"Bring me the sunflower so I can transplant it
to my earth scorched with salt,
so it can display all day to the azure mirrors
of sky the anxiety of its yellow face.

Dark things stretch towards brightness,
bodies exhaust themselves in a flow
of colours: this in music. To vanish
is thus the hazard of venturing.

Bring me the plant that leads
where blond transparencies rise
where life dissolves like essence;
bring me the sunflower crazy with light."

*Eugenio Montale

What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful?
It is shimmering, has it *******, has it edges?

I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is what I want.
When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking

'Is this the one I am too appear for,
Is this the elect one, the one with black eye-pits and a scar?

Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus,
Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules.

Is this the one for the annunciation?
My god, what a laugh!'

But it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me.
I would not mind if it were bones, or a pearl button.

I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year.
After all I am alive only by accident.

I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way.
Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains,

The diaphanous satins of a January window
White as babies' bedding and glittering with dead breath. O ivory!

It must be a tusk there, a ghost column.
Can you not see I do not mind what it is.

Can you not give it to me?
Do not be ashamed--I do not mind if it is small.

Do not be mean, I am ready for enormity.
Let us sit down to it, one on either side, admiring the gleam,

The glaze, the mirrory variety of it.
Let us eat our last supper at it, like a hospital plate.

I know why you will not give it to me,
You are terrified

The world will go up in a shriek, and your head with it,
Bossed, brazen, an antique shield,

A marvel to your great-grandchildren.
Do not be afraid, it is not so.

I will only take it and go aside quietly.
You will not even hear me opening it, no paper crackle,

No falling ribbons, no scream at the end.
I do not think you credit me with this discretion.

If you only knew how the veils were killing my days.
To you they are only transparencies, clear air.

But my god, the clouds are like cotton.
Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide.

Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in,
Filling my veins with invisibles, with the million

Probable motes that tick the years off my life.
You are silver-suited for the occasion. O adding machine-----

Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole?
Must you stamp each piece purple,

Must you **** what you can?
There is one thing I want today, and only you can give it to me.

It stands at my window, big as the sky.
It breathes from my sheets, the cold dead center

Where split lives congeal and stiffen to history.
Let it not come by the mail, finger by finger.

Let it not come by word of mouth, I should be sixty
By the time the whole of it was delivered, and to numb to use it.

Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil.
If it were death

I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes.
I would know you were serious.

There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday.
And the knife not carve, but enter

Pure and clean as the cry of a baby,
And the universe slide from my side.

did it work?
I give a useless tug on my skin, done to reassure me
instead it reaffirms to me:

I am, again, inconsolable.

is the mask I wear today sealed on tight? too tight?
does it hurt to pretend so much?

does it seem clear to anyone else that there are loose ends I've yet to tend to? backdoors I've overlooked?
transparencies?    can they see through me?

I bare my teeth. canines, canines from the days of carnivores.
am I that carnivore? in my genes I am.

and in practice?

inconsolable, uncontrollable
barely a threat in her form.

this question comes to me under many guises:
an old man asking me: are you that of practice or are you that of genes?
a professor lecturing: are you that of cultivated identity or that of inherited form?

my concerned friends crying:
who are you?
is your mask anything like you?

and then i wake.
it's a terror turned nightly chorus.
recurring nightmares, doctors offer.

i admit i know the content of my dreams to be unfounded:
in life there are no physical masks that do the jobs my terrors depict.
no veil to hide the contours of each flawed personality, no mask to others, just me, weeping-in-the-bathroom, never-myself me

and those attempted favours to be like one another
i'll be like you so you'll like me
i'll like you because i'm like you

so the body charges on in this society like a mirror
cross your left leg when she crosses her right, fold your arms when she's folded hers, raise your hand to say hello, raise your hand to say goodbye

a kiss on the right cheek, a kiss on the left, one more on the left
this is how you show love and a greeting all at once

fold your arms over each other, this is sympathy, this is greeting, do you take comfort in this too?

so you learn to speak with your arms, and you learn to speak with your legs, and you learn to speak with your face, and you learn to speak with your head.

soon your eyes are apprentices of acquaintances, learning to borrow looks like library books, take on others' stories like they've read them end to end.

so in the middle of this process you learn to effectively say:
i see you, i hear you, i perceive you.

and in these attempted favours, at the end of your night terrors, is the parrot that they want to see. the parrot that you argue, can't really be me.

