Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts

Sunday, February 1, 2015

Born today...Hugo von Hofmannsthal February 1, 1874, Landstraße, Vienna, Austria




Creatures of Flame

We are all creatures of flame. The butterfly: the intensity of a short life and fragility
become color. My death is like shadow, my life aquiver, a pulse in the light; I am so 
close to death it makes me proud, cruel and demonic.
Unmoved, I flutter from Helen's lips to Adonis' wound. 
I love my death, the flame, more than anything.




Creature of the Flood
Poem of the Mussels

We are alone in the dark. You up there have lips, rolled-up leaves, hands entwined with rosy blood and bluish veins, we are alone and cannot touch. We live our life fully, our fate is to resist the waves, that is what we become, and triumph and pain color us as the reflection of fall and of the sun colors the waves there near the surface.


Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Paul Holman... Tara Morgana, excerpt, 2014










from Tara Morgana by Paul Holman published by Scarlet Imprint and illustrated by the photography of Paul Lambert


Thursday, October 2, 2014

Born Today ... Rosaleen Miriam "Roie" Norton, October 2, 1917, Dunedin, New Zealand






image: The Hag , watercolour



...My home is the house of winds,
With great songs of Space ringing wild in my ears
Whose shouting heart leaps to their tune.
I mock at the shapes, plodding thickly, through lamplight:
stupid and cruel - or kind -
They are alien, Other, I'm touched with uneasiness...
Fear of these human.... and glide away sidelong:
Yet joying in fear, in my stealthy aloofness,
To know they are They and I'm I.
Towers of old cities are spiralling over me, Night-conjured,
rising from Time
And I hear, through the seething of luminous silence -
Secretive, vibrant, the sound of the Solitude -
Calling of others like me
Quietly they come, flitting softly as secrets; light-footed,
velvety, swift...
With eyes gleaming green, lambent flame of the Opal.
Kindred... we signal our quick recognition.
I am I ... but I know we are we
Panther of silence; god of Night; Lord of the wild inhuman
stars:
You are my own; teeming soul of solitude.
Here is no loneliness, secret Master -
You, Dark Spirit are with me. RN


Saturday, November 9, 2013

Louis Marcoussis...illustrations for Guillaume Apollinaire's Alcohol... 1913




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The Betrothal, etching, plate 29 from Alcools1934


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“And the solitary cord of sea lutes.”
Singer, plate eight from Alcools1934



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Moonlight, plate 30 from Alcools1934



Mellifluent moon on the lips of the maddened
The orchards and towns are greedy tonight
The stars appear like the image of bees
Of this luminous honey that offends the vines
For now all sweet in their fall from the sky
Each ray of moonlight’s a ray of honey
Now hid I conceive the sweetest adventure
I fear stings of fire from this Polar bee
that sets these deceptive rays in my hands
And takes its moon-honey to the rose of the winds



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Lul of Faltenin, plate eighteen from Alcools1934



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Rosemonde, plate 21 from Alcools1934


I named her Rosemonde
Lest I forget
Mouth flowered in Holland
Then slowly I took my way
Seeking the rose of the world


Monday, February 18, 2013

Susanne Iles & Audre Lorde... Aido Hwedo



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Aido Hwedo, West African Creation Dragon by Susanne Iles



Holy ghost woman
Stolen out of your name
Rainbow Serpent
whose faces have been forgotten
Mother loosen my tongue or adorn me
with a lighter burden
Aido Hwedo is coming.


from ''Call'' by Audre Lorde ~ February 18, 1934 – November 17, 1992





Monday, March 5, 2012

Justin Lee Brown ... drawings & poem



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"Maximum Velocity Realization"

A History of Abuse

Devotion punishes
the submissive tenderness of love
rattles the bars of the riot cell
the event horizon explodes
ecstasy seizes my ersatz heart
accelerates paroxysms of cobalt quivers

I strain
against taught strung bow
of limited compassion
I sink into delicious madness
plunge terrified
into the reverie of myogenic dream
my serial killer love springs its genetic latch
everything is offered
nothing will be forgiven
everything must die

my crisis of dimension survives
the vicissitudes of my shape shifting
into fire I throw you, true believer
twisting flesh, contortions of long shadows
whispering, the ancestry of restrained milieu 
familial bonds break tender bones
cruel thoughts race mercilessly
they cut across the frozen tundra
tearing away layer after layer of lies
exposing the new pink flesh of the righteous kill

