As pertains to LICHTSIGNALE

Death is only resisted, in the condition of its ghost- so much that even life becomes- the pale it would recede; it grips an equal turmoil, when no object is confronted; that nothing be so fatal, than its simplicity; the phase that Dix becomes, is more to lose his torsion; the "guazzo," the opaque tension of its form, cannot convince its distance; the flares commit a carnage, not to be observed; the skeletons - mired to their torque- are almost alembic to deviate, the amalgam they become; even inside their entropy, no war is resonant; the background of white, red, yellow, and cobalt blue, are bold to emanate, what they can't consume; Dix was no less seminal, berated from descent, than to shift his broken skeletons- from the commune of their wish- to fall but not beyond their death; the beauty is that, they are unnatural; and to make them fictive would denigrate, what they can't illumine; they may have dreamed a better imprint- even of Dante's Paradiso- the orders of angels were more suggested, in a yellow rose; that interposition that death creates; the assemblage of a body, reduced without a symbol, when every form is bleak enough to manifest its reason; and yet that logic can't transmit, the reversal of itself, they writhe when all is silent, to declare its lie; art would never be so tempted, to shift their intuition; that even to be functioned, it must condone their absence; and so in the way an aesthetic reveals an instinct from its cause- their Danse Macabre is unexpressed- until they mire form; it is such they have no tragedy, and Dix, for all their pathos in his fury, absorbs the ghosts he can't confide; with the war one year before its end- he sensed the twisted limbs, the mustard gas, the sobbing trenches, the shrapnel he would scar- as if his blood were not their phase, he interposed neglect; consumed without a hero; would he confide his sense? A dream refrained its anomie; their beauty was to be more foreign, imitating death. 

CORONATION 

To be where the moon is scarlet- and shadows are only the distance- between the pillars a rose erects, when nothing is unmoved, and the wind no less a tether, unwoven as my eyes; I am not consecrated. I mimic intuition. The tribulation of a dream, that cannot be disguised. That every poem I wake, wakes to be expired, I must not be outlived. To mimic beauty, I am its premise; art conflicts my imitation- its Protean withdrawal- to shift what I conserve, and without my conservation. A pyrrhic solitude; that any word condemn its absence, nothing is unreal. 

Poetry tempts what I oppose: its phenomenology cautions value- but not so much to dismiss- the value it can’t equal. To erect its observation, it must diminish me. That my fear not be its intuition- that I be less misguided- beauty disrupts its desolation, until I am expressed. 

How must my function be, the function it misgives? As if to mimic form, I mimic violation.    Death is the access of its modulation, to transpose beauty-that any value- inhibits its decay. Even to withdraw, what it must react, no premise is ideal enough not to be evoked. The driving caution of art, is not to be unreal. Truth is not a valor. The lie it can’t evict, that seminal tension, the woken relic, the hieratic occupation: that art seclude its absence, it cannot be unmade- and still, as any sacrilege- to condone what it upheaves. Art can’t equate a beauty, equal to itself. Somehow an aesthetic entropy; its design is not to be outlived, until it is recurred. A primeval torque- the twisted horsemen- unfinished but provoked, and deeper than his hand; the Magi were only sibylline, when DaVinci was withdrawn. So little transitioned to predict, his oil would infect their blood. And beauty spectatorial, to be the witness of itself. That an aesthetic concerns a ritual, it must condemn its cause. Was Margaret wan, conflicting grief, when nothing else was young? “What heart heard of, ghost guessed;” to take what is uncertain, beyond its circumstance. GoldenGrove evicts its passage- that even art is less considered- inside its formlessness. A narration provoked, to question loss, no deeper than the child. Is beauty resisted, when even grief, is the grief she can’t console?

There are no trajectories to confide. Art resolves a path, and still unfollowed, deepening its memory. To be abandoned, without neglect, as if to dream itself: were I The Galleria D’ell Academia, just past gloaming, the halls that walk without a shadow, were I the instinct they convert. When to feel the busts- of writhing marbles- a dream becomes its infancy. What night would not vacate its vow to wake the moon inside itself? When mirrors that shift as tapestries- forget to be evoked- when the walls resist their vellum? And nothing is so funerary, than to be observed?  A word suggests its echo, to mimic his approach. There is no blood to fear. The marble supplicates its basin. Nothing is translatable. The “David” can’t commit his plumage deeper than its myth. It is not to have him shift, that his body is not visceral. The parable of his hand is the hand it can’t resolve. He is equally an artist, to transition ennui; were Michelangelo’s Goliath beyond his fate, no faith would be withdrawn. 

 Were I The Galleria D’ell Academia, nothing else would speak. Even for its discrepancy, beauty is misplaced. He was not intended beyond his trail, and yet for it he is condemned. To be expressed- but incomplete- a mold confirms his absence, to resist its death. When nothing else objects its form, he cannot be evoked. Michelangelo may not have foreseen this posture: unveiled for The Palazzo della Signoria, in 1504, his “David” was the entry of its form. It is almost that the unfinished figures are the entry of his ghost. And it is not for him to approach their absence. They fall away as petals, Herodiade would lament: to consider beauty its supposition, “Si la beaute n’etait la mort…!” Even to consume his will, he can’t resist their liberty; his humanism is obscured. He emits a naivete and mastery- his ghost is crimson- his blood pearl gray; he cannot hear the quarries, that listen for his form; and yet the myth he cannot reach- as myths are made to caution faith- discerns a will he can’t approach. Art is the valor he neglects, to imitate the hero. 

And yet for the shade he would transmit, the moon converts itself; it threads a veil beneath his skin- collapsing veins in lavender- shredded without the twilight, his blood endures its lace; serrating wounds that only bleed, in the drift of a thorn, its liberty, the Rose it can't attach; and yet to wilt, its vapor settles, to bruise the sky beneath its soil: he is observed but too innate, not to fear himself; there is no dimension- he mustn't wake- and the secret of his beauty, is to deny its magnitude. 

And yet his recognition, is to fall before his myth. His treatment is not epical; his fortitude is absence. The moon may hide his shadow, as if to find its ghost; and stir its mold as if he were, no deeper than an echo; that tragic mediation, that even his myth survive a dream, that wakes the rood before the Rose, and drifts as any spectacle; in the gilt betrayal of a tulip, inside a marigold- and the lavender too swollen- to collect an Iris from the rain, when rivers are molten and even Lethe, derided from its clay; it is the light he cannot cast- that he equate a parable- unequal to himself. A man transmits divinity, to premise naturalism, that nothing is so vain, than not to be imagined. He is the eternity of Aquinas: "the possession of oneself, as in a single moment." His remainder is the hero, to constitute neglect; is there nothing more tragic to imitate, than the choral busts misleading him?

That even Aristotelian enough, to connote what a form must manifest- exceeded from itself- and still within the measure, of what he can't expand, no logic is oppressive; he must consider sleep. And broken as an interstice- no revenant consoled- the busts so peopled to civilize, what they can't evoke; is it here his sorrow questions, the death it cannot choose? 

Be it I concern his larger hand, the skein that drifts- when swans resist- the symmetry they feel; as if to be imagined, they must not follow blood; even to betray their golden gallows; that his vision avert the cress, pulled when a wood of raceme, shifts its leaf meal from the sun; no beauty is historic; his secret is autumnal; a yellow rose too faint to shift, the violence it would wake, in those noctilucent cellars, that aggregate the sky; a Chaldean cumulus, should Proteus be stilled, and find an Orphic prophecy: "the gates of Pluto cannot be unlocked; within is the people of dreams." 

