Collected Writings, 2021-2022

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From the heart of stillness streams a soft light
a falling leaf is its quaking beat
water flows and returns
resounding echo of being, the echo of itself
shimmer of wheat, wheat of shimmer
the heart of stillness is the opening
through which the origin whispers


It is said that there was a hollow chasm from which a voice howled. Tonight the trees whisper with wet leaves and the rain flees from an imposing night that speaks of oblivion. An old presence is sealing this tomb as eternity trembles with the suspended question: Who is there?


I dream of a deep history, for the ‘time’ of such a history can only be a dream. This history is the time of eons, where nothing occurs other than the slow-moving hand of some unknown god creeping the sun along like an eternally blooming flower. Such a time is old, swallowing itself in its own abyssal age, catching up to itself, yet always too late. Only in this loss of presence, the absence of time as we know it, does life happen. Only in deep history do the rivers flow and the flora come and pass, do the people dance and sing as the melody fades into the night like a cricket’s ringing. This entire dream is a ringing that is fading, a fading made possible only as that of which has faded long ago.


Dusk holds promise of an intoxicating hour when the river creeps slow along the bank and the sky glows a soft rosy purple hue that blossoms in the water like death and hangs in the air like a hyacinth dream. Let your ghost pass through it effortless as a wisp as your spirit dissolves into the blue.


Loafing in the grass by a lake: Whitman’s wet dream. Sun warm caress on skin as spirit rustles above and runs fingers through Earth’s soft white willow hair, the crazed passionate flow of its blouse whirling weary eyed wanderer’s heads and intoxicating their thoughts with pluming noxious spores. Gulls swoop endless joking arcs, bellies grumbling with cavernous mystery, while above Hölderlin’s swans murmur and swoon with love – many take part in keeping a secret. Water ripples of excitations on its sacred body. A forbidden drink takes your mind and pours out its songs of blessed drunkenness – Full of life, everything blushes rosy with pleasure.


The face melts back into the waxy substance it came from – origins creaking mellow voracious openings lay into me sublime and pierce a hole, a wound for flowing air and restless spirits. Waiver a cool refrain – every contagious spilling drips over into untold similes – smile, pull the face back up – retreat a step and let it linger – shadows dance from your toes and pull your bones down into hell.


Earth twists out from me once again; lilacs hang along the rain as my feet move merely to stop me from falling. Squawking birds lay thick in the trees like glue. A laugh melts within me like wax. A place where one must search but where no one expects to contain anything upon seeing. It’s happening again, but slow molasses. Seal me up in this sticky cocoon for the last time, smother me with a thousand whispers clambering over themselves. I’m in love with it and wish to make it my home – a sticky home where I may eternally suffocate on my own moulting skin. A cry in the distance is my own. My heaviness surrounds me and droops my face in slow terror. What is there to listen to here? My tongue licks at my ear, the air moistens and squirms; nothing can be separated anymore.


Flames kiss at my ears as the dry hot embers peel off the wood like a lover’s sticky sweet saliva. The raven’s lungs glow from the fire like a brass bell that rings out with the rays of the sun.


Does the sun fight through atmosphere and cloud to reach us, or is it a fruit of the sky’s abundance? One enters into a union with the unnamed by giving themselves away and taking part in the play of squandering ripening and rot. Beauty comes when beauty goes: give it away and it returns.


Blackened was the house
where ancient memories swell
of the lyre that sings
with all years’ glow
of whose dawn beckons
our lulling winter’s night
where in sleep dissolves
our wakefulness just as bright

the guard who keeps watch
peers into the earth


You are a threshold. Do you feel the wind in your hair or are you the wind blowing it back? From what reaches do you howl, of what storms and potentials? Of turbulence and lightning, your heart is a storm that rages from the eternal hour. You are a pulsing wave that bathes the landscape. The cataclysmic membrane perspires through its perforations. A cosmic seance of force: a communion with spirits that hover over distant planes whose time has not yet come for the eclipse, when hands will reach out through your chest and shear the atmosphere with light.


When the pavement pops open like millions of tiny eyes perspiring in wide awake terror, dig your heels in and breathe, for they pop open on your skin and peer out. Bodily sensation is a form of vision too, so don’t panic when you catch the world looking back and feel its little eyeballs crunching underneath your boots.


Iridescence welcomes you to demented bliss
your spiralling song of lunacy trickles on the wind
remember when the maenads spoke of the forest’s maddening?


It is with a light gaiety and natural movement that one can create, at which point it is no longer the one who can be said to create or be responsible for their creation. This is the paradox of creation, that it is only possible as that which cannot be. In the creation of the world, everything dances around itself, falling into itself and ceasing to be. The dance is a spinning ´round as the cycling of the eternal fire. Is not the maenad’s frenzied dance of intoxication itself a maddened falling? The planets, the stars, this holy Earth are spiralling mad blissful dancers moistened by the mediterranean sun, loosened of inhibitions by the streaking kiss of comets that shine like ice in the night because the night has accepted them freely. The meaning of Love: the falling embrace where all things burn themselves out.

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Creeping Phlox

Philosophy and Prose