Lord Dermond Copyright © 1986 - 2006 =================
Hey guys: I found these in an old notebook down in the basement (I've really been cleaning house and trying to get my writings in order)... Pages in this notebook actually had shopping lists for whiskey & beer written in them.. Anyway, a lot of the stuff in this one was booze addled nonsense, but a few of these were completely new to me (and O.K.)... So, please keep these in mind, if you like them, for one of your future Blast/Ocular compendiums.. This notebook is practically ruined by rainwater and neglect, but here's a few that I could salvage.. Let me know how they grab ya's.. Cheers, Lord Dermond
X X X X upon the everlit jig of eternal extant flows the unbroken mind's beholden dream. Such lending splendor, in lighted veils all its own, that drapes the tender fury of the word. X X X X Salut de la demence -- extinguished asphodel, sun exalted in incandescent enchantment... My dream will rise toward you the lone flower shadows dissolve w/ ballerina ease.. X X X X Medications: the reeling moon was caught upon a wave, hooked to the gills waiting in silence for the sprig of acacia, I let go too soon. disembodied soul crying alone in the blind; the rosewood bitters. X X X X the river pulsed like a slow vein warming the skeletons of trees. St. G., a poem of place. upon consideration of the idea we both had of losing ourselves about yr lavish landscape (to construct richer ones in verse), I considered what I might create in such a case. It was decided that pen and paper be damned: The universe eloquently incorporated upon my consciousness entering. open my heart and behold the rings. X X X X Fields of flowers, a polka-dot princess removes the gold from black-eyed susie and paints rainbows on her soul. X X X X The heavens rinse paradise from beguiling skies in fortunes of color. X X X X the apricot trees cease to speak, the descending silence struggles when misting rains return. the sleeping tongue is rusting, eyes pretend a steady gaze: imperial prayers put forth as soft mysteries caress my fate and flames tremble in my hands; w/ heroic glows' ascending glory in the moon's strong current, sweet beneath the willow tree. X X X X (this one's nearly impossible to decipher) Flames dispel jealous fate naked in affected poses toward myself, all is closed Laughter booting the azure unpouring tempest corroding my vein boxhaul to the listless mirror the walls are faded, the ravaged essence from a primeval sleep. Of the consecration, we level elegies to weep upon the cinereous rose. ================== T H E E L I T I S T D A N I E L B. D E R M O N D THE ELITIST Daniel B. Dermond COPYRIGHT 989 BY DANIEL B. DERMOND PUBLISHED BY BLAST PRESS BOWIE PLACE, COLTS NECK, N.J. 077 ALL ILLUSTRATIONS FOR MR DERMOND HAVE BEEN FURNISHED BY GREGG G. BROWN
"Perhaps of all the hidden needs we try to merchandise, the selling of immortality is the most astounding of all efforts."
Justin Rayder's voice, tilting nimble in curling shadows of the compact conference room, sinks in dissolving syllables as salty spears course his porous forehead.
"One of the most serious problems we face, calls for creative thinking. Gentlemen, how do we sell life insurance to women and not remind them they're getting older?"
The pewter coned mesh, grey globe floats in monotone illumination, a suspended spur humming to the peach-toned bricks. Slow shaded faces blurring in stifled purpose, Rayder's rigid figure is the only flexless hinge to puncture the choking orbital abyss, the shadowless fingers tapping in clipped friction against the podium like a shrinking anchor muffled in orange occlusion. Lights from the black, needle streaked windows, fluctuate in crimped cinder on his cringing, roseate pate. Hoping to grow, the aching angles of demented stone, slants amplified in glass flecked arches and blind to the injured hieroglyphic script, the walls splice the void of persistent volition and exaggerations of sunken numbness. His square sounds bounce from the dental still weld of watercolor abeyance, intersecting his winking green acrylics.
Cluttered with dead enthusiasm, Rayder finishes, "...so we must remember that the social acceptance of responsibility is not always the true desire of the prospective buyer. Thank you for your attention."
Rayder's collapsed cornea, static on the arcing oak portal, sulking boundary of designed drama, burns the tidal diurnal wire. Silvery ball bearing pellets sting the stencil of his chalky crown, emerging on the frozen emerald ice spill, bold eternal tumbled intrusions of floating ceremony. Doused houses, the tudor maisons of gables, humorless collimated swellings to twisting chimney pots and invisible winds, his red resistances on the pebble capped escarpment cease.
"Goddamn rain," Rayder exclaims, staring at the waxy blue pavement. Abrupt oblivion swipes his slurry determination; tinseled fingers his polar placed face. Diminished fate; his pantograph blurs to a client meeting in fifteen, then back to agility, to be out of that stone faced circle of couched reflection. The sifted mist dotting iridescent darkness folds in splattering remnants. Rayder's chromed key pinches the grooved tunnel on the side of his oriental auto.
Isolated high-beams, jilted rain haloes, diffract the dripping glare. Furious water and marble folly unfolding his soul, the plump spiritual pulp closed in vein nascent tragedies, a rapacious oval pulse. Christened, and lone sculptured diamonds glowing motionless, ceramic moon, blank yellow pebble, cradling the shallows of a naive sky. Edging the narrow corners of dark star origins, he sees gardens, like elongated postage stamps, as drowning rubber rotation and interior conundrum humming wilts.
"Miss Marguerite Lattimer." Rayder's stitched murmur splits the filmy windshield.
His leather heels click up the slippery concrete street to her fieldstone home of tinted convergence atop the calico watered patio, and clanks the door latch.
Pine gate swinging ajar on tin pins, she shivers before him, pale composure and lined climate like rings in a stone skipped lake.
"Hello. I'm Justin Rayder, here to discuss the insurance options you phoned about."
"Yes. Come in. You look a little cold."
"Well, it sure is a grey day."
"Come into the sun room for tea."
