He came to me beneath the harvest rains, Most beautiful and most afflicted face; When his enchantingness was not constrained By frost a moment more, my day had place. The sunlight found its truest warmth in him, And in our season flourished love and song. But now the days are shorter, cold, and dim; I shrink away, and all creation longs. I'll never see his face again, will I? Beyond the realm of life my love's been snatched; No godly healing arts did I not try, But death among all things is never matched. If only I could nevermore return, Instead I will remember, wane, and yearn.
Author: Nick
Hyacinthus and Apollo IV
These hands that wrought the lyre, that serpents fear, What twisted work have you now wrought today? They made that discus, now must make the bier; My prince of flowers on the clearing lay. My victories dissolved on horror's floor, Is this defeat beneath the master, Fate? In contrapposto for a second more, His temple shattered by a searing plate. Watch this, he said, but then it ricocheted. The blood ejaculated from the wound. Gore painting flowers, he could not be saved. I felt a desperate death-lust in the swoon. My being obsoleted by a toss, Why ever live if live to feel this loss?
Hyacinthus and Apollo III
Two youths enjoying mutual desire, Exemplifying mortal mysteries Of passion, the encumbrance of entire Millennia of solemn histories. The first resplendent with a godlike touch, The warmth creation radiates distilled Into the one supernal artist, such That when they joined all art was love fulfilled. The other: blossom boy and objet d'art, Himself alive in the idyllic scheme Of man and beauty yet to be apart. A fragile visitor that made gods keen. The flower's beauty–that which knows and crowns Its elegance must also lay it down.
Hyacinthus and Apollo II
Pure beauty was the love of that young boy, For fine-tuned song, an orison of grace, The seasons' several blooms, the sense, the joy Of man in subjects that hold beauty's trace. Naïvely and innately did he taste The latent miracles creation births And praised them with his care and earnest faith, Perceiving everything's partaking worth. His supple limbs untouched by doubt or age, How many days we sported head to head Or arm in arm made love and song, a sage Embodied in a kritios's bed. The Feminine divine throughout his way; The Masculine refined without decay.
Hyacinthus and Apollo I
It was Apollo Hyacinthus loved, And never happier was he than when Before his horses carried him above, They sang together in the dewy glen. His chariot and circling fire were great, Yet for the sacrifice he made it seemed There wasn't anything to obligate Him, loving naturally as he dreamed. And in his day the boy knew love from him, That product Beauty stoops to proffer men. Their joy was effortless, was grace and whim; If man could be love he had learned it then. He must have had what many die to find. Poor Hyacinthus! Down the disk declined.
Sonnet for Tim Buckley
In poppies sleeps the bard eternally. Now what remains? Can we then estimate? His incantations still are heard, and see, Believing souls in these still conflagrate! The tender fierceness of a passion fleshed In loving, conquering, confusing need; He sang of sticky heats of love where threshed Are youthful souls by evanescent deeds. The lovers crossed and crossing on their way Who always say goodbye are with him there: We transients. We see undone the play Of prisoners we are, dissolved in care. He sleeps in poppies, carried on the wind; I ride with them atop Oblivion.
The sun descends before his head designs
The sun descends before his head designs To let its weariness allow decline Into a pillow or a blanket's touch, With hours of work at his bench left behind. Despite exhaustion plying overmuch Upon his downslumped shoulders, tired as such Would make his sleep necessitated, though No rest he finds, no flight from tiring's clutch. Insomniatic paramores bestow Their anti-inspiration from below The liminal request, but wakefulness Prevents the blossom: rest, its growing show. No dreaming glow within the tired's duress, No nightlong calmness that the beasts possess, Gestaltly seething in nocturnal sounds Insensible, unlike his waitfulness; Though sunlight tenderly extends around The back of earth, caressing with the down Of nightshine from its lunar elbow strewn Upon the moths that seek its midnight crown; And frogs in hidden choirs intone the tune Of nightling drones. Their covert throats balloon In waves of sonic darkness. They reply To one another and beyond the Moon. The song they sing for just themselves is wise, Far wiser than what can be known: their I Is not the same as mine. And from the marsh Their din might indicate the Way's device. The Way in its inexorable march, Unseen, unheard, mistaken to be harsh In its obscurity, we seek in vain For traces of it in the chthonic karst. In "where it must have been" a thought explains Itself and reconciles with one domain Near truth, but only so far, lost in mist; This senses must be fluid to attain. A million forms of matter does it twist, A million pores in states and senses list A million paths, yet most escape us still; Divergent millions toward a single tryst. To one eternal colloquy they will Return, and even now might oneness fill The chambers of a soul ecology One sometimes grasps before it overspills. A glimpse affords a little peace to me, If only it could be to him some key To access feeling whole, my friend who said, I feel no god within when there I seek. I take him at his word, though I'm not led By any means to think him lost or dead Completely. Oh, but how he feels alone Among it all, the hermit of his head. The water tracks the way throughout the zones Terrestrial, and spiritual's own Domain alike is replicated deep Within the journey of a droplet's koan. An ancient riddle? That's what he's to keep At dawn when he's exhausted in a heap? We transient things need despite ourselves, For wisdom makes poor substitute for sleep. I hear at leisure all the host that delves In midnight's niches, yet that same dispels The hope of sleep for my poor friend who's still Unrested in so many hours past twelves.
