boehm
02/01/10

He nurses his coffee, by himself most days,
Occasionally with the one or two others
Constituting the bulk of the clientele of the diner
(Low-slung building both faceless and nameless
Although those who remember a day
When the village was at least borderline prosperous
Still refer to it as “Kitty’s Place”,
Though its namesake has been dead and gone some two decades)
One of the few going concerns which implausibly remain,
Seemingly through nothing more than sheer inertia,
In the drab little downtown along Canton Street.

He languishes over his cup for as long as the mood hits him,
There being no discernible reason to hurry
(Indeed, the diner itself, once open before sunrise
Now dark and silent until a leisurely seven-thirty or so)
His place not really a working farm these days,
Just a smattering of beef cattle
(Milking and stripping out more than he can manage now)
And what acreage of corn he can get in the ground.
Eventually, he totters out of the front door,
One sleeve of his shirt rolled and pinned up
(Its former occupying member removed
After the incident with the ancient and malevolent corn binder),
Moving toward his truck with an all-but-one-legged gait,
His left-leg jigsaw-puzzled
By an overturned Farmall some time back
(Most days he reckoned he’d tipped the tractor
By failing to shift his balance to accommodate driving one-armed,
Though if he was in a black enough mood he’d put it down
To an old Iroquois curse placed on the entire St. Lawrence valley.)

One could say, if he was a poet
Or some other **** philosophical fool,
That these partial sacrifices served
To ward off some even more awful finality.
He would have none of that, of course—in his own cosmology
The gods and demons most likely have bigger fish to fry,
And, as to the prospect of some inexorable wreck and ruin,
He is of the opinion that what he was given up to this point
Is both ample and sufficient.

Outside the rail car is untouched.
Seventy years old and it appears ready
for the next journey
as it languishes in this graveyard
of steel and aluminum.

Inside it is different.
Graffiti and abuse.
Seats ripped from the floor
and piled one on the other.
An old mattress lays at one end.

This is what happens
to travelers like yourself,
left too long in a single place.

When you dated the woman you love, you would drive
two and a half hours for coffee and conversation.
Folks thought you were mad. Perhaps so,
but it is a madness that has plagued you all your life,
this hunger to go, the place never mattering
as much as the journey

Not made of steel and aluminum,
the stillness has left you rotting from inside.
It is worse and more deadly than rust.

It is time to leave this place. To go
before your weaknesses and demons write graffiti,
break the windows and crawl out
of the darkest recesses of your mind.

It is time,
to travel east, towards the sun,
towards the sea, the destination a second thought,
the flight towards light the first.

A spore
Sought my sopor.
It is volatile,
It disperses,
And languishes.

Instantaneously,
The silence breaks.

(c) 2014 Brandon Antonio Smith

(Originally written 10/11/10
Revised 9/29/14)

Everytime,
Yes, everytime
I pour out a poem,
I think I've finally
Brought one home.
But then it languishes
In the cloud;
Suddenly,
Yes, suddenly,
I'm not so proud.
No thunderous applause
Makes it rain,
My paltry poem
Is blown away.

FIVE HAIKU

1

The sunset’s last rays
light up my beloved’s face
I just want to stay

2

Red autumn leaves fall
one by one on the  wet ground
the crows pass them by

3

The town languishes
it’s the coldest winter night
the streets are empty


4  

The same fisherman
the same river he travels
he feels not the same
5

Friends of long ago
meeting after fifty years
they struggle for words