Rayder scans the luminous heated oblique countenances of uninterrupted vision. Red, rolling endlessly beneath chandelier constellations to the faded haze of a matronly Etruscan vase, step intricately to the black blotched contours of her smoky cabinet doors, and flooded notions of mirrored counters. Scuffing the squarrose floor, he hunches in his woolen clothes, saturated in sea tears, light leaking on his coral cube. Stars that spiral in unconscious hands, distant in the smooth orchid patched amber that eludes distorted trees, are the illusions of aging jade. Appalled moorings darkened in the dun stumps clunking in open soaked ignorance, the black stabbing lights of his intimate pupils bends perception abruptly upright, in an instance of hesitation.
"...we concentrate on protecting the security of women like..." He stops mid-air, unaware he was speaking. Her pink powdered impulse, angels unspoken, composes her discerning glance. Splintered sublimation and sacred departure, Rayder clasps her triangle hands, dazed in cyclical gestures. She follows him, two dissolving heads, hypnotic shades of a painted wave, up the knotty sloped staircase.
Whitely Diminished
A flaccid stigma
Of hope remains
Still in vain,
As salt falls round
In a bodiless eclipse
Of rings, so glass
Verging upon stone.
Thick sister, dissolves
Like airy destiny
Spiral and blind,
Illusion aware of
Your tired eye in
Blackness, corrosive
Visitation happens home
At abrupt departures.
Soft sun breathes
When silence stops
And shadows melt,
The fountains cold
Unfold pale fire
Under brooding clouds.
And quivering heart
Flames the holy,
Edge of desolate
Silver leaves, poor
Endures a hollow
Ghost's soul.
Burden, in moons'
Watered light is
Thrown to sleep,
Borne in dismay
Hooking the cold
Dead ground.
Shamed fingers, playing
Upon every prayer,
Bled until they gave
Rage, swims in blessed
Light, pictured ballet
Hoping to rise; upon
All ancestral scorn
To cast out remorse
Or descend...
Roses Sont Roses, Bluets Sont Bleus
Security blanket of the lone bedsit set
and feeble sun slicing my rigor-mortis blinds,
underlined in red and italicized in neon
the faintest voice that lies on a sleeping spine.
Knitting visions glimmer of an angel within
eyes falling starless on palisade stones,
her incarnation is in a blue cat basket
the ice pearl carries our happiness alone.
Locked on a cliff into lashing blue seclusion
in slow cloaked freedom of the bossa nova things,
drinking pages boil in broken born corners
a solitary icon that only her visage brings.
Her radiant spirit is now made of shadows
grey dusk of doubts, in this solitary haze
rain to be afraid of those fatal destinies,
I know emotions are the magic ink of days.
Vesuvius Man
Garden kneeled, gathered
Blushes, obsessed, dreaming
Processions.
Divinity of passion
Enduring bloods
And none can see
Here upon witchings
Catastrophe.
Searching clouded breath
Of nights, aureole waves
None, the blue rings
Melodious prophecy
Receding plum, orations
Relinquish bosom of
Ecstasy.
Inescapable rounding
Naked strings of
Absolute euphony,
Late time semblables
Sting malice in
Eye.
Supremacy descends all
Reddest hallows, aquiline
Perpetual.
The Shells
Bodiless, dense
In crystal-- sheen
Drifting.
Airs of green
Cortical skies in
Undone decorum
Thumbing bold
Corollas low, silt
Spilled ruins.
My paper cuts
Preserve and mirror
Small sketches
Embalmed, the
Dolorous morning
Tangibles
Disintegrate as
They will rule
Stellar remains
As the dead
Of Jeherico lie
Date raped.
Tenderous Leaves
My slow guilts,
Angels slip
In empty light
Embracing
Sultry graves
Invert cataract,
Gardens and
Scarlet snowflake.
Blue scythes. Her
Marbly iris, in
Petal passions of
Jade silk tinders.
Looking out? Inwardly.
Coma kiddie-- tio pepe.
Empty
Today in lime
Light parody
A rhythm for
Lost Lina,
Leanly in grace.
Slits
May rain, lush
Coffin silks
Shone lonely webs
Mangled.
Robbing opera
In rose faded
Stillness, losing
Yesterdays all fabled
Catacombs. Eclipse
Dwindled ocean
Elegies and blues
Traverse, whispering
Princess, fissures
Mollify the sullen
Hysterical elements.
It shuts my eyes.
For Samantha
Spilling flawlessly
Soul to soul
Laid purified
As she arose
Angelic eye in
Earth and air
Lived insolent
Enraged and bare
Temptations compose
Blue dreams true
Pierce the ages,
Summon solitude!
Traced to a strain
Ice minds shone,
Musing she bathed
Coal water cloven.
Hooping elegies so
Gentled upon sight
Womb beauty dressed
In new dawning light.
Veins, in a tomb
Intent on a truth
Decreed, shed this
Black heart; did she?
=============================
THE UNAGING MUSE
LORD DERMOND
BLAST PRESS
Colts Neck, New Jersey
1998
Lord Dermond is the author of at least ten volumes of poetry published by Blast Press from 988 to 998. This is a selection of those poems.
Cover Art: Alice B. Talkless
Introduction: Gregg Glory
My thanks to each of them. Thanks also, to my mother, Anne D. Dermond for her continued love and support. Most of all, thanks to my wife Marysa and son Troy-- without whom, I would not be alive today.
Lord Dermond
The Unaging Muse Copyright 998 by Daniel B. Dermond.
All rights reserved.
~ the poems ~
Whitely Diminished
...and so we don’t know
Drinking is a dying art
The Gods of Autumn
Burn the Rainforest
Only a Man
Disintegration
January
All Hallows
Imperfect Testament
Shells
A Temporal Exhalation
Birthday
Silver
Afterbirth
In Silence
Absolution
Tenderous Leaves
Empty
Alice B. Talkless
Primeval
Church St.
