From website gregglory.com
Ascent
This is it!
"Hang on to my glistening wings!"
— Gregg Glory
Gregg Glory
Published by BLAST PRESS
http://www.gregglory.com
gregglory@aol.com
Contents
The Human Immortal
Slaves of Glory
Shouts of Blankness
!
Buccaneer
Acrobat at Prayer
"A Jellyfish"
Alderedman
Or However the Weather Tends
Hunting
New Day
Ghost Prince
Bella Belle Isabella
Elegy Avenged
Outing
Mood
When that the Trem-bling Pen
Bonfires
Coleridgean Errata
The Bells of St Mary's
What Love
What Age
Himself
Sonnet: for P. B. Shelley, Bay of Lerici
Jazz Skeletons
Blank Generation or, the Death of the Muse, No, Hardly
BASTARD ALABASTERS
Why I Like Wet
Lyric Licked
"A Saint is in the Eye..."
My Pardons, My Praises
Prayer. Again.
New Year
Inundation
Kiss this Bliss
"I'm Seein' Life in Debravision"
"Jes' Tryin' ta Tell a Vision"
Shakespeare Writes It
"O How has this World, this Vacant Vacant World"
Day in Heaven
Conformity is the Crime
A Summoning
Ascent
The Human Immortal
I
The sovereign Poet, who's awakened gasp
Flows out from infinite soul to soul along
As arrowy moonbeams, unmixed and strong,
Sweeten with brightness the dusts of snow
In architecture-yielding light,--
Lacking the telling word his feeling shows
Kills whatever of sorrow or delight
His paradise-enhancing tongue might build
Or more mindful heart would clasp.
II
In our soft light of winter-time
When no bird is in the bough
And yon black yew is strung with frozen lime
At walk I heard a single nightingale
Thronging the wood with nightingale's song
Resurrecting Spring that summer burned to this:
No tindered spirit in the leaf but emptiness.
To bind in eternal being --- paradoxical Love! ---
Even in coffers small as a nightingale's heart--
What the mad, fragile, passing world has spent.
III
Straining faces may seem immortal
But it is desire that makes the skull a portal!
Thus in joyance Joyance does pursue,
And to give and take in pleasure is pleasure's all;
For from the living the living voice is never parted--
No psalm spoken but gentle-hearted,
As though some aching mystery of LIFE and DEATH
Moves through human hearts, and steals breath,
Touching a veil trembled
In a wind anticipated.
IV
When to this stormy world, this realm of lightnings
One electric mortal comes conducting
Awful powers whose careless touch enhances
The deadest things to life, as paper-ashes thrown
From the wild static of an ecstatic hand
Or when a rainbow aura's stabbing crown
On an X-Ray rears far brighter than the bone,
---Take, take that hand! No matter how alone
And however whitened fear, and draining lips,
Or other breathless augury eclipse,
Still take that hand--- and crush it to your own!
V
I am awake in the radiant frameless day!
Unbounded beginnings start and renew
What severer sleep and longer dream forgot--
The dragon-draught forced past blue pinched lips
Ignorant of everything save God's solemn name;
A coarser sovereign than my slipping sun!
For the dream-vision and dream-life at noon
Wax alive in the weeping vision that we tear.
Rapt with vision, what I now on the hour require
Is burning love singing in a burning choir.
Slaves of Glory
The very astonishing hour has come.
The very astonishing hour indeed!
Green Heinekens, jade brain and rose-coral vodkas
--Exhausted! In one final, fantastic evening.
Hosannahs invade the empty windows,
spurs of blacks, mysterious
As the tender invitation of the body.
Bright, alcoholic after-haloes sift
Timid ash upon stale, upraised lips.
Sobriety has entered us
As mourners enter a white church.
Enough of this pathetic quietness!
This simpering, dog-like wish for 'temperament,'
The madness of faces full of 'sound judgment.'
I forgive all disasters, all accomplishments,
Every disguise that announces 'I am finished!'
Choking its inhabitant as a mirror chokes beauty.
Songs of sporadic intensity, wicked verses,
The poem of flayed skin, blind eyesight,
Mutes imagining laughter, I forgive you!
Pathetic quiet!
Bring tympans, wild sibilants,
Drunken elephants of sound, mists,
the harsh clangour of brass.
New eyes, new hearts, new senses!
Bring a speech of bloods, the invention of Angels!
Why was one ever afraid of waking?
Eh! a little daydream I had in the haypile.
But now the new era has arrived --this moment!--
Let us revenge the sky for an hour!
Let us run out, muds of new births upon us,
And seize in hands of ice the very flowing waters----
Dreams of incorporeal perfection!
Dawn-leaves splinter in my eye
Enacting the death of Satan.
Vertigineousness in the closet!
Very astonishing!
Shouts of Blankness
When nothing is left but divinity
And each man shouts to the next: "Look!
We are become the human angels!"
Wings made fabulous-- disasters surpassing
imagination!
Abominable, the bricks of this image.
All will be re-constructed, in Paradise.
At the discretion of no God
Do I spin and unfurl;
What is the hypothesis of passion?
The inextricable answer in the diamond.
"I am the unnamable silver,
past continuation,
I march beyond continent and clime.
I sing without vocable glitter."
A death that was reasonable shimmers
Shining ignored in a dirty jade pool.
Men will that day become?
Men will that day become?
Tales and fables melt to insignificance;
Palaces disappear in a maze of flames.
Men will that day become what?
I woke up in an ecstatic ditch;
I don't know very much about it.
The disingenuous suffer overmuch.
The rhetoric of Democracies!
Very commendable!
And after the Sousas and oompahs....
And after the senses to emphasize
what blankness?
!
no toiling rose, but this:
1]
Extinguish it! Eyes resigned, spirit limned
In greenest defeat--lick exaltation and brew
A world-- a world renewed; by you, by you!
