Telepath

i

What would you choose if a look could kill,

turn the tide or save the day.

Reverse fortunes on the head of a sixpence.

Turn your only godchild to stone

(that she might have a change of heart) 

or do you stare helplessly

into the abyss – immobilized by your sense

of historical inevitability.

ii

Frau Demuth already sees what will become

of Marx’s first biographer

on the day she announces her engagement

to Doctor Aveling (since loneliness

can’t be cured by a kiss)

but for all her knowing looks, she can only study

the waltz of shades unraveling

during Sunday dinner at Regent’s Park.

Second sight – powerless to stop time,

despite the ‘sure thing’

of a spectre haunting Europe

or the shabby ghost of a third Jewish messiah

whose ideas would one day divide the world.

iii

Any wonder why Eleanor Marx fell

through the looking glass. Crashing from nervosa

to love. Love to nervosa. And nervosa

back to love again.

Impossible, in all the after dinner conversation,

to tell which from which.

Only that the phrase: ‘this looks familiar,’

goes unheard by those whom we would save

from themselves,

if only they would hear us.

Cosmic Cradle

i

What shall we do with our nameless child – 

so much a part of us? So much more, than loss of hope

for Karl and Jenny, or the burial record

of an invisible girl? She who holds both dissonance

and harmony (rose and wreath

in her tiny hands) as we lay her to rest

under indifferent skies, but no one knows why  

a dying girl’s face tilts

towards the moon.

ii

Last night, the girl we already grieve

as a lost galaxy – crawled from her crib to sing

as a star – spreading her wings

in exquisite poverty. Here at the world’s edge,

her breath leaves semitones of light

on the latticed glass.

Here, nothing is more important

than music and moonlight.

Shining Light

We have learned your name by heart,

Helene Lenchen Demuth.

And we can tell you that Demuth,

from the Middle High German, ‘diemuot,’

or ‘demuot,’ is a nickname

given for a humble or modest person.

How do we know, only because

there’s no equivalence for ‘Lenchen’

in the Indo-European vernacular,

but ‘L’ is always for love,

which you give to all you encounter.

‘E’ is for equal footing, because you meet

us all on a level playing field.

‘N’ is for necessity, because the realm

of needs, can never be breached

by the leap to freedom alone.

‘C’ is for change, because you adapt

to both ebb and flow. ‘H’ is for heart,

because you always make a home  

out of hope. ‘E’ is for endure,

because we can never forget you.

‘N’ is for nodal point, because going on

is the only option to not going back.

Prelude in E Minor Op. 28 No. 4

for Nora

What is this sadness that invites us

to withdraw into the magic

of minor keys. Are we the astronomers

of descending melodies, discovering

the faintest of stars. Is this what loneliness

sounds like. Chord chains torn

from another dimension. As if the heart,

(cleaved from the body) still grieves alone

in a Warsaw crypt. Tomorrow we smile

again, for tonight we live

our saddest dreams.

Diamonds and Water.

The book of your life is hardly written

yet you look at the world

with all the curiosity life affords.

And though you sit and watch in silence,

you reject the impasse

of a world that defies kindness.

Understanding the secret

ballot that ties the big stick to diplomacy,

or as democracy’s diary

would have it: ‘All for ourselves

and nothing for other people.’ A maxim

so deeply rooted, so definite  

in the division of worlds, it chaperones,

protects and champions

portfolio investment in art, repo-markets

and perfect competition in a face off

with the tasteless tyranny

of the ‘herd.’

You know it’s not your job to think,

only to follow orders,.

yet you have devoted your heart

to the struggle to shape your own ideas,

in your transformation

from wide-eyed peasant girl 

to radical, confidante, and public enemy 

with Soho’s most dangerous

philosopher. A dissident Jewish doctor,

forced to pawn

his only suit of clothes

to buy a coffin for his unnamed daughter – 

unwrapping the ultimate paradox

of value.