How is it to mismanage form, no deeper than its focus? Be tragedy the imitation of one act, the David is one emotion- and yet without a spectacle- he contradicts the "shite;" he cannot haunt his absence; it was an arbitration; Michelangelo's purgatory busts, were not meant to trail his plume; to figure his ink inside a skein- willows a pale- to reproduce; the David can't commit a stage, no deeper than his purge; be it to find a better light, he must return himself.

As such- even that the hall is vacant- he need not know those lyric shadows, that often follow heroes, when words mislead their cause; be it iambs or hexameter; the drums and flute of a NOH play; the ovular illuminations- Ochorowicz suggested- would root personality; to find its own impression, life is barely spectral- until it is resisted- so much that art should violate, the soul that wakes itself; to come as phases that mediate, a mirror from its mask; when every sense betrays a value, as if to be unmade. The David hides his coronation, the immaculate hall he can't predict, even so christened without a hand: he is the child of a ghost. 

Je Suis Hante

That art conflicts what I relent- and any form congregates- the havoc from its myth, beauty is an imitation, broken from itself; and not so much inside a mirror, but to delegate an atmosphere, where form becomes its absence; that death is not its remedy, until nothing is unreal; and every expression an interlude, receded from its symbol; in Je Suis Hante, I provoke a tension; my heroine - for her aesthetic- conflicts amnesia, when even madness, interprets its neglect; is there no divinity to confirm, when every instinct she adheres, resolves my formlessness? To speak without her tyranny, I vacate her relapse; the posit of art, too episodic, not to toil me; the following is of she- to address herself- I am the relic, her myth cannot commit:

Her petals cannot fold the wind;

A basin empties from the moon-

In tears of ash and porcelain

And purple reeds that shift too soon

That Lethe stir their memory-

The hemlock fastening its plume

Too quaint without her heraldry; 

There was no crest the rose outgrew:

The Corona Borealis

The Coventry its ash withdrew;

Salome writhes her stiffened cheek,

To narrate ghosts she can't exhume;

She fears her dance to fear her blood

Embalmed in stars and broken tombs

The silver cliffs she can't erode;

The azure of their swollen womb,

A shadow that would fasten clay,

A mirror emptied and entombed;

She is not young when winter sleeps-

The frost that wilts as if to bloom

A garden buried from itself-

The amaranth her ghost renewed:

Why sleep and not resisting bows,

 When beauty is an interlude?

The wood corroded from her sword,

The opal pasture of its wound.

Tableaux Vivants

To be where the moon is scarlet- and shadows are only the distance- between the pillars a rose erects, when nothing is unmoved, and the wind no less a tether, unwoven as my eyes; I am not consecrated. I mimic intuition. The tribulation of a dream, that cannot be disguised. That every poem I wake, wakes to be expired, I must not be outlived. To mimic beauty, I am its premise; art conflicts my imitation- its Protean withdrawal- to shift what I conserve, and without my conservation. A pyrrhic solitude; that any word condemn its absence, nothing is unreal. 

Poetry tempts what I oppose: its phenomenology cautions value- but not so much to dismiss- the value it can’t equal. To erect its observation, it must diminish me. That my fear not be its intuition- that I be less misguided- beauty disrupts its desolation, until I am expressed. 

How must my function be, the function it misgives? As if to mimic form, I mimic violation.    Death is the access of its modulation, to transpose beauty-that any value- inhibits its decay. Even to withdraw, what it must react, no premise is ideal enough not to be evoked. The driving caution of art, is not to be unreal. Truth is not a valor. The lie it can’t evict, that seminal tension, the woken relic, the hieratic occupation: that art seclude its absence, it cannot be unmade- and still, as any sacrilege- to condone what it upheaves. Art can’t equate a beauty, equal to itself. Somehow an aesthetic entropy; its design is not to be outlived, until it is recurred. A primeval torque- the twisted horsemen- unfinished but provoked, and deeper than his hand; the Magi were only sibylline, when DaVinci was withdrawn. So little transitioned to predict, his oil would infect their blood. And beauty spectatorial, to be the witness of itself. That an aesthetic concerns a ritual, it must condemn its cause. Was Margaret wan, conflicting grief, when nothing else was young? “What heart heard of, ghost guessed;” to take what is uncertain, beyond its circumstance. GoldenGrove evicts its passage- that even art is less considered- inside its formlessness. A narration provoked, to question loss, no deeper than the child. Is beauty resisted, when even grief, is the grief she can’t console?

There are no trajectories to confide. Art resolves a path, and still unfollowed, deepening its memory. To be abandoned, without neglect, as if to dream itself: were I The Galleria D’ell Academia, just past gloaming, the halls that walk without a shadow, were I the instinct they convert. When to feel the busts- of writhing marbles- a dream becomes its infancy. What night would not vacate its vow to wake the moon inside itself? When mirrors that shift as tapestries- forget to be evoked- when the walls resist their vellum? And nothing is so funerary, than to be observed?  A word suggests its echo, to mimic his approach. There is no blood to fear. The marble supplicates its basin. Nothing is translatable. The “David” can’t commit his plumage deeper than its myth. It is not to have him shift, that his body is not visceral. The parable of his hand is the hand it can’t resolve. He is equally an artist, to transition ennui; were Michelangelo’s Goliath beyond his fate, no faith would be withdrawn. 

 Were I The Galleria D’ell Academia, nothing else would speak. Even for its discrepancy, beauty is misplaced. He was not intended beyond his trail, and yet for it he is condemned. To be expressed- but incomplete- a mold confirms his absence, to resist its death. When nothing else objects its form, he cannot be evoked. Michelangelo may not have foreseen this posture: unveiled for The Palazzo della Signoria, in 1504, his “David” was the entry of its form. It is almost that the unfinished figures are the entry of his ghost. And it is not for him to approach their absence. They fall away as petals, Herodiade would lament: to consider beauty its supposition, “Si la beaute n’etait la mort…!” Even to consume his will, he can’t resist their liberty; his humanism is obscured. He emits a naivete and mastery- his ghost is crimson- his blood pearl gray; he cannot hear the quarries, that listen for his form; and yet the myth he cannot reach- as myths are made to caution faith- discerns a will he can’t approach. Art is the valor he neglects, to imitate the hero. 

Putative Piece, at present

Blank Verse Notations

There was no ancestry to be unmade;
She wakes in a mirror to wither ghosts.
His eyes too hollow not to break her pall,
The waste of heaven to seduce a rose
Rusting the tethers of its velvet thorns.
Her shield was broken to inherit him
Where blood was the clamor of a shadow,
Too much a ghost not to ripen echoes,
The wind too heavy to corrupt its cheek:
No crag was buried to collect her ghost.
A swan is severed but to be exposed-
Her tears are the fury of his ether-
The stage she murmured would not break his mouth,
Never so postured not to mimic sleep
She trembles the rain that collects in wells;
Never so withered to abandon shadows
And the ashen pools that his mask became,
His hands were the pallor of her simper
She was too small not to be his posture;
Never less prodigal to sequester
The acrid consecration of her sleep,
Swollen as starlings that forget to sing
In the hymns they sever to be unborn.

Texts and Blank Verse Notations

QUOD ME NUTRIT ME DESTRUIT
To be unborn,  I must not grieve, the death I cannot posture. What sustains me also deprecates; I am intrinsic not to be, what I can't imagine. The nuance of beauty- to conflict form- as if to goad its absence- to seclude an intuition-when nothing is unmade. That wind and rain and blood and sleep, fall beneath their shadows, I only wake what cannot stir.  The supposition is never so much , that death exceeds what it condemns; the silken rose- its ministry- not to wake the moon; the lily absorbed, that every garden, wake its infancy; I commit strength, no less opposed, to hide what it conceals; am I Aeolian to be transferred, when the wind forgets to bury me? Art transforms its instinct- that even death and beauty- cannot be consumed; no symbol is unheard,  that I forget to be, an elegy too woken, not to mimic grief.


