Labyrinth

...clouds and clocks drift

inside silken mirrors.

A flux of panoplies of skylines

Expand in paradigms as

I look through

the window high.

Pale rose and lavender

at the corners

of the eye...

Walls

Of vision twisting, burning

Like  a candle

Molten image of city lights flowing

Through mental passages in refractions

Of curtains swaying

Before the window.

Myriad trails in the room,

Tiny flashes in my eyes...

Moment of night 

When the moon solves

The net of stars

Laden  with the lost catch

Of time

Like a vast fish

Of white fire

And

Leaps back, escaping into 

The Sea of Mind

engraved with cosmic reflections

even the planets

move

as in a labyrinth...

As fog rolls through the city and

    I

Only search for

my missing love, she

The Reward

at the end

of  this maze…

Baptism By Fire

It is at last finished. There is only this stand,

This baptism by fire in the land of the dead  

This font of holy water in which I place my head,

Laughing without irony at all which is damned

Laughing at all that is profane and forced to move

Through the market place, passing inner temple doors.

Laughing at all that are flawed beyond hope, rich and poor,

Mired in delusion's mad depths beyond all reproof

Pointing fingers at myself I laugh, cold as ice,

For no one is as damned as me,  and so I submerge

In a pool of fire, which takes all of my courage;

Self-destruction and willed failure my main vice

This laugh of bravery, this laugh unfinished

Bellowed past futile conceit,  past all raw defeat

A laugh at all that is wholly damned that I repeat

A brave, imperfect laugh forever undiminished

Through the gales of eternal hell arising

In waves of turmoil, troubling these clear, still waters

With irony, but that no doubt can cause to falter,

Not this laugh which bellows through this baptizing

To Sing of The Beloved

To sing of the beloved is to be

Like a god

And all at once enjoy

The ecstasy of that which is song,

To rejoice in singing 

And to know of love.

To know a man's bliss 

And a man's pain 

All at once.

That tender ache in the heart 

That gives rise to songs...

That sense of perfection and goodness 

Of lying beside her

Like that of a god's pleasure 

And Her's of a goddess.

When with the beloved the heart sings

As every event within the universe

Takes place in a million kisses

That tremble in the sun.

The Husks of Ancient Clouds

                                        I

The turning of the round of sky, lower and lower

Electric rain winnowed clean from the husks of ancient clouds

Scattering into the void of avenues.

Wet distillations of space filling the streets-

The Azoth of the ages, a dry rain of electricity
Blowing the dust of the surface away
Leaving subtle impressions of the shadows of tall buildings;

The element of Water becoming the element of Earth

The element of Earth becoming the element of Water
Revolving in the retort of that which was never solid:

The involution of cosmic radiant energy into matter,
The fabric of the Spirit
Whirling and whirling...

The Moving World clothed in clouds and vapor

A lightning charge, a thunderous manifestation:

Clouds and vapor infusing every structure

Opening onto

Thresholds of inaudible music concealed in the clouds

Playing occultly upon the floors of The Immovable World

Chromatic streets of Fire; scales and colors combined

In the spectrum of sound and light

Leading to ten myriads of rooms conjoined in Air

Floating through the forty myriads of walls of intuition
That whisper of another reality

Concentrated into

The Moving World;
The Quintessence which builds all things from within      
Opening onto

Magnetic stairs of folded attention

Rippling like lightning,

Shifting and reflecting, displayed in arrangements

Of mental tableaux

Opening onto

Memory lining the imaginative passages

Of each individual, compounded source

Reflected once more and again, once more, outward as

Inner Vision      opening onto

Fantastic translation of The Immovable World

By the ONE energy into the projection of forms,

The drama of echoes and reflections of

The Moving World as subtle as the shadow of a butterfly

                                                II

These streets and buildings awash in the aethers

Of this mysterious assemblage

Reverberant with the thrum of harmonic clouds whose echoes

Spill into form and amass high into archway and colonnades,

Rising in an apex of substance,

Vibrant, accelerated chords of dreams,

Tangible dreams playing behind time,

Intense tension of the music of reality

Orchestrated in the celestial amphitheaters of the sky

Spilling into fine shavings of  voicings

Of domes, halls, towers, and statues

The might of the endless power of civilization

Rising into a crescendo of architecture;
Time and form of immense histories

Raining into the void of The Moving World

Struck by the clear lightning of Mind

Catalyzing the alchemic blending

Of star light aglow with

The mystery of the ancient nous-sphere

Their ever-flowing presence

Pulsating in the clouds

Precipitating into a reign

Of ancient and future images

Become Men and Buildings

Opening onto The Immovable World

Within doorways of the mystery

Existing only to transform us.         

                                          III
I speak to the goddess of Water and of universal substance, O Lady

I reach toward thine breast of skies

My breath heaving beneath these clouds of incipient forms

As I move through the spectrum of your avenues

Below daring high-rises watching passersby, rich and poor

Push up the streets like your moon the tides

Like the silver braids of your twining waves, the clouds of your hair

The Moving World constellating into your tresses

Climbing towards the stairway of your horizon

The arcing flights of Man’s vision and dreams

Hovering upward throughout

Your Immovable World

Rising in octaves of buildings

Shivering in your frozen, burning music

 Mounting into the overtone

Of the One Note

Of every step of music

That is, or has, or will Be

Building toward the Opening

Of the rhythmic figure of time

Developing into the motif of Now

Joined in the cadenza of possibility,

Into the phrase that speaks of

The self-encounter with the musical sentence
Of Life and Death

In the theme of your every movement

Sounding from the philharmonia

Expanding from the endless pieces and sections

Throughout Creation

Undressing and revealing

The naked sum

Of all events

Leading to the moment

In any given signature of music

The score of Heaven and Earth

A long fantasia of planets

Equaling naught

But

The Sound, Light, Movement, and Stillness

Of Your Music and Your Dance, Lady

                                         IV

The framework of sound of diapasonal clouds

Keying the stops of empyreal harmonium

Pulsating into the swelling streets going on abreast of themselves

From the terrace of mind, inner vision rises in constellations

Of aeons and archons as things reckoned in this invisible fire

Take momentary shape like the perspectives of the outlying environs

Hit by lightning

The Octave of Creation dreaming forms

The figure eight of  tensile streets, stretching into infinity

Building toward the opening of The Immovable World

Pulling open a door swept out of the hand

By the tempestuous breath between birth and death

Pushed forward to fulfill a mysterious destiny

Within the constant metamorphosis accelerating into manifestation
By the wind that turns the mill

That which is inside one's self, that which one does not comprehend

One's blood and breath clothed in the elasticity of sky

All placed inside a question turning round and round

Swept away by wind, 
One's body no longer fitting

One's mind no longer fitting

One's life no longer fitting

Inside a universe which one does not comprehend.
One must find a new life and seek to answer the question

Be still and know

All is vanity of the void