Take Me Tomorrow

Salvador Dali-a Miserable Flat (From the Marquis De Sade Suite-1969

Forever the sensualist, pursuing the pleasures
Of the flesh and the transitory moment,
Every passing chance and fleeting lust
With your oh-so debonair, cavalier
Devil-may-care-can-take-me tomorrow attitude,
Never paying heed, feckless and reckless
Following every bizarre whim and contrary impulse.
You never know why you are the way you are,
Though upon any given day you may blame
The father for passing on his rogue genes
Designed to self-destruct whenever
You gain an instant of clarity and collected calm,
Or the mother for expelling you from the Eden
Of the womb into this world of sorrow and woe.
But why stop there, surely the impersonal God
In the vast unreachable fortress of the Heavens
Deserves a share for even thinking and therefore
Emanating all the demiurges and demons
To fashion this perfectly flawed creation
With its built-in obsolescent as the unique selling point
Yes the guilt and the shame has to be theirs
For the urges that you always have to act on
Regardless of consequences and the possibility
Of a whole universe of hurt and pain
But can anyone take the weight of such responsibility?
At times like this, better to drink deeply
And gamble on the possibility of redemption,
Within her encircling arms lies salvation
The pressure of her hand on your thigh
Hints at an all-encompassing bliss
An unsurpassed re-capturing of the holy moment
If only she holds on tight and doesn’t hold back
You could die right now looking into her eyes
But one moment escapes into the next
And this night, like all nights, has to end:
The sun breaks the magic circle
Ending the eclipsing spell
Returning you to the sleazy here and now,
The dishevelled bed in this pallid light
In this foetid atmosphere heavy with sex
With the bitter taste of a fulfilled desire
Turning heavy and cold in your mouth.
The time is now, I think,
Tomorrow has come
Your party is over
That race has been run
You sinned in such haste
Time now to repent
At, of course, your leisure
For Hell is forever.

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The Principle

Valentine Hugo-1948

I propose a motion:
To elucidate the principle
Of absolute pleasure;
You may demur and say,
Well, that it is incompatible
With the fundamental nature
Of ultimate reality,
Or at least suggest
Tabling an amendment.
But just give me a night,
To capture a moment
An imitation of eternity,
To turn you on—To turn you out:
Upside down, round and round,
Within 360 seconds
I would take you
Beyond the Seventh Heaven,
Transport you higher still
To the abyss of the Empyrean,
That realm of fire
That burns deep inside
Between your spreading thighs,
I will accept the invitation
Of your parted lips
And swollen nipples:
Then pause— —
— — just for a while,
Not longer than a series
Of hammering heartbeats,
Because I’m cruel like that
And I want to be sure,
That you want me
As much as I need you,
So that when we
Are finally indivisible,
And I have seeded you
With the light of supernovas
And the unbearable heat
Of a million blazing suns
You come —
— not with a scream
But with the softest
And most heartrending of sighs
For after such pleasures,
There will be no sequels
And no tomorrows
Of such agonising intensity.

Auguries of Innocence

the Vision of the Last Judgement-William Blake 1808

William Blake was widely derided during his lifetime. William Wordsworth said, “There was no doubt that this poor man was mad” and this view of poor, mad Blake seems to have been the accepted wisdom, even among the Romantics.

However Blake also mixed with major radical figures who would have an immeasurable influence on the history of ideas. For long periods Blake’s main employer and only source of income was the radical bookseller Joseph Johnson, who introduced Blake to Thomas Paine, author of Rights of Man, William Godwin, the godfather of anarchism, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the first feminist and author of Vindication of the Rights of Women, as well as advocates for the abolition of slavery. Although Blake would remain on the periphery of this circle due to his humble background, lack of formal education and visionary tendencies, it cannot be doubted that he shared their radicalism and belief in equality and freedom, especially sexual freedom.

