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1. |
Ophelia Breathes, Part I
08:18
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Under a cool blanket of Night, I am made of mists and moonbeams.
Communing with nothing more than my own sense of life, more alive after dusk,
My mind ambles aimless, listing in each moment,
willingly carried aloft by the libertine sincerity of starlight.
Interrupt fades in,
and slips past my awareness, so draped am I across these moments.
Abrupt and alluring, its protrusion into this space asks no permission,
Nor does it give so much as a by your leave.
It simply begins with the plucking of a recollection,
and I am flashed backward across hours, days, weeks.
Scented breezes, crisp in evening-bloomed fragrances strike a recollection of Her.
And, at once, time and space halt, and into the pause of this memory,
she returns,
Slowly moving into my body,
her feet traverse on the taste of minted lips and eucalyptus.
In these moments, nothing moves but her,
the Moon, chained around her wrist, peers downward in its own pleasure,
as her vision takes over my being.
Her shroud is soft light, her hair wild and piercing,
blending like a knife blade into the colors around her.
Leaving behind how and on what magick she returned,
my eyes, fevered and rushing with burgeoning moisture
flood with her mastery of my senses.
With a simple beckon of her plunging gaze, she enters my body of memory
and we dance, again.
Visions swirl, and I reel with her, against her, through her.
Control is now an illusion, and I take leave of my senses.
She authors these moments by the merest whim,
Dictating them to me, a heady verse dripping with an exquisite hunger,
prismed through her own version of the Divine.
My form is no longer my own.
It melts into her forming a familiar entity composed of two.
Her voice becomes my voice,
my breath flows from hers.
Hearts swirl around each other, circling,
spiraled into the song written by Infinity when the Universe was young.
A wordless symphony begins to rise over the din of collision.
It is raised up aloft into the still night air, meandering behind the lift of our bodies.
Expression unbound from speech.
Heat, the raspy tension of a timeless ache, begging madly to be released,
crying to set itself free into the fiery chamber our forms create.
Lips speak into each other without need of phonetic chains,
a flavour of touch,
a rich and velvety taste of her luscious frenzy,
Sounds from my throat voice what words fail to reveal.
And so it begins . . .
The table set,
Eat your fill, and this tale will drag you along behind.
It will skin you alive in pleasure, chop your clarity into pieces
and drop those over the edge of the jagged cliffs
with a laughter far removed from sanity.
These moments ride me like goddesses.
She takes the helm of my resolve; I am a wind shear in her hand.
Lucidity, gone in a whoosh.
The room is emptied of air, and beauty consumed in her flames.
Blown backward into the walls with a merciless force
flown at my soul by her searing gaze,
impassioned throes nail the slave to her altar.
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2. |
Lament of Ismene
05:05
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The days bring an exhaustion of the soul.
Her eyes fade in to walls of comfort that may also cage a heart,
once free.
Words of phantoms temper the stars of her firmament, and in
an ocean of light-filled darkness, she stirs and corrodes.
Can you see my soul hanging from these gallows?
Do you see how she takes the rope from your hands and
loosens the coil, the hard knots of lifetimes,
the rage of a thousand volts,
infected with sadness, the despair of lips murmuring to
the Nothing.
Rushing madness, blink for years, hold on to moments.
Let go, they say. Slough off the tears, let them sting your
eyes filled with bewildering pain, no longer.
Cut the rope, slip the stream of consciousness forward.
In the spin of it all, grasp and clench with all deliberate
knowing, what you have spoken to others in those soft times.
If your legs have been cut from under you, grow new ones.
The others were tired of carrying a Queen of Ages,
a woman with children she has never seen,
a quiet prophet of sorrow and fierce whispers.
~G.
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3. |
Mori Matrem
08:10
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She turns, inward.
In the expanse of time unforgiving, she slams her sword into the hot earth,
destroying the summer sun in flaming tears, withering leaf and life, as her hands become wretched and aged.
Gathering her robes of darkness, about her she ventures forth from days of fecund abandon, the dances of seduction and smooth soft flesh, the screams of birth heard in thunderstorms, and the time-driven harvesting of her children. Her eyes, course as the dying grasses upon which she walks, see her home, across the spanse of Autumn, lying in wait, the spark of her winter soul lights the fire in its chamber, the room in which she will live and die.
