Poem VII - "I am not who I am" [Back catalogue]

I am not who I am.

Locked in 21-year corridors,
Left to peep through narrow keyholes
To espy fleeting moments of fantasy
And my Darkness.

Left and right the walls,
Night-black, polished onyx,
Flaunt portraits
Of horrific romances:

How lovely they all are.

But reach to touch them as I may
And they fade behind more locked doors
Of these twilit corridors.

I am not who I am.

M.M. — October MMIX; edited December MMXI

Poem VI - "Solely and supreme I held thee" [Back catalogue]

Solely and supreme I held thee
On sparkling, serene seas
Of yesteryears and forgotten lore;
The burnings of the heart and its roar—
But I have lost sight: my woeful pleas.

For what I have known of love
And the flights of splendid doves
Has been dashed by Time
And its reign; and the bitter clime
Of fate cast by the Above.

Now I tremble in sight of thy countenance,
And to give double mine own essence
Would be no great a price to pay if once again
Grace would resurrect and stay this pain.—
But alas! the pall is still and absolute the consequence.

M.M. — Februarius MMIX; edited December MMXI

Poem VIII - Esoteric Art [Back catalogue]

Words and thoughts: I shall bend and mould to my Will.
The cryptic and hidden: I shall prise wide and imbibe;

And deep inside I recognise and affirm the plurality of men I am and can be.
To set free and let wail the manifestations and fantasies that swell within me.

To kiss the snake and embrace the world,
Plunge into bliss and the million folds
Of love and time—into all things that are mine—

Whilst up above the stellar host will know no equal to their own light
Other than my radiating and emanating, illuminating orb burning so bright.

Without fear I am, with potent Will at my very core;
Without constraint my consciousness shall ever soar:
From inflamed Venus to belligerent Mars;
From aureoled Helios to Selene up in stars.

I wish to live unabashed and fully,
Be at once Dionysian and Apollonian—truly;
Unlashed, able to evolve and thrive,
To explore the labyrinth of my questioning mind—
And what infinite wonders may I there find?

Thus to cradle the Pillars of Creation
And witness the Universal cessation.

M.M. — October MMIX; amended Februarius MMX; edited, title revised December MMXI

Poem XII - "And so the world" [Back catalogue]

[Published in Forward Poetry's (formerly Forward Press) Poetry Rivals' Collection 2010 - Whispers Of The Mind on 30 November 2010.]


Influenced in no small part by T. S. Eliot.

And so the world continues its languid dissolution,
and the hum hum, drums and wails drown all out;
whilst creeping along his bleary path, head-wingèd,
comes Hypnos and in train his progeny—

What whimpers will I give when Thánatos comes for me?—

Creeps:

the scent of ancient forests where hoary wizards roam in wisdom—
In his hollow-hillock covered in moss and lichen lives the hermit:

I am the one-man screaming, arms in upward fury, lambasting the silent sky;
the spectator, miserable and magnificent, spying happiness from corners.

But what if that reflection of sunlight on that tin could bring me
back to those carefree days in places long gone?
Back to relive—to relieve!—reword words not said
but meant!—so dearly

...meant....

His back: so bent!

I tarry here; tire of this place.
What lies beyond where the stars pine
and
—'bove?
—below?
—before?
—behind?
my mind?

Would that I could...

could just....

Take a moment!,
ye hurried masses;
take but one single moment!
And—

Behold:
A vista:

An afternoon of a dying sun
dispersing its golden sea of remains—
Azure sky and a painter's clouds.
What a marvel to see
(to be able to just see!)
the neo-Gothic tower and spire
Posturing Proudly, timelessly,
defying their makers
and all manacled man alike.

What will break my adamantine shackles!
I wish to handle my hollow universe!
And dare!—yes, dare!
Ha-hah!
I will dare!
and!...

