The principle behind my recent book, A Strange Frenzy, if you can call it a principle is to improvise a response to a snippet from a Rumi aphorism or poem. In the uncanny, and rather unlikely dialogue which ensues over cultures and epochs, hopefully, there is a constant challenge thrown down to boredom and convention and an exaltation of freedom in all its myriad manifestations, freedom to speak, freedom to be different, freedom to dare, freedom, above all else, to love.
Love teaches us that we must dare, we must take the gamble or else our lives are dull and lacklustre affairs. Rumi may talk of a love which joins with a grander more spiritual love of all loves, and I may attempt to write of a more material poetic love of moments and commitments to desire, and yet, there seems to be a bridge, where something like hope, dances, in a strange frenzy. Something like a desire which cannot be smuggled away into fact or capital, a stolen moment which somehow contributes to the eternal through its laughter and joy. Something remains, something sings, even in the pain. This strange book says: open me and write your way out of this prison!
Here 'en avant-premiere' is poem XV
"How do we keep our love-secret?
We speak from brow to brow
and hear with our eyes."
- Rumi
XV.
skin to skin
i breathe who you are
through the lung in my eye
i gobble your lies
i devour each one with laughter
licking the tips of your impudence
i have grown vast like an ancient olive
my silver leaves mirrors to skies azure
i do not need to look to find your mouth
nor call to hear your eyelashes caress my chest
you have grown vast also
like the deep underwater rivers
without which your whole land of liars
would lie beneath us in cinders
links to purchase
A Strange Frenzy - new book
I am delighted to announce the publication by Unbound Content of a short book of poems (17 in number) inspired by the mystical writings of Rumi.
The poems are accompanied by illustrations from Emily Faccini. Her drawings are simply marvelous.
I hope you enjoy the journey.
Here are the links to purchase :
Unbound Content
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.fr
And here :
to visit the website of Unbound Content
3 improvised moments for a young aubergine, for a kiss, for the dark
1
it is scarce
enough for a word or two
to slide along the hymen of your absence
dont speak
dont show me your eyes
be blind a minute
be lips for me
be tongue be remembrance
let my pen tip toe into you
be the beginning
of another chapter of scream
2
the words piled
burning compost of existence
i walked through there
it was a new roaming
with songs in my head
i had not written
i promise i said nothing
it all came alone
and said what it had to say
that was the beginning at least
of our poems' kissing
3
voices
equal to the scream
turned your suffering into song
still our lips
toothless in their unfathomable abyss
time of no time
they broke the piano
they smashed the insect with hideous wing
we were nobodies
again
in the little dark night
the graceful aubergine
you wish to kill
sung to me
i caught its violet flower
i broke the powders of its future dying
i sniffed their coming
i conjured a totem
i left
there is really nothing
it is scarce
enough for a word or two
to slide along the hymen of your absence
dont speak
dont show me your eyes
be blind a minute
be lips for me
be tongue be remembrance
let my pen tip toe into you
be the beginning
of another chapter of scream
2
the words piled
burning compost of existence
i walked through there
it was a new roaming
with songs in my head
i had not written
i promise i said nothing
it all came alone
and said what it had to say
that was the beginning at least
of our poems' kissing
3
voices
equal to the scream
turned your suffering into song
still our lips
toothless in their unfathomable abyss
time of no time
they broke the piano
they smashed the insect with hideous wing
we were nobodies
again
in the little dark night
the graceful aubergine
you wish to kill
sung to me
i caught its violet flower
i broke the powders of its future dying
i sniffed their coming
i conjured a totem
i left
there is really nothing
morning song
it is a Gypsy guitar morning
to dance silently on the terrace
in the dawn's warm invitation
it is a semi erect pine
blown by a northerly storm
into the sands of forgetting
it is the voice of an unknown woman
singing to me alone
from the stage of anonymity
the sea will take my bones
it will be full of salt wind
the sky will blacken
i will be alone finally
my poems scattered in the spume
an undying sunset
what constricts me is what hurts you
it stutters in my heel as i limp
the potatoes are under attack
as they flower in the white heat
the first zucchini small tender
fried with their orange flowers
delectable in egg batter
sprinkled parsimoniously with salt
the radishes are finished
too bitter now too hard
they will be cast to the eager rays of the sun
and burnt to compost
between midday and the dying night
i amble this evening
thinking of how much money one needs
to protect a dream
i fear the air they breathe
i do not trust the words
from beneath their southern smiles
spinach leaves raw peas
pungent rucola coriander plenty
parsley and basil gathered
water sprinkled carrots in ferrous earth
finally starting to grow
pain is a lizard mating in the jaws of morning
the grass snake seems to fly
over the dead weeds
the lizards jump to avoid its black gullet
the swallows year after year
build the same nest of dead olive twig and straw
somewhere you dance
somewhere you scream
i doubt these rumours which have you dead
your flamenco is an undying sunset
as you cry dry tears over your baby's sleeping brow
it stutters in my heel as i limp
the potatoes are under attack
as they flower in the white heat
the first zucchini small tender
fried with their orange flowers
delectable in egg batter
sprinkled parsimoniously with salt
the radishes are finished
too bitter now too hard
they will be cast to the eager rays of the sun
and burnt to compost
between midday and the dying night
i amble this evening
thinking of how much money one needs
to protect a dream
i fear the air they breathe
i do not trust the words
from beneath their southern smiles
spinach leaves raw peas
pungent rucola coriander plenty
parsley and basil gathered
water sprinkled carrots in ferrous earth
finally starting to grow
pain is a lizard mating in the jaws of morning
the grass snake seems to fly
over the dead weeds
the lizards jump to avoid its black gullet
the swallows year after year
