dead stars flashback the rest must rise
to an unknown helplessness
an earthbound memory
savanna to tundra
each day a commanded homage
to kao tao of fate
to its fled ancestor
but i brimmed in apocalypse under the welter of bones
yield to the inevitable
in its charnel house brain
as panic stricken packs sudden rain blaze
an earthbound memory
thwarted in its choked cry
ancestor in its death but inevitable more than bones
sudden rain blazed dead stars
a homage to until it fled in its brain
each day commanded brimmed in apocalypse
to yield to the flashback with the rest
the welter choked cry charnel house
as panic stricken packs
kao tao of fate
savanna to tundra
i must rise to an unknown helplessness
each day commanded of fate
i must rise to an earthbound
memory to kao tao yield to the inevitable
more than a homage to death to an unknown helplessness
brimmed in apocalypse
i flashback to my then thwarted ancestor
its choked cry as sudden rain
blazed in its brain
until it fled with the rest panic stricken packs
savanna to tundra
under the welter of dead stars charnel house of bones
Robin Ouzman Hislop is on line Editor at Poetry Life & Times at Artvilla.com. His numerous appearances include Cold Mountain Review (Appalachian University, N.Carolina), The Honest Ulsterman, Cratera No 3 and Aquillrelle’s Best. His publications are collected poems All the Babble of the Souk,Cartoon Molecules, Next Arrivals & Moon Selected Audio Textual Poems. A translation from Spanish of poems by Guadalupe Grande Key of Mist and Carmen Crespo Tesserae, the award winning (X111 Premio César Simón De Poesía), in November 2017 these works were presented in a live performance at The International Writer’s Conference hosted by the University of Leeds. UK. A forthcoming publication of collected poems Off the Menu is expected in 2020
yellow dust flights of hazes present as absent abstractions
as dawn breakings
as the ache of unfathomable memories
hauntings in a trackless desert of signs we make believe
each moment the better to kiss it goodbye like a butterfly
trapped beneath the sky
our entangled fate moves us only to wait the next entrapment
a seizure of happen stance dreams
as spectres of the day before its fall
and all we slay have slain after the birth of name
across that vast indifferent drift
that once seen we trembled in awe before
the arbitrariness of fate we now articulate
in our indentured voice amidst the tumult
& how could we ask for more when before us is only wall
we splatter our graffiti on
we threw our amazed cries like spears on the fresh wind
flights of hazes in the yellow dust
present in their absent abstraction
we make believe each moment the better to kiss it it goodbye
Robin Ouzman Hislop is on line Editor at Poetry Life & Times at Artvilla.com. His numerous appearances include Cold Mountain Review (Appalachian University, N.Carolina), The Honest Ulsterman, Cratera No 3 and Aquillrelle’s Best. His publications are collected poems All the Babble of the Souk,Cartoon Molecules, Next Arrivals & Moon Selected Audio Textual Poems. A translation from Spanish of poems by Guadalupe Grande Key of Mist and Carmen Crespo Tesserae, the award winning (X111 Premio César Simón De Poesía), in November 2017 these works were presented in a live performance at The International Writer’s Conference hosted by the University of Leeds. UK. A forthcoming publication of collected poems Off the Menu is expected in 2020
Solstice winds, rain return in spells
a moon waxes full, dogs howl as well.
All the babble of the Souk
men over there, over there women.
All the life of the planet
so little part of it that i breathe.
Weather beaten highlands, once passed through.
The river bed, no more like a parched bone
its late autumnal river meanders as a vein
past four reservoirs
a quest that will end in winter´s flood.
Between them are momentary mists
where brightly clad figures of the north, suddenly dim.
On the frontier’s beach taxis come, go
only the stranded remain, together with the seagulls
four men huddled, drenched in pouring rain
dead once more, again, all pathways home
washed away, again.
A broken song
remember me, sung in a doorway
brings the world at large together
as suddenly as it narrows.
Water runs on marble
nakedness revealed, nakedness concealed
form water words, water memories, mists, fates.
Veins wrestle the marble into mangled knots
blemished pearls on an implacable skin
shards leaving fragmentary traces
empty spaces awaiting faces.
Lights dance in the night, picturesque
“casas blancas del pueblo”
appear through the darkness
as the brush strokes of my mind steal the action of the shadow.
