Carnivale In Primitive Season
...It is sometime after midnight,
but time does not matter...
We dance, smeared in clay and stamped with ashes.
our heads adorned in brightly colored regalia
of swaying sea plumes
and shimmering kaleidoscopes.
It's Carnival Season.
We celebrate down the streets
with a large pageant of masked dancers
in endless configuration of feathers and ribbons.
The vision of winds blowing
across a prairie of bodies
dressed in flowing streamers of yarn
with colors swirling around.
Each of us is aflame!
In the urgent beat of rhythms
we have no roots. We soar
into the experience of some ancient
tribal memory, circling our hearts.
Maybe this is why we dance.
To bring back that long ago memory
into a frame for real life.
As splashes of finery take to the floor
we try our best to stay away
from a band of growling men
with leather jaguar masks---who trade punches
to draw fresh blood.
We move closer to the women
with bronzed-breasts-glowing who crack
their whips in imitation
they say, of the 'Goddess of Thunder.'
They chant to her furiously
and we chant along with them.
Nobody knows why music transports
the way it does, but we begin to weep
in ecstasy.
We feel a way of life whose surface
is less solid than our own.
A life in which we can see
through the skin of a beloved.
Earth and time.
As if they were only painted gauze
with textures of the past
and the visions beyond.
Sea, sun and bodies become one
as we slowly enter into another night.
We're still dancing, joyously adrift
under a full moonrising...
From Chapter II - Moonstricken
Siren Of The Night
I gently roll,
listen, then hear faintly...
This pang of pain
rises in the self-defeat
of purpose, like a salty sail
hoisted in the wind of my despair.
What massive mast must I
raise for hope now? erected
into the lush loins
of the blue-earth sky,
dappled in lonely, loitering clouds.
I have steered a steady course
upon the liquid plain of my contentment,
found solitude
turned to isolation
before my eyes. No horizon comes,
no surety of shore,
only swells and swellings
of the deep dream of desire,
lapping the hollow hulls
of my mind------
And beneath the vast silence
of the sullen stars,
in a day turned to night
by a sunken sun,
I hear your first call--
you are the subtle sound
in between the crests of waves,
playing the music
of a palpable passion,
tapping the tympanum of my heart
with the undulating rhythm of
your insatiable, inexorable will.
You will be heard and heeded,
hanging me on the hope
of honey-healing hell,
before the morning rises, circulating
its redeeming glare
in the consciousness of regret.
Where are you?
I can feel your soft sound,
I can hold it in my mind,
a necessary buzzing of unseen, carnivorous
flies that hover like cherubs,
pretending, droning diplomats of desire,
while I grow insane
with unrequited pleasure for you.
I feel through the dark
with unharnessed hands
for a way, a restoration:
Oh! Odysseus,
where is your humble, halting wax,
to arrest the ache
that enters these once inviolate ears.
Wing-woven and swift,
my Siren of the night,
you descend
and attend to my undoing.
Swift, your uprising drafts
of drunk-delighted discourse
sweep me off my feet,
to the friction burns of temptation!
Swift, you lead me
to the rocks of a waiting wrath,
while I smile in my detention.
And swift...your storm of night
cascades in billowing flows
of unseen, sweet corruption
upon this soon erupting, rocky shore.
My meager boat now tossed,
I am capsized, marooned,
whetted,
by my dream's redemption,
upon the bedroom floor
...and hear no more.
From Chapter III - Eclipsed
Evisceration
Each night I love you--
more than the night before,
punished to roam my own desire,
as darkness descends without
true guidance of the light
of the full moon's secretive bloom.
I wish I could tenderize this
adrenal gland, feed it to those
who have no one to love,
and erase the tang and tension
that marinates my inner core
with thoughts of you.
Then, let me drown my heart for good,
rich with the brew of your being,
in its voluminous vat of
longing and tympanic tyranny,--
murder this mighty muscle
so it beats no more...
Here are my eyes that gazed on you,
ripe for the plunder and plucking,
crystal cells of lucid awareness,
caged in inexorable orbits of your vacuum.
Here they are, all,
like Vampyritic villains that cannot die:
Immortal, hungering for you.
Take them, and,
in the early morning's rise
of renewing day, impale
these body-part demons on
the stakes of the incinerating,
baptismal rays of sunlight,
never to be re-assembled,
never to feel,
never to hurt once more...
But,----if you cannot administer
this deadly, merciful deed,
tell me:
How am I not to love you
over and over again?
From Chapter IV - Moonfire
Hungry Forevers
I want...you
with the naked seclusion of greed,
to dip my hands deeply
in the rich evening of your hair;
massage the moments of this unexpected
taste and awareness
of your natural beauty; grasp
the subtle invitation of movements, to
explore wide-open territory of your wet,
unworried desire
...to feel
the stark landscape of your skin,
expose its smooth, unhidden surface
to the moisture of more and more's,
plundering well-springs of your discovery,
as fingers of brave but gentle determination
spread wide...and far...
saturate, with glimmering enrichment,
your fragile, soft terrain, leaving,
in their wake, facial trails of scented trust
…I want
to be captured
in the illumination of your eyes,
plummeted to depths
of mysteries; my mind aglow
in their honest liquid, reflecting a light
to guide me through
your secret spheres, sun
and moon and stars and heaven, swirling,
shining in seductive, celestial intensity
on a heated, glorious land, as yet unknown
...to hold you
within our universe, as you hold me...
for the static second of this stare,
where humbling need and thrusting urge
pioneer an elsewhere of understanding,
transforming the immediacy of breathless, lusty
gain to the serenity of unrushed arrival...
…embrace you
in the newly scaled, exotic wilderness of now
explore you beneath the hungry forevers
of tongue-tethered skies
call to you atop this pristine,
unconquerable summit
both hands to mouth,
screaming out "I Want You"
to the echoing everywhere
of the bursting,
dew-delivered dawn
of each
silent
kiss
From Chapter V - Moonscapes
Tonight by the Juniper Tree