I am parched by absences and acquisitions
my teeth are in my stomach instead of in my mouth
hope, consigned to oblivion
albeit practiced after every loss or forbidding
unlike like muscle memory
which never lies and never forgets


I forget things when I am skinned raw and bare naked
In moments of an utter disconnection from love  
still, my fear of you holds me close like exile
like a sickness in waiting
longing for fire while being burned by it
consumed by even the most objective elements of self
the crush of the malevolent familiar
spits me from the bloodbath of your mouth

curious confusions rebound, recoil
my darkness wrapped around me like my father’s lust
I recognized the tone of your intentions
filling my rusted water can with blood
what better way to control me
than to drown me with your hybrid vigor
survival, an odd balance of nature and nurture
that which doesn’t kill me makes me crawl.


Justin Lee Brown aka/Desiderata © Copyright all rights reserved 2011


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Detail from "The Arrogance of Observation"



Saturday, March 3, 2012

Dolorosa... new drawing... La Inquieta 2012



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a H.I.M. is still ah HER.
a hymn Her.
a song unto HER
a chant unto HER
a lotus flowHER at HER
sacRED lotus feet
is ALL Eye e'er was
and WILL
BE unto She who be
HER
and I AUM HER HYMN.




Monday, January 23, 2012

Dolorosa ... a drawing for Harry Crosby 2012




...if it were not for you...


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The Sun in unconcealed rage
Glares down across the magic of the world

The sun within us, that sways un incalculably.


At night

Swift to the Sun
Deep imaged in my soul
But during the long day black lands
To cross
And it is faith in the incalculable sun, inner and outer, which keeps us alive.
Sunmaid
Left by the tide
I bring you a conch-shell
That listening to the Sun you may
Revive
          And there is always the battle of the sun, against the corrosive acid vapour of vanity and poisonous conceit, which is the breath of the world.
Dark clouds
Are not so dark
As our embittered thoughts
Which carve strange silences within
The Sun

 HARRY CROSBY ~ CHARIOT OF THE SUN



Sunday, October 16, 2011

Robert Taylor... Pen & Ink drawings and Poem...





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Rose ~ pen and ink


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Sri Yantra for the Kali Yuga ~ Pen and Ink
 
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Flower of  Freya ~ Pen and Ink


The Pointillist

In the gathering indigo of evening
at the twilight of the day,
as ghosts of blue smoke be rising
from chimeys red and grey,

an ink-besmeared drawing board,
testament to lonely nights
of labor-intense endeavors
where his patient work is wrought.

The small key rolls the tumblers
of an oiled, aged lock
that opens the door to stillness.
He feels for the light switch
to vanquish the dark.

Alchemist of the stipple-pen
in his black kitchen of art,
pursuing the endless journey
from ink to pen to dot.

His hair now streaked with silver,
Myopia dims his sight.
His years in dots are measured,
subtracting from his life...


more wonders here at the Red Salon



Monday, February 21, 2011

Rosaleen Norton... poem excerpt






Light's Black Majesty : Midnight Sun: Lord of the wild and
living stars:
Soul of Magic and master of Death;
Panther of Night... enfold me.
Take me, dark Shining One; mingle my being with you,
Prowl in my spirit with deep purrring joy
Live in me, giver of terror and ecstasy
Touch me with tongues of black fire.
Fed with the fire at the Black Opal's centre,
I drink living silver in moon-quickened streets,
And star-voices ringing:
All Strangeness is with me
Towering, invisible, changing the Earth
Hatred and heavens are blending within me: They beat in the
pulse of the stars,
For a god in my heart cries with primitive splendour

....

And I hear, through the seething of luminous silence-
Secretive, vibrant, the sound of the Solitude-
Calling of others like me.
Quietly they come, flitting softly a secrets; light-footed,
velvety, swift...
With eyes gleaming green, lambent flame of the Opal.
Kindred... we signal our quick recognition.
I am I ... but I know we are we
Panther of silence; god of Night; Lord of the wild inhuman
stars:
You are my own; teeming soul of solitude.
Here is no lonelines, secret Master-
You, Dark Spirit are with me.