As can be seen from Auguries for Innocence, Blake saw our relations to the natural world as another example of injustice and tyranny. Taking several occult ideas regarding the microcosm/macrocosm (To see a world in a grain of sand) and the Swedenborgian theory of correspondences (the basic relationship between two differing levels of existence), Blake presents in randomly assembled couplets a damning indictment of humanity’s casual cruelty, which, as he views the universe as interconnected, have far-reaching and reverberating consequences across time and in other realms. However Blake, with his belief in the innate divinity of humanity that would become apparent if we cleanse the doors of perception and escape the prison of the senses five, doesn’t despair. He knows that we can do better.

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.

A dove-house fill’d with doves and pigeons
Shudders hell thro’ all its regions.
A dog starv’d at his master’s gate
Predicts the ruin of the state.

A horse misused upon the road
Calls to heaven for human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted hare
A fibre from the brain does tear.

A skylark wounded in the wing,
A cherubim does cease to sing.
The game-cock clipt and arm’d for fight
Does the rising sun affright.

Every wolf’s and lion’s howl
Raises from hell a human soul.

The wild deer, wand’ring here and there,
Keeps the human soul from care.
The lamb misus’d breeds public strife,
And yet forgives the butcher’s knife.

The bat that flits at close of eve
Has left the brain that won’t believe.
The owl that calls upon the night
Speaks the unbeliever’s fright.

He who shall hurt the little wren
Shall never be belov’d by men.
He who the ox to wrath has mov’d
Shall never be by woman lov’d.

The wanton boy that kills the fly
Shall feel the spider’s enmity.
He who torments the chafer’s sprite
Weaves a bower in endless night.

The caterpillar on the leaf
Repeats to thee thy mother’s grief.
Kill not the moth nor butterfly,
For the last judgement draweth nigh.

He who shall train the horse to war
Shall never pass the polar bar.
The beggar’s dog and widow’s cat,
Feed them and thou wilt grow fat.

The gnat that sings his summer’s song
Poison gets from slander’s tongue.
The poison of the snake and newt
Is the sweat of envy’s foot.

The poison of the honey bee
Is the artist’s jealousy.

The prince’s robes and beggar’s rags
Are toadstools on the miser’s bags.
A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.

It is right it should be so;
Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Thro’ the world we safely go.

Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.

The babe is more than swaddling bands;
Throughout all these human lands;
Tools were made and born were hands,
Every farmer understands.
Every tear from every eye
Becomes a babe in eternity;

This is caught by females bright,
And return’d to its own delight.
The bleat, the bark, bellow, and roar,
Are waves that beat on heaven’s shore.

The babe that weeps the rod beneath
Writes revenge in realms of death.
The beggar’s rags, fluttering in air,
Does to rags the heavens tear.

The soldier, arm’d with sword and gun,
Palsied strikes the summer’s sun.
The poor man’s farthing is worth more
Than all the gold on Afric’s shore.

One mite wrung from the lab’rer’s hands
Shall buy and sell the miser’s lands;
Or, if protected from on high,
Does that whole nation sell and buy.

He who mocks the infant’s faith
Shall be mock’d in age and death.
He who shall teach the child to doubt
The rotting grave shall ne’er get out.

He who respects the infant’s faith
Triumphs over hell and death.
The child’s toys and the old man’s reasons
Are the fruits of the two seasons.

The questioner, who sits so sly,
Shall never know how to reply.
He who replies to words of doubt
Doth put the light of knowledge out.

The strongest poison ever known
Came from Caesar’s laurel crown.
Nought can deform the human race
Like to the armour’s iron brace.

When gold and gems adorn the plow,
To peaceful arts shall envy bow.
A riddle, or the cricket’s cry,
Is to doubt a fit reply.

The emmet’s inch and eagle’s mile
Make lame philosophy to smile.
He who doubts from what he sees
Will ne’er believe, do what you please.

If the sun and moon should doubt,
They’d immediately go out.
To be in a passion you good may do,
But no good if a passion is in you.

The whore and gambler, by the state
Licensed, build that nation’s fate.
The harlot’s cry from street to street
Shall weave old England’s winding-sheet.

The winner’s shout, the loser’s curse,
Dance before dead England’s hearse.

Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born,
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.

We are led to believe a lie
When we see not thro’ the eye,
Which was born in a night to perish in a night,
When the soul slept in beams of light.

