mardi 23 août 2011

New poem !

Traces II

7

cello shade brushed

through the soft grey fingers of dawn

woke to the roll of pebbles


out there


chest against chest you two struggling

to wring life from matter like

water from a soaked napkin


wrapped again


within sea-soiled dreams

missing your smell


8


drove to town in the glow of sunset

parked nowhere or so


copper liquid splashed on

whatever lay around

filled

lingered


glass-scaled blocks of life burnt

whatever awareness remained

inside


9


reedy industry-scored steppe

scrawled hastily

sprawled to extinction


still

litter


I had left a pebble within the folds of my pocket

clasped it the sun singed brassed dank forehead

blank bleached wild

erness


love

sped to you

across aeons of wasted space


10


the bow beamed

luminous pathways into your smile

the waves' bottle-glassed frown grew

lesser


shreds of sound

ravelled anew clothed you in

fabulous rags


meshed

I tripped a willing captive

flung across the marine depths of your bonds


11


like a handful of fine sifted sand

cast on a drum

smooth glowing graze

while

slightly tarnished gold

trumpet chords along the pier

no haste

brown rough-stoned office blocks

bass over the waterside

heat

setting

shall be driving home soon


12


drop me a line

isn't it high time we

weighed anchor


the tide is out

come on or else

I will sail for a mermaid dream

alone

droplets of watered blue paint scraped

on a wide faded cream canvas

the splayed pathetic presence

of the things we never did


samedi 2 avril 2011

My new poem : The Soft Rainbow Episodes II.

The Soft Rainbow Episodes II


1.


We turned our backs on the adulterated niceties of language,

exchanged hot air for the whiplashness of weather.

The land welcomed us, wordless. We braved it forth

like vessels bent on sailing whatever the cost

in lives or meaning. There was but the two of us,

one-manned craft on seas of independence,

no one to account to, or to cry up to either. We weren’t

spared. The land rained no favours upon us,

just water and pelting hail when such was its humour,

brute energy, crude strength. Skies drifted past like possibles

unfolded, made plain for eyes raised heavenward,

for the non-blind. We watched but did not sit.

Walked. Trudged on ground never even, bumped on

moss-hidden rock, slid on

treacherous weeds but with eyes uplifted like prayers,

not like hands, which clung to the straps of our rucksacks,

were needed in the support of these our mortal frames,

souls we were not, nor thought we’d ever be. We never quailed.

Wind and rain fought against us. Our faces froze

till our skins felt no more. Our hair stuck

to skulls we believed would burst with the storm’s uproar.

The sky did smile on us. More than once. We welcomed

the pouring light as if a well had opened in heaven

upside-down, showering warm blessings. To us,

it looked the first light that was ever rained on earth

at the beginning of the land’s history, long before men

came and stabbed dagger-words over the whole of creation

and day turned grey in the brightest of afternoons,

everyday dullness the norm. Nothing came out of this

but the temperature of vain heated brains. Comfort

held us bound for a while, whiles, lives squandered and lost

till weary with dying we took it upon ourselves to brave death,

a much lesser foe if one at all. We have endured long

in our self-decreed solitude. No one complained,

there was, is, no one for that. All the better

or nature would have turned its back on us the way we did,

an issue not to be thought of, a fear

too dreadful to face. We’re there still,

won’t stop moving about on this moor men forced upon us

and we took like a gift, not the punishment

criminals are made to suffer. Criminals we may be since we

repudiate the consumerist religion and its attendant normorality.

Refusing to compromise, refusing to die,

we became instead of fading,

will keep our course in all weathers whatever

darts the slanderous may choose to shoot.


2.


Where does truth lie ? We sought for it in each patch of light

the wayward sun showered upon us like an offering,

meant to be one and to be received as such. We did.

