By Harry Laventure
ALASTRAM DEBET FOIBLE
So,
Lonely man up there, all in rays,
I ran out of wall today.
Tomorrow the faces of yesterday’s grey
Will be entombed as I, utterly,
Ivory wrung by the ring of a
Fullstop, the inkblot working on time monochrome,
In rhythm alone with ironed staves and, undying,
Always to find a haunt
In the darker enclosures of my head.
Outside is only sound these days;
Now glottal shadows mock and dance around my bay.
My doors are locked but it is they who, impenetrable,
Tangle themselves as barbed strings.
From the little that drips in, I gather
That broken violins are shrieking lament to
Rejecting skies and loving depths,
And I tell it to you like a blind man,
Robbed of and in excess of shade,
And no present doctor or nurse:
The hollow blood of a cough heard is
More crimson than any wound licked clean
In a limp moment, private, paper-cut absurd.
What vipers now, I wonder,
Have weeded the grounds,
And the canals that surround the scents of billowing rubbish,
Tumbling like heads, guillotine-freed,
Down the licked cobbles of faecal birds, and their
Two-legged shadow puppets on empty streets.
Often I long to be suspended as they,
On the wind’s many nooses,
To sway without swaying as the next objective.
To be spoken through in folded, gasped parcels of sky-breath’s prayer,
Rather than to speak as my broken hands once did in colour
To fade on these walls, now full, tongue shrunk in age.
What more have I to say?
When, I ask, did dank mustiness become the bedfellow of my nose?
How, I ask, have I sacrificed my wife of May
To plague days, angels of air circulating replaced
By penitent husking, bruised and self-flagellated by
The brooding of this once holy place?
Did her spring blood sing to make my carmine,
Cast only to drape decadent flaps on my friends frozen
As they dash this way and that?
A thimble of Chartreuse, jewel-shot, inverse
The floral iron lace of a bar in calligraphy’s shadow
To petal and pave the stems of herbs
In twinned stale, air bored, an ancient
Summer’s thoughts pull the brows of sinners
As sows grass, growing Chartreuse, from the ground,
Plucked thinner.
Oh I have not left this place for so long,
Stranger in the masque,
This mirrorless all reflecting place,
So please do forgive me,
Please do forgive me
When, rash as a goat and pagan, I ask
What has become of my face?
Did I leave it by the gates of the palace of the Doge? By
The train station? Has it floated to some island,
Been cast in silver before lusty rot made its claims?
Did an actor, youth and ambition gilded, bathed,
Wear it for a little line or two as he boxed with the Dane?
Perhaps a doctor, a good one, sat it down in his wife’s armchair with a dram,
To diagnose the glum in the glance,
A pure saintly and protected face such as this,
Lips indigo as the rings around wintered knuckles,
Weathered eyes above, look above.
I ask, you see, because
I can no longer.
My mind’s dissonance enough, rendered a walking mausoleum,
I have curated my little men:
See how they stand, poised, to a moment’s attention.
We are bound as a brotherhood, slaves to our silence despite best intentions,
And, whether in strife or adoration, they remain but
Walking gentlemen.
Intentions. Perhaps in the words of this
Barren den of dashes and curves
I build myself a cross for martyrdom, or merely dust
The road to Calvary with icing sugar.
For how is it, that only in characters’ company,
I am to burn with the concrete breath of my pigment conspirators;
How then, to singe history’s fine, oafish hairs to
A fool’s scalp, hidden by a fool’s hat. My brush
Flailed, flails, poltergeist like, to conjure myself into his Sunday best’s seams
– Shepherds, come adore! –
But it is his surgery scrub’s breast pocket I fear he deems the fitting spot for me.
Oh I have gazed and gazed
Into the graves of better men than I. Choked
Myself on the cold metal fonts of typewriters,
Once graced, and with bludgeoned tongue,
Devoured lobsters with the shell quite deliberately on.
I have held lightning in my fingers like the
Orchestra’s stare below the baton. Maestro!
Silken blues and greens have, under my watchful eye,
A tango about a night, in liquid affairs,
Melted clay-like and brought forth men and eyes
As hands through sheets in morning’s sunlight. To think of
The sins these walls on my watch have seen!
Perpetual resurrection, agonies evergreen.
The muscular gluttony of mares moulded from the muddy clods that spill onto the streets on a rainy day, drawing with them the strings of plague.
Oh how I see him laughing at my
Flimsy gallery of spectres,
Blackened teeth bare
With the cynical imp‘s incredulity at my throttled despair, longing.
Sometimes memory creaks in with a wincing knee,
Speaks to me like the springs of a hotel bed,
Dusts him away,
Residual, a harlot making herself at home
In this good house, His house,
This good church, now framed to me,
As the bars of a stave.
A life outside
My little kingdom inverted prism on the walls,
Fades into the oil of this marble spot
On that drowned man’s stubble,
face crescent in the puddle,
a rosary in the sand,
melancholic and holy.
Indulgence, indulgence
I simply cannot bear to indulge such potency;
Diseased, for goodness’ sake,
Let them hang ‘til dry
On street lamps from those early, slain nights!
But never mind, never mind.
Time is not mine to flirt with anymore,
Nor is a bowing palette, a hanging seat to
Raise me above the floor.
The work is done, all motion nailed down.
The chords of dying hordes still throw
Their splattered disorder into
The frail ears of my brittle laws, ridiculous
And speck the motley below. Meticulous
In its asinine obstinance, now sprawled supine on the walls
I hoped would glow.
Goodbye now, kind stranger, may such sentiments chained
Strain to call in my gilded frames;
May I curse them as unrolled palms of waves,
To claw and creep in time with tide and never reach,
Never hold.
The anemone reels from light’s cadence,
And I have become part of my coral.
Goodbye now, kind stranger,
Ecce homo; a weary trundle back to my sloth remains
Upon the revelation that I have not run out of walls,
But paint
Image credit: en.venezia.net