From website gregglory.com
Written by Gregg Glory (Gregg G. Brown)
Naked Eloquence
Naked Eloquence
By Gregg Glory
Published by
BLAST PRESS
Copyright © 2000
Contents
Praying Out Loud
Naked Eloquence
Half animal and man in my shambling frame
It Comes, It Comes
Hollywoody
Scold
Mister S
Banquet
Moment By Moment
Psalm
Psalm 2
Psalm 3
Psalm 4
Praying Out Loud
Vouchsafe my voice may its voyage make
beyond closed body, its closets and its coughs;
And may my uncertain meaning sweeten
and my white intention leaven
whatever hoarfrost horror might roughen
or conspire with sliding Time to take.
When your look alights, so soulfully open,
my syllables Philippic to protest,
each cabinet burst, their vacant emptiness.
So hollowly going your full gaze along,
a skinny whistling wind round gravid earth,
I moan with thinness where you stand strong,
a willess whisper strained across a mountain's growth.
So you uphold me wherever I go
(an errant profligate invisible above)
whose forgotten as soon as sighed, and who blows
himself to nothing to herald aloud
how the green solid world unfurls below.
Naked Eloquence
An icosoles triangle
constructed by chance
as when the world falls
together on the bed,
or some comet constellation
in mercuric increments descends
a star hat down
on some heightened head.
Shards of naked eloquence,
permanent aquantaince in a glance,
how many years of staring at life
had ocean-sanded to a soul?
Shapes of light and greatness
confound the eye to quietness
and all the rest as well, unless
confessing naked eloquence
and stretched to a howl
over petulant rocks
in the barbarous tasseling of dawn
I stand with my back
to the midnight clocks
and drop my cock to the caustic waters,
my soul to spawn.
Half animal and man in my shambling frame
Half animal and man in my shambling frame
I ache toward the open doorway;
wounded and wronged in my make-believe flesh,
blazed and amazed by a million teardrop eyes,
my every ear alert to illumination
in the star-flying dark and flak daylight--
I hunch against the wind of forever come.
It Comes, It Comes
It Comes, It Comes,
an Ariel Colossus,
Armageddon without the glosses;
I'll look and take my losses,
get down and get my rocks tossed--
sweeter than a Shiva
for an enemy in the river.
Hollywoody
I stare at my figure
too dull to doll
it up with knots, wry ribbons
that stitch the wild hair into a tail.
The hips flare out
from the belly sack, a hairy flood
of becomings, selves
I may invite back for a drink...
Incipient breasts
flow molded from mounded shoulders,
nipples stiff to be bitten.
It's womanish,
except for the blowfish.
Figgy balls
complacent as labia, shed placenta
from some god-afterbirth.
The dill a willie
soft as a loaf or foggy forethought,
clitoral when licked
by a mind or a lip
anything that drugs the blood
into the long cave,
the manger
hung with drums, a terrified beating
that surges and squeezes.
A swallowed heart
would be less insistent, more nurturative,
provide a maturer moaning
than this hollow stick
with its found sounding, a seashell
dragging its echo.
Hot, prophetic
folds saunter simmer-shimmeringly,
lacteal, erect.
The wet coast
solders its salts against the groin,
sand and fire and thighs.
A night, a womb
floats her sewn awning over us,
a marmalade
softness constricted to eloquence.
Stars hung out to dry,
zen observers,
mark our dartings
like twins in the linen.
Love, love
swells and sweats
between us, cloisonne oysters
stripped
from their bone shells,
the shellack of evolution
returned to nudity.
Somewhere, hidden
below the neckline of waters
that define us,
my semen rot
and wait, rot and wait,
acid prisoners
pale to escape.
Scold
The face is porcelain, sourceless
perfection
towed from the cemetery
whites of the sea
and spit upon by lime,
cremated to this coldness, this clarity.
Blank statuette,
unriven by sweetness or sorrow,
smooth as a blind moon
or dew on a cactus!
Follicleless, is this
the end of wrath and worry?
Does a wild rabbit shred cries
below your shine?
Anatomy entrapped by a sheen,
mechanism steeled to a polish,
there are such depths in your surfaces!
A star could not finish it.
