Chapter 2

Tenebrous youth accosted by callow Time bleeds the heart with spring aloes. No comfortable shibboleths to restrain the wriggling polyps in the skin or nestling hair.

Gerundive in movement, each particled whimper of the clock surrounds a cloistered second poised about the bearded target. As far as you know, nothing unusual.

A total of eight hundred months but grammar school sums, spiel & mileage to drift across a lifetime. At thirty, the best half of the potage is gruel hand drawn from the sabulous pot. 38

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PASSAGEWAYS

Greet the days - greet the moon, gather the stars.. . Man is not at one with himself - collars the infidel ways of his race under pressure domes of widening silence.

I scan the horizon barely cognizant of the metallic bits that pierce the night's crown - no jewelled orb stabs this queen's spectre. I am running and lost. . . ever slow to breech this reasoning.

Honeysuckle mist with armfuls of orange lilies with scent stronger than the carriage needed in their gathering.

Place the constellations upon their heads, the colour so transcends. And then there are the bludgeoned stars fallen into the eyes of my farmhouse scene. The sphinx moth that darns the night with her acrobatics escapes the wreath of troubled moon that places about her proboscised head. Let her stone the night in peace, feel palpitations on her ocean breast.

The darting of stone cracks in fissures along the causeway to the stonehouse is certain and sure. A definite mood projects the starling tunnels, forlorn now with limpid darkness, crushed lavender from the pews of thoughtful night.

There are armfuls of crushed bats in the passageway to my heart, each reeking with squeals to alarm the most frightened princess. Only one has stained the pass key and I must find her.

A toad abides the thoughtful recess broken under the wall. He is a good toad and mourns the night creaking from the river bed. A monster dragon to the insects making a living near the light - a source of amused contempt to lepidoptrists squeezing the eye's circle, pressing her to release her giddy charms.

At morning, skeletal remains shall stain the blighted chain (mood collector, toad, moth) but, for now, only the night buzzes with alarm, cracking her secrets with each tiny monster hurled at light's intrusion into dark.

Perchance I shall narrow down the divide, position alarms, remind myself I am inured to the mood & scent that mans this cosmic bandwagon. I hold up flowers to remind me light escapes through jelly and that rare LUMINESCENCE exists only in lost bat chambers buried deep near the recesses of the snake.

The cry of havoc, all those armfuls of collapsed lilies breaking under the toil of enforced handshakes leaves me like a broken lamp. I have no more shades to patch the plinths or barricade my heart. I have left my love on bended knee in a land I choose to forget. 39, 40, 41

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KINDLING

As a matter of fact, ovens do carry a glazed stare, fireplaces are wont to parry thoughts to kindling before their stoop and on breathless summer nights one is hard pressed to recall cinder and blackened barleys any more vegetatively than upon these harridan pots. 42

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THE GLOWWORM

In slow sutures of pale white - dabbed in growing spume & mud dried earth, a glowworm is obliterated by warm, soft light coming up to elbow particles of near dappled clay that plants dissect, warm as feasts, aloft a muscat lawn.

Pale, segmented tortoise - trite in area and jellied purpose, the glowworm oozes headlong through an aroused dark necking furiously with fungus turds and truffles rooted from the pig ground by mice sized swine holidaying on scents and mildew salvaged thru pores & nestling bowels of their planet sized turf. 43

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BETWEEN TWO STONES

They poured hot water into people's cups in which green tea leaves were floating like algae, or into red-painted spittoons placed on the floor which the travellers made frequent use of... It was strangely quiet. 44

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THE WATERS OF THE BAY LIE BENEATH

An abandoned house - dark salved to eclectic; crinkly, black pigment of old pine boards disparate to the elements.

The waters of the bay lie beneath. A long slope trailing back of brush, garbles stones hoarse in the throat of a dust-flecked field are made more barren by the skunk cabbage weeds, the ugly, flotsam cloaks of horse hair to the neck - a hair shirt, coddling abrupt the barren pain tilled from empty soil.

The summer's heat. Nameless insect waifs wavering, adjusting tumult to straighten the tight air about the outward door frame. Pinched in windows, glass in refugee lots billowing about urine paper; nails a ruddy pick dried to rusty blue, some dim shiny in their cropped disrepair. A road dry, rotating bare, nameless zigzagged

only limestone in shelves meanders in throngs about stony debris, sometimes up to this beaten house. 45, 46

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PASSING

I should be busy with words but light distracts me makes for me, in the sowing of its waves, neutral observances, a chilled awareness that the sublime is contained herein the wonders of the commonplace. 47

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KITH AND KIN

Once there was a giant who lived in a kneecap, a peculiar giant at that who expelled all reality as a pig might a poke.

Not concerned with the dilemma of easing life's toothpaste form into dental crustings or oblivion's dark shadows from lightless paths, the giant assumed guardianship over his fibro-tissual home.

The giant could be seen ferrying dwarfed bones over the inter causal dome of flesh and blood.

At times, he substituted a remarkable likeness for his kith and kin by dumping calloused cushions, too long cousins of the diaper rash effect bunions, corns, carbuncles eager to roam the padlocked sockets between distant fibula and tibia.

Poor femur, of course, was outraged against carpals and the growing phalanx arrangement of distant phalanges. Even the metatarsals were girdled in righteous indignation committed against their person by a maverick masquerading in pelvic insubordination.

