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Posts Tagged ‘Poetry’

From the Greying Void

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on July 4, 2014| Leave a Comment »

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POETS OF THE GREYING VOID ( BOOK OF VOICES)

Only by these words
Only by those your demons allow
By those airs and sorrows,
Those scars,
That keep them so contentedly anaesthetised.
A mirrored spirit in mirrored halls.

Teeth and lips, tongue and breath
A landscape dreaming life
Into itself.
A moon, a lost planet,
A drift of photons.
Sparked, struck flint,
A blink or such
In darkness
Illuminating nothing
Momentarily searing
Momentarily serene.

We cannot question the beauty
Of these voices, beautiful as they are,
So like our own, so like oceans,
So like sighs.
The meaning comes and goes,
A flock fierce and pierced.
The quivering salt
That falls, drying hard,
A new skin.

Maintenance of edges
Honed, traced upon, mapped,
The armies of the Lord,
A sway jut-chinned, belligerence.
The same countries, the same roads
Renamed, mispronounced.
Recidivists redacted,
All is sweetly perfumed,
Sweetly ended.
This my demons demand:
A better, bitter truth.

—

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Buxton in the High Peak

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 30, 2014| 6 Comments »

BUXTON IN THE HIGH PEAK

Away into the high hills shrouded.
Away to the high, scoured lands laid with lines of stone.
Where the wind crows cedilla the sky
Giving their own reasons for silence and for speech,
And the unknown calls across fields in trills and ghosts of rain.

We are smudged and drawn thin through tangles of time,
Halting to grasp slim volumes, locate a name or place.
A footfall, a scumble of gravel, a whisp of evening moth,
A rag, a window outlooking, a scurry of moments.

But always, cloud-hugged and green,
The valley air pricked with cool distance,
Fluent with miles of silence and the sky.
The depths below and the depths above,
A certain thinness, a certain wild lateness to the season,
A short uncertain summer, clouded, piled up fragrant.

A near forgotten tune, a debris of careless architecture,
A mapping of overgrown scars, a huddling of sorts.
Under the dark maples, under the covens of elder,
Under the long light, the distant shining land crowned with evening sun.
The long roads, the long roads from hill to hill,
A nonchalent scattering of sheep, stone kept.

This long breath, a cool drink, a meeting of streams
Down by the rose, purple rose-dropped park
Where jackdaws bob in and out those stately walks
Where the walnut tree and the yews kneel and pray.
And always the happy, straining dogs, the flurry of ducks
And the slow, heavy drops fall bending the grasses,
Blue geranium and honeysuckle, and a drift of elm seed,
A patient confetti, swirled away down drain and culvert.

The high town and the low town
A history of names, a relaxed concentric dream,
Gathered, pooled, walled by silent woods,
By silent caves and the sound of running waters,
A scribbled note from heaven.

—

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Solstitial

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on June 20, 2014| 3 Comments »

SOLSTITIAL

This longest day
Hard to throw off endings,
The slip of names and times,
The ongoing of impossible disasters,
The rot and decomposition, composting dreams.
It is the words
That lack the elegant bright moment.
It is the mind
That, persistent, contrives distant futures.
It is the habit
That dredges what lies safe in darkness,
Holds it up, misinterpets and despairs.
So many words for failure
So few for bliss.
And thus our bias
Sweeps us toward an edge,
Soft screaming, torn thin.
World watching on
Keeping balance between
This dark, this light,
This day, this night,
Knowing it is not the thing,
Not the specific, nor the particular,
No soul weighing more than any other.
But it is the spin, the dance, the chant,
It is the hymn of becoming and return,
The melting of light, the retaining pattern,
Constant
is the revolution
of breath,
The breath of revolution.

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Dream between dreams

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on June 18, 2014| 4 Comments »

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DREAM BETWEEN DREAMS

It shall be called
The dream between dreams.
It shall have the sound of rudra veena
Howling the low, long song
Of mountains.
A doorway that vanishes
In walls and moments,
Hunters of persistence and cunning
That track betweens
With such eager precision.

A sepia lithograph of ancestors
Scattered with scratched code.
A stuttered sunrise,
A mumbled equation.
Fragmented, woven storeys.
Intercepted thought-
A patterning of stars.

It shall take beauty to itself.
It shall wear a body
Suspended and gently packed
With birdsong.
It shall have a sunrise
Located in a northern way.
Magnificence untranslated and untranslatable.
A verticality, a rotation, a specific gravity.

Freed from the body
It twists to a certain extent,
A mind will take colours to itself
As murmurs of joy.
A shuffled deck of cards
(Where all images are constantly changing),
Vapour words uttered to themselves and gone,
Drawn from all tomorrows,
A suffering of beauty.

The rudra veena says:
“Music is the very means
Ye shall venture through vastnesses,
The telemetries of time and space,
Control panel of deity,
Bender of physics, answer to worlds,
Mating call of galaxies.”

—

The rudra veena is an instrument of South India, a pumped up, pimped up sitar, more growling even than the surbhahar ( a bass sitar). It has two huge gourds at either end, that wrap around the person holding it, and a long,wide fretboard. It has a monumental, alien sound in recordings. Live, it probably vibrates bones and deepest soul. Beyond human, the rudra veena is the player, human being the instrument.
( search ‘rudra veena’ into youtube and give yourself a thrill!).

—

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Conversations with Invisible Friends (14)

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on June 17, 2014| Leave a Comment »

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CONVERSATIONS 14

HOW EASY
Wonderful wonderful
how easy a cat will purr
how easy a flower will open
and scatter
how easy a smile
how easy a hand
how easy a good word
leads the way
becoming a vast flock
of joyous song and seeing.

