Jagged Mountain

Come up on the roof
And smoke a cigarette with me
And we’ll swap stories of thieves
And things we have lost.

In a reoccupation of space
I conquered previously in time
My mind became a camera
that reframed the photograph
I took when we were there.
The sky as it was
The mountain as it was
Sun a little more to the right
(Because it’s later in the day)
And a displacement of air to the left
- the spectre of her.

Let me sit in this place
In imitation of the past
And sweat the haunting
through my heart and my face
Alone, alone – leave me alone
But don’t go away, don’t go.

Give me a cancer stick
With its brown filter, white tube
Let me place it my mouth like a dummy
I want to feel the black
Cinders speckling my lungs
I need a new feeling
In the cavity of my chest.

Come up on the roof
And smoke a cigarette with me
And we’ll swap stories of thieves
And things we have lost.

James Piers Taylor, 27/8/2006 Barcelona


IMAGE: Montserrat (1931) by Pere Daura

A New Hot State

Those last few minutes to the hour
Are the slowest to go
Wine in the glass
Chasing down the clockhands

Thoughts of a future
Without science fiction
Only the telos
Of science fact

The first American city has been destroyed
But no one seems to have noticed

When will I eat the marigold with you?
Unpeel the fiction to reveal
Theatre
Apply the delineation of narrative
To our collision of random
Make the tale last
To the death of one
And perhaps beyond?

I challenge in the pattern
Or all those who choose love
I challenge the cosmos
To thwart me again
As I rebuild story
From these tattered
Wounded elements of plot.

Cohere in the space
Before termination
Refuse loose theories thermodynamic
Make like an Heracletian

I will find the rose for you
And place its petals
On your forehead
Pierce the silence that is strangeness
Break the thick air of the world
And breathe with you
The oxygen
Trapped
In
Bubbles
Beneath
The ice

Beneath the ice
We’ll watch the second city fall
And all clocks seize
And make our pax
With the man with the knife.

James Piers Taylor, 19/08/2006 London


IMAGE: Portal between Worlds (2001) by Henry Kaiser

Muddy Road

All gentleness I relate to you, all grace
You the connect, the passport
The mirror, a prism
To reflect, to refract
The surrounding world
Into a shape of sense
The gentle hand of Apollo
Stilling the waters
Clearing the skies
You made the horizon
Defined the edge of the leaf
Revealed my heart outside my body


Tanzan and Ekio were once travelling together down a muddy road. A heavy rain was still falling. Coming around a bend, they met a lovely girl in a silk kimono and sash unable to cross the intersection. "Come on, girl," said Tanzan at once. Lifting her in his arms, he carried her over the mud. Ekido did not speak again until that night when they reached a lodging temple. Then he no longer could restrain himself. "We monks don't go near females," he told Tanzan, "especially not young and lovely ones. It is dangerous. Why did you do that?" "I left the girl there," said Tanzan. "Are you still carrying her?"

(‘Muddy Road’ from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (Tuttle Pub, 1957) compiled by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki)

James Piers Taylor, 17th August 2006, London


IMAGE: New Moon (1958) by Maxfield Parrish

Be Longing

I ask myself 'what do I need'?
but no clear answer comes
the compass needle spins
a magnetic pole reversal of
your breath on my neck at midnight
in a dream of shivered glass

I tell myself 'I need to be seen and heard'
then hide under a month-long duvet
reading ancient scrolls by
torchlight, never making a sound
louder than the sob of eggs
black and white phoenix camouflage

I hear them shouting 'Let me see your papers'
and know that terror is the plat du jour -
what I can't tell is where inside and outside
meet anymore, which voices shrill
within, which reach the bridgehead
of mind, dropped from outer spaces

I climb the pyramid on a cardboard donkey
pasted together by laughter and tears
held in harness by milk of magnesia
oil of cloves in the nostrils of fear
tonight is a time for ear candles
and dreams of the molten queen

I am visited by the clock face
telling the time of sickness
grasping at moments long lost overboard
savagely smiling in a corpulent gale
this is the comet my stardust head
has feasted upon for fun

