0. Yarmouk C.E.
2016
The satellite’s
eye, compound like an insect’s,
glistens with pixels
of doped silicon. Perched
upon an obsidian pillar
of geostationary nothingness
high above any air
that would support a vulture’s wings
it spreads its
solar panels and watches modern battlefields,
and the refugee
camps that blossom all around them.
It is the
perfection of blindness
because what it
lacks is not function.
The bright metal
orbs stalks the sky with immaculate precision.
Technical marvels
of bandwidth convey prompt updates
so that disingenuous
politicians can persuade parliaments
and sorties can
be scheduled and bombs can be dropped
with a pinpoint
accuracy that proves it functions perfectly.
No. What is
lacking is compassion.
We lack the very
thing an eye is for.
We have become
mere detectors.
I. Ecumenopolis
Once we could
withdraw within stories,
but now the
strong are gone and there are no more tales to tell,
no deeds worthy
of song. The weak must defend themselves,
and so mere
economics must now ensue, unsung,
while the world's
ruin is wrung out, strung out,
strip-milled and
shrink-wrapped in neat piecemeal parcels
for general
consumption. We reciprocate each other’s deceit
and eagerly share
in our routine and unremarkable victories
and with grand
commonplace fanfare the meagre spoils
are distributed
far and wide, losing meaning with each allocation
and
re-allocation, re-hypothecated until all value has been drained,
to finally become
a subject for the disputation of squabbling gulls,
reeking in land
fill with the inevitable oxidation that is our legacy,
as the plots and
portions of the world we have not burned
slowly rot
instead, spooled and spilled from the bound
and unwound world
whose ragged axis bleeds,
whose splintered
spindle snares us, snags and drags and tares us
into decaying
orbits, entwined in plummeting plumb line trajectories
seeking the sea
fall and final loss of deprecated satellites
whose orbits
rattle in the black socket of night
like a roulette
ball seeking the double zero that blinkers fate,
discarding the
centuries and rediscovering the weight they had,
crashing into the
age of Hypatia.
Exaggerated
celebrations of trivial triumphs resound
with shrill
cash-till campanology on late and weary market days,
and complacent,
apathetic, exhausted veterans
of equality,
justice and democracy, bear away their petty prizes
and nurse the
sting and solitude of promise and regret alone,
each behind the
great impregnable walls of their own Constantinople,
where the hot and
heavy night is loud with the shouts
of prowling fools
at the docks, each fiercely guarding
his own bucket of
chains, tethering the night's obscure cargo
to
corrosion-blistered bollards with sinews stretched
and muscles bent
into a gnarled Eucharist of labour,
licking
rust-scabbed towers of iron blind with dreams of gold,
but failing to
disentangle the doomed ballistics of hope,
as the hawser
lightly slips, and all is lost,
and a hard-won
and tightly spun gist drifts slowly away, unravels, dissipates.
The Bosporus
rests with the ancient imperturbable stillness
that met Io when
she first forded it long before time began,
couched in the
horst and graben of an ancient rift
that still
gradually grinds the time-chewed ground
beneath the
waters that have flooded it long since.
That expanse of
space we now criss-cross with voyages
that bind our
world, routes that sew shut the eyelid of our age
and make of it a
barren map where imagination's fabulous bestiary
is trapped and
traded by empty vessels taking nothing nowhere,
and lost hopes
linger with Leander in the tarry starless molten dark
of the
Hellespont's anoxic depths, which surge as slow and slick
and black as the blood's
dark rush in the eyeless brain, its pulse
and dull blunt
thud expounding the captivity of dim hulk-knuckled minds
upon the
bulkheads of their sunken capsules
where day's last
light
lies contained.
