Status Updates From Selected Poetry & Prose: Th...

This flesh you break, this blood you let
Make desolation in the vein,
Were oat and grape
Born of the central root and sap;
My wine you drink, my bread you snap.

Once in the wine the summer blood
Knocked in the flesh that decked the vine,
Once in this bread
The oat was merry in the wind;
Man broke the sun, pulled the wind down.

This bread I break was once the oat,
This wine upon a foreign tree
Plunge in its fruit;
Man in the day or wind at night
Laid the crops low, broke the grapes joy.

The brains of death undid the knot
Before the blood and flame were twined
In love’s last collar.

Night in the sockets round,
Like some pitch moon, the limit of the globes;
Day lights the bone;

[letter] I realise that it is impossible for me to raise myself to the altitude of the stars, and that i am forced, therefore, to bring down the stars to my own level and to incorporate them into my own physical universe.

When logics die,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,

Dawn breaks behind the eyes

Light breaks where no sun shines;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides;
And, broken ghost with glow-worms in their heads,
The things of light
File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.

You who bow down at cross and altar,
Remember me and pity Him
Who took my flesh and bone for armour
And double crossed my mother’s womb.

I, born of flesh and ghost, was neither
A ghost nor man, but mortal ghost.
And I was struck down by death’s feather.

And time cast forth my mortal creature
To drift or drown upon the seas
Acquainted with the salt adventure
Of tides that never touched the shores.
I who was rich was made the richer
By sipping at the vine of days.

My throat knew thirst before the structure
Of skin and vein around the well
Where words and water make a mixture
Unfailing till the blood runs foul;
My heart knew love, my belly hunger;
I smelt the maggot in my stool.

And flesh was snipped to cross the lines
Of gallow crosses on the liver
And brambles in the wringing brains.

I who was deaf to spring in summer,
Who knew not sun nor moon by name,
Felt thud beneath my flesh’s armour,
And yet was in a molten form,
The leaden stars, the rainy hammer,
Swung by my father from his dome.

Before I knocked and flesh let enter,
With liquid hands tapped on the womb,
I who was as shapeless as the water
That shaped the Jordan near my home

And rock twin floods upon their starry laps,

Let for one moment a faith statement
See the first living light,
And your maieutic slumber drag it forth.
(maieutic = obstretic; sleep is regarded as the midwife of faith.)

The child tells, when the trembling cord is cut,
Gods shall be gods, and many deaths be death.

A goose’s quill has put an end to murder
That put an end to talk.

When it is rain where are the gods?
Shall it be said they sprinkle water
From garden cans, or free the floods?