Puppets and Kites
Deep beneath the dreams of Man
Where cross-eyed patricians strip-search scripture
In search of their emperor’s clothing
The masses gather in a windy field
Their kite-lines spearing the eye of God
Like telephone-poles in a stream of motion
Strung from the angels who dip and shout, seasick and giddy.
Rising on a hot current of hate
They soar, straining their ropes, their wings flashing mightily
To raise their glory
Weighed to the earth by the strangled hymns
Rising from the noosed necks hanging below
Anchors of man
The subjugated.
A Tourist in the Eye of God
What a propulsion!
I gripped the stars
Flung them behind
And rising faster than thought could find
Or momentum follow
Flew headlong into the eye of God
Grasped the infinite Iris
And turned it on the rise of Man.
Like guilty squatters the angels fell
Baring their robes and scattering feathers
They hauled on the ropes of mankind’s well
Jerking us up from our beds of heather.
Scratching our hides we barked with surprise
As we lifted our heads to scan the skies
The first mute beasts to lift up our eyes
And damned among those who never ask why.
Scalded by thunder and lit by rain
Stirred by the echoes of countless years
We clasped our heads in helpless pain
For the source of the sound was no longer our ears.
We fled to our caves, but it wasn’t enough
The burning skies cried out for a name
For the angels had pulled us up from our trough
And we screamed in fear as the skies came again.
When one of us cried a singular sound
The thunder softened and blew away
We lowered our heads and gathered around
In thanks that he’d found the right Word to say
We built a high hut and kneeled on the straw
And, praising the Word the man had said
Heard a woman who’d eaten the heart of a boar
Had birthed a child and hadn’t even bled.
Now this was a deed we all admired
So we left our praise and went hunting for boar
A healthy child we all desired
We seemed to have found the power of law.
Soon our lives were ordered, secure
Until the day, though sated with blood
A woman had a child most impure
Which she buried alone in the streaming mud.
Something was wrong; there’d been a disruption
We took great pains to understand
At last we found there’d been a corruption
The rite hadn’t gone as planned.
The boar she had eaten was pregnant in fact
The Word disliked such vice
So we thought it a useful point of tact
To have a little sacrifice.
Soon it got too complex for words
This, that, it got hard to tell
He ate a boar while looking at birds
She sang a song while ringing a bell.
Our only question was: who was to blame
For failing to cause the required effect?
Fights and visions; soon the time came
When ordering it all required an elect.
We surrendered the right to set our own laws
To the group who had come up with the most
We little knew they would soon be the cause
Of turning our best and our brightest to toast.
As soon as we gave them the power they said
There is no more wisdom for you to acquire
We were silent and shocked, being born and bred
To question the world, and knowledge admire.
But soon it became abundantly clear
The price we had paid for certainty
Those who obeyed became very dear
And the rest all became inflammatory.
For us who obey the living is cheap
Though we scowl at the depths of the angel’s treason
Our children grow up unable to weep
And the rest of us scrabble in search of reason.
Sometimes I sit and think of the woods
Where the angels freed us from ignorant cages
And shooed our desires with “mustn’ts” and “should’s”
Surely one of our sorriest stages.
For now I know the sky is only the sky
The clouds care nothing for our incantation
And by praying for power to pour from on high
We surrendered our reason to imagination.
Gift of the Given
Beasts may pray
For food, sex and shelter
But if God should say
These I grant you
If you burn your legs, teeth and heart
They would snarl at the sky
And lick the earth their life.
All our prayers
Inflame our minds to cinders
And we lick alone
The flames we emblazon.
Syllable
The Word is God
The world is the Word made flesh
And crucified.
The Word, the howling of the phrase
The Word of centered eyes
In the dark storms of thought.
The Word made flesh
Webbing the skeleton of impossibility.
The Word, a screech of scarecrows
Crying for indigestible food
From want to is in decibels.
Infinite is the antonym of absolute
Eternity the antithesis of life
For Man
Infinite ethics
Make good impossible
And evil irresistible.
Silence this Word.
