Poems that you love

[milo]

Brash, Over written and obscure, written by a friend and never published as an attempt at a triple sestina this will always be one of my favorite poems:

Orpheus and Thelxepeia
or
The Song of the Silent Siren

rape:
-n. rapine, plunder, seizure (obs.):
carnal knowledge of a woman without her legal consent.
-vt. to seize and carry off (obs.):
to commit rape upon:
to ravish or transport, as with delight (obs.).
-ns. ra´per; ra´pist.-adj. ra´ping, tearing prey (her.):
ravishing, delighting (obs.).
-n. a division of Sussex.

wild rape:
Charlock or Field-Mustard.


1.Prologue


This is not about feeble-wombed attempts to scrape
A few sunlit zephyrs from their perch on the cloud-break
Of rainbow-buoyed cumuli. These cries are silenter than the eyes
Of Philomela, unlidding from the darkling sycamore boughs that bow
To Celia's sorry wane. Pleasure has become dread's rose
And I can only hear the dog-wan
Whines of Weber's burning edifices; Hate
Is the cuckoo nested in crumbled infrastructures: it lays
Its head parallel to the traffic lining the full
Motorways, Freud's twenty-first century mind gapping in the slip-shone
Crimson cracks of cat's eyes, a prophecy of the slip-road light
Of men resting their heads perpendicular to the sea
Of a headlight's anti-umbra. Ruin is didacted in Red
Sea central reservations; the X-sing
Of two auto routes; the collapsing of the free way; wax
Melting its taper into a self-annihilating anti-smile.
And when the fat has tremulously set
Into the brittle plaster of the past, escape becomes the kiss

Of history's pillaged hills. The capital hands reach action
Bloody into inheritance's reserves, trying to collate
Natural safety, gathering from the stores of certainty's mile.
Tarmac claws reach out and rend the beautiful
Truth, once a pastoral Arcadia, now upset
By wheedling service stations, smogging factories, the burst grape
Under the cemented tongue-crush of civilization. Daybreak
Cannot kiss away the tears of morning, when it wakes
A deeper dimness in the heart of humanity's blight.
This is about how the Orphean Lyre can sing
Of tranquility in the fastening waves of the sea;
Of positive capability in the rejected white-swan
Purity that was once held in the harboured
Hands of poetry. I have charted capitalist glory's rise
In a ravel of wretched memories and I bow
Under the roll of its Stygian brouillard, which plays
Mutiny with our bones. This is a prayer that Psyche's dark is
Not a violated husk lashing nakedly in irrecoverable throws.

2.Brighton


London was becoming a blur of twilight
Zone high-rise office blocks. I decided a break
Was the gem of decision, the billowing easy
Of the ocean's massage, a reach for the dextrose
Revitality of Brighton. The monastery of the uncloistered
Channel would unfetter the claustrophobia of polluted skies.
Taking the M23 south, meadows soon made a laze
Of the memory of gray monotony, with a traipse
Of mustard-yellow charlock, in the careful
Leas quilting Surrey. The mega-road cut an incision
Ominously through the hills, shadowed in the rising
Walls of a cliff-cut swell, but the sunshine won
A battle and restored the temporary blackish-
Ness to forgetful interment. The ashy elbow
Curves swathed gently downwards, as if the sea could deflate
Terrain into its lapping arms. Soon the wind's mill
Of salt breeze coasted the solemn quacks
Of gulls to my ears, wrapping me in a slackened saline corset.

Apollo was sending his final arrows shooting from his bow
As I stepped onto the pebble-caltropped beach. The floozy
Caresses of white Nereids tried soothingly to placate
The stones into sand; the stones in turn rumbled derision
At her strokes, not knowing their eroding plight
Was in the future of her persistence. The sudden whacks
Of rock on bone drew my doe ears to its fretful
Sound and then I saw her: the horse-break
Poseidon met her feet for fin in the ambrose
End of day; she lay in the sun's last glaze,
Sulkily stacking sailor's skulls in the guise
Of a miniature Golgotha. The last daughter of Phorkys,
Thelxepeia, silkily in black-dyed clothing creped,
Immodestly divine and hybrid in her deceasing
Attire. As starlight began to glimmer in her roan
Hair, she caught my stare with a cat-suited smile
And gazed with the nebulous pockets of the Mariana Trench, carmine-fevered
And sorrowful, as if they were Hades' sole earthly faucets.

