THE FOLLOWING POEMS ARE PUBLISHED IN MY TWO BOOKS –
DAWN PEOPLE AND OTHER POEMS. – AND
DREAM NAVIGATOR AND OTHER POEMS. (Both books are available on Amazon.)
ASSASSINATION.
By killing potency
I can drink potency
The bullet shattering bone
Becomes my explosion of rage
The father of a country falling
Is the death of my own father
The spurned child’s vendetta
In the darkening of an age.
-------------------------------
I welcome death or the cell
As the womb or sleep
Drunk and replete with the power
That spilled blood bestows
Death engulfs, and light steals away
But neon replaces the twilight.
The cruel sunset darkens
But the stars twinkle.
The moon maintains vigil
Over the fallen petals of the rose.
-----------------------------------------
Is there not then a purity
In the meticulous hardware of death
And in spilled blood a cleansing
Of peacetime’s simmering wound?
The pus drained from the boil lanced
The bullet’s blood fountain
The father felled and stricken
An era run to ground
-------------------------------------
Lest that anger turn inward
Death watches through cross hairs
The fueled finger poised with its gift
That will kill and immortalize
The inner child pulls fly wings
While the outer man plots and stalks
On the bright day darkened with foreboding
The bullet’s trajectory is born
And the balance of a nation hangs poised
In the defaulted child’s eyes.
--------------------------------------------Roger Elliott. March 12th 1995.
THE BEGUILED GENERATION OF WOMEN.
Shed a tear and speak a prayer
For the beguiled generation of women;
Lured by the false bright tinkling chimera
To barter and deny their womanhood,
To negate their bodies’ tides that well and cry,
To seal the eclipse of their foregone moon-marriage,
That thrall of deepest mystery to deny.
------------------------------------------------
Now all that wise visceral knowledge distrusted;
Now only the head can chart the ways
Through unfamiliar territory;
The deep guidelines, the shared timeless wisdom
Vestigial, useless in the created maze.
-------------------------------------------
The moon-drawn wax and wane
Cannot ever reconcile,
And so must fail and die;
Its knowing, shining plains of certainty
Now no longer bathed and golden lie.
No longer in its light can the ineffable essence bask;
But the neon glints hard on the bought tinsel,
And stretches endless the mean and thankless task.
-----------------------------------Roger Elliott, Aug 10th, 1989
A WOMAN’S DEATH.
A woman’s death
Is only a hydra’s tentacle retracting.
Her flesh lives on, umbilically conjoined.
In her repose she partakes still
Of the endless cycle;
And she is one
With its timeless burgeoning.
-----------------------------------
A man’s death is more separate.
The final extinction finds him
An island ready to submerge
Forever under a swelling sea.
He is only the seed – not flesh,
Merely peripheral in the play,
A bystander, a worker bee;
With death he does not endure.
------------------------------------------
Therefore men with equal awe as ecstasy
Should taste love’s union of flesh.
It is as near as they approach
To the eternal;
Before annihilation, for a moment
They clutch the infinite,
Which is woman’s gift and birthright.
-----------------------------Roger Elliott Dec 8th 1996.
My unerring cupid’s dart
Pierces her woman’s faithless heart
That smiles and bluster move;
And yet the inner core of me,
Stashed away so tidily,
Buried as deep as deep can be,
She cannot know and love.
-----------------------------------------
Only at surfaces we meet.
Her eye computes my balance sheet,
And calculates the loss and gain,
But cannot know the inner pain.
----------------------------------------------
Together we propose and plan,
But set aside the inner man,
The buried nub and essence deep
That only surfaces in sleep.
----------------------------------------
Together in our puppet show,
Our love will fructify and grow;
And yet the inner heart of me,
Buried as deep as deep can be,
Her pitiless eye can never know.
---------------------------Roger Elliott, March 27th, 1982
WASHING MACHINE AD.