Mists cordon the mountain tops
guerdoned crowns like wreathes.
Ancient fields’ still colours surrounded
by burgeoning new lead to the valley below.
Old women, old as aglow, so slow they go
poised aloof in an untouchable world, trapped.
High in kiln firelight they cowl night’s shade
to oversee goats on the hill beneath.
Daughters of necessity naked in the rock
unleashed in white trefoil in the marsh
swamp of night rain, stark where epochs
sleep in their shadows
replication of memories, where the old
becomes the new, a world splits in two
with Morpheus in the breach.
Beyond control, beyond reach the erratic butterfly
flits bloom to bloom, the intrepid stalker with net
both captured in the mimic mould.
A knot is tied, a knot that wrestles
embraces, that ravels birth
unravels death & binds its existence.
Her face is as if a moon glazed over
with a less serene ceramic dust that in the end
after its perplexity contains its surety.
She draws her forefinger laterally across
under her eye lid in a smear
nor can you change the image of what you are
in the pupil of her eye.
Babble bodies blur
voices with their echoes down the street
sky high, prices fly
a bird song breaks, a splash charade.
Faces in the rain thin
weakness of watery years.
A winnowing canvass tosses corn
as fireflies in the blazing day.
The hag in her rags begs her bag
holding all shadows to account.
You sit in the solitary corner
at the empty dice board
to throw, as the music swells, as strings play.
On the washing line clothes of all shapes
sizes are waiting to be filled
suspended between earth, sky, where white sheets blow.
A twinge of nostalgia flashes
a link between a fluttering curtain
an open window frame, a sun shadow game
a flickering apparition pattern leaving only – strands.
A breeze flutters an open foolscap on the table
as though a phantom reader
should flick with regard through a score of notes
then stops at the first blank white sheets
stays, the moving hand that wrote, wrote no more.
On record, old honky-tonk goes on
amidst the heaps of consumer city sneakers
in the same dust where faces
turn from their spring red lustre to a sun soiled wear
through a beehive of alleys
names, aye to fetch them home again
as if where the countless dead resided, you’d said
in a market of women shrouded in shawls.
Berlin falls, Baghdad falls
all the years turn to further tears
further fears to merge with your voyage
the shape of dreams to come
to be only endearments of what has gone before.
A flower opens after a thousand years in a shell of tears
indifferent to its beholders’ sight
who paint it with the colours from the waters of their night
on an unknown shore, to whose sight it opened once before.
Children’s faces like radiant imps
play carefree in the streets below
overhead on red tiles, fat pigeons bicker, coo.
In an internet cafe, an Arab girl discrete in headdress
plays with cartoon molecules of Mickey Mouse
Koala bear
nubile women’s faces dream of nudity in their shrouds.
Wonky pinz nez specs, jumble sale clothes
bad teeth, unshaven grin
looking a faded duplicate of a down
out James Joyce with the come on
are you Irish, he asks
perhaps he was once upon a time.
They came through the cleft of the mountain
– where the river ran
to swim as a blur in the naked purple of the eye
on the mountain face there is a scar
once a sacred place, now extinct, as they are.
Yet wild still she runs, amidst the sheep, goats
toils at the hearth, dutifully bears children
yesterday she knows but not tomorrow
where she hides her sorrow
even as he ploughs the hillside
a photo will steal his soul, but his beasts will do.
Twilight’s girls, girls, girls
throng the bustling street corners eating caracoles.
By day the olive tree green in the blue sky of the window
seems almost immortal enriched with the blood
it’s enriched, now at its roots.
Costa de la playa, white beehives in the sun, all money, no honey.
In the broken lights of the bazaar
the dusky eyes of the beggar sunk in their sockets
maze in crooked cul de sacs embargo amidst
the furls of silk that foil the flickering lantern niche.
In the gloaming a solitary reaper reaps its shadow.
Streets packs ravage carcasses
at dawn, the city wakes to the city’s obedience
to obey its disappearing shadows.
A ghost city of watchers
watched as shadows by a memory that has outlived them
now fragments in an admixture of old, new
– amidst a junk yard of rubble
watcher shadows phased captive to their fading stories.
The street’s mechanics of the day
obey their limits, patterns of parts
where we end only to start in a series of nows
post mortem of the world at large
an autopsy of ghosts on the slab.
