# Gathered on This Beach

> Poems & Perspectives for a Converging World

**Published by:** [Ade's Press](https://paragraph.com/@adespress/)
**Published on:** 2024-05-05
**Categories:** poetry, books
**URL:** https://paragraph.com/@adespress/gathered-on-this-beach

## Content

Gathered on This Beach poems & perspectives for a converging worldby Ade M. Campbell note: this is the revised edition from 2014 of early collections of poems, now as NFT on BASE x Arweave 2024 with some edits, possible alterations.) Collect Copyright. All rights reserved. First published: 2006 CONTENTS A Quick IntroLOOSE COLLECTIONS:-NATURAL…-PERSONAL…-CYBERPUNK…RELATED QUOTES & EXTRACTS(The Original) INTRODUCTIONAbout the writerEXTRA ARTWORK A Quick Intro Knowledge enormous makes a God of me. Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions, Majesties, sovran voices, agonies, Creations and destroyings, all at once Pour into the wide hollows of my brain, And deify me, as if some blithe wine Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk, And so become immortal. (John Keats, Hyperion.) ‘These poems were accumulated throughout the early days of the Internet, and surrounded the excitement for the communication potential to come. Having grown up with the growth of the Web and computers, fascinated like most by these new elements of control and wonder, I began to think about the spiritual implications - mixed up with a personal struggle for expression - for our reaching souls within a system of nature. It was only later that I thought to gather these speculations together, and some of the results here question identity and highlight the limitations in our lives prior to such a projected 'convergence', in the future. I feel there is scope for much more speculation, to aid us in our relationship with computer technology. I have the support of my parents, big brother and sister to thank for all the time spent on this early work. It was an invaluable project of self-expression.’ LOOSE COLLECTIONS: Natural Immensity of Blue , The Treacle Trees, The Lost Gods, The Tree Carver, The Greatest Fire, Dream Without, Trees, Furious Dreams, Skulldruggery/For the Richly Stoned, Fear for the Underbelly, Perfect World, The Wheel that Burns, Outburst, The Beach Attendant, Writing in the Sun, Finite, Away from Wheat Fields, Plans, The Dreamers, Thoughts of Unification, An Old Victim, Fallen Figures, Convolution, Obmutescence, The Tree Carver (2), Winter Quailing, To the Lords, Plunder Fast, Loosening, Song at Dusk, Lost Gods (2), Reflection, The Shining, Clear Wine, Natural Motion, Human Song, Forces, Smoke, Ruins, Life and Love, Old Dogs Personal Morning, December London, Winter Ways, DIffering Instinct, Flying a Life, Joy Upon the Hard Surface, Bath in the City, A Walk Outside, Jooby, Grounded, The Meeting, Don't Look, Sessions, Beauty, Phoenix, Being Young / Riding Souls, Out of an Uninspiring Seminar, Estranged, Aloof, From Your Look and Your Smile, To the Survivors, Student Realist, Loss, The Talents, Concupiscence in a Library, Entanglement, Shame, Resonating Shades, Sailor, Empowered, The Mellow Mystics, Rich Days, Confusion, More True, Beneath the Day, Before the Dusk, One Dream, Ruin, Friends with the Sun, Earth Glow, From a Quiet Summer Night, This Striving Cyberpunk Post-Convergence, Cry of the Lords, The Unrelated Space, Gamers, Prelude / Overwhelming Worlds, The Darkened, Confliction, Screen People, The Fearless Lords, Hollow Gaze, The Techno-Tower, Items, Enclosures, You are Me, E-Ode to Lone Gun 30 In this last of meeting placesWe grope togetherAnd avoid speechGathered on this beach of the tumid river... (TS Eliot, The Hollow Men) NATURAL… IMMENSITY OF BLUE Look out, with moisture in the eye-whites Into the cold immensity of blue. A blue of stones and husks and skies Blue as iron, blue as all the water of the world, Blue that turns to grey, to cordite metal, flashing in the fire of Spheres, Its light breaks the surface as it sinks into the skin As a pure Love penetrates one’s own deep silence and is lost Inside the crash of waves, the salty turn of screws, The oily blue of guts, of substance and of all Life's storms and dreams. Look then, with thunder in the pupil-clouds Into the eyes of the elements At the crystal-cold immensity of blue. THE TREACLE TREES Along the gleaming and the brutal beach Our Art carves out the Cacti and the Treacle Trees. Beneath - soft peoples gather silently to see Such brightness in the hush - the gazing up - Into the bristling of the bullion leaves Their eyes towards a frozen, close, reflecting spread Of beauty whole and reaching into vacancy. The leaves will fall if they're ignored The trees will die But they have stood to be To shine and intertwine above a hesitating glee - But not to entangle or to drown us out - Into their sullen, self-defeating visions of the sea. THE LOST GODS Is there God in the deep desperation of men Locked alone in their worlds, That can burn to the surface into thoughts and deeds To shine on Brightening a condition? Where everything may seem to be Just dry dust, Or one, real need For a strong, embracing love. It is a binding, driving key To feeling we could be at home here - Under the broken moon; so many suns – And feel free. THE TREE CARVER / CURL The definitions of the paper-bark Like a world for the creating - The wrestling of thoughts out into form By scraping thin lines into measured marks; It satisfies a temporary conjunction of cells. Words, drawn from a day, a time As though description were an impressive way To hold a human view of earth Or some message to behold an outlook Or a way to see or live - When the world is of the world With its own voice Eking moments out for Beauty in dark motion Inhaled from the silence of the void, The motion of a million thunder-rolling waves Curling in upon themselves to feel inherent space within Then break apart in fast, magnificent exhalation; Finishing all immediate sensations. THE GREATEST FIRE ‘Give to me the Greatest Fire,’ he spoke, ‘To gather round with thee, my comrades in the calm And cast a web of words one world away from this, A dreamy shore of hopes and fears; with forms and needs, Our broken limbs laid out and eaten by the feeling and unfeeling flames; A conflagration swift upon the many grains Of sand that is our time and mellow moments passing – (To be washed away by Sea and Rain). I’ll help you cast yourselves upon these tongues That speak in whispered power of old times and futures, older than the oldest times Though you will find them at the last.’ The friends there, nodded in their ways within response to this – The words being wise and thus the older man began again In summoned soft yet striking rhymes… ‘We are the sun and shadows Moving across the land For we are bright and sacred Feasting on the gladness in our Man… Though Dark and Brutal when the lava Flows from where it all began… So we must do and dream and love whatever and whenever that we can...’ A finger lifts and points… ‘I’ll speak this and be bound to You and Art that are my Keys Within all Darkness and our Desolation and our haunting thoughts that spring from these.’ ….And so with this speech spoken (through dry, cryptic lips) The man sat back And gazed with all those gathered black, but warm Into the smoke and redness and the sound of singing, crying From the bloated wood still damp from stinging rain and tears - That as with letters has been shared and shed. ….'The world unfolds, unfolds And twists its fretting figures with all their brilliance breaking out and out – And onwards round where the Sun breaks too But rises still…’ DREAM WITHOUT Tenderly, string-nymphs kiss the trees In amongst light patterns filtering through leaves And water-greens, as cold as wood-cups dipped in streams With sweet, cool ghosts which ride inside the breeze Softly speaking peace of nature’s ease Through delicate sounds of twigs and bees And tiny minds which sing and see Without a life of longing, need… But where lost piper-elves will play for thee. TREES The trees are there; I love to stare at trees. They stand and creak before me Seeking new, far reaches Through the opened panels of their leaves Through which they breathe at me, Where I may breathe them in. They are great and proud Yet silent, humble company; Unnoticed, 'till we notice them, Shimmering in their billowing breeze. The trees are there; I love to stare at trees. They stand and spread themselves at air, At sky, and at the high eyes of circling birds – Their cool companions - gripped into winds of the dark Earth – The throws of unknown, momentary mirth – they sway; They crown a wideness; Filling the white of the pure world. The trees are there; I love to stand and stare at trees. For each of them are forged, and fine, and stretching high; Fresh full in the sun’s blood; Anchored, yet marooned by the far moon; Wise to the waves’ will and the deep ground; Jostling to the language of the gloom. They whisper in the knowing of what’s really known - the nescience – Planted into darkness; unto brightness; Pure masters of their own. FURIOUS DREAMS Soft thunder, kept in the nexus of the guitar's neck Breaks out now from its stout; its rounded hollow heart... Reaching out to seek a soul To share the moon's deep music in the mad, fast fields. But what brazen soul? What nimble recognition of my thoughts - What witch's wicked call to spring my wizard's own - Sorts out her spells to snuff out apathy in darkened rooms - And dreams somewhere of dancing in the bad; the beckoning night. Hear these silver sounds, these sacred schemes I'd cast away with you! Into your watery eyes; two jewels beneath fierce starlight; Your soft skin's incense; your incensed feminine eyes Flashing with acknowledgement of power; our power - With which together we would carve out worlds Like cool, cool flowers Rooting in and shooting up into the dark, dark towers of the tall trees Pure swiftness of our craft, our molten joy and deep, deep fire Of special fire; our hunger, sudden; High on rich, metallic moistness in the dew-drenched air... Yet how I fear such air... Its coldness and the thoughts it cannot clear... How I fear my dreaming of you keeps you as a dream And how I fear this world will not be such a world that frees the moments and realities From bitter tainting by such furious dreams... SKULLDRUGGERY / FOR THE RICHLY STONED Speak, where your world turns And we shall turn it over Into the fat of a black laugh Gathered here where this world burns away More death-threatened moments. Stumbling threads of thoughts are sprung to fade As words in smoke Or laughter bursts – at the width of one’s own laughter – Inside our quirky world still holding out our precious worlds To one another. For we are the light of the same sky The dream of the sun Gazing at its own similar tissue And feeling reconciled. It may be that all that may be gleaned Shall free itself – At the last far toke of a soul-consoling sea-spliff, Dissolving our resolve once more; It leans this soul’s body Onto the bed of the earth Where our species dream and danced once Regretting less The darkness in the hearts of its comrades. But we inhale again in our own, fresh way As the waves of flames From the pyre on the beach In our watery, watering eyes – Bleeds us off, into the smoke and the swallowing. I have nothing left to say Make it all go away Where the world feeds on us And I would feed on worlds… For so long are we all pushed out Onto this strange stage And then played out and out... So long I dwindled with you beneath the willows In the twilights In the groggy glare of mornings with their promises Of loving you… and loving you… With all our missions simmering; for so long in readiness to cleanse Inside some bright tomorrow... So long I dwelt among these movements In the rhythms of my hands And sought refuge along the sweetness of the sand In a skilled skull-druggery With you, my old reflections; my old friends. FEAR FOR THE UNDERBELLY Born up and round and out, Sprung forth to stand and look about this moment with a power; A green child shining gold - Provided for - yet on this bone-clean, open-handed heavy earth - providing, Feeling the fuzzy strength kiss-prickling the curling palms on corn leaves Calmly filling out their bubbled fruit for teeth Inside my red, my random, supple soul, Riding in the arms of a clockwork fire-life Flowering now in full but crafted from a chaos... Suckled with a sandy sponge-brain, Cut up to wrestle and admire the cool, blue forces of the careless sky Throwing wind against the bright pillar-skin Around receptors being threatened from the swift and struggling grass That under melted ice-shred scrapes of ghost-thin clouds Could be cracked open and exposed; My cosy mind of thoughts whose fathers clutched up facts To build elaborate camps to distance death, Could perish in a pain that thunders on the clutching bugs A kingdom of wide coins Connected to some black fire forming hungry games Denying our holy ballet, Bouncing on the buried unkempt physicality Of a vague and savage line Buzzing by the drums, thumping to the underbelly; The gothic roofing of some ribs Encaging us alone above the unknown falls Whilst looking up into the high of the knowing sky That swims with fastened flame; Spreading, always spreading in its silence... A PERFECT WORLD The bird bathed in blinding light, The wind, its touch, held its flight – Suspended, vacant, and its wings moved Delicately slow but savage in the silence. I felt our eyes reflect the brightness of the sky, Felt the cold abyss of fire as I fired Then recoil – as an axe Pulled back across the sun, distracts The land and the cool, dark souls Of a perfect world – So its screams just died Within the might of time. THE WHEEL THAT BURNS Into the wheel that burns... Into the wheel that's blind and burns; The wheel that yearns and overturns We're