Stand in a great hall.
Stand and raise your eyes.
Draw light through this forest of arms,
Draw down to common size.
From the floor
ASPIRE!
and with your eyes adore,
then dig the earth and busy yourselves -
let that which rises be the sound
of your infinity,
the resounding of your lyre!
Well of life and fire.
O Stately Cosmic Map,
Commons of the Heart,
Web of Pattern, Sound and Image,
where your wells rise
an ash tree roots.
So be.
Enter the tree.
Holding to the labyrinth, stretch into the wind with the voice of
Zephyrus!
From this rivered limb, sap-full,
unwind into Heaven.
Look around & hail your Country!
“Dear mammals of earth, gather we here with the birds of the air and the moths and the winged critters!”
“The leaves of the ash are light and stretch into heavenly airs, but the limbs of the tree are more seductive than any lover I have known. They twist and turn and dance about me.”
And thus it takes you in.
In this tree
be transfigured by love.
And, being loved for yourself, be about your being.
Time now to shout and sing!
Time now to weave new languages around yourself, close to the wild self you have been chasing.
Where the old post meets the foaming shore,
have somebody whip you with long belts of seaweed;
rub hands with juniper about their sex;
be bitten hard enough in the back to be ivory-dented with patterns of your choice;
pluck emblems from a world quite beyond civility, that speak with, and of, you.
Like, there's a day you'll wake up, and the floor will be soft for autumn love. And all the colours will be a forest pattern of fallen leaves; and bright uprooted toadstools will spread their tiny parasols, and cool elegant white fungi thrust themselves from between rotting fronds. And you will sing of berries and the hurricane of colour which sweeps the harvest world and binds the seed with love before the winter frost, and your balls or ovaries will glow with the kick of love, and your eyes become sloes, and sparkle with wonder.
And we will talk of a Kingdom; a verdant void and great jewelled halo surrounding our virile immodesty; fed on by all, gloried-in by all.
And the fluorescent seas, hedged clouds and green-furred earth, which are all Earth’s Commons, are also the ermine robes of a higher place, clothing the mystery of that invisible, powerful lordship to which we all do homage: the hollow crown in which all are made.
Rejoice!
Our King is Well.
It is November, and a time of cold air under stars, characters burn bright in still, bright nights where the trees walk on the horizon, as you'd expect in this our land. A time to sing of totems; your totems.
I sing of ASH TREES; MAGPIES; WELLS; STARS&WILDFLOWERS; POPPIES & RIPE BARLEY; DUNG.
And the sacred rites are:
to make pornography joyous and wonderful
to destroy the deification of culture
to be honest, tactile in relation to mysteries,
and not self seeking
TO BE IN LOVE WITH ALL
Wings of your spirit, Eros, are abroad even on the winds of the wildest storm that grips the ash crowns and loads the dipping spears of winter buds with rivers, and throws its dripping pearls on rusty thorns and blackened berries;
and shivers the heart
with the edge of that far-
raging sea, laden with the marching ridges of white plumes in the black of night; and yet find shelter in a cliff-crack, where even
a little dandy-headed lilac flower grows - room for calm in that micro-world around the flower's stem, for prayer to bless the storm.
[[And in this cave, far beneath the gale, impossible bison thunder
with extraordinary hermetic force
amid the dusty roots of trees -
o how they love you but they will not speak.
To your amazements
No answer.
This cave, in silent miracles, takes living form
but yet defies our act of touch.
To dance without owning such partners from a further world!
Only empty do we know this place,
naked and newborn.]]
Wide sands lie and curl with the soft turn of a downy thigh, and coy enticement to talk of myriad dances that were done in the last festival, when tide was in, and since, in the endless wind, have curled back to bed, to the lee of those few pink rocks, covered in dark green.
Here on the new shore's edge, far enough out beyond my lifeline of staid land's rocky stand
my dance begins
with the singing singeing colours
above Welsh hills
when
God appears in great wings of air between heaven and me.
And these great wings of truth and hope are of course our death, but how tremendous!
