"She led hym to þe eldryn hill,
Vndurneth þe grenewode lee,
Where hit was derk as any hell,
And euer  water tille þe knee.
Þer þe space of dayes thre,
He herd but þe noyse of þe flode;"

the bard's tongue flickers as he traces his steps

Theseus had no choices,
he could not but reach the centre.
And from the centre
he could not but
rediscover the entrance.

The labyrinth was unicursal,
there was only a single path,
through which he dragged
his impotent thread.

"How koude ye withouten bond me bynde?"

"It is all half lights and profound shadows like those serpentine caves where one goes with a candle peering up and down, not knowing where one is stepping."

Dewey Dell

"I have been amazed more than once by a description a woman gave me of a world all her own which she had been secretly haunting since early childhood."

I'm so sorry to have to forget you

I keep having the strangest dreams. Last night, I was atop some overhang on the Golden Gate Bridge, my legs dangling from the cutting metal precipice. I was too scared to jump. Cars moved past without seeing me. Then some began to slow. A person with a face I have known but did not recognise walked up to me, slowly, from the road.

Alaska, she said.

I was too petrified to ask her what she meant, but she smiled and her smile was like the laugh of Medusa and it froze me and it warmed me. And others came, those she knew, a collection of them. And they took my arm, even while I leaned away, out, out, they guided me into a car.

And I was ushered calmly into a home, and I very nearly resisted and ran, a home for others who hadn't done what I hadn't done. I knew many of them, though I had never known that they were like me. Some I embraced, some I smiled with. But before I entered I looked back to those who had caught me, I looked to the first one.

I hope this won't be the last time I...

No. They give us visiting hours, she replied, telling me something I had not known until then, something warm and homely, something comforting. I think now I recognise her face.

How can it be that I am so grateful yet so empty?

Le nid tiède et calme
Où chante l'oiseau
Rappelle les chansons, les charmes
Le seuil pur de la vieille .

"Forests have boundaries too, in our imaginings of them."

Jagged Brink

No,
you're nothing soft
at all, and if I kissed you,
your bones would cut into me.
Every breath would be
a struggle.
The fury of your teeth would bind
me to you,

the blades of your shoulders
might sever me.
The fangs of your ribs
would eat me whole,
because your heart always has space
to devour.

Our mouths taste of metal when we meet.

Your pupils are a kind of oblivion,
in each pit
a deeper pit.
In you, I could never stop falling
if I fell.

I mean, it's all so self-indulgent, isn't it?

"You can't go home again"

-Thomas Wolfe

Pelafina

I don't think I'll be commenting on these scheduled posts anymore.

I just don't need constant reminders of the state I was in a year ago. I have enough reminders of the state I'm in currently. I suppose by now you must have realised that not all these posts were ones I scheduled.

An unrelated poem. It reminds me of someone's mother.

"Before you'd given death a name
Like bear or crocodile, death came
To take your mother out one night.
But when she'd said her last good night
You cried, "I don't want you to go",
So in her arms she took you too."

Necropolis | Life is the cenotaph [and empty chambers are the embers of a laugh [you gave up [

When I am buried you can just as well imagine yourself in the coffin with me, but you cannot feel the edges of the wood. It all spreads out and you feel nothing but darkness around you, and who knows how many others lie sprawled out beside you, around you, just out of reach, and that is what my death is, and what life is.

the hollᴏwness

So the main question is, What is 'you'? Or if it helps, what is 'me', here? Or if I'm on a printed page, with other characters (real or fictional (I resist the whim to use inverted commas on those two values)) and I coinhabit the space, the same plane, the same matter, ink, how far are the distinctions of black dye or pixels circumscribed? What if I am being read? If I blaze out and scatter and resonate and vanish in a cloud of what always has and always will come before me, and after me?

Jack

So this place where 'you' ends, or begins - there's really no distinction in this case, the unity of opposites and all such ambivalence. Your fingernails might be a clue - protruding from your hands, connected? embedded? affixed or inhabiting? Part of you like a tooth, though less permanent (more whims resisted). And when you cut your nail, or gnaw it off, what then? Is it still you, severed? Or is it, bereft, an Other? Not even bereft but isolated now and always. And are you less of you without it?

But I cannot have been the first to ask any of this empty questioning, all in all which winds back to the necessity of accepting the dissolution of the self- no, not that but the abstraction of the "you". I'm getting lost. Or not lost either, but too grounded. These words wither as I speak them.

There is no you here. Nor an I. Maybe not even a him. Or her.

What about a lock of hair?

Once, I saw Emily and Anne Brontë's hair entwined within a locket, an embrace meant to destroy borders, physical, emotional, temporal, personal. An embrace to forgo the caprice of things. It was in their old , empty now, save for how full it is of memory and thought. They turned it into a museum. I visited it myself. Took a coach from Manchester to a valley-slouched town over a hill from their own residence. I walked up to their home, stopping once, to drink some lemonade in a pub. I remember it now, full of bloated bubbles. It was the artificial, stale tasting kind. But I was thirsty, and I drank all of it, and I carried on.

Afterwards, I turned off and headed upwards, and eventually found my way to the graveyard near that place. It took a while of pacing up and down the yards, line by line of tombs. But I found it. Or her?

"ɪɴ ᴍᴇᴍᴏʀʏ

sʏʟᴠɪᴀ ᴘʟᴀᴛʜ ʜᴜɢʜᴇs

1932 - 1963

 ᴇᴠᴇɴ ᴀᴍɪᴅsᴛ ғɪᴇʀᴄᴇ ғʟᴀᴍᴇs

ᴛʜᴇ ɢᴏʟᴅᴇɴ ʟᴏᴛᴜs ᴄᴀɴ ʙᴇ ᴘʟᴀɴᴛᴇᴅ,"

And flowers marked it, but they were weeks old, or longer. Almost gone. She was almost gone too, even there. But only almost. The rock was cold and rough to the touch, like the skull of a sheep I found in a field. Out there, just before. In the moores.

There was dirt on the grave, and with a tissue I wiped at it. Some came off. The stone was no less grey. The flowers were still brown and brittle.

How much of fire blazes within us?

"In darkness, and amid the many shapes
Of joyless day-light
             and the fever of the world



                 Thou wanderer through the woods,"

μαντεία

I carve
a new line on my palm,

hope with blood
and sting I might

gouge a new destiny

"And a whisper will be heard

in the place

where the ruined

once stood"

blue-black

Of course, this can never be quite the whole story.

Je rêve d'un logis, basse à fenêtres

Hautes, aux trois degrés usés, plats et verdis

..............................................................................

Logis pauvre et secret à l'air d'antique estampe

Qui ne vit qu'en moi-même, où je rentre parfois

M'asseoir pour oublier le jour gris et la pluie

a pregnant fear to fester

The fatal Engine looms,
draws itself near,
a warning in itself, though none listen.

It shudders at the gate,
creaking with its own weight,
the doom it carries.

Three times they tug
before it enters.
The gates close behind it.

All Edges and Weight

His name is Ares
the battle and the carnage
his shield is blistered and dented
his lips are cracked

fault line scars darken his skin
his wounds open with each roar.

None know if the chains
bound
length after length
biting into his wrists
are his fetters or his flails.

What one evening had to say to another

It's fortunate
     you spoke
because I would have lost
     my way.