Adoring Thorns
by Gregg Glory This Book Published By BLAST PRESS Copyright © 1992
I write this to all the harried angels of the earth
This is no post-mortem, but a moment recalled, my Dear
How briefly was her face tilted to the heaven where I lived! Never had another angel-- so hungry to experience love, real love, terrifying love and its frightful freedoms-- come to the cool harbor of my arms with such intensity screwed into her face. Her face itself was an angel's puzzle; the tripped electric gate St Peter shut. An alert and mobil majesty in those pale features and dark locks that perhaps only still photography or a 1920s black and white film could possibly capture. In life, her grins and winning compressions of her nose seemed too hectic to be believed-- too rash and ecstatic to really be communicating from any, more static, core one was willing to call recognizably "human." But I also knew these faces in their slow-motion mode, their more belatedly loving and august character. Alone, and at her feet, I would watch the world wash over her face at the end of the day in complaint and exasperation until it seemed that all expression must vanish from those exhausted lips and ceilingward, nearly black, eyes. Within moments, however, she would grimace or resolutely sigh-- shaking her head like a wet terrier and, perhaps, open her blood-alive lips again to say my name or breathe out through a self-indulgent smile untraced by any concern other than its own tired loveliness. These were treasured instants, which I now (how calmly!) recollect. My bitterness, my anxiety, my righteous self-defense of some imagined personal integrity ripping from me now as the world then fell from her looks. And then I remember a slight sound of water mingling with her sidelit countenance; some fountain where we sat out a midnight vigil, the waterlight of rose and blue coral; laughing in delight at the airy realness of the stone cherubs floating before us rises to mind and floats around me now somehow liquidly-- the unviewable sandpaper of the sea our only backdrop. Here was passion and patience and regret for the thought of a future we then in-hearsed, burying our told wishes as if just so much weight of dust. The taste of dust stays with me; dust and water still mingle on my tongue.
My neon heart's kneeling in defeat;
Beauty by its gentle precept
Now all its silken ties relents,
Loosening sighs my soul had kept.
Never under a deeper terror
Moved one blinded spirit's seraph
Than this enchanted note might tell of
---However voice is prone to error!
For I was one who had loved Love!
Nor ever for my hot fondness stood reproved
But tripled-up that passion cold eyes removed,
Heating deep Atlantics from my heart's cove.
Sacred were those wellspring's vents!
Deeplier delved than baptismal frankincense
Crushed to holy foreheads in Arab tents---
Never of life's pulsings to relent!
Time has put all such dreaming now to bed,
All louder hearts to quiet 'neath calmer heads
As if to lie asleep were to forget the dread:
Though lying living now, we shall lie dead.
So then what is it to have lived?
Nothing; if not "to have loved."
Thus life's premise is against me proved
And I am dead--- though I have loved.
I have been by your tempests overtaken
And wallow waterlogged in your waves' swales
Whose salt in tender licks my mouth
Opens thirsting for.... Drowned by years
Of loving whatever your love abandons here
On the constant beaches of my devotion.
Not one pebble turns from the spray away
Or hesitates to douse itself in you.
Beyond the fell pace of antelopes
Lost to sight in the cold engulfing woods
Where hot hounds give ululating chase, up slope
And deep into the dimmest mossy fold---
There my mind in ranting rage unwinds
And knows the sharp sorrow of each bitten thing
And falls with the great hart in bludgeoned love;
Twice by speed of love was my message sent
Dimming suns by bright heart's relent-
Less, sincere and spiritual, self-amusement.
Here joy castled and burning voices flowed
As fire were water, up skies bluely endowed
(By wedded loves' light now new embowered).
And --as a flower-- leapt my longing
Universes high, unkempt light prolonging
As tender looks in lovers' eyes are kept
By mutual fire alive against the ashy wish of death.
Thus this flaming wreath hath reft roses and suns
Of their writhing petals, but not their worth
Which, reckless of cold time's slow vast waste, runs
On and on, racing still my pulses to loved earth!
There, nimble and fantastic
As the bar closes, a tilting girl
(Near wooden doors eerily elastic)
Stands, dances and twirls,
Shrieking "Life!" to adoring airs
A chandelier's flaming wings make roseate.
