(To Marcel Schwob in friendship and in admiration)

In a dim corner of my room for longer than
my fancy thinks
A beautiful and silent Sphinx has watched me
through the shifting gloom.

Inviolate and immobile she does not rise she
does not stir
For silver moons are naught to her and naught
to her the suns that reel.

Red follows grey across the air, the waves of
moonlight ebb and flow
But with the Dawn she does not go and in the
night-time she is there.

Dawn follows Dawn and Nights grow old and
all the while this curious cat
Lies couching on the Chinese mat with eyes of
satin rimmed with gold.

Upon the mat she lies and leers and on the
tawny throat of her
Flutters the soft and silky fur or ripples to her
pointed ears.

Come forth, my lovely seneschal! so somnolent,
so statuesque!
Come forth you exquisite grotesque! half woman
and half animal!

Come forth my lovely languorous Sphinx! and
put your head upon my knee!
And let me stroke your throat and see your
body spotted like the Lynx!

And let me touch those curving claws of yellow
ivory and grasp
The tail that like a monstrous Asp coils round
your heavy velvet paws!

A thousand weary centuries are thine
while I have hardly seen
Some twenty summers cast their green for
Autumn’s gaudy liveries.

But you can read the Hieroglyphs on the
great sandstone obelisks,
And you have talked with Basilisks, and you
have looked on Hippogriffs.

O tell me, were you standing by when Isis to
Osiris knelt?
And did you watch the Egyptian melt her union
for Antony

And drink the jewel-drunken wine and bend
her head in mimic awe
To see the huge proconsul draw the salted tunny
from the brine?

And did you mark the Cyprian kiss white Adon
on his catafalque?
And did you follow Amenalk, the God of
Heliopolis?

And did you talk with Thoth, and did you hear
the moon-horned Io weep?
And know the painted kings who sleep beneath
the wedge-shaped Pyramid?

Lift up your large black satin eyes which are
like cushions where one sinks!
Fawn at my feet, fantastic Sphinx! and sing me
all your memories!

Sing to me of the Jewish maid who wandered
with the Holy Child,
And how you led them through the wild, and
how they slept beneath your shade.

Sing to me of that odorous green eve when
crouching by the marge
You heard from Adrian’s gilded barge the
laughter of Antinous

And lapped the stream and fed your drouth and
watched with hot and hungry stare
The ivory body of that rare young slave with
his pomegranate mouth!

Sing to me of the Labyrinth in which the twi-
formed bull was stalled!
Sing to me of the night you crawled across the
temple’s granite plinth

When through the purple corridors the screaming
scarlet Ibis flew
In terror, and a horrid dew dripped from the
moaning Mandragores,

And the great torpid crocodile within the tank
shed slimy tears,
And tare the jewels from his ears and staggered
back into the Nile,

And the priests cursed you with shrill psalms as
in your claws you seized their snake
And crept away with it to slake your passion by
the shuddering palms.

Who were your lovers? who were they
who wrestled for you in the dust?
Which was the vessel of your Lust?  What
Leman had you, every day?

Did giant Lizards come and crouch before you
on the reedy banks?
Did Gryphons with great metal flanks leap on
you in your trampled couch?

Did monstrous hippopotami come sidling toward
you in the mist?
Did gilt-scaled dragons writhe and twist with
passion as you passed them by?

And from the brick-built Lycian tomb what
horrible Chimera came
With fearful heads and fearful flame to breed
new wonders from your womb?

Or had you shameful secret quests and did
you harry to your home
Some Nereid coiled in amber foam with curious
rock crystal *******?

Or did you treading through the froth call to
the brown Sidonian
For tidings of Leviathan, Leviathan or
Behemoth?

Or did you when the sun was set climb up the
cactus-covered *****
To meet your swarthy Ethiop whose body was
of polished jet?

Or did you while the earthen skiffs dropped
down the grey Nilotic flats
At twilight and the flickering bats flew round
the temple’s triple glyphs

Steal to the border of the bar and swim across
the silent lake
And slink into the vault and make the Pyramid
your lupanar

Till from each black sarcophagus rose up the
painted swathed dead?
Or did you lure unto your bed the ivory-horned
Tragelaphos?

Or did you love the god of flies who plagued
the Hebrews and was splashed
With wine unto the waist? or Pasht, who had
green beryls for her eyes?

Or that young god, the Tyrian, who was more
amorous than the dove
Of Ashtaroth? or did you love the god of the
Assyrian

Whose wings, like strange transparent talc, rose
high above his hawk-faced head,
Painted with silver and with red and ribbed with
rods of Oreichalch?

Or did huge Apis from his car leap down and
lay before your feet
Big blossoms of the honey-sweet and honey-
coloured nenuphar?

How subtle-secret is your smile!  Did you
love none then?  Nay, I know
Great Ammon was your bedfellow!  He lay with
you beside the Nile!

The river-horses in the slime trumpeted when
they saw him come
Odorous with Syrian galbanum and smeared with
spikenard and with thyme.

He came along the river bank like some tall
galley argent-sailed,
He strode across the waters, mailed in beauty,
and the waters sank.

He strode across the desert sand:  he reached
the valley where you lay:
He waited till the dawn of day:  then touched
your black ******* with his hand.

You kissed his mouth with mouths of flame:
you made the horned god your own:
You stood behind him on his throne:  you called
him by his secret name.

You whispered monstrous oracles into the
caverns of his ears:
With blood of goats and blood of steers you
taught him monstrous miracles.

White Ammon was your bedfellow!  Your
chamber was the steaming Nile!
And with your curved archaic smile you watched
his passion come and go.

With Syrian oils his brows were bright:
and wide-spread as a tent at noon
His marble limbs made pale the moon and lent
the day a larger light.

His long hair was nine cubits’ span and coloured
like that yellow gem
Which hidden in their garment’s hem the
merchants bring from Kurdistan.

His face was as the must that lies upon a vat of
new-made wine:
The seas could not insapphirine the perfect azure
of his eyes.

His thick soft throat was white as milk and
threaded with thin veins of blue:
And curious pearls like frozen dew were
broidered on his flowing silk.

On pearl and porphyry pedestalled he was
too bright to look upon:
For on his ivory breast there shone the wondrous
ocean-emerald,

That mystic moonlit jewel which some diver of
the Colchian caves
Had found beneath the blackening waves and
carried to the Colchian witch.

Before his gilded galiot ran naked vine-wreathed
corybants,
And lines of swaying elephants knelt down to
draw his chariot,

And lines of swarthy Nubians bare up his litter
as he rode
Down the great granite-paven road between the
nodding peacock-fans.

The merchants brought him steatite from Sidon
in their painted ships:
The meanest cup that touched his lips was
fashioned from a chrysolite.

The merchants brought him cedar chests of rich
apparel bound with cords:
His train was borne by Memphian lords:  young
kings were glad to be his guests.

Ten hundred shaven priests did bow to Ammon’s
altar day and night,
Ten hundred lamps did wave their light through
Ammon’s carven house—and now

Foul snake and speckled adder with their young
ones crawl from stone to stone
For ruined is the house and prone the great
rose-marble monolith!

Wild *** or trotting jackal comes and couches
in the mouldering gates:
Wild satyrs call unto their mates across the
fallen fluted drums.

And on the summit of the pile the blue-faced
ape of Horus sits
And gibbers while the fig-tree splits the pillars
of the peristyle

The god is scattered here and there:  deep
hidden in the windy sand
I saw his giant granite hand still clenched in
impotent despair.

And many a wandering caravan of stately
negroes silken-shawled,
Crossing the desert, halts appalled before the
neck that none can span.

And many a bearded Bedouin draws back his
yellow-striped burnous
To gaze upon the Titan thews of him who was
thy paladin.

Go, seek his fragments on the moor and
wash them in the evening dew,
And from their pieces make anew thy mutilated
paramour!

Go, seek them where they lie alone and from
their broken pieces make
Thy bruised bedfellow!  And wake mad passions
in the senseless stone!

Charm his dull ear with Syrian hymns! he loved
your body! oh, be kind,
Pour spikenard on his hair, and wind soft rolls
of linen round his limbs!

Wind round his head the figured coins! stain
with red fruits those pallid lips!
Weave purple for his shrunken hips! and purple
for his barren *****!

Away to Egypt!  Have no fear.  Only one
God has ever died.
Only one God has let His side be wounded by a
soldier’s spear.

But these, thy lovers, are not dead.  Still by the
hundred-cubit gate
Dog-faced Anubis sits in state with lotus-lilies
for thy head.

Still from his chair of porphyry gaunt Memnon
strains his lidless eyes
Across the empty land, and cries each yellow
morning unto thee.

And Nilus with his broken horn lies in his black
and oozy bed
And till thy coming will not spread his waters on
the withering corn.

Your lovers are not dead, I know.  They will
rise up and hear your voice
And clash their cymbals and rejoice and run to
kiss your mouth!  And so,

Set wings upon your argosies!  Set horses to
your ebon car!
Back to your Nile!  Or if you are grown sick of
dead divinities

Follow some roving lion’s spoor across the copper-
coloured plain,
Reach out and hale him by the mane and bid
him be your paramour!

Couch by his side upon the grass and set your
white teeth in his throat
And when you hear his dying note lash your
long flanks of polished brass

And take a tiger for your mate, whose amber
sides are flecked with black,
And ride upon his gilded back in triumph
through the Theban gate,

And toy with him in amorous jests, and when
he turns, and snarls, and gnaws,
O smite him with your jasper claws! and bruise
him with your agate *******!

Why are you tarrying?  Get hence!  I
weary of your sullen ways,
I weary of your steadfast gaze, your somnolent
magnificence.

Your horrible and heavy breath makes the light
flicker in the lamp,
And on my brow I feel the damp and dreadful
dews of night and death.

Your eyes are like fantastic moons that shiver
in some stagnant lake,
Your tongue is like a scarlet snake that dances
to fantastic tunes,

Your pulse makes poisonous melodies, and your
black throat is like the hole
Left by some torch or burning coal on Saracenic
tapestries.

Away!  The sulphur-coloured stars are hurrying
through the Western gate!
Away!  Or it may be too late to climb their silent
silver cars!

See, the dawn shivers round the grey gilt-dialled
towers, and the rain
Streams down each diamonded pane and blurs
with tears the wannish day.

What snake-tressed fury fresh from Hell, with
uncouth gestures and unclean,
Stole from the poppy-drowsy queen and led you
to a student’s cell?

What songless tongueless ghost of sin crept
through the curtains of the night,
And saw my taper burning bright, and knocked,
and bade you enter in?

Are there not others more accursed, whiter with
leprosies than I?
Are Abana and Pharphar dry that you come here
to slake your thirst?

Get hence, you loathsome mystery!  Hideous
animal, get hence!
You wake in me each ******* sense, you make me
what I would not be.

You make my creed a barren sham, you wake
foul dreams of sensual life,
And Atys with his blood-stained knife were
better than the thing I am.

False Sphinx!  False Sphinx!  By reedy Styx
old Charon, leaning on his oar,
Waits for my coin.  Go thou before, and leave
me to my crucifix,

Whose pallid burden, sick with pain, watches
the world with wearied eyes,
And weeps for every soul that dies, and weeps
for every soul in vain.

Awhile ago, I had been at a party. I’d listened to someone talk about Kate Moss for ten minutes straight. I left the room, found my flatmate and asked why anyone was interested in anything at all. We’d come up with no answers.

All this started a month ago, and all that started long before. I will not bore you with trite aphorisms about how I survived, or how wondrous life has become since. At some point my mind broke. This is a collection of memories about my attempted suicide and the absurdity of the entire experience.

Wednesday, 26th of April, 2017, midnight.

Couldn’t sleep. Surfed the internet. Fell into ASMR sub-culture.[1] Meta-satire, transitioning to post-irony, before pseudo-spiritual out-of-body transcendence. I thought, *this is the most ****** experience I’ve had in half a decade, while a woman spun spheres of blobby jelly around my head and whispered elephant mourning rituals into my ears.

Tuesday, 27th of April, 2017, afternoon.

Woke up mid-day. Looked at all the objects in my room, unable to understand why any of them mattered. Milled around the flat. Went online to order helium so I could make an exit bag.[2] Cheapest source was The Warehouse, though the helium came with thirty bright multi-coloured party balloons. I kept imagining one of my flatmates walking in later that day, seeing my crumpled body surrounded by these floppy bits of rubber and a note saying this life is absurd and I want out of it. There was no online purchasing option, however, and I couldn’t be bothered walking into town. I began reading suicide notes. One was from a kid who’d slowly taken pills as he watched TV, culminating in a coma. That sounds pleasant, I thought, whilst at the same time knowing that it takes up to three days to die from painkillers and that the process is anything but painless or final. I opened my drawer, found a bunch of paracetamol and began washing them down with water, whilst listening to the soundtrack of End of Evangelion.[3]

I’m not sure why, but I began crying violently. I knew I’d have to leave the flat before my flatmates came home. I hastily scrawled a note that said, donate my body, give my money to senpai, give my possessions to someone I don’t know, it smells like burning, it was good knowing you all, before walking out the door with Komm Süsser Tod playing in the background.[4, 5] I’d already written my personal and political reasons for suicide in the pieces méconnaissance[6] and **** Yourself,[7] so felt there was no reason for anything more substantial.

I wandered the back roads of my neighbourhood. My body shook. I felt somnolent, half-dazed. I wanted a quiet place to sit, sleep and writhe in agony while my organs slowly failed. My legs kept stumbling, however, and my head was beginning to feel funny. I found a dead-end street and sat on one of those artificially maintained rectangles of grass. There was a black cat lying in the middle of the road, just bobbing its head at me. I zoned out for a bit and when I came to a giant orange cat was to my left, gazing intently into my teary face. I tried to refocus on my crotch. I couldn’t help but notice a white cat across the road, pretending not to be seen. It had a dubious look on its face, a countenance of guilt. What the hell was going on? A delivery person looped round the street. People returned home from work. Garage doors opened, cars drove down driveways. Here I was, slowly dying, surrounded by spooky ******* cats and the bustle of ordinary existence.

