A Dream of Mirabella

From the very first day  

A spree of constellations washed over me
A birdman forged by boundary and apparition
Breathed over me
Elusive rabid vapors
and ozonal personas
of liquid suns

My perception crawled and crooked
like the house rippled
by hideousness and famine
murmuring in the shallow of its pity.

The sea painter’s house on the narrow street burns like a Nova.
I sense your presence, exclusive of dualities, condensed in its shadows.
A shift in transcendence is a parting cry to beauty
and a way out of the lion’s village struck by isolation.

Today I had no luck, and I’ve never been known to part the floor to the stars …

Because the sea is my bondage

My gravitational Babel

My aqueous paradigm that deflects an infinitively blue gaping wound.

The irrational pull of spring when I waited at the jetty’s edge,
seabird in tow, the end of days looming warily on its Pacific rim,
it all came to me in the Secret Dream weighed by the whirring waves
and an insidious ferment in the oceans lament that brought you to me,
draped in alaria and cleansed by striation of transcendence,
The elegance of your essence a treasure oblique

Mirabella

A crucible filled with alchemic charges
shaped the vessel that would carry you
to the breaker of chains
who gave me a key to the light keeper’s house
should the pale in night be extinguished.

I’d caress her endlessly, here by the gardenias,
those marvels of great feasts at the brink of the river’s end

But words are more palpable.

So I sit and wait
the passage of time an annulment of intention and dissent

I watch for a breach

and wait

and dream

The primordial mocks my bearings much in the way
harmony is hidden to me.
I’ve swallowed incomprehension whole; a vortex at place in the dusk
of an oasis that I have no part of.
I am no more of the moment
But I hear what I hear and I see what I see
And I assemble momentary centrifugal pulses from an anomaly
sputtering across Battery Harbour like a drunken wave.
I see the great indivisible exhale in the window of hidden thought,
lift itself out of the nowhere and into the crowded head
crowned with the key to the floodgates
open and gushing through fetal streets,
wiping them of any kind of withdrawal, duplicity and morass.
I’m tempered by the caravan of black swans riding the wave that calls my name,
But I’m still here, watching over Atlantis’ etheric reflection
summoning the death of Anaideia and the rise of Brizo.
When the gorge grows deeper with difficult reason
You’re beside me
But one look in your direction and all thought is laid to waste.

The tide takes me slowly in an arcanum hum,
forgives my celestial wisdom and astutely tunes me
to the beginning of words where the future has not yet begun.

It drags me into the grotto caught in your hands.

You lift it and pour out the sea, creating a surge of such portent magnitude
a fissure is formed in the atmosphere that splits the sky and spills my inversion
far into the future.
Blinded and bonded to the moment, my senses open violently to a school of anglerfish
who envelope and carry me to a pulsating gleam in the hydrothermal vent
and then Deeper
to the Octocorals and the Nereids that dwell within them in service to you.
When you come to me, you come as an exponent of trinity;
A trilateral labyrinth that stirs the beauty of things
and rakes the misery of the great unknown in your wake.
You embrace and engulf me with the hysteria of the twin of tomorrow:
The lighthouse on the hill no longer undressing the shedding stars
Left behind now
Deeper
and
Darker
The way you dream
luring me through lumens of blinding coral
of the Fourth World
bathed in a green phosphorescence
that illuminates the sea around us like
Renewal
Deeper
and
Darker
to innocence
When I’m reconstituted into your ship of dawn
trawling an ocean path for old sounds and a snail’s bed of jewels.

As I walk with you I sink into dark sediment
and instantly give birth to the Bathyscaphe Trieste.

Deeper
Past schools of jealous bones crossing the sepulchral waters,
their mandate a rendition of the receding dream in the oceans’ nest.
Optic land, wrapped in mist, now a half-forgotten Fortean daydream
Its surrounding lines emptied of mysterious surges,
Its fixed light extracted and replenished with remembrances of storms
at their densest when spindling the nectar of the shadow of words.
The abyssal plain, scratched from an old whore of heaven,
Fills our gnosis to the brim
Redeeming and revealing arcane references of an external world
without a trace of the myth spectrum
nor a sluice of the United Fakes of America hiding under their triple drone.
The golden Saint of ICHTHUS
Born of the torn edges of the midnight zone
Is father to receiving them,
the omens of monsters and deities
Leucothea and Hydros, Delphin and the Graeaes.
Deeper
Beyond the nightmarish glass of insufferable reason
and the fugitive warbler of insatiable faith
Truth at his feet almost childlike, liquid
Bartering gravity for a course through the green air and the marine snow
that covers the salty lepers of ancient sun in eternal revolt here.
The triangular teeth of an extinct Helicoprion sound out the ecstasy
of a hydrogen poem
Its source an ambrosia of fractals displaced and dispersed to the collective.

We reach the Snake River Plain
where you will me to desire, but also regret
The Holy Ghost of this darkness is fading into winter whales
And the poem never emerges again.

