INTRODUCTION TO THE LYRICS
1
From Age 13 to the present, there’s been a continuous flow of lyrical poems. At minimum, I’e written about four a month, but depending on the inward season, theremay be whole cycles in a month. As of this writing, my Lyrics are collected into sixty books.
My lyrical poems, like the dramas and epic, trace an alternative course away from current market culture, seeking subjective oceans of vision and symbol; the hope always being, to infuse these with the ‘never before’ qualities of the person, in the unique contexts of lived experience.
While I am a modern person in a modern world, and my life and work reflects this, I chose to write from what lures me from within, from internal myth. I reflect the current age by seeking to find freedom in the timeless realms of inward life.
from Archeology of Mist-
As I’m working through readings in historiography, my dreams have been suffused with images, of the process and human orderings of history, our recordings of
of rectilinear time.
These past few years, trying to train myself as an historian, I become aware of this aspect of my work-some spiritual workings out of histories’ hidings and revelations. As in the Apocryphon, (epic poem) in my lyrical poems the notion of Memory has a recurring role. The inauguration of crucial moments pass visibly and invisibly into the Memory of art, as one aspect of the memory of the world.
The union of art and life lives, as we live intensely, our poems fall off our shadows even as we breath. In this moment, as we encounter the confluence of moments, with overlays of outward actions and subterranean associations, allusions to classics, resonances with dreams, fears of the future, we live as we create.
As Hegel mentions, the definition of Occasional poetry could be expanded to the whole of literature, and would lose its specific meaning. With out intending to do anything of the sort, by the union of art and life I began to think of a broader sense of Occasional poem, not as commemoration of public figures, but the occasion of a lived adventure as it moved.
So many moments of climbing fences to forbidden places, climbing roofs and abandoned buildings, or climbing to the tops of trees and mountains, all of these, if in these moments were captured in symbols, the word would pass as breathlessly out into crystalized myth of the outward action, with all internal implications.
This is the union of art and life. All anniversaries traumatic and beautiful. A church calendar of feasts of the inward experience.
LOVE IN DARKNESS
A love between
Our eyes has night
Encompassing
Too fearfully
To vanquish pain
Of parting needs.
But words in reeds
Make music when
Lovers have lost their heaven.
Aug 5 2005
HER PRAYER AT THE OCEAN
The stars in the waves of the ocean
Intoxicate and resonate with Time’s
Unending evocation. And the path
Of the heartbeat, seeing the heaven’s veil
In the wilderness of water, would lift
The dyad of its music to colors
Of ecstatic permutations, and live
In the synchrony of the soundless beat.
April 20 2009
from Book 47
The smallest leaf, or color whisp, or change
In atmosphere, and you are present. Time
Moves, and you attend it, a painter’s seeing,
How the ivy in a spiral climbs, would
here devine the trasparacny itself
of Being.
Jan 27 2010
Dream, Demona, and whisper in your sleep
The misted syllables of the soul. Dark
Is the drape about your lips, the portal
To the place you wonder in, in contrast
To The black of the chamber’s sleeping quilt,
You speak from the forests of the colors
Uncountable, of textures infinite
And free. And through the crevices of skies
Of the woven birds and clouds and light, slip
out your oracles to the realms above,
ghostly In the darkness, and obscured by time,
for the speech you speak is withered by the clock,
In remnants of runes unparseable.
April 28 2010
May our new work, invisible
This day devine by reason
By ciphers seek the histories
In decimations of the crown.
May 1 2010
Toothache Apocalypse
My mouth is now an instrument
of a spiritual wave
of pain, which punishes attention,
and denies all exit from its sight.
In this heart beat in my head, rising
And falling in gradations of a
Cut Into ether, the pronged and drawn
Out thread of a razor’s regression
To hollowed caves of dissipation,
Knows that, even through this spiraled turn
the moment next may relieve me, if
Only in that moment; then there will
I live in peaceful expectation
Of the end of refuge, cyclic storm
Of culled returnings, pounding progress
Of the march of my annihilation.