born... We are its forms, Bound with a spirit ever deep and able Blown in its throws into brightness, Blown where it goes into darkness, Thrown into thorns and turned towards scorn; Made to mourn and conform to the dawn; Haunted by the feel and by the feelings of forms - Our fellow forms - It uses for the forming of fresh forms To fill the warm and harsher hollows of its storm... A storm that stirs and stirs to grow; It wants; it needs to feed to grow - Amid the features of our woe - Through all our scratching in the snow, Our powers that we need to know - To sow and fight with pride against consuming fires Of everything we'll never know - And never trust to know So we can grow... So we must always know - Where we must yearn, Where the wheel would burn - To not be overthrown... Where we are we; where we're alone Where we are one; and what we have become And may be what we may become - We will be overcome, and overturned... We must be stern To laugh and love and live through all the yearnings Of the turnings Of the blind, misguiding wheel that burns... OUTBURST The new students, Dark and sad on some hard seats Listen vaguely... They are unknowingly worthy Of the dangerous ignorance Escaping their lives. Delicate comprehensions of each other; A paper dart, a severed eraser, Move individually - last stands To wither the teacher, Who shines with an infinite intention Inflicted on the alive. The wall-clock ticks, A strip-light flicks on the loose minds As an abstract power - The gun - raises from the back row liar... Faces flush as its own truth fires - Aimed at the ordered and as ineffectual As the red dawn. THE BEACH ATTENDANT Tender are the attendant's eyes, drawn low and focussed On his resting seat within the wide abundance of a beach. Such eyes he knows have been inserted for sustainment of a balanced life; an unrestricted growth; A climbing calm within an underwater soul on which astride, They hope so fearlessly to float. They witness all the sad, the pleasant, now joyful-jerking shadows Held against the often threatening faces of a dusk To be dreaded. Voices, tools and rampant games. The command of children. He thinks and mutters Thanking life and family for his strengths, this peace Where he is free inside confined connection to the space where his mind Pulls down from thorough, understanding skies Cloud-thoughts shaped from fleeting forms and bending features with their beating hearts Beating with the sand,Odd creatures torn from a force that feeds within, upon this sand Where Sense is beaten by the wind as on a candle But which shines to beat back wind, to conquer, To prolong the burning of the wax and wildly watch… ….Watch where the flickering enables fellow minds To intermingle with pronunciation And intense immediacy of film that colours poems, Stamps out a new perspective relegating tangled evolution to some rationale - The roots twist in the guts as cars flow fast As thoughts and bodies - all as tools co-operating with the base Burning faster, fresher safeties - more secretive seconds for some sex That spills too suddenly out new attendants on to sandy patches, ill-prepared. He glances at the rake unused, and moves to make it glow again, Raking up from the raw earth Where he has vainly laughed, indulged too thickly strength among his fellow faces Flashing in the influence of entertaining forces he now carves To deepen like the glimpse into a might of leaves - For close are the jungles, is the clench of fear For the many, murky rivers - coursing - to be crossed Or be delivered from. And he who tends the sands so sighs, and knows this land of waste Forcing up the fullness and mad mixtures.He looks again beyond the reckless end of his quick rake To where the images crowd, where crowds of souls join hands And dance, and fail to lose themselves in frenzies Where he hopes - They never neglect the Sense - so simple - and the pride of purpose Running through this warmth of the beach speaking through us And the spaces it in turn would take us through. THE DREAMERS Huddled in our homes to grow Where pages move and music mutters Where we are shown the dreams on tv screens - Great, shifting myths to move us further from the darkness smothered underneath These loosening days where darkness lies asleep… But where it lurks to rise, to strike into our worlds… Once we have moved enough to move… right out into the crowds… To work the pistons of the system… From within our secret systems... Keeping our secreted dreams discrete but - With a certain hope we may return some day to homes not yet overgrown And artfully burn what we have learned into the myths we’ll make… Such myths! For the remains of our sweet day today And for tomorrow… And all the travellers travelling through Through the tomorrows… CONVOLUTION To be just strong and deeply fine And happy While grave winds threaten the glass panes Of small spaces shaping our strange species - To be just one upon the sand amongst ones fellows - Perhaps was one Intention Despite a drive that gave us hunger for some vast, unattainable power Recording beauty, breeding madness, Convoluting ways to move, and making mysteries - These insights on our lives; aesthetic time. But just to live with glory in a moment, as Provider And to die constructive, Master, A traveller free, Describing to the young the wonders to be won and witnessed Where the rest is gimmick; Weakness in our kind That feeds too much upon the frenzy, Fails to summon strength within the flux And strives too fast beyond what should be filled with brief, unleashing fire. GATHERED ON THIS BEACH The sea sounds stir within the words on scattered pages Circling where figures, aimless, stir and change their cages On the rough, seductive sands - Uncertain, shifting; mostly bland They play with faces and create reflections of the real, They thrive in spaces and contribute to the wheel, The reeling roll of breaking waves Pushing, driving and sustaining inner caves The turning liquid life so moving, moaning up through prisms in their interfacing minds. They are one within the roll of all these wilful waves Though lost to wander and to work Their brittle, supple skins in symmetries across the shore's fine line. Those unfastened fade and reach the beach as unknown or once-treasured stones of older gold, Of washed-up souls Tinkling and clicking - bearing broken jaws That will not be sighing anymore. The huddled figures gather them in dances and as ghosts in radiant shows They carve strange cacti knowing what they know To honour such a revelling and purity of overflow - The overwhelming melting of what bullion may be burnt To keep their course upon a vexing quest - The treasuring of the riding of the crests - Their tumid eyes have grown upon the crests, Their tumid eyes stare all around And down to the abyss Into their friends upon this beach; They hear the waves converging, building The running river dark - inflating And the secret seers knowing and inscribing all the motion of these waves Examining the aspects and the undulations of themselves The pages curl and swirl around their eyes before the curling waves. The figures stir - The busy figures - Search the coming quickness of their words, The sand supporting brave new worlds, The Treacle Trees as frames the figures play and sway within The thrilling and the tragic days Obscuring lofty visions of the looming and insouciant waves The symbol-turning symbols of their ways Their dreams within the fiery water flowing forth Wild horses, frothy-charging, silky-white and reinforcing such a system Such a shadow over eyes that widen with concupiscence The eyes upon the waves so borne aloft The waves, their thoughts, their frail and salty dreams Billow like the breeze upon foundations of their flames They wonder if their widening eyes atop the waves Will save them now they have created what can break - What towers now - to bring the whole scene whimpering down To dry and glint as stones upon this once so sacred ground. OBMUTESCENCE Kick-starter of the scattered stars, Your subtle random implants Have evolved Insignificant minds, Assessing their present place Tucked up, yet musing far above The helpless states Where they burn, embedded. Your greater power has entranced An awareness of all things - Bright beings that perceive Yet often fail to feel, Your stationed obmutescence - Streaked inside The reach of the cold, wide sky, Where vapour-trail shreds of our intelligence Unthread in the elements and are spun Against the socket of the lone, specific sun. THOUGHTS OF UNIFICATION From here in the garden where the sun and breeze and the sounds of free and brazen nature break the wide silence of the green world… I feel our souls riding above its system as two of its own quick systems… working, yearning, trying for the thriving in their own near spheres… Tongues of branches, fingers of the trees creaking, leaves as open palms and grass the feet of a steady fire; wires bending in the currents… where all the leaves lay themselves out, soaking in the gold warmth and the indeterminable blue of a big sky… What can I leave…What can I leave…but the shared knowledge of the free breeze… Where I think and write to feel and show to feeling and to my brothers and my sisters – smiling, crying, flying, dying in this beauty – how our feelings reach within their feelings… Will there comes a time when all the world may show their sleeping passion where it holds us huddled now and so subdued? Will the thrown disclosure melt this brilliance with its pure blast only whispered by this pen which strays… to leave us in the shining sun, or as the sherry dusk, or where its orb falls… throwing us open to the fierce and sparkling blackness and on towards some far unification of our severed stars… THE TREE CARVER (2) Incensed - To understand the world with wonder Fired-up thought-tunnels become as rich trees - Struggling to fill a sky with meaning; Shed the leaves to find the truth, While just the patterns are produced - Fading as the winds change. Flies know what to do - Quick-jerking in response to space, Fruit-feeding in a rhythm and a buzz Where the brain floats - in need of such a beat. Life starts like a gift, but measured wakefulness and duties grow; The knowing of all the nothingness we shelter from In sacred spaces and in digital throngs, The special, thought-affecting songs. We may inspire our hungry, swimming, still separated fish-forms Treasuring dark efforts at chess. Or grow more leaves of a Lotus to lose concern with an unfed hunger - Our concern for being still at the shore's harsh edge Where the breath of the first wilderness so impresses. And you may heed, or look away From this tree-brain pattern spilling now with leaves, reaching... It can snap or fade on a wild stage So long as Love, or something that burns travelling is prized forth from the earth; Among men to feel unknown - as birds - Set free to feast beyond all stages of the sun, Beyond all secret emptiness when days are done. BEAUTIFUL FACE So much Life this life - This world - Requires of itself, to breathe - Sustaining self; Its lazy smile where So much sweat and blood And fears, and tears are known, For wholesome focus; balance through the years. The pain of love, The soul of life; All that might make beauty Break with radiance, from its changing face. The wheel beats on; it feeds us dreams And visions sweet, our minds retreat - It helps us feel unique - And vital - still - to the freezing Earth… Away from what we feel is bleak, or keen... And blindness suddenly felt But never wholly seen. WRITING IN THE SUN Hunched with his spine over Dripped, laziness cliffs, The weary head-man Gropes for the bottom Of the dark world - The burned-out poem place Where the heat Spreads over the vessel, Causing the deep base To stimulate A strangled face Bending in reaction To the fallout friction furnace Combing the shoulders. He boils beyond The temperature of cool and easy thought - Drunk from morning, glassy lochs - But - sore-squinting, Where the bright, high flame of day Floods his eyes And leaves a dry-withered husk-awareness Flicking the grass And an aimless insect - He drains the last of his great bone brain, Smoothing out new symbols for imprisoned fires Of burning words that fumble forth. CONCAVE The elevated feeling from the deep Concave - It holds the very power of our Truth - The weight of what we really are Among and with, and yet without, The yawns of where we sit and grope for hands, The quickness of the sand in which we stand. PLANS The sweep of a loaded soul Excites itself in one pale room. It casts out more of its thoughts And they struggle into corners of the city, Struggle with the strange activities Of his fellow emanations; His lost, fellow friends, the lost Gods, Fumbling with the redirection of their powers; The need to focus all their fire and find Joy To join them in far forests. They scratch at the stones in the old walls And take photographs that drift in river-Times They will not swim in; And he thinks of their soft-struggling sounds Their hidden music And a lazy, mellow freedom in cool company. So he plans the fullest feast; Where they can meet, sing infinite songs and belong; To form new, jewelled paths through their art, Feel fresh, affecting stars And for seasons crown themselves as heroes; Monarchs of the dark. PLUNDER FAST You are the soft embodiment of Life That makes me feel that I must hold you And enfold you - to make me whole. Your understanding hands Could follow your unsettling eyes - above your secret soul - To reach around my soul Which simply needs to drink In all the dryness of this desert. This desert gives us strength within its storm of days A strength that is such weakness when it yawns its jaws - We are brief lives of glinting, huddled glass Beneath the silence of the unseen faces In the oceans of dead stars. Their time - timeless - should