Within Our Ken

A bedroom scene where morning light insists
through lace upon a strew of clothes; a bed,
unmade, lace pillows with the scent of trysts;
depressions in their careful plump; a head
shadowed by the sun’s renewed forgiveness.
Long hair, quite black with pooling silver shimmers,
distracts the eye a while from all this mess
that talks of passing heat that barely simmers.

With the twisted silk pyjamas wrapped about
her neck, how like a doll within its house
she lies, snapped, jetsam hurled by sudden drought
across the wastes of velour sheets. Such nous
as may be found here comes in childish grief
outside, in sobs for temper, subtle thief.

Red Book

‘I should advise you to put it all down
as beautifully as you can – in some
beautifully bound book.’

– C. J. Jung

Red leather traps Ahura Mazda’s fingers.
He strokes gold shafts, gold vanes, gold barbs and barbules
barbicels that form his wings. He lingers
high in mid-space of the blue horizon,
aloft within chaotic azure rules:
two places here, and here, and neither, none;
when from the zenith of a midnight sun,
darkness clems like ink in swirling pools.

For when he hints of speech in glints of glyphs,
In frosted syllables of glistered fright,
Tanit rips the tongue from out his throat;
devours the words that never see the light.
But from his champing teeth comes sprays of gore
those eagle-livered dark, eternal Ifs
that manifest as paeans, beauty, war;
palimpsests of horror and of note.