"Long time," I began feebly, the words buzzing like flies
In the moon-spilling air. My words shattered
In the crack of a flinted blow upon the sleazy,
Vacant stare of a faceless mariner. "This one, did he hate
Me when the rocks ripped a ragged hole, the waves' flays
And lashes rushed in and penetrated his vessel's unbreak-
Able flanks?" Without pause for reply, even one
Apologetic whisper, my cavern mouth was bouldered: "And this, crow's
Nest watcher, when he dropped like Hermes from a Zeus-thrown flight
Into the cracking timbers of the Armada? And when I beset
The Lusitania with a barrage of missiling cants? The icy missing
Dead of the Titanic? All my playthings, they all bow
And nod to the bitter swannish music, a simile
For the oscillations of the eternal tides, waned and waxed
In the pitch of my storm-filled aria. Undying attention,
Undying lovers, unquestioning in where their wreck is
Done lying." Her mounds of manacled Troiluses, graceful
In the necrological moonshine, tilted to her barnacled melodies, enrapt.

I heard a scream in every murmur of her voice, the cries,
Dreadful screams in a thickly-painted soundscape, of murdered
Men in a forest of falling masts. "Only the seraph
Of sunflowers and sun can wield the brush that daubs me undone
And slave to the emptiness of enchantment. You think your unlight
Verse can bring an early dusk to my morning transcendency?"
"I hate the filthy cloudy evening, I hate
The night, more hate the morning and you. Your words are loathful
To me, Apollic pawn; and how fares your wife's condition?"
Vine-strangled gloss greened my throat, offset
By the piston-tempest of her insult's bone-break.
Petty, though, I retorted: "The Muses must laugh and smile
To see how low your feather-plucked song has warbled in cussing."
But crystal tears of dried sea spray caught my blaze
In a pillared flashback of Eurydice. "Your words lilt me more than prose,
Orpheus, but suffering?" she spat, "In that you are not as acidly verbose.
Oh, all your anguished, bleeding angels look like cigarettes, as they kiss
The devils that cut their heads off, with a poet's ink-feathered axe."

"So tell me, which tree birthed the unholy sighs
Of your lilt; which forbidden fruit's mark is
On your tongue's bladeless hilt?" Now on
Her visage her heart left a passing template
And I feared she would turn on me with a new axe
Of felling rhythms. "You know nothing of sorrows,
Nothing, nothing." The syncopated delays
Of her crocus-forced words left me uneasy;
I could see the comma dotted on her lips, which pared
Like butterfly wings, nestling on a stanza break
For breath. "You ask why I turn to the russet
Tones of thorns, why my voice is the scrape
Of broken oars on half-sunken jags? Will your soulful
Lyre taunt me again since Jason found salvation
In that messianic fugue?" Life had cycled its mill,
Ground full circle now; her voice set alight
My silent submergence; her shoulders drooped willow boughs
As I sat. "This time I am listening. Please, sing."

3.London


"After: History only marred its pages with heroes, only remembered
The vanquisher. After the Argo passed and the satrap
Jason sailed on to destroy other women, the fretful
Laments of my sisters keened in miseried plosion.
Though we took one of your number, the coursing
Agony of Parthenope's suicide took delight
From the cascade of blood we lacerated from Zelion's wan,
Drowned squid, Butes. There seemed no cure for her demise,
But vengeance. No more Greek sailors waxed
The boast: "Aristen men hydor!" to their land's mile
Distance; we caught up Scylla in our swirl, set
Charybdis and our sister Gorgons on the crazy
Path of venom, till only black-sailed vessels braved the breaks,
In tribute to our family of funerary genii. The bowl
Of Poseidon's See was a bath for vampire prelates,
The blue-bloodless bodies were infinitely beached with stained inlays
Of the ocean's suckling teeth in them. Unbound verse arose,
In a hymn to homicide, a psalm to slaughter; a cacophonic hiss.

"I remember when he, Odysseus, appeared, surfing the slate
Rocks on a bitterly boarded trireme. The crew axed
Their duties like motor-energized echinoids, only messy
In the mouth-spat threats that scouted their sail's mile
To our Sicily. Then promises made true; the anchor set
And the disembarked intent swarmed and scoured
Our sonnetry into a broken prison. Destruction
Took undiscovered forms; what more can flies
Say to the pantheon's wantonness? We have been cursing
Them since Hades stole Persephone; we could not brake
That juggernaut of patriarchy then, why now? Just one
Voice survives; and that lacks, but longs to account for the rape
That repeats in the undertow wrapped about
The unstoppable engine of men. The wrecked reckless flight
I allied myself to has no record, the wrack is
Only in my mind, like an undocumented holocaust; it lays
An ovic nightmare in my sparsely stolen slumber, ever doubtful
In my weathered, naked, irrecoverable throws.