make me unafraid To tell you in no time, of your great power Speaking to my starving man As shining fields of corn That I would claim in art and mind But only stare towards in distant flesh Through all the dark, the dreaming leaves of Summer trees Their palms that hold us, fold us and so mould us in their ways That all I'm left to do is think, and hope - You could just like what they have made of me What I may have in me - In those strange moments Where we stand and look at all we are Without our tears in futures, rising from the past That make us feel we are not this part Of love that through these sudden moments can be found And plundered fast, with all the thrill and hope that we could last. WINTER QUAILING Fresh and ghostly mist drapes thinly through the fields, Through the dim, craven trees Brushing out in a keen, green coldness. The unbreakable fastness of red fire - The rubicund round God - sinks in loss Beneath the raw beauty it possesses; A creation and a sense-absorbing pureness No artist could ever forge Or keep upon crisp canvas. I return into the dark, closed woods, Ingesting the rich leaves, powerful still, Feeling the strong loss of something or the yearn for everything I will run with to the end of my days - Quailing and subdued - before this sense of simple truth We squander in our grim pursuits. Think of me, my friends, when you are old For I should lose my mind and blaze away my whole core In the way of this alive, this dying day. AWAY FROM WHEAT FIELDS Water drips and prickles plainly in a pond Where wooden wind-chimes softly knock above the world Wherein this mind that's mixed with mood And wants to wield impressions like some god Just melts its life in lives of days and hours - away - From old wheat fields. Congealing down some blue-pens onto paper here; My words seem parched already like the wheat - Once soaked under some sun, where I now sit - Where holy water in pure breeze and this strange text Unites the thrill and fire of living breath With birds, long grass and other men… Where men elaborate on timeless themes Evolving dreams where names unthread And building up pretence that alters what was fresh. Our flames burn on it seems To bend us further from our flesh and from this ground Where we are bound to what so easily can drown all words - These words - to whisper not of death - But of the dream of something just as rough and real - as wheat - Or waves of wind through fields of shining wheat - To gaze on and to praise beyond; and to accept. THE OLD MAN AND THE FIRES The face is frowned By the stains contained inside the old brain. Feelings from the hard times strain The ropes in cheeks; Their mechanical movement, well-worn; Loosening in grooves. Forgotten pain hangs around the old glass eyes Honouring the depths of lakes, Looking out at some still strange trees - A blink is a whip-crack flinch Slowed in its reaction; The camera flash carves the new time Into ravines of the dark Past and the Gulag flesh Eroding the man away – And too alone – From fires - fading - That he once so strongly stoked to own. FALLEN FIGURES They are the fallen figures Smashed from the pumpkin ground; Aloof, created strangers Once creating, now slipped-out To seek the solar-stomach Joy - The power-magic in a rugged world Breathed only in their night. They climb, and pine for this fuel-gift To the lost ones They can bleed by leaning Into worn and severed winds - Inflicted drifters within dreary threads Of slow-spilling swamp dream. For they are threshold dig-ins Un-blown to the beyond, Unattached to bone-crack Ache-shod wisp oblivion, But moving where the system Now bends best about the self, Where the creak-black crow tree Speaks out and reaches for an emptiness The figures stretch towards In loosened tooth-connection to each other. Far from the hot and savage Blood-ful places Their bound up black ink Drips down crow-marks onto bleak paper-pages Sustaining flame-souls in winter-crested lands To feed alive a flickering desire That burns and crinkles, lifting into ash To dangle high above deep pools, To tangle in the tears of willows And disintegrate to falling dust That dapples the dark water Of their delicate thoughts. Here at the fringes of cool-rolling ripples Do the pumpkin people slender-stride, and sing - Struggling to tap talents And glean frenzy from the carved and inconclusive Spontaneity of life That has sculpted their maturity From unknown sorrow-sweeps Of sweetened, sacred air. For they are shreds of the world Time has diminished to ghosts, Torn embodiments of moments Once loved but now dispersed, Mourning open wound-ways Back through burial in faint flesh To celebrate their un-belonging. TO THE LORDS Your cool significance glimmers With the moving, moulded music That empowers the young and poor But tires the rich mind. Blank moments lie underneath With those strained silences between us. Your thoughts can make you famous But how much locking-on to the world can you take? While your mind is fresh and your legs work How strong is the art in your arms Reaching out their realizations in thin ghosts? Soaked up by your receivers and incensed To sway rough realism and to soften the leaves Of this dense, this dark human swamp, Embedding you in its proper time. FINITE The mind - Its chaotic fabric - Breeds its own existences. Cellular elements of a space Connect to its components And interpret some brief world Hidden within oblivion. The dark between the stars, Infinitely cruel as our containment Invites us to an emptiness. While the preoccupation with sensation - The laughter and the child's smile - Fades on the strange face But fills a lifetime. LOOSENING At the mercy of the brilliant systems Self-sustaining And of our own salt shells Reaching out to each other And to the space where there is silence - One must channel The rich and random Gleaned and gathered up Old gold - Such understandings so applied beyond the mould Cool swaggering and celebrations can unfold Upon the fine and more elaborate sands. Hear how we haunt our lives and overlook The shape of the shore and the sea sounds Loosening our salt through slow and sumptuous Revelation of their plans. SONG AT DUSK You and I Have carved a deep, high sky And coloured our rich sleep inside The golden caverns of the dusk. Your soft warmth Becomes again the red sun Flickering all the craze of my daze Into a sudden ember-glowing joy. Our private power, formed by us alone Was bestowed by life, for life At once attained, it may remain A uniquely flavoured flower from the dark soil Blooming at the cliff's bleak edge Before the bitter breath of death And the black, black coldness of the sea; The moving desert dunes of everything flowing on earth. LOST GODS (2) Real inspiration does exist but why? How happy are the ‘honers’ or the humble Gods Who walk among their own creations - They know what they can do, Have done what they have done And now have turned away - To work the fresh fields. We feel special, soaring in the sky Chosen even, getting crushed into the dust How much of the world can you feel? The sky is paint - the whole sun is stationed And it shines at us; Bright fire breathing right through the round eyes, The light pulling black dots back to pinpricks Reaching deep to the unknown substance of a teeming brain Strung to the deep sea of oneself. Songs sing out and wrap around - their makers washed away, Their worlds lie scattered in the one. For we are lost Gods of an unknown God Trying for release by celebration Denied the real in revelation Beyond the bruising brow of the hill Escape could appear so clear yet never come But the shining pipes are here So, near the end of our dreamy days Let us try and play it all away Anyway… REFLECTIONS Searching back through dusty notepads At old, dried-out hunger that would have touched Some drawn-out world from sharpened pencils and soft pens… It seems we would have made, We would have seized, We would have said… Before the last of our suns had bled… Although I cannot even say What it was we said... Just to reach some perfect saying To feel its beauty for a moment And say something of the day Within our ways Within the deep, deep waves. There is the balance of the day Making time for the sun’s clear spray The celebration of the ways And their reflections in these worlds we shared Beneath the day. THE CLEAR WINE (a song) Worlds… they lie outside These needs…. drive inside Inside unwinding time Inside the falling signs Amid the myths from our own minds; They strangely rhyme So deeply fine… Red leaves and broken trees In Autumn by the Serpentine… Trying…..to find the wine Trying…..to leave behind Some truth of being, feeling fine Before our lack of time Shall blind our access to the wine. Autumn… feels like clear wine Autumn… breathes with such clear wine. It’s all changing You can feel the raining And the leaves are dark… The ground is drowned With the shattered bark And Pan plays still and frozen In the dampened park… A shadow in the shadows In the silence before dawn. If only there was time For you all and all these dreams we keep inside So much that is denied Though we should never hide Trying… to reach the wine Trying… to leave behind This truth of being, feeling fine Before our lack of time Here blinds our access to the wine. Autumn… feels like clear wine This fall… breathes with such clear wine. Worlds… they lie outside These needs… drive inside There is only you and I now Flickering with the firelight and the figurines Aching, with an ember-shine So deeply fine... From being true and feeling deep Inside unwinding time Inside our falling signs Inside the clear wine That shines in autumn. NATURAL MOTION The world forgets to argue At our being, our perceiving Of its wonders. The sand and life Hold us in their palm Fingers closing round our days Like petals; Their softness in the sun's deep warmth Becoming one; Showing us the natural motion Of our end. THE SHINING In Life, There will always be the life itself Amid a concentration - Or a striving for some height Where we can feel, the greater sun But also breeze, Where quality of sand improves with quantity of light For a shining where Death's shadow lengthens, Where the new seed strengthens And we weaken at the knees. HUMAN SONG Let us think and fret less - Grow out what hides, what drives within - The sun seems like a friend, The sky - free with fire and warmth, The night – majestically - secretes silver With a dead moon gleaming with its memories; It entices our strange souls still. The hills are the teeth of the sky Within the body of the land Water is life We dwell within the form, with all the forms of our mystery. Let us tend and keep in tune And be cautious of the forces in the bleak wind We flinch from For they need their nourishment. They may seem blind but are great and savage Making and unmaking, Maintaining the worlds flame through us From a lifelessness. Such a fine and noble role; Our energies finding niches in the world Until their bending; wilting; their quick ending In complete, and utter sleep; To make us cherish our days. FORCES I've seen the great care in Nature And its destructions Deft as a kick, or through a soft, subtle kiss. Within a wailing wind on my flickering fire I've felt the full force of the Earth Breaking through its 'scapes, above me or beneath So sweet; or mighty... To the ghostly moon a myriad of dreams have I cast For your Love and a dark laugh into the Sun's singing face... By chance it may fall less ferocious in the cold, blue space Between our worlds. RUINS 'He look'd not like the ruins of his youth But like the ruins of those ruins'. - John Ford, The Broken Heart Words have no weight where the wind sings Where my voice rises and is thinned into the shouting trees. The supple leaves have edges, honed and dark, and you and I could be kings and queens of the whole world Bound up in the harshness of its bark, And yet I'm here... And this night is here; long and naked Where the souls of our fellows are flown - or far - and give us these reflections of time. What were the worlds behind your eyes? What were the teeth in the horizons of your thighs? What are the charred ruins of my heart and soul in the hand of your memory? For no more do they warm you fiercely Where the cold tide turns us over And we are changed again... Where my fate feeling sealed, as this ghost Came from knowing and the need to be known ... My pride that we were, My hope that we would, stay safe - In our dream-soaked sleep; From these moon-locked lands, From ruins - ancient - where I struggle just to stand Amongst the blacker ruins of our brightest, best intentions. But there is the sun... The same that shone upon us. It will shine in the eyes of the new. Its hunger will burn in their hearts... Even here... ...Where words have no weight and the wind sings.... Where my voice rises and is thinned into the shouting trees... SMOKE Smoke lifts, from its ember nest Requested like some service from the dead To spaces where our powers flail… To see how we may simply sail All the colours of the influential waves. The motion drowns the breathing and the wide-eyed, red Into a hiding where these current, steady spirits shed Some grey fullness; comfort; A soothing peace in free motion without contact. Smoke lifts, from its ember nest Its incarceration in a complex system - Unconcerned, to become the Invisible; Ghosting forth to where it haunts and pours through loosening thoughts; Unveiling streams of circles, out Into the raw air and nothingness. The burning, burning core Screaming in silence Glows hot with its ambition To maintain a Time through quiet, cloudy strain, To think away a soft, compressed brain In vacant snakes, uncoiling their charades Around the surfaces, distracted faces , of our hardened world. This oblivious heat Summons structures, lingering and thin, That drift on out - to fade - As