One sudden morning

One sudden morning, as the sun sprang gayly
Slung across the day
And the breeze teased the slithery waters
And crowned the trees with whispers
I slipped the irons of time.

The child grandfathered the world
Through my heart, and I saw the true meaning
Of love beyond mentioning, of life unsheathed.
I saw the fringe of being, the birthplace
Of torment and gain, hand in hand in hand.

Awash in that speck of reality
That illusion casts in the eye,
Was unbending everness, all in gale and garnet,
In anguish above and below
That which eludes the grasp.

A wisp of this and that,
And great epics are written
In groaning slabs of rock, in ecstatic wandering
Through surges of joy and despair
All identically kitted out.

Whether we arrive here or there
Means nothing, after all;
That was the secret that escapes always.

In the beginning was the word
And the word was not.

The birth of time

My last post may have seemed rather a dismal prospect, so I felt the need to perk things up a bit. Hence this prequel.

Suddenly, there was suddenly
Suddenly one thing could follow the last
A great thumping cosmos hummed itself
Into being, bits of light chased and clumped

Into riots of color. Suddenly,
There could be succession, a rhythm.
There could be change and season
And the songs the winter writes for summer.

Then came memory, and all the love and loathing
To fill it til it spilled bursting
Into spinning clinging helical again
What was became was

How could I not be born?

I strode along Boulevards of grace-rimmed
Wonder, green-eyed raspberry wet
Racing, lapping my feet, my soul
The color of sweet melting kisses.

A swirl of endless life/death enticed about me
How kind to have this path so under me!
How clear to have such rhyming intense otherness
Calling all about!

I have these charts, these vectors,
This swollen ark to take me sailing.
Here comes a grandfather wind
All a-swoon!

The poet who sang at the end of time

The bland design falls, outward bound.
The swilling beast groans with cheap ecstasy,
Sometimes interior,
Sometimes superior.

What is exterior obliterates me
Until my fragile image asserts its wee voice,
Lost in a chorus
Of wee voices.

I know, I know, I am the only me,
The only conjunction of these points,
But how could you have failed to guide me
Through this hidden path?

Was I supposed to intuit mere chance?

As it is, I’m left to glide along
Waste-bound avenues,
Street grime the color of storm clouds,
Tipping into a middling redemption

Unawares, using old navigation charts,
Useless azimuths, discarded distances,
Captain of a bottomless vessel,
An occidental sailor upon oriental shores.

See there, where no destination lies.
A simple ending, no beyond, no before.
Not even a reason for despairing.
We’d mistaken the moon for a song.

Genealogy II

Somehow, a mitochondrion wormed its way
Into our native beast, and, having found shelter,
Settled in.

We have twisted it to our liking,
Harvesting its life energy,
Binding it to ourselves

Like an indentured child
Harvesting the boundless sunlight
For a wizened mole.

Those walls have long since dissolved,
But part of us still seeks
The primitive new,

The strange echo of mutation,
The protean coil,
That entwines alien virtues.

But for every meld there is a sever,
How can I embrace you
If we have become one?

And for every sever there is a mending.
And so we spin and part our helix
Until end becomes beginning.

Caro Federico: An homage

Inspired by the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca.

This flaming music
Cannot stop itself
Useless anyway!
The guitar sings of things
It dares not understand
The surly birds of a dead spring
Of bloody spades
And sinking sands
And cameliatic brands
This life without death
These pointless arrows
These wineless cups
This meeting without understanding
This whimless moon
These bullrings
Ringing endlessly
Why?