Palsy: fell-come, my dear friend:
Do you too feel the heavy weight on my chest?
My heart tender is severely constricted!
and restricted!
My how restrained and pained I feel!
Damn It!:
It is merciless!
Damn This!:
This lace!

But do I still not wander?:
in secret fantasies of love
and in secret fantasies of life?

In these precious
reverie-memories;
sham remembrances:

Garden lights—
outside a modern Danish summerhouse
—under variegated twilight.

Childhood innocence in a sheltered school-world
Oh and all the little things that are for me
All the small and touchable things
All the things with noises
And flashing lights
My things
Mine

A horroromance with
my Lady of evenfall-breed,
enswathed in sepulchral ruched satin;
and a dead-of-night tryst:
We together hurrying away
to oblivion
in an ebon landau
drawn by daemon equine—
all the while flitting with ease
between lucidity
and lunacy;
between the ethereal

and idioreal:

So I ride as passenger;
the country-dark night-chill
—erstwhile besieger:
I dismiss apathetically
its clamouring for the world—
and it
now forgotten.

So I ride;
onwards!
on byways;
onwards!
on highways;
onwards!
on my ways.

So I:

I, ensconced in a seat that stokes warmth—
Come, dream!; come, sleep!

I, observing the unlit country in awe—
Come, mind!; come, psyche!

I, immersed In the Nightside Eclipse—
Come, memory!; come, reverie!

(Two glinting eyes: unshut;
two pricked ears: censorless;
but a smirk
and silence kept.)

M.M. — Februarius-Aprilis MMX

Sonnet I - "For is my heart a vessel daring sea?" [Back catalogue]

Posted some years ago; presented here with cosmetic changes.

For is my heart a vessel daring sea?
Dare tempest, thunderstorm, and trident's quake?
Alack! yet mine is sheltered by no lee,
But rather shipwrecked, beached—denial's wake!
My lute, a-tuned so fervidly, doth dote
On thee; thou, crown'd for prime seraphic grace.
I strive toward thy heart despite thy moat,
Toward that thorny rose done up in lace.
And those who confidently try compare
To Beauty's host, but folly they will find.
As sure doth night aways with any glare,
In like course souls of ours will duly bind.
So onward, seaman! Love for none will wait!
Forever onward—nothing left to fate!

M.M. — October MMVI; final line revised December MMXI

Song II - A Love Song Macabre [Back catalogue]

Oh deathly Cassandra, come
For you I have shunned the sun

Rise from your fathomless dream
So we may haunt the lands unseen

To wander twilight arcades
And nocturnal promenades

Take my hand and I will show
Secrets only devils know

Oh my cold Cassandra, come
For their hollow love lies undone

How your obsidian tresses stir me
Razor-spiked like kraken sea

I could gaze forever into your eyes
Serpentine, lambent like fireflies

All at once you stupefy me
Daze and deaden so easily

Oh impish Cassandra, come
Hearken to words once unsung

I have armed 'gainst frivolous light
Flaunt now your eclipsing might

Unleash 'pon my entranced heart
Shadows of your blackened Art:

The evernight of your worldview
The diffidence you eschew

M.M. — Martius-Maius MMX; edited December MMXI

Words for a Picture VI

To be read alongside 127 by Mecuro B. Cotto (MecuroBCotto).

[Excerpt from an unfinished work:]

Why            is it
            when        the
      mirror                     shatters
and            I
                        try
            to    rearrange
      the                        shards
      does the reflection remain the same?

M.M. — December MMXI

Prose III [Back catalogue]

The Revelation of Lyrus Maskivian, the Deathless Prince, General of the Askkalan Armies (Ch. IV, § xxiii); recovered from the ruins of the Black Citadel in the year —.