My soul as template spiral hurls the sullen ash
From the charred coil of broken eyes blinded.
Lift the spirit eyes wasted tears have spurned,
Envision the sacred spirit of man-- for all!
It is a glory heralded out of defeat's smokes,
In formless flame engulfing the sculpted light
Each soul alone uplifts illimitable,
Chaliced hearts eternally bleeding desire
As sacral skies dissolve in light eternal,
Alight in love alighting!
2]
O champions vaulting nights gone everlastingly
Far into lording realms of divinest light,
See as I see all things beloved, no longer
A swollen testament to wrong, but loved & saved
As only this soul beside me is saved--
3]
O saviors who ride astride the centuries glow
Heralding glories of each living thing
Parleying the rose above rose's smudged light
Into unblinded eye's greatest might & right,
Forever the reds in ecstatic verity remain
Sincerer than universes by nobility's sum
untouched.
4]
O immortal beloveds inscribe your soul upon me,
As I have seen it in unspent visions granted
By right of ravishment-- consciousness supreme!
O Poets, immortal lords of ME, sweetly draw
That light and limber vision that I see
In your eyes re-souled as they have drawn it on my own.
5]
O my Soul, o my rose! burning vision
In ecstatic clarity reclaiming loves
Unlost in the votive moment
And candled in the champion's heart, indeed!
Make me more bright, let all myself allow
Light alone to enter unto eternity by my
Will, the will of my consciousness construed.
Here the leaf, here the sparrow unfallen
Skirl aloft in tangential glories of soul's one repose!--
Calling down the blessing waterfalls of Byron's soul
By light to limb unfurled in this dawning moment.
6]
No God, no outworn lords of dust look down
Upon spiring chance's swift instant, only
Effortless universes filling times illimitable;
Lightnings tendered in daybreak auras
Revive the angels, undust the wings!
No foul universe can inhabit my glory;
Out of lone luminescents comes glory's
unbounding,
My light in rosaries' tendered opalescence.
Come touch the hand I have created for touching!
7]
No god, but I who revive the spirit,
Deigning the invisible winds of heaven's breath
That command the heart beat and my loves beget.
Inceptive kisses befall the poet's lips---
Paradise! offering all greatness sustained!
Out of my holy mouth blossoms the soul of you!
8]
O indivisible!
9]
I will! and my will be done.
Lording tongues above all creation
Forever this minute's moment create.
Yes! Speak and speak again! My will
Unveiled and real-- the living borne.
10]
Let bright be the place of thy soul!
Skimmed minutes and parcels of light
Like sparks flung from divinest sight---
No coal smokes the heart of the blest
But visions immortal deigning flame to the rest!
O winners! Not sinners! O blessing be
Of Good thy soul discloses in thee!
11]
O Glory immortal, grace seeking purest form
Lies bestowed upon hearts made holy
In the astonished realms, raving hope remaining.
Golden senses in fervent adore enlighten infinity,
Conceived in dearling virtues untamed!
Reflections revel brightly-- the pride of princes:
New beauties, once viewless, now forever immortal!
12]
The unbound revelations of prophecy unfold--
Behold the champions' eyes unblinded by gold!
Behold!
An angel whispers her soul into hearts
Divining miracles from heavens' dust--
My angel!-- spun winning from heavens disclosed,
Sighing alive into the purl of my soul.
13]
Behold my glorious tone discased from alone!
Sparring lights advance against the dashes--
Dispelling black ghosts, dispersing all ashes--
Upswept in trined clouds, lights everliving!
Tornadoes of fire torch forgotten woes:
Choiring ecstasies respire: True Life!
Infinities sanctify eternal ages, unbroken
From cities of saints I sanction, exhumed!
14]
A call to heart, saints and lords link arms!
Undeniable in new light, these truths inscribed
From an unrivalled shrine-- creating all!--
From purer hearts' undying sublime.
Glory! O glory, Come to this!
Come douse hands and douse hearts and all of love's love
Into whatever the pleasures of will will decide!
Exist as I exist, I command thee all:
Breathe thy light, take heart for your all!
15]
As I found this, I give it,
With no reserve in my soul!
16]
Allow one more flurry of ecstatic verity--
As light allows no shadow on its soul
But, unconsuming, alights, consuming all.
A disembodied ghost imparts this holy sight
In solitary flame of truth departing the night.
Lord Dermond/Saint Gregg G
O lyric genius, to grow ecstatically one!!
Buccaneer
"Me house gots no door,
Me door no house;
All day me sweetheart
Trapses in and owt.
Fire's in d' kitchen,
No kitchen to clean;
I fry an' I boils
What best pleases me.
Me bed's got no trestle,
Me trestle no bed;
No landlubber sleeps
On no happier head.
Me cellar's up high,
Me barn's The Deep;
All ass-over-noggin'
I lay me down to sleep.
All sharp and blinkin'
I'm up at a race;
At no place I'm stoppin',
Me stoppin's no place."
GOETHE
Acrobat at Prayer
What
could be more limber, in the gold-
edged frame of this cancelled post-
card from Notre Dame
cathedral where
hurly-burly
God-beware
people crawl on their sagging knees
to eat the brittle, little pieces
of their savior?
A God beloved
in the house his lovers built for him
after death.
"A Jellyfish"
A jellyfish
is enough, a wish
willed from vapor, condensed
to a quiver beneath
the bright, lacelike
vail that sedates
the eye that watches
the gem of its innards.
Alderedman
Having joked for so long
Now that the point is near my heart
And all my premises scratched back to start,
I wonder at the humor ripped from song
That has left me houseless as I belong---
A final joke of sorts.
The birth-cannon that breaks my bread
Scalds this quiescent heart
And sets named dignity aflame;
Ach! My aching head!
Better living livid than dying dead.
For my poor alderman's chalked part
In the passing play,
I'll resign dead generations of fame.
