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Posts Tagged ‘language’

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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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WORD

Paper planes:
Some glide,
Some crash.

The subtle folds
Lilt and stomp
A trial by word,
A swoop, elegant
And pointed.

Hitting and missing
Of targets.
Languid language
Airborne,
Unconcerned,
Once born.

—–

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VOICES FROM WHITE NOISE ( a dream stream)

I have tuned my ears towards the voice and must try to narrate, to corner sense, 
scribbling 
urgent message 
mind map 
message 
wittering.
I have heard the ravings of the cellared recidivist, the relentless, insistent heretic.
I have chosen,on a whim, to sit next to the glassy stared lunatic on the bus, the Ancient Mariner, and must bend and blow in that breeze.

There is a thread, 
a whisper, a word 
that travels through our dreams. 
Something that remains, that delicately holds on. 
How long does an idea flicker and burn in darkness before it expires? 
(The sigh of acquiesced defeat.)

Deceit is freely given, not asked for, cajoling. Truth must be asked for, urgently, earnestly sought. Why? Truth cannot be weighed out, patted neat and square like butter, wrapped and satisfactory. Truth does not fare well as a commodity. It is a map from only where you are, only from that place, whispered to you alone. Not one great instruction for all. Only madmen rave about universal truths. Each truth is an apple. Each the most round, succulent sweetness produces a thousand seeds all different: some soft, some bitter, some long-lasting, some fragrant. And no one can tell which might be which but by time and patience and the eventual taste of it.

So some of us wake to our dreams, 
scribble in the dark urged to construct, 
to record, 
to remember whispers. 
A reconstruction of echoes.

If I should continue long enough, listen, mould, worry it, then shall it eventually run true, discordant chaos becoming rejoicing refrain, voices emerging from the white noise. The mandala will become populated, the statues shall speak, the mirror offer wise advice, sound reflection….

It fails, it falters with daylight.
What was clear, insistent, cogent,
Pales and hollows.
Dismiss the howls, the complaints,
The sequences that seemed fair.
Tuned out, they rant in another quadrant
Of time and space, stiffled by yawns,
Inconsistent with birdsong.
The Furies, the Oracles,
Sinking slowly
To darker depths,
Slipping,
Spiral-wise,
Melodramatic
Monologues,
Mouths filling
With sifting sands….

——-

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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.

****

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A6concentric2d

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.

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****

STRUNG OUT ( a bereft history of every sing)

In the beginning,
The worm word:
Strung thin sound.
Hesitant, looped
Monochord.
Free:
As much as it wanted,
Tied:
Either end an anchor
Of some
it
or other.

Simple,
Soon tangled
( darned attraction
Of molecular
soup).

A good idea
Scribbled over.
Attempts at,
Forgetful of.

Seriously playful,
Now only
Serious, panicked
Lost, mazed
Trapped
Traipsing time
Tired
But unable to
Prevent
Echo, mutter,
Wild laughter.

Self portait-
The void black
Reflection
Dilated pupils
Staring, straining
Into space.

Midnight skitters,
Meaning pretends
Itself.
Vocal chord,
Knotted, node,
A gap between
Wuh, wuh, words.

****

something to do with the primacy of sound, language, self-referencing mixed in with cosmogenesis, DNA as a jam session ( that slick four-piece polyrhythmic jive), a quote from Robert Musil, via N. Filbert ( jump starter of my brain). Souped up silence, those seers who strive beyond language, return from heaven stumbling and drunk, stutt, tut, tutter. I place on the tip of my tongue a consonant of fire, a vowel of air, extinguished by a sliver of spittle, mistakenly taken as a reason, a viewpoint, what is only a howl of sound, a pushchaired child hooting for echoes in cavern subways….

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the images are some sketches of the seed syllable ‘hung’, one of the three primal sounds of manifesting mind that may or may not become paint or silver or more words at some point

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ST. GEORGE’S DAY ( April 23) (dream stream)

Emblazoned,
A green field.
Light rampant,
Golden-haired,
Erect.

