incoherent, irrational
emotionally hypothermic
she initiates terminal burrowing
paradoxical undressing,
an illusion of warmth,
accelerates her demise
beneath the frosted
eyes of aspens
a final hallucination
circle of frozen angels
their wings long distorted
by the transformative ice
preside, their excruciating
silence heralds her
last breath, reveals
her true nature
Notes: This poem is a continuation of Ice Floe, originally posted in March:
“Man is not free to refuse
to do the thing which gives him
more pleasure than any
other conceivable action.” – Stendhal
III 1: Pure potentiality and suffering
forceps bruise her unformed head
Shakespeare’s extraordinarily gifted
sister is born, made aware
of her conscious mind, she will
now address the reader as an I
already creating lexical lists,
exploring the avenues
of concurrent thought
am I dreaming or the
universal dreamer?
III 1.1: Anything can happen
it does
III 2: The sanatorium collides with the imaginarium
I keep you under lock and key
like the Marquis de Sade
my kaleidoscopic star,
you blow my mind
and arouse my (curiosity)
I’m repelled, terrified, and
utterly besotted by your shenanigans
III 3: Neologisms ignite the thaw
I will write my way to freedom
into or out of sanity depending
on the size of my nonsense
dance to the compelling
beat of semiotic erotica
IV 1: The awakening and immersion
Your image arrives in my mind
and I realize what it is
to melt in the presence
of another’s beauty
travelling an infinite distance
to caress the contours of your face
embrace your anarchic heart
I make no claims upon it
will not burn it or suck it dry
before you are gone
only I want to see it beat
and respond to the world
its liberty astounds
IV 2: Without a room of her own watching the procession of the sons of educated men
a spiritual medium scrys:
you know nothing of the frustration,
the rage to master
crushed by the tides
of apathy, misogyny, and abuse
my ferocity burns mountains to ash
your terrors haunt you,
mine devoured me long ago
I am free of fear but dead
yet continue to believe
I am alive
IV 3: Conflation of the immensely attractive and talented jester genius, the teasing diver, the downtrodden poet philosopher, the spiritual professor, a faithful cuckold (almost), a foreign artist, the intriguing flatterer/thinker, all the gods and monsters, matter and antimatter, and me, the one who refuses to be cast as the observed
Hofstadter laughs at my quandary
we no longer need to get together
fuck, or even exchange e-mail, now
that we understand that our consciousness,
our ‘I’ is distributed among all our brains
as part of the ‘strange loop’
it makes human interaction redundant
I’ll keep to my cave
Zarathustra Rapunzel
consummate performance artist
unless, of course, mind melding
isn’t the primary agenda
linguistic experimentation is
akin to sexual creativity
was Joyce masturbating
or gifting us a vital energy?
(he so wanted to be natural)
will my art be tainted like Bronte’s
with rage and sexual frustration?
I gave up everything for you
but gave it to someone else
who shattered it into pieces
V 1:Fluid cyclicality
an enormous aureate ouroboros forms
and proceeds to consume itself –
it’s in its nature
V 2: Chameleonic desire, a great daimon
the most profound expression of the self
or even more ontological than this ‘I’
the loam out of which a self emerges
Plato’s divine spark longing
to unite with ever more
transcendent forms of beauty
V 3: Interstices and penumbra of the soul
Eros awaits in the density of allusion
cartographic intertextual patterns
that gather in erotic cathexis
vast ecosystem arises
integrates with the eternal
V 4: Skeleton key
for a moment I thought
you caught sight of
me in the corner of your eye,
availed your coruscant intellect
and emotional intensity to really see –
not observe but engage,
an eye that challenges but invites
a look that doesn’t degrade,
demand, or destroy but makes whole
a look of recognition
often only given by
an inner paramour
V 5: Anything can happen
I will live here in the poem
and begin to see what is possible
Notes: This poem was written for Victoria’s excellent prompt on literary allusion at dVerse Poets Pub. It makes allusions to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (perhaps the most allusion laden literature ever written), Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and the philosophical writing of John Riker. The title Saudade is Portuguese and means the feeling of longing for something that you love and is lost. Another linguist describes it as a ‘vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist.’
Brief, brutal act
reenacted
ransacked pages
wrote love’s stages
their rages inked
taut cages wrought
here she first taught
what he sought out
she caught his core
James Joyce’s score
‘strange-eyed whore’, Nora –
jibdoor obscene
Letters unclean
to be seen, shown,
his keen mind blown
gifts to atone
she alone knew
his moan’s timbre
Written for Form for All at dVerse Poets Pub on Than Bauk http://dversepoets.com/2012/11/08/formforall-than-bauk/. James Joyce and Nora Barnacle’s erotic letters were the inspiration for this piece. A jibdoor is a door made flush with a wall without dressings or moldings and often disguised by continuing the finishings or decorations of the wall across its surface.
