1] Extinguish it! Eyes resigned, spirit limned In greenest defeat--lick exaltation and brew A world-- a world renewed; by you, by you! 5 My soul as template spiral hurls the sullen ash From the charred coil of broken eyes blinded. Lift the spirit eyes wasted tears have spurned, Envision the sacred spirit of man-- for all! It is a glory heralded out of defeat's smokes, 10 In formless flame engulfing the sculpted light Each soul alone uplifts illimitable, Chaliced hearts eternally bleeding desire As sacral skies dissolve in light eternal, Alight in love alighting! 15 2] O champions vaulting nights gone everlastingly Far into lording realms of divinest light, See as I see all things beloved, no longer A swollen testament to wrong, but loved & saved 20 As only this soul beside me is saved-- 3] O saviors who ride astride the centuries glow Heralding glories of each living thing Parleying the rose above rose's smudged light 25 Into unblinded eye's greatest might & right, Forever the reds in ecstatic verity remain Sincerer than universes by nobility's sum untouched. 4] 30 O immortal beloveds inscribe your soul upon me, As I have seen it in unspent visions granted By right of ravishment-- consciousness supreme! O Poets, immortal lords of ME, sweetly draw That light and limber vision that I see 35 In your eyes re-souled as they have drawn it on my own. 5] O my Soul, o my rose! burning vision In ecstatic clarity reclaiming loves Unlost in the votive moment 40 And candled in the champion's heart, indeed! Make me more bright, let all myself allow Light alone to enter unto eternity by my Will, the will of my consciousness construed. Here the leaf, here the sparrow unfallen 45 Skirl aloft in tangential glories of soul's one repose!-- Calling down the blessing waterfalls of Byron's soul By light to limb unfurled in this dawning moment. 6] No God, no outworn lords of dust look down 50 Upon spiring chance's swift instant, only Effortless universes filling times illimitable; Lightnings tendered in daybreak auras Revive the angels, undust the wings! No foul universe can inhabit my glory; 55 Out of lone luminescents comes glory's unbounding, My light in rosaries' tendered opalescence. Come touch the hand I have created for touching! 7] 60 No god, but I who revive the spirit, Deigning the invisible winds of heaven's breath That command the heart beat and my loves beget. Inceptive kisses befall the poet's lips--- Paradise! offering all greatness sustained! 65 Out of my holy mouth blossoms the soul of you! 8] O indivisible! 9] 70 I will! and my will be done. Lording tongues above all creation Forever this minute's moment create. Yes! Speak and speak again! My will Unveiled and real-- the living borne. 75 10] Let bright be the place of thy soul! Skimmed minutes and parcels of light Like sparks flung from divinest sight--- No coal smokes the heart of the blest 80 But visions immortal deigning flame to the rest! O winners! Not sinners! O blessing be Of Good thy soul discloses in thee! 11] O Glory immortal, grace seeking purest form 85 Lies bestowed upon hearts made holy In the astonished realms, raving hope remaining. Golden senses in fervent adore enlighten infinity, Conceived in dearling virtues untamed! Reflections revel brightly-- the pride of princes: 90 New beauties, once viewless, now forever immortal! 12] The unbound revelations of prophecy unfold-- Behold the champions' eyes unblinded by gold! Behold! 95 An angel whispers her soul into hearts Divining miracles from heavens' dust-- My angel!-- spun winning from heavens disclosed, Sighing alive into the purl of my soul. 13] 100 Behold my glorious tone discased from alone! Sparring lights advance against the dashes-- Dispelling black ghosts, dispersing all ashes-- Upswept in trined clouds, lights everliving! Tornadoes of fire torch forgotten woes: 105 Choiring ecstasies respire: True Life! Infinities sanctify eternal ages, unbroken From cities of saints I sanction, exhumed! 14] A call to heart, saints and lords link arms! 110 Undeniable in new light, these truths inscribed From an unrivalled shrine-- creating all!-- From purer hearts' undying sublime. Glory! O glory, Come to this! Come douse hands and douse hearts and all of love's love 115 Into whatever the pleasures of will will decide! Exist as I exist, I command thee all: Breathe thy light, take heart for your all! 15] As I found this, I give it, 120 With no reserve in my soul! 16] Allow one more flurry of ecstatic verity-- As light allows no shadow on its soul But, unconsuming, alights, consuming all. 125 A disembodied ghost imparts this holy sight In solitary flame of truth departing the night. Lord Dermond/Saint Gregg G O lyric genius, to grow ecstatically one!!
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
A jellyfish is enough, a wish willed from vapor, condensed to a quiver beneath 5 the bright, lacelike vail that sedates the eye that watches the gem of its innards.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
A saint is in the eye that sees thee Upholding light impatient skies descend-- 5 Blue litmus insert bedeviling a patched wold Changeless spirits inherit and descry a lice-bed. Infinitely dark trees 10 shade the scree- Shaped cynosure-- adoring Life! Crying bloods leak down a marble eye In thirsting wish seeing 15 glory-adornments Perched at the white clasp of your throat Charging the plush surge velvet time blots 20 --- in violet time reprised!
