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All is not what it seems
Because I was an atheist
Long before I realized I was God,
But that was much, much later
Then, at that time, I succumbed
To the lurid but exciting depths
Of freedom, the joy of love and danger
Of searching and of knowledge,
Embracing every moment;
I surrendered to ungovernable impulses
That invoked within my very existence

Still to realise the true extent of this
It's perhaps best to start before the beginning
Before the earth embalmed me
A time when Cyparisse had not
Yet set root in my belly
Nor made sap of my blood
A time when it was possible to speak
To Panza's donkey when I thought of Zanzibar
A time when the vagrancy of my soul
Had not yet embarked
On its erratic itinerary
Plunging me eventually
Into the bright light
Of tainted and squalid reality

Like oscillating libraries, noise oppressed,
Contradictions of dreams
Suddenly I took flight,
With violent wrenches of imagination
In Persia being worshipped
Beneath the moon by Gods;
Caressed by those impetuous charms
A dazzling vision
I thought of death the only sister of charity
Whose dark night has no malevolence;
Black and white, silences that migrated
In sonorous symbolism took control
Shimmering like a painting of a sorrow

Streaked with unashamed colours
A single tear from a promethean candle
I would move to lick the stain of destiny
That pillar inhaling its black perfumes
Like a communicant on his knees.
Exiled in reality, I saw what I had never saw
Or only thought I saw now condemned
To see what has never been seen

Words corralled themselves in my mind
Writhing maggots on a corpse
Wriggling for position waiting to be pronounced
How they flew, taking wings
Hovering for an instant above the page
Hunting out the detritus of man
To feast upon the putrid flesh of misery
I too went searching
For my ancient feast; for Zanzibar

However hideous pages
From the note book of the ******
Imprisoned the words, stampeded the search
Scattering it in many directions
Shattering blue-white eyes
A castrated country, century, impotent, impure
Like politics, the ******* that can be purchased by coin
Like so much bread in the market,
A thousand profanities became the popular song
But silence is the real language of the fool

For he alone bears witness to what he feels
Misfortunes not understood, weeping the popular ballad
Morality and law, parades of red robed Judges
Carcasses, a circus for carrion crows
Yet like a cannibal the dead were still buried in my belly
The gloss of reason hiding madness
Like so many veneered fronts in a proud precinct

Paraded in full view, silence is demanded and got
The words wither, fake time continues,
To count the unrelieved falsehood the chimera of life;
Reason did not imprison me
My life being not heavy enough
Was allowed to take flight
To float above the reasoned realm
Revelations of the truth realised only by detachment
Devoured my mind increased my errorless purpose
The search for Zanzibar

Accepted values; valued only;
Because of this acceptance
Are accepted as value
Thus accepted in silence
The fools resign themselves
To a false reality
One that nails them to a poisoned cross

In the gardens of the dead
Like rowed tulips that
Gardeners know how to match
I found myself, among those who had gone
Remembered yet forgotten
Whose edifice unlike their lives
Reached not upwards but down.
I smelt the scent of unknown things
The perfumes of eternity that histories bind;
Intensity, a murmur; gurgle, as in a child
Yet extreme its aberrations
Like celluloid hand that
Had never known toil
Or wiped sweat from a brow
Laughed yet grimaced
Its smile a crimson smear
The sorrow that it felt
A burnished hand upon its nakedness
To see its enshrouded presence in such a garden
One well stocked and growing
Caressed my being with its glee
To turn white feel the touch
Of its venomous fingers upon my flesh;
Its purpose, to prevent any search for Zanzibar

The stench of death
Then cast its' new
Yet antediluvian gaze
Upon its purpose
Odour of grave
Faraway nonexistent
Yet it is perfume to those
Who feast upon its scent
Moistures mingling with the air
Its common purpose
Floating like un-forgiveness
Its atmosphere ozone sans holes
Its meaning ever present
Its' outcome to halt
The search for Zanzibar

And so the stencils of oriental scribes
Like black shadows overpowered my reason
Floating high above, adrift on an expanse of darkness
However, presently that azure ink
Raised its curtain before my very eyes
Revealing the stage, the illuminated stage
On which I was to set my drama
Where the phantoms of my imagination
Would enact their mysterious mysteries;
A poetic alchemy

Then a golden spark of pure
Nocturnal light blinded me
In an instant I saw, observed
The sun drown in its deathly sea
Its healing wings spread
Fear would see it rise again
Still searching for that fatal flaw, happiness
How many lives do I need?
How many existences will it take?
Incarnations a hundred times
Searching for Zanzibar.
Awakening to continue to
Live the saddest of my dreams

Furtive footsteps through Cimmerian landscapes
Ah such enchantment, do you understand?
Ah such a charm, listen to its undying echo
Feel its charge, that siren call
Cosmic summons, the vagrancy of mind
That caresses the imagination
Whose tender touch can place you
At the apex of the universe
Can lead to Zanzibar.


And so the subtle and foolish tortures
Inflicted upon me by I, my quest began
One that would ascertain, take centre stage
Make an unheard appearance of a philosophy
That, I am everyone and everyone else is me
Eventually at some point
In time and space we are all one
All linked, for we are condemned
Yes condemned to live these lives
This is why the dead have dreams
Dreams about the tyrants and demons
Of other lives of who they were;
Who they have yet to become.
Nourished on half truths,
Forever pulling at the thread
The rotted rags of reason
Those tattered twines
Unravelling the stitching of reality
Of hallucinations, empty illusions
And tarnished dreams create a constant struggle


Therefore for every conscious thing
That happens in the world
There must be a responding reverberation
Within the human soul
Let us put a halt to the calls
For the death of imagination
And demands for imagination to be silent
Such absurdities
For imagination is the true door to reality
For only in imagination
Can there be a bearable act
Of self examination
It is memory that hurts
More than the imagination
Always prefer the imaginary to the real
Imagination is neither an exit
From our nightmares nor
An escape from reality
But the place we are all trying to get to,
Zanzibar its shared images
Its story, its own life a new reality.


Mysteriously in the midst of unknown
Mazagran landscapes I feel
The full impact of fleeting visions
Without the limitations of space or time
Feel the act of experiencing their reality
This requires no explanation, no proof
Either together or separate
Because simply they are,
Judgement, condemnation
Punishments are gone
There is no cleansing a world
Without consciousness
Landscape devoid of people
'La Lune' growling in the orchard of the sea
Calypso again one or ten
Eucharis, tempest or temptress
Take both the meaning and the experience
Taste the tear drops of the sun
Telemachus searching, searching
Zanzibar

The idol, tentacles undulating
Vibrations of collective knowledge
The blank face, featureless
Touching around the domain of Atlas
Speaking in a thousand different tongues
Moving but still, blocks my path
Disturbs the line of imagination
Makes reality quiver
Dream flowers sway in its cosmic wind.
Yet Alhazers' iridescent arch allows
The steerage of my passage
Without pious pilgrimages to empty silences that
Contain an eternity of tears
Who graciously offers coverage
For the echo of footsteps
Allowing the magic moments to come


Robbed of sunlight, artificial night shines
Its deception attempting to secure knowledge
Of a future unknown, winning only it's unattainably
Offering instead knowledge of the past
Master of silence, offers only knowledge
Of invaded consciousness
Bedlam of paradise where Eros and Pan
In congress sleep, close at Zanzibar.


Lifeless beauty that lives everlasting
Time that reason cannot change, only help.
O enchanted torture you have stolen
The taste from my mouth
Masked I against the spectre of reality
Proclaimed the age of 'hasashin'
The creator of recollections, maker of memories
Possessor of impulse giver of echo
That rings in the ear
Cloud cast its surroccoian shadow
Air tinged with the aftermath of fire
Floating in an Asian wind, so subtle
Like a breath suddenly the sound of song
Of dance rents the solitude
Silence is slashed like a canvass screen
Happiness pours forth unconfined
Unfettered, both faces of Kandinsky as one
I extinguish the light, turn to the wall
Gazing upon its Janis face
My eyes behold the giver of pleasure.

Then I found myself in an extraordinary place
Whose skies where made of crystal glass
Water of the enchanted land was blue-grey
Bridges zig-zagged its shimmering domes
I stared as masts and parapets came to life
Its people, musicians sporting
Tangerine and white livery danced
The air filled with the sound of their music
Then as if from nowhere a light hit my eyes
Blinking, this apparition was gone
Can I not always believe what I see
Just because I see what I believe
The inhabitants at once became spectres
Engulfed in thick clouds of smoke and sulphur
Erinyies roamed, inflicting madness
A circus of the macabre sped past
Its symbols of death fluttering frantically
Around this false and fragile world
Suggested children, like creatures in an imagination
Were made ready for their rebirth
By the touch of the poets pen
A thousand Cheribino

In another, swirling sonorous scenes
Stormed the citadels of my mind
Marched through my imagination
Mab engulfed the long closed
Cemeteries of my thought allowing me
To see the dreams of others
Like precious pearls prised from their shells
Their visualisation so intense
Joy overcame me at once
Then a swarm of kisses descended upon me
Like a regiment of famished men
Feasting for the first time
I freely gave myself as the main course
In the most beautiful of banquets
In another, yielding to these seductions
I was enraptured by portraits of beautiful young men
Which appeared to be on the point of speaking
They were most mysterious their intrinsic
Charm so beautiful, stimulated desire
Whose assuagement was so pleasurable
That it might be called pure ecstasy
A perfect pleasure which had never before existed
Entirely individual and new

Thus upon the horizons of my mind
Had been shed a mysterious light
In which I now saw everything bathed
I was summoned by the Prince
Knowing dreams have no limits
I obeyed his call
For a long time failing to set
Foot on the shores of reality
Drinking from the wells of magic
While angels danced on grassy slopes
Disturbed by flames
The stars shot out their fragrance

Sweet smelling; blue abyss
On I went to the court, the court of the Prince of
Poets, a visitor to life
There I spat out the bit of liberty
Embraced the Prince
Courtesans mocked me, ridiculed
Laughed and taunted me
Their jibes merely part of
Their own deluded reality, not of mine
They did not serve my purpose
Dressed as they were
In meaningless words
Clothed in phrases of falsehood
They tried to make me compromise
There was fire burning in my eyes
Vivid dreams were eating up my mind
They wouldn't let me be
There were dead men lying
By the sides of the road
With daylight in their eyes
I saw villages under the sea
I stood at Galactic central point
Watched the earth burn
They did not know
The way to Zanzibar
Could the Prince show me?

However each morning I awoke
I found myself in a purgatorial fog
I roamed lost the alternative harbour
For my soul still distant
The Prince, I discovered, existed
In a twilight world of mysterious ailments
He denied his feelings
Such denial only immersed him
In maintaining the world of external restraints
It created emptiness, a vacancy
Filled by material concerns
I pleaded with him
The emerald gene came down
Soon the leaves of grass
Whispered another order of existence
Strangeness of sensation
Intoxication of vision
Unhinged for mortals
And as the sound increased one cannot
Describe what else it is that has been
I viewed a world transparent
Devoid of illumination within which
Was never a sea or land
Then the prophets were ******
For they were all liars
And I saw the most beautiful flower
Unfolding out of its own roots
For such a flower cannot
Unfold other than it does
I stood on the threshold of Orcus
I met Abbas Effendi the Gene without a name
Bab, Upanishads spilled music in my ears
Called to me in the most spectacular of colours
It was wonderful for the colours
Were like my dreams, red, black and green
I witnessed the three, sometimes as one
Other times as two, again and again
The self eternal and inseparable sons
Of Shakyamuni caressed me with their thoughts
Their music and colour moved about me
In ecstatic rhythm like the peaceful
Waves of the ocean as upon a shore
I read the sentences of silence
Breathed the perfume of never fading flowers
Walked in cherry blossom snow
Heard Hafiz reciting in the night
I saw for the first time
The unfinished likeness of others.

Then one day the Prince
With a sweeping theatrical and
So to speak, allegorical flourish bowed
Called me an exiled angel
Said the time had come to travel
To leave the images of naked heels
Imprinted in the clay
We wondered
Then as if by magic, suddenly the shadows
Of houses, halls, and a church
Emerged like enchanted islands in a fairy tale
The spiritualised forms of civilisation
I was approached by a graceful youth
Draped in cobweb lawn
He was pale, delicately beautiful
Spanish looking, but his name was Alexis Sonyeuse
Whose family it was said was
Related to the French Emperor Napoleon
It was also rumoured that he had
Had a tempestuous affair with the Bishop of Monaco
And once slept with his half brother Julian Apollinaire
When he spoke he was at once original
Delicious, moving, droll and discreetly melancholy
Listening to him was like breathing
The perfume of wondrous flowers
But the scent of datura hung about him
Paralleling his every movement
  Another youth, Edmond also greeted me
He was a young man with aristocratic features
A complexion pink, like a girls
And a bearing at once charmingly gracious
And audaciously insolent
His shirt was strange, the lining
A peculiarly orange colour
A flame coloured taffeta
Like the petticoats of a *****



They looked at me
Furtive glances emanated from their eyes
Training a profound stare upon my person
The two youths took me to 18 Avenue de Friedland
There two boy servants
Adoum and Outhman greeted us
Spinario's lay about its confines
Frezans caressing them
As they touched their feet
A hundred echansons moved
With dazzling delicacy dispensing dreams
In drops from crystalline cups
Here I witnessed the tragic faces of the population
Urnings, cleaning in the midst of anarchist trials
The room a fiery red, stained with light
The caress of forgotten thought
Like the thickness of a sorrow
Musicians playing on broken strings
Crimson ******, who defied the King of Naples
We moved past wretches
Like Virgil, but Danteian
Saw the usurers heard the rustling
Of lute strings the clinking of grey paper
Observed in this Minatare's lair
The purchase of a twelve penny dagger
Liberty of speech meeting its great reckoning
In a little room, Ingram the poltergeist
Of misfortune was there
Dead Scythian, who ever loved you
Loved you as you might, loved you at first sight.

This was a new and exciting world
Whose environs were populated
By the most mysterious and colourful of people
I was introduced by the two youths
To a suicidal young painter who
Was rebelling against his class
He was a somewhat forced intellectual
With an over quixotic passion for equality
Still he was warm, kind and impulsive
Poetry, he made it known
Had opened his mind to the invisible
Beside him was a painting
Exemplifying a new kind of observation
In a style absolutely faultless
Each structure clear, each brush stroke
Falling exactly into place
Inscribed in the top left
Corner were the words
"Quod me nutrit me destruit"
An introduction to himself of a tall youth
Whose eyes possessed a constant
Vagrancy of desire
Who seemed at once, for one so
All is not what it seems
Because I was an atheist
Long before I realized I was God,
But that was much, much later
Then, at that time, I succumbed
To the lurid but exciting depths
Of freedom, the joy of love and danger
Of searching and of knowledge,
Embracing every moment;
I surrendered to ungovernable impulses
That invoked within my very existence

Still to realise the true extent of this
It's perhaps best to start before the beginning
Before the earth embalmed me
A time when Cyparisse had not
Yet set root in my belly
Nor made sap of my blood
A time when it was possible to speak
To Panza's donkey when I thought of Zanzibar
A time when the vagrancy of my soul
Had not yet embarked
On its erratic itinerary
Plunging me eventually
Into the bright light
Of tainted and squalid reality

Like oscillating libraries, noise oppressed,
Contradictions of dreams
Suddenly I took flight,
With violent wrenches of imagination
In Persia being worshipped
Beneath the moon by Gods;
Caressed by those impetuous charms
A dazzling vision
I thought of death the only sister of charity
Whose dark night has no malevolence;
Black and white, silences that migrated
In sonorous symbolism took control
Shimmering like a painting of a sorrow

Streaked with unashamed colours
A single tear from a promethean candle
I would move to lick the stain of destiny
That pillar inhaling its black perfumes
Like a communicant on his knees.
Exiled in reality, I saw what I had never saw
Or only thought I saw now condemned
To see what has never been seen

Words corralled themselves in my mind
Writhing maggots on a corpse
Wriggling for position waiting to be pronounced
How they flew, taking wings
Hovering for an instant above the page
Hunting out the detritus of man
To feast upon the putrid flesh of misery
I too went searching
For my ancient feast; for Zanzibar

However hideous pages
From the note book of the ******
Imprisoned the words, stampeded the search
Scattering it in many directions
Shattering blue-white eyes
A castrated country, century, impotent, impure
Like politics, the ******* that can be purchased by coin
Like so much bread in the market,
A thousand profanities became the popular song
But silence is the real language of the fool

For he alone bears witness to what he feels
Misfortunes not understood, weeping the popular ballad
Morality and law, parades of red robed Judges
Carcasses, a circus for carrion crows
Yet like a cannibal the dead were still buried in my belly
The gloss of reason hiding madness
Like so many veneered fronts in a proud precinct

Paraded in full view, silence is demanded and got
The words wither, fake time continues,
To count the unrelieved falsehood the chimera of life;
Reason did not imprison me
My life being not heavy enough
Was allowed to take flight
To float above the reasoned realm
Revelations of the truth realised only by detachment
Devoured my mind increased my errorless purpose
The search for Zanzibar

Accepted values; valued only;
Because of this acceptance
Are accepted as value
Thus accepted in silence
The fools resign themselves
To a false reality
One that nails them to a poisoned cross

In the gardens of the dead
Like rowed tulips that
Gardeners know how to match
I found myself, among those who had gone
Remembered yet forgotten
Whose edifice unlike their lives
Reached not upwards but down.
I smelt the scent of unknown things
The perfumes of eternity that histories bind;
Intensity, a murmur; gurgle, as in a child
Yet extreme its aberrations
Like celluloid hand that
Had never known toil
Or wiped sweat from a brow
Laughed yet grimaced
Its smile a crimson smear
The sorrow that it felt
A burnished hand upon its nakedness
To see its enshrouded presence in such a garden
One well stocked and growing
Caressed my being with its glee
To turn white feel the touch
Of its venomous fingers upon my flesh;
Its purpose, to prevent any search for Zanzibar

The stench of death
Then cast its' new
Yet antediluvian gaze
Upon its purpose
Odour of grave
Faraway nonexistent
Yet it is perfume to those
Who feast upon its scent
Moistures mingling with the air
Its common purpose
Floating like un-forgiveness
Its atmosphere ozone sans holes
Its meaning ever present
Its' outcome to halt
The search for Zanzibar

And so the stencils of oriental scribes
Like black shadows overpowered my reason
Floating high above, adrift on an expanse of darkness
However, presently that azure ink
Raised its curtain before my very eyes
Revealing the stage, the illuminated stage
On which I was to set my drama
Where the phantoms of my imagination
Would enact their mysterious mysteries;
A poetic alchemy

Then a golden spark of pure
Nocturnal light blinded me
In an instant I saw, observed
The sun drown in its deathly sea
Its healing wings spread
Fear would see it rise again
Still searching for that fatal flaw, happiness
How many lives do I need?
How many existences will it take?
Incarnations a hundred times
Searching for Zanzibar.
Awakening to continue to
Live the saddest of my dreams

Furtive footsteps through Cimmerian landscapes
Ah such enchantment, do you understand?
Ah such a charm, listen to its undying echo
Feel its charge, that siren call
Cosmic summons, the vagrancy of mind
That caresses the imagination
Whose tender touch can place you
At the apex of the universe
Can lead to Zanzibar.


And so the subtle and foolish tortures
Inflicted upon me by I, my quest began
One that would ascertain, take centre stage
Make an unheard appearance of a philosophy
That, I am everyone and everyone else is me
Eventually at some point
In time and space we are all one
All linked, for we are condemned
Yes condemned to live these lives
This is why the dead have dreams
Dreams about the tyrants and demons
Of other lives of who they were;
Who they have yet to become.
Nourished on half truths,
Forever pulling at the thread
The rotted rags of reason
Those tattered twines
Unravelling the stitching of reality
Of hallucinations, empty illusions
And tarnished dreams create a constant struggle


Therefore for every conscious thing
That happens in the world
There must be a responding reverberation
Within the human soul
Let us put a halt to the calls
For the death of imagination
And demands for imagination to be silent
Such absurdities
For imagination is the true door to reality
For only in imagination
Can there be a bearable act
Of self examination
It is memory that hurts
More than the imagination
Always prefer the imaginary to the real
Imagination is neither an exit
From our nightmares nor
An escape from reality
But the place we are all trying to get to,
Zanzibar its shared images
Its story, its own life a new reality.


Mysteriously in the midst of unknown
Mazagran landscapes I feel
The full impact of fleeting visions
Without the limitations of space or time
Feel the act of experiencing their reality
This requires no explanation, no proof
Either together or separate
Because simply they are,
Judgement, condemnation
Punishments are gone
There is no cleansing a world
Without consciousness
Landscape devoid of people
'La Lune' growling in the orchard of the sea
Calypso again one or ten
Eucharis, tempest or temptress
Take both the meaning and the experience
Taste the tear drops of the sun
Telemachus searching, searching
Zanzibar

The idol, tentacles undulating
Vibrations of collective knowledge
The blank face, featureless
Touching around the domain of Atlas
Speaking in a thousand different tongues
Moving but still, blocks my path
Disturbs the line of imagination
Makes reality quiver
Dream flowers sway in its cosmic wind.
Yet Alhazers' iridescent arch allows
The steerage of my passage
Without pious pilgrimages to empty silences that
Contain an eternity of tears
Who graciously offers coverage
For the echo of footsteps
Allowing the magic moments to come


Robbed of sunlight, artificial night shines
Its deception attempting to secure knowledge
Of a future unknown, winning only it's unattainably
Offering instead knowledge of the past
Master of silence, offers only knowledge
Of invaded consciousness
Bedlam of paradise where Eros and Pan
In congress sleep, close at Zanzibar.


