Man, member, And the holy fluid... Cocteau & Takahashi

Jean Cocteau from the White book



The God Statue I Love

Your body is made of lily and sex
Piles of strong-smelling, night-illuminating lilies
Upon them your pageboy has spread the ointment of nard
For the lower half of your body you wear a bullfighter's tight
costume
The elegant joints of your big fingers press on the brocaded
arabesques
Beneath the costume, between the two overpowering thighs
Wrapped in highly fragrant clouds
Sleeps a beautiful lion cub, I think
The gentle beast is made of particularly splendid lilies
The suspenders press into your dark chest
The night sky framed by the lions silky hair
Hooked to the chain of stars a medal shines like the moon
One arm, gathering the flow of muscles, like a river
Leisurely hangs towards the center of the earth
The hand grips a whip
The leather lash of the whip snake-coils on the ground
You will suddenly jerk it up and imprint a swift welt on the
air
From the wound brilliant blood will spurt
I will put your standing figure
On the horse's fluffed buttocks, in the shining sky at dawn
On your shoulders
I shall put the wrestler's head as thoughtful as a forest
(I clipped it from the pictures in a sports magazine)


In the name of
Man, member,
And the holy fluid

Amen




poem by Takahashi Mutsuo

The graphics works of Arthur Boyd (4 Jul 1920–24 Apr 1999) part 2

Arthur Boyd was one of Australia’s most widely respected and prolific artists. He was born in 1920 in Melbourne, Victoria and was part of a dynamic generation of artists and thinkers, which included Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, and Joy Hester. Boyd was brought up in a lively family of practicing artists, with whom he studied and developed his painting and printmaking.

My favourite of his pieces are collaborations with one of my favourite poets fellow Australian Peter Porter, whom he collaborated with on 4 books during 70s and 80s.

Jonah 1973, The Lady and the Unicorn 1975, Mars 1988 and 

Narcissus 1984 ( images shown below)

Narcissus, Seckers & Warburg London 1984

"But what Arthur & I was trying to do in Narcissus was sort of turn upside & like the rest of us when you look in the water we are turned upside down. that we wanted to produce, of really really how the Natural world doesn't . . . we don't see ourselves in the Natural world. The Natural world, in fact, enters us and becomes ,well, becomes really a kind of life, it has a pilgrimage through us. "

Peter Porter

A wonderful collection of drawings and prints

at the ART GALLERY NSW

Part 1

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven...poems...

The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Dec. 1915

"Kindly" in a letter to Djuna Barnes undated

"Ejaculation" undated

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven -wiki

Baroness Elsa > more poems

The Sphinx...Oscar Wilde & Alastair...1920

Your lovers are not dead, I know;

They will rise up, and hear your voice,

And clash their cymbals, and rejoice,

And run to kiss your mouth, -- and so

Set wings upon your argosies! 

more on the background of this book and other illustrators  > THE SPHINX 

previous Alastair posts L'Anniversaire de L'Infante

Devour the fire

Abdellatif Laâbi... poetry

Abdellatif Laâbi: from Fragments of a Forgotten Genesis

Translation from French by Gordon Hadfield & Nancy Hadfield

FRAGMENT 1

In the beginning was the cry

and already discord

Which tore

the marriage of fire

Confused

violation

sordid struggles of separation

and staggering blows of solitude

Sky drew back from fire

water drew back from sky

earth drew back from water

idea drew back from clay

and the form surged

cut in two

One half was retained

the other thrown in the abyss

No one thought of good

or evil

Who could have done otherwise?

It was necessary to pile

embers against embers

to awaken this unshakeable

fire in the eyes

The prey softens and submits

offers its hairy neck

to the belly’s

voracious germination

Everything devours everything

each cunningly takes its turn

the gluttonous sounds of swallowing

Vast was the destruction

The tadpole

in its stagnant pool

could not fathom

If only he had an antenna

with a small lens attached to the end

he could have …

But what would that accomplish?

