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Posts Tagged ‘art’

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NEURAL NET

As if holiness
Were a subtraction
They would have us
Feign goodness,
These bullies of belief.

Tracks of sparks in pathways of desire,
This darkened room, these walls and doors,
Appearing, disappearing.

A space to move in, a sudden halt.
Sparks and glimmer in the dark,
Sparks on roads, these gods, these equations.

This electric touch, this love glow
A scatter of sparks.
This blackbird in the morning,
This dull thud of bombs,
A scattering of sparks.

Sound and light
Sprayed along roads
Falling golden.
Configuring this dream.

—-

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continuing the themes on the nature of thought, the real, the truth, the seen, the unseen the creation of matter and the creation of meaning,

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SERRY

What is said,
This moment,
This word,
Is real, torn, squeezed,
Extruded
From heart and breath
And world.

This sly scribble,
A snake that curves
And curls tight,
Brain deep.
My thoughts
In your voice,
A mask,
A masking.
Laid down,
A trap, cunning gin
Tongue-tying,
Strident
(Though even whispered).
Time bomb.

We sing in chords,
In chorus.
Drum on flesh and earth
Together,
Drum with feet,
Drum with tongues.
Together ululate,
A stampede, a flock.
Syncopate pulse,
We merge.

Never this
String of thought,
Tugged out to tie senses,
Alone, locked on paths
With no cessation.
A spell, an enchanting,
Mazed: ink and electron
Dancing grim tango.

Entangled, entangled
In mind or mouth,
Striving to know escape
Or to know belonging.

The mute language of skies,
The sing of cloud dissolving.

Being nothing
But ourselves
We dive down
And drown.

What i mean is
What eye can mean
What mean is even tranquil
What line dances
What dance thrills out
Worlds words
See spy the key
Notation
Reminders
Remain
Only.

A cool breeze lifts the poplars
A cool breeze learns sound,
Then passes back to silence.

—–

Sparked by a pile of books, a passage of time.
The title, originally ‘Orality’ ( a new word to me, precise and useful but somehow ugly) I changed to ‘Serry’, a very nice concise, old word that sums up both restriction and unity….( I randomly found it whilst checking the spelling of ‘cessation’!).

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FIGURATIVELY

Such as it is,

(All immanent),

It fades, fades, flies, falls.

Our art,

The only way

To catch the present moment,

Reflected, mirrored

On this moving, rippled

Lake of memory.

—-

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WHAT THE GODS SAY

1.

These,
the ghosts
adhering to inner walls,
stains and smudge,
scribbles in haste
‘remember me’.
Words that leapfrog meaning, bray and boast their sounds, exultant cascades untranslatable, insubstantial, picked out, chosen, chaos bouquet, emphatically vague. They are summoned and summon yet more. A duty, to weigh the grains and count.
Enumerate.
Embody.
To be,
(that’s what the scholar said),
to be, only the purpose, the desperate clutch of the sliding mind, the seed to puncture shell, to push aside soil, to explode in cellular satisfaction,
only for a moment,
only a fragment spinning from sight,
(a haze of insect wing, moth dust, singeing carapace),
quick fizz of smoke
before a new
silent morning.

___

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2.

The gods are talking and
who, now, will listen?
( except the still heads, still ears of cats, furled limbs, breathing soft).
The songs drunken with time, beyond reasonable explanations, beyond vocabulary, even.
A world rhythm,
geologic heart,
solar wind tatters,
a raiment of light.
Bruised and blue, bullied, subdued with belief, the weight of knowing, the want of neat ends. The jazz ravings disdained, we stutter, scatter, mutter into neat insanities, inexcusable attrocities, the most urbane deniabilities: accepted gospels, ( polite murmur, a scatter of slight applause).
Damned, chained,
not fit for consumption,
bagged, tagged, dumped.
Peeled back, flayed, hearts melted, livers liquified, bones removed, it rattles yet: the endless excuses, one more throw, red or black, no more bets.
Certainly, a certain outcome.
These flickering words dissappear.
Peals of laughter.
Exit stage.
Silence.

—-

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3.

The giants, ensorcelled, (confined to the bitter end, the edge, paled and wan)
Believe they begin to believe they doubt their own existences. Instead, we have designed
Towering tree houses, worlds on a toothpick, serpents performing charity,
Clever monsters spruced up, natty dressed, elocuted, certificated
Charm themselves into, insinuate, invade and invalidate the belated wakers.
They are now the boys in charge, elegantly rewriting memory,
Railroading necessities. The taste for giants long past, evaporated ice.

——

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4.
Shall I list the devatas, the demons and angels, ( who bear the identical of names, who bear the burdens of our blame). Pinned out, wings splayed, members politely erased, genders hushed up. Who strode worlds: now only the names of new cars, lines of fashion, confections. Reincarnate as pet dogs and cats, the endless dreaming of glories, biding time.