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
To this true hand giant hearts come leaping For it upholds them in such gentle wrath As makes them beat with truer beating Until uneven pulses fountain only worth: 5 Which is what true hearts and friends together do, Each the other chiding higher Until all of air beneath them blues And stars peep out beside them, wan and weak, And all the crucible world below seems and is 10 Shrunk to the simple dimension of a dish--- Thus their flaming souls are brought to finest light That burns hottest in that dispersed place Empty of high substance but what high hearts have brought Giant out of themselves by giant wish.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
What could be more limber, in the gold- edged frame of this cancelled post- card from Notre Dame 5 cathedral where hurly-burly God-beware people crawl on their sagging knees to eat the brittle, little pieces 10 of their savior? A God beloved in the house his lovers built for him after death.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
Having joked for so long Now that the point is near my heart And all my premises scratched back to start, I wonder at the humor ripped from song 5 That has left me houseless as I belong--- A final joke of sorts. The birth-cannon that breaks my bread Scalds this quiescent heart And sets named dignity aflame; 10 Ach! My aching head! Better living livid than dying dead. For my poor alderman's chalked part In the passing play, I'll resign dead generations of fame.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
Awake, awake! For all the dear bay's glistening In uneven light still listening For whatever of utterance 5 Soul's chrysolm beauty may glance Into willing water's dark, My sweet meaning the whole of my bark. Set sail, set sail, my soul, set sail Let no hindrance, no halt, avail: 10 For we are the sweet of the tree, Blossom and bole, shoot and root we three, Myself, my soul, and me. Nor does the shaping heart forego To lend its beat to our argot, 15 My spirit a crystalline keel, Inspiration a motion wind feels Lifting in blessing ascent All some deeper sleep had blent With nightmare chimeras now forgot 20 By all within my steady boat. Somehow, now, still lingering Out of the sullen east the sun Has given my soul a tongue. Soul may speak what mind began: 25 Light's meditation is an ardor, Of my soul the keeper-warden Which never must be abandoned For so simple delight is saddened And everything of remembered worth 30 Thrown seedless to the earth Whence never another vine will reach From dusky plain unto the sun Bearing with ripeness as a spillage Grape or fruit of many an age 35 Longing time may bring to blossom Out of darkness' drowsy bosom. Gentle Charity, no farther, Must you bear this as a father Childish swearing does forebear. 40 Those who see not propounding noon Liquified in soul's triumphant swoon As swan lifts trumpeting his song All the purple light along At tender vespers, languid and long, 45 Or blinking matins, awake and strong, For themselves must conquer hatred Through loving hearts, many-gated, Until dim and churlish slaughter Lies self-becalmed as these waters. 50 Go out, go out, my broken-hearted-- With untroubled look depart them, Cast back no final, futile glance For all in a single chance Is your future concentrated. 55 Let not one chafing countenance, Deaf to this beneficence, Shake from their sordid hearts a sigh; Live in my smiles, or die! From here commences, in my sight, 60 An headlong, eternal light That every living form bedights, With dews of immortality Awakening soul's sweet rarity Floods the loosening dawn 65 With: ocean, field, and lawn, (Building light from evening's jet By apperception the mind begets) From the gentle fount of grass To the living wave like glass 70 No such light may overpass But must ignite in simpleness Love's million multiple beams! Every morning wayfarer 75 Whose light boat cannot tarry But pushes on out of darkness With whatever of best and best In tangles of light impressed In bossing golds on waves' breast 80 Plies resistless to the crest! Such silver as the eglantine To the dew-fraught morn resigns And heaven on every still thing deigns Rewarding quiet prayers 85 With this mercurial layer-- Such silver I say is savior When soul its own good blossom knows Nor will be shaken by the cold Into something hard and cold 90 But that a sheath of clear protecting Such firm flowers thus selecting That deep winter's dire infecting Shall not break them by its cold, In such clear light protecting. 95 All that night my heart had lain Upon this boat and silver stream Until all memory became Like the memory of a dream; And there true life began 100 Beneath night's stars swirled to one Past the extinguishment of suns When realer dream draws us on To dream of all we may have been And in heart's solace draws us on 105 In dreaming dream to dream again! O how cold the moon's a mirror For all the heats within her! I my own bright soul create Nor did this fascination make 110 To slave it to a universe I, living, gaze on as a hearse. My silver hand in dawn's lake Dips, its own soul to take; From this sweet enlivening 115 Come my symbols unquestioning: Crown upon my crown rests cherishing, The sword in my hand unperishing. Do not dispraise the light That, singing whatever's brightest, 120 Undoes the theft of night-- In soul-enchanting soliloquies Enmansioning aerial ways That we might thrive there all our days In realms of spendless purity 125 Absent nations' perfidy Heart to heart for sole surety; This our pledge, this our guarantee That all's well with humanity Once these bleak constants, fear and dread, 130 Lay to light exposed, and dead, The human plant may only mend, Think to create, and speak to praise, Throughout the endless paradise of days --Touch to caress, or move to love, 135 As this thoughtless rhyme does prove. Ai! Ai! High radiancy, Round eve's ever-changing sea Like universes' bright periphery, Back to sun-like man's centrality 140 I and all mortality Welcome both thy light, and thee. And if all the world condemn What all the heart commends What matter, so that heart sail on 145 In self-discovery without bourne Through mystic waters, blue and calm? What does pleasure's grieving echo give But light to dark-hearted lives? O when the trembling hand may shiver 150 And some momentary joy deliver To thought-locked face and brow What passes from that hand to bless In an unending tenderness As paradise were with us even now? 155 Memory makes no bounty of the scorn Dementia attempts to ripen on In sold human hearts since we're born; Whatever slender wing endeavors Be communicant with the treasure 160 One heart may hold forever Will find such wind in chambers there Beyond conjoining woe or care That they may sail infinity In the air of that one heart's ease. 165 Pleasure alone may live within The human bound of life given As light within these waters: Ungrieving, crystalline, faultless. And now my soul is voyaging on 170 In mystic waters blue and calm. For whatever true hope had wrought In time-defying, true love-knot How could Love forget?
