1
moon leans down.
spirit of the departed
pale, smiling.
in the yakitori bar
every face
a character from Hiroshige.
we bend to each other
laughing
at the unfailing sorrow
of our human condition.
sake tasting
of tears.
warm night
cicadas tisk and tut:
our homeward staggering.
—-
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged cicadas, friends, Haiku, japan, journeys, loss, meetings, moon, night, Poetry, return, sake, sorrow, spirits of the dead, travel, yakitori | 3 Comments »
MIND FLICKER
Dream-quick,
These words
Borrowed
From
A deeper well.
—
AIR OCEANS
Broad prowed,
Galleon wood-pigeons
Dip and anchor
On buttercup oceans.
Bright morning breeze.
Lullaby shanties
From crow’s nest trees.
Sun-still islands,
Slow air tides.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged air, birds, birdsong, Poetry, spring, sunlight, welling, words | 4 Comments »
—
Night rain
The broken sky
Puddle moon
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged cool, Haiku, moon, night, rain | 2 Comments »
—-
CITIES OF NIGHT
The prickle-skin of neon
Electric cicada buzz.
Light – the city’s camoflage.
Fickle, flicker
Paling sun, moon, stars.
Echoed shadows coloured.
Time puddled,
Hissing.
Neon kimono
Expressionless stare
Indwelling darkness.
Iron castle
Skull-wreathed.
A sludge of thought
Clay-like, heavy.
The weight of
Tomorrow.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged cicadas, city, darkness, kuwait, landscape, neon, night, photographs, Poetry, rain, Tokyo | 2 Comments »
How still
The lashes of your eyes
Searching words
How still
How long
The slow rise of your breath
Searching peace
How long
How fine
The enamelled morning
Blue, shadowed
How fine
How light
The dive of swallows
above buttercup shine
How light
How still, how long
How fine, how light,
This filigree life
Floating skywards
—
Well, a thanks to Marie Marshall, whose words this morning fed this little thing, sort of summing up the morning sun here, before the clouds pile up and wind carries in rain… ( if I can put in a link to the original I will, not that it’s difficult but I am all at sea with invisible machinery).
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged May, morning, Poetry, song, spring, sun | 2 Comments »
A continuation of fragments inspired by others in this virtuality. Thanks be to all their moments of light.
WHEEL OF FORTUNE
Drained dregs,
swirled,
interrogated.
Take possession,
a wonder!
(shadow of a monkey,
top hat, spinning wheel,
a descent into most
beautiful desolation!)
—-
MARI’S PAINTING
The smudges,
fingerprints of,
intentions of.
Something emerges.
Something.
Something peels away,
flakes of time.
A brush with fate,
a moment
remarked.
—-
MAPPA MUNDI
Place is a story
someone has inhabited,
long ago, leaving signs,
debris, memory.
A place where no one has been
exists nowhere,
inhabited by jealous dragons,
guarding their own history.
Blank space
waiting for words, instructions.
Place: a time that piles up upon itself,
memory on memory,
making ghosts that sing
sweet, terrible songs.
—-
OBJECT
Maybe more that it is a thing,
a presence, but not recognisable.
Like an archetype it resonates
with many types of object,
but its form, colour, meaning,
purpose are not appearent.
It serves its own existence,
intrudes upon ours.
—-
WRITER
Pouring words from the jug of your head.
More you pour, more is there.
How many sights, how many sounds
are buried in memory and dream?
There will be no end of it,
squeezing out the now and the then.
It is nothing and then it is everything.
From afar, we watch your erratic climb,
cheering, oohing and aaahing.
—-
REMINDER
Food for the spirits,
food from the ancestors:
our breath, our voice.
—-
INTROSPECTION
All this
could be as pointless,
as self-enwrapped,
as walking solo to the South Pole.
It could be as noble
as a wounded messenger
warning of danger over the next hill.
It could be science.
It could be experimentation.
It could be a zoo.
It could be shared visioned stories
around a small fire on a wild night.
It could be howling ‘why?’ at the stars.
It could be showing off.
It could be a fatal avoidance.
It could be searching,
searching for what has been lost,
what has been forgotten.
It could be a waste of time.
It could be the whole damn purpose of time.