The dance and
jostle of days, the summons and discharge of seasons,
the rising dawn’s
bright brisk bubbles detached from our stricken sinking vessels,
spheres of air
that rise to become the Moon's true metal
through the
brimstone of grim chalcogen alchemy,
in grander globes
geared with equants and epicycles,
primed and
teeming with swift bustle, while on earth below
our hollow
histories drag, propped like laundry
that sags between
catastrophes, tattered and trailing
over the rubble and
rummage of the toiling trummerfrau,
gathering dirt
and nursing her wrath. The sultry hours
of this great
city of surfaces strips its paste and paper layers in the heat
to reveal the
ceaseless superimposition of empty and appalling appeals
of competing
conceits,
and torn pennants
peel, waft and beckon with wasted urgency
like the
discarded threadbare banners of a scattered cavalcade.
The small-print
bristles with weaponised words entitling the rich
to strike their
coins at our expense, lies scrawled and stamped
on the backs of
ancient and long since unintelligible codes
and maxims of
honour, now used only to provide a mute substrate
to strident
deceit, to promulgate laws that are a deranged origami of lies
for citizens who
ignore you unless they think you owe them something anyway,
inmates of this
shape-shifting, costume-changing cosmopolis,
this orgasm of
marble, where facades, billboards,
and every glowing
surface are all folded,
cut and shuffled
interminably,
and the people
are dealt their beguiling illusion of choice.
II. Eos
But these dross
coins are strange metal moons whose orbits I elude,
whose countenance
I shun, whose face does not preside over my dreams,
monuments to
nothing. My muse is constant. She steadily inhales
and exhales the
light of the month's long night,
unlike the rapid
random flashing phases of these tokens
spun upon an axis
of tawdry chance: pale flat inert metallic glaucomas;
tribute pressed
on polished ivory eyes as white as the clenched teeth
of a shield-biting
berserker in the Varangian guard
defending the
dead and painted statue of a mad emperor
against the
turbulent mob rioting in the hippodrome.
My muse smiles as
the star-scaled gleam of dawn
stirs within the
unsettled silt of night. Elusive filaments of light
sift and till
gardens of cloud, and a restless unborn dream
stretches and
hesitates behind shuttered eyes, and shifts its weight
from foot to foot
as it balances upon an uncertain retina.
The nippled sun
leaks gold upon the world's edge until its weight
tips that wider
disc away from night, the sky spills its inky amniosis
and a misty
vernix clinging to the land's dark declivities
is rinsed by the
slow light that summons us from sleep at last
to mornings woven
from birdsong, laughter, games,
and sights knit
and minted in love.
I was a child
when, with my grey bearded guardian,
I played in our
courtyard in those new hours.
I ran my fingers
along his battle scars in calm and peaceful gardens
on summer days.
Had his wounds been hewn more deeply
he too would
surely have fallen like his brother,
defending the
city's high walls, or extending the emperor's reach
far beyond, to
the shores of Italy and Africa. But he survived
to smile and join
my games and laugh as he defends himself
in peaceful days
against my wooden sword
and smile while
only a child's curiosity interrogates his flesh,
and only a
child's imagination populates the worlds
mapped by
violence upon his skin.
III. Apophasis
A blind veteran
sits alone on the steps
between the rigid
fluted columns of the basilica facade,
a rag wrapped
round his empty eye-pits.
The temple is
inhabited by dust, and the flicker of tallow,
cupped in bowls
of light, wilts as its wasted incandescence
spills among the
shadows. Space is expressed
by the
reverberation of a tentative novice's faltering plainchant.
He has escaped
the popular heresies of his village
for the rigor,
certainty and spiritual hygiene
he finds within
the simple step-wise melodies and intervals:
this is a sound
he can be part of, at last. Once he was defined
by jeers, mockery
and ridicule of crowds and peers.
Now he can live
in a space filled with sound that exalts his isolation,
invoking original
sin to obliterate their innocent hatred.
Slant stiff
straight sleeves and crutches of sunlight, slipping in
through the high
seldom windows, laying their feet upon the mosaic floor,
putting their
shoulders to the walls, buttress the edifice with luminous air,
and the novice
imagines himself a revered stylite
thrust to prominence
atop a pillar of pure light.
