Cyclical

Collected Poems
Illustrated by the Author

Rowan G. Tepper, M.A.

Department of Comparative Literature
Binghamton University
9 January, 2009
 Prelude

If I continue on this path I will surely go mad. Yet I cannot proceed any other way. I am
addicted to my own anguish such that the intensity madness would be preferable to life with
barely a trace of intensity. I tremble, fret and pace. Anxiety builds in the depths of my being
and erupts into the blank plane of consciousness with the intensity of a solar flare. Just as
instantaneous as the eruption of anxiety into consciousness, so it recedes, retreats into the
twin voids of non-being and nothingness. I am left awash with memories and emotions, while
at the same time exhausted, savaged, ravaged by searing tongues of
anxious fire.
Thoughts properly inexpressible leads to a poverty of words. Emotion is as a thought
above or below the threshold of the articulable, and the expression of its limitless wealth is
found in a single word; a word which propagates the notion that emotions are fungible,
interchangeable; that we can communicate the complexity of emotion in one word and be
assured of comprehension.

Words forever fail me. My speech never fails to falter.

Reflection ever on the brink of breakdown.

To break the silence

To shatter my inertial state
To end the disoevrement
A choice must be made
Living in bad faith
Eternally noncommital
Betraying myself at every turn
The time has come to put an end to this

The hold of the past is broken

And the future beckons
The time has come to traverse the void
The time is come which fills and overflows the void
 First Cycle

Drawn Into Myself

ONLY SOON TO

E F
S A
I L
R L
Pierce the dawn
And twilight
D R A W N I N T O MYSELF

Inexorably
Intolerably

Interrupt this reverie

 II

Beyond the eight o'clock blue of August twilight

Lies the truth we now see, that in our grandeur and temerity,
We have outlived the <fin de notre Histoire>, and in our sur-vival
we bypassed this end, and yet stand suspended above the abyss that it is.
I have ever lacked the sense of endings, death and departure are the unknown
to me;
in me;
The deep blue sky, as it prepares to erupt, whispers to me,
that the end was always already completed, and elevates me
to that apex of poetic grandeur, from which I can see that
at the end of History, every ending has touched my heart, inscribing
seductively this truth – that every ending has been dear to me.

A crack of thunder shatters the immense silence of this kingdom of ends

Illuminated by the lightning bolt, this silence is exposed as refusal
– As an obscurantism of ends –
And shattered, torn to pieces, a new truth is born; that each and every ending
Has been but the inverted image of nascent beginnings waiting to be born.

The sense of our hypertelic Histoire will never again be the same,
for the lies of stillborn worlds have been exposed – even if
our Histoire was finished before it ever began, it is now possible
to inscribe on my heart, on our Histoire, a new truth – that the end
was no more than a beginning, and that death and departure have no sense,
are the absence of sense,
except as rebirths in joyous non-sense

i
 III
The piteous i n a d e q u a t i o n of word to world leaves me wounded; the schism marked by
but one d e a d l e t t e r, the mark of the anguish of imprisonment in language. In another
tongue the i n f i d e l i t y of words is clear – it is self-evident...

W e l t und W o r t – the word: Welt-ort, the l o c u t i o n of an ordered world

This too signifies, as a s i g n a t u r e, that s i m u l a c r u m which is the world of words – Burying
beneath words the r e m n a n t s of being and of b e c o m i n g
– which r e m a i n forever u n g r a s p a b l e by l a n g u a g e –
– words cut through me in the fading light opening unto a s i l e n t v o i d
-

In the u n g r a s p a b i l i t y of autumnal sensations

In the s e p a r a t i o n a n x i e t y of Demeter
In the urgency of the lengthening t w i l i g h t
The fruit of f o r g e t t i n g brings to light
the f a l s e f o u n d a t i o n secured by words
as but a t r a p – d o o r opening onto
an i n c o n c e i v a b l e abyss and onto ecstasy.

IV
What new wounds are needed
To end the ceaseless betrayal of words?
Endless words, endless stories,
Productions of a restless mind
Craving the reassurance of an enduring identity...
I slip, I fall, I lose myself in laughter and in tears
Pleading with chance
Yet she hears only my incomprehensible laughter and tears
Pleading with time
Yet his only concession is my forgetfulness of his reign
My time is not that of this world
Losing track, losing my way, my sole consolation
Fickle chance in conspiracy with implacable time
Brings me to my knees
Then bears me aloft
Beyond words... Beyond the desire to endure...
And yet...
No sooner do I catch a glimpse of what might be
I fall... into the abyss that subtends all...
I have seen the depths
And I cry
And thus betray words with wounds
Stories, with moments at the extremes of anguish
Identity, with the forgotten hours falling free
Implacable Time - you will never let me BE
Without transition, without care
Flowing free
As rivers into the ocean
As waves lost among other waves
Far off at sea
Chance, the seductive countenance
of some event, yet far off, on the horizon
...defies time and smacks me in the face.
 V
A Confession in Verse
silence without respite
here a cat cries
outside my window
sometimes the auditory
traces of happiness and hope
other times, words of anger
or anguish

or...

Nonsensical words intended for a dog's ears

I wanted the silence to break

I wanted to see it shatter in crystalline
fragments
fragments falling from the sky
open wide; cracked open

irreparably

no more than cursory words intended for my ears

vestiges of quotidian existence
traces of the public shell I animate
Behold! come, see the puppet dance

Oh tragic farce that I am

a cry caught in my throat gurgles
revulsion

i wanted to speak profound words

I wanted profound words whispered in my ear
i wanted to be understood
I wanted profound understanding of another

these desires now forsaken but not forgotten

sit upon my shelf beside musty tomes
i now desire nothing more than

...un raison d'espoir...

 VI
Par-delà le nom

In solitude I tread swiftly

Across this deserted heath
Just as I walk the streets
both empty and teeming
teeming with the masses
of passers-by
and of those I imagine
With this cliff rising
as if alive and growing
higher with the passage of time
Suddenly, and without a moment
of transition
I am atop this rising peak
with the world now infinitesimal
at my feet, in transposition
smaller now than I, enshadowed
in the expanse below

From these heights I cry out to you

Beneath strange new stars
Beneath another night
Yet far above the heights
held by the sun of day
In this stillness of night
I call out to you, this time by name
A word that without my knowledge
had become lodged within my throat
I cry out to you once more
and, impossibly, another voice
cracks the silence of strange night

Again transposed
Now as though before a mirror
the cliff, the night, the heath,
the entire deserted expanse
all vanish entering this moment
Insouciant, in laugher and in tears
suspended within this moment in time
I see you now before me

Not knowing how your name came to my lips

Without knowing how you came to hear my call
Not caring even to ask; made superfluous
by this silent moment, by this impossible
metaphysical mirror
We dismiss the knowingness of the teeming mass
And shatter the silence of this moment
With the convulsion of a tear-stained laugh
 R
à E. –

Such resignation I cannot remember ever having felt

...yet can I trust my unfaithful mistress, Memory,
with matters of such malleable sense...?

