Happy Holidays & Merry Christmas!

... and I call upon some old friends who always made me feel right! 

Wishing you a very Merry Christmas!

3 from Roger McGough

Roots
Like a poem around a tree
Like a freedom flag unfurled
A homeless refugee
I have travelled round the world

I remember slanted mountains with dusted white peaks
ivory snow and emerald green trees.
I remember the tickle going up my spine
when birds settled on my branches.
The soft footfall of a passing fox.

I remember the sweet smell of pine-scented smoke
wafting from chocolate log cabins.
I remember thinking that there will come a time soon
When I will no longer remember any of this:

A sickle moon
The scrunching sound of footsteps
A brutal saw chomping through my bark
and the snow slides off me like a silken robe.

The squabble of sea birds and an icy deck
the savagery of ropes and roller-coasting waves,
until eventually, the warm cuddle of sleep.

In a clearing in the concrete forest of a city
I rise to the noise of pigeons and car horns,
Of children laughing and crowds cheering.
With 500 white lights I am adorned. Am excited.
Crowned with a star. I am adored and delighted.

When the children leave and the music stops
And the lights and the words taken down
Unlike the tree I have put down roots
In London, my new home town

Lights, camera, action!
A switch is pulled
and I light up like an angel.


The way things are
No, the candle is not crying, it can not feel pain.
Even telescopes, like the rest of us, grow bored.
Bubblegum will not make the hair soft and shiny.
The duller the imagination, the faster the car,
I am your father and that is the way things are.

When the sky is looking the other way,
do not enter the forest. No, the wind
is not caused by the rushing of clouds.
An excuse is as good a reason as any.
A lighthouse, launched, will not go far,
I am your father and that is the way things are.

No, old people do not walk slowly
because they have plenty of time.
Gardening books when buried will not flower.
Though lightly worn, a crown may leave a scar,
I am your father and that is the way things are.

No, the red woolly hat has not been
put on the railing to keep it warm.
When one glove is missing, both are lost.
Today's craft fair is tomorrows boot sale.
The guitarist weeps gently, not the guitar
I am your father and that is the way things are.

Pebbles work best without batteries.
The deckchair will fail as a unit of currency.
Even though your shadow is shortening
it does not mean you are growing smaller.
Moonbeams sadly, will not survive in a jar,
I am your father and that is the way things are.

For centuries the bullet remained quietly confident
that the gun would be invented.
A drowning surrealist will not appreciate
the concrete lifebelt.
No guarantee my last goodbye is an au revoir,
I am your father and that is the way things are.

Do not become a prison officer unless you know
what you're letting someone else in for.
The thrill of being a shower curtain will soon pall.
No trusting hand awaits a falling star
I am your father, and I am sorry
but this is the way things are.


First day at School
A millionbillionwillion miles from home
Waiting for the bell to go. (To go where?)
Why are they all so big, other children?
So noisy? So much at home they
Must have been born in uniform
Lived all their lives in playgrounds
Spent the years inventing games
That don't let me in. Games
That are rough, that swallow you up.

And the railings.
All around, the railings.
Are they to keep out wolves and monsters?
Things that carry off and eat children?
Things you don't take sweets from?
Perhaps they're to stop us getting out
Running away from the lessins. Lessin.
What does a lessin look like?
Sounds small and slimy.
They keep them in the glassrooms.
Whole rooms made out of glass. Imagine.

I wish I could remember my name
Mummy said it would come in useful.
Like wellies. When there's puddles.
Yellowwellies. I wish she was here.
I think my name is sewn on somewhere
Perhaps the teacher will read it for me.
Tea-cher. The one who makes the tea.

-

Image source here

About Roger McGough

M&L

Here's the music...

And here are the lyrics...