The instinct of beauty, when even death, cannot be consumed.      Dagon Anais The First
I am the covet of a ghost, undreamed but not to mimic death, when nothing else expires. There is no womb to contend. An asp consumes its echo: the Edenic pallor of a garden, too small to hide my mouth.  A rose neglects its shadow, to break my sacrament. The lavender is acrid- as any pall- postured not to wake. And still without a tether, the moon forgets to sleep. Its shrift is no less fetal, not to keep me here. I cannot be unborn, to undulate its quarry. The tidal shift of pools-sequestered that I be- the prison of their lava, the crystal of its
mirror, the shrapnel that collapses the ghosts I liquify. I was made, but to escape, the morgue I can't confine; the moon is less misguided, not to bury me.



There is no beauty to violate, when every augur that shifts my ghost, cannot shift its absence.

Never to seek its expiration, I cannot hide my mouth.


I cannot mimic dreams, until I bury you

Dec 2 3:15 December 3rd at  3pm


I only mimic dreams, to hide inside your ghost.

Is beauty no more the temptation, of a form it can't become?

There is no beauty to violate, when every augur that shifts my ghost, cannot shift its absence.

I only mimic dreams, that cannot mimic mirrors

Saint Matthew And The Angel The Third for Caravaggio

For everyone who died on September 11, 2001:

Saint Matthew And The Angel The Third for Caravaggio

The skeleton's womb is in the sea,

Its tears are the foam, exploding,

Incessantly, from remnants

Of their birth, waves rooted

Deep in the sooty balm of the earth.

And when the skeleton calls back

For that bosom in which it was made,

Its heart becomes the rocks,

The angular teeth of the cliffs

Shedding, every time a wave screams,

For the mother that forsakes,

Destroys its limp esteem.

But what womb would know,

The star that puts its blood upon a plate,

Makes the moon its fork,

The sun obliterating as its knife,

All to reach back into the bones

Grabbed by gouged eyes

From a worm who'd gouge our faces,

From the interstellar sea?

No womb, no skeleton, forsakes me:

I do not feel my bones,

I do not feel the sea,

I do not even feel the earth

Re-claiming me, my arms, my legs,

So I can finally dance, and see, the shadows

None can see, in the mirror of the dark!

Wreck me, so you may see my dead city,

The sighs and words have been annihilated

And I am Virgil, with no voice to guide,

My mother has died, but I am dead, too:

Medusa fixed her eyes upon a point

So the snakes would writhe,

And reach out from a concave shield,

The perspective your eyes might yield,

If you cared to see beyond their death.

I have no breath, I am no body,

My bones are buried with Shelley,

Off our Tyrrhenian Phalanx,

We are not shielded from dying.

And the waves continue to drool,

Until the drool becomes their foam

Dragging us into the loam

That bases all forgotten things.

But I have dug through the soot,

From beginning looking in

Took apart my very bones.

We are not shielded from dying?

At least we know the light

That is rooted in deepest black,

I do not want to go back,

Still something drags me to the womb,

And my skeleton falls apart,

Each bone inoculating the sea,

What beast will come of this unholy kiss?

I am the son of unholy trysts,

And the blonde reaper will not take my star,

The moon will not outshine its death,

For as it dies it is most brilliant,

Re-claimed by interstellar ash,

To be re-born, inveterate mass,

Verging into human skin.

You are grabbing me from without

To take me within, and your hand

Has all the flesh I have forsook,

But you at least see the spirit's flesh,

The spirit's skin:

Lambent tears, dying stars

Against a sky much blacker than ash,

Falling deep into the sooty womb

Of Demeter. For we are the lost daughter,

We pluck Asphodel in forsaken fields

And Hell feels much brighter in the light

Than the black tears from our distant Mother,

Praying, as she knees into the grass,

For spring to come and reclaim her child,

Her womb. And yet, you take me too soon,

And yet, not soon enough.

*

   The columns at the entrance into Chancellary gardens are exposed by graffiti. Above shields, the stoic armor of men, who may or may not have been stoic, the names of lost comrades. In the gardens of the Reich Chancellery the bodies of Eva Braun and Hitler are burned and buried. In Oberwallstrasse the bodies of Germans and Soviets are decaying into ash the stars do not envy. The graffiti on the columns licks its wounds. It would rather obliterate the ash buried in the garden. And grow into beautiful weeds, destroying the flowers that were gutted from heaven and fed to hell.

   Hell has skinned you. But, unlike The Gestapo, its fires will not touch the snow that buries your heart. It is your heart that will burn through and tattoo: the snow, heaven and hell, graffiti on the columns, an American solider in the Berliner Sportspalast stabbing Hitler and every ghost of Evil that isn’t really a ghost and not even light enough for the night sky in mock salute.

   I see Saint Matthew and The Angel in a book. I look at Vandivert’s photographs and notes. (M) oldy SS cap lying in water on floor of sitting room. I laugh that the skull is almost obliterated, subjected to water and mold. And weep that Saint Matthew, a face you must have taken off the street, a body with a hide subjected to toil and sun, a man who may have been a farmer with deep black eyes recalling the soil’s lore, that this man must gore in his own haunted wood. We were never happy and never good.

   Your angel overlooks Matthew. Places its effeminate hand over the hide of his arm. Peers at a book in which he is writing. I do not know what he writes. But Matthew is the earth, and if the Angel has been before his birth, has always been, it has not preceded me. For I do not see, cannot trace a question mark in the dirt laying ants and all their structures asunder, without looking at the night sky to wonder, does this dirt make to be?

   My bones might rot in ash. . I do not know. Still, I go, where graffiti thrashes with gutted buildings. Skeletons, surrounded by the rubble of their very bodies. The hands that made them, long gone, maybe ghosts weeping that their blood should be mixed with a broken bust of the Fuhrer. And their skeletons haunt them. Reclaim them. Graffiti on the columns. Their song a throng of vespers digested by the air: I was here, too!

    And I am here, now, to reclaim them. . Reclaim you. I do not look for angels or saints. Only an angel can define a saint. I can only define my skeleton. My blood has been re-claimed by the earth. Where Saint Matthew and the Angel are both destroyed, and the graffiti columns restored, and all the rubble painted away, the ash too heavy for the sky never re-claimed, flowers gutted by noble weeds, a mock salute. Come to me. I can only look down. If I am the voice that might save you, you who stepped on the fangs of a snake, I will not look back. But the stars look back at me. Graffitied against an obsidian wall. My skeleton breaks. And I fall.

           *

I'll paint a flower that thrives in ash,

And finds a sun in deepest black,

The sea evoked my skeleton,

Berlin up-heaved my reckoning,

Beckoning my bones' blood,

To account for the sea's flood,

The womb that bleeds anemones,

Has no will for enemies,

So maybe you reclaim my ghost,

To make a body I am its host,

But I know that the man I killed,

His blood forever from dirt distilled,

Haunts nothing not even night,

Not even the amber light,

That comes to preserve the first cry,

Even though we all must die,

Still your eyes have the sea's shade,

A blue moon with its heart shaved,

And tears will take you nowhere,

Your bones are not your despair,

You cannot see a shadow's death,

Berlin in rubble re-claimed my breath,

Then I will make you from my brush,

Into an angel Saint Matthew trusts,

For you know not angel but paint the saint,

Your songs bleed without restraint,

Rooted in a sooty womb,

You cannot see beyond your tomb,

And I see the color of Asphodel,

Smells like the apple that never fell,

You think we were never made free,

From everything we cannot see,

That demons lurch from haunted eves,

Of roofs from forests with black leaves,

I'll set you Angel in human skin,

You will gut the rind that rots within,

Your Saint cannot taste its seed,

So I will paint Berlin bleed,

You'll both be on an empty street,

No voice except where your eyes meet,

The Saint will be a newborn child,

Wrapped in a blanket bloody defiled,

The Angel will be in a black gown,

Its read mouth attachés a sinister frown,

They'll stare deep into each other,

The baby wanting its mother,

Its mother dead underground somewhere,

And this Angel holds the Saint without a care,

A rope that would easily let go,

Were it not for the ash falling like snow,

The Saint's skin will be light grey,

The sky on an overcast day,

The Angel will look like porcelain,

Lighter even than the snow's skin,

And behind this equipoise,

A city in the gutter's throes,

All mist and gutted bloodless too,

All rubble except an ash draped shoe,

I'll paint a flower that thrives in ash,

And finds a sun in deepest black.

