The yoked cart became a fiery chariot,
The trekking pony a fierce steed.
In the first flight in that appetite for blood,
Victory to be through death refreshed,
Warrior & steed became one in the battle.
Man & beast fused in life & death,
From the fallen rose the first song of liberty,
Warrior & steed had drunk their glory
Through the blood of their dead, their health.
The spirit of man had been born;
The crone cackled under the moon
For the hunting time had begun
& the inheritance passed down:
Onto the beast, warrior & steed became one.
She’s sat down at the large couch end,
in the room is a grand piano bed,
there’s a menu.
Husband sent her because even on viagra
he cant get it on with her, she says,
thought i needed something
& didn’t like it was with another man,
so he sent me over to you, i’m sixty one.
‘Well now, you look as nice as pie, to me.’
I bet i do, she says.
‘an there´s all sorts of things we can do’
is that right, she says,
aint never been with another woman afore.
Two hours later, traipsed in her fineries,
her eyes curious like a caged bird…
The music plays on
as softly
as the drizzle on
the window pane,
melodic & chained,
insistent, after
awakening
from a bitten dream
to a mist
of rain stain
from the riot
that had been.
A world best forgotten,
when nightmare intervenes,
the weird figure
in the doorway,
grim & blue.
I didn’t ask him in,
let him rot,
the waves are best,
all of us,
in the rigging,
blowing,
like the caravan of Noah’s lot.
In a sky deep as marble,
yelling at it,
it didn’t crack, didn’t answer back
our cries, shouts & screams
filling
the last drop of space,
friction of the pendulum
rounded in a little weep,
all creatures great & small.
& so the music came on,
stopped & started
& the wind it seemed
with the rain
entered the room
together with the shadows
of the street,
as if seeking embrace.
But home is not a wind
& the netted rigging
that bears us all
empties it’s catch
on the shore.
Wordplay you say
was it play then
was it the trees then
the trees and the wind
and the child playing among the roots in the
dirt
in the dirt
in the,
no,
in the wind.
Do all the yesterdays go back as far as all the tomorrows
go
forward
forward
forever
and backward
backward
backward
or does it all go both ways
like crazy mad
like the wind metaphor rattling the branches of the tree
metaphor
until the arthritis
stops my hands
from typing on this keyboard
and it all
stops one day
and ends up in that picture
where George lassos the moon
Map 1.
(i.)
Extend the environment on a mental horizon, a fluctuation of memory embedded in the scene & a configuration of chance abreast with the makeshift reality:
the rational mind hangs like a millsone around the neck as it grinds out the day.
(ii.)
On the periphery the noise of engines establish the controle of borders & their crossings:
in the clouds a bomb explodes on the ocean floor & a Tsunami heaps a debris rubbish tip cascading shards of junk glinting in the sunlight.
Map 2.
(i.)
The road’s continuum in the eye towards an end exists between being towards death & a universe expanding in all directions.
(ii.)
Time is the link of the auditory & visual cortices, a retina which maps a fission, the unseen form of sound & the unheard sound of seeing.
& that eye which evolves but to see the day sometimes glimpses the phosphorescent fossil spark;
& the dykes on the hill buried in their dark, where in solar picture of the sky, selves arise only to die.
Map 3.
(I.)
Small placards, squares of white & black triangles hypotenuse earth & sky
for the hunter’s right of way;
where streams flowed black cable pipe lines run to water turbines that feed the village in the valley:
shots mingle with the revving carburettor of the skidding tracker in the hue.
(ii.)
Animal tracks cover the tracks of our dead, new forest dirt roads carve ways transforming the hillside from a landscape, where the eye cannot escape its shape;
& only touches the fleeting remains, as dust of bones beneath the stones,
where there is no vintage wine under the golden bough that drunken will awaken the myth of bygone yore.
(iii.)
The eye extends its reflected space to glint through the bars of its existence, in repetition of ages past & ages to come, the limits of eternity;
& the voice is a shadow cast from its silence, a resonance that returns to haunt the seeing as a spectre, a phantom caught in the cage of existence.
Map 4.
(i)
Across the plains ancient rocks weave a sculptured dialogue of secrets,
amidst the innumerable tracks of creatures domestic & wild;
& the debris & junk visited by our transit civilization blown there on the wind.
ROH2013
i.
Morning brings the gull’s squall, surreal beyond the curtained windows, starting faint dawn’s debate flighting harsh and sweet.
ii.
The trees are ivy clad in a laurel bay, like a galleon’s mast & rigging sunk to the bottom of the sea.
iii.