I walk in stride with people
much taller than me
and partly it's the boots but
mostly it's my chi
and I'm becoming transfixed
with nature and my part in it
which I believe just signifies
I'm finally waking up

and there's this moth outside my kitchen door
she's bonkers for that bare bulb
flying round in circles
bashing in her exoskull
and out in the woods she navigates fine by the moon
but get her around a light bulb and she's doomed

she is trying to evolve
she's just trying to evolve

now let's get talking reefer madness
like some arrogant government can't
by any stretch of the imagination
outlaw a plant
yes, their supposed authority over nature
is a dream
c'mon people
we've got to come clean

cuz they are locking our sons
and our daughters in cages
they are taking by the thousands
our lives from under us
it's a crash course in religious fundamentals
now let's all go to war
get some bang for our buck

I am trying to evolve
I'm just trying to evolve

gunnin for high score in the land of dreams
morbid bluish-white consumers ogling luminous screens
on the trail of forgetting
cruising without a care
the jet set won't abide by that pesky jet lag
and our lives boil down to an hour or two
when someone pulls a camera out of a bag

and I am trying to evolve
I'm just trying to evolve

so I walk like I'm on a mission
cuz that's the way I groove
I got more and more to do
I got less and less to prove
it took me too long to realize
that I don't take good pictures
cuz I have the kind of beauty
that moves

and I am trying to evolve
and I am trying to evolve

-

Immortel

Il y a ni portes ni fenêtres pour aller où c’est toujours parfait. Celui qui est né là-bas, vit éternellement jusqu'à la fin du monde.

Penned Nov 17, 2011.

Image source here 

Serendipity

"To live a dispassionate and cultured life in the open air of ideas, reading, dreaming and thinking of writing--a life so slow it constantly verges on tedium, but pondered enough never to find itself there. To live this life far from emotions and thought, living it only in the thought of emotions and in the emotion of thoughts. To goldenly stagnate in the sun, like a murky pond surrounded by flowers. To possess, in the shade, that nobility of spirit that makes no demands on life. To be in the whirl of the worlds like dust of flowers, sailing through the afternoon air on an unknown wind and falling, in the torpor of dusk, wherever it falls, lost among larger things. To be this with a sure understanding, neither happy nor sad, grateful to the sun for its brilliance and to the stars for their remoteness. To be no more, have no more, want no more...."

The Big Apple

  

 Source here

God Speaks (Rainer Maria Rilke)

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.

Embody me.

Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

What this is not about. Or is it.

There are those who live by the map. And drive by it. Those who are humble. And uncertain. Some with the half-life of an elephant's memory. Some who choose to live there. For some, every milestone is a trigger. An echo their sound bird, their word carrier across chasms. Of space and time. To some, this life holds no enticement. To some, the only fear of loss, is death. Some wait for forests to move. Some toil in silhouettes to cave out barks of trees to make them. There are also those whose lives are as fickle to chance as the paths they take. Random. With no design. Then there are those who want nothing. They simply exist in flame or ash. Like air.

Penned June 22, 2011. 

Letter to a young poet (C.K. Williams)

Pulitzer Prize winning poet, C.K. Williams, gives his advice for a poet starting out.

I’ll begin by promising that there’ll be times in your life as a poet when the problems that are a part of trying to live that life will make the whole undertaking seem a terrible mistake, and you’ll find yourself thinking there must be something else to do that might better reward your labor.  And indeed some poets do release themselves from poetry; they become novelists, or teachers, or accountants, (happy accountants!) and this can happen to poets who are still surprisingly young.

I should also say though that I don’t think the decision to abandon poetry has to do with how much talent one believes one has or doesn’t have, or how much dedication, or confidence; it’s rather more a spiritual crisis, a loss of faith in the conviction that poetry has a value beyond the doing of it.  Surely the pleasures of that doing are undeniable; the making of something from nothing is a delight unlike anything else.

So the conviction that poetry has significance beyond its practice becomes absolutely essential, yet it isn’t at all self-evident.  Finally, at some point we have to ask what it is that draws us to poetry in the first place? It seems to me that the essential function of poetry is to unify.