In the riotous swathe I cut through the centuries, I sought always to unite the exudations of the beauty of love and war. And I succeeded. Though lesser men—men who dare not utter my name even now—have called me a madman, a butcher, all the permutations of malevolence, the very awe and terror that will perfuse through them once they know the true magnificence of what I have reached will at last and forever stain history with the quintessence of this grand conception, of this Art Revealed. The weak-willed worms cannot even begin the attempt of opening their insignificant minds to imbibe this most secret and enrapturing knowledge. Mountains of life-despoiled bodies I have piled, nightmarish landscapes I have trodden, entire nations I have burnt to ashes and one woman I have loved to the extreme; all to learn that in reeling horror and burning love there lie things that are crystal reflections of each other. They are, quite simply, the manifestations of what repels ordinary men and what ordinary men feign and pretend to understand. They reside at the threshold between sanity and madness, where very few are able to remain wilfully. They are the warmth that radiates within when one encases and seals his heart for just one other, never again for it to be unlocked. They are the purest art, revealed to an individual only during the very rarest of experiences, experiences of masterful devilry and uncompromising adoration, experiences that I have dared, in my audacity, to live.

M.M. — Ianuarius MMX

Poem XIV - "To the North" [Back catalogue]

To the North—
where blizzards beat
where white death hides

To the North—
where a nightsun eerily shines
where I dream of shadowed luminescence

To the North—
where mile-upon-mile is glacier and snowy plain
where ice kingdoms are unmoved and eternal

To the North—
where truth lies at the end of the world
where I walk aimless and fated

To the North—
where coldness wraps round me
where numbness seals me inside my mind

To the North—
where I lunge into the unknown nothingness
where I seek the something my heart craves

To the North—
where solitude is a congenial audience
where the gelid wind cuts open my distended self

To the North—
where I conquer all and in-between
where to languish is to be vitalised

To the North—
where silence is song and symphony of soul
where I begin where I will end

M.M. — Junius MMX

Experimental I

Written extemporaneously when somewhat intoxicated by alcohol at 3 a.m. on 10 December 2011.

What are the lines when extracted from the mind?
What are lines?
when hidden sometime in summertime,
when lines were one time of a mind unlike that now mine—
signs of a time when mind was kind,
kind like the lines that seep through all the time,
that seep through my mind, clocking away aligned with time;
and the spine of mine that heightens with every line that my mind, though unkind, writes,
line by line by line by line.

M.M. — December MMXI

Ex Tempore XI - Lights seen from Bangor Pier, a night-scene

Conceived and extracted on the evening of the 9th of December 2011.

Here, there and everywhere an incandescence dots the nightscape.
Some are clustered together; some pattern; some shift or drift;
some dim for a moment, disturbed by life not their own;
and each lonesome light: some punctuate and comfort country-roads, illuminating the way
for the Passenger who dismissed the world's clamouring;
others, the most solitary of all—strivers alone in the inescapable darkness,
the heart of a hermit
or the beacon beckoning the disattending soul into a dream-memory.
But at her height the mistress Moon dominates; full, vitreous and extra-real in the cloud-scarce sky.
The scene is hers, and the lights: I am merely the wanderer and welcome witness who strayed here.

M.M. — December MMXI

The bliss of experiencing [Back catalogue]

I have previously remarked on the merits of putting spontaneous thoughts, or epiphanies, into written word. Here I attempt, briefly, to describe and explain one such revelation; specifically, a thought on the nature of experience.

It is without doubt that many before me have expounded and many more after me will expound a theory of experience. This may well have been and be a broader philosophical endeavour or a narrower psychological one. What I have come to believe is more in line with a transcendent perspective. Concisely, it is this: though what we call experience can (quite cogently) be defined in psycho-physical terms—i.e., with the help of cognitive neuroscience and like disciplines—no amount of description of the nature of experience or its aetiology can ever be equatable to the experience of experience.

