Hans Holbein Dance of Death
apathy feeds upon itself like an ouroboros
growing fat on mountains of blood
voracious consuming cycle of death
a hunger never satiated
decomposing an elegiac
symphony of suffering
within a necrotic nightmare
desecrating corpses on a
carrion feast day:
sacrosanct ritual
of renewal
Note: This poem is my poem Consuming the Masses from the alternative viewpoint of a detritivore. Written for dVerse Poets Pub.
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.
Willem De Kooning
poems like Snyder’s lost ponies
gallop down shining sand dunes
all heat and sweat and neighing
great stallions of imagination
humbled in embodiment
in motion, huffing, striving
toward the blue-dark horizon
frenetic birds flit at the edge of sky
stencils against the thread of clouds
unable to escape the picture
painting landscapes of loss
singing songs of lament
at the walls of the white monastery
within the hobbled monk chants
breaks the night with his strange descant
there is nothing to accept
prostrate surrender of an endless ritual
rhythm chime of an inner bell
words cascade, an avalanche of lost meaning
roaring down the scarred mountain
felling ancient trees, thundering echoes
through fire-kissed meadows
gods hover at Duncan’s margins of thought
here in the hinterlands of a long forgotten tale
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/Pegasus; http://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!
Semper Augustus Tulip 17th Century Anonymous
infatuation is a
fat finger key punch
flash crash
value laden mishap
amidst black-box trading
high frequency lust
computer malfunctions
neurological misfires
acts of cyber-terrorism
hearts mitigate risk
installing circuit breakers
so adoration can’t slide
popping a speculative bubble
in the madness of crowds
under delusions of love
greater fool theory applies
Flash Crash 2010 (Creative Commons)
degenerate art
unsanctioned
unbefitting
destroyed
ashen remnants
invisible work
painted along
history’s corridors
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]
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
memory is a horse
drawing reigns
through the snow
myriad threads
of retrocausality
converging
mathematical
model predicated
on chaos
mind traces
a divergent
illusion of absence
melody haunting
blue interstices
of imagination
motion creates
waves of substance
woven in spacetime
this poem is a wormhole,
a dimensional shift, an anarchy,
a nonexistent thing asserting itself
there is no inherent orientation in outer space
only an expanding universe, accelerating
a phantom energy driven expanse
illuminating a bestiary of metamorphosis
nebulous, interchangeable creatures
viewed from subsuming positions
encoding a matrix of symbols
laciniate selves emerging
from the mysteries of geminating galaxies
supernovas of nuclear fusion transmutation
———- birthing and destroying ————–
a disorientation at the event horizon
terminating in elegant effigies ingloriously askew
amidst the gracile lines demarcating existence
metaphrastic missives from dark energy
an unraveling poetic exegeses
it is unknowable and unseen
dancing these helical truths
pneumatological enigmas of stochastic intimacy
in an explosion of probability theory
systematic errors of passion
improbable actions inventing equations
expressed by carbon fueled mouths
digressions of regurgitated sense impressions
from a finite point in space
picturesque idioms torn asunder
by the slings and arrows of a native tongue,
lightening that tears at the veil
constructs and deconstructs perplexities
that tremble with human sensibilities
Derrida’s post-structuralism
exposes and undermines the oppositions
hierarchies and paradoxes:
signifier/signified; sensible/intelligible;
writing/speech; passivity/activity
liquid modernity’s tentative position
cloud construction of identity
which imagines a neutral mode
of writing (existing)
veridical paradoxes, congeries of the strange,
margin notes and shadow expressions
cantos in the wilderness without compass points
husk and kernel unite
unsaying every word
in indented continuations
cave paintings and charcoal outlines
of the same lamentation
all artifacts of the passion:
Kierkegaard’s desire to discover something
that thought itself cannot think
ancient pearls embedded in glacial time
these round numinous volumes,
clay surfaces formed of pounded stardust
howling waterfalls of half-life elements unwinding
constructs in the fourth dimension
curved space departing Euclidean geometry
threshold frequency erects the base
a foundry of hollow spaces
where precept and concept unify
an intentional dementia
impenetrable fortress of subjectivity
mastery and transgression merged
into something perpetually
lost in translation
aleatory insights resounding
in a multiplication of caesuras
semantic slippage and resolution
birthed in unimaginable articulations
accretion of allusions weighing upon poetry
morphing electroacoustic transducer
interrupts echolocation, dislocatingting
signifier from its denotata,
disrupting the patterns of semantic relationships
speech acts like a convoluted telekinesis
positing thought invents language
superflat eye disfigures
this universe of enactments as
poetry collapses, excises novelistic tendencies
so poets become geometers of dismemberment
lacerating with erotic precision
spinning an elaborate manifesto:
produce without possession
envision freedom from rationality
educe a contradistinction
gather the cipher and the subtext
and integrate a secret sharing scheme
excel but do not lead your thoughts
breathe, decrypt the psychological schemas
act without premeditated expectation
be the paradox of noise within the silence
assimilate the workings of the universe
puzzle out an esemplastic theorem
unlock strategies of liberation
allow entropy to overpower existence
be an echo in the caverns, stealthily passing,
an imperfect processor with selection bias
questing for an oracle of algorithms,
embody a fading murmur, trace the interstices,
become a ghastly literalness of absence –
all states are possible in the end
NOTES: This was written for my Meeting the Bar: Wild Beasts prompt at dVerse.
I’m an Executive Director with a doctorate in education, a consultant, painter, photographer, composer, poet, and vocalist.
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