You!
Hey.
Good-day.
I presume.
Pessimistic flu.
Hypocritical to annoy.
The poor man's Rolls Royce
-is the pessimists one good choice.

They live with fragility,
-unwilling rigidity,
-and rarely tranquility.

Some weep at morbid memories,
-others at faithless fantasies,
-do they (or you?) see the precipices
-between the then, now and will be?

So what if you take a blue bruising back-slap
-for your lacking, a juicy reminding
-for regretful whining, lifetime timing,
-miraculous hopes of a future shining
-because you're wasting your time
-and not even minding!

So listen, or in duller cases, read;
-thoughts are naught but mares and dreams,
-man made mind transparencies
-will's the sum of immediacies
-like waiting in your station
-but you're deciding the destination
-your journey fundamentally what you make it
-it's simple but pessimists are complicated
-would you not trade freedom for a life you hated?

Pessimistic man, forget it
Ranting is silly - you just don't get it
You didn't see the golden beauty I bet it
Gold is copper to you anyway
What would Fibonacci say!

In these times of indecision,
we are thrown into delicate plans
and intricate decisions
about the cracked peppers
in kitchens alongside
peppermint flavoured chocolates,
and I wonder,

though you are stabbed in the neck
with stories of existential writers,
I hope you come out of it all,
with an air of desperation,
or an inclination towards revolution.

Then again, I do not see this
red orange feather dancing
through the sun strokes between the trees
for no purpose other than the momentary
grasp towards these possibilities

So I now imagine,
is it here again in no time
to doubt these transparencies?
Would it see through this
chaotic night without prejudice?

though still tamely, timid feathers dance with flowers
and nowhere is nothing so calm ,
elusive, -

i want to stand like a boy on a rock,
in the middle of rushing water;
unafraid of snakes;
and holes and the unexpected whale.
shouting, "Here, look at me now."

diving down
into brackish transparencies;
chasing bubbles
and rippled light,
and all the while wading out
to a smooth dead tree,
that stood long before you,
or me,
or this hushed river,

d
  r
    i
     p
       p
         i
          n
            g

                 off
                        
                        of this lonely
                                                   sphere.

His form a shadowy sketch, thin and gaunt
Leaning up against a wall.
At the right place, at the right time – as always,
A touch fancy, a bit dressed up
Ready to take on the world;
armed with the freedom to fail.

His occupation?
The consuming of miles of white paper,
His inspiration provided by
A lonely view off of Devil’s Highway
Where Pico blvd. meets the sea.

Seeking the inner root of expression
Through tall red wine bottles and nightly wanderings
In places beautiful yet dangerous,
Packed with life’s complex geometry
– the city breathes, the streets are alive.

Visualizing in delicate penciled lines and thick brush strokes
Vibration, sound and light manifest in brilliant colors,
Depth, shadow, color / the void – all merging together.
Pushing abstract boundaries;
Inter-dimensional windows
Through the intricate layering of transparencies.

Experience of self-discovery.
No mistakes, no traps, just childlike experiments.
Experiments and initiations;
A fusion of universal laws and ethereal dreams.
Kinetic value, composition,
Balance.

Creations – sealed in time like amber.

there is a storm in the glass of water you leave on your bedside table
it rises and falls within the walls of transparency as we rise and fall within the walls of your transparencies
every wave is clear and the rush of your voice radiates over the azure sea
I am the storm, reflecting my clouds down onto your crystal surface
Rolling tumultuously over the still
Our eyes meet in the heart of the sea
My thunder crashes into your tidal
and the glass of water you leave on your bedside table crashes to the floor
sunlight shatters the overcast and washes the room in a rainbow of transparencies
we breathe salt and fall asleep on the beach


c.d.