And the voice is within me, centred with the magpie souls on the girl's smile, dreaming,
that
we should honour death, and invoke the greatness, the tumultuous, tempestuous weight of it which is in our blood,
that
we should know honour in lust and in killing,
and in all the engines of desire and destruction,
(for we have done our loveliest with them in our being)
praise the bloodlust,
praise the orgy,
praise sacrifice and willing degradation,
praise the truth of our being that savages
safety and security,
for those
twin illusions are masks of fear
which make us cruel, and cold
and untrue.
No praise for them, for fear of failure, no praise for 'fear, father of cruelty'
no praise for malice,
unkindness
only for the passionate truth of wild being
that runs to the Atlantic's edge, beyond Land's End, and passing through the eye of a needle between great cliff stacks, climbs down in reach
of universal forces, where the rocks shudder to the staggering seas;
that... runs naked in the blinding surf boiling over reefs and wild sands 3,000 miles out from Senegal, hurled by trade-winds, burnt by tropic sun, on Barbados' shore.
The key points are:
that God is inside and thus it is our CLOTHING
which denies him, including the construction of ourselves,
and so we have to uncover;
to strip back to God
and this stripping back
this laying bare
leads us into a
great
simple
complex
so tender, that we dare not face it and rush for cover and are excited by denial
and thus every taboo of the world is the excitement of the denial of the really beautiful nakedness we can't sink to, but which glimpsed leads us to ecstasy; and which is why the goal of desire must not quite exist, never quite be reachable, and must be as if hidden,
because the beautiful humble nakedness of
the great deep truth of universal love
is our gentle path back into night
but route to understanding this is the loud bright shout of ecstasy: the running to the edges in brightest
day.
I remember catching sight of a 'memento mori' carved on a tombstone amidst the ruins of Elgin Cathedral, and in the eye sockets of this skull and crossbones moss was growing. We think of death as bearing down on us with his grim sickle, but I remember thinking 'Death has beautiful green eyes'.
Petals of solitary daffodil, pale, holding the rain drops in frame against the blurred metallic and white horizontal sky, nesting in the greying marram and damp blonde sand:
Cool scent, cold drops, grey-shifted light
treat me as a beached seal
articulate in instincts, following my clock's journey
warm blooded,
vulnerable & bright.
Watching the child run forth from your
own limbs
suddenly,
the sun is back in the hairs on
your arms,
where your chin rests
like a dozing lion
in the great growing resting time
which precedes the spring,
and the light on the meadow hairs of your
arm, the rainbows in your half shut
eyes,
paves the shift of focus to the blowing clover
beyond the sweet smell of sunned skin
and suddenly I am become child again, certain
in my dancing steps
soft in the darkness
of my loving, looking eyes.
So tell me, do you welcome the pure dancer, who whirls through your life, romantic, ecstatic, uplifting, unruly, unfitting; gone, as Bede's sparrow, through the smoke-hole?
Do you welcome the melancholy gazing after, the disorientation, dissatisfaction, this Puck-like spirit leaves like a strange tidemark in your soul?
Surely you will try to grab this butterfly; surely you will wish to harness such spirit to the heavy cart of man on his leaden road!
Surely you will say, at first, we can cope very well with this, we can certainly do with such spirit!
And as soon as it shone, suddenly it was gone - you reached out and there was lead again where magically there had seemed to be gold. And bitterly, you disbelieved.
And yet... beneath your anger, your contempt, your hiding... always in moments where magic was all that was left to offer faltering life hope (which you reject as impracticable, but with which you secretly keep faith), you knew in your soul that you had already met one of its angels, that he would have spoken with you if you had talked.
The sun escapes into this warm ovum of light: green dappled, shadow-shattered, but bleached, silvered, faded, whitening over all & its skin-tingling reaches under the darker hairs to the small golden boy hairs on my arm & spills down inside my clothes to stroke the skin down my side.
In the leaden fields of this our life, it is the spirit which transforms matter into the golden meadows of heaven.
Daddy, you were a fool to die
only thing of you I got
was your cock
and not your pride
you gave me no cause to live for
no cause to die.
Running as a wild thing,
I was adopted
by parents of the further world,
that is, of this our same own endlessly further world; and they were spirits of it, father of star-studded blackest night, endlessly clear, endlessly further, endlessly behind and around and inside; and mother heavenly mid-day blue towards which poppy petals, corn fronds, bees and buttercups rise and laugh and sing - softer, warmer, milkier thing.