No. This resignation bordering on desperation

Is a novelty –
It is ironic –
• - for such novelty contradicts Memory's melancholy

Distant and removed from life as lived

no not living but watching myself live
disintegration unfolds in slow motion before my eyes
the elongated downfall of disaster

Bearer of infinite resignation

errant knight of unfaithful faith
epithets attached properly to my name
as verbal emblems of my half-hidden raging passions

There is no one with the necessary strength to withstand the tempest that I am
And thus I resign myself to a double and doubled life
Within – a tumult of passion and rage
Without – Melancholic, having lost my way in the night

No one could possess the strength to withstand the force of my rage

nor would I permit one, willing or no,
but you, my powerless paper victim, I vent my spleen upon you – page.

Wound
Wounded we come unbound(ed), unwound
we unravel, unhinged, torn asunder at the seams
Fabric of experience rent, we become
once again bound up, wound up, tense and taut
At the very moment when our wounds begin to mend
Premature

The limitless infidelity of words

strung into sentences,
into lines, inevitably -
if I but once glance away -
betray my intended meaning
with apostate-words

Insufficient
my linguistic heresies - my apostate words
fall short and never once attain
the truth of our measureless moments in the night
which overflow, and into which I ever long to fall -
Into moments brimming with truth, with beauty.

Dare I attempt to translate

these memories so true to the time
Can I even so much as evoke
A mere echo of the time,
time filled by you alone,
your voice and mine

[a mere evocative echo...]

[No more apostate words]

Senses-blind to the outward world,

insensate, but for one,
No other memory remaining,
beside the sound of your voice, evoking in me
dormant senses of a different kind
Slumbering sentiments, your voice calls
out to, and awakens from hibernation
The same for each and every
passing moment, silently overpowering,
overflowing, me -
- as we were drawn together in preternatural rapidity
ceaselessly, until our premature -

INTERRUPTION
 VII

The Fall

At times the walls close around me

Me? Who is this “me”? So enclosed...
In these walls invisible, yet impassible, having....

F T
A O
L M
L B
E É
N T E
O '
T L
H E
E

NAMELESS PROFONDEUR
DEPTHS SANS NOM

...OF ME ...DE MOI

 Second Cycle

I... What a mistake I make every time I utter the word I to refer to myself. My self is not the I that speaks. The
I that speaks is not the self that is or has become. The I is always in the rose-hued dawning of consciousness;
I am always ahead of myself, my self is never there at dawn, lingering in the loneliest hours of night.

I... Strictly speaking, I am nothing. Is there any trait, characteristic or piece of personal history that one could
excise from my very BEING? No. Not because none can be removed, but rather that NONE TOUCH ON
MY BEING. They are merely accidental, extra-essential, extra-conceptual; THEY DO NOT CONCERN
ME. What then is the I but the man without qualities? But then, I insist in my absolute uniqueness, my
absolute singularity. Indeed, the variations of the human are infinite, but the variations in the concept of the
human are nil! But were my uniqueness situated in the accidental, it would not merely be unsatisfying, but
rather it would, in principle, open the door to identity - would my characteristics, history, etc be replicated
precisely, so would the I. But I WILL NOT BE REPEATED. I am a different I at each moment, each passing
I becoming a part of my self. Deracinate me; extirpate all qualities from my being; I will still be, but I will
scarcely be at all myself.

My self is the ossification of my characteristics and who I have been. I yearn for eternity in this petrification
of the soul. Little did I realize this when I sighed and said that I was overjoyed to be myself again. To be
myself again. What a laugh! I can hardly suppress the wry smile that creeps across my lips, contorting them as
if in death throes. In this very utterance I became alienated from myself.

Who then am I? Can the I be at all? Or can I only be myself ?

Perhaps this is why I can never communicate myself, why no one will ever see ME, why no one can ever
desire ME. I'm at once singular and fungible. I am...

Spent. I can write no more.

(i)
 Eros and Mnemosyne
What am I to make of the eroticism of memory? How am I to see through this afterglow, these aureoles, to
the truth? The truth? There is no way. The past has already changed in becoming memory. In becoming
memory, I inadvertently, and yet inevitably, accorded each and every memory with a value that exceeds its
actuality. At every moment I FEEL. In every moment there is a residue, expressible only in affective terms. In
truth, memory is absolutely inexpressible. It is a futile endeavor to convey either a factum brutum or the totality
of experience. This is why I can lie in bed for hours, my eyes riveted shut, my pupils fixed, as I explore the
unfathomable depths of stillborn worlds. Stillborn worlds, once summoned to appear before my minds eye,
reconstitute themselves as a macabre dance of images. This play of images is hardly innocent or innocuous - it
rends me. Only through this imaginary reconstitution of the past, can I receive the intensity that I crave.

Why cannot I become conscious of the fact that the erotic cast taken on by the past is the result of hindsight?
Why is it not possible for me to recall with equal lucidity the heartrending events? Why must the past always
be looked at with nostalgia?

Stockholm syndrome only scratches the surface. Sometimes I imagine that had I survived the gulag, the
memory even of such years would acquire an erotic afterglow.
 God?
I imagine the personal deity to be the ultimate figure of suffering. With each passing step taken in the
direction of omniscience, I realize this. I do not imagine that I ever will approach omniscience. But, with every
thing I know indirectly my knowledge grows. At the same time, however, my power of action remains paltry
in comparison to my possibilities and pitifully limited in its domain. With every knowledge beyond my sphere
of perception my anguish grows. I remember as if it were yesterday, at a concert some years ago I found
myself haunted by the thought that "I know she's fucking someone else, right now." It was not the mere fact
of its occurrence, for I knew full well before and it had not lacerated me so. But rather it was that I was
thinking that thought at the same moment! Had I any inkling of the profundity of this at that time, I should
have instantly lost consciousness.

I imagine a personal deity as omniscient but powerless. Thus, knowing all, its anguish would be amplified to
infinity. It is no wonder then that there can be no such god. Such a god would have long since have died
wounded by anguished desire.
 And so the memories turn out to in fact be real. For some time I'd been convinced that these emotionally
charged yet hazy recollections evoked by music were illusions of my experience deprived imagination. But now as
experience overtakes idle contemplation I realize that the memories are real, they just were nowhere I was looking.
They fell in the interstices, in the times-in-between, in the junctures where life could have taken a radically different
course, wherein a different stillborn history would have unfolded. These are the experiences referred to in reverie. The
emotional charge of these recollections drives me toward the future.

In the turn of seasons that uncanny aura returns. I am awash with the waves of a familiar and yet uncanny sensation.
The feeling speaks of standing alone on a promontory of being amidst the void. It speaks of a trapdoor ready to drop
in the comforting illusions of enduring being. And yet, I find myself almost dancing. Dancing above the abyss. Yes.
That's it. Is it the catastrophic state of the world that is mirrored in my semi-conscious apprehension? Is it the dramatic
changes wrought in my life that has left me still catching up with myself ? Is it the turn of seasons and the return of
autumn (Demeter's trennungsangst) that tinges experience with this exquisite hue? Is it merely the vicissitudes of my
unsettled life? These questions demand answers, yet more so they demand an unceasing questioning, they prohibit
answers. Each falls short; demands a further question. Taken together, perhaps they find at least a sense of the
question. Each in turn leads to a circular return to the initial question, tracing Jormungundr in question form. It's all
changed, yet it feels so familiar. Events are impovershed, but this aura suffuses all with a wash of intensity.