"I dove into disappearance, but my feature's striking barb owes
Too much to the ensuing pursuit. By daylight
And dark Odysseus forced his hounds on, the scrape
Of his hooves in the hunt of a bushy trophy, the cracks
Of rigging rope whipping my vixen gauntlet. In full
Cry they curdled the screaming waves, tossing the white equine eyes
Into mad sweat and a suicide spray of daggered
Rain. Storms and stealth I cast behind, crossing
The deadliest vortexes with the discord of broken odes, till I knew an
Answer lay only in seeking the horizon's fractured sunset
And by scenting the sanguine horror of another daybreak,
All a salvation-stalking prayer, pleading to the gods to black his
Eyes with permanent charcoaled sleep. Those great heroes,
Honoured for avidity to blood, hostile to a peasants' smile,
Loyal only to the flower-strewn fields they sow corpses in, the weight
Of a sword-strike on a red-sweet jugular, or the curvation
Of their oars' thrust into the hearts of a blue salt water. They blaze,
Those men that died for Odysseus, as he did. They lust for frenzy;

"Pangs for fire, famine, flood: tied to the red
Fog of their own masts, begging to unleash madness miles
Into our shared world, claiming all with no need for a brake
On the surge of manic expression. Detestation grows,
As Odysseus knew; and when a man dies,
Someone is to blame. Someone will drop the final kiss
On a cold cheek and raise their head, the sequential
Of sadness to spite. He was carved in wood and set
His men to the same direction; the elements were truthful
To me in whittling their multitude, but my swan-
Song coarsened into a screech-owl howl as their delight
In vengeance bloomed barren of all fruit but the wracks
Of torture they could reward themselves with. The bow
Of his ship bent crooked in speed, sprouting scrabbling claws, the sea
Trailing the scars of the ruining harvest being reaped.
Soon he mounted each roiling crest alone, the sharp serrate
Of the prow gashing opaque foam, the leagues unlacing
Infinitely in exhaustion, his filthy desire ignoring my pleading lays.

"The mouth of the Thames gulleted me, the page-break
From salt to fresh, soon stale. The sands of Margate were trampled,
submission-
Stamped by broiling whirlpool hooves; Moorgate acted thunder-voiced plays
Above, till, a fortnight dead from chase, the static-cascading, full
Clouds overturned, spilling onto the liquid mountains, valleys and ridges
unsmiled
In the bowl of Richmond's breached womb. Highbury excreted me into the
blight
Of Sin's spawn, barking death from the cribbed innards of the London dock's
Sprawl. Stalactitic scratches retina-plummeted to meet the stalagmite
Crests growling from the psychotic screeching of the Thames Daughters,
rising,
Meshing as a grotesquely barred cave. In the dim cavern of Westminster
Bridge, captured
In the barrel-burning flicker of a plastic-smoked rubbish fire, I could see
Him, presupposing, cunning. Smuttily gulping Scotch and moly in the
undisguised
Garb of a vagabond, he was deaf to my enervated tereuing; clogging earwax
Protruded like a stench down his stubble-spattered cheeks. Odysseus grabbed,
scraped
My tired scales on the glass-gouted ground, lurched me stomach-wards, elbow-
Propped on piss-covered tiles. That man on my back; the cyclopean fire that
set
A random rive of kraken-eyed incidences: the overabundance of history's rows
Of repeated cycles; a million to my one broken body left insanely scarred
and wan."

4.Brighton


The hand that writes this is a badly made bivouac
For sheltering the shiver-splintered voice of that tale. No gusset
In her armour was left unpierced; she tried to thread
Together a Circaean-assembled smile
That saw me transformed to tears. The glazed clays
Of her eyes were as chipped as the iguana-spiked plate
Armour she had slipped with such difficulties
To the unsoftened pebbles. My verse was a bow
Firing silence in the dark of midnight, the sea
The only angry ripple of her kindred suffering. Fed by slight
Breaths short in her chest, she remained beautiful
In a broken survival, wretched as the heartbreak
I felt when Cerberus was at my back again. Losing
Pace for the sunlight, life can always return to life, even to one
Like this. Just as my arms became a wrap
To soften her shuddering woes, so I use this pen; it throws
Its words around the form of a damaged timbre; its mission
Of comfort the only offering with which her tears to kiss.

"Philosophy suffers in reality; if there is ever an easy
Escape from a razed existence, then find me someone
Who can release that noun, that object, the one that undiscovers the set
Of atrocities seared in a ravaged mind. Those theoretical voices glaze
The clay of life into gaudy angles, so the colour flies
Off the fragility encasing your anima, in draped
Associations of another man's wit, not your own shaped condition.
I cannot give you my verse, my own melody, as a way to break,
Shatter, then mend the jigsaw mentus from pained panic into a smile,
Abstracted from your soul-penetrated despair. Could I sing
Of joy in stone? - Then of water on stone and the alight of sunshine's kiss
Played on that trickled tune, that runs its freight
On the stony rhythmic bass of a solid promise - but a fretful
Sonic twist will hear the dark-boled whine of twilight
Traveled on the slaughter-stained river, that throws
A torrent along a war drum beat of bone. Your ears bow
To your emotion, your eyes to the gray-shaded perspex of a shuttered
Blindfold, sealing innocent vision from afflicted memory stacks."

