migrant, writer, work in progress
Look seaward west where
Sun’s gone down pale mauve striped pink
Cloud dimming shadows
*
That photographer
With his spotlight on the beach
Where people are shades
*
The silver ocean’s
Rippled blue reflecting waves
Whishing softly by
*
Offshore windmills stand
Like far off crucifixes
Harvesting the sky
*
Spirits whisper power
To earth and air and water
Resurrecting time.
*
**
*
Photos of Scheveningen Beach, The Hague, by Freddie Oomkens
Harry’s Bar, Rome, on Via Veneto –
Where the king of paparazzi waits,
White bandage on his cheek, like a raw scar
Of honour – is heaving, full of Dolce
Vita‘s cream, in Rino’s memory –
Illustrious as some vague delirious fantasy
Of his gilded past… – He’s snapped back to the
Present, as out walks Gerard Depardieu
With his companion, Magda Vavrusova:
Sad scenes of sordid violence ensue –
*
Recalling Rino in his pomp, maybe,
Scourge of glitterati outside all the bars;
But now, he says, the street is like a cemetery
Thronged only with the lonely ghosts of stars.
*
**
*
Photo by Ziogiucas via Italian wiki
two crows watch the beach
until the sea spits out a fish
flying and then dying on the sand
*
two crows pick this fish
to pieces, scoff down their feast,
fly on back inland
*
—the crows are lucky
all the gulls were gone—they’d have
had to fight for food:
*
they’d have lost it,
weren’t it only witnessed by
a passing poet.
*
**
*
Omm
*
*
**
*
Photo by F. Oomkens
when we want to live
a life more lit and touched with
fire we need the beach
*
where sea throws us waves,
surf singed with feels we can’t share
like words lost in storm
*
light snow drifts on dunes
while wind blows cold and dry, we
walk down to the shore—
*
foam flies from the waves
like smoke, rolls on soft wet sand,
the dog sniffs, bites it;
*
sunlight’s lying on the beach–
wet, shining now the ash-curled waves sink
reflecting sky:
*
clouds of flame and ash
float through blue, hidden heaven
soaking into earth
*
sky, flames, snow and wind, waves, foam and sand,
they and all of it are never still not ever but they move us
through us as we walk, wish, stand–
*
what I see, I write,
and with my words I try to
catch the snow and light
*
**
*
Photos by F. Oomkens
*
This crowning of a king
Is a strange, uncomfortable thing:
*
Among the watching crowd:
A pleasant peasant madness;
On our screens: choreographed grandness
While unseen cops arrest and make all protest voiceless;
And he who is crowned
Bares visible sadness.
*
*
**
*
On being conscious:
–We are dewdrops in the dawn
Of sunshine on the thirsty lawn:
*
We are sparks that fly
Through deep and darkening night sky
Till rainclouds quench us.
*
**
*
Having spent time recently in Thailand I was able to reconnect with Philippe de Saint Maurice and go through some of his Meditations.
These two haiku on consciousness are part of a longer sequence called revelation realisation, but they stand well alone.
I took the photo on Bang Niak beach on the Andaman coast of Thailand last month (December 2022).
For those interested in epic literary hauls, translations of the Meditations are coming along fine and will be shared in Book Seven of The Dark Gospel; I’m sharing the odd snapshot and highlight as I proceed.
A poem by Ummidia Quadratilla, on learning that her husband, daughter, and son-in-law have been killed in the Vesuvian holocaust. The family’s seaside villa in Pompeii (now known as the Villa of the Mysteries) has just been destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, and the family died while helping their household to escape. Ummidia Quadratilla, a Roman-era Messager of the Tabernacle of Gaia, had stayed in Rome. Selections of her poems appear in The Dark Gospel and are translated by Freddie Omm:
Sweet home, bodies loved
Before the ash and pumice storm:
Thoughts, loves, lives, buried
*
Words too crushed to speak
My loss through lasting love now
Silence covers all—
*
Busts, scrolls in libraries,
(Like grapes left liquid in the press)
Some burned, crushed, some saved:
*
We can only wait
For the centuries to come
To uncover us
*
**
*
Peaceful as the dawn
of spring above Lake Como
one silent morning
*
the windows open
while the still soft air wove fresh
sweet scented coolness
*
on our skin we felt
our gentle touch our hands our
lips our mouths musing
*
peaceful as fresh dawn
of spring close by Lake Como
that silent morning
*
wrapped in our lovers’
waking warmth—help us remember,
daughters of memory!
*
**
*
This haiku is a translation of one of Philippe de Saint Maurice’s Meditations (the 54th).
As so often with translations of Philippe’s Meditations, whose originals are in a mix of Aramaic, Ancient Greek and Latin (languages in which I’m far from fluent), I’ve relied on intensive discussions with Philippe himself to arrive at the English. This unconventional practice is justified only by Philippe’s perfect command of English in all its forms, as well as of the ancient languages he first used to compose his Meditations.
love is simple yet
impossible to understand:
best just let it be.
The advice—if “best just let it be” is indeed advice—is unlikely ever to have been followed by lovers in the painful phase of passion, but is apt for the kind of unconditional love to which many meditators aspire.
While Philippe never echoes Krishnamurti (say) in injunctions to simplify experience by ceasing to think, love’s simple unknowability is something to which he often returns. He refers elsewhere to love’s “mystical mystery” and in this Meditation seems to say that love should be accepted, left to run its course, and not analysed or attempted to be “understood”.
*
**
*
From Tank Person to
Person, transitioning, stillI
Standing up to power
*
I became one with
The tank, then we dissolved, gone—
Person can return.
*
**
*
Omm
from conversations with my friend
Yu Yan Yip
*
**
*
The photo is of a rare and wondrous Inchan tree, over 200 years old, in Thailand, which bears two different types of fruit, the In and the Chan, at alternating times each year. In a similar way, one person may develop two different, alternating kinds of being, at alternating times, while remaining the same, consistent person.
This poem is part of a series inspired by the experience of Yu Yan Yip, previously known as Tank Man, who has been on the run and transitioning for many years.
The previous poems in the series are:
Photo of the Inchan Tree by Freddie Oomkens taken at Kanchanaburi, Thailand, in 2022
Haiku and pic by Freddie Omm
*
*
*
**
*
*
Note: This poem is the third section of a triptych of poems.
The others are: autumn blaze away (and next year be a blast) and new year’s eve, oudejaarsavond 2021.
The triptych starts with autumn (the left hand panel), then comes new year’s eve (central panel) then this one, the brave new year wakes (right hand panel.
*******
*******
*******
31 December 2021
haiku and photo by freddie omm
the shortest day is swallowed by the longest night
and though the time is festive we can close the darkness out in sleep
until we rise again to greet the waking light
*
last night’s cold moon is waning gibbous and the town shines bright
and while the spreading mist and frost grow thick and deep
the shortest day is swallowed by the longest night
*
we walk this world we wish for warmth and all that’s pleasing to our sight
but nightmare deepfake monsters of perverted dreams disturb us in our sleep
until we rise again to greet the waking light
*
O pity our poor planet filled with foolish deathly viral agents mired in their own shite
they rave and squall around our godforsaken earth and even as we weep
the shortest day is swallowed by the longest night
*
but there’s a ruthless aimless tenderness in nature’s creatures and in you that rare delight
we find when we’re alert to each mere moment whose uniqueness we can keep
until we rise again and greet the waking light
*
now in the southern hemisphere the sun shines at her height
but we are locked in dark and where the shadows creep
the shortest day is swallowed by the longest night
until we rise again and greet the lengthening light.