A certain nostalgia comes over me as lines of my histoire recommence. For the longest time I sought to
outrun my past, seeking to cast its weight off from my shoulders and into the river of time. There are even some
relatively recent episodes of my life, which I have sought to consign to the dustbin of history. Which attempts to
cast off the past succeed and which fail? Even where I did not actively do so, I passively let the past slip from my
grasp and into distant memory. Oh, how the past returns. The dustbin of history is full of the detritus of my past lives,
and yet there is so much that remains, and which, on occasion, recommences stories long since interrupted. Today I re-
encountered an old friend, whom I had not seen or spoken to in five years, in a city that I once called home, and it was
as if the events of the intervening time had made this meeting necessary. Over coffee, we mused over the very
thoughts that this event induced, tried to remember what caused us to drift so far that only five years brought us into
contact again. Oh, how memory lets the past slip. We could not recall a reason, it was but an arbitrary interruption.

A certain aspect of my self was returned to me today; the fragments, the pieces came back to me last night.
The asceticism of a life without past is in decline. Today was its disaster, its catastrophic falling away from the
guiding star of der Heimatlosigkeit des Vergangenheitlos. There's a certain lucidity returning, a certain engagement
with the world that I have scarcely felt for months. A past in part regained gives birth to a new Histoire, a new future -
es stimmt eine unbestimmt Zukunft.
How then had I become a stranger to myself, while, at the same time, becoming so thoroughly akin to a long-lost but
unforgotten other (by all rights, and after such an interminable hiatus, one of whom time could just as well have made
a stranger)? Without response, my question brings forth the desire to further revisit my past. How many stories
remain to be told; and can I ever hear enough to sate and placate overbearing conscience? To this question some inner
certainty responds: there are pasts which cannot be recovered, and there are stories which can never be heard.

I have ever wished in vain for but one opportunity to reprise and revive certain periods of my life and re-live those
times with a difference – after years of thought, in a different time, place, permutation... does this wish truly signify
the sterility of a mind no longer willing to risk itself in the future to come? No... this desire reflects the impossibility
of exhausting the possibilities immanent in every moment... in all the moment's minutiae...

In these otherworldly days at the tail end of summer, events mirror one another. Occurrences, of which I'd
prefer not to write about also produce strange parallel paths, correlations, and correspondences. When
resolutely I swore that these events, which reprise and resonate with the bygone, would be no repetition... I
seized upon a moment which was already half-submerged – passing swiftly out of sight – my vow thereafter
condemned me to blindly re-enact, striving to re-trieve that drowned moment. It was not me, and neither these
events nor the passage of time, but the grasp and the vow, my vain vows...
 (I)llusion

The “I” superimposed upon the “me” never yields truth,

but neither can it be a lie.
It is but the decision of an author, or even an editor,
the absolute arbitrariness of narrative
Being noncommittal, and playing the dilettante:
but two responses to self-fragmentation
Every face(t) of the crystal of self must act with equal passion.
No necessary unity - only be passion in every pursuit.
Unity, wholeness, totality - are all illusions, distractions.
This grail-quest is a fools errand.
One is only a tension and harmony of passions.

Of myself I reject and refute any positive statement.

I am driven to contradiction.
To negation.
I refuse the concept of self,
I relegate it to the empty nullity of an abstract negation.
I denied the existence of the self; and denounced it as pipe dreams of being
A narcotic stasis within ceaseless becoming.
This denial: self-negation, auto-deconstruction.
I negate myself and become other than self.
And yet I do not negate my self instantaneously and entirely
Rather I negate the self-ness in myself.
I decouple the narrative, whose fabric torn reveals countless threads of possibility.
Still I fear that I have forgotten just how to weave these threads into a coherent whole.
– a reflexive, situational, ephemeral, a substantive momentarily hypostasized eternity –
fabricated from these threads of fate, future and possibility.
For my narration of self-annihilation tells no story and no truth
except
that
...I am an illusion
 There are moments when, in the depths of alienation, some bond to the quotidian self is
broken. Anchors raised, adrift, we chart a strange course we drift between Scylla and
Charybdis. In solitude we are their prey. There are moments however when in the final,
inevitable approach, we see in a flash an image of ambiguous provenance – a flash of
significance in the image – an intimation of estranged immanence – a fleeting glimpse of a
narrative of being. The supreme narrative that the image of immanence intimates can
never be elaborated upon. This is because it is no narrative, but rather these flashbulb
moments, even if initially overlooked, are later elevated to the status of absolute
significance and the building blocks of a growing narrative. These are the events that
constitute the narrative of our lives. These moments are the signposts of our lives and the
tombstones of the past.
 Epicycle I – Revenants of Times Past

Shadows of a Dream
My memories of her are those of a dream half recalled
Those swiftly fading images, thoughts and emotions
Slipping beneath the waves the deep blue sea of infinity and drifting
Current-drawn, slow, almost imperceptibly,
across the sea, drawing me outward, onward toward oceanic infinity

Soon I am lost, forgotten, drifting in the sea of infinity

But not so lost am I, soon washing up upon the shores, returning,
With but a fleeting recollection of my odyssey

I awaken amidst these fleeting shadows drawn from a dream –

– Scattered – still, and still just as lost as I was, carried off by the sea
It's endless expanse can be ever seen through my eyes, in these eyes,
longing to return to that warm, hypnotic, tranquil reality

She is gone with the dream, though somewhere she wakes

We have already shared dreams, but always we must wake

I know she draws close, the time draws near

When we are lost in an embrace and cast off all fear
A time when I can gaze deep into her eyes,
see through her eyes,
to see in her my fellow dreamer,
as one in reverie under moonlit skies,
in our waking dream we kiss unseen
As we did in so many half-forgotten dreams

Constellations
I gaze up awestruck by this beauty
I stand transfixed, my tears frozen to ice
I have spent this night so alone and free
So far from them all in this cold night
But not so far as the bright stars above
Burning and dancing through eternity
The bright waxing moon hangs in the void of
Space between Orion and the Pleiades
What are our passions to the stars above?
What is our time to the cosmic hunter?
To the Seven Sisters what is our love?
But our time is short, theirs is forever
Emotions long asleep awakened once again
By your beauty beyond mortal ken
Twilight Revelry
As the silence descends
during the dark hours before dawn
The flames die down to ash
as this long foreseen day now comes to pass
The only sound which breaks the silence
the chill north wind
rustling between bare tree branches

I hold the ashes in my open hand

ashes of a scarcely extinguished flame
ashes already bitter......cold
the winds blow away – ashes and the.......old
Upon everything which these embers alight
Springs fire black and cold
Burning shades, fires inflamed by cold wind

And as these flames die down

to ash and ember warm,
thus, a new cycle begins
of cosmogony, renewal; preceded by purification by flame

Ah, we now dance amid flame and ruin

Unchanging, Undying
In nocturnal celebration of debauched revelry,
broken only by the cold light of dawn
When at last the earth cries out, in a final, wretched plea

When at last the dawn does come

No birds of morning greet the sun
For the World-Tree is burning
and the Rainbow Bridge is black
The winds at last change, gusting now from the south,
and in turn, fans higher the flames
which engulf the pyre of all earthly beauty,
as the World-Serpent stands poised to strike
at last.