My poem for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets Pub, Orphan of Silence, is here: http://kshawnedgar.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/orphan-of-silence/.
Digital Art by http://wwwsueann.blogspot.com/ Used with permission
‘I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul’*
An engulfing meteor shower writes our passion into existence
I lick the candied drips that streak like star trails to my mouth
fetishizing the geography of your body, its angular geometry
delicacy of a nuanced line skips fire across my face as you trace
words, hot breath infused, bending to the contours of my
desirous curvature, whispers embrace the inner recesses,
a secret that unfurls this singularity, collapsing my life
into this moment, potential energy gathering in our
liminal space, your shadow inscribes its legacy upon my body:
asterisms, pictorial glyphs, symbols of erotic exclamations,
broken chords releasing a neo-lexicon of sound
I want to redraw the lines, drafting scripts of bliss, pour
color upon your skin to transgress the boundaries of your
pleasure threshold, arrive in your mind in ecstatic pictures –
flood your senses, transport you to my inner landscape
words of seductive influence, your ambassadors,
have served you well – first contact of flesh presses their weight
into me, I fade to deepest blue limned with strawberry’s kiss
in a place beyond language, awash in celestial light
* from Pablo Neruda’s Love Sonnet XVII
Linked to dVerse for Poetics: http://dversepoets.com/2012/11/03/poetics-through-the-artists-lens/
quasar blazes at the known limit of the universe
signifying the birth of pleasure at the edge of a
circumbinary system, once considered an impossibility,
but only to those forgetful of the myth of Eros & Psyche
Psyche, beau ideal, planetary anomaly in a galaxy where
perfection cannot exist, her acts of imagination,
butterfly fantastications, pull her toward the precipice
of consciousness, anagoge of luminous poetry
her liquescent beauty unbounded attracts his ardor
Eros, cloaked as an invisible planet approaches,
influencing her orbit, she perceives only a blue shift,
introduction of a chaotic cosmogony hinting at metamorphosis
captured by high precision photometry she senses
his gravitational pull, enticing mirage, buried image of divinity
so they are joined in clandestine union, mystic bliss
until Psyche’s atmosphere is pregnant with new life
in his immaturity he proclaims if she awaits the birth
without revealing his true nature it will become immortal,
but if she must know him, the child will fall from celestial heights
her multiplicity introduces hidden doubts, what dragon,
what unseen monster, caresses her?
a cathetic quandary that consumes her delight
she stops a passing pulsar, pleading for revelation
showing her Eros’ true self as a god benighted star
he flees, red shift abandonment, condemning her, an orphan planet
struck from his orbit, floating alone through interstellar space
freezing to death in a spiritual suicide, abrading her love
seeking absolution for her transgression and his return
she is tested, searching for cyphers to initiate transformation
at the end of her trials she comes weary to the black hole
an underworld that could consume her soul and the promise
of her unborn potentiality, where she must travel for the final answers
in her quest to regain his gaze, further into the darkness that will act
as catalyst yet threatens to unravel all if she becomes consumed
victorious she emerges but the immersion takes its toll
she is rendered silent awaiting the restorative kiss of Eros’ forgiveness
humbled by her struggle he returns to her side convincing the gods to
grant her immortality, transmuting her into a star that she might shine
as brightly as he, in a circumbinary system birthing an eternal joy
ISS Startrails – TRONized from Christoph Malin on Vimeo.
Written for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets Pub: http://dversepoets.com. Tuesday is my birthday so I will be a bit slow returning visits.
To read the erasure poem/painting click on it to zoom. Circled text forms the poem or it can be read in stanzas below:
Jane rehearses heartbreak on a splendid Midsummer night at Thornfield while Mr. Rochester’s potent lightning strike, a seemingly small lie of omission, tears asunder the great horse-chestnut tree at the bottom of the orchard
Erasure poem and painting by Anna Montgomery
Text from the novel, Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë
the sea is a barrier
from you
brine and foam
destined to rush between
it is a long way
morally certain
on the eve of separation
stars enter into their shining
my heart was still
a string inextricably knotted
cord of communion snapped
impossible to proceed
I endured no longer
grief and love
claiming mastery
petrified, it strikes me with
terror and anguish
to be torn from you forever
it is like looking on
the necessity of death
This is a form of experimental poetry introduced to me by Vince Gotera in a prompt, my first erasure poem is here: https://chromapoetica.com/2012/05/03/calyx-of-held/ along with the link to the original prompt. This poem was written for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets Pub. Join us: http://dversepoets.com.
‘We are committed to an unqualified act,
not illustrating outworn myths or contemporary alibis.
One must accept total responsibility for what he executes.
And the measure of his greatness will be the depth
of his insight and courage in realizing his own vision.