Destruction

sole witness to destruction

With this indictment the water returns

cloaking the unsavory spectacle

Amplifying the disorder

These purposeless waves

For a lapse in eternity

there was nothing but waves

A wineskin

its contents shaken

as if something begrudged its roots

With somber jaws

the waves cut to the quick

stifling these stammers

mixing and remixing

For which fleeting idea did they seek revenge?

The waves mixed primal decline

excess of matter

meagerness of memory

This upheaval spawns Hybrid

arch menace

cauldron of pure insanity

Hybrid frolicked

proliferated

color is invented

by a simple rustle of light

free from its form

the gaze rises from the offal

mouths adorned

by either a retractable vulva

or an edible penis

Organs mirthfully

exchanged

One even hears snatches

of clear music

Being sculpts Being

Limbless life

examines itself

Like a vital flowering

with a sprig of intelligence

and immediate love

There were only dreaming leaps

in the dance of origins

Body of all bodies

Hybrid

the possible denying the impossible

progress from the horizon to the whole

genesis in love with genesis

But a darkening

from flashes of rage

and a flood of meteorites

What endures great trials

will last

Then the waves ebbed

abandoning the earth

that overturned cauldron

with its bloodless population

Why this confusion?

from the wonderful collection at >

POEMS AND POETICS

 

Joseph Jengehino...poems and drawing..

a physiology of conversion (collab with Amely Jones)

Gerald slices his thoughts with a citrus knife. Removes the matter.

His fiction is the salt she sucks from open wounds.

Her machinery is too much for him. At night he tears it down.

He likes to watch her mouth sleep.

likes the way it is crooked but still toxic. but silent.

He's afraid of her.

He's afraid of her unobstructed mind and the traps and equations she uses.

He wants to get under her skin

his static can break her. disrupt her.

break the plane of her bones,

break the circuitry of her mind,

give her parachutes to numbness.

Her head is turned, the profile of a bird on a pillowcase.

he touches her throat, a little

Hides his hands

He wants to hold her

in the softest prison,

place a thumb on her eye,

and feel the kaleidoscope's stained and transparent explosions.

The dreams are fueling her mind

maybe he can make her smile when she is like this...

but he won't touch those toxic lips

even with the latex fingers

he envisions her a future huffing oxygen from an apparatus.

sees her body tied to machines

sees the bricks of her mind dissolving

in a place where he can forever watch her mouth sleep

The Broken Neck of the Swan

Joseph Jengehino blog at MYSPACE

Paen for Pan...Poem & drawing

Dolorosa

PAEAN FOR PAN

Brashest of the clan

my half-brother Pan is

my pet pandemaniac

my quite incorrigible

my fleet unflappable

His is the pipe of my my panegyric

He pantheizes my natural nature

I feed for my health on

his organic folly

I work out on the exercise of

his indiscretion

He is my undressable beast

He is the wildlife in my bedroom

I take him for

my cohort cavorter

my itch-twitchy goat

my knockout smeller

my randy rumpus

my pantophagous marauder

Him I adore and hump for

Him am crazy to jump with

James Broughton 1981

Agostino Carracci... Satyr

The Satyr Mason 1578

I make leaf-circlets
and a crown of honey-flowers
for thy throat;
where the amber petals
drip to ivory,
I cut and slip
each stiffened petal
in the rift
of carven petal:
honey horn
has wed the bright
virgin petal of the white
flower cluster: lip to lip
let them whisper,
let them lilt, quivering:

Most holy Satyr,
like a goat,
hear this our song,
accept our leaves,
love-offering,
return our hymn;
like echo fling
a sweet song,
answering note for note.