Ah, we dance now amid flame and ruin

Unchanging, never-dying,
Reveling in such a Twilight
Au-delà
The past and reality melt away
At dawn under the rising sun
For a time all is gone except the Now
Most memories too, and yet somehow
I know where to go, but not why nor how
When so much else is lost and too
As reality and past melt so sound
Distort and contorts in ways never heard
No sound or nature, not man nor beast nor bird
Sounds of horror, perhaps best left unheard
Distortions of nature things not of this world
Brood beyond the borders of consciousness
I have seen what dwells in the darkness beyond the black
I have seen the blackness that lurks beyond the light
The brooding shadows that wait to swallow up the light
and substance of this world ephemeral
Oblivion, a ravening beast so feral
Draws in a devours all light and life
Of this world of greatest beauty, hate and strife
Once all will die and fade away
Could that day have been today?

Hydra

I never knew, I remained ever unaware,

yet it was always by my side
For years on end I fled, but could neither elude nor hide
...from this personal demon, ever-present
...from this demon of time, omniscient
During years following years,
as a falcon perched upon my wrist
I bore you along with me,
devaluing, unwittingly, each and every kiss
Burdened by pointless, unnecessary haste and urgency
...even when I thought myself to be truly free
Ever-present in my consciousness
You made me impatient and restless
A vulture, you lurked, awaiting the scraps
Remnants of times when haste causes happiness to collapse
My sworn enemy, I have cut off your head
A hydra, momentarily acephalic, you are, another head will grow,
At this passing moment, I am free, no longer serving you, nor enslaved to any other
Catharsis
I bequeath to you my bitterness
In defiance of myself, I stand by the window
And lose myself in storm
And cleanse myself...
...of you
As rain turns to snow, so grief to bitterness
Your face a pale remembrance as I begin to forget you
But never to forgive,
As I cleanse myself...
...of you
As lightning splits the night asunder
And with the thunder you disappear into the void
The waters wash away memories,
As I cleanse myself...
...of you

And you're gone...

As you reap this bitter harvest of midwinter

Whose seeds in full bloom of spring you did sow
But I am now as the pure white snow,
For I have cleansed myself... of you...

Cessation of Retrograde Motion I

 Fugitive Eros
They insisted that I explain every act. And wherever a rationale could not be fashioned, I bore the
stigmata of having failed to narrate, of having falsified my story. They enthroned perpetual guilt and
instilled a moralizing compulsion to explain every action. The imperative to explain has been overthrown
but there remains still a sense of falling short. Every success rings hollow, while every shortcoming
resounds.

I imagine a trial in which conviction is assured. I imagine myself as both defendant and prosecutor;
the judge and jury: the idealized images of past lovers, whom I, in the past, had wronged. Absolution:
Impossible - the future foreclosed; so this image proclaims.

In my weaker moments I imagine that the life I lead is that of a fugitive from this most intimate of tribunals.
I've absconded, yet no other choice remained. What traces have I left, aside from a path littered
with the detritus of discarded dreams? My despairing hope is that somewhere beneath the smoldering
rubble lies some fond memory; that is all one can wish of the past.

I wrote these lines in the final months of a time of profound alienation from the world of
action. These lines exhibit the depths of dispossession and a failure of narrative with such
poignancy that today I have difficulty conceiving myself as their author. I found myself betrayed
by identity and by narrative; their attestation was empty while they had become instruments of my
oppression. Through unceasing narrative explanation of my actions I had thereby refigured a part
of myself in the internalization of my persecutory other. Thus I renounced both identity and
narrative, in toto, and yet something remained. Voluntarily deprived of identity and the ability to
narrate, I remained, as did my faulty of imagination. The exigency of this image impelled me to
record it in writing; writing that exhibits no action and no narrative and in which I found myself
fractured into three identities: the self of imagination, persecutor, and fugitive self. I did not lose
myself; rather I witnessed my own fragmentation. I say witnessed because I did not create or
configure this image; for this image came upon me and I found myself refigured by this writing, a
mimetic representation of self-dispersion.

The aura of memory is like love after the fact. It is a lie to myself by myself that I've forgotten was a
lie. It is a metaphorics of memory and desire. I forget the failures, I forget the reality, I remember the
eidos, the idealized image. If it really were this that I remembered the aura would never have cracked.
I retrospectively falsify my memory to re-create the aura. The erotic afterglow grows with time's
passage. I'm becoming trapped in my memories. Why can't I just believe a new lie?

The fragments have at last escaped me. I can no longer conjure up the erotic aura of memory. I can
no longer re-create the aura. Eros was kidnapped by Mnemosyne who then turned fugitive and
escapes me. The memories remain, yet they do not. They are still there yet their are denuded
representations, lacking all form and all feeling. They are dead objects in my memory, monuments -
memorial to times past. But was Eros really kidnapped? No. Eros at last escaped Mnemosyne, and so
deprived memory of its erotic charge. Eros, now in secret solidarity with Thanatos, looks toward the
possible and beyond that to the impossible - to the future that comes.
There's a stirring within
Strange, suppressed emotions and memories well up and wash over me
Artificial rationality buckles and creaks under the weight of its systematicity
Such feelings have no place within reason;
they corrode reason.
Unassimilable, this overflowing erodes the pillars of reason.
....so this is the outside of thought, the outside of the concept...
The submerged is now surfacing.
Reason and fear held emotion beneath the waves
to drown the pre-rational – feeling
The repressed returns and suppresses repression.
Sentiments again arise with such intensity they burn holes into the fabric of being. Black holes....
Indeterminate, yet in a moment every emotional tone manifests.
as raw feeling.
There is a particular poverty of words
revealed by uncensored emotion
poverty pointing directly toward inherently incomparable richness
the plenitude of experience
pure
in an intensive state.
I see the aura and its incipient cracks.
One crack, another swell in luminosity.
Every diminution accompanied by augmentation,
the quanta of aura henceforth resistant to repression.
Objectless, emotion disrobed displays a pure state.
Objectless, desire disenchanted shows its pure state.
... am I subject if object is absent? Desire unfulfillable
Unfulfilled yet intensified.
the only true fulfillment of desire...
 Désir à Dieu
There's always a sense that an insight that has yet escaped me lies just beyond the frontiers of
consciousness. This sense is invariably accompanied by a feeling, an idea that this next insight, this
insight whose immanence I sense, will render the world intelligible in its immanence to me and my
immanence to it - it would bridge the gap between consciousness and being and with it bring at once the
fulfillment of the desire to be God and lose oneself in that becoming while at the same time retaining
self-consciousness and identity - this retention dissevered from reflection but rather constitutes a
perfectly immanent awareness of self. But maintenance of identity and self perpetuates a fiction and
renders this immanence false. No mediating term can be permitted, for one inserts a crack into this field
of immanence through which reflection may enter and spread cracks in the aura. Desire for the universe
and becoming God through amorous fusion with the beloved must be unmediated, unlimited and
unrestrained. Why? Because the entrance of reflection through the cracked, broken aura introduces
transcendence, time and reflection - this throws us back into ourselves and revels to us our finitude and
mortality. Wanting to be the totality of the real (the universe, the world, my yet unknown beloved, God)
equally implies not wanting to know everything. Must I renounce my quest to know in order
for desire to be fulfilled?
Is a disenchanted world worth fighting for?
Demythologization can only find passion in making itself a myth.
Demythologizations: a performative contradiction par excellence.
Was noch?
Demythologization re-enchants, re-mythologizes the world - the mythology of reason.
Enlightenment: the new religion.
Why advance reason except out of a religious passion for reason? Likewise there is a rational impulse in religion
and
mythology, a latent enlightenment.
Thus the pendulum in perpetual motion continues to swing.
If it is true that fictions are essential to life
We must then delude ourselves,
we must lie to ourselves and be ever in bad faith
if we are ever to take leave of the present.
I thus create new tropes and narrative forms for future life;
These I conjure and summon out of the depths of imagination
grounds for new fictions to arise and replace
all those autochthonous metaphors and fictions,
dispelled, disenchanted, and deracinated by the progress of demytholigization
God – knocked out – not knocked off...