"My angel, my light, come down, come here!"
She leaps from her chair-- too high, too late--
Pirouettes, trips, recovers herself
In the innocence and vision of a dream:
From the paradise of her lips
An atmosphere, a heaven, of absinthe
Slips.
Drunken and lovely, the Intoxicant,
Following with feet wherever heart went,
Learns like a supplicant to lean
On whatever the dream means.
Her eyes intensified destroyed the impossible clarity of the evening. Aquamarine at midnight, skies of milk and summer. By erasing it yet more clearly. Hyperbolic acid in her glance-- impossible to petty moralities; all enter and dissolve. Ha ha! How luxuriantly have caravans of myself, my own, my bedouin soul, passed green nights exploring these portals. Meadows of somber enormity. Ha ha! This should interest those who pretend to be scientists of spirit.
Myself? I am rapturous for escape. Into reality, the unpurveyable.
Prom-dressed scarecrows stuffed with diamonds of anguish would pay a very high price for my innocence.
Then:
---Your mouth is a brood ground of old whores.
Every word is an untranslatable genesis.
---Piquant egotism!
I say her eyes.
The face haunts me. Melts, vagrant ghost that it is, enters my veins and wells up to impossible laughter. Shrieking radiance of newness-- shrill and virile! Well, well, I feel that I have not yet forgotten how-to-love.
Blue innocence of adorning airs-- unnecessary extravagance! in the face of your face. Come, stand beside me. There is so much I demand to imagine as still possible tonight. How void of solace is the empty moon! One bladed touch of your fingernail, and the world lies ripped around me in bleeding shreds.
Art, poetry, complexity: Let us destroy these sterile mechanics of happiness--
How uselessly this world is gold troubadour to my impulse!
Yet, the face haunts me.
Oh my giant honeydrop
Y'know my heart will never stop
Look at me I look at you
Is all I ever want to do
Oh my cherry lollipop
There my cherry lollipop
Oh ma chere I look at you
That's all I ever wanna do
All these longshoremen of the heart can go fuck
O water water aching blue and bright
Get that little scubagirl up to the light--
Prayers are ashes when heaven is wet:
O lonely little scubagirl, fly up to my net!
My heart is full of candy roses,
My hand's a daisy patch;
I bless all runny noses 'cuz
I hope one blessing yours will catch.
O little aqua lycra scubagirl
You swim in my Adriatic heart's red swirl.
Love and longing live for light---
It is a torch's tempted touch
Comes to candle conscious sight,
Komes in kicking blisters-- it is too much!
My love and longing endure a night;
Every luminescence shut
when she blinks against the light.
A saint is in the eye
that sees thee
Upholding light
impatient skies descend--
Blue litmus insert
bedeviling a patched wold
Changeless spirits inherit and descry
a lice-bed.
Infinitely dark trees
shade the scree-
Shaped cynosure-- adoring Life!
Crying bloods leak down
a marble eye
In thirsting wish seeing
glory-adornments
Perched at the white clasp
of your throat
Charging the plush surge
velvet time blots
--- in violet time reprised!
Naked angels who watch my spirit, weep
As I have wept, and still this vigil keep.
For purer love has never in its season
Been given than this I give unease in.
O Disquiet! Come hallow this soul of me
Forged between an ariel halo listing in fire
And sultry dusts spurring restlessnesses.
Come shift my spirit's solidity-- as mist
Arisen to sun's atomizing power
Lifts to brighter character by its change of state.
How sweet the blossom shouts the winter's over
In cannonades all of yellow love
Starring a ground still downy
As if summer suns outswept the inaugural day.
How dawn's above this starling stalk uncertain
Which of the light is bearer and receiver!
Parted lovers met on life's intervening strand:
Close in love, and closer still in loving.
Pearled light held the near angels' adoring,
Angelic in reflection of love's uplifted brand.
All these unlimited ministries glisten
Ingeniously-- lights capitulating to lights'
Increasing haloes.
So her face
Angelus limitless from lips to unpinned hair
In my heart radiates life
Until every limb lies annealed
And even my fingers infect the spring with joy
Teaching each sweet bird its flight
From high height to highest!