Last night’s stars, last night’s meteors, showers of light as we plummet dark towards the spin of centre, the galactic hum.

Last night’s shooting stars
see them scattered sparkling
on the green grass of morning.

St. George’s Day bright with a sword edge in the wind. Little lambs sleeping warm in the sun. Guardian’s day, the land’s day. We who are, who are we, a part and portion, a flock hovering, gliding down to feed. Our field, bordered and named, bred of us, born and bearing us, dirt and soil grasped, the smell of it, the smell of bone and memory, the deepest smell. The redolent sound reverberates from in to out. Sound beyond, sound within. Nothing that does not vibrate and sing hymns to itself and its innocent exuberant expansion.

Awoken with sounds taking form,
star whispers filling echoing corners.
Placing sounds and syllables.
Taking time and running it
still to watch.

Lanced, vanquished, absorbed, armour to armour, name to name, sound to sound, the neigh of horse, jingle of rein, rasp of scaled iron claw on rock, hiss of expelled flame. The conflict of vowel and consonent. Pinned, wings upraised, the word is formed, dragon-mind gives up and yields to sword-tongue, shield palette. They are not two nor many, those actions, these seconds, these words. They are the stretched thin ever-now, the elongated serpentine, elementally configured, evolution of instance.
He rears up, he severs skin, subdues, subjugates, becomes monster. Not two but one. Bound together as icon, sound and form. Primal hunter hunted, eater eaten, seer seen. Send out from each eye a spear of mind, ineluctably, inevitably hooked, united, absorbed, absolved of difference, a flow of electrons. Eye to eye, saint and demon, exchange sky and earth, fire and tears. One, redundant without the other. Standing waves, crest and trough, a rippled ecstatic hum, white noise of endlessness, gong of falling away.

I shall sink into sound now,
sink into sound, name the names,
place the branched syllables,
string myself naked for nine days,
sacrifice, sacred act,
forget and recall the way the tongue
touches tooth exploding instruction,
an exhalation of daylight,
sparks, stars, a spittle of,
a shaft of,
a spear of.

Purring back and becoming the wriggle of the living heart, forged and cast, caparisoned in echoes. Sound shelled within sound. An eggshell heaven tumbling with birdsong. It savours the roundness of the day. Exhales cloud, tumbling, scudding. A roar that might be sea, might be forest, might be time itself, enfolding shield, vanquished and glorious, golden and slain in the morning.
The giant from whom the world is formed. The jester has slain the king. He takes a golden bow, winks, farts and dissappears. High minded flatulence of patriotism, set to against demons and heretics, the giants of the wilderness. The old names abide, whispered.

A little right
and a wealth of wrong.
To image is to fix.
To fix is to miss the point.
The heart of itself is severed and expires.

A parable of all things, as well as a description, as well as a poem, as well as a mimicked riddle. High on his horse, self-appointed and righteous, the knight rides out to do good. He will go native before nightfall. Seduced by the rainbow sinews of maidens. Then we shall see pierced flanks in the spring, hilltops yearning for a splice of passionate light. We shall see a might entering in and an entering out, a trouncing, a gasping pant of travail. It shall scatter the roosts, it shall raise the heads of deer in the trees. A mighty union there shall be. No battle but a dance, a molecular dance, strings knotted, syllables severed from dictated meaning, wrapped only into its own involution.

Saint and dragon lover,
each echoing sighs,
the fire of tangled nerve
shooting out to the horizon’s edge.
A green shield lies the field.
A sparrowhawk hesitates,
turns and dives.
Silence inside silence.
Sound itself,
a swallow in new skies,
expanding.

