Too Many Voices

White Rabbit-Jan Svankmajer-Neco Z Alenky 1988

-I’m going to be late
-You’re always late
-Have we met before?
-You have always known me
Since the end anyway
-Quick hurry hurry quick
Underhill overvalley
Up up and away
This is a bird
This is a train
This is a bullet
-I would like to propose
A dialectic of chance
-Rather a toast
To the innumerable charms of women
Jade eyed goddess spare ribs
Heavenly portraits exquisite sculptures
-Hang on that is rather rich
Coming from you that gives
A whole new world of meaning
To every derogatory term I can think off
-Blue blue neon blue
Flashes and blinks the colour
Of my mid-morning dreams
-Too many voices
Subject to a savage distortion
Sending the cats and dogs
Of the neighbourhood into
A barking yowling frenzied cacophony
-Of course this is utterly without consequence
-But it may in fact be highly significant
-I will give you sixty seconds of pleasure
A moment outside time
A concentration of experience
The naked truth the bare essentials of existence
I’ll open your eyes when you spread those legs
-Droning on vocals fried
Ante post meta
Morpheus alpha omega
-The legends of a life
-Monsters behind the myths
-Cutting scratched breaking
A chorus echo of amens
-Immobile face and as heavy featured
As an Easter Island stature
Watching waiting before turning away
-Now I’ll never make it intime

Chance would be

I-Ching

Chance would be
a beautiful thing
make it reign fall
downpour a deluge
and after the storm
a reverent silence
before starting up
and over again
to begin afresh
chance encounters
revelatory rituals
random sequences
casting of die
turning of cards
flipping of coins
drawing of straws
moving of pieces
intertwining-locking
heavenly combinations
hieratic poses
together you-I
swayed by chance.

The Staircase to the Forest

Susanne Rempt-Staircase 2018

The way out is through the door
verging on a vertiginous staircase
the only way is down though from
this skewered perspective that may
paradoxically lead you upward
so ever onward begin the descent,
quickly take the steps but careful
mind the gaps widening fissures
leading you into the dense forest
so easy to lose your bearings here
the sunlight barely penetrates
this vast twilight realm of hidden
dangers patiently waiting preying
in the branches, undergrowth
did you forget your thread, crumbs?
Compass or maps are no use here
in this contorted maze old as time
if by chance you ever do stumble into
the sacred point, the absolute centre
what you will find is a jumble of stone
slabs stained by millennia of sacrifice
the enactment of hushed mysteries
performed to the veiled huntress
forever unrevealed, unknowable
the sacred cannot be witnessed
any verification is defilement
of a majestic divine inhuman purity
transcendence is transgression
punishable by transformations
inexorable sarcasms of fate
so move on, there is something
to be seen here but not by our eyes
let’s just scatter to the wind
stand by the towering waterfall
that pounds, pulverises, wears down
the landscape changing eventually
courses streams you can’t
step in here twice so float flow
towards distant mother pre-adamic
hold hands jump into the swell
feel the caress of the dark masseur
the currents riptides the source
of life an unconscionable dream. .

Glossolalia

Alexandra Levasseur

I will have you
You will be speaking in tongues
Crying out harsh barbaric invocations
Shouting entreaties to forgotten deities
Babbling away in rapturous ecstasy
Before this night is over but you better
Believe that this is only the beginning

For I will have you
Over and over and yet once again
Every element of these arcane rituals
Have to be satisfied in every aspect
The right word said in the right place
At the right time this is the right action
That will cause the doors to open wide

I will have you
I will take you there to a place you
Can only vaguely remember in dreams
A world of mesmerising fascinations
Inevitably leading to intoxicating danger
Nothing is true nothing is real everything
Shapeshifts you only have your self to lose.

Colour Schema

Ellen Rogers

Your fingertips glance
Glide press down there
Glissade here yes
Definitely right there
Now your touch
Locks me up
In a prism of colour
Chromatic schema
Red-black-blonde
Linger forever
Jade hazel verdigris
Slate azure golden
Still-point the centre
Slightest impact
Implosion the taste
Of mouths filled
Consumed with star
Light turning inward
Rushing recklessly
Onwards towards
The horizon event
Vanilla honeyed tristesse.

The Magistery of Gold

Max Ernst-Le Silence á travers les âges-1968

Come here you, closer still,
I want you to be the first to know
That gold is all around this town
Beneath the streets & sewers,
Scattered haphazardly here there
Everywhere, enough to dazzle,
Blind the unwary with the glitter,
Shimmering dissolving glamour
When the sun shines again:
Do you have it within to dare?
To serve this magistery right?
To make the mad dream real,
Turn this place into Tenochtitlán,
Render into actuality El Dorado:
Do you possess the strength to will
Into existence all the power & glory
Of this metallic inhuman purity
The cold coalescence of stars?
After you have known, dared,
Willed these forces into being,
Now that you are experienced,
Initiated & illuminated can you
Keep a secret, will you remain silent?