earnest yet uncertain Orienteering thoughts, From lost and long dead, Pure, but now irrelevant worlds. LIFE AND LOVE Life is Fire and it is Flux Speed and flowing Heat. It is strife and melting grime, Bloodshed; bright Art-glow; Burning through all kinds. Life is dark and undone Silent burial To tremor soft smothering. Struggles for light in waiting Earth, To shake the sown but shifting for overflow. Life is liquid languishing To loosen into flow. Unquenchable thirst For freedom brave but drying Next to waves that melt to overthrow... In Air that is the Wind To hound and harken, Huddle and inspire. Rumple through the system in great twists To funnel, break out or draw into despair. And Life is such Great Love To bind and free and suffer through all Burning, freezing, moving, Breaking Time. Such sweet and sticky fillings on the vine To call and find and follow - In the wild spirit of the blind. OLD DOGS We are not the ones we were - anymore. Time has challenged us, won cold battles in the war, Lengthened our long shadows under the sun, Shifted our characters - unfazed - into the cracked, and crazy, Washing us out onto whiskey-red shores. As all things in the world Fragment we slipped in sleeps downstream through the Falls of mornings Flashing in the blue, green and the gold. We sung in unison with stars While the score still scored its trance But now - no more. The songs skipped rings as we sung its grooves And now our lips move crookedly. Let me not lie to myself But believe in Love and be old now, Another puppet in the show that I know Carves puppets of us all. Winking in my nature at the dust and loud dogs on the doorstep; Banging at the frames again I cannot lie to them; The game has changed - all unchanged. Bones of our memories will dry. We cannot rule or fight the widening tide But just keep on in some flow That flows and flows - Through its highs and lows- Drinking its drink of us - Silencing lives inside Time. PERSONAL… Morning I stare out - Two pellucid, bulbous blues Connected by a sullen spirit-glue, My organ-eyes become transfixed Upon the eyeless mind; the invisible wall and space of sky Beyond the window. Birds are brightly bound and cloud drifts As a blanket born around The long, slow motion of this platform world. To forge from some compulsive scheme, To draw one's own world out from this pure being Boggles the blank brain and the pleasant belly. This place of forms and oily fires Craving drink-sensations underneath My high and abstract dream of willing wonder - Some real, absorbing all… The signs of such release - the dawn, the ardent yawn - So raise me from a half-life, From some safety and this bed To ponder, listless on conditions; On the finding of known joys - and some new joy towards excess - Before the dead. December London Pull back the curtain, Face the greys of London winter day From comfortable Kensington flat Top floor, big door Musty eccentricity and heaters Old Orwell London winter comes Peeping through the bone-black skeleton trees They line the smooth roads, fresh and raw With grazed-knee uniform bleakness. A harsh wash smear-edge blends with breath, and time Subdued by cars Smoky bacon smell and leaves All cleared away but ghost-remaining With the taste of smudgy rooftop clays. Steady iron work and cars continue Like the smart black sleek one passing now Shining and un-charred amidst the cold bark Down which I watch to glimpse Its soft pastel luxury insides With leather-gloved importance gripping wheel And windscreen-wiper leaves which clutch for Summer. Crow-biro, hard-black, digs across this smooth, white pad Knuckles, clench-skinned, scrape against the ledge, To feel myself as animal, alive. Lamplight carves out faint yellow fires From cosy study innards, Reaching out with ancient ember-arms of glow As do the street-lamp beacons, once ablaze But cooling in the concrete air. My tree-height lookout is from Robin’s time in deepest Sherwood, Squinting at the red-faced resting men of Nottingham Scrooges amble through the slab-cut pavements Home to family living rooms To loving wives, to pets and laptops, Wine and carpets cleaned for Christmas-tide. A sudden car alarm abandons Dickens and the mind The barren parks seep their frosty air Over the lost chimneys of the city. A taxi slows in shuddering, grinding cries As the school-smart grey shades deepen, And a young child’s laughter fades Into the sky. Winter Ways Jack’s seven silent books Are tales to draw out secrets Far from shadow-fells Where children’s fresh adventures Follow subtle, snowy calls Through unassuming, aged doors To the Narnian shores; The wonders of a close yet distant world Blown-open to explore… Such winter ways of lamplight Reach to realms of flux and flight To homes of animals that talk and fight For their kingdom lost, to be regained So friendly lives can thrive again Before its end Beyond our glassy walls, Our frozen pictures and fixed selves. The magic and delights in store For young and brightening minds Re-light for all A feeling for some form of goodness In our quest of old; To reach across the strands of our string times Unravelling - winter-dimmed - Towards new worlds of once-fresh gold. Upon the Hard Surface Roller-skates upon the Hard Surface Revealed our exotic powers to the evening, and each other. Revelling in the strength of our legs, our hearts We reeled in swiftness, balance and panache Releasing noisy joy into the quiet stars. We thought that in their dark way The tall trees in the wind laughed with us Enjoying our enjoyment of the strange exciting life Arranged for us – a group of young and dangerous boys Stretching breath beyond all nature and the concrete. Here in this magic did we hone ourselves, The secretive soft-orange glow From the high floodlights Defined the boundary of our show, a dark green net That held our weight when we pressed against it, Curling fingers through the spaces, round some plastic wire To stare beyond, where waited all the shadows And working wonders of an ongoing, independent world. In such distance, rising, cooling tower-clouds Suggested we'd find richer, fresher kinds of fun Outside the school restrictions that we knew Were focusing all our beings and our minds In preparation for the unknown times to come. It was a place of simple skating and a start to the adventure; But the shared exhilaration of our lives That joined us there together – as joy does – Remains deep down - and if I write and can remember – May resonate in this – here - forever… Bath in the City A fledgling water-pixie comes up from a dipped tub Into an enclave of dimmed cream Congealed into corners, Fashioned for the wallowing and body-drenching Of a being in itself, an unsaid incarnation Rising in the fastened flesh of a world-walker. Stripped and bone-charged, primed in youth, It rebounds its eyeball soft-stare through space of the knuckle-glass Flattened in a vertically mastered mind-craft And thinned of its affinity with any skin - To see supple strange-limbs slip away pellucid liquid, Hair strands licking thick warm cheeks, An assemblage holding mixtures of the soul and patterns in the mind That recognise themselves, And the effects of bathing pale orientations of the whole ghost In the finger-touch translucence Of a steamed-up carefully constructed room. As the materials of towels bend around the legs of brains The air outside intrudes away To footsteps, and orange origins of lamplights drinking stone Where my secluded circulation stretches out its ears To the high-sprung sneaker-girls Easing their eye-glue catlike coolness over pavements - Heartbeats and flickering features soft but as separate from skin-touch As wicked worlds of dream They move through macrocosmic flared-jeans in a fresh and skin-tight drifting Further in their space than ongoing silent celebrations in the stars That we are kept from... A last high laugh, and their sounds and echoes are withdrawn somewhere beyond, Secreting their reaching dreams, hiding their thrilling rides Where the deep city car-winds pass And where the door-slam swiftness becomes a video-clip from the next room Triggering a shiver, and edging the night Closer to conjectures that to lose oneself into another, into life, or into God - Is perhaps the proper pleasure that this physical time, fails to contain..... Between cool corridors a buzzer goes And soon a key will fit into the locks Taking my daring thoughts, Dripping words And driving them here Where my immersion-heater being Endures from the slab-line trenches Crevices of comfort amid the continuing concrete rush Of my unknown blood Rejecting movie-merger and severed from the heights of suicidal dawns Spilling their pink over skies, and into closing eyes. A Walk Outside My great, brown, wrap-around coat, Smoothens against the bony air, Finely binding my packed self To walk within a warm separation, snugly-cut From the clean, smudgy freshness Forcing, drooping upwards - Solemn fountain-casks of star-born sap. Their brittle finger twig-tips fall down low, Brushing; biting the clay-green growths of the earth From damp and delicate, open seas Of ghoulish, ghastly grey. Over the softly impressing black mud, Through the lonely smoke - Torn and folding; Burning its dry bacon out, and further out In frenzies for far fields - I tread - Aching for the calm, cosiness of home - Where the brothers of coats Will receive the beacon brain Plunged amongst its tightened tower-lair Ready and aware For calibrations - deep, drowsy focussing - Beside a crackling fairy-fire. Jooby Good dog, good soul... You are what’s good in souls Your eyes know what they need to know Of trust, and time; your heady time Of needs and loves, and sudden fun. You're gentle and so wise with this It makes you look amused - You friend and fellow phantom of this fire That moves, that drives inside of us And seeks the smells and joys around here still - Good Jooby... Come on, let's go out again - For walks into the wind, the great wind - Carrying us all away... The creatures of your kind Are restless in our homes - Incensed... or so resigned... But always soft heads readied, set On trying to be high - Then you'll bumble on besides To just drink up upon a life Be warm, and sleep in deeps; And wake again, before we die… What it is to ride these days of direct duties And in the sun's good time, just slide Where it hides us, home again Worked out, full up and tired For sleeping deeper; ever deeper. Flying a Life The kite flew like a life Launched miraculously For the guidance to begin Within the many forces of a world. In finding its space inside the air A hesitation passed, a downwards dip - It could have crashed - For thinking of its distance from the ground. But then it took the chance - to fly - And lifted up, and up, And held itself so high That into the dark of the grass and the bright sky We laughed ... At our attachment to its joy At our suspension in the wind - Although earthbound - In the heights of our exhilarated minds. It came down slowly Only tumbling at the last To lie lifeless. And the man who wound the entrails up, Who gently held the body in his hands Had been at both ends Had fulfilled a life Before he strode away; Heading boldly towards the disappearance Back inside. Differing Instinct To run at the bright day – Long hands trembling, glittering deeps in the keen eyes – It could always be the last. The body in the small room charges fast, A flash of focus, a stare into within To yield out secrets from loose thoughts And arrange them, through the mind machine; Craft the notions through pen-nails, slow-sinking, into the self; Straining it all into the material. Should one be as the rest? – Under the simple sun outside Their busy souls sound and seem untouched, unknown Amid the music of The Doors. Painting and the poetry of passion, belly of fire For form and the excitement of ideas, The objective to become a someone Stumbling for a hidden whole, for all the souls of men Thrown outwards in a paper-flesh While knowing of death, hearing mortality in a shell - The cool hushed roar of air against the head - While maybe never knowing the total, sudden rush Of this world’s instinctive-ness, and its savage bliss Hidden in the instinctive, strange search for one’s own. Grounded My thought-mechanics reason with monotony Unexposed to monkeys. The force of mind ignites my actions So that pens will move for purposes That lose themselves. While my ardent instincts, Kraken feelings, Emotional configurations And potential fires for belonging To this whole world Around this whole being, Remain in check for the duration – Wild, available moments in existence Grounded - While I wonder how to reach the sky, What I could construct to swoop up high To scratch the moving fabric briefly wide… Before I simply fall and die. Empowered In smooth cream I write At a creaky table in the garden, rustling cool With nature’s hushed and humble tease Honed at night in hunger for the rush of life Spreading limbs for pleasure by this current swamp of light; Large leaves on tube-fat stalks feeling honour for the sun and breeze. The smell of work and burning wood Smokes up; smokes all around, between complexities, carried down this pen And clasped inside the pass of cars That drift on through to other towns While time allows me to be here, to sound My emanations for a fundamental love, An association or an ideal aspect hidden in the village That even from the balance of this moment before a change of years Is strong-scented simple Summer; All of its warm and golden powers That help me inhale deep, squint out and swallow down, The views and tensions of my kind thrown far aside – No more to be relied upon – their lost, laciniating lies - But left alone at leisure to a game – Within some greater game, pulsating – Smiling up with stimulation for the joy and dream And one’s becoming even closer to another; What