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
Sand and eyesore verse ---Swift, immutable, impure Ageless symmetry Illimitable--- Eternity--- 5 I never lost you Still regal & tru
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
When I, listening, hear The bird-word "above" I merely deem it to mean "With others," which seems 5 Paradise enough for Love.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
Blinked, deluded, new- Minted by the philosophic shift Of words in the House, I lift My sunsteady voice to every wind's spew.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
I've cannibalized my heart for the sake of a few sacred sounds. This life is the record of My harshest acts. No gentle psalm moves 5 Through lordlings of love Out of this coruscating breast.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
Unerring Newt Did, daring, confute Philanderers and sophists Serving unwatered Liberty, 5 no twist.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
. I desire everything! Nor would change my state With angel-birds to prate Among God's clouds the everlasting things.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
To the lapsing shores of cold criticism I came, Now so out of love to overwhelm. The wounded heart, spilling grief, Sustains nothing: useless life. 5 Perversely in the air God was hung, Perversely still in air has man sung. I never saw the animal Who grieved and sighed "It is in myself, withal, 10 That I live and die!" By this trembling breath of mine I soliloquize, In death's despite, the fair, the beautiful and the wise.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
God, liquor & love Never deceive the dove That hovers in clover clouding This supremest chest. 5 Torrents of roaring--- Heroic echoes upbourne In the chime of a stolen dawn UNBORN-- this minute-- still lorn--
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
Arctic flowers, barbaric sky, Spic trumpets and limitless eye.... The human new emerges Spectrumless, aloft, scroogeless-- 5 Filling willing belief With dogmatic aperitifs.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
Far birds reflect the inner cymbal, Brass winds chime; Santa Ana linguistics limber My longing soul to 5 Libertine Liberty----
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
The sinister is in us, and wins Whenever we unfurl and think 'sin.' Otherwise there is nothing But a troublous something 5 And joy and destruction again.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
I never saw the animal Who grieved and sighed "It is in myself, withal, That I live and die!"
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
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. 5 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; 10 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 15 Before they of their giving taste gave all.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
Defeated by the paraphrase, or nearly, He puzzled out a dwindled life in poetry Who, perennial importunist, assessed His era unfit for "the best." 5 Defeated by the paraphrase, The inexact guesswork of sleepy heads, Eyes closed and empty mouths upraised--- Fit for execution or their communion of lead. Spackled cadavers in mottled light 10 Recite lines of despair, never knowing another, Never sensing, in their age's indifference, another More enduring light. No longer The Ariel feeling 15 Or whipping spirit stronger Than an evening's reeling. Untouched by the amorous, Stripped Goes Eros, incomprehensible 20 To "the masses." Hieratic verse, Each head limned in light, Suffers the obverse, Blotted rummagings of a blotted sight. 25 Yet still they felt, with a savior's amour, Neither drugged hedonist, nor yet a bore, Limitless possibilities Like so many leaves Clinging to the ancient portal's wetted door. 30 The percipient shall rule, discerning 'Neath modernity's fractious overlay Here an emerald, there a ruby, thing: Sustenance enough for poets in the ruby day. I I 35 The age demanded an image, Bland, unthinking, dull scrimmage; Never the descent of Angelic fate, Making impossible their unwaking retreat. Not a mirror to the muses' face, 40 Not Ariel, limitless in grace; Never divinity, never the light angelus, Nor any, still ephemeral, "sublimities." The age demanded an image Rapped in cellophane or bandage, 45 A brain of eaten hates, or laughter Soulless out of deadened waters. I I I Villains are feted in peeling shoes, and garlanded Is Ginsolds, the great damaged head 50 Thrust into the atmosphere, Impercipient, the small eyes dead in their spheres. Seeing in earth neither paradise, nor fit habitation, The Ginsolds of his father's scabrous generation,--- Monumental dinosaurs of the heart,--- 55 Researched dung and drugs for their start; At first, a religious pre-occupation Made them stare at Sunflowers and feces, Purporting maculate Bhudda in the rose Of an anus in dilation. 60 Tarry pools Accept their coral bones, Steeped in excesses Of the incorrect and religious. And no one left to give a damn about "the Graces," 65 And the reviewers live on, indifferent; Slaughtered Beauty shot in the face; Apollo and Bacchus hanged in the neon marketplace; Cold feet under etherial faces. When all the world shall kneel 70 At this bright whisper, Striving with unapt paws To strip the golden spirit down, or unpeel, No heaven shall listen; Silence shall be their first reparation; 75 Paid or unpaid, the soul's discourse discloses Itself, thrumming after no repatriation To a nation, clotted, with whores and doses. "BLACK ORCHIDS ON THE RED DOOR" Black orchids on the red door; 80 Fitfully the raconteur Consigns the ownership of elegance For a few hundred dollars, for a "superior" glance. Black orchids on the red door Mark the poet's stipulated habitat. 85 Depression afflicts; he begins to yawn.... Stretching away from the world with a bored 'eclat.' Exhausted by his meditations on the black Orchids on the red door, of a few, niggard, dark, Striations intermit with rose; 90 Guilty only, in his ichorous lair, Of a certain Kempt Baudelarian repose. MON HYPOCRITE LECTUR: Ginsolds of the foetid spawn 95 Patched with no forgotten pulchritudes-- Vulgar paucity faintly echoed In the weak light of decline. Mr H. (insert your name here), possessed of an anesthetized soul 100 Blathers his useless abstraction, A tongue-tying of half-felt immolations--- Unendurable! if not so falsely done. Enslaved imbecility defiling life, A sycophancy supremely mired, 105 Never to ring in celestial essence, Or inhere, in patches, to glory's sculpting light!! The age demands an image, The image that we give it! Chiselled tongues of thunder rung 110 In rising airs rained innocence! We demand the eternal image, Absolute, inscribed, violet, blessed, Suffering only self-made Gods bleeding divinities--- Intensities of existence intensifying infinite! 