build the same nest of dead olive twig and straw
somewhere you dance
somewhere you scream
i doubt these rumours which have you dead
your flamenco is an undying sunset
as you cry dry tears over your baby's sleeping brow
you learn falling
the Scirocco is a wind from the south
it fetches water from the far reaches of the Mediterranean
it brings cloud this morning over the olive grove
in the night the motorbike skidded to its death
the cars sliding under the bright full moon
i had one hand on the wheel
we were kissing the moon and the night
we stripped the blackness
sip my coffee this morning
gather the dead carcasses of the slugs
as i write to the soul music from that other planet
where my fellow poetess suffers
where they are trying to stop her beauty
with forms to compile and post
with lawyers and injunctions
with the insults of jealousy
and inverted adulation
i pick up the compost and the slender tomato plants
what else can i do
i must take advantage of these first clouds
i have lost too many seedlings already
their leaves crinkled or black
you learn falling the man said
there is no way forward
which is not backwards
into the errors we can repair
with love
it fetches water from the far reaches of the Mediterranean
it brings cloud this morning over the olive grove
in the night the motorbike skidded to its death
the cars sliding under the bright full moon
i had one hand on the wheel
we were kissing the moon and the night
we stripped the blackness
sip my coffee this morning
gather the dead carcasses of the slugs
as i write to the soul music from that other planet
where my fellow poetess suffers
where they are trying to stop her beauty
with forms to compile and post
with lawyers and injunctions
with the insults of jealousy
and inverted adulation
i pick up the compost and the slender tomato plants
what else can i do
i must take advantage of these first clouds
i have lost too many seedlings already
their leaves crinkled or black
you learn falling the man said
there is no way forward
which is not backwards
into the errors we can repair
with love
no need for tomorrows
in this baking august-may
the burnt grasses homes
to hungry lizards
must be harvested
much as a piano plays
for the echoes of a lost child
all the farmers know
any more rain is a bonus now
as they fix their leaky hoses
as they plant the final battalions
of peppers and aubergines and tomatoes
the peas are so sweet my friend
they rarely make it to the kitchen
we pull the first garlics
we merrily crunch on radish and lettuce
the rocket leaves marry well
with Parmesan and olive oil
the spinach nourishes the multitude
the last cauliflowers and broccolis
the fave are picked
they lie in the sun to blacken and dry
for faraway rainy winters
the first tiny courgettes along with their flowers
are gaily fried and munched
this cloudless week
has seen many casualties
collapsed seedlings pasted on the red muds
but the lavender and sage and cistus are in flower
there is something eternal
something contrary to man which delights me
in their necessary flowerings
it is dark now as i sip red wine
listening to Arabian jazz
i have punctured time
and yet still it screams revenge at me
sometimes an extra glass
brings eternity to your bedside
it is draped in images of olive groves in the sun
what i transmit now is the feeling of it
the rising moon of friendship
which needs not look for tomorrows
Salad for the Heart, for Marilyn Basel
young spinach leaves
crunchy spicy wild rocket
young fava beans from long green pod
spring red onion chopped fine
safran pecorino balsamic vinegar
unfiltered olive oil
cloudy green from terracotta jar
barley bread and malvasia bianca
brings a smile a song from blue
from afternoon heat to fresh dew morning
from celeritous green lizard to lazy black snake
rosemary bloom ends now to thyme and sage
from calendula to poppies
from dandelion to rocket
the day spent kneeling
to rake away the weeds
to part the ferrous earth
for a hundred tomatoes
fearing for their youthful stock
in the burning midday sun
it is late you say to take arrogances seriously
you sung of Rilke as now zinnias and peas
it is the same word you sing for an old fellow
whose echoes wade into the shallows of Michigan
there is love in everything you do
no judgement no shame
just these words which sing despite themselves
and challenge the plentiful to introspection
my knees hurt now as i write these tender words
i will dream of tomato saplings and sprouting purple basil
everything needs a guardian and i know you have one
every plant i place will live within a chaotic logic
garlic on either side of every tomato
mint with the potatoes
chick peas with broad beans
all this you know
you know these weeds are far more than that
they are the answer they are the antidote
far too easy of course to listen to your wisdom
as the world sleeps into folly dreaming of monsters
i open my garden to you
crunchy spicy wild rocket
young fava beans from long green pod
spring red onion chopped fine
safran pecorino balsamic vinegar
unfiltered olive oil
cloudy green from terracotta jar
barley bread and malvasia bianca
brings a smile a song from blue
from afternoon heat to fresh dew morning
from celeritous green lizard to lazy black snake
rosemary bloom ends now to thyme and sage
from calendula to poppies
from dandelion to rocket
the day spent kneeling
to rake away the weeds
to part the ferrous earth
for a hundred tomatoes
fearing for their youthful stock
in the burning midday sun
it is late you say to take arrogances seriously
you sung of Rilke as now zinnias and peas
it is the same word you sing for an old fellow
whose echoes wade into the shallows of Michigan
there is love in everything you do
no judgement no shame
just these words which sing despite themselves
and challenge the plentiful to introspection
my knees hurt now as i write these tender words
i will dream of tomato saplings and sprouting purple basil
everything needs a guardian and i know you have one
every plant i place will live within a chaotic logic
garlic on either side of every tomato
mint with the potatoes
chick peas with broad beans
all this you know
you know these weeds are far more than that
they are the answer they are the antidote
far too easy of course to listen to your wisdom
as the world sleeps into folly dreaming of monsters
i open my garden to you
The image we have of ourselves is not ours (Translation of a Juarroz poem)
One must let the negative of one's image
take shape within oneself,
the blacks and whites transformed,
the meanings transformed,
the abysses transformed.
