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.
Author: Nick
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.
Helixes of retrospection
Helixes of retrospection Coil together from the days of Fragmentary self-reflection, Always seen in different ways. The Memories, withholding hatred As I couldn't have before, in Scenes more sensory than dated Show me just a little more than What I had remembered; plainly My own whimpering and weakness, All the shame of my ungainly Worthlessness remained to speak, hiss Venomous but true. Ineptly Did I try the task, and wanting Was I found. And still I've kept the Sting of it, forever haunting Me in idle recollection, But I see now also threaded, With remembrance and dejection, New dimensions of the dreaded Failures of the past. A twining Thread of details flowed adjacent Facts as I had known them, lining Up where once the thread of hate spent All the energy in torture, All perspective tied to burning Self; that thread receives retort, for Now perceived by simply turning Over points of view are passions Unexamined which could offer Some experience, some rations From within the mental coffers. All the pain of wounds remaining As the price to first remember, Pull the line across the staining Layers of the bleeding members Of the past; withdraw with sorrow Deeper shades within the gory Wound to take into tomorrow. Bloodred hues and ochre story, Richer for that painful richness, Shows the desperate parties clearer, Lets me be a better witness. Small mistakes and those severer All displayed less passionately, Memory more fairly meted Once released from obstinately Coloring with shame defeated. Strip the crimson tint from off the Actions past; beneath, the varied Interplay of needs that often Bobbled in the air, were carried On in bruised and welting purple Or unable to fulfill were Left to fester in their hurtful Monochrome desires. What will or Fantasy or motive may have Led to certain situations That before ourselves we paved while Knowing half the expectations; What delusions bolstered taking Roles that clashed incongruously With our sad remainders, faking Just so nearly-ponderously Our desires and real affections? Questioning not how; just peering At the needy introspections That performed, and with their steering Twisted candor through denial And encouraged them to alter Thus themselves to give requital To their feelings, then to falter. Watch the prancing cryptofeeling Change its shape and masquerade as Love within an instant, sealing Sadly such a plan mislaid as Providence. Chimeric colors Mimic patterns for survival In the wasted psychic dolors, Is accepted on arrival; Symbiosis. With another Finding joy to not be less than But gestalt, so hope recovers For a while impressed but destined Not to thrive in this relation. That elusive feeling wavered In its camouflage and station, Could its counterpart have labored Under similar conditions? I will never know that answer, But can have the recognition Of my own confusing dancer: Loneliness or desperation, Likely both in turns portraying Love, but breathing love's oblation Can't be love despite its praying. It was loving but too needy, Couldn't offer up desiring From it's emptiness so reedy; So it found itself conspiring. As did I, at first unknowing, Hoping we were truly loving, That we were in truth bestowing, Yet that gift was far above me. With desire, but not for someone, Rather to become enveloped And fulfilled by one to come from Fantasy still undeveloped. We were not each other's choices, Yet we chose each other clinging To the hope that feelings foisted Could be true; they stopped the stinging To believe. And I, deluded, Couldn't let it go; I craved that Quality that truth precluded, So although I could have waived that Stupid act I didn't. Rather I persisted dyeing fibers Hoping newer strands could gather And could change the hollow cipher Of an able lover I am. So in all the tones of desperate Pantomime can I espy an Interim devoid of respite. Trying on diverse delusions, Failing to accept the object That my port was an illusion, Left adrift again, a prospect I took cowardly and shaded Differently my being hoping Misery could be abated. It was all deceitful coping, There was not a chance; my trying To contort myself, veneering What I am, its fruit was crying, Merely multicolored tearing. It was shameful but a lesson, So we learn through painful dealings With each other of the stress in Form and makeup of our feelings. I was pitiful, disgraceful, The unmanliness I showed is Lightly dealt with called distasteful; But the wretch can still be loaded With a burden demonstrating In its wanly colored vestige The remonstrance integrating In oneself a cringing message; In a self-elucidation Of iniquity one can be Freed from a deluded station, And can come to understand the Feeble grip upon emotion That a withered soul possesses. What's the color of devotion? What's its shade when it impresses On the soul its proper palate? I can't tell, but in this cording And recording the invalid Vows of yesterday's purporting Panoplies of passion, all the Plumage of misled connection That I blush at but recall to Know with stoic circumspection, I relive my lie of courtship And discern the tint of those who On delusions are supported. After all the glinting close to Vivid blotches of exacting Woe, there dapples memory with Embers, washed out tones enacting Ghosts of masks and tremoring fists. Fading, false veneer with trappings Of fidelity; or wanting. After that the color sapping Out, away, into the daunting Depths of time, elapsing steeper. So my recollection slackened, Leaving memories still deeper Where beyond the thread is blackened.