                    *

*

The dirt’s blood is the motion of everything. When the sea came at the soil with her blue teeth, she put it into the air. And wore the wind around her thyrsus, which she stamped towards the night sky but could not reach. Until a star cried, because it was afraid of its luster for all luster means death. And put its invisible tears into the wind, where every spirit, from everything, would eventually dance.

Put down your brush. I do not care that the painting is unfinished. Because you and I have bitten the apple. We’ve divorced the Myrtle and the Cypress. When Virgil has no voice to lead will Paradiso and Liszt’s heaven be anything but restrained hyperbole? And now I am seeing a bloody rood. La Sagrada Familia, Gaudi Cathedral, locked inside. But I don’t care. I’d much rather be locked out and see the spires try and pop the star’s tears.

I wear the rood. The blood has been so engraved; I wrap my long hair around this thyrsus, just to hide my graffiti. I do not want to read what it says, but I think it might say: your spirit has been stolen, your battle horse is too swift, you do not even rein Eden in the summer and spring, and your kidneys wear scars that will never heal. The pills that keep you alive are the Hemlock Socrates took. The pills you stopped taking, to stop the voices and avatars from hell that treated your spirit like a changeling, made you another Conrad Veidt in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. And now you must pick up the ash covered shoe and murder the Angel and the Saint. They are back. The stars’ tears will keep to themselves. There never was an Eden. There never was a Hell.

So go. My sacrilege was in giving your ghost a skeleton. And letting you feel the flesh, again. My roots will not even touch the air. I looked up at the sky, just now, and saw a formation unlike any other. A sliver of clouds shredded by shark’s teeth. The cerulean tent did not faze me. Because eleven years ago my city was murdered by rubble. And it wasn’t a shoe made prominent in ash, but people I’ll never meet. Crying tears that tasted like Ambrosia to our new Hitler. Still, I meet them in the cloud shredded by shark’s teeth.

My tears belong with the stars’. And I cannot touch them. The wind tries to blow my hair from my thyrsus. But I keep it wound. Black Ivy shining under a spring rain. You will not escape this rood. My eyes are blue dahlias. Locked in a glass cage. They see the graffiti maybe all of us fear:

I was never here.

                                                September 11, 2012

                                               

Dad, Boccioni, Pollock, Chauras, and Teddy

I started Roethke's book, The Waking, which, (I was erroneous), won him the Pulitzer in 1954. It was published in 1953. Even so, after experiencing the first two poems, and his ingenious use of the word pelludious, (poetic license), I went outside, lay on the hammock. I looked up where the leaves of the Dogwood and Oak meet, and thought about nights when I would sit there, and watch as their canopy assassinated the sky's. It also brought me back to my father. He died of metastatic melanoma in May 2010. I wrote this poem after stepping inside, an hour ago, for him. The photographs were just taken... mind you, I may seem hideous as I have no make up on, save for lippie and mascara. Still, when I was in despair weeks ago and walked into the back room and saw Roethke's book, with Georgia O'Keefe's painting on the cover... I could not know it would enhance everything I have learned, and am learning. I even like to believe my father may have had something to do with placing it there... for Roethke was, like me, concerned with the way disparity makes for oneness, and how soon oneness can fall apart. He separated the soul from the body, for a time, only to find the two intertwined, and realize the anonymity of form. By the by, my father always believed in me, as does my mother. I only hope this is a fitting homage, to him... he loved art, and collyrium is a reference to the 50 stanzas of Chauras, lines of which he quoted in a love letter to my mom:

For Dad

There was a night, when Dogwood and Oak
Met each other and decayed the sky,
I lay on the hammock, the words you never spoke,
That space between leaves-stars in Pollock's eyes-
I'd blur the canvas, until the stars exploded
Into strides Boccioni may have painted,
Into what sweet hell as the wind collided,
And collapsed the stars into the dirt?

You will not answer when I break a leaf
And trace a question mark upon its hide.
And place it upon the earth-not within-
So no worm will invade its green,
But surely it will die. And you, within,
You cannot cry at your invaded flesh,
And in your last hours when air collapsed,
Were you oppressed by the worm's weight?

The words you never spoke come and go
As ghosts invented by shadows, but I know
You cannot answer them, so I do:
I tell them, the leaves are heavier
When they pretend to make stars,
And oppress us until we cannot breathe,
And we are locked in a glass box,
Anemones plucked from the real night sky.

If collyrium indents my cheek,
Plucks its petals, until all I feel are bones,
When tears just will not do-to wet shadow-
I cannot drink the rood, and become a ghost.
I feel the worm eating and I want to be the worm,
But even within the earth there is no inward growth.
So I go in and find without, enclose you in the night,
Where nothing can scar you, not even my poisoned sight.

Kafka's Axe... and, well, my lost (one)!

I've been reading much Roethke as of late... and a friend, a wonderful poet, Rob Plath (one of Ginsberg's last students)... mentioned something Kafka said all writers and artists should do. Break their ice with a flippin' axe! Though I have suffered, and these past few days have been no exception, I decided, two days ago, to constrain my angst within a form, that hopefully breaks apart the mirror I've conveyed for my missing axe! *By the by, Roethke's first three books of poetry were/are still wondrous. I cannot wait to read The Waking, tomorrow, which he won the Pulitzer for in 1953. Still... I'm posting something of an inadequate poem, here, alongside photographs I took today. Because yes, even when I am ill, I "doll" myself (up). The blight of being "mad?"* :

The Axe

Lest we forget, the blond axe
Cutting ice petal by petal,
But still a film laughs behind,
And all contained in a cask,
Wrought from the very metal
The axe and Sun entwined.

Amaranth says it will not pass
And the ice film will not meddle,
It melts instead, stoops its hind,
So we may drink and trespass
The cask, our lips stung by nettle
Lined skin, our skin a bleeding rind.

*

Lest we remember, blood drawn thin,
Draws curtains from the Sun,
Sits in a room, not even shadows pass,
Looks for the axe, bones cave in,
Takes the barrel of an empty gun
Bled to chalk, maneuvering a cast.

But this cast contains my skin,
And casts me away from one,
I cannot shake off its putrid mask,
I bleed to find its bones within
To find my cask has been undone,
These bones, the fetor, where is my axe?

The Blond Reaper

FOR MOM:

There is an orange leaf in the sky,
It has uncumbered the sun, for the moment,
Has slain its eyes. So it doesn't will the world
Unto a magnificent prism wheel, it does not
Take the stream and make it flow harder or less,
It could care less; it doesn't even know I see.

But in the center of a forest, deep and verdurous
In dark green and deepest black, my eyes are blindfolded.
I may feel a slight wind, and hear it upon the verdurous eaves,
But the roof is leaking, and its burden makes me bleed.
I rip the blindfold apart. And take a piece, and put it up,
To the blond reaper. But the reaper's eyes will not be slain,
For the cloth can only sustain a haze of muted green.

