For My Sins

For my sins since I have come to this town I have been a fool and continue to be so, eschewing all masks and roles but for that, offering genuinely, and without scruples, the most intense compulsions toward wholeness, even truth. Rage, envy, regret have been my burden.
From soulless nightclubs, allnight bakeries, reflected electric light I have been able to draw a kind of sustenance, noting that the poet must be indestructible, even if he has to creep like an insect across a dirty floor, the city, any city, is his Revelation, his Koran and Torah,  his Old and New Testaments seen in inscrutable flashes, on the fresh-lipped faces of friends, behind their human eyes and on their mortal noses, behind windows, too, where liquid light wanly flickers and goes out.

Little shards of redemption, always ungraspable. Always fleeting, transitory, illusory. Always ephemeral, the gifts of music and wine, vacant-eyed girls under sodium light, dropping forth from their mouths scripted sounds of assent or delight, weariness or boredom.

From An Old Letter

There is nothing much more to be expressed. I have the most awful feelings almost all the time now. These are what I must struggle to express, but it's hard work. Only because she has something in her, some intangible thing, that is deeply attractive... a vast, unfathomable well, the source of another Nile.
There is a flame that still responds. There is after all a heart that beats. There are brown clothes, scents, rooms, that from this distance still come back to me. Her mouth, her smile, her hair, her eyes, all gone, done for today, wrapped up. And yet I know as sure as death that they'll recur, haunt my dreams of other days. There seems to be something in me that will not rest, nor be resisted. And all this fear is to another soul wedded, all this shame is to another life bonded, all at once, all in misery, all in love.
I love because there is no such thing as love. And I can't stop.

Poetry as Struggle

Force out creativity in blocks of earthy stone, onto the paper.
Unload your brain, all of it, in a tantrum Jackson Pollock mess with no boundaries except writer's cramp and sighings of existential fatigue.
A sick complaint of desks and empty bedrooms.
I decided to take the Muse and strangle her, till she vomited all of her beauties on the page.
All her nonsense and ugliness too, that just as relevant.
Trapped forever under stark, austere glass.
Poetry! Fuck it, almost kill or abuse it so that the muse herself either dies from shame or is driven mad with laughing.
Try and grasp reality, force it into sense and beauty, force it like a struggling animal into the cage of words and, before it can escape, pin it like a specimen onto the page.
Sheer poetry killed and hung up for spectators, all the exquisite poetry you ever dined on vomited back up, like Saturn vomited up his own children.
That bird of poetry becomes like a stuffed museum piece, poised forever in pretend flight inside the book covers, until the reader comes along, ignites it into life again with the power of his imagination, and it soars... and then falls, crashing, into oblivion.
Art or writing was to me then, some kind of awful struggle, a fight with myself to express some kind of beauty or meaning, to wring truth from madness, to take a zero and make it into a one.
Doing this I had to convulse, fatigue myself, loosen my wrists and grit my teeth, screw up my eyes to see more clearly.
Till some blasted, sudden, half-understood vision would force itself upon my mind, blooming vaguely into an explosion of words.
I had to become a godly creature striking jagged lightning into my own world of words, till it became ignited into quivering beauty.
It was ultimate focus intractably screwed down onto objects, all of the truth squeezed out of it in an instant, discarded like a flipping fish onto the page.

On Desire

Or, to take, to steal. What is it that loves? The eyes see, the brain thinks, the fingertips touch. To love is a function of what? The soul, perhaps they might have said. Something loves... the self, the soul, the will... The heart, it's function is to pump blood around the body. Affection is felt, but felt by what?
Passion is the function of what?

Analyse your desires carefully and you can find your true self, your true position. Honest to yourself and therefore full of integrity. What do I want? Away from clichés, separate from prejudiced expectations, I use my desires as a guideline, a rule of thumb.

Desire, flowing from me, is a bulwark of truth, something that can be counted on. The royal road to knowing yourself. Desire leads to unhappiness and pain, says the Buddha. Obvious truth. But what of it?

It can lead also to moments of joy, glimpses of fulfilment. I will not cut myself off therefore from desire, become an ascetic, seek to "transcend" the flesh. It is human to drink in life, seeking fulfilment, not accepting pain but fighting it, using your desire as a weapon, drowning your pain in sweet floods of love, aspects of joy endlessly renewed, eternally renewable. A guarantee of your life: That your desire is inexhaustible, and that your sorrow can be conquered.

Song of the Occident

Here is the dread land that the grey clouds sweep over,
Here the cathedral, here the summer shower;
Here the medieval, here the modern reigns over
An aching acre past its hour;
This is the round and utter West, the liberal West, the soulless realm,
This is the ultimate Occident, dreamed of by blue-eyed, cynical men.
Wonderful, wonderful land, first host of the grave of God,
A God that died, and went west;
We now accept your Gods, New World:
Lip-service sacrifice to holy Commerce.
With one eye on the hedonist future,
And one on the ruined past-
Between the Reich and Flanders Fields
We stand aghast: To turn and fan the flames
Of future parties, future games,
Clothed in paltry, borrowed hats
Purchased from bankers and bureaucrats.
This was our world but we let it go,
Our nation, our empire, in one throw,
Of an idiot die to the world below.
That was the world that was, it's over, let it go.
O what a world it was, it's over, let it go. 

The Sound

At night, if you listen very hard, you can hear a sound which you can never hear during the day, because traffic, etc, drowns it out.
It's like a constant sub-bass vibration or oscillation, like that given out by an electricity sub-station, or like the sound of cosmic radiation, like some infernal machine or engine always left running.
I described it in a poem as "the giant engine of the night".
If you listen to it long enough though, you'll notice that it has definite fluctuations and variations in texture.
You have to have absolute silence to hear it.
And you know what I was thinking this morning, while listening to it? I was thinking about earth (the planet) and all the nonsense that goes on there, and how stupid it all is.
And I wished that for once, I could say something with all my heart and mean it.
And I wished that I could say pure words in a pure language, that would set it all in a new context, transform all the base materials to gold. It would be like the kind of prize that only has value when you give it away, this new language, and this new context.
It would be glorious, like a full summer. It essence and its quality would be: Permanence. It would be the transcendence of the final boundary. It would burn like the flame that Prometheus gave to mankind. It would shine like the gold that paves the streets of the New Jerusalem. It would be the long-awaited alchemical transformation of material dross to spiritual gold, the philosopher's stone and holy grail combined.
And I was writing all this down when my pen ran out.

We Poets

We poets, not many of us left, are left to starve while they give all the means of life to footballers and pop stars and other soulless idiots.
All the energy, all the value, and all the time, given away for free to atrocious, selfish, privileged, witless bastards, who want to reach "the top", whatever that is. When you get there, you realise it's nothing. A hollow wind echoing in an empty chamber, a diamond made out of glass, a paper tiger with no teeth, a Hollywood western saloon with a blank wall behind it.
People don't go mad you know. Something happens to them. A thing called life. That's all. They aren't mad, or sad, or bad. They've just lived, that's all. And it's enough to fucking break your heart, life, to break it.
The poet is the human paradigm. In him is seen all, all the failures of homo sapiens, all the failures and all the hopes, and all the weakness, and I'll tell you the insight he has gained therein: Love is important. That's all. He thinks it might even be the meaning of life.
Whenever I wake up, I am infinitely disgusted and disappointed to find myself still in existence.
A sad story, bittersweet.  The last act of the oldest human drama; heartbreak. I've written the same lines over and over, and still I can write no other. I've written, in my heart's blood, my last words, a farewell to mother earth, who loved me imperfectly. (Good idea for a poem).