The Monumental Grunt
Charred Remains
Litany
Alexis
Grace
Aftermath
Alexis Trailorpark
Insight
Valium
Coffin Nails
The True Season
Gone dead
The Wake
Recovery
Ritual Winter
Farewell Girl
Epitaph
Twilight Lake
The Yearling
The Eternal
At the End of the Path
The Divorce
Double Exposure
Jetty
Ulcers
Bar Scratch
Hangover
The clinging skins
Moonlight Meditation
I spill vodka warmly
4 Roses
Ruat Caelum
Gala Vehem
The Gift
The malodorous sky
Not yet called
The Lord’s Prayer
I retire in the grass
For Marysa,
you pour from my heart
like holy water...
A boulder-stone is as arid as I,
you’ve milked me dry.
Ladies and gentlemen,
come to the show
this very moment,
a great poet
will dance before you.
--Vladimir Mayakovsky
Introduction
The world enlarged from a shell
Is stripped and standing bare,
A grinding dancer on a stage
Violent with despair
And sweet to look upon.
A poet of my acquaintance passes to mind as an exemplar of such despair. The one doomed man of my youth, I remember him speaking with an unearthly quaver in his voice, slouched in some easy chair, as if violence and vision had been compounded into one pale apparition. There were times when the veil was drawn so lightly over his eyes that all creation seemed but an interruption of some more perfect dream. When serious- and cajoled out of his bad habit of entertaining those who would be merely satisfied with hollow jests or minuets of jibe- he would reconstruct life as a series of holy moments, with a casual acquaintance or sacred girl assigned some certain sainthood, and villainy consigned to those thin absences that accrue minute by minute and stain and weaken us as surely as drops of blood drained from the heart that comprises most human traffic.
In his house there were few things; a tastefully black divan holding limp clothes, a few treasured books, his own works hardbound, some utterances of a friend, philosophy and small books of verse against the wall. Nearby, a solemn stereo performed its central office as a conduit of sound, bringing moving voices from a past carefully purged of all not made meaningful, all that had not been lifted in sainthood, its outlines made more clear and more deeply itself by a diligent and trained perception. For he always found in these voices of young men and women, discontent and dreaming, a something essential- the voices harshly laughing or plaintive, or hissing with an assumed vanity from the enclosure of a garage studio- the opposite of the anesthetic music of our own day, with its rhythms dry and repetitive, and no step ladder of melody on which to ascend to meaning or escape out of this abyss into the real.
It is always a miracle if we can taste in our passing relations some hint of their eternal character. And it was this miracle which his glass heart recognized and out of which his life was made. A musing girl’s face remembered without haze, the movement of scarlet snow over a wound, or the same girl kneeling in a June garden, the face lost in her hands, or bathing perhaps in an autumn pool as we come to meet her in black water. It was, I think, the deliberate strain of art imposed too strictly on life, the hideous distances straddled by a single personality during the daily commerce of existence that induced his despair. He had, as T.S. Eliot put it in one of his poems, “his soul stretched tight across the skies.”
But what must be called despair was actually, in him, a heightened form of concentration- a concentration so intense that it must consume whatever it apprehends in its conflagration. There was a skeletal intensity in his visage, as if he had poked through life and found it vile. Only objects of a purified memory, past touch, past life itself and renewed in the mind by their continual loss, can withstand such attentions. No living girl, nothing real, nothing that must ache and change could long remain.
The result of this concentration was the production of poems of permanent value; intricate, sullen, objects of a devastatingly sincere spiritual nature. As he had said to me in accounting the cost of their materialization, he had gone through “the blackest days of hell” to pull out these few things into the clear. There was no clutter, no useless abstraction among his images but only the intensest remembrance codified into a tongue that “angels would weep to hear.” And it seemed that in his life too there was no time for the clutter of desultory loving but only anguish and passion bound into a whole. He had so few objects in his household and before his attention because he perpetually felt himself passing through life like Adonais’ dying star and he only had time to touch what would burn, letting cool things lie in forgotten waters.
I have often, at the close of the day, having climbed to a view of waters, and sweating with the effort, come to play in my mind some such image as his verse brings, the fire cold in contemplation. We have always before us, whatever our mood or preoccupation, some such unguarded image holding before us, undiminished as in an inescapable dream, the mask of life.
Gregg G. Brown
Whitely Diminished
A flaccid stigma
Of hope remains
Still in vain,
As salt falls round
In a bodiless eclipse
Of rings so glass,
Verging upon stone.
Thick sister dissolves
Like airy destiny,
Spiral and blind--
An illusion aware
Of your tired eye
In blackness; corrosive
Visitation happens home
At abrupt departures.
Soft sun breathes
When silence stops
And shadows melt,
The fountains cold
Unfold pale fire
Under brooding clouds.
A quivering heart
Flames the holy
Edge of desolate
Silver leaves, poor
Endures a hollow
Ghost’s soul.
Burden, in moons’
Watered light
Is thrown to sleep,
Borne in dismay,
Hooking the cold
Dead ground.
Shamed fingers play
Upon every prayer,
Bled until they gave
Rage, swim in blessed
Light, pictured ballet
Hoping to rise upon
All ancestral scorn--
To cast out remorse
Or descend...
...and so we don’t know
what will happen tonight--
maybe death.
“Your death.”
A soft hurt child
on the edge of blue
night is lost,
hiding truth.
Courage wants to laugh.
Drinking is a dying art,
The masters never last...
My own Mona Lisa hangs
In the fetal catacombs
Of disfiguring shadow--
Thrown to an upright stone.
I hear the gravespun roar
The hocked blood whispers
That hold me ceaseless
Dying once more.
My red sable stings
Oiling off the moment--
A lambskin ceremony
In soul stretched memory:
To these tantric essences
I am not immune.
Consumed by a youthful darkness,
I stagger to the unaging muse...
The Gods of Autumn
The cruel glow
of a grotesque urn
may render us blind
to the elusive
rose.
I could manage a miracle now,
were it not for a voiceless tension.
The sky surrounds itself like a pregnant soul
in the lush atmospheres of forgone light,
binding the spirit veins in a deadening
shrink-wrap.
