Standing at the revolving belt
of a Japanese buffet
he picked out a teriyaki bowl.
Soon the bowl is empty soon
full of gleaming tears. A tiger-moth
flitting over the gleam.
A mug of coffee steamed up
the windows of his mutism
where suddenly someone smiled.
Someone who loved him the most
but never existed.
©Osara New York
A trysting couple
about to kiss each other
by an opalized light of June
that bathes the seaside promenade.
Van dwellers dancing to a gypsy
accordion like dogs barking
around a bonfire.
The sea hushed and aglitter.
A solitary poet at a pub bench sips
a glass of frothing Guinness
and waxes lyrics on a serviette
about the couple the squeezebox.
The moon waxing full
over the twilighted promenade
regardless the sigh-lorn poet
and the lovers now parting
gloomy without a word.
In a red and white puppet booth
Judy takes a swipe at Punch.
The van dwellers still dance wildly
under the spell of gypsy tunes.
©Aric S. Queen
Just now the sun proffers to me
a glass of elderberry wine.
Then a glass of mead.
I shut the eyes and sip.
I open 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 gets distorted
and dwindles
to become a blade of grass.
Time small as a pebble.
Once upon a time there was
a tabby cat called Melampyge
(so named after Casanova's dog)
he was the only deceased
when the San Marco's campanile
was doomed to collapse in 1902
Last night I dreamt myself petting
Its harlequin-fur at sunset just before
the tragedy came across la Serenissima
Rilke the poet -a black Homburg in hand-
was walking past me at a seraphic pace.
He whispered with a broad smile his last elegy
to some kind of elegant Comtesse
attired in blue organza and yellow gloves
Both blended slowly into the foggy backstreets
Melampyge (podgy but nimble)
followed their ambling shadows
that scent the canals with violet hues.
I followed Melampyge toward the hidden
alleys off the beaten paths in Dorsoduro.
Suddenly Rilke looked back
and frosted his countenance
with exactly the same blue eyes
of the cat glinting at me
just before running away
rightwards la Piazza San Marco...
What were they singing the Titanic's coal stokers?
What did they choir along in the steam engine
while shoveling coal on end amid screams,
expletives and sailor jokes?
What were they humming larksome soaked
in rills of sweat, ale and eating beef stew, plum
pudding like ravenous gannets?
Were they guided finally by Virgil as a lodestar
while walking through the last and eternal
flames of their lives?
What did they ever sing somewhere
in the waiting room to the other side
through the pearly gates?
I hear their hobnail boots tapping
a rag-time on the flooded floor.
A child is
(still not an exile
not a failed bard not
a kind of eternal castaway)
skipping ropes at sunset
in his native home patch
called Sueño
Reparto Sueño
a child
collecting silver caps
of milk bottles earthworms
blue marbles pick-up sticks
like coins to pay for daydreaming..
another kid in the shade
of a flowering mango tree
still expects his father
from a far-off war
like a dog mourning
its master by his grave
A red sun hangs
on the sea-scented horizon
glittering like a goldfish
in a plastic bag.
Here I am in this garret
where no insulting light
could glimmer on
my endless guffaw
like taking a curtain call
and bowing down
to be acknowledged
by an audience of ghost-
like beauties
in broad morbidezza.
I drunk a swig of hemlock
along with the ghost of Keats
and all of the sudden
the blue-green waves of poetry
rushed at last into the most
beautiful words.
Oh love, stay there in the sunshine
don't tarry long beside this gloom.
"Sunt Lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt"
(Virgil, Aeneid, Book I)
Tears of things are gleaming
in the darkness of memories.
Camellia, cherry blossoms
fill up the ground of my mind.
Tears of things like dew drops
on the bones of springtime
picked clean by the moon.
(the memory
lost by the moon
is mine)
Tears of things
sparkling like stars,
the stars are tears
of the unknown
forever.
When I was a child a dense swarm of bees
Poured into my mouth pure forest honey.
So it happened to Isidore of Seville
when he was just a nipper, legend says.
Everyone expected of me the eloquence
Of a saint in Damask, a rethorician in Athens.
But nobody, not even my mother knew
About those bees having already sipped
into the white asphodels down in Hades ,
into the delusive oleanders in Arcadia.
Nobody expected of me to be a poet,
a secret polisher of words, the amanuensis
of the invisible...
I still can listen their humming on my lips.
(2006)
I cried the louder at birth
so loud that all the hollow deep
of Hell resounded...
but I was not orphan like Oliver Twist
in Pentonville, London.
Just brought into this world
sired by the sullen glare
of tropical sunsets.
I cry now -even louder-
at my mother's ascent
into the unknown as a skylark
from a garden of blue roses
by the sea.
I saw her soaring embracing the sun.
*
o moth!
night-rover of England
roaming from hedge to hedge
from sweetbriars to gooseberries
from gooseberries to the moonrise
from the moonrise to finally alight
on the mirror reflecting
the most dulcet smile
of my late mother
o moth!
*
Dear mum, you already rest
in some melodious plot of beechen green
guarded by rain-soaked crows
and squirrels in Hampstead Heath.
Your ashes glowing as a constellation
of fresh stars or a new moon goddess.
Oftentimes the Constable's white horse
in a gallopade neighs your name.
Something in the aroma of your name
calls to mind the scent of wild moors.
I smell the aroma grazing along
with the horse, now cantering in blue.
And the world outside stop mattering.
Pindar said
a man is just a dream
of his shadow
I am the nightmare
of my walking shadow
not even sure
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
sat upon a rock in Montségur
but his shadow rushed back
to his lofty mansarde in the old Paris.
*
Smelling the days
like an idiot savant
sniffs the numbers
he scavenges the night
like vulpine figures
searching for his own shadow:
early morning he traded it
for a bottle of wine and a mongrel
who laughs out loud
instead of barking to the moon.
.
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 a wild laughter
and the erect phallus
of an African god.
*
(Venus Anadyomede)
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.
*
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 event horizon
*
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.
*
A scarecrow wrapped
in a military overcoat
receives the splashdown
of prison vans and lorries
passing by.
A symphonic rain
caressing wheatfields
and roadkill.
The sky is like a mauve notepaper
where a solitary swallow
scribbling a gleeful madrigal
is observed by caravan of gypsies
and lovers just about to elope.
*
Whatever the wolves
Think of rain
So do I.
'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 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
.
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.
