METAPHYSICS OF THE SHADOW

    

  

Pindar said

a man is just a dream 

of his shadow

I am the nightmare

of my walking shadow

I am not even sure if 

it's mine.

*

Plotino refused to be

portraited because his self

was only the shadow

of his platonic prototype.

The shadow of a shadow

of a shadow of a shadow...

And the last shadow just

a seagreen twinkle

 in my cat's gaze.

*

Sat upon a rock in Montségur 

stronghold of the hapless 

Cathars and songful birds

the poet aligned his heart

to the sun in summer solstice

The poet became one of the Perfecti:

his shadow went back to his loft 

in the big city 

FLASHES

 

Wild geese

where are you going now?

Sweet day not to alight

where the clan of hyenas

drink at sunset.

*

the past is not a foreign country

the past is already my country

for good. A country with no flag

other than laughter and the erect

phallus of an African god.

*

She sprung like a goddess

from the whirling froth

of dream-seascapes

He stepped into her glance

with the randomness

of a fallen card

following the saline fragance

of her vellus hair

She embraced him with a touch

of a dolphin playing around

dissolving him

in the sunblind waves.

*

Etiolated like a daffodil

trodden upon by footfall and rain

I was in a cafe

of the station concourse

but the last glance

 she gave me at leaving

became a robin redbreast

 in the garden

staring at me with hope. 

*

I am a mortal who made love

with a goddess

and must die

and will never know

the goddess'name.

*

Don't bite again

the wrong side of the apple

-said the Sphinx squatted

in the middle of a vast desert

among the italianate ruins

of my mind

A sandstorm coating

her lion-wise head

*

The dogs scenting me.

I am already a wolf.

Maybe the moon.

*

like Anaxagoras I point to the stars

as my native home

even beyond the dark matter

*

All day long 

I've been smelling deep

the moonshiny aroma

 of jasmine trellises.

All night long

I've been smelling deep

the jasmined aroma

of the moonlight.

*

Odd times

I write to God

and she replies to me

in form of dancing cranes.

BEHOLDING THE LONDON GLOOM FROM THE OVERGROUND....(SUNDOWNER)

 

'He triumps now, the dead,

Beholding London's gloom'

(Lionel Johnson)

Beholding the London gloom

 from the overground

                                bound to Gospel Oak. 

There is a beam of fickle sunlight

 that glares onto the buildings plateglass

a succession of drystone walls 

with all the verdigris

of centuries and drizzles.

*

Komorebi

                     -so call the Japanese 

the sunbeams filtered through the trees.

 I want to be called Komorebi, Komorebi,

 even the tender sound of the word

subdues the clicketyclack of the train

alighting on West Hampstead.

Call me Komorebi, Anne, when I be home

with your favourite Jaffa cake and carnations.

Conatus 

               -so called Spinoza the strength

driving each human being to carry on...

Carry on in this gloominess, Jo, 

keep at watching those strands of light 

along the bridges and fences.

But how could I avoid watching all that knackered

people in tracksuits and elegant suits?

How can I get rid of that voices chewing

like cows trite and rain-streaked words?

How can I turn all that mud into light?

I can listen outside the leaves 

of the ash trees hissing in the wind.

I can see a posse of thugs that pull

a mooney to the train passing by.

I can see a pigeon pecking at a dog-end.

Carry on, mental Jo, sing along with the rain

pitter-patter on the cobblestones.

"Something will turn up"

                            -says Wilkins Micawber 

with his eye-glass and walking stick

 waving at me a silk hankie from a park bench.

I smirked him back.

Disabused of reality, down-trodden by hope...

Carry on, mental Jo, ya scum of the earth

enlisted to drink, ya closet poet, dotty low-lifer,

man up and stop nursing the same flummery moans...

*

A smell of deep-fry 

cast my reveries away.

Still don't know

 if I got off at Gospel Oak

or rather at a purple  desolate

 seaside in Devon.

THE BAREFOOT POET

The barefoot poet walks carelessly

over the last shards of his wisdom:

crimson, green, blue, yellow shards

glinting by the autum gloam.

Far from bleeding his feet sing out

all the paths he never wandered

all the paths he is just traversing

all along the next life.

BAREFOOT

 

The uneventful life of a poet

barefoot in soiled dungarees

deadheading carnations

first thing in the morning

trying to balance the scales

of justice and madness.

Satiated his magpie need

for shiny words

he leaned a ladder

against an invisible wall

to climb for his shadow

stolen by the dimming stars.

He hears goat-bells

from a violet distance,

the rustling of some cypress

that godly seems

to hallow the morning

crowned by a sun

forever in childhood

forever in gold.

PASTORAL

 

An old van rusting away

by an elm-lined footpath,

a cat stares at me bemused

like someone seeing a ghost.

A dray horse weary near

an old stone trough

bites a beam of sunshine,

huffs and puffs at hearing

my sighs.

There is an apple tree nearby

a honeycomb of irate bees

there is a beetle corpse dragged

by ants on a straight line

there is a din of merry birds

circling above

and the sudden sight of a naked

maiden riding a deer

there is the hermit's ramshackle hut

where I'll be kipping for a while

over the dead leaves

a brownish skull as a pillow

a firefly as a lover.

*

Like a salesman 

who sells pure mornings 

never stained by polluted cities

venal glories,

I sat over an oak stump

to bargain with the stars above

my next cloak of invisibility:

there hardly I am but I am

at least bedazzled

by the flying squirrel

about to jump

upward to the moon.

(2007)

LETHOLOGICA*

 

Like a moth buzzing around a flower

as she can't alight on a word. 

(Virginia Woolf)

I cannot find the right word

to define my present station of life.

Maybe quietus, maybe oddling.

Oddling crow in the quietus

of a back and forth existence.

The right word is a moth flitting

around the light we'll never see

for good. The right word is

like Democritus in his garden

laughing off for nothing

while tending black roses.

*The inability to remember a particular word or name.