One must allow the wrong side
to rise to the surface of oneself,
in order to see oneself differently,
to look at things differently.
One must allow the free form of oneself
rise in oneself
and let it mingle with its virtual images,
its lost images,
make it form a bouquet of all its images.
The images we have of ourselves are useless.
They undo themselves like a canvas without a frame,
they collapse like a mirror of dust
into death.
One must seek one's own negative
and instead of developing it, dig into it.
The image we have of ourselves is not ours.
We have loaned an image.
But its negative can be the path
to an image which is ours this time:
the positive side of a thought
which corrects the void.
(Roberto Juarroz, 2002, Translation Gabrielli)
take shape within oneself,
the blacks and whites transformed,
the meanings transformed,
the abysses transformed.
One must allow the wrong side
to rise to the surface of oneself,
in order to see oneself differently,
to look at things differently.
One must allow the free form of oneself
rise in oneself
and let it mingle with its virtual images,
its lost images,
make it form a bouquet of all its images.
The images we have of ourselves are useless.
They undo themselves like a canvas without a frame,
they collapse like a mirror of dust
into death.
One must seek one's own negative
and instead of developing it, dig into it.
The image we have of ourselves is not ours.
We have loaned an image.
But its negative can be the path
to an image which is ours this time:
the positive side of a thought
which corrects the void.
(Roberto Juarroz, 2002, Translation Gabrielli)
Blues for Maalouf 2
so many empty chairs
when to many a stone suffices
how much to lose
on the ascent
the tumbling hoof
stones once more
falling on the innocent
i climb with you
we are here by chance
we are visitors
we are accidents
which somehow do not happen
standing still
in a future moment
i feel like kicking all the chairs down
all the stones into the blue air
punching the living daylights out of
the goon who sprayed his weed killer
on once resplendent orchids
the victory of arrogance never ceases
his will to greater
and the dying bees
and the dying snakes
in the midnight moon the lame fox
preys on the mutant mouse
the earth cries from its open wound
and we are in there
our anger is only the will to continue
is that another arrogance
wouldn't it be best to push it all
down the burning slope
a fine apocalypse finally
the bees and poetry and all our magnificent children
sometimes smiling is impossible in this south
yet the sun effaces even idiots
the Mediterranean takes the lonely coke bottle to hell
and leaves it there with my bad temper
it will rain your music on this unknown city
on this my anger
i call it blues
i take so many supreme liberties
none greater than this writing itself
which stutters
which strides
which your trumpet soothes
serenading the bees as they die
for an extra ounce of meat
for an extra litre of oil
for some meagre profit
it is always for profit
the waters ineluctably polluted
the people slowly surely
poisoned and cured by the same hand
the taxi driver will risk his and your life
to take you to where you needn't go
to smoke a cigarette under a millenary olive tree at midnight
what does it matter
don't forget your malt whisky and hashish
your raw fennel munchies
hugging the most beautiful girl in the world
you will look over the valleys
signs
still to be written
in music
the bus will take you at dawn
through the pine woods and the groves
the homeless gathering kindling
in the waterless plains
you have to take your sound with you my brother
you cannot stop at every village
you are always already leaving
you must leave your tears in your eyes
one or two heavy suitcases
to cross the historical water
the ethnic divide
our chance is to be born into ignorance
the walls will no longer come down
they will rise again the same evening
in these lands of the deaf and the blind
in these lands of suffocating beauty
if we have enemies
even they are as unknown as us
they are the common murderers of beauty
bee killers and snake assassins
man cannot rid himself of the organ which kills
the ladies in headscarves know that
as they carry the grains to market
they sit on carpets
they talk in silent signs
the men smoke
dogs bark
you play your trumpet in silence
dawn your sister on a hill top
echoes
with stripes of silver and blue
when to many a stone suffices
how much to lose
on the ascent
the tumbling hoof
stones once more
falling on the innocent
i climb with you
we are here by chance
we are visitors
we are accidents
which somehow do not happen
standing still
in a future moment
i feel like kicking all the chairs down
all the stones into the blue air
punching the living daylights out of
the goon who sprayed his weed killer
on once resplendent orchids
the victory of arrogance never ceases
his will to greater
and the dying bees
and the dying snakes
in the midnight moon the lame fox
preys on the mutant mouse
the earth cries from its open wound
and we are in there
our anger is only the will to continue
is that another arrogance
wouldn't it be best to push it all
down the burning slope
a fine apocalypse finally
the bees and poetry and all our magnificent children
sometimes smiling is impossible in this south
yet the sun effaces even idiots
the Mediterranean takes the lonely coke bottle to hell
and leaves it there with my bad temper
it will rain your music on this unknown city
on this my anger
i call it blues
i take so many supreme liberties
none greater than this writing itself
which stutters
which strides
which your trumpet soothes
serenading the bees as they die
for an extra ounce of meat
for an extra litre of oil
for some meagre profit
it is always for profit
the waters ineluctably polluted
the people slowly surely
poisoned and cured by the same hand
the taxi driver will risk his and your life
to take you to where you needn't go
to smoke a cigarette under a millenary olive tree at midnight
what does it matter
don't forget your malt whisky and hashish
your raw fennel munchies
hugging the most beautiful girl in the world
you will look over the valleys
signs
still to be written
in music
the bus will take you at dawn
through the pine woods and the groves
the homeless gathering kindling
in the waterless plains
you have to take your sound with you my brother
you cannot stop at every village
