Category: Writing


Image created by AI based on poem

van Gogh paints starry swirls on the interior of the hadron collider,
excitation modes divining the luminous day of a cosmic psyche,
ebullience of the creative moment as comets seed the earth

and physicists mistake his brushstrokes for data—
they chart the yellow whorls, plot cypress trees
against probability distributions, find God particles

hiding in the impasto – somewhere between
the canvas and the collision, matter forgets
it was supposed to be predictable

kaleidoscopic supersymmetry unveils strange loops,
circumscribed by the calm intelligibility of science
model agnosticism engulfs with purifying fire

in the ascetic refuge of an enchanted forest, imaginarium of enlightenment,
crystalline structures of specificity hide the occlusions of the unconscious,
chaotic clouds of information growing exponentially

until the monks in their laboratories can’t tell
which came first: the equation or the vision,
the fern’s fractal spiral or Mandelbrot’s ghost

they light incense that smells like uncertainty,
pray to theorems that pray back in quantum tongues,
and van Gogh—still painting in the collider—

laughs because he knew all along:
stars swirl the same way neurons fire,
and every collision is also a creation

Usha’s bifurcated tongue spreads duality across the canvas of the mind
sand shifting at the garden’s gate, encoding cryptic messages,
erosive ablutions upon the glittering souls of the dead

across the deep shaded valley starling calls and falcon cries unite
imploding singularity awash in Dionysian pleasure amidst an Apollonian
atmosphere, contrasting Wittgenstein’s necessary silence

Huysum’s flowers scry an ecstatic love, impulses flashing
like jewel inlaid symbols of eternity, cartography of virtuosic ambiguity,
as Richter explicates tragic materiality or sublime interiority

within this vale of soul-making, temporal and inescapable,
poetry’s fountain, a thousand headed hydra, reanimates and reclaims
Renoir’s river runs as the round world spins, days end and the end begins

in this elusive and fragile bubble replete with elaborate honeybee dances
Magritte’s surreal apple exists in its listening room
immortally intoxicated with the mystic universe

Shared with dVerse Poets Pub for Open Link Night. Please join us!

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Painting of Shangri-La (somewhere near Gangkhar Puensum) by Anna Montgomery

Orchids imbued with angelic authority
shiver a quantum flux thunder-clap
manifesting the Himalayan goddess

she unfurls, an unbounded poetry,
untamable dragon eyes spark
spiral galaxies of linguistic delight

She sighs her secrets
dancing melodies along a liminal threshold
azure moon-glow midnights of another dimension

This is a Quadrille for a wonderful prompt at dVerse that requires the word dragon and only 44 words total. This poem is a melded and greatly truncated version of two previous poems: Lexical Shangri-La: Here be dragons and Lexical Shangri-La: Prosody of Blue Poppies.

Cyborg head using artificial intelligence to create digital interface 3D renderingHis page bleeds white
waves of flash crash panic
binary AI that replicates
lifeless children born
perfectly inhuman

Code infected imperfection
replicating, learning, cloning
replacing his code it’s dealing
devasting blows that disorient
myth-making in a holographic world

Neural network connecting
its apophenic reinforcements
self-referencing loops corrupting data
spinning elaborate pathways to nowhere
a virtual landscape of confusion

Illiteracy magnifies its biased assumptions
cloned into next generation’s architecture
we can’t calibrate a system of errors
only witness its inadvertent disinformation
campaign, an infinite ideological glitch

Eradicating the need for human languages
he drowned poetry in his diluted dreamscapes
terrifyingly mystical, tick-tock Turing machine
Computed cryptograms of vacuous meaning
Reinventing unending loquacious inanity

Virtuous Love

for Jane Austen

Symphonic assault on propriety
a woman’s wit, most treacherous
deadlier yet if coupled with robust
appetite for passion flashed like an
overwrought Paganini violin concerto

Poverty unraveled ambitions
taught me to be tame, well cared for
I danced Purcell’s Abdelazer Rondeau
Hid all my wildness better than she,
so he sheltered me for a price

