Prose Poetry at Zoomoozophone

I have two prose poems in the prose poetry issue of Zoomoozophone Review. Always a far out read.

https://issuu.com/zoomoozophone_review/docs/zr10

Snow Blindness Music

The fog came in from the ocean, covering the islands, covering the shore. Sometime later it enveloped the town, smothering the buildings with a clammy hand. The hilltop itself was clear and bright under a full white moon, hanging like a giant snowball in the sky. Stars twinkled like distant fires, sending messages between the galaxies. From above, the fog had been compressed and compacted, and was illuminated by the brightness of the moon. It stretched out across the town and over the Firth like frozen tundra. You felt as if you could step right out and walk across it. It was white and glowing and shone up into the black sky with the light of a fallen angel.

   “It’s beautiful,” gasped Elizabeth, staring out at the frozen sea.

I tried to say something but couldn’t find the words. The silence was the silence of space, deep and unending, but sprinkled with life.

   We stood for ages, gazing down on the fog. Eventually, Elizabeth spoke.

   “I’d like to be reborn on another planet,” she said. “Can you imagine?”

   “Yes,” I said, looking up into the sky at the distant stars, “I can.”

   It began to get really cold on the hilltop. Somewhere a horn sounded, breaking the stillness.

Silver Ghost Hostel

Visions persist, vapours rising from a trough where the pigs are feeding...

   No doubt I am with a friend, and we are young, standing in a clearing, surrounded by trees, by a river, information streaming from branches like light freezing time. It's impossible to decipher or decode, but leaves us euphoric. We crunch through the woods, talking of battles that might have been. Memory and mystery hammer my chest and I think about the Spanish girl we met on the island. I wear love like a scent.
   Out on the road, we walk in a delirium, the clouds above us ripe with meaning. It may be we're heading towards Eden, or an ocean. At this stage, all landscapes coalesce. There are mountains, valleys, rivers, seas in the body, limbs as windswept as boughs. Passing vehicles are narratives, family histories, fascinating radio dramas.
   "We've found the way!" I shout.
You whistle up ahead. Waterfall. Jimi Hendrix.
   Someone is bound to open a tearoom on the highest mountain, or introduce gullible Americans to ghosts. We don't talk much, but when we do, it's about important things, like imaginative Spanish flights while listening to Miles Davis, or what Katrina sounds like on half a tab of Acid. At the hostel, we are about to meet Christians in a vortex of synchronicity. No doubt I will derive much meaning from this. I am so earnest. I have come from a place where pigs are forgotten and there is refuge and rest in monasteries. You are modern; I am more medieval at present, but waking up to modernity. I am so incredibly earnest. Occasionally I wonder if you have lost your virginity. I'm sure you have, and it frightens me a little. I want to lose mine, but not yet. Not until I have captured sound. It's hard to imagine, but each of my atoms is packed with guilt and, in time, all sorts of darkness will roll in and swamp me. If I tell you this, you'll probably just laugh and speak about innocence and my death fixation.
"So serious," you'll say, and head off with other companions.
But you'll draw me in again, and what I learn will settle like silt in an estuary.
   I want you to phone me late at night, and when you do, I'll try not to be consumed by so many lifetimes rolling fear between my fingers. Our meaning will always be unspoken, because sometimes, really, too many things are said.

Punk Mark Grave/Mother Unknown

What marks the year. This candle. This procession. Dazzling sun clusters. Smoke at the altar. Waves of incense. Incensored. I held her and kissed her, drew the poison from her belly. Up and out and up. To air. One cheek. Then another. Insufficient. How calm she was! How sensitive to the damage! We regard the seasons cheerfully. Cruel fingers mark her mother like a passing.

An idol day. A high day. These things I have to attend to. This office. Let's concentrate on getting through. A female form within me. Her embrace is velvet. She asks me to heal her. I tell her I've tried. Embers at the altar. Voices in the kitchen. An altercation. There are horses in Mongolia that heal with silence. Gentle. Insouciant.

A blend of spiritualities shoots an opening through my veins. An aperture where the horses graze. Rapture. Too young to suffer torments. Too unknowing. I've found a field where we can go and watch the spinning. Our arms are full of offerings to forbidden deities.

Ink, Sweat and Tears

http://www.inksweatandtears.co.uk/pages/?p=3932

More prose poetry of a different sort up here today. These appeared in my free Red Ceilings ebook:

EYE JAR

The Prose Poem Project

http://www.prose-poems.com/pagetwo.html

I have two prose poems up at this site. Scroll down page 2 to read them.

