Long Leviathan Poems
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My head spins as the noise from the crash echoes in my head. I sit up in some kind of terminal with strange trains bound left and right for places I don’t understand.
One is gold and ornate but the trappings are fake with cracks that filagree in its façade the train reminds me of a serpent-like Leviathan.
The next is sliver and clean with white and sliver cravings blue accents and the train looks sleek streamlined like it's from the far-flung future. Bright lights gleam. Chrome.
Is that blood I see dripping from the golden cracks along the tracks. I feel the frost of the sliver train's exhaust. My head swims and lay my head back to let the world catch up.
The terminals lights are harsh here, harder than Fluorescence More brutal than incandescence the building I find myself in, is like no glass and armature skeletal structure I have to seen before. An architecture unknown in my life. On earth or anywhere. I feel the infernos of one and the chill of the other.
In this Terminal were these mechanical beasts are cradled. This terminus stretches into infinity. I see pail figures drifting up and down the platform faces all a blur like failed dreams I have dreamt once before. My eyes focus but the faces don’t, a little chill runs my spine.
I look around the depot, it is staggering. The architect must have been mad or on some mind devastating drugs.
I look to the right the building fades to a brilliant blue sky with regal clouds and a sun low on the horizon but never settings as occasional clouds pass before it shooting glorious rays of light my father call the visions of divinity. I think I see wing shapes fluttering like butterflies, but that can’t be? I rub my eyes nothing changes.
To the left, I look to see a dark horizon with thunderheads miles high of endlessly thunderstorms churning and crimson and violet lightning lancing the rim of a cityscape on fire. Dark industries tower and burn. A jagged broken land of fissures like rough-cut skin and bleeding lava, belching smoke. The worse nightmare of a demented god.
I stand lost in my own translation. I fell the screams of a car crash echoing, the rubber screeching, burning; in my head like a lingering bad dream. Fading in my inner mind's eye. I am forgetting the time. I must go. I feel I should go but I stand there for a while.
A chrome gun glittering
in the hot sun raise, rays radiating
like a heliographic rainbow,
drawn from shimmering halos
of inferno light, hot.
White smoke from a funeral pyre,
drifts like ghosts over this lost terrain.
The hum of traffic
on a different shore,
each appealing in his own discourse,
each the shadow of a passing memory,
faces of lost in the Dream
becoming chrome…
A smoking gun; tears fly, ragged...
across this war-torn dominion,
to the unknown,
on the coming thunder, it echoes
in the canyons of a city, vast.
A figure falls,
the shadows deepen in the halls.
Something stands tall,
slow in elements of time...
of a past life to no one last,
screams of some come to different traffic.
The hmmm of white sound!
Drones in the veins
of the leviathan,
elements of a life lost and lived out,
at last,
the chrome gun glinting
under a hollow sun,
heliographed.
…incoming of one,
as the storm clouds gather
on the horizon.
He Dreams bitter,
resounds with echoes down
the Corridors of Time.
As vacant a car sits,
in lost baron shopping marts
and forgotten car lots,
the dead
are sitting sublime
in chrome spinning
flashing over around
down under a gun
glittering under the Infernal Hollow Sun…
oppressive hell in its damnation. Eternal!
A chrome gun glittering in the hot stars,
hot shells flying into the air,
exploding rounds echo in chambers of ancient cities…
a ruined Metropolis!
Raise!
Oh!
Death...
the reapers scream
radiating like a heliographic rainbow...
as the shells spin to the ground,
down shimmering halos,
thunder resounds
sparks alight in inferno white light,
hot…
burning!
BRIGHT!
Dragons are fabled beasts of myth and lore;
and yet, some say they lived in times long past.
And they were noble creatures at their core,
or so says every mage, whenever asked.
They slept on golden treasures they'd amassed,
and their hoards were oft-rumored to be vast.
They were often seen soaring silently
on magnificent wings, masters of flight.
And yet, Man attacked them violently;
their beheading, the quest of every knight.
And they were hunted down and killed on sight;
until no more Dragons were left to fight.
St. George once slew a Dragon in England;
and He is renowned for it to this day.
The last of Dragonkind, killed by Man's hand,
was a leviathan of silver-grey,
that once flew the skies of ancient Cathay;
only to be speared and left to decay.
Now long extinct, destroyed by greed and fear,
Dragons were once magical and austere.
Let the day perish on which I was born,
and the night that said,
‘A man is conceived.’
Let that day be darkness!
May God above not seek it,
nor light shine upon it.
Let gloom and deep darkness claim it.