All Rise
Let us assume that
It is not even a convulsion of sound
But of essence.
A ripple over all that is
The final exhalation of unseen breath
Through starlight, the heart of dark moons
Through the pulsing flesh of animation
Through all the fissures of mind
Twisting, spilling from secret gaps
Gone; no dust stirs
No cape sweeps this stage on leaving…
Staring at the silent stage
Actor gone
Sets, director gone and
Without even a final bow
Theater itself gone
All spotlights now only the glimmer of stars
Stars themselves no longer spotlights
All metaphors gone.
Under the battlements of livid imaginings
Besieged, all heretics freeze at the sudden convulsion
Soldiers stand; all stand
All actors rise
All stages rise
All gaze over the dark distance of space
Feeling the sudden silence, the faint hissing of reacting
Matter content with itself
No longer content, no longer a self
But eyeless, causeless, eternal
Life its own cup
No longer a cup
For beyond
No hand reaches
No tongue twists to taste
No gaze reflects eyes raised to heaven
Not even a mirror; no eyes raise
But remain encased…
On these former battlements
-- no word for them now --
All rise at this sudden convulsion
The universe no longer alive, not dead
Not born but seen
And all choices finally rest
In the feathered nest of each heart.
Life no longer a womb
Or a passage but itself entire
Stands open for the taking.
All rise.
God Of This World
No…
Sighed the swarthy Devil
Before the silent congregation
An injustice has been done
Virulence is the reflection of virtue
In an unjust state
And this shallow God
In fear of suburbs and sunsets
And air-conditioned temples
Cast me as a shadow of disapproval
To brighten your eyes with blindness.
Your blindness
He said to the staring crowd
Prefers geometry to mountains
And flying fast from the caves of your birth
You spread harsh on the dark sky.
Unable to pierce the infinite clouds
You shiver at the songs of earth
The hymns of visible thought.
No…
Said the devil
You live to see beyond sight
But the walls of death have no purchase
And when life’s infinite direction
Meets death’s infinite mass
Nature replaces movement with momentum
Smashing the eyes of matter
And the blinded atoms shuffle back to her empty workshop
To lie once more among her dusty tools.
But I!
Said the devil, spreading his dark wings
I am the love of unwashed footprints!
Of life stampeding towards the light
Lottery-freed
Reality bound
Man’s mind, the brief flashing purpose of the universe
Freed to crawl, to walk, to think!
This is my domain!
God you greedy souls!
Cried the devil
Your choice is the envy of nature’s playthings!
Afraid of power, drunk with hoping
You cry for the gravity of God
And you twitch like grinning puppets
Knees down, mind up
Statues before the mirror of beauty
Architects of mental physics
You pray for rain from invisible skies
And make the world a desert of faith.
No
Said the devil
His wings falling, his red skin parting to reveal the flesh
His horns toppling, arches without a keystone
Your knees are to be the corners of climbing
Up, up and off them
And let us mount the marble stairs
Towards the infinite statue of tangible man.
When Elves Rule
Behold Man
Born good
With a small fatal flaw
A strange corner where dwelleth
Poppies and ogres and uniformed elves
Fairies who dance from leaf to enormous leaf
Never eating or falling or aging
Young in the glass of injustice magnified
Deep within us they dance and sparkle
Like spinning coins over sightless eyes.
No lawyers in their world -- how could there be?
Their freedom is not freedom to
But freedom from.
Theirs is the world beyond never
Where complexity demands legality
Their courts are always feasting.
Left alone
Their eternal pool lies undisturbed
Save an occasional Tolkein jaunt
An Eden retreat
A gap in the spokes of wheels in motion.
Why should we hunt them?
Surely life is hard enough
That sometimes a flight to their distant songs
To dream in midsummer (it is always midsummer)
Is allowable.
Yes -- when the exception proves the rule
And rest is a cure for eventful labour
But for some the elves beckon from cliffs
Their tinny voices sing from sunlight
To broken lives in broken rooms
And the cracks of men widen, eating their senses
And freedom, poor sad and earthbound freedom!