Spirit veins, the bloods of illumination
bleed no reason here
clotting on the floors of misfortune.
This scenic daydream, plotless as Burroughs
renders a stillborn heart.
Lost, grey and wandering...
the matter of myself,
this matter we call humanity.
Burn the Rainforest
if a poem falls in the forest...
The forest light marauds my spirit
conjuring a tearful breeze,
a dull jag of green splits the eye,
salt fortifying my tongue.
Death from above as cicadas fade
into the past. My hardened arteries.
(nocturnal bastards)
Sacrilege of innocence abounds--
these pollen glaciers in a terrae
of shrieking stabs.
A violent night diminishes
on a thin mirror of dreams
seeking the heavens’ blare,
the rose burnt blessing--
resolute and unconquerable
inventing its own fate.
I shall learn to propel
myself into the moment,
bezelhead all a glimmer--
all for the mortal one,
the absence dissects us
in a cleansing of fire.
Perhaps these venomed essences
until realized,
dissuade the intemperate head--
fading as the moon lags in desolation
around my criminal soul,
compelling the skies
to unmended melancholy.
The moon chills
like a dead medicine
into the paralyzed flower
of its silver skin.
White dosages arise--
blindingly compliant,
edging the mouth
of raining acid
plucking colorless anarchies
in an airless revolution.
The trees say nothing of this...
Divinity rarely lifts her mask,
so revel in the naked forest...
Strike the golden torch!
and lend us sacred vision.
Let the trees scream orange...
Cut these weeds ‘round my infant stone
as I ingest a frosty lung of green
under the heavy chaos of my marble grin.
Posterity is a deadly lie,
the arsenic of my silence
in a hollow exposure to the moment.
Returning to the flaming rage
with lungs of stone,
I wander into a charred twist of wind
rooting the alluvial light.
The leaping trees clutch upwards
in a sudden gust of untamed substance
that laughs into the glassy blackness.
The ambers of her delicate hands
burnish uncertainly in the bluish air
as she sheds her purpled skins
in the faded silks of solitude...
Mother of my morning eyes
protect me, please protect me!
Flames seed the sunless airs
courting her venerable dreams
in memories of naked afterlight.
The rain gives into the heat bitten sky.
The smell of deadened wood
haunts with stunted voices
as I retreat into calmer memory.
The oaks assume a deeper hue
rearranging a shade of brown
as the sun ascends all recall.
Only A Man
The whole world,
I have to fight
with one hand tied
behind--
nails, once soft
as a virgin
cradling
the sweat wet neck
of my martini
harlot.
With my whore
in me, I was
an only man
ready to love
the world whole.
Disintegration
Fallen in dusts’ decay,
Shall the arisen ever rise
And ever truly know?
Allow me the medication of sun--
Of stars, soul and air! For there
is enough here to fill my needle.
January
A bittersweet baptismal.
I love him-- hate the taste,
Daddy long legs
Swirling in my glass of memories.
I pour him down...
Why do you hate me, hurt me?
The waters are black and my heart sinks
Like the stone you said could not swim.
All Hallows
Nomadic swirls of bruised ruby
Descend in peerless isolation,
A longingless alone of motion.
Trees stare to a goblin nod,
The lowered glow beans furiously
As we dance for joy, joylessly.
Next time will be the last--
This time will be the last!
And last fall, we fell for sure,
A divinity of undying recall--
Deadly devout as all hollows fall.
Imperfect Testament
Idle, in eyes of black--
A child of astonishing days
Deluging elegance and tears.
Emerald angels bleed
In my consuming soul,
Rushing my remorse
To drenching revolt!
Purified in eternity,
I stammer fatally
For the infinite life,
Alighting the dry alive
Of astonishing days.
The unrepentant went
Of worry, languishes
In holy terrors,
Blacking the radiant revive
In my assuming spirit
Of crushing repose.
Retire into the blue,
For I shall ever soar
Forever alone,
Alone in the cruel glare,
The wind riven array
That betrays my heart
Humbly holding gold.
Eternally, I shall leave this
Before it kills me.
Shells
Bodiless, dense
In crystal-- sheen
Drifting.
Airs of green
Cortical skies
In undone decorum
Thumbing bold
Corollas low
Silt-spilt ruins.
My paper cuts
Preserve and mirror
Small sketches
Embalmed,
Dolorous morning
Tangibles
Disintegrate
As they rule
Stellar remains--
As the dead
Of Jericho lie
Date raped.
she walked into my heart like a tall cool sunflower
throwing golden light into my eye
A Temporal Exhalation
The unextinguished wave of a tameless strength
Trembles in unseen revelations that fall
Among our kindling eyes.
Voiceless shadows of this undying flame behold
The unknown envisioned, clasping ecstasy
From an illumined pursuance.
The living truths that your laughing spirit tell
Render death out of a blue veiled paradise
In the awakening wings of a dream--
To weep as we would flow in the velvety dawn
Like a thin eclipse of the living consumed.
Diffused by a sightless joy,
Like some itinerant beating of angels’ breath,
Desolation flees into the immortal hollows
Of eternity’s abode.
Birthday
I am alone.
The moon culls no glory--
Half-cracked.
Black baby airs chill
Blue suicides
Icing altitudes exhausted.
Wrap me in the salt torrent,
A kleptomania of tides
And crippled reflections.
The womb spews it out.
Does this make you feel
Removed
Contemplating each shred,
Pinned to a prayer
Terrified?
Effacing the elements,
Stars steep in stillness
Fatherless,
Married to shadow--
They bury me.
Merciless radiance.
Impetuous echoes, irretrievable
In lost sleep
Dreams
Endow elate celebration.
Vase of wake, the end
In dead iridian
Very sensed--
Embalmed, never less
Eternal.
Silver
Silver floats suspending
In scapes of opalescent shadow--
Pearls dandle the sea.
Kiss my eyes of azure
In the blessing embrace
of the dream’s tendencies,
Immortalizing heaven’s veil...