“Uh, hey. You look, uh, like something isn’t . . . do you need, uh, help?” a woman asked, crossing the street with a pram to reach me. I groaned.

“It’s just that, you know, ordinarily, um, I mean normally, people don’t sit on the sidewalk,” she continued, glancing down with the half-confused look of a concerned citizen who is trying to enter a situation outside of their usual experience. I mumbled something indistinct and went back to staring at my crotch.

“You know, I can, er . . . I can . . . I can’t really help,” she ended, awkwardly. “I have a daughter to look after, but . . . if you’re still here when she’s asleep . . . I’m the red fence.” She darted off without another word.

Had she wanted me off the sidewalk because it was abnormal to sit there, or had she seen the abnormality as a sign of something deeper? Either way, she’d used abnormality as a signifier of negative change. Deviancy as something to be corrected, realigned with some norm that co-exists with happiness and citizenship. I was being a bad citizen.

I thought, I miss those cats. At least they had judged me in silence. Wait, what the hell am I thinking? This is clearly a case of deviancy associated with negative feelings. Well, negative feelings, but not necessarily negative change. Suicide is only negative if one views life as intrinsically worthwhile—

I could hear pram lady in the distance. She was talking to someone who’d just come back from work. They thanked pram lady and began moving towards me. Arghggh, just let me die, I thought.

She introduced herself as a nurse. From her tone and approach, it was clear she’d handled many cases like me. I’ve never hated counselling techniques. They seemed to at least trouble neoliberal rhetoric. There is little mention of overcoming, or striving, or perfecting oneself into a being of pure success. Rather, counselling seemed to be about listening and piercing together the other’s perspective. Counsellors tended not to interject words of comfort. They’d tell you mental illness was lifelong and couldn’t be fixed. They’re the closest society has to positive pessimists. Of course, they’d still want you to get better. Better, as in, not attempting suicide.

I talked with nurse lady for an hour about how life is simply passing. Passing through oneself, passing through others, passing through spaces, thoughts and emotions. About how the majority of life seems to be lived in a beyond we’ll never reach. Potential futures, moments of relief, phantasies we create to escape the dull present. About how I’d been finding my media and politics degree really rewarding, but some part of my head broke and I lost all ability to focus and care. About how the more I learnt about the world, the less capable I felt of changing it, and that change was a narcissistic day dream, anyway.

She replied “We’re all cogs. But what’s wrong with being a cog? Even a cog can make changes,” and I thought, but never one’s own.

She gave me a ride to the emergency clinic because I was too apathetic and guilt-ridden to decline. Why are people so nice over things that don’t matter? Chicks are ground into chicken nuggets alive.[8] The meat-industry produces 50% of the world’s carbon emissions.[9] But someone sits on the side of the road in a bourgeois neighbourhood and suddenly you have cats and nurses worried sick over your ****** up head. I should have worn a hobo coat and sat in town.

Tuesday, 27th of April, 2017, evening.

I had forgotten how painful waiting rooms were. It was stupidly ironic. I’d entered this apathetic suicidal stupor because I’d wanted to escape the monotony of existence, yet here I was, sitting in a waiting room, counting the stains on the ceiling, while the reception TV streamed a hospital drama.

“Get his *** in there!”

“Time is the real killer.”

“It wasn’t the cancer that was terminal, it was you.”

Zoom in on doctor face man.

Everybody hugging.

Emergency waiting rooms are a lot like life. You don’t choose to be there. An accident simply occurs and then you’re stuck, watching a show about *** cancer and family bonding. Sometimes someone coughs and you become aware of your own body again. You remember that you exist outside of media, waiting in this sterile space on a painfully too small plastic chair. You deliberately avoid the glances of everyone else in the room because you don’t want to reduce their existence to an injury, a pulsing wound, a lack, nor let them reduce you the same. The accident that got you here left you with a blank spot in your head, but the nurses reassure you that you’ll be up soon, to whatever it is you’re here for. And so, with nothing else to do, you turn back to the TV and forget you exist.

I thought, I should have taken more pills and gone into the woods.

The ER was a Kafkaeque realm of piercing lights, sleepy interns and too narrow privacy curtains.[10] Every time a nurse would try to close one, they’d pull it too far to one side, opening the other side up. Like the self, no bed was fully enclosed. There were always gaps, spaces of viewing, windows into trauma, and like the objet petit a, there was always the potential of meeting another’s gaze, one just like yours, only, out of your control.

I lay amidst a drone of machinery, footsteps and chatter. I stared at ceiling stains. Every hour or so a different nurse would approach me, repeat the same ten questions as the one before, then end commenting awkwardly on my tattoos. I kept thinking, what is going on? Have I finally died and become integrated into some eternally recurring limbo hell where, in a state of complete apathy and deterioration, some devil approaches me every hour to ask, why did you take those pills?

Do I have to repeat my answer for the rest of my life?

I gazed at the stain to my right. That was back in ‘92 when the piping above burst on a particularly wintry day. I shifted my gaze. And that happened in ‘99 when an intern tripped holding a giant cup of coffee. Afterwards, everyone began calling her Trippy. She eventually became a surgeon and had four adorable bourgeois kids. Tippy Tip Tap Toop.

The nurses began covering my body with little pieces of paper and plastic, to which only one third were connected to an ECG monitor.[11] Every ten minutes or so the monitor would begin honking violently, to which (initially) no one would respond to. After an hour or so a nurse wandered over with a worried expression, poked the machine a little, then asked if I was experiencing any chest pains. Before I could answer, he was intercepted by another nurse and told not to worry. His expression never cleared up, but he went back to staring blankly into a computer terminal on the other end of the room.

There were two security guards awkwardly trying not to meet anyone’s gazes. They were out of place and they knew it. No matter what space they occupied, a nurse would have to move past them to reach some medical doodle or document. One nurse jokingly said, “It’s ER. If you’re not moving you’re in the way,” to which the guards chortled, shuffled a metre or so sideways, before returning to standing still.

I checked my phone.

“Got veges.”

“If you successfully **** yourself, you’ll officially be the biggest right-wing neoliberal piece of ****.”[12]

“Your Text Unlimited Combo renewed on 28 Apr at 10:41. Nice!”

I went back to staring at the ceiling.

Six hours later, one of the nurses came over and said “Huh, turns out there’s nothing in your blood. Nothing . . . at all.” Another pulled out my drip and disconnected me from the ECG monitor. “Well, you’re free to leave.”

Tuesday, 27th of April, 2017, midnight.

I wandered over to the Emergency Psychiatric Services. The doctor there was interested in setting up future supports for my ****** up mind. He mentioned anti-depressants and I told him that in the past they hadn’t really worked, that it seemed more related to my general political outlook, that this purposeless restlessness has been with me most of my life, and that no drug or counselling could cure the lack innate to existence which is exacerbated by our current political and cultural institutions.

He replied “Are you one of those anti-druggers? You know there’s been a lot of backlash against psychiatry, it’s really the cultural Zeitgeist of our times, but it’s all led by misinformation, scaremongering.”

I hesitated, before replying “I’m not anti-drugs, I just don’t think you can change my general hatred of existence.”

“Okay, okay, I’m not trying to argue with your outlook, but you’re simply stuck in this doom and gloom phase—”

Whoa, wait a ******* minute. You’re not trying to argue with my outlook, while completely discounting my outlook as simply a passing emotional state? This guy is a ******* *******, I thought, ragging on about anti-druggers while pretending not to undermine a political and social position I’d spent years researching and building up. I stopped paying attention to him. Yes, a lot of my problems are internal, but I’m more than a disembodied brain, biologically computing chemical data.

At the end of his rant, he said something like “You’re a good kid,” and I thought, ******* too.

Friday, 28th of April, 2017, morning.

The next day I met a different doctor. I gave him a brief summary of my privileged life culminating in a ****** metaphor about three metaphysical pillars which lift me into the tempestuous winds of existential dread and nihilistic apathy. One, my social anxiety. Two, my absurd existence. Three, my political outlook. One, anxiety: I cannot relate to small talk. The gaze of the other is a gaze of expectations. Because I cannot know these expectations, I will never live up to them. Communication is by nature, lacking. Two, absurdity: Existence is a meaningless repetition of arbitrary structures we ourselves construct, then forget. Reflexivity is about uncovering this so that we may escape structures we do not like. We inevitably fall into new structures, prejudices and artifices. Nothing is authentic, nothing is innocent and nothing is your self. Three, politics: I am trapped in a neoliberal capitalist monstrosity that creates enough produce to feed the entire world, but does not do so due to the market’s instrumental need for profit. The system, in other words, rewards capitalists who are ruthless. Any capitalist trying to bring about change, will necessarily have to become ruthless to reach a position of power, and therefore will fail to bring about change.

The doctor nodded. He thought deeply, tried to piece it all together, then finally said “Yes, society is quite terrifying. This is something we cannot control. There are things out there that will harm you and the political situation of our time is troubling.”

I was astounded. This was one of the first doctors who’d actually taken what I’d said and given it consideration. Sure we hadn’t gotten into a length discussion of socialism, feminism or veganism, but they also hadn’t simply collapsed my political thoughts into my depressive state.

“But you know, there are still niches of meaning in this world. Though the greater structures are overbearing, people can still find purpose enacting smaller changes, connecting in ephemeral ways.”

What was I hearing? Was this a postmodern doctor?[13] Was science reconnecting with the humanities?

“We may even connect your third pillar, that of the political, with your second pillar and see that the political situation of our time is absurd. This is unfortunate, but as for your first pillar, this is definitely something we can help you with. In fact, it’s quite a simple process, helping one deal with social anxiety, and to me, it sounds like this anxiety has greatly affected your life for the past few years.”

The doctor then asked for my gender and sexuality, to which after I hesitated a little, he said, it didn’t really matter seeing as it was all constructed, anyway. For being unable to feel much at all, I was ecstatic. I thought, how could this doctor be working in the same building as the previous one I’d met? We went into anti-depressant plans. He told me that their effects were unpredictable. They may lift my mood, they may do nothing at all, they may even make me feel worse. Nobody really knew what molecular pathways serotonin activated, but it sometimes pulled people out of circular ways of thinking. And dopamine, well, taken in too high a dose, could make you psychotic.

Sign me the **** up, I thought, gazing at my new medical hero. These are the kinds of non-assurances that match my experience of life. Trust and expectations lead only to disappointment. Give me pure insurmountable doubt.

Friday, 28th of April, 2017, afternoon.

“The drugs won’t be too long,” the pharmacist said before disappearing into the back room. I milled around th

1

I am a house, says Senlin, locked and darkened,
Sealed from the sun with wall and door and blind.
Summon me loudly, and you'll hear slow footsteps
Ring far and faint in the galleries of my mind.
You'll hear soft steps on an old and dusty stairway;
Peer darkly through some corner of a pane,
You'll see me with a faint light coming slowly,
Pausing above some gallery of the brain . . .

I am a city . . . In the blue light of evening
Wind wanders among my streets and makes them fair;
I am a room of rock . . . a maiden dances
Lifting her hands, tossing her golden hair.
She combs her hair, the room of rock is darkened,
She extends herself in me, and I am sleep.
It is my pride that starlight is above me;
I dream amid waves of air, my walls are deep.

I am a door . . . before me roils the darkness,
Behind me ring clear waves of sound and light.
Stand in the shadowy street outside, and listen-
The crying of violins assails the night . . .
My walls are deep, but the cries of music pierce them;
They shake with the sound of drums . . . yet it is strange
That I should know so little what means this music,
Hearing it always within me change and change.

Knock on the door,-and you shall have an answer.
Open the heavy walls to set me free,
And blow a horn to call me into the sunlight,-
And startled, then, what a strange thing you will see!
Nuns, murderers, and drunkards, saints and sinners,
Lover and dancing girl and sage and clown
Will laugh upon you, and you will find me nowhere.
I am a room, a house, a street, a town.

2

It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning
When the light drips through the shutters like the dew,
I arise, I face the sunrise,
And do the things my fathers learned to do.
Stars in the purple dusk above the rooftops
Pale in a saffron mist and seem to die,
And I myself on a swiftly tilting planet
Stand before a glass and tie my tie.

Vine leaves tap my window,
Dew-drops sing to the garden stones,
The robin chips in the chinaberry tree
Repeating three clear tones.

It is morning. I stand by the mirror
And tie my tie once more.
While waves far off in a pale rose twilight
Crash on a white sand shore.
I stand by a mirror and comb my hair:
How small and white my face!-
The green earth tilts through a sphere of air
And bathes in a flame of space.
There are houses hanging above the stars
And stars hung under a sea . . .
And a sun far off in a shell of silence
Dapples my walls for me . . .

It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning
Should I not pause in the light to remember God?
Upright and firm I stand on a star unstable,
He is immense and lonely as a cloud.
I will dedicate this moment before my mirror
To him alone, and for him I will comb my hair.
Accept these humble offerings, cloud of silence!
I will think of you as I descend the stair.

Vine leaves tap my window,
The snail-track shines on the stones,
Dew-drops flash from the chinaberry tree
Repeating two clear tones.

It is morning, I awake from a bed of silence,
Shining I rise from the starless waters of sleep.
The walls are about me still as in the evening,
I am the same, and the same name still I keep.
The earth revolves with me, yet makes no motion,
The stars pale silently in a coral sky.
In a whistling void I stand before my mirror,
Unconcerned, I tie my tie.

There are horses neighing on far-off hills
Tossing their long white manes,
And mountains flash in the rose-white dusk,
Their shoulders black with rains . . .