The blind and
ancient beggar dwells outside
in an accidental
hesychasm, his bowls of light
abruptly emptied
in a fit of spite to leave him exarch of eternal night,
exiled in the
enforced leisure of a strange and anxious Arcadia,
a sunless,
fraught, unsought and songless idyll. He was not born blind,
but sight no
longer presses through the reticulations of his mind
to gently seep
and soak into the creases of its fabric and stain his dreams.
Now his skin is
the surface of his memory, carries its colours,
tinted by touch,
and in the gentle thrust of recollection he remembers
the burden of the
slightest garlands of Rome's last triumph,
reflects on the
withered laurel, what he once was, now is not,
and what survives
this bitter commutation.
IV. Obol
We passed the
basilica, my uncle and I. "Fools think
to ascend to
heaven coin-shod upon a stair of beggars' palms,
casting alms to
clatter like metal rain upon the steps,
coins they then
must roll into pins and rivets to fasten shut
the wide,
immolated eye of outrage and make a closed furnace
of their morals blazing
and bursting in their tight minds
that gives them
headaches they blame on too much sun",
he told me,
laughing with the merry generosity of a survivor,
and I laughed
too, not with understanding, but with love
of the lavish
unassailable grandeur of his presence
and his
acceptance of my own rude youth,
but then a sudden
shock halted him,
a convective
fever seemed to shake the veil of air
and he stopped, and
whispered "give Belisarius an obol"
and passed me a
coin
The beggar
received the obol honestly. It bore the emperor's brow.
but no memory of
what the metal once was before the coin was struck
remained there
now. The intricate and intimate artifice
that had once
gently stroked and teased it into elaborate conceit
to adorn a
finger, wrist, throat or forehead,
given and
received in love, was shed when it was sold
and cast into a
forge for the value ore retains in crisis
once the pretence
of ornament has melted away,
the basic and
most debased tribute that all dignities owe
to the voracious,
insatiable, raving delusions of wealth:
and so a coin was
struck from its wreckage, and memory
was left crippled
among the dross and tailings.
Worth withers in
exchange. To survive
it must remain
secret and unrequited, pressed
between the palms
of two hands clasped in private fellowship,
hidden even from
God himself, passed in silent commemoration
of other imagined
cities where fortunes are reversed and acts ennoble,
rescued from the
limits of transaction, the meagre means
and bitter ends,
the all-consuming moral amnesias of trade.
This is how the
honest obol was received, without obligation,
without scrutiny:
for if one did look into the eye of the emperor
whose image is
impressed upon that flat dead disc,
what if one
discerned another coin there, a Stygian toll
levied for what
is lost in gain, bearing another imperial impression,
another eye, and
inadvertently cast oneself
into a pit and
vertigo of infinite regress?
"Am I mired
and weak, the sad summary of a man,
whose strong
bright presence briefly illuminated the thrones
of Carthage and
Ravenna for a day apiece, in lieu of he who paid me?
You think you
find me diminished by my losses,
but we are what
remains beyond all limits of transformation,
and I am what has
stayed, when all that there once was of me
was washed away.
There is no further decrement of self,
time's chisel
finds no glint or purchase
against the
polished black Anatolian obsidian of my heart,
my soul's
infinite ash within its shattered urn engulfs every insult,
and this
knowledge raises me beyond the stars.
"There is no
need for you to enter through these pillars to offer prayers.
You will only
find scholars who treat wisdom as a watchword
for their banal
conspiracy of egos, and their condescension
is the odour of
dead brains vivid with the breath of grinning vermin:
chattering clubs
and cliques of self-congratulating cunts. No,
this shape before
you now, this empty space it occupies,
has been cleansed
and made sacred without prayer.
