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 am already home

with your favourite Jaffa cake and white 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 memorable 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 at dusk.

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.

SHADE

 

 

I do well in the shade  near the hydrangeas

and my dreaming cat   without the tyranny of the sun

spotlighting everything I do well.

Only the violet shade can shine up

all this black brooding from the spirit,

the wishfulthinkingness of life.

A true poet is a hawker crying out

to sell the goods of his soul knowing

that only the Devil can afford them.

.  

ASHES

 

my own ashes well kept

 in a transparent urn

of heartwood and amber.

Shall I scatter them from a cliff

in Patmos or maybe in Corfu?

perhaps they might turn into a white trireme

 sailing away to the sun. Perhaps

I'll be expecting so long for the arrival

that a war in Troy will break out again; 

this time Priam would be the victorious one

and Ulysses crushed by his own wooden horse.

and Helen up to the creek sick of Paris

would end up jumping on the white trireme

seaworthy for the distant Egypt.

 patiently patiently I'd be expecting: the world

has defeated me but not the freedom

of my wandering ashes.

POEM

 

I love my empty life 'cause 

also empty are the haunted houses

where the dead saunter around

with breeze-like feet and voices

of drizzle tapping on the windowpanes.

In the lounge of my empty life

I am sitting on a bidet of lapislazuli

reading Joyce surrounded by unicorns 

that mistook my self for the Virgin:

 they approach and sip dewdrops

 in the mossy well of my hands.

I pet their horns of erected whiteness.

The lounge of my empty life is infinite

like the Universe and Circe's laughter.

It has no walls but the sea and the horizon.

It has no light but glowworms 

and your eyes, Maria. 

Lumière mariale 

It has no windows but words

 overlooking ravines

where cranes, bats and sloshed angels

 alight on.

Love my empty life where gracefully

I riff on the piano without knowing 

how to play the thing... And listen to myself

as if being entranced by the most 

perfect rendition of a Beethoven's sonata:

a brief sonata of violet waves 

breaking into 

                       deserts of vast eternity. 

POEM

Alone

At the edge

 of my manifold shadow

I saw the light

That I'll never see

(Lumière mariale)

All boasting truth

Ends up like those

lettuce leaves wilted 

in the shopping trolley 

Consider the lilies

 of my turd 

POEM

The March robin song

 signalling my renaissance

 from the last defeated

 renaissance.

No more words 

that shine

 like a prop sun 

on the horizon. 

Ah the beauty 

of the ubi sunt moment.

The beauty 

of a suited-up minister

playing a tuneful recorder

to a beggar in the street.

Goodbye

to the hectoring tone

Of my voice 

at any old stone

lion in West End. 

The wooden fish 

that Buddhist monks

Beat during the prayers

Is my life.

Once in many a dream

I hear their Sutra 

enlightening

the many pathways 

 to the blue Void.

Somewhere in the past beckons

the foredoomed meaning

of my next soul.

KIKU-NERI

 

The temple bell rings a cristaline sound

like the mute whisper of the dead.

Clouds of starling swirl in a glow as bright

as the red flame of a baker's oven at dawn.

The sun streams its morning smile

upon the poppy fields. 

Thought-worn and at last 

person of no interest

I knead chrysanthemums into a silver bowl

to beg for alms in the streets.

Far from the tweedy gathering

of soft-cops and merchants de sommeil.

My senescent heart is now a heart of jade

see-through and pure like crystal rock.

I lay myself out to be stared by the stars

Upon the wings of passing shadows.

The stars, indifferent, sideglance at me

brimming over with light my silver bowl.