is seen to rise and surface through A calm and quick girl’s street-wise, wide, enchanting glance. Is it this connection, and its glory that empowers? With the glowing hope there could be space For us and art Amid the hurried throng, Among the song and strong perception of these flowers. Beauty To behold the beauty that lies outside And know that there is beauty within... If forth from all the sand and chaos driving sin One flower still springs.... I feel there could be light and hope enough, to sing And for a darkened world, to cling to. Rich Days Oh God of it all How I adore these days Where there is Sun and Wind and freshness And it blows and fills and flows through England And my soul Yet it is not cold Everything is alive and I am rich and high and loose. My thoughts are blown; they blow back to you; Your smudgy warmth; your bulbous body Bearing down to take it up… and out of me, Giving yourself up… and out through me To make me free; to kill me greatly; To kill you greatly; Deep inside our worlds for seconds, rhythmical… Here and now, we clamber back and drift Along the walls where we are walled in – dryly - So to work and give out more again Of focus and of forging through our strength of will what drives The next wind back Towards the world’s wild overflowing; Some blue beyond perhaps as bright and tall As where I’m all… breathed out… … Where I breathe in again…. … But whatever I - that I may be - shall one day it hardly seems Be lost and dead and drowned… No longer strong to breathe this strength in anymore. Phoenix I have fought the fires of love and hate with paint And escaped the house I built Before it turned to chaos and to waste. I've since found warmth enough to build again; To thaw frozen honey, flowing round your eyes of late... Amid these eyes that feed, upon the sweet and chaste Amid the dreams we water to outgrow Time's changing taste And though my legs are long; my body strong My life is short... So I shall give my gold, to shine Where here the songs are sung And we run a darkened race. The Meeting Our sounds fail like life-lines tossed without belts To get a grip on; I flail in behaviour on a hot and bottomless sea Stammering in the sweaty wake of this sudden time While you are a ship, large and looming With potential never designed for moments Confronting inability, Gliding in aware proximity To a presence where the moments tread In a gridlock; Later to remember all we could have said. But here there is such ice Nothing can be salvaged. Impressions build behind quick-drinking eyes, Turning into tyrants that distil my lies Inciting me to strangeness to be scrutinized; The unseen facets of a character clouded out As when we lock, and it all floods out of me... Perhaps if I did not care so much for my awareness There would be a way to be saved; We could cut straight to some new kind of embrace. Don’t Look 'The eye sees more than the heart knows.' (Blake) Don't look. You will only see, What you already seem so sure you know: That there is nothing fast in me - For someone such as you - To ever reach for, or deeply need. Your soft, your slender arms - are owned - Despite these dreams of everything with you I would have seized... Where you are only friendly now and swift Towards this fumbling soul - Stranger and more dark - In all this briskness - than the bright Foolish rounding of conceited clouds, Closing slowly over the pure snow. I am - to you - only what I've always seemed to be… Confusion Where do poems go? Where should they go? With their broken noses; Fiery words that burn away and fail As candles gutter… With their clever endings Impressing cleverness… and forgetting Anything that was ever threatening; They are snuffed out. I would love To write and know surrender And the quiet magnificence in private pain; A solitude where crucifixions only can explain What nothingness explains… This loneliness and loss… I’d think romantically and twist the ways Till all is love and beauty - truth – A greater good that knows what goodness is… But that your beauty lied And my world died where still it dreams to die - Escape from a feeling, half-alive - Inside a world where it may really die - in one cool moment; Just another sad, and too-wise man Who never felt his youth again Or found a youth that only you could find. I do still think… But cannot think without the truth Of feeling alone, remaining. Is there just too much to blame… I could believe in anything; That I deserve this nothingness or that The space you kept between your eyes and mine Was destiny. I would have done my best for you Where you were unimpressed I would have held your hand and cared for you, I would have loved you but instead I cannot live or change or rid This bitterness that surely blinds - With having glimpsed a world where your sun shines on mine And there is happiness. Of course I wanted you instead of knowing what I knew That I could never win… I wanted you not to have the everything That kept me only as some vague friend Where I would lose within my shyness and my dryness All the access to your soul through speech and through the mind That you would not allow But then would take to some degree in passing from me. For there is nothing in this world But the strength which may befall some men And the bitter knowledge which the weak Cannot and would not inflict in ways upon their friends. This way, my friend. So I am here and cannot see you now again… I’m lost to harbour only dreams Where you are not a dream which dreams no dream of me… Where I am all the lost who have their worlds More known in poems by their comrades So they need not feel they’re so alone With broken noses That they’re thrown To showing those they still may love Their deep confusion and the emptiness that comes with blood. Where still I’d offer unto them The marks of this black pen On this white cloth. Out of an Uninspiring Seminar Books split open into halves And the warm, bloody bodies Gather to enhance their thoughts In patterns upon big pads. I'd seen it in a film, The complex student, and his crucial peers - As enduring victims of the still air In-between their beings. The hero moves on through With longing for mellifluous girls Freely fastened in the nearby space - And blind, intently - to some joy they could discover In the countries of his needy soul. Locked up upon an open English beach And for focussing a passion for the closed stones He wins my sympathy Watching from overhead, through insatiable eyes As the sea roars. Where is my power in this place? Scribbling the rhythms of this reason As I sit constrained. It serves the neat emboldening of the lie In some future seminar And if ever to be read, or studied From inside such solid ice - Let it here be said; I cast myself from windows into wild winds and the blank blue-sky; Dark sufferer of a mind The revolutionary kind - As if I could betray - as this tutor waits - Through the flicker of a feature - Any subtle hint at all Of the as yet unasserted schemes To thaw, To thaw Our huddled and flesh-frozen fires. Chester, '00 Being Young / Riding Souls Eyes of a friend cast awareness over me To convolute a focus and any sense of vision. They draw the mind Into distracted pure awareness of itself - Awkward and frustrated... They force my hope to some new future Where the blending of our being's needs Are just controlled by what they need And not by what they make out they don't need; Ungoverned by wide-open eyes, this careful room Or my animal pride. Realities more real to the brain But where beneath them all this one still remains Untainted, by our station within it; A girl's respectful expression; An outside view of oneself Where what we feel we should or could be Stirs the insides; it can make us hide In thoughts of some free future. Here where I have indulged my spirit Or been infected with a face-preparing plague - For your faces that were young and will remind me How we were nothing - How still I am nothing - But a riding soul placed onto powers we receive - That so relieve and so deceive - Inside stark yet phantom limitations to our worlds. Sessions Fumbling between each other and such space In the darkened niches where we seem so safe - Within the breathing waves - Craving adoration or some smothering warmth, Hollowness of time and unknowing souls Kneading at the outskirts of each other… How can I express my love? My fire? For you and all these friends who find me acting In this strange array of faces - Shells of passions vaguely traced, round brains unloaded into shows - Within this field of days so open that they flow And want to grow Through all our trapped and fading visions of a world - Our private and once-precious powers - So soon to stand between us and the cold. Aloof The unfathomable soul outside Is washed up; silent, Under the streetlight... He stares out - from the infliction of a concrete breeze Cutting off all question. His stance is an animals; heavy-set; A ghost's; Speaking for itself… He looks up once - Moves off into the night - To leave one single space, deserted; Whole oceans alone. Concupiscence in a Library In a library - Soft, non-threatening - The quiet mind feels stretched Elements of letters Dried out; embalmed in tombs. People glide past And I think, feel needy For fat cupid's hungry darts To rip my belly through And own some ripe girl's soul For great sensations... So many girls and thrills, though I would bid come through me And through all these skills, and frills; To the nature that is what we starkly are... Our fingers pressed towards Our barren eyes, our hollowness; Fulfilling all it can while it can. Estranged I am not passionate or impressive here, But dry and dead - or alive as some ghost - Uneasy - Where we flounder and you await some fun To be shown to you, through me. We breathe, where underneath - In me, everything is tangled and the mind so vast Like a sun burning in, but down among These shadowy, shaping waves - Dictating what should here and there, be done To reach you and to attract you and to carry on Stumbling over trinkets all around these old rooms… Wherein real ghosts are meant to care, or mourn Our clumsy, strange restriction in their legacy of air We share and now say nothing in. The Price of Weakness for the Darkened To long for a big bang; All that can alter feeling, the travel, the music, endlessly pulling instincts, good times waning into a slow dusk; a lack of power, words spoken and dissolved in minds, a cigarette black to the stub, dark brushes hardened with old paint, the large sky crossed with vapour-trails that fade, My pint glass drained into froth... I knew your place and failed to comfort you couldn't reach your room, because - I was afraid to behave in a bad way - Fumbling aloof… As though we are these worlds checked and cast into sad and damp, uncertain spaces; feeling our fresh flowers fading with a lack of the sun; our features never really known, nor ever traced. To the Survivors In a seminar I imagine futures; Watching the peculiar self Through screens for soaring states, and implications. Distracted back to dullness; Concepts gaze out, Locked in words upon weak pages; My own examinations Move out and emerge wild - To be confined to the same separated Dry dimension. Somehow, Proximity to these people stifles dark expressions of the brain There's no familiarity So I at least, am willingly condemned; These stilted words here given out For any survivor's ends ... Student Realist Lights outside glow like in London But a harsh, a secret ocean breeze Reaches the Autumn stripped trees and the clock of Chester. Could this be a movie-land, about to show more human glory Through its particular dreams? We gather together upon the old walls and stare out blankly - It all looks good, and festive; The squirreling up of hopes for future joyful moments. Yet to be here, or anywhere - With words spoken failing, and struggles in the soul Darkening the leaves that scratch around the walkways Is to feel the hollow burden of so many striking stories Holding fast, and slowly playing out - Resolving only by degrees of change, Above the free, actuality of now; The surrender of our sacred dreams. Entanglement Sharp, entangled union; The tongues of the grass lick light Beneath the flow and flow Of these Summer trees and breezes Beneath a black pen scribbling and digging For some paper freedom; Some scrawl through whiteness that may reach wholeness; A temporary totality That can quiz or spin the spirit; so raising it back Towards the silent sun. Although free, I feel I am bound and wound up In you and time and the drugs of our time; Our own music. What kind of music are we? Mellow to be – or soft, romantic poignancy - Rising up to try and sound surprising or so cool To try and keep it all so smooth Though mixed with metal as we forge and perform our art In our last hour. Even in the English grey I am drawn to look afar And ask again, for stars To hold us close to truth and not to be disturbed By outbursts from the earth - the grass struggling suddenly - Where nothing may be gleaned as pure or whole, Though it be filled. Shame How may we mend our ways? Re-claim lost time and the bright blue days Of our child's great forays - The swift goodness in the soul Before Corruption by so many Worlds, Dark, distracted feedings of a beast And the shame of giving nothing of oneself. We may not bear the burden of our ways But for the salvaging of fragments long delayed Within the simple freshness of today. Resonating Shades I sit again Amid my secrets in a sacred solitude Treasuring floods of thoughts and visions Empty of any actual worth? The shadows of mere stories already crowding Large and heated homes. This inspiration breeds some dreams - Refuges for pride throughout the balancing in days. Desire is stoked for a happy future self And something underneath that's gold and grows Fuelled by some