To go back to deepest black and dark green,
Is the dream I once broke apart. Tore. To the despair
Of my muting heart. But now, I want the orange to blindfold me,
Even in the second that it wills the sky, and stars and supernovas
And black holes to swallow it eternally. I may see, now, all the particular
Colors of a magical prism fall apart into a lifeless stream.
But I do not dream on these waters, because I know the stream is not lifeless.
I evoke roots in the forest's center, and it evokes currents, that take my roots away.

You held my arms; I was but a fragile pup,
You swirled me, in the Sound's warm crystal,
And made a liquid of its source. So even as I stand in the forest,
And see so many bright things amid the black, and feel so much
The withering of a breeze and the drowning of my roots,
And the headlong roof that keeps leaking,
You held me apart. You are the keeper of my heart,
Because you didn't mock the pup's laughter.
You sang with it, sang with me, your devoted child.

And now I hear so many things,
I despair in the rind just to rip my core,
But I want more, oh I do. I want you, and me, back.
To that day, when we swirled in laughter, and everything
Was just a touch. But the circulation will not let this be.
So I cry, and die under the glare of a little orange leaf,
Too important to think it could ever last.

Somali Cyclamen

Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle" is his most famous poem. People praise it for its tragic beauty, the way he rages against death, seeming to counter another poem he wrote (Death Has No Dominion). It saddens me, though, that the majority of people do not know the form in which it was composed. For Dylan did not go without a tennis net (Robert Frost reference) when he raged against the dying of the light. He took a much overlooked form, the vilanelle, much overlooked for its difficulty. (I wrote one when I was nineteen; it's in a journal somewhere, and have yet to try again). He constrained himself to the repetitions, the nineteen lines, the tercets and final quatrain. And walked in a form that brings self delusion, does not seem to evoke a conversation, yet walks into the meditation of dead, quiet things, things that scream for mercy and tear us (all) apart. The real poet finds instinct, yes, but the real poet must also be a critic. I do not listen to the claptrap that art is all inspiration. And that the greatest artists have a Muse. To me, it is bullshit. When Dylan wrote this, he worked within the form. Because form depersonalizes the rage of passion, that unchecked just brings forth messy ranting. It's this depersonalization that makes the poem most powerful. Effortless. Much as I value him and this, the most famous vilanelle ever written (Do Not Go Gentle), I must say it is not my favorite vilanelle. One that has been quite overlooked is Theodore Roethke's The Waking. And I will tell you a secret, out of all the poetry I've experienced, this is, by far, my favorite poem. (The Waking). "I wake to sleep and take my waking slow..." No one has ever topped that opening line, by my estimation. And by my estimation, no one can even be considered a poet until they have tried, the vilanelle. Now for some messy ranting! Yesterday, I decided to write a poem for someone of great beauty. I put it to paper, yes, the old fashioned way with a pen. And I had the thought that perhaps I should linger over it, take my time. But this came out in ten minutes. Exactly what a poet should not do! Still, I am posting it, as a dedication. Just do not assume it is about love or passion or anything but the dream of always being seen, even by what you may never see:
 
Somali Cyclamen

 The deep black of their deep light,
Fused, in the lichen, of a dead rock
In the isolation of an even deader night,
Your eyes. Take me back, and give mine sight.
So long, so long I wandered, mine gouged
By my very own hands, torn from flesh
And even ghost, in the adulation of dead men
Whose words spoke love, but could not see,
I was more than they could ever see.

 My eyes. Threads of blue, phosphoric flames,
Falling away,in a glass box, where tears
 Work to take their flames away.
And being shut away, where all is lost,
In the lament of a song no word could sing,
I see your eyes, want to see, all that they,
Have seen. And have them break the glass,
And invigorate the blue, with your touch,
The touch of deepest black, rooted in earth,
Where worms may devour everything,
But nothing dies, when nothing lives.

 Your eyes. They see. Everything.
And oh, I want them, to see me.
That I may touch the earth, and still see,
The ghost is only ghost when it is rooted.
 In the isolation of a deep dead night:
Take me back, and give mine sight!

Black Tulip, again!

For all my suffering, my journey into the blood life:

 Black Tulip

I have always kept you, sweet rind,
Covered you in the cloak you gave to me,
Making me invisible, and blind,
To everything I should see.
But in the agony of my body,
Handing me a black tulip when I held a rose,
And didn’t even feel the thorns,
The thorns that would dispose my blood
To the air, and I could not even feel,
In this agony I threw away the rose.
Because I did not understand it did not see,
The impression of my body, my seed, the black,
Decaying to take me, back to what I could not see.

 I have my hand displayed outside a car window,
And amid all the rind’s perfect turbulations,
The laughter of a breeze, the echo of what I see.
I’ll hold the core in my hand, because I have seen it,
Decay. I have seen my own face fade away. And when
 I used to display death as a black flag, oh me, it is life,
Life’s greatest lover and friend, It is that bend in the road,
I do not want to see. For I have fallen into deepest black.
I do not want to come back. I have seen the wind. I have
Seen the rain breathe. I cannot achieve eternity or space,
In the concept of what I dream, but oh I can dream that
Eternity and space are more than distant relatives,
Catching a conversation after too much silence
And yet committed to the silent vow: I do not make a vow to you.
You will break me apart into a prism, and circulate my colors
To eyes that will not see, too stuck on the rind, to ever know,
The nature of invisibility. But I do love you, more than rind ever knew.

 You took my body and made it a soul,
You gave me the black tulip, and I did not hold back.
You wear no mask, you are no vision, but what I am is your vision,
You know all visions break apart, circulate, and die.

 But you are my blood, and I see you more than rind ever knew.
And I cannot be but to stay true, to the life that isn’t me,
 To rise in the bevy of sunset, and discard my cloak,
And let my nakedness feel the blood of a dead rose,
Mourning without veil, the sound of black,
The color of white, the blood, the dead attack.

The execution of Federico Garcia Lorca

I am drawn to Lorca's lecture on "duende." I've just been experiencing it. And (I) wrote this poem, as an homage to him, over the weekend. Of course, he deserves much better than my pen. Rooted deep in the earth, where what births us brings us to our end. But, he is by far my greatest influence. And I only wanted to capture that moment, in 1936, during The Spanish Civil War, when the horrid Fascists executed him, point blank, reportedly beside a matador and school teacher (also executed). For a man who said Dali found "eternity with limits," I must say, Lorca, your eternity was too beautiful to traverse time:

 The Execution of Federico Garcia Lorca

 The refuge was washed in your blood,
Dead volcano, dead church,
 And for everything that hummed in the silence,
You did not give word.
A Cypress branch
At dawn. The sun.
Mystical reaper with its eyes shut.
Take my body, oh, but never a thousand violins!

 I cannot hear the tears, and think my well is dry.
 And in the mirror of my eye,
I find everything sharp and shattered.
And wonder, why, did I, escape the pool,
That granted me my face,
And gave beauty a mountain?
Is this the dream I must erase?
 Lay down your gun, give the gun disgrace,
But, oh, don’t disgrace me!

 I hear a thousand violins
And oh, they are silent.
Traveling to mountain
And sea. And Andalusia. Just to taste, I see.
But where will the embrace go,
If it cannot carry me?

The lullaby. I need to go where I cannot see,
But oh, the terror, is overwhelming me!
So many, so many, are watching me.
Even as they cannot see.
My body will be a dead church,
My ghost a dead volcano.

 Yet somehow, I must march beyond the birth,
The blood, the breathing, the moaning pain.
And find a morning in its deepest rain.
And see I was not a dream in vain,
Because all dreams are painters,
And we the stealers of their brush,
Even in the lush fog.