*
**
*
freddie omm
*
**
*
Called a man, then, I
Changed, fluid, freely flowing. Now
I am Tank Person.
*
**
*
Omm
from conversations with my friend
Yu Yan Yip
photo by freddie
We celebrated last year’s Feast of the Ascension with a single, potently philosophical haiku based on a Meditation of Philippe de Saint Maurice (Ascension). Focusing on a pebble at the bottom of a pond, it got a lot of comments about the nature of consciousness, the will to rise up from the mundane mud, and suchlike.
It was a rather uplifting item all round.
For this year’s Feast, we have another of Philippe’s mighty meditations, but this one comes at the idea of Ascension from an altogether more provocative angle, wondering whether Yeshua’s ascension wasn’t perhaps the result of his wishing to escape the judgmental coldness of us killjoy humans – a sobering thought, entirely apt on this day of feasting and celebration.
Becoming sweaty,
They feared their bodies’ passions
Would take them over
*
Sometimes forever
They fought their desires to death –
Thought to transcend them
*
Morals to judge them,
Judgment to condemn and kill,
Death to embrace them:
*
They feared their own love
And so blamed others, made up
Sins deserving death –
*
Is that why Yeshua
Rose up to heaven – to escape
Our killjoy death-wish?
*
Tired of being judged,
He left us to our cold, mad,
Delusional lives.
*
**
*
Omm
Feast of the Ascension, 13 May 2021
how if we try to
do something like change the world
we can and we can’t
*
achieve all we want
by force of will alone that’s
just delusional
*
when the world around
is just as real as we are
our will is not all
*
yet in our mind lives
a universe just as real
as any other
*
being all we want
needs an equilibrium
a balance between
*
**
*
haiku chain and photo by freddie omm
I followed a path
thinking that it led somewhere
but it’s ended here—
*
It isn’t the road
not taken so much as the
untakeable road—
*
Follow my advice:
don’t follow a path—choose the
made up, pathless ways.
*
**
*
freddie omm
january 2021
*
with apologies to robert frost’s road not taken
– the poem is based on a meditation of Philippe de Saint Maurice
Mistletoe clusters
On tall bare wintry poplars,
Pale, poisoned berries
*
Sowing witches’ brooms
With Saturnalian seed
To spread love’s shrouding
*
Solstice potency:
Nurturing nest, fast food for birds,
Spring’s bees, butterflies
*
But all’s veiled, still, now—
This short midwinter moment
Death’s reared in beauty
*
Breeds life in sticky
Clinging, skeletal branches,
Mistletoe clusters.
*
**
*
This new sonnet riffs off Shakespeare’s 18th:
…for all those whose love is so fresh and strong it can seem unreal, here’s a sonnet for each and every one of us – Happy New Year!
In Chelsea Old Church
(December Evensong: 12 Haiku)
*
**
*
In Chelsea Old Church
At Evensong on Sunday
I hope, pray, repent
*
For the coming year’s
Dates – work, duties, dreams – love’s loose
Change of comings, goings:
*
I’m not quite sure who
My confusion of spirits
Would be praying to
*
Jesus seems quite far
Our Father even farther,
Holy Ghost most lost
*
In faith that is ours
To find by quaint disbelief’s
Dark dusty corners
*
Darknesses of this
Church’s memorialised pasts
–
Framing spaces where
–
A handful of us
Sit, stand, kneel, sing and mumble
–
In twilit hangovers
–
There’s darkness that turns
As the world turns its seasons round
To joy and gladness
*
In the shadows, clouds,
Disintegration delights
Dismantling sadness
*
In meadows, poppies,
Gardens by the Thames that bloom
Long centuries long
*
Before Thomas More
Prayed, sang here with Erasmus
Wisteria grew
*
On the Embankment –
Once a low shore – cars now crawl
Past flowers, me and you.
*
**
*
Omm
Note: This poem describes a time when I lived down the road from Chelsea Old Church, along Cheyne Walk, where what is now a busy road on the Embankment (the A3212) was a sleepy village shore in Sir Thomas More and Erasmus’ time. More worshipped (and was upbraided for singing) in the church and added a chapel to the south or river-side of the building which, unlike the rest of the church, survived World War II bombing. The church was rebuilt in the 1940s, retaining many of its original features and fixtures – it’s a powerfully atmospheric place.
I used to join Evensong regularly to contemplate the week ahead.
This year, most services have been cancelled – I hope they will soon be able to reconvene, and these twelve haiku (one for each Christmas Day) are humbly dedicated to that outcome.
The painting is by Henry Pether (1800-1865). His father and brother were also painters, known as the “Moonshine Pethers” for their addiction to the hooch and liquors they illicitly brewed in seedy stills on the banks of the river moonlit scenes.
Another of my poems with links to this part of London, Ghosts of Cheyne Walk, was published here last year.
My upcoming book, Migrant Shadows – Sicilian Haiku, will be published by Mad Bear Books in early 2021 – with all profits going to support refugees.
days shrink, night e x p a n d s –
light and warmth of close kind friends
make love more intense.
*
**
*
freddie omm
december 2020
*
photograph by siddharth salve
sometimes when we smile
at some shared joke, it’s as if
you’re smiling in me
*
and we’re one wit (as
it were) in one split
second
when you smile in me
*
a smile spilt over
from that mere moment of now’s
spillage of pixels
*
past laughter uplifts
us – we’re happiest when shared
smiles float up again
*
**
*
freddie omm
winter 2020
Note: The idea for this haiku chain was sparked by Proust, where he describes Swann’s memory of Odette’s laughter just as he is sinking into disfavour with the Verdurin set: …”il voyait Odette en rire, en rire avec lui, presque en lui.” – Un Amour de Swann, p. 282. The memory of shared laughter lifts us, as it does Swann, bonding us in a timeless bubble with those whose passing laughter we share, becoming especially poignant and powerful when that bond feels as though it might break through separation or drifting apart.
oaks spread and twist low
branches close to damp dark earth
white sand under wind
*
as time-tinged leaves blow
rustling past
migrating birds
vague mists ghost the dunes:
*
time, fog, wraiths and haze –
insubstantialities
that haunt us all our lives
*
**
*
freddie omm
november 2020
I
All my life I’ve loved
beaches and the beauty of
being on the edge
*
Where senses merge like
sex in sand and sky in eyes
we are everywhere
*
Feeling a moment
like lifetimes of loving light
from intense shadows
*
While feelings blur like
sea in sand and sky in air
we’re here everywhere.
II
All my life I’ve loved
beaches and their hot bodies
heating everyone
*
(Save folks or times with
lack of lust for life in sex through
mood or age or choice)
*
All my life I’ve loved
soft warm curves that turn things hard
tangling everything
*
All my life I’ve loved
those days when outlines grow so vague
you shape in the flow
*
Like waves washing worlds
that wishes made whole, oceans
smooth and connect us
*
All our lives loving
beaches and bodies and love
make us all hotter
*
And all our lives’ love
lifts us from life’s heaviness:
makes our lives lighter.