Perhaps this at first sounds odd, but it is in fact curiously intuitive. An example will serve well to elucidate this "non-equation": Take the idea that experience (or consciousness) is the grand result of a high-functioning, highly evolutionarily developed, highly complex neurocortical system, where the impressions of something called reality are realised, in some unknown way, by interwoven psychophysiological processes. By all accounts, a reasonable explanation, albeit one that is still underdeveloped. Nevertheless, it says nothing of the experience of experiencing: one may know all there is to know about the mind but never, by this, know the intrinsic value of listening to Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" for the very first time.

I now know that experiences are of the highest order; they are never to be trivialised. Thus the revelation of my epiphany: how glorious it is to have the quality of experience as part of our existence. All the more so do the ambience of warm, golden autumn sunsets, the reveries of cosmic explorations and the matchless pleasures inherent in love dwell in me in a regard indescribable.

M.M. — Februarius MMX

Epyllion I - Felnah consoles the forlorn Sókan [Fragment of a possible larger work – Back catalogue]

"Come, dear warrior, Son of the Light,

What ails you so? Gone is Hixen's Blight,
And all world rejoices at your valiant deeds!
Do you not walk as hero? No other's feet
Shall ever tread where you met plight."

So said Felnah, ascended from Her Nether Realm.
Replied Sókan, lifting his weary head, removing his helm:

"O Goddess, Guardian of Those Who Slumber,
You speak no lie: all the enemy I have left asunder.
The righteous have triumphed and the benighted earth
Shall be as it was—all will welcome again hope and mirth.
But Agánn has fallen! and I feel heavy and sombre."

The Lady of Shadows took pity upon hearing this,
And told Sókan of the fate of Agánn, comrade now missed:

"The indomitable Agánn: loyal friend, warrior bold;
His brand will be ever sheathed, his body ever cold.
But pine not for him: he now sleeps the Blissful Sleep,
Dreams the Eternal Dream, and reposes where I keep.
There he will be when on you death begins its hold."

This uplifted the battle-worn Sókan and assuaged his grief
As he watched Felnah depart, soundless, like master thief.

M.M. — Februarius MMX

Words for a Picture V

To be read alongside Opheliac by alberich.

[Excerpt from an unfinished work:]

How calm the ocean deep—
navigating blind, seeing all there is to see
amidst the darkness;
                        whilst above the storm rages and writhes [...]

M.M. — December MMXI

Prose II [Back catalogue]

Bearing down on him was what seemed a merciless rage, an unrelenting assault: The sun was at its highest point and, so, seated upon its haughty throne, artfully unleashing what it had unleashed for countless aeons. The rays speared into his back and pounded like angry, animate monoliths.

How long had he been walking the dunes of the desert? How long had he seen nothing but these ancient sands that had Time and Death as their only companions? It may as well have been an eternity—an eternity of stifling heat and incessant burning. There was but to trudge on, and hope he would soon come to the end of his journey.

But Hope was nowhere to be seen; Hope was gone; Hope had left the desert long ago. The faithful keeper of the sands was not Hope but Her. And She was always there, had always been there. Always watching and glaring and abhorring. She was like the sun: implacable and single-minded. And now She was studying him, sneering all the while. Only a bit longer had she needed to wait before it was too late for him.

But it had already begun. The creeping corners had started to close in. There in the distance the tapestries had began to melt away and drip into mammoth drains. All imperial aspects were shattering in the wake of incomprehensible galleons. And what of the warm beds of carefree lovers? Apostolic and apathetic.

These things were spinning about in his head; he heard them from every direction.

She was upon him.

M.M. — October MMIX

Poem XI - Sleeping with Dragons [Back catalogue]

Inspired to an extent by Gojira's "Where Dragons Dwell".

Once, I saw a dragon

With a lucent snow-white mane
And a glinting diamond eye;

To my balcony window it came
Where it sang a soft lullaby.

I drifted into darkness and dream
And soared away with the old beast

To lands of crystal and seas untame,
Where the sleeping dragons lie.

In the creatures' den we did alight
And I climbed atop a small crag and beheld:

Wingèd forms, some black as night,
Others that with divers colours could meld.