May 12 2010
from Book 48
TWO CELLOS
The low and sound-cooling liftings to the warmth
Envelop measure, and times’ own duration
Is gently turned upon itself, to the mists
Of liquid amber, unto the cooling black
Of the onyx heart of sound itself.
Two angels, on either side of the candles’
Alter, and in their laps their instruments of
Earth, alter light with the groundings of their bows,
The subtlest winds of their wrists are braiding flame
By the candles’ flicker, where all etheric
Shade and light are origined.
June 10 2010
Dissociation
Held at his shoulders, his little girl
witnesses his screamings at his mate.
And clouds in her little eyes annul
her union with the world and its fate.
I call the way of separation
from the pair in the pulse of the wind.
The dulled and darkened decimation
of the laws that the light would rescind.
July 3 2010
Birthed in chaos, ordering soul through art.
I will desend through my decent, and find
The torch light of the sun. For time is made
Of mist, and Clouds all images divine,
But those that I was born to, horror forms
I look at, openly, unblinkingly,
I see, till I am all contemplatives,
And out of myself find Beauty in the
Dark sublime.
Sep 23 10
Homeless man in sunlight
When time defies the origins of change
And loves revolve into redemption,
And the beggar’s raiment’s rich with light
With arms out stretched for alms, then the stench
Of miseries in conciseness speak in
The angelic tongues of heaven’s fallen woe,
And royalties of sufferings bequeath
The blessings of heaven on the soiled snow.
October 19 2010
from Book 49
ICONS OF ETERNITY
I
Prophecy
Metaphoric, musical, and merciless
Trauma and dreams, your vision gates will find
The heaven, and underearth of the mind
Where initiate eyes are speechless.
So sacred is your dance among the blind,
Itself is rich with symbol. Pass through the halls
Of illusioned intelligence, gathering skills
From their hidden troves, but beacon their walls
With the brush that kills
Mortality, mendacity,
The rites reduced to petty commentary.
But the thread will live in you which leads to see
The burnished emblems of eternity.
II
The Magus
My paltry self in this is magnified
To marvelous music! You seem displeased
My painter, that I see that wondrous eyed
Apparition in your paint, somehow seized
From aether, as symbol, and I, mortal
And model to your work, the smallest part
To your luminous darkness and portal
To an earth, beautiful and fearful art
That makes of me this figure from your eyes,
And gives me life in myth.
January 18 2011
II
Trauma and Denial
Thunder, in a little porcelain box,
In delicate curves of appearance
Displays the lacquered blossoms on the
Lid, subtleties of what is not said.
Admire, and not disrupt the contents
Of this cautious container’s silence,
Vague and hinting in half seductions
To a truth that would burn the forests.
IV
Medea writes in the inks of nectar
The names of her atrocities. One
By one, most sacred inmost vows of life
She breaks in the braids of the red of the sun.
Why this, to hurt me, are the innocents
Of our selves conjoined, uplifted, undone
Their gentle eyes unclosed in resurgence,
Soiling the nest where our love was begun.
V
The tender exhaustion of never falling tears
In a child’s acceptance of a corner’s darkness,
Longs for the never known in the passing years
Parental storms of orphaned wilderness.
There is a sense that all she dose has made
Embroideries of gilt for being as she is.
And nurturing sleep for a little girl is laid
In the warmth’s of invisible rest
VI
Belladonna
“I am the apparition of your dream’s
Delirium of illness, touchless, Pale,
Unwelcomed by the sunlit viper streams
Of visible poison…only the stale
And unseeable malediction’s drone
Of my beauty, of my scarlet kiss, of
All my bodies’ unnoticed cuts take the tone
And harmony of the pigments of my love.
I decry you, I adore, I am lost
In the airless chambers of my freedom.
Warmth of my self-wounds mingle in the frost
Of the skin you hunger for. Taste me, sum
Of all erotic traumas, in the shade
Of night, where I in the ecstasy am laid.”