willow of crystal, a poplar of water,
a pillar of fountain by the wind drawn over,
tree that is firmly rooted and that dances,
turning course of a river that goes curving,
advances and retreats, goes roundabout,
arriving forever:
                     the calm course of a star
or the spring, appearing without urgency,
water behind a stillness of closed eyelids
flowing all night and pouring out prophecies,
a single presence in the procession of waves
wave over wave until all is overlapped,
in a green sovereignty without decline
a bright hallucination of many wings
when they all open at the height of the sky,

course of a journey among the densities
of the days of the future and the fateful
brilliance of misery shining like a bird
that petrifies the forest with its singing
and the annunciations of happiness
among the branches which go disappearing,
hours of light even now pecked away by the birds,
omens which even now fly out of my hand,

an actual presence like a burst of singing,
like the song of the wind in a burning building,
a long look holding the whole world suspended,
the world with all its seas and all its mountains,
body of light as it is filtered through agate,
the thighs of light, the belly of light, the bays,
the solar rock and the cloud-colored body,
color of day that goes racing and leaping,
the hour glitters and assumes its body,
now the world stands, visible through your body,
and is transparent through your transparency,

I go a journey in galleries of sound,
I flow among the resonant presences
going, a blind man passing transparencies,
one mirror cancels me, I rise from another,
forest whose trees are the pillars of magic,
under the arches of light I go among
the corridors of a dissolving autumn,

I go among your body as among the world,
your belly the sunlit center of the city,
your ******* two churches where are celebrated
the great parallel mysteries of the blood,
the looks of my eyes cover you like ivy,
you are a city by the sea assaulted,
you are a rampart by the light divided
into two halves, distinct, color of peaches,
and you are saltiness, you are rocks and birds
beneath the edict of concentrated noon

and dressed in the coloring of my desires
you go as naked as my thoughts go naked,
I go among your eyes as I swim water,
the tigers come to these eyes to drink their dreams,
the hummingbird is burning among these flames,
I go upon your forehead as on the moon,
like cloud I go among your imagining
journey your belly as I journey your dream,

your ***** are harvest, a field of waves and singing,
your ***** are crystal and your ***** are water,
your lips, your hair, the looks you give me, they
all night shower down like rain, and all day long
you open up my breast with your fingers of water,
you close my eyelids with your mouth of water,
raining upon my bones, and in my breast
the roots of water drive deep a liquid tree,

I travel through your waist as through a river,
I voyage your body as through a grove going,
as by a footpath going up a mountain
and suddenly coming upon a steep ravine
I go the straitened way of your keen thoughts
break through to daylight upon your white forehead
and there my spirit flings itself down, is shattered
now I collect my fragments one by one
and go on, bodiless, searching, in the dark....

you take on the likeness of a tree, a cloud,
you are all birds and now you are a star,
now you resemble the sharp edge of a sword
and now the executioner's bowl of blood,
the encroaching ivy that over grows and then
roots out the soul and divides it from itself,

writing of fire on the slab of jade,
the cleft in the rock, serpent-goddess and queen,
pillar of cloud, and fountain struck from the stone,
the nest of eagles, the circle of the moon,
the seed of anise, mortal and smallest thorn
that has the power to give immortal pain,
shepherd of valleys underneath the sea
and guardian of the valley of the dead,
liana that hangs at the pitch of vertigo,
climber and bindweed and the venomous plant,
flower of resurrection and grape of life,
lady of the flute and of the lightning-flash,
terrace of jasmine, and salt rubbed in the wound,
a branch of roses for the man shot down,
snowstorm in August, moon of the harrowing,
the writing of the sea cut in basalt,
the writing of the wind upon the desert,
testament of the sun, pomegranate, wheat-ear....

                         life and death
are reconciled in thee, lady of midnight,
tower of clarity, empress of daybreak,
moon ******, mother of all mother liquids,
body and flesh of the world, the house of death,
I have been endlessly falling since my birth,
I fall in my own self, never touch my depth,
gather me in your eyes, at last bring together
my scattered dust, make peace among my ashes,
bind the dismemberment of my bones, and breathe
upon my being, bring me to earth in your earth,
your silence of peace to the intellectual act
against itself aroused;
                         open now your hand
lady of the seeds of life, seeds that are days,
day is an immortality, it rises, it grows,
is done with being born and never is done,
every day is a birth, and every daybreak
another birthplace and I am the break of day,
we all dawn on the day, the sun dawns and
daybreak is the face of the sun....

gate of our being, awaken me, bring dawn,
grant that I see the face of the living day,
grant that I see the face of this live night,
everything speaks now, everything is transformed,
O arch of blood, bridge of our pulse beating,
carry me through to the far side of this night....

gateway of being: open your being, awaken,
learn then to be, begin to carve your face,
develop your elements, and keep your vision
keen to look at my face, as I at yours,
keen to look full at life right through to death,
faces of sea, of bread, of rock, of fountain,
the spring of origin which will dissolve our faces
in the nameless face, existence without face
the inexpressible presence of presences...