RN

accompanying piece for "Black Magick" below





previous Rosaleen Norton post




Monday, February 14, 2011

Edward Estlin Cummings...poem & drawings...



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i like my body when it is with your

 
i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh ... And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new


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previous posts EE CUMMINGS



Sunday, December 26, 2010

Victor Brown.... bookplate for Lily Yeats





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from Poems by WB Yeats, Cuala Press 1935


"There's nothing but our own red blood
Can make a right Rose Tree..."
wb yeats



Saturday, December 11, 2010

Suniti Namjoshi ....Building Babel..The Black Piglet





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from Building Babel by Suniti Namjoshi

Every retelling of a myth is a reworking of it. Every hearing or reading of a myth is a recreation of it. It is only when we engage with a myth that it resonates, becomes charged and recharged with meaning...



Suniti Namjoshi ...poem excerpts







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Theres sunshine in the garden
there are flowers in the hall
at your gate a lovesick beast
is breaking down the wall...
from poem ~ Courtship


Why did you make a hole in the sky,
Breaking the backdrop of placid blue days?
The black crow are flapping wildly in my head
While the blue air has closed about your absence.

from poem ~ In Three Tenses



Suniti Namjoshi




Monday, December 6, 2010

Secret Games.. the Prose and Art of J Karl Bogartte... part 1




The WONDERful prose of J K Bogartte...excerpts...

Secret Games is Book II in the ongoing series of prose poems exploring the sense of the marvelous mating of science and erotic metamorphosis as a form of landscape in which the real becomes imaginary, and forces itself into visible nature.....


In that place where life and death pass by unnoticed, the Messengers without their shadows light up the fabric of unauthorized expectations, like vague recollections of thoughts that were never yours, or another form of magic, or perfidious logic, when it multiplies your body out of the space that occupies your body, out of the circle of your ageless metamorphosis within a further space more paradoxical than the others, when you follow the births and funerals of a consciousness that resembles the sea, like a fire-propagating game of chance...

~~~

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The Paradoxical Game of Night
~~~

The pure fruit of an emergency landing, is a last ditch effort, a glowing hunger strung up by its ankles from the rafters, and impersonating the sputtering compass when it loses all sense of direction, kneels and licks your precious feet... then dashes off, exhilarated and beside itself. There is humor in the word: “precious.” The fruit is a night-light for the children who walk in their sleep––and therefore, the night is a narcissistic diversion... an act of irony that makes for intimate conversation between total strangers, when hidden meanings are always appreciated... when no one is present.



Reality is the amorous disruption of the wedding night, its fables and narratives in the black glass of the zookeepers’ promiscuous twin, the leopard’s robe of ingenious escapes, and the promenade of wonders...



Love is subversion of the senses, the negative light of magnetic sensations that cover you with the black dust of wings in the continuous vessel that reproduces your presence, and overflows. A singular plurality out of which are coaxed the drops of poison, of light, or words, a language of dew in the early morning, the dangerous clairvoyance of the body that swims in the bright water of its own two-way mirror. The psychosomatic eggs of an open window. Black honey, a pure black stone with a faithless heart of fire. Illusive and impeccable intervention.



 When the laws of nature intercede on her behalf, footprints are sent scurrying in every direction, and when the coordinates mimic the exact measurements needed to trigger the alchemical vessels that seduce the weather, that whir and hum like simian lanterns held up to warn of impending dangers and invisible locks, she enters the forest from behind, where the spirits speak only Spanish and the nights are without equal. It is necessary to harness these wonders. The minerals of distraction, molecules of light.



Her flesh of poppies reflects the sun while her shadow impersonates the moon. The history of perversions is the gold of science. She is an endlessly bathing light.



Amethyst of exchanging blood that ravages equality in the mother tongue, when the moon is a cat’s cradle in the sea of consciousness, of civil war in the telepathy of rebellious spirits, lovers in the fields of lunacy...



She was conscious of the purity of revenge, and he, the color of Central Asia at noon, always knew the mirror of her arousal. Together they avoided detection. Together, they were distant treasures.....