It is morning. I stand by the mirror
And surprise my soul once more;
The blue air rushes above my ceiling,
There are suns beneath my floor . . .

. . . It is morning, Senlin says, I ascend from darkness
And depart on the winds of space for I know not where,
My watch is wound, a key is in my pocket,
And the sky is darkened as I descend the stair.
There are shadows across the windows, clouds in heaven,
And a god among the stars; and I will go
Thinking of him as I might think of daybreak
And humming a tune I know . . .

Vine-leaves tap at the window,
Dew-drops sing to the garden stones,
The robin chirps in the chinaberry tree
Repeating three clear tones.

3

I walk to my work, says Senlin, along a street
Superbly hung in space.
I lift these mortal stones, and with my trowel
I tap them into place.
But is god, perhaps, a giant who ties his tie
Grimacing before a colossal glass of sky?

These stones are heavy, these stones decay,
These stones are wet with rain,
I build them into a wall today,
Tomorrow they fall again.

Does god arise from a chaos of starless sleep,
Rise from the dark and stretch his arms and yawn;
And drowsily look from the window at his garden;
And rejoice at the dewdrop sparkeling on his lawn?

Does he remember, suddenly, with amazement,
The yesterday he left in sleep,-his name,-
Or the glittering street superbly hung in wind
Along which, in the dusk, he slowly came?

I devise new patterns for laying stones
And build a stronger wall.
One drop of rain astonishes me
And I let my trowel fall.

The flashing of leaves delights my eyes,
Blue air delights my face;
I will dedicate this stone to god
And tap it into its place.

4

That woman-did she try to attract my attention?
Is it true I saw her smile and nod?
She turned her head and smiled . . . was it for me?
It is better to think of work or god.
The clouds pile coldly above the houses
Slow wind revolves the leaves:
It begins to rain, and the first long drops
Are slantingly blown from eaves.

But it is true she tried to attract my attention!
She pressed a rose to her chin and smiled.
Her hand was white by the richness of her hair,
Her eyes were those of a child.
It is true she looked at me as if she liked me.
And turned away, afraid to look too long!
She watched me out of the corners of her eyes;
And, tapping time with fingers, hummed a song.

. . . Nevertheless, I will think of work,
With a trowel in my hands;
Or the vague god who blows like clouds
Above these dripping lands . . .

But . . . is it sure she tried to attract my attention?
She leaned her elbow in a peculiar way
There in the crowded room . . . she touched my hand . . .
She must have known, and yet,-she let it stay.
Music of flesh! Music of root and sod!
Leaf touching leaf in the rain!
Impalpable clouds of red ascend,
Red clouds blow over my brain.

Did she await from me some sign of acceptance?
I smoothed my hair with a faltering hand.
I started a feeble smile, but the smile was frozen:
Perhaps, I thought, I misunderstood.
Is it to be conceived that I could attract her-
This dull and futile flesh attract such fire?
I,-with a trowel's dullness in hand and brain!-
Take on some godlike aspect, rouse desire?
Incredible! . . . delicious! . . . I will wear
A brighter color of tie, arranged with care,
I will delight in god as I comb my hair.

And the conquests of my bolder past return
Like strains of music, some lost tune
Recalled from youth and a happier time.
I take my sweetheart's arm in the dusk once more;
One more we climb

Up the forbidden stairway,
Under the flickering light, along the railing:
I catch her hand in the dark, we laugh once more,
I hear the rustle of silk, and follow swiftly,
And softly at last we close the door.

Yes, it is true that woman tried to attract me:
It is true she came out of time for me,
Came from the swirling and savage forest of earth,
The cruel eternity of the sea.
She parted the leaves of waves and rose from silence
Shining with secrets she did not know.
Music of dust! Music of web and web!
And I, bewildered, let her go.

I light my pipe. The flame is yellow,
Edged underneath with blue.
These thoughts are truer of god, perhaps,
Than thoughts of god are true.

5

It is noontime, Senlin says, and a street piano
Strikes sharply against the sunshine a harsh chord,
And the universe is suddenly agitated,
And pain to my heart goes glittering like a sword.
Do I imagine it? The dust is shaken,
The sunlight quivers, the brittle oak-leaves tremble.
The world, disturbed, conceals its agitation;
And I, too, will dissemble.

Yet it is sorrow has found my heart,
Sorrow for beauty, sorrow for death;
And pain twirls slowly among the trees.

The street-piano revolves its glittering music,
The sharp notes flash and dazzle and turn,
Memory's knives are in this sunlit silence,
They ripple and lazily burn.
The star on which my shadow falls is frightened,-
It does not move; my trowel taps a stone,
The sweet note wavers amid derisive music;
And I, in horror of sunlight, stand alone.

Do not recall my weakness, savage music!
Let the knives rest!
Impersonal, harsh, the music revolves and glitters,
And the notes like poniards pierce my breast.
And I remember the shadows of webs on stones,
And the sound or rain on withered grass,
And a sorrowful face that looked without illusions
At its image in the glass.

Do not recall my childhood, pitiless music!
The green blades flicker and gleam,
The red bee bends the clover, deeply humming;
In the blue sea above me lazily stream
Cloud upon thin-brown cloud, revolving, scattering;
The mulberry tree rakes heaven and drops its fruit;
Amazing sunlight sings in the opened vault
On dust and bones, and I am mute.

It is noon; the bells let fall soft flowers of sound.
They turn on the air, they shrink in the flare of noon.
It is night; and I lie alone, and watch through the window
The terrible ice-white emptiness of the moon.
Small bells, far off, spill jewels of sound like rain,
A long wind hurries them whirled and far,
A cloud creeps over the moon, my bed is darkened,
I hold my breath and watch a star.

Do not disturb my memories, heartless music!
I stand once more by a vine-dark moonlit wall,
The sound of my footsteps dies in a void of moonlight,
And I watch white jasmine fall.
Is it my heart that falls? Does earth itself
Drift, a white petal, down the sky?
One bell-note goes to the stars in the blue-white silence,
Solitary and mournful, a somnolent cry.

6

Death himself in the rain . . . death himself . . .
Death in the savage sunlight . . . skeletal death . . .
I hear the clack of his feet,
Clearly on stones, softly in dust;
He hurries among the trees
Whirling the leaves, tossing he hands from waves.
Listen! the immortal footsteps beat.

Death himself in the grass, death himself,
Gyrating invisibly in the sun,
Scatters the grass-blades, whips the wind,
Tears at boughs with malignant laughter:
On the long echoing air I hear him run.

Death himself in the dusk, gathering lilacs,
Breaking a white-fleshed bough,
Strewing purple on a cobwebbed lawn,
Dancing, dancing,
The long red sun-rays glancing
On flailing arms, skipping with hideous knees
Cavorting grotesque ecstasies:
I do not see him, but I see the lilacs fall,
I hear the scrape of knuckles against the wall,
The leaves are tossed and tremble where he plunges among them,
And I hear the sound of his breath,
Sharp and whistling, the rythm of death.

It is evening: the lights on a long street balance and sway.
In the purple ether they swing and silently sing,
The street is a gossamer swung in space,
And death himself in the wind comes dancing along it,
And the lights, like raindrops, tremble and swing.
Hurry, spider, and spread your glistening web,
For death approaches!
Hurry, rose, and open your heart to the bee,
For death approaches!
Maiden, let down your hair for the hands of your lover,
Comb it with moonlight and wreathe it with leaves,
For death approaches!

Death, huge in the star; small in the sand-grain;
Death himself in the rain,
Drawing the rain about him like a garment of jewels:
I hear the sound of his feet
On the stairs of the wind, in the sun,
In the forests of the sea . . .
Listen! the immortal footsteps beat!

7

It is noontime, Senlin says. The sky is brilliant
Above a green and dreaming hill.
I lay my trowel down. The pool is cloudless,
The grass, the wall, the peach-tree, all are still.

It appears to me that I am one with these:
A hill, upon whose back are a wall and trees.
It is noontime: all seems still
Upon this green and flowering hill.

Yet suddenly out of nowhere in the sky,
A cloud comes whirling, and flings
A lazily coiled vortex of shade on the hill.
It crosses the hill, and a bird in the peach-tree sings.
Amazing! Is there a change?
The hill seems somehow strange.
It is noontime. And in the tree
The leaves are delicately disturbed
Where the bird descends invisibly.
It is noontime. And in the pool
The sky is blue and cool.

Yet suddenly out of nowhere,
Something flings itself at the hill,
Tears with claws at the earth,
Lunges and hisses and softly recoils,
Crashing against the green.
The peach-tree braces itself, the pool is frightened,
The grass-blades quiver, the bird is still;
The wall silently struggles against the sunlight;
A terror stiffens the hill.
The trees turn rigidly, to face
Something that circles with slow pace:
The blue pool seems to shrink
From something that slides above its brink.
What struggle is this, ferocious and still-
What war in sunlight on this hill?
What is it creeping to dart
Like a knife-blade at my heart?

It is noontime, Senlin says, and all is tranquil:
The brilliant sky burns over a greenbright earth.
The peach-tree dreams in the sun, the wall is contented.
A bird in the peach-leaves, moving from sun to shadow,
Phrases again his unremembering mirth,
His lazily beautiful, foolish, mechanical mirth.

8

The pale blue gloom of evening comes
Among the phantom forests and walls
With a mournful and rythmic sound of drums.
My heart is disturbed with a sound of myriad throbbing,
Persuasive and sinister, near and far:
In the blue evening of my heart
I hear the thrum of the evening star.

My work is uncompleted; and yet I hurry,-
Hearing the whispered pulsing of those drums,-
To enter the luminous walls and woods of night.
It is the eternal mistress of the world
Who shakes these drums for my delight.
Listen! the drums of the leaves, the drums of the dust,
The delicious quivering of this air!

I will leave my work unfinished, and I will go
With ringing and certain step through the laughter of chaos
To the one small room in the void I know.
Yesterday it was there,-
Will I find it tonight once more when I climb the stair?
The drums of the street beat swift and soft:
In the blue evening of my heart
I hear the throb of the bridal star.
It weaves deliciously in my brain
A tyrannous melody of her:
Hands in sunlight, threads of rain
Against a weeping face that fades,
Snow on a blackened window-pane;
Fire, in a dusk of hair entangled;
Flesh, more delicate than fruit;
And a voice that searches quivering nerves
For a string to mute.

My life is uncompleted: and yet I hurry
Among the tinkling forests and walls of evening
To a certain fragrant room.
Who is it that dances there, to a beating of drums,
While stars on a grey sea bud and bloom?
She stands at the top of the stair,
With the lamplight on her hair.
I will walk through the snarling of streams of space
And climb the long steps carved from wind
And rise once more towards her face.
Listen! the drums of the drowsy trees
Beating our nuptial ecstasies!

Music spins from the heart of silence
And twirls me softly upon the air:
It takes my hand and whispers to me:
It draws the web of the moonlight down.
There are hands, it says, as cool as snow,
The hands of the Venus of the sea;
There are waves of sound in a mermaid-cave;-
Come-then-come with me!
The flesh of the sea-rose new and cool,
The wavering image of her who comes
At dusk by a blue sea-pool.

Whispers upon the haunted air-
Whisper of foam-white arm and thigh;
And a shower of delicate lights blown down
Fro the laughing sky! . . .
Music spins from a far-off room.
Do you remember,-it seems to say,-
The mouth that smiled, beneath your mouth,
And kissed you . . . yesterday?
It is your own flesh waits for you.
Come! you are incomplete! . . .
The drums of the universe once more
Morosely beat.
It is the harlot of the world
Who clashes the leaves like ghostly drums
And disturbs the solitude of my heart
As evening comes!

I leave my work once more and walk
Along a street that sways in the wind.
I leave these st

THE HOUSE OF DUST
A Symphony

BY
CONRAD AIKEN

To Jessie

NOTE

. . . Parts of this poem have been printed in "The North American
Review, Others, Poetry, Youth, Coterie, The Yale Review". . . . I am
indebted to Lafcadio Hearn for the episode called "The Screen Maiden"
in Part II.


     This text comes from the source available at
     Project Gutenberg, originally prepared by Judy Boss
     of Omaha, NE.
    
THE HOUSE OF DUST


PART I.


I.

The sun goes down in a cold pale flare of light.
The trees grow dark: the shadows lean to the east:
And lights wink out through the windows, one by one.
A clamor of frosty sirens mourns at the night.
Pale slate-grey clouds whirl up from the sunken sun.

And the wandering one, the inquisitive dreamer of dreams,
The eternal asker of answers, stands in the street,
And lifts his palms for the first cold ghost of rain.
The purple lights leap down the hill before him.
The gorgeous night has begun again.

'I will ask them all, I will ask them all their dreams,
I will hold my light above them and seek their faces.
I will hear them whisper, invisible in their veins . . .'
The eternal asker of answers becomes as the darkness,
Or as a wind blown over a myriad forest,
Or as the numberless voices of long-drawn rains.

We hear him and take him among us, like a wind of music,
Like the ghost of a music we have somewhere heard;
We crowd through the streets in a dazzle of pallid lamplight,
We pour in a sinister wave, ascend a stair,
With laughter and cry, and word upon murmured word;
We flow, we descend, we turn . . . and the eternal dreamer
Moves among us like light, like evening air . . .

Good-night!  Good-night!  Good-night!  We go our ways,
The rain runs over the pavement before our feet,
The cold rain falls, the rain sings.
We walk, we run, we ride.  We turn our faces
To what the eternal evening brings.

Our hands are hot and raw with the stones we have laid,
We have built a tower of stone high into the sky,
We have built a city of towers.