I want to go on, to go beyond; I cannot;
the moment scatters itself in many things,
I have slept the dreams of the stone that never dreams
and deep among the dreams of years like stones
have heard the singing of my imprisoned blood,
with a premonition of light the sea sang,
and one by one the barriers give way,
all of the gates have fallen to decay,
the sun has forced an entrance through my forehead,
has opened my eyelids at last that were kept closed,
unfastened my being of its swaddling clothes,
has rooted me out of my self, and separated
me from my animal sleep centuries of stone
and the magic of reflections resurrects
willow of crystal, a poplar of water,
a pillar of fountain by the wind drawn over,
tree that is firmly rooted and that dances,
turning course of a river that goes curving,
advances and retreats, goes roundabout,
arriving forever:

*Mexico 1957

Under the cover of darkness
Our most feared creatures dwell
Leaving our minds a mess
With only transparencies to confess
As if they were never there at all
Let's put our minds at ease
Erase the symptoms but not the disease
Have a new change of address
Listen to words but don't hear the call
Of imagined things that track our smell
For the darkness is feared most of all

1.
Moon multiplied in panes of haunted glass
Renewed in rains long overdue of pink, peach and white.

Fragments floating in turbulent concrete towers
Reducing the million technicolour thoughts to dust.

2.
Blue and white limbs titillating upon destruction
Of the stark grey self succumbing to denegration.

The grandeur is singing as we unlock
The catatonic mistake that we have yet to make.  

3.
Destroying what we had known before the field
Caught fire in oceans contained within.
Her single, sulphuric transparencies.

Lie down to rest in remnants of a world refracted in
The artificial sunlight crying hymns of fabrication.

Misplaced curiosity in solitary places,
Where forlorn cubes eat darkness like ghosts
Graciously accepting fruit in exchange for a wandering eon.

I was obliged to a vow
This vow was an obligation
To commemorate my
Perseverance.
Persecutions upholds the level
Of transparencies
Consequences flamboyant to
My ideologies.
Preserve and perceive
The hollow tumor of my
Beloved radiant memory
I render a tender
To my self vender
Does it come asunder
After like striking thunder?
I bow to this vow
Obliged and compelled
A favor to my self I shotgun
Impelling this vow and
Disrespecting not.
The oomph of vowing and the zeal
To embrace
I heart this vow for betterment
Of me myself and I.
♡♡♡♡

Terrified already and i haven't even  began to be able to express
all that I've realized with this vulnerableness
I have begun to helplessly and at the hand of God invest
i don't understand at all and i find little rest
in the fact that I've said the same words to a lover but they didn't likewise
peel back the skin to reveal the heart, or sometimes, in some places
the lack of one in my chest

You're unsure if i am even worthy to know
and granted i understand that before you've
heard the antagonist of what you've been shown
but to hear that, be shut down, when so far, so hard i push,
to open places in you closed for ages past,

I am not struck with rage but with confusion
, and pain, and paint on faces,
that i can see through but do not know what lies behind
the transparencies, and their clarity,
do not ease my mind

God i am trying.

They through no fault of their own
become see through
torn
worn out
a Styrofoam effect
chipping from the rim
splitting down and in
pieces
they'll be
we'll be
none the wiser
which is the appetiser
and when they're gone
we'll go on
to the main course
which is guilt free

if they're not there
we don't see.