Human beings experience ourselves as assemblages, almost collages, of the passional, the sensual, the intellectual and the spiritual. We are at once philosophers, aestheticians, social and political theorists; we are lovers and haters, children and parents, we lie, we tell the truth, we make myths and stories; there is violence in us, but there is also the unlikely charity which illuminates our spiritual history.  And what’s more, we are both participants and observers of all these portions of ourselves, these selves.   Poetry’s real greatness is that it is the most effective means we have of bringing together these apparently disparate parts of ourselves.  Because to be real poetry must be true, and  because it must deal unconditionally with the reality of a single person’s existence, by its definition it entails a bringing together of selves within the self.  Poetry makes us more whole than we thought we could be.

And for a poem to do this, in some strange way it doesn’t matter what it is about, what its subject is.  Poems can be self-consciously dedicated to the moral adventures of our lives; they can delve into that complex swarm of emotions and thoughts out of which our ethical sensibilities and obligations arise, and this will give them a certain admirable weight, like the poems of Dante, or Milton, or Baudelaire, but whether poems do this or not doesn’t determine their ultimate merit.  All poems exist in the tension between the immateriality of consciousness and language and the brute physical facts of reality, and so all poems, or all poems that are not empty drums banged to garner the applause of others, poets or critics, resolve this tension in ways that make them speak both to and out of the self.  A poem can seem to be about nothing at all – a clever conceit about lost love in a sonnet by Ronsard, a meditation on a moment of sensual delight in an ode of Keats – and yet, if a poem is authentic, if it is true, it will still evoke this essential unity in us, and will help us understand that we are not the poor fragmented things we can seem to be, and that our social organizations aren’t merely groupings of other fractured beings.  Because poetry demonstrates that the plural is merely a convention for the human spirit. The truth is that we are born and live and die one by one, and poetry, because it speaks at once to the poet and the reader, links the experience of one single soul to another and by doing so it exalts both.  That, finally, is what poetry is about, it is what allows us to be able to sit in a room by ourselves and do battle with language and form and with the pain of being able to do so little about human pain, and still feel we are doing what we know is the right thing.

Pulitzer Prize winning poet C.K. Williams has published numerous books of poetry, including Wait: Poems (2010); Collected Poems (2006); The Singing (2003), Repair (1999), The Vigil (1997); A Dream of Mind (1992); Flesh and Blood (1987); Tar (1983); With Ignorance (1997); I Am the Bitter Name (1992); and Lies (1969). He has also published five works of translation.

Among his many awards and honours are an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and a Pushcart Prize. He has served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. Currently Williams teaches in the creative writing program at Princeton University and lives part of each year in Paris

C.K. Williams has travelled to the UK to give the Poetry Society’s Annual Lecture “On Being Old.” He will also read a selection of his poetry at the lectures which will take place on:

• Wednesday 25 May at Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts, Newcastle University
• Thursday 26 May at Senate House University College London
• Thursday 13 October at the Kenneth Allott Lecture  at Liverpool University

In C.K. Williams’ Letter To A Younger Poet, he emphasises the need to keep faith in poetry. If you had a time machine and could send a letter back to yourself when you first started writing poetry, what would you say? Do you have questions you would like to ask your future self?

Source is here

Starting with the bitters, ending with the sweet.

Try them!

I started with the bitters today.

The gnarly, near unpalatable, dreaded green of the bitter gourd or the ‘ucche’.

It’s an acquired taste, the bitters. I always wondered why Bengali meals began with it.

Living in Delhi’s heart of Bengali-land, Chitaranjan Park for over three months now, I have had my fill of butter chicken, paneer and butter laden ‘aloo parathas’. Of course, I did get around to sampling the fare from the localities’ several ‘Bengali’ restaurants and take-aways. To every aficionado who would zealously advocate this fare, I would say, it ain’t the real thing; especially the non-vegetarian, which is well, much like Delhi-Chinese, the Delhified version of authentic Bengali grub.