A rose in my heart
Unterrified--
The cherished suns sleep
In the liquid ministries
I see.
The will eclipses profusely,
The dying rounds renew
With tears
Waking in sight consumed
As ascending successions
Compeer.
Glittering, slain of till--
The onbound prow
Cast her down
Plunging the sacred jewel
To feldspar raining,
Everlit.
Afterbirth
Tears terrify the skies.
Holy communions
Of irretrievable blessing
Emptied of cold beauty--
Such a bleeding of pink,
Egos touching soul
Surely drenched to isolate
Enticing destinies
Wounded like the tide’s
Stitching incoherences.
Dawn swaths the infinite
In a visitation of pearl
That crawls in fluid necessity,
The heavens holding still
Dissolved of the sorrowed
God lollies....
In Silence
I return to the sea.
Babies ring drinking
The rosen altitudes,
My leash tightens.
Inexorable and pure
As jeweled air-
Moons knuckle stiff
For the annunciation--
An opus of holiness.
As I respire and repair
These emptying veils,
It is my heart--
Those pink colonnades
Evaporating-- wings
Of glass opening.
Absolution
I no longer hold my soul--
no affinity for this play,
long since dead. My voice
hangs in cold sceneries,
efflorescent eyes empty
and my heart retards
when I need it most.
And once I seemed pure,
epiphanies to melt gods!
But now all is lost,
my words so useless.
I feel real healed.
Tenderous Leaves
My slow guilts
Angels slip
In empty light
Embracing
Sultry graves
Invert cataract
Gardens and scarlet
Snowflake.
Blue scythes.
Her marbly iris
In petal passion
Jade silk.
Looking out? Inwardly,
Coma kiddie- tio pepe.
Empty
Today in lime--
Light parody
A rhythm for
Lost loves,
Leanly in grace
Slits
May rain
Lush coffin silks
Shone lonely webs,
Mangled.
Robbing opera
In rose faded
Still, losing
Yesterdays’ fabled
Catacombs.
Eclipsed ocean
Elegies and blues
Traverse, whispering
Princess, fissures
Mollify the sullen
Hysterical elements.
It shuts my eyes.
Alice B. Talkless
pinched in exhalation,
beating apparitions to the sky
The nothing truth
heavily against itself
in shallow light
I wrote openings
of myself...
I breathed against
the empty good
cruelly opened
I built a god
loss protected blue head
of flat light moves
and removes.
Primeval
No innocence enchants the hideous distances
in colors of grief, the blindless tide
follows its visionary indifference,
holy streams blackened
with a well tongued hide.
The virgin landscape
mounts the temples
of unspoken truth.
The deeps of wrinkled dawns
warm the skulls of youth
and sear the riding skies
where no one is lost--
passion springs unflowered
from ensconcing altitudes,
cool as a tear.
Round boned memory wreathes
the living skins of light
that lie upon unlidded eyes
in heart shaped silence
while sliding seas die,
the illusory winds brays
the bloodlet benign,
mured up in salt.
The desert of exile.
Church St.
Pentecostal chimes summon
lights unfolding rose in stone,
shedding these frail inceptions
that our priested ears concede.
A grey tinctured church hoists
the cloistral barb and recedes,
an impatient weather prophet
deluding the gradual moon.
impatient souls renewing tongues
imposed angels conjuring tunes,
a braided ear inhales ceaselessly
in cries amid temporal swoon
And so said Miss Straw
who strummed for us all
with her love for words
and stories of the dead
wisteria she cared for,
so troubled an orison
with unbuttoned head.
She held a poem to her heart.
The Monumental Grunt
She bathed in a balding moon’s
warm poultice, with quavering lips
pursed in scarlet hissing,
bleeding essential form
in the rife starlight, pearled
and plucked.
Melodious light, insurgent
on the mended eye, exhaling pride
to unbidden suns,
eyelids in lecherous oration
like a rend communion wafer
limpid by the ruck.
Hesitancy of processions,
my vengeance of memories decays
to dissuade.
Charred Remains
Our aspiring minds
lost in flux, rolling up
the soured detail
save dying.
Hollow, drumming
a poem on stone ears,
he persists.
How much is lost?
Echoes shelving recall,
ringing with words
crashing to excrement--
do not cease.
Your face.
A flower opens
a bride of terror,
will your rose close
screaming with light?
recover, recover!
Litany
Blackness sheds its stare on all,
closed over by the moon’s big hole
with idle glow.
The mind once flowed, smothered in bloods
as children hold eyes on the man
with unseen hands held dead.
The stroke of repentance seeks
the strong heart until it lies
in a silken lair,
whitely furnished and knowing despair.
The funeral candles’ flames ascend,
promising salvation, release--
as they huddle into the numb tones of grace.
The fires of hell unveil dead memory
and bury indigence.
The solemn vigil sways in an evening rout
of crescent tongues and aging flesh,
a fulvous multitude
whose dismembered shudder blindly rises
in a song of remembrance that passes
from look to look.
Alexis
She is set ablaze
all within.
The blank sun
pins a pearl drop
upon hollow blue--
radiant pinions swoon
in crystal vision
she consumes.
The heavens round,
angelic spheres rising
encircling each moment,
are no less painless.
Fluency of holy shadow
born to stone
pours incessantly
in rarefied repose--
her eternal flames
of fury abound.
She is beautiful,
to be seen
as beautiful by me.
Grace
Black airs haunt
the unnested child
empty as a prayer.
full of grace
God! My soul is perjured
mourning her glass coffin,
blackened eyelids
awaiting a judgment.
full of grace
Into the spiritual
golden ball,
a grave of roses
pinning up the moon.
Hail Mary
full of grace...
Aftermath
I can only liken it
to childhood...
Now this won’t hurt a bit.
My last Halloween
caught in Fitkin,
water on the brain
they said...
Torn into truth,
gilding stillwells
in moon-clung silver,
tapping the spine
watching goblin
masks of death--
I shall retire
the artist within.
Now you’ve done it,
raised a spineless liar.