Or However the Weather Tends
I have been by your tempests overtaken
And wallow waterlogged in your waves' swales
Whose salt in tender licks my mouth
Opens thirsting for.... Drowned by years
Of loving whatever your love abandons here
On the constant beaches of my devotion.
Not one pebble turns from the spray away
Or hesitates to douse itself in you.
Hunting
Beyond the fell pace of antelopes
Lost to sight in the cold engulfing woods
Where hot hounds give ululating chase, up slope
And deep into the dimmest mossy fold---
There my mind in ranting rage unwinds
And knows the sharp sorrow of each bitten thing
And falls with the great hart in bludgeoned love;
New Day
Companions of my mellow youth
Bound by circumstance to squeak wry truths
In awkward dartings of darkened tongues!
They themselves forget
How greatly were their wits
Distended--- for age has this much blessing:
That we forget our misdemeanors
As so much chaff's fretted away
And retain the golden grain that we consume
Day by day, by eating making new.
Ghost Prince
Pale wraithe in autumn's fuming!
I gave up poetry long ago for these cavillings....
Oh Autumn, my beautiful companion
Bella Belle Isabella
Her silvered eyes entranced the moon, leapt bare
From dim cornice to swept heaven, stared
The moon-man from his stirless rest
By fibers of affection bound him breast to breast.
So Isabella charmed each element she met,
Bent to calm waters, and made those waters crest
As she were the moon come down to trod the wood
And with luminous looks set whispers among the reeds.
The wind that swept her sighed away enthralled;
And crickets kept her steps enshrined with hymns;
Birds added wondrous silent powers to their calls
And marked her visit solemnly, like small dignitaries trimmed;
Sweet berries shook themselves to roll along her palm
And of those moon-liveried lips have some taste
Before they of their giving taste gave all.
Elegy Avenged
Autumn has pruned your star from heaven
With unforgiving shears snapped the sweet light out---
Who but God can count the odd stars from even?
Or know by looking the straight man from the lout?
All that moves progresses only by seeming
As a wheel that cannot touch the earth revolves
In a mind of fire, by circles of its dreaming.
So you, I think, were not from or into the heavens
sent
But gave loving light to all, which darker heavens lent.
Outing
No Transcendental Impulse but then
Invaded, sense by sense, and sense by senseagain!
Confused, harassed, stammering, half-mad,
I arrived at a mountain stream's small source alone
Whose each mere moment of dropping flowing
By dropping more intensely flows. Heart's-blood
Stuttered along the tongue of solvent air
Following out the stream's wanderings apace
As if my liquid's hush through every cataract
And canyon-enhancing rivulet did move;
What weariness then penetrated every limb
Which had flung itself the whole blue morning through
Like a ceaseless wheel! I lay a lonesome hour
Upon a table of stone spined just so long
As myself from dead heel to skull-top
Imagining its travel! By my veins
The moss-indentured rock with iron force
Is cracked, a hammering flow enveloping the mass
With pale empurplings and smooth-prompting bulbs of glass
That maturer nature had given a more rugged touch.
So I lay sun-warmed upon that human stone,
Neither foot nor head beyond its grating cradle,
Until all that made me I un-made
Then wove again together in eye and ear;
As if sunlight spoke and sound gave voice in light,
All these before me in hazeless dazzle floated free
And I consigned them to their Liberty!
My rushing emerging blood swept past
Cochlea and ear-drum in bird-like thrum:
Stream on stream ascended purer air in song
Til all was bathed by part, the unaccustomed whole
Of oceans leaping from my spring! each martlet that sang
Told some note of me; myself had stained
Sky's unstarred majesty with pinks, and in a wink
Sent each sense sharpened as it spread
From azure zones of whispered fire
To the old pond's own cool shadow of repose
Til every busy sound was somewhat tinged with red
And every shifting leaf, dew-shadowed as they were,
Burned outlined by that bright delight
Their own laughing motion shucked from them in sound.
Then a purple rain, it seemed, descended
In answering haloes shaken from the sun
And broke in its descent to mist, hallowing all.
No part of the under-sky receded
From that pursuant touch,-- but rather
Rose to its own undoing in erotic rapture
As drones to their honey-loving maiden-queen
Lift translucent wings in flight;
Leaf and leaf in murmuring applause
Stretched on each twig-end toward that sky!
The stone that held my casing seemed more up-raised
And the low appearance of the swimming sun
Took on a duskier and a closer tone
As if it wished to immerse itself again!
Strange mist was everywhere, endowing each
Glowing glen that lay as little as a lens.
Strange mist had wrapped the very bowsprit of the rock!
My own skin was mist-engrafted!
Within, my own departing heart,---
So whirled with-in and -out with the luminous,---
As pulsant globe and center now resolved.
And on this thought my mind no longer moved,
By spells of rapt intransigence inly held,
Til all that had its faultless action once impelled
Conjoined to conjure pause; sweet was the wind
That kissed my aching lungs with such sweet breath!
All piny, with some sunny hawthorne scenting mixed,
---Even still that air is fresh within me,
Even still do I desire the clearness I had then!---
For one hour's welter of such unwon wealth!---
For then I had found out-- in clearness still
Do I see it!-- motive of moon and sun and sincerer stars,
Our perpetual guest, the unsullied source of glory
That limned my out-flowing veins in rivers'-light!
Out, out of the very center where my spirit slept
Flood called out to flood and flood responded
Out-pouring Life! there, there are the harmonies!
There the endless systems counted back to One!
There the measureless Space contented
To a water-drop! There echoings on echoings
By their velvet source are hushed!
Anguish and insistence vanquished by a touch!
Nightmares and chimeras chastized by a love
The soul's own shaping power makes animate!
