Poem XXII - Ode to Night

For the night I write these lines,
a homage to the cold and to the dark;
the night,
wherein I have found solace and secret,
and a stillness that soothes a raking inner-voice.

In the distance
of the vast nightscape:
there resides mystery and a thousandfold ending to a single life.
In the distance rolls the deep movement of sound,
the gradual approach of a rumbling and turbulent
darkling dream—

...forlorn on a beach, touched by the chill before a coming storm
gathering itself in the heavy leaden sky...

Here I have watched many times the silent dance of shadows:
nebulous reflections of joys and failings from the past,
phantasmagoric sequences of future on black canvas.
I have conversed with them long, been overwhelmed by them,
have become a wraith and been taken aloft with them.
No more have they told me and taught me
than all of what I already know
—yet do not wish to know:
In night, truth is denizen.

Deeply ensconced
I have clasped strange thoughts and ideas seemingly not my own;
I have been taken to places so far, yet which lie but a reverie away.

Bereft of light and its lively life
I have come to apprehend
the life in light,
as that that lives disconcertingly in the grotesque incandescence of streetlight;
and that in the stars up above:
Those darling diamonds,
colossal spheres of undying fire
that span infinity
of space and of mind
—and yet how simply they stud the great vault of night.

Fear,
have I not come face to gaunt and grisly face
with you?
Love,
have I not endlessly been assailed by you,
and riven?
Here, where the ugly and the beautiful discard their masks.

Oh, here...
here are wondrous world-scenes:
though I have known them only in word and through the cadence of song,
here, in the night, they are raised
to fullest vigour,
brought to the fore at a heady pace;
they are glimpses that escape from fantasy, the progeny of dream.

By the night these words are uplifted,
held and enwrapt,
then cast into the evening wind;
thrust to the stony faces of glaring derelict edifices
and to the dreary dead woodland
hidden in the corner of my mind.

To the night I remain ever commended;
in the night, ever lost.

M.M. — Aprilis–Junius, Augustus–September, November MMXI

Ex Tempore VI

the moment I can longer day-dream of running through vast, ageless forests
the moment the undying stars and immeasurably distant and unknown worlds do not enthrall me
the moment I do not ache for the great Sun's fall or rejoice for its triumphant rising
then I will know that I have died, that I no longer draw my breath from the mystery in air
then I will know that my mind has withered, that my light has fizzled out, that I am dust and bone
then I will know love, life and beauty were true
then I will know everything I wanted and needed to know

M.M. — November MMXI

Study of a Woman

"Study of a Woman: The emotion of Beauty (or the shell of it) experienced"

or

"On beholding a certain uncommonly handsome woman, widely known, yet here unnamed; a study of her, and the concomitant emotions thereupon felt"

[Written ex tempore one night.]

Why do these feelings come when I see you?—you, who are someone, a woman, who I say is uncharacteristic of womankind in your allure and classic features. (But are you Beautiful? does what I feel allow for this qualification, this aesthetic valuation? or is this sham as you are a stranger to me and I to you?)

But I do not know you.

Few amongst your sisters have I found and do I find to be like you: with your looks, of your looks (but the question tears: is it just appearance?).

But I do not know you—And you do not know me.

I see you, but from a world-distance away. And because of this great thing I see you as you are framed as portrait—are you hung as yourself? is this really you?—and I view you with the invisible disconnection acting as voyeuristic mask. Do I see you? would your face and looks and features and the yearning and the enchantment wash away were I to place my cold hand on what I wish to be a warm face?

But I do not know you—And you do not know me.

Why do these feelings come when I see you?—could it be that I long for someone like you?: whose sweet visage (that drives poets and master artists to madness!) touches and stirs something that is at my very core: whose character and personality (which I only know vicariously) evokes the greatest unassuageable and poignant affection and amorousness in me.

You dizzying woman; you high woman; you all-woman; you woman's woman; you: Woman. But!: woman-but-not-woman; instead,

Self!

Outwith Me and my Self—You Are a Self in all your glory, and this makes your splendour, and your mystery, resound within me as esoteric symphony upon a cavern-domed crystal lake! Surely then you are Beautiful! and so let my yearning and burning tax me on, for it whets Beauty—yours—to pierce me with such sublimity and rose-thorn proficiency!

Why do I feel this way?: because what is also engendered with all this, but diademed and laureate:

Love

—the capacity (the capacity) to Love!

And so I now look at you, E——, and I have, at the last, resolved why these feelings rise when I behold you:

I do not know you—will never know you—nor you me; but within me there is an inexplicable, ineffable Will to Love,
a will to love you, you whom I do not know—
(I could love you: how inimitable that is!)—

and so these feelings come because I, ready, wait for the one whom
with fullest measure
I Will Love.