Lifeless beauty that lives everlasting
Time that reason cannot change, only help.
O enchanted torture you have stolen
The taste from my mouth
Masked I against the spectre of reality
Proclaimed the age of 'hasashin'
The creator of recollections, maker of memories
Possessor of impulse giver of echo
That rings in the ear
Cloud cast its surroccoian shadow
Air tinged with the aftermath of fire
Floating in an Asian wind, so subtle
Like a breath suddenly the sound of song
Of dance rents the solitude
Silence is slashed like a canvass screen
Happiness pours forth unconfined
Unfettered, both faces of Kandinsky as one
I extinguish the light, turn to the wall
Gazing upon its Janis face
My eyes behold the giver of pleasure.

Then I found myself in an extraordinary place
Whose skies where made of crystal glass
Water of the enchanted land was blue-grey
Bridges zig-zagged its shimmering domes
I stared as masts and parapets came to life
Its people, musicians sporting
Tangerine and white livery danced
The air filled with the sound of their music
Then as if from nowhere a light hit my eyes
Blinking, this apparition was gone
Can I not always believe what I see
Just because I see what I believe
The inhabitants at once became spectres
Engulfed in thick clouds of smoke and sulphur
Erinyies roamed, inflicting madness
A circus of the macabre sped past
Its symbols of death fluttering frantically
Around this false and fragile world
Suggested children, like creatures in an imagination
Were made ready for their rebirth
By the touch of the poets pen
A thousand Cheribino

In another, swirling sonorous scenes
Stormed the citadels of my mind
Marched through my imagination
Mab engulfed the long closed
Cemeteries of my thought allowing me
To see the dreams of others
Like precious pearls prised from their shells
Their visualisation so intense
Joy overcame me at once
Then a swarm of kisses descended upon me
Like a regiment of famished men
Feasting for the first time
I freely gave myself as the main course
In the most beautiful of banquets
In another, yielding to these seductions
I was enraptured by portraits of beautiful young men
Which appeared to be on the point of speaking
They were most mysterious their intrinsic
Charm so beautiful, stimulated desire
Whose assuagement was so pleasurable
That it might be called pure ecstasy
A perfect pleasure which had never before existed
Entirely individual and new

Thus upon the horizons of my mind
Had been shed a mysterious light
In which I now saw everything bathed
I was summoned by the Prince
Knowing dreams have no limits
I obeyed his call
For a long time failing to set
Foot on the shores of reality
Drinking from the wells of magic
While angels danced on grassy slopes
Disturbed by flames
The stars shot out their fragrance

Sweet smelling; blue abyss
On I went to the court, the court of the Prince of
Poets, a visitor to life
There I spat out the bit of liberty
Embraced the Prince
Courtesans mocked me, ridiculed
Laughed and taunted me
Their jibes merely part of
Their own deluded reality, not of mine
They did not serve my purpose
Dressed as they were
In meaningless words
Clothed in phrases of falsehood
They tried to make me compromise
There was fire burning in my eyes
Vivid dreams were eating up my mind
They wouldn't let me be
There were dead men lying
By the sides of the road
With daylight in their eyes
I saw villages under the sea
I stood at Galactic central point
Watched the earth burn
They did not know
The way to Zanzibar
Could the Prince show me?

However each morning I awoke
I found myself in a purgatorial fog
I roamed lost the alternative harbour
For my soul still distant
The Prince, I discovered, existed
In a twilight world of mysterious ailments
He denied his feelings
Such denial only immersed him
In maintaining the world of external restraints
It created emptiness, a vacancy
Filled by material concerns
I pleaded with him
The emerald gene came down
Soon the leaves of grass
Whispered another order of existence
Strangeness of sensation
Intoxication of vision
Unhinged for mortals
And as the sound increased one cannot
Describe what else it is that has been
I viewed a world transparent
Devoid of illumination within which
Was never a sea or land
Then the prophets were ******
For they were all liars
And I saw the most beautiful flower
Unfolding out of its own roots
For such a flower cannot
Unfold other than it does
I stood on the threshold of Orcus
I met Abbas Effendi the Gene without a name
Bab, Upanishads spilled music in my ears
Called to me in the most spectacular of colours
It was wonderful for the colours
Were like my dreams, red, black and green
I witnessed the three, sometimes as one
Other times as two, again and again
The self eternal and inseparable sons
Of Shakyamuni caressed me with their thoughts
Their music and colour moved about me
In ecstatic rhythm like the peaceful
Waves of the ocean as upon a shore
I read the sentences of silence
Breathed the perfume of never fading flowers
Walked in cherry blossom snow
Heard Hafiz reciting in the night
I saw for the first time
The unfinished likeness of others.

Then one day the Prince
With a sweeping theatrical and
So to speak, allegorical flourish bowed
Called me an exiled angel
Said the time had come to travel
To leave the images of naked heels
Imprinted in the clay
We wondered
Then as if by magic, suddenly the shadows
Of houses, halls, and a church
Emerged like enchanted islands in a fairy tale
The spiritualised forms of civilisation
I was approached by a graceful youth
Draped in cobweb lawn
He was pale, delicately beautiful
Spanish looking, but his name was Alexis Sonyeuse
Whose family it was said was
Related to the French Emperor Napoleon
It was also rumoured that he had
Had a tempestuous affair with the Bishop of Monaco
And once slept with his half brother Julian Apollinaire
When he spoke he was at once original
Delicious, moving, droll and discreetly melancholy
Listening to him was like breathing
The perfume of wondrous flowers
But the scent of datura hung about him
Paralleling his every movement
  Another youth, Edmond also greeted me
He was a young man with aristocratic features
A complexion pink, like a girls
And a bearing at once charmingly gracious
And audaciously insolent
His shirt was strange, the lining
A peculiarly orange colour
A flame coloured taffeta
Like the petticoats of a *****



They looked at me
Furtive glances emanated from their eyes
Training a profound stare upon my person
The two youths took me to 18 Avenue de Friedland
There two boy servants
Adoum and Outhman greeted us
Spinario's lay about its confines
Frezans caressing them
As they touched their feet
A hundred echansons moved
With dazzling delicacy dispensing dreams
In drops from crystalline cups
Here I witnessed the tragic faces of the population
Urnings, cleaning in the midst of anarchist trials
The room a fiery red, stained with light
The caress of forgotten thought
Like the thickness of a sorrow
Musicians playing on broken strings
Crimson ******, who defied the King of Naples
We moved past wretches
Like Virgil, but Danteian
Saw the usurers heard the rustling
Of lute strings the clinking of grey paper
Observed in this Minatare's lair
The purchase of a twelve penny dagger
Liberty of speech meeting its great reckoning
In a little room, Ingram the poltergeist
Of misfortune was there
Dead Scythian, who ever loved you
Loved you as you might, loved you at first sight.

This was a new and exciting world
Whose environs were populated
By the most mysterious and colourful of people
I was introduced by the two youths
To a suicidal young painter who
Was rebelling against his class
He was a somewhat forced intellectual
With an over quixotic passion for equality
Still he was warm, kind and impulsive
Poetry, he made it known
Had opened his mind to the invisible
Beside him was a painting
Exemplifying a new kind of observation
In a style absolutely faultless
Each structure clear, each brush stroke
Falling exactly into place
Inscribed in the top left
Corner were the words
"Quod me nutrit me destruit"
An introduction to himself of a tall youth
Whose eyes possessed a constant
Vagrancy of desire
Who seemed at once, for one so
Ceida Uilyc Jul 2015
I could tell you,
But you’d laugh at me.
Because it is bare, raw and pure.
You gloat on the preservatives.
You discard the genuine.
Listen to me, my friend, there is a part of the world, where even a bulb is never, ever, witnessed in real, but reel of the sanskrit Cartoon slots. The peppy  and ‘lone B-grade Cartoons .
Filled with Flesh.
The stories of tantric mantras, with a sliver of diminishing hearth,
on the
Dimensions and depth of the Yoni in the resin of shellac
on the Immaculate ceremony,
In a woodpecker hole just underneath the sealed power of the Yakshini who truly screws it up if you have taste of her once.
the one who harbingers drunk loners of Kavadiyattom alley after 3:20 am.
She takes them to the crown chakra of palm trees.
Shows them the world.
she pushes them off the crown and the falcon falls in endless spirals of a inhuman push that pushes the concrete innards to a danlgling mass of amoebic copulation.
Breath comes back.
It is a big nauseating gag of Kumbhakarnan's long sadya that lasted for half a decade.
Of the soma saras that made the entire India go, ga-ga and believe they've seen the god.
But not one nor any saw the same face, colour, shape or even vibe of the god they had seen alone.
They agreed in unison that all their hallucinations of beautiful humans in Flower UFO s and high-tech cloning, were a vital hair in the nostril of the cosmos.
They made, each a god out of their genuine mix of memories.
Or in the, priest's ways,
Hence, the 2.3 Billion populous of the country had the same, well, odd Spiritual benefactors.

Keeping it all aside, lemme be honest, I'd follow many a fairy god-mother but give my milkey teeny tooth to the special one.
Hinduism tells you God is omnipresent.
Hinduism tells you God is within you.
It also says, there is no God.
The clipper to snap off the confusion of this, lies in the same cheap stained-yellow cliche of love. It entails everything. You, me, animals, plants, cosmos, vibes, thoughts, dreams and the universe.
It tells you to live with your body mind and soul.
From Kamasutras that teaches sense.
The excitement, control and breakthrough of it.
Like tao did under his exposed roof without the sacred dung of from Hindu Land.
This is the secret of a rumoured Mohini,
Of her 1000 per hour ******* during the her/ his/ its 352 incarnations.
which was the reason for Big bang.  
Amidst the sultry scant of the voluptuous *******,
Their skin,
a vernacular reflection of a dusk on the Japanese gold beaches, And the mounts,
firm and glowing with the rusty shade of pharaoh’s Gold anklet.
The gooey glaze of yesterday’s glamour in the wink of a gay galore.
Paulo Ceolho’s Holy Communion with God,
Or like the Japanese Tengaman says,
Or rather screams,
That all it it takes is a little *******.
So, yes.
That precise art of attaining a consciousness, from where your mind was
Afloat
Wild
Free
Satiated
By yourself
You’ve just consumed the essence of you
Your Ojhas
And the tiny matter that teaches the universe
Of a Shunya.
That, momentary sense of lapse of your body mass,
Or the breakthrough into your eye of the crown.
Only to join the mundane bustle of the 10,00 speakers on all four
JBLs, Boses and Pioneers live looping the zillions of sanskrit mantras under one roof.
In your Ear drum.
A synechdoche of the Gods and their jacuzzi of amphetamine bubbles.
Splashed from a white Elephant's bejewelled Snout, which has the
crowned ring in your pineals.
Secret lies under
the rotten bone chip of Hussain Sagar
deep under the ***** green lake,  
drowning the rainbow Buddha in the city of slimy immortal maggots on ham.
Open your eyes.
For the Gods will
Else
Cut your eyelids off
to show you that
the city's shardminds await you.
roaring
Playing close to the fire demons of Redland
A nail close to your wide open lid-less
White flowing eye.
Hear the city scream.
The deafening chaos,
In unison,
Intoxicating their venomous fruits
of the delirious worlds
Or simply put, divine prayer and offering
for
the Omnipotent,
Omniscient
And the
Om.
Shunya.
Or the cyclic abyss of meaninglessness.
But,
Like, the wilted azures
that seduced those flies,
From a far far away,
To come the praise the combs of their bellies,
Filled with the red from the omnipotent, dead, weak and evil
In one little fly belly.
They came from the
land called Lullaby.
To go there
from here,
But, first,
bear the Weasleys' infamous extendable ears and heed me now, for I say twice and See him Come.
The snake, the tangy smell of goated black rub and blueness.
Siva shouldn't come?
Not yet. A little DMT more in the brain and perhaps the spark will happen.
Better than the potions of those gigantic forest priests.
No, Heed me, now.

3 Dodos Walk-afar,
And, take the lone left-laden log
the one that is,
limitless Long
loyal and  let alone
By those
languors which
Killed
Lord Leopard Loot'.
While,
Lord's Lass
Lays lolled lambs,
Lolled ‘long le ******,
Leech on the laiden log,
leading to Lord Lava,
Yes.
The bridge of Casilii Po.

Of the Lord.
Guarded
By these bubbling bellies with a drop of the world's make.
Assassins.
the Fly, flies.

retain the scarification of theolden curse,
Older than the rocks underneath this gurgling lava,
On which reincarnation steams.

As destiny should have it,
the astrologers had seen,
3 centuries back
That at a Sphinx’s Wedding,
a war of Vision,
will break.
It will
Bring the Stars
Out of those melting blue nightsky of Neruda's wails;
And the diabolic estrangement inflicting Eagle,
From Meena’s vibes,
that rubbed of a distinct scent of Malabar embedding a little of everybody in the village,
on its Kasavu lines posing
at the focus
of Sahib's Ferguson or Baker.

The gold turned white.
A liquid white, like that of the sap,
For that,
***** on a parrot green rubber plant
And work your fun with the white gluey milk,
fragrant than the sap
Like the  Ylang Ylang buds freshly kissed by the drooly dew,
sealed away
elegantly in a crystal Indigo bottle by the pen stand.

One that glitters if you look at its surface, but smells of naphthalene ***** in the sink
in
that
creepy trailer in
mid salem night of the tut.
Colourful.
This is colorblind.

White is motile.
White is wriggling.
White is life.
With a **** of Eve’s fabric-less
Skin.
White is divinity
feeding you excess of everything,
With an tenfold over dosage injected intravenous, by a silver-haired-glow-in-the-dark-dodo-cupid;

She is divine.
**** Her.
**** her on a Pyre.
**** her innards on a fire.
inflame the bubble
of her her oily effluent you found on the toilet seat
Instil in her, the seed of your sodomic occult,
Not by compassion, but through a hiss and sting
of the
flawless venom of the diabolic.  
Then. Disinfect your fruit that you flicked off the paradise.
And bellow to the blowing gurgling below.  
A reign of ****  nihilism,
moaning the mood-swings-of-a-98-year-old-menopausing-Bhairavi of the Indian Aghora Tales;
And Shelly, fueled in his undiminished hearth with the help of his impetous West Wind,
dreaming lucid,
on a flight in the sky for one week,
with Lucy’s sewing  sequined buttocks,
Stinging their luminescent, lactating, lustrous skin,
Like a tatto machine, lifting rays into the epidermis
So that it roasts, burns a soot and neonifies the only colour
A shade of
The rave, rainbow-red karmas of human existence,
Its little greedy quantas waltzing around the matter
And of its unleashed illuminations
That fuel the same vessel in the universe,
infamously known as,
the
black hole.
Uggh!!
All characters and plots are fictitious.
Your nightmares are yours, not Caesar's.
This is truly the fruit of my insomnia. I have been awake 52 hours now. Had to rant the wakefulness out.
It is unedited. All those offended, I didn't mean it, you did.
Keith J Collard Jan 2013
Resident Facebook by Keith Collard

{remnants of a blood and ice coffee stained diary}


23april1996,

Been working at this mansion for at least four months now. Fellow co-workers are friendly enough. The pharmeceutical researchers are very pompous with their exact demands. Im in charge of the food storage and refridgeration for the mansion. It is the only modernly powered facet of this mansion. Besides the labs in the basement(from which I only heard).


26april1996,

This mansion is too creepy, the architect designed the living quarter and main facade of the mansion in a 1920 neo gothic fashion--with gas lamps and gothic paintings. Every device, even the typewriters in the mansion are old fashioned mechanical. A top researcher told me in casual conversation that these doors and clocks are more durable than current electronic means, built in the same fashion as the pyramids and stonehenge--he was pointing out all the clocks and engraved doors in the dining hall as he was speaking,while I was putting out the food. He's the usual eccentric for as these researchers go, he told me the company president paid him to design classical mantraps along the mansion and guardhouse to keep workers from straying, encrypted with runes and riddles as keys(some odd ducks).


2may1996,

Mansion workers were given each a laptop today by the head researcher Albert Wesker. This guy is like the James Bond of scientists, dashing and suave with a 9mm berreta at his side(wish we were allowed guns). He wears sunglasses--even at night. He said they experimented with a comunications app the scientists have been using to communicate expeiremental data. The only app available on there is something called Facebook, which the scientists call "fbproto."


5may1996,

The f.bproto is neat, we can watch movies , talk to eachother, and to workers at the pharmaceutical's sister facilities. Everything is monitored by the companies security admins Ive heard. The company will be holding raffles via f.bproto for staffers who could win a chance to participate in "beneficial lab trials" from ***** extension treatment to magnetic wave reducing therapy. Sounds unappealing to me...I put my name down on the site just in case.


6 may1996,Been talking to girl who works in sanitation department underneath the guardhouse, her name is Ada, she said there was an important goverment official flying in to the helipad today. She is pretty cute, and one bright light in this shadowy mansion. message from company, we should join democratic party on fbproto. whatever they say,they're the scientists.


10may1996,

Been stayin up too late posting on f.bproto,the company is posting alot of links, of visual images and sentences I don't quite understand. Ben from mansion cleanin services keeps hitting on Ada,I want to defriend him but want to know what he's doing. I put my cat in fbproto company pic contest,with everyone else who was given lab pets by the scientists, I put little gloves on her paws--Im sure to win.


11may1996,

Karl sent me a message on fbproto that he saw a researcher go into his room, and never saw him leave, and when he went to clean his room the researcher was not in there. This mansion is creepy, I mean a statue of a woman cutting her own throat with the inscription "only death shall set you free,"is that a little gloomy or what. fan of smiley faces on fbproto.;)


12 may 1996

man, the doors are like eight inches thick, solid wood, I locked myself out of my room and tried to shoulder the door in. Well, the door with its inlaid wood carving just laughed at me, it resembles a dragon or snake or someshit with two fern looking wings, red and blue. Spooooky stuff. I had to go get the security admin for the mansion staff living quarters. He unlocked the door, and told me that all the doors are solid oak. I asked him what the words at the bottom of serpent meant, he said it says in latin “ the two wings of the beast are red and blue.” I asked him what the hell that means, he says he didn’t know, but that it has to do with the research the scientists are doing.

I stayed up almost all night on fbproto, at first because my shoulder was killing me, but then it went away, and I kept finding myslelf with a ciqerette in my fingers all the way burnt down and my skin charred, geez, fbproto really takes your mind off things, especially this mansion which reminds me of a sepulcre. That Dan thinks he’s hot stuff, posting himself in his living quarters in the guard house, which is better than the mansion staffs. He get’s to go to the guardhouse recreation room, his profile pic is a bottle of Johnny Walker Red in it’s high end package that looks like a coffin, that him and the guards won at dart’s. It’s not hard to win that when Albert Wesker is on your team, that guy sunk three darts WilliamTell style into the bull’s eye. He tagged me in the picture of the Johnny Walker, *******.


13 may 1996

Locked myself in the walk in freezer today by accident, forgot the code….a researcher let me out finally, and asked if I was alright, I said I was fine, he just looked at me curiously. I was in there to clean out these blue vines, that kept on growing into the ducts and stuff, kept on turning the temperature down. But I won’t lie, I had my laptop with me to pass time, but after a while I couldn’t scroll down because my fingers stopped working , so I pressed the keyboard with my tongue. Ada’s pictures kept me warm, oh how I love her…..I want her so bad.


13may1996

Had a dream about the helicopter ride in and how the dense forest resembled a corpse’s face as we flew past it fast overhead. We touched down on the helipad, and there were dead bodies in the razor wire, they were shaking as if they were in a laughing frenzy from the rotor wash of the helicopter. Then as I entered the main façade (my footstep's echos on the tile seemed to walk away and disapear into the mansion)and stepped on the black and white checkered hall floor, Albert Wesker was there, and he was nicely dressed as a bartender or sumthin, and he asked if " I wanted a ****** mary," and he was squeezing a heart into the glass, then I looked down and there was a hole in my chest where my heart was supposed to be. Then there was a giant ice coffee and dancing with a mirror to moonlight sonata….****** stuff, this mansion is getting to me.


14may1996

dan is such a ****, keeps posting pics of himself shirtless, he was given some experimental hormone from a researcher and is relleshing in it It was some form of energy drink called Red Bull.

Him and Ada are talking more. Message from company to like republican party page(whatever)Daves three eyed frog won fbproto pic contest,grrrr.


15may1996,

there's been more accidents in the mansion and in the labs below. Fred from the kitchen staff cut off his fingers today,and Ive heard through Chris' post that someone fell into the live feed area where they feed animals to their experiments. Bob put his fbproto password(instead of mansioncode) into the mechanical lock at the observatory springing a trap of spikes that spiked his hand to his head and his head to the wall, the featherduster was still in his hand(or face).;(


16may1996,

the scientist with the always grave look has disapeared, the guards said he transferred,but a fellow researcher said he was fired, shame, I liked him.

There is a plant living in my radiator, keeps growing vine-like tendrils, and is turning up the heat...230 friends on f.bproto,woot woot.


17may1996,

the company is handing out promotional ice coffee that they created in the labs to staffers via f.bproto,I wasn't picked, dang,its said to give you "10x human energy and vitality".I became a fan of Backstreet Boys on f.bproto.