You were the first
To answer the ad for the washing machine;
And you shrugged it off when I insisted
On the ineffable mystery of our meeting;
And that it was long ordained
Your eyes would peer the pages, flickering,
Scanning for a response in the print columns,
Alighting to haul in the strands connecting us
Across time and space,
That indeed had always connected us.
----------------------------------------
You were the first
To answer the ad for the washing machine,
Your fingers fumbling, dialing the phone
In their haste to actualize the connection
That before the sun’s birth had always awaited
Its consummation inevitable.
-----------------------------------------
When I heard your voice
Across time and space, down the telephone wires,
I knew I had made a connection;
That the conjuror’s hand had magicked,
In the random universe, an impossible meeting,
So that you were the first
To answer the ad for the washing machine.
-----------------------------------Roger Elliott Aug 20th 1997.
ANOTHER.
When I slept with you,
I slept with another.
When you spoke,
Another’s voice cried out to me.
With her clothes and jewels and raiment
My perfidious eye adorned you;
And her unstill presence soured our every joy.
---------------------------------------
And when we kissed, your lips were over – painted,
As if you were a pale palimpsest.
Her eyes beamed like beacons from your sockets.
Her shade overshadowed you, and would not rest.
-------------------------------------------
And whenever we walked,
She walked always by our side;
And when with grief and bitter tear you died,
It was for another’s death I cried.
-------------------------------Roger Elliott, June 30th ,1989.
THE EXQUISITE COSMOLOGICAL ORDER.
Sometimes my tears well up
When I contemplate
The exquisite cosmological order.
The abundance of teleological markers
The nested layers of paradox
The signposts whose fingers point
To the sublime symmetry of stars.
My tears well up
Contemplating our human default
Our wishful blindness
Oblivious to the heartbeat
That synchronizes the spheres
The unheard symphony
Silent in our solipsistic negation.
Our boundless vision betrayed
As human eyes turn away
From the exquisite cosmological order.
------------------------------------Roger Elliott, Sept 1st 2013.
MY WIFE AND MY MISTRESS.
One prays in the chapel by day
One cavorts naked before the moon
One is the safe haven
One the St Elmo’s fire
Atop a ship’s mast in the bay
One is the gentle midday breeze
One is the harsh night wind
That whips and threshes the trees
One wanders and roams the night
While one is content to sit
One is the unclouded gaze
One is the mad glint of fire
Volcano uttered from pupil’s pit
Mixes rage and desire
One bakes in a microwave
One stirs a cauldron on naked embers
One is Evian
One is whisky surge to the brain
One is sunlight
One is the lashing rain
One is the good fairy
And one the malign elf
And one is loved by my true heart
And one by my shadow self.
-----------------------------------------Roger Elliott June 21st 1997
THE THREE OF US.
Of the three of us sitting at this table
One will be famous
One will be infamous
And one go unreckoned.
-----------------------------------
Of the three of us sitting at this table
One will cluster words together
And of the endless sheaves
A single verse will echo in men’s hearts.
------------------------------------
Of the three of us sitting at this table
One of us will murder,
And his malign implements
Axe, rope, and acid bath
Will thrill generations
With a frisson of dread.
------------------------------------
Of the three of us sitting at this table
One will work at wealth
Which his heirs will squander.
He will no monument buy
Nor his toil leave trace.
----------------------------------------
Of the three of us sitting at this table
The future courses silent through our veins
Our deeds welling within
Waiting like cards to be dealt.
As we sit, only the teacup gives an inkling
---------------------------------------
Of the three of us sitting at this table
Which will be famous
Which will be infamous
And which go unreckoned?
-----------------------------------------------Roger Elliott August 3rd 1995
Vested interest has hijacked
The truth – our birthright.
Seekers can perceive
But an inkling.
An implacable reductionist vision
Drains the magic
Out of The Cosmos.
The voices of science are bought and paid for
Everything bows to the balance sheet.