Pigeon Poetry

 

A man leaves a roadside cafe at dawn. He has a pigeon in his eye and floats feathers on his tongue. The sky forms itself into pigeons and swoops down to meet him. The man yells, "Behold! Behold!" Up above, a new kingdom of clouds is anti-celestial. Hands take a chainsaw to history which reforms as a puzzle in space. More children are born with herring in their eyes while ancestors weave nets to catch them.

No-Self Discovery

I seem to have found it!

It is I. It is not I.

Let’s call it Christ, because Christ is the constant in whom all things manifest. It is Christ and I am. Yet I am not Christ. Such a claim would be ridiculous. It is I.

You see the muddle I am in?

Ha! I have found it. Here it is. The I, the all in I. Christ. I have it here in me like a bean. It appears transparent, flares up, moves from my sight, then reappears, here, then here. I hold it in my heart, cupped, in the palm of my heart, cupped, lovingly.

Christ the bean, which is I.

At sunset I almost had it, but it would have destroyed me. Red sky spaciousness. It burned me, tore my eyeballs to shreds, left me dumb and gaping. Such catastrophic beauty! The all in all in I. Almost. It.

One place I find it is the bench up there. It happily comes through the trees and the flies and the tyre factory, sits with me happily, as it should do, as it wants to. Jesus, I call it. Here it’s a gently exploding glass, a drenching in love. Here it sits. Jesus.

It leaps from the young lovers to the family enjoying a summer stroll to the little boy peddling his bicycle uphill. It leaps to me. It leaps like the moment you recognise the world and everyone in it, the I that they are. Yes, that’s it! That’s . . . oh everyone listen to the eye that’s new me not me. Swallow it whole! Digest it!

You as I.

You, not you.

Not I.

We seem to have found it. You in me, the I. It.

Magpies

Here's one of only a handful of poems I wrote between the ages of 20 and 30 (when I was otherwise engaged in the poetic art of survival). It's a prose poem, written before I knew what a prose poem really was, and I present it now, some 15 years later, because of an renewed interest in the archetypal images of Kundalini awakening it draws upon, at a time when the effects of that awakening are still being worked through with a heightened sense of wonder, awe and hope in the mysterious processes involved. Hope you enjoy it:


A thousand magpies were sent up from the earth and broke her crust and dispersed. And one broken winged magpie flew on a crow's back to a house where a girl received it and cooked it and ate it. She ate it and fell ill and saw, that night, in her delirium, the vision of a thousand magpies launched into the world.

And one magpie flew to a river rock where it absorbed the sound of the water’s roar and carried it, in its throat, to the sea. Returning to the rock, returning the water’s roar, the magpie was drowned by a sudden surge of the indignant swell.

The dead bird floated downstream until it was washed up on a bank where a boy fished. Instantly, four crows came from the four corners and lifted the magpie in their wings and flew off, returning the bird to the fountain of the girl's dream, where she received it and held it and transformed it into a thousand living bluebirds.

Fig Tingle

Those reckless spendthrifts throwing air with frozen twig fingers, breaking a girl in the middle of the photograph. By some miracle of light, the streets, sacred entertainers, examined the hot dance her wild and reap a winter. So the dress between my harvest fuelled in supernatural glory, rolling her drunken eyes, angry and venturing to love us. Someone took I wanted her, flung my arms reflected inside, "You're not Amy!", the most beautiful girl, shaped to the flesh, becoming cold and vile after a raid.

With Apologies to WCW

A girl in a field and a boy up a tree. Watching, dancing, watching. Two boys. Three boys. A city of boys. Watching. But only one girl - like a road out of town.

A boy in the ocean and a girl on the beach. Swimming, laughing, swimming. Two girls. Three girls. A party of girls. Laughing. But only one boy - (a tiny baby turtle hatches from an egg in the sand).

Smoke Cut Up

Streams of the glen existing in stillness, get up and jam the door - in the body, altering perception, a ganja fire through leaf and bush; the mind and the firelight, or the drums and light in space, tempting me with fantasies: where the ego is, accompany the smoke. I feel the trees unravelling, the sheen and shine behind the night; void soft with fancies; mountain lands and joy. And soon, dark pearl in the soul, abandon restraint and all humility singing; take praise and adoration, law breaker, dope fiend. My bedroom is the composer of the galaxies, an interior universe switched off, candles lit. I am merely now of angels, a pile of ladies, my loins flicked through for ascent.