field of wonder in retreat and power; A reach-out from my realism to the peopled stars that flow With quicker dreams and backgrounds For so many loudly 'teeming brains'. They colour their modern worlds, pleasure specific senses Soft, insatiable and open to arrays of joys - Our condemned cavemen in the cold cry wildly for. Will another ladder to just brief, thin heavens be constructed By my stumbling, cut-off conjuring - Or may real roads to deeply resonating shades Be truly paved within this day? The Talents The power is there - within. We feel it move, And want to rise on up And gloriously out... But we wait, like so many - Spirits in a limbo of control Upon a dry surface, Soaking ourselves in the harsh and heady Feel of the water. Until the Sculpting Time can come, When we can slip inside To be alive, Raise our miner's palms Against the invisible sky Or drown on the outside. The Mellow Mystics Arms itch and a vagueness rolls into our souls Our eyes droop onto the edge and hold their inbred recognitions of a world… Let it be said that we were all friends of a far moon and a high sun Crouching in our awkward rooms maintaining, maintaining, our warmth and music in the gloom. Reaching for some rich delight through our art through the dark. Our clocks were our compasses where the raw cold Dragon-ed up against the glass frames, depicting dimly The silent, solid shapes and frozen structures, stationed to support our kind. Our need was for the dreams in smoke and pure pulls on mugs of sacred tea We struggled for our pens But the night lay long and voluptuous ahead of our eager heads And beneath… the belly belched and gurgled with its need to be in deeps of hallowed sleep. Such was it as we were, together then, In fellowship of friends, yearning for more wondrous connections with one another. Fumbling joy-pad punching thumbs; flexing finely-fashioned fingers and desiring everything that seemed it could be better or just closer to the pressure for absorbing, beautiful absorptions… Like mellow mystics, slow outside of moments where we Lift ourselves free of the need of a cause or a question or an incompleteness… Though it will all pass… our passion will pass… this brief lament towards it all… Our romance and our time and our destinies, Our craving for colours before we will sleep Before the great dawn drives us onwards… For the pure crystal, where we may be fixed … and made whole… Sailor What is my configuration? As a code released to air near flowers Locked in to their unfurling. As a sailor of Panopticons of worlds Bound inside a thinking flame To this mad mast Of meticulous, manipulation-making. While the life-sea strikes foundations I must forge the way for union, Unfold inside some heightened power To elucidate fragility of form; The strength of self above the natural and the norm; Imagining whole calms within the rocking and transfixing storms. More True Strange creatures I once knew, Stranger than this creature of myself; They smiled at me, and knew my name; They recognised my ways within the days we played. They dwelt with me And felt me as a face and goodness In one stifled world and in one stifled time... Would that I had time and worlds enough To love them fully. Would that I could build new worlds for them, For me to be in and to be more free in And be more true with them Together. From your look and your smile (for G) You look down and round into me As though to see in deeper down To hold on to what you see. You shine when your smile breaks wide Perhaps to its widest delight; A sweet girl’s glee, Lingers over shapes of thoughts that please; For there are still few rocks here where a smile may run aground And a sea wide where its motion feels so known by you In our brief moments. Your brown look is soft and hazel seeing; A dark warmth from a round face Safer with a certainty from sounded words That fuel this warmth, to assure it where it lives; Ready to give out its fire while it’s warm, Ready to receive my longing look Amidst some sudden breeze; amidst fragility in me or you That could cool the redness or inflame our game into flames; An everything we could reach into and extinguish together. But now your look is as ready to break as your smile was But in reverse… seeing a threat beyond parted lips to a distance Where its fire can die Where it knows it shall die – Where its world that was mine for this time May take away what it saved towards nothingness and dismay; Towards outer things burning in at the edges: That suddenly were burning in at the edges. We may hold them back. One Dream Where we sleep inside one dream... Dreaming all our dreams inside this dream, I would have been your dream If you had dreamed of being mine... If your dream of me had seemed perhaps As worthy as it seemed to be to me... But being mine may never seem to mean enough to you As being yours would mean to me, much more than any dream... So I remain asleep; a dream undreamed, Or to be featured darkly in your dreams... My words being murmured by another Where the deep waves turn; turning me down To face the harsher features of the one dream I cannot reach you in. Beneath the Day Hiding in my sadness Beneath the flow and edge of day I should not want to wonder If you'll ever see me in this way... In my world where I see you Where you are all the days And I am strange to your owned eyes - And far away - Inside one life and youth that keeps your beauty for another's eyes And time flows where I here float and notice tides That will pull on and come for this safe darkness Where I can only hide. Ruin Words have no weight where the wind sings, Where my voice rises and is thinned into the shouting trees. The supple leaves have edges, honed and dark, and you and I were kings and queens of the whole world Bound in the harshness of its bark. And yet we’re here, and I am here… And the night is long and naked Where the souls of our fellows are dead - are gone - and give to us these reflections of time… What are the worlds behind your eyes? What are the teeth in the horizons of your thighs? What are the charred ruins of my heart and soul in the hand of your memory? For you never needed them where the slow tide made me love you as another does… As another would… or another still does… Where the knowledge that was secret was shared… Where my fate as a ghost in your eyes that was sealed….came from knowing and the need to be known; My pride that you would, My hope that you should, My despair and my ruin that you could never. Friends with the Sun From in controlled coldness I've watched your milky warmth Thrown around a world like mine. Our faces meet - And I may only see - such sun. I try to feel there'll always be Some hope for me. Simply through my smile you could at least Guess, how much I'll always Darkly love - as much as the rich Earth - Your light, shining on me. (nov '00) Loss The crisp waves break, and fall onto the shore, Spreading out like a moist tongue over tiny teeth. I drop down on the sand as a washed-up wolf, The old shells crunch like the bones in my hands, My dry mouth chews on its own heavy fangs. Amid the crash on rocks your laugh was lost And now our time is too, so milky and smooth. Biting the old skull I can still drink our dream-desert, The hillocks of the body moulded into land Where your warm and windy footpads fade next to mine. At dusk, in the silent colour reaching to the end of the world Do I feel you there? Or somewhere - Drowned in this thick world with tears Or released perhaps, into this blood-light Sinking my own grey spheres. Before the Dusk You, who I once knew When we were high, When I was high and desperate For destruction by your perfect lust. When my bright life loved only shadows Failing to escape the dusk... I'd never known your kind of kindness, In your voice, Your sudden touch, That I could darkly love; To love before the dusk. If only I could now Give you my soul; my whole, strange soul - Here on the sand in the full sun - Before you pass away to the dusk, Before I pass away Or drown, And pass away into dust... Yet I could not ... Earth Glow long feel of her full hair on my sensitive skin is dark emmanuelle, a movie-scene so close yet so far, you are but all softness on my tight, coiled wounds and their strange Hunger. i may know one part of you, or you may know the whole of me, or we may never know one another, or even ourselves; but as a stranger you have me sharing your hair agreed in this intimacy and in nature - in the air - you control my whole body - bared - Its stark edges against yours; I'll rise where you feel. For I am the dog on his back and a demon, wings spread needing your powerful tease and you are the woman, dark angel taking me in you find uses for limbs brushing feathers against feathers; holding back with your arms in our clouds, all the rain and the breakers beneath. It's the mystery we give, of so many we are given... roused from our sleepings - ourselves - our tongues lolling out, all the way to the grave... ...To be shown what is known under heaven and to dream of what lies towards hell, denied rights to dark utterings of fallen words that would readily beg, for so many things.... though it would keep the light from our earths? From a quiet summer night How wasteful we have been, How stressed and disrespectful, How proud, non-peaceful we all seem ... From here, within the darkness of a quiet, Summer night Within its truth of peace on restless Earth I creep to bed, thinking only of the measures That may breed more chaos, On the goodness which suspects More cold, diluted hunger; Tired eyes grown wide for dreams, Illusions of control and fresh escapes What unseen future waits for us? Close softly here, at least, down deep To gain what's still and sacred in this night's sweet gift Of purity, in sleep. This Striving In the quiet I'm drawing lines again In understanding; The ceaseless arrangement of oneself in nature. Books of evolution spoil my secret But I choose my music one last time, for other times In this privileged time… Distilling the sun's gold in waters of sound Coffee goes cold again, Sharing it all before all Time and all drowning, Bound between the clock of our race - Of our striving - and this striving... Where… am I closer to sinking, or to flying? Is this living? This lyric - here - balanced in the unknown; So close to living and to dying. CYBERPUNK… 'Live in fragments no longer…..only connect.' (E.M.Forster) POST-CONVERGENCE Lost is this soul in shadow-worlds while in a sandy swamp as it rains, golden, with the dreams, the visions of our fellow fires. The energies that flow in this dimension; rising; reaching; hoping for an overflow where an insect crawls; spontaneous in its itch of life….yet close to the quickness of our real deaths. Fresh wonder in the child’s glow that doesn’t know - of the assessment of its own dark and precious state. Such assessment drives an adult to this action, introspective, in this search for universal, further evolutionary power that makes more mere dreams… until one can exhaust such force. It is a rapid fire, denuding wonders of receiver to the struggle of a maker. The rich magic; what is made and flashed before the eyes that is always to be made while bodies of emotion sway in the lands of the mind, motivating the soul… or otherwise. The wise man knows of this blinding, heightening vision; the entry into fires through our own fire-magic or the makings of the mind - and the cool corrupting combustion that shall work upon the lost, the searching souls. CRY OF THE LORDS Now it must be shown: Wild words wrung out amid loud sounds, through resonating eyes From careful code To the figures so restricted in their bones That space is to be blown; Worlds opened, richly known; To find one's soul and settle in some throne Above the harness of this force and place That tries us and would hide us Crying and alone... Or… darkened; narrow; restless… Unatoned. CALL TO THRIVE 'He who binds to himself a joy Doth the winged life destroy. But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in Eternity's sunrise.' (Blake) Will you come? And thrive inside this sound with me - Let its light surround us And re-animate the Ways that will here play Upon our special day. Reach out and feel the fire - Brightening empty streets and faces that so fade - Become what you desire! A moment is not worth its mark Within a free, exhilarating time When it is forced through cautious, overbearing Powers of the mind. THE GAMERS Gun-blasts bleed the little men Over and over 'Till the next stage Places the next caged Version of ourselves In a fresh setting Dead for the killing, Ready-ripe for the filling. The fixated reaching Wields up Brain attainments Clutched in the blood palm; White knuckle balm For the hungry source Of these advanced projections - Fleeting in the flickering light Blinking between trees, The clockwork chaos Amid a strange place Only previously dreamed Unwinds its deluxe and detailed world From fabric that allegedly evolved Rogue minds Which search for fresh fulfilment To stimulate the unchained Instinctive ways of a being Unexplained - Doing what there is to do That can be won - Crunched in the mouth for the Ask Belly, For digestion to be done - And once sunned Slipping to the next… Until the laws that define the space Where our embedded actions pace, Where our imagination takes Our feelings Breaks out our special breath And stills this vast net Where gamers shake - Crashing the whole burden Beyond sensations Incessantly insisting themselves Within the crypts of ourselves, Beyond the quickness of our slick digits Where an immersion burned of all immersions Makes it inexplicably known… That we must complete a life Through involvement that can make us strive to own Some sound and balanced, rooted home For all the worlds where we are known or unknown - Easily enthroned - Lost children of our