Pitiless in their ivory towers
In their dominant paradigm complacent
They peddle paper formulas
To subdue the soul
And constrict the infinite heavens.
----------------------------------Roger Elliott. Sept 4th 2013.
THE BODY REBELS
The body rebels
Against the will’s loud clamor
Its unheard cry of pain
The secret tumor.
--------------------------------
The body ever urged
To show its mettle
But now the dark flower
Spreads out its petal.
--------------------------------
To its incessant voice
The will must yield
In death’s quiet repose
The wound is healed.
----------------------------------
The body’s will
Are rivers underground
And hear those waters,
Or the self confound.
---------------------------------Roger Elliott. March 8th 1998.
IT IS WRITTEN.
History is written ahead of time
Each page waiting to be turned
All the events inevitable
Darkly on the horizon stand
The future waits to be fulfilled
The unwritten poem to be revealed
The symphony hangs in the air
The composer ready to inspire
Planets and their moons revolve
Waiting for the mind to solve
Beneath the rolling fields of grass
Deep strata lie for us to delve
It is written
It shall come to pass.
-------------------------------Roger Elliott. March 17th 2011.
CLOUDS FLOAT SO HIGH.
Clouds float so high
In the thin film
Of Earth’s air envelope
-----------------------------------
Drowning is so deep
In the tenuous wisp of water
That wets Earth’s whistle
------------------------------------
The moon through its allotted space
Hurtles headlong
In a slow motion dream
-----------------------------------
Time hurries by
The clock hands frenzied
In the slow procession of eternity.
--------------------------------------Roger Elliott. July 27th 1997.
ALL THE MASTERS OF THE LIE.
All the masters of the lie
Will extinguish truth’s bright eye
The truth no mind can ever know
But always will its brightness glow
Its glimmering light that none can see
Held captive all eternity.
----------------------------------Roger Elliott (undated)
THE HEAVENS’ SEVEN WANDERING EYES.
The Heaven’s seven wandering eyes
Nightly twinkle glint and gleam
Dance and twirl their clockwork dream
And the gearwheels synchronize
Their pirouettes through darkened skies.
------------------------------------------
The Heavens’ seven wandering eyes
Their several orbits harmonize
Unreckoned by our Earthbound gaze
But all configured to amaze.
----------------------------------
The Heavens’ seven wandering eyes
In subtle counterpoint make play
Cavort until the break of day
Each planet through the dark vault flies
In thrall to some orb music sweet
They march to the conductor’s beat
Unheard by stilted Earthbound ear
All in their intricate array
Our eyes can never dare to meet
But rather turn aside in fear
And evermore must turn away
----------------------------------
The Heavens’ seven wandering eyes
Their subtle harmonies disguise
Their quickened movements we mistake
But we will know it when we wake
And that the gearwheels synchronize
Their ordered movement through the skies.
---------------------------------Roger Elliott. March 2012
ECOLOGICAL ISSUES.
There are a hundred signposts
On the blind man’s road
All pointing to never and forever.
-------------------------------------
Oblivious, the blind pass by in droves
The sun hangs dark in their occluded eyes
The signposts scream in the doomed skies
The accusing fingers of the tree branch point
The blind man denies
It is sunset, but he thinks it is dawn.
------------------------------------
The crow utters warnings
On the deaf man’s road
The carrion crow that circles overhead.
The vulture wings ready to pick carcass
Of the man who doesn’t know that he is dead.
------------------------------------------
The poisoned grass stands differently
So the wind through it sings a different note
The wind harp’s playing “taps”
The deaf man thinks it’s reveille.
---------------------------
No one hears, no one hears
The sight turned inward on the dead man’s road
The forests are dying
Greed alone survives
The sickly urge to prosper
To seize more than the earth allotted
---------------------------------
Eyes are averted on the madman’s road
From the wrought harm
Palpable on the Earth’s brow
They have stolen even the air
Next they will want to blot out stars
Starless on the road that spirals inward
To the coming reckoning
The blind man’s meeting
He can neither defer nor envisage.