115 "EVEN WHEN I'M DOWN, I HEAR SYMPHONIES" Apollo and Bacchus hanged in the neon marketplace; Cold feet under etherial faces. Bore-ed by the lack of temerity, Slack desire suborning the bandannaed faces 120 Of hippies contented by Peace, and not Energy; Marijuana leaves placidly Shading the crib and high-chair. Bored by the lack of passion Expanded bank accounts conferred upon their elders 125 Lacking still the capacity, it seemed, messrs, To "cope;" they craved the indelible in action. 100 punks, or fewer, or one, Concoct out of impossible desire impossible reality: Burning ambitions in Waldorf St, or SoHo's zone, 130 Shed from the aether These symphonies. With a tongue of justice, With an eye of fire, With an ear made fabulous 135 By beloved mind's one wept flame: desire. Rotten's masquerades, Sid's pinioned victory, The burboned voice of Hell establishing "blankness" as priority 140 In a world floating valueless; incisive, the eye of ice. Aching faces brave the astonishing light, Asserting TRUTH in ecstatic sanction; Our redemption was individual, 145 London our capitol. Our "decade" compressed to " '77!" We acknowledged, as aftereffect, a fey, uneven "inheritance" of "reticence." Youth as a remembered depravity 150 Gives no living soul satisfaction; relentless Sojourning away from their parents' questioning Consigned to them the "aridity" of bliss. * * * * When dust hath hushed the roses, 155 Unmeditating silence This crimson-cerise splinter of song Encloses On time's blank slate Lick this, and relate: 160 "Here twists, with upraised fist, An Anarchist!" HOW TO WRITE A VICTORY INSTEAD OF A TRAGEDY Indelible bloods 165 Arise heroic rose Each love a sung Sempiternal sun. Exile first the inconsequent, The casual hand, 170 Speech procured at secondhand, Opinions possessed for an "effect." Recast ANAKE as the actor's whim: Vital eyes Outweep all that tragic circumstance, 175 Lear and Cordelia locked in paradise. Catastrophe hacked at Hector In his skirt, but the Eumenides Themselves were mild when Antigone died, Singing at a string-end in the tomb's lee. 180 Become Promethean, to this purpose: Amid lesser qualities, personalities and such, Swimming in unexamined idolatries, personalities and such, Inscribe what I equate: Man = universe. 185 DECONSTRUCTING THE DECONSTRUCTIONISTS Philosophers of stone Ungainly shift, By love's bright drift Undone. 190 Of unbodied air Came spirits' enhancing; Never a Dunciad But angels' hearts made glad. Impeccable sirs 195 They discerned Exegesis Spit in sand.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
The age demanded an image, Bland, unthinking, dull scrimmage; Never the descent of Angelic fate, Making impossible their unwaking retreat. 5 Not a mirror to the muses' face, Not Ariel, limitless in grace; Never divinity, never the light angelus, Nor any, still ephemeral, "sublimities." The age demanded an image 10 Rapped in cellophane or bandage, A brain of eaten hates, or laughter Soulless out of deadened waters.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
Villains are feted in peeling shoes, and garlanded Is Ginsolds, the great damaged head Thrust into the atmosphere, Impercipient, the small eyes dead in their spheres. 5 Seeing in earth neither paradise, nor fit habitation, The Ginsolds of his father's scabrous generation,--- Monumental dinosaurs of the heart,--- Researched dung and drugs for their start; At first, a religious pre-occupation 10 Made them stare at Sunflowers and feces, Purporting maculate Bhudda in the rose Of an anus in dilation. Tarry pools Accept their coral bones, 15 Steeped in excesses Of the incorrect and religious. And no one left to give a damn about "the Graces," And the reviewers live on, indifferent; Slaughtered Beauty shot in the face; 20 Apollo and Bacchus hanged in the neon marketplace; Cold feet under etherial faces. When all the world shall kneel At this bright whisper, Striving with unapt paws 25 To strip the golden spirit down, or unpeel, No heaven shall listen; Silence shall be their first reparation; Paid or unpaid, the soul's discourse discloses Itself, thrumming after no repatriation 30 To a nation, clotted, with whores and doses.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
Defeated by the paraphrase, or nearly, He puzzled out a dwindled life in poetry Who, perennial importunist, assessed His era unfit for "the best." 5 Defeated by the paraphrase, The inexact guesswork of sleepy heads, Eyes closed and empty mouths upraised--- Fit for execution or their communion of lead. Spackled cadavers in mottled light 10 Recite lines of despair, never knowing another, Never sensing, in their age's indifference, another More enduring light. No longer The Ariel feeling 15 Or whipping spirit stronger Than an evening's reeling. Untouched by the amorous, Stripped Goes Eros, incomprehensible 20 To "the masses." Hieratic verse, Each head limned in light, Suffers the obverse, Blotted rummagings of a blotted sight. 25 Yet still they felt, with a savior's amour, Neither drugged hedonist, nor yet a bore, Limitless possibilities Like so many leaves Clinging to the ancient portal's wetted door. 30 The percipient shall rule, discerning 'Neath modernity's fractious overlay Here an emerald, there a ruby, thing: Sustenance enough for poets in the ruby day.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
Black orchids on the red door; Fitfully the raconteur Consigns the ownership of elegance For a few hundred dollars, for a "superior" glance. 5 Black orchids on the red door Mark the poet's stipulated habitat. Depression afflicts; he begins to yawn.... Stretching away from the world with a bored 'eclat.' Exhausted by his meditations on the black 10 Orchids on the red door, of a few, niggard, dark, Striations intermit with rose; Guilty only, in his ichorous lair, Of a certain Kempt Baudelarian repose.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
Philosophers of stone Ungainly shift, By love's bright drift Undone. 5 Of unbodied air Came spirits' enhancing; Never a Dunciad But angels' hearts made glad. Impeccable sirs 10 They discerned Exegesis Spit in sand.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
Ginsolds of the foetid spawn Patched with no forgotten pulchritudes-- Vulgar paucity faintly echoed In the weak light of decline. 5 Mr H. (insert your name here), possessed of an anesthetized soul Blathers his useless abstraction, A tongue-tying of half-felt immolations--- Unendurable! if not so falsely done. 10 Enslaved imbecility defiling life, A sycophancy supremely mired, Never to ring in celestial essence, Or inhere, in patches, to glory's sculpting light!! The age demands an image, 15 The image that we give it! Chiselled tongues of thunder rung In rising airs rained innocence! We demand the eternal image, Absolute, inscribed, violet, blessed, 20 Suffering only self-made Gods bleeding divinities--- Intensities of existence intensifying infinite!