Somewhere in the secret paths of a sun lit wood a plastic bag spews forth its innards of rags like a desecrated corpse staining the elfin fern with a black sin.
iv.
How the midges dance and in a blink gone again!
v.
Returning to roots, a garden of forked paths, a strangler in Eden, cobwebbed her face spun the spell of lechery.
vi.
Day and night tremble on the morning and evening star.
vii.
Cast me your mantle dried on a sunbeam, some hours ago it ceased to be the longest day, summer’s musk makes my heart heavy, my head giddy.
viii.
The hill moves on, a slumbering breast of cloud blooded in night’s music on no breath of breeze.
ix.
Crepe clouds smear folds of scarlet flesh, plume a three cornered hat, pistols bloom black roses. Lady highwayman riding a sky of blood disappears, as creation eschews & the moon pursues.
ROH 2000
It is in a bright lt night that shines
he lays his bed
deep in hues of Lapis Lazuli.
In the corners sit the winds
dressed like musical chairs.
An olive ferments in a pastel saucer
into mossy green minutiae,
where a painted flower swallows
against its form, liquid spaces
in lean reflections towards a bottomless well.
Veils swim on the verge the flower
defines drawn against
an olive splash of skin
in the glazed lacquer
gloss to the anonymous images.
A cock crows cockle doodle do,
discrete, concrete, on the fronds,
ruffles in the red sprocketed throat,
a screech of feathers
stilled in the flowers passion
in the pool’s hoard.
The gibbous mound,
a crimson flash in the curtain
through which he passes
beneath the bridges.
A stairway in pastel hue
laps tranquilly cool
to a hole in a wall,
a cavernous breach which retains
the scream of the arch
scrawled on a screen,
defiant in the stance of plumages,
hordes of epiphanies
buried in petrified pastel ripples.
Below the rift of its eye
the sealed beak that will open
gleams on the lee.
Throughout the entire circumference
can be seen the tilt giving rise
to both translucence and transparency,
where the acid and oil separate
only to appear to coalesce
in the almost pure liquid sheen
containing its own light
even in the presence of the vegetative
silt at the bottom of the bowl.
At the moment of its brimming,
at that line of definition,
in a room that roams without corners,
he must rise with a chalice of blood for lips of shades,
where the vertigo edge of the flower distills the dish
together with the quantities of immeasurable throng,
catacomb coombes head to foot on stilts
on watery groves billowing with ivy bowers
sprung over hidden lairs of concealed hoards.
Night begins and the dogs draw nigh
scavenging for scraps
yapping at the walker’s naked ankles
in the dust of unknown allies.
The broken lights of the bazaar
spangle with glittering promises
and the eyes of the dusky beggar
sunk in their sockets maze
in crooked cul de sacs embargo
amidst the furls of silk that foil
the flickering lantern niche
throttled in an olive tray,
whilst the flower’s blur does not allow
the stroke that blurs its horizon
and all beneath to return.
It is helpless in its light,
a camouflage to visitation,
to the sigh of the rock’s flow
so few, so few, so few.
The olive saturates its wish
outlining monuments amidst the rubble
in momentary musical explosions
and the spell is cast.
Fireworks like a diaphanous lithograph
print an emblazoned sky
on the craggy mountains of the night,
where comets play at kites,
and glistening the eerie beak hisses.
i.
Shadows in the eye divide
where walls & doors & floors collide.
*
The hand´s grip, the flayed hide,
I do not know the driver´s cry
nor the donkey´s bray.
*
Our shouts mingle, the switch
& the hide are my burden.
*
Half the hand, half the hide,
who´s the beast that bridles the bride!
*
Day yokes a shadow,
a humped form flickers a fan fin,
a corona for the load.
*
Quieter still, tethered shadows on the hill,
than the bray of the marketer.
ii.
The one who hides in a place of shadows is trapped.
The one who seeks there the hidden is lost.
*
The jester courts a screen to an audience unseen,
as though upon a stage shadows turned on every page.
*
No shadow is lost to the phantom in the glass.
*
Companion to your host, nameless shadow in your doom,
could I so command you, not to pass, when I pass,
would the world then fall apart, where I struggle & you slide
to glide between a sky shed thin as a skin.
*
Shadows fall to steal the hours,
fall to steal the face of flowers.
Sing shadow´s a slave,
drunk to the moon,
as silent they vanish, as silent they loom,
who speak more silent than the tomb.
*
In the gloaming the solitary reaper reaps its shadow:
on pathways in the heat of night’s starlight
shadows grow to seem as if watery pools
floating glittering rims seized into blackness.