Purloined glories from my smashing chest
Accept no council
Neither fear nor philip of wit
Nor care of any creepy pink thing
But plunging on in their own bewildered wonderment
Scroll out til stars pile up
Making earth's envisioning air
Seem the thinnest ribboning.
Her incandescent body
Tender under told time's one gigantic tick
Incinerates hours and fables by swept, kept licks;
Molten beneath the moon's white story
One by one the unspoiled stars spill from her side.
Take all my lorn light unshorn (to you only belonging)
Twist flame and flower and winking spring
Into the midnight ivy of your dark, swung hair
And into the blended candle's long eye at dawning.
Twist every strand of the wild, wild air
Into the midnight ivy of your dark, swung hair
Until Love jumps out from spuming earth
And mounts the lost, cross ways of my breath.
All-at-once lovely in your loved eye,
Awkward and able, spry and awry,
My burning body like a shouted cross I move
(O golden-boned frame suffused with unrefusing Love!)
All-at-once lovely in your loved eye.
Now out of sparring breath
I pause to praise and honour all her ways:
Whirled brave alive again from her inward world
I sing all loves sprung from her beginning word;
And deep in the sacristy of her candle-hot breath
I lay down my moons and worlds for the honor of her days.
My heart's a lamp of "red, mirrored fire"
Blown to sun-eyed daises flown
From the uncovered light of her chest;
Now ashen heart has a smoky charm to fondle
And she had a will to touch such smoke
A wick-licked nipping love
Mouthed from the sensual tongue of summer air
Writhing with daisies in the heaven-flooded fields
Whirled about her rich wildness where she lay.
Then all my pyred, wronged
Soul abandoned broken in its ageless grief
Stood forgetful of its doom of harm
In the myriad afternoon of her maenad's chin:
And lapped in happiness through the tumbledown night
I rose with the joy-streaked stars again
And felt in the blood-flared marrow
Of my pyring, fire-christened soul's core
The meadowed virgin's sung lovingness come
Whiten and bless me with her petal-fall.
Her silvered eyes entranced the moon, leapt bare
From dim cornice to swept heaven, stared
The moon-man from his stirless rest
By fibers of affection bound him breast to breast.
So Isabella charmed each element she met,
Bent to calm waters, and made those waters crest
As she were the moon come down to trod the wood
And with luminous looks set whispers among the reeds.
The wind that swept her sighed away enthralled;
And crickets kept her steps enshrined with hymns;
Birds added wondrous silent powers to their calls
And marked her visit solemnly, like small dignitaries trimmed;
Sweet berries shook themselves to roll along her palm
And of those moon-liveried lips have some taste
Before they of their giving taste gave all.
I'll resign the moon
[And all the fainting artwork of stars tear down]
And all the flagrant shouting stars
That leech their whiteness to every sky
Indifferent as the wind
For her whose whiteness stays concentrated
More than the gigantic roaming moon
Or meteors that diminish as they pass
In higher light oval as true love
That touches everything as it touches
You with its white tangential tongue.
Let it come, let it come
Hypnotized time of supremest Love!
I faint from paitience,
My memory dead;
Fears and falseness-- enchantments!
To heaven are fled.
And Love's soft thirst
My sick veins bursts.
Let it come, let it come
Hypnotized time of supremest Love!
Arthur Rimbaud
Here my winter heart,
And there my summer soul
In frosting opposition stand:
As when noon and midnight meet,
Contend.
When I truly dream on Paradise for me, how few faces accompany the vision! None of them recognizable! Here, an unendurable tenderness-- leechlike affections, very like modern art. Empty souls gyrating with a sound of suffusing suction! Wanton in their emptiness, their excessive lack. What sold-out paucity. Inhibitionists sacrificing the spinning wish to live! Mourning doves hop from my head to eat out the eyes of these remorseless sycophants. Trapped by a desire-- they know nothing of how to desire reality for themselves... Ah, my petite soul! How conjugal thy green dance. Come, swirl your cherry scarves around me! We shall play at spitting on these faces!
Shattered lilies on the abstract faces
Poor bastard! I shall wear your skin-- as a victory and a celebration! You have stripped it off as a drunkard strips off moderation. How jealous of God's spotlight ached St John! There is a willing divinity--- as real as any pig sacrifice in Tahiti.