you are always already leaving
you must leave your tears in your eyes
one or two heavy suitcases
to cross the historical water
the ethnic divide
our chance is to be born into ignorance
the walls will no longer come down
they will rise again the same evening
in these lands of the deaf and the blind
in these lands of suffocating beauty
if we have enemies
even they are as unknown as us
they are the common murderers of beauty
bee killers and snake assassins
man cannot rid himself of the organ which kills
the ladies in headscarves know that
as they carry the grains to market
they sit on carpets
they talk in silent signs
the men smoke
dogs bark
you play your trumpet in silence
dawn your sister on a hill top
echoes
with stripes of silver and blue
For Tomás Segovia
I heard with great sadness that Tomás Segovia has died at the age of 84 in Mexico where he was still teaching. Segovia was a tremendous poet but unfortunately very little has been translated, if anything, into English. There is a good collection in French called Cahier du Nomade. He used to post poems on his blog. His wife has kept the blog going. You can visit it here: http://tomassegovia2.blogspot.fr/. It is moving to go there and feel the signs of the passing genius. He has just flown to a land of echoes, to join with the echoes he has always left, here, the leavings of leavings, robbed from time, strange objects, outlaw meanings in a labyrinth of the precarious. Here is a translation I did of his rather complex but superlatively fascinating metaphysical poem, Don de lo Hecho. I remember sending it to him at the time and he replied in perfect English (he is very well known for his translations of Shakespeare). He said he was astonished that I had got so close to the original. I was moved and then sent him some of my own work including a piece which I dedicated to him and is now in The Parallel Body, poem 32. In fact the translation of this particular piece led me to the poem. I then send him the full collection and he wrote back immediately saying how he spontaneously enjoyed them and that my poetry was the type of poetry he immediately felt drawn to. Later when speaking with my editor, Marcus Reichert, we wondered if we might not use a sentence from his informal comment in an email for the back cover of the book. He quickly replied: "Of course you can, I do not believe in intellectual property." Truly the comment of a great and humble man. Later he invited me to the Spanish consulate in France for a talk on Cahier du Nomade. I could not make it. I wanted to go to Valencia and meet him last year. I didn't make it there either. Now it's too late. I really should have gone. Here is the stupendous poem. Tomás , sorry I never made it!
The Gift of what is Made
We should learn to forgive ourselves
for not having made the world Love you and I
to forgive the enigmatic nastiness of Time
humiliating father who never gives up
we should learn to stop fearing him
to look at his ghosts so they remain ghosts
to not die for having lived
to not be the ghosts of our ghosts
time - not love - made me
time nourished me from the sap of its betrayals
time sowed me already poisoned me with pluralism
all that time brought me was perishable
apart from the negation of myself by which I efface time
but what to do Love with this trickster
how do we play your triumphs against him
if you win against Time Love we have lost
I betrayed you since birth
I gave you lots of faces which only Time devoured
and all of them were you who were none other than him
and you always repeated yourself and you never said anything
or each time you spoke a real name
and all save the last you give to him
and once again you rip me up to give me to him so he can eat me
let's not joke Love shuffle the deck of cards
eat time and eat my life
I can tell you all your false names
and your false true names
start by speaking start at the end
don't start with the defences of fidelity
which is like building a castle with a moat of treachery
start by launching an offensive into the heart of Time to fight it
in your name I will betray my betrayals
and I will become faithful to the infidelity of Time
to you Love I can say everything
to you Love i can speak
in your name I oblige my time to speak to you
it is he and not I who will give you what he stole from me
you alone will be able to give the gift which is yours
this said for you there is nothing outside your life
and i am yours only and you alone are you
The Gift of what is Made
We should learn to forgive ourselves
for not having made the world Love you and I
to forgive the enigmatic nastiness of Time
humiliating father who never gives up
we should learn to stop fearing him
to look at his ghosts so they remain ghosts
to not die for having lived
to not be the ghosts of our ghosts
time - not love - made me
time nourished me from the sap of its betrayals
time sowed me already poisoned me with pluralism
all that time brought me was perishable
apart from the negation of myself by which I efface time
but what to do Love with this trickster
how do we play your triumphs against him
if you win against Time Love we have lost
I betrayed you since birth
I gave you lots of faces which only Time devoured
and all of them were you who were none other than him
and you always repeated yourself and you never said anything
or each time you spoke a real name
and all save the last you give to him
and once again you rip me up to give me to him so he can eat me
let's not joke Love shuffle the deck of cards
eat time and eat my life
I can tell you all your false names
and your false true names
start by speaking start at the end
don't start with the defences of fidelity
which is like building a castle with a moat of treachery
start by launching an offensive into the heart of Time to fight it
in your name I will betray my betrayals
and I will become faithful to the infidelity of Time
to you Love I can say everything
to you Love i can speak
in your name I oblige my time to speak to you
it is he and not I who will give you what he stole from me
you alone will be able to give the gift which is yours
this said for you there is nothing outside your life
and i am yours only and you alone are you
Video and Reading of Poem 22 from The Parallel Body
A big thanks to Vincent Segal and Ballake Sissoko for allowing me to use their sublime music from their recent album, Chamber Music. Hope you enjoy.