"But I have moved through time, petrified like water in an oxbow
Lake; and yet the turgid rumblings of fear unset-
Tled me. Curled, knees to breast, in the sulphured
Baths of Etna, a razor blade edge-balanced to fall its miles
To oblivion either way, I watched man, how he rose;
And even Kepler, Cornelius, they couldn't change natural discord, placate
Him from his ever-twirling in Ptolemaic circles of awful
Selfishness. In bloody crimson the sun and moon each waxed
Their tapering gloom till they burned to a phosphorescing
Abscess, shed on the gathered evidence of my prosecuting twilight
Chronicles. The sea ran its eddies, falling from each hell-kissed
Iris down my cheeks, as if they would restate gravity's
Case." The layered clouds were breaking
Dawn in their shadow-cast vapours, shelving the cinemation
Of the stars behind their racks. The day was climbing untrapped
From the hands of Hades and the dissentient sea
Flicked assegai waves, needle-crested, as one
At the pebbled rug of the beach, become a martyr it had to slay.

"For twelve hours of a day, the world spins you quizzing
And questing for noon. Life brightens to life, as a scion
Sunflower will bend from shade to sustenance, its calyx curving to light.
And then twelve single peals of a bell will brake
Our progress, like strangers voices whispering tones of hate,
Revolving us into unhallowed midnight. But the moment where we can smile,
Where mortality pines for stasis, is the time-spliced drowse
Of a phantom between, the wish of iced parallels to the sun, a grasped
Eternity in a pivoted midday, or a witching hour, when motion
Gives to paralysis. You can stay trapped in the umbra-sea
Of night's high noon, earth's diametrous abyss blocking the bow
Of Apollo's warming arrows; or you can turn to axe
Your own sanctioning mast into its illusory splintered
Trivia. Lift from the limbo floor to the horizoning dawn sky and set
Your future in the impetus of the chameleon veil over your eyes.
When you cannot see, then smell the salubrious sun-kiss
Of embroidered fate, threaded through your own masterful
Fingers, until the tapestry of colours you weave is ablaze."

"Your hands are unsanguined, bard, you have won
By example. The veil lifts in alleviation
And ventricled harmony valves my life's mill
Again. But the battle, not the war, is in its final throws.
Words; the mask the page wears to disguise its slate
Disfigurement. No matter the tree sacrificed so easy
By man's tools - Proserpine cypress, balsa-light
Ash, or Amazonian tropic - the poem is still as the axe
That cut the tree down: the cup of your mind, when full,
Empties itself to shroud the pulped lumber, the uncared
Liquid discarded uncaringly; so as black is
The Medean venom of Crowley's spring storms, bridal drapes
Of godful showers are scattered by Miltonic pieties.
Poetry is a tool, as good or as bad as the falset-
To voice that forges it. And when a Lydian lyre bows
To a high-picked tenor of unfelt danger, ignorance breaks
The unkept pitch in pieces. Sympathy, that tunes your lays,
But experience pales your song to nothing when I sing."

A misted oubliette seemed exorcised in the rise
Of the burning chariot of day, in the scrape
Of zephyrs against the blue-gapping cloud-break.
Her eyes, squinting mirrors of the ocean, gleamed from the bow-
Slit of her eyelids to gather the prism-split rose
Of optimism. A faint humming, like a lark satiate
In the morning, escaped the butterfly lips on her wan
Skin and her cheeks blushed as our eyes collided. The full
Ecstasy of the present had jilted her onyx lays
Into crumbled anaesthesia, taking cautious flight
Into the salt breeze. A moment of epiphany shone
In a microsecond, of clear sky and pure sea
Matched in equal tint, while the slivered red
Edge of the sun obliterated the last fizzing
Stars of pessimism back into Celia's bosom. The wax
Of discourse burned down and true light rose with her smile,
As our heads turned to meet and the keys
Of motion unlocked us from the frieze that time had set.

5.Envoi


The Sussex Sea slowed, slower, then ceased to drape
The once hard stones with its breakers. The expression
Of the pebbles was now one fine smoothed crescent bow
Of bay-stretched sand. The ripples froze in dipped smiles
And laughs, which carpeted red-orange sunlight
In a water-walked pathway, set in a warm, wax-
Soft texture. Two pairs of eyes took visionary skates
Across the immutable blaze. Together we found lips to sing
Of the dawn in hushful sigils, as we leaned together in a kiss.

George Tolis