No sun
can blanche you beyond what you are.
Limitless
glares anger at you larynx
that never once hurt open for air.
How does it feel to be in there
seamless and beaming? Tell me, tell me!
Open your mouth and bleed
a God-spout,
a riot.
Mister S
The scenery of the ribs is a stage-set:
medieval coils of veins,
cracked flames
and the abysmal bellows,
the gold heart going like pocket-watch,
muffling a photoed face in its hands.
Heart! O Heart!
Look at the ruins you have maneuvered!
the hothouse monster who smahes the panes
and leaves the scene in spasms.
Mysteries
stiffen the pinions
of God's black bat,
dark Lucifer, soiling the filigree panelling
as he loiters, fingering a silk cigarette.
He's plausible,
a skirmish of smokes and dishwater, lonely
for a light or a toke....
A molten, mirrory backdrop
floats his eyes through the chest like train-lights;
A few, stray, unused thoughts
flashing and dangling
assemble the scarecrow
who puts goodness to flight.
Banquet
Sick ink
vomited belly up on the throw rug
as if I had forgiven it,
the swallowed ball
of my poisonous poem, a loaded ode
to limitlessness and light--
What trash!
as if the sky-- vapid and superior in its imperial blues
didn't know how to bite!
Mistakes, mistakes!
The pen's a miracle of mayhem, wild slips
of a wrist once slitted;
the bleeding, careering nib,
a moult of details in the schitzophrenic flow:
my mangy life,
my frozen embryo
carelessly cast from the shelf, unlidded
and palely little.
The cornflower fists
ache to begin, the watery lungs
two skinned, amneotic fish.
A bonfire, a bonfire!
Something huge and ruinous with real red in it!
That's what goes, what really goes
with this stone decor,
this face hung in a mirror slashed to tears.
Heat, heat
anything to exhaust
this caustic blank in my being, torn calendar--
Journals, drawn loves, alien lines
poems mouthed from poems
--dead-weight papers pushed to a death heap
a Jew harvest at Dachau--
Perfect things
as final as a corpse,
ashes to ashes.
The matchsticks itch
to finish it.
Irritable Rubicon
of lava, language vulcanzied on language,
I cross you languidly.
I am nearly asleep
in the oxygenless air. I am tired, tired,
tired of curses, tired of cures
tired of the alphabet.
The wall, infinite sheet,
turns intense as an oven, the nails
must be melting...
And here I stand
awash and exhausted, perfumed in the rolls
of corspse-smoke,
words burned to whorls.
Too tired to live, to die, to anything
kilned in skin.
Moment By Moment
Eyes that banquet upon every minute that intends itself!
Throat that lowers to the water you'll drown in;
how horribly a face pours out words,
the search lights just gone on behind the eyelids
turning down another forgotten road....
Azelea veins fill with bitter beauty,
ending in exuberance and death.
Psalm
Oh, language, why have you left me
and tongue why have you forsaken me?
The waters of my mouth are as a rock.
My words are a fountain that no longer runs
the clouds of my eye are dry.
The fields of my being are burnt to stalks,
their verdure lies shocked and degraded.
I am shucked and hollow only now.
That which flowed through me is now fled.
Cisterns in my lungs deep with bowls of meaning
lie emptied and shattered; they are dead.
My soul has walked under the eves of despair
and stepped into a shadowy place.
The shapes that beheld my hands
now are fled as in a broken dream;
chance sentences and meaningless accents
appall the day worse then the most wretched silence.
The new time of the morning no longer glorifies me,
afternoons are hot, confused with musings;
I am no more a thing to myself without you, o song!
a dead man wrapped in today's living,
a whisper that cannot hear itself.
Time indulges the spectacle, space adheres;
temptation that once so strongly bade me onward
like new dress laid out before me
folds soiled and dusty before my sense.
Chance and disaster, my twins,
bring nothing, are bright in nothing, come to nothing;
they are sold and dead, unmournable whores.
The mountain from which I saw myself, and perceived love,
as doves perceive it in the tilled field,
the open homes quaint with chimney smoke,
is flattened and ashes now. I am nothing and nowhere
a traveler with no goal for his feet,
a melody without purpose, hissed to a screech,
an arrow without target or trueline--
misery without meaning, despite double sadness,
a low moment stubbornly remembered,
without reason, without fixtures, like an old scald.