Let clouds dwell upon it;
let the blackness of the day terrify it.
That night—let thick darkness seize it!
Let it not rejoice among the days of the year;
let it not come into the number of the months.
Behold, let that night be barren;
let no joyful cry enter it.
Let those curse it who curse the day,
who are ready to rouse up Leviathan.
Let the stars of its dawn be dark;
let it hope for light, but have none,
nor see the eyelids of the morning,
because it did not shut the doors of my mother's womb,
nor hide trouble from my eyes.
“Why did I not die at birth,
come out from the womb and expire?
Why did the knees receive me?
Or why the breasts, that I should nurse?
For then I would have lain down and been quiet;
I would have slept; then I would have been at rest,
with kings and counselors of the earth
who rebuilt ruins for themselves,
or with princes who had gold,
who filled their houses with silver.
Or why was I not as a hidden stillborn child,
as infants who never see the light?
There the wicked cease from troubling,
and there the weary are at rest.
There the prisoners are at ease together;
they hear not the voice of the taskmaster.
The small and the great are there,
and the slave is free from his master.
“Why is light given to him who is in misery,
and life to the bitter in soul,
who long for death, but it comes not,
and dig for it more than for hidden treasures,
who rejoice exceedingly
and are glad when they find the grave?
Why is light given to a man whose way is hidden,
whom God has hedged in?
For my sighing comes instead of[a] my bread,
and my groanings are poured out like water.
For the thing that I fear comes upon me,
and what I dread befalls me.
I am not at ease, nor am I quiet;
I have no rest, but trouble comes.”
I am accustomed to spitting out bones of my prisoners, not witnessing their escape. I hear whales whistle their stoic dirges as I descend—they know the doomed are villains and freedom is promised to the brave of the brine. I am Devil Damsel, doomed as villain deemed with jagged teeth of unworthy. I am a colorless livid leviathan ghost ready to seize joy from the helpless, from the hopeful. I see red, but I am not blind. Before my downward plunge, I witnessed stars in the sky. Distracted by their glow, I missed your own, sinking back down into my monomaniac world, where stars are only dreams I shame over.
Seductive subduction.
I thought I knew darkness till I saw that glow—that glimpse of unreachable light. And I can live there. All I need to do is swim upward and kiss the surface. But the abyss—I consume it, and it consumes me.
Hydrostatic hell.
I am chained to these Platonian trenches eternally deemed ignorant. Death boxes. Nailed, anchored, mercurial, messy, mine. I deal with the discarded, the forgotten just as I disembody the discarded, the forgotten.
Catastrophic cold.
It freezes everything that I am that you see me only in your pain.
(Note: this is a sequel to an older poem I wrote years ago called Devil Damsel)
A visceral prayer, a tragic curse, and an evocative love letter to a missing muse.
A spiritual lament and artistic testimony — a merging of ancient myth and modern existential anguish.
It is both a prayer to the divine and a punishment from it — a paradox at the heart of the artist’s life: creation as both suffering and salvation.
Title.
My Confession.
(A lone voice whispers)
Am I cursed like poor Orpheus, the son of Apollo?
To just wander through life, wasting my time.
Cursed by the Three Crones, to now write rhymes.
For just you, who I silently follow?
Writing about our love and sorrow.
Whilst hiding alone in here, my hollow.
For only two invisible pennies or dimes.
Because my Goddess, Divine, has called in all my worldly sins.
To be tormented in every known way, like poor Orpheus by the Maenads.
To play with only words, with this as punishment, for all my eternal crimes.
So every night or at the break of day.
I'm now doomed to write for and to you, sometimes in darkness.
Sometimes in light.
Writing for my soul.
For my freedom to really see.
Unlocking old mysteries, hidden deep down within me.
To take back some form of control, using secretive newly found keys.
To unlock mysterious occult doors.
To traverse through strange literature about inner kingdoms.
As I now speak to you, my love.
Hiding cleverly amongst life's many moors.
Hidden in the vastness of The Universe.
My simply forgotten trespass into salvation and tragedy linked to sin.
When the Leviathan tricks you into thinking:
This time, we're going to win.
(C)
Copyright John Duffy
.