Orillas del Sar (A Translation)
ESTABAS desleida en la dulzura
de los secretos jugos de tu cuerpo
y te llevaba el agua
como a una larga cabellera verde
engendrada en los limos
obstinados del fondo.
Era tu forma ese deshacimento.
Brotar.
Fluir.
Abandonarse.
Bajaba el aire hasta los limites
perfectos de tu piel.
Blancura.
Y ya oblicuo, el poniente la encendia
para nacer de ti aquella tarde
de que lugar, que tiempo, que memoria.
(Orillas del Sar)
YOU WERE diluted in the sweetness
of the secret moods of your body
and the water carried you
like long green hair
bred in the obstinate
silts of the river bed.
This disappearance was your form.
To spring.
To flow.
To let go.
The air descended to the perfect
contours of your skin.
Whiteness.
And already oblique, the sun set it ablaze
to be born of you that night
in that place, that time, that memory.
(The banks of the Sar)
de los secretos jugos de tu cuerpo
y te llevaba el agua
como a una larga cabellera verde
engendrada en los limos
obstinados del fondo.
Era tu forma ese deshacimento.
Brotar.
Fluir.
Abandonarse.
Bajaba el aire hasta los limites
perfectos de tu piel.
Blancura.
Y ya oblicuo, el poniente la encendia
para nacer de ti aquella tarde
de que lugar, que tiempo, que memoria.
(Orillas del Sar)
YOU WERE diluted in the sweetness
of the secret moods of your body
and the water carried you
like long green hair
bred in the obstinate
silts of the river bed.
This disappearance was your form.
To spring.
To flow.
To let go.
The air descended to the perfect
contours of your skin.
Whiteness.
And already oblique, the sun set it ablaze
to be born of you that night
in that place, that time, that memory.
(The banks of the Sar)
Blues for Maalouf (when will you become a woman)
To the Following Music:
and the trumpet sounded the orient
where do you come from
in the night as the piano plays
another blues
when will you be woman
woman with a voice
you share a bed with memory
dark soils hide you from dawn
night a deeper cloak for a smile
there is no trust which is not distance
which does not sing from another land
in the desert sands
i was closer to this sound of trust
i played this naked piano first
i watched the blues pour from your eye
it wasn't a crime
it was the play of love on love
it was dawn being dawn
we are paths to nowhere
our graces are words
folded fingers of perfumes rare
leavened scriptures
kneaded by our bodies
crawl across
to where woman becomes woman
and the trumpet sounded the orient
where do you come from
in the night as the piano plays
another blues
when will you be woman
woman with a voice
you share a bed with memory
dark soils hide you from dawn
night a deeper cloak for a smile
there is no trust which is not distance
which does not sing from another land
in the desert sands
i was closer to this sound of trust
i played this naked piano first
i watched the blues pour from your eye
it wasn't a crime
it was the play of love on love
it was dawn being dawn
we are paths to nowhere
our graces are words
folded fingers of perfumes rare
leavened scriptures
kneaded by our bodies
crawl across
to where woman becomes woman
evening note to Rumi
I am not good but I worship your goodness.
I am not the red of wine but I am drunk on you.
Even if I am prone to ecstasies, my love for you is only slightly mad.
I am not the red of wine but I am drunk on you.
