Poems

Heterotopia


There are ghosts

Of spaces

Like buildings that

Once were bodies, living, present, but now

Decay in stillness and history

Like flowers dripping, saturated by

violent echoes, screams and discord-se

That phantom death of time

A black cat full of secret that brushes

past your hand, your heart

Darkening re-membrance, the eyes of mind

Blurred as truth – strange as transgressor

Purring, attaching you to experience until it

Disappears.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Eucalypt

Take up and drink from the

sun of the day, take up and

drink from the welling fount

that flows from

victory peering over our horizon,

over that dankness; what shade of Hades

a scent like the stillness of night

left and yet to be revived.


O, Eucalypt, how our daily deaths are like leaf matter

decaying and yet remade in eternity

by your Internal Root


we are leaves off the trunk that is world

- chlorophyllic, swaying with wind

diseased and yet by a grace

you perfume the air

and I, worshiping your source

take my living breath and die

in the faith of the hand that made you.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Homo Liturgicus


All incarnations of love are driven,

To signify in a moment the liquid sheen of

A silvery glow that lights lips of fire and hearts ablaze

Like lovers who kiss and know their Oneness,

To speak, and sing, and act, and dance, and worship, and make love

But the city falls, it does,

It makes grand temples, that Delphi of beauté si agrandissante,

That keeps us suspended,

Killing the malakoi, and arsenokoites

– Such disgusting bodies, such horrible souls,

Split them apart they cry, split them

In the numb shadows of death

They speak and curse; condemn, nations of normal over us,

In which you buy your carved god or goddess,

You know them with authorial omniscience,

and exploit them,



You enslave your neighbour and yourself with these gods,

The grand arches of their form cast dark over us,

Until the riots pull them down,

The Mind being suspended away from Body,

In enlightening, fiery desires of a dead and maligned spirit

And in the crucible we forge our own science of perfection

Which is our own vanity, Cartesian dreams, all figures of naturalism.

We cry for the salvation of

Deconstruction (I say with a German accent).



But a voice still remains and battles to this Dei,

Imago,

Homo Liturgicus,

I am what I worship,

I love, and therefore I am,

And it speaks, and promises, and relinquishes its love,

To perform what it speaks, and promises in truth

(Unlike Artemis, or Pan or Dionysius or Mammon)

And then it dances, acts, worships, creates and makes love,

All to say (and never in vain) -

“I have just died for you.”

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Le Bosquet pres de Monastère Cimiez



Silence is cushioned

In this grove of falling leaves

Defined by its brown, leafless interior

Housing owls that hoot

Whisper and pray

To stone nuns,

With the white of doves,

They peer into texture serene

Deep olive, like my lover’s eyes

A dark forest of hair above;

His smell musk like pine

A kiss that makes me a

Body again.



I am broken from Him now

This place of the One

Solitude, cool and soothing like

The rain that falls; heavy drops

Through canopy

I find, at the centre

Nature so unqualified

Peering out

To see the sun; ochre and new,

Lighting the green

Grove of day.

Hades' Mountain

We climb it seems,
An incline of sloping dreams,
Boding in time with shimmers echoing,
Dogged spirits fuming up fires,
Eucalypt blue from cooling streams,
Licking dank and enclosing desires.
With the moaning scrape of sandstone – itch,
The coalescing circles of skin – slide
We define the vessel with our mouths,
Relishing its scaly surface, kissing it, sucking it dry,

Until Sisyphus seizes our lips, and possesses their work -
Apparitions, ghost-like and wooden holding us back,
Spilling up from a ferned crevice,
Sexed, taken-in, drenched, wrought and done -
Coming, coming at its peak.
The hole, the dirt, the brain-deadening moment,
Finding nothing in the dark,
But white sensed and once delicious nothing.