Our past reeks of week-old salad dressing.
     Don't tell me you're not intrigued.
My health has always been secondary to the glares
     you send my way.
Your love is my tangy dipping sauce;
     too much but never enough.
Super-size me, friend.
I haven't the time to wait for your fickle
     transparencies.
Love me now or love me never.
You never shared your goldfish but I understood your
     upbringings and nibbled on heartache.
An expiration date halts me not. I am too willing for
     your passions and fail to excuse myself.
It takes two to tango but one to dougie.
     Explain or I shall leave at once.
I dance alone, and darling,
     my fries are getting cold.
The microwave does not
     suffice.

floating delightfully with a million rounded
colours, a deep and delicate pressure
we gazed through our collective transparencies at
a magnified love; full of a single breath until
suddenly we-

muscle and teeth bite into her
tearing apart her sensibilities
eating her whole
swallowing her soul
and the worst part is
is that she doesn't mind
she doesn't mind at all

the strangest thing this relief is
sense to sense, nerve to pull
powder blue restrains me so
it's the way it is
or should've been.
mother raised her right
it could've been--
strong bones shiny eyes
sunny milk and porcelain
pretty girl pretty hair
spiteful shaking windy air
tossing golden dead cells
off her shoulders
feigning no awful mystery
giving nothing to hide
for youth has been kind

but what if, the sultan cried
what if the sparrow died?
to the bird that lost it's flight
from being powdered blue
from windless nights?

soaked in water-like tendencies
she'll become like you--
amphibian needs and transparencies
water drops on countertops
sniffing noses every night
runny eyes dry sockets
chains held tighter the safer and sounder
of the faucet transgressions
to the sewer conventions
to the minor inventions
of the heart

and beat beat beat beat
who cries heart
who cries wolf
my Rogerian adventure
cries the moonless girl
and powdered blue this muscle tee'd man
he's her solider her painted town
oh la la she cries
on his shoulder
running dripping faucets
on his shoulder
you see
there's nothing here
and Gui Jun will stand here, eternal flame,
And soon, there's only one thing left to do
i promise

i see him straightening the
ruffle of his native clothing,
putting words of truth
inside the empty parentheses
of mendacities -

it is through his leonine eyes
that i see the pointlessness
of men. through the
TV's hoarse static i can hear
his voice occupy the space
of obligation without swerving
to paths made available for ease
without clear trudge.
    sir, you make it painless
to conceive these cutting truths -
death trembles in these taut attestations. in half-lighted periphery i can see the shadows
threatening to cast us into damnation, and it is in the bright ray of your speech that i have started to uncover the beasts
  and their diminutive language.

dark as dark these ploys could be,
  now that they are whiter than
  ever with their transparencies,
you have handed these people
  flames to torch effigies
   and use their glare to light
  the intransigent paths
    to this nation's true calling!

    spare us from the debaucher
of this once sacred land, the contortionists   of these ill fates.
and preserve our just tillage
  over these archipelagos!
save us from the vertigo of these
   mangled, twisting roads!
give our speech obdurate
   magnitude so we can hammer down
the lies thrown at us and cast them away together with their wretched demagogues!

    let us once more, be brave
    to withstand the eye of storms
    and emerge wizened like
     trees in the summer of
    our old, resplendent memories
     where everything is
   and nothing
         is speaking loosely
   of something far from our hands
     to hold, like
   prosperity,
        or effulgence - altogether!

I am not ok
I am alone in this world
All alone
To combat the fears
Brought on
By years of uncertainty
Years of trial
And failure
Through it all
I trudge
Alone
Hope dissipates
Into blood-soaked thoughts
Trickling quicker
The truth of reality
The transparencies
Of lies
Pain follows
Then release
Demons inside claw
Into dreams
Into life
I am not ok
I am alone with
This

It isn't the fuel I lack,
My heart rests at the spilling point.
I look not for kindled wood to keep me lit,
But for the Kinder voice that would yield the appropriate heat.
I am as cold as butane alone,
I burn for a companion.

Sparks are as cheap as thrills,
The wholesome whisper of the promised ignition teases the flint in my pockets.
I yet burn for another temporarily.
Yearning for the forever, while bursting over every one, ever.

Peasant pleasantries persist painfully,
Pouring through my pursed lips I stray a plenty.

For every fragrance carriers more then a scent,
They collaborate together,  a massive cyst in my mind.
I cannot overlook the Siren's smell.
Rather I take note and dwell.