Even if I am prone to ecstasies, my love for you is only slightly mad.
an instinct to differ
poems are colours lost in the sky
voices below paintings
talking to songs
in search of logic
paths are to wander down
will they ever end
it is legitimate to ask
what makes the poet stop along the path
an instinct to differ
in what spheres has the poet travelled
to listen to a stone
to wait before a tree
as if mesmerised by a lover's chant
into what temporality
do guitars make me cry
with headaches of acoustic similarity
you are an olive tree
your cross armed kisses lost in shouting
you return
in fields of orange suns
on scattered carpets of snow dusts
beneath ancient olive bark
there is no knowing you
there is nothing
until the next time
until the next time
voices below paintings
talking to songs
in search of logic
paths are to wander down
will they ever end
it is legitimate to ask
what makes the poet stop along the path
an instinct to differ
in what spheres has the poet travelled
to listen to a stone
to wait before a tree
as if mesmerised by a lover's chant
into what temporality
do guitars make me cry
with headaches of acoustic similarity
you are an olive tree
your cross armed kisses lost in shouting
you return
in fields of orange suns
on scattered carpets of snow dusts
beneath ancient olive bark
there is no knowing you
there is nothing
until the next time
until the next time
a rare emotion
i was in a waterless river
its bed made of brittle stone
water had not filled it for millions of years
it would rain there
only two or three times a year
plants would grow
flower fertilise and propagate
in three day spans
before the sun's parched burning
exterminated all but their hardy seed
i threw that frontispiece poem out
i wrote it last
as if to say this is what i meant to do
i had no assurance i had done that
but the songs had sung in precedence
the pen had dipped into impossible rains
and something had been built
within the shadows where this writing dwells
a picture of something which cannot be
and must never try to
Celan spoke of the hour
between midday and midnight
when the rope is thrown
and the light of the star
could maybe shine
on you
but the poem you write
must court not only the star
but also the rope
which could easily
burn your throat
every time a poem touches a poem
something miraculous is born
the rarity
of finding an ego-less eye and ear
roaming these common paths for survivors
it is a rare emotion
for a poet
who never expected to be heard
(for Lisa Gordon)
its bed made of brittle stone
water had not filled it for millions of years
it would rain there
only two or three times a year
plants would grow
flower fertilise and propagate
in three day spans
before the sun's parched burning
exterminated all but their hardy seed
i threw that frontispiece poem out
i wrote it last
as if to say this is what i meant to do
i had no assurance i had done that
but the songs had sung in precedence
the pen had dipped into impossible rains
and something had been built
within the shadows where this writing dwells
a picture of something which cannot be
and must never try to
Celan spoke of the hour
between midday and midnight
when the rope is thrown
and the light of the star
could maybe shine
on you
but the poem you write
must court not only the star
but also the rope
which could easily
burn your throat
every time a poem touches a poem
something miraculous is born
the rarity
of finding an ego-less eye and ear
roaming these common paths for survivors
it is a rare emotion
for a poet
who never expected to be heard
(for Lisa Gordon)
Tonight
Tonight
smiles lost to stray gargoyles
cars to colliding good sense
ladies in the Adriatic winds
walk unto me
which way do you turn
do you look to the stars
do you unearth a wish
without you
i could not face the street
i could not curl nor unfurl
i am hidden in Drake's guitar
I write the word midnight
again and again
smiles lost to stray gargoyles
cars to colliding good sense
ladies in the Adriatic winds
walk unto me
which way do you turn
do you look to the stars
do you unearth a wish
without you
i could not face the street
i could not curl nor unfurl
i am hidden in Drake's guitar
I write the word midnight
again and again
Musings on Naught, Michael Mc Aloran's new chapbook from Erbacce Press
Mc Aloran's stance, awkward as it might seem, is ever clearer: the stubborn pursuit of his own difference. In this sense the poet is a geographer of the self, writing an intimate cartography of sensations. Such is the polysemic and molecular complexity of the land of Naught, the landscapes of this minutely individual world are becoming ever more fascinating to those of us who have seen Mc Aloran grow in stature and confidence. Of course the superficial diagnosis is gloomy and one can imagine the smirks as prudes and show-offs run for cover at the inglorious images of ungainly becoming which populate this world of poetic spirits. But in the fearful agony and pain, black too folds, its grey tinges weeping freely in the liberating drunkenness of release. Nursery rhyme ritornellos remind the fellow traveller of the coordinates of profound fear when personality can no longer help, where identity has been long gone and sensations are free to roam, to run, to sail. Yes there is another newly regained time, one which is a very well kept secret. Not a time to reminisce or pine, not a time to lament. Such Times are irrelevant. For the new nothing is a time of the surface, a time of moments immediately undone as they happen. Of minuscule events whose beautiful (in)significance is only apparent to those who have relinquished all forms of ideological bombardments in a world without ideals, hopes or purposes.
Surgeon scalpel to hand, the poet explores his own wounds and kicks dust into the voyeur-reader's judgemental countenance. The book? The narrator? The poem? Nothing so grand, barely fragments, barely sentences, barely words in this decidedly post-Beckettian cosmos. Hence this tongue in cheek, this lick in wound, humour, sarcasm and buffoonery. Irony died with the subject. Some internal rhyme, some petales du mal, sprinkled with black pollen, in a sunless desert. Mc Aloran guides us through Naught with malicious brilliance. There is no entitlement to hope, no body, barely these living wounds inscribed with the pen scalpel in the writer's land of affects, and some abject vomit and piss. The bile of centuries of literary invective has been learnt. Many past writers have been buggered and bastard infant-poems birthed. Critics and philosophers surrealistically ingurgitated. Poem dogs have been noosed to the eunuch totem of anxiety's future.