VII
Icons
Voices, eyes in the auras of golden mists,
Time is ungraven in the stones
Of their speech. In utter stillness,
Stray echoes of their language leans
To the sacred suffusion of
Cedar and pine and the fragrance
Of incense distilled in my dream.
And always their words are half heard
Half speechless, broken in emblems
Of the darkness diction, whispered
In voids of the meanings unmade
Blended to the blindness of the golden gaze.
VIII
Wrathful goddess and child
“Be
Away
From My child!
My eyes are storms, my tresses fire,
But you, profaine, away, for she
In my arms has the armer of
My rage at the hands of deniehers
Of denighers, I spite you, for
All about you rains your guilt, but
This one daughter of my eyes is me,
Vanquisher in futurity
Of your ashes in the dust of sloth.
As fiercely, if not more, as I
Wished you once to never leave, now
I prayerfully wait for your soft
Unspeaking departure
From the gates of the city to
The distance.
March 12 2011
From Book 50
She breaths the red of passion. Where furry pounds
Against the walls of the unjust, she finds
The rivers of the scarlet one, in the sounds
Of the heartbeat’s decollation. Furry unbinds
All boundaries to be the instrument of the unnamed
Anger, who’s many faces haunt her, masques on the fire
Of the untamed
Gates, opened and unclosing and desire
Burns all things to ash.
June 17 2011
Elegy
Even a prophet can not recognize
his home. How can I comprehend the way
of words when meanings are mirrored and set
to melodies too alien to ears,
and all that should be ways of interweaving
are themselves the seeds of isolation?
For the inward steps to the soul are laid
with each a myriad of threads which lead
to the chambers of threads and of steps, and
the whole of this cathedral beckons each
the footstep to the faithfulness of the bright
conveyance to the eye of all, but I,
lost in the maze-like mirrors of minuteness
have found my self in a stepless vault
both threadless, and mute, and unknown.
September 21 2011
My face, draped with the cloths of darkness
Beneath the shadowed introspection
Still breaths the embers of the fire-light,
Of the heathered heart beat
Of your dreaming inoration. How,
In my imperfect state, do I redeem
The spectral sparks of my speechless
Lips, but in this, to swear my faith that
There at the heart of my cold dark soul
I see you there, and weep.
Nov 18 2011
In the kairos moment the families hiden viper
Cuts through the cloths of illution to the pass of
The dear delight of calumny. Not all humor fills
With joy, some is the child of defeat.
Dec 14 11
From Book 51
in the waters drift, like the lllt
of seaweed strands, in the trance of
the curvings to its own internal
waves, here, this thread remembers, calls
me through all dark’ning storms to hear
the siron song of vauge forgottin things,
luring me back to the sceamings
of my forgootten home.
Jan 12 2012
The dragonfly in the wilderness
blooms in vibrations of memories,
the wisdom of tumult and tenderness
in the warming wings of the sun.
Dear friend, in the music of its wings,
in the upsurge and intensity
of the vibrant currents that it weaves
and sings
as half-sounds in the soul’s emencity ;
this music is stasis in a world begun,
the paralyzed peace of pondering
what never is undone.
march 4 12
If you could hear the words I write, though the hand
undose the designation, you would hear me,
and the margins in the meaning would subsume
the whole, and the empty page would crack the soul.
march 26 2012
from Poems 52
The slow, smooth recomposition
of my self I approche, waiting
for the entry to my sealed
and darker chambers, where the seeds
of things unfathomed answer in
theire absence.
june 13 2012
when I sing into my self the whispers
of half refected revalations,
of my soul in you, Your painting disinters
the ashes of my former night. elations
lighted like toruch lights lead me through to where
the pigmets of your image open tones,
portal to a passage, ether thick and rare,
my foot falls on the painted moss and stones
of an unknown earth. And there you kneel, waiting,
in a dress of black and scarlet, with eyes
as inoccent and fulll as as the dawn’s wing
of whisped first light, and with a hand which cries
with pigments, first with my ashes, you paint,
with silver then, my figure, as a martyred saint.
july 24 2012
THE VAULT OF KNOTS
Dark lines of your revisitation
to the vault of my unspeaking knots,
I can not countenance the shadows
of all the worlds you speak unsaid. There
All splintered hurts, all memories, hewn
from the ancient wood of child fears…
you decimate, and indistinction’s
ashes are laid in the knot of vaults.
until this place, where you visit me,
becomes like to the face of God.