How are you better
for it?
My gaze falls to heaven
lumbering wondrously,
this mood watching
from without.
Alexis Trailorpark
Alexis watches the sea renew its salty blood
in a sinless welling of waters blessing,
taunting her to rejoice in the ringing infinity.
Pinkened roses edge the stark weeds
weeping to the sultry blush of fertile skies--
such beating upon her breast as clouds
in noble crepe linings dream lullabies.
Melancholy winds, deep in thought
on sands wild and solemn as a living voice,
consider the ocean she holds in her hand
as she stares into a night of royal blue dignity
punctuated with longing as bareheaded stars
Tenderly strain to atomize the answers
to awaken her sleep twisted heart.
Insight
Does my ripened eye glistering
in the tearful moonlit hold
disguise its blinded hollowness?
We tread beneath the thriving sky,
a desert of roses dusting our brow
with one more flowing skull
exulting the torn shadow, something
that rises from our loss of conscience--
an unmeditating of the heart.
One may recall with disinterred shame
the lone nakedness of soul,
stripped cold in rains
that soothe and purl the elusive char
of presaging joys that mothers
salvation in a laudable hour.
Our semblant souls ache and yearn
from the wrath of all human hope
breeding eternal dreams.
Valium
Return me to the black abyss--
the shallow drop
before nerve takes hold
rendering an upright perception.
Drop me into the water
where no life rings
but a pool of tar mires the soul...
A scenic daydream grows tiresome.
I need something to enliven
my senses, something to choke
blood out of each passing instant.
Abnegation, torch the holy image!
The dark haze hides my soul
in black dualities as I render
another afternoon meaningful.
I cannot forgive what has become
so I endeavor to remember
the truth that fell into rings.
Liquids are distant and torture
like these words no one will read.
Coffin Nails
I’d like to drown the world in vodka
like a dumb kid pouring Coca-Cola on ants.
Salt-lick, dry as the bones I wept to recover,
held shining in mind like a radiant vision.
Torrid, the hooks of misfortune beset
the habitual head, cloaked in a glow
of warm affluence.
I enter this shell like a temple,
a cavern of recovery that heals all who enter.
A din, like somber church voices rising
in the dull haze of smoking deliverance,
delivering that rough grace that falls
among the glowing cubes of ice,
dispelling shadows and former selves.
The dull glow of neon haunts my pupil.
I retire and desist, raising the glass
to my lips in a ritual like scripture,
long since prophesized, but until now
untold.
The knotted oak attacks my ass
as light circles with unconscious hands
gripping my senses, rinsing my skin of the past.
Everything worthwhile will one day die.
Cognac drips like Xmas morning,
like the warm embrace of a lover or harlot.
The moment is seared into like eternity,
a purer vision of the world
from on top of an anthill.
The True Season
The sun is dropping and I know
there’s only time for one more,
so I make it a double and forgo
the vermouth.
I feel my mind unearth
from its shell as I reclaim
the radiance of my youth,
the warm embrace of moments.
I stagger off the stool
with a nod to the executioner
and burst upon the cool night air.
I’m ready for last rights.
I watch the leaves descend
in heart shaped dualities
like elegant flames, a sculpture
of glowing in holy gestures.
Love breathes it life into me
as I become the leaves I see,
a nomadic swirl of peerless
isolation alone in motion...
I strike into the blacks of night
like some enduring corpse
treading the bloods of autumn--
an aspiring eternal ember.
The trees whisper:
go lovingly...
Gone Dead
My hands made numb by the salve
for my soul gone dead,
all by itself dancing alone
and likely to die
by crucifixion’s ply,
pushing its vile on tideless stone.
No more does the lusted lip sing.
(Memories fade of the singular dream.)
How do I soot the raw edge again?
Retiring rain drops a spiritual head
all to drain me of this sensual rale
as the sinking eye stares cold--
black shot, half itself, flat
or gone dead.
The Wake
It’s hard to rend rituals
that enflame the soul--
when all is lost
(hope and the like)
O rusted bloods of retort...
Generations upon generations came
on humps of wood with twisted brains.
Purged heads stuffed with gods,
no centuries to hide the pain.
Waters blanche my spirit
at both ends,
like Chinese fingertraps.
Chalice in terrified hands
they sing:
Generations upon generations came
on humps of wood with twisted brains...
Recovery
The trick of it is to cradle
the small glass tit of hope
that no longer exists, trying
to milk a dream from nothing.
Rise if you must, no inhibitions
for the drowning of the prayer,
and behold a coma’s leggy soul--
dusts churning unsung umber.
Swill the rebus of coral gist,
pinchblades desiring a rive
in the jubilate curing of seas-
I am the womb of faineancy.
The divorce craves the miraculous
in a torrent of naked vocables.
Ritual Winter
A ritual in the winter of my soul
sheds light to limb
as a red cloud assembles
on the fluid grave.
An infancy of pickthorns
twines moon bitten rocks--
these bloods forewarn
a headless night.
Winter winds chill my bones
as the grey crested sea
prowls over watering wounds
in the drowning eye
of this unfed womb,
choking dry kisses,
in a weeping ruin.
A ritual in the winter of my soul
speaks to the newborn rose,
alive in its freezing skins,
the newborn sea wringing senselessly
christening a stillborn heart
for the intemperate dead.
Farewell Girl
Her mutinous glance
comes to vision,
eyes that mollify
endlessly, this night’s
stony endurance
misting pliant blues,
christening the ochre.
Her raveled lavender
will walk forever,
acquiring the gods
of pure vermilion.
Sun, the yellow
spur smoldering
ceremoniously
in uneven seasons
dissipates the wry
horizon the seas
insinuate.
Lost girl, elusively
leaving in light
circles of air,
disappearing
on a wave’s gentle
turning.
Epitaph
The poised white faces
murmur in pious mouths,
brows of azure
climb the almighty
into raftered airs.
Standing in a repose
of golden fire, I think:
will it ever happen,
this young man’s repair?