Angels possessing cowardice! You too!-- I have felt it-- wings delicate and oily as a fly's, shivering with the anticipation of some heavenly visit-- the recorded face of a little girl at the instant of death; the very moment when she threw herself on the tracks to save the family dog. These are the fetishes of good spirits.
I myself am hurtling down the same track, my eyes magnetized by my eventual death-- a death totally without salvation: For I have seen the glorious angels and stood among the hive as they communed with their Creator. My hanging heart, hungry with righteous appetite, has been caressed by the Supreme Hand, altering its tick-- but still I refuse to believe in them; I won't stick by that dirty crew! Not I! Not that lot!
Still, heaven is open to me. Its razor azures. Just the thought of falling in love stops my heart.
The watered loves of salvation. Again! Again these symphonies disrupting restless dusts. How long and how lovingly I longed to be a corpse! Let the roses close over my eyes-- how shyly! Simply the moon's light leaks into the tomb, my arms crosswise, awaiting the heart's cool command to cease. My nostrils shudder at the other corpses; morose disfigurement gnarling the stone. Even in death I am a snob! To have given as I gave: this face to this time! Horribly, I held her hand. I mewed, "I love you." And at this, at this her vailing virginity lapsed! No heroic soul melted between us. Monstrous Beauty! Chaste hands held and licked like cold-cream. How tender were the lies we steeped each other in! Disingenuous lust, dispirited genetalia. She, too, was dead. Her eyes died when I licked the tears from her face-- and laughed!
We are so immemorially close! In the velvet afterlight of burning decay, how solemnly her lips beheld mine. Bridegroom to spent darkness. Avidly, vividly, licking. Night, night, my own most especial despair! Unwrap the spirit this cellophane traps! Extend my nauseousness to the masses! Sick, and in infinite hope infinitely despairing, I extend my tongue to your bootsole... I weep if I can touch one discarded object of your hatred!
Mysterious Heart!
My words are nails!
Useless nails!
What a Satan I truly am!
Small faces gather at the great, Romantic heart
Staked alive in the stiff glare of dead eyes' love-glances,
An icicle-daggered light that stabs the loveless dark.
How like the vaccuum-vacant philosophy of Sartre!
Small faces proved mute, they slink towards death....
Dwindled souls! Seek death's vile ecstatic chance!
O hatred! glow again within this loving breath
And spurn with angel's-fire every falseness weaving wreaths
About this lighted grove of truest Love
I hold within me in untresspassed stillness yet.
Every striving leaf to some high lightness tends,
Sending its green tendrils through a shadowed net;
So I strive, and my striving may have no let. O Love, love
How sacred is this tended flame no matter how you move--
I'd divine the source your rich mystery was made in
But head cannot know what heart's forsaken
That groans awake in the harassing [solitary] wind
Which irritates these high-borne summer grasses
Stirred as I to your blood's momentary thrumming:
How out of deafness had I heard your deep soul coming?
And what strange remembrance then shall my heart find
Pulsing beneath new autumn's colored masses
When lungs pulse solemn in the halo-light
Beaten to sweet gold above one winter's night?
O there are days that drive one to be blind
To all the world's cruel, compelling ashes
And force my bludgeoned, hidden heart to see
A coarse, cold beauty behind a dark reality.
When you are gone my heart is buried
In damned time, my grave maker and keeper;
What tripped unerringly then stumbles, dead
In a world deceased, save for active reaper
Who seeks live hearts for deadliest solace
And in velvet caress comes touching to kill.
I adopt the cowl and wear an empty face
Stained by cold reticence when I lack your will
Which hotly blushes all my good intent
As sunlight interfuses loveliness
To every airy thing, in whole or part,
Imbuing sheer transfigurement by thy wish.
But now, my sun, you are come again
And make all departure welcome by such return.
Up the singing stair I bound as heart
Pounds a rhythm of joy, unbounded, full
Of its own spread glory as kissed lips that part
To set royal notes to soul's burning all.
Here there is wine; wine, poetry and love
To last all evening long, and light the morn
In flame everliving as my spirit moves
Above the limning eye of dawn. I've borne
Untold sorrows as wind bears up the clouds
That fly into the atmosphere's soft
Height, where still my soul beats loud!