Mood
Great accomplishment great regret has brought;
A city of sighs pent in a full-teneted breast
Exhale in languishment! The moony dawn
Slow moves from verge of blue to greener rays
As the heart up-bourne by dark and dark deceits
In reality's plain day now lighter grows
To whiteness --- and is lost among
the hopeless snows.
When that the Trem-bling Pen
When that the trembling pen in hesitation stalls
Putting blots on thought's most precious spree
Clotting what had sung one soul's simple all
With bandages of indecision on thought's flow-free
Of singing blush and crimson victory....
Over all blanche competitors palely lame
Come reds revanching by tongue's sincerity,
Completing luck with hues of highest sun.
Bonfires
Hilarious was the night Coleridge and Wordsworth knew....
At the angst-incisive beginning of their pogrom for bliss,
all the bad old poets the Juden that they'd strew
to the picnic bonfire blazing---
each soul-protesting, regurgitated face
another indictment in the long, wrong roll of Fame;
Shelley himself the fir-apple in the fire they grew!
They drank until their syllables burst with light,
Kubla Coleridge chanting his politician's heart
in Krystall Nacht clarity under the shadows that they threw:
"The mind is like a Humming-Bird
Invisible & furious, aloft & true!
Imaging epileptic Translucence,
Tho' held in God's rosy lips like a Word."
Coleridgean Errata
Love and Innocence alone let Duty live
In Coleridge's lonesome, holy book,
Finding Jesus entwined in ivy
Or God in a sparrow's nook.
The Bells of St Mary's
Sweetly beat the bells of St Mary's
Over all the pasturage;
Ignorant souls and weary
Come gather at the meeting-edge.
When ever was body and its wreck
Home enough for what the spirit seeks?
The great clock has run down
And fair and foul are mixed;
Come where the bower's sweetly blown,
Come wind the clock-hands round again.
Come wind the bell of the old clock tower.
Sweet are the bells that beat St Mary
To bright sky and mournful cow;
Sweet are the hands that row the ferry,
The backs that pull the plow.
Work of the back can bring liberation
From too-great ache and half-starved
Candlelit concentration.
The great clock has run down
And fair and foul are mixed;
Come wind the clock-hands round again;
Come wind the bell of the old clock tower.
Sweet is knowledge for the weak
Who cannot tell what they are,
Mind and misery sunk in tar.
My heart is fathered in such soot
Unable to reckon either 'good' or 'truth.'
At midnight soul work begins.
Come sweet ladies of St Mary's
For the hands are running back,
Come wind the clock-hands round again
That beat the swollen face and rend skin.
Come wind the bell of the old clock tower.
What Love
What love can know its underpinning,
Cause and causeless are so whirled?
What horse that canters at the gate
Stamp assured of the final winning?
Often what is best starts late---
The midnight pilgrim has her prayers heard
Before the dawning bird's.
What Age
How rhetoric-filled the evening slumbers!
All sky a dark anticipated; trees
Grown dark under stars that increase the dark.
And midnight waters cannot glimmer
When gathered into an eye of age;
So despair councils; mute birds averr.
Now deep in years at the water's edge
And lacking all right light to disclose,
Must I stand grown cold yet convince, propound
That all lovers' hearts but beat to a purpose
That Love herself is profound and good
At once simple and deep (O lost and found!)
Or soul an angel raging in a cage
God had lost the key to unlock?
For I do feel both in bone and look
Heroic champions of more forgotten blood
Rise through the veins, charge vein and mind and glance
As glory consumes imagination
When timid skeleton's dispensed.
All whirls upon a moment in a dance!
Himself
Sweet was the passion, and the vision sweet;
Thought heralded out what one heart imbued.
Sparse charges of insistence neglectfully gather
Whatever willow leaves shiver in autumn waters....
How all the unpulsed skeleton is left bereft!
Now watching out the winter, to dazzle us in snow.
Congruence is for loafers -- even saints have loafed!--
Lovingly gazing at God in that silver shower.
We lived in the tyrrany of loving what we knew.
Briars on his hands, briars on his head!
Now some terrible moment is coming to its bliss,
Unconsummated hearts are burning, and the old
Shatter into slivers of this THIS--
Everything unpreparedly is turning gold!
Somehow our own souls must know, prescient
By their bliss, we are all that we pretend!
God, Man, Beast, Himself has his rosy shadow lent,
Sweet briars on my hands, briars on my head!
Sonnet: for P. B. Shelley, Bay of Lerici
Here silk hope crumbled, the rough hand decayed
That charged imagination's sweet heresy
As if man's knotted mind had coyly played
Its final line like Shelley on the Lerici--
Infinite in the instant's autumn ecstasy
Despite of Death's splay yaw and indecision.
Though human and immortal, no human grace he
Found. Till flesh foundered he met derision
Only. Then spirit's keen herald need meet the call--
Flashing imperious light where e're he dwelled.
Burst free from body's bounds he broke his thrall
To time and space, though quickened bells knelled
Einstein's circularity to his spirit's ash:
He roared alone the universe entire, all its call and crash!
Daniel Weeks
Gregg G. Brown
Jazz Skeletons
Simple men pursuing sawn-off strings of sound,
Such bright, abstract things,
Sumped on the spirit's lavender elixir.
Silver drubbed the drums. Ho-humm, ho-humm.
Washed out of wishes and livid, endearing things
They came, the men of vital evening
Pipped silkwise with green melodious coffinings.
Catarr, catarr, snarled the blackish guitar.
Tripleted they spat, in spic array, lunar sojourners
Cresting the spurious evening, and, ear by ear,
Ascended the profoundest bass effusive and exact,
near the waterheater.
Blue-blackish thrubbed the muddy bass in blubs.
Men made simple in the mimic minute of the spirit's leavetaking
August imaginers in the moon's hollow light
Sculpt skeletal, plead out of prismatic catacombs
Such swooning, harmonious things.