Demands for communication are presumptuous and irrelevant.’
– Clyfford Still, Abstract Expressionist Painter
Calligraphic signifiers rouse masterful enumerators
an experiment with a curl of smoke, perhaps . . .
there’s a way to measure time in that
she felt her body astonishingly vague
the wave nature of electrons taking over
words being wind or web
sound and suggestion speared
open . . .
lively and intact in a recurring wave
of arrival.
the soul establishes itself.
language seduces astral bodies,
inscribing their orbits . . .
before one’s shadow ever grew
out of the field into thoughts of tomorrow.
definition of a proper sense of distance –
a dog barking off in the barn, a mystical stroke.
our pellucid order blown apart
in the mysterium tremendum
bouquets of adoration and
certitude unending . . .
to trace you in
the charcoal outlines
of angels
enshroud your song
in rice paper
say that a ballad
wrapped in a ballad,
casting hollow precipices,
jousts firm convictions
underneath the cumulous chatter of troubled skies
I am threshing felicity
for we are language – lost
longing to be free, outside, but we must stay
posing in this place. we must move
as little as possible . . .
we see only postures of the dream,
satiated by pearls of ancient treasure
paths of glacial time pouring over steppes
white irises gleaming on clay surfaces,
pounded stardust on our filigreed emotions
Fuck! I want to be bound by devotion!
Tortured by passion!
in the cavern you understand how
a shadow works
because you’ve brought your own light . . .
free will in blind duel
half-life elements unwinding
earth as thought of the sea
I will dream you.
draw you.
that is the tune but there are no words . . .
The words are only speculation.
(from the Latin speculum, mirror):
they seek and cannot find
the meaning of the music –
I seek shelter along tantalizing downspouts
a tremulous, daring surrender
skin lost borders
merged
traditional imagery fills up
with unfamiliar shadows
(if properly abstract)
the strewn evidence meant something,
the small accidents and pleasures –
something like living occurs, a movement
out of the dream into its codification . . .
how many people came and stayed a certain time,
uttered light or dark speech that became a part of you
filtered and influenced by it, until no part
remains that is surely you
those voices in the dusk –
she meant energy & how in her dream
it came back to her
she hummed her own notes . . .
volumes of secrets to teach
Socrates
the leashed stars kindle thin
perpendicular
clear space of blackness
tiny words of substance cross
the darkness
uniform substance,
a magma of interiors . . .
concede/merge/meld
suck wonder and
lyrical promises amidst this
crumbling compulsion of syllables
float in ephemeral delirium
avidity penultimate in a
fugitive dialogue of masterwork
a desirous, glowing, sensual unraveling
Notes: This is a cento, a poem made up of lines from other poems, like a collage. This piece cheats a bit by using some lines from my own work too. Lines are pulled from John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Ray DiPalma’s Rebus Tact, Maureen Owen’s African Sunday, and Susan Howe’s Speeches at the Barriers. Thanks to Samuel Peralta for the nourishing prompt at dVerse Poets Pub.
Magnolia Blossoms by Anna Montgomery
For Immanuel Kant
I persevere
in this shallow depth of field
art of perception
keeps me anchored,
floating in the halation
of your poetry
in the Japanese tea garden
I traverse the half-moon
bridge to nowhere
sublimity of the formless
blurred image becomes
my method of loci
memories of belonging
to you, to the world
through my embodied perspective
surround me
fingertips trace your shadows
phantoms cast in my peripheral vision
sensitivity amplified
to unbearable heights
all sounds are blown mute
left with complex silence
eidetic imagery of you
like the sun ghost
burning beneath closed lids
ephemeral spaces alight
in the tinted ambiguity
nuances of hue illuminate
this interplay of epiphenomena
as if an absence of psychology is possible
specificity of time and place diffuse
opposites now lose focus through erasure
circle of confusion defines my
travel without passage
aporia breaks the logic of identity
into a deep, silent wonder
no longer aware of my limitations
philosophical puzzles denature
self engulfs grand sensation
I am a boundless magnolia
celestial body, fertile,
[untranslatable]
without a cipher
ever distant/ever close
your immersion ignites
heat flushes my face
a sweet release
mystic union
encountering the limits of language
a border kissing the initiation of bliss
encompassing all, alone/together
as I was then, as I often am
seeing anew:
moral freedom is gained from conquering fear
here lies the hunger and the nourishment
heartbeat within and without
creative impulse and its fruition
I am forever mutable
melting in the presence of beauty
Posted in response to Claudia’s truly inspiring Meeting The Bar prompt on Beautiful Solitude: http://dversepoets.com/2012/09/20/meetingthebar-beautiful-solitude/
I’m an Executive Director with a doctorate in education, a consultant, painter, photographer, composer, poet, and vocalist.
Chromapoetica 