Prologue
Naïve
There was a man who thought he could live free from danger and duress.
So much so that he began to climb down from his mountain and be careless.
Not before long he became ensnared in the spideress' web.
Slowly the threads would fetter and throttle him.
The days of his solitude would be long dead.
Insistent Instance
Insistent instance,
Transient distance:
Listening to the looming
Night's silent music
I First Infection
The Park
Strutting the park like Rimbaud,
Her lustrous light-laden cheek
Tilted towards the sun's lancing rays.
Her hewn raven brow and sphinxian lips ...
'Why is the world gazing my way?'
Ask her declamatory, fierce eyes.
'I am just an ordinary woman...'
The world reels,
Besotted with her innocence.
The Road is Never Easy
The road is never easy,
It is never lax nor sweet.
There will be stones in your soul,
And blisters on your feet.
And a heart made for suffering,
Is all that one can bear,
As false-friends thrust the knife in,
While pretending that they care.
Dionysian Lamentations
Snake-black locks
Overt oval pucker
Squarejawed squaw
Dusk
Musk
Enveloping dread arousal
Perseusian aversion
Medusean head
Pitted 'gainst
Serpentine encirclement.
Prometheus enchained
Josef K entrialed
Bitch-spittle
Blent with
Man-salt
Sweat.
Chased to tears edge by her pursuing eyes,
I still wear this black choler,
This severed, asphyxiating, velvet-noose,
Symbol of my slavery
joyously torn
...limb-from-limb,
Ad infinitum
Love Melancholy
If Love be a 'species of Melancholy'*,
Then inoculate thyself with the stop-time Black Riffs of Cosmic Blues,
And ride the twelve-legged steed of suffering towards dark discords.
That place where Nothingness obliterates all harmonies,
And where only the inutterable noise of Silence reigns.
(*according to Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy)
The Lack of Love
The lack of love,
The blue abyss, and the
Bliss of an eternally
Withheld
Kiss.
Laid in Earth
As I am laid in earth,
Would she weep for one such as me?
And yet I have wept a waterfall for her,
A flood in which she disdaineth even to dip her feet.
...I would fain those feet would trample me down,
So that I may kiss with bruis-ed lips that dappled flesh;
Spangling them with rosy clots besmeared,
And salty, sanguine, streaks of my blood.
Oeil
Her ...
I...
Her ...
Eye...
Secreting,
Secretive,
It pulls,
And pools,
And shudders in
Burnt umber.
Unwilling, to credit the
I
Trapped in its
Incendiary
Slumber.
The securing brow,
Barring the
Brazen diver,
Desperate to
Dip into the
Brown
Black
Dubious
Oil
That is her
Eye.
Forget
Bacchus invented wine as a
Gift,
For those men who needed
To forget.
Just as mead
Was made from
Memory's severed
Head.
London Underfoot
Carrying her cheekbones in my
Mind's eye,
I nose through the
Squalid, slush-churned streets
That twist and swerve among
Mushrooming building-sites.
Hard-hats, high-viz and hobnails offer
The shabby comfort of uniformity.
Dragging my carcass,
Caressing memories
Of dead friends.
My still handsome head
Carves through the cold
As car-jams hiding
Louche drivers
Laugh at me.
Streets that have sloughed off
The erotic parade in favour of a
Dismal, trudging despond.
Fixated,
I sadly follow the
Star of her
Visage,
Like a fool.
Alas, the eternal wench does
Not lead upward,
But leads astray.
Better to follow
The light of a
Dead misogynist philosopher
Than the heat of lust.
II The Trial of Tiw: Unadjourned
Bring me his head
Arms folded 'cross chest,
Hard face-mask of
Melancholia: at turns
Wan and wine red.
She wants one man
To punish another
For the madness of love.
For the disease of love.
Cruel goddess immune
To this male madness,
She calls for my head.
On a bloody platter.
Her method to wreak
This decapitation?
Betrayal.
Only betrayal.
The crime of cold
Premeditated betrayal
'Gainst that innocent emotion
Of inappropriate love
Siren
It's the same old tale;
Bound to the mast
'mid sheets of
Siren song.
Rigid male,
Torn and blast
By the hurricano of
Seductio.
Heaping on
Heat and ice,
Nasty and nice, in
Unpredictable measure.
And buried
deep is the
Lure of an always
Unreachable treasure,
Bringing this sailor
To his knees,
Forever on the
Treadmill seas.
Keelhauled, he
Bounces back continually;
A hanged man
On a bungee jump.
No hero can
Conquer the Siren.
He can only dangle there
And hope for survival.
Welcome to Coventry
Welcome to Coventry,
Let them stew in their
Aloof stupidity.
No longer speak to me,
Saith vanity in its precious,
Pretentious finery.
Drunk on stale hostility,
Moonshine ressentiment,
And impotent inferiority.
Welcome to Coventry.
Let them stew in their
Aloof stupidity.
Cast not thy eye towards death,
Nor let thy breath sag beneath
The weight of oppressing dearth.
But raise up thy flaming head
From the earth and spit fire
And sulfur at the undertakers
Of the spirit and the living dead!
Welcome to Coventry
Let them stew in their
Aloof stupidity.
Heroic Laments
You cannot refuse the quest forever,
You cannot choose the nothing. Nor turn back,
To tread water, or to ignore
The call to the road, and the grail search.
For it will come to you when least expected;
When you are ill-prepared and ill-at-ease
With yourself and your world.
But for all that,
Your trial, when it comes, will be most dire.
And if you survive, your strength will be boosted
Tenfold. And your depths will plunge fathoms below.
Survival and Return - finding your way back
Over the corpses of those adversaries
Who tried to block your way and torture you.
A reluctant hero, thrust into the
Perilous Realm of initiation.