18may1996,

karl found a memo from the missing researcher under his bed when he was cleaning out his room, sent me a message via f.bproto,it read that the researcher concluded that the f.b proto had negative effects on living tissue, decreased brain function,increased tendencies for violence,and not worth the sublimal control contract with the goverment, and that both pre-cambrian ferns pose to much liability for a biohazard and show signs of sentience.........hmm,im up to 300 friends now.


19 may 1996,

more accidents in mansion, Albert Wesker sent message to staffers that he was just promoted to Head of Security,and that if anybody is caught leaving the premises they will be shot. I wouldn't even dare to go out in the surrounding forest, I hear the wild dogs howlin all night amid those dense woods.just became a fan of Ace of base, they are awesome.


20may 1996,

my roomate looks like a hot messs, his skin looks pale with black blotches and he has pitch black circles underneath eyes, he's been taking the labs new painkillers, man he should change his profile pic. I poked Ada.


21 may 1996

message from f.bproto, "outside guards replaced by Hunters.".....man, def would not go out there now, I fed one of those ape reptile thingy's live feed the other day( Phil went missing, I had to do his job, always doing other peoples work), and the feed for that day was a cow, and this thing just poked the cow to death with its razor claws.

Everyone of those brute raptor things have a skeleton key has their middle razor claw, a researcher said they can hear every door open and shut in the mansion, " If you see one, turn around and go out the door you came, if you enter a door your not supposed to, well....." he didn't finish what he was saying, only walked off muttering "what have I done....".....I friend requested him on fbproto, his last post was "god forgive me." His profile pic was his mansion room, with replicas of insects and a fishtank(that is rumoured to be a model of a giant one in the basement). He disapeared soon after and his fbproto was deactivated.

Joined Labville on fbproto.;)


22may1996,

message from company, the labs are combining expieramental ice coffee,painkillers,and steroids,anyone on f.bproto can partake, and we should document how we feel and what we do on fbproto multiple times a day. Took a pic of myself shirtless, can see spine coming thru skin, and I keep catching the red plant from the radiator posing in the background, or giving me bunny ears......grrrrrrrr.;(


23may1996

went to smoke a spleef on the stone balcony, near the greeen house over looking the forest the other night, they grow all kinds of red and blue marjiauna there.....but there was one of those reptile hunter things, standing guard there, blocking the path, it screamed and almost blew my eardrums out, " okey dokie" I said, and slowly backed away and left......friggin nazis these pharmaceutical people are.

I got rid of the Labville app on fbproto, that game is too hard, I keep running out of butlers to feed my experiments, and my humans keep escaping into the woods. But mostly, Im sick of seeing

Albert Wesker's name with the highest score everytime I play......



25may1996,

Ben said he saw a handfull of scientists and guards on the helipad taking a chopper out. There is more plants decorating the halls, no one knows who put them there, some rooms are blazing hot, others are ice cold. Ben said to not go to the library, everyone who went upstairs to that room has not returned, that the blue ones have took over the cobblestone path to the courtyard where the armory is. Said he saw Kevin in the tangles running up the stone wall on the side, he had a vine going in his mouth and coming out his eye; and he said that the researchers call the red ones "evaginates," for how they trap and slowly eat you(sounds ******). Im not on Ada's top friends list anymore, angry.


26may1996,

the mansion is awash in accidents and fighting, roomate looks like zombie, others look like reptilian muscled gorillaz, others just a blur they move so fast.eyes hurt from staring at f.b proto. Moaning alot. everyone is playing "I Saw the sign" from Ace of Base. Vines keep stealing my hat, and eating people.


25...,

no food, ate cat,mittens and both hearts,gas lights out, dark,everyone walking around with laptops to see,blue fbproto reflections on walls.fml.


2aprol

took chris' ice cofee and killed ben before he took steroids,lol,ate steroids,no one cooking food, getting hungry,guards came,ate em.....bullet hole in my chest......chaaange f.bproto profile pic to facee....my quote is mooohaha... just. saying


23...,

feel strong, fast,gruntin alot, hungry, no food, ate carl, ate red plant, carved him with my skeleton clah....I hate mondays was post on f.bproto,yum ice cofee.


43

oooohhhh, lol,lol, top ada friend list, ,ate benny...b.esisde armpits....he stink.....roarrrrr......oohhh....bullel wond in cheeek....see benny in thar......moving quick......hunman bones everyware....stain carpits....helicupter....mur guards......no.....pulice.....wesker is wit em....ace of base now.....bed of blud..I wit...fur em.....fbproto sez **** starssss ......


2..........rooooooahhhhh,yum, ohhhhhhh,lol,raohh.fml............[rest of transcript unintelligible]
All is not what it seems
Because I was an atheist
Long before I realized I was God,
But that was much, much later
Then, at that time, I succumbed
To the lurid but exciting depths
Of freedom, the joy of love and danger
Of searching and of knowledge,
Embracing every moment;
I surrendered to ungovernable impulses
That invoked within my very existence

Still to realise the true extent of this
It's perhaps best to start before the beginning
Before the earth embalmed me
A time when Cyparisse had not
Yet set root in my belly
Nor made sap of my blood
A time when it was possible to speak
To Panza's donkey when I thought of Zanzibar
A time when the vagrancy of my soul
Had not yet embarked
On its erratic itinerary
Plunging me eventually
Into the bright light
Of tainted and squalid reality

Like oscillating libraries, noise oppressed,
Contradictions of dreams
Suddenly I took flight,
With violent wrenches of imagination
In Persia being worshipped
Beneath the moon by Gods;
Caressed by those impetuous charms
A dazzling vision
I thought of death the only sister of charity
Whose dark night has no malevolence;
Black and white, silences that migrated
In sonorous symbolism took control
Shimmering like a painting of a sorrow

Streaked with unashamed colours
A single tear from a promethean candle
I would move to lick the stain of destiny
That pillar inhaling its black perfumes
Like a communicant on his knees.
Exiled in reality, I saw what I had never saw
Or only thought I saw now condemned
To see what has never been seen

Words corralled themselves in my mind
Writhing maggots on a corpse
Wriggling for position waiting to be pronounced
How they flew, taking wings
Hovering for an instant above the page
Hunting out the detritus of man
To feast upon the putrid flesh of misery
I too went searching
For my ancient feast; for Zanzibar

However hideous pages
From the note book of the ******
Imprisoned the words, stampeded the search
Scattering it in many directions
Shattering blue-white eyes
A castrated country, century, impotent, impure
Like politics, the ******* that can be purchased by coin
Like so much bread in the market,
A thousand profanities became the popular song
But silence is the real language of the fool

For he alone bears witness to what he feels
Misfortunes not understood, weeping the popular ballad
Morality and law, parades of red robed Judges
Carcasses, a circus for carrion crows
Yet like a cannibal the dead were still buried in my belly
The gloss of reason hiding madness
Like so many veneered fronts in a proud precinct

Paraded in full view, silence is demanded and got
The words wither, fake time continues,
To count the unrelieved falsehood the chimera of life;
Reason did not imprison me
My life being not heavy enough
Was allowed to take flight
To float above the reasoned realm
Revelations of the truth realised only by detachment
Devoured my mind increased my errorless purpose
The search for Zanzibar

Accepted values; valued only;
Because of this acceptance
Are accepted as value
Thus accepted in silence
The fools resign themselves
To a false reality
One that nails them to a poisoned cross

In the gardens of the dead
Like rowed tulips that
Gardeners know how to match
I found myself, among those who had gone
Remembered yet forgotten
Whose edifice unlike their lives
Reached not upwards but down.
I smelt the scent of unknown things
The perfumes of eternity that histories bind;
Intensity, a murmur; gurgle, as in a child
Yet extreme its aberrations
Like celluloid hand that
Had never known toil
Or wiped sweat from a brow
Laughed yet grimaced
Its smile a crimson smear
The sorrow that it felt
A burnished hand upon its nakedness
To see its enshrouded presence in such a garden
One well stocked and growing
Caressed my being with its glee
To turn white feel the touch
Of its venomous fingers upon my flesh;
Its purpose, to prevent any search for Zanzibar

The stench of death
Then cast its' new
Yet antediluvian gaze
Upon its purpose
Odour of grave
Faraway nonexistent
Yet it is perfume to those
Who feast upon its scent
Moistures mingling with the air
Its common purpose
Floating like un-forgiveness
Its atmosphere ozone sans holes
Its meaning ever present
Its' outcome to halt
The search for Zanzibar

And so the stencils of oriental scribes
Like black shadows overpowered my reason
Floating high above, adrift on an expanse of darkness
However, presently that azure ink
Raised its curtain before my very eyes
Revealing the stage, the illuminated stage
On which I was to set my drama
Where the phantoms of my imagination
Would enact their mysterious mysteries;
A poetic alchemy

Then a golden spark of pure
Nocturnal light blinded me
In an instant I saw, observed
The sun drown in its deathly sea
Its healing wings spread
Fear would see it rise again
Still searching for that fatal flaw, happiness
How many lives do I need?
How many existences will it take?
Incarnations a hundred times
Searching for Zanzibar.
Awakening to continue to
Live the saddest of my dreams

Furtive footsteps through Cimmerian landscapes
Ah such enchantment, do you understand?
Ah such a charm, listen to its undying echo
Feel its charge, that siren call
Cosmic summons, the vagrancy of mind
That caresses the imagination
Whose tender touch can place you
At the apex of the universe
Can lead to Zanzibar.


And so the subtle and foolish tortures
Inflicted upon me by I, my quest began
One that would ascertain, take centre stage
Make an unheard appearance of a philosophy
That, I am everyone and everyone else is me
Eventually at some point
In time and space we are all one
All linked, for we are condemned
Yes condemned to live these lives
This is why the dead have dreams
Dreams about the tyrants and demons
Of other lives of who they were;
Who they have yet to become.
Nourished on half truths,
Forever pulling at the thread
The rotted rags of reason
Those tattered twines
Unravelling the stitching of reality
Of hallucinations, empty illusions
And tarnished dreams create a constant struggle


Therefore for every conscious thing
That happens in the world
There must be a responding reverberation
Within the human soul
Let us put a halt to the calls
For the death of imagination
And demands for imagination to be silent
Such absurdities
For imagination is the true door to reality
For only in imagination
Can there be a bearable act
Of self examination
It is memory that hurts
More than the imagination
Always prefer the imaginary to the real
Imagination is neither an exit
From our nightmares nor
An escape from reality
But the place we are all trying to get to,
Zanzibar its shared images
Its story, its own life a new reality.


Mysteriously in the midst of unknown
Mazagran landscapes I feel
The full impact of fleeting visions
Without the limitations of space or time
Feel the act of experiencing their reality
This requires no explanation, no proof
Either together or separate
Because simply they are,
Judgement, condemnation
Punishments are gone
There is no cleansing a world
Without consciousness
Landscape devoid of people
'La Lune' growling in the orchard of the sea
Calypso again one or ten
Eucharis, tempest or temptress
Take both the meaning and the experience
Taste the tear drops of the sun
Telemachus searching, searching
Zanzibar

The idol, tentacles undulating
Vibrations of collective knowledge
The blank face, featureless
Touching around the domain of Atlas
Speaking in a thousand different tongues
Moving but still, blocks my path
Disturbs the line of imagination
Makes reality quiver
Dream flowers sway in its cosmic wind.
Yet Alhazers' iridescent arch allows
The steerage of my passage
Without pious pilgrimages to empty silences that
Contain an eternity of tears
Who graciously offers coverage
For the echo of footsteps
Allowing the magic moments to come


Robbed of sunlight, artificial night shines
Its deception attempting to secure knowledge
Of a future unknown, winning only it's unattainably
Offering instead knowledge of the past
Master of silence, offers only knowledge
Of invaded consciousness
Bedlam of paradise where Eros and Pan
In congress sleep, close at Zanzibar.


Lifeless beauty that lives everlasting
Time that reason cannot change, only help.
O enchanted torture you have stolen
The taste from my mouth
Masked I against the spectre of reality
Proclaimed the age of 'hasashin'
The creator of recollections, maker of memories
Possessor of impulse giver of echo
That rings in the ear
Cloud cast its surroccoian shadow
Air tinged with the aftermath of fire
Floating in an Asian wind, so subtle
Like a breath suddenly the sound of song
Of dance rents the solitude
Silence is slashed like a canvass screen
Happiness pours forth unconfined
Unfettered, both faces of Kandinsky as one
I extinguish the light, turn to the wall
Gazing upon its Janis face
My eyes behold the giver of pleasure.

Then I found myself in an extraordinary place
Whose skies where made of crystal glass
Water of the enchanted land was blue-grey
Bridges zig-zagged its shimmering domes
I stared as masts and parapets came to life
Its people, musicians sporting
Tangerine and white livery danced
The air filled with the sound of their music
Then as if from nowhere a light hit my eyes
Blinking, this apparition was gone
Can I not always believe what I see
Just because I see what I believe
The inhabitants at once became spectres
Engulfed in thick clouds of smoke and sulphur
Erinyies roamed, inflicting madness
A circus of the macabre sped past
Its symbols of death fluttering frantically
Around this false and fragile world
Suggested children, like creatures in an imagination
Were made ready for their rebirth
By the touch of the poets pen
A thousand Cheribino

In another, swirling sonorous scenes
Stormed the citadels of my mind
Marched through my imagination
Mab engulfed the long closed
Cemeteries of my thought allowing me
To see the dreams of others
Like precious pearls prised from their shells
Their visualisation so intense
Joy overcame me at once
Then a swarm of kisses descended upon me
Like a regiment of famished men
Feasting for the first time
I freely gave myself as the main course
In the most beautiful of banquets
In another, yielding to these seductions
I was enraptured by portraits of beautiful young men
Which appeared to be on the point of speaking
They were most mysterious their intrinsic
Charm so beautiful, stimulated desire
Whose assuagement was so pleasurable
That it might be called pure ecstasy
A perfect pleasure which had never before existed
Entirely individual and new

Thus upon the horizons of my mind
Had been shed a mysterious light
In which I now saw everything bathed
I was summoned by the Prince
Knowing dreams have no limits
I obeyed his call
For a long time failing to set
Foot on the shores of reality
Drinking from the wells of magic
While angels danced on grassy slopes
Disturbed by flames
The stars shot out their fragrance

Sweet smelling; blue abyss
On I went to the court, the court of the Prince of
Poets, a visitor to life
There I spat out the bit of liberty
Embraced the Prince
Courtesans mocked me, ridiculed
Laughed and taunted me
Their jibes merely part of
Their own deluded reality, not of mine
They did not serve my purpose
Dressed as they were
In meaningless words
Clothed in phrases of falsehood
They tried to make me compromise
There was fire burning in my eyes
Vivid dreams were eating up my mind
They wouldn't let me be
There were dead men lying
By the sides of the road
With daylight in their eyes
I saw villages under the sea
I stood at Galactic central point
Watched the earth burn
They did not know
The way to Zanzibar
Could the Prince show me?

However each morning I awoke
I found myself in a purgatorial fog
I roamed lost the alternative harbour
For my soul still distant
The Prince, I discovered, existed
In a twilight world of mysterious ailments
He denied his feelings
Such denial only immersed him
In maintaining the world of external restraints
It created emptiness, a vacancy
Filled by material concerns
I pleaded with him
The emerald gene came down
Soon the leaves of grass
Whispered another order of existence
Strangeness of sensation
Intoxication of vision
Unhinged for mortals
And as the sound increased one cannot
Describe what else it is that has been
I viewed a world transparent
Devoid of illumination within which
Was never a sea or land
Then the prophets were ******
For they were all liars
And I saw the most beautiful flower
Unfolding out of its own roots
For such a flower cannot
Unfold other than it does
I stood on the threshold of Orcus
I met Abbas Effendi the Gene without a name
Bab, Upanishads spilled music in my ears
Called to me in the most spectacular of colours
It was wonderful for the colours
Were like my dreams, red, black and green
I witnessed the three, sometimes as one
Other times as two, again and again
The self eternal and inseparable sons
Of Shakyamuni caressed me with their thoughts
Their music and colour moved about me
In ecstatic rhythm like the peaceful
Waves of the ocean as upon a shore
I read the sentences of silence
Breathed the perfume of never fading flowers
Walked in cherry blossom snow
Heard Hafiz reciting in the night
I saw for the first time
The unfinished likeness of others.

Then one day the Prince
With a sweeping theatrical and
So to speak, allegorical flourish bowed
Called me an exiled angel
Said the time had come to travel
To leave the images of naked heels
Imprinted in the clay
We wondered
Then as if by magic, suddenly the shadows
Of houses, halls, and a church
Emerged like enchanted islands in a fairy tale
The spiritualised forms of civilisation
I was approached by a graceful youth
Draped in cobweb lawn
He was pale, delicately beautiful
Spanish looking, but his name was Alexis Sonyeuse
Whose family it was said was
Related to the French Emperor Napoleon
It was also rumoured that he had
Had a tempestuous affair with the Bishop of Monaco
And once slept with his half brother Julian Apollinaire
When he spoke he was at once original
Delicious, moving, droll and discreetly melancholy
Listening to him was like breathing
The perfume of wondrous flowers
But the scent of datura hung about him
Paralleling his every movement
  Another youth, Edmond also greeted me
He was a young man with aristocratic features
A complexion pink, like a girls
And a bearing at once charmingly gracious
And audaciously insolent
His shirt was strange, the lining
A peculiarly orange colour
A flame coloured taffeta
Like the petticoats of a *****



They looked at me
Furtive glances emanated from their eyes
Training a profound stare upon my person
The two youths took me to 18 Avenue de Friedland
There two boy servants
Adoum and Outhman greeted us
Spinario's lay about its confines
Frezans caressing them
As they touched their feet
A hundred echansons moved
With dazzling delicacy dispensing dreams
In drops from crystalline cups
Here I witnessed the tragic faces of the population
Urnings, cleaning in the midst of anarchist trials
The room a fiery red, stained with light
The caress of forgotten thought
Like the thickness of a sorrow
Musicians playing on broken strings
Crimson ******, who defied the King of Naples
We moved past wretches
Like Virgil, but Danteian
Saw the usurers heard the rustling
Of lute strings the clinking of grey paper
Observed in this Minatare's lair
The purchase of a twelve penny dagger
Liberty of speech meeting its great reckoning
In a little room, Ingram the poltergeist
Of misfortune was there
Dead Scythian, who ever loved you
Loved you as you might, loved you at first sight.

This was a new and exciting world
Whose environs were populated
By the most mysterious and colourful of people
I was introduced by the two youths
To a suicidal young painter who
Was rebelling against his class
He was a somewhat forced intellectual
With an over quixotic passion for equality
Still he was warm, kind and impulsive
Poetry, he made it known
Had opened his mind to the invisible
Beside him was a painting
Exemplifying a new kind of observation
In a style absolutely faultless
Each structure clear, each brush stroke
Falling exactly into place
Inscribed in the top left
Corner were the words
"Quod me nutrit me destruit"
An introduction to himself of a tall youth
Whose eyes possessed a constant
Vagrancy of desire
Who seemed at once, for one so
judy smith Sep 2015
Neelam Gill showed off her figure in a very risqué gown with a split running from her shoulder down past her bottom.

How cheeky - Neelam Gill went all-out on Wednesday night as she flashed her *** in a rather risque dress.

The stunning model - who is rumoured to be dating former One Direction man Zayn Malik - stunned at a glitzy event in London this week.

Wearing a floor-length green gown, Neelam gave onlookers a bit of an eyeful with a split down the back of the outfit, revealing a hint of her bottom.

With layers and a front split showing off a lot of leg, the 20-year-old certainly made an impression during the party.

She stepped out at the London Evening Standard's Progress 1000 Most Influential People launch, and showed why she may have grabbed Zayn's attention .

The star - who has made her catwalk debut for Burberry - is reportedly planning on jetting to Los Angeles, where the singer is working on his debut solo album, so they can spend some time together .

According to Mail Online, Zayn and Neelam first met in London back in March, but nothing happened because he was still engaged to Little Mix star Perrie.

They bumped into each other again at the Asian Awards in London a month later, with Neelam later writing on Twitter: "Congratulations on your award tonight zaynmalik, catch up again soon!"

The pair reportedly stayed in touch as friends until Zayn and Perrie called it quits at the end of last month.

A source told the site: "Neelam doesn't know if she wants all of the drama that comes with dating someone in the public eye. She is going to LA to spend some time with Zayn and see how things go from there.