Holy Satyr by Hilda Doolittle 1922

may butterflies rise from yr grave every year..for Garcia Lorca...Rob Plath..poem

Louis le Brocquy - Lorca


may butterflies rise from yr grave every year..


by Rob Plath

a soldier pumped
two bullets
into yr buttocks
for being a queer

then another
into the branches
of yr lung
for being
a poet

another word
for dirty communist
to them

you were their worst enemy
w/unplugged asshole
& wide open singing
lung bags

i imagine yr
assassin bragging
about it afterwards
to his comrades

then later that night
giving his wife a good
hetero fascist fuck

his dick standing like
a middle finger
to commie faggot poets

his torso full of
fearful gears
moving w/precision
over her body

his clenched homophobic
cheeks thrusting
like a pair of iron fists
bloodless knuckles

giving it to her once
for himself
& once for the gang

the regime

Leonor Fini... Sphinx & Charles Baudelaire...Beauty..poem and drawings...

Beauty

I am fair, O mortals! like a dream carved in stone,
And my breast where each one in turn has bruised himself
Is made to inspire in the poet a love
As eternal and silent as matter.

On a throne in the sky, a mysterious sphinx,
I join a heart of snow to the whiteness of swans;
I hate movement for it displaces lines,
And never do I weep and never do I laugh.

Poets, before my grandiose poses,
Which I seem to assume from the proudest statues,
Will consume their lives in austere study;

For I have, to enchant those submissive lovers,
Pure mirrors that make all things more beautiful:
My eyes, my large, wide eyes of eternal brightness!



Charles Baudelaire - The Flowers of Evil
Translation by William Aggeler

Federico García Lorca...drawing and poem...

Sonnet of the Sweet Complaint


Never let me lose the marvel

of your statue-like eyes, or the accent

the solitary rose of your breath

places on my cheek at night.


I am afraid of being, on this shore,

a branchless trunk, and what I most regret

is having no flower, pulp, or clay

for the worm of my despair.


If you are my hidden treasure,

if you are my cross, my dampened pain,

if I am a dog, and you alone my master,

never let me lose what I have gained,and adorn the branches of your river

with leaves of my estranged Autumn.

Aleksander Blok... poem..

"Snow Wine"


Again, from the goblet, your presence
sparkling fills my heart with care--
you with your smiling innocence
and your serpentine waves of hair.

Swept off my feet in the dark stream
I again live through
a passionate forgotten dream
of kisses, of snowstorms masking you.

Your laugh your magical laughter
and in the golden goblet sway,
and lightly over your sable hair
the current of the blue wind play.

And how, looking into the liquor,
could I miss my Bacchic wreath?
and fail to remember your kisses
my face upturned to meet mouth your mouth?

29 December 1906

Devour the fire...Harry Crosby 2 Poems... illustration Alastair...

± RED SKELETONS, 1927 ±

TEMPLE DE LA DOULEUR

My soul has suffered breaking on the wheel,
Flogging with lead, and felt the twinging ache
Of barbéd hooks and jagged points of steel,
Peine forte et dure, slow burning at the stake,
Blinding and branding, stripping on the rack,
The canque and kourbash and the torquéd screw,
The boot and branks, red scourging on the back,
The gallows and the gibbet. All for you.

These tortures are as nothing to the pain
That I have suffered when you gaze at me
With cold disdainful eyes. You do not deign
To smile or talk or even set me free-
Yet once you let me hold your perfumed hand
And danced with me a stately saraband.

SALOME

Proud panoply of fans and frankincense,
Gold blare of trumpets, flowered robes of state,
Unnumbered symbols of magnificence,
To lead Salome through the palace gate,
Where loud the prophet of the Lord blasphemes
The red abominations of her race
And chides her for her flesh-entangled dreams
and turns his back upon her painted face.

Thus do we turn from some red-shadowed lust
That through the broken forests of the brain
Weaves silently with tentacles out-thrust,
Groping in darkness, but for one in vain,
For like a sliding sun the soul has fled
Leaving a princess and a vultured head.

¤ SUN-TESTAMENT ¤

AND ALL IN ARMOUR ON HER BED SHE LIES by Paul Holman.... & new drawing

Dolorosa 09

AND ALL IN ARMOUR ON HER BED SHE LIES ...