So the poet gets up today relatively free. He writes on the tympanum of futile tomorrow. He carries on despite the apparent apathy and indifference which surrounds his valiant efforts. He doesn't give a fuck that everyone seems to prefer poet laureates and Oxbridge graduate's effete musings about 'the truth,' 'first loves' or 'daisies and buttercups'. The poet is an animal and like a tick's essence is to suck blood, a poet's essence if ever he had one is to bleed the arteries of nothing. The counter-productive and counter-cultural vocation of the outlaw is to write the law of the future, a brave man once said. Even if there's no future? Why carry on then? Because there's little else to do, once you've travelled this place of Nothing, but to sprinkle this negativity with the dust of stars.
I find these mutterings beautiful and fascinating, I encourage you to read them, to live with them. To chart this country and live with the patois of a beautiful vagabond.
Strangely and amid great guffaws of laughter, the agonistic struggle of the ephebe continues. Beckett, Bataille, Popa, Rimbaud, Cioran can be heard in the interstices. The gauntlet constantly changes colour as any decent painter would will it. There is no fear of going mad. Literature has long been on the pyre, in the abattoir, in the pit. Artaud has burnt the interpretational masks over this chaos-cosmos.
Now spells are cast and sail freely through highly digitalised space. Messages are sent in real time. Tribes of like-minded poet warriors gather and disintegrate instantaneously. Spies and madwomen follow from acute vantage. Luckily Naught cannot be photographed. There will be no films or clips. The only trace is the one you read, inscribed in your blood. The poem without author. The bones without body. Precursors have failed miserably at such attempts because wounds must remain wounds in this world of anti-words. Why try to heal in a rotten and sick world? How absurd is that? Speaking as the last, after the last, in the impossible lasting, words are shattered, fractured, bludgeoned, infected, painted with venom and silent sickness and lovingly posted into the world become asylum. Silently they shall live in this laboratory for saccharine dependent patients with unlimited diseases.
Mc Aloran is a leader without followers. The best we can do is buy all his books and collect this marvellous and futureless opus.
This infectious book can be found here:
http://www.erbacce-press.com/#/michael-mcaloran/4542338472
Surgeon scalpel to hand, the poet explores his own wounds and kicks dust into the voyeur-reader's judgemental countenance. The book? The narrator? The poem? Nothing so grand, barely fragments, barely sentences, barely words in this decidedly post-Beckettian cosmos. Hence this tongue in cheek, this lick in wound, humour, sarcasm and buffoonery. Irony died with the subject. Some internal rhyme, some petales du mal, sprinkled with black pollen, in a sunless desert. Mc Aloran guides us through Naught with malicious brilliance. There is no entitlement to hope, no body, barely these living wounds inscribed with the pen scalpel in the writer's land of affects, and some abject vomit and piss. The bile of centuries of literary invective has been learnt. Many past writers have been buggered and bastard infant-poems birthed. Critics and philosophers surrealistically ingurgitated. Poem dogs have been noosed to the eunuch totem of anxiety's future.
So the poet gets up today relatively free. He writes on the tympanum of futile tomorrow. He carries on despite the apparent apathy and indifference which surrounds his valiant efforts. He doesn't give a fuck that everyone seems to prefer poet laureates and Oxbridge graduate's effete musings about 'the truth,' 'first loves' or 'daisies and buttercups'. The poet is an animal and like a tick's essence is to suck blood, a poet's essence if ever he had one is to bleed the arteries of nothing. The counter-productive and counter-cultural vocation of the outlaw is to write the law of the future, a brave man once said. Even if there's no future? Why carry on then? Because there's little else to do, once you've travelled this place of Nothing, but to sprinkle this negativity with the dust of stars.
I find these mutterings beautiful and fascinating, I encourage you to read them, to live with them. To chart this country and live with the patois of a beautiful vagabond.
Strangely and amid great guffaws of laughter, the agonistic struggle of the ephebe continues. Beckett, Bataille, Popa, Rimbaud, Cioran can be heard in the interstices. The gauntlet constantly changes colour as any decent painter would will it. There is no fear of going mad. Literature has long been on the pyre, in the abattoir, in the pit. Artaud has burnt the interpretational masks over this chaos-cosmos.
Now spells are cast and sail freely through highly digitalised space. Messages are sent in real time. Tribes of like-minded poet warriors gather and disintegrate instantaneously. Spies and madwomen follow from acute vantage. Luckily Naught cannot be photographed. There will be no films or clips. The only trace is the one you read, inscribed in your blood. The poem without author. The bones without body. Precursors have failed miserably at such attempts because wounds must remain wounds in this world of anti-words. Why try to heal in a rotten and sick world? How absurd is that? Speaking as the last, after the last, in the impossible lasting, words are shattered, fractured, bludgeoned, infected, painted with venom and silent sickness and lovingly posted into the world become asylum. Silently they shall live in this laboratory for saccharine dependent patients with unlimited diseases.
Mc Aloran is a leader without followers. The best we can do is buy all his books and collect this marvellous and futureless opus.
This infectious book can be found here:
http://www.erbacce-press.com/#/michael-mcaloran/4542338472
The Time Sculptor (re-opened)
I was lonely. Sitting down with empty pads, writing what I assumed were ideas, sculpting the contours of something, which resembled the outline of a thought, abstract shapes and black lines of suppositions. I didn’t ask anyone if I was right or wrong. I didn’t care. I was so profoundly alone I made friends with books. I cancelled dream and hope. I lived in a domain some people liked to call nothingness, but it was mine. It was my web and I was spider.