 Will my body erase you, mountain?
Or will I erase you, sea?
 I give the brush back to you,
And go, where even summer, cannot dream.

No frater ave atque vale

I do forgive not having posted in quite some time. I've been ill. But, expect poetry rife with my approximations of beauty, soul, and mind. Some of which will befit my status as Jewel of the NIL! If Flannery O'Connor wrote through SLE, so I must (too).

Sum (COGITO ERGO)?

I wrote the following poem yesterday... more a poetic effusion, than poem. I've called it Sum, because it is, in many ways, the sum of me, and if you pursue the Latin root of the word Sum, it is a verb "To Be." Hence, Cogito Ergo Sum... (I think therefore I am)... now that I read it again, in its entirely unfinished form, I realize, the mood I'm setting isn't one of happiness or despair. It's more the "I am; to be" of a resilient soul, a rose, who will take the attacking rain, which is the quintessential embodiment of life, and death, and rather than let it dissipate, into the grass. It catches a drop, of this medal of air and the absent sun. What I must signify is the fact that the rose and the absent sun, in this poem, share the burden of being nailed, much like the rood. They die for life, that is. Because life and death are nothing if not landscapes that mimic each other, are endemic to each other, in everything but temptation. I've been in quite the fight as of late. Physically, with my Lupus... which not only has affected my kidneys (since 2005), but is now, more than likely, affecting my brain. I suppose I feel like the rose, because I'm constantly attacked, by a reality that wants nothing but suffering (for me). Like the rose, though, I take that little bit of without, a piece of the evil that pelts me, and keep it close. Within. To feel my fire, my fallen light, my flight into some apotheosis. And, if I can say anything here, it's this: we are always given burdens we cannot bear. It is only when we pursue the dream of bearing, not just bearing, but fighting them that despair becomes less and more prominent. It seems so many poets and artists are trying to reconcile an Eden with reality. But, my belief is that pain precedes Eden. It is only from sorrow, as Oscar said, "where there is sorrow there is holy ground," and Goethe implied, it is only from sorrow that our wellspring erupts. And we can dream on the clear water of a stream that seems to carry nothing, but really enhances everything we've ever lost. Maybe even (what we) never had. Basically, we pretend to invent a future from a past we'd rather prevent. And we manipulate this future into being a past. I, through all the pain I've been experiencing as of late, believe in something of the earth, endemic, primal... and this is to where I must go back. To distill the "eternal from the transitory," as Baudelaire thought one should, and feel an essence of something that may be a chimera, yes. But I keep the chimera's source (stronger,) when I enclose it in my petals. We are all primal, but it is always possible to take the wind, the rain, the sun and moon, and find in all its beauty and brutality, brutalities of our own making. Ones that we can enhance, an ugliness we can shape, into truth... that is... "eternity with limits"... transcendent measurements:

SUM
The rain escapes a modest cloud,
Trampling wildflowers, grass
With its medals of air, and gold
Extracted from the absent sun.
And one rose, it falls upon,
Assaulting the white petals
Until they turn a deep red
And the rose wishes it were dead,
This rose captures a drop,
Keeps it hidden in the fibers
Of its bleeding petals, for it knows.
The absent sun is better gone
When its lips and throat and tongue
Are parched, than when, already sunk
In this water, all the warmth is drunk,
And these medals of air, and gold
Are only nailing its tissued mold.
Every drop is another nail,
A wealth of medal from the white sky,
The modest cloud dissipates,
The rain has nailed its perfect rose
Into a perfect rood, gone into its roots,
Has mauled its bed, has given it
Not the comfort of being dead
But the task of knowing death
Is life, and both, assault and retreat
And are given back to the absent sun.
But this rose will not give back its drop,
It keeps it couched in its fibers,
Tastes the water dissipating, becoming part
Of it, part of the blood, the fight,
The falling flight, now fallen light,
For this rose will see, beyond day and night
Beyond the demarcations of root and air,
Rood and blood, its tissued mold against the sun:
And be, as it were, the echo, in a forest of mirrors,
Reflecting back and forth the reflection
Of a faceless crowd of a thousand suns,
Reflecting, in despair, the refraction of no one.

The Rood and the Thorn

This is dedicated to everyone, who was, under the assumption the world would end, today. Also, after listening to all of Chopin's nocturnes, early this afternoon, both his Piano Concertos, Liszt's Un Sospiro, Stravinksy's Firebird, I must say, I think a colossal sigh came over the world. Thanks to Liszt! Expect a poem on Rusalka... me embodying Rusalka... dedicated to (Dvorak) tomorrow. And bear with me, in my wondering if Delacroix really said Malibran was catering to the masses who had no artistic taste?! I love Delacroix, but I would also love to take a "time machine" and see Malibran, and her sister, Pauline (Viardot), perform. Forgive my not having any "profound" ramblings. Things have been rather horrid, today, despite my immersion into beauty, and the subsequent intoxication. Remember, we are all Phoenixes, but we go to different fires. And, despite beauty's intoxication, I've been feeling horrid... more so at the moment, with this execrable stomach pain, and, what I hope isn't bronchitis, or, Sol forbid, Pneumonia! *With the CellCept that would certainly kill, or do a number, on me!* Do not pray, but sing, for me. And I will prevent the day's arrival, the night's arrival, so death can find its perfect breath, a sigh, if you will, from what was being forsaken, taken, by what we "expect" :

THE ROOD AND THE THORN
Await the lark, and see,
For every cloud that bleeds
No consolation in the dark,
And rip apart, the black ivy.

Forget the lily opened white,
And didn’t want any hue
Save a clear stream of water,
Without any shade of light,

Color of Cypress, and its root,
Apple untouched but craving soot
The blood delivers from the rood,
But there is no flesh to make it true.

There was no lark when lily grew,
And no frost upon the sleepy grass
Or dead volcanoes erupting: the pass,
Of deepest night unto its death,

Annihilation of the ghost, the breath,
The birds sit in their morning pews
And do not mourn their brood,
But sing to praise of flesh and youth,

And I know what you will never see,
To rip apart the black ivy, the white lily,
The clear stream of water,
Without any shade of light,

Is to take the blood from the rood,
What seems to you the morning’s light?
And turn it into fresh laid snow,
Where roses bleat, but thorns won’t grow.

A poem, dedicated to Bunbury

I realize it's been quite some time, since I've posted. I'll admit I have been in horrific states. But, this morning, circa 5 am, I woke, looked out a window, and saw my dogwood tree, full bloom. White blossoms, illuminating the shadows that foregrounded it. And, of course, this image incited me to write a poem, which I am dedicating to Bunbury:

DOGWOOD TREE

Your white flowers exemplify shadow,
Reaching towards me from the bushes
Who are green but seem of deepest black,
To break from night and take the daylight back.

But you, a haven of phosphoric blue,
Dotting the sky when night is most profound
Helped lost sailors hope, when none was found,
Blossomed, to be rooted, from tip to ground.

The rain falls, in a small swell of petals,
It breaks against those shores that are distant
And yet, so close, the earth and the ash,
Your flowers bob, and petals clash.

Better than gloaming, grooming the past,
To move into a future, and wear its cape
Blacker than the night sky, your escape,
Of rain, wiping tears, from the wind’s cry.

Putting its sorrow back in the earth,
The sorrow that a farrow cow won’t feel
But embodies, to ever dream of a new calf,
Is nothing, if not, that dreaming lasts.

Your white flowers recede into daylight,
And I mourn that their light must pass
Unless another night comes, another dawn,
But when air gives root, my dreams, are gone.