Which made me venture into the kitchen myself. For a taste of home. Home, which is my inheritance, the comforting salve which I carry with me wherever I go, the memory of my grandmother and mother, garrulously toiling away over the kadhai, never running out of complaints, “When my child, will you ever learn?”

I of course, never learnt. I could never learn how to measure when it came to cooking. Things continue to be flung in at random. This of course makes the Man Friday, the guest-house keeper here jump out of his skin to see the amount of chillies I flung into the pan every time. Perhaps in fear of indigestion, curiosity or general well-being that I not burn down the house, he stands in vigil, as I cook amidst the fumes.

“This is burning,” he says. No, it is not, let it cook. “Are you sure about this?” he adds suspiciously and I tell him ever so gently, you really don’t have to eat this you know. Which works; well, for the time being.

So after the fish and the meat over past weekends, I came upon the bitters today.

They can be overcome, the bitters, with tempering.

“Why does Bengali food have to be sweet?” I’m asked ever so often. Most people not accustomed to the taste, cringe a little to spot the sweet taste in the dishes, sweet – something often reserved only for the last course, dessert.  

It’s all in the balance.

Sour, pungent or bitter, everything can be overcome, tempered, countered with its opposite taste. It is an inheritance, the kitchen’s chemistry of a handful spices, blending, searing, raging, bursting with their personalities, waging their own humble battle in the pan, plunged into scorching oil.

How much to extract of every flavor, how and exactly when… just like life, so in the kitchen. And it is toil. It takes patience. Time. And a little faith.

There are no masters, nor wretches who cannot go right, or wrong all the time. It is all a matter of acquired taste.

Today I broke them, the bitters. Gently seared it out of them, with the melting of starch in potatoes and acrid egg-plant. Sprinkled with swift rushes of pungent and sweet, it blended into the ever, ever so humble ‘sukto’.

Temperance, or moderation, to achieve which there are neither masters nor wretches who can inch towards it without the trying or the effort.

Life’s lessons need not always be in fancy places, high-profile meetings or boardrooms.

They begin, like you and me, in our own humble roots.

The place we must never forget, to keep forever close to heart.

Bien fait

I have said everything.

I have written down everything

You’d like to have ever known.

About anything. Or everything.

I have written it on butter paper.

Strung it across a shell of twigs

Set it alight

And let it afloat

Into the night sky.

How you read it now

Is to your devices.

And to none

Of mine. 

(Penned May 6, 2011)

Chittoh jetha bhoy shunno

...uccho jetha sheer. Gyan jetha mukto, jetha griher prachir...

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up
into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason
has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action -
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Gitanjali, Rabindranath Tagore. 

A minute for the basics

Stoicism (Greek Στοά) was a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium in the early 3rd century BC. The Stoics considered destructive emotions to be the result of errors in judgment, and that a sage, or person of "moral and intellectual perfection," would not suffer such emotions.^[1]

Stoics were concerned with the active relationship between cosmic determinism and human freedom, and the belief that it is virtuous to maintain a will (called prohairesis) that is in accord with nature. Because of this, the Stoics presented their philosophy as a way of life, and they thought that the best indication of an individual's philosophy was not what a person said but how he behaved.^[2]

Basic tenets

“	Philosophy does not promise to secure anything external for man, otherwise it would be admitting something that lies beyond its proper subject-matter. For as the material of the carpenter is wood, and that of statuary bronze, so the subject-matter of the art of living is each person's own life.	”
—Epictetus[5]

The Stoics provided a unified account of the world, consisting of formal logic, non-dualistic physics and naturalistic ethics. Of these, they emphasized ethics as the main focus of human knowledge, though their logical theories were to be of more interest for many later philosophers.

