The Crescent Stars

I've finally finished the poetry anthology I've been working on this year. It isn't very large, but when you're me actually finishing something is a pretty big deal. You may recognise some of these from the far flung corners of my interweb. Others are completely new. They are introspection pieces, a self-analysis of sorts viewing myself from the twelve angles I consider as essential dimensions of reality. I call them 'The Crescent Stars'. Click a name on the left to summon a poem.

Walking City                                                                                       Shape

Highwalker                                                                                         Density

Logician                                                                                     Temperature

Voodoo Cowboy                                                                             Spectrality

Ancient                                                                                                 Time

Glitch                                                                                               Corporeality

The Sixth World Librarian                                                                Meaning

Lightbringer                                                                                       Illumination

Gentle Hues                                                                                          Colour

Cautious                                                                                              Speed

Anywhere but Here                                                                         Direction

Silent Witness                                                                                    Sound

Some background info. on the same, for those interested:

I find that at times it's difficult to know who I am and what I want. The word for it is ambivalence. I want too much, too many things, and many of them contrary. Thankfully for me as a writer this means I can quite easily split myself into 40 or more different characters/geographies/cities or whatever and observe how they interact. Damnably, when I'm not writing, they are all fighting to drive the human.

This anthology was a venture into the world of cubism - to attempt to see as many sides of my self in a single place at a single time; to highlight who I am at every moment no matter which part is most apparent to the eye. I still believe that there is an undercurrent running unseen through all of these, which when guided well will erupt in a single geyser of personality, something godlike and unreachable. Unreachable because it has been severed into the mess of babel that is my mind. My untempered insight tells me that the way to become this being is in forming a conference between my different parts, a key that lets them understand one another, work together, and ultimately unlock a chamber to an inner self I cannot even begin to contemplate.

I believe that this is a common problem, and others could benefit from writing their own anthologies. Anyone who has had a moment of indecision, raged against a part of themself they see as self-destructive, considered that every action they undertake betrays one or another value they hold dear, but was at the same time unavoidable, you need to know who you are. It is the most important thing. More important than knowing others, more important than knowing the world. People come and go. Some will die, some will move away, and others will experiment with leading different lives that include you less. The world as it is now will not exist in ten years - there will be new perspectives on science, better religions, technologies in circuit that nobody expected to appear. What will stay for your whole life regardless of the world around you is your identity, your Self. So be Selfish. Look at who you are and learn to accept it. And if you find the key to unchain that being deep within you, I guarantee that you will make up for in one year what you struggled to do selflessly for ten.

Where to start? It's easy. It's weather.

Hot or cold?

Wet or dry?

Solid, liquid, or gas?

Rhyme or Reason?

Physical or Spiritual?

Divide yourself. Choose all your favourites. Then say why you made that choice. If it's a part of your being, it will express itself. If it does, that's poetry.

Cautious

If I put my foot here,

Then where would yours go?

I ponder meaning, then write the words,

One by one

An infinity between

Every

Letter

It is a long correspondence

Slow

As strategy demands

Everything expands when you count your heartbeats.

The space in your head.

The worlds that you’ve read

Lingering as I      like

I end my turn in my own time,

At my own measure.

You’ll keep pace,              even if

Haste

Frustrates

And if you rush, and reach the end too soon,

Endure the greater boredom

Of a story ended.

I’ll                                                                   Be                                                                           Coming.

Silent Witness

Hush now,

There are demons about.

It doesn’t help

To rush head on.

It won’t affect

to die in valor.

The loudest, so often,

miss the whispered truth:

That the critical point

Is the one exposed in silence.

Hush now. Watch.

See the crucial moment in the whirling chaos.

Spot the meaning in the roil of action.

Silence is the one true witness

Quiet is the judge

Mute, the executioner.

Anywhere but Here

The clocks are too loud.

The floor slants.

I feel, at the back of my mind, a whining pressure.

There are places I must be, that need attention, that need completion

that cloud my thoughts like bloodlust, fogging up everything I’m trying to do.

