A Portrait From The Archives (c.1974)

A cursory posting today, as needs must speed my swift departure to meet with cohorts on the mainland. Any positive outcomes of this pivotal consortium will be posted here in due course i.e. when details can be safely shared. Until tomorrow then mine kindred hearts, yours,

The Mage.

(Incidentally, this photo was taken three months after my prison break, and was professionally shot, as a farewell gift to my family before I sacrificed all familial and social luxuries to go underground.They pray for small mercies. They get smaller/)

Meanwhile, a poem dredged from the archives of my former vocation:


The Perfunctory Man.

Whilst fireside I kneel and pout,
Play weight games with the poker,
A tireless apathy won out:
My world hung mediocre.

In the stealing eye of noxious flame
I saw the Imago dei.
He stared complicit; sang my name
Determined we should save me.

Homunculus of earthenware
A stuttering sylph of coal.
Soap-box sermon from the air
Has me plucked from the shoal.

The greatest pride, my host confides;
Fruit of his cloven gut;
Triumph of his bilious asides
Will be to burst the rut.

From shoe-shined coffers plentiful
Hails a century of Pucks.
A galaxy of sentinels
Addressed to push my luck.

To be flung upon the canvas of space
Where harlots jest with choirs
The entitled right of every race;
Celestial pariah.
.
The pot-bellied prophet cast in earth;
The pedant of the heart;
His pedestal a tickled hearth
I bow to his imparts.

From deep within the fire-eye
Ten rheumy vines extend
Their hymnic creak a rhapsody
Of hearts about to mend.

Glazed buds shooting from the hips;
The Big Cahouna, Behemoth
Unearthly roar of righteous rubrics.
The decalogue of Sephiroth.

My heart entwined in hardy vines,
Fat pulsing motor bulging
Through the mesh of fishing-lines
The purpose not divulging

Lest I plump haste to err my feet
So cold to taste the embers.
Plunge roots us home to heaven's fleet.
One shrub gives mighty timbers.

The seeds of illumination cast,
Minutiae scattered 'cross the hub.
The germination of the mast:
I'm to sea in a hammered tub.

From which will bloom a galleon,
Of three ten-storey sails
Like raptors sprung from carrion,
Gleam deep beneath entrails.

A perfect double-helix
Blows our renaissance, before,
As envisioned by the phoenix
Vaporous seamen take to oar

The bird, atop our crow's nest motions
For immediate embarcation.
As the shore melts into ocean
I can see the hope of nations

In my temples still are spoken
Through the rasp of terra-cotta
The polemic of my token:
Aye, my feet are getting hotter.

He unravels the Kabbalah
Be it Lourdes, Mermansk or Salem,
Be it Vishnu, Hitler Allah,
In the Voudon doll or Golem,

In the Rabbi's myth, the maker
Templar, Incubus or siren
In the gullet of the Fakir,
In the flesh-breath of vampyren

From Lao-Tzu to Paracelsus
Via Jung, the Mage and Karma
Lies Tradition born to help us
Sail the breadth of our arcana.
Our vessel the Gematria
Lashed square across the water
Ploughs furrows rarely statelier
In search of Lillith's daughter.

And how remote she may be found
We'll slowly recognise
Our destinies are homeward bound
Below our feet the skies,

Horizons may be obsolete
Inventions of the eye
Beheld by men bound to compete
Together in the lie.

My faceless crew ne'er weary tread;
Their souls with the elect,
While I, blue, blistered and un-fed
Steer thrashing and unchecked.

The land on all sides vanquished swift.
Alone on thunderous breaks,
A starfish prow-stretched masks a rift;
Shows how my concentration quakes.

Three nights on we've skirted shut
Round the same magnetic locus
With sodden maps I've flirted but
My compass fails to focus.

Is this the gaol of Bermuda,
The frontiersman's oubliette?
In quicksilver eye, the barracuda
Circle. Dizzy, you forget.

Aspirations trashed we stalk
About a lunar underworld;
My spectral crew refrain to talk
Their figures waste to pearls..

Between soft walls my words dry out
As hollow and spurned as my hull
I never will be heard cry out
So decrees the goblin's gull.

The Golem's word was kindly meant;
As Faustus had to learn;
When glimpsed by minds of weak intent,
Impotence had me burn.

My splintered vessel aches and groans
A symphony of woe.
Is this the way careless seeds sown
Are fated, doomed to grow?

El Bruxo (1972)

Dead pastiche or profound, formal, insightful slab of noise? None of the above? All of the above and so much less? It's very not me. Although I wrote it.