—

VERBAL WARNING
Word to word
invisible tugged ties,
chains golden from tongue to ear,
a ripple of bells, a chime, tinkled river,
mind stream quenching thirst,
a million million reflections
showing nothing much of anything,
just how it is.

—

SEDIMENT
In the deepest oceans
Are the bones of all
That have ever lived.
A sediment free of sentiment,
World shaping pressure
Of was-ness turning into is-ness.

—

GRACE
Dressed ghosts, borrowed rags.
Why so hungry always? Why so?
As if bereft. As if supported.
As if punishment. As if reward.
As if a test.
Interpret this.
Pain and beauty.
Edges, boundaries, limits.
A dance to slow music.
If we can be but elegant, somehow,
so the universe turns toward us
(as we turn toward its ever open eyes),
weave a new way, gentle, strong,
accepting, melting, acquiescing.
Grace, it would be.
Perhaps reason enough.

—

RED SHIFT
Heat haze.
A shimmering road.
All the colours shifting towards evening.
A sharp sound rumbles into deep distance.
An elucidation of edges.
A smudge of vast moments.
Thought storm, tranquil dreaming.
Your voice (somehow) in my head (somehow).
Via the heart of things,
we ricochet amazed
through crystalline spheres.

—
HOW ELSE
A tissue of lives.
Connective, connected surfaces.
A fine tracing of whorls and ridges,
Whispering alphabets
Attempting an understanding,
Perhaps a cataloging,
An exposition of position.
A thin, sky thin, elucidation
A slender, tender hinting thing.
Not quite dream, not quite wish,
Nor remembering, nor forgetting.
This placental sustaining,
Held suspended,
Amniotic day,
Bridged away from pain.

Else we slip unseen,
Or so we conceive it,
Mouthing wept whys
Into blank cold nights.

—

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Death talking, dreaming maiden.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 12, 2014| 4 Comments »

These are some more pieces from my ongoing project, “Death and the Maiden (A romance)”, which developed from a couple of images from the V and A I have posted earlier. At the moment I have a series of layered images, becoming dreamy abstracts. These I may add text or calligraphic elements to. The verse imagery parallels and complements the pictures, I hope. Love, sex and death – how very…

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Peel back the curious eye,
A dancing touch to your innards,
Let it pierce the mysteries
Of your fleshly mechanics….

Your cool fingertips, smooth as pearl,
Slip down roads to sudden roundness,
A blessing of seed…..

Swimming where oceans clash,
The liquid crush, wave on wave.
Our very ground throbs feathered…

Pouring souls into circles
Achieving the fruit of life,
Its juice drips warm to sleep….

Your face, a half moon
In the sky of my desiring….

The most perfect words
Slip between the cracks of sleep…

—

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Cradled in bone
Time rocks to and fro.
We trespass not so far
Then flow smooth and fast
Into luminescence,
Penetrating softnesses,
Following sages, burning letters
Flying before us.
An unprecedented rivalry of substance,
A cloud of element and vapour.
Demure, then ferociously hungry
We exchange bodies for heat and flame
And roaring liquids.
Pouring vessels.
Spout of hard bliss.

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Skywards

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 10, 2014| 4 Comments »

SKYWARDS

Days ornamented with cloud,
Days dressed and wrapped in skirts of wind,
(The silk, shot silk green, the rippled fields of barley).
June bordered with honeysuckle, with dog rose,
Woven with the flitter of chaffinch, of bullfinch.
Woven into the choir of blackbirds
These hours, these stretching days,
Reaching skywards with the steepling grasses
Well towards solstice, well towards standstill,
The uppermost sun, the huge curving moon,
The silver singing stars of summer.
And us here, all of us here, within, without,
The commonest of senses, simple, watching
A gathering of friends, a multitude murmuring,
A cellular symphonic, rippled, waving, skywards.

—

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June Now

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on June 1, 2014| Leave a Comment »

JUNE NOW

Days as laid out cream white,
Days as numbered and round,
Days as fragrant as elder.

Worlds turned facing sunlit skies,
Worlds warmed, fed and content.
Golden bowls, sky-blue bowls and green
Holding as much as may be.

For a few weeks, near perfect balance:
Heaven and earth set spinning
On fingertip of time,
A measured delight.

—

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Soft

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on May 31, 2014| 4 Comments »

SOFT

It lies ready,
Gleaming, gentle
For the gentle sun,
Gentle for the rain.

Gentle the dead,
Soft the morning twilit
Silence.

Soft the hour
And cool
Before birdsong.

A silvered grey
The heavy grasses
Full and laid
In low waves.

Seed mantra
Low and fragrant.

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Whitebeam Otherworld

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on May 19, 2014| 6 Comments »

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WHITEBEAM OTHERWORLD

1
The desire to move
To the centre of silence
Where the big trees
Pin their shade
In the deep valleys.

Where big wings wheel
Marking an upward swing
Of stars and moments.

A cradled place,
Habitation of saints.
A long dust, incense
White hawthorn,
Incense lilac.

And the voice
Of dappled rivers.

2
The present slips
From between our fingers
But the past is always with us.
We, its shadow,
An uncertain glimmering
At the edge of cities.

Moving to Otherworlds
Where past and future
Dissolve the moments
Like sugar in water.

3
He writes the wisdom down
Upon his own skin,
A continual palimsest.
A fugue of breathings,
We flicker in and out
Of that dream,
Actors, watchers, or both.
Now summoned
We shall dance.
Dismissed,
Will return to shadow.

Close your eyes, love,
And see the world
As it is,
As it dreams itself:
Whole, hungry
And continually singing.

—-

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