Love in Absentia
This is not Love that perseveres,
Nor can it withstand the dogged siege of years.
It elevates not the other, nor takes a lesser part;
This is the love that caused the world to fail,
A passion that still drives the pyretic nail
Through the chambers of the heart.
Love in Absentia
This is not Love that endures to the end,
Yet restless souls on its ‘fabled’ cures depend.
Nor is it grounded in bedrock tried and true,
No, this love is an impulse that runs like a flood,
Tearing at the banks in the heat of the blood;
Leaving wreckage where the passions swept through.
Love in Absentia
This is not Love that keeps no account of wrongs,
But a false idol around which blinded masses throng.
It does not acquiesce to lay open a pure heart’s intent,
This love is a compulsion that runs off the rails,
A tempestuous vanity that suddenly sets its sails
And rides out on an ocean of contempt.
Love in Absentia
This is not Love which is built on trust,
Its vows are not set in stone, but written in dust.
It does not seek a middle ground at which to meet,
But is an auspice which no one can take hold,
Even while, to attain it everything is sold-
Leaves one in the cold as it devours with fervent heat.
Love in Absentia
There My Soul Abounds
-A Psalm of Birovius
Proclaim your faith out loud, my brothers;
Sisters, proclaim your faith!
Speak into the gathering storm, now
Speak through the crashing wave,
Declare your steadfast confidence,
Saying:
‘Bid me come out to you, Oh Lord,
Bid me out onto the raging sea,
Where You walk on troubled waters, Lord,
My soul is safe with Thee.'
Lift your hands in prayer, my brothers;
Sisters, in one accord unite!
Take courage in the ‘Evil Day’, now
Fear not the terrors of the night.
Suffer light into the world of darkness,
Saying:
‘Bid me come out to you, Oh Lord,
Lead me through the burning flame,
Where You stand in the fiery furnace, Lord,
There my soul is saved.'
Shout out in exaltation, brothers:
Sisters, let your praises soar,
For the burden is lifted, the bond is broken, now
Works of wickedness trouble you no more.
Avow the coming of the ‘Blessed Hope’
Saying:
‘Bid me come up to you, Oh Lord,
Raise me into the piling clouds;
Where You gather your Holy Ones, Lord,
There my soul abounds.'
The Warrior Worthy of His Blade
The Warrior worthy of his blade
Is himself in fires tempered,
His mettle on the anvil laid.
His senses must be sharper
Even than the edge of his steel;
His fierce judgements
Yet more thoroughly annealed.
Life and death are elementally forged
Into the blade’s hammered layers,
In the worthy hand it is fearsome
‘gainst oath-breakers and betrayers.
In cause to liberate, or to decimate
Strike hard!
Destinies ride on the narrow edge
Of Courage and of Faith!
The heavens will look down with regard
When arm and mind is so aligned
In purpose set higher than impending fate.
Arm flash forward as fire
And mind constrain as ice;
Let the soul and the scabbard
Both be fixed with this device:
‘Loose the blade’s imperative,
Hold not back
When sound reason,
Or strong warnings
No longer suffice.’
MANSIONS OF THE PHOENIX
Mansions of the Phoenix: 33 Poems, Prologue, and Ponderings
Renga
Rumbling imperishable
out of and into existence,
carrying the binding energy
and the radiant energy,
heavy waves massing
thunder down
onto the black isthmus
of space releasing
the Fires of Origin
buried deep in dark cobalt,-
casting forth unnumbered
suns to blaze upon the void.
Arching undiminished through
and returning into base matter,
the Word Imperishable rings out
sharply in the fountainhead.
Engine of Universal Mind
(vesting the causal order)
fashions divine ciphers
establishing the design
of every elemental form,
as evident in pin-wheeling galaxies
and in the crescent lens
of the juniper seed.
From outflowing boundaries
the Destroyer passes back
into the thorium cleft,
swiftly returning
to the veritable source
bearing the keys to the Abyss;
solemn of aspect,
gazing outward through
the thermal cascade;
one eye flashing Dawn,
while the other dims with Dusk,
stands in the rush of mysteries,
witness to the opening
of the Lotus.
The Obsidian Lake
When the heights of heaven were yet unnamed
and the chaos of the world not yet tamed,
before the web of words was set,
or the first thought snared in illusion’s net,
I saw the raven’s shadow seep
from behind the hidden walls of sleep
to cut the air on wings of thorns,
trailing behind it mists and storms,
raising the first ever rippling wake
on the face of the Obsidian Lake.
Before I heard a single sound
build up slowly from the rumbling ground,
before the sun uncoiled like a serpent fire,
casting into the heavens its liquid spiral
to light the world from end to end,
I felt shadows racing over bent stems,
folding living dragons into hills of stone,
sweeping luminous beings from their high thrones
into desolate abodes in the outermost waste,-
long before man rose from the mud of this place.
The Threshing Floor
Thoughts carried strafed and windswept,-
Icarus plummets on wings he wrecked,
coiling in bruised, blue and abraded skies
is driven afield by his own beguiled eyes.
Now he at primordial shadows vainly gropes,
cast down into the vortex of perished hopes.
Like a meteor caught in the gravity of despair
yields he to the icy sweetness of rushing air.
The soul drifts on- suffused and striated,
like an abstraction abruptly vacated.
The heart crushed in the mortar of reality
drains out empty into an ambivalent sea.
The disparaged hulk of contentions abandoned,
into craters of emptiness there cruelly landed
radiates detached lines of pain outward, raw,
rippling in isolated waves along the flaw.
The dream that races skyward on waxen wings
and on that fragile framework risks everything-
enflaming passions to chase a profligate auspice,
spreads wide the full range of the mind’s canvas
encompassing length and breadth of limitless possibility.
Nonetheless, it is divine governance that rules destiny
and tests soundness in our contrived wings’ trusted integrity.