Our hands are light, they are singing with emptiness.
Our souls are light; they have shaken a burden of hours . . .
What did we build it for?  Was it all a dream? . . .
Ghostly above us in lamplight the towers gleam . . .
And after a while they will fall to dust and rain;
Or else we will tear them down with impatient hands;
And hew rock out of the earth, and build them again.


II.

One, from his high bright window in a tower,
Leans out, as evening falls,
And sees the advancing curtain of the shower
Splashing its silver on roofs and walls:
Sees how, swift as a shadow, it crosses the city,
And murmurs beyond far walls to the sea,
Leaving a glimmer of water in the dark canyons,
And silver falling from eave and tree.

One, from his high bright window, looking down,
Peers like a dreamer over the rain-bright town,
And thinks its towers are like a dream.
The western windows flame in the sun's last flare,
Pale roofs begin to gleam.

Looking down from a window high in a wall
He sees us all;
Lifting our pallid faces towards the rain,
Searching the sky, and going our ways again,
Standing in doorways, waiting under the trees . . .
There, in the high bright window he dreams, and sees
What we are blind to,-we who mass and crowd
From wall to wall in the darkening of a cloud.

The gulls drift slowly above the city of towers,
Over the roofs to the darkening sea they fly;
Night falls swiftly on an evening of rain.
The yellow lamps wink one by one again.
The towers reach higher and blacker against the sky.


III.

One, where the pale sea foamed at the yellow sand,
With wave upon slowly shattering wave,
Turned to the city of towers as evening fell;
And slowly walked by the darkening road toward it;
And saw how the towers darkened against the sky;
And across the distance heard the toll of a bell.

Along the darkening road he hurried alone,
With his eyes cast down,
And thought how the streets were hoarse with a tide of people,
With clamor of voices, and numberless faces . . .
And it seemed to him, of a sudden, that he would drown
Here in the quiet of evening air,
These empty and voiceless places . . .
And he hurried towards the city, to enter there.

Along the darkening road, between tall trees
That made a sinister whisper, loudly he walked.
Behind him, sea-gulls dipped over long grey seas.
Before him, numberless lovers smiled and talked.
And death was observed with sudden cries,
And birth with laughter and pain.
And the trees grew taller and blacker against the skies
And night came down again.


IV.

Up high black walls, up sombre terraces,
Clinging like luminous birds to the sides of cliffs,
The yellow lights went climbing towards the sky.
From high black walls, gleaming vaguely with rain,
Each yellow light looked down like a golden eye.

They trembled from coign to coign, and tower to tower,
Along high terraces quicker than dream they flew.
And some of them steadily glowed, and some soon vanished,
And some strange shadows threw.

And behind them all the ghosts of thoughts went moving,
Restlessly moving in each lamplit room,
From chair to mirror, from mirror to fire;
From some, the light was scarcely more than a gloom:
From some, a dazzling desire.

And there was one, beneath black eaves, who thought,
Combing with lifted arms her golden hair,
Of the lover who hurried towards her through the night;
And there was one who dreamed of a sudden death
As she blew out her light.

And there was one who turned from clamoring streets,
And walked in lamplit gardens among black trees,
And looked at the windy sky,
And thought with terror how stones and roots would freeze
And birds in the dead boughs cry . . .

And she hurried back, as snow fell, mixed with rain,
To mingle among the crowds again,
To jostle beneath blue lamps along the street;
And lost herself in the warm bright coiling dream,
With a sound of murmuring voices and shuffling feet.

And one, from his high bright window looking down
On luminous chasms that cleft the basalt town,
Hearing a sea-like murmur rise,
Desired to leave his dream, descend from the tower,
And drown in waves of shouts and laughter and cries.


V.

The snow floats down upon us, mingled with rain . . .
It eddies around pale lilac lamps, and falls
Down golden-windowed walls.
We were all born of flesh, in a flare of pain,
We do not remember the red roots whence we rose,
But we know that we rose and walked, that after a while
We shall lie down again.

The snow floats down upon us, we turn, we turn,
Through gorges filled with light we sound and flow . . .
One is struck down and hurt, we crowd about him,
We bear him away, gaze after his listless body;
But whether he lives or dies we do not know.

One of us sings in the street, and we listen to him;
The words ring over us like vague bells of sorrow.
He sings of a house he lived in long ago.
It is strange; this house of dust was the house I lived in;
The house you lived in, the house that all of us know.
And coiling slowly about him, and laughing at him,
And throwing him pennies, we bear away
A mournful echo of other times and places,
And follow a dream . . . a dream that will not stay.

Down long broad flights of lamplit stairs we flow;
Noisy, in scattered waves, crowding and shouting;
In broken slow cascades.
The gardens extend before us . . .  We spread out swiftly;
Trees are above us, and darkness.  The canyon fades . . .

And we recall, with a gleaming stab of sadness,
Vaguely and incoherently, some dream
Of a world we came from, a world of sun-blue hills . . .
A black wood whispers around us, green eyes gleam;
Someone cries in the forest, and someone kills.

We flow to the east, to the white-lined shivering sea;
We reach to the west, where the whirling sun went down;
We close our eyes to music in bright cafees.
We diverge from clamorous streets to streets that are silent.
We loaf where the wind-spilled fountain plays.

And, growing tired, we turn aside at last,
Remember our secret selves, seek out our towers,
Lay weary hands on the banisters, and climb;
Climbing, each, to his little four-square dream
Of love or lust or beauty or death or crime.


VI.

Over the darkened city, the city of towers,
The city of a thousand gates,
Over the gleaming terraced roofs, the huddled towers,
Over a somnolent whisper of loves and hates,
The slow wind flows, drearily streams and falls,
With a mournful sound down rain-dark walls.
On one side purples the lustrous dusk of the sea,
And dreams in white at the city's feet;
On one side sleep the plains, with heaped-up hills.
Oaks and beeches whisper in rings about it.
Above the trees are towers where dread bells beat.

The fisherman draws his streaming net from the sea
And sails toward the far-off city, that seems
Like one vague tower.
The dark bow plunges to foam on blue-black waves,
And shrill rain seethes like a ghostly music about him
In a quiet shower.

Rain with a shrill sings on the lapsing waves;
Rain thrills over the roofs again;
Like a shadow of shifting silver it crosses the city;
The lamps in the streets are streamed with rain;
And sparrows complain beneath deep eaves,
And among whirled leaves
The sea-gulls, blowing from tower to lower tower,
From wall to remoter wall,
Skim with the driven rain to the rising sea-sound
And close grey wings and fall . . .

. . . Hearing great rain above me, I now remember
A girl who stood by the door and shut her eyes:
Her pale cheeks glistened with rain, she stood and shivered.
Into a forest of silver she vanished slowly . . .
Voices about me rise . . .

Voices clear and silvery, voices of raindrops,-
'We struck with silver claws, we struck her down.
We are the ghosts of the singing furies . . . '
A chorus of elfin voices blowing about me
Weaves to a babel of sound.  Each cries a secret.
I run among them, reach out vain hands, and drown.

'I am the one who stood beside you and smiled,
Thinking your face so strangely young . . . '
'I am the one who loved you but did not dare.'
'I am the one you followed through crowded streets,
The one who escaped you, the one with red-gleamed hair.'

'I am the one you saw to-day, who fell
Senseless before you, hearing a certain bell:
A bell that broke great memories in my brain.'
'I am the one who passed unnoticed before you,
Invisible, in a cloud of secret pain.'

'I am the one who suddenly cried, beholding
The face of a certain man on the dazzling screen.
They wrote me that he was dead.  It was long ago.
I walked in the streets for a long while, hearing nothing,
And returned to see it again.  And it was so.'


Weave, weave, weave, you streaks of rain!
I am dissolved and woven again . . .
Thousands of faces rise and vanish before me.
Thousands of voices weave in the rain.

'I am the one who rode beside you, blinking
At a dazzle of golden lights.
Tempests of music swept me: I was thinking
Of the gorgeous promise of certain nights:
Of the woman who suddenly smiled at me this day,
Smiled in a certain delicious sidelong way,
And turned, as she reached the door,
To smile once more . . .
Her hands are whiter than snow on midnight water.
Her throat is golden and full of golden laughter,
Her eyes are strange as the stealth of the moon
On a night in June . . .
She runs among whistling leaves; I hurry after;
She dances in dreams over white-waved water;
Her body is white and fragrant and cool,
Magnolia petals that float on a white-starred pool . . .
I have dreamed of her, dreaming for many nights
Of a broken music and golden lights,
Of broken webs of silver, heavily falling
Between my hands and their white desire:
And dark-leaved boughs, edged with a golden radiance,
Dipping to screen a fire . . .
I dream that I walk with her beneath high trees,
But as I lean to kiss her face,
She is blown aloft on wind, I catch at leaves,
And run in a moonless place;
And I hear a crashing of terrible rocks flung down,
And shattering trees and cracking walls,
And a net of intense white flame roars over the town,
And someone cries; and darkness falls . . .
But now she has leaned and smiled at me,
My veins are afire with music,
Her eyes have kissed me, my body is turned to light;
I shall dream to her secret heart tonight . . . '

He rises and moves away, he says no word,
He folds his evening paper and turns away;
I rush through the dark with rows of lamplit faces;
Fire bells peal, and some of us turn to listen,
And some sit motionless in their accustomed places.

Cold rain lashes the car-roof, scurries in gusts,
Streams down the windows in waves and ripples of lustre;
The lamps in the streets are distorted and strange.
Someone takes his watch from his pocket and yawns.
One peers out in the night for the place to change.

Rain . . . rain . . . rain . . . we are buried in rain,
It will rain forever, the swift wheels hiss through water,
Pale sheets of water gleam in the windy street.
The pealing of bells is lost in a drive of rain-drops.
Remote and hurried the great bells beat.

'I am the one whom life so shrewdly betrayed,
Misfortune dogs me, it always hunted me down.
And to-day the woman I love lies dead.
I gave her roses, a ring with opals;
These hands have touched her head.

'I bound her to me in all soft ways,
I bound her to me in a net of days,
Yet now she has gone in silence and said no word.
How can we face these dazzling things, I ask you?
There is no use: we cry: and are not heard.

'They cover a body with roses . . . I shall not see it . . .
Must one return to the lifeless walls of a city
Whose soul is charred by fire? . . . '
His eyes are closed, his lips press tightly together.
Wheels hiss beneath us.  He yields us our desire.

'No, do not stare so-he is weak with grief,
He cannot face you, he turns his eyes aside;
He is confused with pain.
I suffered this.  I know.  It was long ago . . .
He closes his eyes and drowns in death again.'

The wind hurls blows at the rain-starred glistening windows,
The wind shrills down from the half-seen walls.
We flow on the mournful wind in a dream of dying;
And at last a silence falls.


VII.

Midnight; bells toll, and along the cloud-high towers
The golden lights go out . . .
The yellow windows darken, the shades are drawn,
In thousands of rooms we sleep, we await the dawn,
We lie face down, we dream,
We cry aloud with terror, half rise, or seem
To stare at the ceiling or walls . . .
Midnight . . . the last of shattering bell-notes falls.
A rush of silence whirls over the cloud-high towers,
A vortex of soundless hours.

'The bells have just struck twelve: I should be sleeping.
But I cannot delay any longer to write and tell you.
The woman is dead.
She died-you know the way.  Just as we planned.
Smiling, with open sunlit eyes.
Smiling upon the outstretched fatal hand . . .'

He folds his letter, steps softly down the stairs.
The doors are closed and silent.  A gas-jet flares.
His shadow disturbs a shadow of balustrades.
The door swings shut behind.  Night roars above him.
Into the night he fades.

Wind; wind; wind; carving the walls;
Blowing the water that gleams in the street;
Blowing the rain, the sleet.
In the dark alley, an old tree cracks and falls,
Oak-boughs moan in the haunted air;
Lamps blow down with a crash and ****** of glass . . .
Darkness whistles . . . Wild hours pass . . .

And those whom sleep eludes lie wide-eyed, hearing
Above their heads a goblin night go by;
Children are waked, and cry,
The young girl hears the roar in her sleep, and dreams
That her lover is caught in a burning tower,
She clutches the pillow, she gasps for breath, she screams . . .
And then by degrees her breath grows quiet and slow,
She dreams of an evening, long ago:
Of colored lanterns balancing under trees,
Some of them softly catching afire;
And beneath the lanterns a motionless face she sees,
Golden with lamplight, smiling, serene . . .
The leaves are a pale and glittering green,
The sound of horns blows over the trampled grass,
Shadows of dancers pass . . .
The face smiles closer to hers, she tries to lean
Backward, away, the eyes burn close and strange,
The face is beginning to change,-
It is her lover, she no longer desires to resist,
She is held and kissed.
She closes her eyes, and melts in a seethe of

belaboring hurt-bells
of twilight

outside there is a furious wind
sweeping the sour-faced pavement.
the helm of the morning
fits through the pinecones.
through the dandelion,
the diadem of some mystic flower,
the flurry of children
and the fury of the populace.

i know whence the wind stirs
cold flame from the many a dead
stones, sequined floor and the
dreary stillicide of night.
our bodies rise to the sun
that is a full woman
or a ripe apple
or a half-bitten moon in glare
and when her lips purse
there is pang in the wind that blows austere beneath the foot
of hills in ruin.

let the night come later than
a bird's secret sojourn,
or the cicada's enigma.
let the cathedral of my heart
quiver later than the unsheathing
of the night's bone
but in the twilight,
when the skies are bruised with
silence and somnolent without voice
my hands shall leap into the wind
and make do, the belaboring
hurt-bells of twilight.
no more than a crepuscular twining
of a sad vine on a melancholy hymn
that makes fuller with its tender
maneuvers, the trundling in
love's wearisome vessel.