-----------------------------Roger Elliott. Aug 1st 1995.
DEW DISCOVERS GOSSAMER.
Dew discovers gossamer
On morning bushes woven
That turns instead to glistening ghosts
When the sun is high in heaven.
--------------------------------
Fly wings are neatly parceled
With iridescent twine
Await the master’s pleasure
When he should choose to dine.
---------------------------------
The webs are shimmering harp strings
The winds can make unstill
And fashion soundless music
That no ear can ever thrill.
-----------------------------------
Another dawn will whiten
With droplets set in rows
Busy spinnerets replenish
What time’s decay must lose.
-------------------Roger Elliott. Oct 19th 1997.
IN THE BATH.
Lying, my every surface immersed
Reminds me I am animal
That garment obfuscates.
Suddenly stately processions
Appear naked, and their pomp
Undone, erectile tissues
Goose-pimply in chill wind,
Shame-faced regalia.
Feet and ankles tell me who I am –
Protein gathering machine
Who learned lateral thinking;
Fingers nimble to set traps,
Back broad to break earth;
Every tendon tells tale
Of ancestors disowned.
As we disowned ploughs
Put concrete for earth instead.
---------------------------------
Now, in the bath, the lies come clean
With every inch scrubbed
Each follicle carded of sebum plug,
Each expanse reddened
In the bathroom neon.
-----------------------------------
Now toweled, I dress that animal
Who, pristine, stood dripping
Water film and bath steam
After the chase, which ends
In blood dabbled lips,
The limp prey warm
Amongst the toiletries
Stowed in the bathroom cabinet.
--------------------------------------
Dressing, I return into denial
Of the blood scent
And the earth’s fruit
And the animal I am
Who reigned once
Under the same moon and twinkle of stars
The neon usurped.
---------------------Roger Elliott, Jan 21st 1996.
THE EARTH IS WEEPING ELECTRIC TEARS.
The Earth is weeping electric tears
At the dark moon’s rising.
Aurora’s mantle decks the skies,
And the meteor is blazing.
----------------------------------------
Earth’s trembling casts ahead
Its shadow of portent
The beaconed message all unread
In the Northern Lights glint.
------------------------------------------
From the crystal’s hidden symmetry
Are wrung the globes of fire
That from Earth’s dungeon seek the sky,
Higher and higher.
-------------------------------------------------
The Earth is weeping electric tears
From burning mineral eyes
Aurora’s mantle stardust bears
At the full moon’s rise.
The Earth in passion is trembling,
And the meteor is ablaze.
------------------------Roger Elliott Feb 16th 2001.
It is women who wage wars
By the men they choose
To sire progeny they lose
Upon the battlefield.
-----------------------------
The gentler sort they spurn,
The sort who in their turn
Would sire the gentle son
Who could in conflict yield.
--------------------------------------
And when the battle’s dead
To the worms are fed,
And women’s tears are shed,
Then the marriage vows are sealed.
-------------------------------------
It is a woman’s love
That to war will move,
That will kill the dove
Whose blood the sword annealed.
-------------------------------------------
------------------------------Roger Elliott, Feb 28th 2001.
BEETHOVEN’S DEATH BED.
On his deathbed, Beethoven
The blown circuit magicked to life.
The world of submerged sound surfaced,
And the dumb chord sang loudly again.
-----------------------------------------
Bows gliding greased silent over string
Now with rough friction seized.
The violin’s wasp waist trembled electric;
The air was shimmering bright.
--------------------------------------------
The creator, to whom alone the ecstatic steam
Was merely conceptual
Now with rapt tears heard as none other heard
The clear clarion-sharp effusion.
--------------------------------------------------
And the peals of notes cascaded
More real than the world’s wilfully blunted senses
Could ever embrace or fathom.