Last month, the model, who worked with Romeo Beckham in Burberry's Christmas advert last year , wrote on Twitter: "to live and die in LA, it's the place to be..."

read more:www.marieaustralia.com/red-carpet-celebrity-dresses

www.marieaustralia.com/formal-dresses-adelaide
All is not what it seems
Because I was an atheist
Long before I realized I was God,
But that was much, much later
Then, at that time, I succumbed
To the lurid but exciting depths
Of freedom, the joy of love and danger
Of searching and of knowledge,
Embracing every moment;
I surrendered to ungovernable impulses
That invoked within my very existence

Still to realise the true extent of this
It's perhaps best to start before the beginning
Before the earth embalmed me
A time when Cyparisse had not
Yet set root in my belly
Nor made sap of my blood
A time when it was possible to speak
To Panza's donkey when I thought of Zanzibar
A time when the vagrancy of my soul
Had not yet embarked
On its erratic itinerary
Plunging me eventually
Into the bright light
Of tainted and squalid reality

Like oscillating libraries, noise oppressed,
Contradictions of dreams
Suddenly I took flight,
With violent wrenches of imagination
In Persia being worshipped
Beneath the moon by Gods;
Caressed by those impetuous charms
A dazzling vision
I thought of death the only sister of charity
Whose dark night has no malevolence;
Black and white, silences that migrated
In sonorous symbolism took control
Shimmering like a painting of a sorrow

Streaked with unashamed colours
A single tear from a promethean candle
I would move to lick the stain of destiny
That pillar inhaling its black perfumes
Like a communicant on his knees.
Exiled in reality, I saw what I had never saw
Or only thought I saw now condemned
To see what has never been seen

Words corralled themselves in my mind
Writhing maggots on a corpse
Wriggling for position waiting to be pronounced
How they flew, taking wings
Hovering for an instant above the page
Hunting out the detritus of man
To feast upon the putrid flesh of misery
I too went searching
For my ancient feast; for Zanzibar

However hideous pages
From the note book of the ******
Imprisoned the words, stampeded the search
Scattering it in many directions
Shattering blue-white eyes
A castrated country, century, impotent, impure
Like politics, the ******* that can be purchased by coin
Like so much bread in the market,
A thousand profanities became the popular song
But silence is the real language of the fool

For he alone bears witness to what he feels
Misfortunes not understood, weeping the popular ballad
Morality and law, parades of red robed Judges
Carcasses, a circus for carrion crows
Yet like a cannibal the dead were still buried in my belly
The gloss of reason hiding madness
Like so many veneered fronts in a proud precinct

Paraded in full view, silence is demanded and got
The words wither, fake time continues,
To count the unrelieved falsehood the chimera of life;
Reason did not imprison me
My life being not heavy enough
Was allowed to take flight
To float above the reasoned realm
Revelations of the truth realised only by detachment
Devoured my mind increased my errorless purpose
The search for Zanzibar

Accepted values; valued only;
Because of this acceptance
Are accepted as value
Thus accepted in silence
The fools resign themselves
To a false reality
One that nails them to a poisoned cross

In the gardens of the dead
Like rowed tulips that
Gardeners know how to match
I found myself, among those who had gone
Remembered yet forgotten
Whose edifice unlike their lives
Reached not upwards but down.
I smelt the scent of unknown things
The perfumes of eternity that histories bind;
Intensity, a murmur; gurgle, as in a child
Yet extreme its aberrations
Like celluloid hand that
Had never known toil
Or wiped sweat from a brow
Laughed yet grimaced
Its smile a crimson smear
The sorrow that it felt
A burnished hand upon its nakedness
To see its enshrouded presence in such a garden
One well stocked and growing
Caressed my being with its glee
To turn white feel the touch
Of its venomous fingers upon my flesh;
Its purpose, to prevent any search for Zanzibar

The stench of death
Then cast its' new
Yet antediluvian gaze
Upon its purpose
Odour of grave
Faraway nonexistent
Yet it is perfume to those
Who feast upon its scent
Moistures mingling with the air
Its common purpose
Floating like un-forgiveness
Its atmosphere ozone sans holes
Its meaning ever present
Its' outcome to halt
The search for Zanzibar

And so the stencils of oriental scribes
Like black shadows overpowered my reason
Floating high above, adrift on an expanse of darkness
However, presently that azure ink
Raised its curtain before my very eyes
Revealing the stage, the illuminated stage
On which I was to set my drama
Where the phantoms of my imagination
Would enact their mysterious mysteries;
A poetic alchemy

Then a golden spark of pure
Nocturnal light blinded me
In an instant I saw, observed
The sun drown in its deathly sea
Its healing wings spread
Fear would see it rise again
Still searching for that fatal flaw, happiness
How many lives do I need?
How many existences will it take?
Incarnations a hundred times
Searching for Zanzibar.
Awakening to continue to
Live the saddest of my dreams

Furtive footsteps through Cimmerian landscapes
Ah such enchantment, do you understand?
Ah such a charm, listen to its undying echo
Feel its charge, that siren call
Cosmic summons, the vagrancy of mind
That caresses the imagination
Whose tender touch can place you
At the apex of the universe
Can lead to Zanzibar.


And so the subtle and foolish tortures
Inflicted upon me by I, my quest began
One that would ascertain, take centre stage
Make an unheard appearance of a philosophy
That, I am everyone and everyone else is me
Eventually at some point
In time and space we are all one
All linked, for we are condemned
Yes condemned to live these lives
This is why the dead have dreams
Dreams about the tyrants and demons
Of other lives of who they were;
Who they have yet to become.
Nourished on half truths,
Forever pulling at the thread
The rotted rags of reason
Those tattered twines
Unravelling the stitching of reality
Of hallucinations, empty illusions
And tarnished dreams create a constant struggle


Therefore for every conscious thing
That happens in the world
There must be a responding reverberation
Within the human soul
Let us put a halt to the calls
For the death of imagination
And demands for imagination to be silent
Such absurdities
For imagination is the true door to reality
For only in imagination
Can there be a bearable act
Of self examination
It is memory that hurts
More than the imagination
Always prefer the imaginary to the real
Imagination is neither an exit
From our nightmares nor
An escape from reality
But the place we are all trying to get to,
Zanzibar its shared images
Its story, its own life a new reality.


Mysteriously in the midst of unknown
Mazagran landscapes I feel
The full impact of fleeting visions
Without the limitations of space or time
Feel the act of experiencing their reality
This requires no explanation, no proof
Either together or separate
Because simply they are,
Judgement, condemnation
Punishments are gone
There is no cleansing a world
Without consciousness
Landscape devoid of people
'La Lune' growling in the orchard of the sea
Calypso again one or ten
Eucharis, tempest or temptress
Take both the meaning and the experience
Taste the tear drops of the sun
Telemachus searching, searching
Zanzibar

The idol, tentacles undulating
Vibrations of collective knowledge
The blank face, featureless
Touching around the domain of Atlas
Speaking in a thousand different tongues
Moving but still, blocks my path
Disturbs the line of imagination
Makes reality quiver
Dream flowers sway in its cosmic wind.
Yet Alhazers' iridescent arch allows
The steerage of my passage
Without pious pilgrimages to empty silences that
Contain an eternity of tears
Who graciously offers coverage
For the echo of footsteps
Allowing the magic moments to come


Robbed of sunlight, artificial night shines
Its deception attempting to secure knowledge
Of a future unknown, winning only it's unattainably
Offering instead knowledge of the past
Master of silence, offers only knowledge
Of invaded consciousness
Bedlam of paradise where Eros and Pan
In congress sleep, close at Zanzibar.


Lifeless beauty that lives everlasting
Time that reason cannot change, only help.
O enchanted torture you have stolen
The taste from my mouth
Masked I against the spectre of reality
Proclaimed the age of 'hasashin'
The creator of recollections, maker of memories
Possessor of impulse giver of echo
That rings in the ear
Cloud cast its surroccoian shadow
Air tinged with the aftermath of fire
Floating in an Asian wind, so subtle
Like a breath suddenly the sound of song
Of dance rents the solitude
Silence is slashed like a canvass screen
Happiness pours forth unconfined
Unfettered, both faces of Kandinsky as one
I extinguish the light, turn to the wall
Gazing upon its Janis face
My eyes behold the giver of pleasure.

Then I found myself in an extraordinary place
Whose skies where made of crystal glass
Water of the enchanted land was blue-grey
Bridges zig-zagged its shimmering domes
I stared as masts and parapets came to life
Its people, musicians sporting
Tangerine and white livery danced
The air filled with the sound of their music
Then as if from nowhere a light hit my eyes
Blinking, this apparition was gone
Can I not always believe what I see
Just because I see what I believe
The inhabitants at once became spectres
Engulfed in thick clouds of smoke and sulphur
Erinyies roamed, inflicting madness
A circus of the macabre sped past
Its symbols of death fluttering frantically
Around this false and fragile world
Suggested children, like creatures in an imagination
Were made ready for their rebirth
By the touch of the poets pen
A thousand Cheribino

In another, swirling sonorous scenes
Stormed the citadels of my mind
Marched through my imagination
Mab engulfed the long closed
Cemeteries of my thought allowing me
To see the dreams of others
Like precious pearls prised from their shells
Their visualisation so intense
Joy overcame me at once
Then a swarm of kisses descended upon me
Like a regiment of famished men
Feasting for the first time
I freely gave myself as the main course
In the most beautiful of banquets
In another, yielding to these seductions
I was enraptured by portraits of beautiful young men
Which appeared to be on the point of speaking
They were most mysterious their intrinsic
Charm so beautiful, stimulated desire
Whose assuagement was so pleasurable
That it might be called pure ecstasy
A perfect pleasure which had never before existed
Entirely individual and new

Thus upon the horizons of my mind
Had been shed a mysterious light
In which I now saw everything bathed
I was summoned by the Prince
Knowing dreams have no limits
I obeyed his call
For a long time failing to set
Foot on the shores of reality
Drinking from the wells of magic
While angels danced on grassy slopes
Disturbed by flames
The stars shot out their fragrance

Sweet smelling; blue abyss
On I went to the court, the court of the Prince of
Poets, a visitor to life
There I spat out the bit of liberty
Embraced the Prince
Courtesans mocked me, ridiculed
Laughed and taunted me
Their jibes merely part of
Their own deluded reality, not of mine
They did not serve my purpose
Dressed as they were
In meaningless words
Clothed in phrases of falsehood
They tried to make me compromise
There was fire burning in my eyes
Vivid dreams were eating up my mind
They wouldn't let me be
There were dead men lying
By the sides of the road
With daylight in their eyes
I saw villages under the sea
I stood at Galactic central point
Watched the earth burn
They did not know
The way to Zanzibar
Could the Prince show me?

However each morning I awoke
I found myself in a purgatorial fog
I roamed lost the alternative harbour
For my soul still distant
The Prince, I discovered, existed
In a twilight world of mysterious ailments
He denied his feelings
Such denial only immersed him
In maintaining the world of external restraints
It created emptiness, a vacancy
Filled by material concerns
I pleaded with him
The emerald gene came down
Soon the leaves of grass
Whispered another order of existence
Strangeness of sensation
Intoxication of vision
Unhinged for mortals
And as the sound increased one cannot
Describe what else it is that has been
I viewed a world transparent
Devoid of illumination within which
Was never a sea or land
Then the prophets were ******
For they were all liars
And I saw the most beautiful flower
Unfolding out of its own roots
For such a flower cannot
Unfold other than it does
I stood on the threshold of Orcus
I met Abbas Effendi the Gene without a name
Bab, Upanishads spilled music in my ears
Called to me in the most spectacular of colours
It was wonderful for the colours
Were like my dreams, red, black and green
I witnessed the three, sometimes as one
Other times as two, again and again
The self eternal and inseparable sons
Of Shakyamuni caressed me with their thoughts
Their music and colour moved about me
In ecstatic rhythm like the peaceful
Waves of the ocean as upon a shore
I read the sentences of silence
Breathed the perfume of never fading flowers
Walked in cherry blossom snow
Heard Hafiz reciting in the night
I saw for the first time
The unfinished likeness of others.

Then one day the Prince
With a sweeping theatrical and
So to speak, allegorical flourish bowed
Called me an exiled angel
Said the time had come to travel
To leave the images of naked heels
Imprinted in the clay
We wondered
Then as if by magic, suddenly the shadows
Of houses, halls, and a church
Emerged like enchanted islands in a fairy tale
The spiritualised forms of civilisation
I was approached by a graceful youth
Draped in cobweb lawn
He was pale, delicately beautiful
Spanish looking, but his name was Alexis Sonyeuse
Whose family it was said was
Related to the French Emperor Napoleon
It was also rumoured that he had
Had a tempestuous affair with the Bishop of Monaco
And once slept with his half brother Julian Apollinaire
When he spoke he was at once original
Delicious, moving, droll and discreetly melancholy
Listening to him was like breathing
The perfume of wondrous flowers
But the scent of datura hung about him
Paralleling his every movement
  Another youth, Edmond also greeted me
He was a young man with aristocratic features
A complexion pink, like a girls
And a bearing at once charmingly gracious
And audaciously insolent
His shirt was strange, the lining
A peculiarly orange colour
A flame coloured taffeta
Like the petticoats of a *****



They looked at me
Furtive glances emanated from their eyes
Training a profound stare upon my person
The two youths took me to 18 Avenue de Friedland
There two boy servants
Adoum and Outhman greeted us
Spinario's lay about its confines
Frezans caressing them
As they touched their feet
A hundred echansons moved
With dazzling delicacy dispensing dreams
In drops from crystalline cups
Here I witnessed the tragic faces of the population
Urnings, cleaning in the midst of anarchist trials
The room a fiery red, stained with light
The caress of forgotten thought
Like the thickness of a sorrow
Musicians playing on broken strings
Crimson ******, who defied the King of Naples
We moved past wretches
Like Virgil, but Danteian
Saw the usurers heard the rustling
Of lute strings the clinking of grey paper
Observed in this Minatare's lair
The purchase of a twelve penny dagger
Liberty of speech meeting its great reckoning
In a little room, Ingram the poltergeist
Of misfortune was there
Dead Scythian, who ever loved you
Loved you as you might, loved you at first sight.

This was a new and exciting world
Whose environs were populated
By the most mysterious and colourful of people
I was introduced by the two youths
To a suicidal young painter who
Was rebelling against his class
He was a somewhat forced intellectual
With an over quixotic passion for equality
Still he was warm, kind and impulsive
Poetry, he made it known
Had opened his mind to the invisible
Beside him was a painting
Exemplifying a new kind of observation
In a style absolutely faultless
Each structure clear, each brush stroke
Falling exactly into place
Inscribed in the top left
Corner were the words
"Quod me nutrit me destruit"
An introduction to himself of a tall youth
Whose eyes possessed a constant
Vagrancy of desire
Who seemed at once, for one so
All is not what it seems
Because I was an atheist
Long before I realized I was God,
But that was much, much later
Then, at that time, I succumbed
To the lurid but exciting depths
Of freedom, the joy of love and danger
Of searching and of knowledge,
Embracing every moment;
I surrendered to ungovernable impulses
That invoked within my very existence

Still to realise the true extent of this
It's perhaps best to start before the beginning
Before the earth embalmed me
A time when Cyparisse had not
Yet set root in my belly
Nor made sap of my blood
A time when it was possible to speak
To Panza's donkey when I thought of Zanzibar
A time when the vagrancy of my soul
Had not yet embarked
On its erratic itinerary
Plunging me eventually
Into the bright light
Of tainted and squalid reality

Like oscillating libraries, noise oppressed,
Contradictions of dreams
Suddenly I took flight,
With violent wrenches of imagination
In Persia being worshipped
Beneath the moon by Gods;
Caressed by those impetuous charms
A dazzling vision
I thought of death the only sister of charity
Whose dark night has no malevolence;
Black and white, silences that migrated
In sonorous symbolism took control
Shimmering like a painting of a sorrow

Streaked with unashamed colours
A single tear from a promethean candle
I would move to lick the stain of destiny
That pillar inhaling its black perfumes
Like a communicant on his knees.
Exiled in reality, I saw what I had never saw
Or only thought I saw now condemned
To see what has never been seen

Words corralled themselves in my mind
Writhing maggots on a corpse
Wriggling for position waiting to be pronounced
How they flew, taking wings
Hovering for an instant above the page
Hunting out the detritus of man
To feast upon the putrid flesh of misery
I too went searching
For my ancient feast; for Zanzibar

However hideous pages
From the note book of the ******
Imprisoned the words, stampeded the search
Scattering it in many directions
Shattering blue-white eyes
A castrated country, century, impotent, impure
Like politics, the ******* that can be purchased by coin
Like so much bread in the market,
A thousand profanities became the popular song
But silence is the real language of the fool

For he alone bears witness to what he feels
Misfortunes not understood, weeping the popular ballad
Morality and law, parades of red robed Judges
Carcasses, a circus for carrion crows
Yet like a cannibal the dead were still buried in my belly
The gloss of reason hiding madness
Like so many veneered fronts in a proud precinct

Paraded in full view, silence is demanded and got
The words wither, fake time continues,
To count the unrelieved falsehood the chimera of life;
Reason did not imprison me
My life being not heavy enough
Was allowed to take flight
To float above the reasoned realm
Revelations of the truth realised only by detachment
Devoured my mind increased my errorless purpose
The search for Zanzibar

Accepted values; valued only;
Because of this acceptance
Are accepted as value
Thus accepted in silence
The fools resign themselves
To a false reality
One that nails them to a poisoned cross

In the gardens of the dead
Like rowed tulips that
Gardeners know how to match
I found myself, among those who had gone
Remembered yet forgotten
Whose edifice unlike their lives
Reached not upwards but down.
I smelt the scent of unknown things
The perfumes of eternity that histories bind;
Intensity, a murmur; gurgle, as in a child
Yet extreme its aberrations
Like celluloid hand that
Had never known toil
Or wiped sweat from a brow
Laughed yet grimaced
Its smile a crimson smear
The sorrow that it felt
A burnished hand upon its nakedness
To see its enshrouded presence in such a garden
One well stocked and growing
Caressed my being with its glee
To turn white feel the touch
Of its venomous fingers upon my flesh;
Its purpose, to prevent any search for Zanzibar

The stench of death
Then cast its' new
Yet antediluvian gaze
Upon its purpose
Odour of grave
Faraway nonexistent
Yet it is perfume to those
Who feast upon its scent
Moistures mingling with the air
Its common purpose
Floating like un-forgiveness
Its atmosphere ozone sans holes
Its meaning ever present
Its' outcome to halt
The search for Zanzibar

And so the stencils of oriental scribes
Like black shadows overpowered my reason
Floating high above, adrift on an expanse of darkness
However, presently that azure ink
Raised its curtain before my very eyes
Revealing the stage, the illuminated stage
On which I was to set my drama
Where the phantoms of my imagination
Would enact their mysterious mysteries;
A poetic alchemy

Then a golden spark of pure
Nocturnal light blinded me
In an instant I saw, observed
The sun drown in its deathly sea
Its healing wings spread
Fear would see it rise again
Still searching for that fatal flaw, happiness
How many lives do I need?
How many existences will it take?
Incarnations a hundred times
Searching for Zanzibar.
Awakening to continue to
Live the saddest of my dreams

Furtive footsteps through Cimmerian landscapes
Ah such enchantment, do you understand?
Ah such a charm, listen to its undying echo
Feel its charge, that siren call
Cosmic summons, the vagrancy of mind
That caresses the imagination
Whose tender touch can place you
At the apex of the universe
Can lead to Zanzibar.


And so the subtle and foolish tortures
Inflicted upon me by I, my quest began
One that would ascertain, take centre stage
Make an unheard appearance of a philosophy
That, I am everyone and everyone else is me
Eventually at some point
In time and space we are all one
All linked, for we are condemned
Yes condemned to live these lives
This is why the dead have dreams
Dreams about the tyrants and demons
Of other lives of who they were;
Who they have yet to become.
Nourished on half truths,
Forever pulling at the thread
The rotted rags of reason
Those tattered twines
Unravelling the stitching of reality
Of hallucinations, empty illusions
And tarnished dreams create a constant struggle


Therefore for every conscious thing
That happens in the world
There must be a responding reverberation
Within the human soul
Let us put a halt to the calls
For the death of imagination
And demands for imagination to be silent
Such absurdities
For imagination is the true door to reality
For only in imagination
Can there be a bearable act
Of self examination
It is memory that hurts
More than the imagination
Always prefer the imaginary to the real
Imagination is neither an exit
From our nightmares nor
An escape from reality
But the place we are all trying to get to,
Zanzibar its shared images
Its story, its own life a new reality.


Mysteriously in the midst of unknown
Mazagran landscapes I feel
The full impact of fleeting visions
Without the limitations of space or time
Feel the act of experiencing their reality
This requires no explanation, no proof
Either together or separate
Because simply they are,
Judgement, condemnation
Punishments are gone
There is no cleansing a world
Without consciousness
Landscape devoid of people
'La Lune' growling in the orchard of the sea
Calypso again one or ten
Eucharis, tempest or temptress
Take both the meaning and the experience
Taste the tear drops of the sun
Telemachus searching, searching
Zanzibar

The idol, tentacles undulating
Vibrations of collective knowledge
The blank face, featureless
Touching around the domain of Atlas
Speaking in a thousand different tongues
Moving but still, blocks my path
Disturbs the line of imagination
Makes reality quiver
Dream flowers sway in its cosmic wind.
Yet Alhazers' iridescent arch allows
The steerage of my passage
Without pious pilgrimages to empty silences that
Contain an eternity of tears
Who graciously offers coverage
For the echo of footsteps
Allowing the magic moments to come


Robbed of sunlight, artificial night shines
Its deception attempting to secure knowledge
Of a future unknown, winning only it's unattainably
Offering instead knowledge of the past
Master of silence, offers only knowledge
Of invaded consciousness
Bedlam of paradise where Eros and Pan
In congress sleep, close at Zanzibar.