Art WORKS - photomorphoses




Saturday, November 20, 2010

Johannes Sadeler ...Bacchus, Amor & Music...1500's




Sadeler, Johannes bacchus amor music
click for larger image

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from Six Little Poems in Prose
by Charles Baudelaire

translated by Aleister Crowley



Saturday, October 30, 2010

Justin Lee Brown (Desiderata)... Of Dreams and Madness ...poem&drawing..




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Of Dreams and Madness


I am one stutter-step away from the rails, too late for a hail mary pass. I've become an intentionless phen-omega-non, tearing it up in a senseless dynamic, tearing it down in the mine fields of mutilated flesh where the bloody stumps of a futile resistance twitch out before the final paralysis. Flex paradoxical, just for the thrill of it. Pussy, pussy, run. Don't you see? In life birds fly where cats can't follow, towards a seemingly unfathomable destiny; climb towards ferocious heights where tender hope and unmolested sky momentarily erupt into the plausible. But not for me, the untouchable one.

In these final days of absurdity I AM the gravitational pull. I am the freedom that must extend, spiraling downward towards the rhizome, the mechanism of molecular, towards the intention itself in spite of all its pointlessness. I seek out the lowest level of libidinal energy rendered down to its quintessence, deconstructed and abstracted to the point of consummate alienation just to see it rise above terrestrial. I am the only conviction of my own contradictions, in the end the solitary breath that I draw from the collective will be drawn in the isolation of a solipsist consciousness. The journey of ages begins and ends with a solitary gasp.

It took me decades to find my voice, recognize it, flesh out my screams against impartial instruments and enigmatic signifiers, my ferocious investment only partially returned before I flipped the switch of void. Still alive and swollen with the genealogy of rage, I come to merge the violence of the self with the rogue cells of sadistic attraction. I AM blood. The native ancestry of a florid massacre. Against whom do we release our suicide? Who's skulls do we crush with rubric truncheons of dereliction? Step to the center and slide right. Five squares and three circles intersect at madness. The schism of imaginary presence augments a glistening archetypal voidness where the clatter of runes speak but leave no trace. I dissolve into this lush unified field of consciousness, an incandescent surreality of disaster, then cathexis, until I am a ruin of my own imagination. The aesthetic revenge of a simple madness comforts me as I descend.

Bathed in quiet rings of latern light, the figurative darkness of cognition divides me until I am scattered, only lonliness remains intact. Pushed along by cool atomic winds while pursued by consumptive assassins with cold enamel eyes, I sing ludicrous ballads while choking on shards of ivory bone. Three obsidian figures from childhood aberrations appear beyond the rumor of distant cries. Their starling smiles encode death and empty me of fractal infinites. Have you come here to dream code with me? How long will you stay before the Machinic explodes? Suddenly I am elsewhere in this discursive amalgam, sequencing dread through involuted time. Its symbolic order expressed through ripples of multilevel perception searing its way through waxy axon terminals, mindflesh, and the endless paroxysmal twitching of my eyeballs. I begin at last to see.

I AM become the manipulations of the paranoiac as I plunge through strata of cosmic drift. I float naked in its ether above Byzantine gardens, through a sudden burst of metallic rose petals quivering like dragonfly wings, float further down across pools of cobalt blue tipped with jade quantum foam. An ensemble of grey stone herrings suddenly take flight, flood my synapse with a cultivated integration of pain. The sound of wingbeats rushing around me, a soft static noise of cruel.

Voltaic penetration as an act of malice invades my dreaming with disquieting dialog of subatomic consciousness trapping me between layers of earth and stratosphere. The smell of seared flesh wraps around me to the point of suffocation. I struggle through emptiness, cryogenic tears pound like hail against my skull. Illumination and exposure bind me. Am I still dreaming? Who has come to judge my emptiness? I say, bring me the sweet enigmatic growl that I can adhere to. I much prefer the sun when obscured by cloud and your mouth when sewn tightly shut.