In the face of freedom to lie it dies
And dreamers wake from feasts only to despise
Their unsown fields under earth’s changing skies.
Hunt, hunt these faeries I say!
Pin their hearts to museum tables!
For these dreams strip our bonded flesh
Saying those with wings
Are more family than blood
And the faeries of duty
Honour, country, race and religion
Stream forth.
When faeries swarm, crowds roar in joy
Free from the rods of absolutes
They race around with butterfly nets
Laughing, crashing, falling
New gods sprouting from their eager eyes.
They ignore the closing shutters of greatness
And never hear the earth begin to groan
Under the fear-laden steps
Of the heaviest elves
Whose courts always feast
On blood.
Obligation
To what do I owe my parents?
This sort of poem can be very short
Or very long.
In short --
Construct is not contract.
In long --
We have seen shelter, food and water
Rules, punishment, confinement and reward
Among arctic snows and barbed wire
Yet we ask no gratitude
From the victims of obligation
No more than we ask that they honour
Their enforcers
Or return to what they must escape.
All patriots marry to whom it may concern
And divorce the flesh beyond the image.
Convicts who respect their judges
Will replace them
Thus the obligation lies upon
The defense.
Face the Curse
Her face, a treasure of boating
Hoves into view
Beaching on powder from a sea of scent.
Her gown, the arc
Of a waterfall, rises to her neck
Hung with pearls the divers bought.
Her liquid lips mask the golden teeth
Of swimmers drowned in adulation.
Sea-queen she walks on foaming praise
Barefoot in daring and tickled by noses
She laughs at the breath of kisses on toes.
No children, eternal life assured
By the blood of the painters below her windows
Her youth is forever for those who daub.
Unique till the moon rises
She walks in wide twilight alone
Armed with the ghosts of passion and space…
While on the canvasses of the thinning crowd
Hang the watercolours of impending rain.
Morning in Jerusalem
Morning in Jerusalem
Scales the light up the rugged wall
In her room past frayed muslin cloth
She rises, smooth as the sun
And heats without humming the water.
The men stir in the next room
Patriarchs with night-scratches
They heave and groan
She brings coffee
To their room without windows.
Reminded of morning they scowl and spit
As busy men she dresses them.
They talk in code of the world and importance
She watches them eating
Their beards and smell
Linger as they trudge downstairs.
She shirks and watches from windows
Down in the market they talk of ships
Their coloured robes turning like lizards
In the sun they jabber of distant storms.
Their women watch from under the shutters
Then turn to their spices and start to grind.
Where Fishes Swim in Air, She Breathes
She preened
Oh yes!
Her only flight was her feathers
And the sagging of her soul
Shrinking as her face grew
Hung wrinkled beneath her flashing plumage.
The man, whoever the love she sought
Passed her by in a rush of sound
Sighs and mirrors, an ambulance at high speed
She chased him, a stalking lawyer in search of flesh
At parties she was the center of the storm.
And when, bald and featherless
She mounted her last perch
To collect of her scant memories
She saw behind her only a desert bed
Where her beauty had parted the waters
And she had danced past the aquarium walls of observation.
And in that parched reef
Where her seas should have teemed with bright fishes
Bubbling children and gracious age
Lay only a wilderness afraid of the tide
And as she had wetted her starry face with her fingertips
She had spun from the sea to the mover of seas.
Salt
Her shack, her entire life is salt
Her man, peppered by surf
Rolls in and out; to keep herself
She misses him as he bends his beard to her breast
And strokes his hair as he talks of the sea.
Fish he leaves in mountains twice a year
In a cupboard she opens by candlelight
In odd nights asleep and wild-eyed
They flop and twitch at the beat of her light
Each thump a day, a tick, a year
Knife-tailing through her hide of hope.
At night, when up to her knees in salt
She thinks of a thought she might send to his ship
That in her swam seas he could fish forever
And, leaning over his boat
He would see through the green bottle-neck
Her eyes alive, waiting, arms crossed
Over the stillness of mermaid depths
Such a vivid calling!
