Poetry Tapped

Studies of You

2006-08-25T06:46:00.000-07:00

(I)

I wait
anticipating your presence at the door,
I wait,
watch your shadow strengthen along the floor,
I wait,
Naked except for the completeness of your scent,
I wait,
heart seized,
already grieving for your leaving.

(II)

While I sleep
You slip into my heart,
And I wake with just you,
My high harvests gathered, binned:
I?
Sated within you

(III)

Nothing remains of my selves
My faces are dissolved,
My shadows sundered:
All I was is now You

Your green stretches, turns to blue
(I)
I look at you,
The face of the one I love.
I see you smile,
The smile of one without reflection,
All within the blue your green,
Their numbers perfecting your One.

(II)
I look upon you,
The form of the One I love.
I see you smile:
Your green stretches, turns to blue;
Uncut, as the first, is, true.
Haq! You are the One, the sum.

(III)
Dare I love you, send my words flattering
Emissaries from my tongue tied heart?

Enraptured I by the I within you
I dare:
Shines within you the I above I,
Lives within you that I I love,
And my eyes dare to unpeel the self,
That which my lips would keep puttied,
Fleshed in the flesh bound to the flesh,
And drenched with you, my love
I enter,
My egg, my soul bound to your sum.

I move desiring You

Born of water into water
My tracks are traced with that water

Born of the mountain, the red rock
In whose shade rests my heavy jug.

I’ve travelled far to quench my thirst,
My clay parched by roads dead and cursed,

Crossed countries sanded, rivers killed,
Driven by the heart, moved by my thirst

For you: All I am is built on love
For you: My hunger a sign of love

For you: I move desiring you.
I will not wait until that moment

When dying I’ll say I’ve never drunk
your blood, Eaten of your wet flesh: (, that wine and bread divine.)

I move desiring you, your truth.

hipstofingertips

2005-04-11T11:34:00.000-07:00

hipstofingertips
Originally uploaded by selkie.

Selkie continues to metamorphosise.....

Raindrops on a pane

2005-03-11T06:24:00.000-08:00

You wait, fall precipitous

Stop:

coalesce breaking I’s.

A tribute to Wide_Open's genius

2005-03-07T04:25:00.000-08:00

...
Originally uploaded by Wide_open.

Showing my appreciation for the curve shore of her.

Enflamed

2005-02-22T00:51:00.000-08:00

enflamed
Originally uploaded by selkie.

I am stunned by the beauty of Selkie's work. This lady has that elusive quality of the highest genius.

Say my name:

2005-02-01T14:43:00.000-08:00

I am the window, the face of the eye
staring at the birds whirling past
into the clouds spreading rain, hiding
the stars, the hands that burning keep me,
falling away from the stone and the trace.

Say my name:
I am the air that breathes cold music
into the met breast of the nightingale;
Listen to the song of the candle;
Lose yourself in the rose, that dark
Creched intelligence of the universe,

And say my name,
Tell me who I am:
You, who, have known me before I was ever spun.

Speaking of Chessboards

2005-02-01T13:10:00.000-08:00

----------------------------------------

The pieces have lost their significance:
The hand must move over them, beyond
The board into the face not a face,
Into the realm of fluxing land unrooted
By the death mask of logic’s light.

The melodies of flesh no longer lie
In the moving of the passing music:
Our shadows burn too vivid, too false
To show how pure is our impurity.
Burn this idle hunger, pierce the ribs

Of history’s barn, look, stretch beyond,
Behind the masque. This game will never end,
Begun, will never move past that is,
White and Black, both boned as pregnant
As the un-carved hands of the all-known.

Copyright ã 1986-2005 Pilgermann BM

2005-01-21T06:38:00.000-08:00

The Face of a Woman

Fractures

2005-01-21T05:07:00.000-08:00

(in memory of my grandmother)

The tectonic shifts that shaped my life

Were shaped by her, by her alone.

I rose not from her, but through her son,

And yet I call her mine, mother

To the heart that still weeps, calls out

In sleep to the ghost I remember,

Etched stark by the runway lights,

Beneath the still wings of my flight,

Still, hands raised to stay my departure,

Still the fracture opening, my cry

Drowning under the dark deep grind

Of the engines firing farewell.

Her ghost now comes to me often

To heal life’s fractures and soften,

And her shape is the molten rock,

Shaped and shocked into the stratum,

Which keeps, sustains love’s momentum.

Dust We Play

2005-01-17T15:36:00.000-08:00

We bear in silence plays of grey,

Imagine dazzling dress one day.

We smile, grind dust to clay,

Wear bricks and mortar, fear decay,

The fading paste, our alabaster flaking dust.

Dust we play at green,

Run hearts on suppleness of rust,

Eyes definitions, images we trust.

Orion fades, suns turn black,

We stand on tectonic crust

Scrabbling for pearls to line our lack.

Copyright ã 1986-2005 Pilgermann BM

What's a Dog know about Morality?

2005-01-16T11:51:00.000-08:00

Was listening to the radio and came across the interview with a Scottish woman who had been married to a Rwandan Church Minister. The marriage had been going through a rough patch and she had left the country to see her sister in Zimbabwe. While there the killings started in Rwanda. When she came back she expected the worst:

This is her story.

What’s a dog know about morality

“In Rwanda 800,000 were murdered in 100 days.”

They welcomed me smiling, careful, watching

As I retraced myself into the land.