Born to see, in the boutiques people seem
like their own mannequins
existence is a mystery with no purpose
only we endow it with a destiny, it does not seek from us.
Robin Ouzman Hislop is on line Editor at Poetry Life & Times at Artvilla.com. His numerous appearances include Cold Mountain Review (Appalachian University, N.Carolina), The Honest Ulsterman, Cratera No 3 and Aquillrelle’s Best. His publications are collected poems All the Babble of the Souk, Cartoon Molecules, Next Arrivals & Moon Selected Audio Textual Poems and translations from Spanish of poems by Guadalupe Grande Key of Mist and Carmen Crespo Tesserae (the award winning XIII Premio César Simón De Poesía). In November 2017 these works were presented in a live performance at The International Writer’s Conference hosted by the University of Leeds, UK. A forthcoming publication of collected poems Off the Menu is expected in 2020.
words at the speed of time
on precipitous edge awnings break
into kaleidoscopic space patterns
there’s no place like sing along
if you are going that way
tomorrow’s dawn framed no less forever unborn
on the floating horizon of memory
we find to the particular stance added
a wind written on water poem conch
encounter with preceding waves
on the shores of emergences
as sudden as nevermore beholds
ongoing to get you where it’s most
but never does never can can dance
because the shiny glistens
only because of havoc under wormwood
where the predatory plunders breaches
from niches unto the become assunder
time enough for mourning clouds to rain dust
& footprints fade where words become their fossils
Robin Ouzman Hislop is on line Editor at Poetry Life & Times at Artvilla.com. His numerous appearances include Cold Mountain Review (Appalachian University, N.Carolina), The Honest Ulsterman, Cratera No 3 and Aquillrelle’s Best. His publications are collected poems All the Babble of the Souk, Cartoon Molecules, Next Arrivals & Moon Selected Audio Textual Poems and translations from Spanish of poems by Guadalupe Grande Key of Mist and Carmen Crespo Tesserae (the award winning XIII Premio César Simón De Poesía). In November 2017 these works were presented in a live performance at The International Writer’s Conference hosted by the University of Leeds, UK. A forthcoming publication of collected poems Off the Menu is expected in 2020.
Robin Ouzman Hislop is on line Editor at Poetry Life & Times at Artvilla.com. His numerous appearances include Cold Mountain Review (Appalachian University, N.Carolina), The Honest Ulsterman, Cratera No 3 and Aquillrelle’s Best. His publications are collected poems All the Babble of the Souk, Cartoon Molecules, Next Arrivals & Moon Selected Audio Textual Poems and translations from Spanish of poems by Guadalupe Grande Key of Mist and Carmen Crespo Tesserae (the award winning XIII Premio César Simón De Poesía). In November 2017 these works were presented in a live performance at The International Writer’s Conference hosted by the University of Leeds, UK. A forthcoming publication of collected poems Off the Menu is expected in 2020.
Oh when the saints tread tenderly
flora & foliage are abundant so the pain
with bird song is not seen with the
lessening of in my eyes human traffic
bury me here go marching in & laugh
in the face of the wind & come back next year
bring me the face somewhere over the rainbow
when will we return? of the grateful deadi wanna be & i will sow skies are blue
the flora of tomorrow will the deserts be green
again amongst that number as when homo erectus
trecked through them? once in a lullaby
what did they seek freedom? before confusion
& the babble of tongues when the saints go marching in
episodes however brief virus in the slaughterhouses
obedience to the state or there is fragmentation
a world of fragmentation is not of epiphanies
but epitaphs they tell us surrounded by hegemony
that camouflages our right of way we multiply
in the expectancy to gain the wealth of the world
it is our sadness as we grow old
the fear we cannot care for each other
this is what the walk of life has led us to
misunderstanding the unknowable unknowables
the something and the nothing noths
helpless as leaves upon a tree
we struggle on in our suffering as so many millions
upon millions have done must do in silence & stoicism
remembering
lost friends & relatives without blame for we cannot enter
their minds i had had a surprising dream
about death i figured but so personal i didn't want to speak
about it to anyone in case i might make it happen
early morning mist rain thunder rolls on the blue mountains
this really is the kingdom of exile where we play with words
the silent absent words yet embedded in every action
even as we think before we speak words that tell
truth & falsehood are fragments episodes however brief