Stoicism teaches the development of self-control and fortitude as a means of overcoming destructive emotions; the philosophy holds that becoming a clear and unbiased thinker allows one to understand the universal reason (logos). A primary aspect of Stoicism involves improving the individual’s ethical and moral well-being: "Virtuewill which is in agreement with Nature."^[6] This principle also applies to the realm of interpersonal relationships; "to be free from anger, envy, and jealousy,"^[7] and to accept even slaves as "equals of other men, because all alike are sons of God."^[8] 

The Stoic ethic espouses a deterministic perspective; in regards to those who lack Stoic virtue, Cleanthes once opined that the wicked man is "like a dog tied to a cart, and compelled to go wherever it goes."^[6] A Stoic of virtue, by contrast, would amend his will to suit the world and remain, in the words of Epictetus, "sick and yet happy, in peril and yet happy, dying and yet happy, in exile and happy, in disgrace and happy,"^[7] thus positing a "completely autonomous" individual will, and at the same time a universe that is "a rigidly deterministic single whole."

Stoicism became the foremost popular philosophy among the educated elite in the Hellenistic world and the Roman Empire,^[9] to the point where, in the words of Gilbert Murray "nearly all the successors of Alexander^[10] [...] professed themselves Stoics."

The Categories

The Stoics held that all being (ὄντα) -- though not all things (τινά) -- are corporeal. They accepted the distinction between concrete bodies and abstract ones, but rejected Aristotle's teaching that purely incorporeal being exists. Thus, they accepted Anaxagoras' idea (as did Aristotle) that if an object is hot, it is because some part of a universal heat body had entered the object. But, unlike Aristotle, they extended the idea to cover all accidents. Thus if an object is red, it would be because some part of a universal red body had entered the object.

They held that there were four Categories.

• substance (ὑποκείμενον)
  • The primary matter, formless substance, (ousia) which makes up things.
• quality (ποιόν)
  • The way in which matter is organized to form an individual object. In Stoic physics, a physical ingredient (pneuma: air or breath) which informs the matter.
• somehow disposed (πως ἔχον)
  • Particular characteristics, not present within the object, such as size, shape, action, and posture.
• somehow disposed in relation to something (πρός τί πως ἔχον)
  • Characteristics which are related to other phenomena, such as the position of an object within time and space relative to other objects.

Epistemology

The Stoics believed in the certainty that knowledge can be attained through the use of reason. Truth can be distinguished from fallacy; even if, in practice, only an approximation can be made. According to the Stoics, the senses are constantly receiving sensations: pulsations which pass from objects through the senses to the mind, where they leave behind an impression in the imagination (phantasia). (An impression arising from the mind was called a phantasma.)^[15]

The mind has the ability to judge (sunkatathesis)—approve or reject—an impression, enabling it to distinguish a true representation of reality from one which is false. Some impressions can be assented to immediately, but others can only achieve varying degrees of hesitant approval which can be labeled belief or opinion (doxa). It is only through the use of reason that we can achieve clear comprehension and conviction (katalepsis). Certain and true knowledge (episteme), achievable by the Stoic sage, can be attained only by verifying the conviction with the expertise of one's peers and the collective judgment of humankind.

Make for yourself a definition or description of the thing which is presented to you, so as to see distinctly what kind of a thing it is in its substance, in its nudity, in its complete entirety, and tell yourself its proper name, and the names of the things of which it has been compounded, and into which it will be resolved. For nothing is so productive of elevation of mind as to be able to examine methodically and truly every object which is presented to you in life, and always to look at things so as to see at the same time what kind of universe this is, and what kind of use everything performs in it, and what value everything has with reference to the whole.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, iii. 11.

 ...

Source and more on this topic is here 

Home Improvement

Beaded curtains.

Glimmery. Shiny. Bright.

A little wild. Untethered.

They jangle.

They catch the light.

They tug at you.

Declawed crabs.

They tangle you up.

They make a lot of noise.

They never stick.

They’re not really curtains.

They’re not

What they’re meant to be.

Quite a nuisance

Such things are. 

(Penned April 8, 2011)  

Only babble

It is happening again.

Every time I break a snooze regime that never existed, I suffer this very same wakefulness.