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
. Apollo and Bacchus hanged in the neon marketplace; Cold feet under etherial faces. Bore-ed by the lack of temerity, Slack desire suborning the bandannaed faces 5 Of hippies contented by Peace, and not Energy; Marijuana leaves placidly Shading the crib and high-chair. Bored by the lack of passion Expanded bank accounts conferred upon their elders 10 Lacking still the capacity, it seemed, messrs, To "cope;" they craved the indelible in action. 100 punks, or fewer, or one, Concoct out of impossible desire impossible reality: Burning ambitions in Waldorf St, or SoHo's zone, 15 Shed from the aether These symphonies. With a tongue of justice, With an eye of fire, With an ear made fabulous 20 By beloved mind's one wept flame: desire. Rotten's masquerades, Sid's pinioned victory, The burboned voice of Hell establishing "blankness" as priority 25 In a world floating valueless; incisive, the eye of ice. Aching faces brave the astonishing light, Asserting TRUTH in ecstatic sanction; Our redemption was individual, 30 London our capitol. Our "decade" compressed to " '77!" We acknowledged, as aftereffect, a fey, uneven "inheritance" of "reticence." Youth as a remembered depravity 35 Gives no living soul satisfaction; relentless Sojourning away from their parents' questioning Consigned to them the "aridity" of bliss. * * * * When dust hath hushed the roses, 40 Unmeditating silence This crimson-cerise splinter of song Encloses On time's blank slate Lick this, and relate: 45 "Here twists, with upraised fist, An Anarchist!"
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
. Indelible bloods Arise heroic rose Each love a sung Sempiternal sun. 5 Exile first the inconsequent, The casual hand, Speech procured at secondhand, Opinions possessed for an "effect." Recast ANAKE as the actor's whim: 10 Vital eyes Outweep all that tragic circumstance, Lear and Cordelia locked in paradise. Catastrophe hacked at Hector In his skirt, but the Eumenides 15 Themselves were mild when Antigone died, Singing at a string-end in the tomb's lee. Become Promethean, to this purpose: Amid lesser qualities, personalities and such, Swimming in unexamined idolatries, personalities and such, 20 Inscribe what I equate: Man = universe.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
Bonfires Hilarious was the night Coleridge and Wordsworth knew.... At the angst-incisive beginning of their pogrom for bliss, all the bad old poets the Juden that they'd strew 5 to the picnic bonfire blazing--- each soul-protesting, regurgitated face another indictment in the long, wrong roll of Fame; Shelley himself the fir-apple in the fire they grew! They drank until their syllables burst with light, 10 Kubla Coleridge chanting his politician's heart in Krystall Nacht clarity under the shadows that they threw: "The mind is like a Humming-Bird Invisible & furious, aloft & true! Imaging epileptic Translucence, 15 Tho' held in God's rosy lips like a Word."
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
"Me house gots no door, Me door no house; All day me sweetheart Trapses in and owt. 5 Fire's in d' kitchen, No kitchen to clean; I fry an' I boils What best pleases me. Me bed's got no trestle, 10 Me trestle no bed; No landlubber sleeps On no happier head. Me cellar's up high, Me barn's The Deep; 15 All ass-over-noggin' I lay me down to sleep. All sharp and blinkin' I'm up at a race; At no place I'm stoppin', 20 Me stoppin's no place." [GOETHE]
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
Love and Innocence alone let Duty live In Coleridge's lonesome, holy book, Finding Jesus entwined in ivy Or God in a sparrow's nook.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
O arrow of constancy Thy iron will be mine-- remind! As soul upbourne on spirit-wind Begets the image that created thine. 5 From all time-mist Fly on, as this Heart-rhyme in mind twists Turning thoughts to goodness. Heart to heart aloft, 10 Mystical rose and bright cross-- Invented in airs I lost: Thrown to ocean and sea-dross. Here spirit and spirit meet, Fiery yolk and albumen sweet, 15 Disguised in faces the hidden praises; Tossed and aloft they congreet In songs no other sees as hosannahs.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
And who shall live in these new cities of fresh Liberty, able as irises, solemn bluebells, tittering at the grit dragged in through the slant doors sundays....
Martyrs of vocable plunder! Unhinge the lost oblongs of souls, splayed past the sun's reeling keel to enter here. Barnacles of heart stuck to World's underpinning!
Martyrs, storms of whores, myself among them, miniskirted and with a face of bright rouge: myself, myself!
Is it so terrible being a visionary? Spilled martinis on the chartreuse tablecloth, cold haloes, the glasses akimbo.
Everything akimbo that would give my soul a face and name!
Noble martyrdom. Another face in the glass.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
Autumn has pruned your star from heaven With unforgiving shears snapped the sweet light out--- Who but God can count the odd stars from even? Or know by looking the straight man from the lout? 5 All that moves progresses only by seeming As a wheel that cannot touch the earth revolves In a mind of fire, by circles of its dreaming. So you, I think, were not from or into the heavens sent 10 But gave loving light to all, which darker heavens lent.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
Pale wraithe in autumn's fuming! I gave up poetry long ago for these cavillings.... Oh Autumn, my beautiful companion
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
Sweet was the passion, and the vision sweet; Thought heralded out what one heart imbued. Sparse charges of insistence neglectfully gather Whatever willow leaves shiver in autumn waters.... 5 How all the unpulsed skeleton is left bereft! Now watching out the winter, to dazzle us in snow. Congruence is for loafers -- even saints have loafed!-- Lovingly gazing at God in that silver shower. We lived in the tyrrany of loving what we knew. 10 Briars on his hands, briars on his head! Now some terrible moment is coming to its bliss, Unconsummated hearts are burning, and the old Shatter into slivers of this THIS-- Everything unpreparedly is turning gold! 15 Somehow our own souls must know, prescient By their bliss, we are all that we pretend! God, Man, Beast, Himself has his rosy shadow lent, Sweet briars on my hands, briars on my head!