Blank Generation or,
the Death of the Muse, No, Hardly
Defeated by the paraphrase, or nearly,
He puzzled out a dwindled life in poetry
Who, perennial importunist, assessed
His era unfit for "the best."
Defeated by the paraphrase,
The inexact guesswork of sleepy heads,
Eyes closed and empty mouths upraised---
Fit for execution or their communion of lead.
Spackled cadavers in mottled light
Recite lines of despair, never knowing another,
Never sensing, in their age's indifference, another
More enduring light.
No longer
The Ariel feeling
Or whipping spirit stronger
Than an evening's reeling.
Untouched by the amorous,
Stripped
Goes Eros, incomprehensible
To "the masses."
Hieratic verse,
Each head limned in light,
Suffers the obverse,
Blotted rummagings of a blotted sight.
Yet still they felt, with a savior's amour,
Neither drugged hedonist, nor yet a bore,
Limitless possibilities
Like so many leaves
Clinging to the ancient portal's wetted door.
The percipient shall rule, discerning
'Neath modernity's fractious overlay
Here an emerald, there a ruby, thing:
Sustenance enough for poets in the ruby day.
I I
The age demanded an image,
Bland, unthinking, dull scrimmage;
Never the descent of Angelic fate,
Making impossible their unwaking retreat.
Not a mirror to the muses' face,
Not Ariel, limitless in grace;
Never divinity, never the light angelus,
Nor any, still ephemeral, "sublimities."
The age demanded an image
Rapped in cellophane or bandage,
A brain of eaten hates, or laughter
Soulless out of deadened waters.
I I I
Villains are feted in peeling shoes, and garlanded
Is Ginsolds, the great damaged head
Thrust into the atmosphere,
Impercipient, the small eyes dead in their spheres.
Seeing in earth neither paradise, nor fit habitation,
The Ginsolds of his father's scabrous generation,---
Monumental dinosaurs of the heart,---
Researched dung and drugs for their start;
At first, a religious pre-occupation
Made them stare at Sunflowers and feces,
Purporting maculate Bhudda in the rose
Of an anus in dilation.
Tarry pools
Accept their coral bones,
Steeped in excesses
Of the incorrect and religious.
And no one left to give a damn about "the Graces,"
And the reviewers live on, indifferent;
Slaughtered Beauty shot in the face;
Apollo and Bacchus hanged in the neon marketplace;
Cold feet under etherial faces.
When all the world shall kneel
At this bright whisper,
Striving with unapt paws
To strip the golden spirit down, or unpeel,
No heaven shall listen;
Silence shall be their first reparation;
Paid or unpaid, the soul's discourse discloses
Itself, thrumming after no repatriation
To a nation, clotted, with whores and doses.
"BLACK ORCHIDS ON THE RED DOOR"
Black orchids on the red door;
Fitfully the raconteur
Consigns the ownership of elegance
For a few hundred dollars, for a "superior" glance.
Black orchids on the red door
Mark the poet's stipulated habitat.
Depression afflicts; he begins to yawn....
Stretching away from the world with a bored 'eclat.'
Exhausted by his meditations on the black
Orchids on the red door, of a few, niggard, dark,
Striations intermit with rose;
Guilty only, in his ichorous lair,
Of a certain
Kempt Baudelarian repose.
MON HYPOCRITE LECTUR:
Ginsolds of the foetid spawn
Patched with no forgotten pulchritudes--
Vulgar paucity faintly echoed
In the weak light of decline.
Mr H. (insert your name here), possessed of an
anesthetized soul
Blathers his useless abstraction,
A tongue-tying of half-felt immolations---
Unendurable! if not so falsely done.
Enslaved imbecility defiling life,
A sycophancy supremely mired,
Never to ring in celestial essence,
Or inhere, in patches, to glory's sculpting light!!
The age demands an image,
The image that we give it!
Chiselled tongues of thunder rung
In rising airs rained innocence!
We demand the eternal image,
Absolute, inscribed, violet, blessed,
Suffering only self-made Gods bleeding divinities---
Intensities of existence intensifying infinite!
"EVEN WHEN I'M DOWN, I HEAR SYMPHONIES"
Apollo and Bacchus hanged in the neon marketplace;
Cold feet under etherial faces.
Bore-ed by the lack of temerity,
Slack desire suborning the bandannaed faces
Of hippies contented by Peace, and not Energy;
Marijuana leaves placidly
Shading the crib and high-chair.
Bored by the lack of passion
Expanded bank accounts conferred upon their elders
Lacking still the capacity, it seemed, messrs,
To "cope;" they craved the indelible in action.
100 punks, or fewer, or one,
Concoct out of impossible desire impossible reality:
Burning ambitions in Waldorf St, or SoHo's zone,
Shed from the aether
These symphonies.
With a tongue of justice,
With an eye of fire,
With an ear made fabulous
By beloved mind's one wept flame: desire.
Rotten's masquerades,
Sid's pinioned victory,
The burboned voice of Hell establishing "blankness" as
priority
In a world floating valueless; incisive,
the eye of ice.
Aching faces brave the astonishing light,
Asserting TRUTH in ecstatic sanction;
Our redemption was individual,
London our capitol.
Our "decade" compressed to " '77!"
We acknowledged, as aftereffect, a fey, uneven
"inheritance" of "reticence."
Youth as a remembered depravity
Gives no living soul satisfaction; relentless
Sojourning away from their parents' questioning
Consigned to them the "aridity" of bliss.
* * * *
When dust hath hushed the roses,
Unmeditating silence
This crimson-cerise splinter of song
Encloses
On time's blank slate
Lick this, and relate:
"Here twists,
with upraised fist,
An Anarchist!"
HOW TO WRITE A VICTORY INSTEAD OF A TRAGEDY
Indelible bloods
Arise heroic rose
Each love a sung
Sempiternal sun.
Exile first the inconsequent,
The casual hand,
Speech procured at secondhand,
Opinions possessed for an "effect."