My extinguished
ego no longer tethers me to its unruly
and overgrown
temenos, no longer confines me in surly patrols
around the
ferment of its smouldering precincts.
My sight has
passed far beyond the tyrannies of beauty,
my soul beyond
desire and regret,
my mind beyond
the epic sorrow of memory,
my tears beyond
the deepest grief drenched by the final star-set
beneath the dry
and emptied skies
that now reside
within these hollow sockets,
"for beauty
is mere relief when the ego survives
and is not
crushed utterly by the precipitate world
the instant we
suddenly become truly aware of it,
the trauma of
truth, the blinding reperfusive shock
our narrow nerves
constrain, our dim eyes attenuate,
our self-centred
stumbling prevents, it is not truth,
not the
insignificance that thrills and pursues us
when we see the
world at last, it is a dissonance,
it is a mischief
of our partial and parcelled sight
within a world of
infinite light. It is a reprieve
and like all reprieves, it is only temporary,
and if you can't see that you are as blind as I am,
"and so what
use have we, the annihilated, for beauty?
We scrape beauty
from the soles of our shoes in passing,
and are equally
untouched by squalor. Once, in former times,
I found myself
terrified by innocents: their indifference and ingratitude,
their blindness
to necessity and the efforts made on their behalf.
My most astutely
considered exertions were unappreciated,
and the one in
ten thousand who did not flinch upon this point
when made most
strenuously conferred the hint of void purpose,
of null sense,
and I have only recovered from my terror
after I have
endured and survived the horror and the glory
of my own
insignificance. And it seems that Victory is not satisfied
until the victor
himself is overthrown, and She delights
in a blazing
revelry of arms that consumes us all without reservation.
And in all his
meagre squeak of power, Justinian cannot muster
the glory of the
gutter in which I sleep, anointed with this knowledge
of my
nothingness. The emperor of this city is just a tramp, this town
a bag of broken
people on his back, but every night
I meet and dance
with Melusine by moonlight"
I don't know what
had prompted him to speak.
Could Bellerophon
forgive the gadfly? Perhaps
a sense of
unfortunate confraternity with my guardian,
born in shared
atrocity when together they placed their feet
across the
throats of Vandals on the briny soils of Carthage
by the tenth
milestone.
V. The dream of
Belisarius
I am old now, and
plague and war have wrought their alterations
upon the land and
me since last my innocence encountered this man.
Our borders are
buffeted by invasion, our lines are depleted by disease
and our forces
collapse in disarray before the onslaught,
and before I prepare
to put on my uncle's ancient armour one last time
to defend in all
futility the depleted coffers of this decrepit empire,
before I die, I dream. I spend the night before battle alone and rest
and I
reflect again upon a dream of mine which Belisarius inhabits,
his absent gaze
drawn once more by the lure of lingering noctilucence
upon a painted
sky, his empty eyes now furnaces filled with aurorae
that shimmer and
ripple across his dry retinas, a flickering livery of light
upon his inner
firmament, and in this dream the cavalry of night
charge across the
Moon, while on Earth mountains of ice gleam
beneath the
polished breastplate of advancing dawn. I awake,
put on my armour, and review we who defend the ruins of empire.
VI. Yarmouk A.D.
636
I contemplate the
forces assembled at dawn on this first day
of the six days
of our downfall: men rallied by duty, religion, cupidity;
other names used
to conceal one hundred thousand secret motives.
I understand now
there is no such thing as freedom,
nor is there such
a thing as captivity.
We experience one
moment succeeded by the next
like a butterfly alighting
upon the tips of spears,
We drift between
worlds we connect with a fiction we call time
to make sense of
our haphazard trajectory,
but there is no
such thing as time, or free will, or its denial.
The armies of
emperor and caliph oppose each other
but there are no
opposites.
We feel love. We
feel fear.
We know
authenticity. We know alienation.
We are the singer
and the song, unconstrained
only in the
inevitability of who we are, completely free
only in the scope
of the limitations we impose on ourselves.