own deep Gods. THE UNRELATED SPACE I've written pithy poems I would not utter - Nor ever utter - In your pressing presence. It's this space; this face And the star of my deep pride That keeps me barren. Near and far From sleep at night - My many thoughts grow out to you Yet die within this time and all this harsh Oblivious life. Is there to be made another place? An unrelated space For forceful, thoughtful breathings of our soulful race To pace freely and to blend with grace; An eloquence to come That we could carve with power To empower or defeat the one; The madness of the one. For words make worlds that could unfurl; Where there's some screen between our beings; Where there's no rude or crude; No quick, or cutting consequence To hinder how our insides mix; To stain and drain a flustered brain - Still stranded in these moments rich - but which remain - Just dry amid the hungriness of eyes; They fill my mind. PRELUDE / OVERWHELMING WORLDS Drink up upon your deep and sweet and overwhelming worlds Your hungrily rendered worlds of drunken gold, and hordes of words and art on screens Reflected to the limits of those crowded, glassy organs of your eyes The teeming shadow-waves of which could safely desecrate the strangeness Forcing up and spreading out your thoughts from small-stacked rooms Your faces forced to meet the gaze of real waves inside square mirrors; The feeling of the ways of eyes so high upon the tide The knowing and sustaining of its life, The reading at the records of Man's truths Within their tightened voyage around the suns Amid the moon - within what is and what must then become Undone - the glories exigent and wide And intertwined. Knowing silky beauty dancing through the maenad mind Amid the realms of what is harsh And draining you. Knowing Life's main duty in the heat while lying closed Amid cool shells in pools of shade - Knowing both the fact and fiction of a Life - That in the fattest butter there is air And in the air there is the light and blood of suns Look about and fight despair! Where minds apply and reach to clasp it all Defining the Divine that is to shine with the Divine While simply squinting out before the ragged and the threatening sea And leaning more towards the trees Before the curls and murmurs of a vast and temperamental tide - Holding all the program of our subtle drive Binding and directing where you work beneath the riding mind - Loosening and breaking in the waves And falling down among the raw vicinity - The rooted beasts of you, and this stark me. THE FEARLESS LORDS Words amid the world - Seem dead by design. Old voices muttering from pages When the wind is wild. Fly - as beholders of the storm Against the program. So much brilliant beauty, Sensation-seeking, Useless art; We'd all be Travellers surely, Young and proud; Forceful; fearless lords; Ingesting lives, Talking out in totality of Time, Expounding worlds of flame in perfectly articulated ways, Revelling with revelations - far away - From humble, darkened fields, Where simple flowers Struggle not to fade. THE DARKENED We know the old-aged islands that we are in youth Within the loud, proud seconds we would waste While blessed with light and kept from Plundering the sudden wantonness within our separated souls. So we must display A keen, hard sex in homes of millions So soon forgotten by those satiated and ashamed. What is the animal reaching out for? More life - the driving force deluded by itself. You cannot keep your beauty private with its meaninglessness So your love remains unknown by those who suffer on the streets, By those who aren't your closest friends But who could be and would care more for you; They stay darkened. SCREEN PEOPLE Senses orienteering and engaged By strange ranges of a warped world. Our eyes, our souls are insatiable; Bald, bloated watchdogs Peeled back for penetrating, Filling up upon, Our silence-filling dreams… Where the special silence of the total nights Incites the fires we strive to quench Through use of powers bestowed on us From distant suns. We live stoked-up and so inspired, In deep and ever-restless Places of our simple, perching souls; Demanding of our shadows paths to peace and better being - Sudden joys - Acquired through all our dim and misdirecting, Overturning, Over-knowing, Overthrowing Movie-minds. CONFLICTION Somewhere beyond a cell Created and maintained by minds We glimpse the sights And feel the slippery key Dig into the gut, Poking the wilderness within. Out there The cries of whales are not soft, exotic tunes, The circulation of our blood Pumps in the fluctuations of the weather Through the rangy wolves, with eyes like pools of the pure moon Raised together. They shine like glassy drinks, Filled from the bottle of the horned God; The flash of fear and the fang on the skull Is the clink of the toast 'To Life's insanity, bare, Its deep, rich taste And those who've won their share.' Escape attempts Into the unaware inebriation of the wild Bring us back to the cell To treasure the sensations While we scorn the fading of the key And condition a conscience For our suppuration in the sea. HOLLOW GAZE The ability to read fast fails - It frustrates my hope of focus onto All the figures of the world The Grecian fires burning on the shores, Thoughts written filling canvases of paint, Friend-circles, broken slowly by their time To be re-drawn in fresh, pretending forms, Perpetual stormy struggles - Byron and the Shelleys - gazing from the gloom - Drowned - Flickering in the spirits of this world And on the screen Transfixing souls with dull-glow And so much wine and spice Drenching a fallen state… It asks us why we strive, What is the cause towards fulfilment that we'll find? Here where all that catches busy eyes Are paths to quick emotions in new moments In this culture shaping now our minds, our enhanced lives With thick, invigorating lies. THE TECHNO TOWER The terra-stella Techno-Tower - Tall-standing now and soon to swallow souls - Is holding close its gold, and gleaming With its sorbefacient songs, and shadows stolen from the world - We fill with colour there, and turn over, so amazed To know reflections of ourselves inside our prisons under glass; Our coldness under stone. I would offer my own suffocating soul up - whole - If through this new Tower's replicating spells It could restore what broke at Babel - Heal this sense of fear amid a force of fire, fragmented And assuming homely cubes - Diminished by close space and blinding use of minds… Full and naked visions of the stars that squint upon us from the clarity of night Susurrate through our struggle to the hollowness of will Where our wits have glorified in paints - ideals - That thrive in its electrically-enchanted fields… Yet still this will - it needs unleashing Where the Tower spins quietly in binary its webs to re-awaken All such celebratory powers: A realm of interweaving realms wherein Our Darkness can assume new, unimaginable attires And dance - its joy away in flickering facades That once did tower round the flickering of more familiar, feral fires While ranting back at the long, black breath of the night around us. ENCLOSURES Half our lives Lie sheathed among the knives That sleep in darkened corners Of this world's new rooms. Drawn out - they shimmer in the sun, Glimmer with the moon, Sharp in the awareness of the stone That scrapes away their bone, Blunting the fine edge. The subtle struggle to secure our soul Constructs the phantoms from the mind; They grow out together, crowding skies Becoming a complexity That blocks the chance to fly. Have we here enclosed The real, impressive sparks - That melt away all masks, That concentrate our fear Around the making of great Gods And at the full exposure to their sound - Like the sound of crashing and replenishing waves - Could break us loose - And let us let out cries into the places where we hide That no thin squares of sky Might hide or disguise. YOU ARE ME This is me - Is me - You are only Somebody in a film I think The Idea of me - You make me fulfil Far away from Life in the here and now That waterfalls Out of myself - Where a face is covered by a blanket of a mask And itches where the brain-waves bleed - eradicating me. Severed from physical intensities with you - Where there are roles we could play for a while - (You - calling me by funny names -) Make us make no story or particular, transforming dance - The sudden acquirement of a long-dead laugh - But only recognise the wind and altering of light on me, on you - Dying - where no lens shines to rescue With effects What you could do In the other-ness and void… Give me a cigarette since you're here Depleting the drift of a poem - speaking to itself - Drag me away From the elaborate smoke That is the chains and the twisting ropes Of this silence under life Eating at our voices and our useful words, Deconstructing all the dreams where we're unique And I am not what dreams and shadows make me Me. ITEMS We live in soft focus So it's easy to forget The depth, The tragedy - The cold vicinity Of the knife-edge. Sudden storms Bleed across the substance Of its surface. And what can we do - In the space of a short time Given to the gifted, Attached to the mind And desolately empty Amongst the items That make us feel The missing quantities of dead friends And the deep Why Apparent only in the zoom-out Of our entire lives. E-ODE TO LONE GUN 3O To break on thru You needed 3 codes To access your own new future… The white of the long boxes Lay in the synthetic air Empty and eager For the info-rich; the well-connected select. The GUI you’d souped up; fully primed, For the hidden space; it was the darkened place To seek out, download and exec the correct face. The Oracle’s implants you knew Lay locked and idle, fast inside you Pulling the sweat out; It was not a full-proof zone To go it alone The data had some old bones And only Hope10 said they’d been picked for you; Some sympathetic SYS-Lord or Supa-man; a hacker-guru… With the blessing of the Oracle. You punched in the cool key sequence Rattled some bones of your own And the words were yours; Ripped or copied out, razor-quick; Pasted into the pocket of your sharp e-senses Console-tuned. Before any ghost trace glimmered up in the system; Hawk-Mods zeroing in, to swoop down Savagely. For then you were gone, out-drifted, User-proof and secret select; Chanting the password; Chanting the net charm same as the real: that it’s ‘who you know Not what’ - That helps a wired-in, fixated soul break out; To make it Phreaker/jacked; outbound For higher levels of art and soft command, Secreted and un-jaded; jamming forth Unto the know-zones; Education–weighed; a mind-tune set-up Wet-modified; emblazoned For the better control of worlds. I see you Lone Gun, I see your sigh; It falls down to me from some new high u ride… And I expose my eyes; We did hear false but brilliant chimes in our accelerated time - So I raise my misty glasses unto you; I expose my eyes; I throw u this goodbye… RELATED QUOTES & EXTRACTS '…..as the world's information becomes digitized,…[packet-switching technology]…can carry everything that humans can perceive and machines can process - voice, high-fidelity sound, text, high-resolution color graphics, computer programs, data, full-motion video. You can even send packets over the airwaves. In research-and-development laboratories today, one popular buzzphrase is "digital convergence," which means that a lot more than virtual communities and libraries of text are going to live on the Net in the near future. Digitization is where the future of the Net is likely to collide with other computer-amplified forces in the world….. "Cyberspace is where your money is" [John Barlow]. Money is already an abstraction, part of a huge, incessant, worldwide flow of electronic messages. The value gained now by knowing how to move these abstract money messages around the world's telecommunications networks dwarfs the original value of the goods and services that produced the money. Cyberspace is where global entertainment and communications are headed; large colonies of those industries already live there. Televisions and newspapers rely on a slightly different flavor of the same basic electronic signals traveling through the same worldwide network. The cable companies are in on it. Everybody knows that only those whose networks connect to everybody else's have a chance to reach the enormous world market, but nobody knows yet which set of interests - newspapers, television networks, entertainment conglomerates, communication giants - will dominate the mass-market networks of the future.' (From The Virtual Community by Howard Rheingold, 1994.) 'Cyberspace: a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts….A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.' (William Gibson, Neuromancer, 1984.) 'Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge - it is as immortal as the heart of man. If the labours of men of science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the poet will sleep then no more than at present, but he willbe ready to follow the steps of the man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he willbe at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of those objects of the science itself….. If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarised to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man.' (From Preface to the Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth.) 'Men are suddenly nomadic gatherers of knowledge, nomadic as never before, informed as never before, free from fragmentary specialism as never before - but also involved in the total social process as never before; since with electricity we extend our central nervous system globally, instantly interrelating every human experience.' (Herbert Marshall Mcluhan, Understanding Media, 1964.) 