Lifeless beauty that lives everlasting
Time that reason cannot change, only help.
O enchanted torture you have stolen
The taste from my mouth
Masked I against the spectre of reality
Proclaimed the age of 'hasashin'
The creator of recollections, maker of memories
Possessor of impulse giver of echo
That rings in the ear
Cloud cast its surroccoian shadow
Air tinged with the aftermath of fire
Floating in an Asian wind, so subtle
Like a breath suddenly the sound of song
Of dance rents the solitude
Silence is slashed like a canvass screen
Happiness pours forth unconfined
Unfettered, both faces of Kandinsky as one
I extinguish the light, turn to the wall
Gazing upon its Janis face
My eyes behold the giver of pleasure.

Then I found myself in an extraordinary place
Whose skies where made of crystal glass
Water of the enchanted land was blue-grey
Bridges zig-zagged its shimmering domes
I stared as masts and parapets came to life
Its people, musicians sporting
Tangerine and white livery danced
The air filled with the sound of their music
Then as if from nowhere a light hit my eyes
Blinking, this apparition was gone
Can I not always believe what I see
Just because I see what I believe
The inhabitants at once became spectres
Engulfed in thick clouds of smoke and sulphur
Erinyies roamed, inflicting madness
A circus of the macabre sped past
Its symbols of death fluttering frantically
Around this false and fragile world
Suggested children, like creatures in an imagination
Were made ready for their rebirth
By the touch of the poets pen
A thousand Cheribino

In another, swirling sonorous scenes
Stormed the citadels of my mind
Marched through my imagination
Mab engulfed the long closed
Cemeteries of my thought allowing me
To see the dreams of others
Like precious pearls prised from their shells
Their visualisation so intense
Joy overcame me at once
Then a swarm of kisses descended upon me
Like a regiment of famished men
Feasting for the first time
I freely gave myself as the main course
In the most beautiful of banquets
In another, yielding to these seductions
I was enraptured by portraits of beautiful young men
Which appeared to be on the point of speaking
They were most mysterious their intrinsic
Charm so beautiful, stimulated desire
Whose assuagement was so pleasurable
That it might be called pure ecstasy
A perfect pleasure which had never before existed
Entirely individual and new

Thus upon the horizons of my mind
Had been shed a mysterious light
In which I now saw everything bathed
I was summoned by the Prince
Knowing dreams have no limits
I obeyed his call
For a long time failing to set
Foot on the shores of reality
Drinking from the wells of magic
While angels danced on grassy slopes
Disturbed by flames
The stars shot out their fragrance

Sweet smelling; blue abyss
On I went to the court, the court of the Prince of
Poets, a visitor to life
There I spat out the bit of liberty
Embraced the Prince
Courtesans mocked me, ridiculed
Laughed and taunted me
Their jibes merely part of
Their own deluded reality, not of mine
They did not serve my purpose
Dressed as they were
In meaningless words
Clothed in phrases of falsehood
They tried to make me compromise
There was fire burning in my eyes
Vivid dreams were eating up my mind
They wouldn't let me be
There were dead men lying
By the sides of the road
With daylight in their eyes
I saw villages under the sea
I stood at Galactic central point
Watched the earth burn
They did not know
The way to Zanzibar
Could the Prince show me?

However each morning I awoke
I found myself in a purgatorial fog
I roamed lost the alternative harbour
For my soul still distant
The Prince, I discovered, existed
In a twilight world of mysterious ailments
He denied his feelings
Such denial only immersed him
In maintaining the world of external restraints
It created emptiness, a vacancy
Filled by material concerns
I pleaded with him
The emerald gene came down
Soon the leaves of grass
Whispered another order of existence
Strangeness of sensation
Intoxication of vision
Unhinged for mortals
And as the sound increased one cannot
Describe what else it is that has been
I viewed a world transparent
Devoid of illumination within which
Was never a sea or land
Then the prophets were ******
For they were all liars
And I saw the most beautiful flower
Unfolding out of its own roots
For such a flower cannot
Unfold other than it does
I stood on the threshold of Orcus
I met Abbas Effendi the Gene without a name
Bab, Upanishads spilled music in my ears
Called to me in the most spectacular of colours
It was wonderful for the colours
Were like my dreams, red, black and green
I witnessed the three, sometimes as one
Other times as two, again and again
The self eternal and inseparable sons
Of Shakyamuni caressed me with their thoughts
Their music and colour moved about me
In ecstatic rhythm like the peaceful
Waves of the ocean as upon a shore
I read the sentences of silence
Breathed the perfume of never fading flowers
Walked in cherry blossom snow
Heard Hafiz reciting in the night
I saw for the first time
The unfinished likeness of others.

Then one day the Prince
With a sweeping theatrical and
So to speak, allegorical flourish bowed
Called me an exiled angel
Said the time had come to travel
To leave the images of naked heels
Imprinted in the clay
We wondered
Then as if by magic, suddenly the shadows
Of houses, halls, and a church
Emerged like enchanted islands in a fairy tale
The spiritualised forms of civilisation
I was approached by a graceful youth
Draped in cobweb lawn
He was pale, delicately beautiful
Spanish looking, but his name was Alexis Sonyeuse
Whose family it was said was
Related to the French Emperor Napoleon
It was also rumoured that he had
Had a tempestuous affair with the Bishop of Monaco
And once slept with his half brother Julian Apollinaire
When he spoke he was at once original
Delicious, moving, droll and discreetly melancholy
Listening to him was like breathing
The perfume of wondrous flowers
But the scent of datura hung about him
Paralleling his every movement
  Another youth, Edmond also greeted me
He was a young man with aristocratic features
A complexion pink, like a girls
And a bearing at once charmingly gracious
And audaciously insolent
His shirt was strange, the lining
A peculiarly orange colour
A flame coloured taffeta
Like the petticoats of a *****



They looked at me
Furtive glances emanated from their eyes
Training a profound stare upon my person
The two youths took me to 18 Avenue de Friedland
There two boy servants
Adoum and Outhman greeted us
Spinario's lay about its confines
Frezans caressing them
As they touched their feet
A hundred echansons moved
With dazzling delicacy dispensing dreams
In drops from crystalline cups
Here I witnessed the tragic faces of the population
Urnings, cleaning in the midst of anarchist trials
The room a fiery red, stained with light
The caress of forgotten thought
Like the thickness of a sorrow
Musicians playing on broken strings
Crimson ******, who defied the King of Naples
We moved past wretches
Like Virgil, but Danteian
Saw the usurers heard the rustling
Of lute strings the clinking of grey paper
Observed in this Minatare's lair
The purchase of a twelve penny dagger
Liberty of speech meeting its great reckoning
In a little room, Ingram the poltergeist
Of misfortune was there
Dead Scythian, who ever loved you
Loved you as you might, loved you at first sight.

This was a new and exciting world
Whose environs were populated
By the most mysterious and colourful of people
I was introduced by the two youths
To a suicidal young painter who
Was rebelling against his class
He was a somewhat forced intellectual
With an over quixotic passion for equality
Still he was warm, kind and impulsive
Poetry, he made it known
Had opened his mind to the invisible
Beside him was a painting
Exemplifying a new kind of observation
In a style absolutely faultless
Each structure clear, each brush stroke
Falling exactly into place
Inscribed in the top left
Corner were the words
"Quod me nutrit me destruit"
An introduction to himself of a tall youth
Whose eyes possessed a constant
Vagrancy of desire
Who seemed at once, for one so
All is not what it seems
Because I was an atheist
Long before I realized I was God,
But that was much, much later
Then, at that time, I succumbed
To the lurid but exciting depths
Of freedom, the joy of love and danger
Of searching and of knowledge,
Embracing every moment;
I surrendered to ungovernable impulses
That invoked within my very existence

Still to realise the true extent of this
It's perhaps best to start before the beginning
Before the earth embalmed me
A time when Cyparisse had not
Yet set root in my belly
Nor made sap of my blood
A time when it was possible to speak
To Panza's donkey when I thought of Zanzibar
A time when the vagrancy of my soul
Had not yet embarked
On its erratic itinerary
Plunging me eventually
Into the bright light
Of tainted and squalid reality

Like oscillating libraries, noise oppressed,
Contradictions of dreams
Suddenly I took flight,
With violent wrenches of imagination
In Persia being worshipped
Beneath the moon by Gods;
Caressed by those impetuous charms
A dazzling vision
I thought of death the only sister of charity
Whose dark night has no malevolence;
Black and white, silences that migrated
In sonorous symbolism took control
Shimmering like a painting of a sorrow

Streaked with unashamed colours
A single tear from a promethean candle
I would move to lick the stain of destiny
That pillar inhaling its black perfumes
Like a communicant on his knees.
Exiled in reality, I saw what I had never saw
Or only thought I saw now condemned
To see what has never been seen

Words corralled themselves in my mind
Writhing maggots on a corpse
Wriggling for position waiting to be pronounced
How they flew, taking wings
Hovering for an instant above the page
Hunting out the detritus of man
To feast upon the putrid flesh of misery
I too went searching
For my ancient feast; for Zanzibar

However hideous pages
From the note book of the ******
Imprisoned the words, stampeded the search
Scattering it in many directions
Shattering blue-white eyes
A castrated country, century, impotent, impure
Like politics, the ******* that can be purchased by coin
Like so much bread in the market,
A thousand profanities became the popular song
But silence is the real language of the fool

For he alone bears witness to what he feels
Misfortunes not understood, weeping the popular ballad
Morality and law, parades of red robed Judges
Carcasses, a circus for carrion crows
Yet like a cannibal the dead were still buried in my belly
The gloss of reason hiding madness
Like so many veneered fronts in a proud precinct

Paraded in full view, silence is demanded and got
The words wither, fake time continues,
To count the unrelieved falsehood the chimera of life;
Reason did not imprison me
My life being not heavy enough
Was allowed to take flight
To float above the reasoned realm
Revelations of the truth realised only by detachment
Devoured my mind increased my errorless purpose
The search for Zanzibar

Accepted values; valued only;
Because of this acceptance
Are accepted as value
Thus accepted in silence
The fools resign themselves
To a false reality
One that nails them to a poisoned cross

In the gardens of the dead
Like rowed tulips that
Gardeners know how to match
I found myself, among those who had gone
Remembered yet forgotten
Whose edifice unlike their lives
Reached not upwards but down.
I smelt the scent of unknown things
The perfumes of eternity that histories bind;
Intensity, a murmur; gurgle, as in a child
Yet extreme its aberrations
Like celluloid hand that
Had never known toil
Or wiped sweat from a brow
Laughed yet grimaced
Its smile a crimson smear
The sorrow that it felt
A burnished hand upon its nakedness
To see its enshrouded presence in such a garden
One well stocked and growing
Caressed my being with its glee
To turn white feel the touch
Of its venomous fingers upon my flesh;
Its purpose, to prevent any search for Zanzibar

The stench of death
Then cast its' new
Yet antediluvian gaze
Upon its purpose
Odour of grave
Faraway nonexistent
Yet it is perfume to those
Who feast upon its scent
Moistures mingling with the air
Its common purpose
Floating like un-forgiveness
Its atmosphere ozone sans holes
Its meaning ever present
Its' outcome to halt
The search for Zanzibar

And so the stencils of oriental scribes
Like black shadows overpowered my reason
Floating high above, adrift on an expanse of darkness
However, presently that azure ink
Raised its curtain before my very eyes
Revealing the stage, the illuminated stage
On which I was to set my drama
Where the phantoms of my imagination
Would enact their mysterious mysteries;
A poetic alchemy

Then a golden spark of pure
Nocturnal light blinded me
In an instant I saw, observed
The sun drown in its deathly sea
Its healing wings spread
Fear would see it rise again
Still searching for that fatal flaw, happiness
How many lives do I need?
How many existences will it take?
Incarnations a hundred times
Searching for Zanzibar.
Awakening to continue to
Live the saddest of my dreams

Furtive footsteps through Cimmerian landscapes
Ah such enchantment, do you understand?
Ah such a charm, listen to its undying echo
Feel its charge, that siren call
Cosmic summons, the vagrancy of mind
That caresses the imagination
Whose tender touch can place you
At the apex of the universe
Can lead to Zanzibar.


And so the subtle and foolish tortures
Inflicted upon me by I, my quest began
One that would ascertain, take centre stage
Make an unheard appearance of a philosophy
That, I am everyone and everyone else is me
Eventually at some point
In time and space we are all one
All linked, for we are condemned
Yes condemned to live these lives
This is why the dead have dreams
Dreams about the tyrants and demons
Of other lives of who they were;
Who they have yet to become.
Nourished on half truths,
Forever pulling at the thread
The rotted rags of reason
Those tattered twines
Unravelling the stitching of reality
Of hallucinations, empty illusions
And tarnished dreams create a constant struggle


Therefore for every conscious thing
That happens in the world
There must be a responding reverberation
Within the human soul
Let us put a halt to the calls
For the death of imagination
And demands for imagination to be silent
Such absurdities
For imagination is the true door to reality
For only in imagination
Can there be a bearable act
Of self examination
It is memory that hurts
More than the imagination
Always prefer the imaginary to the real
Imagination is neither an exit
From our nightmares nor
An escape from reality
But the place we are all trying to get to,
Zanzibar its shared images
Its story, its own life a new reality.


Mysteriously in the midst of unknown
Mazagran landscapes I feel
The full impact of fleeting visions
Without the limitations of space or time
Feel the act of experiencing their reality
This requires no explanation, no proof
Either together or separate
Because simply they are,
Judgement, condemnation
Punishments are gone
There is no cleansing a world
Without consciousness
Landscape devoid of people
'La Lune' growling in the orchard of the sea
Calypso again one or ten
Eucharis, tempest or temptress
Take both the meaning and the experience
Taste the tear drops of the sun
Telemachus searching, searching
Zanzibar

The idol, tentacles undulating
Vibrations of collective knowledge
The blank face, featureless
Touching around the domain of Atlas
Speaking in a thousand different tongues
Moving but still, blocks my path
Disturbs the line of imagination
Makes reality quiver
Dream flowers sway in its cosmic wind.
Yet Alhazers' iridescent arch allows
The steerage of my passage
Without pious pilgrimages to empty silences that
Contain an eternity of tears
Who graciously offers coverage
For the echo of footsteps
Allowing the magic moments to come


Robbed of sunlight, artificial night shines
Its deception attempting to secure knowledge
Of a future unknown, winning only it's unattainably
Offering instead knowledge of the past
Master of silence, offers only knowledge
Of invaded consciousness
Bedlam of paradise where Eros and Pan
In congress sleep, close at Zanzibar.


Lifeless beauty that lives everlasting
Time that reason cannot change, only help.
O enchanted torture you have stolen
The taste from my mouth
Masked I against the spectre of reality
Proclaimed the age of 'hasashin'
The creator of recollections, maker of memories
Possessor of impulse giver of echo
That rings in the ear
Cloud cast its surroccoian shadow
Air tinged with the aftermath of fire
Floating in an Asian wind, so subtle
Like a breath suddenly the sound of song
Of dance rents the solitude
Silence is slashed like a canvass screen
Happiness pours forth unconfined
Unfettered, both faces of Kandinsky as one
I extinguish the light, turn to the wall
Gazing upon its Janis face
My eyes behold the giver of pleasure.

Then I found myself in an extraordinary place
Whose skies where made of crystal glass
Water of the enchanted land was blue-grey
Bridges zig-zagged its shimmering domes
I stared as masts and parapets came to life
Its people, musicians sporting
Tangerine and white livery danced
The air filled with the sound of their music
Then as if from nowhere a light hit my eyes
Blinking, this apparition was gone
Can I not always believe what I see
Just because I see what I believe
The inhabitants at once became spectres
Engulfed in thick clouds of smoke and sulphur
Erinyies roamed, inflicting madness
A circus of the macabre sped past
Its symbols of death fluttering frantically
Around this false and fragile world
Suggested children, like creatures in an imagination
Were made ready for their rebirth
By the touch of the poets pen
A thousand Cheribino

In another, swirling sonorous scenes
Stormed the citadels of my mind
Marched through my imagination
Mab engulfed the long closed
Cemeteries of my thought allowing me
To see the dreams of others
Like precious pearls prised from their shells
Their visualisation so intense
Joy overcame me at once
Then a swarm of kisses descended upon me
Like a regiment of famished men
Feasting for the first time
I freely gave myself as the main course
In the most beautiful of banquets
In another, yielding to these seductions
I was enraptured by portraits of beautiful young men
Which appeared to be on the point of speaking
They were most mysterious their intrinsic
Charm so beautiful, stimulated desire
Whose assuagement was so pleasurable
That it might be called pure ecstasy
A perfect pleasure which had never before existed
Entirely individual and new

Thus upon the horizons of my mind
Had been shed a mysterious light
In which I now saw everything bathed
I was summoned by the Prince
Knowing dreams have no limits
I obeyed his call
For a long time failing to set
Foot on the shores of reality
Drinking from the wells of magic
While angels danced on grassy slopes
Disturbed by flames
The stars shot out their fragrance

Sweet smelling; blue abyss
On I went to the court, the court of the Prince of
Poets, a visitor to life
There I spat out the bit of liberty
Embraced the Prince
Courtesans mocked me, ridiculed
Laughed and taunted me
Their jibes merely part of
Their own deluded reality, not of mine
They did not serve my purpose
Dressed as they were
In meaningless words
Clothed in phrases of falsehood
They tried to make me compromise
There was fire burning in my eyes
Vivid dreams were eating up my mind
They wouldn't let me be
There were dead men lying
By the sides of the road
With daylight in their eyes
I saw villages under the sea
I stood at Galactic central point
Watched the earth burn
They did not know
The way to Zanzibar
Could the Prince show me?

However each morning I awoke
I found myself in a purgatorial fog
I roamed lost the alternative harbour
For my soul still distant
The Prince, I discovered, existed
In a twilight world of mysterious ailments
He denied his feelings
Such denial only immersed him
In maintaining the world of external restraints
It created emptiness, a vacancy
Filled by material concerns
I pleaded with him
The emerald gene came down
Soon the leaves of grass
Whispered another order of existence
Strangeness of sensation
Intoxication of vision
Unhinged for mortals
And as the sound increased one cannot
Describe what else it is that has been
I viewed a world transparent
Devoid of illumination within which
Was never a sea or land
Then the prophets were ******
For they were all liars
And I saw the most beautiful flower
Unfolding out of its own roots
For such a flower cannot
Unfold other than it does
I stood on the threshold of Orcus
I met Abbas Effendi the Gene without a name
Bab, Upanishads spilled music in my ears
Called to me in the most spectacular of colours
It was wonderful for the colours
Were like my dreams, red, black and green
I witnessed the three, sometimes as one
Other times as two, again and again
The self eternal and inseparable sons
Of Shakyamuni caressed me with their thoughts
Their music and colour moved about me
In ecstatic rhythm like the peaceful
Waves of the ocean as upon a shore
I read the sentences of silence
Breathed the perfume of never fading flowers
Walked in cherry blossom snow
Heard Hafiz reciting in the night
I saw for the first time
The unfinished likeness of others.

Then one day the Prince
With a sweeping theatrical and
So to speak, allegorical flourish bowed
Called me an exiled angel
Said the time had come to travel
To leave the images of naked heels
Imprinted in the clay
We wondered
Then as if by magic, suddenly the shadows
Of houses, halls, and a church
Emerged like enchanted islands in a fairy tale
The spiritualised forms of civilisation
I was approached by a graceful youth
Draped in cobweb lawn
He was pale, delicately beautiful
Spanish looking, but his name was Alexis Sonyeuse
Whose family it was said was
Related to the French Emperor Napoleon
It was also rumoured that he had
Had a tempestuous affair with the Bishop of Monaco
And once slept with his half brother Julian Apollinaire
When he spoke he was at once original
Delicious, moving, droll and discreetly melancholy
Listening to him was like breathing
The perfume of wondrous flowers
But the scent of datura hung about him
Paralleling his every movement
  Another youth, Edmond also greeted me
He was a young man with aristocratic features
A complexion pink, like a girls
And a bearing at once charmingly gracious
And audaciously insolent
His shirt was strange, the lining
A peculiarly orange colour
A flame coloured taffeta
Like the petticoats of a *****



They looked at me
Furtive glances emanated from their eyes
Training a profound stare upon my person
The two youths took me to 18 Avenue de Friedland
There two boy servants
Adoum and Outhman greeted us
Spinario's lay about its confines
Frezans caressing them
As they touched their feet
A hundred echansons moved
With dazzling delicacy dispensing dreams
In drops from crystalline cups
Here I witnessed the tragic faces of the population
Urnings, cleaning in the midst of anarchist trials
The room a fiery red, stained with light
The caress of forgotten thought
Like the thickness of a sorrow
Musicians playing on broken strings
Crimson ******, who defied the King of Naples
We moved past wretches
Like Virgil, but Danteian
Saw the usurers heard the rustling
Of lute strings the clinking of grey paper
Observed in this Minatare's lair
The purchase of a twelve penny dagger
Liberty of speech meeting its great reckoning
In a little room, Ingram the poltergeist
Of misfortune was there
Dead Scythian, who ever loved you
Loved you as you might, loved you at first sight.