M.M. — Aprilis MMX; edited Iulius MMX, Februarius MMXI

Hymn I

Glory unto Thee
Who dreamest eternally
In the darkest Abyss,
Where only the Few darest
Trespass and tread into.

Thou art the Nameless;
Thou art the Formless;
Thou art the Hidden Torch;
Great Bringer of Light.

Without mine eyes
Yet wide-eyed do I behold Thee,
Father of Illumination,
With coruscating sword in hand
Slashing away Fear from my Path.

I, freed from all Resistance, transcend
Into Thy garden of proscribed Love
And stand in awe before Thee,
Mother of Truth, Destroyer of Lies;
Gravid with Chaos in Thy womb.

M.M. — Martius MMX; Junius MMXI

Words for a Picture IV

To be read alongside 67954 by aleksandra88.

Although the paragon of carnality and great conqueror,
and even now seemingly held highest in all her splendour;
still she waited for bliss in just a kiss,
or for the Sun to fall on her just the same.

M.M. — November MMXI

Poem XXI - "When Beauty came"

When Beauty came
she precipitated the sack of city and soul.
When she descended from her throne
she stepped upon our paper-hearts.

When Beauty came from the sea
he flooded us in his titillating nausea;
the sight of him threw us into delirium
and a ravening bloodlust overcame reason.

Man devoured man, and woman too.
In a great display of ecstasy
our world turned murderous fantasy,
and ravaged lay the love we slew.

When Beauty came to me
I dared to caress her alabaster face,
only to be caught in his fatal embrace;
and down I did fall to the hard earth.

When Beauty came,
none were left the same.
We would have given our all
but Beauty only came to steal our souls.

M.M. — Februarius MMX; Aprilis, September, November MMXI

Words for a Picture III

To be read alongside 654573433 by aleksandra88.

[Excerpt from an unfinished work:]

For many a faded autumn did this stately Penelope wait,
    though pining in heart, wasting in body, dimming in mind.
Was it not She who attended, till insipid day grew late,
    that point that consorted with the sea, both so unkind?

M.M. — November MMXI

Words for a Picture II

To be read alongside Solar Passage by Greg Martin (sirgerg).

The face of the god.

M.M. — September MMXI

Poem XX - Gothic

In the midst of night, out on the moor,
shadows were stirring at my coming.

There, caught in the restless mourning wind,
the moon illumined all with its leering lidless eye.
With trepidation engendered and a weakness coming over me,

                        I set forth further into the dark.

Along my way I met, coldly, fiends of my past and present,
their hands lunging towards my neck; they were numberless,
        a ruthless swarm merciless in their onslaught.

But only one would I truly see:
              her cloaked spectre in the moonlit gloom, flitting within the mist.

Once upon a fadeless time I had her;
                                    she was rapt by the lavish love in which we lived.

    But our eldritch flame burnt too fiercely and we lost ourselves in the giddying decadence,
                                                 lost to time and its tendrils that took everything
                                                 slowly away.

Here in the wasteland
               nothing seemed truer, more honest and forthright,
than the bereavement I felt—
        than the dreariness pervading the heath and my soul.

M.M. — November MMX; Februarius, Maius–Iunius, September MMXI

Ex Tempore V / Aubade III

Lines written in an effusion aboard an early-morning train travelling from Glasgow to Carlisle on 15th September; "fulfilled and refined" after the experience.

I see a great fire!, there, to the east.
An amber-red glow with a latent immensity is slowly ascending.
The kingdom of deep, dark night is but a remnant,
its trace nearly subsumed in the fire and growing azure of the sky.

But now, before me: the mists rise over the pastures and rolling hills, and about the cold, silent trees.
Streams and creeks themselves seem to rise with the mist.
How thick it is, the incandescent lights of man shining so weakly within it.
—They come not even close to matching the fire's likeness!

In the distance: the kindling fire grows ever mightier!
And the clouds: they hail the coming of the imperial thing;
they are filled with an orange and red and—colour indescribable!, the very colour of Creation!

Is this Beauty?
Is that great fire and ancient thing also in me?

Here in this carriage do I feel the morning-chill outside that must eventually die?—in the greatest of births!
—the most fiery and most awful of advents!

The dull gold stretches now,
flung across the appearing firmament by the streaming clouds.
Surely this light is the herald of wonder—of all life—
recalling the earliest of days—earliest time—
when its rays struck the young earth and all those things that crawled or swam, which are long gone.
Those things rose in consequence of this fire that is now all-consuming and inexorable....

And at last!—the blinding rays break through the mist and clouds
and in triumph they parade!, displaying themselves so admirably.
The sky, the earth, the denizens below: they are now truly awakened.

At last! the Orb of eternal power, that I dare grasp and fit in my hand, begins its reign.
The Fire! the Light!—fierce, bright, beautiful!

Majesty Sun!, You are risen!

M.M. — September MMXI; edited September-October MMXI