SHAMAN
I suppose this is a persona I have adopted akin to Hanuman and Herne and possibly this is my most fitting persona. All my life I have a great interest in and knowledge of plants and animals. I fully believe in our mutual evolution from one common seed of life. I empathize with the pets and domestic stock I have kept. Although anachronistic in this modern world, the persona of a shaman is one I gladly adopt and the following poems all manifest this in some way.
Le Cirque
Les Hercules
Three strong white men,
Coalminer white,
Fresh from the pithead baths.
Anthracite miners’ muscles
Made metamorphic rock
As hard white marble.
Pale gods from our pagan past –
Lugh, Finn and Cúchulainn
Lifting huge rocks.
Emptying at a draught
The brimming bowl.
Hoisting themselves aloft
They form a human totem pole.
Our world on their Atlantean shoulders.
Give us the strength of men.
L’Équibriliste
The walker of balance,
Ying yang yeti man
Dressed half in black, half in white,
Hermaphrodite,
Calmly walks the tight-
Rope between heaven and hell,
One foot in his evolutionary past,
One foot on the first rung
Of Jacob’s ladder.
He teeters precariously
As the world beneath him spins.
He shimmies widdershins
In human equilibrium.
Give us our animal past
And hope of heaven at last.
Le clown
Psychologist hypnotist
Mesmerizes you and me.
He has us eating coconuts
Out of the palm of his hand,
But speaks no audible word.
An ultra-hoarse whisperer
He holds us on the tight rein
Of his mime to applaud,
To laud or bury Caesar at a whim
Or cease to bury him.
Give us charisma,
The power to read or lead
Our fellow men.
Le Jongleur
The Logi of our netherworld,
Joker in our pack,
He juggles balls.
“I am the lottery
Of your genes,” he calls.
Watch out for sleight of hand,
Counterfeit and contraband.
One wrong answer
Gives you cancer.
“I hold your testicles in hand.”
May he not fulfill our fears,
But keep the harmony of his spheres
And give us luck.
Les contorsionnistes
Pretty pretzel girls,
Supple as eels entwine.
My cerebral calm undermine.
Sensuous as temple dancers
In fig-tree strangled Angkor Wat.
They form love’s lesbian knot.
An anaconda mating ball.
I sense their siren call
And wish myself entangled
In their sequin spangled snakeskin coils.
My blood boils.
Give us the allure of women.
Les Artistes de Trapèze
In Spartan attire,
Smooth limbed and fair,
Strong with grace,
Somersault through empty air.
When we would fall through space
And plummet to despair,
For them the grasping hand is there.
The bravery and the dare!
You are the leap into dreams,
Our soaring hopes, our aspiration.
And oh the trust!
Hold me sister.
Without you fall I must.
Fear not for I am there,
And at our final breath,
If this our trust we share,
We’ll outdare death.
Give us the hope to live
And give us the courage to die.
L’Acte Finale
L’acte finale, c’est moi.
Shaman in the spirit tent
With supracognitive intent
I cast my amulets and bones,
Consult my oracle stones,
Call forth the magic of the circus.
I am the audience spellbound,
But also spellbinder,witchfinder.
Pattern weaver, wordminder.
Wayland Smith.
I forge Damascus steel,
Where the silver river of the past
Illuminates the present.
I have hammered the iron
Of my life’s moments
Into the sword of time.
Magpies.
The magpies of my errant youth
Were arcane birds of ancient sooth.
Popular lore and lay tradition
Held with pagan divination.
One for sorrow, two for joy.
Three for a Yid, four for a Goy.
Five for famine, plague and war.
Six to school-bike Betty score.
Once in a bare-branch frosted fall,
Perched on a ewe-fold drystone wall,
Under cold, grey, wool-skein skies,
I saw a parliament of pies.
They clamoured, screeched and cawed
With jewels of gossip from their hoard.
They spied me taking shorthand note
And mobbed me as they would a stoat.
I counted one hundred and eleven.
My Amateur Augury went to seven.
As far as corvid oracles went,
This number must have dire portent.
Their leader waddled to the fore
And in fluent pidgin English swore,
"I am Caractacus, King of Pies,
Pica pica, pecker of eyes.
We decree to teach you, human young,
The meaning of the magpie tongue,
And raven, crow, daw and chough.
We feel that ought to be enough.
And so from that day forth to this,
I've listened to the birds in bliss.
You wonder about a snag no doubt.
