XXIII

I sat beside you in the local bar,
And let the spirit seize anatomy,
Each bone, each hair of who you really are,
And how it spoke in aching cells to me
Of all those years in search of a good show,
Of women who have known you, and have gone
With all the fondness you could really know
Into the past, into oblivion
And when you left, with other friends in tow
A chill came on the place, it was forlorn;
You said that I was bright, with a good brain,
I wished again that I had not been born
With such a body, and with such a face;
How can I change to be in your good grace?

XXIV

The ladies of the night have midnight minds,
At one or two o'clock they think no more
Of making lust or hate to him or her
Than lords of the dark light, than Lucifer,
Too proud are they and too indifferent
To consequence unless it come as gold
Or diamonds or a bottle of good scent,
Tomorrow never comes. But they grow old,
Whose trade in the broad street is only young
To poets, who have served a human need
For longer in the cold, with tale and song,
Whilst sowing in the mind a deathless seed,
Since man could knock a rhythm on a stone
And needed to believe in love alone.

XXV

I have a devil's contract, twenty-five
Good years of wild intensity I signed
In blood on parchment skin, and while I live
Consort with goblins of each kind, maligned
In every kind of scripture. I've a pack
Of Tarot cards that have a demon in,
He's bound by a great Buddha, in a sack
Of orange silk, and is a mortal sin
In European terms to even name;
I have a rosary of little skulls
Made out of yak-bone, which I count my prayers
And supplications on, in syllables
Of arcane tongues the Himalayas know
That reach great heights, where ancient spirits go.

XXVI

It takes no time at all to lose your heart,
But when you lose your soul, there's no return
From falling down all history to the start
Of universal heat, explosive burn.
The all-consuming loss that I have had
From looking for a second in your eyes
Cannot be stopped, will drive me slowly mad
Since I am cast from Eden, paradise
Is lost to me, a certain innocence
That came to me in years of being chaste
Has vanished, and a light-year void of sense
Has opened when there's no time left to waste;
It takes ten minutes for the world to change
Forever, and forever feels so strange.

XXVII

If I could say 'I love you' and make sense
Then I would do so, but a billion tongues
Repeat that phrase, at lifetimes of expense
In broken marriages and crying wrongs;
You are no Latin Romeo nor cold
And academic critic of the word,
You work with silence, colour is your old
And stalwart ally, whilst I have absurd
And chattering speech, a palette full of paint
As wayward as dream pigments, and as fake
As a seducer's blandishments, a taint
Of perfidy in everything I make;
The quiet that I own is in the flesh,
To lie with you in truth is what I wish.

XXVIII

To lie with you in truth and not to lie
Beside you in the mornings when I wake
Is to be separate from ecstasy
Without the strength to challenge and to speak
Against the currents of the latest fashion,
Which is to treat the body like a dress
Or take-away repast, to be put on
Or tasted, then discarded in a mess
Until the next exchange, until the trade
Of strong sensations can be made more sweet
By sharp betrayal of the bargain made
Last time in other socks, with other feet;
I am not playing under-table games,
By asking you to where there are no names.

XXIX

I shall be nameless, I shall be unknown,
Unfinished, broken, buried before I
Can make the love I wish. You will be gone.
Then will the silence swallow up my cry,
The crowd my face, the years my history
And you will go into another's arms
And there be sated with a different scent
And rapt with other lives and other charms
More seasonal and far less innocent;
Much as a ghost may wander in the halls
Of some vast mansion when its day is done,
I'll roam the planet's major capitals,
A lettered idiot with a heart of stone;
This I foresee, unless you can estrange
Your promised promiseless; promiscuous change.

XXX

They are all dead, all gone, those I have loved
Into the dusty vaults of history,
Their talents shattered, spent, the world bereaved
Of architecture, movies, poetry;
Oblivion's gaping maw has swallowed up
Good men and passionate, the hungry flames
Devouring what was dear, his hand's firm grip
On mine, the secrets shared. When that day comes
Again, I would be there, not closeted
In some far distant bar, in drink too deep
To feel it, since the relatives have said
I have no right, or do not know I keep
This vigil, since my name was never said
In my exclusion from that last sickbed.

XXXI

So do you want me? I am in no doubt,
With no illusions of the simple kind,
But here I can romance you inside-out
And touch you from the centers of the mind;
The time is now, before the world reclaims
My humble circumstances, prompts a move
Of some sort out of paradise; it comes
Down to the usual choice of wealth or love;
I know that there is much that is not said
Between us, and the painting takes your time
And full attention from me, which is good
Since my compulsion is to work in rhyme;
But I am present, weeks are in my gift,
And somewhat more if your desires should shift.

XXXII

Ah, shifting wishes, wants, desires, beliefs
That change like colours in the different lights
Of diverse times of day. Our joys and griefs
Depend on circumstance and our delights
Are brief. There is no cure for this disease
Except we make our promises, and keep
A measured watch on all those things that please
And tempt us to excess. I would delve deep
Into your bed and be a canvas too
For what dark brushstrokes only Cupid knows,
Abstracted passion in a blinding hue,
When bodies join together and eyes close;
But when I give myself, then I am given
To yield up everything in earth and heaven.

XXXIII

To yield up everything in earth and heaven
To you, to give this little world of mine
Into your hands, and to rejoice, being given
Your presence and your vigilance within
My self, this is a passionate desire
Which haunts the lower regions of my brain,
Which sets the darkness in my loins on fire,
And wakes the demons in my fate again,
Those following hungry ghosts from a past life
Who wish to tear my body limb from limb,
By using separation, distance, strife
To keep me from my love, to injure him;
So I do nothing, but this nothingness
In which I plead, and argue, and confess.

