London to Edinburgh

Yorkminster the impossible,
I’m afraid you’ve done me wrong.

On the soft ground around Cathedrals in an ancient land
Awe settles like a fever in a pub,
Like a chill in the fog.
The dome at St. Paul’s has room enough
For a mind stretching to hold the present and the past together,
Staring with unblinking eyes in search of faces,
Seeing only stone –
Stone, stacked and chiseled over long centuries
With tools of soft metal,
Held with softer flesh.
Eyes stunned, offended, seduced
By the aromatic sight of bronze and dark, carved wood,
Of decadent tombs addressed in Latin script,
Of a thousand saints climbing the endless walls, foot upon foot
Of stained glass.

Place a candle on the stand and release a prayer,
Spare two quid for the Kingdom of God.

I see a life of loneliness standing dauntless in front of me,
Gleaming like a flying saucer on a little moonlit knob of earth.
I know it will take me across the stars,
Show me glory beyond the mind’s capacity to create.
I feel the tension rise and fall like an unending Wagnerian prelude –
My neck relaxes from trying to turn,
And I board.

This isn’t solitude, this isn’t serenity –
This is furious velocity-loneliness,
Fiery loneliness that arcs across the sky
And screams through the air, just feet above the ground,
Lighting candles under the black steeples of
Scottish chapels.
This is loneliness that fuels suns,
That shapes planets out of blasted rock,
That chased a monk up Yorkminster tower,
Until he was imprinting each narrow stone step
With a footprint fresh from the fire.

The fury builds with nowhere to go –

–and I will build a cathedral in the stars,
With towers that stretch across the light years of emptiness,
And I will light a candle for all the lonely souls
To call them on their pilgrimage across the drifting void.
What will I say to you when you arrive?
Will I dare to call you brother?
Will I speak to you in grand terms of the longing that drove us?
Will I burst with a smile and with tears, declaring that at last you have arrived, that before us is a long year of rest?
Will I be bold enough to pretend you hear me at all?

On a rocky hilltop engulfed in fog,
A pipe passed in a circle of friends
Drives the anxious shakes away,
Like the lingering call of bagpipes
Banishes my troubled sleep.

Tritone

I heard sirens as I was walking back to my car tonight,
And for half of a second,
I thought it was the most beautiful sound I'd ever heard,
That the sheet had been pulled
And right there was ultimate reality -
The sirens singing in harmony,
Coming out to vindicate life at last
Now that it had finally broken.
But they sang too high.
They embraced me and scrubbed me
The way darkness and freezing street light
Cradle cracked ribs, pulsing like a Ukranian techno club.

They got there in time.

But they forgot to take me with them.

We started taking walks because the anger is easier outside.
Raging at suburbia, simmering in a psychic heat
That withers every dwarf tree, recreates Hiroshima
On every growth-stunted tree it passes,
We walk on for a few hours, not looking at the sun
Because it really doesn't get it. Eventually it'll go away.

We'd seen that footage of a wide-open square
And a grey-washed ceiling-sky,
The Hindu-Buddhists crowding together for a circular mile,
Shaking and shouting in fear of the abyss they stand on,
Waiting for a blessing, a guardian angel drawn together out of the cosmic mire
And injected onto their backs.
They felt the rage then too, shrieking in the animal tone
That's soulful only on the Bayou,
Digging in with fingers only for claws -
A tug on the ear,
And the madness is gone.
They slept in the woods and got frostbite looking for Vishnu.

They don't know it, but we had a creed too:
Never settle
Never grow roots
Never admit to being sensible
Never claim to be healthy, because health is an illusion
Never explain to them the difference between insanity and Madness -
But we never seemed to realize that the anger came with it.
It's all rage that the sun should set
Before we finished speaking our mind to it.
We can't walk fast enough - it slips down behind the infinity of road
And is gone.



Far overhead a porcelain whale glides through the sky,
Now as blue and dark as the Adriatic,
And a desolate Ahab follows it on the ground,
Lonely and heartbroken,
Gripping his harpoon in vain readiness.
At last he shrugs and turns slowly homeward,
Aching for his proper place and time,
Now more than a hundred years gone.

And the whale spreads a tantalizing wake across the sky.