Africa North 3.
i.
Water runs on marble, nakedness revealed, nakedness concealed form water words, water memories, mists & fates:
veins wrestle the marble into mangled knots, blemished pearls on an implacable skin, shards leaving fragmentary traces of empty spaces awaiting faces.
(ii.)
Lights dance in the night, picturesque “casas blancas del pueblo” appear through the darkness, as the brush strokes of my mind steal the action of the shadow:
life is the illusion of a dream, the watchful shadow reproaches.
(iii.)
Mists cordon the mountain tops that will guerdon the deluge with crowns like wreathes, ancient fields in silent colours surrounded by the burgeoning new lead to the hidden valley below:
old women of the valley, old as aglow, so slow they go, yet still poised aloof in a world untouchable, yet trapped.
(iv.)
Daughters of necessity naked in the rock unleashed in white trefoil in the marsh swamp of night rain, stark where epochs sleep in their shadows:
replication of memories where the old becomes the new & a world splits in two with Morpheus in the breach.
(v.)
Treachery can remain on even the most benign plains, high in kiln firelight they cowl night’s shade & oversee goats on the hill & below:
now we are found phantoms at her Carnivalesque, let us toast our host, O phantom Sphinx, we are found honoured guests at her feast in Paradise.
(vi.)
Beyond control beyond reach the erratic butterfly flits bloom to bloom, the intrepid stalker with net both captured in the mimic mould:
a knot is tied, a knot that both wrestles with & embraces its duality, that ravels birth & unravels death & binds its existence.
The deluge will come,
warm waters will lap at your home,
the plague will increase
& we creatures will perish.
The meiotic dance
in our speciation
could have been a trance
not a deception,
biophylia in the masque of eros
in life after estrus.
Evolution doesn’t say
& perhaps on another day
it’s androgynous anyway.
& we’ll sequence the genome
again, in trans-genderey,
at the end of the century,
a new human womb
in the womb of time,
or will we start it all over again,
from homo sapien to homo rapien!
Talking heads loom, expert
in this, authority on that,
profession, specialisation, prophet
in this, last word on that, then fit
into the screen, focus the information,
take it down, you are now one of them.
The crowd is full of strays,
being sent home,
embedded in the grain.
& all stories are the same
swallowing themselves like Uroborus,
who in its own dream disappears,
only to appear again.
World at Large. Chapter. 1.
Part (2.)
i.
The serpent was once invincible, it could cross ice & desert & marsh until it reached a spiral terrain, which only feet could climb.
ii.
O serpent then, spread out your fins, grow feet again & become the winged dragon you were before.
iii.
Who swoops upon the human’s high domain & helter skelters kaleidoscopic into human dream scene.
(2.)
(i.)
Metamorphosis: according to the book of human discourse, what’s done can be undone.
ii.
But irreversible & irretrievable loss & gain is the name of the human game, chaos.
iii.
Who first discovered fame & then invented name & followed manically insane through symmetry, number & letter until finally written in the image where you remain in the chains of your freedom.
iv.
In the metamorphosis of an archetype that in its twilight duality grows its shadows.
v.
Layers of time & erosion in the blink of the mind’s eye.
Robin Ouzman Hislop
ROH2012
Excerpt: World at Large. Chapter.6.
Part (3.)
i.
What you are in denial of, what you are in affirmation of, you determine only through desire.
ii.
A track unwinds on the mountain rock.
iii.
Where every fell, can seem as if an every-when waiting to invite you in.
iv.
The lure is but an entrapment,
v.
Where the debris still tumbles from other footsteps that have expired before.
vi.
The mountain rock appears like an uncanny sculpture set in an inert equilibrium poised to slide.
vii.
As if it could escape the dense foliage that would relentlessly consume it.
viii.
Whilst you creature of central nervous system & brain believe you transmit the emitted events.
ix.
Not knowing where or how but nevertheless a fluctuation guided somehow by time’s arrow -
x.
To seem as if in flight.
Robin Ouzman Hislop
ROH2012
Dan Tompsett
Old bald crabber; your pots plugged
with thistle and grass, stacked ten
high behind seaward listing shed,
will miss back-deck, hold and season
while you rig houses for birds, splice wire
for TVs and toasters. Your dry-rot
thinned spirit crumbles slow, a sorry
beach and reef away from fifty-fathomed
dungeness grounds, wind-curled, chopped;
jostling jellyfish and slob cursing blockmen.
Claw-cracked clams, dead or dying
in cull-crate lashed to rail, hold more
meat than your creaking dreams
and dry-docked days.
c Dan Tompsett
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