*Expect some ramblings, reader(s)?, from me in the upcoming weeks. I have not vanished. Baudelaire wrote, in relation to genius the public is like a slow running clock. (This was in an essay on E. Delacroix). I've been thinking how true this is, particularly in contemporaneity. I'd never declare myself a genius, I am not one, however, it seems the aristocratic population is diminishing. We must work to sustain the blood line! C'est Moi? The Jewel of the NIL!*

FRATER AVE ATQUE VALE

...I wanted to take the sky at night
And wrap its stars around my finger,
And pretend I were wed to their light
Always on the cusp of decaying;
But the stars never told me
The night was their muslin, worn
As a shroud, to mourn
Their projection; into the space
My eyes erased, by turning it
Into a place of my own...

These lines above, from the beginning of a poem I wrote recently, called OSIER, perfectly embody me. In his salute to Dali, poetically, Lorca lauded Dali's penchant for seeking "eternity with limits." When Baudelaire wrote of the concept of beauty, he noted in modernity an artist must "distill the eternal from the transitory." It seems, I have come to the realization, that finding my own expectations in the transcendent, the eternal, has led me astray, to where everything is NIL. Mind you, I do believe the entities of beauty, truth, art, and love are valueless, things to which we ascribe substance via imitation. By imitation I'm affirming nothing is the root of everything, of DASEIN, of becoming... but this isn't a nothing to which nothing can be had... it is capable, it is culpable, its invention is ascribed within, via instinct. An instinct that is inspired, not by transcendence, but the material(s) without we so often -perfectly- ignore. The transitory, if you will.
I'm woven into this poem as if it were an Osier, because I enhance, in these first lines, the fact that my mistake is in trying to find transcendence in something already infinite. So the stars wear a shroud. They mourn the space I erase, by turning it into a place of my own. A place of the finite. I'm, in fact, distilling the transitory from the eternal, probably the one mistake we all make, the mistake, which leads us irreparably astray.
I'm beginning to feel the dialogic nature of everything. Those little things I encounter, especially... the earth, the dirt... the sun, the moon... the wind, the sky... we're always in a conversation, much like literature converses historically, so what we encounter, "naturally," is a palimpsest. A past from which we're thrust, to which we change, and adapt into a future that may seem singular, but is really inscribed with that strain of love, according to an excerpt from a Spanish lullaby I read, that clear water carries, long past, and left unsaid.
It's strange to think we must treat the past as we do our blood. Something that is endemic, yes, but also inscribed with layers of experience, history, etc., which we make alien by forsaking, for the future's burden. So we are thrust by it, yes, but we re-invent it, to re-discover a future that has actually already been inscribed, by our need for creation. I used to speak of the re-creative capacities of art, Joyce's Ulysses, beginning with an "s"... Stately Plump Buck Mulligan... and ending with an "s"... Molly Bloom's inimitable "YES!"... was always a signifier, alongside his use of stream of consciousness, that everything was a matter of re-invention, re-creation, "the ineluctable modality of form."
Now I see this is somewhat true, yes, and it perfectly defines the trajectory of the novel. But I believe humans are a combination of the novel and the epic. We are always on the cusp of creation, which is really re-creation when intertext is taken into account, but then recoils on an inheritance we all have. To which we speak; it's when the world- the earth, the dirt, the word- speaks back, when we see the transmutation of infinity in the concepts we define, that any epiphany or artistic process can be had. Hence art requiring both instinct and the critical capacity, to which instinct is always a predecessor.
I've been gone for quite some time, hence my frater ave atque vale (Hail brother and farewell)! I've been in horrid states. My soul has been destroyed. My body equally harmed... and all I can ever come to imagine has amounted to NIL... whether by manipulation of me or something extraneous, I do not know. What I do know is there's so much more beauty to the hidden path, the one that destroys you, until you realize you are not the Phoenix, but the fire that kills and re-births it... it's when you are deconstructed, destroyed, torn apart, that you come to find there IS an instinct, there IS a core...and it is something to be cherished, it is where form finds its fluidity, to perfectly enhance and define (by) its own constructs... its own confines.
Sadly, for me, my core is precarious, something that can be torn out, so I feel half here. A mirage of a ghost. Any poetic endeavor henceforth will be an attempt to recollect it, so it becomes a familiar room, a familiar mirror that I can look upon, and see ME staring back.
I believe I must go to the dirt, to the root, to the wind, to the rain, to the sun and moon, to find, we're all tragic and doomed, but it is our ability to groom this tragedy into a comedy that makes us wise, and gives us grace. Some would say this is our destiny, I only say it's the space we erase to come up with our own version of place. I may have an epic inheritance, but my novel manipulation of it... well,there you have the rub!

Half Revealed Vacancies and Accuracies in reference to Dasein

I wrote this yesterday, in the AM, and the poem, (complementing it), the afternoon before. Do forgive my not being on in quite some time. Truth be told, I've been ill. I was in the ER Friday night, but felt a bit better after intravenous Morphine and anti-nausea medications (IV). Now, I'm feeling quite horrid, again. I believe it all comes down to the Systemic Lupus... even so, I do hope you appreciate my theories set forth. I'm also providing a response I wrote, to this "philosophy," to negate any notion of my being "anti:"