Her drawings show how she thinks we see her, but it is not the predicament in which she finds herself in the course of each implied adventure, shackled to the steam engine or discharging ectoplasm in some darkened room, by which she is defined, but the quality of distance she brings to these situations,amused and just a little haughty.

This detachment causes her to appear most distinct from her sister - the unicorn might be prettier, but does not gleam so, though both are made up the same -
yet, even in her more recent elegance, the twin we follow may allow
herself to be weirdly exposed, to look not composed but engaging: a
controlled goofiness in a moment that she chose to treat as if
unobserved, as if all eyes were not upon her.

Girl as landscape, girl as costume: how she permeates, sharp faced and quizzical, still unmistakable in the demon mask.

from Tara Morgana
Paul Holman

RIP Alda Merini...

Winged woman, stop your rancor:
the life that you bear of mystery
smells bad above the cushion
and moribund passes away.
Just so every proud tree oozes
love, behind your dark manures
that you spread of seed and of lust,
and pays at least for the seduction
of violated souls. Even so cantata
of the devil, you are an enemy of God
and then sullenly your lust
coagulates over the souls of heroes,
and you are young. You harm
all who see the path
of your peace and no one penalizes
you for the altar of your greatness
which makes offers to gods. As if you
were a goddess dressed in lust,
you call the gold into your arms
as I call the sons of the night.


¤¤¤


I do not need money.
I have need of feelings
of words, words chosen wisely
of flowers called thoughts,
of roses called presences
of dreams inhabiting the trees,
of songs that make statues dance,
of stars that murmur to the ear of lovers.
I need poetry
this spell which burns the weight of words
that arouses emotions and gives new colors.

Love do not damn me to my fate
Hold me open all the seasons
let my great and warm decline
not fall asleep along drives
put in passive all the passions
sleep on the pillow tenderly
where grow provident ambitions
of love and universal passion
take my everything and do not hurt me.

Alda Merini

Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin... book cover & poems...

Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin (1872–1936) was a symbolist poet, prose writer, and playwright. Openly gay, he wrote the first celebrations of
gay themes in Russian literature, and the first Russian coming-out novel, Wings (1907), in which a young man learns to accept his sexuality, which makes him feel as if he has grown wings. Kuzmin too was a poet who mined his own biography,incorporating its associations
and events in his poem-cycles.

Wings.Story in Three Parts(Krylya) cover by Nikolai Petrovich Feofilaktov

~Poems~

Sun, Sun

Sun, sun,
divine Ra-Helios,you delight
the hearts of kings and heroes,
sacred horses neigh to you,
in Heliopolis they sing hymns to you;
when you shine,
lizards crawl out onto rocks
and boys go laughing
to swim in the Nile.
Sun, sun,
I am a pale scribbler,
a library recluse,
but I love you, sun, no less
than a tanned sailor
smelling of fish and salt water,
and no less
than his accustomed heart
rejoices
at your royal rising
from the ocean,
my heart trembles,
when your dusty, but flaming ray
slips
through the narrow window by the ceiling
onto my filled page
and my thin, yellowish hand,
writing out in vermilion
the first letter of a hymn to you,
O Ra-Helios sun!

The Sense Of Your Bidding

The sense of your bidding is unclear:
to pray, to curse, is it, to fight
you bid me, inscrutable genius?
The spring slackens, niggard, meager,
and Benozzo Gozzoli's courier
dozes in the drowsy thickets.

Hills are dark with honeyed cloud.
Look: I do not touch lithe strings.
Your gaze, prophetically flying,
is clenched, gushes no winged streams,
and beckons by no May road, trying
to outstrip Hermes in his flight.

Hobbled horses do not neigh,
Aging warriors sprawl in disarray...
Hold your palms open wide!
Risen spring is bright,
but groves of darkness are not given
to leap for joy having leapt from dreams.

The groom names not the hour,
be not guiled to tarry,
hark through ice the clarion voice,
your flax is drenched with chrism,
and, bidding goodbye to numb laze,
free, in love, you will rise.