Blue Wail
My head says futile, my heart keeps faith
A journey so long for one lonesome waif
Steadfastly onwards, my heart rules my mind
As on I endeavour, that one I might find
These limitless seas that I wander alone
Carry the sounds of my beseeching tone
If one might reply ’cross my vast ocean home
In search of another, together we’d roam
Yet when you’re the biggest creature on Earth
And nought has come close since your mother gave birth
All you can do is endeavour to find
A single companion of your own kind
Men used to hunt us with boats armed with darts
They’d tie us aside and harpoon our hearts
But now an eleventh hour human decree
Allows me to go with a new sanctity
A tardy reprieve for a creature like me
As I roam every ocean and search every sea
But it’s late in my day and though I be free
Another Blue Whale is the longing in me
(Inspired by the John Gordon Davis 1976 novel
‘Leviathan’
which suggests that a Blue Whale can live its entire life
and never encounter another)
I see it tied up to its pier,
steel monolith, huge and grey,
the USS Massachusetts,
now a museum by the quay.
Big sixteen-inch guns are silent,
the five-inchers point to the sky,
kids play on the forty-mil guns,
shooting phantom planes as they fly.
Tourists walk this leviathan,
product of my grandfather’s age,
he served then, in the Pacific,
might have seen the ship’s cannons rage.
His great-grandchildren scamper ’round,
one tries to lift the anchor chain,
each link outweighs him massively,
but the boy still tries all the same.
Above the superstructure stands,
a massive, armored sentinel,
as if guarding Fall River,
should any not wish the town well.
As if those big guns are waiting,
to swing up, belch fire again,
a dragon floating on water,
built proud by the hardest of men.
I know she won’t fight anymore,
by modern ships she is outclassed,
yet looking at her, most admit:
that battleships feel more bad-ass.
-- Re: Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Rue de Fleurus #27, Paris --
What would Gertrude. What, Gertrude.What, Gertie?Have thought.Have thought what thought?Thought thought driving,forward,remorselessly.Remorseless Remorse? Forward.Never reverse;no reverse.No.No remorse.
Remorseless,spurning reverse,seated.High!Seated high in Auntie.Then in Godiva seated. Looming.Enormous.
Looming enormous.Unsinister presence. Certain presence.Definite.Definitely not sinister. Positively looming;enormous in brown. Brown,
in brown corduroy,driving Paris.
In Paris,through Paris.Looming high in Paris in Godiva.With Alice,
quiet beside her. Quiet; always, Alice. Alice always.
And zipping, about -- coming to Rue de Fleurus 27.
Zipping to Rue de Fleurus.To 27. And Alice so able.
Able Alice, each a.m. transcribing.Able Alice typing.Automatic Gertrude.
Typing Gertrude.Great Gertrude.GeniusGertrude.Talking Gertrude.
Genius talking.Great brown Gertrude; Gertie, to Alice.
Absorbing, talking, buying art --- buying Matisse.
Absorbing Matisse.Showing Matisse.Banishing Matisse.
Selling Matisse,collecting Picasso.Great Gertrude -- genius Gertrude
at court, holding court at Rue de Fleurus 27.
And Leo.Gone Leo.No Leo at Rue de Fleurus. Not at 27
After Leo, after Mr. Stein, after brother Leo. But there was Alice.
Alice was there Among Braques.And Cezanne.
(Not Matisse.)No longer Matisse, but Picasso.
And Picassos, Picassos, Picassos!
And Alice; alongside, was Alice.Next to, was Alice.
Alice next Gertrude,Gertie, G. --- Gertrude, Miss Stein.
Genius Gertrude Stein Quiet Alice always.
And a great Gertrude. A great brown Gertrude. A leviathan.
A passing ship; a great leviathan.Gertie, a genius.
A hugeness.A shibboleth.But to Alice,
just Gertie.
Sixty thousand pounds
One hundred sixty horses
Snorting like leviathan
On uncharted courses
Eleven feet of width
Thirty-two of reach
Tank-like tracks that crush the rock
With a metallic screech
Carving up the hillside
With the greatest ease
Playing toss with boulders
Plucking up huge trees
A tree that falls is heard
Some even make a sigh
A sound that makes me wince
I will not tell a lie
Progress can be brutal
On nature, we intrude
We like to make an entrance
Loud and brash and rude
I tell myself the openings
Make room for trees to grow
Or so I justify;
I’m pretty good, you know
Deftly flicking boulders
Smoothing out the dirt
Yard by yard he moves along
Master craft at work
It’s not for the timid
Or the faint of heart
Carving trails on mountainsides
Truly is an art
We’ve started every morning
Briefly, with a prayer
For Shawn and for his safety
And for God’s presence there
Hard to juxtapose
Stewardship, dominion:
The beauty there down in the vale,
Diesel-powered pinions
In time, the forest will forget
And cover up our scars
For now, I walk His wooded trail
At night, beneath His stars.