I can not live and look,and only
the shadows of suggestion infer
the hindered whole.
October 8 2012
Time has entered in and denied
the weightless retrodiction of
design.
november 21 2012
From Book 53
No dreams, only the blanketed darkness
of slumber. Gently as gilding silk I slipped
to wakefulness in the drape of primal
morning. And the window sill left open
for the lightless air to gather, was wet
with the sounds of rain drop patter. Sitting up
in the night of our bed, in smooth and
crisp alertness, I felt your full and rhythmic
breathing, harmonium of your slumber,
outward warmth of your far away realms within.
April 29 13
No pain, and no escape. and no
disillusionment. Only
the marble of mercy, the slumber
of heaven, only the Sea
of heaven, the darkness, low
and deep of rest, simplicity
of one partition from the breath.
May 22 2013
Threads that weave in the dark
of perpetuity,
your motions are unyielding-
Influence, unwittingly
my crimes of negligence.
and in the crevices
of doubt, the crises of
utterance, my depths suspend
the soul’s alleviation.
and echoes, raw and tunneled,
tease these threads to tightly tamed
and unmasked tapestries,
who’s imaged face belies
the eyes of witness to murder.
may 23 2013
Book 55
when I sing into my self the whispers
of half reflected revelations,
I am a well of primal echoes
calling for my name. And time defiles
the boundaries of self, and elations
of sound collapse into the icy snows
of moribund waiting….memory beguiles
the hearing, and chooses what darkness prefers.
January 4 2014
no passage into roads of treachery,
where mere suggestions at the edge of slips
sugest the mundane guilt of open eyes
longing for self-blindness.
here one parent’s suggestive words might mean
in the contours of possible meanings,
the lie that blinds the decency of kin
and lets the poison in.
Jan 19 2014
This the dream relic, this the fragment
of the consciousness of sleep, I see her
writhing serpent tresses, eyes intense, sent
into billows where dissensions stir
into ecstasies of terror beyond
the limitations of the vague horrific,
beyond the boundaries of sight.The bond
of heaven and earth is broken, sick
and fainting in the fevers of her fear,
she utters the scream of the song of piercing,
shivers and ossifies the inner ear
to the stasis of non dispersal, spring
with out movement, to the fingers, tone
of silenced fifths. In her beauty I am stone.
May 20 2014
Book 56
In the dark distillations of
recollection are the seethings
of the sequence where one who
falls to the substrate of the dream
is the breath of the forest down
descending ,
and the mother feels
in her in-girt limbs the bitter
bite of the tearless heaving.
December 5 2014
Book 59
Though I write lines, I neglect you,
bright poems of descending time.
You come like sparks in the spaces
Betwixt the byways of moments,
Marvelous caverns of secrets
Sequestered from the language of
The fall into devision.There
oblivion lurks in seductive
Songs, calling for the fullness formed
In extremities of voids, crashing tides
Of nothingness in ecstasies
Of thunder, fracturing ice
Of light to fast unfolding visions
in musics primal as the spring.
March 21 2016
VILLANELLE
Lead me to the orchards of your slumber…
Your beautiful vision in slumbering
Where the apples are stars without number.
Where symbols rich in touch and taste concur
And collapse into the secret meaning,
Lead me to the orchards of your slumber.
Where the haunting winds in the maple’s stir
Fringed with bells of ghosts of children laughing
Where apples are stars with out number.
And beautiful figures who walk there blur
Into the haze of a deeper dreaming,
Lead me to the orchards of your slumber.
And a strange music who’s voices prefer
The harmonics of moonlight echoing,
Where the apples are stars without number,
Blend to the silver eddies of whisper
Where love infers the innocents of spring,
Lead me to the orchards of your slumber
Where the apples are stars without number.
August 22 2001