****

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(the images are from a series of sketches I have been making to turn into silver pendants. Dragon energies are a fascinatingly robust archetype of earth/solar/cosmic sentience and as such are a fertlie ground for internal explorations in matters of consciousness and deep ecology)

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THOUGHT FLOWERS NAMED

The lamp is lit.
I would return to some calm
Abiding.
But here they come, first a whisp, then wraiths, now raucous echoing gamboling up from the buzz and chink of that wild banquet below. These beeezes: where do they gather their names and faces, become recognised, familiar? Back around what corner do these thoughts cease to be words, and what do they then become?
Sharp and edged,
Glinting bright,
Defined and cherished,
Tools of tongue and eye.
Who and how have they been refined, clothed, acquired status? Language clothes thought, but it is not thought. Simply three noticed feelings: attraction, repulsion, indifference, (atomic and galactic habits, too), the sum of them all. Feelings are what? Pulses of light and reaction along cellular lanes, a dance in a ring, unwatched at twilight. Goblin market, a tumble of shadows.
A web spun
By a spider world
To catch and hold fragments
Of itself.
I am food. I am food. I am food.
I am eater. I am eater. I am eater.
Precocious, petulant they are. Give them no attention! Primadonnas, show-offs. The more you react the more they will play up. Tinnitus, endless ringing, blood and heartbeat, breath, bone. The motor running, only the motor running. A drift of exhaust in the cold, frosty morning.
Underwater streams,
Deeper than worms,
Darker than pleasure.
An instant of dreaming,
A startled crowd of starlings
Take shape, wheeling away.
This river, were it to stop. This wind, were it to cease. And whence did it arise?
Coming over the hill’s smooth crest:
A green forest of birdsong
Spread draped in shaded valley.
Dive in, become lost, cooled and tongue-tied,
Dappled, aimless.

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CLUES NAKED, REVEALED

Spit it out
These nails
This dust
These flowers
Spit it out
And move on.

The soles of my feet
Wedded to dust
Spit it out move on.

This naked morning
This clarity of frost
Say it.
Unsaid, it is not.
Spit it out
Like nails.

Seeing is sewing.
Speaking,
A song of noise.
Birdsong
In the mist.

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UNTOUCHED

We do not make our own reality, nor the reality of others, nor the dream of reality, nor the wish of reality. We glance off the Real as light off metal, as wind off ice. At best we taste an edge. Then enfold upon ourselves to fill the void. Pretty shards of sight woven to inhabit a world. Sonorous thoughts woven to withstand irrelevance. Needle-slight, this point of view.
A compass of stuttering,
an occassional brilliance,
a stroboscope,
a fabric of simultaneous equations.
Erasing one world, one instant gone, recreating one world. Shiva blinks, eternity ends. The Ladder of Being, the descent of doves to the chasms of fire. A riverbed of laughter tells me what is my nature. This not this. Now not now. Never, not never. The tune, that one extraordinary tune, the perfect sequence, secret to all things, sweet and haunted, is a candle in a still cavern of dream.
Sung and forgotten,
sung and forgotten,
each note sung and forgotten.
Memory is not the answer, but memory is a clue. Will it can it shall it free us?
One word held, a flower reached for, a line that becomes straight, a point between the pointless, a key, a way out or a way in. Chained, owned, here we belong. Nothing to do but build and destroy, forget, forget. The thirteen classes of beings, the ten thousand things, the aeons and elements stand aghast, amazed:
the song of this stream,
the rippling of the sight of it,
the rainbow surface, the dazzling light.
Best song of the singer of all, golden chains to our tongues. The oracle speaks clouds of nonsense, vapours and dust. It follows its own nature. Sun and moon. The fifth day it shall return. Look to the north, the wild birds dance, the sight shall become a sound. Everything will be accomplished.
Vapour trails,
name of one writ in water.
Forgetting is the clue.
Do not forget it. Never forget it.
Forged, iron, still,
now the thing that never was, is,
and now, not.
Capture this sound –
it becomes silence.
Hold on, hold on
and it will be lost forever.
To say all things simultaneously, one chord, bringing all edges together. Eleven or thirteen dimensions. Constant is the speed of stillness. Nothing illuminating nothing. It illuminates surfaces once it arrives without moving. Constant speed of light. All sound, a commentary on the nature of silence.
A river in heaven,
Heaven’s river,
Way of milk,
Road of stars.
Looking in, looking down, looking out.
Hunters and hunted on circular paths.
Vindicated, never meeting.
Untouched is the Way.
Untrod by any shoe.
Unsigned.
Forgotten.

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