Painting A Libretto

Forget all rules, forget all restrictions, as to taste, as to what ought to be said, write for the pleasure of it...

William Carlos Williams


Walking alone
on the leafy paths
of Kempen woods
A whole slew of words
vain, thorny, mute
with neither an onset
nor an ending
cradled in mighty unsettling colours
scoff into my flesh
while I'm scoffing to their nonsense.

I bolt their way
but the beastly ones
have a ravishing power
to emerge from the abyss
into which I push them.
So I guzzle them up
voraciously
and they go in "All That Jazz"
joyful or mournful
on and on
in a wicked ballet
of jeering and sneering.

they get drunk
by their own beauty
their own wit and virtuosity
they burst into aesthetics
I feel restraint
they feel freedom
in wild words from a stranger
and they give in
to brilliant pyrotechnics.

They are sloe colored
like a shrub of blackthorn
portent, entrancing
dipped in purple, magenta, crimson
of vascular systems
all nuances off claret
those sensuous words
conceived in the stream
of conscious desire
frozen in ultra and aquamarine
of some northern sky.


When they give in to nostalgy
they are mute, sullen
Their thorn chiseling away
on my heart
as if it was a tombstone
in the lonely forgotten rest yard
of all my beloved ghosts
where I can't find their stone
cause through storms and Time
they have moved around
and I have lost them.

I go back home
lay down and let them get trapped
in the fibers of my mattress
their splashing colours lost
to my beloved departed

Infinite empty spaces
Infinite silence.
in my whole being.

Elusive forms
impossible to capture
ripened along the line
of the Time
fading colours
invisible shapes
coming close
to a silky greige
or an earthly ochre
or the undefinable colours
of rubbles in the bed
of a dried up forgotten river.
They give an uneasy feeling
to the daring
who ventures into their slew.


Conceived in the embrace
of a stillness
nearing death
they inflict wounds
to the living
and it's then that I realize
the power of written words
over all Art forms
it's then that I let loose
the crescendo fight between music and words
forgetting all rules, all restrictions,
I write for the pleasure of luring
untamed words from the souls
of Oh! Père Lachaise
into my one and only libretto.

Flora

Words Ripened In The summer's Breath

I'm a sigh in a dark chant
The night's pupil in an abstract gaze
closely snuggled with words
out of a Colm Toïbin's world.

I'm an audacious
yet mellow sigh
in the breath of a perfect stranger's
hollow, cavernous desire
expressed in words
that are unborn
unconnected, unsought
sailing on a yellow wave
from the heart to the toes
and through that stranger's street
where they nestle in the cracks
in between old bricks paving the road
like colourful unknown flowers
patching the monotonous green
of a well groomed garden
visible only
to gifted eyes
able to sweep the scarce, unlighted
disheartening spaces.

Words that are bold and juicy
like crimson figs
from undefined faraway places
missing in dictionaries
but persistently hang
in the young summer's breath
slowly ripening
among myrtle growing in marshes
or in between promiscuous café tables
on which old friends exchange confidences
with overtones of news in brief.

Words that were safely tucked away
under the wood panels
of a bed room.
Then came an icy winter
crying out for hearth fire
that burned down the panels
exhibiting the words underneath
on cold concrete walls
now ready
to be fiercely expressed
without the help of summer staples.


A whole slew of words
swarming on the sweaty skin
of prurient bodies
within the tips of the fingers
yet moving
in the yonder
and resisting
to be framed
in a nonsense poem
or any other twaddle.


Words
inhabiting the guest house in me
where I gather them together
in the fading light of drizzly evenings
to play a vivid and sometimes cruel game
endlessly through the night
and the morning's light wrap haggard faces
both mine and theirs
so unexpectedly
that I let them run loose
once again
in the realm of untamed
while the world focuses
on getting up on its feet
and someone somewhere in the world
has already composed
a gentle love poem

"I love you and the ground
you walk upon."

Words whose beauty
is defined by the unreachable
by distance and parting
and the tears that are
an intellectual thing.
words that are intruder
into the intimacy of others
desultory words
trying to regain
over life's putrefaction
all the while knowing
that the day's impression
and the night's perception
are not resumed in poetry
but in good mornings
and good nights
from strangers
in the obscure gaze of whom
are sunk
redundant words
like fragments in a poem
hang to the sighs
in the sorrowful chants
in the abyss of tears
in the depths of eyes
glazed by the drizzle
of an ending summer
and I'm for ever
snuggled in them.

Flora