Altogether the body contains 206 bones. It is rumoured none contain a giant of his capacity, notoriety, or effect. 48, 49

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TO SIT ARRAYED

To sit arrayed and task consumed by the edge of a window, the world as fire stepping free of winter's stain, jutting fingers of light to a basement ledge then allowing their foggy movement to displace dust's circle as it has come to be known over the last five months, is to come as near as possible to the brink of private sanity. 50

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SILVER COINS

Seen the whores in doorsteps, slack, crouched as packing crates behind their quiet wardrobe lamps, inset like a skeleton's crown there to bend our will, provide passageways to power and suggestion; the winding entrance to rouged light flickering with powdered flesh yellow of gold, then black to ivory a frightful circus in a palace of turn within the grate of execution. 51

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SENTRY

In Edvard Munch's painting, The Scream, eyes are grouped as discs — almost rotund arches, much as suns breaking over an eclipsed wall. Hollows, jittery the bridge a creamed escape careening the soul madly backward a pastel gathering sky - water rivulets where two solitary, graven figures seem indulging a flaccid, breaking stream. 52

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THE POTATO EATERS

The potato eaters - grim, weathered souls wrenching a meal from sandy waste.

The dark toil lined ridges carried from their fields to each human face, dim, pale light as shadowy as lives eked out upon this stoney rash of soil.

Brows, a murky legend of overwork - deflected hope, seasons up in the smoke of a potato boil. 53

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THE ASSIGNATION (PONS ASINORUM)

Many devils are in woods, in waters, in wilderness and in dark, pooly places ready to hurt. . . people, some are also in thick, black clouds. — Martin Luther

. . .Masaccio to the Florentine Renaissance but a naught- every man the same, St. Francis the same as a Jack the Ripper. their rosy surfaces filled.

Like an Old Testament curse he is loosed upon the earth. Ecking out his pound of flesh delivering misery in sordidness, he parboils the land.

A modern day Tantalus up to his throat in burning lies, his death is to live, in the contemporary sense, the thousand cuts- to bury the skies as a dread Caiaphas into the contradiction, the snares of his being.

Measure for measure his blond mane, pale scarf are hallmarks of the doomed Dutchman searching out the Coromandel; like Cain stumbling upon existence, he hearkens back to the original Murderer, has sold his inheritance for a pittance and by doing so has ridiculed the human condition with his life charged obscenity; his blond beast scowl curdled about respectability's neck, his fang tussled face a menacing white cigarette, the soul imprisoned jailer to his teeth, breath and brain. 54

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HAUNTED CHILD

In the dark of wedlock nightly sky, the wither of hope and estranged replies, cause a white face to flicker with transparent eye, calumny of purpose to slowly die. 55

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TRIANGULAR TRADE

I would watch him lifting another drink from the fridge, joke about the connection with a triangular trade - bedroom to kitchen fridge, then to the bathroom - only to repeat the cycle not knowing such comments scratched his eyes climbing through the window for escape. 56

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CASTING ROCKS Merely on edge, the wharf in bad light clinging to water's ledge - a loon from afar the Woods closing with each sound.

Casting rocks toward moon's glare lapidations laughing back, the treacle of warm night coaxing fire's glowing might.

Sudden, oceanic wilderness breathless in barked silence - and camphor to keep the flies at distance, the anchored boat like a prison ship dallying on the waves, brambles & underbrush sunken wet sand, abundant berries rasp in thickets - the cottage like a jar closing for the night. 57

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BRUSHSTROKE

On rue Vincingetorix, a Paris hovel in a garret of cold - Gauguin enchanted serpentine colours, the medium of a brushstroke from a paltry primitivism.

Rue Vincingetorix, cloudy haze sun as billowing plaster, neatly laps scrapes clean the bereavement of a man's pain. 58

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MAN

In the old air by his rocker, a silent trapeze of thought suspends an aging man.

Each movement as of the katydid droning - a monologue with the past; a buzz escaping across still, warm air. Elsewhere, cicadas whittle about the octogenarian heat.

Nestled quietly, a supine stare erodes both time & place unto bearded grey - nuances clasped in a breathless chat with death. 59

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LANDING SCHEMES

Omens are the cloth of dreams scissors used to open sky - the future riding birds en route to ariel docking piles.

Leonardo was of the opinion creativity might be enhanced a notch should aspiring artists nota bene principalities, bile, their rhumes as tiles then perceive them piecemeal as stratagem, not snuff or random blotch, the heads of diseased pigs but conjuror-sextants toward the stars. 60

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MIRAGE

The intense focus of light but pointillism, into this juncture bits of light surround rough, inverted sky - dawn is their message unfurled about the alumni apparatus of incensed eyes and whispered sun.

The heavy mirage of dots, landscape locked Seurat, a frieze of summer heat choking water lilies - the sun as a crystal ship adrift across bedlam-sponsored random dots. 61

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STONE GUIDE

She was fading - into the stone into rifled shadows heavy with fallen light, rippled boughs of splitting fruit & droopy leaves to a sallow body under clumsy years that ripped the tunic of her coat while bleating the dismal age with each petal fall of a stockinged foot. 62

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RED ILLUSIONS UNDER GLASS

Life as green illusion - the cool fronds of the fern are deep set in firmest soil and the grassy narrows brook a silent, liquid play.

Red illusions under glass - quietly picking strawberries where a woman hums to the buzz of flies with the afternoon sun disappearing overhead.

Each grasp of the berry a red stain, the darting of seeds, crimson tendrils do confuse the eye with a polka dot starling raucous in glee above. 63