Thistle in Humble Soil

Perhaps your closed crown defies the wind

in a field where shadows bully

the faithless, but we live

here where faith is currency

to silence the Aspen’s wild pulse.

Where is the ‘doing’ word that gives us

the upper hand? We speak

while we still have use of our tongues.

In less than a heartbeat

your spiny leaves will yield

their armor under the heavy boots

of Caledonian foresters,

but your magenta crowned florets will prevail

in the field’s heart as if poised to mend

the world. You who thrive

in the barest of ground, rise up again

in winter’s drifts. Testament how we live

to fight another day.

Helene Demuth Notes A Change of Heart

Q. How do you turn down a dialectical thinker

with a hard on for a new idea?

A. Tell him the dialectics of hope turn out to be

nothing more than the interpenetration

of id and ego. You can’t always hold back

the tide, but you can always muddy the waters

by taking refuge in the greatest good

for the greatest number. One death is heroic.

Two deaths, a tragedy. Better to be dissatisfied

as Socrates, than satisfied as a pig.

A qualitative leap between, ‘I have begun

to long for you.’

And, ‘I who have no need.’

Venturing Beyond

You are not a peasant girl from Sankt Wendel,

Housekeeper or fellow traveller.

You are not your age, or even ageless.

You are all the people you touch

when other people find them untouchable.

All the smiles you bring to others

when smiling is felt subordinate to living.

You are the promises on both sides

of assonance and dissonance.

You are the discontent which belongs to hope.

You are the tears of Niobe when pride takes a fall.

You are the verity of pride

when pride surrenders to pity.

You are all children that are never lost

because you are reborn in the image of children

(the Not-Yet-Conscious and Not-Yet-Become)

on the horizon of all being.

You are the one who changes

into what they really are, what they can really be.

The forward dreamer, who is yet to break

through into words.

Van Gogh’s Irises

Even in La Villle d’Amour, the state of emergency

is not the exception but the rule.

Think of the continuous flow of empty time

and the tiger’s leap into the thickets of long ago.

Think of two hundred canon on the brow

of Montmartre. Of the sixty-four days redeeming

the past in service of the present.

Think of blue irises at the Wall of Love

and the words ‘I love you,’ on three hundred tongues.

Think of purple irises uniting springtime love

with the Communard’s Wall.

Think of the history of civilisation

written in blood. Then think of the future as a flower

turning towards the sun – rising in the sky

of a history – yet to be written.

Angelus Novus

Art does not reproduce what we see, rather, it makes us see.

Paul Klee

All art is metaphor. Even when it evokes the union

between progress and catastrophe

Time in need of salvation, an ancestor

in need of awakening, or an angel thwarted

by war and civil war. A storm cloud 

blown in from paradise –

trapped between future past and future present.

Suspended in the struggle of empty-time.

Staring towards the horizon, saying something

profound. Awaiting an answer, beyond

the artifice of perception, as she turns her thoughts

away from internal flight.

The West is the best. The West is the best.

Here! Here! Let’s hear the rest! Light at the end

of the tunnel – the only extraction now

from time in a cage.

What is the Name of this Poem?

i

Your social aims may be fashionable

and indeed, admirable, but no amount of political cheer leading

can prepare you for the darkness

of the lived moment. If semiology is a negation –  

no amount of words can expurgate, refine

or reform the shit shovel. What is

‘ghost forest’ for you is only a private metaphor

for desertification.

An exile from the ancient city of Aleppo,

might well be ‘displaced,’ but any politically correct verbiage

belies the human dimension of losing one’s home,

one’s family and being compelled

to live in a skip or public toilet like an alley cat.

A rebel from Mount Simeon, might well be a ‘job seeker’

to you, but any attempt to dress ‘stateless nationals’

as anything other than ‘stake holders’

will be met with derision from the floor. Since a reserve army

of unemployed is always good for business.

ii

If thought itself can be called a negation:

what of unsustainability and over-production?