It’s not easy being an insomniac. Not even for a sorry-excuse-for-a-partly-reformed-one either.

It was many years ago when I heard a little story. Well actually, it was quite an elaborate, well etched story. It was like almost a moving picture, in words. (More of a bane of the mind sort of a matter to see things narrated come alive in that manner. Sorry. Diversion.) It was not exactly an easy story to hear. I had to keep a straight face. I could not reflect the inside on the outside. It wasn’t advisable. It was quite a dilemma. Almost a moral one.  This chortling of self-expression. However, it was accomplished. And just as gently that a golden bronze maple leaf drifts off the tree in autumn, something snapped ever so imperceptibly. It was almost an epiphany. A gentle one in passing.  Something that does not ruffle things but simply flows by. Much like the maple leaf. 

Many people keep maple leaves, ok leaves inside books till they dry. As a child I was told, “Look at the dried veins of the leaf. There’s really nothing to them. But they keep together. And they will. Till the time you want to keep them.” It made me wonder then, why would a dried leaf be more fascinating than a living one? And that of course, would qualify for a rhetoric question as I learnt much later.

Am I trying to get to a point? Well after all, that’s what readers are interested in.

Maybe.

But mostly, I am writing this since as is obvious, I’m still waking.

And maybe because it might just be something to read.

Now. Or at a later point in time. 

Theories of the Soul (Karen An-hwei Lee)

Kant says, transcendental

    idealism. In Aquinas,

we exist apart from bodies

    but only on Thursdays

when his famous ox

    flies by the window

wiser at Cologne

    where Albertus Magnus,

his real name, appoints

    Aquinas to magister studentium,

master of students. Aquinas

    is petrified but says yes.

He feels his soul

    sailing out of his head

floating near the roof

    where a blue ox wings by.

On Wednesday, two bodies

    are one soul

waking at sunrise

    thanks to the pineal gland

of Descartes, who thinks

    this node in the brain

is a tiny sugar cone

    or salted peanut,

the seat of the soul

    while Aristotle points

to the chopping

    ax as a teleology

as if the ax were a living,

    breathing person

which it isn’t.

    Heraclitus, air and fire

while Aquinas objects, no

    not an ax but ox.

If you’re a bird or soul

    I am only one mile

from the sea. If you

    are a soul in two bodies

life is more complex

    and we must labor

twice the field of sorrow

    after sleep, bath, and a glass

as Aquinas whispers, the things

    we love tell us who we are.

 

 

Source: Is here 

In the quiet

It is fashionable

this derision

we entertain.

Rising tides

need no invitation.

Those seven bones

can only extend

so much.

So learn

the impervious.

The ways of the whirled

bobbing planes

the physics of inertia

the harmonics

of everything

to find

to rest

to cut through

to the centre

of everything.

(Penned April 7, 2011) 

Basho

"In this mortal frame of mine which is made of a hundred bones and nine orifices there is something, and this something is called a wind-swept spirit for lack of a better name, for it is much like a thin drapery that is torn and swept away at the slightest stir of the wind. This something in me took to writing poetry years ago, merely to amuse itself at first, but finally making it its lifelong business. It must be admitted, however, that there were times when it sank into such dejection that it was almost ready to  drop its pursuit, or again times when it was so puffed up with pride that it exulted in vain victories over the others. Indeed, ever since it began to write poetry, it has never found peace with itself, always wavering between doubts of one kind and another, At one time it wanted to gain security by entering the service of a court, and at another it wished to measure the depth of its ignorance by trying to be a scholar, but it was prevented from either because of its unquenchable love of poetry. The fact is, it knows no other art than the art of writing poetry, and therefore, it hangs on to it more or less blindly."

Excerpt, The Records of a Travel-worn Satchel, Matsuo Basho

 

Measure for measure

The concern is ample.

The light lingering touch

of fleeting feathers.

The words are kind.

They drift from where

the lungs are longing.

The glances are glowing.