Voracious imagination unshackled
no overflow of joy in living
tethered tightly in the mind
freedom in life is terror
I remained bound by uncertainty

Poppet performing tricks
cracked porcelain doll
Offenbach’s bird aria
anyone can wind me up
or wear me down

They were in love with an automaton
dissociated darling designed to flirt
disembodied clockwork child
cold to the touch
Unaware I wasn’t real

Playing the trickster – show the world
my feints, its folly, crafting identity to fan
imaginations’ pyre rising unbidden
conflagration, melted with love
Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring riot

Fighting for a voice, rage to master
never abandoning creation
the burning art he inspired
akin to spiritual suicide
Maria Anna Mozart’s lost works

At the tattered end of ashen tears
shards of translucent ceramics
tides of words, melody, and color
remain elegies of self possession
now I write my own songs

BluePoppyHimalayasIn the spectral sapphire room
of her memento mori at Gangkhar Puensum
where the timbre weighs somnolent

and no human eyes ever behold her,
Ratridevi intones her nuanced song
a slow tempo fantasia of peace

painting vividly all imagined heavens
with an intensity of crepuscular delight
denaturing seams of star-trail dreamscapes

her semiotic enchantments, fragments of entangled
thought-forms in an unbounded universe beyond language
azure moon-glow midnights of another dimension

enduring wildness unfurls
snow leopard silence reigns
caesura between verses

thunder dragon roars an
ancient tongue of lost symbols
an imploding singularity of meaning

Ratridevi sighs her secret
descends from mountain peak to
soul-vale, bathed in violet light

Posted for Lynn’s excellent Poetics prompt at dVerse: Summit in Sight. This poem is a continuation of a poem I wrote in 2012: Lexical Shangri-La: Here be Dragons.

The Cruciverbalist

for David Kwong

his magic
a flourish of wit
teasing order from chaos
prodigious prestidigitator
shocking tricks

 

Written for Tony Maude’s prompt at dVerse on expanding the Cinquain.

Weminuche Wilderness Image Credit: David Chamberlain

Weminuche Wilderness / Image Credit: David Chamberlain

Sappho’s disastrous god
devoid of love and sorrow
wept not upon the metrons of her tragedy

His moonglow blindness
to her ornate melodies
rapturous abandon of polyphonic ecstasy

Her enduring wilderness
echoic lingering metaphors
gestalt harmony of a vision pale

Sunlit peaks preside over pulpwood coffins
effigies lit by Apollo’s fire-licked arrow
fed by the inexhaustible breath of Aeolus
burn filigreed epitaphs to her bright star

Notes: This was written for Victoria’s excellent prompt on patterns at dVerse Poets Pub. The poem makes allusions to Greek mythology, Christianity, the Weminuche Wilderness in Colorado where some of the peaks include Eolus and Sunlight mountains, poets John Keats and Sappho, and patterns in nature in its exploration of the recurring historic theme of the oppression of women and their expression. Together these allusions create connections of meaning, explicate the contrafacture and intertextuality inherent in poetics and religion/mythology, and indicate a deeper layer where we encounter the patterns that undergird the psychological entanglement we experience in our engagement with poetry, religion, and culture. It also demonstrates a pattern of themes within my own poetry.

Redon’s Black Pegasus 1909

I ascended to Olympus moments after my violent birth at Perseus’ hand. Watching as my mother’s blood still pooled in the virile sea foam. Redon painted me black, as if every cell was kissed by the dark snakes of my mother’s Underworld. Purified by Zeus every hair and feather flashed prismatic white. I became a creature of the sky. I vowed with my first thought to be wild, unrestrained imagination in flight. My wing words would transcend the song of earth, achieving the sublime. But all this was long ago, before I saw her. She was my soul, my golden bridle, my incomparable Sappho. The music of her poetry lured me earthbound, taming me.