Lord Pluto wears an invisible helmet
he jigs out a danse macabre with old Charon
celebrating the hubris of humans
a particular braid will spin new plutons
out of relational void
into the face of complacency

Under the bed the spiders are busy
the earth sprays pressurised mud at the sky
geysers of hot grey slurry piss upwards
good for the skin, good for the grave
longing to touch you in pitiless style
with unconditional desire



kh
17.8.06

IMAGE: 'Desire' by Pino (www.naturessence.com)

I cannot claim possession of the rain

I had plans we never spoke of
Which evaporate now
Off the flat plain of the future
To condense elsewhere
For someone else
Some others else
To rain on their parades
Or saturate their deserts with love
And perhaps some of this precipitation
Will fall again for me
Or fall again for her.

I cannot claim possession of the rain
Nor forecast the weather
Or foretell the future
Tell dry spells from wet
It is a mystery to me
Why the clouds come and go.

I write my name
In the mist on the window
And peer through the letters
To perceive
What is written outside
I trace a heart
In a separate pane
And watch it bleed
Down to the frame.


James Piers Taylor, 15/8/2006 London

IMAGE: Beautiful Storm (2006) by Rob Colvin, available from the artist.

Sub-munitions

Roll-up, roll-up, hear the Stalin organ
Katie is still playing after all these years
whistling away with all the new kids -
an anti-electrical mesh, this anti-personnel flute
(chewing up soft targets) -
crude like napalm
with seductive duds
failing to kiss the sky with death
- at least until those tiny fingers
prize open your deadly green buds
or suck on your depleted heart
to feed the emphatic cancer in their spleen

no longer to be shrouded and shamed
brave bomblet, sister, lover
hold your head high like the bullets do
you are needed at the front back and sides
of terror, working your hot metal magic
in postmodern swirls, in shrapnel dancing
in keeping the fire stoked against evil

but I find myself wondering about meeting you
what would you really be like?
I enjoy gathering blackberries, sweet grenades
of autumn, but to you they’re exotic weeds
in need of the pesticide drench –
so I wonder – when will you open
without going off? When will your
hi-tech style recognise its reflection
in this puddle of blood, shit and tears?
When will you slip bananas into
the starving mouths of my cousins?
When will the order come for you to sleep?


Kh
11.8.06

IMAGE: 'Munitions Over Morals' (2004), anonymous illustration for performance of the George Bernard Shaw play Major Barbara by the University of Wisconsin College of Arts and Communication.

Such is the way that pedestals are made

Such is the way that pedestals are made
And women raised upon them
So our minds carve them from themselves
Sometimes to find a finer model
Than their art alone would allow
A realisation of all they could be.
Sometimes to make a fiction
That’s serves neither party well
A transactional device
That hides the truth of both
A mode of exchange
Become all that is exchanged.

And yet that line of your cheek
Is a slice into marble
This line of your neck
Is divine where it meets the shoulder
If it’s not the depths of heaven
That darken your eyes so
What seeds of obsidian
Did god plant there instead?


James Piers Taylor, 9/8/2006 London


IMAGE: The Soul Attains (1878) from the 'Pygmalion and the Image' series by Edward Burne-Jones.

Avesta

In dreams the truth is learned, that all good works are done in the absence of a caress

Leonard Cohen


Here comes the Genuflector. Raiser of demons. Whispering of Zoroaster, spectator of the cosmic struggle between the good Lord, Ahura Mazda (Ormzad) and Ahriman (Anro Mainyu), the cruel Evil Spirit, the Demon of Demons (Daevanam Daeva). At sleep, the shore of Vendidad Sade is given – vi daeva data – and a price is exacted on the exchanges of Azazel. Answers are sought but not forthcoming, poets know nothing but how to fool the moon with shy bread, a fake nourishment to serve a fool or starve a king.

Real and unreal, navigating groundlessness, beyond the day-gates of fear and madness, or the orgone-spin of duality, moment in moment the dream now, body-stilled and mind-shot, wakes to the threshings of desire, the subtle carrion delivery of the dark post. Sleep the sleep of the dream-animal in vital bounds across wasteland ash, holding the bright eye of wisdom on a red silk sash, pranic and gravid with a polyp of ceaseless drool.

