By Jupiter! By Bacchus!: Against Humility
In the black ooze of the sky,
where golden spangling stars alight,
Jupiter, alone at its zenith
inhales the wispy galactic night
and knows it will always be
lonely drifting in the mortal dark
ether, with lurking stars dripping
over the Gaia’s distant green park
cos’ stars were never enough
to rise from the black nadir, and up
into the remote and empty nebula
to drink from Bacchus’ drinking cup —
and drunken Jupiter, alone, towers
the stars, the Earth and its ground
for once upon a time, it dared
to think beyond the common crowd
and forge its history in the cloud
of planets and celestial objet d’art
that whistle to the interminable tune
of red Jupiter’s bellowing chant.
Pale Tangerine Glimmer
A pale tangerine glimmer
of the night-bound bedside lamp
throws the musky June room
away from the rising damp.
In the glimmer, in the bed,
a twenty-something dreamer lays,
a torso and his brain out
to dream of better days.
The night is otherwise blank
where most of dreaming is done
and his hopes in tangerine glimmer
are days that will never come.
Annabelle
I.
The waltzer of the ages sleeps
in the gulley’s of the Gaia, as black
and draping starry skies
lurch on the night’s bowed back
and the tired dried lips of her
pale bouche fall tenderly agape
above the body foetal-wrapped
into a shrunken huddled shape
where the ashen day-wandrin’ limbs
and boughs of the temple’s trunk
enmesh in the cold March night
in the room of sheets, bumf and bunk
but in this drunken crimson womb,
the waltzer takes forty to fifty winks,
turning the curled lashes to the rising
whiskey sun and clouds of mottled pink.
II.
In the milk-white mist of life,
a kindred spirit cantered passed
with painted deep-mauve lips
parted by the iced Bacardi glass,
with her rhythm, loose and beguiled
as the slinking tangerine sun,
sinking into the dusk
of what must
go and then become
and over the lawn, the season
greened except for this spirit, lost
in the wispy dandelions, blowing
in the gardens, wild and tossed
where the kindred spirit lingers,
dancing on the evening’s glebe
loitering in the party’s gobbledegook
by the tallest, greenest willow tree
and though the night’s as black
as rum, her eyes billow wild hazel
fires, which send a tingle from
my dreamy brain down to my navel.
The Weeping Traveller
Tonight, the feckless dreaming jongleur
pours wasted tears into his palms,
thinking of the dark peat-brown fringe,
combed, glossed, stitched and darned
to the iridescent spotless sky,
the brown barnet of a wild free youth
wavering above her ashen face
shaped by the brutish hands of Zeus
and the jongleur’s seas of tears fill
the Earth’s oceans empty floors
when he is sure he never wanted
anyone so much, so long, so more.