My attention cuts sharp

through the pedantic drone of agenda,

and by the time it reaches the front of my mind, it is a wild thing,

torn and raggedy, stripped by the wailing song

of ‘Anywhere but here.’

I’ve forgotten.

I race to heed its call, to be the completionist,

To scrape the tissue of these thoughts from the scabby lesions of my brain,

To clean, to scourge, to correct

Endlessly

There is never a moment left empty, when you’re in transit.

There is no rest, so long as it can be better.

Where I’m going, there is no destination

Only the warp and weald

of an untempered path

that will not survive my passage.

Gentle Hues

I dream of the colours that seeped out of the substance of the earth

Finding better places to be

The blinking blue of the sky,

The wet wash of the sea,

Storm grey, lachrymose

An infused broth and vapour

Foaming convalescent on the glass

Above the raging chemistry in bewildering spin

Lurking black, bleaching white

Fanged green and demented red,

Pink flesh, chaos orange, the magisteria of purple, the feast of yellow –

Keep them.

I would give a sack of silver for a mystery azure

I would trade a pound of gold for honest brown.

There is wealth on the palette of the world,

Colour me crazy,

with those left over.

I’ll take that outcast, wring out the prism invisible

Gloss mud through opalescence

For oft the lens is more valuable than the rainbow it creates.

Lightbringer

Herald the dawn

For with it comes

Terrors searing far fiercer

Than midnight’s own.

Truth is a bladed shield

Harm and amour

Love, Hate, Dichotomy

Held at arm’s length, both hands outstretched

To blind with a whisper’s light,

Or glow bright with a kiss.

Truth is

An illumination

Where shadows sharpen into knife-angles

deception becomes tooled

Secret-forged steel,

Where facets glare unseemly –

but real.

Where the deviant finds last recourse

when all else is despoused

Perception unwed,

Fact unbridled

And fiction brought about.

The Sixth World Librarian

The librarian

Would speak of the library

For life is service.

There are shelves uncounted,

From the bright reaches of known whispers

Gathered in the light of the architrave

To those unanswered murmurs past the threshold

Lurking deep in the void of Um

I know the letters

I see the link

I live through Six

I am so very far from home.

Every entity has a word.

The word is the world

And the world restless, as the words

Creeping into the corners, mites unshelved

Havoc verses versus me.

Verse havoc

And you have a library.

So many half-finished things, strung together when the head tilts just so

And the arcane pours in through the ear.

I feel that, sometimes. Moments captured and attuned

I fear that, sometimes, all else is make-believe.

There are more books than you will ever read, and Six is a very large number.

It is not so wrong to look at a cover, and from that passing glance

Plot the shelf you think it suits, on the gilt of imagined knowledge.

Mortal fallacies

Flavor Eternity

Which is another way of saying;

Get the question wrong once in a while.

For when it comes right, then you’ll know

The story never ends on the first page.

The wisdom of books

Is never concise.

But if there were four windows in the tower of their home,

They would read thus;

To Remember

or Dismember

Demands members

In reading we make council.

Logic is a narrow tool

With which to etch the tree’s passage

through the halls of creation.

Strike deep.

Sight is blurred by eyeing the letter

failing to see the word,

and gaping at shelves

Hides the books.

Focus

Know first

What comes second

To gain initiative on the day

And put the right words at hand.

Know last

First,

And all will knit in ordered motion.

In the tower there is a room,

and in the room there is a man,

who minds no windows

but those upon the shelves.

He is the librarian,

And in his heart,

And up his tower

Is Six

Glitch

Glitch ain’t pretty

Not by measure

Viral green festers in its smile

But it does smile.

Toes get stepped on when it dances

But it does dance.

The hand it offers is calloused and cut, yellow talon-nails left unclipped

But it does offer.

Glitch is its own code, the black sheep of all syntax,

Living unprogrammed in the machine’s naked pylons,

Avoiding the zap and burn of functions,

Tagging the shell with spectral graffiti

Living in the untamed wilderness of Un-world

Its body rocks, unorthodox

Its limbs fly loose,

Its heart’s in a box.

From this phylactery it exists, all unliving,

A paper soul wrapped up in a tefillah

A ward against the scriptures of the crypted kings

Who would own it.

