Journeys of the Writer

You said it had been over
Before you entered here
And so you turned and strolled away—
Your mind a Cheshire Cat.
And it could have been several days ago
Had it not been memories.

So I turned another head,
Another hinge on my bed,
And traded the spice of cinnamon
For a luscious smack of thyme;
I watched the sky of Robin eggs
Slumber in a grain of sand.

Yet, time wearies spectators
So I picked up my blue fountain pen
And wrote of the goose from which it came—
A little grey thing
That swam in the lake every morning.

Ah me! The books I have read
The knowledge ingested
While I have consulted the blazing sun
Coated in his sugar-sweat—
The ancient tomes of ancient dust
That crumbled at the slightest touch.

I’ve splashed my share of ink and pen
On a thin papyrus crust
And dreamt of Egypt—Isis eyes!
The noseless Sphinx, the Phoenix skies,
And the vocal barge of baritones
Floating down the binge of tombs.

Little flakes of snow, pristine,
Melted round my thermos toes;
A little tincture of frozen pools,
The dozen lessons of sadist schools.

There were fogs that I wrote of too
All chocked up in little bottles,
And sprinkled over the twilight skies
Above the Northern Sea.
The Spermaceti danced for me
With rolling fats for fins—
Wretched, wretched limbs!

And so I did seek counsel of self
Within my endless volumes,
And all the little papers filled with blots
That lay strewn all around me:
Notes of how I’ve lived, and slept
Beneath an endless field of stars
And my soul found its purity
By lines scribbled into the moon,
A dash of lovers dreams.

The pictures formed into my mind
And sculpted their numbers there—
Yet I still remember Alice
Before she came to Wonderland

And I’m sure I would have followed her too
Had it not been a memory.

Dreams of the Broken Churchyard

There was a churchyard by the dell—
An awful, dreaded spot
That stands in shadow by the hill,
Whose barren roots have rot.

The church is old and moldering
With spires void of spine;
And bats in belfries loitering,
Asleep by tolless time;

And in the walls inscribed a skull
With tapers underneath,
That spoke of monks in drunken lull
By Word of Sword unsheathed.

How, lost they were in witchcraft rites
Amongst the swirling mist
That transfixed every Arab Night
One thousand one, to list.

Obsessive drinking of the blood
Of flaming infidel
Brought with its draught a thought that would
Assign its deathly knell.

Whereby these thoughts I thought had passed
And, sitting down to think,
The vision ere did end at last
And fell far down the brink.

And I awoke, by belfry call,
To find it was not dream at all.

Enchanteresse d'accordéon

Sleeping under the moonlit skies
Your mesmerizing melodies
Belly-danced with every star
That spanned the space below us;
And people rose like smoke from there,
The massed multitudes were searching
For our dark, secluded, cove.

Yet I cared not, and you still played
Alabaster accordions—
Their tunes were tearing straight through
The hazes of hash and incense,
And their melody hypnotized
An Albatross to carry us
Off to the Caspian Sea.