Interlude

Time grinds to a halt, the dialectic is frozen in place. I no longer find myself always already ahead of
myself by leaps and bounds. No longer projecting into the future. Rather, immersing myself into the forward
flow of the river of time. The waters are strangely soothing, even as the mist of its rapids obscures my vision.
The river of time is at once the stern father of myth and at the same time our gentle lover, embracing us if we but
accept its ephemerality. It is no longer projection, no longer at all an intellectual act, but of intuition surpassing
all rationality and permitting us a glimpse of that which lies further downstream. With a gaze neither toward the
past nor toward the future – we see the future embedded in the present. This intuition, this image which is not an
image, persuades us further to relent in clutching futilely the present, the frantic attempt to grasp and take hold of
the present as it inevitably recedes.

Each and every moment could not me otherwise than it was. The breakdown of language, the
inarticulability of experience bears witness to this truth. Yet within the moment, itself, there is preserved a trace
of otherness, one point of origin that which "might have been." When this breakdown, this standstill fails to
occur (which is usually the case), we never cease to reflect long enough to truly experience the moment in
unadulterated intensity. Blinded by reflection we ruminate upon that which might have been, yet was not; blindly
we chew the cud of memories real and imaginary
 Epicycle II
Biffure

Not a trace remains of you,

only an abandoned pseudonym sous biffure
your scratched out emblem
second-hand stories of stasis
of you...

The passage of time

The procession of years
In unison, they have effaced (yet not erased) the biffures, the scratches
the nails dug into my skin, my heart
and debris beyond measure has buried
this tiny trace of
bygone days and bypassed paths
effacing even nails that once tore at my heart
erotic pinions
Mnemosyne's talons

Analog of needles, your talons injected

guilt-venom talons
envenomed my heart
culpability coursed through my veins as though I had betrayed
by remaining true to my vow
as though an oath was sworn and broken

Never again can your nails, your pinions, your talons, envenom me
my vow ever was exacting beyond compare
yet I remained true and truth revealed to me
beneath the trappings of quotidian docility
lies ceaselessly coursing rivers of time and change
currents carrying me relentlessly toward the sea
making my passage ineluctable and ever bitter, bitter-sweet
you saw no beauty, no consolation in the bitter-sweet, but saw only the bitter
for your fear ever eruped in rage,
becoming
indifference and
definitive disappearance.
to your deepest horror vacui you succumb and fade
disappearance, your sole refuge from true disappearance

nostalgic night-glow of memory fades to a mere point

I imagine
beyond, behind, an obscured, scarred, ever-present, et maintenant biffé
pseudonymic-mask ,
lay a name-face, concealed, never-present, and no less scared, beyond, beneath innumerable masks

Par-delà this point a fond recollection

arises unbidden, and yet not unwelcome
for my fondness, free and unmixed with nostalgic afterglow,
has removed the nail-splinter of my heart left by your bygone love
Sommes-nous satisfait? Nous sommes les dieux qui cette caricature fassons...
Content? Satisfied? No words more laughable... None more devoid of meaning...
But for brief intervals...
...elongated instants, moments long as hours, hours brief as the blinking of an eye...
...fleeting, elusive, sublime and ungraspable apperceptions of beauty (and likewise of terror)
L'ange Apocalyptique
Femme apocalyptique
Ange féminine
Précurseur du désastre
de la étoilé tombée qui je devrisse
blême et épuisé comme les restes
d'une étoilé explosée
d'un nain blanc dans l'ombre de la
lumière bleu et aveuglante des passions dépassé

Ange-Mère
Je ne fut pas ton enfant faible
Peur-être fièvereux, brûlante dédans
avec passion lumineux
et expression sans inhibition
Mon passion fièvereux
qui naît en mon coeur blessé
dervrent froit et tombée
loin à tout j'eus intime tenant
et pendant les temps lorsque tu panses mes blessures
et répares mon coeur
Ta médicine fut une injection
à mon coeur de froid glacée

Fille-angélique
Dédans l'espace entre tes ongles de l'amour, du souci
tu me éleves à un espace plus loin
Mes blessures maintenant fermée, et je,
recouvriée sous un marque d'une cicatrice
tout mes moments du passion ouvert
divrent à toi une maladie nouvelle pour ton remède

Femme-Apocalyptique
toi, à qui tes serres enfin
déchiris les blesseurs nouvelle en mon coeur
plus qu'acune touchée souciant ou mot calmant
ces blessures déchirant ouvert par tes serres de l'amour
laisses la chaleur du sang encore coursir
le mur froid de glacée argent maintenant tomber

Ange-Feminin-Tombée
Ma étoilé du Phoenix est encore élevant
enflamée de les passions nouvelle
avec un chaleur de bleu qui est encore brûlant
Face-à-face le désastre
Oeuil-à-oeuil et sans l'evasion
et avec un coup de tonnerre
il n'y a pas plus quelconque murs de hèsetation
qui sont très haut, haut jusqu'à le ciel
serres déchirant en morceaux ce voile gris, qui fait les plus proche apparaît plus loin
ton désastre révéle et éleve mon étoilé du Phoenix, fièvereux, et nouveau-né
Limpid Void
You will emerge renewed,
you will sur-vive,
leap over,
live over,
(Sur-
- vivre:
to live over –
− but over what?)

[In our other original pre-

− /Histoirique/ tongue, an un-
− related word is identical in implication,
über-leben,
once again – over-living]

[excessive life – time over-flowing]

your anticipation of absence,

the void itself.
In truth, in every moment,
to live is to sur-vive,
but the void is devoid of duration -
transitory – the leap is your transition
and your melancholy is a faint,
scarcely audible transmission
from the future to come

(à-venir, zu-kunft, words again

unrelated yet entwined – your future:
that which is to come)

[the present recedes and is submerged in the seas of memory...

