Anorexia Carcosa

4:24pm:

5:52pm: One and Forty
It's not that we don't know.
It's that we don't do.

No wind stirs this
shadowed dust,
and cooling ashes
repose under a
red and bloated sun.

The scent of lime,
rising like the gentle
steam of a bath
awaiting our repose,
haunts my memories.

Where once was fire,
ashes tumble.
Where once

4:21pm: Forty
Sonnet for October

To autumn come we all against our will.
As stormy shadows gather into night
All colour washes from sepia skies
And battleship grey clouds thunder broadsides
'Til they can't be seen in the fading light.

Morning sidewalks scarlet and amber in the chill.

Now the time, when grey frost rimes our rooftops,
That we must huddle closer to the fire
And burrow under wool until we find
Each one the other, shivering, entwined
In longing for the summer of desire.

Morning sees the last of the lavender hyssop.

Amber and scarlet dance in icy air
And spiral towards the heavens as our prayer.

8:31am: Nine and Thirty
After the Storm

Crisp, freshly-laundered sheets
Cool against sore muscles,
Filling the brightening room with
Lemon and morning.

Curtains sinuous in the sun,
Dancing the ancient autumnal rites,
Restless, but exhausted from
The evening's storm.

A soft, sleepy sigh escapes
Your lips, glowing embers still warm,
And your half-closed eyes conceal
A new storm warning.

11:25pm: Eight and Thirty
I have dreamt of far off places,
forgotten by most waking men.

The hills are some sort
of otherworldly bemisted
faerie-land.

Shredded leaves of cloud
dance in wild profusion,
but stately procession.

Low, fast moving,
they dart like fish,
into and through the sun's rays
while their slow lumbering brothers
prepare their eclipse.

Each reedy beam of sun's light
surrenders at last
to the approaching storm.

And the land is dark and wild.

12:10pm: Seven and Thirty
Forgotten

The Lady Night says,
(in shadows descending
  and growing from the
  deeping corners of the world)

"I've hidden the Sun
And ev'ry pleasant memory
of the Dreaming World."

  We, the forgotten,
  In desire and in shadow,
  Are stalked by silence.

Lamentations rise,
(in grey smoke heavenward
  obscuring its source,
  the altar of sacrifice)

"If even the Sun
Can die, then none of us, not one,
Can be immortal!"

  Dreamless sleep stalks us
  In desire and in shadow,
  We Children of Dawn.

10:46am: Six and Thirty
Dissolution

You’re walking through the ancient city of Carcosa. Grey dust swirls around your feet in the wind. The neighbourhood dates to medieval times, but it was extensively refurbished in the late 17th century. The street is narrow and crooked - in some places the houses lean so far over the street that it’s completely enshadowed.

You leave the shadow of the neighbourhood streets and step onto the boulevard. Wide, lined with trees, it is cobbled with dusky grey-blue stones, rounded and weathered. You come to a café with colourful awnings of golds and blues. Round tables crowd the sidewalk in front, white tablecloths fluttering in the warm breeze and held in their proper places by small vases of pink flowers. You can hear the echoing clatter of horseshoes on cobbles and creaking wagon wheels and the mournful strains of a cello.

The boulevard isn’t crowded. Singles and couples and small groups gather at the café tables clutching tall glasses and smiling at each other with their eyes and lips. An old man, hair thin and silver, hunches over a chessboard. Is he waiting for his opponent, or reliving past glories?

Nearby, there’s an old stone fountain in the middle of the small square where the boulevard intersects a slightly narrower avenue. Young women in floral dresses sit on the side of the fountain, chatting and laughing with each other under the pretense of filling tall narrow buckets with water.

Across the avenue, a young man in tweeds and cap plays a mournful cello in the fading sun.

You’ve come into the boulevard from one of the crooked little side streets. You sit at a café table, alone with a newspaper. The headline, small and discreet, claims “Burial Mound of Genghis Khan Found in Altai”.

The waitress is a tiny, pretty little thing with a delicate face, bones fine as a sculptural study. Her hair is short and dark, and her wide eyes are a pale, pale blue like glacial ice. Her lips smile wide and red, but her eyes are studying, questioning. You raise your thumb, and she nods once, slowly, and her eyes finally smile. She comes back a moment later with a tall glass of emerald.

Your hand gently brushes hers, briefly, as you take the glass from her.

