The Flotsam and Jetsam

If I loved you, I would dream of you,
If I dreamed of you, I would love you.

The best philosophers, then, are the least human. Therefore, they are of no use to humanity. Everything I have learnt, both of love and of wisdom, has come from the poets.

It's less papering over the cracks than cracking over the papers;
The slow digest of a slowly digesting world,
The internal small death when facing to the reality of small deaths.

I wanted to be a haughty girl,
With high cheekbones, again
Broken by circumstance
(When I read your words).

"I walked through the rain for you,"
And I knew that she had. I could see it marking
Her face,
The rivulet tracks catching a prismatic beauty
That had nothing to do with light
And everything to do with love.

A conspiracy of angels,/an ill-excuse to speak,/fools and dancers and the million midnight eyes/without sorrow, a man of pains/with tears, then a heart of light/that eschews self's own lightheartedness/with wry anguish/whose words now say, arise!

Tell me what it is you whisper.

Either cling to the reality of hatred or wilfully choose the reality of love.

Back when it was okay to be a Futurist.

Keep me from secrets.

Why does the omniscient narrator tell stories?
What else is there to do at the end of time?
He always knows how they'll end.
He hates the regret people get when they don't find out what occurs.

And twisted priorities;
Going into sleaze,
Going into disease.

Sing to me of oceans
And then I'll know I'm far away
In cities beyond reckoning,
Off-book, off-map, off-project.

ELSEWHERE:
The wet darkness has gathered in
But may yet be dispelled
Today has gone back and forth
And surely shall
For longer.
Fear, the future, the anticipation
Of what maybe might be,
Is my curse of the day.
But perhaps today is the day of
Final Catharsis...

Was I invincible then?
Was I really that untouchable?
The sort of moments that'd cripple me now,
Gone through, gone through,
And now so strange, so foolish,
An old madness, like the rites of spring,
It should have been
Worse
Worse
Worse!
And yet that was how it was then and this is how it is now.

Everything that had meaning is now driftwood,
Beauty despoiled by sexuality, and not mine own,
An Aphrodite who inspires zero lust, zero desire,
And an Eros wearied by failure.
I know every curve and contour
Of the world that I once wanted,
I know every number and dimension,
And it is worth ash to me,
There is no beauty left in those eyes that lie like mine,
I know the sag and droop and the simple gravity
No eyes of love could restore the sight that saw
Anything poetic in this,
This my awakener, this my corruptor,
What can be had is worthless, only what cannot is gain.

Hail the death of the 'living goddess'
Hail the crypt of former obsession
Hail the foolishness of having any heart at all

Even vampires age in reality. Blood
Does not sustain them,
Youth must die, even
When surrounded by orgiastic death and violent sex,
Even when it knows itself more truly immortal
Than unsundered youth;
The world rains down thorns,
And a thousand rose pinpricks equal one stake.

Candi Coated Ciss
Kandy Koated Kiss
I found the division point, on the grass
Overlooking a level-layered town,
And we were about to run away, to split,
I called it the place of division, and
The pseudo-expected had paired up to run,
And run and run, to go off
On some adventure that would end in violence and
Sparse prose,
She having expressed her exhaustion
With a twee existence
But then comes one who says
'If this is the time when we go our separate ways,
Then I choose your way.'
And we accept her, we see no need to say no,
Indeed, the conclusion will surprise me, when it comes,
Will shock me, and fascinate me in its detail,
But first there's a final interjection,
Suggesting that what we look down upon,
In this place I half-recognise from flickering cathode memories and
Distant East European provinces,
Saying that this endeavour will walk a path of unity, unexpectedly.
Before I can consider it, comes the kiss,
Komes the ciss,
A sticky, sugary kiss, I can taste
The sweetness on your lips and it's not some nectar-metaphor,
It's genuine, crushed, glassy, spun sugar,
Torn sugar, won sugar, slick,
Dissolved with saliva but not dissolved completely,
So sensuous and so sensory and so strange
Like nothing I have ever experienced or likely will,
But the idea is there to be pieced together in the dream.

Sometimes,
You have to accept
There is no a sufficiently convincing connection
And this is no medication.
Only a drug.
Prescribed not,
Proscribed, yet done,
And have no authority to halt it
For what is willed, is enacted,
Even when the revolt/revulsion/revolution comes.
Ban me from myself.

Purple,
Purple,
Imperium.
White and silver, white and silver,
Around the trees, around the trees.

Upon the loathing of the Dawn:
Birdsong is a bitter sound,
When heard at its rightful time,
And the sky is not midnight blue,
Nor midday blue,
But the blue of dawn,
And I know that I shall never sleep again.

An inverse valley,
A sky of hair,
And the greatest bridge we have ever built.

I was a far better therapist as a teenager,
Because I was so
Self-uninvolved,
And now I'm all grown up
I have angst, and Arngst, and hippie diseases,
Feel a bit less cut out for it:
The couch in an outdoors that was never unsafe,
And obsessions that were worthy,
Nigh constructive –
Maybe I think of 'glory days'
But my feelings are contiguous enough to map.
I learn by analogy the ongoing thread of love,
So too every other pang,
And conclude,
I was a far better therapist in my teens.