The magpies pecked my right eye out.
Blackbird
Check this out.
You should not have come to my doorstep
With your begging bowl and bold gypsy eyes.
Mischief had befallen you.
Most blackbirds are streetsmart and savvy,
Alert to cats and dogs and men.
They background merge
Or shrill alarum scarum
To draw the attention of all
To a man standing in lonely shadow.
But not this young female,
Breast speckled like a muted thrush,
Who watched me dig,
Appraised me with obsidian eye
And decided somehow I was safe.
She would appear and flutter down
Almost under my boot or spade.
Yesterday she flew into the house
And perched on my bed.
I had no choice but to gently clasp her
In praying hands and place her
Outside my door.
She trembled and lay still on her side
And guilt washed over me.
But she came to, from her brief
Departure from this world,
Hopped on the lawn and ate the crumbs
I had scattered there.
Who are you really crystal singer,
And why have you come
So wantonly into my shadow,
My dark nightingale?
Narwhal
I am narwhal, bowsprit caravel of polar seas,
Brow spiked marvel, true and ancient unicorn.
I am spice singer of the blue ice,
Shepherd of the grinding bergs.
Some see on my head the convoluted
Candy rock twisted, spiral horn.
They see an excrescence of pride
And will come and break lances with me.
But some will see instead
The florescence of my pineal eye,
The wormhole’s radiant coils
Between my singularity and yours.
I look in blindsight to the furthest reaches
Of my circumpolar sea.
I see the massacre of seal pups,
Red maple leaves on white snow.
I sing the slow sad whale song,
The dumbspeak, melancholy cadences,
A cetacean serenade of love
To feel deeply in your guts.
I see a thousand Great Auks herded up
The gangplanks of sailing ships
Like little Jews into cattle trucks,
The last squawk of the very last Great Auk.
I am narwhal, griever for the grey sea.
All my thoughts and feelings emanate
Ringwise and spreading, seeking you,
Waiting for an echo back to me.
I see the shadows of Steller’s Seacows,
Great grazers of the Arctic kelp.
Hardly had man discovered them,
Their molecules are interstellar now.
I see old man polar bear stalking you
With one white paw over his black nose
That you might not glimpse his true intent,
For the blizzard of emotions blinding you.
Only Inuit intuition will save you.
Carve my form in scrimshaw lines
On the bone head of your harpoon.
I am gnarled whale, see my scars.
Fish in Ponds.
Fish in ponds.
Fission splits but fusion bonds.
Vision goes beyond.
In shallow ponds the goldfish cook and fry
And gulp for oxygen and slowly die
Or quickly, harpooned by herons
And so do I.
My dorsal fin breaks water,
A monstrous crucian carp
Whose bronzed scales show annuli,
Chain mail rings
Of a thousand summers.
A battered gladiator
Who escaped the tridents
And cruel intents
Of boys with eel spears
And the nets of retiarius
Who would drink my blood
For his immortality.
Only to suffocate in the mud
Among the roots of water-lily flowers
In some suburban garden.
Fish in ponds.
Fission splits but fusion bonds.
Vision goes beyond.
In the Great Lakes I can breathe.
I am Atlantic salmon
Leading with my jutting jaw.
The red stranger from the sea,
Cataract leaper, Viking.
But the lampreys rise to meet me,
Hagfish defeat me,
Gouge holes in my belly,
Drain my colour, suck me dry.
Fish in ponds.
Fission splits but fusion bonds.
Vision goes beyond.
In the talons of the sea eagle.
He grips me lengthwise,
Aerodynamically,
My eyes to the front
As he carries me from the water,
Above the land, through the sky.
I have perspective.
I am transcendent.
I am fit to die.
Fish in ponds.
Fission splits but fusion bonds.
Vision goes beyond.
Back among the tench
And stench of black bottom slime,
I wriggle, obvious
To heron or cormorant
And bide my time.
Gagool
Gagool, witchfinder,
I see you squatting
At the feet of Twala, the Zulu king,
A hunched, wizened, toothless hag,
Shuffling on your bony buttocks in the dust,
Muttering imprecations
Over your leather pouch of monkey bits.
You point your aye-aye finger
At a tall handsome warrior
In his ostrich plumes.
His ox-hide shield clatters to the ground
As his impi comrades drag him out of line
To disembowel him with his assegai.
Where are you Gagool,
Velvet-skinned Zulu princess
Who chose once a tall and handsome youth
To love in the moist dark African night?