Life requires a belief in origin and end. We go from womb to tomb, and in this physical experience, transcend the physical, make every concept of beauty and love a concept of imitation, from this. But what happens when this imitation becomes a limitation? When a person finds a womb in the tomb, from which all origin, all death, is just the consequence of nothing?
I speak of such a state, because the eternal recurrence of the same is really the recurrence of nil. Or naught. To value life is to see this, because it is only in nothing that we can even define substance. So, when a person recognizes the futility behind everything, the vanity, if you will, they go from body to ghost, and spar with the very idea of life, as something that needs origin and end. They are post-mortem, but still the substance of being, trapped where invention ends, and all becomes the bait of an imaginary hook, looking for imaginary fish in imaginary waters.
These waters are invented to feed an appetite of worth. It is from worth, the gem of contemporaneity, that people feed themselves. So art and beauty and love are self -affirmations. Made by the self, who needs to contraindicate death, and so doing, contraindicates truth.
When Keats wrote of beauty as truth, and truth beauty, he was speaking to the importance of negligence. It seems this second decade of the 21st century communicates worth as the only means to enlightenment. One must have self-worth to understand life, as it should be: vibrant, fertile, a blonde sun. But this trend makes beauty and love and art the stuff of imitation; imitating Ego as if it were a mirror from which a better image was reflected. So Cogito Ergo Sum isn’t really the existence of thought, but the fabrication of thought, from what is considered most coveted and worthy.
Still it is only in neglect that truth is revealed. A thought unfortunately lost on contemporaneity. The importance of negligence is a black tulip in a field of violets. It is neglecting the need for womb and tomb, for worth and affirmation, and even imitation. Art and beauty aren’t meant to imitate anything; they stand out by virtue of vanity. It is only when one is in the throes of nothing, of vanity, that art and beauty can be conceptualized as origins from which we are but imitators.
Baudelaire spoke to the importance of beauty being both transcendent and tactile. Every culture has its own interpretations, and Ideals. But it’s unfortunate to think that every concept of collective beauty, cultural beauty, in the 21st century is an invention of worth. Transcendence is the transcendence of self, and what so many perceive to be beautiful, is really a broken mirror; pieces of what we want to be, what trend tells us we must be, to be important.
There is an importance to trend. It gives conceptualization to chaos. It allows Ideal to flourish, and idealization to thrive in purity, even amid chaos. So the artist can re-create the turmoil, the tandem of mind, and find the scales balanced, can, in fact, create a line by dissecting a circle. Where the madness of closure is balanced by the structure of continuity.
But trend, when its fundament is worth, self-worth, destroys art, because it makes art and beauty begin in creation, and end in decay. From womb to tomb, it aggrandizes the self, it makes the Ego a God, the demiurge that can so easily grasp bliss, and even transcendence. Bliss and transcendence are the origins of Ego conceit, even, and Ego conceit makes truth a mockery and lie.
So, the self-worthiness of the 21st century, is, in fact, destroying art and beauty. We make art and beauty imitations of ourselves, when in fact, the thought that we are their imitators, has been so lost, so fundamentally forgotten, that the valueless nature of beauty is gone. It is all self, all womb and all our attempts to stymie the tomb. It is so important to us, yet we have lost its nature, so we’re feeding on lies; we’re living in the absurdity of thinking worth not only creates, but can be created, so long we reduce art and beauty to images of ourselves.
Art does not decay, but creates us. It is the nil, the nothing we so fear. When a person comes to the realization that there is no womb or tomb, and there is no immortality, that person becomes an artist. Because even though we are born, and we die, and we dream Elysian immortality, the artist will always question just how these thought processes deceive us. The artist will be at odds with the world, as is, because the world, as is, rejects futility.
As the Marquis said, happiness is ideal; it is the work of the imagination. All our creations are imaginations. But they are not our imaginations. They are the imaginations of truth. And truth is neglect; it is the recurrence of nothing in all we pretend has value. I say beauty is valueless because it isn’t something that needs worth. We don’t create it. We don’t even re-create it. Art and beauty are the things we must imitate; they are Cogito Ergo Sum, they want us to think, and be, but only with the temperament of a mood thriving, not in aspiration, but nothing.
When you realize nil is the core to everything, you begin to see how we’ve destroyed beauty. We’re so obsessed with the trajectory of womb to tomb that we fail to see we are the tombs of a much grander womb. We’re dead in our continual affirmation of worth. But only when we deny it is self-worth we seek and procreate.
An artist will go back to the womb; if all we are and seem is but a dream within a dream, as the great Poe said, an artist will be the one to wake up. But even, after waking, be the somnambulist of dreams much grander than conception. Art and beauty are nothing. They are not projections of our worth. They are the primordial, the mouth of a dead volcano, and the dreams of Dasein.
Where most people sleep walk in dreams of worth, the artist sleepwalks in dreams of the valueless. An artist lives in half revealed vacancy and accuracy; respectively, the beauty of nil, and making an approximation of its truth by realizing we are only ever half there. And even though the torment of this, the thought that being true means neglecting that there is wholeness to self and value, torments with a ruthless temper, at least the artist can be a temperament of this. Can, in fact, imitate beauty and art not by being worthy, but by aspiring to a worth that the artist knows was never there. An artist will always temper the mood had, but never the mood wanted. It is for this reason that humility and suffering are the soul of beauty and art; when an artist humbles the suffering of pain and thought, the vanity of self becomes not revelation, but re-discovery.
I fear so much the confines of worth. More so, the common thought that we exist in creation and revelation, when really we exist in destruction and re-discovery. There’s a danger to thinking we are always creators, and always worthy; we forget our lives are an imitation of something much grander, much more beautiful, of less, but more value, than anything we could ever possibly conceive. We aren’t Gods, but mirrors, and shatter ourselves when we think there’s any value to our own reflections.

The moon sleeps, but the sun dreams
In showers of rain, dissects itself,
Looks through a broken microscope
At its invisible carcass,
Amid the wet, the vapor, the flesh
Of sweat that was once ambrosia,
Once fell from its eyes,
But as roots of the cypress,
Its eyes no longer cry, for life.
So I stand as a shadow to this.

A rose can only take so much
From your eyes,
A hue reddened by the pallor
Of its own thorns, pricking your skin.
You may look upon its red,
And see the dusk, the secrets
The rain withholds, breaking it,
On the cusp of its very petals.
Not seeing they, and the dawn,
Once promised us, will fall apart.

The wilting part of a seed’s heart
Crushed by your own shadow,
Evaporates, raining on red rose petals.
Give me your ghost,
I say, a consequence of breath,
The broken death of night,
The broken heart of art.
I am the shadow that will not feed,
Cannot be pricked by dreams
And bleed into their orange blood.

The mouth of a giant volcano,
Wishes it were dead, but I am already there.
You might see your star dissected
From a grander dream, the rose bud,
The rain fainting, upon its petals,
The fire of a branded sea,
Branded by death’s company,
And so enlivened there,
But I was always in ash, the dream awoken
The broken breath, of your not so broken stare.


My response:

I don't want to come across too... anti... but what I'm trying to bring forth is the need for re-discovery. Instead of putting ourselves before the art, instead of putting our trends before the art, we should let the valueless nature of bea...uty and art conceive (of) us. So that all artistic experience is really a re-discovery. I came up with half revealed vacancies and accuracies when I was nineteen; I didn't quite understand it, then, I almost do now... just imagine nil. Nothing. Naught. See that as a core, that you discover, but in discovery realize is only half there. So you make an approximation of its truth, only to realize this truth is only half there. It seems, our approach in the 21st century, at least in pop culture, is to think art and beauty are our creations. Are extenuating worth, more importantly. Self Worth. There's a grand difference between self worth and self love. Whereas self worth confines us to fashion and trend, effortlessly, self love expands us to re-discovery, to find, in the midst of the universe, the vanity of all these concepts... beauty, art, love... when their substance is aborted. Baudelaire was right to speak of the transcendent beauty that every era has, and the material beauty, too. It only seems, to me, we've gone too material. Because we'd rather have worth over love. Everything seems to be about self-esteem, the EGO, and we are manipulated by our avowal (to this); so much we let trend overwhelm, and make ourselves (feel) better, be better, by conforming to trend. I realize every culture has conformed to trend, and trend does have its benefits, as I say, above. It's just, when you go into it thoughtlessly, you become the somnambulist, sleep walking through your very (own) dream of worth. But, when you realize, that concepts like beauty and love and art have no value, inherently, that we are substantiated by them, rather than substantiating them, you come to approach art as a means of re-discovery. The primordial, really. The nothing. Dasein. (Being). I know we all have complexes. I do; I'm ridiculous, absurd, posting pictures (of myself) to affirm my "beauty," because I so often feel hideous, and vile, even when I know a truth discovered long ago (by me): beauty is at best elusive and is its own design. You can only find it when you approach the vanity of everything. And the consequence of nothing. There's this bit in the Phaedrus where the idea that a beautiful specimen, physically, is so striking because it recollects the beauty of a self, in another, spiritual clime. Much as I love Plato, I don't see it that way. I'll admit, I'm a slave, certain (men) turn me on by virtue of their graces, my "muse" is beautiful by standard, for example, he'd be the envy of beauty, in its material ways. But I'm also aware, and keen, to the truth that the very nothing and futility we so fear, the valueless aspect of Dasein, is where real beauty, real love, and real art, resides. There are then two beauties, transcendent and physical, and they have no relation to each other, except to oppose. Transcendent beauty is the beauty of art, physical beauty that of fashion. And even as both are moved by trend, it is really those who can manipulate it (trend) and see beyond their own worth, the shadow of which they are really composed, it is only those who are artists. I've questioned if fashion designers, who specialize in the visual, can be considered artists. And, much as I love fashion, much as I adore Betsey Johnson, I do not think they are artists. Because they contribute more to the culture of worth, than the culture of love. And the culture of love seems to be one we have lost, because we ascribe far too much value to ourselves. Assuming we are the creators, of everything, when really, beauty, art, love, and truth are the creators of us (all). We imitate beauty, it cannot imitate us. Just as we imitate art, it cannot imitate us. It's all a matter of re-discovery, really. Because we are all part of a grander dream, from which the artist will always have already awoken.