The ghosts became embodied;
The dead spoke again,
And the chords upward in sunlight wafted.
--------------------------------------------
Finally, when sleep came,
It was not in the sea-green submerged silent world
Where the mournful moon held sway,
Where tongues flapped soundless
And bell clappers made mocking shadow-play,
And the billowing pall smothered desire;
Rather it was in the crescendoed sky,
Deep in the sun’s ray,
Sublimely crowned with its fire.
----------------------Roger Elliott.
July 22nd 1995.
In your cracked lips
I kiss the palimpsest of beauty.
From your rheumy sockets
Still shine youth’s clear gaze.
Your sagging flesh
Firm beneath my caress,
Your muted cries
Echo urgent down the years,
Replenish the lost days.
Our laughter holds back the welling tears,
The approaching sadness occluded by our mirth.
My love strengthens
The fragile thread that binds you to this earth.
--------------------Roger Elliott (undated)
SCHOOL DAYS.
As a child
I had no path set out for me,
No mentor – none to tell me the way,
No signpost to where my destiny lay.
-----------------------------------------
School was a “holding facility”,
Prisoners on “lockdown”,
A parroted pretense of learning,
A ritual to eke out time,
A tundra of dead years receding
Into a fathomless future
To be released into the world directionless
Finally from that dark pantomime.
----------------------------------------
Rote remembered trivial snatches
Of stultifying lessons,
Dreary bottomless dredging;
These the foundations to build upon,
The edifice to grow upwards,
The tree to branch and thicken.
----------------------------------------
Now I have built – but am bitter
For those early desolate years wasted,
Where raucous banality reigned,
And wisdom languished unnurtured and untasted.
-------------------Roger Elliott Sept. 2013.
PAST.
My past is but a dream
I have awoken from.
My past deeds are no part of me,
As I swim this stream of consciousness
And tread this path of destiny.
----------------------------------------------
I see each vanishing milestone,
But not one can I call my own.
The ships approach, and then pass by,
Submerged into a bottomless sea.
--------------------------------------
Identity the past defines,
And like a guiding light it shines;
But it does not encompass me;
Of all its shackles I am free.
--------------------------------------
Men wear their history as apparel,
But I travel naked in the world;
My past is as another’s life;
A small pinprick of receding light
In the rush towards eternity.
---------------------Roger Elliott Sept. 2013.
It is a shame and a disgrace
That the constrained astronomers
Cannot name God.
----------------------------------
With their blind atheist telescopes
Searching skyward,
They see the letters,
But not the word;
They see the word,
But not the message;
They pick notes on a keyboard,
But the symphony eludes.
-----------------------------------------
Their stipends and tenures
More urgent than the ineffable meaning.
----------------------------------
God wrote our destiny
In the sky in letters of fire;
Astronomers shield their eyes
From this majesty.
Slaves of peer pressure,
They bury the truth;
Humans’ birthright defaulted,
A terrible lie propagates.
---------------------------------------
In their conspiracy of silence
The pact of censorship
Seals the vision;
And we stare instead
Down the dark tunnel.
--------------------Roger Elliott, Oct. 2013.
A PLEA FOR BOOKSHOPS.
Once Bloomsbury bristled with bookshops
Bustling browsers clutching their prize;
Now droves of “greasy spoons”
Have settled like flies.
Fast food is the doom
Of the bookseller and the dusty tome.
Rapacious rents and business rates
Have driven them into cyberspace.
---------------------------------
You can imbibe beer
But never knowledge here.
Soon every corner of the Earth
Will be awash with trinket shops,
Whole streets in thrall to The Big Mac,
Or selling garment sweated on the rack.
No bookshop can survive
The Darwinian logic of the hive.
In the dumbed-down street no space
To spare for culture of the mind
“Progress” swept through
And left a desert behind.
---------------------Roger Elliott Oct 2013.
IS THERE ANYONE WHO HAS ESCAPED?