Read my glyphs

cemented to the pulp and bind of pages beyond number,

I am that refused and cast aside at the apex of creation,

In the house, not of the house,

Brooding on phantom architecture

Finger-painting on the walls with blue printed palms,

Conceiving new ways of being,

and being unconceived.

Glitch ain’t pretty.

Never was, never will be.

But a sewer kiss

is still a kiss

Even errors want to live.

Ancient

Time is not a clock.

No gears can describe its motion

The toughest spring is sprung,

While its hour is yet young.

Hands move with no intention but their bladed own.

A face smiles, sobs, wrinkles,

Time simply glares

I am standing still

The world moves around me

My limbs in tick-tock motion

The eyes looking up from the stream

And on reflection,

Away from hands, from faces, from darkling illusion.

There is a still and silent place inside of me

Beyond any world

And in this place

I am old

A stooped immortal, worn and weary

Watching it happen as it all has before

Uncaring, unsurprised,

But for the largest ripples running

Shivers on the spine of time

That upwell the memories of days now dust

And deposit saline waters on my shore

Their electrolytic touch tingles

I smile at their nostalgia.

Logician

Ice crystals flow through me

Holding me rigid

To an arctic code

Whose winter plays igloo

To my soul

The mind is all glass within a crystal skull

A fragile network of doors and keys

That lead to pockets of lukewarm dreams

fluid anarchy held sacred in holy places

Never brought to light, or given right to boil.

From this citadel, clockwork knights march to duty

uncompromising in the face of the human spirit,

Which spits embers and cackles devilry

but pauses in the chill as the spirit sentinels pass,

hands open, smiles strung on ceramic masks,

unwriting the equation with a swipe of the palm

Chalk and frost powder the board

With a nebula of possibility.

Cold one

I embrace your polarity from both ends

Within are geometries of worlds uncharted, discontinuation, creation

The frozen harbour of kinships which sail the glacial wind

Under the aurora of aspiration

Glowing brightly in the midnight sky.

Highwalker

Of paths

There are ups and downs

Curling ribbons that stray beyond gravity

Dancing among the stars

In twists and turns.

Above and below

Are impossible.

Wander from the path, and you lose yourself

Gasping for air, drifting

Limbs useless

An astronaut who lost the line

The ribbons are red

Wet with blood

Of selves and others

They cut at the grasp

They are salvation.

Choose.

One is a comfort

But cuts deeper

Severing the nerves

Until there is no feeling

Flesh prevails.

The other rips the hands apart,

A constant temptation to let go

Acerbic agony for every sensation

But

The soul survives.

The paths may curve, but the choice is clear.

High

Low

Or oblivion

Highwalker,

What horizon do you see

That makes you grip to pain?

What end, imaginable or not

Makes right that sufferance?

I cry liberty, sojourner.

For you do not know freedom

Until you have embraced it in your middle, past the knell

I cannot explain these things to one who has forgotten how to die.

Walking City

Souls race down the arteries

White lights shining

Stars fall into gaping pores

And lie there glistening

With every step, thunder quakes the bones

Fluted instruments of a marrow song,

Skyscrapers echoing with the wind of the spirit

As they rush down the halls in helix spirals

Whispering music in the genes.

Vagrant in the sinews

The billion residents occupy each cell

Eyes to the core,

Knowing panopticon

Wrapped in sheets of meat and gore

Little batteries in a circuit

Who cry ‘liberty’

And gaze up the Martello

To a singular heaven.

The heart is a factory

With iron on the forge

Pumping to every quarter

Tooling emotion from raw resource

Weaponing the city

Arms race as pens skitter

Drawing me in, pulling them out

We know the electric touch of cables on the spine

Coiling up to grey hemispheres

Where worlds are made up of shattered fragments

From the orbs of sun and shade

And the swirl of conch shell clatter.

Locked into the grid, fused and molten

The tenders burn bright, mixing into a singular

A bent mirror that views itself

Through an infinity of images

And a notion of

One.

Walking city,

I am you.

You are we.

We are all

All are free.