Channelling - A Cut-Up Poem

Two girls stood apart. Both of them streets and glowing lamplight. One of them I liked brimming sound and gathering delight. She wore purple heavy make-up; the other rub and bounce of flesh – carried downhill in eyes. I turned to her with life, charged and channelling in the tree with desire. I turned away. I did with fire and glowing youths, life leaping all an answer, like a curious child. I knew burn of evening. I was looking for alcoholic splendour – glimmer wouldn’t find it lying. We lay on the floor, a taxi confused by distance. Sound echoed in the woods looking at me. A ball of voices burst through was more natural, but with seductive dark around. The woods were radiant, an opportunity to sing silver buckled boots. The girls wore black image of life. We were the flames, given their souls to evening.

1-2-3

slow integer. freedom serves. dash diction dash. as I rise I speak. a multitude of beginnings. silence for no reason. focus on the pain. an integrated encumbrance. vex. hex. the resulting euphoria sustained by a deep conviction. hair oil. heir oil. the degraded lama dips for convenience dips for theoria dips for peace. a happy majority. voiceless. personality obliterated by elliptical thinking. a deep conviction reinvigorated by promiscuity. disdain. motivation. smooth literature.

Speak Out Against the Madness

vicious vision hound out meat sacrament tripartite black cat magic voodoo impotence. reef reef salt soak hope bean jug loaf red lie oceanic sick sicken suffering. rock rage raga pope blend mend sicken satan croak frog fester spin gala fox deliberate. tuft turk turgid church wrapper rape inchoate vender cult bug cosmic seismic low log welcome. beast cake soporific huge grace vanish splendour dome disgust disown divine entangle rich parental. doff drape silt lane spy polish kitten vestige alien eye eye eye scrape guilt custom feather. plant vain riot dream manage stain abusive soul pipe will wind wall rope soil intrusion.

Extract from a Prose Poem Novella in Progress

It begins with no( )thing. At least nothing observed. Perhaps a description. A dark frozen sea. Floating chunks of ice reflecting moonlight. Then, ( ).
The northernmost rim of the earth. C.

si
le
n~
ce

A slow curving back breaks the calm plate surface of the water. The arching back extends and dips and throws up a tail which flips and softly sinks. I go there in movies, in dreams.

Light-Being Boy has the temerity to step inside my dreams on a nightly basis. He summons me north. We hover above the Pole, irradiated by Aurora Borealis. He replays the scene before our arrival - the flat frozen sea, the leathery whale, the vast unending emptiness. I switch off and stare into the past.

Dream no.151:

The whale basks in warm tropical waters. The islands sparkle like emeralds set in blue. The palm trees sway in mild Caribbean breezes. C.
Having established the scene, we attempt to locate Light-Being Boy. We follow a trail of ganja smoke.
In a hut in the woods on a hill in the forest with the high priest of Rastafari lies a boy in a vest with a cape on the floor (a silver cape, discarded - too hot) and a hood on his head (a silver hood, retained - too cool).
Cult Girl screams, indicating the presence of snakes. The fug of smoke rises and drifts below the ceiling. Light-Being Boy is awakened from his reverie.
- I thought I was with you in the Arctic, he says.
He sits up and coughs, emitting a dazzling corona from the top of his head. The high priest of Rastafari intones the daily prayers, irritating Cult Girl, who for the time being has sworn off religion.
- JAH . . . RASTAFARI!
He thuds the drum in clouds of smoke while the forest resounds like a heartbeat.
- JAH . . . RASTAFARI!
He chants the Psalms and invokes the name of Selassie, until the goddess Nyabingi ascends from Rwandan rainforests and takes possession of Cult Girl, sending her into a nightmare trance where the history of African cults runs like a film reel through her.
A beam lights up the wall, which acts as a screen displaying an array of spirits, dancers, and witchdoctors in black, white and various shades of grey. We find ourselves witness to the rituals of a pre-colonial African village. We feel like anthropologists taking part in a seance.
When the drum stops, Cult Girl sighs and sinks to the floor in a melodrama of her own devising. Light-Being Boy beats me to the mango juice. She sips the juice from his hand, licking up the last drop until the taste can only be that of chrome metal. The high priest leaves with a look of non-committal. He has forgotten his drum.
Outside, pages of scripture are falling from the sky until the forest floor is littered with sacred words.
- God has too much to say for himself, says Light-Being Boy.

After The War

They took me to Norway on an old boat. They wanted me to broker peace. Then, during the war, you left me. I died in a limousine while you sang to Italian aristocrats. Funny I can say this now: God loves you.

Someday I will become your guru. You will be beautiful in silks and I will give you the mantra: Ma-Ra. In some ways, it has already happened. Little consolation, high above the Atlantic.