She snatches her hand back, astonished. She looks at it, cocking one eyebrow. It is calcifying, becoming a crumbly grey stone-like texture. The grey spreads quickly. As a perfect red wondering “oh” escapes her lips, first her hand, then her entire arm, turns to stone. Within a breath, her whole body becomes a statue of itself.

And then she crumbles. First at the edges of her fingers, but soon great sheets of dusty grey plaster are shedding from her body, until she collapses into rubble and dust at your feet.

Fear and panic rise in your breast. You look around at the other people at the café tables. Has nobody noticed?

You rise from your table, convincing yourself that it hadn’t happened, couldn’t have happened. You brush past a friend sitting nearby.

He looks up, as if to say hello. He grabs for your arm to get your attention, but his fingers calcify the moment he touches you. He looks puzzled as he sits, immobile, while the grey washes over his body, leaving him a statue crumbling into dust.

His companions stare at you, mouths agape and eyes wide. You back away from them, apologizing over and over. It won’t happen again, you promise, “I won’t touch anyone”.

You turn around to see the old man with his chessboard. He shyly asks if you play. You smile at him and move a knight. Check. As he smiles up at you, his eyes frost over. The grey starts in his eyes and lips, and before you can do much more than open your mouth, his head tumbles from his shoulders and shatters on the chessboard, scattering the pieces. The worst, though, is the sound of it, the soft crunching like crumpling paper as the grey races over his skin. And now he is nothing more than a gargoyle, dissolving into plaster dust.

You hadn’t even touched him.

You’ve got to get away from these people. They’re not safe with you around them. All around, you can hear the sound of the calcification, that horrible crunching, echoing softly around you from every corner of the boulevard, surrounding you, washing over you like waves.

You’re running.

The women at the fountain are piles of grey dust and rubble before you even pass them. The cello totters, then falls onto the cobbles a discordant clattercrash. All around you the calcifying sound, and that grey dust that once was people clinging to your shoes as you’re running, running down the crooked little empty side streets.

Eventually, exhaustion overcomes you and you slow to a walk. You’re walking through the ancient city of Carcosa. Grey dust swirls around your feet in the wind.

9:31am: Five and Thirty
First:

The only possible reason for not
Asphyxiating Monday in plastic wrap
And storing its carcass in the freezer
Like an old bit of salmon you can't
Quite stomach, is this:
It would be quite angry
If it got out, and who wants
Cryogenic zombie days
Howling after them
Come Tuesday?

Second:

The book itself was a spell
Bound in the skin of its still-living author.
Hardly beautiful, I thought, but imbued
With a kind of awful majesty.
Deceptively plain, grey, ordinary,
It has become for me a fascination,
A nexus of coincidence.

Third:

I'm an old chair, comfortable and unregarded,
Who looks upon the invention of the
Premade tea bag as
One of the five great cornerstones of
Western civilization,
Such as it is.

11:03am: Four and Thirty
Fabulous

When roaming gangs of
Well-adjusted youths
Would swing by malt shops or
Descend like locusts upon libraries;

When every confirmed bachelor
Was irascible and
Looked exactly like Cary Grant
in "Bringing Up Baby";

When sandwiches were made
With wonderbread,
Perfectly uniform bologna, and
Glowing yellow mustard;

When every town was Mayberry, and
Every city was New York, and
They didn't smell of
Stale cigarette smoke and sweat;

When every church was full and
White faces shone from each
and every polished pew,
     that was the
          moment
that was the
          era
when America was at its most
          fabulous.

8:00am: Three and Thirty
Ruminations
In a Café Near the Corner of First and Spring in Downtown Seattle

When I was last in this café, it rained
Cold and dark and hard. Always does, it seems,
In autumnal Seattle. I was wrapped,
Like now, in the warm swirl of mocha steam,
Recorded violas, and woolen scarves,
Enchanted at the thought of seeing you.

That day you cast your inadvertent spells,
Umbrella over eyes of fire blue,
Your very words a healing melody
When your desire spoke to me at last.

This morning, as you wished on breakfast tea
That we had just another hour left
Before we had to run into the storm,
I realized it's you that keeps me warm.

10:00am: Two and Thirty
Here in the shadows of desperate Empire
Twenty-First century Seattle, like
Fin de Siècle Paris or Vienna,
Is sepia-washed autumn rain on a
Hundred black umbrellas and the dimming
Yellow of carriage lamps.

Here in the shadows of desperate Empire
Unemployed savants crowd into cafés
Plotting every revolution but the
Inconvenient and going home to their
Artist's lofts, writer's flats, and internet
Caffinated and warm.