Dark Goddess, I am about to slay you:
Else I will be trapped in your Hell forever.
Medals
Wearing her slurs as medallions,
Beaten down, spat upon -
Never did I feel more
alive than now, as every
Tendon aches and every muscle
Screams its purple pain.
Darksome Eyes
Worship the darksome eyes of the wild woman.
Those midnight visors have possessed me wholly;
A stormcloud sent in vengeance silent, to
Derange my mind with their swart violence.
Am I in love with my own Hell?
Folly
Society demands mediocrity in exchange for security.
Conformity is raised above truth and honesty;
Pretend and deceive is the way to popularity
Along with false hilarity and a chorus of;
'How are you'!
But is the need for security so great today as it was in the past?
Are we not paying fealty to an anachronism that no longer deserves to last?
Let eccentricity flourish and let madmen reign,
For the Fool was always the wisest of men and the least sane.
All my heroes were considered to be madmen at one time or other.
The Ideal
Attraction/Affection makes us impute beauty [or the 'Ideal'] to the plainest
things - even to the ugliest things.
Does the inverse work? Or does repugnance not rather make us see things the way
they really are?
Poets extol the Ideal like cunt-struck
Lovers in their zeal for mere replication.
Art might be a bridge to that Ideal,
Or a substitution for the hard and real.
Life and Death Struggle
Perhaps life is a pilgrimage after all,
And the dark bitch guarding this leg of the way -
Squatting with the Toad work and plotting my Fall -
Is the Herculean trial and token to pay
The ferryman of the stagnant world below.
I am now in the most dire fight of my life -
in combat with the Evil and carnate aspect of the Divine Mother.
I am to be severely tested for the value of my truths.
The black-hearted bitch Kali wants to crush me.
She sniffed out my Void, filled it with her poison and went in for the slow,
agonising Kill.
She rushed in like a sickness.
Caught in the Spider's web - pulling away and going forward are equally
dangerous.
But the hag herself remains eternally trapped in her own stultifying Wilderness.
I, the victim, have what she does not have: the possibility of escape.
The Axe Fell and Cleft
... One side of my bifurcated mind is obsessed with you, dismal muse.
You perch on my right shoulder like a malicious version of Odin's Raven;
Piping not wisdom, but the siren song of madness into mine ear.
Lightning
Mere love strikes like Thor's thunder - blasting, blitzing,
Blistering, breaking the ego in twain.
The victim - heroism now thrust upon him,
Must attempt to retie the knot and refrain from
Splintered thought and
See-saw emotions,
Or he shall be forever caught and consumed
By the flesh-eating bug of his own mania.
Even Beyond the Grave
Dark lady, your charm-ed circle hath me corrupted,
And my exile from hence at your cruel behest hath my life disrupted.
I did breathe thine air so poisonous,
And did enact your shifting bidding so perversely tyrannous.
Thy face is too beauteously evil for me to take in.
And yet I must drink in the elixir of your stern eyes,
And quilted lips and septum; sculpted nose and gargantuan jaw.
I cannot describe your brows as they are beyond astonishment.
Your cool visage and midnight hair -
What Devil made you and threw you in my midst?
I wish I never knew you and would like to
Slash my wrists if I were not so cowardly.
Death would be no release for me as I know to my cost,
That I would love you forever, even if my life be lost.
Roads
Three roads fan out in front:
I take the nearest first;
A Stoical road,
Not tied to a mast, nor ears stopt with wax.
No.
But most nakedly will I bear
The brunt of the blastings of the beastess.
And I will not be turned nor will I be spurned
By fear
Nor burned, nor spun nor run:
I will stand my ground without a sound, nor murmur, nor whimper.
Cold, statuesque,
Deliberate, unyielding,
Wave-breaking.
The test of stone
To cheat Medusa by playing stone dead.
III The Bridge Back
Cupidity
The antients were far more kinde:
For they did not care to binde
The lover to his love,
But rather opined that Eros fired his dart
Which did impinge the lover's heart
And so make him desire against his will.
And so love was a kind of ill,
And not a common idle thrill,
But destined to be, despite all.
The World is You
There is no 'evil' in itself: you impute the evil.
Therefore the Evil Mother is thine own invention: your own evil projected onto
the Mother.
The demon's eye is demon-ising.
Draw this intentionality in and remove the barb-ed sting.
Absorb the Evil Mother back into your Self.
The Mother is the World.
The World is not Evil - thinking only makes it so.
The World is You.
Return
The test has been passed: all that needs to be done is to endure the result.
Overcome good and evil - there is a boon to be collected and taken home:
'Beyond Good and Evil' - but not beyond 'Good and Bad'.
For the noble Good is that which does not re-act:
It is certainly a Good which is not dependent upon wo-man for its Selfhood.
Woman, I have painted you in Black hues;
I have imperiled you with my dark resoundings.
I have foisted upon you the blame for my blues.
I have projected upon you the poison of mine own surroundings.
I now see you in your purity and blamelessness.
I now see you in your vulnerability and childishness.
Your beauty is undimmed in my eyes.
I can only scream soft surprise at my beastliness.
Forgive me; the quest was upon me thrust.
This was no conscious deed but only the relentlessness
Of a destiny cloaked in must.
The Bridge Back
The gods desired me to quest as I had long resisted the Call.
The gods brought me to the extreme limits of my tether
And brought me to the very precipice of my Fall.
I was plunged into the torrid and stormy weather
From which there is little recall.
I could only follow the path to the ends of the earth.
To the very extreme of hate and spite.
I could only fight and come to the very dying of the light.
The bridge has been passed and the turbulent river beneath assuaged.
I am now on my Island where I will sojourn and end,
Still and calm, like the solitude which is my only friend.
Posts