Think of me as a meadow, dreaming beneath the stars...
Whence Spring dances, May-light, the air flying
blossom pollen high, and is shot–through with
the golden laughing play of youth, young leaves, young
love, and yet wherein the voice of this romance
is the sweet beauty
of elegy
to have lived one swallow’s swoop of time in sunlight on the meadows is heaven, and rushing into the cataracts of night, out into the river of stars, for that one moment’s prismatic flash of light upon an eyelash, for that brilliance
all’s forgiven
that false pride and expectation
marred one’s myriad moments with,
for the prism’s dance,
the swallow’s swoop,
laughter of joy weaving the sky, on the
eve of endless night-fall falling.
But still there’ll be eggs, milk, rain, mud, shit, spunk, blood; weeds between flagstones; erections and periods among the downtrodden margins of the day. Periods, and missed periods. Syncopation. Roundelay. Bed and breakfast for those in heaven’s pay.
Thus the tribes. Sown and scattered.
All things, for always stand on the shore of infinity, so that even the wild oat at dawn begins its roll toward the sunset, and the great tide of night, the river of stars, draws like an undertow beneath creation, till all dip their heads to the lapis wash, and feel the breath of dew and curl to dream or chance to gaze on wonder.
Sweet Chroma, elegiac a thousand million years. Always in the bloom of youth, sweet murderous, cannibal, rainbow youth.
What, then, should be one’s bed, your platform of dawn, whence resolutions for the day take form in the changing light?
Let the floor be your bed. The small floor, even the rug, the wide, even, only of itself, clear, hemmed and perhaps even raised, the top of a small rock chimney, a mountain ledge, the first ridge above the storm tide, the highest room in tower.
Mosaic floor, tessellated image of the world, all the orders and forms – the rivers and shores, the ocean and animals, the passages and the rites, and centrally, the sun radiant, with hem of wildflowers where the sea enwraps, enfolds.
To be held in a star-quilted cloth, with softest darkest night’s-hue wrapping you, womb-like, otherwise naked, while the sun, bright for another’s world under your stomach and back, travels beneath you curled in your star-sack.
To wake and rise and drop darkness, as a curtain falling around you, to discover in morning’s flesh, warm-bed-naked, standing on the radiant disc, barefoot, with the orders of the world, of the sacred garden at its feet, the platform for your day.
See it, see the formal floor, map and stage and temple, and the sun itself in the centre, big enough for the curled family to sleep on. Heaped upon the golden, radiant image, a nest of straw or reeds or rushes might sit, and coiled in the star egg of night, but in the heart of Chroma, of fire, burning in the void, you may sleep contented in twinkling dream-light.
As the wind first brushes your cheek at dawn at the sea’s edge, and the light shifts from whisper to brightness, the power of vision has touched me and filled my night - rolling heaven’s body with light and the song of wildflowers; and there’s no counter-current to this mighty voice that exults in every corner of my being, and there’s no longer any fear of what it means or begs.
The light, as a child, entered my soul as a ring that would burn itself whole into my sight as I prayed, or slept, and at other times. This white-hot emblem transferred to wheat - fields, to breezes over September meadows kissed by swallows, to poppies and clover, and angel’s wings rising from the edge of daisies. Creation took off and glowed in me like a charge and all around would transpose in a moment’s unexpected way into goldenness, into the warm sexual god it is.
Many’s the day I’ve walked away from this, feeling somehow abused by such extraordinary love, feeling that as nothing could be unseemly for it, my own indulgences would honour creation in decadence and degeneracy. And safe, always, in the knowledge that I would not escape the truth of my being and the loveliness of my odd destiny.
And so I haven’t, but time is here to embrace the lover that touches my cheeks at dawn, or sends me swallows to skate the meadows, to fill again with the breath of God, and really sing.
For good there is, and was in touching base, and the cesspool runs like blood in the veins, holy and splendid as the fairest hair and twinkling eyes, but I must also fluoresce in the cheek-down, the poppy petal and the stone, and make universal love by day.