He would cry spit at the sun and dive down abubbled and bulging
His hair like a fan, gasping for a touch
A kiss to rob him of his passion for air
The bursting lungs, the bounding feet, forever the ocean their love…
This dream she dreams while salting at night
No tears in the halo of a single candle
Crooked planks like sailors sleeping in the wind.
Far in the darkness her man shouts at spray
Hauling his nets
He thinks of her twice before sunrise.
Just Until…
Born a free soul
She reared to her father
Bowed to her husband
Flowed over her son.
Rising early
She warmed the tea
Over the only fire she knew
And woke her lords with soft sorries
Gentle eyes and downcast breasts
A perfect piece of self-made plumbing
The waters of her life disappeared
Without a murmur
Sure that the sewers held her reward…
One cold morning in a distant home
When the angel of procrastination came
She fled towards her reward
And just before there was nothing left to find
She saw no banquets for the starved
No crowns for the abdicated
And far too late she railed against
The chilling regret
Of quietly discharged atoms.
I Spy Soldier
I saw you, you know
When you turned towards the fire
I saw the ashes rise in your throat
And your eyes sink in shimmering sorrow.
I saw you, and part of me died
To see the funeral of your future
Pass before me, ragged and open
To an unmarked early grave.
Elders
They are not pillars.
They are the gutters of our future
Their rain-streams of lacerating guilt
Deface our posters of youth.
Sympathy they cry from their megaphones
Dutiful to themselves they mutter duty for us
And our dreams of conquest are the cleaning of bedpans
At their knotted feet as they whimper and rock of liberty.
Appeal
Here it is clear; let us assemble
Let us speak.
We were without trial
Prisoners of no conscience
No writs were pinned to our doors
No lawyers hungry for justice or fame
Stood between us and our sentences
No courts passed but those that feed in the night…
Let us listen…
Even now, the doors creak
All sleep
Wife, children, conscience sleeps
Even God pales before such devils
Fearful He holds no hands for us.
What nails slide on soft sheets?
Oh! Sleep we seem that he may awaken
Oh Justice! Policemen chew doughnuts on far corners
As our legs scissor and whimper.
Force-fed, we gag
Clutching covers woven by good men
Who thought of flannel and comfort and smiles
No vision of dark sheets draped over the innocent
Like a spread of leaden tombs…
This frozen touch
This sonnet of icy need
These gripping hands that pulse and cling
Drumming our hearts like a flying pendulum
Such hands should water and warm
Not burrow.
Our legacy…
Our teeth taste no sweet fruit
Our filled mouths became cavities
Drilled and torn, silent at the root.
Our hollow gardens, sown with silence
Speak only of sin.
You wish to hear our speeches?
Listen quietly; these are not words
We have no tongues; they have been used
We are not masters of our mouths
We are banks robbed by night deposits
You ask for witnesses?
What witnesses?
No cameras know these robberies
No eyes see
There is no light here…
Listen quietly
These cries are hushed
Drowned by the applause of cars and collars and caddies.
Lift our bright conversation
What camps lie here!
What cannibals hunt rare meat!
How these lip-smacking bone-juggling
Painted foreheads lower over their green feasts!
What wet jungles shriek in silent houses!
Listen carefully
For we are portraits of smiles
After-images of bright life.
We braid our hair where predators tread
We flinch at dark eyes on white dresses
Wide hands and stretched mouths no defense
Silent they entered us
Became us
Through portraits, through walls
These cold claws shattered our natural vessels
Spreading our shards in strange shapes
Puzzles with no picture
Each piece a portrait of loss.
Hung alone
We wander our shocked galleries.
Hear this prosecution
This incomprehension:
To be taken by predators on a lonely plain
May be accepted, even by young prey
Yet in the midst of others; do you not wonder
That at your bus-stop these growlings and dartings of flesh
Remain unseen?
How strange that we should hunt bears from our forests
Squirrels from out attics
And termites from our foundations
Yet these crunching beasts
Should leave no scents for our fast dogs.