Following threads that are clues,
or are the unravelling of sense.
—-
ATTRACT
The mind orbits fascinated,
bemothed heart fluttering
near then far.
These harsh,
gentle words.
—-
INCIDENT
Scintillating sparkles.
Mind silenced
by a million small
dancing suns.
Distantly,
the shipwreck slides
silent beneath the waves.
—-
ARTLESS
“express yourself”
Vapid instruction.
Read this book
Teaching how to read.
Ride this bike,
Hands here,
Feet here.
Stuttered, stumbled,
(Walking, running,
After all, just falling
Cleverly)
“express yourself”
Reveal attractive scars,
Elegant vulnerabilities,
Do not shock nor upset,
Refine the blood, the stains.
Tidy up the mess,
Sauté the raw.
Season, disguise,
Dissimulate.
Pressed out, inside out,
Regurgitated, ejected,
Void, voided.
Go,
Express yourself
Numb
Skull.
—-
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged bloggers, conversations, fragments, images, Poetry | 2 Comments »
SOUL’S MUSIC
This, then, is the music.
My head: a rippling stream,
A passing breeze,
A rustle, a lifting
And a falling.
Notes that cascade and tumble
But hold still.
New green leaves, new shade;
Harmonic tides,
Distant waves pierced:
The gull’s wheeling turn;
A slow stuttering starlight;
A bloom of sun, a drift of moon.
Fingers rippling on water strings
A remembrance, an essence, a perfume,
A rise of incense.
The turning of a page,
The sound of honest paper.
A rhythm of gardening,
A stroke of brushes,
A slow file turning soft, bright silver,
An edge revealed.
Trembling cascade,
Inevitable shift
From melancholic
To elegaic,
A broken heart soothed
Somehow
( but never mended).
The smell of rain.
The smell of summer.
A sequence moving along time,
Planned but reckless,
A bed, a couch, a cradle.
Always building to this matchlessness:
The revolving, wheeling heavens.
A path between dawn and dusk,
A road paved amongst the stars.
It is neither the truth
Nor the lie of words,
Neither the insistence
Nor the revealing of maps.
It is weaving the name of a soul,
A secret name known by all.
This music, a familiar mystery,
An itch, a longing, a homecoming
Just beyond that green hill.
Just beyond that hill.
***
There is that sort of dream wherein one listens to, or manages to play, the very essence of oneself, the most perfect delightful complete sounds, the most exquisite melody. Probably a compilation of the oldest, forgotten echoes from childhood, the phrases and rhythms that themselves formed the brain’s shape, how it moves within itself. Always fascinating, the way a composer or musician can be recognised by a phrasing, a pattern of intervals, a sequence of chords. As if they always return to those notes that name the shape of their own soul.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged chord progression, composition, dream, edge, emotion, feeling, guitar, identity, language of sound, languageless communication, longing, music, note sequence, perception, Poetry, resonance, signature, Soul | 2 Comments »
AN INSTANT OF MIDNIGHT
Fragments of midnight
Drip.
Fears congeal.
But wait and watch,
Hold,
Turn not away.
See them stretch
Long shadows,
Return to only
Small knotted memories,
Hopes lost, misplaced,
Strategies discarded.
The grooves of tears
Gnawing cascades
Down ravines
To the slow, dark plateau,
The lake of now
An instant of
Midnight.
****
Move past the words
And there is just
The pumping songs of blood.
Down velvet streams to pools
Where washed cells
Glow golden in caves
Of pleasure,
Delighting in organic dance.
Enwrapped,
Swing upon the breast of being itself,
Resting in motion
The way a leaf belongs
The way a star belongs
The way a moment belongs.
In eternity
Held forever.
****
The names of night
Are scribbles
Within its own darkness.
Scattered fragments
Of midnight
Glint, investigating
Endless variations:
One pattern, one sound
A horizon to hollowness
An edge, slurred, smudged,
Scumbled.
Each form extruded
Attempting definition.
Continuous recitation
A rope between emptinesses.
Each, despairing, spins
Vanishing to void.
Choosing a new name,
A new path,
Emerging, bubbled into being,
A roar of foam,
White noise of silence,
Ocean vastness
Vast, holy darkness,
Rumbling hum.