Frozen separately in waking
Frozen separately in waking Convalescence, base obsession, A ritual encroaching on Subsistence, living gets replaced. Corpse-like the results in breaking Troughs, the vacuum of impression Imploding in the void and spawned Again in waves one fears to face; Then the wake of slumbrous moments' Undertow recedes and closens, As distant as it's far away, As dangerous as yesterday. Spend an episode in coma, Living in the world of feeling, The world of fearing to exist. The bleak disease that grips the core Menaces the spirit's home, a Second's depth between revealing The fear of shrinking sandbar's mist And dead men swimming back to shore. Wake again with these contending Shades, and crawl inside the bending Demands of rectitude and time. A year has passed, or maybe nine. Crippled once, effects still linger, Weighing down with sand the conscience That knows the necessary tasks And doesn't do them, knows the cost But has others pay. Whose finger Points in mirrors of remonstrance, But hesitates though knows what's asked, And buried in the sands is lost. How the sands outpaced it, crested The already half-arrested And sinking thoughts, how much consumed In time, in terror, in its doom? Conscience shivering? If thawing Frees the mind in stasis, set then A flame to sear the worldly, base Intimidation from a brow. Set a blaze to burn the gnawing Frost of soul that lets regret and The shame of fear progress, but wastes All else inside its frigid now. Melt away the indecision; Grow the body from a vision Of life and time alike employed, Renewed again to be enjoyed.
Alcoholism
The person who I am is not the one To live the life required, he is undone. Me too. There's nothing left to salvage should I fail this time; the smallest crystals would Be grinded into dust. The bloodied shards Beyond recognizance, no further charge, No third or fourth or fifth chance, atoms smashed And gone. His final ultimatum lashed To my ribs and apartment door. No more! The proclamation, no and never! For A lie was given for a truth, therefore That lie needs turn to life, or purified From death and fury and if not: demise. But bloodied still my mind, necessity Demands that actions reap their recipe Of lack of self-control; I cleaved unto My anger, stripped of any power, through Iniquity and rage I was remade. I had it, had it tenfold times repaid. And when I thrashed and writhed within my skull, I cried out for salvation but I pulled My only love inside my hatred full Of impotence, imprisonment. Was I Denied assistance? No. Ask rather why I sought omnipotence from human love. Instead I made myself a vision of A vicious wretch, inhumed and bound in pall, And damned myself imbibing alcohol. False anodyne when first invited in; My twisted mind more wrung subsided in Its wet brain for an hour before it drowned In chaos and reformed the world around; Just suicide in acts, in words no sound. A hostile environ by hostile draught Dissolved one moment, then the next one fraught With anger in inebriated scope; The refuge in a momentary cope Becomes a trigger–newer, shorter fuse. It morphs my rage, it doesn't disabuse Me. Hatred of the jail of circumstance Becomes the need to free with my own hands This sickest soul from blackest dying through My death; but though I've ever held that true, To kill myself would be to kill them too. Who suffers when I self-harm, is it me? A vacuum of self-torture, can it be? It cannot; when the severed muscle hangs, The limb is crippled and the phantom fangs Return at night to gnash the missing piece. The bleeding someday stops, but where's release? What day returns a revenant to life? I tell you, none. Though maybe someday strife Recedes, a loved one lost is not replaced; And likewise does it daunt a loved one faced With fear that my mortality's outpaced Their every effort. Blinded; lustful death Antagonizes all us through my breath. A hellscape is a mindscape with itself Alone, unreachable upon its shelf; In monochrome the planet turns and turns, But nothing grows and nothing's ever earned. As such my meager coin I spend on booze When there is nothing else for me to choose. When I'm alone and all the plants have died, And when the stagnant winds have not replied, And only insects come to eat my hide, Intolerable is the sober world, Its diffidence with my own insults hurled Upon my head like stones. Uphold the law! Pay death to weakness and remove the flaw I am upon the Earth. It never does. It minds itself with almost-silent buzz Until I cannot take it anymore! It’s the indifference of this hell that scores Me more than anything else. When I feel Too much yet haven't strength to turn the wheel, I turn to metamorphosis to heal. The world won't change; I try to change my mind, To change my mental state to somehow find A corner where these things do not apply. To warp my inhibitions with the lie Of drunkenness; to see the world and see Myself transposed within a fantasy. I wish to wake in dreams from nightmares real; In altered states the state of Earth repeal. Somnambulating in a stupor still, I smile one second, having had my will Succeed; it shatters, and I'm left to kill, To maim, to recompense stupidity With pain, to turn the judgement onto me; To find cupidity is always there, The lens has changed but it is still my stare. I tie the noose while struggling to get loose; An explanation, never an excuse. Within the shadow of deliverance Addiction creeps and preys upon my sense. It's come to this: I either learn to quell The sickness, truly learn the lesson well; If not, then I shall die alone in hell.
The withered shoot will desiccate
The withered shoot will desiccate, The sickly sapling coruscates Luxuriant and loved a while With tender fondness, as a child Who loves its greenness but abates. It's not enough to briefly sate The wandering eye's need with spates Of evanescent, dying smiles; Grow up, for love won't reach the dead. The sturdy tree we designate As worthy, and determinate Not on those weeds without the guile Or otherwise tenacious style To grow from their own lands their fate. Grow up, for love won't reach the dead.
A place for my poems 