III
All my life I’ve loved
light, I’ve left darkness behind
when stuff got murky
*
At dawn if things got
sweaty I might stay on till
stuff got cool again –
*
– I get dark sometimes
too, we all do, but try to
leave darkness at dawn
*
**
*
Omm
September 2020
O my days all blue
With loves like suns that warm and
Burn us up all through
*
Hot nights of turning
On the spit of sleeplessness
Feverish with you
*
Blazing together
– Days and nights of endlessness
For making love to
*
**
*
Freddie Omm
September 2020
Forever in blue
Light warm day lifts woke souls to
Elysian Fields
*
Light that conceals
Leaks among us and links us
Each in sublime joy
*
West winds fan our passions
Growing golden flowers to garland
Blessed lit up isles
*
Float on light that hides
Night for a bit while gods wake
Heaven is being.
*
**
*
Words and photo by Freddie Omm
September 2020
The vine writhes in wind –
Sunsoaked leaves, darkening grapes,
Ripening season
*
**
*
Freddie Omm
August 2020
To go with this little puzzle, some words by Verity Worth:
Becoming strong can come when you fall apart and break down.
You’re overcome by – you melt in – you surrender to – you give your self up to (and in) the present moment.
That moment can be a space filled with overwhelming emotion.
Maybe you are mourning a loss, someone you loved.
Maybe it is the moment itself you are mourning, the intensity of feeling it has evoked that feels as though it’s passing.
You become the moment – the moment becomes you – give yourself to the moment –
You find strength in pulling yourself together, and every time this happens the extra strength seems more, like building muscles.
And yet another part of you feels wasted, emotionally hungover, psychically drained.
The two sides coexist in you, different facets of the same self, two selves within a larger You, like rainclouds amd sun, selves containing many more aspects like scattered pieces in a jumbled jigsaw puzzle.
Neither gains the upper hand for a while, the two sides just about balancing, then matter resolves, the hangover dissipates, it drains away, as is natural, it passes like a cloud.
The pieces can be reassembled.
There’s enough strength in you to grow again.
*
**
*
Verity
I stood up to you,
Then disappeared.
O
Even now
up to you
I stand
*
Not invisible,
Although unseen, unknown, still
O
I stand up to you.
*
**
*
31 years on.
We greet and salute you, Yu Yan Yip—and all who stood and stand up to faceless tyranny.
Peace.
§
freddie omm
Sunk in the mundane
like a pebble in a pond.
*
How rise up again?
*
**
*
Freddie Omm
Feast of the Ascension
21 May 2020
What is it to be
Normal when our past, now, is
Newly abnormal?
*
Wasn’t it always
So, and don’t we overstate,
Slightly, the moment
*
We live in – strange times,
Strangely recasting our selves
For the new normal?
*
Isn’t it normal,
When living’s new and strange, to
Hope past lives survive?
*
**
*
Freddie Omm
April 2020
Here in the now we think of then
And them – of times when we
Could meet outside – touch, kiss, hug – when
We felt like it, so free –
*
That world of honeyed dreans is lost
In isolated dawn
It succumbed in the last spring frost
And cannot come again
*
In April blooms the bees are woke
And drunk on nectar as the evenings wane
They seep and melt through air like smoke –
They may not come again
*
We sleepwalked into viral purgatory
Long distanced days of social dystrophy –
But nightmares fade away at dawn
If we can wake again.
*
**
*
Freddie Omm
April 2020
in times of sickness
it’s hard to see spring’s beauty
in the littlest things
*
(all the world’s beauty
– sun, skylarks, cherry blossoms –
can’t make this spring spring
*
when all the world’s sick,
only health, love, could ever
make spring spring again –
*
pale flowers grown on graves
look like little things of health,
love: the seeing is all.
*
**
*
freddie omm
march 2020
This Spring’s a Psycho
Come to take our lives away
While we hide inside
*
This March, Spring is Loss
Of what we thought was control
Of our little worlds
*
This March, Spring’s gone mad –
Scattering buds of sickness
Seeding fit bodies –
*
This Spring is Zombies
The Undead with the Living
(No one knows who’s who)
*
This Spring is stealing
All our money, our nest-eggs
For a rainy day
*
This Spring spawns madness
We hide ourselves away but
Still the virus comes
*
(No wonder we’re scared
And sad and buying loo rolls
To wipe it all away)
*
Crazy thief of Time
Of plans, hopes, closeness, futures
Still the virus comes
*
While we stay inside
The season of life unfolds
Sick blossoms of death
*
Days stretch into days
Blank nights of feverish dreams
Of gone, better times
*
Like blossoms floating
On vague streams our memories
Drift down to the sea
*
Those gone, better times
When once we sang in crowds now’s
Still, deserted streets
*
As we shelter from
These threats we’ve never seen
One small comfort’s true:
*
While you come for us,
Psychoid virus, we know death
Soon will come for you.
*
**
*
Freddie Omm
March 2020
*
**
*
I took the photo in Villach (once the home of Paracelsus the Alchemist) last month.
Still deserted streets –
Spring’s forgotten earth, lovesick
in times of quarantine
*
We’re isolated
Beings – lone, socially-distanced
Bodies in disease:
*
Now in spirit we
Should touch each other’s hearts, share
Droplets of airborne love
*
Spread lockdown loving
Through springtimes of quarantine
Till the virus leaves.
*
**
*
Freddie Omm
March 2020
things we feel will not
die for want of words to speak
them – those feels will stay
*
your breast warm on my chest
heart and tongue’s incoherence
dissolving in sex
*
how our words run free
of sense when what we feel speaks
more than we can say
*
love shifts forever
infusing lust’s hot moist mouths’
fluent sweet nothings
*
the love we feel gone –
ghosted, holed in our hearts alone
swells in silence still
*
love remembering
each wordless stroke of the tongue
bodies becoming
*
that loss sends us mad
whose griefs we know shall not pass
so we stay still, still
*
love like roots in earth
grows deep, inarticulate
all through tacit seasons
*
till we cry our loss
pain blurred blind – we’ll not be heard
nor seen as we are
*
love is a virus
spreading our sweet infection
mingling genes, bodies
*
this is how these words
might speak to those who hear and
feel their inner sense: –
*
if what we felt died
through lack of words to speak it
this is how it ends –
*
**
*
freddie omm
20.02.2020
February ink
Scrawls dark promises on sky
Written in love’s shade.
*
**
*
Freddie Omm
February 2020
Poets play with words
like kids with toys – in this way
We all are poets
*
(When our thoughts are cut
up full of rage we need a
Monosyllable
*
If we want to make
things complicated we get
Polysyllabic) –
*
We all play with words
to shape our worlds according
to our needs and wants:
*
Whether or not we
think life’s a game, only words
can change the metaphor.
*
**
*
Freddie Omm
30 January 2020
*
**
*
I wrote and published this one on the same morning – this morning. Like many other recent haiku, it is based on one of Philippe de Saint Maurice’s Meditations. The photo was taken on Scheveningen beach recently. The pawprints in the sand are Coco the Dog’s (the copyright, to all of it of course, remains mine!).