—-

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the images are taken from a longer sequence of drawings, yet to be titled and still ongoing, an animation of stillness, a shout of silence

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Just got a small pile of hardback volumes of my long poem, “The House of Trees”. Quite pleased with how they have come out. After a few false starts, I went with Blurb. Having a solid book with paper pages is a joy. Not aiming for any mass market ( wherever that is ), particularly with poetry!

If anyone is interested, a few copies are available from http://www.greenmanshop.co.uk so please go and have a look.

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Each spread has an image page facing the text pages, derived from photographs I took in Skye last autumn.

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Located during long overdue clearing out, this work from 1998, that I knew was lying around somewhere. Esoteric, but to those who chew.
Forbidden fruits,
says Miss Eve, ( missive),
forbidden by whom?
She says. Foolishness and Wisdom? To risk what for a world? To lose a world what would you not risk? Elastic minds dance. The rigidity of denied souls, the refusal to blur lines. Common sense, a weedkiller on the path to the orchard (where she waits, ready to offer more than everything). Nonsense, nonsense. Defining madness by your turgid, proscribing fears a little unwise, do you not think? Somnambulism, catatonia, walking backwards towards the abyss. Some things are too simple for words. Some words are too short, some too long. Orchestrate, sound values. Tongue shaped like a leaf. Leaf, a light-savouring tongue. Tuned. Resonance. Morphic. Shapely. What a nerve. ” I praise the many-functioned plants, Mothers of Mankind.”
The First and Last is a seed.
Mind, the compost.
Shimmer, cascade,
the arrows of light.
Our Lord is a tree.
Our Lady, an orchard,
a forest.
Our blanket is green.
Our air, our breath, a benison from roots…..

WAY OF SALT

Salvia Vocabulary.

Vocabulary
Vocabulaire
Words in air
The word is, was, is
Salvia
The Way of Salt,
The Room of Life,
Our Lady of Origami,
Queen of Convolution.

Man eats plant,
Plant eats man.
Slain by a salad –
Seen, sane, slowed,
Honey-slurried, shifted,
Slid, shaped and stopped.

The word is: listen.
A steady wave of silence
Approaching the ear
From both sides. I do
Not, never, merely object
To subjective. What else
Is there? Me and my leaves:
A thousand shivering whispers,
Divine veins, snakes, circles, whisps,
Whispers: from behind the curtain
A prompt, a curtain-raiser, or
The diva Herself. A scurry
Of scivvies.

Human to humus, plant to
Planet, words to worms. Slapped
Sharp against that bitter green wall.
The fizz – utter excitation of electrons,
The physical forgets form, form turns
Flow, flow turns vast;
Vortex: ex thought, ex libris,
Ex calibre. The Way that can
Be named is not the true Way.

Awareness: a well. Whither
Whatever whispers? Upon
What input, impulse, can
Thought flap like a fish,
Beached, lipped?
Stranded upon silence,
Salvia space, zephyrs
Sough the room, see
Sound, seed significance.

So, She says: ” Either
Servants of the planet
Or Masters of nothing”.
No choice. Plant voice,
Rooted human. Who?
Who cares? Who cares?
Homo viridis.
Homo vegetalis.
Homo salviensis.
Plant people,
One and all.
People plants, percept of
Perfection, confection of
Creation. Extraction of
Ex-stasis; bodiless buddies;
Hand in leaf with Lady of Life.

The word is, was, is
Salvia,
Saviour and salve.
Words in air
Vocabulaire
Vocabulary?
I wouldn’t like to say.

—-

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BLINK
(for Nathan)

How is it some patterning of the familiar, some phrase turned this way, that way turns more than echo, enlarges, exponents, fractures into its own chaos pattern?
We blink and the world disappears. We sleep and the universe unravels. We talk to the distance, converse with the invisible, as if our thoughts had pulses. And then there is that silence, in that forest, where that tree falls, unhindered, unremarked, unwitnessed. And the question marks the doubt.
What will be missed?
Slowly turning, slow breezes of distant breath,
We are enwebbed,
Weightless, waiting our turn.
A sweep, a cascade,
A clamour, a whisper,
A yes, an and but,
A slight widening of eye,
A lick of tongue to lip,
A spark, a cinder reseeded.
Upon an ash of dull vocabulary, a sudden dust devil dancing, acrobatic heretic, acrostic cross-stitch. And there it is, temporal flux. Gravity well. A siphon, a vortex, a cascade of neurons inventing new species. A bloom of bacteria basking in the bright futures of near-death.
Nothing is further from the truth, it never crossed my mind, a creature of habit, transfixed in the headlamps. A tumble of the banal: our raw matter to tease out, to squeeze.
I am winged yet
And spinning,
Woven somewhere,
Laced, enbroidered,
Pricked out,
Sketched.
Not quite becoming,
Hesitant.
You were and are a mirror of sorts, silvered, distant. A moon sailing through cloud. There, intimated, expressed, uncovered. A lapse in time. Time-lapse. Shutter speed. Blink. Blink. Forgetting,
Remembering,
Forgetting.
To whom belongs the face in the mirror?( Always looking a little surprised, a little disappointed). Of all the voices in my head, strange rainforest bouquet, there was, is, will be, one more calm, one more complex, a careful equation. News from Nowhere.

