4 and 1/4 Poems before 9 O'Clock (My Lie of Love, Enchantments, Idle of Autumn, Rivers of the Universe, The Orphan's Voyage)

 

My Lie of Love

 

I scoop sunlight into pillows,

Abandoning sleep to fill the holes

Pouncing in my sockets.

 

I resuscitate the summer

As an infant composing order,

Blinding our magnet’s core.

 

Again, I praise prisoners

Stuck inside my steep parameters

Of burnt-collar spires.

 

Returning moments to Earth

I play by ear my year’s birth,

Timing eternal our death.

 

 

Enchantments

 

Only If I could embody the braveries of Dawn,

Where all is possible and all is seen

And all life congresses to the fortune of thought!

But I grumble out of bed and arch in drowsiness

Putting socks, trousers and idleness all on my suit

Of awakening, not quite ever knowing what it means.

 

I have never dreamed,

Or awoke to a full day of light;

‘All technique requires a person!’

Cries the tattooed man riddled with sight.

 

And so marches the condemned geniuses

In lead cloths, circles and itching youth

Unto their failures, unto the fortunes of night

Where their war cries are perverted to a fight;

Over the sailors, through rivulets of midnight

Where their martyrs are screams and vagaries.

 

Behind mirrors, consecrating the glare of clocks

In blackness splitting spaceless the breath

Carrying the words;

‘All technique requires a person!’

 

The starving breeze wheezes over the doodle

Comically engraving transmutations of words into flesh;

A shimmering silver light plates a heart red, 

A mother's touch forms a wolf’s dozy rose.

Saladin's genuflect inwards to the stars,

Each one forms a step ignorant of space.

 

My eyes expand and flood like a puddle,

Dew reflect marbles from my sight.

Native rivers spur and gargle from the mouth,

The crows hum, devout oaks croak

 

And I awake to a river of darkness

Trickling from the bower of my lips;

I try to whisper, shaking visions over shoulders,

Shuddering eyes delighting themselves in dawn:

The crows sing, devout oaks bellow

And my hands stain the bed-sheets with ink.

 

All is an approachment of detachment,

I fade unto the light

Uttering the words;

All technique requires a person.

 

Only If I could embody the braveries of Dawn,

Where all is possible and all is seen

And all life congresses to the fortune of thought!

But I grumble out of bed and arch in drowsiness

Putting socks, trousers and idleness all on my suit

Of awakening, not quite ever knowing what it means.

 

I have always dreamed,

And awoke to a full day of light;

‘All technique requires a person!’

Cries the tattooed man riddled with sight.

 

Idle of Autumn

 

In orange fields where troupes of hares rehearse

And singe exotic the prosaic grass,

Eyes slew out the last breath of summer.

Oak veins curdle oiled sap to mirrors,

The season claims you as it’s undertaker;

Bells drone behind paint beginning to chime,

Blind alchemists huddle under gold sketches 

Leaking whiskey for voluntary slaves;

Amongst this never-ending parade

Memories revive themselves in a squirrel’s skull,

Unfostered clouds hurl down strings and caskets

For a leaf beginning it’s last dream.

 

Several attitudes shake themselves off,

Moles ignite graves sickening soil with peaches,

Dust preaching reason waits only to start.

The Hatter’s jaw rings itself open

And suicidal priest's erect aviaries;

Wings apologise to the clapping wind

Setting auroras for a play of death

Capsizing eternal promises of life;

Duvets rolled dry rip and drip ash,

The peg-legged tiger re-tells his tale,

A presence creates a past for his cage

Floating on the brine iris reservoir.

 

The doodles once motioned by lead of breath

Recite the experiments imposed on them

By winds contrived for living portraits.

The relinquished infant regains decay

For history’s bucolic idealism;

The pirated Sun shadows cobbles 

Shrivelled to dates and ticks for swollen hooves,

Vandals and tourists awe over gagged statues;

Marigold and rose-bush tanks charge themselves

Whilst the cuckoo assesses his mane,

Flat-head tempests peek through halcyon curtains.