This was a new and exciting world
Whose environs were populated
By the most mysterious and colourful of people
I was introduced by the two youths
To a suicidal young painter who
Was rebelling against his class
He was a somewhat forced intellectual
With an over quixotic passion for equality
Still he was warm, kind and impulsive
Poetry, he made it known
Had opened his mind to the invisible
Beside him was a painting
Exemplifying a new kind of observation
In a style absolutely faultless
Each structure clear, each brush stroke
Falling exactly into place
Inscribed in the top left
Corner were the words
"Quod me nutrit me destruit"
An introduction to himself of a tall youth
Whose eyes possessed a constant
Vagrancy of desire
Who seemed at once, for one so
All is not what it seems
Because I was an atheist
Long before I realized I was God,
But that was much, much later
Then, at that time, I succumbed
To the lurid but exciting depths
Of freedom, the joy of love and danger
Of searching and of knowledge,
Embracing every moment;
I surrendered to ungovernable impulses
That invoked within my very existence

Still to realise the true extent of this
It's perhaps best to start before the beginning
Before the earth embalmed me
A time when Cyparisse had not
Yet set root in my belly
Nor made sap of my blood
A time when it was possible to speak
To Panza's donkey when I thought of Zanzibar
A time when the vagrancy of my soul
Had not yet embarked
On its erratic itinerary
Plunging me eventually
Into the bright light
Of tainted and squalid reality

Like oscillating libraries, noise oppressed,
Contradictions of dreams
Suddenly I took flight,
With violent wrenches of imagination
In Persia being worshipped
Beneath the moon by Gods;
Caressed by those impetuous charms
A dazzling vision
I thought of death the only sister of charity
Whose dark night has no malevolence;
Black and white, silences that migrated
In sonorous symbolism took control
Shimmering like a painting of a sorrow

Streaked with unashamed colours
A single tear from a promethean candle
I would move to lick the stain of destiny
That pillar inhaling its black perfumes
Like a communicant on his knees.
Exiled in reality, I saw what I had never saw
Or only thought I saw now condemned
To see what has never been seen

Words corralled themselves in my mind
Writhing maggots on a corpse
Wriggling for position waiting to be pronounced
How they flew, taking wings
Hovering for an instant above the page
Hunting out the detritus of man
To feast upon the putrid flesh of misery
I too went searching
For my ancient feast; for Zanzibar

However hideous pages
From the note book of the ******
Imprisoned the words, stampeded the search
Scattering it in many directions
Shattering blue-white eyes
A castrated country, century, impotent, impure
Like politics, the ******* that can be purchased by coin
Like so much bread in the market,
A thousand profanities became the popular song
But silence is the real language of the fool

For he alone bears witness to what he feels
Misfortunes not understood, weeping the popular ballad
Morality and law, parades of red robed Judges
Carcasses, a circus for carrion crows
Yet like a cannibal the dead were still buried in my belly
The gloss of reason hiding madness
Like so many veneered fronts in a proud precinct

Paraded in full view, silence is demanded and got
The words wither, fake time continues,
To count the unrelieved falsehood the chimera of life;
Reason did not imprison me
My life being not heavy enough
Was allowed to take flight
To float above the reasoned realm
Revelations of the truth realised only by detachment
Devoured my mind increased my errorless purpose
The search for Zanzibar

Accepted values; valued only;
Because of this acceptance
Are accepted as value
Thus accepted in silence
The fools resign themselves
To a false reality
One that nails them to a poisoned cross

In the gardens of the dead
Like rowed tulips that
Gardeners know how to match
I found myself, among those who had gone
Remembered yet forgotten
Whose edifice unlike their lives
Reached not upwards but down.
I smelt the scent of unknown things
The perfumes of eternity that histories bind;
Intensity, a murmur; gurgle, as in a child
Yet extreme its aberrations
Like celluloid hand that
Had never known toil
Or wiped sweat from a brow
Laughed yet grimaced
Its smile a crimson smear
The sorrow that it felt
A burnished hand upon its nakedness
To see its enshrouded presence in such a garden
One well stocked and growing
Caressed my being with its glee
To turn white feel the touch
Of its venomous fingers upon my flesh;
Its purpose, to prevent any search for Zanzibar

The stench of death
Then cast its' new
Yet antediluvian gaze
Upon its purpose
Odour of grave
Faraway nonexistent
Yet it is perfume to those
Who feast upon its scent
Moistures mingling with the air
Its common purpose
Floating like un-forgiveness
Its atmosphere ozone sans holes
Its meaning ever present
Its' outcome to halt
The search for Zanzibar

And so the stencils of oriental scribes
Like black shadows overpowered my reason
Floating high above, adrift on an expanse of darkness
However, presently that azure ink
Raised its curtain before my very eyes
Revealing the stage, the illuminated stage
On which I was to set my drama
Where the phantoms of my imagination
Would enact their mysterious mysteries;
A poetic alchemy

Then a golden spark of pure
Nocturnal light blinded me
In an instant I saw, observed
The sun drown in its deathly sea
Its healing wings spread
Fear would see it rise again
Still searching for that fatal flaw, happiness
How many lives do I need?
How many existences will it take?
Incarnations a hundred times
Searching for Zanzibar.
Awakening to continue to
Live the saddest of my dreams

Furtive footsteps through Cimmerian landscapes
Ah such enchantment, do you understand?
Ah such a charm, listen to its undying echo
Feel its charge, that siren call
Cosmic summons, the vagrancy of mind
That caresses the imagination
Whose tender touch can place you
At the apex of the universe
Can lead to Zanzibar.


And so the subtle and foolish tortures
Inflicted upon me by I, my quest began
One that would ascertain, take centre stage
Make an unheard appearance of a philosophy
That, I am everyone and everyone else is me
Eventually at some point
In time and space we are all one
All linked, for we are condemned
Yes condemned to live these lives
This is why the dead have dreams
Dreams about the tyrants and demons
Of other lives of who they were;
Who they have yet to become.
Nourished on half truths,
Forever pulling at the thread
The rotted rags of reason
Those tattered twines
Unravelling the stitching of reality
Of hallucinations, empty illusions
And tarnished dreams create a constant struggle


Therefore for every conscious thing
That happens in the world
There must be a responding reverberation
Within the human soul
Let us put a halt to the calls
For the death of imagination
And demands for imagination to be silent
Such absurdities
For imagination is the true door to reality
For only in imagination
Can there be a bearable act
Of self examination
It is memory that hurts
More than the imagination
Always prefer the imaginary to the real
Imagination is neither an exit
From our nightmares nor
An escape from reality
But the place we are all trying to get to,
Zanzibar its shared images
Its story, its own life a new reality.


Mysteriously in the midst of unknown
Mazagran landscapes I feel
The full impact of fleeting visions
Without the limitations of space or time
Feel the act of experiencing their reality
This requires no explanation, no proof
Either together or separate
Because simply they are,
Judgement, condemnation
Punishments are gone
There is no cleansing a world
Without consciousness
Landscape devoid of people
'La Lune' growling in the orchard of the sea
Calypso again one or ten
Eucharis, tempest or temptress
Take both the meaning and the experience
Taste the tear drops of the sun
Telemachus searching, searching
Zanzibar

The idol, tentacles undulating
Vibrations of collective knowledge
The blank face, featureless
Touching around the domain of Atlas
Speaking in a thousand different tongues
Moving but still, blocks my path
Disturbs the line of imagination
Makes reality quiver
Dream flowers sway in its cosmic wind.
Yet Alhazers' iridescent arch allows
The steerage of my passage
Without pious pilgrimages to empty silences that
Contain an eternity of tears
Who graciously offers coverage
For the echo of footsteps
Allowing the magic moments to come


Robbed of sunlight, artificial night shines
Its deception attempting to secure knowledge
Of a future unknown, winning only it's unattainably
Offering instead knowledge of the past
Master of silence, offers only knowledge
Of invaded consciousness
Bedlam of paradise where Eros and Pan
In congress sleep, close at Zanzibar.


Lifeless beauty that lives everlasting
Time that reason cannot change, only help.
O enchanted torture you have stolen
The taste from my mouth
Masked I against the spectre of reality
Proclaimed the age of 'hasashin'
The creator of recollections, maker of memories
Possessor of impulse giver of echo
That rings in the ear
Cloud cast its surroccoian shadow
Air tinged with the aftermath of fire
Floating in an Asian wind, so subtle
Like a breath suddenly the sound of song
Of dance rents the solitude
Silence is slashed like a canvass screen
Happiness pours forth unconfined
Unfettered, both faces of Kandinsky as one
I extinguish the light, turn to the wall
Gazing upon its Janis face
My eyes behold the giver of pleasure.

Then I found myself in an extraordinary place
Whose skies where made of crystal glass
Water of the enchanted land was blue-grey
Bridges zig-zagged its shimmering domes
I stared as masts and parapets came to life
Its people, musicians sporting
Tangerine and white livery danced
The air filled with the sound of their music
Then as if from nowhere a light hit my eyes
Blinking, this apparition was gone
Can I not always believe what I see
Just because I see what I believe
The inhabitants at once became spectres
Engulfed in thick clouds of smoke and sulphur
Erinyies roamed, inflicting madness
A circus of the macabre sped past
Its symbols of death fluttering frantically
Around this false and fragile world
Suggested children, like creatures in an imagination
Were made ready for their rebirth
By the touch of the poets pen
A thousand Cheribino

In another, swirling sonorous scenes
Stormed the citadels of my mind
Marched through my imagination
Mab engulfed the long closed
Cemeteries of my thought allowing me
To see the dreams of others
Like precious pearls prised from their shells
Their visualisation so intense
Joy overcame me at once
Then a swarm of kisses descended upon me
Like a regiment of famished men
Feasting for the first time
I freely gave myself as the main course
In the most beautiful of banquets
In another, yielding to these seductions
I was enraptured by portraits of beautiful young men
Which appeared to be on the point of speaking
They were most mysterious their intrinsic
Charm so beautiful, stimulated desire
Whose assuagement was so pleasurable
That it might be called pure ecstasy
A perfect pleasure which had never before existed
Entirely individual and new

Thus upon the horizons of my mind
Had been shed a mysterious light
In which I now saw everything bathed
I was summoned by the Prince
Knowing dreams have no limits
I obeyed his call
For a long time failing to set
Foot on the shores of reality
Drinking from the wells of magic
While angels danced on grassy slopes
Disturbed by flames
The stars shot out their fragrance

Sweet smelling; blue abyss
On I went to the court, the court of the Prince of
Poets, a visitor to life
There I spat out the bit of liberty
Embraced the Prince
Courtesans mocked me, ridiculed
Laughed and taunted me
Their jibes merely part of
Their own deluded reality, not of mine
They did not serve my purpose
Dressed as they were
In meaningless words
Clothed in phrases of falsehood
They tried to make me compromise
There was fire burning in my eyes
Vivid dreams were eating up my mind
They wouldn't let me be
There were dead men lying
By the sides of the road
With daylight in their eyes
I saw villages under the sea
I stood at Galactic central point
Watched the earth burn
They did not know
The way to Zanzibar
Could the Prince show me?

However each morning I awoke
I found myself in a purgatorial fog
I roamed lost the alternative harbour
For my soul still distant
The Prince, I discovered, existed
In a twilight world of mysterious ailments
He denied his feelings
Such denial only immersed him
In maintaining the world of external restraints
It created emptiness, a vacancy
Filled by material concerns
I pleaded with him
The emerald gene came down
Soon the leaves of grass
Whispered another order of existence
Strangeness of sensation
Intoxication of vision
Unhinged for mortals
And as the sound increased one cannot
Describe what else it is that has been
I viewed a world transparent
Devoid of illumination within which
Was never a sea or land
Then the prophets were ******
For they were all liars
And I saw the most beautiful flower
Unfolding out of its own roots
For such a flower cannot
Unfold other than it does
I stood on the threshold of Orcus
I met Abbas Effendi the Gene without a name
Bab, Upanishads spilled music in my ears
Called to me in the most spectacular of colours
It was wonderful for the colours
Were like my dreams, red, black and green
I witnessed the three, sometimes as one
Other times as two, again and again
The self eternal and inseparable sons
Of Shakyamuni caressed me with their thoughts
Their music and colour moved about me
In ecstatic rhythm like the peaceful
Waves of the ocean as upon a shore
I read the sentences of silence
Breathed the perfume of never fading flowers
Walked in cherry blossom snow
Heard Hafiz reciting in the night
I saw for the first time
The unfinished likeness of others.

Then one day the Prince
With a sweeping theatrical and
So to speak, allegorical flourish bowed
Called me an exiled angel
Said the time had come to travel
To leave the images of naked heels
Imprinted in the clay
We wondered
Then as if by magic, suddenly the shadows
Of houses, halls, and a church
Emerged like enchanted islands in a fairy tale
The spiritualised forms of civilisation
I was approached by a graceful youth
Draped in cobweb lawn
He was pale, delicately beautiful
Spanish looking, but his name was Alexis Sonyeuse
Whose family it was said was
Related to the French Emperor Napoleon
It was also rumoured that he had
Had a tempestuous affair with the Bishop of Monaco
And once slept with his half brother Julian Apollinaire
When he spoke he was at once original
Delicious, moving, droll and discreetly melancholy
Listening to him was like breathing
The perfume of wondrous flowers
But the scent of datura hung about him
Paralleling his every movement
  Another youth, Edmond also greeted me
He was a young man with aristocratic features
A complexion pink, like a girls
And a bearing at once charmingly gracious
And audaciously insolent
His shirt was strange, the lining
A peculiarly orange colour
A flame coloured taffeta
Like the petticoats of a *****



They looked at me
Furtive glances emanated from their eyes
Training a profound stare upon my person
The two youths took me to 18 Avenue de Friedland
There two boy servants
Adoum and Outhman greeted us
Spinario's lay about its confines
Frezans caressing them
As they touched their feet
A hundred echansons moved
With dazzling delicacy dispensing dreams
In drops from crystalline cups
Here I witnessed the tragic faces of the population
Urnings, cleaning in the midst of anarchist trials
The room a fiery red, stained with light
The caress of forgotten thought
Like the thickness of a sorrow
Musicians playing on broken strings
Crimson ******, who defied the King of Naples
We moved past wretches
Like Virgil, but Danteian
Saw the usurers heard the rustling
Of lute strings the clinking of grey paper
Observed in this Minatare's lair
The purchase of a twelve penny dagger
Liberty of speech meeting its great reckoning
In a little room, Ingram the poltergeist
Of misfortune was there
Dead Scythian, who ever loved you
Loved you as you might, loved you at first sight.

This was a new and exciting world
Whose environs were populated
By the most mysterious and colourful of people
I was introduced by the two youths
To a suicidal young painter who
Was rebelling against his class
He was a somewhat forced intellectual
With an over quixotic passion for equality
Still he was warm, kind and impulsive
Poetry, he made it known
Had opened his mind to the invisible
Beside him was a painting
Exemplifying a new kind of observation
In a style absolutely faultless
Each structure clear, each brush stroke
Falling exactly into place
Inscribed in the top left
Corner were the words
"Quod me nutrit me destruit"
An introduction to himself of a tall youth
Whose eyes possessed a constant
Vagrancy of desire
Who seemed at once, for one so
My smile
Once lost her beam.
To vices , the vicious and vile.
Her crown
Fell down
At once,to drown

Deep in the ocean blue
My lips expelled
Dangers and woes.
My heart
Like my face spelt 'red'.
Words weighed void, equating emptiness.

Darkness
Darkened darkness.
Wars
Rumoured wars
Could not revive her.
Lost in the dust...

My smile
Had no chance of survival
Till I rose
To praise the beauty
Of the morning sun.
It's scattered reflection on and on.

To see
The wetness underneath my feet
An evidence
Of the rain being
Blessings from
A planet of many waters.

To hear
The sweet tweeting
Of little birds.
To see the  wind swaying the heads of the trees
The beautiful petals of  an emerging flower.

To behold
The fluffy royals
Floating in the skies.
The gorgeous setting
Of the morning
Into noon.

Then my crown
Resurrected
Banished, from the bottom
Of the sea.
Re-coronating my smile
No longer exiled to drown.
A smile could make one feel better
I am learning to dwell on the positives.
All is not what it seems
Because I was an atheist
Long before I realized I was God,
But that was much, much later
Then, at that time, I succumbed
To the lurid but exciting depths
Of freedom, the joy of love and danger
Of searching and of knowledge,
Embracing every moment;
I surrendered to ungovernable impulses
That invoked within my very existence

Still to realise the true extent of this
It's perhaps best to start before the beginning
Before the earth embalmed me
A time when Cyparisse had not
Yet set root in my belly
Nor made sap of my blood
A time when it was possible to speak
To Panza's donkey when I thought of Zanzibar
A time when the vagrancy of my soul
Had not yet embarked
On its erratic itinerary
Plunging me eventually
Into the bright light
Of tainted and squalid reality

Like oscillating libraries, noise oppressed,
Contradictions of dreams
Suddenly I took flight,
With violent wrenches of imagination
In Persia being worshipped
Beneath the moon by Gods;
Caressed by those impetuous charms
A dazzling vision
I thought of death the only sister of charity
Whose dark night has no malevolence;
Black and white, silences that migrated
In sonorous symbolism took control
Shimmering like a painting of a sorrow

Streaked with unashamed colours
A single tear from a promethean candle
I would move to lick the stain of destiny
That pillar inhaling its black perfumes
Like a communicant on his knees.
Exiled in reality, I saw what I had never saw
Or only thought I saw now condemned
To see what has never been seen

Words corralled themselves in my mind
Writhing maggots on a corpse
Wriggling for position waiting to be pronounced
How they flew, taking wings
Hovering for an instant above the page
Hunting out the detritus of man
To feast upon the putrid flesh of misery
I too went searching
For my ancient feast; for Zanzibar

However hideous pages
From the note book of the ******
Imprisoned the words, stampeded the search
Scattering it in many directions
Shattering blue-white eyes
A castrated country, century, impotent, impure
Like politics, the ******* that can be purchased by coin
Like so much bread in the market,
A thousand profanities became the popular song
But silence is the real language of the fool

For he alone bears witness to what he feels
Misfortunes not understood, weeping the popular ballad
Morality and law, parades of red robed Judges
Carcasses, a circus for carrion crows
Yet like a cannibal the dead were still buried in my belly
The gloss of reason hiding madness
Like so many veneered fronts in a proud precinct

Paraded in full view, silence is demanded and got
The words wither, fake time continues,
To count the unrelieved falsehood the chimera of life;
Reason did not imprison me
My life being not heavy enough
Was allowed to take flight
To float above the reasoned realm
Revelations of the truth realised only by detachment
Devoured my mind increased my errorless purpose
The search for Zanzibar

Accepted values; valued only;
Because of this acceptance
Are accepted as value
Thus accepted in silence
The fools resign themselves
To a false reality
One that nails them to a poisoned cross

In the gardens of the dead
Like rowed tulips that
Gardeners know how to match
I found myself, among those who had gone
Remembered yet forgotten
Whose edifice unlike their lives
Reached not upwards but down.
I smelt the scent of unknown things
The perfumes of eternity that histories bind;
Intensity, a murmur; gurgle, as in a child
Yet extreme its aberrations
Like celluloid hand that
Had never known toil
Or wiped sweat from a brow
Laughed yet grimaced
Its smile a crimson smear
The sorrow that it felt
A burnished hand upon its nakedness
To see its enshrouded presence in such a garden
One well stocked and growing
Caressed my being with its glee
To turn white feel the touch
Of its venomous fingers upon my flesh;
Its purpose, to prevent any search for Zanzibar

The stench of death
Then cast its' new
Yet antediluvian gaze
Upon its purpose
Odour of grave
Faraway nonexistent
Yet it is perfume to those
Who feast upon its scent
Moistures mingling with the air
Its common purpose
Floating like un-forgiveness
Its atmosphere ozone sans holes
Its meaning ever present
Its' outcome to halt
The search for Zanzibar

And so the stencils of oriental scribes
Like black shadows overpowered my reason
Floating high above, adrift on an expanse of darkness
However, presently that azure ink
Raised its curtain before my very eyes
Revealing the stage, the illuminated stage
On which I was to set my drama
Where the phantoms of my imagination
Would enact their mysterious mysteries;
A poetic alchemy

Then a golden spark of pure
Nocturnal light blinded me
In an instant I saw, observed
The sun drown in its deathly sea
Its healing wings spread
Fear would see it rise again
Still searching for that fatal flaw, happiness
How many lives do I need?
How many existences will it take?
Incarnations a hundred times
Searching for Zanzibar.
Awakening to continue to
Live the saddest of my dreams

Furtive footsteps through Cimmerian landscapes
Ah such enchantment, do you understand?
Ah such a charm, listen to its undying echo
Feel its charge, that siren call
Cosmic summons, the vagrancy of mind
That caresses the imagination
Whose tender touch can place you
At the apex of the universe
Can lead to Zanzibar.


And so the subtle and foolish tortures
Inflicted upon me by I, my quest began
One that would ascertain, take centre stage
Make an unheard appearance of a philosophy
That, I am everyone and everyone else is me
Eventually at some point
In time and space we are all one
All linked, for we are condemned
Yes condemned to live these lives
This is why the dead have dreams
Dreams about the tyrants and demons
Of other lives of who they were;
Who they have yet to become.
Nourished on half truths,
Forever pulling at the thread
The rotted rags of reason
Those tattered twines
Unravelling the stitching of reality
Of hallucinations, empty illusions
And tarnished dreams create a constant struggle


Therefore for every conscious thing
That happens in the world
There must be a responding reverberation
Within the human soul
Let us put a halt to the calls
For the death of imagination
And demands for imagination to be silent
Such absurdities
For imagination is the true door to reality
For only in imagination
Can there be a bearable act
Of self examination
It is memory that hurts
More than the imagination
Always prefer the imaginary to the real
Imagination is neither an exit
From our nightmares nor
An escape from reality
But the place we are all trying to get to,
Zanzibar its shared images
Its story, its own life a new reality.