...the future over-flows itself, in waves breaking on the shores of the now]

let not the static obscure this call from beyond,

rather, hear it clearly – and free the future to come to pass
Of Time and Place
By chance alone I stood beside you awaiting the train
A mere moment before a loud, disquieting and disordered fellow
Descended the stairs, inebriated, inarticulate, and yet loquacious,
unsteadily placed himself in our proximity

Stationary evasive movements and signals

to no avail - rather than rendering ourselves elusive
- drew his intoxicated eyes toward us,
transfixed, trapped within one steel cage car,
without escape, only arriving at squares in retrograde
Across and at an angle from you, I rode with you
At the wrong end of the wrong subway car

Out of absolute contingency,

regardless of whether my act was free,
or, rather, determined by some half-conscious intuition
obscure to me
I sat opposite him, so as to interpose myself diagonally,
succeeding, in part, at deflecting
the drunken depredations
Of a raspy-voiced, middle-aged man
Intoning absurdities, approaching and transgressing
that distance at first in between

In a sidelong glance, one pair of eyes caught the gaze of another,

a complicitous half-smile betrayed my involuntary role,
which I assumed for those many minutes
prolonged by my apperception,
appearing to me as longer than countless days

Incessantly he spoke, drew close, attempting to touch

or, rather, grope your alabaster body
At this moment, now intentionally, I found myself
speaking as though automatically,
with nowhere words I was speaking,
somehow achieving my aim of distracting
him from intoxicated intentions
directed toward you

From the first moment when I stood upon

the station platform, and
Through all the moments in between,
Knowing not why I, appearing so tired, my hair disheveled,
and striking no image of intimidation,
acted thus that evening
From the moment you vanished from sight,
and even before this drunken fellow followed suit
I knew without knowing, for, idle was my faculty of reason,
that capricious chance and time, which
brought me, but for a brief moment, close to you –
− had interposed me between him and you.
The Sandcastle
My faculties of language and speech in an hypertrophic condition
condemn and enslave thought to endless toil at Sisyphean efforts,
other times thought take flight, borne aloft on wings of wax, which,
melting, almost imperceptibly takes shape as some sort of script
In vain, I seek the meaning of these unrecognizable characters
written upon my body; and caught in a moment without duration or cessation,
wings now completely melted have inscribed foreign words upon my flesh
Now falling, enraptured by that ruse of language that we call reason, and,
by chance alive, sandcastle reason now gone with the tide, I
find myself speechless, all words in abeyance, silent, at last

in the image of actual émigrés of times past

and I, an émigré from the world of words, I write in a foreign tongue,
and in a foreign land, far from the lands of speech

Reason, that crumbling edifice of sand, at last, was overcome by waves of time
Perverse, audacious Chance in time exchanged vision for reason,
Limit-figures of desire now dashed to pieces,
and my outstretched hand lay empty and still, still weak-willed grasping,
until the living wax-character script flowed down to my wrist...

Suddenly intelligible, the script spoke truth irrefutably

A message inscribed by chance, in strange words and letters,
Its sense palpable – undeniable – my proper renunciation of reason

...to put an end to all grasping and striving – in recognition of dice already cast...

...The Rest Is Language...

We are born with a cry, we die

(if we are lucky)
with a cry, a scarcely audible rasp, or in silence
And but for brief, transitory moments,
...The Rest Is Language...

Living thus within language, we are

ever-strangers-estranged from the world.
For, every language is to us a foreign tongue –
born as we are into a world of speech –
− into our NATIVE tongue.

Likewise all names are im-proper,

our names and surnames given
to us – my name becomes proper and property
only on conditions already imposed on me
− To escape: empty anonymity, or rather, self-given, self-assumed, pseudonymity . . .

Cessation of Retrograde Motion II

 Third Cycle

8-5-8
Who were we to cut time in two?
To place a hand outstretched between two infinities
Digits fingering the supernumerary infinite of time
enumerating, denumerating,
digitally devolving,
continuum contracting
into
wind-blown desert-sand-seconds
counted and counted, once and eternally again
by three anthropomorphic clock-hands
grandfather-clock-hands
the clock
deified, itself now digital
clutching, counting,
sand-seconds
passing
sur-viving the dis-aster of man
two infinities of time once again become one
one-not-one
number-no-longer
analog continuum

Synchronic Chronology
In lunar or solar cycles, so natural
On inscriptions, of acid-etched dates
artificial and calendrical

In time with countless clocks and calendars

Which ones? And how many?
Detour-Questions – responses superficial

Transitory moments
Movements mortal-immortal
Indeterminate intervals
Instants – interstitial

The complicity of Chronos reigns over

my synchronic chronology
Marked-time signifier-guides
for this ephemeral revolutionary
 The Point
So grave and egregious an error,
of having ever conceived the point
− of a pointless non-dimension
How natural, then, how easy it was,
to think time as a line...

Pointillistic self-conception
Time, strung-out, in unceasing reduction,
Thought-thinned, wasted (away),
without width, wan, in one-dimension

Punctured and apportioned

According to an artificial and arbitrary order
Once moments of life abounding, now transfigured
as exchangeable points of time,
all-instants,
exchangeable
any-one for any-other
each one, self-ennobling, envisions
an eternal identity, a singular self
any-one ironically identical to any-other
in line with such pointless noetic economy

Lifethread & Lifeneedle

Becoming frayed
my life-
-thread

infinite-infinitesimal
filaments fill
my unbent
life-needle eye
fitfully,
and yet in intervals
even-stitched onward

At this frayed edge

of my life-thread
Entwining, we weave
our life-tapestry
 Moments of Orpheus

Quickening Pulse
at the heart of life
Changing Rhythms
at the moment of epochal revolution
Arche and Telos
at once, in momentary superposition
At the overflowing heart of life
In each ephemeral, momentary beat -
All Time, Eternal Beauty

Upon Wings of Time

Ceaseless oscillation, inexplicable hesitation
mobile moment – hiatus from history
hovering, gliding, on the winds, my wings, of time

Cosmic inflation, endless and without hesitation

advancing arrow – inexpiable succession of instants
passing, flying, on my wings unfurled, filled by the winds, of time

Circular undulation, infinite and without repetition

paradoxical presence – present moment populated with those
departing, arriving, on winds, on wings, of flying time

Supernumerary aspiration, to live without hesitation

revenant revulsion – intolerable idea of superannuated stories
− of the horror of history in repetition
− of retrograde motion, the future-past, of Mnemosyne's temptation
– and yet, desire and defiance,
surpassing, surviving, the tempestuous winds... borne aloft... fragile wings...
...of, ... on ... of TIME.
Without image in my mirror – without image through the glass
Sans l'image dans ma glace – sans l'image travers la glace
Ohne Bildung in meine Spiegel – ohne Bildung durch mein Glas
Finding myself naked before you – losing yourself coming after me
Je me trouvé moi-même nu devant tu – Tu perdres toi-même viennant apres moi
Ich finde mich nackt vor du – du verlierst dich wenn du nach mich folgst.
Selves lost-found without recognition –
– converging-diverging, minds-eyes empty
Names – erased – scratched out – our names...
Individualités perdu-trouvée sans reconnaissance –
– convergant-divergant, passer-par, l'oeuil du memoire vide
Les noms – raturée – biffée – notre noms...
Personen verloren-gefunden ohne Anerkennung –
– mitkommen-weggehen, Einbildungskraft sehr schwache
Namen – gelöscht – heraus verkratzt – unsere Namen...
There is no reflection in the mirror – there are no more North-Star-Ideals
Il n'y a pas un réflet dans la glace – il n'y a plus de Étoile-de Nord-Idéals
Es gibt keinen Reflexion im Spiegel – es gibt kein mehr Nord-Stern-Gedanken
No more split-self-doubles – where once four were, now two
Jamais plus de les dédoublements-de-individualité-dédoublée – où ëtre un fois quatre, deux maintenant
Kein mehr spalte-selbst-döppelgängern – wo einmal vier war, jeztzt zwei sind
A stone thrown without care – indifferently – breaks the glass dividing you – from me
Un pierre jette insouciment – indifférentement – cassé la glace qui divider nous – à nous
Ein Stein unvorsichtig geworfen – gleichgültig – brucht das Glass zwischen du – und ich
No longer is the mirror empty – but it reflects neither two nor one but a multiplicity.
Jamais plus est la glace vide – mais elle réfletant ni deux ni une mais une folle
Niemals mehr ist der Spiegel leer – aber es gibt uns als noch nicht zwei und nicht als eins aber vielen
 My Involuntary Muse
Your movements in accord
with the rhythms of my time
Into my world, my proximity,
you glide upon wings unseen,
unexpected
un-expecting
hovering above, coming-over, traversing
the void which makes ME,
makes YOU,
As pendulums suspended,
oscillating, above an abyss,
time brings an embrace -
an instant, immemorial
when, in unison, two mouths
speak one word - WE
Memory-images immediately effaced,
Imagination re-creates in remembrance,
as I think you into my arms
transfigured, my artifice has made you my muse involuntary

Muse (I)
You will be my inspiration
You will be my desperation
My hope
Despair
Time crushes me in the absence of my muse...