The most majestic of them stood before me,
Ancient and colossal like primæval tree.

Embraced by its span, by its might,
No more wondrous a thing ever me held.

This company of legends, this mythic throng:
As one they spoke—

But did not speak, rather, chorused a song
Of soporific note.

The diamond-eyed dragon then coiled round, acting as lee,
And I lay beside its breast, warmed by its hidden fiery heat.

I desired to remain, no matter however long;
But, forced, I awoke.

Once, I saw a dragon.

M.M. — Februarius MMX

Song I - "Hurry now, Sister" [Back catalogue]

Hurry now, Sister
The spiteful morning sun awakes
The weight of the sky's grey eyes
Grows heavy upon our crowns
Left for plunder are all the dark roses
We had gathered for our gardens

The day waxes, scorching our bodies
Your wilting hand will not impede
Its wrathful trumpeting
Night, who had hid us away
Has left us to be consumed
The tears we shed scar our cheeks

Sleep now, Sister
Our ruin dances complete
Watch the sovereign vaunt
Where are the stars that lit our forest paths?
They have been outshone
Where is Death? He comes with hand outstretched

M.M. — Maius MMX; edited September MMX, December MMXI

Aubade I - "To sweep away, You and I" [Incomplete?; Back catalogue]

To sweep away, You and I,
      and blaze across the morning sky;
To greet the dawning light
      and bask in searing rays abright.
The slumb'ring earth will grow small
      as we draw near that City's wall,
Engirding the Realm of Sunrise-Dream,
      where sights unseen doth fully stream.
It shall be You and I who open the gates
      to sate desires that never abate.
Lo! the spires and moving monuments
      made of glister and blinding elements.
It is in this Citadel we shall linger,
      tasting bliss with our fingers;
Ambling 'twixt immense colonnades,
      in halls with floors of many gems made.
So clasp fast my hand and we shall flit
      skywards to our rightful throne to sit.
Together abreast, away we will be taken—
      close thine eyes: the Sun awakens.

M.M. — November-December MMIX; Aprilis-Maius MMX

Poem XIII - "She was a song" [Back catalogue]

She was a song—

That took me on Her dulcet wings,
Away from this tiresome earth,
To places within and outwith myself:

      Dreamy distant deserts of the primal
            and
      Kilometre-high metropolises of the emotionally edified.


She was the setting Sun—

With Her I lived in the
                                    moments:
Each infinitesimal of the Greatest Falling,
The diurnal monologue only we cared to listen to.

      With Her I would expend the triumphant golden day,
            and then
      Search out the obsidian monuments and ancient tarns in arcane night.


She was the secret of the silent Snake—

Brimming with Wonders undelved;
The delirium of Imperium;
The spring from which my bewilderment drank.

      Her kiss had the impetus of comets,
            and
      In Her cavernous Mind darkly wraithlike Ideas fluttered and darted.

M.M. — Aprilis MMX

Poem X - "She reclines on the divan" [Back catalogue]

Largely written in a hypnagogic stupor induced by Karl Sanders' "Preliminary Purification Before the Calling of Inanna" and preferably to be read alongside.


She reclines on the divan,
Hand propping up her head.

Sounds become deep, abyssal.
The image of the world diminishes to a blur.

She stares but does not see.
Her eyes are heavy—burdensome.

I study her face: expression swept away;
Infinity slowly expanding within her.

The drums' beat resounds and vibrates
Through dead weight—lulling, swinging.

Who she is—masked—is not who she is.
I can see her—now: as she tumbles through time.

They whisper, hiss, chorus in the encroaching dark.
The Egyptian flute mesmerising and haunting.

Her eyes close—the end of the world.
The sounds rise to symphonies.
She is released and becomes
Master and Wanderer.

In this moment I fall in love with her

—all of her

—forever.

M.M. — Ianuarius MMX