Consumed in tall thought,
I weep in the sun’s comfort
worshipping a sinned image
that fills my head,
unchilding the blasphemy
on undinal seas.
Twilight Lake
The air grows to sugar.
The anemic trees
are drained and mouthing
beneath the sky’s
cracked lip
toneless and austere,
inheriting the heavens’
unstrung yellow.
Dusk impounded
cruel fluencies
of sight,
needling the eye,
blind to abrading
red tumuli,
pinching the black stone,
a rose cut bluster.
Pondering the silence
of the bay, insolent--
unaware.
The Yearling
Tainted dreams leave me
bloodied and red-blessed,
displacing pitiless tears.
Bodiless wisdom loosed
the tongueless myths
and elixive wicks,
imageless.
Too much is lost,
unrecoverable
and brutally endless...
I walk beneath
paring earthskins
commanding god’s
exiled while hands.
The night desecrates
a sky of indolent
flint
clouding my veins
of gritted indifference--
capes of light
lick the bitters.
The Eternal
Trees line the shapeless river marrow
like dead braille as perilous divers
harden in the arterial waters
of this hourless grail.
Images roar from a desolate claw
mystifying all the ageless jibe,
the keepers of a virgin tide
drumming on stone.
Free all of your water gods!
erect an unrelenting rose
in the blood stringed hills
where she now grows.
I wasted much in brotherless dust,
a blackened rind or citric bide
that boxed my love, a bride
in her velvety bale.
At The End of The Path
Grant me a wisp of sunlight
from the silent undulations
of blue,
that play in momentary splendor
upon the softness of your face
as you leave and are leaving.
There is no divinity
only hollow longing.
The gentleness of our caress
warms my stubborn beatitudes
as I inhale your tender spirit
with a crushed lung--
I use every breath of my being.
So now you will leave me,
your warm rings encircling my empty soul
unseen, unheard.
The Divorce
I want to retire from the thrive,
my heart cracked upon the horizon--
and I’m an unloved sucker to boot...
Who needs the stars to guide us
when we dote in rote and desist?
Dig a weed out of the ground,
the cancer out of my innards,
the grey out of my eyes; the sky
holds no answers and the light
only leads me back to the dry root.
The walls are blank, spiral out.
Stare like a corpse and take a drag
on the moment, out of the ashes
that whisper in the winds of a dream,
lining the edge of a careless boot print.
I want to be held, just like you do...
Perhaps if I held you, I could breathe
some of this foul world back into you
so you could give it back in spades
to the thiever of your life, your killer.
Double Exposure
Colors blaze in upward sweeps,
the center of truth resides
within life
I outstrive
death’swings
Upon my lips
against the wind
my breath may not accede
but dreams
upon the indestructible elegance
of a mirror.
Jetty
Rose light bleeds upon me.
Cut apart--
a dream perishes on stone feet.
I am undone, hurling
into the windshake--
colors scrape my eye,
split upon the sea and sky--
dead centered
on green rocks
amid the fervent scape-
pressing up to foam
my head’s spent star
as I watch the sea
hailing hillstones.
Ulcers
The abraded skin, savage and ill
faces its drawn shade
mining the ancient sea
as the child softly sleeps.
A hole in the body
like some lover reflected,
or an actual window within--
a door rusted shut.
I’m one hole forward...
Violet cries, jaws blown apart
where no light gushes
and the curb spits stares:
my bones chew dirt and stones
under the golden moon...
Eyes long,
salt blood rose vision--
able to love.
Bar Scratch
Innocence, in pure white
claimed in fire
the red brick glares
into my charred tear-
I dive into your face
without fear.
The charge is holy.
Divinity laughs
in newborn light
I am born into you
into your being;
the animate light
can claim no grace
beside your sight.
Hangover
I try to run
and it does not come
like a needle missing the vein.
The ink dries up
on an overdue promise
as one thin star dimly flickers
in and out, out and out...
To compose a soul in clay:
would that be real?
Understood?
My fingernails are torn,
a tongue in twain
as pictures glisten
and wither in my memory.
There is no beating,
at least for me--
engaged to space
in velvet separateness,
as I desist
in the raving day
and miss.
The clinging skins
the amorous winds,
shadows taut
with upraised arms
a voiceless laughter
out of sin--
the sun throws down lyric petals
beneath a weeping tree.
Not to be understood,
a soul painted with breath,
blood stone eyes stare
the world alabaster,
eyes that wear darkness dead
in this moment’s
final plea...
Moonlight Meditation
I stand before the window
and gaze upon an October moon
that lights with indifference
the balance of my life--
a change of moods
in the descending expression
of night- yellow follows red
to an elevated white.
Until we again bump heads...
I spill vodka warmly
on the plush extravagance
of a tired obsession--
the cracked ornament of dawn.
The anemic moon
commemorates the night
with subdued terror
while my blood overflows
in the thirsty jewel
of virtue.
Roses
Locked in blood
and crossed with roses--
the irretrievable malignancy
of empty and stark naked vacancies--
the elate voice
is memory emptied
vast and vagrant,
without sin.
Ruat Caelum
Blood unprompted,
eyes overtaking
the castrated daylight
in excruciating abstinent virtue
that binds body to itself
in marble monotonies.
A moral color
cast me dead,
no wandering spark
of deserted language
to choose me.
Gala Vehem
Skies of iris,
blood is thicker
than scotch and water.
A little hint of death
now and then reminds
us we’re still alive,
though I realize it’s time
to vacate this strive.
The bottle is empty,
there’s no time to die
as the moon splits
and the sun entrusts
itself
to memory.
The Gift
Existence puckers up
like a loose afterthought,
the thought of the kiss
you wished to give,
but didn’t
in the sleepless hours
of self-incrimination
and persistent diminishment
that’s commensurate
with the shadow
of my departure.
The malodorous sky,
faithless and sublime
is a sworn prophet,
forged of brickdust
Christ’s blood,
mother’s love
and the words:
I forgive you.