Since no concept can articulate the whole relationship

vis-a-vis man and Nature – the semiotics

of exhuming the dead or saving the planet to secure a home – 

will be met by an irresistible canon ball

fired at an immovable post. Positing truth itself

is negative – insofar as it presupposes

something else is not true.

Shamanic Dance Sublation

for Douglas Colston & Dylan Murphy

i

O’ pliable experts in humanity. You who proclaim

the end of history. You who mop the brow

of Nero (bless the mob as you talk our dreams to sleep)

hold a noose over the past, as if to cut a deal

with the future. You who watch Rome burning 

while the tyrant fiddles, if only to observe

the facts. You who say nothing of master and slave,

lost peoples, stolen lands.  Mouthing

those heroic last words: ‘What an artist dies in me,’

as if to turn language and art into consumables – buy up

the last innocence of thought. You who procure

freedom like a bestiarii in that chamber of horrors

we call the Circus – for the age-old celebration

of ‘business as usual.’  In the prison of apprehension

we can hardly move, let alone breathe freely,

but history doesn’t end in triumphalism for one class

or nation over its rivals. It is open to the future 

precisely because we’re surrounded by possibility.

Because agency suggests the content

of the future – because the ‘mystical fire’ of the soul 

lives forever in the recall of night eyes. 

In the constellations of Orion and Cassiopeia.

Where we dream and we remember: 

Nature and human nature are opposite sides 

of the same nature because we still live in a prehistory 

that only stands because we are yet to grasp

who we are. What we might be without constructs

and aggregates – the esoteric architecture

of studio, stadia, steeple, church. The appropriation 

of man by man. Division and progress. Progress

and division.

ii

To know a thing is to know its end but the quest

for knowledge is not conquest of the unknown 

but a journey through the unknowable.

Being moves through time  – from the Servile Wars

of Spartacus to the Peasant Revolt,

from the beheading of a Cavalier King to the shootings

of the Tsar and Tsarina .But time only remains

as a function of being. The real antagonism for the cat

in the box is living. In the boardrooms of Titanic,

progress implicates itself as problem

and solution, but the solution remains the problem.

If we are to translate the world as we change it,

we must learn how observation weasels out

of objectivity. In the bordellos of objectivism,

we must renegotiate the objections to knowledge

over function. Where science serves myth

and myth maker, (which only paves the way

for more whoring) the self-encounter is not quantitive 

or absolute, but rebellious because it puts no price

on sovereignty. S is not yet P,

but when we change subject and predicate,

we change how we see the world. Age and death

can do no more to define us because the ‘Now’ 

is our time.  The locus of Winstanley’s diggers 

(which is Not Yet articulated)

is beginning to carve the skyline of the future

from the vanishing point of the past into the horizon

of the present. The sky in Heraclitus reminds us

how flow and flaw reveal the path ahead.

We find ourselves in the places where we were most lost.

iii

We find ourselves in the Shamanic dance

of ancestors, in the Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee – 

in moments torn from time, because being

and time are tied to a tug of war in the infinite

possibilities of the finite. True genesis (the creation

of man by man) does not call for gods.

It is not at the starting gate but the finish line 

because freedom is not the fabled flower of immortality

but the action of picking the wild flower

from the chain – the present moment fulfilled 

in the rupturing of empty time.

In the leap between the rebel dead and the Novum. 

Fearing the past only petrifies the past

until slave and rebellion are redeemed in the present,

because the past is only a rebellion 

for memory until it is re-enacted in the world.

Rebellion not only pervades the past – it proposes

the future. Reminds us of the light

at the mouth of the cave, because the sun

(which is yesterday’s memory) ascends in the daydream

of childhood. In the homeland of all living beings

where man is yet to belong. As the slave army turns

to the sun, so the past turns to us 

before it threatens to disappear – because healing begins

in the rebellion  of the fragmented mind 

and we are the creators

of miracles.