In the still soft hours
Of night I wake as if alone
In bed although we’re not
*
Still there in each space
Between kisses in each breath while
We sleep love completes us
*
When we’ve way too much
Unsaid we want to say and
Much unshared to share
*
Even in silence
Our closeness warms us fills us
Speaks us forever:
*
Coming together
After time apart too long
Fills a voiceless void
*
Our lovers’ talk so close
Lasts longer far than mere remembered life
Never really ends
*
While we’re together
Hold each moment hold each one
In fullness of love
*
Even in silence
Still warmth eloquence love
Speak us forever
*
**
*
Freddie Omm
(very loosely translated from an original Meditation by Philippe de Saint Maurice)
*
**
*
I took the photo of the sunset through a window, quite dirty, in San Francisco.
For millenia, humans
waited for god to show up
Now we are furthest
*
from belief – closest
to meeting god in person:
Unwelcome stranger –
*
Forever mortals
on earth forget our fate is
Eternal promise
*
Eternal waiting
for the life that has no end
Mortals forever
*
Unwelcome strangers
to their own lives and planet:
Strange and unwelcome
*
Until they embrace
the passing of all that flows
and streams us is all.
*
**
*
Haiku and picture by Freddie Omm
(Loosely translated from an original Meditation by
Philipe de Saint Maurice)
*
**
*
The photo was taken at Scheveningen on a windy afternoon last month when the sand was seething along the beach in noisy funnelflows.
hey josephine kate
welcome to this wild wide world
you will grow in love –
*
each newborn baby
has wise ones who come to bless,
bring gifts, praise, omens:
*
caspar, melchior,
balthasar – kings with gold, frankincense
and myrrh – following a star.
*
written in the god book
we glow like spells of unspelled words
on the unscrolled page
*
will we float in light
like morning mist on frost still white
as night’s evening dawns –
*
will we make our homes
watched by the gods of ourselves
scanning our future?
*
written in that god book
spells untold on unscrolled page
speak the unspelled age.
*
**
*
freddie omm
epiphany 2020
Our cousin, Josephine Kate Bader, was born on Christmas Day 2019, making triply apt this Epiphany welcome on Twelfth Night, the night of the Magi’s visit.
The Magi, or Three Kings, bringing their gifts to the baby Jesus, from a 6th century mosaic at Sant’Appolinaire Nuovo, in Ravenna.at year’s end we try
to let what’s done and doing
settle in our minds
*
our memories edit
us in a flowing sequence
like a narrative
*
mishmashing hot nights
that wake lush fantasies of
love made (up) just right
*
as kaleidoscopic
impressions make up all our lives,
bye bye bygones stream
*
a vision of us
on waking up in beds we
don’t quite remember
*
to be joyful we should
see life as though providence
really worked for us:
*
(without edits like
random words our streamed stories
make no kind of sense)
*
our dreams of bliss are
real when woke in each other’s
arms in homely beds
*
each day we give fresh
meaning to lives streaming by
loving each other
*
**
*
freddie omm
new year’s eve 2019
*
The kaleidoscope collage is made up of kaleidoscope photos which I shot of various subjects over the past few days, including Coco the Dog, trees and skies, our Christmas tree, etc.
before the snow falls….
this winter, we’ll warm ourselves
with wine and firelight
*
within tall sheltering walls
we’ll lighten lovelost shadows
through this longest night
*
green-winged chiffchaff calls
warbling from the weeping winter willows: –
woke spirits take flight
*
**
*
freddie omm
the hague
winter solstice, 2019
*
The chiffchaff (pictured below) has an onomatopoeic name evoking its song (cf Dutch: tjiftjaf; German: Zilpzalp) – even though the trilling chirrups of the chiffchaffs I’ve heard sound more like chee chee than chiffchaff. (And how, in any case, could a bird produce an ff , let alone an lp sound?)
Most chiffchaffs who breed in Europe migrate south in winter, but they seem quite keen on the continent, arriving earlier in spring, and leaving later in autumn than other birds.
Avian heralds of global warming, many of these summer colonists are now becoming permanent residents, overwintering by Dutch and Belgian coasts, the English Channel, on southern Welsh and Irish shores, in Normandy and Britanny, and along the Mediterranean.
For all that, this slightly bastardised haiku chain isn’t exclusively about chiffchaffs, much as I love their presence and the vigorous, spirit-enlivening brio of their song.
when we make love a billion cells break free
our bodies flowing fluid like disgendered
creatures of great beauty growing unbound gloriously
*
although we’re only human too and so quite ordinary
we spiral into plasmic dust as spores sprinkling our eggshell world
while making love a billion cells break free
*
in some identities we hardly see
among us – beside, within, beyond us – enraptured,
creatures of great beauty rising upward gloriously
*
like stars that gleam and glow in space and transiency
like birds in deep still forest undergrowth unheard
love is made perpetually so billions of our cells break free
*
our love in life is that which lets us be
ourselves in an intensity of moments scattered
creatures of great beauty growing unbound gloriously
*
we find new freedoms freeform ecstasy
now top and out of mind and sight no need for thought nor any word
when we make love a billion cells break free
like creatures of great beauty growing unbound gloriously
*
**
*
griffith park
LA
we had such careless loving times back when
we sheltered on the shore as storm and sleet swept in –
we hugged each other hot and close again
*
and with each kiss our mouth and tongue would send
such warm and wordless blissful touch and then
we’d find each other’s joy in hot wet carnal time again.
*
those deep cold nights of storm that draw us in
together closer than we’ve ever been
to kiss and fuck each other warm and well again
*
against the pain that cuts us deep when wounded by a friend –
we long to make it up but can’t begin –
we miss those carefree loving times back when
*
so young and fresh, with sunlight prickling our skin,
we spread our arms and let the sunlight in –
we hug and hold each other hot and close and mingled up again.
*
so to pick up the heartloose wreck of storms (which time will also mend)
our edgy lust and love that longing doesn’t end
we’ll have such careless carnal time and then
we’ll hug hold kiss each other hot and close again.
*
**
*
freddie omm
december 2019
from the way we act
when we’re in love you’d think love
wounds and hurts us most
*
in life – though things far
bitterer are daily thought and done –
love hits us hardest
*
– at times though we seem not
to even know we’re alive
while we’re here living
*
we can’t remember
our births, don’t believe in our
deaths – all too human
*
errors throughout life
shape our being – our delicate
small blue fragile world –
*
it’s quite likely that
love changes us because love
makes us come alive
*
as time goes past pain
fades but love’s the thing that lasts
to save us from ourselves
*
when we kiss and touch
our loving tenderness makes
hard living softer
*
we come alive then
love ourselves into being
loving mortal gods
*
**
*
freddie omm
*
**
*
This haiku chain is loosely translated from a Meditation of Philippe de Saint Maurice.
Sounders of the Depths is Emma Talbot’s exhibition at GEM in The Hague (next to the Photography and Kunstmuseum). It features brilliant, visceral installations (photocollage of selected works above). The show’s soundtrack, serendipitously, is a recording of Hurrian Hymn 6, the earliest piece of transcribed music (c. 1400 BC) – and it’s serendipitous because I wrote this haiku chain about it, some of whose preoccpuations resonate with Talbot’s work:
hurrian hymn
as we humans sing
for the goddess of the moon
singing creates us
*
now we come alive
in a forgotten language
past and unsurpassed
*
words from long ages
of birth, death and love relived
make us only us
*
being an offering –
the oldest song in the world
written in our blood
*
printed on this clay
by god through genes of humans
words and melodies
*
our voices swelling
the endlessly singing silence
breath of timeless sound
*
thirty three centuries
in a blind eye’s blink – always
we sing of presence
*
always we are song
mostly so when discomposed
in discord suffering
*
we’re never to be
silenced or wiped out as we
sing ourselves alive
*
**
*
omm
in case you’re puzzled –
these are my latest haiku
fresh from instagram
freddie omm
*
**
*
The haiku on the bottom right (“Ego Fires”) is based on a Meditation by Philippe de Saint Maurice.
