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.

I still don't know if I got off at Gospel Oak

or at a purple and 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

to 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 cipress

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- her whirr of voice

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

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.

A LETTER (VIRGINIA WOOLF TO VITA SACKVILLE-WEST)

(MONK'S HOUSE, RODMELL, 1933) 

The downs sizzle across the marsh

with all the dust and ashes of my brain.

I hold a green parasol to deflect the sunrays

scorching like embers of my last sensual dreams.

I could write oodles of volumes about the lives

I lived in just one second of this silence

to finally celebrate the heat fainting

among the dahlias, near a vagabond

kipping under a gorse shrubbery.

I lay flat on the grass at Leonard's feet,

follow the flight of a white owl

crossing the meadow to Brighton.

My white owl soaring above cornfields, blue wagons;

my black spaniel barking the sheep away.

A draught of digitalis is slowing my pulse.

Who brought home this great jar of oleanders?

You? Don't remember...

An Emperor moth hovers over their heady aroma

blended into the smell of rain.

Reading Jane Austen's letters by a log fire

She died at 42, the best to come

Leonard has turned on the wireless: 

Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring...

Asheham Cement is now all noise and smoke by day

and light by night. The Rite of Progress...

Ah meretricious gesture of my fingers

wriggling into my crotch. I miss your presence

in the green fields of Kent, dancing high

on cider, hashish and Lady-bits.

I am still spinning with the last night shindy:

dressed up as Queen Victoria on her wedding night

I fell into the arms of the Prince Consort

suddenly turned by charm into a black savage

of Mauritania in the nude. Halfcut he whispered:

"I want to film The Waves"

The outcome upon the royal blood

has yet to be discovered.

The thrushes sing. Leonard is pruning the fig tree,

and Violet Trefusis sent me a bunch of lilacs.

I like her drinking brown ale in purple satin.

How can I smooth out all the glooms of late?

Miss you, Donkey, I want pink towers, green follies,

moats and swans, one tireless bull pacing

up and down.  You, in shorts. Me with no garters,

no undergarments, my gingerous muff pearled with dew

blossoming in your mouth.

No more digitalis. No more Spanish wine.

Ah it was the sight of your gaiters

that inspired Orlando

("the gaiters and what lies beyond")

as the sight of the violet socks

 of Fabrizio del Dongo

flared up the passion in Madame Sanseverina.

I write all this twaddle while travelling books

on the way to Sussex

My teacher is called Bianca Weiss. I am learning

the language of love and dolce far niente

Tell me, amore, what are you doing in New York?

Do you like Blacks as Nancy Cunard?

Did a handsome one screwed you ever?

London is so quiet, one hears a man

blowing his nose in Kensington High Street.

Almost dreamily I write Flush, a silly book, a joke,

O write me long letters on violet scented paper.

Flush is black in the novel though was red in real life.

You are always mauve in dreams.

Please, darling, ask me to Sissinghurst.

Ask me to be off in my car to Italy.

Ask me to be one of those virgins you deflower

and make them the most awesome flowers in Pink Tower.

Now I must take a bath, all lust and ink stained.

Must dress and take a hamson cab to a dinner in Pall Mall...

Did I tell you I'm going to be painted naked by a woman

who says I am the image of Lilith?*

Did I tell you my notion of Heaven is mushrooms?

Did I tell you I have a marmoset that nibbles on my ear,

bites my nipple and I come?

Would you ring me up to Lewes 385 soon?

Though your voice in the telephone

is a leaf in the breeze.

Send me a basket full of quinces afresh.

*Ethel Walker (Scottish artist, 1861-1951)

.                   Ethel Walker, Lilith, 1916

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 erect 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 sozzled angels

 alight on.

Love my empty life where gracefully

I riff on the piano without knowing 

how to play it... And listen to myself

as if it was a Beethoven's sonata:

a brief sonata of violet waves 

breaking into the

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 couchant 

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 ways

 to the blue Void.

Somewhere in the past

lay all the meaning

of our next soul.

POEM

 

Just now the sun extended to me a glass

of elderberry wine.

I shut the eyes and sipped and wassailed.

I opened the eyes: the world ain't there anymore,

not even my books and the sea.

Circe and Helen smirked

staring at my solitude. 

I bit a golden apple.

And the vast Time got distorted, dwindled

to becoming a blade of grass.

EPITAPH

 

That no one loves you

at this stage of life

in any walk of life

it does care less

that the touch of violet waves

back and forth in reveries

the brush of crane wings

flying unto the 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 with light my silver bowl.