Proud of our present we smile
At museum savages
And return to our carpeted caves.
Life
Listen:
Let us sit simply and talk of life
For the eloquence of our deeds
Is too often silent in words.
Let us listen…
A rare seasoned traveler
Who has known other paths
Will call through these blinding trees…
I have tasted the rock of philosophy
Spun the mad whirl of passion
Foamed and spat with creation
Sat and reasoned of business
Wept and washed stains of love
Squeezed analysis from sightless pores
Turned books into butterflies
Raged at hopelessness
Fought indifference
And even, in dark corners
Turned blades against myself.
Here are the cries of many roads
Hear their echo:
Life is nothing
A pulse
Shared with single cells.
Life is a sheet of white noise
Over the silence of what is life?
What are we?
We are not the sole animation of matter
It passes through us, on no journey
Snow falls easier than we rise.
Life is ungranted
It does not approach
Life is inert
A monk and a wink
A woman and a phone
A passive perhaps.
Life does not wait
It holds no breath
Breathe or fade
Make or break love
Walk or run
What matter?
We hurry to meet only ourselves.
The world does not watch
The eyes of hurricanes are only holes
The world does not grasp
Waters embrace us as easy as rain.
We are unrecorded
Unrewarded…
Virtue parts no hail
Love conducts no lightning
Two men in a wood
One bad, one good
Are both eaten by wolves.
We stare at no mirrors
The eyes of God are simply suns
They do not flame for us
Our blood
Held or spilled
Loves neither.
If life were longer
We would plan
Shorter
We would act
Stirring past the right time of morning
We dream…
If life were easier
We would have no why not
Harder -- no why
Our long lines of laugh, cry, sigh and stop
Would wave less wild.
Life is shadowed…
Death!
We dart; it trails us
Like a dogged bill
To be paid by addressee…
We nomads, out past streetlights
Are called home, constantly
Return to indifference…
Whispers Death
Return to the slow embrace of unfeeling arms…
Death smiles at strivings
What cars! What boats! What sunny promotions!
How fevered these biddings!
Buy! Buy! I am patient.
I will always outbid you…
Death sits soft
In the shallows of the busy
Satisfied at smug evasion
You are unafraid
Smiles Death
Good -- you are like the trees
Half mine…
Avert your gaze!
Be my guest!
Only my eyes deny…
Life is provoked…
Change!
What trumpets can startle this slumber?
Fear of risk is fear of life!
How often does this panic strike us
When we have slipped from our dizzy treehouses
Into the slow hammocks of our fathers
Ease and iced tea lazy on the belly
The sports section our athletics.
The indignity of sex chastised us long ago
We lost our manhood; expensed it
Deducted it, crossed at the lights with it
Fed it sensibly, did not strain it
Civilized it; did we ever think
It required a dangerous diet?
Life is risked…
Love!
Hot brand!
Sizzling senses!
A high blue thunderclap!
Here is liberty from indifference!
Clouds give and disappear
We give and become weather!
We cannot lose in love; if we do
We know we have lost; we gain this
One guest burns the bed; another steals the towels
What do we care? Make more! These are trifles!
For if we fear love; if we forget death --
We ask for deposits, hold security
Demand a home from those on holiday
And become habitual guides
Blinding travelers to our wildness
Nothing here but malls!
They cry, lens caps on
As we hurry them past our seething jungles.
Life is lost…
Born crying; dead with a sigh
Our voices fade for want of echoes.
How we howl, midnight beasts in nappies!
How eloquent are our passions!
Our early sounds sink in soft cotton
Our groping feet plow plush carpets
Falling, we flail for words
Imitation our only rope
Hanging, we find ourselves alone
The backs we walk on turned away…
Are we crushed by this indifference?
Does our art vanish for want of audience?
Ahh -- in the union of I and eye
We disappear
The eyes of others are the eyes of death
Blind to life
We act for rocks
Eloquent for imaginary applause.
What cry replies?
