The Poetic Method

THE GOLDEN HOUR

“No ceremonial, no incantation, no rites, but attainment of the state of lucidity in which the notion of time becomes a fruit one can peel.” –Robert Lebel

On a table made of bright fog, in a room of hard black coal, the visitors arrive and depart like ghosts more desirable as water than memory. They manipulate time into splendid movements that could be both sublime and dangerous as a form of erotic landscape – in an animal sense of being, when desire hunts for its object of hunger. Movements that imitate the velocity of quartz, which begins to grow and spread out like an organic wave filling the city with tender kisses, or crimes of passion that light up all the little corners and niches of the world.

THE HUMMINGBIRD’S REVENGE

“Love is conspiracy to commit mayhem.” -Unknown

There are very few reasons why magnetic obsessions are not biological reflections from the mirrors of the forest in the rain. It is in the breath that sees its twin magically aligned against the folly of distant events that hunts to enliven its initiation into the non-locality of poetic violence. Sunlight is the prism of night, and the phoenix of its fatal arousal. Time is moving in a very different direction. Transparency is the anomaly of devastation: euphoria is the art of disorder. When she comes to you, morning is the hummingbird’s revenge.

VANISHING POINTS

“Bee swarm, lightning flash, and absolute condemnation: three oblique angles of our summit.” –Rene Char

Navigation will always be inspired by master astrologers from the Orient, scintillating ambassadors leaving no mystery unturned, and coaxing out of dark places the most unreasonable perfumes to quell the fears of powerful intuitions that dazzle your grave markings. Your trust in the errant façade is toned with acid. The mad sepia of quarries idealizes the diaphanous bodies and transplants of your causality… through every change of your presence, for the other by another, there remain the divergent gauges of thought provoking absence. The notes you left behind were filled with obscure references to archaic cosmologies, while the images themselves brokered regal doubts… as to where exactly, and when, you danced by starlight in the slaughterhouses. Wondrous ligatures remained…

THE ENCHANTED CALIPERS

“A night left swinging, a night suspended.” Jean-Louis Bédouin

The future is a form of desire. Your eyes the casting of flares over the abyss. Words that charm are the lacerations of Sapphic floods overpowering the motors of the city. Trust is not without its roots of sorcery, or its flowers of betrayal. There is nothing evenly proportioned that grinds radiant colors out of smoke like ravens out of fire. The optical fluids will always flow in the direction of the moon, unless heated to the level of a desirable conflagration: to see is not to see what isn’t there, without blind passion caressed by the velocity of thorns. There is only the conquest through flames, the ravishing fur of disquiet, and the slaughter among pines, where stars shimmer in the mind like fading rooms. Incantations are tigers, clairvoyance is rain, and consciousness follows suit. You leave by the window of the raptor.

PHASES OF THE LOON

“As strange as it might have seemed, the visitor had come and gone.” –Eric Bragg

The silvered and tenuous cynosure of lacerated glances that dispel the ashes of a feverish angelica, (in her blood-shaped gown of nightfall, somnambulant shipwreck) nailed to the rafters in the guise of a compromised royal slave, (the power struggle unbalanced at dawn, the gloating unbearable…) its grand and unreasonable desires, polished beyond reproach… It is her joy that lights the torches, releases the keys dipped in the eyes of ruby, under the fingered and flint-stroked cloak of medicinal cleverness. She understood the last rites and marked them with her black circles, and he (the one who resembles your shadow in the fresh wound) was impeccable down to the most unfashionable of details, and appeared as neither liquid nor breath. Transparency was the bride of the assassin, and the claws of the moon growing poppies in doorways. The wind was a mummy of ether, and the invisible pearl of a last resort is the window through which can be seen the dance of scorpions. The only way out was through reckless abandon. Gates are swinging like sighs… In the tree of mirrors facing each other, the seeing-eye leaves arrange according to desire the language of flagrant roots, to illuminate the night masks that hunt and haunt, that lacerate the dark aching stones of a glance that deciphers your name and your awkward linage. The secret rendezvous is an indication of identity, when it least expects it, when it moves the fountain of promiscuous water just a fraction of a shadow to the left of your face, veiled by the clamor of words playing. Bright fissures of a clairvoyant embrace. Your mask is a conscious forest, an abandoned city, the fall of clothing from an animal precipice, and a bloodline of fireflies. Your reconnaissance is not the sunlight but the mask that looks back at you from the distance of a wishbone that cannot be broken…

CLOSING REMARKS

“Do not leave the following morning without erasing your name, The glazier is bleeding windows. Do not forget the spreading hives of noon (for the Grand Mirages) and never spill the evening rivers without those painful biographies of gratuitous tinkering and evasive maneuvers that call to you, disturbing the inviolate perfume sleeping out in the dark, reclining, glowing, evolving, humming…”

Selection from The Poetic Method

J. Karl Bogartte