O inner certainty, sure as that sky aloft
I'd give again each heartache, live every painful hour
That I may know one moment of beauty's fearsome power.
Riding angel-lambent in cloud-crystal bliss
I mock all pricking peaks' diminished blacks
Until the near sun dissipates like a vapored kiss
And all Love's crystal excess cracks away and sinks
Light-shattered to the deep-augured sea.
I sing my imaged beauty's bright obsequies
As rancid temples sink from my heightened sight
And anchors reel away from now-rising ships;
I sing despite defeatists who moon for cold Carthage dead
Or, sunk with heart-tonnage of thickest lead,
Curse the blessing God gave them free:
Truth, dear Beauty, and long-souled Liberty!
Thus I fly on, re-luming a salvaged past
Until out of whatever worst of worst surrounds
I divine this syllabic, righteous best!
Look to where groins are purring
To touch the spur to flank;
Miraculous backs heave sweating
In midnight's suspended black.
O open your heart without letting
Until the moon bends down to watch;
Touch fire and fire to match,
No matter the weight of the dark.
Halfway to heaven a hero and sinner rest,
Grave mouth to mouth, and breast upon breast;
Long were those kisses as the sky may melt and sway,
Deep the breaths that crest up there
Until mountains are clay.
Straight upright stand the dead,
Trumpet upbourne on skull and head;
No laurel wreaths do their eviscerate hearts display,
All that song had woven together now lays unmade;
And thorn and dust have taken
All song and tongue away.
When God's asleep we'll dance as saints,---
In naked innocence heart and skin may meet;
Clouds of proud demeanor will fall from our breaths,
Our milk kisses pour and taste milk-sweet
Deaf to the whisper of death.
Although my love's made for joy
I taste black ashes at my lips;
For I am pining sick in love
And love is all my remedy.
For love but wounds to cure
By wounding giving cure, cured to wound again!
I am an apostle of that ecstasy
And still cannot the deadly sweet
Of love's maddened sweat forget.
Such is love's mystery
When we lie abed
Who would give heart's cure
Must first stitch heads.
Though love is brief, on my hurt I meditate
And find all ill who all-wished for sweet;
One heart, my own, unowned
Like a drop of salt-sweet spray
Cold oceans of feelings shows.
Oh still to be a human thing alone!
[For her of whom I have written both "A million-souled angel this incarnate minute," and "When I in my lover's eye am cast aside," and felt both sayings true with the savage conviction of a ghost doomed to haunt the deathcamp of his last breath]
In her cockle-slip of coffin
My love lies lightly best;
Out of my own small, sinned bones I begin
And shape one splinter to sail gigantic seas;
I lay the red keel in my breast.
What if all those images
-
-?
I cannot identify the phrase
Or the man that made it
But I know the wild heart
When cupid's deputation takes all in fee
And steals from free souls what slave hearts would keep
Pulling from sweet love sweetest misery
By pluck of heartache till sound judgment jump
Off sworn love and with leaping desire goes
When sorrow, like summer rain, the dry heart
Remands under dewy freshets of itself
Joy, like the summer sun, follows it in heat
Suborning sad hours' waste with a wealth
Of thoughtless play the ageless leaves among,
Leaving no weep of what had the day begun.
the weight of imperious light
When spirit's ecstatic tenancy
Too closely visits the frame of me
Writhing about all her rich wildness as she lay
In the heaven-fields flooded with daisies.
Half-way to death in my ark of skin
And unable to loosen the thorned pin of my love
For all that green and swaying may about me move
My bones conferred with time's disconsolate wreck
Love knuckled under with a cold, long fist
A million-souled angel this incarnate minute
When I in my lover's eye am cast aside
Stop, ageless star, kissing my desire
That night has fed with dreams of lasting fire
And see the charging river such kisses have unhearsed:
For pale and pointless as the stony ground
Have I lain with whispers until by night immersed
And in that night await your silent burning sound!
I look to you when my youth deceives me
And all the tempest of my indignant blood
Throws the sauntering seas of daydream into fever:
Ever calm above these opposing storming seas
That meet in my breast and cancel
You stare, bright star, in vauntless victory ever!
