Barry Van Asten

In kamikazic state and crisp,
Steered and wrenched from soft illusion;
Terrible, it's fragile, dust-blown shape
That carried it's fat world within -
...

In these nocturnal woods, my heart finds
The sacred light of a forgiving sun -
Her radiance through the wild boughs, winds
To the dark beauty of unending woman.
...

This eye-glass on Byzantine worlds
Of our own mythological fate,
Locked upon some distant star
Like Gullivers' gulping on dead space.
...

The house is empty and seems so cold;
Rooms are dying, winding down, all through,
Where childhood thumbled long ago.
...

I am called:
The times of destruction,
By awaiting star-manifold seers.
The room lay in never-ending
...

At twilight, I imagine her as before,
Assembled from posted fragments, gathered
Into an alphabet of her ways and more,
Until the female form is covered -
...

To see beyond this veil of stuff
And glimpse the things that I once saw;
To feel the same strange formlessness
Weave its way and create once more.
...

Should this veil between us ever part
To reveal love's course and astronomy,
Where the gentle ballad of womanhood
Sings soft and sweet within my heart;
...

Part IV - The Blossom And The Sigh

From this holy place I go
Unto a wilderness unknown;
...

There was a man lived in a house
Made of graveyard bones!
'But bones decay: Why not use clay? '
A young girl said, 'and maybe sticks and stones? '
...

'My child', said a stranger, 'come into my tomb,
There are lots to see and do in here, and fairies light the gloom;
There are tigers and dragons, and unicorns to ride,
There are pink baboons and elephants: but nothing here has died!
...

I'm an elegant sod, a chemical savant:
We're killers in flared jeans.
We are beautiful
When we're cutting worlds in half.
...

Part VII - The Holy Place

Sprite:
...

Lion, you fix your stare upon your prey
And sit, as some oyster-gorged demi-god;
With eyes like Death's nostrils, smoking hate,
And your fingers manicured like vampire stakes.
...

I gazed through the half-open window
In the dimmed afternoon;
And sombre, my heart set me dreaming
As I paced from room to room.
...

He, in the wistful air,
Turned away like sheets, twisting,
And still our love was inward, pressing...
As our hearts in displaced care
...

These wretched feelings I conjure
Only darkens the soul with regret;
This requiem; this Rubicon of rue -
These wretched feelings! I conjure
...

Not for the ceremonies of each day
Do I ring with wrongs, and look away;
Away to where a forgiving light
Brings comfort to the solitude of night.
...

Down below the waves that keep
My restless heart so incomplete;
Wet with kisses from the deep:
Swim with monster fuel, my sweet,
...

Where wild in the heart and mad with love,
Cold of all thoughts which were not of you,
As the moon, in its darkling embrace, always slips
From my fiery mantle and my every move.
...