Mysteriously in the midst of unknown
Mazagran landscapes I feel
The full impact of fleeting visions
Without the limitations of space or time
Feel the act of experiencing their reality
This requires no explanation, no proof
Either together or separate
Because simply they are,
Judgement, condemnation
Punishments are gone
There is no cleansing a world
Without consciousness
Landscape devoid of people
'La Lune' growling in the orchard of the sea
Calypso again one or ten
Eucharis, tempest or temptress
Take both the meaning and the experience
Taste the tear drops of the sun
Telemachus searching, searching
Zanzibar

The idol, tentacles undulating
Vibrations of collective knowledge
The blank face, featureless
Touching around the domain of Atlas
Speaking in a thousand different tongues
Moving but still, blocks my path
Disturbs the line of imagination
Makes reality quiver
Dream flowers sway in its cosmic wind.
Yet Alhazers' iridescent arch allows
The steerage of my passage
Without pious pilgrimages to empty silences that
Contain an eternity of tears
Who graciously offers coverage
For the echo of footsteps
Allowing the magic moments to come


Robbed of sunlight, artificial night shines
Its deception attempting to secure knowledge
Of a future unknown, winning only it's unattainably
Offering instead knowledge of the past
Master of silence, offers only knowledge
Of invaded consciousness
Bedlam of paradise where Eros and Pan
In congress sleep, close at Zanzibar.


Lifeless beauty that lives everlasting
Time that reason cannot change, only help.
O enchanted torture you have stolen
The taste from my mouth
Masked I against the spectre of reality
Proclaimed the age of 'hasashin'
The creator of recollections, maker of memories
Possessor of impulse giver of echo
That rings in the ear
Cloud cast its surroccoian shadow
Air tinged with the aftermath of fire
Floating in an Asian wind, so subtle
Like a breath suddenly the sound of song
Of dance rents the solitude
Silence is slashed like a canvass screen
Happiness pours forth unconfined
Unfettered, both faces of Kandinsky as one
I extinguish the light, turn to the wall
Gazing upon its Janis face
My eyes behold the giver of pleasure.

Then I found myself in an extraordinary place
Whose skies where made of crystal glass
Water of the enchanted land was blue-grey
Bridges zig-zagged its shimmering domes
I stared as masts and parapets came to life
Its people, musicians sporting
Tangerine and white livery danced
The air filled with the sound of their music
Then as if from nowhere a light hit my eyes
Blinking, this apparition was gone
Can I not always believe what I see
Just because I see what I believe
The inhabitants at once became spectres
Engulfed in thick clouds of smoke and sulphur
Erinyies roamed, inflicting madness
A circus of the macabre sped past
Its symbols of death fluttering frantically
Around this false and fragile world
Suggested children, like creatures in an imagination
Were made ready for their rebirth
By the touch of the poets pen
A thousand Cheribino

In another, swirling sonorous scenes
Stormed the citadels of my mind
Marched through my imagination
Mab engulfed the long closed
Cemeteries of my thought allowing me
To see the dreams of others
Like precious pearls prised from their shells
Their visualisation so intense
Joy overcame me at once
Then a swarm of kisses descended upon me
Like a regiment of famished men
Feasting for the first time
I freely gave myself as the main course
In the most beautiful of banquets
In another, yielding to these seductions
I was enraptured by portraits of beautiful young men
Which appeared to be on the point of speaking
They were most mysterious their intrinsic
Charm so beautiful, stimulated desire
Whose assuagement was so pleasurable
That it might be called pure ecstasy
A perfect pleasure which had never before existed
Entirely individual and new

Thus upon the horizons of my mind
Had been shed a mysterious light
In which I now saw everything bathed
I was summoned by the Prince
Knowing dreams have no limits
I obeyed his call
For a long time failing to set
Foot on the shores of reality
Drinking from the wells of magic
While angels danced on grassy slopes
Disturbed by flames
The stars shot out their fragrance

Sweet smelling; blue abyss
On I went to the court, the court of the Prince of
Poets, a visitor to life
There I spat out the bit of liberty
Embraced the Prince
Courtesans mocked me, ridiculed
Laughed and taunted me
Their jibes merely part of
Their own deluded reality, not of mine
They did not serve my purpose
Dressed as they were
In meaningless words
Clothed in phrases of falsehood
They tried to make me compromise
There was fire burning in my eyes
Vivid dreams were eating up my mind
They wouldn't let me be
There were dead men lying
By the sides of the road
With daylight in their eyes
I saw villages under the sea
I stood at Galactic central point
Watched the earth burn
They did not know
The way to Zanzibar
Could the Prince show me?

However each morning I awoke
I found myself in a purgatorial fog
I roamed lost the alternative harbour
For my soul still distant
The Prince, I discovered, existed
In a twilight world of mysterious ailments
He denied his feelings
Such denial only immersed him
In maintaining the world of external restraints
It created emptiness, a vacancy
Filled by material concerns
I pleaded with him
The emerald gene came down
Soon the leaves of grass
Whispered another order of existence
Strangeness of sensation
Intoxication of vision
Unhinged for mortals
And as the sound increased one cannot
Describe what else it is that has been
I viewed a world transparent
Devoid of illumination within which
Was never a sea or land
Then the prophets were ******
For they were all liars
And I saw the most beautiful flower
Unfolding out of its own roots
For such a flower cannot
Unfold other than it does
I stood on the threshold of Orcus
I met Abbas Effendi the Gene without a name
Bab, Upanishads spilled music in my ears
Called to me in the most spectacular of colours
It was wonderful for the colours
Were like my dreams, red, black and green
I witnessed the three, sometimes as one
Other times as two, again and again
The self eternal and inseparable sons
Of Shakyamuni caressed me with their thoughts
Their music and colour moved about me
In ecstatic rhythm like the peaceful
Waves of the ocean as upon a shore
I read the sentences of silence
Breathed the perfume of never fading flowers
Walked in cherry blossom snow
Heard Hafiz reciting in the night
I saw for the first time
The unfinished likeness of others.

Then one day the Prince
With a sweeping theatrical and
So to speak, allegorical flourish bowed
Called me an exiled angel
Said the time had come to travel
To leave the images of naked heels
Imprinted in the clay
We wondered
Then as if by magic, suddenly the shadows
Of houses, halls, and a church
Emerged like enchanted islands in a fairy tale
The spiritualised forms of civilisation
I was approached by a graceful youth
Draped in cobweb lawn
He was pale, delicately beautiful
Spanish looking, but his name was Alexis Sonyeuse
Whose family it was said was
Related to the French Emperor Napoleon
It was also rumoured that he had
Had a tempestuous affair with the Bishop of Monaco
And once slept with his half brother Julian Apollinaire
When he spoke he was at once original
Delicious, moving, droll and discreetly melancholy
Listening to him was like breathing
The perfume of wondrous flowers
But the scent of datura hung about him
Paralleling his every movement
  Another youth, Edmond also greeted me
He was a young man with aristocratic features
A complexion pink, like a girls
And a bearing at once charmingly gracious
And audaciously insolent
His shirt was strange, the lining
A peculiarly orange colour
A flame coloured taffeta
Like the petticoats of a *****



They looked at me
Furtive glances emanated from their eyes
Training a profound stare upon my person
The two youths took me to 18 Avenue de Friedland
There two boy servants
Adoum and Outhman greeted us
Spinario's lay about its confines
Frezans caressing them
As they touched their feet
A hundred echansons moved
With dazzling delicacy dispensing dreams
In drops from crystalline cups
Here I witnessed the tragic faces of the population
Urnings, cleaning in the midst of anarchist trials
The room a fiery red, stained with light
The caress of forgotten thought
Like the thickness of a sorrow
Musicians playing on broken strings
Crimson ******, who defied the King of Naples
We moved past wretches
Like Virgil, but Danteian
Saw the usurers heard the rustling
Of lute strings the clinking of grey paper
Observed in this Minatare's lair
The purchase of a twelve penny dagger
Liberty of speech meeting its great reckoning
In a little room, Ingram the poltergeist
Of misfortune was there
Dead Scythian, who ever loved you
Loved you as you might, loved you at first sight.

This was a new and exciting world
Whose environs were populated
By the most mysterious and colourful of people
I was introduced by the two youths
To a suicidal young painter who
Was rebelling against his class
He was a somewhat forced intellectual
With an over quixotic passion for equality
Still he was warm, kind and impulsive
Poetry, he made it known
Had opened his mind to the invisible
Beside him was a painting
Exemplifying a new kind of observation
In a style absolutely faultless
Each structure clear, each brush stroke
Falling exactly into place
Inscribed in the top left
Corner were the words
"Quod me nutrit me destruit"
An introduction to himself of a tall youth
Whose eyes possessed a constant
Vagrancy of desire
Who seemed at once, for one so
judy smith Sep 2016
WHEN Kylie Minogue began the process of tracking down 25 years of costumes and memorabilia for an exhibition on her (literally) glittering stage career, she had one crucial call to make.

“There were a few items the parentals were minding,” laughs Minogue. “I, too, do the same thing as everyone else: ‘Mum, Dad, can you just hold onto a few things for me?’ It’s just lucky they weren’t turfed out from under their watchful eye.”

Kylie On Stage is the singer’s latest collaboration with her beloved hometown’s Arts Centre Melbourne. She’s previously donated a swarm of outfits to the venue, going all the way back to the overalls she wore as tomboy mechanic Charlene on Neighbours.

This new — and free — exhibition rounds up outfits starting from her first-ever live performances on 1989’s Disco in Dream tour. Still aged just 21 and dismissed by some as a soap star who fluked a singing career, Minogue found herself playing to 38,000 fans in Tokyo, where her early hits “I Should Be So Lucky”, “The Loco-motion”, “Got To Be Certain” and “Hand On Your Heart” had made her a superstar.

“From memory, I was overexcited and didn’t really know what I was doing. I just ran back and forth across the stage,” says Minogue of her debut tour.

Disco in Dream also premiered what would become a Kylie fashion staple: hotpants. “Those ones were more like micro shorts, not quite hotpants, but they started it,” she admits. “There were also quite a few bicycle pants being worn around that time, too, I’m afraid.”

That first tour stands out for one other reason: Minogue officially started dating INXS’s Michael Hutchence at some point during the Asian leg.

“I had met Michael previously in Australia, but he was living in Hong Kong [at the time] and I met him again there. The tour went on to Japan and he definitely came to visit me in Japan.”

Fast-forward from Minogue’s very first tour to her most recent, 2015’s Kiss Me Once, and the singer performed a cover of INXS’s “Need You Tonight”. She remembers first hearing the song as a teenager. “I don’t think I really knew what **** was back then,” notes Minogue. “But that’s a **** song.”

Before the Kiss Me Once tour kicked off, the Minogue/Hutchence romance had been documented in the hit TV mini-series Never Tear Us Apart: The Untold Story Of INXS. Minogue said then it felt like Michael was her “archangel” during the tour — “I feel like he’s with me.”

Her “Need You Tonight” costume was also deliberately chosen to reflect what Minogue used to wear when she was dating the rockstar. “It was a black PVC trench coat and hat,” she says. “I loved that. It just made so much sense for the connection to Michael. I literally used to wear that exact same kind of thing, except it was leather, not PVC.”

By 1990, Minogue’s confidence had grown, something she’s partially attributed to Hutchence’s influence. Before her first Australian solo tour, she performed a secret club show billed as The Singing Budgies — reclaiming the derisive nickname the media had bestowed on her. It would be the first time her success silenced those who saw her as an easy target. Next year marks her 30th anniversary in pop; longevity that hasn’t happened by accident.

Minogue’s career accelerated so quickly that by 1991 she was on her fourth album in as many years and outgrowing her producers, Stock Aitken Waterman, who wanted to freeze-frame her in a safe, clean-cut image.

On 1991’s Let’s Get To It tour of the UK, Minogue welcomed onboard her first major fashion designer — John Galliano. He dressed her in fishnets, G-strings and corsets; the British press said she was trying too hard and imitating Madonna at her most sexed-up.

“Of course those comparisons were made, and rightly so. Madonna was a big influence on me,” says Minogue. “She helped create the template of what a pop show is, or what we came to know it as, by dividing it up into segments. And if you’re going to have any costume changes, that’s inevitable.

“I was finding my way. I don’t think we got it right in some ways, but if I look back over my career, sometimes it’s the mistakes that make all the difference. They allow you to really look at where you’re going. I’m fond of all those things now. There was a time when I wasn’t.

“Now I look back at the pictures of the fishnets and G-strings I was wearing ... Maybe the audience members absolutely loved it, maybe they were going through the journey with me of growing up and discovering yourself and your sexuality and where you fit in the world.”

As the ’90s progressed, Minogue started experimenting with the outer limits of being a pop star, working with everyone from uber-cool dance producers to indie rocker Nick Cave.

Her 1998 Intimate And Live tour cemented her place as the one thing nobody had ever predicted: a regular, global touring act. Released the year prior, her Impossible Princess album had garnered a credibility she’d never before enjoyed. But more credibility equalled fewer record sales.

The tour was cautiously placed in theatres, rather than arenas. Yet word-of-mouth led to more dates being added — she wound up playing seven nights in both Melbourne and Sydney, and tacking on a UK leg. All received rave reviews.

The production was low-key and DIY: Minogue and longtime friend and stylist William Baker were hands-on backstage bedazzling the costumes themselves. The tour’s camp, Vegas-style showgirl — complete with corset and headdress — soon became a signature Kylie look, but it was also one they stumbled across.

“I remember the exact moment: the male dancers had pink, fringed chaps and wings — we’d really gone for it. I was singing [ABBA’s] “Dancing Queen”. I did a little prance across the stage and the audience went wild. I thought, ‘What is happening?’ That definitely started something.”

Then came the “Spinning Around” hotpants. Minogue couldn’t wear the same gold pair from the music video during her 2001 On A Night Like This tour — they were too fragile — but another pair offered solid back-up.

“That was peak hotpant period,” says Minogue. “Hotpants for days.”

After the robotic-themed Fever 2002 tour (featuring a “Kyborg” look by Dolce & Gabbana), 2005’s Showgirl tour was Minogue’s long-overdue greatest hits celebration.

Following a massive UK and European run, her planned Australian victory lap was derailed by her breast-cancer diagnosis that May. Remarkably, by November 2006, Minogue was back onstage in Sydney for the rebooted Showgirl: The Homecoming tour.

“I look at that now and I’m honestly taken aback,” she admits. “It was so fast — months and months of those 18 months were in treatment.”

Minogue now reveals her health issues meant she had to adjust some of the Showgirl outfits: “I was concerned about the weight of the corset and being able to support it. I was quite insecure about my body, which had changed. For a few years after that I really felt like I wasn’t in my own body — with the medication I was on, there was this other layer.

“We had to make a number of adjustments,” she adds. “I had different shoes to feel more sturdy ... It was pretty soon to be back onstage. But I think it was good for me.”

The singer’s gruelling performances involved dancing and singing in corsets, as well as ultra-high heels and headdresses that weighed several kilos.

“A proper corset, like the Showgirl tour one, is like a shoe,” she explains. “It’s very stiff when you first put it on. By the end of the tour it was way more comfortable. The fact it made it quite hard to breathe didn’t seem to bother anyone except for me. But it was absolutely worth it. I felt grand in it.

“It took a while to learn how to walk in the blue Showgirl dress,” she continues. “I had cuts on my arms from the stars that were sticking out on pieces of wire. You’re so limited in what you can do. You can’t bend your head to find your way down the stairs.

“Whether it was the Showgirl costume or the hotpants, or the big silver dress from the Aphrodite tour [in 2011] that was just ginormous, they all present their own challenges of how you’re going to move and how you’re going to do the choreography. There are times the costume can do that [figuring out] for me; other times I really have to wrestle with it to do what I need to do.

“But you’re not meant to know about that,” she adds, “that’s an internal struggle.”

Minogue has spent much of 2016 happily off the radar, enjoying the company of fiancé Joshua Sasse, 28. She gets “gooey” talking about her future husband, whom she met last year when she was cast opposite him in the TV musical-comedy series Galavant. He proposed to Minogue last Christmas.

Just like the “secret Greek wedding” that was rumoured but never happened, reports of summer nuptials in Melbourne are also off the mark.

“I hate to let everyone down, but no,” she says. “People’s enthusiasm is lovely, we appreciate that, but there are no wedding plans as yet. I’m just enjoying feeling girly and being engaged.”

Minogue will be in Queensland next month filming the movie Flammable Children. The comedy, set in 1975, features her former Neighbours co-star Guy Pearce and is written and directed by Stephan Elliott (The Adventures Of Priscilla: Queen Of The Desert ).

“It’s Aussie-tastic,” laughs Minogue. And she is also planning a sneaky visit to check out her own exhibition when she’s back in Melbourne.

“I’ll probably try to move things around the exhibition,” she says. “And they’ll probably tell me off: ‘Who’s that child playing with the costumes?’”Read more at:http://www.marieaustralia.com/formal-dresses-sydney | www.marieaustralia.com/formal-dresses-2016
mark john junor Jan 2014
shuffled into the hallway
the laughing ignorance
stews in its bathrobe and cigar
at the edge of its own manicured lawn
with a pale eye it it calculates
with a thin cold lip it ponders
he makes his lazy way to his bed among the spilled leaves
makes his way to the comforts of eyes closed visions

the laughing ignorance proverbial
fool in ragged cloth dancing a jig
on a spring moon's grave
flowers in hand and wreaths of holly adorning
his head like a crown of soft thorns
his skilful laugh echoes across the barren field
littered with the passing of days
strewn with the formulations of nights bitter embrace
no mere words can delay or
mislead the way that darkness creeps into the mind
when alone with its own devices

done with his jig
he sits on the springs moons grave
and sips at the christmas wine
savoring its crisp life on his tongue
the laughing ignorance still wearing
the dancing fools leather shoe
is a hobbled prisoner of his laughing jest
no other time or place has room for his kind
for his pantomime of long lost victory's
on beachheads of distant sandy shore

his rancid eye calculates me
in all my rumoured mistakes
and he speaks to that dream not to me
so i will leave him here
standing in manicured existence
of his own sour pain
the fall will find him sleeping sweetly
on the spring moon's grave
and it will renew him
leaves swirling down as the world steals the crown
of the tree above
he will be a young man once again
renewed by the promise of maidens dancing
and the dance of winterlight on snowbound fields
B J Clement Jun 2014
So that was what all the mystery was about! and the reason why we were kept in the dark, Task Force Antler was set up to test Atomic weapons!
I don't think Gordon and me had missed anything exciting, the early days of the task force were just a matter of preparation for the real events that were to come later. The tests were scheduled to take place in October and November, It was rumoured that we would be home for Christmas!
I was impatient to get back home, I worried about my dad's poor health.
I was beginning to put a bit of weight on now, after the spell in hospital,
The food was excellent. There were some Aussies stationed on the camp perimiter, they lived in air conditioned  aluminium units,
we of course,(being British,) roasted and froze on a daily basis, and thought little about it! The days passed quite slowly at first, until we were ready to carry out the first test, It was on a site forty five miles away. We were all assembled on the day of the test. We all wore our sunglasses, and were assembled for the countdown, If memory serves me right it was supposed to be a seventy two hour countdown, but I think the catering staff may have been excused some of it. We all needed to eat, after all!  The first test was like a damp squib, we hardly noticed it. It consisted of a little thunder and a cloud of black smoke. Rumour had it that the touch-paper was damp!
After a week or two the second test loomed. This was much bigger but less than we had expected, both  of the atomic devices had been mounted on towers, the next and final test was to be the biggest.
They asked for volunteers to observe the test from a roadside position some six miles from ground zero, forty five men out of six hundred plus volunteered, I was one of them! Maybe you can work out the percentage ratio, idiots to normal cautious men, It might prove useful to the military. On the day of the test, we were transported up to the roadside position where we began the countdown linked by radio to the headquarters. Half an hour before ground zero, several wagons  full of troops left the forward area. The corporal in charge radioed headquarters, "Has the test been cancelled?"  "No hold your ground, the test is imminent, you know the drill- we are commencing the final countdown."
It was rumoured that there were a number of soldiers in the forward area, in slit trenches, An officer told me later that Dr. William Penney, the chief scientist in charge of the whole test, did a quick calculation on the back of his *** packet, and said "This may be bigger than we expect!
Better bring those troops out of the trenches." It was certainly a wise decision,(probably the only one,ha ha.) We were now the nearest to the bomb! The bomb- or device, was suspended in plain sight, hanging under three barage balloons, (I kid you not),  which were tethered about one hundred and fifty feet above the  desert. The count down continued, Ten, Nine, eight,!!!!
Qweyku Nov 2017
An aged woman her sight waxing dim
Waits at the gate called patience
A stalwart near the inner court;
Whose walls are named deliverance
Bolted by a door of praise.

She watches at the gate intently
Though many hurriedly egress
& fewer enter by it.

She tells those who will listen:
I look for the one coming from Edom
The one dressed in red
The wearer of the royal turban
The giver of the eternal ring.

So old
She is rumoured to be immortal
Her name is Kheftsivah
Though some call her Beulah
But I prefer her sacred name; Wisdom
& the secret one not yet given.

She is there still, they say
Ancient yet standing
Watching & waiting

           © Qwey.ku
A lone paddler
within rumoured holy waters,
blessed by the touch
of a vacant apathetic god,
she gaped mutely like a halibut,
lips parted comically in a silent wail,
the clockwork functions
of her jaw,
forced teeth to reacquaint as sisters,
grinding together
in discomfort,
as lukewarm fluids rippled
around her thighs.