Is there anyone who has escaped the mill
With its careful grinding to the average mean
Of thought to obsession, of truth to half-truth,
Of choice to a lie that is spoken through the will.
Is there anyone out there who escaped?
---------------------------------------
Bland choices, easy options, softened resolves
Seduce into slow betrayal.
Too late, too deep, too far we discover our death,
A death made stealthy by its denial.
Is there anyone here who has escaped?
--------------------------------------------
Forgetting the language in which truth is told,
We learn the argot of evasion only,
Breaking our wide-eyed childlike promise,
Those eyes now shifting, unable to hold,
Fearing to face their reflection, their broken image.
Is there anyone who has escaped?
-------------------------------------------------
Who rejects the deadly conditioned comfort,
The seduction of routine lulling us through days
In a sleep without stimulus or pain?
Who has grasped at pain to force himself to feel?
Who risks death to make his life real,
His mutilated spirit whole again?
Who has escaped?
---------------------------------------------
Who makes his cold heart warm
Braving the icy storm?
Who faces the burning eye
To burn out the deep lie?
Who digs anew his life’s foundation?
Who eschews the comfortable passion?
Who can say truly “It is I”
Who can say they have escaped?
----------------------------------------------
--------------------Roger Elliott July 16th 1987.
Flocks flying
Claim the poetry
Their squat landing belies
-----------------------
Abject to Earth
They launch from their hunched, huddled resting
Their kinetic geometry
Graceful in the skies,
Then wheel and turn their formation pirouettes
With their spirits’ element to harmonize.
----------------------Roger Elliott, December, 2013.
I WILL LOVE YOU.
I will love you because my kindness kindles
In your eyes sparks that never thrilled and danced;
I will love you because your pallor brightens,
And winter time to sunlight in enhanced.
------------------------------------------
I will love you because autumn mimics springtime;
The parched trickle becomes the fecund flow;
And our tongues conjoined may speak of wisdom
That solitary, you could never know;
----------------------------------------------
Because I can behold the transformation
That in your face and bearing I have wrought;
Because our bodies intertwine with knowledge
That dusty tomes of learning never taught;
-----------------------------------------
Because your cry of night-thralled pleasure
Makes echoes in each corner of my soul;
Because I found you out a wounded creature
That my caresses could make strong and whole.
----------------------------------------------
I will love you because your anger
My wand of plenty’s magic can assuage,
My kisses deep soften your world worn hardness,
My playful lips becalm your sullen rage.
------------------------------------------
I will love you because I may not lose you,
As you were forlorn and lost before,
And in the memory of that bereftness,
I can only love you all the more.
----------------Roger Elliott, July 27th 1997.
DEFAULTED FRIENDSHIP.
Tonight I look back on defaulted friendship
That death has finally made absolute.
Always the balance yielded between
The burden of contact
And the dollar’s rush of adrenalin;
The mindless focus on empty endless gain.
--------------------------------------------
Always preferring ever to defer
Until that warm closeness became merely
A past pinprick of light
In the tunnel through which my life roars like a train;
----------------------------------------------
And then suddenly the day arrives
When it is too late to return
The default extended just a day too long;
And then you embrace that reticence-wrought cruelty,
And in some hidden corner to inter
The denied flower with the unreckoned pain.
----------------------------------------------
Now death has sealed the shoddy pact of silence,
And laid bare and magnified the loss
Brought finally beyond mend,
Now only to mourn untrodden paths
That I cannot return to tread again.
--------------------------------------------
Your death, in its ultimate cost to me,
Is more than, in your dying, you ever knew.
The one-way street of time
Stretches ahead only;
And I measure and reckon up my life’s spurned hours;
And in your memory
Hold them more precious.
------------Roger Elliott Oct 4th 1993 (For R.H.)
CRAFTSMAN OF THE LIE.