Island hopping in the archipelago of dreams,
I throw away empires of words,
Whole lives of unlived beauty,
I have been so far, and so near, and so close,
Journeyed to all the lands I willed,
And slumber hath promised them all,
The tide-time-shrinking, the weight of fog,
That opens the doors to every forests and the one,
Alluding, and eluding, and
Taking flight. Of fancy.

An illustrious termination.

I have pored into the depths as permitted,
As tacitly allowed,
And operated on my assumptions,
Hoping for the genderised roulette
To have favoured
My number,
Presumably twenty-nine. It's not bad to be represented by a meaningless neurosis.
I forsake sleep because I see only the weight,
Of the work,
That lies afore me,
I, who has ascertained nothing, who has brought only uncertainty,
But that beautiful unanswered uncertainty,
That which is temporary, fated to end, a terminal case,
All that must be done?
Think not upon it. Think it done. Think the first step taken.
Think of the most secret secret.
Then hail the birth of ardour.

Sometimes I feel I walk like a Frankensteinian,
Not so much unsteady on my own feet
As unsteady on someone else's.

Romance? Romance is inefficient.

I guess it is important to note
That I have written what I have written,
And have marked myself as surely as Pilate,
We have such trouble with words. Well,
I've been telling the old stories for so long,
It's no surprise that a letter, delivered by a friend,
A counterpart, is going to be the thing that changes everything, again.

What is it, exactly, that leadens you?
What that smelts iron inside you?
The function of you was to understand this,
To reflect,
And with a cosmological scale inside your head,
You still don't understand.

Today I received the inheritance from my grandmother. I inherit from
Her, a whole different world. Not merely age,
Her home, which passes not to us, nor ever could,
Tells of a world apart, a world to which I cannot return,
Yet has its beauty,
Its timelessness. (Today? Today dates this, though the date is unspecified. Poetry
Locked in time,
Somehow,
A response incomplete, unthought-through,
But necessary. This could not
Pass unheeded).

Hammer, hammer
At the door. The horde
Of the beckoned, the horde of the desired,
The horde requested to be let in,
And have flooded in,
Leaving only the last bastion
The Keep of the Force,
The force-held and force-kept keep,
Against the horde
And the stone is wounded, the stone has
So many little cuts, the stone is bleeding,
The walls that are not maintained by discipline
Cannot face up to such claws.
I have opened the door one too many times.
The horde is inside, and sanctum is no longer a word.

Reactionary,
My first response is to come to you –
The page,
Who is my only confidant.

There is good news and bad news and I'll take the good first,
I've not slept right in days,
Not slept properly,
The art eludes me,
Since when was it a skill, a talent,
There is a good news and it is good,
Because that moment, that power invested in a single, tangible, fragile
Object,
Is all to the good. The bad news
Is not unexpected and thus not so bad,
It's the sudden shock of such news that can give it its punch,
Yet what can be said of the conclusions and the consequences?
Does being desirous mean more than being desired?

I have used barricades and complexity,
I dance in secrets desperate to be revealed,
Speak the love language that is illegible to my
Real understanding; we each are floundering,
But we must make a show of treading water,
Of competency, and we
Are suddenly so honest. So open. Because
We are hiding, we can confess all, tell all, reveal all,
Save who we are,
And even that shall not stay so secret for so long.

In the era without surprise,
There is only the pain of the expectorate,
Spin rings, spin rings,
I'll be alright in the morning. There's nothing, nothing,
Nothing worse than knowing that. Because
If I'm so easily out of the woods,
Then what was it worth
Having some mystical forest? Why not bring a fire and a flame?
Last time I was too crushed to complain,
That it didn't hurt, that it was just a sort of
Sigh
A regret,
And tick.
Tick.
Tick off the list,
Because what does it matter?
It's a morass of statistics and stories that are
Grist
To
The
_______
Mill.
Quote: "I'm the King of the Weltschmerz!"
And sink/sync/sigh
Of course it comes, of course it flows,
Nothing better than
Endless complaint,
The hallowing echoing mess of
Driftwood
Of the flotsam and the jetsam and the dead ribcages
Of sunken ships, of all the sunken ships.
A hawkeyed desire
To bring them all down,
But I love the wrecks and ruins,
Love to preserve them.
My words are salt that encrusted the wetwood, the deadwood,
And it's important that my name is going
To be Thomas Levant again someday.
'Today you say time is a healer,
Truth is it just makes you numb.' Words sung only on a boat.
I'm going to wake up,
Having dreamed, at the end, of you (see above),
(see the beginning. The start of this all now made true at its end),
The destiny was the dream to be the close,
I am not surprised.
Tangle my hair in your hands. Shadow me,
As I walk into the old world, the dark world, the known world,
The real world.
If I am a conjurer, and given that I am a poet,
Then why can I not make anything
That I will
Real? Aren't
Words
The only way?
No. Poetry is not the creative magic, but the primal,
The fire and the storm
The brushstrokes that lead not to life.
And this is not the end. Stymied,
In one sense, I must write on,
Write only on, only write on,
I have not completed the poem,
Only closed the door on one avenue, one chapter, one world. Goodbye.