Tender embers, the promise

of distant warmth.

The questions are sated.

As much ease

as intent.

It registers.

Shallow waters

only yield so much.

It takes another make

to grate nails to gravel

to bleed soil to life.

It is not a bad place, shallows.

Where minnows school

to the sunlight.

Befitting, to receive

only what is sought.

And no more. 

(Penned March 11, 2011)

A certain Ms. Atwood

For not ebbing on being graphic.

For calling a spade a shovel. 

For saying it like it is.

For not the faint of heart.

A favourite of all time.

Brother likes Lady Lazarus by Plath. 

_
 

Half Hanged Mary 

by Margaret Atwood
 

7 p.m.
 

Rumour was loose in the air,
hunting for some neck to land on.
I was milking the cow,
the barn door open to the sunset.

I didn’t feel the aimed word hit
and go on in like a soft bullet.
I didn’t feel the smashed flesh
closing over it like water
over a thrown stone.

I was hanged for living alone,
for having blue eyes and a sunburned skin,
tattered skirts, few buttons,
a weedy farm in my own name,
and a surefire cure for warts.

Oh yes, and breasts,
and a sweet pear hidden in my body.
Whenever there’s talk of demons
these come in handy.

8 p.m.

The rope was an improvisation.
With time they’d have thought of axes.

Up I go like a windfall in reverse,
a blackened apple stuck back onto the tree.

Trussed hands, rag in my mouth,
a flag raised to salute the moon,

old bone-faced goddess, old original,
who once took blood in return for food.

The men of the town stalk homeward,
excited by their show of hate,
their own evil turned inside out like a glove,
and me wearing it.

9 p.m.

The bonnets come to stare,
the dark skirts also,
the upturned faces in between,
mouths closed so tight they’re lipless.
I can see down into their eyeholes
and nostrils. I can see their fear.

You were my friend, you too,
I cured your baby, Mrs.,
and flushed yours out of you,
Non-wife, to save your life.

Help me down? You don’t dare.
I might rub off on you,
like soot or gossip. Birds
of a feather burn together,
though as a rule ravens are singular.

In a gathering like this one
the safe place is the background,
pretending you can’t dance,
the safe stance pointing a finger.

I understand. You can’t spare
anything, a hand, a piece of bread, a shawl
against the cold,
a good word. Lord
knows there isn’t much
to go around. You need it all.

10 p.m.

Well God, now that I’m up here,
with maybe some time to kill,
away from the daily
fingerwork, legwork, work
at the hen level,
we can continue our quarrel,
the one about free will.

Is it my choice that I’m dangling
like a turkey’s wattle from this
more than indifferent tree?
If Nature is Your alphabet,
what letter is this rope?

Does my twisting body spell out Grace?
I hurt, therefore I am.
Faith, Charity, and Hope
are three dead angels
falling like meteors or
burning owls across
the profound blank sky of Your face.

12 midnight

My throat is taut against the rope
choking off words and air;
I’m reduced to knotted muscle.
Blood bulges in my skull,
my clenched teeth hold it in;
I bite down on despair.

Death sits on my shoulder like a crow
waiting for my squeezed beet
of a heart to burst
so he can eat my eyes

or like a judge
muttering about sluts and punishment
and licking his lips

or like a dark angel
insidious in his glossy feathers
whispering to me to be easy
on myself. To breathe out finally.
Trust me, he says, caressing
me. Why suffer?

A temptation, to sink down
onto these definitions.
To become a martyr in reverse,
or food, or trash.

To give up my own words for myself,
my own refusals.
To give up knowing.
To give up pain.
To let go.

2 a.m.

Out of my mouths is coming, at some
distance from me, a thin gnawing sound
which you could confuse with prayer except that
praying is not constrained.

Or is it, Lord?
Maybe it’s more like being strangled
than I once thought. Maybe it’s
a gasp for air, prayer.
Did those men at Pentecost
want flames to shoot out of their heads?
Did they ask to be tossed
on the ground, gabbling like holy poultry,
eyeballs bulging?