God appears, and God is light,
To those poor souls who dwell in night;
But does a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day.

Intimacy

Rene Magritte-The Lovers 1928

All you ever
All you ever wanted
All you ever needed
All you ever
All you ever looked for
Was that intrusion of intimacy
At first, maybe just a glance,
Then the fleeting touch
That lingers for a brief instance
Suggestive of a succession of eternities
Something yet still more
Than the fiction of painless friction
A sovereign surrender
A paradoxical return to the self
Urging to merge together
Indivisible diversity
Rushing towards a paradise
Of blissful annihilation
All we ever sought
All we ever
All we ever tried to find
In tired old hotel bedrooms
Where the leaky faucets
Taps out a tedious tattoo
On the cracked enamel
All we ever
Amongst the haphazardly scattered
Bricks of centuries old ruins,
Beneath a uniform sky
The very denial of colour
All we ever desired
On the encroaching beach
Torching the landscape
With its scorched earth strangeness
All we ever tried to do
In the wasteland littered
With bric-a-brac and detritus,
The untold story of a million lives
Struggle for pleasure,
Was to become intimate
To really feel someone other,
To escape the terror
However briefly,
Even for an instance,
Of the All-Seeing I.

All I ever needed
All I ever wanted
All I ever
Was your intimacy.

 

More Beautiful Still

Bob Carlos Clarke

My fourth (and final, well for the moment anyway) recording from my recently published collection Motion No. 69. My other recordings The Answer, My Evil is Stronger and Curvature can be heard by following the links. Of course to get the full works you will have to buy the collection available from Amazon.

Happy Christmas and Holiday Season to all my lovely, loyal readers.

 

You are the bride
stripped bare by the
vestal bachelors, even.
I would strip you down
to the very bone,
to burn myself
on the upside-down flame
that is your heart.

For you, to me
are as beautiful as
a lipstick-stained cigarette
held between trembling fingers;
More beautiful still
than the parted legs
of an architect’s divider
bisecting a wearying,
unwavering straight line.
Even more beautiful
than a roiling dark cloud
pregnant with heavy rain.
As beautiful as
a string of zeros and O’s.
Still more beautiful
than the city in summer—
festering like an open wound.
Still as beautiful, even
as the angle
between two walls.

Will the conjunction
in the heavenly zones
between your beauty
and my uncertain,
flickering self
result in a happy ending?

 

 

Papua New Guinea

Andre Breton Atelier , 42 Rue Fontane-Gilles Ehrmann 1968

Andre Breton’s apartment at Rue Fontane, above the strip clubs and clip joints of the Pigalle red light district was by most accounts almost a work of art in its own right. In 2003 the French auctioneers Calmels Cohen put over 5,300 lots under the hammer from Breton’s vast collection of books, manuscripts, works of art and objects at Drouot-Richelieu; the catalogue alone extends to 8 volumes. The sale included 150 items of Oceanic art, the most important being the magnificent Uli statue from Central New Ireland, Papua New Guinea that graced his desk for many years.

Once again it is instructive to look at the Surrealist Map of the World (reference my previous posts Redraw the Map, Re-Write History and Re-Invent Reality or Rapa Nui) to see the importance official Surrealism attached to the islands of the Pacific. In this idealised rendering of how the world should be according to the Surrealists, Papua New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago is centrally located and larger than both Europe and Africa and truly dwarfs Australia.

Central to Papua New Guinea artistic reputation within Surrealist circles were the Uli, ancestor figures used for rites and endowed with immense magical powers. When a chieftain died his skull was buried and a tree planted on top of the burial place. After the tree had matured it was then cut down and the Uli was fashioned from the wood. The Uli are often bearded with protruding jaw and phallus to represent the traditional masculine attributes of strength and protection, while also possessing breasts as the ideal chieftain must maternally nurture and provide. When the Uli wasn’t participating in fertility, initiation and funerary rituals it would be kept in its own special enclosure away from prying eyes.