The oft leaden sky never deceived us with lavishness,

truth beamed down but too seldom for us to err

within castles of mazy illusion. We rushed like madmen

but where there is no one to deem you mad such things

count next to nothing. We knew offerings are brief,

mere ephemerae not meant to endure, only to flash meaning

and disappear. So we made all the speed we could despite

treacherous bogs and sudden downslumps in the level of the land,

subtleties devised to test our endurance, not to deter us,

whatever winked at us knew the winking would be seen

and quested after. Such was the motive of these callings,

trust given and fully pledged. When we reached the patches

that lay on the land like balm on slowly healing skin,

we always tried to figure out shapes in the hazy outlines

that would change ever so quick, often before the mystery

had cleared away our internal clouds, hardly less thick

than the ones within that the world sees not, while we do.

The cosmos speaks, we listen. There is no purpose in birth,

being is absurd, mechanical, accidental,

yet if it were not so,

if I and you, friend, had been made to grace a purpose,

be sure it would have been for this, to

read and rejoice, pore into the land’s arcanae

everlastingly. The cosmos is mystery and we

are its priests. We worship not with words,

the world’s means of coercion and treachery. Only

our bodies know the way they never had to learn,

ever rejoicing when they show the mettle

they know they’re made of. The moor is no end,

we shall be tested soon, that we sense with more certainty

than we ever had before our birth. Mountains are

coming though their visible stage still hasn’t come to be.

It shall. We know. The shadows spoke

plainly and loud. New shapes yet to be born,

rising land, steep valleys and chaotic hills

await us. They were fashioned for us, they are us,

what we mean, are fated to be. We must be

ready, available, keep the once rusty gates of our hearts

open for when the time comes, unconscionable though expected,

a time beyond times as mortals know them. No half-way

will rank us among the elected few. Doubt on the doorstep

remain. High on the mountain-side if not at the very summit,

truth shall be given, showered upon us like light

our eyes and skins long forgot the taste of.

We believe. We stand and wait. What our minds can’t fathom,

heaven shall reveal unto the faithful we are.


3.


Mountains ! We were not ready to face them

but then we couldn’t have been whatever our efforts,

believing we were was the thing, the source of stamina,

stubbornness and strength - death flew so close

we felt its rancid breath on our cheeks, and the salt tang

of that peculiar type of sweat let loose by fear

pricked our nostrils with bestial uncompromise. Rock

ever more rugged, slippery and bite-edged

met us with a brute’s blunt presence. Clothes

were spattered and rent. We became beggars of the wild,

gloved by solitude and the incomprehensible tenderness

that attends the wandering crazed. No one saw us

for even if there had been someone at hand,

we would have been passed by like common growths,

bushes stunted by the wind, from the soil as inseparable

as the sky from our souls. We had phased, not faded, in

to the cosmos. Our wanderings had passed beyond knowledge

as mortals know it. Not seen, talked to or (worse) about,

we simply became. We didn’t die of it

yet came so close that we looked on the surrounding fells

with the wondering eyes of one suddenly reborn

a child with a man’s wisdom but none of his bitterness.

Plateaux we found, unless we were found by them,

causality was just one of the so many trappings we had

to leave, shed like dried skin, replacing the anguish of loss

by the wideyedness of innocence, learning not to look back.

Lakes, too, jewelled our errantry. These were but

mirrors of transience, recollection of our moorbound past

and we skirted them hurriedly. We were not to loiter,

as the inner voice that motioned us on said : slopes

still awaited our chapped skins, cut wrists and mud-caked faces

and our energies, however hale, cried for haste. It

came

faster than a flashburst of lightning

in a sky we had never seen so blue.

Suddenly there was nowhere to go, nothing to climb but air.

We sat. These were the place and time.

We sat and waited till only the wind clothed us

and the dust of years no more to be had settled on our bared skins.

Clouds scurried overhead and we took the scant light they sent

like the blessing of accomplishment. Blue never returned

but as rock and air claimed us we tasted a light

far beyond a thousand suns. Sometimes we enjoy

recollecting what we used to be, fleshbound sharers of the faith

and we smile when we see ourselves on this mountain top,

lashed at by the demanding elements. We have gone else

where. Pain and place are but memory,

childadulthood’s nightmares one laughs at with joy

unalloyed. We are eternal,

in the world and beyond it. Some may glimpse us

occasionally, if their hearts will,

and wonder what it is they’ve sensed.

Let them wonder. Let them listen to their inner moors, to

the light that rains

and hides again for one to find it. Let them believe,

be.