In this silent act of cleansing,
sin's hallmark should have faded
from her skin,
still her father believed
'her to be the devil's young'
due to scientific witchcraft,
her concoctions to lure demons
to their dinner table.

'I'm doing this for you, darling.'
her father reassured
with an earnest glint in his eyes,
madness paced hungrily,
encircling pupils in a territorial manner,
delusions of God himself watching
over his daughter,
with tears streaming down golden cheeks,
repeated within his fragile mind.

Unsure, the girl remained standing,
the embodiment of Mary
with her arms spread like angel wings,
did she dare disobey
her father's wishes,
and feel the leather belt against
her rear,
or reject her own troubled heart,
for her father's sake?
nivek Oct 2014
pulse and pump and waterwheel cascade of sparks from a hot iron rivet
bound round with copper sliding down river and parachuting into the blackest of holes dug out for the ounce of gold rumoured to still be somewhere at the bottom while fish jump willingly into the net Jesus encouraged fishermen to cast and a woman gives birth in the taxi ride to the counting house of names and addresses knowing there is no room at the homeless hostel because there is a card game going on in town and every hotel is booked up to the hilt with cowboys thinking my lucky day has come spitting out a ship made of spittle and stinking chewing tobacco that sails around the world full of tourists
Mateuš Conrad Aug 2016
the people look like flowers at last, and i guess
what matters most is how well you walk through the fire*
worth the palette, and the eyes - it's the beef tongue honesty
as cited in the poem of the same name -
never mind the 1930s poem -
i too wish i could have written the 1980s
(Poland) - but the communist years
are marred and budding in China while
people bemoan the two years under Martial
Law - and queues, endless queues for
provisions, and stamps for rationed food,
and shops filled with empty shelves or
white vinegar (a childhood friend's mother
was rumoured to have committed suicide
by drinking white vinegar) -
in all honesty i guess before the borders opened
and products started pouring in we could
have claimed a happy childhood,
but for us back then it was the call of the wild -
and the fact that we were together as kids,
even though the steel plant was being undermined
for profit and people were either forced to
leave to somewhere else in the country or
abroad - a thriving beehive of a town reduced to
what became know as the pensioner town -
supermarkets sprouted like churches, the city
centre once a trading hot spot was now the bank
square - nothing but banks; growing up i used to
travel for summer holidays - a fit child i became
hooked on the coca cola dream - between 16 and 17
i lost 30 kilograms on my bike back home, doing
50 kilometres a day - once the fat kid at the back
of the class, now the pomegranate munching hippy -
but that didn't matter: aged 21... god... jealousy
is so horrible, it transcends the healthy competitive
streak of sports and capitalism - now, each waking
hour i wait for the evening so i can numb the pain
riddling my brain - it's like being perpetually nibbled
on my an electric chair - and i can't do anything about
the sizzling of blood on this organic sponge -
headphones sometimes provide an equilibrium
and i jack-in and the pain is reduced - but try talking
to someone when you can't hear them - god, jealousy
is so horrible - i remember times when i'd go with
the guy to Reagent's Park mosque and sit there on
the minimalist floor and just absorb this grand
poly-chromatic social experiment - born into a monochromatic
culture i was fond of the diversity - but times have
changed for the worse, and i'm proof of it -
as i already mentioned the other great schism (not
in religion but) in medicine - what insanity overcomes
them treating physical damage with metaphysical
promises of a chemical imbalance? they treat the brain
as some ******* chicken soup - thankfully i was well
aware of everything - but that's beside the point,
why i survived i attribute to what happened to Sisyphus -
i'm not going to be as bombastic as the original version
depicts Sisyphus, son of Atlas (both of them the boulder
men) - well, i don't see Sisyphus as an absurd hero
like Camus - i very much see him akin to Loki (the trickster),
but it's not about that - for me Sisyphus had a near-death
experience, and was condemned by the gods to
that boulder of his and the ***** and the rolling back
and forth as punishment for that Sisyphus had no insight
from his near-death experience - he didn't become a poet,
and he certainly didn't become a philosopher -
nor a ***, rebellious in the sense that what Sisyphus
did do is return to business as usual - he had no insight
into death, he didn't befriend it, he didn't akin to
Marcel Proust or Tristan Tzara gain "a new way of seeing";
not many people have near-death experiences in all
honesty - and from the myth as stated, few can return
with insight - most come back with cliches, the unimaginative
white light at the end of the tunnel -
Sisyphus was condemned to the boulder for his lack
of inspiration - then again, any madman talking about
the next world with promises is doing a handstand while
attempting to outperform someone running the hundred
metres - circus Olympics - what's keeping me motivated
is what others would call the Cartesian extension -
my brain can't craft a fluid cognitive narrative with ease
as it once was able to do - these are snippets of what reminds
me of the ease that the brain once hosted -
which contradictory if Descartes was about -
a thinking thing is un-extended - if that were true
he wouldn't have out-poured his thinking onto a blank
page - matter extends but does not think - unless of course
you get into a debate about god (i don't see the point
ascribing atheism all the perks - i'm also referring to an
impersonal entity, not a personal entity that might require
praying five times a day for personal gains and repressed
grievances - you know, god of the airy fairy and the casual
phrasing of the word that is usually censored by
Jews - g- -d - which i find as absurd as western censorship
of oath words). so coming back to this Descartes point,
it's true that physical corruption (damage) would qualify
me as a non-thinking entity, pure matter, and therefore
purely extending onto this digital pixel white -
but the counter argument is... there's a distinction between
thought and narrative - and given the casual standard
of philosophy is more akin to narration than abstraction
of either 2 + 2       in mathematics, or μ + ω
in phonetic encoding or whether ω could be encoded
to a more aesthetically pleasing macron-omicron (ō) -
because if we're going to follow Descartes prescription
(they are like doctors, those philosophers, or that's
how i treat them, every key idea they regurgitate out
from their predecessors - a priori - and is new
and challenging i treat it like i'd treat a prescription from
a doctor - Heidegger, for example, prescribed me
the equivalent of sleeping pills for my insomnia) we
don't have to necessarily accept it as the gold standard,
holy, a sword in a stone - but i'm not going to fall
for the rigidity of their vocabulary, the part where using
imagery would refer to a monkey pushing cubes
through a canvas of squares to the other side of something -
or that great table tennis match of philosophical
narration - how did something, nothing, everything,
anything
are categorised as pronouns akin to
i, you, me, he etc. - i don't like their concentration on
either nothing or the basic self - that always bothered me -
but i guess it adds to the fluidity of language -
now i'm lost in my own labyrinth - and there's
the Minotaur on my heels breathing pungent hot-snot
from his snout - which can only mean one thing -
a trap to get into fixations and the stability of words
as one-dimensional, non-deviating from a unitary meaning,
rigidity of the non-existence of synonyms -
basically burning the Thesaurus Rex - which also means
no oil for cooking or butter for bread, or anti-ageing
creams - if ever anyone wanted one-dimensional
words, rigid language, a stability of some sort,
safe ~chemistry experiments read from a primer and
never new, black is black, white is white -
well... but i guess there's a preference for such an
approach to language, rather than the antonym of
such use of it, with negations in politics, in jurisprudence,
lies and corruptions, nuances, games and injured
hearts;
            Sisyphus ibin Atlas was punished because after
a near-death experience he didn't come back with
any insight - he just returned to his day job, and didn't
gamble on something beautiful - however
scrambled eggs it looked like.
The Eden Project Jan 2015
You’re my ether medium.
For me only do you bring light through your substance,
As I walk, breathe and live you.
You are everywhere and my everything,
while much rumoured,


But they say you don’t exist.
PMc Aug 2018
Did he feed you the line about how you’ve rekindled his need to write?
and how he can’t seem to stop thinking about you ahhhlll the tiiiimme?
How about that new take on sunlight
that he’s never seen before.
or how one day he’ll map the heavens for you

did he tell you he’s talked to his dog about you?
He’s full of ****.  
The dog is less full of **** than he is.  The difference is – the dog knows it.

He’s spent this dime a dozen times and the thing is
he won’t even keep his mouth shut about it.
He’s gotta go on and on and on to his buddies about his new “friend” and how he
can’t seem to keep his mind on something simple as driving.

And he’s all about the romance – oohhh the romance – this guy is good.
Flowers on a first date – his “favourite meal” for your first evening in.
And you’ll notice he’ll go easy on the wine –
only until you realize you’re going to have to take a cab home

Then he pours it on thick – thick and fast
So fast you don’t even know what’s happening –
Then you’ve got his phone number
and you know where he lives
and one day (you’ll find some excuse) you call him at work

Ohhh it’s all downhill from there so far as he’s concerned.
There will be one night – not to distant – there will be one night
while he’s reciting some romantic piece he just had to find
you wonder what it would be like to show this man what it is
to really be kissed
to be kissed by you – as only you can.

And he looks at you knowingly – and you at him almost hypnotically
He awwwll that and more – and so you think – it’s a work-night / school night / non-holiday
How far can this go??  How bad can this be?

Then - he’s pouring it on thicker and faster than you will ever remember
moving in with more predatory poetry – using a good meal as bait

You spend the night exploring each other as you never thought you could
as you’d never imagined you would – you think about letting go completely
you re-consider and you can’t quite decide why…  
nor do you consider when you reconsidered
there’s just something about this that…..

Ohhh fuckit – too young to live life wanting
and far too old for what ifs – how bad could this be
he’s a nice man – a good man – his poetry says so
you’re all the woman he’d hoped to be – you’ve shown him that
besides – after ** amount of months or years or decades
it’s time to relax, lie back and get laid.

Then you do  - and it’s beautiful – more beautiful than you’d ever thought possible
During the past ** number of months or years – at al.
He   is    as tender     as     his poetry – all he’d rumoured it would be

while you are as giving as an office Christmas party
– as if it may be the last time you lay with the same or opposite *** ever again

it’s so much more than that – it’s love making
---- well it’s romance making really – there’s no love involved  
-  but it ‘s more than ******* – it’s
the physical relation that makes the world whole
somehow – just makes the world whole….

Then – all at once – he’s a trapped lobster - he can’t find the words any more
There aren’t any romantic phrases left
and he’s read all the poetry ever written by anyone – ever
Deep down inside this “nice guy”
this poet of a million words - this artiesst
really is full of ****

Everyone can see it –they’ve known him for years -they’ve seen this play out time and again
Hell – even the dog knows he’s full of **** –
but the dog has been told – it’s none of his business
and with that in mind – the dog won’t say a word.
I knew a guy where I worked.  This was him to a tee.  He is much less charismatic now that I know how he operates.  He thought he was so smooth - until folks started to see through him.
Valerie Csorba Feb 2014
We all know you're a sadist with masochistic tendencies.
Pain is your ecstasy, and it makes no sense to me;
we all know I can't breathe with your hand around my neck.
The passion in the bedroom is dying with every gentle peck.

I can tell you want to **** me from the look inside your eyes,
but I never told you stories that were full of heartfelt lies.
So why am I still here curled up inside your grasp?
I'll be careful what I wish for, this breath might be my last.

You want it rough- where your life makes no sense anymore?
Well... you'd fit rather well with the title "Neighborhood *****."
You won't let me go because you're a fraud from hell,
and you're scared that if you loosen your hold I'll run and tell.

You're no saint, you're a sinner
and you're mad I won't be your dinner.
But I'll do exactly what I please in my life,
and it includes never being the patient beneath your knife.

So I'll run away with half the passion you left me with,
but it's hard to step down when my heart makes me stiff.
I hear something click beside my head...
**** the gun, and pull the trigger, I'm better off dead;
better off in the grave with the rest of the bones
that you laid there because you can't help your heart of stone.
So I'll run away with a head full of holes,
and I'll keep running as the barrel rolls,
and I'll go- go straight to hell,
because I'll never know whatever dwells...
in heaven...
Because I'm a rumoured demon that everyone hates,
and even ignorance can reach the Golden Gates.
So here I am sitting outside of the Devil's home,
and even he won't take me without a dissatisfied groan.

I'm stuck outside hell,
I'm banished from heaven...
Well, Karma will get you
in a year, maybe seven.
You're the one who pulled the trigger,
and made it look the opposite.
Suicide is what it was named,
but even you know the truth of it.

I'm a run-away with half-assed passion,
because you decided I was just a burden
and I wasn't 'allowed' to live anymore.
Well ******* too, you neighborhood *****.
SassyJ Apr 2016
ohhh Soul raptured and captured
Fractured in moments of reciprocity
An outward doubt of censorship
Widening smiles of spoken misfortune

A tear, a mend, the exposed laughter
Tributes of adventure rouse the sheep
Rumoured lines of defensive solutions
Evolution with a tenancy of dissolution

Hearts of hearts, a distanced resolution
Insulated in clenched stimulant jokes
Introverted cells taking a pick of self
The ***, a sect, to solve and save the rest
Funny how comedians make fun of themselves. Inspired me to work on a long neglected comedy set..... here we go, I'll pick on myself!
Adam Latham Sep 2014
Far over the mumbling Mountains of Moan
Where blazing hot Firebirds are nurtured and flown,
Through silver veined canyons and mines filled with gold
By Dwarves in their halls seeking riches untold.

There lives by the side of a babbling brook,
Buried deep in the earth, in it's own special nook,
Underneath a quite small yet conspicuous knoll,
Hidden from prying eyes is the home of a Troll.

Alone in his cavern of amethyst ore,
He sleeps undisturbed with a grunt and a snore,
And makes the ground tremble with dream induced growls
That fly up with spit from his thick flapping jowls.

The floor all around is a sea of gnawed bones
Stained pink by the light from those crystalline stones,
That shimmer and sparkle like miniature storms
Left raging for aeons in mineral forms.

His slow beating heart sounds a deep thumping boom
That scythes through the half light and twinkling gloom,
By which, if you look in the cold that persists,
The Troll's heavy breath funnels up into mists.

A great iron club with its spots of rust red
Stands upright and ready close by to his bed,
The Troll's hairy fingers draped over his prize
To ****** at the hilt should the instant arise.

One beady eye open, the other shut fast,
Only the foolhardy would dare to creep past,
Wake him at your peril, no need to surmise,
You will meet a brutal and violent demise.

A wrinkled behemoth with rings through his nose,
The truth of his origin, nobody knows,
Some say Trolls were spawned at the dawn of the world
When primeval magics and such swished and swirled.

While others less fanciful look to the West
Where dark Elvish wizards in black arts invest,
The wrong incantation performed on a man
Is rumoured to be how the Troll race began.
#Troll
Cry Sebastian Dec 2009
Your light is but a mere reflection of broken stars,
of whose nuances and rumoured brilliance you act out so well.

You are blind my love,
in all our time you never met me.
All you see are the faerie tales
tattooed on the insides of your eyelids.

When the hype is over you fly to the next
and the next
and the next.
I knew from the day we met you would leave.

Even with all the songs you write,
the writers you quote,
your elegant chatter,
your flare that melts men and women alike-
you are still as shallow as pink bunny's and baked beans.

You are the most lethal kind,
if you were at least a ***** you would be honest,
but your softness and kindness
sets men up
to be dropped like broken toys from a fat spoilt brat.

I really don't know why I'm still so tender towards you.
Terry Collett Jun 2012
Edweir knew she came
To the cafeteria for her
Lunch each day and usually

Sat in the same place if
She could and this day
She is sitting there with

That blue dress on the one
That shows the valley
Between her ******* and

Her hair frames her face
In such a way and he tries
To sit so he can see her so

And turn away his head
If he thought she might
Gaze his way but now she

Sits in pensive mood as some
Women do her hands holding
The glass her thoughts seeming

Far away and he wonders if
Maybe she has grown tired
Of her work up in Dawlish’s

Office or maybe has is often
Rumoured Dawlish had soft
Touched her where it’s known

By those in the know he is
Often want to go or maybe
She thinks of some other thing

An evening date with some sad  
****** or some schmuck who
Only wants to drink and ****

Now she pauses and sips from
The glass and deeply sighs oh
How he would love to go and

Embrace her and say anything
I can do to help and run a finger
Along her face but now she stares

At him and he feels a creepy finger
Up and down his spine and her eyes
Wash over him in cold disdain while

Outside the skies are blue and the sun
Shines warmly with no sign of rain.
GloriouslyFlawed Jan 2013
Once upon a time lived a little young girl,
She had bright button eyes and her hair had a curl
Of saffron, ginger and pineapple too
She looked like no other, not I and not you.

She lived in a village not far from the sea
Where nobody ventured, not even the bees
For it was far from pleasant, you must comprehend
It is rumoured that death lingers under the bed.

Gnarly and spiteful, the creature below
Listens out for those sleeping, those about to go
To the land of the dreaming, the peaceful sweet place
That brings all pure happiness upon yonder face.

Now little young girl creeps around in the dark
As she fears the creatures will bite her and bark
That’s how they get you, as you will soon know
If you rest your sweet head on the pillow below.
you will be 14 the first time a boy surges his way inside you
like a battering ram, unyielding at the castle gates
and you'll cry quietly and forget about it until you're 17
when a leering grin is the only precedence to fingers like knives
that scale the walls searching for whatever treasure that is rumoured inside you
you will be unable to dismiss the fear that swirls like animation-show thunderclouds above your head
when its dark outside and you've still got 10 minutes left of your journey and right here, this alley
cross the road to avoid it because you can't trust shadows in places like these
and hell, you'll still be afraid the next day at 2pm walking home from a doctors appointment
hearing the loud thud thud thud of footsteps behind you and they speed up with a thud thud ThUd THUD
your heart crazy and rioting like a bird in your chest but its just a man trying to get past you because of his long, long legs, and heavy footfalls
you haven't felt safe in the places you should've and that scared you for years until you made it to 17
layers of memory peeling back with the catalyst and you know now why arms always felt like iron bars
because you see a smile storm past your eyes when you close them
and hear the soft laugh of the older boy
as you squirm under him and no, you haven't told anyone
too late to make change and too late to stop being afraid
this, your secret shame,
you will be 14 when you let yourself get *****.
Lyss Brianne Jul 2020
My mother’s addiction is a shapeshifter—
It takes on so many forms it’s rumoured
that nobody knows its true face
It’s a master of disguise
it hides itself behind thin lipped smiles
and tired eyes—
It changes so often it’s hard to tell
if it ever recycles old forms
I frequently ask myself if I would
recognize her if I did not have her eyes
If we didn’t share a body for 7 months
would I know the sound of her heartbeat
even when she’s disguised as a dragon
—sober is the shape she fails to hold the longest
the edges between make believe and reality
blur almost as quickly as they form
It’s easier to be a flame than still water
so she burns down everything in her path

At home we don’t dare say the word addiction
we walk on eggshells like her cover will crumble
at the slightest vibration from the floorboards
—we glide through the hallways like spirits
there’s no need for a haunting here
ghosts already roam in the walls
you hear wailing more often than silence—
I’m beginning to think Halloween is my favourite holiday
because it’s the one day of the year
people can look into this haunted home
and they don’t judge me for what they see
behind closed doors
—I’ve never been one for haunted houses
but maybe it’s because I’ve been living in one
for 22 years without a break
I wish to escape from my own house of horrors
so why would I pay to enter somebody else’s
Instead I put on devil horns
and watch movies where there’s always a final girl
wondering if it would be worth my soul
to make a deal with the devil
so my mom can stop shapeshifting
so my brother can sleep at night
so I can finally breathe, even just for a moment

—my mother’s addiction is a shapeshifter
I hope someday soon I can see what she truly looks like
I have been living with a stranger for so long
I’ve forgotten what it feels like to recognize
the people you love
Ottar Mar 2013
The Trail Creek,
could not hold
the flow of
a million million
drops of rain.

The bank let loose and a Gulch became a river,
basements of homes and stores became indoor pools but
not one resident was close to foolish enough to go in and swim.

The streets became
a river of
a muddy coffee
coloured toxic feared
enemy, that had
no weakness but
time.

An apartment building fell as the Columbia River swelled,
eroded and took the ransom till it flowed down stream and
was rumoured to have crashed into a transom of the old bridge.

So many memories swept away down stream, many more, could
not resist to power of the water to remove and ruin, words and images,
by force, and in time, dirt and sediment remained everywhere, after the flood.

Tears replaced rain,
in time water,
all of it,
was drained away,
peoples lives strained.

To a ten
year old boy
this was big!
And as the
Columbia was growing
larger each day
parks disappeared as
the danger neared
I sang, "rain,
rain, go away
we have had
enough, there is
no where to play.


The flood of
nineteen sixty-nine,
was a vivid a
disaster you will,
ever find, but still
the City survives.
1948 and 2012 and (maybe 2013) floods have also occurred, even though they redid the creek and culverts and reinforced it all.   There may be other years with floods but these ones stand out in my
memory
Raj Arumugam May 2014
you visit this disused Olde Gaol
remote, renowned
250 years old and now a musuem;
and rumoured to be haunted

you love the thrill but fear meeting
a ghost,  the one said to make
unexpected appearance in this prison
"I love the excitement," you tell the guide
"but I'd die if I met one"

The guide pooh-poohs your suggestion
and says: "In all my time here
I have yet to see a ghost"


"And how long," you ask, "have you
worked here?"


And the guide answers: *"245 years"
...last of the poem in my ghost poems series...

— The End —