Scant light grows even deeper, darker and deeper where I am at the bottom
scavenging for pearls that are the faint stars that glisten above.
And they fit perfectly into you
Each one a nominal perfection that burns rapidly, infinitely

Their light guided me; lifted me,
Beckoned me to enter

And then I hit the light…

Consequently I drift, snagged between the Bathyal and the furtive sun.
Having witnessed the richness of common madness spiraling amidst specters,
I wonder how I might be restored to the earth.
How now in every speck of rain I will always sense the sea
and the possibility that I will echo like an abysm as I fall against the ruins.

You bring to me a place where there is no warmth or light
Where the islands of the Gulf of Salerno’s fabled coast
are the teardrops on your breast.
Mirabella
Consort of the Marvelous
Mysterious Deity of rhapsodic amphibious amplitudes
You invert the curse placed on my bland opaqueness
beyond the ghost domains nestled between the intervals
of the duration of magic.

In my haunted way I’ve mourned the days of the empire lost

But what is done is done
And what is begun has begun.

At that dismal hour when you purge the dead paths
from a life being dreamt for me
I find myself drowned amongst the shipwrecked bodies
of a collective dream unfulfilled.

Your thoughts possess my own, shape the edict of my cohesion
into a cobalt eruption of sorcerous timbre.

Your inner worlds inhabit me, and like Orpheus vexed,
Speak to me without a voice:

“With emissions only the dead receive, I invoke you to walk the suns
and levitate on each like a breath of flame.
Our telepathy creates the glow of siennas there where our chaos
is the apex of ekstasis.
We rise from a nuance in the abyss enabling lost spirits to rule again
in the atom of the compound that is neither your day or night,
your sea or sky, your fire or earth, your flesh or soul.”

“We are not stone we are not wind we are not the earth
There are days we are whirlwinds,
We do not know where the jagged ledges lie so we tumble endlessly here
through no error of our own, listening to an ancient tide overflowing from
a cistern at the beginning.
We are spread here like ruins, hidden from others to see
No longer resembling anything vivid or dead
But growing smaller at dawn and larger when our dreams surge and we
siphon the sea to fill the unbound spaces in the stretched out clouds.
How can we dream when nothing endures and time plays its empty hand
with the intent to bind our hearts to the dead husk of longing,
plunging it into the ocean whole where it splits into a multitude of patterns
moving through beds of buried mosques and clusters of Atollas
as radiant as stars, as incandescent as the leaves on the trees falling
at the awaited hour when you appear with the moon in a sling and the dream
of a young child grasped firmly in your hand?
Coral reefs beckon you, delicately hidden in the drift,
and a briny sky of different colors guides you through a womb in the dark
to a bridge, and to us.
You will cross the bridge when you enter our house, a house of summers of ether
and dead mythological rivers filled with copper hulls and the dust of the blood
that will seal your fate.
We are aquatic vibrations self-posited in a world whose purpose lies beyond judgment.
There is nothing beyond you but our hushed voice, blessed child,
Death is hollow and cannot tarnish you.
Under the tow of our brows, spring will appear in your snow blue eyelids
and will serve as a passport to our little house.
There are no doors, no dimensions, but it is filled with light, so you will find your way.
It is an island and a tiny stone, a living body whose flesh has yet to be subverted.
And you are at the center of its crest.
This destination placed upon you began in illusion when you were vulnerable, shut down,
walking a crooked line with all the vacuity of things half remembered.
We wished for you to vanish among living spaces, amongst eternal dreamers,
but the absence of your presence was too burdensome, so we set you adrift.
We are the mist that serves your memory; the breath in the Red Sea.
Did you not recognize us circling you, eyes manacled by reason?
Overdue, we are happy to put it behind us.
Our thoughts are a labyrinth, a space filled of mirrors that move
as sound brims through them.
A long silence followed you, and you were unable to choose.
We have come to quell the silence.

Choose Beauty, and choose to follow the acute modulations of your heart.

“The path that unfolds before you is the only path worth traveling.”

Postscript:

Between the distant sea
My sea
My body is in a cage
My heart given to serpents.
Caverns beneath the oceanic plain
are probed diligently for secret passages
obscured by occulted mangroves
thick with a deceitful harvest.

The present and future tense
of the phosphorus waters
ends in a toil of light
wavering and amiss.

See my fate drawn into the fog
thick with extravagance.
The passages flow upwards
in ways I know nothing of.

Haven’t you heard the sea humming for hours,
adorned by a kind of boredom
that drones into depression,
and then, eternal silence?

Boredom is the necklace of the night tides
always burgeoning one way or the next,
A briny jewel glistening
and luring the spirit adrift.

There were truths to be reaped from these illimitable currents
but starfish have taken and laid them to rest.
My spirit creaks like a wreckage in the deep sea shadows,
bruised and frayed by the ebb and caress of the undergrowth,
a living nodule shattered into little flecks
across the vineyard of the abyss.

See my soul drawn from darkness
thick with opulence.
The waters flow upwards in ways
I know nothing of.

Arthur David Spota
Aug-Sept 2016

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