Tears bite off
my apologies
from beneath the prowling eye,
ever effacing.
Not yet called
to that luscious plot,
gone fatherless
in a starlit place
as my heart beats
double time.
It’s hard to see
the eyes that look
back at me,
though I know
all beauty and rightness
rests in these
loving arms--
wrist scars and all...
The Lord’s Prayer
only the rain
in my shot glass
has gone dead.
Shot myself
full of scotch,
into a mirror
that sees me
through...
The fire burns and spits out ash,
the world carries me over
on a seasick vision
that creates its own outcome.
the limitations are limitless.
My profusions of loneliness
slip on blood
and crouch in a corner
despairing,
repairing these veils,
though I unroll
and become whole
in a naked, solitary
kiss.
: :
The breastbone throbbed like no other.
I’ve never seen it like this before--
not a wasted elation under skies,
a golden sash of bloodshot stars
a blossom on every reeling vine--
sculpting rain, with a purity of mind
that holds my throat, pulling me in
alone for the thrill, deprived under
an eternal expression that I may not kill
or deserve to reclaim; but that is required
from these straining eyes I seek to blame.
: :
Where is this soul,
the malformed skull
cursed in sinful grin,
roses dangling
from glinting eyeholes.
What beauty bursts forth
from this calcic stare
under the disc-sheen
quiescence of stone?
In a solitary flame
the unwashed parting,
starlight beckons hesitantly
upon one love’s unsubtle memory--
the sun appears to rise
out of a viciousness of bliss
and then, sadly, does not.
Feel the aortic charge
pounding against ribbed indifference,
choking the clouds
that carry you off
out of your skin--
ripped to shreds
as pulses quicken;
only one heart survives
under these raping skies.
I no longer know you--
a transcription bleeding through
to a dull malodorous veil.
: :
At the bar,
I watch my cherry drown--
the lime, the sublime with it.
A cold smolder choking her
down.
Marigold!
on tap for the revelation:
death in the afternoon.
: :
The sun etches age
in my stone smooth face,
the cruel chisel of heat
carves my eyes deep
into a sweating skull
enfolding this perception--
scarred for art.
I haven’t written
a good poem
since giving up drink--
having grown up
and away
from a youthful glory.
Will living be enough?
As the beer drains into my soul
the world drains out, renewing me...
once again newborn and pure.
: :
Inebriation is the mama of regression.
Writhing in a sea of sweat
and regrets, I find I have nothing
to cling upon...
but, at the hour of my return
I shall stand anew,
a man made whole,
once again ready to combat
all his self created fears.
: :
Morning’s blue minute
ticks over me, her hands
upon my dreaming face
as a few revolutionary rays
tempt me from out of the haze,
igniting the light that revives
the shapes of angels
in sculptured flight,
cracked as the faint lake of the river
falls softly on stone ears.
I burst forth, asunder--
slicing the sky, opening it up
and letting a lost and uncorrupted
childhood pour over me...
There are angels
in my heart’s moist architecture.
: :
The morning sky floats
before my half-dreaming eyes
like a silver page,
the unscarred parchment
of some great book,
yet to be opened
and inscribed.
A thin mist of pollen clings
to my throat in desperation.
I am conscious of the weight--
the blood in my hands,
eyelids, lips, chin and knees...
it is in the warm breeze
that lightness licks my being
with the tenderness of Spring.
The sun is high
like a pellet of burning mercury
flung from a god
(or goddess, I should say).
With the simplicity of a wish,
I step off the curb into the streets rich ink.
So what shall be my verse
upon this gently turning day?
: :
I blame myself
for every and all
blessed disheartment--
blind to the holier
human love
we so cynically dream of.
Love is an idea,
my flesh is separate,
only this shot gets inside
my shrink-wrapped
chem stained graveyard.
Searching for a theme...
Smoke
The assertion of self
is the ultimate act of living.
Life is no good.
: :
Astride starry eve, fists of dusk
forged in the earth’s worn sleeve,
slaves sanity in a powder of absent light
as a religious vision in ribbed apparel
erects sin in the image of itself.
All of this will be misinterpreted,
forgiven to wander from the gilding womb.
The poet:
a flash of white light,
stealing the heavens
on a lotus bloom.
: :
Upon which my eyes have fallen,
a glory for which no meaning
can be ascribed.
: :
Live in the lit jig
of the liquid instant--
I recover all my tears
like the flame
that burns
in your melting pupil
that purges a childhood
disease.
The ruby in your glass melts
into gleaming cubes.
I love you...
Your hateful eyes
and unshaven stare,
as I stumble back
on baby legs
to the escape
spilling down
my cheeks
into a shot-glass
cameo.
: :
The trees shed the sky
in a remarkable armor
of time...
And we too will pass,
these leaves upon our tomb
in all their outrageous dyes--
their precious deaths
from budding bloom
give the poet
his lasting
line.
The sun, half-masked
in minions of grey caping
like an orange rind
half-peeled
or neon circumcision.
A christened vision,
blind to the spectacle below
is lost on suspended
time.
Oblivion!
how romantic--
to go out in a blaze
of razor blades and such...
No... not I,
who seems here content
to suck my lime
and write myself
into obscurity...
: :
Finished before the beginning,
intractable intensities
have reduced me to smoke.
Ash- denied and dry
in the forgotten winds,
too much is lost--
unrecoverable.
The dead nettle browns
& there is nothing to affirm
or sustain, except
this saving pain.
The sun is dust covered
and memory chilled, simple
as my soul stumbles
dumbly from the ruin,
slain and tainted
w/ hatred,
never to outlive the tears
that afflict my vision,
expiring my senses.
Without love nothing matters--
and I’m nothing,
never to become...
I retire in the grass,
alone and expired--
the darkened winds
circulate majesty
to the uncomprehending
trees. I stare blindly
as in an empty dream
asking:
are there no words
I might procure
whereby some form
of my soul
can beam alive
upon your grasping
branches?
==========================