I imagined an impossible space, a space-less circle, in which my mind wandered and I spoke to myself on the wings of a secret music.
I wondered if it was space at all. My main preoccupation was time or how to annul it. I was a negativity trying to negate another. It was unequal combat but I felt strong. My Nietzschean vocation wholly intact, I hoped by ridding myself of inherited co-ordinates to surreptitiously creep away from physicality into a form of forgetting, a land of molten memories, a land of pure time, from peak to peak.
All my thoughts focussed on destroying memory as I aimed to take Time back into the marrow of nothingness through a breach in thinking. I wanted to make myself infinitely small and crawl through this hole painstakingly punctured in the membranes of time itself. The gamble could only be achieved of course if I myself became nothing, so slight as to be invisible. I could not personally get in the way of my experiment. I had to be absent a priori.
I sought out ditches, caverns, dimly lit grottoes where a terrifying obscurity heralded an infinite optimism and a beautiful forgetting. I was on a journey through darkness to the other side of the night, to the humble acceptance of a new dawn as nothing. Here, I whispered to myself: there is blindness in seeing so let us close our eyes. There is too much noise, too much useless music so let us create silence. I shall sculpt nothingness. Non-time will dance through my fingers. This is my obstinate objective, my aim and my hope. I call it freedom, although you could say that I am trapped in paradox. I know that the words I use are inadequate to express this venture, but there are no others. I will follow the poet and pray the non-religious prayer: Accept paradox and the sky’s thundering. Yes, I am getting there.
Instinct guided all my movements. Improvisation was everything. My words had to be bled of moments. I forced myself to write only in states of fullness or total emptiness. Nothing in between. Events spoke through me and I simultaneously freed myself of what I never could become in fact.
There is euphoria in the renting open of time. There is a hilarious passage through, out and into an outside world of wonders. Something like paradise in this hell, something like a vision after a season in hell. Our eyes can’t believe what they see because believing always comes after; hence we can truly write what we see without seeing it. We can laugh without scorn and hatred. So it is with these movements of thought, which come as they are written. O patience and song! O navigation in rivers undone!
The time sculptor is here again. He left and came back. He withdrew into the sea to live with the colour green, where the scorching Mediterranean sun is his friend, he said:
Be patient, sometimes we need to begin at the end before discovering the middle without beginning or end. Keep moving, these pages are infinite.
The Time Sculptor counts grains of sand in dunes of night. He is an undoing and a running. He is a pool of infinity. Non-time can be written.
I imagined an impossible space, a space-less circle, in which my mind wandered and I spoke to myself on the wings of a secret music.
I wondered if it was space at all. My main preoccupation was time or how to annul it. I was a negativity trying to negate another. It was unequal combat but I felt strong. My Nietzschean vocation wholly intact, I hoped by ridding myself of inherited co-ordinates to surreptitiously creep away from physicality into a form of forgetting, a land of molten memories, a land of pure time, from peak to peak.
All my thoughts focussed on destroying memory as I aimed to take Time back into the marrow of nothingness through a breach in thinking. I wanted to make myself infinitely small and crawl through this hole painstakingly punctured in the membranes of time itself. The gamble could only be achieved of course if I myself became nothing, so slight as to be invisible. I could not personally get in the way of my experiment. I had to be absent a priori.
I sought out ditches, caverns, dimly lit grottoes where a terrifying obscurity heralded an infinite optimism and a beautiful forgetting. I was on a journey through darkness to the other side of the night, to the humble acceptance of a new dawn as nothing. Here, I whispered to myself: there is blindness in seeing so let us close our eyes. There is too much noise, too much useless music so let us create silence. I shall sculpt nothingness. Non-time will dance through my fingers. This is my obstinate objective, my aim and my hope. I call it freedom, although you could say that I am trapped in paradox. I know that the words I use are inadequate to express this venture, but there are no others. I will follow the poet and pray the non-religious prayer: Accept paradox and the sky’s thundering. Yes, I am getting there.
Instinct guided all my movements. Improvisation was everything. My words had to be bled of moments. I forced myself to write only in states of fullness or total emptiness. Nothing in between. Events spoke through me and I simultaneously freed myself of what I never could become in fact.
There is euphoria in the renting open of time. There is a hilarious passage through, out and into an outside world of wonders. Something like paradise in this hell, something like a vision after a season in hell. Our eyes can’t believe what they see because believing always comes after; hence we can truly write what we see without seeing it. We can laugh without scorn and hatred. So it is with these movements of thought, which come as they are written. O patience and song! O navigation in rivers undone!
The time sculptor is here again. He left and came back. He withdrew into the sea to live with the colour green, where the scorching Mediterranean sun is his friend, he said:
Be patient, sometimes we need to begin at the end before discovering the middle without beginning or end. Keep moving, these pages are infinite.
The Time Sculptor counts grains of sand in dunes of night. He is an undoing and a running. He is a pool of infinity. Non-time can be written.
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