****
one thousand
And eight names
Of returning night.
****
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged creation, definition, dream, fear, language, manifestation, mind, night, nightmare, Poetry, revealing, Sound, understanding | 13 Comments »
SPEAKING IN TONGUES (dream stream)
Drag it through, wiped, stained, dyed, a sop.
This brush awkward,
the hand suffers from doubt,
stutters laden with gold black signs.
The words to use, the words not to use, the ordering of words, the letters of the law.
Stumbling into gaps, minding the gaps, the howling winds, the imminent rain. It changes everything and nothing. A shaman’s song summoning, departing on the wind. Three worlds by far is not enough, is too much. The twelve halls of the Aesir, joy and feasting in each one, even Ullr’s dark vale.
This script unlocks avenues,
makes actors vapours,
vapours actors.
Howling time, death-watch seconds. Do we care which demons are summoned, so long as they stream in and tell us: now it is real, now those wishes will become ripe and fall, now there will become meaning to all the suffering.
Who is it who sings, no sirens, no silkies, no fatuus igni? The chimes, the bells across the fields mingling with the blackbirds. In the cooling evening so silently the apple blossom peels seconds apart, minute by minute, statuesque, the light holds back, turns solid.
The song is not and is,
Each word offering gifts of meaning
Obscuring invention
Reducing points to lines
The gap, the space,
The disenchanted exquisiteness of it
Enough to breed madness
Or eloquence
Or a flutter of coincidence
The coming together of likes.
The burning of division.
A drum of words, rhythm and shock, imitation of emotion, the ruin of time.
Belonging to, not belonging to, lists, listen to the names,
Each name
a thousand new names,
Each placed here and here in the dark body ’til it glistens, quickens, revives, re-dreams those vast cascades. Smallest shattering of lives, fragmenting to combine into consonant and vowel, the thousand names of every god, every hall, every realm, every storm over the enchanted forest where the golden boys play, the golden boys with golden hair, who watch but take no part in each inevitable slaughter.
A dream only,
a day of dream,
a feast of dream,
an amusement of titans,
a hypothesis of worlds.
The heart singing alone.
The soul’s shape as song.
An ululation.
A speaking in tongues.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged art, awareness, Brahmana Purana, consciousness, creation, dream, language, limits, Mabinogion, meeting points, myth, night, Poetry, probabilities, Sound, void | 3 Comments »
ON JADE BEACH
On Jade Beach,
Looking out west,
Indigo and white, the sea.
Ripples, woven ikat patterns
By the cold wind.
We could not tell
What was precious,
Nor what bestowed
Immortality:
Pockets weighed down
With smoothed fragments
Of beauty.
Dark pine leans out.
An arc of dark sand.
White, cold wind from the mountains.
These pebbles were mountains,
This sea, spring rains.
Looking for signs of heaven,
Dreaming of jade rivers.
Six foot of snow
Deep in the hills.
Inside the grass-roofed houses,
Warm and dark:
Silk-drying racks,
Rice-harvest regalia.
The big drum is silent
But its roundness
Fills up the valleys
All around.
Our footprints along the ice paths
Melted, flowed into the bay.
The cedars redden again with pollen,
Rust-red in the sharp sunlight.
On smooth black sand
The tide rolls a pebble
To and fro.
Your fingertips
Impressed on clay tea-bowl rim.
The fragrance of memory
Bitter and bright.
These roads we take
So winding,
It is difficult to recall
The last views of the sea,
The last of the sunset.
Go on,
We shall not be far behind.
Down to the sea
Looking for immortality.
*****
BLEAK WIND
(no reason why
It should come up.
No reason why
It should not.
Remembering
The last time we saw you
Burdened but smiling
Far over the mountain passes
Down by the sea
Laughter along the shore
Dark pines listening
A bleak wind
Mountain still deep in snow)
****
THE WAY IT IS
no need to wait
no need to look back.
we are all following,
one by one.
the winding path
into deep mountain
stillness.
***
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged beach, friends, jade, japan, landscape, loss, memory, mortality, mountains, Nagano, photography, pines, Poetry, remembering, sea, snow, time | 4 Comments »
simonhlilly 