Here in the shadows of desperate Empire
Where every amber streetlight, spiderwebbed
With raindrops, reflects up from avenues
Slick with splashing sepia and lattés
Spilled in earnest resignation, we are
A city of sleepwalkers.

1:00pm: One and Thirty
I Heard a Mournful Wailing as I Slept
Sonnet Written in a Migraine Delirium

When vision narrows to a single point,
And half the molten universe is new.
In temples that no deity anoints
That howling wind invokes my déjà vu.

That wailing—oh, that wailing!—echoes through
The mountain passes certain shepherds tread.
They shudder with alarm, as if they knew
The sources of those screamings that they dread.

I've often wondered, were those creatures fed
With visions, schemes, or nightmares drifting free?
Perhaps the rueful laughter of the dead?
Or molten slumbers of the dreaming sea?

No matter, for that plaintive wailing still
Drips like honey from those haunted hills.

9:00am: Thirty
For Francine

Let us walk down to the sea,
Just we two together
Past those white-washed houses
That stood too long and are
No longer homes,
Past the hungry shadows who
Would not learn to walk with us
Down to the sea.

Let us walk from our city
Apartments, you and I,
Through rolling vineyards (sweet
Grapes hung heavy in the sun)
And olive groves,
With our straw hats and baskets,
And gather for the pressing
All that we can.

Let others dream their
Lives in parking lots;
Seek with me the sea.

10:00am: Nine and Twenty
Sonnet: Screed

The power's out in London. New York fades
To black as America's cities drop,
Like rotting limbs, to inescapable
Necrosis. Numbing resignation shades
Every sneering twitch of the riding crop
With the taint of the inevitable.

Where is our righteous fury, our cold wrath,
When truths we hold self-evident and dear
Are stripped from us by self-selected Kings?
Where is our revolutionary wrath?

Our cities are in darkness, cold with fear,
With every one of us left wondering
Just when our civilization, much abused,
Somehow became the thickness of a fuse.

8:00am: Eight and Twenty
Sonnet Cycle: Three Markers

occulted

1:00pm: Seven and Twenty
Sestina: Carol of the Birds

"There is no face behind this pallid mask,"
I said, though I only half believed it.
A plaza of birds scattered to the air
At her sudden laugh, chiming like church bells
Across Midnight's Square, telling the hour
When veils replace mere masks with red passion.

"Care you not for such proofs of my passion?"
I inquired as if love were a task,
A chore to be performed upon the hour
At a place foretold by prophets. Can it
Actually be timed by church bells,
Waiting for solace in the winter's air?

Air empties from my lungs, the only air
I ever breathed in what I thought passion,
A cold thin mist, compared with which the bells
At dawn are a hundred mistresses tasked
At my redemption. And now at last it
Waits no longer for some appointed hour.

"Care you not for the lateness of the hour?"
She smiled, filling me with a breath warmer than air.
A raven remains in the plaza. It
Accepts abandonment without passion,
Accepts the lot of one who has tarried,
Witness to, but undisturbed by, the bells.

Bare to the skies, she laughed again like bells;
She was joy and liberty at that hour,
Aware but not enslaved to the terror
That kept an empty raven from the air.
And in the movement of her passion,
We knew a moment and devoured it.

There in the square, with dawn washing over it,
She pledged herself in echoing church bells,
Auburn and gold, to me as her passion.
And I, as the last raven fled, my hour
Come ’round at last, skin naked to the air,
Wearing no mask but a silver mirror,

Surrendered. No mask? But is it
True? The very air burns my skin, and bells
Echo of the hour, when she is now my passion.

2:00pm: Six and Twenty
Tacoma Blues

No cloud to mar the sinister blue sky—
Horizon to horizon, a screeching calls
The ravens and the seagulls now to war.

Birds battle over garbage where the bar
Vomits broken backs and discarded dolls
Into the City of Destiny. Lies
Echo under the deepening sapphire:
The same eternal promises and boasts
Of every prowling generation. Fights
And shouts and tears screech out between one liar
And the next, haunting each other like ghosts
Too doomed to prowl Tacoma's red-brick night:

A culture of distractions in the lulls
Between the warring of the ravens and the gulls.

10:00am: Five and Twenty
Tides

Who can tell what moments we'll remember?
The last parade has passed the avenue
Of silent possibilities. The cars
Have collapsed into their own rust. The fence
That ran down by the old beach is long gone
And only the ocean survives. I'll leave
My skin on that beach, and come back to your
Entwining winepress, forever fresh
Though insubstantial in the wind and rain.