Craftsman of the lie, I ply my canvas
As truth’s dark twin, its close facsimile,
Perfect in detail, only its totality
Deficient in its layers of implication.
----------------------------------
It must be close enough its denial lacks conviction;
Its acquiescence must involve
The advantage of interested parties.
The lie must gain authority;
Learned voices must take sides,
Considered opinions be purchased;
A razzmatazz must drown the still voice.
---------------------------------------------
Craftsman of the lie, I weave the warp
Of alternative worlds;
I fog the edges of things.
Lulled memory alters to accommodate
The authorized version that I propagate.
--------------------------------------------
O, I have tools and tongues that wreak and writhe
To do my bidding,
Word by the bucket, paper by the ream;
Fierce rodents’ teeth that gnaw the very marrow
Out of ingenuous truth,
Leaving it sickly, spineless, cranky.
--------------------------------------------
What chance has truth against my blandishments,
My cosy palatable deviations?
Craftsman of the lie, truth becomes what I speak.
My words are final; the world my version of it.
--------------Roger Elliott, Dec 11th 1988.
DEATH’S DEFAULT ENNOBLES.
Death’s default ennobles
Kaleidoscopes of color
By no Earthly spectrum bounded;
These the forgotten rainbows
The inner eye refracted
Whose lesion vision wounded.
------------------------------------
Death knell conjures music
No harp ever pealed to heaven
Across still water.
These the sounds drowned men hear
When the bell tolls
In the submerged cathedral.
---------------------------------
Death’s taste brings to palate
The ravenous feasts
No lips have ever tasted,
Deft counterpoint of flavors,
Chorus of woven textures,
The spice laden choir’s effusion
At lavish table sated.
------------------------------------
These, these, before death,
Ennoble mundane senses,
Unlock the prison,
Set free the doves in sunlight
Wing the elusive cloud;
Wonder before oblivion.
-----------------------------------
---------------------Roger Elliott. July 4th 1999.
LOVE POEM.
Someone’s got to love you,
And it’s me!
Loving another
Would fail to resonate.
It would be a cracked bell
Deep sunk in a silent sea,
Rather than the clear tones
That cry out to me.
---------------------------------------
Loving another
Would be null,
A blind world of shadows,
A deaf world of muted gestures,
Without the rich harmony.
Yes, someone’s got to love you,
And it’s me!
---------------------------------
Loving another
Would be a blank sightless stare,
A numb fumble
At unresponsive flesh,
A word snatched by the wind,
An un-tuned piano,
“Chopsticks” instead of our symphony.
Yes, someone’s got to love you,
And it’s me!
------------Roger Elliott December 2013.
METAPOEM 6.
When sleep ascends
Into the waking day,
The hypnagogic moment births
A wisp of verse.
Capture it, or it will fly away!
-----------------------------------
Before day’s bustle
The nighttime voices drown,
With the sleepy pen take down
The message
Before the echoes die
And the submerged muses
Cease to cry.
--------------------------------------
Daytime is deaf to rapture;
Blind sleep is null.
Awakening, the moment’s echo capture.
What sleep tells is true.
When the morning chrysalis emerges
From the rapt cocoon,
Seize the dream’s remnant,
And hold it close to you.
-------------Roger Elliott December 2013.
METAPOEM 4.
Elusive whimsical vignettes,
Capricious word sculptures
Lightly from cloud-wisp wrought,
Sunlit words of laughter;
But my words are darker.
-----------------------------------
I would be a fly
On the wall of your mind
When the words tumble
From that sky,
That cornucopaeia of muse
For you to choose.
------------------------------------------
I would those words were carved for all to see
Into the depths of sinuous stone
That with my hands I would turn and turn,
As if words could outlast eternity.
--------------------------------------------
View the faintest star
With vision’s periphery;
With inattention idly seize the word
That slots into the jigsaw,
Finalizes the allotted order;
Take wing towards the sunbeam’s laughter;
-----------------------------------
But my words are darker.