Inertia, I curse you in vain

Time, I reproach for tardiness
Chance, most guilty of all, bores me
with predictability

Time, I have sworn vengeance upon you

Chance, I demand of you
The inspiration which will perturb me from this inertial state
...Donnez-moi ma Muse, qui viendra mon déspoir en l'espoir faire....

The ground upon which hope and desperation wage war is ravaged
My heart is torn, my wounds cut deep
Light of day, oppressive sun, you I denounce
With all the fury of exploding stars

A brief flash, a moment of dèja-vu, ephemeral and eluding memory

Muse, I must have seen you in that flash, for, though knowing nothing
Beyond the raw experience

Inspiration strikes me from l'àvenir, die Zukunft.

Nothing can hasten or hold off your arrival
I am again at the mercy of chance, and yet she is once again a playful mistress...
Time retaliates playfully as well, for I shall no notice in advance that chance will embrace me....
 Muse (II)
Shake me, change me, perturb my orbit, my dear.
Hurl me toward your solar gravitational embrace,
transform my solitary wandering sphere into a centripetal spiral about your sun...
Or, should the fancy take you, cast me aside with such violent force that I fly off
into the absolute void.
I have staked my wager and we must leave all to chance,
for we die if were merely play at life.
Tear my orbit from the earthly sun and capture my revolutions
in your radiant stellar and gravitational embrace.
Free my being from the everlasting suspicion of our oppressive earthly sun;
let us celebrate this greatest revolution
 Speak To Me, Silently
Speak but a single word to me
Or say the same while pronouncing none
No Words, Not One,
Neither a Name,
Nor even the faintest sounds of a sigh
Need trespass,
transgress
that Hallowed Space
between your lips
Speak to me no more words than one
Or speak to me all the same while you remain in silence
Your silent address can only find its destination

Speak, speak not a word to me, but only in silence

And say all the more for pronouncing none
Not a Word, Not One,
Neither a Noise,
Nor the distant echoes of silenced sighs
Could surpass,
surmount
that Accursed Space
between your lips and mine
Speak, speak no longer with words to me,
Speak to me in silence, speak sweetly and remain silent
My lips will seek out yours as I hold you close to me

Speak to me,
No, do not speak,
Not with words of language
Speak to me,
Yes, without words of language, Speak
rather with a silent tongue

Likewise I speak silently to you

Or say the same faintly pronouncing but one (sigh)
No Words, Not One,
Neither a name
Nor even the anguished longing of a cry
Issues forth
Escapes
For my lips are pressed against yours and yours against mine
now, there is no longer any accursed "between."

I speak to you in silence

Or say the same with (n)one
You respond all the same, silently,
As lips touch, we embrace, and I draw you close to me
Speak, don't seek, for this close all words must fail
Speak, don't seek, let our shared silence prevail
Seek no more, speak, speak without Word or Voice
as you draw me closer to your lips, You are intertwined with Me.
 IronynorI

For the inverse of irony

- does a word exist? in any language?
Perfomative non-contradiction
- no, there is neither word nor phrase
which does no violence to the idea,
which has the power to portray without reduction
moments overflowing
supersaturated instants
of untrammeled immediacy
truth beyond the true,
moments when,
(no(t)-
-where)
beyond the Word and the Act
co-inciding
co-incidentally
there exists a truth truer than fact
in moments when,
(no(t)-
(every)days)
beyond coincidence, the two contract
co-mingling
co-mmunally,
and as one, enact
those words which speak through me
speaking in synchronicity -
these words – (meta-
– phors? meta
– stases of meaning)
of words' impossible fidelity
to their deeds during
moments of pure, immanent immediacy
 Revenants/Remnants

Five months, five days, and five years

These are the times of an epoch at last arriving at an end
Revenants and remnants of irretrievable moments
they speak through me,
they speak through you,
they speak through us as one, in one voice
These are the fading echoes of an epoch receding
and, too, the faint, distant annunciation of another, proceeding
resounding within walls of time
a spectral, scarcely audible, presence in the Now

Do you hear them too?

Do they haunt you too?

You

I saw your face

Barely beyond the blurred future-present boundary
I saw your face – did you see mine? through the mists of this borderland, in the ether
I saw the words-non-words
Written upon your chest in a scarlet script, incandescently
I saw those words-non-words, in which we recognize and speak with one another
I felt your embrace
After our utterance, our words-non-words, in mutual intelligibility
I felt warm in your embrace, in which we lose ourselves within one another
 Opening a New Cycle

Endeless

Auratic, I project an image

beloved and idealized, a
noble and nebulous vision, to which I
could never hope truly to attain
or even to long imitate without being exposed a fraud

Disillusion, will it occur, or when

perhaps is rather the unknown
endless expanse of the proper question -
future, what do you carry in your
right hand? Manifest en droit, en
gauche caché, the concealed, never
shown, but in that moment of
happiness, which arrives in spite of
times of despair, in the reign of the
I – the tyrant – I
worthy of the world of myth (which is yet)
joined irrevocably to our own.

Viewed in this moment

killing tie is all we do,
we wait for these moments of superposed ideal and real
Live up to this ideal? This
eXistence? This impossibility?
Maybe. If only for the sake of
You.
-z-
A Novel View

A novel view de novo arisen

manifold in uprising and
opposed to what's already known

Stories unfolding abundantly, in simultaneity

Disparate and divergent
Writing, painting the future
in a confusion of vivid hues (and of cries)

A novel view ex nihilo emerging

Disorienting tapestry of threads interweaving
Crosses out what's now past and known...

Confluence-Crossroads

At the confluence of two streams,

an effluent crossroads, I stand at a
convergence point of my life.

Downstream, concealed from sight

by the shimmering, glittering interplay of reflected light
lies my uncharted future way.

It yields not to knowledge

- it flows away from any attempt to grasp -
And yet sends upstream revenants and presentiments
to the confluence-crossroad, at which I now stand...
...in this unrepeatable, fateful moment
The Lost Moment

Moments sinking beneath the waves of time,

lost, carried away, by deep currents and tides
Circulating submerged,
far from the surface -
their origin, preserved
in a place where no day succeeds endless night.

