Agon without a Name

You pierced me

with a repeated force that was lighter
than what was bearable,
that felt less than paradise;
more than an imagined perception ―
sundered wholeness,
emoted affliction.

Inside my orchid flower was your truth,
your heaven that would not open.
I could not.

Those sounds of love, those sighs of love,
endless breaths of love, cascading noises of love,
resigning, removing, rising, falling...
upon the pressure of a finger
and the touch of a palm.

Words extend, they press their lips
on the pain
of an ever-growing tree branch,
curve of my neck,
and yet the leaves would not tremble,
sunlight could not devote.

I loved, and I vibrated;
I inhaled, and I exhaled,
in a way your intensification of my head
did not reveal
the flesh surrounding my heart,
and would not enter
the sculpture of me,
I could not.
A sculpture I was not.

Your fingers glided
like a starving butterfly
over my ribcage,
brushing against vertebrae of my spine,
penetrating the insides of my mind.
With the strength of ephemeral gunpowder,
like quicksilver carefully preserved
and dangerously sealed
in a glass tube.

Whose sorrowful pretence?

The subtleties and vagueness
of my self for you,
sadly it was not.
Fleeting, and yet not,
never fast.
Will never last.

Since it must be so,
no one remembered more
than what they could hope
to forget.
And what would have been my wound
when I was closest to the sun,
closest
to the reflection
of the palest moon?

The Persian Prince Humay Meeting the Chinese Princess Humayun in a Garden, circa 1450, by Junayd, Persian miniature painting on silk. © Bridgeman Art Library / Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, France / Giraudon

丘壑，頸項，島嶼：metaphoric hills & vales, symbolic napes & islands

Wherever I look you are islands
a constellation of flowers breathing on the sea
deep-forested islands mountainous and fragrant
fires on a bright ocean
at the root one fire
all my life I have wanted to touch your ankle
running down to its shore
I beach myself on you
I listen
I see you among still leaves
regard of rock pool
by sun and moon and stars
island waterfalls and their echoes
are your voice your shoulders the whole of you standing
and you turn to me as though your feet were in mist
flowers birds same colors
as your breath
the flowers deliberately smell of you
and the birds make their feathers
not to fly but to
feel of you

~W. S. Merwin, 'Islands'

Polygon of Love

This inverted triangle begins
with luminosity
the pearl from Avalon.
Breaths of breathless love ceaselessly flirting,
seducing your Utopian stars,
extending thighs of sighs on the sides.
They die
in morning sunlight;
half awake, half asleep.
Over the stretched dome of skies,
a transparent line closes her air
atop
with the unseen, the unfelt:
a non-collinear,
unique plane
of pearlescent shadows.
Watercolours of a forgotten equinox
in Shambhala.

As the darkened tunnel leading to Utopian vertex
narrows and narrows
and narrows, to almost a disappearance
An Atlantis made of sea rocks with iridescent silver lights
glistening, shimmering, a little gloworm,
whence a flow of Klimt's golden liquid
releases,
vertigo ensues, pleasure remains,
tear stains and a ballet of smiles,
emeralds of burning Absinthe intensified with refined sugar.
(...hallucinations of two hearts...)

They crave ecstasy, distilled
and stilled with Orpheus' music.
I wish I knew the melodies,
what it felt like,
the tryst inside of me.

8' Sep' 2012

This new short poem of mine was inspired partially by the beautifully imaginative creations of jewellery artist Janet Theresa Miller -- her "Whispers of Atlantis" series. I think I must be obsessed with the collection as I cannot seem to get the exquisite imageries and forms out of my mind...

Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus, by John William Waterhouse

An early poem of mine, and Georges Bataille's words...

*About that lone rose flowering in snow, in the deep of winter, flushed and intoxicated with foolishly drunken ecstasy... Those flickering, dying flames setting her ablaze...*

The frozen time, stagnated, you are
the language, flowing for ever. You are
blinded by the black mists. There is a dim light, tinkling.
But seeing through your eyes,
the world is swooning and blurred.
A flower dies in the blink of an eye, and
a flower blooms in the withered twilight.

...... 流光

*     *     *

"And I think that in literature we can see the human perspective in its entirety, because literature doesn't permit us to live without seeing human nature under its most violent aspect. [...] And finally, it's literature that makes it possible for us to perceive the worst and learn how to confront it, how to overcome. In short, a man who plays finds in the game the force to overcome what the game contains of horror."


The night is my nudity
the stars are my teeth
I throw myself among the dead
dressed in white sunlight

~Georges Bataille, "I throw myself among the dead," from The Impossible