Vase breathing, key to the Fourth time, now invited by Kurosawa to sip the fire petal – take this longing to Mr Lynch who has a nuclear pass and will show you the galleries of Leng.

The sands blow, the bones slow, life has its undertow recalibrated in the smelter of your heart. Dreaming of the Kraken, of Boethius, of Heraclitean flames, soaring through pain-dunes and dismembered corpses pecked clean by a plague of locusts – you knew each one individually, intimately, each one your lover in a new skin, an ancient clasping desperate and dear.

Ultimately, as the sun sets, the vampires who cannot dance will recommence their shopping
For images, lullabies and the moist trace of tears in the salted-fields of this tooled-up world,
Help them to their endless death, even as they squeeze you through your own vice.

Kh
8.8.06

IMAGE: Zarathustra, via workersdojo

I-man satta at the mountain top Watching Babylon burning red hot, red hot

One night a feast was held in the palace, and there came a man and prostrated himself before the prince, and all the feasters looked upon him; and they saw that one of his eyes was out and that the empty socket bled. And the prince inquired of him, “What has befallen you?” And the man replied, “O prince, I am by profession a thief, and this night, because there was no moon, I went to rob the money-changer's shop, and as I climbed in through the window I made a mistake and entered the weaver's shop, and in the dark I ran into the weaver's loom and my eye was plucked out. And now, O prince, I ask for justice upon the weaver.”

Then the prince sent for the weaver and he came, and it was decreed that one of his eyes should be plucked out.

“O prince,” said the weaver, “the decree is just. It is right that one of my eyes be taken. And yet, alas! both are necessary to me in order that I may see the two sides of the cloth that I weave. But I have a neighbour, a cobbler, who has also two eyes, and in his trade both eyes are not necessary.”

Then the prince sent for the cobbler. And he came. And they took out one of the cobbler's two eyes.

And justice was satisfied.

“War” from The Madman; His Parables and Poems (A.A. Knopf, 1918) by Kahlil Gibran.

Without comment or critique, here are words and image from two Lebanese artists in these dangerous times.

IMAGE: after 19 says i started to cry (2006) by Mazen Kerbaj taken from his Kerblog entry for Sunday July 30th 2006.

(post title from the lyrics to 'War Ina Babylon' by Lee "Scratch" Perry, performed by Max Romeo & the Upsetters on the album War Ina Babylon (Island Records, 1976).)

Umwelt

She whispered in my ear at dawn
‘Only what is repressed is symbolized’
Then drifted away in her goose-pimpled skin to the forest-clad hill
Where all throats are conjoined in green praise
Through the butterfly cities and hawkish clearings
Bringing her dream to those who wear no watches
Encouraging mind-rifles to execute public clocks
Chiliast and Millenarian in her stooping at the brook
She squeezes a drop of entropy from the unpromising bud of science,
Tastes it, grins, and cartwheels over the locked gate.

‘You are deeper than your life’ my dreams sigh
Unconscious banditry looms from mountain passes, like
Maoists chopping monarchy, time-school’s out for ever
Decency is standard issue machine-thought
Vodafone connects us, but only to the triumph of alienation
So our sensed presentness is served up like a suckling pig to
The computational eye
Pretending that concepts trump perception
But losing Rousseau’s dream to a newly backed up hard-drive.

Where are the arts of our most smashed senses, our enfolding touch
Incipient taste, revolutionary smell?
Paint, write, play and dance this wholly excommunicate trinity
So I can love you with my million-membered imagination,
Tickle the dogs in your flooded basement with flakes of silver pavlova
Amid the sticky oil-slick of murdered dreams
Waiting for a weightless geometry
Giving it all away in a thunderstorm
Body as artefact, body of history
Blown from the tree of amnesia
Rhythm and beat of a feral heart
On fire with the sprig of eden.

Kh
1.8.06

clock image from: growabrain.typepad.com/.../index.html