Gagool, witchfinder,
I see you smeared in white clay.
Your withered dugs flap on your chest.
You suck a bone for marrowfat
And watch the dance of the Zulu maidens.
You choose the most beautiful,
Young, taut fleshed and full of grace
To be the bride of death.
Where are you Gagool, young mother,
Suckling a girl-child at your breast,
Softly crooning lullabies
And teaching her love songs?
The Carwash
The sea streams down my windowpane
As I slide forwards past the waving kelp.
There is a maelstrom of surf,
Glimpses of sea otters and marine iguana.
Sea-lions playing hide and seek
With orca and the great white shark.
Aerial lowered, out of touch with terra firma,
I play Mozart on the C.D. player.
Sea horses prance and dolphins dance
To a horn concerto, a wild hunt
As the Sargasso weed thrashes,
Lashes the sides of my car, splashes
In great gyrating ultramarine.
I am bubble hunted by the humpbacks,
Lured by their love songs,
But they will not catch me
For my thoughts are a silver wall,
A mirror of a myriad sardines
To dazzle and confuse you.
Chaos batters at my consciousness
In the suck and roar of the dryer.
The windscreen bulges outwards,
The car rocks. I will be broken on the reef.
Then silence and a green light
Until I explode like a penguin from the waves
And stand dryshod on the shore,
The engine idling gently.
Placenta Trees
By the brown rivers of Borneo
The strange placenta trees grow.
With their crop of rotten fruit
The mangrove branches dangle low.
Here, each new-born's afterbirth
Is not interred in sacred earth,
But swings in a a plastic sack,
Cradled in its binnacled berth.
They wait to gradually decompose,
To drip like hatching tadpoles
Or a rheumy runny nose
Into the waters of their last repose.
Why do the Iban Sea Dayaks
Stealthily by glimmering moon
Paddle out in boats or kayaks
To fasten to the mangrove trees
Each ghoulish Halloween balloon?
Perhaps they hope these afterbirths
Like beautiful pelagic jellyfish
With pink and purple envelopes,
Pulsating in rhythmic strobes,
Will swim soundlessly seawards,
Trailing an umbilicus of stinging cords.
Neolithic Temples in Malta
On a headland by the middle sea
Where myrtle, bay and thyme abound,
Where the sea is bright and scylla blue
And sheets of scented flowers are found,
The owners of these ancient bones
Hewed and raised these yellow stones,
These megalithic trilithons.
Within the apse, the secret niche,
The mother of the tribe is shrined,
Madonna of the pagan mind
With swollen breasts and ample thighs
And steatpygous behind
And eggshell blue pale painted eyes.
To this Venus of the light I pray,
Lady of life and lovelong day,
Make me mint and bright metal,
Wreathed in olive and bay.
Make me fine and fearless fettle.
Forge me wondrous fey.
But beneath my feet I feel the sound,
A hollow reverberation
From the chambers underground.
Far under the bright sun overhead,
Below the warm earth and barefoot tread
Lies the cavern of the ancient dead.
Here the desiccated corpses lie,
In recesses cowering, crouch and cry,
Clutching sad arms to shriveled breast,
Enduring their eternal rest,
Curled foetally in rocky wombs,
Cradled in the catacombs.
One dark stone bears darker stains.
The hot red blood of sacrifice
Congealed to black and cooled to ice
Slowly to the world sump drains.
The shaman with decaying breath
Through the oracle softly blows.
I smell the sudden stench of death
And hear the dim and distant echoes
As the earth about its axis slows
And time collapses till I stand
Desolate in this loveless land.
Clan Mother.
Katrin, my Neolithic Eve
And my ancestral dawn!
You knap flakes of flint
That fall like showers of leaves,
Marble milk and semen pearls,
Stone tears from a rock’s heart.
Your youth was as windflower anemones
In our wild world’s tangled wood.
Your health and beauty
Death’s nemesis and enemies
As you in life’s defiance stood.
They were flint blades to let blood,
To flay skin from flesh,
To sever birth cords,
To cut my arm and yours.
Our blood flows commingled
To leave on your fair wrist
My soot raised cicatrice.
Your bone needle with its bone eye
Sews sinews, sees all – seeing awl.
It pricks your finger.
A drop of our bright blood beads.
You sleep for millennia
Until awakened by this, my gentle kiss,
Our mitochondrial analysis.
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