XXXIV

We are most powerful in silences
Who legislate, beyond the daily range
For all that has to do with presences
Of beauty, of the graceful and the strange
And memorable passages of paint,
That photograph that saved a thousand lives,
The poet in love's agonized complaint,
The dramatist of jealousy with knives,
Fair Desdemona's death, Ucello's Hunt
Where love as a gazelle is being sought
Fair down the woods of sight, to bear the brunt
Of pain, to disappear at the first thought
Of being touched, of being caught at all
Beyond that point of vanishing in oil.

XXXV

The power of silence has a vast abuse,
Great scope for making error out of good
Intentions. Our great strength becomes misuse
When used on lesser folk. The furies brood
And wait to hunt the artist who has used
His powers to lure and to illuminate
Set minds for his own ends. The poor confused
And fettered victim learns to love, but hate
The lover and the maker of this state
In which she finds that she has lost her mind
To someone with another strong life-mate,
Invisible to her, and most unsound;
She simply gets the cycling ansaphone
Whilst we are with the muses, and alone.

XXXVI

There are two minds: the first, that recreates
What it has learnt, and so reiterates
Tradition and the world's more solid states,
The fertile female womb that procreates
Without much thought, and so perpetuates
A single species, all its loves and hates,
The Romeos and Juliets, the mates
And couplings of desire. The second notes,
Observes the first, refraining from its sweets,
Much more discriminating as it meets
Criteria for renaissance, as it waits
For inspiration at the inner gates.
And here I leave you with a small surprise;
I do not fall in love. I only rise.

XXXVII

Come up then to my house and rise to me,
Walk up the mountain path and step away
From usual habits and community,
From village prejudice, and spend the day
In quietness and calm. I will not touch
The edges of your space until you reach
To hold my hand and draw me into such
A place as mere imagination's arch
And pertinent reviews cannot contrive.
I am hard-trained by masters of control
But you must know that that is where I'll live
Once drawn, assumed in body and in soul
By higher faculties than I possess,
Redoubled selflessly in happiness.

XXXVIII

You'd better bring some wine, I do not stock
Much in the way of drink, the flowing spring
Gives water from the hardness of the rock,
My needs are small in nearly everything.
Of love and knowledge only do I lack
Sufficient to renew myself and go
Further in the creation of a track
Record of conquests, where the world should know
Of this peculiar insight from outside
The usual run of banter, off the beat
Of the great thoroughfares of mortal pride
Where ignorance trudges on with many feet;
Bring me oblivion, or bring release
From this captivity in my own peace.

XXXIX

To contemplate the Dharmakaya's pure
Undying power and light without a word
To darken vision, empty of obscure
And foreign terms, that nobody has heard
About, and go about the very end
And the beginning of our genesis
As consciousness and concept, to ascend
From earth to heaven, just musing on a kiss
Of the beloved, this is Tantric love
And sex without the shadow of desire
Betrayed, and the initiated move
From this to union, in the eternal fire
Of sacramental congress, flesh as bread
Of our communion with the cosmic seed.

XL

The power and the glory; what I see
Between us and within us. In your arms
What more of consummation shall there be?
The future casts its shadows of new forms
Upon us, in my heart as in your face
That looks at me across the crowded bar,
The gaze that steals my soul, makes my pulse race.
To know that you still live, and where you are
Is now important, as to know the sun
Still burns, the moon still rises, the North star
Still orients ships. The patterns in my brain
Have altered, its harmonic values soar
Past light-speed, in our friendship is revealed
A consonance with the universal field.

XLI

The physics of relation: absolute
And relative connections to the heart,
The laws for balancing affective heat
With equitable ways to play one's part
With fairness, this is what the Dharma is,
Not a dead code from a forgotten age,
But insight on the checks and balances
Between pure spirit and cold matter's rage
To pull us down and make us mindless slaves
Of dumb entropic reflexes, decay
And lust the way the untrained mind behaves;
The breath of inspiration wins the day
From out of night, the phantoms in the brain
Rehearsing endless felonies, in vain.

XLII

And would it be a crime to make me yours
Completely, paint a picture out of light
Brushstrokes of fire on thought, and penetrate
My long indwelling through its many doors,
To fuse the colours of your warmth, your touch
Most instantly with mine, to mix such paint
And stain such paper as knows no constraint
No limit, without stop, no reach too much
For this invasion, for your ardent will
To conquer with insistent gentleness,
Beginning with the rituals of undress
And ending with surrender in the still
And trembling darkness of combined release,
Such ecstasy set free, and then such peace?

XLIII

The water drips down solitude, the rain
Has filled the olive-groves with silver drops,
I sit upon the mountainside, sustain
A dream of silver. Your remembered lips
And teasing glances, absent from these maps
And promised to another in some sense
I cannot honour, cause me to relapse
Into a reverie that's so intense
I am surprised by vision, and maybe
It is your spirit that possesses me,
Your own desire and dream that wanders free,
Your love that yearns, but cannot see to see
The way to my repose, which I would give
So long as I am free, and that you live.

XLIV

I have not given myself to anyone
For many years, though tempted once or twice,
The actualities of flesh and bone
Were too perfidious, might bring disease
From too much sharing. Iron in the blood
Has needed constant leaching, and I'm weak
To viruses, allergic to most food
And must be vigilant. One small mistake
Could bring disaster, weeks of fevered dreams
Or metal poisoning. I have to take
All medical precautions, gothic schemes
Applied at intervals. The needles break
My veins, white-coated vampires suck me white
Like some B-movie victim of the night.

Continued—»