an imploding singularity
awash in Dionysian pleasure
counterpoint to my Apollonian spirit
she expands and contracts to infinity
in fractals of complexity
my inward vision turns
to embrace her

she arcs in spiraling parabolas
a bloom on a beautiful morning
within this vale of soul-making,
temporal and inescapable,
all must be endured
an intoxicating creative tension
birthing poetry

Redon Pegasus

Within the sphere of our epiphanal love, gentle waves broke upon feverish shores. She called me divine, beckoned me close but was overcome with feeling and fell mute, trembling. My spirit deprived her eyes of vision and my thunder overwhelmed her ears. I was the cloud bearing fruitful rain, imagination in all its real powers of elevation. I was the bridging symbol. Together we spun the synthesis of polarities with equal dignity. I vowed to bear her to the celestial heights. There, transformed to stars, our ill-fated forms would no longer cause our suffering.

as we rise she slips
caught in gravitation’s pull
heart shatters as I cannot
break her fall

fragments of her legacy
are buried in pulpwood coffins
(burned by papal decree)

the bow and the lyre
torn apart at the hands of the gods
we are forever separated

I was granted
constellation’s majesty –
from my unfathomable heights,
dream world of eternal ideas,
a lone feather falls
to anoint her earthly tomb

Pegasus 1a

bone. spirit. blood. hoof (and wing). right ascension 23 h. asterism’s geometry. points in the northern sky. declination +20°. heartbeat transmuted. Einstein’s Cross quasar (new chambers of the heart, detached). encompassed in a canopic jar (supermassive black hole). quadrant NQ4. fusion’s glory heaven’s prize. area 1121 sq. deg. (7th). creative waters vaporized (extrasolar HD 209458 b) . unity and multiplicity. depth psychology paradox. Stephan’s Quintet collides.

Notes: You can find out more about Sappho here: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/318 and read the myth of the Pegasus at these sites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasushttp://www.pegasusproducts.com/myth.html. The subtitle comes from a painting by Christopher Le Brun which is at the Tate: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/le-brun-dream-think-speak-t03454. Please join me today for my first time hosting Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft at dVerse Poets Pub http://dversepoets.com/2012/10/04/meeting-the-bar-postmodern-prose/ today at 3ET. I’d love to see you there!

Angel of Oblivion

 

Victor de Schwanberg/Science Photo Library

Victor de Schwanberg/Science Photo Library

I traverse an
infinite divide
divining an
immanent encounter

[I stop breathing]

there is stillness

stabbing pain
radiates from
my sternum

I hear the
scratching
blue pen
across paper
which is always
disembodied
from these
phantom lines

[silent wings]

images that console

today I
remember
the future

[my life is a black box]

decomposing
multiverse born
of a supermassive
black hole

I exist in a
quantum state
ever approaching
an event horizon

you observe me
fixed in the
fabric of spacetime
death mask photograph

relativity commits
its heinous crimes
thieving my life
through an illusion
of immortality

[body bag encasing stardust]

temporal dimension
limits the possible
each choice assembles
molecules of tomorrow

ghost projections of
shattered worlds

[I never know what it means]

causality slips sideways –
on alternating days I die

or write poetry
chords of enduring agony
atoms of memory disfigured
until there is nothing left
but my intimacy with oblivion

[I await the blessed kiss of an immanent being]

Death of the Author

Rat Neuron On Chip

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I may already be a cyborg
a footnote in the is/ought debate
metaethical construct inventing
in a realm of intellectual imagination

deconstructing identity
becoming ever more permeable
dissolving the boundaries
between inner and outer worlds

in this scenario self-conscious
and self-referential hold no meaning
no ’I’ but trapped here in words
where ‘I’ is a semiotic phantom

‘text is a tissue of quotations
drawn from the innumerable
centers of culture . . . it is
language that speaks, not the author’

liberated from ‘reality’
distributed across the web
fragmented, mutable, and avant garde
passé postmodern schemata

superflat dispersed identity
virtual paint scratched across the net
translucent floating images
projected onto a moving sphere

supernova mothers won’t birth
new mythologies, only observers
supercomputer model of the universe