 

Ruby puddles crystallise reflections,

Transparent embers freeze sweat and time

Stitching heckles on sewn pictures dissolving.

The connoisseur of sound groans in sight

As ripples expanding to red on white walls;

Tuvai’s flick the fire of your nova

Onto sheets covering the crowd’s applause,

Nuclear seeds blossom at the clown’s gesture;

This bed where flowers reach for your touch,

Where every step is an interrogation

And even stairs are mere creations of focus,

The world echoes from your nucleus.

 

In orange fields where troupes of hares rehearse

And singe exotic the prosaic grass,

Eyes slew out the last breath of summer;

It seems I last forever before this fall,

Revolving in the carousels of death,

Somnolence immortalised as my acme.

 

 

Rivers of the Universe

 

Rivers of the Universe

Exile marble neophytes

In ducts faithless as Dawn:

Liberties condemned to verse,

Enslaved by ancient waters

Guiding the washing of hands,

Project birds as ink through stone,

Flying home on wood-stage lights.

 

Tight as air, hollow as bone

In fury these words were made

(That of hare-bound gravity)

In streams as bald as meaning:

The same voices I measured,

Tugged from the bitter-rock pulse,

Crack yolk from each step on wounds

Wasting the year’s split-end curse. —

 

Enslaving the Sun’s orbit

On chrome keys in jigsaw wind

Motionless eyes recite verse

Burning the vale’s oil to sounds

Erecting life in the mind:

Breathing as his monument

Often the Poet will sit

And regress to all that’s known.

 

 

The Orphan’s Voyage (1/4)

 

I

 

Sepulchres declare romantic archaisms,

The beast’s historic famine portrays

And transpires the sword harvesting orb,

The rib-eye nursed over a black-patched cove

Churns out puffs of air from a school boy’s chest;

Pale scythes breed light on brine-nailed decks,

As if a Lock convinced the Moon it was hollow,

The sky shreds the sloughing drape setting the Sun

And each bitter shard in the headlights of a cloud.

 

He feeds the mouth which despises possessions

Of coldness, disguised as lozenges with veins.

The simple aspect of his withering heart

Pumps something other than itself onto shrimps and crabs;

How often do they remember being conquered?

Vaccinated aquariums camouflage themselves

And magnify autumnical depression,

The ripened skull disguised as fruit

(Never before seen or eaten)

 

Reviles against it’s toy-boat jaw —

Every wave compressed into hyphened silences

Reviving mandarin ink from blades transforming nature,

The ancient liquor of the artist’s tragedy,

Reducing reflections to mere immanence,

The sight before birth is only revealed

So long as he chases the scars which mend him;

Rehearsals for an execution of memory

Use the same ink for the bent-neck actor’s script.

 

The sycophant overdressing each season

In monuments of dust,

Paved by the inevitable step of Sun,

Liberates a splash of blood

Onto pages gleaming from a tiger’s tooth,

Polar Eclipsed by the carousal of chipping;

The eternal drain of pre-existence,

Set in motion by the will of confusion

Rekindles the undealt card of ancestral loneliness.

 

The postman of dawn lies starving beside chimneys.

The meadow’s curse is lifted from the genii’s oil,

Rulers and stitch-lip rituals happily dissolve,

Jackals ignite echoes on crystal nova lakes,

The wasted lay hidden as the storm eye gravity

Practicing a retrieval of nothingness

And a performance impeccable enough

For eternity, and it’s mirrored weights,

Turns into gates, gaping open the chest’s sore.

 

Before they had veins, statues stepped on themselves; —

Hands glued to beards groomed ears to sight,

Billows claimed a past in casts of thought

Slewing flesh, worshipping the foreign seed;

Now dreams burst open the liquid from snares,

The King of fools dances to his melody’s rule;

The trident is an ornamental gnat basing the stage

For green comets stalking the orphan’s voyage,

The last one to a land of his birth.