Parenting

organizing the day,
while the baby room adjacent
makes dreaming rock n' roll noises
siren calls to lay in bed,
semi-alert, on guard duty,
scheming about dis n' dat,
you are sleeping, dreaming,
wide awake seeing,
multitasking eyes closed simultaneously.

lesser of a poet, more a notate-er,
list keeper, note taker,
arguing with yourself inside the head,
actually feeling the thoughts
coursing, lurking, seeing both sides now,
parentally, washing the dishes
of the hours and years ahead.

while the woman-mother
makes her soprano dreaming noises,
you laugh at the orchestra of
*******, sighing somnolent noises,
a cadenza of love dancing in your
irresistible wide awake dreams.

paying the bills, lying in the dark,
you wonder-worry about the agenda
unknown that will overgrow you,
fast creeping up the grain of your skin,
ivy on stone skin walls.

lala lala
you borrow baby's lullaby,
yourself calming,
keeping time, silly rhyming,
organizing the days ahead
in you head, while,
recording the harmonies of sensory inputs.

the dark provides the cloak
where you alone
feel and hear the worry and laugh lines knitting
into a single stitch of parenting.


1/20/2013

Cherry nosed serapth,
Is there room on thy pinion for me?
For canst I dream?
As all other flutters,
Worse/off or for better I'm tired of such shudersome tarry,

For art thou any to marry who won't  abscond?
To pull me from ponds?
Wherein zealots doth not percolate.....

For I guess I'm late..

Plant a Woman

"When a woman plants a tree, she plants herself."
John Muir

See the photo, on a stone walkway in a park on an island, somewhere in New York State

Years after first encountered,
Returned this day, purposely,
To trod this bricked-path
Where a solitary brick, these special words carved.

This brick, a patient lady-poem in waiting,
Required a search-and-locate mission,
To verify my memorized eyesight,
Freed to release these words,
Years in the forming, from whence first espied.

When a woman plants a tree, she plants herself.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Much less than obvious,
Import of said statement,
Complex, notes, scents, questions...

Perhaps this is the thus, the why,
Why this po-effort, somnolent, yet disquieted,
In recesses, drew lines on the wall, with one line
Slashed across, for every month,
It gestated, unborn, but not offering to die,
It did not come effortlessly.

I am seed of man,
Planted within woman.
I am a tree of  iLife ,
My seed planted within
You, iReader.

I am as much woman as man,
Perhaps more so...
Wrote you, told you,
I Speak Woman^
Perhaps more so...
Even better than man.

No shame, I rise with the dawn,
To bake the bread,
Alongside her, her secrets, she has, need learning,
Her bread, raisins, cinnamon and secreted inside,
Wisdom of loving kindness.

She scatters seeds with recklessness,
Who can know where wheat will be needed,
Someday, her children exiled?

Forest investor, tree planter,
Futures she sees, where others see but wood,
I follow her lead, for I cannot but fail to
Prosper, when on paths tread,
Formed, excavated by her footfalls.

I give her rubies,
I give her gold,
When I ask where it be,
She laughs and says adorning the tongues
Of the hungry and in need.

So I give her more.

Indeed, I plant my seed inside her daily,
Let her plant trees as she desires,
Her forest, the refuge of my old age,
So she plants trees, as I
Plant a Woman.
Thanks be, that her trees,
Come from her *****.

Now I understand Mr.Muir.

It is true that the rivers went nosing like swine,
Tugging at banks, until they seemed
Bland belly-sounds in somnolent troughs,

That the air was heavy with the breath of these swine,
The breath of turgid summer, and
Heavy with thunder's rattapallax,

That the man who erected this cabin, planted
This field, and tended it awhile,
Knew not the quirks of imagery,

That the hours of his indolent, arid days,
Grotesque with this nosing in banks,
This somnolence and rattapallax,

Seemed to suckle themselves on his arid being,
As the swine-like rivers suckled themselves
While they went seaward to the sea-mouths.

Over the darkened city, the city of towers,
The city of a thousand gates,
Over the gleaming terraced roofs, the huddled towers,
Over a somnolent whisper of loves and hates,
The slow wind flows, drearily streams and falls,
With a mournful sound down rain-dark walls.
On one side purples the lustrous dusk of the sea,
And dreams in white at the city's feet;
On one side sleep the plains, with heaped-up hills.
Oaks and beeches whisper in rings about it.
Above the trees are towers where dread bells beat.

The fisherman draws his streaming net from the sea
And sails toward the far-off city, that seems
Like one vague tower.
The dark bow plunges to foam on blue-black waves,
And shrill rain seethes like a ghostly music about him
In a quiet shower.

Rain with a shrill sings on the lapsing waves;
Rain thrills over the roofs again;
Like a shadow of shifting silver it crosses the city;
The lamps in the streets are streamed with rain;
And sparrows complain beneath deep eaves,
And among whirled leaves
The sea-gulls, blowing from tower to lower tower,
From wall to remoter wall,
Skim with the driven rain to the rising sea-sound
And close grey wings and fall . . .

. . . Hearing great rain above me, I now remember
A girl who stood by the door and shut her eyes:
Her pale cheeks glistened with rain, she stood and shivered.
Into a forest of silver she vanished slowly . . .
Voices about me rise . . .

Voices clear and silvery, voices of raindrops,--
'We struck with silver claws, we struck her down.
We are the ghosts of the singing furies . . . '
A chorus of elfin voices blowing about me
Weaves to a babel of sound.  Each cries a secret.
I run among them, reach out vain hands, and drown.

'I am the one who stood beside you and smiled,
Thinking your face so strangely young . . . '
'I am the one who loved you but did not dare.'
'I am the one you followed through crowded streets,
The one who escaped you, the one with red-gleamed hair.'

'I am the one you saw to-day, who fell
Senseless before you, hearing a certain bell:
A bell that broke great memories in my brain.'
'I am the one who passed unnoticed before you,
Invisible, in a cloud of secret pain.'

'I am the one who suddenly cried, beholding
The face of a certain man on the dazzling screen.
They wrote me that he was dead.  It was long ago.
I walked in the streets for a long while, hearing nothing,
And returned to see it again.  And it was so.'


Weave, weave, weave, you streaks of rain!
I am dissolved and woven again . . .
Thousands of faces rise and vanish before me.
Thousands of voices weave in the rain.

'I am the one who rode beside you, blinking
At a dazzle of golden lights.
Tempests of music swept me: I was thinking
Of the gorgeous promise of certain nights:
Of the woman who suddenly smiled at me this day,
Smiled in a certain delicious sidelong way,
And turned, as she reached the door,
To smile once more . . .
Her hands are whiter than snow on midnight water.
Her throat is golden and full of golden laughter,
Her eyes are strange as the stealth of the moon
On a night in June . . .
She runs among whistling leaves; I hurry after;
She dances in dreams over white-waved water;
Her body is white and fragrant and cool,
Magnolia petals that float on a white-starred pool . . .
I have dreamed of her, dreaming for many nights
Of a broken music and golden lights,
Of broken webs of silver, heavily falling
Between my hands and their white desire:
And dark-leaved boughs, edged with a golden radiance,
Dipping to screen a fire . . .
I dream that I walk with her beneath high trees,
But as I lean to kiss her face,
She is blown aloft on wind, I catch at leaves,
And run in a moonless place;
And I hear a crashing of terrible rocks flung down,
And shattering trees and cracking walls,
And a net of intense white flame roars over the town,
And someone cries; and darkness falls . . .
But now she has leaned and smiled at me,
My veins are afire with music,
Her eyes have kissed me, my body is turned to light;
I shall dream to her secret heart tonight . . . '

He rises and moves away, he says no word,
He folds his evening paper and turns away;
I rush through the dark with rows of lamplit faces;
Fire bells peal, and some of us turn to listen,
And some sit motionless in their accustomed places.

Cold rain lashes the car-roof, scurries in gusts,
Streams down the windows in waves and ripples of lustre;
The lamps in the streets are distorted and strange.
Someone takes his watch from his pocket and yawns.
One peers out in the night for the place to change.

Rain . . . rain . . . rain . . . we are buried in rain,
It will rain forever, the swift wheels hiss through water,
Pale sheets of water gleam in the windy street.
The pealing of bells is lost in a drive of rain-drops.
Remote and hurried the great bells beat.

'I am the one whom life so shrewdly betrayed,
Misfortune dogs me, it always hunted me down.
And to-day the woman I love lies dead.
I gave her roses, a ring with opals;
These hands have touched her head.

'I bound her to me in all soft ways,
I bound her to me in a net of days,
Yet now she has gone in silence and said no word.
How can we face these dazzling things, I ask you?
There is no use: we cry: and are not heard.

'They cover a body with roses . . . I shall not see it . . .
Must one return to the lifeless walls of a city
Whose soul is charred by fire? . . . '
His eyes are closed, his lips press tightly together.
Wheels hiss beneath us.  He yields us our desire.

'No, do not stare so--he is weak with grief,
He cannot face you, he turns his eyes aside;
He is confused with pain.
I suffered this.  I know.  It was long ago . . .
He closes his eyes and drowns in death again.'

The wind hurls blows at the rain-starred glistening windows,
The wind shrills down from the half-seen walls.
We flow on the mournful wind in a dream of dying;
And at last a silence falls.

She came into my life
a karmic explosion
over a pristine
midnight blue
upstate New York
lake,
its breath
damp and warm
and sweet.

Gasping,
labored efforts
expelled a preganant breath,
a prelude to
life.

Blackflies engaged in rutualistic seance.
Lethagic mosquitos emerged
from the evening's sweet mist.
But then raged into frantic spirals,
squealing out futile messages.

Timid pines,
guardians of the ancient site,
loosed their rigid stance,
Prickly spines shivered to the ground.
Anxiously, they awaited rumors
that would quell the fetal dread
that flowed through veins,
invading their bliss.

A bulky mass stirred from somnolent state
in that mud-lined basin,
releasing brown ribbons of agitation,
and inciting a ravenous hunger.

Friendly galaxies,
former guides in his dream state,
abandoned his cause,
flickering a vague adieu.

Having cradled him for so long,
the slick muddy floor now sent him flailing to and fro,
an ungainly dance,
embarassing to watch.

Where once he thrived,
he now gasped for air.

The book of moonlight is not written yet
Nor half begun, but, when it is, leave room
For Crispin, ***** in the lunar fire,
Who, in the hubbub of his pilgrimage
Through sweating changes, never could forget
That wakefulness or meditating sleep,
In which the sulky strophes willingly
Bore up, in time, the somnolent, deep songs.
Leave room, therefore, in that unwritten book
For the legendary moonlight that once burned
In Crispin's mind above a continent.
America was always north to him,
A northern west or western north, but north,
And thereby polar, polar-purple, chilled
And lank, rising and slumping from a sea
Of hardy foam, receding flatly, spread
In endless ledges, glittering, submerged
And cold in a boreal mistiness of the moon.
The spring came there in clinking pannicles
Of half-dissolving frost, the summer came,
If ever, whisked and wet, not ripening,
Before the winter's vacancy returned.
The myrtle, if the myrtle ever bloomed,
Was like a glacial pink upon the air.
The green palmettoes in crepuscular ice
Clipped frigidly blue-black meridians,
Morose chiaroscuro, gauntly drawn.

How many poems he denied himself
In his observant progress, lesser things
Than the relentless contact he desired;
How many sea-masks he ignored; what sounds
He shut out from his tempering ear; what thoughts,
Like jades affecting the sequestered bride;
And what descants, he sent to banishment!
Perhaps the Arctic moonlight really gave
The liaison, the blissful liaison,
Between himself and his environment,
Which was, and is, chief motive, first delight,
For him, and not for him alone. It seemed
Elusive, faint, more mist than moon, perverse,
Wrong as a divagation to Peking,
To him that postulated as his theme
The ******, as his theme and hymn and flight,
A passionately niggling nightingale.
Moonlight was an evasion, or, if not,
A minor meeting, facile, delicate.

Thus he conceived his voyaging to be
An up and down between two elements,
A fluctuating between sun and moon,
A sally into gold and crimson forms,
As on this voyage, out of goblinry,
And then retirement like a turning back
And sinking down to the indulgences
That in the moonlight have their habitude.
But let these backward lapses, if they would,
Grind their seductions on him, Crispin knew
It was a flourishing tropic he required
For his refreshment, an abundant zone,
Prickly and obdurate, dense, harmonious
Yet with a harmony not rarefied
Nor fined for the inhibited instruments
Of over-civil stops. And thus he tossed
Between a Carolina of old time,
A little juvenile, an ancient whim,
And the visible, circumspect presentment drawn
From what he saw across his vessel's prow.

He came. The poetic hero without palms
Or jugglery, without regalia.
And as he came he saw that it was spring,
A time abhorrent to the nihilist
Or searcher for the fecund minimum.
The moonlight fiction disappeared. The spring,
Although contending featly in its veils,
Irised in dew and early fragrancies,
Was gemmy marionette to him that sought
A sinewy nakedness. A river bore
The vessel inward. Tilting up his nose,
He inhaled the rancid rosin, burly smells
Of dampened lumber, emanations blown
From warehouse doors, the gustiness of ropes,
Decays of sacks, and all the arrant stinks
That helped him round his rude aesthetic out.
He savored rankness like a sensualist.
He marked the marshy ground around the dock,
The crawling railroad spur, the rotten fence,
Curriculum for the marvellous sophomore.
It purified. It made him see how much
Of what he saw he never saw at all.
He gripped more closely the essential prose
As being, in a world so falsified,
The one integrity for him, the one
Discovery still possible to make,
To which all poems were incident, unless
That prose should wear a poem's guise at last.

He is
My Azure Dreambird,
(The Sovereign of Songbirds)
That soars upon
Skies of Resonance.
His sapphire wings
Weightless by valor,
Hallowed every doubt
That
Cursed my shadow
Until credence reigned.

He is
The Musicality of my Soul,
That I climbed as
A stairway
Into
Gates of Aether
Upon
Porcelain keys
Of an impearled
Grand Piano.