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
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--- 5 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;
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
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.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
What songs do the dead sing, revelling in air or immortal?
What choir from the caskets will open our hearts, returned from the dust and the ashes? Longing Hallelujahs, or short, sharp dirges?
Unafraid of love-- at last, perhaps-- the dead will whisper miracles. Clear the dirt from their mouths and empty your heart and LISTEN!
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
In us is only this insistent surge Incapable of calming! It is ever-renewing and ever-alarming! Sweet as the winter's quickening 5 For Unforgotten Spring! Sweet as Summer's hungering For Autumn's quickened cooling...! All Airs all Objects all Elements conspire To re-invent Life as but a single Desire! 10 All fire-quick and heart-aloft As if to live were a speeded trance No Eye, no Heart, no Splendour could enchant To any, more docile, slowness than this: To race large eons into seconds, or hurl 15 Blooming minutes into aspiring words, Exploding Black Heaven with their own dear light! Challenging the Skies in innumerable Words!
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
Simple men pursuing sawn-off strings of sound, Such bright, abstract things, Sumped on the spirit's lavender elixir. Silver drubbed the drums. Ho-humm, ho-humm. 5 Washed out of wishes and livid, endearing things They came, the men of vital evening Pipped silkwise with green melodious coffinings. Catarr, catarr, snarled the blackish guitar. Tripleted they spat, in spic array, lunar sojourners 10 Cresting the spurious evening, and, ear by ear, Ascended the profoundest bass effusive and exact, near the waterheater. Blue-blackish thrubbed the muddy bass in blubs. Men made simple in the mimic minute of the spirit's leavetaking 15 August imaginers in the moon's hollow light Sculpt skeletal, plead out of prismatic catacombs Such swooning, harmonious things.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
All these unlimited ministries glisten Ingeniously-- lights capitulating to lights' Increasing haloes. So her face 5 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 10 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 15 But plunging on in their own bewildered wonderment Scroll out 'til stars pile up Making earth's envisioning air Seem the thinnest ribboning.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
Prevalent Bliss, kick the sinisters! Ashes in my ears, burn back to blisters--- Cyanide eyes, so pious in lit sin, No place is my place when you hide; 5 Got to flame you out tonight, aye eye! This insidious whisper is the glory one Makes me talk a universe out of a lonely one. I build myself by black prayer, eye and ear: So loud and tall and true I am at once 10 I stare God's eye to shatters; and hear.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
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! 5 My love and longing endure a night; Every luminescence shut when she blinks against the light.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
Great accomplishment great regret has brought; A city of sighs pent in a full-teneted breast Exhale in languishment! The moony dawn Slow moves from verge of blue to greener rays 5 As the heart up-bourne by dark and dark deceits In reality's plain day now lighter grows To whiteness --- and is lost among the hopeless snows.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
Betraying heroes makes me increase myself My pardons, my praises, My mud-racked, modern dazes And all whiter, sublimer rhyme 5 And higher, more crescent time Forgot-- damn them, and toss the lot! Now I speak of mystery Who sees none anywhere, but me; Myself the selfsame jackanapes 10 Risen from prison of late Of morning-soul's dark-even'd Sleep-tortured and riven Slave-state.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
Companions of my mellow youth Bound by circumstance to squeak wry truths In awkward dartings of darkened tongues! They themselves forget 5 How greatly were their wits Distended--- for age has this much blessing: That we forget our misdemeanors As so much chaff's fretted away And retain the golden grain that we consume 10 Day by day, by eating making new.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
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. 5 How dawn's above this starling stalk uncertain Which of the light is bearer and receiver!