As mine are, as mine are.
There is only one prayer; it is not
the knees in the clean nightgown
on the hooked rug.
I want this, I want that.
Oh far beyond.
Call it Please. Call it Mercy.
Call it Not yet, not yet,
as Heaven threatens to explode
inwards in fire and shredded flesh, and the angels caw.

3 a.m.

wind seethes in the leaves around
me the trees exude night
birds night birds yell inside
my ears like stabbed hearts my heart
stutters in my fluttering cloth
body I dangle with strength
going out of the wind seethes
in my body tattering
the words I clench
my fists hold No
talisman or silver disc my lungs
flail as if drowning I call
on you as witness I did
no crime I was born I have borne I
bear I will be born this is
a crime I will not
acknowledge leaves and wind
hold on to me
I will not give in

6 a.m.

Sun comes up, huge and blaring,
no longer a simile for God.
Wrong address. I’ve been out there.

Time is relative, let me tell you
I have lived a millennium.

I would like to say my hair turned white
overnight, but it didn’t.
Instead it was my heart;
bleached out like meat in water.

Also, I’m about three inches taller.
This is what happens when you drift in space
listening to the gospel
of the red hot stars.
Pinpoints of infinity riddle my brain,
a revelation of deafness.

At the end of my rope
I testify to silence.
Don’t say I’m not grateful.

Most will only have one death.
I will have two.

8 a.m.

When they came to harvest my corpse
(open your mouth, close your eyes)
cut my body from the rope,
surprise, surprise,
I was still alive.

Tough luck, folks,
I know the law:
you can’t execute me twice
for the same thing. How nice.

I fell to the clover, breathed it in,
and bared my teeth at them
in a filthy grin.
You can imagine how that went over.

Now I only need to look
out at them through my sky-blue eyes.
They see their own ill will
staring them in the forehead
and turn tail.

Before, I was not a witch.
But now I am one.

Later

My body of skin waxes and wanes
around my true body,
a tender nimbus.
I skitter over the paths and fields,
mumbling to myself like crazy,
mouth full of juicy adjectives
and purple berries.
The townsfolk dive headfirst into the bushes
to get out of my way.

My first death orbits my head,
an ambiguous nimbus,
medallion of my ordeal.
No one crosses that circle.

Having been hanged for something
I never said,
I can now say anything I can say.

Holiness gleams on my dirty fingers,
I eat flowers and dung,,
two forms of the same thing, I eat mice
and give thanks, blasphemies
gleam and burst in my wake
like lovely bubbles.
I speak in tongues,
my audience is owls.

My audience is God,
because who the hell else could understand me?

The words boil out of me,
coil after coil of sinuous possibility.
The cosmos unravels from my mouth,
all fullness, all vacancy. 

Always, the us

You know, on dank cold nights, like someplace faraway, someplace where it always rains, someplace there is always this moisture hanging in the air, from where you just cannot wring it out like water from fresh washing, the place where we then huddle and pool out centre all our piles of dry twigs, humble fruits of our toil, where we inspect them for the driest ones and we chuck the not so dry ones out, and where we then look around for who might have the splint that evening, and we find that someone does, and we huddle closer at the fireplace, and watch with a pang of craving that splint being struck, we see the pithy sparks birth, like the false, debased child of lightening, and we gouge with hungry eyes the sight of the tiniest flicker of orange-red glow and how it latches onto the twigs, the flame racing for their time-frozen hearts, and the gentle cackle, oh the gentlest of all cackles that ruptures into the night, like the pattering feet of rats scurrying under the floorboards.

You know, on dank cold nights, the solace of that cackle of splinters at that heart of the huddle, that cherished memory of times overcome, would be just as nought as either of us, if there wasn’t an us in the first place, sticking it with that gleaming dank demon of the night.

(Penned March 7, 2011)

Takeaway

 "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’"

- Jack Kerouac (On the Road)