Recast ANAKE as the actor's whim:
Vital eyes
Outweep all that tragic circumstance,
Lear and Cordelia locked in paradise.
Catastrophe hacked at Hector
In his skirt, but the Eumenides
Themselves were mild when Antigone died,
Singing at a string-end in the tomb's lee.
Become Promethean, to this purpose:
Amid lesser qualities, personalities and such,
Swimming in unexamined idolatries, personalities and
such,
Inscribe what I equate: Man = universe.
DECONSTRUCTING THE DECONSTRUCTIONISTS
Philosophers of stone
Ungainly shift,
By love's bright drift
Undone.
Of unbodied air
Came spirits' enhancing;
Never a Dunciad
But angels' hearts made glad.
Impeccable sirs
They discerned
Exegesis
Spit in sand.
BASTARD ALABASTERS
I knew that the spirit of the day was endless, its eyes
unfixed.
The Human New
Arctic flowers, barbaric sky,
Spic trumpets and limitless eye....
The human new emerges
Spectrumless, aloft, scroogeless--
Filling willing belief
With dogmatic aperitifs.
"Sand and Eyesore Verse"
Sand and eyesore verse
---Swift, immutable, impure
Ageless symmetry
Illimitable--- Eternity---
I never lost you
Still regal & tru
Recanticle
To the lapsing shores of cold criticism I came,
Now so out of love to overwhelm.
The wounded heart, spilling grief,
Sustains nothing: useless life.
Perversely in the air God was hung,
Perversely still in air has man sung.
I never saw the animal
Who grieved and sighed
"It is in myself, withal,
That I live and die!"
By this trembling breath of mine I soliloquize,
In death's despite, the fair, the beautiful and the wise.
Recant
I desire everything!
Nor would change my state
With angel-birds to prate
Among God's clouds the everlasting things.
Heav'n
When I, listening, hear
The bird-word "above"
I merely deem it to mean
"With others," which seems
Paradise enough for Love.
Wrecked Beast
I never saw the animal
Who grieved and sighed
"It is in myself, withal,
That I live and die!"
The Sinister is in Us
The sinister is in us, and wins
Whenever we unfurl and think 'sin.'
Otherwise there is nothing
But a troublous something
And joy and destruction again.
The Phoenix Fixed
Far birds reflect the inner cymbal,
Brass winds chime;
Santa Ana linguistics limber
My longing soul to
Libertine Liberty----
In Congress
Blinked, deluded, new-
Minted by the philosophic shift
Of words in the House, I lift
My sunsteady voice to every wind's spew.
New Newt
Unerring Newt
Did, daring, confute
Philanderers and sophists
Serving unwatered Liberty,
no twist.
In Temperance
I've cannibalized my heart for the sake of a few sacred
sounds.
This life is the record of
My harshest acts.
No gentle psalm moves
Through lordlings of love
Out of this coruscating breast.
Stillborn
God, liquor & love
Never deceive the dove
That hovers in clover clouding
This supremest chest.
Torrents of roaring---
Heroic echoes upbourne
In the chime of a stolen dawn
UNBORN-- this minute--
still lorn--
Why I Like Wet
All these longshoremen of the heart can go fuck
O water water aching blue and bright
Get that little scubagirl up to the light--
Prayers are ashes when heaven is wet:
O lonely little scubagirl, fly up to my net!
My heart is full of candy roses,
My hand's a daisy patch;
I bless all runny noses 'cuz
I hope one blessing hers will catch.
O little aqua lycra scubagirl
You swim in my adriatic heart's red swirl.
Lyric Licked
Love and longing live for light---
It is a torch's tempted touch
Comes to candle conscious sight,
Komes in kicking blisters-- it is too much!
My love and longing endure a night;
Every luminescence shut
when she blinks against the light.
"A Saint is in the Eye..."
A saint is in the eye
that sees thee
Upholding light
impatient skies descend--
Blue litmus insert
bedeviling a patched wold
Changeless spirits inherit and descry
a lice-bed.
Infinitely dark trees
shade the scree-
Shaped cynosure-- adoring Life!
Crying bloods leak down
a marble eye
In thirsting wish seeing
glory-adornments
Perched at the white clasp
of your throat
Charging the plush surge
velvet time blots
--- in violet time reprised!
My Pardons, My Praises
Betraying heroes makes me increase myself
My pardons, my praises,
My mud-racked, modern dazes
And all whiter, sublimer rhyme
And higher, more crescent time
Forgot-- damn them, and toss the lot!
Now I speak of mystery
Who sees none anywhere, but me;
Myself the selfsame jackanapes
Risen from prison of late
Of morning-soul's dark-even'd
Sleep-tortured and riven
Slave-state.
Prayer. Again.
Naked angels who watch my spirit, weep
As I have wept, and still this vigil keep.
For purer love has never in its season
Been given than this I give unease in.
O Disquiet! Come hallow this soul of me
Forged between an ariel halo listing in fire
And sultry dusts spurring restlessnesses.
Come shift my spirit's solidity-- as mist
Arisen to sun's atomizing power
Lifts to brighter character by its change of state.
New Year
How sweet the blossom shouts the winter's over
In cannonades all of yellow love
Starring a ground still downy
As if summer suns outswept the inaugural day.
How dawn's above this starling stalk uncertain
Which of the light is bearer and receiver!
Inundation
In us is only this insistent surge
Incapable of calming!
It is ever-renewing and ever-alarming!
Sweet as the winter's quickening
For Unforgotten Spring!
Sweet as Summer's hungering
For Autumn's quickened cooling...!
All Airs all Objects all Elements conspire
To re-invent Life as but a single Desire!
All fire-quick and heart-aloft
As if to live were a speeded trance
No Eye, no Heart, no Splendour could enchant
To any, more docile, slowness than this:
To race large eons into seconds, or hurl
Blooming minutes into aspiring words,
Exploding Black Heaven with their own dear light!