Meditations of Philippe de Saint Maurice, which I’m turning into English haiku, will be published by Mad Bear Books. The Meditations give insights into spiritual growth, so I’m posting a few here, interspersed with other work.
The first was gulls, the second surf, and the third is dialogue:
dialogue’s great but with
each their own idiolects
words spin their own worlds
*
**
*
freddie omm
october 2019
The spider sculpture is called “Maman” and is by Louise Bourgeois who associated her mother with spiders (“spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother”). This casting of the sculpture (there is one original in stainless steel at the Tate Modern and six in bronze that go on tours) is visiting the lawn outside Museum Voorlinden in The Hague.
we humans stand alone and still in life until
love takes our hand and kisses us and helps us walk and talk
*
loveless, the passing hours through which all things must pass
stand still the days succeeding days stand still
and all is focused on ourselves alone
as if the universe herself is holding breath
*
we humans stand alone in life until
one day we find our love and it is good
while loving lasts all lives are rich in joy
and come together we all taste the fruits of heaven.
*
so can we forget a while that sometimes
a human stands alone in life until they fall apart in death
and make our wishes all come true with hope
and faith in love to keep us humans moving?
*
**
*
freddie omm
venice beach
september 2019
the imagination required to see
how life grows through a series of moments
*
(at once selfcontained, static and timeless
yet flying yes swarming into infinity)
*
like flocks of geese breaking from an amber
sunset into invisibility
*
like summer nights fading in september
flown into those endless twilights of eternity
*
where sensation is becoming to where
we run blindly into fresh horizons
fading as each sunrise into darkness
this warm fleeting intimacy we share
created from those moments is the essence
*
**
*
freddie omm
big sur
september 2019
Freddie in Ventura
*
those amber sunsets
never set but hung in mind
resplendent always
*
many years before
this beach and all that’s on it
were now, were mine
*
time was not what it
now is nor is becoming
each moment stayed whole
*
the waves held me fast
while the wind blew permanence
over solid sand
*
gulls sat in the sky
as if transfixed or painted
by a maker’s hand
*
*
a kid on a beach
– in the timeless space of life –
that kid’s always now
*
**
*
freddie omm
ventura, september 2019
*
The first of my haiku chains about Ventura beach was published here in December 2014: on ventura beach. I wrote this new one and took the photo while revisiting the beach last week.
we don’t honour time
enough sometimes we forget
each moment’s passing
*
life’s woke in a dream –
desires’ dissolving seasons –
delusional days
*
sprung on by mad gods
our fantasies in the flesh
dissipating time
*
narcoticised nights
splinter in breaking trance beats
time’s passing fancies
*
like comets’ bright tails
outgassing in orbital
periods of coma
*
millennial hours
centuries past in seconds
lit by mortal suns
*
we wake in our beds
making lifetimes’ catwalk love
cosmic comedy
*
ethereal hopes
brighten our dreams like comets
blazing through black night
*
**
*
omm
i see you my love
as clearly as reflections
in dark water
*
as clearly as the light
i see you stark and unblurred
in the noonday sun
*
perfection of love
that shatters into ripples
when i kiss your lips
*
**
*
omm
*
haiku by freddie omm; painting by john william waterhouse
Meditations of Philippe de Saint Maurice, which I’m editing and transforming into haiku, will be published by Mad Bear Books. The Meditations offer insights into spiritual growth. I’ll be posting a few in advance here, interspersed with other work.
The second is surf:
our loves are dolphins
weaving wild unwinding waves
in and out of sight
*
our sentiments are seals
on rocks submerged in ocean
slicked in ceaseless tides
*
our thoughts’ sea lions
flap and flip on cold bare shores
to breed in rookeries
*
our lives’ deep mysteries
will swim and sink and drift through
phosphorescing seas
*
like drops in quick waters
loves, thoughts, lives are liquid
flowing surfing beings
*
**
*
freddie omm
june 2019
text by freddie omm, header pic by pagie page, footer pic by daniel h. tong
Meditations of Philippe de Saint Maurice, which I have edited and transformed into haiku and haiku chains, will soon be published by Mad Bear Books. The Meditations offer insights into spiritual growth, and I shall be posting some of them in advance here, interspersing them with my other work.
The first is gulls:
since I first could think
I always thought that thought
will turn me mad
*
like gull-crawing skies
thoughts can sound portentous as though
from other species
*
voices like aliens
we think into being as
thought will think us mad
*
words crawl crazy like
lingual creatures who can fly
from our mind’s planet
*
whether in rage or
loving-kindness – we know no more
than if we were gulls
*
fly into the sun
illuminate a last thought:
they. we. light. are one
*
**
*
freddie omm
text by freddie omm – title pic by thought catalogue – footer pic by yifei chen
*
**
*
Decades pass by, while
Moment of eternity
Stands still, like a tank.
*
**
*
Omm
*
Photos of tank in Ukraine taken by Dmitri Bukhantsov in February 2022 and added, with thanks to Dmitri, to this post later.
fresh spring rains pass by –
mist like smoke seeps up from earth,
buried burning warmth
*
i grow in your heat –
pulse beats in the furrowed hearth
of this maykissed field
*
moist excited skies
spread out wide like heavy thighs
fecundating space
*
i burn for your love
lit lust lifts my loins my life
planting fresh new seeds
*
**
*
freddie omm
I
open up like song
let music play us sing us
melodising us
*
we two wrapped in heat –
loose entangled limbs like riffs
of carnal melody
*
interlaced and lit
lasciviously dangerous
lullabying life
*
our bodies pick up
the pumping of each other’s
heartbeat rhythms
*
in our love for us
we’re lyrical and languorous
climax in chorus
*
wild music wakes us
enchanting and shaking us
open like song
*
our skin pricked with notes
glissando licks quickening us
like a morning shower
*
in our love for us
in trust in truth we give tongue
to life’s loving song
*
II – envoi:
*
for all the lovers
who grew lonely as time passed
silencing their space –
*
music of the spheres
come join us close together
sing us woke in song!
*
**
*
freddie omm
may 2019
*
photo by spencer imbrock
love is unchanging
but like the moon looks different
with each month coming
*
from bright new closeness
of a full worm supermoon*
illuminating us
transfiguring all
the sleeping world with budding
love awakenings
*
as each mood succeeds
mood and sad and happy mix
we’re changelings in love
*
our inconstancy
moves, begets us, forgot in
guiltless venery
*
our loves’ festival:
bathe in the pools of Venus
crowned with myrtle
*
rediscover the
endless beauty of new fresh
never ending loves
*
**
*
omm
#haiku by freddie omm; photo by saltanat zhursinbek
#haiku by freddie, pic by david clode via unsplash
#haiku by freddie, photo by charles via unsplash
#haiku, photo by freddie
freddie omm’s Sicilian Haiku, illustrated by lucy henshall, will be published by Mad Bear Books this summer.
