Thirst and the Sea

you lost her
in your arms
her final heartbeat
was yours
you turned to the desert
not the sea
your poem
began that day
your parched throat was hers
in a sea without water
your thirst for her
for her hand
for her lips
for her bosom
waves in your verse singing
for her who was still you
in the desert alone
you would always be together
you called her back
line after line
you begged
the wounded earth in labour
to bring her back
your voice
calling to the elements
calling each tear with a new name
all names were hers
your voice
hers to call
to unite thirst with thirst
and live on in song

A reading of poem 15 from my book, The Parallel Body. The poem is called Thirst and the Sea and was written for the Egyptian Jewish writer, Edmond Jabès.

http://www.bookdepository.com/book/9780956103857/The-Parallel-Body

Morning Eulogy for Nina Simone

with every mistrusted minute
intolerable loves
break out into an insufferable song

the hapless gasp of what cannot be
runs through every conduit of light and dark

to place the impossible jewel of the impossible love
into an impossible crown

betrayal beckoned
blackened the blackness
liberated the hatred
sung the sweetness
for nothing
for hopelessness
for you who were you
lastly
alone

and the crowds came
to cluster around your piano
around the dulcet venom
around the unforgiving anger

applaud the queen
applaud the goddess
applaud the diva of soul
high priestess of intolerable beauty

lost child in life's mayhem
loved by her voice

which the populace could never hear
until they placed rhythms to it
which never should have been

plastic close ups beat the fragrances of spring kisses

who can still smell your lament

as the mass weep before heaps of hideous plastic flowers
for the dead they can't remember
for their dead friends who live in their salacious minds
programmed to erect eject salivate reject

yes my dear
so it is
they have no heed
your voice hopeless
from a land yonder
unwelcome here
where dreams of nonsense rise
in collective orgasm
exchanging artless loves

O the incompetent lovers

they were not worth it

whoever was you never met
or never trusted
or never sung
the echo of your mutual becomings
lost and misunderstood
forever
in this diminishing land of lost souls
where love cannot be
where the winds are the objective complement
of the highest angers caressed by God's finger
where History spoke hushed crushed
as your piano
as your black bird
as your Porgy

as you


(for Nina Simone)

Conversations with Neruda 1

i cannot wake the lateness
the parted anticipations of your sleeping legs

i read sonnets
celebrating the greatness of a love
great time justified and redeemed by love

time i once
lost to the harshness of thought

tear away at the corpse
break illusions and romance

absent rivers
crash through the walls of your poetry's absent house
meter and rhyme and cohesion
tattered and torn
lines going nowhere
but to the love who gathers all to herself
the earth and the flowers and the fragrances of wonderment

against you
thought emits signs
in another sphere
close to the unthought
rises the pearl
which buds

and the loved one suffers
the badness of my company
institutional pariah
sunk in a song of perpetual becoming

oh yes i do
i love your stamen breasts
your pollen your orange fragrance
your bud your clusters your saline promise

you overwhelm the poem
with a common metaphor

because the sun still shines
the sea changes colour every hour
the sunset deceives every mortal minute

and i love you as a second skin of perspiration
i love you as the shadow of my own feminine absence

it was hot that summer in Salento
the figs were sweet purple and golden with drops of sugar lime
we poured primitive wines over each other
sipped with black lips under alternative suns

there were no invitations
only the pull of the tide
scarves of spume draped around our kissing necks

love was a moment
ripped from a fragment of blue cloth
shreds of erect tongue
on the surly bud of metaphor

come with me girl
deeper
three miles down
past the bluesman and the novelist

on a journey out of time

burning fiercer than romance

if you could only follow me
if you could only bend with me toward this black sun

kiss me as thoughts rise
penciled on your mauve softness

yes something would be won
something great will come
from eternity's horizon
drops of silver
from vanquished sobs of a mutilated sun