A Ritual Assignation

Alison-Blickle

You’re looking out of the window
seeing all the opportunities spread
before you like a heavenly banquet
and you’re wondering whether
to dare and make that leap.
Well do you believe in what I say?
Have you faith in my vision?
Will you be ready intime
for our long delayed assignation
to give yourself completely
Over to the dream I dreamt for you?
Falling is such bliss, those seconds
Of recall, clarity, then impact.

You’re trembling like a fine-veined
leaf in a lashing storm, come,
no need to be nervous though
it does initially add to the frisson.
Still I understand your concern,
you’re unsure whether I will be
cruel, tender, or even distracted.
You gather from some of my actions
that I can be wanton and crude
or maybe wayward and perverse.
However if you want the exaltation,
(and I know that’s your desire,
I’ve been around, I know
a thing or two and you wouldn’t
be the first that I have turned
inside out and tied up in knots)
then you must relax and let
what is going to happen, happen;
whether I serve you like royalty
or you find freedom in sacrifice,
the ecstasy of divine debasement,
a savage joy in effacing and erasing
the burdensome wearying self.
I will let you play your games
until it is time for the ritual
to commence in earnest,
revealing the solemn mystery,
contained in your unveiled body;
both the map and the territory:
the exit and the gateway.

The Radiant Nowhere

Voisin Plan

Incarcerated within these four walls,
though God only knows my crimes,
she’s not the only judge these days.

Sometimes I feel there is some hope
however it’s never for us my love,
the radiant nowhere is for others.

The upright citizens of island utopias,
constructing ziggurats to the Sun,
expanding across the Voisin Plains.

Outlining heavenly harmonics,
devising pure driven ideals for living,
building towards a total perfection.

A monumental brutalism designed
to imprison, degrade and monitor
the remnants of the un-engineered soul.

So that now whatever freedom
we possess is limited, maybe illusory.
But what’s life without secret, lies and sin?

SinisterShoreSide

Kurt Seligmann

At the school where I did anything but study
They tried to beat out the boldness
Only to encourage my wild and wicked side,
So they changed tack and instead talked and talked
Attempted to bore me from being bad
But it was of no use, they couldn’t avail
Because I was born sinister, one of the devil’s own;
My sympathy is always for the rogues and rebels,
The wanton and the wayward, waifs and strays,
Those sweet tarts with sickly gold hearts.
Even then my intentions were never honourable
But always and forever criminal, amen.

Let me take you down the left hand path,
Come on angel and crash with me
On the west side with its sinister streets,
Lift up your skirt and part those legs
Let’s ride through the rippling night
I will take you up to where I’m at,
Before showing you what’s down below,
Under the hill and beneath the deep blue.
Then solve et coagula, our reflections
Will refract in an avant garde rehearsal
Then splinter before a final re-con
Figuration on the distant sinister shore.

Be True

Man Ray-Observatory Time 1936

Coming down
Calm it, calming
Coming down
Calming, calm it.

-Talk to me

-I wish I could talk—
But easier said;
A few issues remain unresolved,
In fact permanently outstanding.

I have always been afflicted,
If Memory serves,
(Not me though,
Bitch is thoroughly self-serving
With her insidious insinuations,
Rosey sepia’d projections,
Doctored newreels,
Whispering re-writes,
Flat-out brazen taunting,
Wince inducing comparisons;
The future ain’t what it used to be
But was the past so very hot?)
By a stuttering reluctance
To showtell, that would be an act,
Stripping myself bare to tease,
Besides what if there is nothing
Beneath to reveal, could I stand
The disappointment turning
To anger and then inevitably,
As night turns to day, to hatred?
So I crouched my sentences
In an invented, inverted argot
Of my own twisted devising,
A cunning linguistic cant
Impenetrable and dense
Filled with allusions, elisions,
Strewn with the slang and jargon
Of restless haunted journeys;
The most I could hope for
Was an odd sensation of frisson,
The occasional moment of fusion,
Before the dissolution of an imagined unity;
Fracturing, splintering, fragmenting,
Sending me back into my private
Realm where I can babble away,
In my nonesuch nonsense language,
Or just remain silent if I wished,
(and therefore, be true?)

Zaum de dum dada
Voynich Seraphinianus