His sound emittance
Ascended in frequency until
Pitch became subliminal
For height
ceased to be
Height,
And depth,
Ceased to be
Depth,
It was
Ineffable harmony
And resolution became effortless
With
The touch of his hand.

He is
The Wings of the Dawn,
A Sweeping Rapture
That raised
Me
Beyond the stratosphere
Until graced by
Untarnished embrace
Of the Baptistery of the Sun.

I burst
From Light’s Intemerate Womb,
Renewed and
Gazed upon Terraqueous Gaia
Then for once,
(Yes, for all eternity)
Succumbed to
Faith in the Transcendence
Of his tender affections.

Woe was existence
Before His lightwaves radiated
Within my heart,
For when I purged my pulse
Of that quaking rhythm
And
Hollow cries
Upon his ears,
He stood moved
And remained
Doughty in his devotion
To me.

In that moment
I fathomed his soul
Glistened
O, for he had not forsook me.

I bear a pilgrimage.
One sought to be
Heard,
Seen,
Felt,
Breathed,
And
Divined
By my
Once
Somnolent spirit
Been
Roused
By the incendiary thew of
His ardor.

My revenant soul
Hath emerged from
The Chrysalis of Time as
The Apotheosis of Astral Flame
(A Reverberation of the Cosmo-Plexus of Love)
That since
The Days of Time Immemorial
Guided by the
Whisper of the stars,
I now cleave
To that celestial susurrus:

To the solace buried beneath
The Soil of Afflicition
(For anguish was all I knew)
In repose
Yet yearning to be
Resurrected
In The Dream of Acquisition,
To for eternity behold
The timeless fervor
That doth layeth
In His heart

This sleep has sunk to catacombs
Where dreams are dreaming of themselves,
And where they slump to deeper shelves
A dim and voiceless banshee roams.  
Interlopers jostle memory,
And pressing on his signet ring,
Take on the seal of realer things.  
Truth’s rejected for hyperbole.  
Delusions stack in strata, drowned,
Lives never lived, in parallel,
That puzzle sleepers who can’t tell
Where waking lies, so lies confound.

then one somnolent night
she danced under the misty light
her face coated with delight
an escape from her petty plight
reassuring herself it was alright

i rolled my eyes and let out a sigh
a twitching smile i could not hide
as the feeling landed with a smite
it was easier if i just denied
falling in love with her at first sight

reposting a poem from 3 1/2 years ago, when I knew how to write
  
<>
organizing the day,
while the baby room renter in the adjacent,,
makes dreamy rock n' roll noises,
siren calls to stay~lay in bed,
tho status of semi-alert,
ready to relieve Ernie and Bert,
who have the first shift covered

soon on guard duty,
scheming about dis n' dat,
you are sleeping, dreaming,
wide awake seeing,
multitasking with eyes closed simultaneously.

lesser of a poet, more a notate-er,
list keeper, note taker,
arguing with yourself inside the head,
actually feeling the thoughts
coursing, lurking, seeing both sides now,
parentally, washing the dishes
of the hours and years ahead.

while the woman-mother
makes her soprano dreaming noises,
you laugh at the orchestra of
*******, sighing somnolent noises,
a cadenza of love dancing in your
irresistible wide awake dreams.

paying the bills, lying in the dark,
you wonder-worry about the agenda
unknown that will overgrow you,
fast creeping up the grain of your skin,
ivy on stone skin walls.

lala lala
you borrow baby's lullaby,
yourself for to calming,
keeping time, silly rhyming,
organizing the days ahead
in you head, while,
recording the harmonies of
sweet sensory inputs.

the dark provides the cloak
where you alone
feel and hear the worry
and laugh lines knitting
into a single stitch of parenting.


1/20/2013

Revel in space, yet not darkled, still
the **** and span of things that breeds
airlessness; The trees are evenly cut,
and their overgrowth seems like a forethought.
Where I am from, we eat fish with
our bare hands and our furniture, from bodies
of sandalwood, crushed with the scent of
peregrines. The morning makes you conscious
of space, and altogether the height of trees
syncopates to a nauseating stillness. In the awning
hours, leaves punctuate the ground – the cicada
with its machinistic song prowls, spills like
water from a broken vase toppled by me
years younger, raw, agile, deftly windless,
  wounded in love, lovingly wounded,
perhaps if there is a word for it, then let me
have my way, easily fraught with its meaning:
   a casualty. Sometimes the timeworn folks
would light cigarettes underneath the canopy
of a mango tree to banish ants and send them back
  to their queens – roosters in their wrinkled stations
croon in stasis, a song for the somnolent. I become
what the seasons evict. Constancy. Rearing weight
and gravity from nocturne. Tears are communal.
They make us aware of the weight of the Earth.
Somewhere, a funebre stilts through the silence,
and the jangle of little pieces spells out fortuity,
men in huddles mending pain by the sleight of hand,
a toss of a card, spinning in its imaginary axis: fate,
   feigned and fine-tuned to belief that it is controllable,
a variable, or a tabulation marred by frailty. From where
I am from, people stride through the streets naked,
soldering baskets filled with fruits gossamer from the
harvest, children suckling their mothers, the music of sweeping
metastasizes throughout the afternoon, and the same clouds
contort themselves to afford wry proposition: it is a day tender
with wonder, its allure overwrought, its sheen unremarkable.
  The funebre leaves with a necessary abundance of absence.
All the leaves depart from their mothering boughs,
  collapsing on the dreary back of the loam like penitence.
Like how once when you were young, you tinkered with
the fresh scab of your wound and felt the pain confine
  itself there, a part of you, that has now healed, but is still
      available for the world to break once again.

Your soul; all its liberation.
Amorphous,
I see it in my dreams in the form of its purity.
Crystalline.
I can never catch it
But it captures me.
My only caprice is to love and chase after it.
The feeling I feel from all your presence;
Your dulcet soul
Encompassing me,
I am enraptured, and can not let go,
You're the light
You are ethereal.
The energy you bring to me is exuberant.
Finally
I've found my felicity.
And I am free.
The way you just exist in your form ,
On your own
Incorporeal in your world.
Thanks for letting me in.
You fly and so naturally just exist,
Contentedly pleasing,
So beautifully incandescent.
In all my dreams where you are my vision,
I see you absolutely quiescent.
All your raidiance giving me what I needed.
I can't find on earth
What I find in you.
You in your power defying gravity,
In a sapphire mist, in your own portion of the world, where darkness never lives
Nor visits.
A place so serene,
That is why I only see you in my dreams.
When I am somnolent, and bound to fall down and lay silent,
Witnessing your spherical tranquility with no vestige when I awake,
You take me to my highest point when I am destined to break.
You are transcendent and truly amazing.
I love you in all your lilt sussuration.

My greatest fear is
that my mind will become languid
all these nerves that buzz and fill
will someday become a vegetable

somnolent times will set upon me
a spell from which I cannot recover
lazily and languorously I shall dwell
an intellect without vigour

too much comfort too much praise too much ease
shall push me off the cliff of complacency
and I shall fall without cognizance
a mental suicide, awareness in deep freeze

a hardened blank consciousness
that needs to be broken through
excavated from a  grave of self-righteousness
pushed beyond self-set limits
melted until the core is seen

I need to feel the pain and hurt
cry briny tears and experience grief
need to feel unsure undecided
obscure myself in anxiety
make sure the inner ocean stays unfrozen

- Vijayalakshmi Harish
        12.09.2012

Copyright © Vijayalakshmi Harish

when the world within me is loud -
constant cacophony, clanging, clashing -
I hastily throw pieces of my soul
into large, nondescript bags,
and I take a trip outside of myself
as my heart races and my legs shake.

but when the world is soft -
silent, somnolent, soothing -
I arrive home from the trip
and slowly unpack my bags.
I take deep, cleansing breaths 
as I put my soul back together.

