Another fouffy poem because I forgot

sketch by John Way circa 1952)

The Music Rooms

                            fr Days of Mercury

The Lustrous silence of emotion

lyricism defiled
to glorious feral

beats
to 16ths
damnation
fragments recline
Deep in another dream

visions of
Mercury’s flight to Delos
That burnout like a silent horror movie

but on this afternoon
we lay around waiting for
some guests
who said they might arrive,

but have no intention of letting them in

 

let us
escape now

He is
of Lustrous Emotions
O negative to my Oe’er negative
most campy vampirique
inked my body, then
I thought
the light in his body is
the neural charge
the eternal flame & afterburn
together composer=architect=composer
dreamers’dreamer dream

silent lovers

later
Keeping them out
slugging a bottle
‘52 Chateau Margaux
rabid laughing
drunks
in our madrigals
shadows disappear
on torsos
the dignity & valor
of our space and time
naked & immortalized 

legato

I left him in bed
a pointed toe spooling the silk
sonata busted
inside glamour waiting on
an  incessant
disbelieved fanfare,
a bare-knuckle battle for the lyre

He’s lit a cigarette without
even noticing
the phantom harp
 in his bluesmoke
as notes slice  over of architecture
of these rooms

He made these rooms bounce
universal seed sound to any whisper
He placed a Louis XIV bloodred divan

dead gods lurk under glass
so nothing else vaulted
In his gallery
sacred and profane
instruments from Nepal
the only other object in my
space, oh

the Steinway nuts and bolts

he will look in on me from his distant loft
after hours
swaying over our cliff
naked up there dreaming
bringing in a lyre
blue eyes
black hair over them
a piercing laughter
with his strum
silent hint of a
dance against time
a dance against time
beat conjured
then forgotten

He builds and I compose

& so on

For John Way

The Music Rooms is based on scene portraits of John’s lovers he painted in his NY loft in the early 50s

upcoming

Notes from NY

Opera impressions

Invocation

A favorite poem to launch this public diary.
I don’t know from blogs, but I’ve jumped off bridges before.

As a diarist, I’ve used the Isherwood-Rorem- gay model of formless entries, but
substantive and hopefully amusing. We’ll see. And stealing Donald Vining’s ‘LOTD’ feature.

Often a sketchbook for random notes about performances and performers.

In August, Shadow of Janus

In August
Shadow of Janus by Lewis Whittington

The realms of false sky, descending.
Vanquished
upon the metrolights

Hearing the godless
Gods and goddesses
Liars and demons
Souls and the soulless
Blur along the street
Where there is no darkness unseen
No stillness unnoticed
Or forbidden thought forgotten
On these lost paths
I hear Mercury keeping vigil along
The promontory
Igniting the arrowheads,
Brushing his temples
Eyes fixed,
body ready for flight,
whispers
‘Let’s go’ he
Says, ‘for we are the hunted now.’
Ice basilica
At daybreak and
The running flame
That consumes
The haze
Opened to the sudden shade
Pulling away
The corrupt prayers uttered before
The vanished armor
Offering smoke
And it is just in that
Hour, That I know there are no secrets
Unveiled onto this night
Discovered galaxies are
Noticed for a moment then
Passed away from
The moons
So barren that skin and bone
Feel the same
And emotion is
a remembrance of another life
Or dying star
Foretold by Mercury
Tracking
Heathen and Virgo
In the afterburn
I hear them confide
‘What chance.’
I wired Scorpio
So couldn’t
Break the code to
Mean nothing past that moment
To record the laughter at the
Eclipse over Jerusalem.
Cobalt
Silhouettes arch
on the waters
With flights
Of firebirds and
Of deaths
Told in the fanfares of Tatarus
In this music field
Of disgraced tones
Invites a coarser rhythm
I called
‘not a word, Terpsichore.”
The assault
Beats down over
What existed again but not before
And when the music enters
The body
It digs up
An infinite
If
To be met with ideas and peace
Waiting to be lived
By havoc and adornment
Waiting to die and
This is the water music we feel
I see Janus
Azimuths,
Vanished at horizon
Shielding us
From home.

For Jack Nespoli