Every step across her earth brings the cold winds, their burgeoning gales growing, mercilessly whipping the tattered dress she once wore anew, now faded, replaced by the cape of the Old Woman. Where she once spun her body into a seductive frenzy, the dance coursing through her veins like vapoured drunkeness, she now feels the ache of time, the stiffening of her limbs, and the cold of her blood, growing. In need of shelter she walks onward, wrapped tight, her robes cover the dress of her waning youth, losing its threaded beauty, falling away from her with every step into the turn of her season, the winter winds blow her onward.
Memories of her youth are filled by shadows, and her mind recalls them with storied smiles. And by her hearth, she finally settles, picking up the staff of age and tales left untold, she begins the stirring of her cauldron, each tinkling sound of the potion within brings further the chill of night.
The Sun, once so youthful and virile, the fire of her passions, fails. He dies and is ferried to the Summerlands where she will once again meet him with the return of the Light.
For now, she begins her vigil of death. Pulling the snows from the gathering clouds, she weaves the land with her white blanket of winter. All things die or nestle into her old body, hiding from her failing memory, the voice which once called her to bring forth life and light from her body of earth.
She forgets, now. Quite purposefully her memory is consumed by each stirring of the cauldron.
Her desire only to smile and gather her limbs to the fire of her hearth, warming her fading body as she recounts tales with a smile under her wild hair,
grey and silver,
lying in chaos across her shoulders.
Her eyes may fade into frost, but they sparkle brightly with every numbered breath she takes, and in ice and frost, her rooms become a grave.
She will never leave them.
In her failing form, the winter’s long night eclipses her strength, I
n a bed with no warmth she lies, eyes transfixed by the candle she lit only days ago, now burning its last flames.
With her final breath she weaves a spell, speaking with a booming soul a voice thunders across the cold earth, running through the veined roots of the evergreens which never die, she imparts one last command to her sleeping children, swaddled in the earth, the seeds of new life.
She bids them to rise with the coming Sun, to bring forth life again when her daughter, her self, rises from the silent tomb of winter.
They will live again;
She will live again.
In the smoke of death she smiles, and looks into the chasm of darkness.
Peering forward, taking the reaper’s arm, she steels herself and walks into oblivion.
The winter swallows the Earth she leaves behind.
All things cease and slow.Rhythms of life are arrested.
Waiting for the clarion call of Spring, they watch as she walks into spiraling mists, and disappears.
No laments for their Great Mother pierce the silent snows.
Only the call of wolfen voices split the night, crying to the moon, asking for her touch once more, grieving her loss,
the song of the heart shattered by the cold of her absence.
The silent earth sleeps. The Yule fires fade. She lies down in her own grave and smiles as Death covers her.
She will sleep deeply and dreamless, the dead bones of those who she birthed into life, nestled close, surrendering to the silent snows.
All becomes cold and quiet.
Life awaits.
She gives herself over and is swept away into the rushing waters of Time.
Her dance is ended.
~G.
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4. |
Brontë's Muse
05:21
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Thou doest mend mine heart
and maketh thee
my wither'ed eye to see
that
which thou deemst beautiful.
The Muse speaks:
Verily thine eye hath moistened anew
that thou may see this realm through mine.
Thine eyes are pools dark and rendered in mystere,
As the heart of a womyn that lieth in the field
of an ocian's profound memory.
The Muse speaks, again:
Pools sweet and still, that tempt and offer succour.
Thirst'd we.
Thirst'd for the rain.
Fallen over many winters of the breath.
Into graves innumerable have I chased thee.
Thirst'd.
Howl'd mad, and rent as fynery tramped a'hoof o'er mad horse.
Yet, thine eyes bid me drink, as mine do to thee.
“Remembre,” sayest they.
Please remembr'est thou, me.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Written in free-flowing collaboration with Jennifer Margaret, Muse Extraordinaire,
27 and 28 November 2014.
~~Poet Speaks to J. M. J. P. : "Vous avez toujours été, et sera toujours, une muse pour moi."
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5. |
Winter's Breath
05:53
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LAD & Gypsy Albuquerque, New Mexico
Universes upon universes, mirrors upon mirrors . . . two worlds collided and began a collaborative, creative partnership.
These works are the result of poetry and music written in two separate worlds, in two different parts of timespace.
And to think, it all began over a game of chess . . .
"What's Past is Prologue." Shakespeare,
The Tempest
... more
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