Justin Lee Brown /aka Desiderata

more poetry featured  in The Plebian Rag  & Clockwise Cat
previous post here

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

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





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The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Dec. 1915


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"Kindly" in a letter to Djuna Barnes undated



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"Ejaculation" undated

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven -wiki

Baroness Elsa > more poems




Saturday, August 28, 2010

Maurice Scève (1501-c.1560)...Delie ...Emblems of Desire 1544



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Delie object de plus hault vertu was first published in 1544 in Lyon by Sulpice Sabon for the bookseller, Antoine Constantin. The subsequent 1564 edition, published in Lyon by Nicolas Du Chemin, follows the first edition closely, but moves the initial huitain (“A SA DELIE”) to the very end of the volume and includes an index of figures and first lines. The woodcut figures present significant changes from one edition to the other. The Délie has a mathematical layout; many suggestions have been made about its significance and about the relationship between text and image inasmuch as this work has a visual and spatial component. The Délie is composed of one decasyllabic huitain (an epigram of eight lines of verse), 449 decasyllabic dizains (epigrams of ten lines of verse), fifty woodcut emblems (each with a motto and a figure, surrounded by an ornamental border) which appear at regular intervals.



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Paris : Nicolas du Chemin, 1564.

Scève’s Délie is a syncretic work, which bears the mark of the poet’s erudition and high concept of poetry. The work conveys the thoughts and feelings of a lover suffering from unrequited love and striving for perfection. Throughout the Délie, love is an obsessive and complex experience in which the sacred and the profane are intertwined. The question of Délie’s identity has tantalized critics; some have assimilated her to the Lyonnese poet Pernette Du Guillet, whose posthumous Rymes sometimes echo Scève’s Délie. La Croix du Maine, in contrast, saw the name “Délie” as the anagram of “L’Idée” (Idea), and stressed the Neo-platonic aspects of the lover’s quest. Yet, Délie eludes any attempt to define her; her composite persona combines references to Petrarch’s Rime Sparse and Petrarchan poetry, the Bible and Christian literature, classical texts and iconography, mythology, French and Neo-Latin sources. The concise quality of the dizains, and their convoluted syntax contribute to the complexity of this fascinating work.


from the Gordon Collection at the University of Virginia


* * *

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43

The less i see her, the more i hate her:
The more i hate her, the less anger i feel.
The more i adore her, the less it means:
The more i flee her, the more i wish her near.
Love with hate & pleasure with pain,
The two arrows fall on me in a single rain.
And the love i great which thereby gains
As hate sinks in & cries out for revenge:
Thus my vain desire makes me detest
The one my heart so infallibly requests.


* * *


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163

For this kindness let me at least commend you,
Of which i note both occasion & site
Where, all atremble, you heard me undo
This mortal knot into which my heart was tied.
I saw you, like me, now grown tired
Of my travail, more out of compassion
Than any sense of this great passion
I still feel, though less so than at the start.
For as you extinguished my affliction,
You secured this burnt offering of my heart.

* * *




Wednesday, July 21, 2010

A Season in Hell...Arthur Rimbaud & Robert Mapplethorpe




 ....
A Rimbaud
A SEASON IN HELL [Une Saison en Enfer] (1873)
SECOND DELIRIUM: THE ALCHEMY OF THE WORD

I only find within my bones
A taste for eating earth and stones.
When I feed, I feed on air,
Rocks and coals and iron ore.

My hunger, turn. Hunger, feed:
A field of bran.
Gather as you can the bright
Poison weed.

Eat the rocks a beggar breaks,
The stones of ancient churches' walls,
Pebbles, children of the flood,
Loaves left lying in the mud.

* * *

Beneath the bush a wolf will howl,
Spitting bright feathers
From his feast of fowl:
Like him, I devour myself.

Waiting to be gathered
Fruits and grasses spend their hours;
The spider spinning in the hedge
Eats only flowers.

Let me sleep! Let me boil
On the altars of Solomon;
Let me soak the rusty soil
And flow into Kendron.



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It is recovered.
What? - Eternity.
In the whirling light
Of the sun in the sea.

O my eternal soul,
Hold fast to desire
In spite of the night
And the day on fire.

You must set yourself free
From the striving of Man
And the applause of the World
You must fly as you can...

- No hope forever
No orietur.
Science and patience,
The torment is sure.

The fire within you,
Soft silken embers,
Is our whole duty
But no one remembers.

It is recovered.
What? Eternity.
In the whirling light
Of the sun in the sea.

from LIMITED EDITIONS CLUB- A. RIMBAUD & R. Maplethorpe A Season in Hell. 1986