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
O how has this world, this vacant world, Once all ascension in the childhood realms Miraculous as sky's propoundless blue Whose clouds in heaped divinity shed 5 Simple verity like the clear and simple rain On every causeless confusion swirled beneath Stripped itself of all it gave and gives, Leaving me airless, abandoned, here? Ah! this feeling is a grave in nature's face 10 My heart, turned spade, keeps thrusting in! The corpse of Hope, and lapse of faith, Of all rarer deity are now constrained To whatever dicking thing may bleat Within this shrunken horizon's orison. 15 Oh, my noble spirit, lashed by black tongues To the chiggering prayer of a worm! You, that would arise for fire as for breath In a world transformed beyond imagination As Death transfigures spirits who have shed 20 The sticking Lash of Life! Hear this my plea: I stand aghast in splendid disarray, In spirit bereft, in body weak and poor, Now, as once, tensile, rich, and sure.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
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 5 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.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
No Transcendental Impulse but then Invaded, sense by sense, and sense by sense again! Confused, harassed, stammering, half-mad, I arrived at a mountain stream's small source alone 5 Whose each mere moment of dropping flowing By dropping more intensely flows. Heart's-blood Stuttered along the tongue of solvent air Following out the stream's wanderings apace As if my liquid's hush through every cataract 10 And canyon-enhancing rivulet did move; What weariness then penetrated every limb Which had flung itself the whole blue morning through Like a ceaseless wheel! I lay a lonesome hour Upon a table of stone spined just so long 15 As myself from dead heel to skull-top Imagining its travel! By my veins The moss-indentured rock with iron force Is cracked, a hammering flow enveloping the mass With pale empurplings and smooth-prompting bulbs of glass 20 That maturer nature had given a more rugged touch. So I lay sun-warmed upon that human stone, Neither foot nor head beyond its grating cradle, Until all that made me I un-made Then wove again together in eye and ear; 25 As if sunlight spoke and sound gave voice in light, All these before me in hazeless dazzle floated free And I consigned them to their Liberty! My rushing emerging blood swept past Cochlea and ear-drum in bird-like thrum: 30 Stream on stream ascended purer air in song Til all was bathed by part, the unaccustomed whole Of oceans leaping from my spring! each martlet that sang Told some note of me; myself had stained Sky's unstarred majesty with pinks, and in a wink 35 Sent each sense sharpened as it spread From azure zones of whispered fire To the old pond's own cool shadow of repose Til every busy sound was somewhat tinged with red And every shifting leaf, dew-shadowed as they were, 40 Burned outlined by that bright delight Their own laughing motion shucked from them in sound. Then a purple rain, it seemed, descended In answering haloes shaken from the sun And broke in its descent to mist, hallowing all. 45 No part of the under-sky receded From that pursuant touch,-- but rather Rose to its own undoing in erotic rapture As drones to their honey-loving maiden-queen Lift translucent wings in flight; 50 Leaf and leaf in murmuring applause Stretched on each twig-end toward that sky! The stone that held my casing seemed more up-raised And the low appearance of the swimming sun Took on a duskier and a closer tone 55 As if it wished to immerse itself again! Strange mist was everywhere, endowing each Glowing glen that lay as little as a lens. Strange mist had wrapped the very bowsprit of the rock! My own skin was mist-engrafted! 60 Within, my own departing heart,--- So whirled with-in and -out with the luminous,--- As pulsant globe and center now resolved. And on this thought my mind no longer moved, By spells of rapt intransigence inly held, 65 Til all that had its faultless action once impelled Conjoined to conjure pause; sweet was the wind That kissed my aching lungs with such sweet breath! All piny, with some sunny hawthorne scenting mixed, ---Even still that air is fresh within me, 70 Even still do I desire the clearness I had then!--- For one hour's welter of such unwon wealth!--- For then I had found out-- in clearness still Do I see it!-- motive of moon and sun and sincerer stars, Our perpetual guest, the unsullied source of glory 75 That limned my out-flowing veins in rivers'-light! Out, out of the very center where my spirit slept Flood called out to flood and flood responded Out-pouring Life! there, there are the harmonies! There the endless systems counted back to One! 80 There the measureless Space contented To a water-drop! There echoings on echoings By their velvet source are hushed! Anguish and insistence vanquished by a touch! Nightmares and chimeras chastized by a love 85 The soul's own shaping power makes animate!
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
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. 5 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 10 Lifts to brighter character by its change of state.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
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. 5 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. 10 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 15 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!
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
When nothing is left but divinity And each man shouts to the next: "Look! We are become the human angels!" Wings made fabulous-- disasters surpassing 5 imagination! Abominable, the bricks of this image. All will be re-constructed, in Paradise. At the discretion of no God Do I spin and unfurl; 10 What is the hypothesis of passion? The inextricable answer in the diamond. "I am the unnamable silver, past continuation, I march beyond continent and clime. 15 I sing without vocable glitter." A death that was reasonable shimmers Shining ignored in a dirty jade pool. Men will that day become? Men will that day become? 20 Tales and fables melt to insignificance; Palaces disappear in a maze of flames. Men will that day become what? I woke up in an ecstatic ditch; I don't know very much about it. 25 The disingenuous suffer overmuch. The rhetoric of Democracies! Very commendable! And after the Sousas and oompahs.... And after the senses to emphasize 30 what blankness?
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
The very astonishing hour has come. The very astonishing hour indeed! Green Heinekens, jade brain and rose-coral vodkas --Exhausted! In one final, fantastic evening. 5 Hosannahs invade the empty windows, spurs of blacks, mysterious As the tender invitation of the body. Bright, alcoholic after-haloes sift Timid ash upon stale, upraised lips. 10 Sobriety has entered us As mourners enter a white church. Enough of this pathetic quietness! This simpering, dog-like wish for 'temperament,' The madness of faces full of 'sound judgment.' 15 I forgive all disasters, all accomplishments, Every disguise that announces 'I am finished!' Choking its inhabitant as a mirror chokes beauty. Songs of sporadic intensity, wicked verses, The poem of flayed skin, blind eyesight, 20 Mutes imagining laughter, I forgive you! Pathetic quiet! Bring tympans, wild sibilants, Drunken elephants of sound, mists, the harsh clangour of brass. 25 New eyes, new hearts, new senses! Bring a speech of bloods, the invention of Angels! Why was one ever afraid of waking? Eh! a little daydream I had in the haypile. But now the new era has arrived --this moment!-- 30 Let us revenge the sky for an hour! Let us run out, muds of new births upon us, And seize in hands of ice the very flowing waters---- Dreams of incorporeal perfection! Dawn-leaves splinter in my eye 35 Enacting the death of Satan. Vertigineousness in the closet! Very astonishing!