Their glassed eyes spoke of an aged bloodied,

A generation ghosted by a neighbour’s hand,

Casually directed, casually dispatching

Life, friendships ended, victims of a creed

Blind to all but its self, its new strength

The brochure showed plain and mountain clear,

Skies burnt to gold, sun lighting green the ground.

I found an earth crawling with abortions,

Its weather moist with blood, chill with fear.

The brochure showed tall children at play,

Parents, stilled, leaning happy on their hoes.

I returned, passing children in fatigues,

Armoured, gun barrels ploughing shallow graves.

The brochures showed orchards, fruit heavy,

Temptations branched, shadowed by the red rock.

Stretched before me gardens weeded with skulls;

Empty eyes ploughed, seedless, grounded by the truck.

I approached my home, hunting my husband’s face,

Found bones laced with the leaf, his lines, his trace

Obliterated, marrow married with the dust.

‘They took him away,’ the answer to my quest.

A child captains the chair my husband carved,

Ignorant of the books my husband read

He looks out into the plot where still charred

Flesh stench hangs, where dogs fed on the dead,

Unclothed the man from the bone.

But who, I ask, cast the first stone?

And,

What’s a dog know about morality?

copyright (c) 2005 Pilgermann BM

2005-01-15T03:47:00.000-08:00

Who is she? If anyone can tell me who this woman is a personalised poem is offered as a reward. All I know is she is Greek. I was getting off the bus when I happened to look into the mirror and there she was.

The Poem of Everything

2005-01-13T09:16:00.000-08:00

“Myself, I have a pilgrimage to make to the One dwelling in me. They offer lambs; I offer my breath and my blood.”

Husayn Ibn Mansur Al Hallaj: 857-922

“From my solitude I come:

To my solitude I return.”

Lope De Vega

Master, noman, everyman, wombman

Ghostman, whispers furled till the waking hour

when the flower runs its curled stalk

creeping from the ground to the thin sun strong

in the low day, new sky young

coloured still by the old, memories

anchoring to the past, this present

this coming,

Opens the crescent

To the eye, the stretched horizon

Circled and circling the red, rooftops

Burnt to gold, windows awake to the kiss.

Sea swerve past the shore, thin water flanks

Backward move the scree, rounding edge

By edge the earth, its swell, the wrack;

The moon tide pulling at the depths,

This day signed begins:

Beginning

Spring,

budding tints this eye and that,

Reaches past the curve this hour, colours

The latitude brothers, sisters

The same spring sprung signatures.

No visible disorder clouds come breezed. What plays?

She wanted to get back early,

Left the party, started to walk;

Didn’t have the fare; could’ve asked,

We’d have given her a lift

But it’s just around the corner,

A right, another, a left,

you’re there: There they found her stomach

Ripped open, bottles crushed into her eyes.

“We’re investigating the significance of chrysanthemums placed by the victim’s head. We haven’t ruled out the possibility of links to a cult of some sort, an underground sect. We’re appealing to the public to come forward with any details to help in solving this terrible crime. Our prayers go out to the parents and family of this young woman in this their time of sorrow.”

Change the record: abstract ecstasies follow.

"If I could be with you

I would be nowhere else

Every shadow bears the mark of you,

Every moment is a reflection of you.

Every moment is you and you are

in every moment that is

Babe, we can dream,

Dreaming is free.”

Before the boorish Neopolitan crowd

Maria[1] bent, bouqueted the radishes,

acknowledged proud the brutish louts:

‘I have pleased you well with myself.’

Stomach swollen, corded suddenly spits

Splits; riding eddies, the rip and turns,

Fourth coiled beasts, part u is me fission.

In credible currencies the barter burns:

The child, is just, is slapped quiet, bundled into the back. They drive to the hotel, enter by a back way. Waiting the buyer there. Just off the plane, travelled half way across the globe, he says. ‘This is prime steak,’ the driver tells him,’ very good stuff.’ Turns the child showing every which way. ‘See,’ he says, ‘been plucked pure, just for you, for you man.’ Smiles all around. Whisper in signs, strike a bargain, shake then leave. In the room he begins. When begins the scream takes a sock, stuffs silent the mouth then wiping his brow ties tighter the ties.

Syntax denied the whurld takes flight

Plantied by the night Saturn phades

Cullours shreaded degrailed Cascades

The preyer ghost wite kite white bright

The scream jumping the gap synapse

Lands to brand each gene a bastard

From high the first a startling relapse

Grace grounded blood gels no longer heard

The tongue that taught love.

Sea skin shimmering river runs

Still feeding without bounds dry noons.

‘Teeth pushed through, were stuck to his lips. Mouth puffed up, perforated with sores, blood crusted his face, his sides, had soaked the pillows. Terminally ill, they said. Better he die. Was left without food and water. Fourteen days. Just drugs they gave him, keep him quiet, and he such a talker. Wouldn’t look at me no more. That’s how I knew things weren’t well, he wasn’t right.’

The report concluded:

A deliberate policy of liquid and food denial was adopted

In all those cases judged, within strict guidelines prescribed,

As hopeless. Drugs were administered

To ease the suffering until they died.

“No comment.”

I an empty house, uncrowded

Bricks failing, mortar denied,

Incomplete, uncapped, wounded

Architecture unrendered.

Burnt butts prayers wither on the vine

[1] After a performance in Naples Maria Callas had vegetables, including radishes thrown at her. Picking up the latter as if they were bouquets she stood, like the diva she was, proudly acknowledging the abuse.