'For the society, the impact will be good or bad, depending mainly on the question: Will "to be on-line" be a privilege or a right? If only a favored segment of the population gets a chance to enjoy the advantage of "intelligence amplification," the network may exaggerate the discontinuity in the spectrum of intellectual opportunity. On the other hand, if the network idea should prove to do for education what a few have envisioned in hope, if not in concrete detailed plan, and if all minds should prove to be responsive, surely the boon to human kind would be beyond measure.' (From The Computer as a Communication Device, 1969 by JCR Licklider, R Taylor and E Herbert.) The Lords. Events take place beyond our knowledge or control. Our lives are lived for us. We can only try to enslave others. But gradually, special perceptions are being developed. The idea of the "Lords" is beginning to form in some minds. We should enlist them into bands of perceivers to tour the labyrinth during their mysterious nocturnal appearances. The Lords have secret entrances, and they know disguises. But they give themselves away in minor ways. Too much glint of light in the eye. A wrong gesture. Too long and curious a glance. The Lords appease us with images. They give us books, concerts, galleries, shows, cinemas. Especially the cinemas. Through art they confuse us and blind us to our enslavement. Art adorns our prison walls, keeps us silent and diverted and indifferent. (From The Lords and The New Creatures by Jim Morrison, 1970.) 'Cyberspace: A new universe, a parallel universe created and sustained by the world's computers and communication lines. A world in which the global traffic of knowledge, secrets, measurements, indicators, entertainments, and alter-human agency takes on form: sights, sounds, presences never seen on the surface of the earth blossoming in a vast electronic night.' (Michael Benedikt, from Cyberspace: First Steps, 1994.) 'The city is looking for a ritual to join its fragments. The Doors are looking for such a ritual, too - a sort of electric wedding.' Cinema is most totalitarian of the arts. All energy and sensation is sucked up into the skull, a cerebral erection, skull bloated with blood. Caligula wished a single neck for all his subjects that he could behead a kingdom with one blow. Cinema is this transforming agent. The body exists for the sake of the eyes; it becomes a dry stalk to support these two soft insatiable jewels. (From The Lords and The New Creatures by Jim Morrison, 1970.) 'The spectator feels at home nowhere, for the spectacle is everywhere.' (Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle.) 'Hyper-realists see the use of communications technologies as a route to the total replacement of the natural world and the social order with a technologically mediated hyper-reality, a "society of the spectacle" in which we are not even aware that we work all day to earn money to pay for entertainment media that tell us what to desire and which brand to consume and which politician to believe…..Hyper-reality is what you get when a Panopticon evolves to the point where it can convince everyone that it doesn't exist; people continue to believe they are free, although their power has disappeared.' (From The Virtual Community by Howard Rheingold, 1994.) 'Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance…..We are neither in the amphitheater, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism.' (Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.) The everlasting universe of things Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, Now dark - now glittering - now reflecting gloom - Now lending splendour, where from secret springs The source of human thought its tribute brings Of waters - with a sound but half its own. Such as a feeble brook will oft assume In the wild woods, among the mountains lone, Where waterfalls around it leap forever, Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves. (P.B. Shelley, from Mont Blanc) "We only begin to live when we conceive life as tragedy……" (WB Yeats) 'The trajectory of Western thought has been one moving from the concrete to the abstract, from the body to the mind; recent thought, however, has been pressing upon us the frailty of that Cartesian distinction. The mind is a property of the body, and lives and dies with it. Everywhere we turn we see signs of this recognition, and cyberspace, in its literal placement of the body in spaces invented entirely by the mind, is located directly upon this blurring boundary, this fault…. A liquid architecture in cyberspace is clearly a dematerialized architecture. It is an architecture that is no longer satisfied with only space and form and light and all the aspects of the real world. It is an architecture of fluctuating relations between abstract elements. It is an architecture that tends to music…..The dematerialized, dancing, difficult architecture of cyberspace, fluctuating, ethereal, temperamental, transmissible to all parts of the world simultaneously but only indirectly tangible, may also become the most enduring architecture ever conceived.' (From Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace by Marcos Novak) "I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, downthrow and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression." (Dylan Thomas) '……we should tailor our intelligent opportunist advances to our basic behavioural requirements. We must somehow improve in quality rather than in sheer quantity. If we do this, we can continue to progress technologically in a dramatic and exciting way without denying our evolutionary inheritance. If we do not, then our suppressed biological urges will build up and up until the dam bursts and the whole of our elaborate existence is swept away in the flood.' (From The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris, 1967.) (The Original) INTRODUCTION In the face of inspiring possibilities in this technological civilisation of today and the availability of ways of seeing the world one perhaps automatically turns to symbolism. The use of symbolism inside art tests and embodies various understandings of the world. It is all born perhaps from the need to understand oneself and one's condition in order to drive ahead or work to better our lives. The whole process has been exciting and influential to me, re-affirming my belief in the importance of art for general perception and my enthusiasm for the future. I can only hope that, although the individual poems may vary from worthy to weak in their expressive attempts, a lasting sense of the totalities going on in the background can permeate through. In the face of a changing environment it may always seem correct to re-assert the fundamentals so an idea of who and why we are and where we are going can emerge. The soul searches itself to gather up the facts surrounding it and forge a spiritual knowledge along some thread that convinces best. However misguided this centre might be one supposes some gold to glint throughout the portrayal and incorporation of the facts. Poetry I have learnt seems to be an actual thought pattern that enables its assessments by sweeping over all of one's learning or enlightenment to draw out some conclusion or finer cohesiveness. It is an attempt to correlate this life of changes, desires, and balance. This may be achieved to varying degrees of effectiveness. In this volume influence is a prominent theme - the influence of the world (the waves), the influence of art and media; the power in us to influence. Therefore a premise incorporated and embodied in this work is primarily the force or drive that is Evolution and the assumption that we are extensions of it. Although a fairly evident mechanism to me it does not inhibit religion from transcending it. The very nature of our actual minds and identities however can be questioned in the wake of it, and the way our forms have moved so finely into the occupation of an earthly environment. The central symbolism surrounds the ability to be so firmly a part of the drive as a 'successful species' while simultaneously being able to assess the world and to self-assess, possibly just another tool in the evolutionary flow, the life force that holds onto life. If the condition or environment changes because of the successful way it has established and removed threats to itself, then where will the re-directed energies be channelled? (It may place this body of work firmly within this condition!). Everything serves the function. This leads then to technology and to Convergence. It is assumed that today we stand on the threshold of fundamental changes to our communication and with the idea of Cyberspace, of a fundamental replication of the sense-affecting Space itself. The implications arising from these continued developments in the fields of technological expression, media-manipulation and subsequent exchange of thoughts and desires are unknown. With our relationship to the world and the evolutionary drive in mind, what is the projection for our race? Are we to be strengthened by such a sharing of information, knowledge and desires, or perverted and undone by an overloaded reception of them? This then is our condition, gathered on this darkened beach and waiting for the waves - of which we are very much a part of - to break with the answers. There is the process of this introspection - the wave looking into itself - and there is the oblivious, compulsive presence of life on the shore. 'An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people - it takes away the heat and fever; and helps, by widening speculation, to ease the Burden of the Mystery.' (John Keats) A searching of the self may wield up some answers about what is to come but then isn't too much self-awareness also the tragedy of our kind? We may all be inspired and excited by the developments of the day. Will they lead to a future where we can more earnestly control our environment and our lives through various representations of them? I’m sure that William Blake would be in awe of the potentials and the way that imagination has enhanced our lives. The romantic poets, however, might be dismayed at the lack of realism and distance from nature that representations of the real have instigated. However unlikely it may be to invest the future with revolutionary, apocalyptic scale, it has the effect of investigating the limitations of the present. As my humble results from 'spontaneous overflow[s] of powerful [fiery] feelings' now lie loosely gathered under a few headings, some hope is that they might prove to be of value. Primarily, in drawing attention to - as always - our inherent nature, struggling with the restrictions of the current world at this time, and also a time following where an imagined ideal of Convergence arrives to cure us or to hinder us further. Convergence therefore can represent - here - a technological means to perfect communication, individual expression and articulation into the collective conscience. A smooth-running capability that facilitates realms of representation to be placed between us and reality, thereby promoting greater manipulation of it; for security, spiritual understanding and freedom, collaboration, expression etc. Or else it can stand for a new, less positive emergent culture of perhaps hazardous distortion and amplification of our basic, hungry desires. It is the mind-body problem put to the test, despite in fact the more realistic future consisting of elements from both, assuming, of course, that gradually such technology will become sufficiently powerful. In self-assessing and expressing who and what we are, there is the continued celebration and note of caution that comes with the realizations that result. This is also where the symbolic element comes in, especially in relation to, for instance, the mind-body problem. Mostly throughout this collection of poetry, one should see that the 'waves' of our bodily needs and tendencies (at work in us and the world) still require that our minds be more strongly aware of their instinctive power and be encouraged to seek balance; to ride these waves. Likewise here, the power of our minds could break down the boundaries and spatial limitations of reality - the world - in which our drive and needs have developed in the waves. This could upset whatever original balance first enabled the glorious riding or surfing. Questions also arise such as: who can tell how much we can really influence our own behaviour and to just what subtle extent the world we have grown up in permeates it? Aspects of this symbolism, if applied during a reading of poems where it features, may hopefully portray - even a sense - of their meanings and conclusions; their totalities which should emerge through the sweep of the specifics. With some of these ideas in mind - surrounding evolution and the threat of possible devolution - it might then be easier to consider how the poems approach or explore them. Keys are swiftly pressed while eyes are closed, Digits flex, and crinkle in vibrating winds To interface with particles and products of the fire That framed their tips For turning pages, For understanding all the texture of the close soil All around - Which holds them rooted in the ground. England, 2000. About the writer Between an interest in nature, science, technology, music and video games, Ade has written some short stories inspired by Virtual Reality and also ‘The Wildness Within and the Tree of Eyes’, a short symbolic story about nature and the mind.He hopes to continue to write and to produce occasional artwork and nature-inspired designs. Dedication: for my family (great poems unfurling). such love & support gave me this space to explore. EXTRA ARTWORK oil pastel on paper:

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