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
Here silk hope crumbled, the rough hand decayed That charged imagination's sweet heresy As if man's knotted mind had coyly played Its final line like Shelley on the Lerici-- 5 Infinite in the instant's autumn ecstasy Despite of Death's splay yaw and indecision. Though human and immortal, no human grace he Found. Till flesh foundered he met derision Only. Then spirit's keen herald need meet the call-- 10 Flashing imperious light where e're he dwelled. Burst free from body's bounds he broke his thrall To time and space, though quickened bells knelled Einstein's circularity to his spirit's ash: He roared alone the universe entire, all its call and crash! 15 Daniel Weeks Gregg G. Brown
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
Sweetly beat the bells of St Mary's Over all the pasturage; Ignorant souls and weary Come gather at the meeting-edge. 5 When ever was body and its wreck Home enough for what the spirit seeks? The great clock has run down And fair and foul are mixed; Come where the bower's sweetly blown, 10 Come wind the clock-hands round again. Come wind the bell of the old clock tower. Sweet are the bells that beat St Mary To bright sky and mournful cow; Sweet are the hands that row the ferry, 15 The backs that pull the plow. Work of the back can bring liberation From too-great ache and half-starved Candlelit concentration. The great clock has run down 20 And fair and foul are mixed; Come wind the clock-hands round again; Come wind the bell of the old clock tower. Sweet is knowledge for the weak Who cannot tell what they are, 25 Mind and misery sunk in tar. My heart is fathered in such soot Unable to reckon either 'good' or 'truth.' At midnight soul work begins. Come sweet ladies of St Mary's 30 For the hands are running back, Come wind the clock-hands round again That beat the swollen face and rend skin. Come wind the bell of the old clock tower.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
I The sovereign Poet, who's awakened gasp Flows out from infinite soul to soul along As arrowy moonbeams, unmixed and strong, 5 Sweeten with brightness the dusts of snow In architecture-yielding light,-- Lacking the telling word his feeling shows Kills whatever of sorrow or delight His paradise-enhancing tongue might build 10 Or more mindful heart would clasp. II In our soft light of winter-time When no bird is in the bough And yon black yew is strung with frozen lime 15 At walk I heard a single nightingale Thronging the wood with nightingale's song Resurrecting Spring that summer burned to this: No tindered spirit in the leaf but emptiness. To bind in eternal being --- paradoxical Love! --- 20 Even in coffers small as a nightingale's heart-- What the mad, fragile, passing world has spent. III Straining faces may seem immortal But it is desire that makes the skull a portal! 25 Thus in joyance Joyance does pursue, And to give and take in pleasure is pleasure's all; For from the living the living voice is never parted-- No psalm spoken but gentle-hearted, As though some aching mystery of LIFE and DEATH 30 Moves through human hearts, and steals breath, Touching a veil trembled In a wind anticipated. IV When to this stormy world, this realm of lightnings 35 One electric mortal comes conducting Awful powers whose careless touch enhances The deadest things to life, as paper-ashes thrown From the wild static of an ecstatic hand Or when a rainbow aura's stabbing crown 40 On an X-Ray rears far brighter than the bone, ---Take, take that hand! No matter how alone And however whitened fear, and draining lips, Or other breathless augury eclipse, Still take that hand--- and crush it to your own! 45 V I am awake in the radiant frameless day! Unbounded beginnings start and renew What severer sleep and longer dream forgot-- The dragon-draught forced past blue pinched lips 50 Ignorant of everything save God's solemn name; A coarser sovereign than my slipping sun! For the dream-vision and dream-life at noon Wax alive in the weeping vision that we tear. Rapt with vision, what I now on the hour require 55 Is burning love singing in a burning choir.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
I took the last, royal step.... King of my fierce heart, lounging in his leaded crown, discarding clove cigarettes into the golden O fish-mouths of ashtrays, sent me a straight look out of paired chilled blue eyes. It was the look of an abyss. Sheer ice, serene. Pupils black as the welt from a scorpion, full of ecstatic poison and preening to burst the skin. It wants nothing of the body. Nothing. Nothing of the flawed fable of humanity. I kicked its face. Spat, resisted. My screams deprived alpine birds of their air. He almost smiled.
He came to me, drenched from the midnight swim, an adolescent of exceeding glory. I stared into the mirror he bore on his filigreed breast, the nipples dark, hard, and cold as cherries.
....
But all of these visions are mortal! Bloodsoaked, blood-drugged; full gutters swooning with plush bloods; alabaster eyelids getting redder and more sodden as these torments roll on to the identical, dirty ending.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
These cathedrals sunken in the architecture of the chest! Heart-aches and minarets of wish! Forgetting everything in an attempt to remember myself....
How cold the palace is after the furniture burned. That bonfire of couches! The ceiling hovers lower with its thumbprint of smoke.--
Blood covered the jewelry chest; sapphires licked thin bloods. Pearls, their opalescent charms not desiccated-- enriched even by the lined flow of
blood holding each white globe from beneath as delicately as a child's eye floats in its reddened eyelid, dripping, dripping, dripping....
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
How rhetoric-filled the evening slumbers! All sky a dark anticipated; trees Grown dark under stars that increase the dark. And midnight waters cannot glimmer 5 When gathered into an eye of age; So despair councils; mute birds averr. Now deep in years at the water's edge And lacking all right light to disclose, Must I stand grown cold yet convince, propound 10 That all lovers' hearts but beat to a purpose That Love herself is profound and good At once simple and deep (O lost and found!) Or soul an angel raging in a cage God had lost the key to unlock? 15 For I do feel both in bone and look Heroic champions of more forgotten blood Rise through the veins, charge vein and mind and glance As glory consumes imagination When timid skeleton's dispensed. 20 All whirls upon a moment in a dance!
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
What love can know its underpinning, Cause and causeless are so whirled? What horse that canters at the gate Stamp assured of the final winning? 5 Often what is best starts late--- The midnight pilgrim has her prayers heard Before the dawning bird's.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
When that the trembling pen in hesitation stalls Putting blots on thought's most precious spree Clotting what had sung one soul's simple all With bandages of indecision on thought's flow-free 5 Of singing blush and crimson victory.... Over all blanche competitors palely lame Come reds revanching by tongue's sincerity, Completing luck with hues of highest sun.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.
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: 5 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 hers will catch. 10 O little aqua lycra scubagirl You swim in my adriatic heart's red swirl.
From the collection "Ascent"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.