Once,
That night I wrapped jilted Beauty in my arms-- and I found her bitter-- and I spit at her.
I cursed her; and I [she] wept.
I pickep up the gun against Justice. Terrible vengeance!
I ran.-- O Bitches! O Misere! O Hate! All that is precious I have left with you.
Ill luck was my idol. Sadness, queen over me. Tragady was my master. Unhappiness, my GOD. I, the evil prince.
And then at last the tender Spring apportioned to me the frightful laugh of an idiot!
Ice cathedrals rise to disappear in air; A cold-halo hugs the moon with light And radiates all through the star-shot night, A God-eye x-ray of my swooning spirit Thrown large against the winter's distance. The cold tongue chips from the mouth of Baudelaire, Stark grey and somnolent on his nude tomb And pitted as a rotting virgin's womb. Oh song of Baudelaire! strike through Death's blight, and light's: ring, rise and yet renew The eviscerating dark that here unscrews Melting eyes from intoxicated sockets. How should poets love the night and yet refuse To saunter the sun's mercuric center and unlock it? Daniel J Weeks, Gregg Glory Once under silent stars I kneeled weeping, I sewed a night-black dress for funeral keeping; Seeded by midnight threads of loves kept waiting The breads we held together kept their braiding. And far past the trenchant moon's unlacing Glittered cakes and icy lights. My bleeding Starts: my nightly heart lies beating In a funeral dress of white threading White as these stone breads our hands keep kneading. Ronna Bunker & Gregg G. Brown Sleeping in the tender light of alone My body made itself an army-- My many minds alarmingly rebelled-- My noisy dreams were tossing stones to hell: What heaven bounced back? No echo tells Of tender any keeper. Attack. The sounds How solved, bending, holy, doving, proud Moved to the ways my unkept singleness still loved. Ronna Bunker & Gregg G. Brown I want to be pushed down the slide I need to be punched in the side My love tastes like blood I'm spitting The loved bloods back to sweet need's central black holy holiest firm recif. These fish are angel that blast by my reef-fingered hands and coral-coated tongue stuck in singing Scales and nitrous loves breathe deep and fluid rides Ronna Bunker & Gregg G. Brown Avalanche no sound white sand aching and hot not cold not loud. not touched this middle-light; a apparent parable ---paradise Quiet. Ronna Bunker & Gregg G. Brown I have an absence heart full less than sky, abstract more than clay. I save the seance. I grace one day. I break my heart on each word you say ---I'm a fabulous failure, baby. Hold my absent heart. Fill my broken sky. Tournequet my lurching lies. Hold me where my heart's departed, But don't step on my squish, lady baby. Ronna Bunker & Gregg G. Brown X-ico blonde tomb, tangled tongue, I go spirit-cased to glory golden bow and boy a lute-haired god I trod soully aware I come close and closed for now a noel of no-note tolling a lemon-lozenge apocalypse in lip-sync Ronna Bunker & Gregg G. Brown Mr. Moon is my solo glow; In a blighted night green & blue I see you-- for the first time Tonight all night. Alright, I think, Almighty, I I saw the pale fingers of love Push God-bones through the grey eyes Of a burning dove. I'm so goddamn sober I ain't no goddamn lobo; You're just anti-social No friends outside the go-go. Ronna Bunker & Gregg G. Brown SPIGOT SAYS Spigot says "Take that, evil-doer! Your life of pig is overly done! Your sin of winning no more shall come Disguised in pink and pearly sure!" Fascinated faucet spat right back: "The pure I spit is surely sauce and porkly big." Thus lumbered spigot and faucet on From flush night-crack to dribbling dawn Arguing and arguing and arguing through bigs of brawn. Ronna Bunker & Gregg G. Brown My very senses tingle in the delight of sweet mingled in sour and dark twinkling in light a tiny night dripping from nectar fingers and tickling budding innocence from my lips staining a mug full of mirrored red fire [naked] skin to skin i shed my secrets kiss melted scars and fly into heaven blind and free, nude and intoxicated by utter passion -- love, my nakedness is yours to consume, inhale like the fresh air in summer, warm and alive! to breathe your gentle desire into this purity mingled with wildness and agony for wealth in sensuality is the utter truth of all my naked being Debra A. Calabro