As the Beggar Sings

from the perches of your amorous perfection
the irony of your smile
daggers my wounds

i dream of crying

i can cry tearlessly all the sadness
from the rump of that bitch of the Mediterranean
as she crashes down on my cowed corpse

as the beggar sings

i never buried nobody
never stole no cents
all this judging cuts holes in my flesh

the embrace of darkness' cinders scolds my hollow eyes

flames burn lonesome in the ruins of useless embers

my enemies do not sleep and they hunt in packs
they have large stupid jaws with ugly words hanging from their tongues

my back is an open target
for their venomous darts

evolution had its way

it beat singularity and creativity to death

and now i roam
and now i roam

and now i beg a god could come
from this battered earth
and leave me solace
in the form a lonely poem

Witness to a Storm (after reading Yeats)

the grey stormbuoyant and dark in the sky
my legs crossed upon a bench
dark shiver from the deep

ladybird on my knee
boisterous fly expelled with open book

ladies' silhouettes past my insouciant eye

great is the spectacle beyond
lightning's prongs stabbing the rising waves
digging into mirrored grey spume

anger gnaws at heaps of seaweed
at the beach's diminishing border

the sun dances in my lap
seemingly unaware
of the storm's vagrant antagonism

just so i have been witness to the world
to the howls the rage the despair

bathing visitors hurry to umbrage

still my pen holds sway

i have no eager appetite to negate
long murky lines of horizon's rains
drawing a smoky curtain
over naked nature's pains

rather turn the pen over
spill this ink
clasp the concave moment
as light assembles into dark

clouds into torrent

Solitude 1

one day i shall writewithout hiding my words
from the smiles of day

i shall clothe myself
in dry stones

lizards shall cavort within my vagrant walls

my infinite limbs shall stretch
from the ends of the earth
to the blue horizon

i shall finally accumulate thoughts in emptiness
as the black snake stores heat from the southern sun

i shall laugh as i sing
a meandering passage toward the light

under the ink waters of silence

"Ecrire le livre, c’est associer sa voix à celle, virtuelle, des marges, c’est écouter les signes nager dans l’encre – tels vingt-six poissons aveugles – avant de naître au regard, c’est-à-dire de mourir en se fixant dans leur dernier cri d’amour, alors, dans l’essentiel, j’aurai dit ce que j’avais à dire et que chaque page savait déjà ; c’est pourquoi la forme aphoristique est l’expression profonde du livre, car elle permet aux marges de respirer, car elle porte en soi la respiration du livre et exprime l’univers en une fois." (Edmond Jabès)


i am singing under the ink waters of silence
i have no idea where i am going
until i hear you
you who are as lost as i am
you who ask how the question questions
and swim within it

you walk along the same path of words
with the same gravel stones in your shoes

my wounds are your wounds
in the fourth dimension
and the fifth and the sixth

everything must be reinvented
you found your loved one in a tree which did not exist
you serenaded him with Harlequin's borrowed guitar

thus there was a clearing in the wood
there was shade from a scorching sun

flocks of fluttering words gathered to this sacred umbrage
i would happily lend you all my songs

i know it is dark sometimes
as the lines of destiny fall
into the black holes of misfortune
we are profoundly lost in these moments
we fall foul of our words
and we insult language
opening our flesh with scathing daggers
the words which swarm
are poisonous ants
tarantulas and pestiferous vermin

we do not dare turn
the dagger on our loved ones
so we turn it upon ourselves
cutting with precise incision

i carried my pain with me
to the millenary olive groves
to sit with me on my ancient Greek rock
to feel with me this warm dawn of pale pink seduction

o gentle words
i feel your silver shoals around me
glinting in the absent lights

if you lose me
make a rope of coloured letters my love
tie them around this olive tree
with leaves of lavender scented winds

if you lose me
leave red wine tears in the punctured vessel of time
look through its primitive perforations
you will see me dancing
with the body of a silver harp

only in the desert can we read the signs
on the inner lining of our blue eyelids