Challenging the Skies in innumerable Words!
Kiss this Bliss
Prevalent Bliss, kick the sinisters!
Ashes in my ears, burn back to blisters---
Cyanide eyes, so pious in lit sin,
No place is my place when you hide;
Got to flame you out tonight, aye eye!
This insidious whisper is the glory one
Makes me talk a universe out of a lonely one.
I build myself by black prayer, eye and ear:
So loud and tall and true I am at once
I stare God's eye to shatters; and hear.
"I'm Seein' Life in Debravision"
Parted lovers met on life's intervening strand:
Close in love, and closer still in loving.
Pearled light held the near angels' adoring,
Angelic in reflection of love's uplifted brand.
"Jes' Tryin' ta Tell a Vision"
All these unlimited ministries glisten
Ingeniously-- lights capitulating to lights'
Increasing haloes.
So her face
Angelus limitless from lips to unpinned hair
In my heart radiates life
Until every limb lies annealed
And even my fingers infect the spring with joy
Teaching each sweet bird its flight
From high height to highest!
Purloined glories from my smashing chest
Accept no council
Neither fear nor philip of wit
Nor care of any creepy pink thing
But plunging on in their own bewildered wonderment
Scroll out 'til stars pile up
Making earth's envisioning air
Seem the thinnest ribboning.
Shakespeare Writes It
Although my love's made for joy
I taste black ashes at my lips;
For I am pining sick in love
And love is all my remedy.
For love but wounds to cure
By wounding giving cure, cured to wound again!
I am an apostle of that ecstasy
And still cannot the deadly sweet
Of love's maddened sweat forget.
Such is love's mystery
When we lie abed
Who would give heart's cure
Must first stitch heads.
Though love is brief, on my hurt I meditate
And find all ill who all-wished for sweet;
One heart, my own, unowned
Like a drop of salt-sweet spray
Cold oceans of feelings shows.
Oh still to be a human thing alone!
"O How has this World, this Vacant Vacant World"
O how has this world, this vacant world,
Once all ascension in the childhood realms
Miraculous as sky's propoundless blue
Whose clouds in heaped divinity shed
Simple verity like the clear and simple rain
On every causeless confusion swirled beneath
Stripped itself of all it gave and gives,
Leaving me airless, abandoned, here?
Ah! this feeling is a grave in nature's face
My heart, turned spade, keeps thrusting in!
The corpse of Hope, and lapse of faith,
Of all rarer deity are now constrained
To whatever dicking thing may bleat
Within this shrunken horizon's orison.
Oh, my noble spirit, lashed by black tongues
To the chiggering prayer of a worm!
You, that would arise for fire as for breath
In a world transformed beyond imagination
As Death transfigures spirits who have shed
The sticking Lash of Life! Hear this my plea:
I stand aghast in splendid disarray,
In spirit bereft, in body weak and poor,
Now, as once, tensile, rich, and sure.
Day in Heaven
And who shall live in these new cities of fresh Liberty, able
as irises, solemn bluebells, tittering at the grit
dragged in through the slant doors sundays....
Martyrs of vocable plunder! Unhinge the lost oblongs of
souls, splayed past the sun's reeling keel to enter
here. Barnacles of heart stuck to World's underpinning!
Martyrs, storms of whores, myself among them,
miniskirted and with a face of bright rouge: myself, myself!
Is it so terrible being a visionary? Spilled martinis on
the chartreuse tablecloth, cold haloes, the glasses akimbo.
Everything akimbo that would give my soul a face and name!
Noble martyrdom. Another face in the glass.
2. These Cathedrals
These cathedrals sunken in the architecture of the chest!
Heart-aches and minarets of wish! Forgetting
everything in an attempt to remember myself....
How cold the palace is after the furniture burned.
That bonfire of couches! The ceiling hovers lower
with its thumbprint of smoke.--
Blood covered the jewelry chest; sapphires licked thin
bloods. Pearls, their opalescent charms not
desiccated-- enriched even by the lined flow of
blood holding each white globe from beneath as
delicately as a child's eye floats in its reddened
eyelid, dripping, dripping, dripping....
3. The Three Magi
I took the last, royal step.... King of my fierce heart,
lounging in his leaded crown, discarding clove
cigarettes into the golden O fish-mouths of
ashtrays, sent me a straight look out of paired
chilled blue eyes. It was the look of an abyss. Sheer
ice, serene. Pupils black as the welt from a scorpion,
full of ecstatic poison and preening to burst the
skin. It wants nothing of the body. Nothing.
Nothing of the flawed fable of humanity. I kicked
its face. Spat, resisted. My screams deprived alpine
birds of their air. He almost smiled.
He came to me, drenched from the midnight swim, an
adolescent of exceeding glory. I stared into the
mirror he bore on his filigreed breast, the nipples
dark, hard, and cold as cherries.
....
But all of these visions are mortal! Bloodsoaked, blood-
drugged; full gutters swooning with plush bloods;
alabaster eyelids getting redder and more sodden as
these torments roll on to the identical, dirty ending.
5. Intro
What songs do the dead sing, revelling in air or immortal?
What choir from the caskets will open our hearts,
returned from the dust and the ashes? Longing
Hallelujahs, or short, sharp dirges?
Unafraid of love-- at last, perhaps-- the dead will
whisper miracles. Clear the dirt from their mouths
and empty your heart and LISTEN!
Conformity is the Crime
O arrow of constancy
Thy iron will be mine-- remind!
As soul upbourne on spirit-wind
Begets the image that created thine.
From all time-mist
Fly on, as this
Heart-rhyme in mind twists
Turning thoughts to goodness.
Heart to heart aloft,
Mystical rose and bright cross--
Invented in airs I lost:
Thrown to ocean and sea-dross.