Eager rushing sensations, waiting to escape, finding love and never finding the right words to say. Varied and wondering dreams, restless in all it’s waking threads of time. Rose gardens that house all kinds, like sunflowers for Van Gogh, humming amongst them. The mood helps providing a sense of freedom, though most never follow through. Maybe it’s only peace that I’ve always wanted. Something that isn’t found under a chestnut tree. Poetry a way beyond conversing with oneself, a self portrait for one’s eternal life, opened for viewing, it's something more than wanting street fame. Flashes of knowledge. As pearls. Self-doubt has become normal, something lingering around, it’s tiring in my engagement with it. Clouded mists, dripping over my essence, for I’m guilty for being anxious. Though there’s a-lot of men who stay heated, most of them stay bluffing underneath, hollering at the moon on the roof, passing any yearning for actual love. Because it’s something made out of lust. Now poetry spoils me, maybe it’s too much of a good thing, I’m alone in the world and it’s something I never wanted. For me, it always seems that I end up like this, a darkened world and I’m centered in it. For love, it was all bone and ashes, with poets skills, turned them into something so potent, forming beauty so we all forget about life’s natural wonders. A nightmare for the moment. Thoughts that are vivid, I’m not lost, I’m on a path that’s constructed for me. The only predestined item, in my own existence. Not reluctant. Even when you’re heading towards your fate, it’s still no obligated to provide you all that you ever craved, including the lips of a lover. It’s a sudden and unexpected shock. Sometimes laying a scent of bitterness inside. Yes, it can provide tears. Maybe I’m just impatient. Though in poetry, I take glimpse, into another’s world, another’s experience. I just don’t want to know about love. The experience of it, that's in experience love, far-more illuminating than any poem that anyone can read. It’s a certain grace, a different type of contentment, being in love, maybe a final place for personal progress to stop, rest and let go. Feeling safe in another’s arms. For if the same love is given back. Controlling the movement of the sun with each poem. Salmon sky, starlight, fireflies, providing a sense of romantic aroma, scented poems, kissing, eyes glitters in their flickering. Hands holding, insecurity fades and each lover forgets about them, fear forgotten to the point of it never existed. Love, not belonging to romance art. Violin for symphonies. Some infinities are bigger than others. Changing fates, change paths, I’m a paradox. Whenever I’m glanced at. I’m under no obligation to be the person others are. Like how life is to me. Not out spite. Not to taunt. Just be.The issue of self-awareness, giving me the knowledge to be my own person. Harping in the waltz. Solemn in my own thoughts. Private. Wanting to burst. But I render to myself on my path, dealing with daily struggles. Maybe I’m private in order to keep myself for the one I’m meant to be for. This is all just a prelude to my own enlightenment. This is only a note to a track record. Fire. I look back on times of that self-awareness, what a large lump of weary years. The wanting to live, the desire and dreams, than not having the ability to do so. Till I started the to notice the beauty of life, without knowing the beauty inside, I looked inside and saw a supplication, and produced my own courage, hollowness in others I could always understand, people's wanting to understand, to have friends, to talk, to be noticed, to be helped. To what I didn’t see, original lives, people all just fitting into conformity. Friends and family will believe always in your potential, nauseating in person duality. Always. Without fail. It’s a different story once you want to act on it. Nothing there is spontaneously. Oh frown on that life where it's easier to bleed, than it is to smile. Maybe nothing in life is predestined. And the search to have my own fate come to furitation is all any illusion, a trick to find myself. To create something holy here on earth. And it’s shocking to see how many people want you grounded. Though what do you do, when love turns to hate?For all I know, my own heart isn’t meant to be enclosed. But if you can’t create yourself, if you won’t rebel, stand up for yourself. In order to avoid scars. Beauty won’t belong to you. Not the beauty of the flesh. The kind of beauty that comes from inside.The soul is stronger than the flesh, rendering it more valuable. I’ve noticed the war between Angels and Demons.I could be all wrong. It could just be something of a self-made myth. The smart philosopher will know, the peace is known internally and the externally will never match. There’s few things more pleasurable than *** and revenge. It’s returning to a place of hardship, during success. And no one notices how much doubt affects our own lives. To apply within, to save myself from all those fears and insecurities. For I had meet someone, changing, shifting the patterns inside, I first felt illuminated for the first time. I smiled, encouraged me to stop reading, reading the lives of others, begin to live for myself. He held me hand, caused me to smile, asked me to talk, sat and listened, took an interest, asked for nothing more, than my time and presence, for what we did during that, that was up to me. Putting in time, was the only work required. Projecting ourselves beyond the mundane parts, going forth, passing poetry itself. It was like discovering Mozart’s music for the first time in humanity. We replaced the mocking chants of time’s minutes, moments or angst future to be now, with passion, love, heated exchanges of wanting to dive into one in another. And each lover can remember the first, the last and the only. It’s a brief life. To have it full of something else, like holiness. It’s another thing. Trust me, to be enticed, to be tempted, to be curious. If it’s for true love. Let it happen. It sparked the belief for me, that real love does not live in poetry, paintings, in novels or in some cosmic planet or parallel life. Our soulmates belong in our hands, to have them feel safe to be themselves. It’s funny, I had always wanted a man to come in, storming into my life, to save me. God cannot be everywhere. The most dangerous thinkers are the ones who act on love. For God made lovers, not to be everywhere, for I ended up saving my lover. Poetry only nature's the faith of love, because poems are food for love. But who has not truth in their heart, will not see the beauty of the other. To how I had lost him. It’s on account of the earthly problems. The ego is the ugliest part the human race. As for ignorance. It’s too bad no one can feel pain from it. It was love, at first sight, and everything turned into beauty. It littered this land. Staurating the poets of thoughts of grandeur. Free to be wild. Locked in the heart to be tamed and own, for me, shivering in my frame, providing aesthetic to reality. Burning the sky, dnce all crazy, eyes on fire, we got them in a trance and impending doom of death, drips and melts away. Pulling in dramatic tension towards us, melodramatic and meticulous in our love for one another, ourselves dripped and personally forgotten in the presence of the other. We had broken the fuse of life, it’s living spark, to any predestined wants of it, created our own, anywhere we went, turned to romantic pilgrimage, and finally for the first time, any flaws of life, any poverty, burden or burning want, left, as we shrugged our shoulders, smiling at one another. We have and are, fully absent of any muse that we had once, prior to meeting thee and used for earthly wants and values. Like Milton said, do not think about morals, for they the ability to think about themselves. And our souls, larger than Rome, stronger than any empire. This isn’t a result of dreams, we had lived in reality and said no-more. Because it didn’t watch the throne. What do you do when the willingness to live, turns into something of no more? We just replaced the reality of life and created our own. For the mind is in a place of its own, to what comes into fruition, tangible and touchable. I’ll wonder deeper. Awake and rise. For this isn’t to copy. Something to leave behind. Perhaps this adds charm, shade to the stillness parts of life, colour to the darkness. A feeling of perfection to anything that may of so seemingly born lifeless. And ever since I’ve been left alone, I’ve come to grips in solitude. Out of truth, until this day, I have no idea how to articulate true love, I tell myself, something so beautiful can’t be express in poetry. And if it isn’t true love. I don’t want to know. It’s allowing to continue to believe in love, remaining here under its spell and that we all have a soulmate here, waiting to be discovered. My heart will ache until I find thee. Yes, I’ve heard it’s dangerous to romanticize one’s own past, have it brew to the surface of old sensations, from the secret depths of my own soul, alluring our attention to it and placing a veil to the future, maybe why we romanticize the past, is a simple reminder that life isn’t so bad. Perhaps I’m just a foolish romantic, an expression-mirage of hope. As the thoughts of love, keep coming, I’ll continue to walk, if it’s in exile, alone, parting from everything that I had become accustomed to, let it be. But at least I don’t refuse the potential of life’s fruits and to what I can bear with my own hands.  When it’s in love, anyone can farewell to hope and fear, for the very last time. In heartbreak moments, its singing of torment and personal chaos, collapsing of my private world. To which I deemed valuable on any night meant for you and I to share love. **** and full of fashion. Of how much pain the heart can stand, imagine the experience of tightening strings to crack like glass to the point of no-return. Miserable in the infinity. Just to devour anything worthy of oneself. Huddling together with the darkness and whisper between ourselves. Than by force, burden humanity. And a good poem is the blood for any romantic, but it’s forgotten when love is currently being enjoyed. To the unbearable doubt, I’ll not fall victim to, poetic, I’m fraile inside, like we all are. They’ll be no heros if our inner-worlds weren’t such soft touches of complete tenderness. Mingling glories. Kiss me now. I’ll smile for you than. What is it mean that someone is clingy? Perhaps there is nothing for them. Maybe they had just saw for what I’m worth and saw nothing but beauty. For that, there is nothing else for them, besides to infuse romance. Just wanting to leave me breathless. Tenor for rose beds, shepherd to anything the world made of beautiful, touch it, it will multiple. The breath of life. Hollering at moon on the roof. For the reminds me, of what he thought of me, when he first saw me. But I always answer in response, ‘what about now’. Lowering his head, resting on his arm, hiding his smiling. To which reminds me, it’s always getting better. Like the revolving poems. In spontaneous overflow of something we can’t control. What is the paramount goal between lovers? To self discover? To know another? Be poetic in one’s actions? Oh musing poetry, how can we know how to love thee? How to live? How to write poetry for thee? Now I see the value of peering into the arts made from any romantic period. But what does it mean to pass those poems by? Losing all value of life. It's just passing moments, threading together, stuck to the forefront of my mind, I’m unable to forget. So I lose sense of time and daily obligation. Smoking magic. Spellbound. I’m fully alive and aware now. Constant. There is no change. I’m unable to forget. Though let me breathe in that breathe, an intoxicating perfume. Extravagance. Blunt in twilight. Pierce through obscurity. Temptation to praises. Holding lovers hand under sunlight and moonlight. Pitchy. Eyes convicted of seeing the endgame of beauty, never to look away. Containing fairy tales in dreams, the ability to stain the earth with it. Got to be carefully not to let the evil of this life and earth trap thy. And all I wanted to say to my lover, before I told him, that his voice is my favourite sound, is to say simple words like I love you. So when you see me, our dreams will flicker like the stars of the night, never to fade and when the sun rises, the golden dawn between us, will expand the sun’s glory. In clarity of mixed feelings, we had lived dormant and a calm temperament, contempt to achieve earthly success, to which our heart could never be satisfy with. Drowning in oceans of filling hearts by love, produced by one another. When you’re in love, the world is yours and it spins around. But when one’s heartbreaks, nothing but numbness and you’re alone. Late night, bright lights, lust and lies, everyone with their hands out, no one is giving, but I cannot blame people for trying to get what they can. Loving seeing your lovers smile. Anything goes under this shared sky, who knows what you’ll find. I’m just distilled in poetry. Needing one single kiss and I’ll open my arms, present myself so proudly. As for the naturally wonder, they’ll blink, display itself for everyone, jealous as we walk away. But when your heat breaks, everything is gone and nothing ever seems to matter, plucked into forever. And all wanted, nothing within poetry, is to love. Can one ever get blamed for that? It’s as natural as being born and to die. To my doubt, that no matter how I live, do not engage with me, on how I’m supposed to be. Cello symphonies, tenors. Can I survive a misspirit? Oh for what I’m I really waiting for? For when you open your heart, look how they try to play me, write a couple a poems, now they wave at me. I’ve had my heartbroken, to lovers smiles. From a romantic in desituition, to someone's love. Experience in musings. And to every step I take. Just want to tread over romance and transition into poetry. Smile for me now. From a trembling throb, shaking hands, strengthening of heart, it’s enough for me to know that I exist, not to be contained in any single moment. Do we really know life? I just want love. For poetry, I’m happy to hand out freely. To be beautiful, it’s when one glares at you, to be valued, is for when one knows you. For that, lover? Maybe? Otherwise, it’s not the purpose of existence to be either beatiful or valued for the outside. To which, I can easily do either. A free woman in this unfree world, would be a woman dreams never dared to speak to. A daughter of muses. Dreaming about the romance world. My mind goes boom! For me in the world of romance. To doubt should be a sin. Not to be brave enough to follow through, a sin. Refusing faith that we’re all meant to be for another as a soulmate. A unique miracle for another’s life. For a romantic, a day without love is like no salt on the road for the saint. Ever since adolescence, calling out for my soulmate, until he returns, it’s all eyes on me. I desire, so therefore, I exist in something of an aura, taking in this world’s pressure, without a sound, I slide, I’m unbreakable. It’s not that I can’t make it on my own. I’ve tasted love and earth or this life, cannot provide and other contentment, melting over in illumination. It’s incarnate and inherent. I’ve measured my own worth and dream of someone better. And if they’re less, better go to work to match my eyes. Stars on our door, stars in our eyes, stars exploding in the bits of our brains were the common sense should have been, where anticipation of love making sessions isn’t our greatest pleasures. Unstained by fulfillment for what we can do for each other. When I was younger, my hunger was to let loose in exile, catch me if you can, I giggle at those more vulnerable and impression years. Demand in the present, higher status in the future. Narration of poetry in soft whispers. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world. As for me. I created a love no other human can ever attain, so I’ve replaced every muse that had ever existed. No longer to question my own existence. The lover yet not conceptualize in my hands, is just another unexplored land of flesh and character. Waking each day, a little more, living, movements under the eyes, flicker of light. I gasp and breathe in. Somnolent gestures, it’s a little more urgent and intense, somethings different. More raw and upfront. I’ve loathed and now no more. Piano keys pressed. Heat rises, rains felt colder. Die another day. I huffed and puffed. I came to grips for the life I had live. Parted from it. Moving fingers to wave goodbye. I smiled. For love is funny. It’s comes out of nowhere, at the silliest times, from the most random people, like a fluke. Flutes and melody, along piano keys. Love, hitting me hard, never to leave. Asking in cliches, ‘where have you been my whole life?’ Finally, without effort, a man to understand, even from the smallest glimpses of glance, a single touch, a soft spoken word. Loving each other, not knowing how, but we do. In balance, obliges his self-care, never to allow me to struggle in my own wants of life. Understanding in instant flutters of fury and still yearning for more.  And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur. I see him as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire. Filling out my meaning in his living action. To each look, it’s like the first time, in the last few moments, glancing at me, like it his final outlook on life. Our love, devoted to life, but we couldn’t accept life and it’s demands, so, we devoted ourselves, to one another, and it wasn't enough, so, we committed ourselves to holy love and rose above anything that had once been considered as limitations. Dripped off the sides, in alluring colours to the cosmos, left, in supernova fashions and drifted into mythological fame. As we should. Love hits hard, it hits fast and in unexpected times from the most unexpected people. Most of all, it was horrifying at first, made only for the brave, for those who have never tasted love. It’s like, seeing eternity, mastering it and got all the time in forever to stand and glare out to the immense sky. Careful in one’s manner, so no one will notice, eyes opened wide, never to shut, like if I have found creation more than I could explain. The sting of a poem. Why so often my thoughts flustered. Once went everywhere, unrecognised. Time slows. Instead of a mocking face. I regretted nothing in past loves. I am happy that I had an effort. Are the ones too concerned with these earthly concerns. I doubt would ever be themselves, let alone be in love. Don’t ****** me. Now it’s time to be a ghost. For the devil greatest magic, to have the faith that he doesn’t exist. Filtered through my demonic mouth, this is the end and I know how cultures die. This beautiful sigh. A firefly kingdom. Will it be like this, when I cross over to another place? Grief at lost love, when I’m capable of loving now. I’m the romantic, leaning against poetry, filled with love, whisper it’s tone with meaning. Wet summer in low times. Lover without love. Paralysed at my core. Those who glimpsed inside, know of senseless violence. Eyes that not dare no more to meet mine. Pendlum swinging, more selmn than the sfiting emotions. Do not come close to me. Deliberate gestures in the dark. Behaving like the gloom of failure. I know how the world ends. Artists, raise images as homage to death. Is it like this, on the other side, trembling with sobs. No prays to be heard. Valley of dead bodies, steaming ash, sizzling skin to bones. They never talk. Lifeless. Spasm in Zion. rapture over earth, screams from the religious, who pledged their lives to their dogma, slapped in the face. Shadows. Life is short. Between the desire and the action, I’m there, existing. I’m the essence of your desires. I’m breeding new kingdoms. Whimper in public, no-one will hear. For Zion has forgotten you. For I know how the world ends.  
(knowledge variable)

After Epiphany 1

Epiphany is the door into winter
Into those bleak, grey days, into the cold
When time itself is huddled in the dark
Asleep, suspended in the drifting mist

In clouds of icy mist among the trees
Above the somnolent, shivering earth
The brief, pale sun in silence disappears
The moon in silence rises high to watch  

Over a world asleep until far spring
Epiphany is the door into winter

In the morning, I gather my thoughts of yesterday
Like the foraging chipmunk, collecting acorns
And stuffing them miserly in my jowls
The past is sustenance for a somnolent soul

As age condemns my faculties
I pull, from my once copious jowl
A jewel of sorts
A garnet set in fool’s gold

My memory is manufactured
Assembled and disassembled
No longer what was or is or will be
But was and is and never has been

I confine my thoughts to winter
Where barren fields and sterile trees
Offer less to recollect
And empty my jaws of these useless reminiscences

They had *** everywhere.

In the car,
Parked at Costco,
She teased him,
Bra-less under an unbuttoned shirt,
Her agile hand coated with a thin primer of Vaseline,
She stroked him slowly, precisely with a twist,
As somnolent sad faced suburban Sherpa,
Their neighbours and fellow citizens,
Hauled their apocalypse supplies  
Across pristine acres of fresh asphalt,
Doped by fear,
Trapped inside the pixels of an infinite routine,
Unaware and
Unable to imagine life as a movie.

Out on the highway, as he drove,
She pulled up her skirt
And pulled down her tube top
Trucker’s horns roared their musical approval,
The benefits of a long haul driver were scant and skimpy,
Her ***** alive and anonymous,
Guilt free and aroused.

They ****** in washrooms,
Molested each other on escalators,
Texted friends while they copulated half clothed,
Shared their pride with angels dressed as ******,
And counted their ******* like winnings at a casino,
Excited by the number and the game,
Their brains hot-wired,
Life a blur of alternating currents of sensation.

Death is constant state of ******, he told her,
When we leave this organic realm,
When we have finally turned the oceans into pudding,
And caged all of life,
When it is over,
We will enter into a cosmic stream of pleasure.
This is why the universe is expanding, he told her,
Pleasure is a colossal force,
The big bang was God’s ****** after all,
Her consequence the stars, the galaxies,
The dark palette of her entropy.

He was ******* her on a balcony while watching the moon
And waving to the woman with binoculars
When she asked,
Why is it so difficult,
Why do so many ignite pain and cant despair,
How did the curl and cling of hate
Take such deep root, she asked.

We fear death too well, he said,
And
Within the quick boundary of this moment
As they searched their waft and scent for clues,
They heard a whisper.
Inside the swell,
On top of a crest of acid clear thought
And without regret,
They forgave destiny,
Only to fly to the ground and beyond.

Our moments collect in concentric rings about the nexus
Of a first embrace, adorned with Autumnal colors and scents -
We lovers blend, cupped gently below the stir of flecks and dapple.
Each leaf high up quivers in the bouquets and knows when to let go,
Fly and fall to earth.

Whispers from a rustling canopy climb down the bark encasements
Of these tall and somnolent trees, thirsty leaves that clatter and kiss,
Wink awake – brilliant – hold our gaze and suspend our hearts.
In a pirouette amidst the amity of recollection and premonition -
We shimmer in an iridescence of saffron on copper – remember this.