#haiku
Freddie Omm”s Sicilian Haiku will be published this summer by Mad Bear Books.
each love is a kiss
melting and mingling – messed-up
unmissable bliss
*
each kiss is a sign:
unspoken love awoken –
timeless Valentine
*
**
*
freddie omm
14 february 2019
*
(illustration by annie spratt via unsplash)
we own our faults but
all those faults do not destroy
the good bits in us.
*
Omm
february 2019
one night in London
I saw the ghost of a child
behind my old house
*
dressed all in white
from another century
in the basement well
*
I watched a while
– she was absorbed in herself –
diffusing through light
*
a veil of darkness
her little body lit up
void translucent shades –
*
face expressionless,
quite absent, as if her spirit
had drained her hereness
*
flowing past in light
like the sun’s in moony night
shining chimera –
*
I could not read her
state nor story from her looks:
she stayed still, mute, slight,
*
radiating calm
acceptance between us. I waved –
then went up to bed.
*
**
*
next night, another
ghost came through the bathroom wall
into the sitting room
*
whilst I sat talking
with my ex-girlfriend’s mother
sure I was mad, drunk
*
visions and sirens
called me, but maybe it was
the ghost of our love
*
the evening after
I’d seen that blank ghost daughter
in not to be light.
*
***
*
Omm
freddie omm’s Sicilian Haiku will be published by Mad Bear Books in 2021.
hall of lost footsteps
fugitive hot whispered words
scabrous ancestral songs
*
judgments from the court
of love whose lust-drunk troubadours
inspire my spirit:
*
a joy for living
a past that never passes
a loss yet unlost
*
in this hallowed space
– oak beams, flagstones, marbled walls –
still footfalls echo
***
I long for you much
as I listen to music
whose sadnesses touch
*
my heart still aching
from madnesses and rage that
haunt this rabid present –
*
let’s celebrate life
in songs of now, here, as in those
footfalls of the past
*
we find in absence
a beauty missing in presence
sometimes, timeless love
*
**
*
Omm
1 january 2019
lost in your head
– a maze in shade, leaves in fall
blown autumnal memories
*
your mind’s lost and found
place of missed discoveries:
space to be, begin
*
become right here, be
fresh and free like that loved child
you were and yet will be
*
in this place of warmth
(this then’s the only way in?)
welling from your core
*
and you’re here right now
as these words flit through your brain
lit like sparks in rain
*
in our synapses
no unlinked unwoke spaces
no clueless faceless faces –
*
flaming in the flow
of watery reflections
you are here right now.
*
**
*
Omm
december 2018
warm lights of Christmas
cradled in the dark like faith’s
blessed, blissed mysteries
illuminating
wonders in the everyday –
stars reflecting us
*
link us to each other
and our gods glowing golden,
lighting our lives in warmth
*
**
*
Omm
24 december 2018
splintering sea – deep
troughs of sunset waves – shade, swell,
breathing dreams of sleep
*
lost in waking waves –
our canoes launch liquid lives
in limitless dusk.
*
**
*
Omm
not for me
those clouds that fluff the sky and
shift their shape like ghosts
*
haunting heaven,
inhabiting while whiting out
our snowy floating formless hopes –
*
not for me
the worn-in practised phrase
that targets
*
some soft weakness of our stricken hearts,
but always misses,
misses
*
tittle-tattling flattery that bigs
us up
yet disses, disses –
*
o not for me
those chilled and flaky
trout-lipped puppet tendernesses
*
nor for me
those strung-out wants that need yet never do,
they’ll never do:
*
not for me a life that’s lost for lack of you.
*
for me then what is left to make my day?
for me your hand and head and heart and kiss
*
that permeate
the mark of love which others miss,
miss
*
mashing us while world spins on around us in its feckless way:
*
but all those flakes
who flurry through the sky, who
flourish infelicitously
*
without a touch from you
to ground them cannot be
a thing for me.
*
**
*
omm
november 2018
Night. A single star
Burns, smudged by smog, smokelike clouds
Then blotted out. Dark
*
As my mood when you
Are gone – warmth and light snuffed out
Like a single flame
*
As the waxing moon
Is smothered behind storm clouds
Passing blind below
*
We absent ourselves
In darkness, deep depressions
Hiding from the sun
*
We dig a hole in
The plot of our own story –
Gotta stop digging:
*
Look up, wrap ourselves
In glowing glory, endless
Potentiality
*
Sea, sky, stars and moon
And this solitary earth
Spinning round the sun
*
That storm seething past
Stokes our sluggish blood till time
Reignites the sky.
*
**
*
Omm
September 2018
Come to me in the blind and breathless passion of a night
Spent loving free full feral without thought
For morning – climactic darling hours that brought
Us here as one and yet so other, clasped tight
*
As here in bed between these warm and crumpled clinging sheets
We bask our bodies in the glow and gladdening glory of the sun
Each rapt and untamed moment which our lives have left to run
Each moment while in each of us our wild heartbeats
*
With that loping looping rhythm pulsing love
Outpacing secret cadences of time.
*
Charged with that beat, may tantric rhythmic rhyme
Flow through our coupling, energy-infused from high above
*
And let our inner powers grow and set us free:
May we become ourselves again, each time you come to me.
*
**
*
Omm
open your eyes, love –
begin the unending day
of beautiful play:
*
ripeness of moments
fall into your lap like fruits
of bliss from the tree –
*
song and carefree smiles
wrap you in the warmth of love,
forever happy
*
together with those
whose arms hold you close and safe
wherever you are
*
and when your eyes close
may you see beautiful dreams
and wake to fresh dawn
*
whoever you be
come in your unending day
of beautiful play.
Every morning I sing – the birds above
And earth below move in those dawning musings –
Those twists and turns of dream and thought, those swings
Of mood that drive us off course when we love
*
But when we think we have the lives we hoped we’d live
We sometimes see ourselves as creatures that we feared we’d be –
Monsters of imagination, whom we
Fed because of what we dreamed they’d give –
*
We travelled far through countries strange, and stranger time
Wore out our wishes, blotted all that dreaming shaped in rhyme:
Our vital hopes were blurred – still, half-asleep –
Although throughout it all our vocal passions stirred: racing deep –
*
Till one fine day (like now) we wake, we rub our eyes and then
Realise we’re singing songs of morning once again.