Jorge Luis BORGES... drawing... Self Portrait

Poignantly relating to self-portraits, Borges wrote in his The Art of Poetry:

To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water …

Sometimes at evening there's a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.

The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful....

edward estlin cummings
(October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962)

"I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more."

self-portrait ee cummings

i am so glad and very

i am so glad and very
merely my fourth will cure
the laziest self of weary
the hugest sea of shore

so far your nearness reaches
a lucky fifth of you
turns people into eachs
and cowards into grow

our can'ts were born to happen
our mosts have died in more
our twentieth will open
wide a wide open door

we are so both and oneful
night cannot be so sky
sky cannot be so sunful
i am through you so i

i have found what you are like

i have found what you are like
the rain,

(Who feathers frightened fields
with the superior dust-of-sleep. wields

easily the pale club of the wind
and swirled justly souls of flower strike

the air in utterable coolness

deeds of green thrilling light
with thinned

newfragile yellows

lurch and.press

-in the woods
which
stutter
and

sing

And the coolness of your smile is
stirringofbirds between my arms;but
i should rather than anything
have(almost when hugeness will shut
quietly)almost,
your kiss

2 little whos

2 little whos
(he and she)
under are this
wonderful tree

smiling stand
(all realms of where
and when beyond)
now and here

(far from a grown
-up i&you-
ful world of known)
who and who

(2 little ams
and over them this
aflame with dreams
incredible is)

I Invoke, I Invoke! ...

Pan to Artemis

From The Equinox, vol I

Uncharmable charmer
Of Bacchus and Mars
In the sounding, rebounding
Abyss of the stars!
O virgin in armour,
Thine arrows unsling
In the brilliant, resilient
First rays of the spring!

By
the force of the fashion
Of love, when I broke
Through the shroud, through the cloud,
Through the storm, through the smoke,
To the mountain of passion
Volcanic that woke —
By the rage of the mage
I invoke, I invoke!

By
the midnight of madness: —
The lone-lying sea,
The swoon of the moon,
Your swoon into me,
The sentinel sadness
Of cliff-clinging pine,
That night of delight
You were mine, you were mine!

You
were mine, O my saint,
My maiden, my mate,
By the might of the right
Of the night of our fate.
Though I fall, though I faint,
Though I char, though I choke,
By the hour of our power
I invoke, I invoke!

By
the mystical union
Of fairy and faun,
Unspoken, unbroken —
The dust to the dawn! —
A secret communion
Unmeasured, unsung,
The listless, resistless,
Tumultuous tongue! —

O
virgin in armour,
Thine arrows unsling,
In the brilliant resilient
First rays of the spring!
No Godhead could charm her,
But manhood awoke —
O fiery Valkyrie,
I invoke, I invoke!

Aleister Crowley 1909

*Guest Blog...

Maggie O'Sullivan

Maggie O'Sullivan was born in Lincolnshire to Irish parents. Poet, artist, editor, publisher, she has performed and published her work since the late 1970s.

Arshile Gorky, "Study for "Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia"

"Elegy" (after Arshile Gorky)

You measured things by weight.

You loved the feel & shape of apricots

the wave & sway of fields of grain

the strength & pressure of waterfalls

the flow & shimmer of rivers

the luxuriance of orange, amber & terracotta

on naked paper

the drift & wing, flutter & rustle

of birds & leaves.

You loved the surreal

the song

the edible

and, above all,

bread.

Your palette unfurls a flirtation

of glow & shadow,

a tenderness of breasts,

a poignant sweet incense of lemons

figs olives honey &

cherry trees in blossom.

The sanctuary holds all.

The bitter-red roses,

the scarlet-red crest of the cock,

the shivering silver sickness of poplar leaves

and the pallid hands, distorted, flat

as icons. [...]

Malevich

Malevich, "White on White" (1918)

white on white

white square on white ground

white ground on white square

groundlight on white

white on light

white nothing

nothing within nothing

within nothing nakendess

white nothing

naked

nothing revealing

nothing reveals nothing

yielding nothing

nothing yields nothing

* with many thanks to R O'B