She who has made the stamp,
She who was written me,
She who ordained me,
She who led me here, unwilling,
Unknowing,
She who is the queen of numbers,
She who bears sixty,
She who in making me bear those sixty stripes,
Those sixty months,
Wrote me almost irrevocably.

Marking time, marking twain,
Tearing twain, rending and rendering,
Ticktock, I've broken my promise
To keep my eyes off the clock
(With her fluttering eyelashes)
But then I always was an oathbreaker.

The chance to speak, words,
Costly and impossible.

I painted a city with the lines
That proved stories,
Only following the path of music,
Only marking from Zero outward,
And the colours swept
Over grey, defining it. Marking
Out the territory of the linear,
The tales told by a certain number of songs,
Ruins and rain, devils and dust,
The boldest colours
Where all art aspires,
We write to get the music into the city.

It was astoundingly easy to let
The dark voice speak for me.

Will it be the same tomorrow as today? Will today
Bring a step towards ease?
We are playing the longest game.

Even at the very edge,
None can stifle, there's never
Total dryness in this stream,
And what a joy that is.

There is only the past now, there is no present,
None present,
And impatience is the special of the day,
The cocktail on the house,
But then again,
Drinking alone,
With only the past and the future,
Neither of whom are good-looking enough to flirt with,
It was always meant to be,
A foolhardy alcoholic
Lost on no-one,
And this is an old bar, the sort
From dated television shows and better lit movies,
It's a place that one only visits after the fact. At the
Time, the concern is drink.
(I'm honest to you, aren't I,
Honest and integral,
In the black-ink minority).
There are none standing in the present, no prospect,
No prospectives, no prospectors, no Proserpinas,
But it is not enough to wait
For a single person to enter this metaphorical dive.

Freedom is a
Thing. Freedom is a thing that
Can be illusive, freedom
From one thing can lead
Straight into the new hands of the enslaver. Bouncing
From slavelord to slavelord, never a freeman, never a freeman:
And all I want them to do is watch.

Transcending nothing,
Crossing no veil,
Entering no dead space,
Tomb-like nebula,
The deathworld of the deadest stars,
The feeling as old
As the shineless.

You go north, to find nothing,
South, to find nothing,
East, to find nothing,
West, to find nothing,
Skyward, rimward, orbital,
But it will only be
When you are rudderless,
Surrendered to the sea,
Not seeking to carve a waterway or build a Roman road,
That you will find anything at all.

Break open the stone to find that
Nothing is a barrier,
No impediment withstands desire,
The will to craft,
Will triumph,
Even if it takes one along a longer road,
A night-road, a road of darkness,
The land of imaginary drugs and real dubstep
The land of nothing usual and everything discomforting,
The land of going on even though it makes no sense to.

Gravity has its hold
Until
_
_
The impact. Recoil flows through the body that has stopped being a person and starting being a body. The wave. The pulse. The impact.

Reckless abandon
Is always portrayed as a good thing.

Isn't it so strange that this is so very almost over?

I'm going to miss you when you're gone,
This honesty box,
This pliant page,
This place where I've gotten to the heart of me
And daren't not pretend. Elsewhere,
In that worthy, unread miasma,
I used a character to talk
About the toughest things,
But she needed her own universe, and who would I be to deny her that?
So I come here to talk about
How I spend all of my post-midnight time here,
Because somehow it's the midst of the night
And it's so so dark. Maybe
I've sacrificed beauty, certainly elan,
To make sure this place
Served its proper purpose. The walls
Only worked when I tried,
And as usual this account of myself is meaningful primarily to myself,
Though I'm sure there are some who will see
Something special in it.

I have written its end.

One end is the sign of continuation. Tonight,
I took part in an event that was part of
My childhood, and now is part
Of children younger than I
And shall be, on and on. Just as one phase
Ends, another begins,
Because we are blessed with continuity. We
Enter the next chapter,
Come up with a new principle, a new plan,
But the through-line carries on. That
Comforts me deeply, knowing
That the same me wrote
'Everyone watches...'
That wrote
'I am hearing voices in a dream.'
Yet not unchanged. The parts
Where I did change
Might fall down, be forgotten,
For momentousness is a quality not always accorded accurately,
Not to mention a distorting influence,
And tonight
Is maybe not so significant,
Save as a concluding point,
For eight month's labour, or more,
Trying to craft an ambition,
Trying to get over and away from
The old period. To finish –
I trust
That I will find a way, now,
To be honest and beautiful,
To not need a place where
I put the most close to me, the real me, the one
Not shaped by words,
Whose very life is captured in a specific story,
Instead is free to express
The love of language, the love
Of ideas unfolding
And new places extrapolating,
The torch,
The baton,
Comes from the joint hands of that other me,
The Hyper Woman and the Flotsam Man,
Truly him, aspects that let me
Understand a little of me, and write a little of it,
To carry on that sine wave,
The path traced that's always me and never quite the same.