Wednesday, March 12, 2014

A Few More Verses From An Earlier Life


     Fragment of a Vision

The world begins
its long awaited transcendental
transformation.
Images break
the bounds of meditation and
form the present flesh,
bent on bending time.
(Ashes to ashes, slime to slime.)

The common Beast assumes
his new identity, resumes
his lust beneath the inconspicuous
majority and perjures faith.
Though the Spirit be offended,
to such calamities our futures are
appended, which gives us pause who
paused for little else, indentured
servants of a vulgar age.
(Anger to anger, rage to rage.)






Erotic Revelation

I have seen
the lightning of the candle
in the wineglass,
the lovers' storm,
one endless variation of
the One endless dance,
a dual flame doubly agitated
and the beatific anguish
there,
in the lightning of the candle
in the wineglass:
God's secret and the
spine's ascendant arch.





     Untitled

In being the world
the world
(despite my protests) persists.
Confronted thus I'm moved to reconsider:
I grant it its enchantments...
(then...)
demanding mine
the rest I will to time.





                  Monstrance

Those things which are most secret and most holy
are always hidden in plain sight,
since what's most obvious is nearest to invisible.
The truth is always hidden in the truth,
needing no cloak but the truth to shield it
from lascivious eyes.
The words of greatest power are always
spoken in the plainest tongue,
needing no leathered rubric to defend
them from unworthy ears:
a clear voice has few hearers
and all a pundit's vain expostulations
bring our sense no nearer to what our
Sense already knows.





   Advice to the Next Creators

Make the new world out of other stuff ---
some other material,
(almost anything might do):
out of what you would have done
if only you had known,
or else of youth turned inside out
(so the foolishness is hid).

For my part, though, I would say
forgetfulness is best, pliable and
light, responsive to the heart.
Yes, make it of forgetfulness,
and work it with your highest art,
until it seems again as it did then...
when there was nothing to forget.





          Psychological Reflection

In the midnight hours in the psychiatric ward
among the lesser madness searching out a phrase,
some petty exorcism to still the daylight demons
who will greet me in the morning
when I leave for home,
I often wonder at the cunning
of these incarcerated sick,
consider if they might have stumbled on
the trick that I have often sought but missed.
What have they lost but sentience of a world
the very sense of which is suspect,
this nightmare mercantile
balanced on a balance of ballistics
that grinds the loins of lovers
bones of poets
into columns of statistics
proud with economic growth?

I know of other souls judged whole
to monasteries fled on lesser intuitions,
supernal trappists rapt in cloistered thought,
cinctured with their sworn renunciations,
hooded in their secret brown devotions.

So I pause among my midnight doubts
to barb our common therapeutic notions:
before we cure these mad ones
and return them to the social fold
we ought to know if madness represents
their strangled version of a vow,
private, final, bold.

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