*
**
*
Omm
May 2018
all our holy ghosts
live in us, and we in them –
love’s eternal haunting:
*
blithe spirits spook us
from deserted dunes – singing
sands, rustled by winds –
*
heartbeat-storms roil round
the beach, rouse stomping wildness,
clamour in our veins:
*
we are the children
– and parents – of the past
in love’s family
*
whose children succeed
give birth to generations
for eternity
*
mother father child
live and grow and give their love
timeless trinity
*
all our holy ghosts
live in us as we in them
we are love eternal
*
Omm
Spring 2018
we photoshop out
the alien within us
retouching our selves
*
to present profiles
that are shareable and bland
we become other
*
migrating exiles –
those aliens outside us
beyond the pale walls
*
and who am I then
an alien inside you
apt to be expelled
*
when you draw borders
for my refugee heart, we
live a little less
*
free to be as we
are in our core and essence,
unretouchable
*
irretrievable
inalienable us:
search for us in vain
*
Omm
March 2018
we all have it in us
this dying for summer this
dawning in darkness
*
like buds at the tips
of february twigs we grow
and feel its stirring
*
springtime inside us
until a cold front snuffs out
our wake for the winter
*
a crocus-white chill
grabs us not from the grave but
its deep dark bed of earth
*
winter clasps us tight
anew and what we wished gone
we take it back again
*
like people waved goodbye
come back and kissed afresh our
winter wishes woke
*
we hug them to warm us
our needs and loves we never lose
we have them all in us
*
Omm
at dusk she kisses him
mushymouthed and clinging breathless breast
to breast their smooth commingling
hard then fluid tender melting
*
cool hot creamy sex when two
so made so shaped for one another
couple up as one in one
*
dissolving her in him in her like milk in tea
and in the pearl-pale moisture bleeding from those honeyed lips
and in the sweet salt sweat of thighs and loins
*
she cries he too
for in that kindling consummate moment
they come consumed to be together
*
all thought given up
yesterday today no more tomorrow
she wonders how such mindless mindfulness surrenders
*
she wonders is that it then when valentine dawns
*
when is tomorrow then
when I and you become us
and she conceives as day in night is born
and fused and found forever lost that moment
*
when together now
we come as close as one can be to one
then is tomorrow and tomorrow’s past
*
Omm
valentine’s eve into day 2018
there is a space in our mind
where thoughts are formed
which we do not express
when let’s say you catch a glance of someone
in the street
who smiles and you smile back but pass by
and forget about them
although you’ve never known them to start with
until days later you wake
in the night
from the darkness of a vanished dream
about some other person and their smile
that passing instant returns like a flash
to you vivid as lightning and fades as quickly
in bleached black
yet has left its impression
as if imprinted on your brain
so when you look away a shadow
of it still is there smudged
in faded pigments
like the glimpse of a ghost
of something you don’t quite believe
in
or a déja-vu of such familiar oddity
that it’s unsettling and draws you close
in
as a lover lost from long ago
who seems suddenly close and wants to hug
you back from your absence to feel
the sort of things that you cannot describe
*
Omm
8 february 2018
Floris V van Holland
Early in January 1296, Floris V leaves his court in The Hague for Paris, where – against his better wishes – he switches Holland’s ancient alliance with England to one with France. This sparks off treachery among some of Floris’ nobles, leading to his murder in June.
*
in his hall of knights –
mental topers, tumblers, ravers
– mad din of needy bingeing gluttons
*
smoke-shrouds cling to blackened beams
minstrels mock those braying, belching goblet-brandishers
ranting voices drunk
*
alone in that crowd
and at its centre, he sits
a silent moment.
***
*
thoughts like words unborn
in a womb of forgetting
flit through his spirit
*
scared of too much thought
(which drinking puts a stop to
– as if thoughts could drown):
***
*
sacred hopes, our wished-for dreams
float off like swans when we awake
they glide off on the glossy glassy lake
*
worn out by living
(which dying puts an end on
– as if our lives first wear, then strip us bare).
*
as if as if as
if, in drinking, sleep and dreams
and thoughts and words all drowned like shipwrecked memories
*
and yet and yet and
yet we live and breathe and feed our fates,
our lives float free of us.
***
*
he sits with his knights,
his ladies, fools, his dogs and serfs and clowns
one sated, bloated, slumbering moment
*
comes as if to himself
in the din of that great hall
on his island in the lake –
*
sees in that moment
the ghosts of future feasting,
woken when he wakes.
Omm
twelfth night, 2018
Binnenhof The Hague in about 1290
Hall of Knights (Ridderzaal), Binnenhof, The Hague in the eighteenth century
fazed, floris looks out
across the lake from his tower:
chilled, sluggish morning –
*
his household sleeping
off the feast, he’s alone, but for
the stork and the swan
*
one roosting above
on the roof, one swimming below –
fog-filled sky foreboding.
*
he rises from the bed
behind the banqueting hall,
kisses his lover –
*
blessing his domain
– his folk, that mindless morning –
his dark fate untold.
Omm
new year’s day 2018
´
round the munsterkerk
the Christmas market’s dark, stands
and stalls shuttered up:
*
seasonal crowds withdrawn
– spaces of singular silence –
no one left but us
*
contemplating change
in the temples of our heart
where gods die and live
*
lamps hung from abbey trees,
spotlit abbey walls, cast light
over us remnants.
*
Omm
december 2017
this winter solstice
as I love you, love me –
our Christmas blessing:
*
living loving both –
if life means anything
let our thing be love.
*
longest, darkest night,
while Wodan hunts with ghosts all yearning
through skies of glowing spirits
*
may that night purge us all
those ghosts be at peace, in love
again with living
*
in shadowlands of love:
as I love you, love me
this winter solstice.
*
Omm
winter solstice 2017
because I am a poet I love words
that cover up as much as they discover
my otherness, my flights so fanciful to you, my lover
whose wit and song and thought fly free like bees, like hummingbirds –
because you are my lover my true words
close in zooming close-up on our love, which uncovers
inborn lusts, carnal nectars nestling embryonic deep in us – we lovers
so innerly loved – when up we pair in passion, flock as birds
to cling and fuck and flick like flames all through the sweet warm night
like lit, scatterseeded sex, love’s godlike joy’s in flight –
because our gods come multiply, we lovers
– synthesizing each in one, seedlings whose flowering recovers
lush, latent lyric life – transplant into our words
love’s being, life’s meaning – innate and fecund like nectar, bees and hummingbirds.
*
Omm
pulsing passion fills
our veins – our bodies
cleave together, one.
*
now in our oneness
grows a seed of otherness:
each of us is both
*
oneself, and a part
of another being born
of us, though not us.
*
Omm
in hollywood, our
sublunar gutter-cosmos,
the walk of fame shames
*
collapsed stars, black holes
collide, merge – an afterglow
of platinum, gold
*
counterstellar dust,
like that brute shapeshifter’s lust
ravishing Leda
*
rapist in swan’s form:
sky father, king of gods, power
launched in Helen’s face
*
engendering revenge –
Iphigenia, Clytaemnestra
and Argos dead (the dog…)
*
this darkwebbed media:
supernova’d starfuckers
named, shamed, bollocked up
*
chorus of neutron sleaze:
lost starlets – tricked-, sucked-, fucked-up –
patriarch swansong
*
now mobs bay and rip
lives apart in shitstorm tweets
of #metoo fascism
*
in our black hole of fame
everyone’s-got-it-infamy –
carry on hollywood.
*
Omm
october 2017
from boardwalks buried
in the bed of that steep dune
you step on the beach –
*
sandscapes shift, air-borne,
you’re a visitor here, as
timelessly moving
*
as sea waves wash off
infinite fictions of earth –
mere specks on a spot in space.
*
Omm
october 2017
our summer of love:
high on hope, hardcore uproar
remixing our lives
*
dance in those muddy tribal fields –
surging acid nights – wild orgasmic waves
entranced, crowdy hazy drums
*
all one together
when sunset shades to sunrise –
stay up forever!