Psalm 2
Sweet willing water of my mother's body
why have you left me here?
My heart once so vivid and precious within me,
is now incased in sand. The thoughts of my father
are as strangers to me, unbidden and unwelcome;
we never traveled very far together.
Sleepless sour frowns on my muse's face
create ignorant clouds inside me.
Streams rush by battling, happy and buoyant,
while I stand aside. Leaves crack into fruit,
my blossoms have never hardened or matured,
they orbit ignorance and ecstasy irrelevantly.
Maddening ruts follow their own roads nowhere.
The seasons cringe into change. I, larval,
wallow in wasteful wonder bewilderingly;
my body is the scrapped habitat of apes,
the single plume of a doomed bird: an ostrich, an eagle.
the razors of my eyes have told to dullness,
and are bloodied and blunted,
numb with too many things. The water
is at my feet; my feet are cool
in the growing roll of water, laughed at
and comforted are the ankles. The walk is easy;
the knees are held lightly, shining-weighing.
And now my lungs are stamped with the new motion.
A heavy mercury, bright and without mercy,
holds the muses' potent time, a cadence
against teeth, increasing in loveliness,
and sufferers into the appellate gullet
like a cold breath, an endless spurring.
Psalm 3
Cool is the gravestone laid by for thee,
Soft is the expected Ariel that confounds thee
whose wings awakening with the light
are a memory, a daydream without curse
fragrantly remembered, new moan hay in the nostrils.
Night with its many clouds has come,
day still waits to arrive;
thinking of nothing I have crept into a collar,
diamond deeded and deified... these thoughts
counsel closely as fast friends,
I am cinched in.
When the angel of longing tramples desire,
when dust is with us and green grass is not,
when fear is with us and assurance is lost,
how may we recover forever?
Day comes with its ray's visit and raillery,
long walks in your yard empty of thought.
These ears have continued hearing
long rivers of unpolluted wine.
These eyes are victims saying all.
Howl! How may I be made fit for life
who is so misshapen? whose mirror is a question-mark?
I feel the wing of Ariel and have touched the hot hoof!
[How long and literal are your ages, Desire!]
My skin slits from its default.
Each sense sits configured for glory, again,
each moment made a mandible to apprehend,
each cherry converted to a church to enter.
With sapience and with praise I enter,
with blood on my righthand,
with heaven on my shoulder,
with bones in my sorrow,
with wind as my base and wickedness my tower,
the smile of dust and with a brow of Love,
I enter this somersault I have been dealt.
Psalm 4
All these years walking and where have I got to?
Looking before me I see advancing troubles,
looking behind me I see the nothing dust,
feel the cold pouring down my neck....
to the left a man looking down and still walking:
icy regret and old habitations.
To the right, that which I desired and have forgotten.
Looking down, I see my feet and what they might have been;
looking up, I see the judgment not withheld....
Glancing back within myself
will some strange being not return my stare?
Inside-- inside I sense the blessings and the bliss,
some silver shadow of my desiring unsullied;
steeped with ferocious being burns my happy littleness;
within is the crown unconquered!
What a man desires of the while, who will gainsay?
What voice will arise in the world's opinion
and with that opinion whip him?
My foot has gone upon a triple tread:
tears, and salt of pain, anxiety and trepidation,
pave the mortal manner of my advancement.
What will slow my going or disable my loitering?
What will my speed achieve?
When the mountains rear tomblike with their snow
how will the saying sky stay silent then?
When the eyes look lions but no heart slays
and the bones of fire and age are upon us,
who will court his recollection to remember
what miracles we had put into our years?
When action and touch and art are temptation no longer
will cold and cold attract us
among the millions of moments and maybes?
Who will achieve even unto the limit of a single breath?
When the oracle discourses with the dunce
there can be no God.
When a brave man is framed by his fears
or the coward surveys in hope the majesty of his grave,
there can be no God.
When a priest is used to plea with the blast
there can be no God.
When the populace is swooning for holy approbation
there is no God.
