simonhlilly

DAYS NOW

Days now the whispers come and go

worm words generated from earth,

words of smoke, words of plants.

.

Turn sideways, become thin,

slip between one day and another,

at the year’s ending so little noise.

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These stars – they are not now,

they have burned bright and died

a million, million years ago.

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Therefore, I bow down and breath deep

the dead light of our ancestors,

gone and here and gone again.

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Time is the fat of stars;

seeping in the long years,

other glorious mornings long gone,

distant golden mornings,

other silent rooms, other footsteps.

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Nothing goes to waste

but slowly changes from what it was

woven threefold into other days.

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The Magister holds starlight in his crystal spheres

to rot them down to raven’s wings

where seconds copulate birthing strange homunculi.

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They know the answers only the dead know

in butterfly whispers etching notions,

as acid reveals the jagged web of meteorites.

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He is old now,

his bones creak like galleons do.

His mind, though, a bright moon in a stormy sky

for he is, he says, acquainted with all the demons

that dwell beyond law and science,

who converse in riddles

and move as if dancing upon other gravities.

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Their heads are broken open,

their orifices sprouting green tendrils,

their skin, inhabited scrolls

where letters form and reform in curious calligraphies.

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Lascivious is their language,

exotic and full of lilting innuendo.

Their madnesses are roads untrod before.

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He reads the books that have never been opened,

by walking backwards through mirrors.

His only sustenance, the tiny measurements of primordial dust

wherein he seeks his own eternal name.

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He practices the mudras of teaching and of dissolution.

His words fall sparsely in vast space

like birds that fly across a still sunset sky.

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Their skin peeled back, returned to light

they tend their dripping hives,

honey vowels, the sigh of release.

They climb upon one another,

puncturing their certainty,

melting into each other’s futures.

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The sawhorse shall be put together.

A new constellation shall appear in the southern sky

as Betelguese, or its ghost, or its future,

Weighs the likelihood of eternity.

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The world is fire and light

and time is the fat of stars.

The apple winces in its dawn frost,

The sequoias sing to planet’s spin.

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Clear facts stumble unheeded through forest fires

whilst ungainly notions dress the moments.

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The alembic bubbles and quivers,

uncertain whether it can hold

the sentience of its own soot.

.

Still the Great Work must continue.

In holiness we are rubbed out completely

imagining new wings, writing new musics.

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