Hiding on the topmost of paramnesia’s bunkbed
Hiding on the topmost of paramnesia's bunkbed, All around the rivers of seeming metamorphose, Roiling and effusive, rebounding on the portholes Of perception; what are these waves of oft defunct dread? Infinitely glints the kaleidoscope perspective; Universal tears in the ever changing floodplain Once distilled by focus on one's particular pain, All of living's sorrow becomes a sad invective. Mystifying waves of empathic agonizing Pulverize my vessel, the tiny heart that sings out There across impenetrable deracinating Bouts of torture, someone can hear you harmonizing; Someone hears you crying with notes to match your sorrow, Giving chords to death and to loss. Are you aware that Even I, another small ship, am taking care at Night when you are grieving and when you wake tomorrow? Always feeling touched, but not once while on the breakers Can I find a path to the deepest wave your spirit Rides on; in the tempest of suffering I hear it. Singing back, I try to get through, but no such takers. Who can ride the storm of another, what discerning Sense can find the entrance where neither space nor time nor Thought can claim a trace of it truly? No diviner Sees it, though I feel its divine attempt and yearning. Every soul desires to be known, and every one in Turn has doubts. Appearing alone, unreachably so, Never grasped within as was hoped but meekly–echoes, Semblances connecting two souls that fate has summoned. Do they ever join? Can their lamps send out a gleaming Hail across the waves of the infinitely lengthy Distances from person to person? Could a strength be Powerful enough to connect, or is it dreaming? Something reaches me, for I hurt alike when you do. In our isolation is there a way to breach through Via song or tears to another, somehow reach to The most sacred self that is not my own to soothe you? Where inside myself is the song, and where the aching Friend I long to touch? Is the transience of singing Like the transience of the human spirit's stinging? Something says inside that a song's the same in making. Dark your night, in line with the rest of them, compounding, Wearing down on you in your lonely home of stressing Sirens and distractions. The slowly sung, caressing Lay will be your refuge to weather woe surrounding. So presumptuous to believe a poem's power; Yet my needing soul has but art and tears to cover The expanse between a repression, that which hovers All around the self in its loneliest of hours. Singing, yes and crying, to you in hopes that maybe I could be let in, and the gulf of separation Shrink to one embrace in a union of elation; Just to share a moment I’ll ever weep for daily. All these substances of elusive nature, such as Love, depression, fear, and aloneness which are dwelling Deeply and inchoate themselves, there's something telling Me the song of souls is the missing strength a touch has. Verse will be a promise from me, for never could I Face the gripping notions of misery unless a Song could there be sown for a little shade and rest; a Solace that I'm hoping you too are done some good by. How that touch–communion!–eludes a solitary Drifter in the cold of a beating storm beneath the Eyes, unreachable and afraid to bring to grief a Guide, but one should know that the song is voluntary. Pouring out of dreams to be felt in waking sureness, Heady like a sorrow and piercing just like longing, Every tendency of my mind becomes a thronging Want to carry into your deepest heart assurance. Now my days are constant reflections on emotions And the ghosts of dreams that are breaking on the surface, Shadows of the feelings I long to give some purchase In our real world. Do they exist outside our notions? Can the love inside of my mind advance beyond and Occupy not only your heart but somehow link two Souls that hide in ether, the am upon the brink who Only knows itself, can I know we both are bonded? Something senses it in my deepest unknown seeing. Thriving, with a hand on my chin so gently turning Upwards my whole soul from the darkness of a spurning World, and smiling into my eyes for love of being.
The earthy voice of smoke
The earthy voice of smoke, A friendly, mindful breath, That centers one who soaks In centered life uncoaxed By insular duress. When flame dispels the less Than wholeness placed in I, The warmth of pleasantness Embraces one with rest, No longer self-derived. The tranquil spirit flies Beneath the lowest deeps, And lifts the mental guise Of separateness to rise In wholeness, which it keeps. The spirit, speaking, seeps Away socratically; The riddles that are heaped By ego, we let sleep And automatically Our fear, erratically Responsive, finds the soul: It enters practically, Assured, at that it leaves Transformed without its toll. The newly livened role Of yesteryear recalled From back beyond the shoals Before a doldrum's hold On entities involved In several worldly stalls, Until the spirit great United one with all, From there to let revolve The thing to contemplate. That thing of being–fate Or what a wretch presumes It is, when one relates Their wants against the gate Of happenstance's rooms. Within the smoky plume The evidence is shown; The warmth replacing gloom, The want removed resumes As knowledge that one's own Desire is not alone, Among so many more, But deepest in our bones We all alike bemoan For happiness to score. So, happiness restored, And seeing now the ways The webs of life can shore Up everything and more, I leave the wanting craze. The thing to do is praise. I read that once, it seems Correct to me, to gaze Out on creation's rays Like waking in a dream. And praise how much it teems And sing the grace to be Let in on all the scene Without the need to deem Things aid or harm to me.
If only some conviction could ignite my core
If only some conviction could ignite my core, Some goal or trial I could grasp or could maintain. A quest or burning question making me explore And seek some oracle's illumining domain. Would action seize me, restless, bored, and unenthused; How passionless my torpid day-to-day untwines. My petty wants and needs encircle to accuse My enervated soul of perilous decline. Ambition holds so little power over me, Could oracles with all their secrets even find The cosmic station where my swaying soul can be? No search for truth invigorates my tired mind, All mysteries as real as they are false can seem, But disabused of falsehood still I'm wandering The flattened plain of motivationless ennui; Despite experience or knowledge squandering That precious resource time: inert, unoccupied, A paralytic mind concerned but locked aside.
A place for my poems 