Here spirit and spirit meet,
Fiery yolk and albumen sweet,
Disguised in faces
the hidden praises;
Tossed and aloft they congreet
In songs no other sees as hosannahs.
A Summoning
To this true hand giant hearts come leaping
For it upholds them in such gentle wrath
As makes them beat with truer beating
Until uneven pulses fountain only worth:
Which is what true hearts and friends together do,
Each the other chiding higher
Until all of air beneath them blues
And stars peep out beside them, wan and weak,
And all the crucible world below seems and is
Shrunk to the simple dimension of a dish---
Thus their flaming souls are brought to finest light
That burns hottest in that dispersed place
Empty of high substance but what high hearts have brought
Giant out of themselves by giant wish.
Ascent
Awake, awake!
For all the dear bay's glistening
In uneven light still listening
For whatever of utterance
Soul's chrysolm beauty may glance
Into willing water's dark,
My sweet meaning the whole of my bark.
Set sail, set sail, my soul, set sail
Let no hindrance, no halt, avail:
For we are the sweet of the tree,
Blossom and bole, shoot and root we three,
Myself, my soul, and me.
Nor does the shaping heart forego
To lend its beat to our argot,
My spirit a crystalline keel,
Inspiration a motion wind feels
Lifting in blessing ascent
All some deeper sleep had blent
With nightmare chimeras now forgot
By all within my steady boat.
Somehow, now, still lingering
Out of the sullen east the sun
Has given my soul a tongue.
Soul may speak what mind began:
Light's meditation is an ardor,
Of my soul the keeper-warden
Which never must be abandoned
For so simple delight is saddened
And everything of remembered worth
Thrown seedless to the earth
Whence never another vine will reach
From dusky plain unto the sun
Bearing with ripeness as a spillage
Grape or fruit of many an age
Longing time may bring to blossom
Out of darkness' drowsy bosom.
Gentle Charity, no farther,
Must you bear this as a father
Childish swearing does forebear.
Those who see not propounding noon
Liquified in soul's triumphant swoon
As swan lifts trumpeting his song
All the purple light along
At tender vespers, languid and long,
Or blinking matins, awake and strong,
For themselves must conquer hatred
Through loving hearts, many-gated,
Until dim and churlish slaughter
Lies self-becalmed as these waters.
Go out, go out, my broken-hearted--
With untroubled look depart them,
Cast back no final, futile glance
For all in a single chance
Is your future concentrated.
Let not one chafing countenance,
Deaf to this beneficence,
Shake from their sordid hearts a sigh;
Live in my smiles, or die!
From here commences, in my sight,
An headlong, eternal light
That every living form bedights,
With dews of immortality
Awakening soul's sweet rarity
Floods the loosening dawn
With: ocean, field, and lawn,
(Building light from evening's jet
By apperception the mind begets)
From the gentle fount of grass
To the living wave like glass
No such light may overpass
But must ignite in simpleness
Love's million multiple beams!
Every morning wayfarer
Whose light boat cannot tarry
But pushes on out of darkness
With whatever of best and best
In tangles of light impressed
In bossing golds on waves' breast
Plies resistless to the crest!
Such silver as the eglantine
To the dew-fraught morn resigns
And heaven on every still thing deigns
Rewarding quiet prayers
With this mercurial layer--
Such silver I say is savior
When soul its own good blossom knows
Nor will be shaken by the cold
Into something hard and cold
But that a sheath of clear protecting
Such firm flowers thus selecting
That deep winter's dire infecting
Shall not break them by its cold,
In such clear light protecting.
All that night my heart had lain
Upon this boat and silver stream
Until all memory became
Like the memory of a dream;
And there true life began
Beneath night's stars swirled to one
Past the extinguishment of suns
When realer dream draws us on
To dream of all we may have been
And in heart's solace draws us on
In dreaming dream to dream again!
O how cold the moon's a mirror
For all the heats within her!
I my own bright soul create
Nor did this fascination make
To slave it to a universe
I, living, gaze on as a hearse.
My silver hand in dawn's lake
Dips, its own soul to take;
From this sweet enlivening
Come my symbols unquestioning:
Crown upon my crown rests cherishing,
The sword in my hand unperishing.
Do not dispraise the light
That, singing whatever's brightest,
Undoes the theft of night--
In soul-enchanting soliloquies
Enmansioning aerial ways
That we might thrive there all our days
In realms of spendless purity
Absent nations' perfidy
Heart to heart for sole surety;
This our pledge, this our guarantee
That all's well with humanity
Once these bleak constants, fear and dread,
Lay to light exposed, and dead,
The human plant may only mend,
Think to create, and speak to praise,
Throughout the endless paradise of days
--Touch to caress, or move to love,
As this thoughtless rhyme does prove.
Ai! Ai! High radiancy,
Round eve's ever-changing sea
Like universes' bright periphery,
Back to sun-like man's centrality
I and all mortality
Welcome both thy light, and thee.
And if all the world condemn
What all the heart commends
What matter, so that heart sail on
In self-discovery without bourne
Through mystic waters, blue and calm?
What does pleasure's grieving echo give
But light to dark-hearted lives?
O when the trembling hand may shiver
And some momentary joy deliver
To thought-locked face and brow
What passes from that hand to bless
In an unending tenderness
As paradise were with us even now?
Memory makes no bounty of the scorn
Dementia attempts to ripen on
In sold human hearts since we're born;
Whatever slender wing endeavors
Be communicant with the treasure
One heart may hold forever
Will find such wind in chambers there
Beyond conjoining woe or care
That they may sail infinity
In the air of that one heart's ease.
Pleasure alone may live within
The human bound of life given
As light within these waters:
Ungrieving, crystalline, faultless.
And now my soul is voyaging on
In mystic waters blue and calm.
For whatever true hope had wrought
In time-defying, true love-knot
How could Love forget?