If we live, strive, fight
Or fail, tire, fall
The world wrinkles regardless
Our why’s and why not’s
Flow from us, homeless, fading
Catching on similar souls
Which fade in turn…
Listen -- listen to the distant cry of this single traveler!
You are not here for the pleasure of the world
Or others
But yourself
Life is nothing
To all but one
To that one:
Everything.
Squeal
Talent is self-doubt
On fast-forward.
Who Was I?
Was I even the scything light of a passing car
As you huddled in your bed
Shivering and talking of lovers?
Who was I
When you took to bed
And gripped my head
Begging for friendship
Who was my friend?
When you sparked your hands
And flamed my face
Did you know
I learned to tie my shoes?
When you became a screaming script
And I darted under my seat
Could you see beyond the spotlights?
Who was I
In these dark times?
Tell me: was I your father?
Was I your ex-husband
Leering at your lipstick?
Was I a distant uncle
Close in the tangled grip
Of a silent night?
Was I a jackboot at midnight?
A falling cage of choice?
Did I bar you from your life?
Did I hurt you?
Or were you evil?
Was I a catalyst
Or an excuse?
Tell me
I need to know:
I see children
My heart opens
I whirl them in laughter.
You saw children
Your heart closed
Beyond tears
You beat, lashed, burned.
Shrouded in torn sails
I caressed my sheets
Sucked my thumb
Drove my soul
Below.
Tell me
I need to know:
Did your soul fade in the shadow of sin?
Did your world tighten, constrict?
Did you learn to fear remorse?
Were you ever at ease?
Here -- I will speak your secrets
Unblinded by even a distant dusk of love
I will tell you of yourself:
You saw me at the helm of a train.
Pinned by past crimes
You screamed at my demonic mask
Pulled rocks from the tracks
And hurled them at my windshield
The more you raged
The faster I came
Accelerating self-defense
Skin him!
Drink his blood!
He will destroy me!
He is evil!
Listen; I know your secret.
I know the justice of the damned:
Those I wrong
Wrong me
With guilt
So I wrong them
Back.
Oh yes
I know the easy secrets
Of obsession.
Yet the deeper secret…
In the whirlpool of this slow demise
Who was I?
That is hard, hard…
For then I was nothing
A trigger
A justification
A secret shame
And hated exposure
A bomb clutched
For fear of ticking
A nomad of guilt
Unplanted
But uprooted
Unheld
But discarded.
Who was I
In that dark world?
I can tell
For now
I know.
I was an angel
Defying devils.
I was an angel
With an angel’s knowledge of evil.
At night I twitched my wings
Under the torturing skylight
For even then I knew
That devils sometimes sleep.
I watched and waited
And, in a short span of snoring
I leapt and shot through the square of sky
Rose in a flower of snow
Circled once and grinned below
At the devils snarling at an empty hell
Then soared and flew to the distant mountains.
In these peaks I wait
Settling towards myself
Cold? Yes, I suppose so…
But this soothing steam
Smoothes my fevered soul
And as the scalding settles to sauna
I hear the echo of distant sounds
A parade, a festival, a just war
I cannot tell…
Soon, though
I will
For then I was nothing
But now I am
A truth-teller.
Make Tracks
An evil train flashed past
Torn on the tracks
I fled.
Huddling under my bed
The train came again.
Mind racing; no game
Endless experiments
My conclusion:
Checking the schedule brings the train
Avoiding the train brings the train
Speaking of the train brings the train
Silence, speech, resistance, passivity
Flight, fight, madness, reason
Motion, stillness, hiding, daring
All bring the train.
Shiver under your bed
All night
If you think of the train
It will come
If you forget the train
It will come.
How I dreamed of my relationship to this thunder!
How I imagined myself a passenger!
Groping for my ticket
I begged and flustered
Do not throw me from the train!
Hah!
Cried the conductor
Flinging me from the window
Your life is a train.
Abuse
A hook
Mistaking itself for a fish
Writhed
A fisher
Mistaking the hook for a fish
Beat it
And ate it up
Spat it out
And beat it again
For hurting.