Dwelling in the dark, looking down, I drink.
Water that rushes through the world comes to rest in my glass, as I contemplate the transparencies of my affection.

My fantasies never end
for I dream far too much
and for all cause and purpose
I will always be out there

From mythical creatures of childhood dreams
to spirits of the dead you have never seen
I am a teller of tales, a dream maker
and in dark days a nightmare taker

Would you like a portal to my mind
to see all that I see
could you deal with the transparencies
of those minds hiding so visible as me

Is it the drugs why I am so wired and so ...... spaced out
or something more spiritual that it's all about
do I really live in the world of visions
or just f*ed up and out there

By Christos Andreas Kourtis aka NeonSolaris
© 2012 NeonSolaris (All rights reserved)

5 inches longer than my hips
It drags beneath the floor
Stooped picking ends Up

If it was storage I lost
Then that is what I sorted
To be waiting for my return
And everyplace is an arrival

Some wheels still moved
On smooth grooves and grins
In varnished pavements
Whilst Waving in passing

Since these are the oil lengths
That will separate this way from that
And so will continue

As a thousands hues above the ground

Sleeping through steam and mist
Atop the Atlantic
Or beneath with
black transparencies during the existential technicolor discos

Of arranged meetings of faux upholstery
some that moved with the tunes too
Though most that stayed glued

With that oil that never seemed to dry
Yet managed to keep everyone there in place with no reasons why
And though closer to tar this was not one that flew in through our Olympic airways nor trains or cars

Oh cars
With melted chocolate on the plastic grips that stayed for years
On stretches of land for legs of chairs to soon expand

Some moments are so carefully placed in a room as furniture
Never to move
With or without the planned dance

And through the options here in the sky
Here I will decide
With open window entertainment
which destination and journey
I will ride

i am jealous of the water. that ocean.
i am envious of its transparencies.
how you could surrender in the deep
when the sea held you in blues.
but i am a body of water on my spirit.
the incessant hunger which could
swallow hundred thousands of ships.
bury the relics like his jewellery.
hold the lays of proverbial mermaids.
sink into my love. this whirlpool.
i am jealous of the water. of that rain.
how it pilfers this summer from us
when it had begun falling for you too.
but as the rain pours to your body.
i only have my eyes to pour over you.

When this question arrives
with increasing and sometimes
desperate insistence..
We apparently must suffer
until we dissolve
the boundaries and continuities
of our youthful bodies..
Frightening this can be
until we discover
the joy of being
transparent
transparencies in transparence
waves in water...

Full fathom five thy father lies
of his bones are coral made
those are pearls that are his eyes
nothing of him that doth fade
but doth suffer a sea-change
into something rich and strange
Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I, Scene ii


I was a blue baby.
Umbilical noose drawn so close,
a rope of blood. The starving air
never loved me.

Now my father is air,
all of them are in the graves
of the air, the transparencies.
I can only claw at the silence.

Dolmens of rain collapse
in the kitchen. Black coral rises up
out of the fridge, out of the cabinetry,
out of the thickening lung-mass.

I am ever that blue baby,
leasing breath from a sterile hand,
my hair silvered over like a frost -
my tattoos gathered like a frightened flock.

Sea-changes are coming.
My last thoughts today, that coruscate
from the obelisk of my spine, are of the woman
who slurred my atoms so carelessly.

shattered green on the gym floor, shells from the ocean pulled by the tides. staircases spiral down and down and until they wait for you. small windows open and close and an ocean flashes with black and white credits, zooming in and out and wrapped up in colorful patchwork quilts. air conditioning hums and churns bits of dust in the vents, pine needles shift in the reflection of sandblasted windows. the ocean is near now. I can smell the salt, the brine in the passageway of my lungs. the ghost of the ocean is my hands, the swaying trees, the circadian boxes of leaves. transparencies through water blend color memory, the recall of fossilized love. ancient creatures roam the depths of the hallway, far underneath the strata of the canyon we call home. they float and glow and survey the depths of rock, water, sand, and seams of light to resurface on a sunny day in the riverbed. carved by water, we enter light. and stretch the calcified seams from which we were woven.