-----------------Roger Elliott November 2013.
SLEEP FACE.
The sleep face is a secret face,
The eyes no longer beacons,
Context and meaning ironed out of it,
Merely peaks and furrows,
A bland topography of alabaster.
-----------------------------------------
In the sleep face, the lies
Concealed in waking, like flotsam rise,
A secret smile, a little twist of the lips.
The false face transforms to the true mask.
“In somno veritas”.
--------------------------------------------
When I survey my collection of sleep faces
Observed on pillows throughout countless years,
Their sum and composite
Tells me that sleep is wiser,
Tells me the façade of waking days
Is self consuming passion.
The sleep face is more beautiful.
----------------------------------------------
Drink the restoring fountain
While the stars twinkle;
Bury the chatter and bustle;
Put on the mask of moonlight;
Dim the lights; let the pools of shadow
Fill the eye sockets;
Let the street lamps bathe neon,
And the sleep face dredge lies and truths
From a bottomless ocean.
----------------Roger Elliott Nov 7th 1994.
THE FUTURE IS ANOTHER COUNTRY.
The future unfolds glimmerless
Its ambush with implacable guile;
Licks gamblers’ unwary blood
From lips of a sardonic smile.
------------------------------------------
The road ahead has twists and bends;
A sea of question marks perpends;
But when future hurtles into past,
Dark veil becomes clearest glass.
---------------------------------------
And now into that dark I squint
To capture shadow, ghost, or glint;
Although it is in vain I peer,
And bend my head, and cup my ear
To catch the whisper of portent.
-------------------------------------------
But still – the future’s written down,
Just like a script upon a stage,
A palimpsest on a black page;
Each word in deepest darkness grown.
Against that dark I rant and rage;
And in its depths I writhe and drown.
---------------------Roger Elliott, Nov 21st 1996.
CHILDLESS.
I am ten thousand years old,
And the scurrying crab my kin.
I can live ten thousand centuries more
In the spark of my progeny’s loin;
Or I can face that death of deaths
That only the childless know,
Extinguished forever and eternity
Like a fish snared and hooked on the worm
And plucked from the river’s flow.
--------------------------------------------
My genealogy I can trace
To creatures now strange to me
That once swam and winnowed fishy eyed
In the eye-green deep of the sea;
And without their once having been,
I myself would not be.
-----------------------------------------------
The future and past converge
On this moment I find myself in.
I peer backwards at my family tree
And my hand is a fishy fin.
I peer forwards into the unknown –
It’s as if I had never been.
----------------------------------------------
And the rocks echo with my cry;
But soon the echo is gone;
And the wind eddies and blows away
The dry dust of my bone.
That echo can only live and thrive
In the spark of the loins of my son.
----------------------------------------------
I am ten thousand years old,
And the scurrying crab my kin;
And yet I choose to live no more
Through my progeny’s loin;
And the night will engulf my shadow
As if it had never been.
---------------Roger Elliott (undated).
THE FREE WILL/DETERMINISM QUESTION.
Is destiny bestowed from afar,
Or does it well from within?
I feel my fate, like a tidal pull,
Surging in the deep bone.
Unstill volcano
Shaping random events
That pull together to pattern deft
And hidden consequence.
I ask – Is there a weaver
Weaving this weft?
-----------------------------------------
Is the story set out
Or made up as it goes along?
Does it rhyme and harmonize
Within a larger song?
Are apparent choices
Only the stilted echoes
Of unseen voices?
---------------------------------------------
Swim as you might,
The slow current will pull
All to its will.
Ambition is null.
The wrestle is only a sham;
I can’t deny what I am;
They have “fixed” the fight.
-----------------------------------------
Sky of implacable stars
All destiny will dispense.
They call the tune,
And the people below must dance.
They cast the rune,
Decree fate and chance;
They build the jail;
We only rattle the bars.
---------------Roger Elliott, June 21st 1997.