” Matter
is merely
mind
deadened
by the development of habit
to the point
where the breaking up
of these habits
is very difficult.”

Stubborn, fixed. It is alchemical. I, alembic, a host of raven wings and a lost crown of kings.
Here, it grows late. There: later or earlier. Those who watch, watch over the sleepers. Those who sleep, dream the waking world. Blink. It begins. Blink. It ends. The mirror remains a mirror reflecting upon what it is not. Blink. Turn away, it ceases. Turn back, it re-appears.
As if never gone away. As if never gone by. As if never gone.
Even, even, they say,
In a complete vacuum,
In a complete darkness,
No matter how dark,
No matter how hard they try,
They say,
There always, always, seems to be
Half a photon
Somehow
Remaining.
Light
Persisting.
(Just
A
Thought.)

—–

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kali1e

WORD OF EARTH ( “geo- logos”) – a dream stream.

(from “RECITATION” (3)

Measureless are the layering of voices stratifying the night. A geology of language. A wisdom of the earth. A voice of weight. A voice of remembering. Mutterings over herbs and hunted, mutterings around campfires, incoherant weepings in empty spaces, rocking, rocking inconsolable.
The few
who have pushed through,
who have passed to the other side of the sky,
where the stars walk
on two legs, like people,
in brightnesss,
in brightness.
They find the rhythmic chants spinning out of the web along its thin, strong lines, its reliable patterns, its junctures. They weave and weave in and out of song, free to find and to lose form, to remember and to forget, but always to return to the axis, climbing their own spine-tree just for the view, just for the view.
In the dark,
snakes and daggers.
The hungry fingers, the hungry eyes.
To be sent out
and not to return home
empty-handed.
To never be bereft again, never that spun hollowness where power pulls to the edges and breathes itself away in a silence more devastating than sobs.
Click, clack,
the needles go.
Snip, snap
the shears.
She gathers up,
she gathers in,
she counts the knots,
she raises the winds.
She claps her hands and waves boil. The black cat weaves between her calves, purring. Patter, patter on the wet sand. The strings move deft between cold fingertips. A catching of moments. They are so intrigued, so curious like cats, like moths, these spirits clamber and elbow in to see more. Sticky wisdom traps them as flies. Their syllables mirrored and pronounced, taken from thin lips, pointed tongues, and turned, turned and shaped, malleable soul breath mingled to free the dreaming souls of drowned sailors anchored in the black, black starless deep.
They float and turn slowly.
Increments of light
bounce around empty eye sockets.
Teeth shed like wheat,
like barley, nicotine-stained.
Worn thin
and grazed by little fishes,
little fishes,
scoured by starfish,
bored by worms.
They rise and feel the release of water’s weight. They rise and rise, blow and shatter to powder, diatom dust. Turned song for whales, cathedrals of breathing space.
Oceans : just unfamiliar skies.
Skies : just uncharted oceans.
Skiff and wherry,
stars tacking dimensional tides,
solar winds,
trawling the chants,
the glimmer scale words,
the protection mantras, the seeds, the forms, the road home.

——

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ARCHED (Part 7)

Stone
Cast in,
Rippling
Time’s pool.

Outwards
And inwards,
A settled pattern
Of comings and goings.

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And the weight
Of the stone:
An anchor, a haven.
Small, still island
In a restless sea.

alder creatures boss

A forest for song.
A forest for silence.
A carpenter’s house,
A house of edge and curve.
A mother’s house,
A house of succour,
Of promises kept,
Of warm dark.

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Artificer’s jewel:
A design
Of forever.

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clasped4

I do not know exactly when I took these photographs, certainly a few years ago now. It is not so easy to capture low light distant images without a tripod. Many were so underexposed so as to be completely black. Quite an interesting process to reveal the hidden images, grainy and so resembling the garish contrast of night-vision goggles. The revealing of distant mysteries. Creatures of the Abyss. Phosphorescent trails. The cave, plant sight lit. Eyes open or shut?

forested

THE STONE’S TALE

1
First Commandments.

The first descent
From Sinai
Tutmoses made,
(said these tongues of stone,
Buried in the vaults of space,
Uprised, upraised, given voice
By faith and silent yearning),
He turned Lord Asar, Green Osiris,
Bursting green fire, plant enthused,
Vegetal, spilt his seed,
Red pomegranate lips,
Entwined his heart and loins
With lust of God,
Forgot himself,
Became unmanageable –
Lightning and cloud –
Unintelligible, a roaring message
No one dared listen to,
So they laughed and kept dancing,
Keeping warm by firesides,
The complaints of camels
And obedient women.
—-

cleft

pomegranate carving2

green man2

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