And yet such moments return,

they re-surface, re-
emerge,
they leap through the surface,
in an episodic and periodic
circular return of the origin-
allly lost moment ---
--- A moment of which I can now catch a fleeting glimpse
--- in an eye-blink-image, in mid-leap above the waves
--- Could you catch it too?
--- While at once losing it too?
Ars Poetica, impossible
work of language, and
of words.
What is the work of words?
De-scription, de-
lineation, dis-
course?
Work of order, and
of arrangement -
verbal permutations
of prefabricated
meaning-scripts
What in language exceeds
the work of words?
Neologos
Neologos, e-
vocation, e-
limination of limitations
straining, re-
straining, con-
straining this excess
visible only in that mobile moment
in which words are idled
and cease
to work.

Ephemeral phoenix seconds

enunciate in assent
to affirm your ascent
step-by-step - your incline
supernova seconds - you recline
passing instantaneous
the surpassing of now
on our passage-onward
Days and nights
pages remain blank
white night
day devoid-devoured
all-too-much at home
for words not platitudinous
yet in departure from the familiar
pages fulfilled - over-filled

Rising tempo of time

quickening pulsation
I come closer
as do you
Never shall we meet
but in transience
a temporary halt -
in temporal oscillation
...slowing pulsation...
as time descends
- we diverge
- we depart

à L.

Doubles - sans dédoublement - we become

As we became -
Distance - not distant
never more proximal - nothing further from estrangement
twinning, intertwining, entwined
life-threads inextricably woven together
form our impossible tapestry
we are -
sans désir à l'issue
In an ungraspable instant,
in the blink of my eye,
In my mirror an image appears,
It is and is not my own,
but more, it is also as much yours
My supplication of an unfinished painting
of an image, a fantasy, in the making.
Beauty in the process of becoming,
in utter ignorance of that which is coming

My torment of an unfinished story,

of a tale not yet told, of a
narrative-neverending
awaiting

My word in malediction
against the tyrranical reign of duration
against time-spacing
against delay and deferral

My desire in extremis
a first raised irate at the hours
intervening - defining
the interval of separation

My desire à la fin
to abolish, to obliterate,
and finally to efface
all that separates us,
divides us, the one
from the other,
in two
An Attempted Reflection in Prose

How completely changed my world is; had I not kept pace, evolving in tandem, I would be
hard-pressed to recognize the life and world I now inhabit as my own. To be certain, I remain
at base the same person with the same history, quirks and fascinations, and yet there has been
a distinct shift on some other fundamental level. I cannot help but notice just how vaguely
and nebulously I am describing this - yet this is the nature of the beast. While I can't quite put
my finger upon it, and neither can I precisely indicate it, I have hardly been alone in taking
note of a rather dramatic set of changes, whether endogenous or exogenous in origin and
operation. To say that I have become happier and that I see my world, with its richness of
meaning and experiences, with rosier eyes is certainly true, however reductive such a
description would be.

No, this is not reducible to a mere shift in outlook - scarcely anything remains the same save
my ability to recognize myself as he whom I was at an earlier time. More appropriately, I
could say that the past no longer fixes my attention - melancholia and neurosis have given
way to an open future and access to this very moment in which we always live - and I see the
vast expanse of possible futures which lie open to me. Yes, that is how I would prefer to speak
of this tectonic shift in my self, life and world - I can see already on the horizon the immensity
of change and the expanse of hitherto unknown possibilities now open to me and, in a sense,
inevitablly to come. I refuse to look any longer over my shoulder and permit the past to reign
tyrranical; rather I gaze toward the future with eyes wide and arms open!

A Protracted Convalescence

A year ago I was struck by a certain strange aphasia – an aphasia in admixture with a peculiar
amnesia. During my long convalescence, I found myself unable to speak or write of myself,
and it was only with great difficulty and under duress that I could call up an image of myself
into the view of my mind's eye. At times as though in a dissociative trance, my actions were
not entirely my own. At the same time, when called upon to articulate the reasons guiding
my deeds, I found myself mute; there were no reasons, I was as though an aphasic
automaton, speechless and without a will.

Thus I spent much of the last year, a year during which my wounds from the one prior at last
closed and began to heal. At times lucidity returned, as did my clarity of speech and
remembrance, but more often the demands of daily life stopped words in my throat. Even
among the closest of friends words failed to make me either comprehensible or capable of
true communication. Events, ordinary or extraordinary prolonged this period of silent
distress and solitude; desired events, yes, but yet disruptive to the healing of wounds torn so
deep.
At last my year of convalescence drew to a close – my faculties of speech, memory and
imagination have returned stronger than they had previously been. Likewise, I have emerged
stronger than I had previously been; hardly without scars, yes, but free of the dead weight of
the past.

“To every soul there belongs another world; for every soul, every other soul is an afterworld. Precisely
between what is most similar, illusion lies most beautifully; for the smallest cleft is the hardest to
bridge... There is no outside. But all sounds make us forget this; how lovely it is that we forget...
Speaking is a beautiful folly: with that man dances over all things. How lovely is all talking, and all the
deception of sounds! With sounds our love dances on many-hued rainbows.”
- F. Nietzsche, Zarathustra III: The Convalescent

Convalescence: A Poem

Closing wounds enclosed me

Reimposing a faded boundary
- with fading memory -
Healing in a prison-infirmary,
Of my own making, yet not of design,
My words failing to attain their destinations
Halted by tissue-formations of scar.
As in a trance I traveled far,
Lucidity returning first illumined, then
pierced the tissue-gauze.
Through a wound though forever unhealed
- painless but for momentary pangs -
A new I shines through from within, while
sense once again becomes palpable and unsealed.
Apparition

In a dissolving dream-image
Your apparition echoed
Across the artificial partitions of time,
In a moment removed from the continuum
and into contiguity,

The moment returns, a revenant

As for the first time our lives,
our stories, intertwine
like two naked bodies
profoundly touching

This moment -
Shared moments to come -
Like so many dreams of desire -
Profoundly real
And yet I remain in profound terror
of a sudden waking and dissolution

Attain

Attaining this initial intense moment

which acid-etches its image
- in our shared memory space
- in the depths of our being
This moment falls burning out of nowhere
into place

How many disconnected improbable antecedents

fashioned this intimate and inevitable moment
- in its absolute beauty
and gave form to our being
- yours sharing in the moment's beauty

Open to the Aleatory Absolute

I am too, open before you...
 Postscript

The experience seems quite familiar, although I am quite loathe to say that I've experienced the same,
for that would be too presumptuous. Disconnection, dispossession, alienation: they are all too familiar,
they become all too comforting. The joy of dispossession: a freedom that comes only when a future is
not to be shared.

I think that there may simply be some of us who need this freedom, above all. I am not sure, though,
that the word and trope transitory properly expresses this - to be sure there is a wandering, a transit, a
drift into and out of the lives of others, but there's another side to it, at least in the ephemerality of my
own experience.

Rather than transitory I would say, metaphorically: poetic, lyrical, musical. Life as poem, life as
music: the transitoriness of an orchestral movement, or the flow of a poem. Episodes in life overlap
and return as themes: we are the experience produced harmonically and in resonance with the past at
any given point in time - dispossession then is the disconnect between what we are as a harmonic
product and the themes that constitute use.

But themes return, and so do people. The freedom of dispossession is the allure to which others are
drawn and at the same time that which allows us to revisit the past, free of its bonds.