Breton was very taken with the Uli, naming a beloved Skye terrier Uli and dedicating a poem which I have included below. I have also included photographs for some of the most outstanding examples of this figure that Breton calls Grand Dieu, as well as the Future Sound of London’s seminal dance track Papua New Guinea, the video of which doesn’t include either the Uli or Papua New Guinea much as far as I can see, but does have some magic squares.

ULI

Surely you are a great god
I have seen you with my own eyes like no one else has
You are still covered with earth and blood you have just created
You are an old peasant who knows nothing
To recover you have eaten like a pig
You are covered with the stains of man
One sees that you have stuffed yourself to the ears
You listen no more
You leer at us from the bottom of a seashell
Your creation tells you hands up, and you still threaten
You frighten, you astonish.

Andre Breton 1948

Uli-Previously of the collection of Andre Breton

Uli

Uli

Uli Statues

The Answer

Max Ernst-Un Chant d’Amour 1958

Here is another teaser, read by myself, from my recently published collection Motion No. 69 which can be purchased in both paperback and e-book formats here and across  Amazon regional sites. If you want to buy directly from myself just drop me a line signifying your interest and I am sure we can come to some arrangement.

Whatever the question,
I probably have the answer,
for I have my tricks and techniques.
I know how to entrance and enthrall,
to hypnotize and bewitch,
to persuade and seduce.
Just come over here,
and look into my eyes.
Bend down and I will whisper
softly into your ear,
everything I know,
everything I’ve ever learned
about want and need,
and about the desire born
in the darkness of a heart
filled with a hate more vast and compelling
than the night before the Last Judgement.
This ravening appetite can never be sated,
though I long to return to the primal source
and its pristine innocence.
Drink me and I will eat you —consume you—
and you gorge on me and my love,
for love is rapture—
a rupture between Heaven and Earth.
Love is ecstasy—
a nerve flaying glimpse of dizzying possibilities.
Love is an acid, corroding the identity,
dissolving the ego.

Acid is the answer.

The Announcement

I am very pleased to announce that my collection of 69 inter-related poems and short fictions, Motion No.69  by Alex Severs  and fulsomely illustrated by Thea Kiros is now available for purchase here (as well as the various regional sites), in both paperback and e-book formats. I do trust that you will enjoy and any feedback, whether good, bad or indifferent is most desirable.

My Evil is Stronger

Ellen Rogers

If you weren’t already aware, my collection Motion No. 69 is now available as an e-book (just click on the Author Page link). If you haven’t already decided to buy (for shame), maybe the little taste below will persuade you. I have also included audio, read by yours truly.

That look on your face?
Take it off, wipe it away.
I know you.
You and your kind,
always taking advantage
of every situation.
With a disarming smile,
a cheeky grin, a dubious charm.
But when nobody’s watching,
the smile instantly fades
from your too-full, sensual lips,
licking, cat-like
in anticipation of a kill tonight.
Fresh meat indeed…
Your eyes glazing over:
Thousand-yard-lasered-hypnotic-death-stare
causing electro-magnetic fluctuations
in the immediate field
of vision and effect;
In the unnerving darkness,
your stoned, Satanic laughter echoes.
Yes, your evil is strong.
You know a thing or two.
Read between the lines of Faust.
Hold Prometheus as the burning example.
A dollar-store De Sade,
with a stable of Justines and Juliettes.
But my evil is stronger.
You could never begin to comprehend
the ways of me and my kind:
Contractors for the Apocalypse,
Annihilating Angels,
we are elemental and pan-universal.
Your evil is strong.
No love lost
within your small, black heart,
but I am darkness incarnate—
the isolate of terror.
My evil is stronger,
as you will find out right quick.
Unless you take
that damnable look
off your face.

The Beach

The Beach-Thea Kiros

In approximately 6 hours and 9 minutes both formats of my collection of 69 inter-related poems and short fictions Motion No. 69 will be available for purchase here. At the present moment only the e-book is available, somewhat ahead of schedule for a change.

Rather like its author, this collection is slim, elegant, charming and darkly attractive. Motion No. 69 shows also that there is truth in advertising after all. A must read for a rainy day on the beach, whether it is a Blue Monday or not.