Moments light up, each one, for just an instant, the last of our lives;
Each conveniently the beginning of forever and forever smiles at us.
Rippling across the cycles of solstice and equinox, we radiate –
A nostalgic procession toward unmade memories, like tree rings.
We fly and fall in love.

In Africa the lissome eucalyptus leaves
Sharply ovoid, a washed celadon,
Turn their silvery backs, yield, bend with
The promise of on-coming rain.
You taught me this
Sign, this tree-voiced prediction, long ago, among
The tenderly sloping, densely viridian hills
And heavy, somnolent, rolling fogs of Iowa.
And so, I turn my back. I yield, oh, how I yield.
But, you didn’t foresee, didn’t know
How, much later, my heart would
Flake and flay
How great sheets of myself
Would peel, would fold
Would slough off just like
The bark, the back of those massive whitened eucalyptus trunks, you
Didn’t, couldn’t foretell how this long union
Scars, clings, sinks so deep, tattoos itself so that eucalyptus-like, despite
Repeated rain lashings, leaf bowings, droopings and sun decimated leavings
My heart, my soul sheds, molts, reforms, renews itself and just as those
Sharpened leaves arch and curve and arc and sway
So I bend, I turn, I give in, I give in
To the chafing wind, to the scouring hurt, to
The on-coming African
Rain.

I am addicted to your velvet fatigue
Hypnotize me with your somnolent eyes
Leave me with nothing but intrigue
I swear I could move a mountain in my sleep
In our liquid mercury dream is where we shall always meet

Polaris guides our hearts tonight
In a silent conspiracy
A plight we might never see
As fate would make it be
Again I’m falling asleep beneath your sheets
A dream so warm and so complete

Let there be no boundaries
No barriers to mark where one ends and the other begins
Let’s move as one shape in the shadows
And invite the darkness to come in

Your landscapes compete with those of Eden
I must be lying beside a god veiled as a man
I want nothing more but to taste you
Never let the night waste you
The once forbidden fruit that is now mine
You’ve opened your heart’s doors so wide
And I can’t wait to get inside

The hands of the clock strike the darkest hour
I feel the pleasure of being held within your power
And just as you protect me
The moon hangs vigilant in the sky
Your gentle whispers are a lullaby
And I wish the sun would never rise

Let there be no boundaries
No barriers to mark where one ends and the other begins
Let’s move as one shape in the shadows
And invite the darkness to come in

I’m addicted to your velvet fatigue
And Polaris guides our hands tonight
Hold me beneath your dark sheets
And lead the way to eternity

Hopes we take into our sleep
Become the seeds of dreams to come;
Fears then, roots of nightmares.
Stir our hearts awake,
If you must
Wind gypsies crooning quixotic notes
Dappled like leopard in dandelion dust
Caught in the clatter of castanets
If poems were sheep, this one would be black
That one is black,
And that one is black.
Pupils leaping into pathos,
Without a splash,
That one is black, that one is black.
Somnolence, when ripples lull
Where all lambs go, when somnolent,
When somnolent.

i am a survivor, i am a scavenger, i am a man with
no shame. i am an artist, i am a writer, i am an
iconoclast. i am a lover, i am a creator, i am a
destroyer. i am quality, i am worthless, i am absence.
i am man, i am conqueror, i am world-ender. i am an
addict, i am old, i am wizened. i am free, i am
young, i am unnurtured. i am secret, i am becoming,
i am a wreck. i am a shadow, i am oblivious, i am
obvious. i am obscene, i am abhorrent, i am hidden. i
am a seeker, i abstain – i am a liar. i am a deceiver, i am
an actor, i am unknowable. i am entirety, i am
citizen, i am insolence. i am thought, i am concept, i
am revoked. i am wanderer, i am thoughtless, i am
lost. i am undying, i am inured, i am fleeting. i am
alive, i am mythologized, i am end. i am a thief, i am
a monster, i am alive. i am a philosopher, i am a
thinker, i am superfluous. i am good, i am evil, i am
unaligned. i am pragmastic, i am irrational, i am
common sanity. i am emotional, i am withheld, i am
interred. i am new, i am ruined, i am interregna. i am
proper, i am erased, i am discrection. i am sought, i
am not, i am simple. i am somnolent, i am erratic, i
am errancy. i am abstinence, i am uncontrolled, i am
the world. i am fraught, i am emptiness, i am
humanity. i am dandelion, i am magnolia, i am an
albatross. i am talent, i am intelligence, i am
fettered.    i am here and now, i am then and when,
                     i am done.
i am malice, i am harm, i am self-destruction.
i am a fighter, i am encephalic, i am lost.
i am alone, i am alive, i am free.

Stars scintillates in the sky
in this somnolent night
while i muse upon my plight
with bated breath, i sigh

There's no sign of gaiety
only a flamboyant sadness
in a state of anxiety
that's difficult to suppress

My eyes becomes misty
with tears that fall like rain
Trying hard to refuse self pity
in order to cope up with this pain

I can no longer paint a smile
and my eyes fails to shine
My heart cease to throb for a while
'cos you're now no longer mine

Tears dripping from my eyes
Swelled with too much bitterness
Here, my tormented heart lies
As i wandered in gaping loneliness..

think  I  shall  be springtime; such   clumsy
scent  of  the world   collapsing  not  with  nets
but   hands  not upon  trellis  but    bodies –
    sleep    shall   carry   us  to  inches
of  terrible  speech    such somnolent world senses
    quietness   in  the  rivers   of   our blood;
how  murmurously  veritable    moment
     leaps   forth  ripe  in the   air   of such  splendidness
when  it   was not   mountains
    but    your   *******   deep within   the    Earth of  me
and I  rain    cleaving  the   scent   of   the world
    into   two   separateness   until   the
enormously     ****   moon   plunges    within;
   I    shall   be   a   tree
and you, a rose    or   springtide, or   everything
   that
            blooms,    withers,
dances – new  beginnings;

gather up the things you lust to love
and become the world's loneliest human
just for a night
in a room with blue lights
where so many others have once slept
as simple cloud sheep
when the eyelashes filled themselves with hypnagogia
late late late at night
ad slowly poured (and poured, and poured)
somnolent paint onto the walls
which fainted and licked the floors
rabbit and ft

I watch the loping invalids in the courtyard
nil by nil by nil feet
How to describe a sensation such as heat
to them? The interminable sun and so on
I wonder if they understand that
Light itself is not heat

whereupon the bell sounds
their minds divide and fog in the somnolent air

I look at a Dupuytren in the room
Cord around the chair
His clothes hanging off him
Trying to move his remarkable shock of hair
From his eyes

My room looks out beyond the yard
It is high up - precarious
Through that picturewindow, the world without
is framed, beyond the walls the oldtown
spires and roofing
I see my own sadness, my impotence
In every inch of the heights

the girls come back, propping black bikes against
the gate;
my legs are wrapped in a blanket
and I feel nothing below my waist

Through a system of cables and consent
my companion molls in Bergonic poise
each day the room behind his eyes receded, the heart
lessening
the birds gathered around the bathroom doors to be fed

He read about Escher in bed
waiting to be plugged
unbeknownst rigours of treatment, and
unbeknownst methods
until he forgot those days in Margate
the sound of his nieces
and everything he read about Escher –


the light makes dull
the precision of the thorn

It is noontime, Senlin says, and a street piano
Strikes sharply against the sunshine a harsh chord,
And the universe is suddenly agitated,
And pain to my heart goes glittering like a sword.
Do I imagine it? The dust is shaken,
The sunlight quivers, the brittle oak-leaves tremble.
The world, disturbed, conceals its agitation;
And I, too, will dissemble.
Yet it is sorrow has found my heart,
Sorrow for beauty, sorrow for death;
And pain twirls slowly among the trees.
The street-piano revolves its glittering music,
The sharp notes flash and dazzle and turn,
Memory's knives are in this sunlit silence,
They ripple and lazily burn.
The star on which my shadow falls is frightened,--
It does not move; my trowel taps a stone,
The sweet note wavers amid derisive music;
And I, in horror of sunlight, stand alone.
Do not recall my weakness, savage music!
Let the knives rest!
Impersonal, harsh, the music revolves and glitters,
And the notes like poniards pierce my breast.
And I remember the shadows of webs on stones,
And the sound or rain on withered grass,
And a sorrowful face that looked without illusions
At its image in the glass.
Do not recall my childhood, pitiless music!
The green blades flicker and gleam,
The red bee bends the clover, deeply humming;
In the blue sea above me lazily stream
Cloud upon thin-brown cloud, revolving, scattering;
The mulberry tree rakes heaven and drops its fruit;
Amazing sunlight sings in the opened vault
On dust and bones, and I am mute.
It is noon; the bells let fall soft flowers of sound.
They turn on the air, they shrink in the flare of noon.
It is night; and I lie alone, and watch through the window
The terrible ice-white emptiness of the moon.
Small bells, far off, spill jewels of sound like rain,
A long wind hurries them whirled and far,
A cloud creeps over the moon, my bed is darkened,
I hold my breath and watch a star.
Do not disturb my memories, heartless music!
I stand once more by a vine-dark moonlit wall,
The sound of my footsteps dies in a void of moonlight,
And I watch white jasmine fall.
Is it my heart that falls? Does earth itself
Drift, a white petal, down the sky?
One bell-note goes to the stars in the blue-white silence,
Solitary and mournful, a somnolent cry.

Soft somnolent skies have ceased seething, for day’s nearly through,  
while winds echo whispering thoughts of returning to you
and heavens throb, pulsing and bleeding in crimsons, once blue -
their passions, like flames, fill my veins as you pass into view.
The breeze holds her breath as you touch, then embrace me anew
and smoldering clouds withdraw, blushing, then paling their hue.

The twilight is painted with wandering dreams of your charms,
so close your eyes slowly and slip into sleep in my arms.

The pendulous moon appears, sweeping the fog from up high
distilling the drops into notes of a hushed lullaby,
their quavering tunes spinning tales which amaze, mystify,
while tremulous stars fling a fire that fevers the skies,
for stories they tell reflect love as revealed by your sighs -
their fury is burning, alive in the depths of your eyes.

The twilight is painted with wandering dreams of your charms,
so close your eyes slowly and slip into sleep in my arms.

The shifting shore’s moaning, seduced by tempestuous tides
which flow with the rhythm of flesh as our senses collide,
and quiet explodes as the stillness of night’s amplified.
A lingering kiss bids adieu till the morning breaks wide
when cockerels come conjuring dawn with voluptuous pride
enticing the sun into banishing night, starry-eyed.

The twilight is painted with wandering dreams of your charms,
so close your eyes slowly and slip into sleep in my arms.

The round red sun heaves darkly out of the sea.
The walls and towers are warmed and gleam.
Sounds go drowsily up from streets and wharves.
The city stirs like one that is half in dream.

And the mist flows up by dazzling walls and windows,
Where one by one we wake and rise.
We gaze at the pale grey lustrous sea a moment,
We rub the darkness from our eyes,

And face our thousand devious secret mornings . . .
And do not see how the pale mist, slowly ascending,
Shaped by the sun, shines like a white-robed dreamer
Compassionate over our towers bending.

There, like one who gazes into a crystal,
He broods upon our city with sombre eyes;
He sees our secret fears vaguely unfolding,
Sees cloudy symbols shape to rise.

Each gleaming point of light is like a seed
Dilating swiftly to coiling fires.
Each cloud becomes a rapidly dimming face,
Each hurrying face records its strange desires.

We descend our separate stairs toward the day,
Merge in the somnolent mass that fills the street,
Lift our eyes to the soft blue space of sky,
And walk by the well-known walls with accustomed feet.

She was accused of
Many unstable unsatisfactory emotions
All of which amalgamated her hurricane soul
That so breathlessly changed pace
With every maleficent or peaceful encounter
That fed the storm of her pith
A hollow quintessential girl
Hidden beneath eyes of tragic twinkle and
An amorphous disposition
That so whispered her visceral uncertainty
With which
She placed her demons in plethora
Upon all who obstreperously disturbed
The susurration of her own self-cataclysm
This decrepit distorted typhoon
Of the thundering lullaby she once embraced
Dissatisfied with the resonant rhapsodic scintilla
She so carelessly went from sonorous to somnolent
Once her nature echoed a sanguineous symphony
Of intimate honesty’s to now
Only as discreetly murmur callous contempt
Until this once magnificent hurricane soul
Did crumble like the walls her efficacy once
Tore down to whimper into the dust that is
Now her soul’s riven zephyr.

The Eidolon

She awaits the dawn of love in an ambiguous form; a crystal eye for the mind’s eye.

The apparition of untold beauty has transported her soul to the vanishing realm without her Mother’s knowledge.

She is the daughter of the Earth who has been lain to sleep; somnolent for eternity and ethereal in luminosity.

The wings of phoenix have revived a hollow corpse; she no longer lies down but had broken free of binding soil.

The Universe greets her eyes as she lie on the pavement to eternity…

Where are you?

I see now…

The world is swirling around my fingertips; iridescent cosmic glitter has been laid on my fingertips; ethereality and incorporeality run amuck in this realm.

Where have I gone?

Have I not awakened to the light of Mother Nature’s womb?

Is this not the cascading waterfall cavern with luxuriant blossoms along a baptismal and pristine lake?

The rainbow surge had arisen from the horizon, a cosmic crescent of spectral means.

My body; a vessel unseen; fiery silhouettes of a revitalizing eagle.

Scorching heat blazes across the bare soil and she knows then and there that her soul hath been lain, slain, desolated, discombobulated.

A lurid vision of a gory demise; my annihilation that now has passed.

I see now evermore…

My crystal eye, a prognosticator has revealed to me the ghastly truth.

I am merely an elimination, a casualty from an unknown world known as…

cannot remember

“Is it home?”

By Sanders M. Foulke III