A Troubadour�s Thread

Poem

1 And the winds here are crying For immobile planets Where they can go dark Amid their own fortress... I go from water to air And back to water Slowly twisted by the night Until disturbed beyond all I begin to wish an iron claw Would drain all the blood. A small angered bird Has drawn spite into my garden In his eyes I see the cunning Of a mind forced to rave, A machine he rides sings a tune Love has begun to yield to... And when I open my mouth To address the night-sea people Birds flutter out of my voice All trembling to die with little trace Upon an horizon of dusk; Nightly I stand convulsed with night Hoping the sun would not poison The dark tumour at dawn. And she sits in front of me Making plans for the night; A black gem in the forehead Of the formless whirling dark... My own universe is possessed by clouds 2 In my shirt sleeves I make stitches For a more tolerable future Knitting together islands of weeping clouds And then embalming them with night. I have begun to stitch Together dead white birds, They had sung to me in death About love and song Robbing them of all judgement, Amid a colony of wild spectators I have been called To take night to the heart of a song I have been given The flesh of dead birds To make a symphony of blackened diamonds. Stilled winds have to steady the voice So that when it speaks The mark would be engraved Like when a rat runs hurriedly Into a blank wall to make a cipher. And then the gates are opened again... Soulless feathers cry feverishly After a heart Night muslins crying for lack of weight What a pain to know That even the night too Can sometimes go weak. 3 And in disembowelled form All our foibles become visible Pale, like misted mirrors And beings in flesh Make heavy-footed resolutions And just like whitened scree They roll away with sureness Over the mud fences beyond. And from the voice, The flesh has been taken away And the halo of it Hangs like an impaled animal In a limbo of passive soulless light And within the void of a scream Silence makes a distorted And horrific orifice, The rent beak of the bird Of the dead sphere. And within the long room of the chest We settled all the philosophic Armoury we could muster; To make it worthwhile We placed them upon the cushions of night And then in a fever of oblivion The breezes of a music Came and proclaimed nothing was. Upon my deceptive heath I had planted mahogany trees Which had sprouted 4 Like innocuous tumours Over acres of dream And a flute came within me Undressed herself and then Left within a blank page. What a lesson to reach This white empty room Where all illusions become iron-grey, I murdered a whole country Of virgins in their sleep To realise that the luminosity Of golden affection Tears off the chords Of legs and voices steeped in iron. At the threshold of a tyrannical wisdom I hear the rustlings of a chick: After a quarter of a century Filled to the rim with heart A tome of tears threatens To give to the heart a song. On the first forgiving night I shall go again to mend With a dark cement, the violated promise That I’ve built out of many starvations And in the erstwhile cluttered room A pleasure the most loved one created Has torn down all defences. 5 Trying as hard as rocks Upon a plinth in mid-sky I amalgamate half-formed thoughts Like a sage undressing Within gowns of clouds And water-logged from the inside I begin to count How many steps the spirit has taken. And among the relics of a lecherous age She has managed to relive a profane moment Laughing like a virginal nymph And even with the corpulence of sin We have given to decadence A luminous wave of love. When she saw that he had Lost all his elements again To a catastrophe of light-headed love She gathered night about her And like a panther upon her haunches She strove to make a man Of him again. And she too became poisoned By his inflammation Which donned...