Who can tell the moments we'll remember?
I recall the day we painted the fence,
That day the soldiers came back from their war.
Tell me, must it always end in silence?
Are we just these moments, or something more?

10:00am: Four and Twenty
Sonnet: Lizrael, a Portrait in Oils
For Ms. Luxton on the occasion of her birthday

Immodest dreaming mad, with every breath
She breathes the Yellow Sign. Affixed in her,
It helicopters 'round, a whirl of scythes
Slicing each somnambulist’s heaving death.

She was born within herself and saw her
Name first writ by the serpent as she writhes
Through lone and level sands. Her eyes roll in:
A tatterdemalion vagabond
Catches her Phantom Truth in predawn skies
With only coincidence and aspirin,
Becoming Princess of the Demi-Monde.

Curiosity compels, but his reply
Obliterates her questions, still unasked;
His chalk-blank face inclines, "I wear no mask."

10:00am: Three and Twenty
Sonnet: Aught

No slaves were born, nor barefoot servants trod
Here. No king built our city on the sea,
But honest toil in sunshine raised this wall.
Unlike ancient orders ruled by Gods
(Or rather, priests in cloth-of-gold with keys
of brass), the aristocrats in our halls
Were born not of their parents but instead
Built themselves. Nowadays, we breed peasants
(Or rather, rats who build with feces and
The odd scrap trickled down). Sir Isaac said
We stand upon the shoulders of giants,
But I say we're sleeping in the ragman's
Shadow. Like Sienna, or maybe Rome,
We give up what we must to keep our homes.

4:00pm: Two and Twenty
Sonnet: Emancipation

As waves of noiselessness echoed around
St. Stephen's silent bell and its antique
And ruined belltower, the mourning sound
That issued from a hundred hungry beaks
Awoke my aching fear of emptiness.

The treeless wasteland of my village square,
Church clinging to its edge like a careless
Slouching drunk, lay colourless and bare.

Those hundred angry ravens circled, though,
And screaming accusations fell to earth,
Settling black on cobbles down below
A bruised sky. What is such a friendship worth
When duty has replaced a simple sigh,
And every timeless truth reveals a lie?

9:00am: One and Twenty
Sonnet: Beloved

Why am I sleepless, fearing fading dreams
That visited me these blustery nights?
Outside my windowpane sheeting rain might
Sing of forever, but inside it seems
A crying lament. Gods weep and thunder
In turn at absurdity and ruin:

A dreamstalker hunting a crinoline
And crimson apparition. I wonder
How I survived her absence. The deacons
Light candles for my case, but I need flame.

The learnéd doctors cool my brow, but shame
Obtain: I need a glacier to weaken
This fever, ice the colour of silt and
Sapphire. Stormclouds gather in the Dreamlands.

10:00am: Twenty
Sonnet: Wight

So. Flesh the colour of parchment and ice
Rummages through the cardboard box of femurs
And pauses. Parasites turn, seeking meals
Of intellect, but deeping night conceals
His stink of darkness. Rotting with impure
Motivation but with cunning device,
The creature that consumes wasted moments,
Atrophy writ clear upon his arms,
Invokes the ancient and invisible
Spirits, engorged on the past, to annul
A hundred human lifetimes. What few charms
Their descendants recall to their defense
Omit their hollow ancestors, condemning
All things so born to their rightful end.

2:00pm: Nineteen
Cataract

Folded up in necessary stillness,
Well within himself,

The prophet of the low, red wilding hill
Opens one eye as

His isolated island in the Steppe
Sea transforms into

A cataract, with horsemen pouring 'round,
Horsemen without number,

Pouring from horizon to horizon
Until, before his

Eye can even close, they've vanished into
The horizon's dust again.

9:00am: Eighteen
Sometimes I Hear the Singing When I Sleep
(A Sonnet for the Reverend Tynes upon the occasion of his thirty-second birthday)

In dreams I've heard the wailing on the wind
That spirals through the fluid, changing streets
And alleys of Carcosa. But alone
And in the morning's dawn could not repeat
The plainsong of that choir of defeat.

I've trod the trembling avenue of bone
That mazes through the city as a stream
Whose head's the chorus, squatting there alone
Upon Carcosa's fragmentary Throne.

But now from dreams the City starts to rise,
Crescendo just begun amidst the din.

Such riddles can't but help confound the wise,
But answers to these secrets shall be mine
For I at last have found the Yellow Sign.