I look upon the
shining ranks arrayed in armour.
Perhaps all beauty
is a premonition of death.
The patterns in which
our substance is finally subsumed,
the world showing
itself to us the way it will be
when we're not
there, every conquered summit
revealing vistas
where we are nowhere to be found
and we descend
into valleys not unlike this and speak
in reverential tones
of beauties witnessed from afar
as we looked upon
the world at its most naked
but keep secret
about the only thing we truly discovered,
conceal the
sudden shame it makes us feel,
because the best
witness we bear beauty is silence
and the words of
men were only made for boasting.
The shining orb
of fame is suspended from the stars,
and swings out of
reach of all but the greatest men,
but myths of
greatness need armies to maintain them
and are punctured
by that single arrowhead, fired by a peasant
who may remain
forever anonymous and obscure,
that finds its
way through the warlord's visor,
and brings that
bright orb crashing down, to fall and shatter,
its silica
reverting to the sand from which it was taken,
on which the rust
of blood will crackle until the next rain,
the sun-dried
scab-cracked surface of war's aftermath
crumbling beneath
the hooves of rider-less horses
and conjoining
the ranks once drawn up against each other on it
in a common
obscurity,
and all our
efforts to reach up
and constellate our
deeds in the sky
remain tethered
to the earth
while an inaccessible,
unseen and indifferent eye
looks down on us
from the future and the past
and sees where we
cannot and must remain blind
and we can only
hope it finds a purpose in what we do
once our
intentions have unravelled in the wind
with the tattered
banners of yesteryear.
My comrades turn
to me for encouragement,
but I can only
repeat what the beggar told me,
as if it were a
whispered madness, as if it were a secret doctrine,
careful to avoid
any suggestion of hope or inspiration:
after all, we
make our last stand on ground already abandoned
by those who
brought us to the fray and told us that their fight was ours.
VII. Tetelestai
"You will
never find me, not in this space nor in these words.
Do not fool
yourself into thinking that I speak these words:
you will never
find me in their loud silence
or the
knuckle-kneaded emptiness of my flesh.
"Words are
disposable things, chewed like the half baked bread
dispensed from
the ovens of Uruk, where the priests once doled out
their doughy substitute
for food from temple granaries,
while the idle
elite dined on venison,
back when the
great city-swindle started, long ago.
Since then our
cataphracts have bathed their hooves in the Tigris
by the towers of
Nineveh, and words have been re-iterated
in an endless
repetition and variety of cuneiform, uncial, unicode,
but always with
fundamental and unseen subterranean shifts,
tectonic slips
and spills in their burden deeper than the mind can delve,
and only a barely
perceptible meniscus of meaning remains
in the
greasy-edged mouths of men, words over-written so often
that when all the
various nuances of deceit are over-laid
they add up to a
flat black redaction drained of meaning,
completing at
last the gradual blindness of the mind.
"We perform
mere repertoires of knowing now by another river,
and are like the
figures that decorate our own funerary urns
with their parade
of immaculate forms and meticulous exploits.
Knowledge is just
a pause to catch the breath, a moment's rest
before the urge
to understand compels us
and expels us
from the brief respite of certainty
and takes its
grip upon us once again, propelling us
beyond the poise
and stiffness of the athletes on our urns,
into the rout and
riot of the real, and the obsolescence of all effort
where death is
the only certainty to which the scattered self can rally
in a final
gathering of our intimate and abandoned ashes.
But be glad: some
worlds end by stealth and slight degrees
of declination
and a slow diminution of all that seeming sees.
Our end is swift
and our conduct just. I have been spared
no chance or time
to confine and defile the broad emptiness
which my heart
shares with the cosmos
in mere words, no
chance to perpetrate the elevation
and exaltation of
my narrow self in speech
and so will elude
all kinds of death that speak the tongues of men,
and as for every
other kind, well, I am and always was already dead"
