digigoth: a spellbook for the new sorcerer (new work 8)
When we left off two months ago, the reader was given a choice:
1. To follow the Dangling Yarn
2. To follow the Sinking Lure.
This poem is the path of the Sinking Lure…
Read previous pieces here
This book is winging through the ethers in search of an illustrator and a publisher. If you are interested, please drop me a line.
How to read the pieces from this book:
1. Click on the embedded link to the [music] in the title of the poem.
2. Listen on repeat while reading.
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The Sinking Lure: (Playlist: The Glitch Mob: Palace of the Innocents)
the anglerfish sinks
her lure winks off on
a lightning bug
wil o wisp
yellow sea star
shrinks
to a pinhole flash
and nothings-out
quiet floods
into the would-be time
for mercy to wink
and leap for sidelong dreams a near-escape:
but form is skin-tight want
insisting thought
clench down to bread and blood:
so slow and painful to be things
given arms or legs or wings
worse still
re membered
as a burnt out light might
toss a phantom flare
around the shoulders of dusk
though no measurable beam erupts
absence is thing-shaped
and the more disfigured
the more distinctly felt
another (other) self (ves) which is/are exempt
from 3 dimensions:
the body thing 2. the mind to know it
3. the stranger to both
so the plummet into darkness
depth-sick and pressure-bent
no light needed to hear
the tremble of final air
squeezed out in a thread of bubbles
rupturing a music**:
“my body which my dungeon is my mind to me a kingdom is
the body grows outside
what you are pleased to call your mind
is its own place the body s guest
and in itself Can make HIGH walls and huge when all my body sleeps
the mind great lever of all things THE BODY
not bounded by its skin even the mind the body’s end
between its body throes enshines a darkness a presence
In my flame of living
O Reader! I had you in my mind
to share The life of the dark earth and lose my own
Such stores within a little body lodg’d
all right things ALL thoughts,
all passions, all delights
That in a boundless universe the body may confine
the common mind
and sound mind and the mind that can embrace The radiant body
an inseparable union of field and particle flames THROUGH my heart s palace
I shall remember yet I know there is something left
words burn in the body’s lamp! mind, that very fiery particle
sleeps contained
years have we still to smoulder”
wingless featherless
still: a bird
that emptiness and cold
ignites between doorway and threshold
into a black, bird-shaped light
burning above a dark new country
** music composed of fragments of lines by the following poets:
Sir Edward Dyer, John Milton, John Bartlett. Daniel Webster, Marcus Aurelius,
Edmund Spenser, William Cowper, Charles Lamb. George Gordon Lord Byron,
Epictetus, Samuel Johnson, William Wordsworth, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Louis
Stevenson, Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare, John Charles Earle, Sir Walter Raleigh,
Oscar Wilde, Louis Ginsberg, Carl Sandberg, William Lloyd Garrison, James Chapman Woods,
Alexander Pope, Sara Teasdale, DH Lawrence, AE Colum, John Hall Wheelock, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Siegfried Sassoon, Edward Thomas, Karle Wilson Baker Rupert Brooke, James Bohm