*
heaven in a rave
morphing bodies, spaced-out time:
starstruck eternals
*
raucous, thrilled and chilled
travellers, mutating beings
stagger on the stars’ stoned threshold
*
in love’s euphoria:
kiss our forever lovers –
softcore love hardwired in all of us
*
heartbeat to heartbeat
ecstatic, loved-up pulses
– everything is now –
*
Omm
summer 1989 & summer 2017
Photo by Muhammed Fayiz via Unsplash
sun, sand, sky and sea:
here i sit and write my words
elementally
*
as my dog chasing birds
– or their chatter when they flee –
sense is to words
*
seeking expression –
while we too might seek release
in sweet sensation
*
loving inner peace,
our minds, our bodies set free –
revel in release
*
merge into ocean
like a riff of poetry
in tidal passion
*
shore’s simplicity
sweet edge of comprehension:
sun, sand, sky and sea
every time I glance out of the window, love,
grey clouds slink down into our valley deep
and filter out all colour: grey above,
below, and grey behind our balcony when sleep
creeps up like time on light, and all around our space
the mist coils spreading from the glacier
of kitzsteinhorn, and river salzach’s waters race
and roil beyond the moor’s dark clumps of birch and alder
where wagtail, dipper, and sad willow warbler
chatter cross the fens beside the spa’s hot springs.
around us in the town, the fog clings
to the streets, a scattering of ghosts without a face –
we sip a schnapps, our spirits warm, and love
each other, smiling, dissolved into the place.
la muse et la petite mort
i sometimes wish I didn’t love you yet
so much that I do I do for you but
nothing ever works for us both, and words mistook cut
us up and out of our connection, when we let them.
*
i always love the way you never get
stuck on stuff – some folk would fall into a rut
when hard and heavy tribulations put
their lives on hold – thoughts mired like fish in a net.
*
but you, you seem to blithely slip
through that wide open ocean of freedom
from all the drifting flotsam pains you ever met
*
setting sail on a climactic far-out trip
through wine-dark heavens, where you and all our friends can come –
loving, yet somehow wishing we didn’t love you, yet…
*
April 2017
in our happy hour
blooming among wild tulips
sappily sprung in spring –
*
fresh April showers fall,
sweeten earthy sluggish veins –
riffs of birdsong wake
*
liminal lovers
on the season’s bare threshold,
shivering off the cold –
*
shed our chrysalis clothes,
winter’s pale accessories,
emerging nude, fresh –
*
limitless like love
shaken from hibernation
in our happy hour
__________________
freddie omm , april 2017
She’s sweet like a friend
Yet sexy, slightly scary
Like no one other
*
You like her. She smiles
The smile of one who knows that
That liking you feel
*
Likes her for her self
Like she wishes she could too
But she doesn’t like
*
Like herself… She says
She can’t explain how she likes
What she likes in words
*
She has this dream
In which she merges in her
Lies of love with others like
*
She’s living some truth
Neither selfish nor selfless
– Like her to be both –
*
Sweet, wholesome, love-scarred
And sexy, exposed – scared that
She’s just like herself
*
But is not herself –
Like no one else is oneself:
We’re like each other.
Ganton Street Soho.
At a café called Sacred:
Cloud-splodged blue sky crossed
By pink, white lightbulbs,
Old facades of painted brick.
The dog is panting
On a pavement stained
With smudges of the unknown,
High sun casts shadows –
This poet’s waiting:
On the walkways footfalls pass
Shut shops, tourists snap.
Summer 2016
ventura keys bay
*
borne on a loose-tongued tide
when dolphins sang in our bay,
i swam alongside.
*
i learned my english
in california, oh yeah –
surfing on meaning
*
strange new kid from lands
far-off with paler beaches
i dug those endless sands
*
west of ventura keys
soaked up the lingo in waves,
loghorreic seas,
*
chilled long days drunk down
so deep, my first summer of love,
synaesthetized like
*
a child of the sun –
honey-skied strands, peacemeal love,
kool-aid cookied, fun!
*
like surf out of reach,
lyrics drift through smoke-tinged breeze
on ventura beach.
kool-aid cookies
now, then, soon – shoredays,
wave-lapped hours, wind-spun and warm
like summer kisses
*
blown in midwinter
distillated on our lips
blissed out, oh! timeless
*
yoredays – flown, but here
with you forever, come spring
and the buds and birds –
*
skies drunk on light, blue
till blacked-out, then flopping blank
on a spinning globe
*
summerled like myth,
tripping out on dewy toes –
yoredays, yours, mine, theirs,
*
the only sure thing
left is love in all our lives,
strewn along the dunes
*
days of sun, shoredays –
all transilluminated,
hewn in memory
for lana wachowski
… who am i, and when
wachowski to wachowska
metamorphosized
♥
was there a moment
before i became me? – no,
and yet i wonder…
♥♥
what turns us queerly
recast in a different film
to act against type?
♥♥♥
(type?) (without a face?)
life’s not some single screenplay…
(type?) (without a cast?)
♥♥♥♥
we ask ourselves this
not knowing if an answer
ever was, will be:
♥♥♥♥♥
never yet someone,
neither a nonentity
nor quite nobody
♥♥♥♥
mostly we don’t ask
for fear of wondering, lost
in rapt selflessness
♥♥♥
one eye on the road
which tears our lives inside out
one hand on the wheel
♥♥
and we become one
body, not anybody,
don’t ask who am i…
♥
♥♥
♥
22nd January 2014
note:
i admire lana wachowski’s work a lot and also her general attitude to stuff (as far as one can make out from her few public statements) – she combines humour with intelligence and experimentation – artistic bravery, openminded energy, a sense of inspirational anarchy…
i wrote this poem in one go last night just after i’d been thinking about her life so far.
(it is likely to get edited, tweeted and played with, being in the nature of an experiment, one of my haiku chains…)
my new year’s message this year is this quaint little ditty. i was writing out the fair copy this morning when i was interrupted not by a man from porlock but a mother-in-law from neuss bearing presents. so i had to finish it on a fresh sheet of paper which i then stuck together so you can see that the interruption came at a pertinent point:
for those who cannot decipher my writing:
endings & beginnings
(in a winter’s garden)
BEGIN with the word that comes first, like light
from a twilit winter’s garden, when soft rainfalls
drop on dewy, leaf-pocked grass, showering bright
like a sudden flow of MOMENTS through the calls
of a goosequilled V tooting past, this starry night…
*
I sometimes try to freeze TIME, so it stops
and in an INSTANT feel and think all blend
and merge within MOMENTS—consciousness drops
like heaven’s rainfall in a winter garden—
inconsummate, unbegun, word without END,
*
but now SOMETIMES I forget such somethings,
and in your love I’ve found SEASONS to care
about the here, NOW, not some perfected place where
there are no more ENDINGS and BEGINNINGS.
freddie o
viersen, 29-31 december 2013
leaves like love let go
spiral down to snoozing earth,
dark, russet-brown loam.
*
when fall took those leaves
love became a lonely land—
warmth withdrawn, wan sun’s
*
waning light bled slow
blind trails of mud and sodden
footsteps veined with ice
*
where ghosts shadowed past,
skulked all through that leafless land
to haunt our autumns…
*
stark, unfelled, strange-boughed—
love’s remains in lonely land:
bare old beeches, clumped,
*
storm-ridden and gaunt,
sheltering our homeless hearts,
winterblown—like us,
*
love’s a vagabond
wandering to a nameless place
of endless leaving—
*
on tracks untravelled
from fall to spring, we will see
leaves, let go, return.
leaves, let go, return
___________________________________________________________________________________
– I originally wrote this haiku chain on Twitter — a bad habit of mine — poetry on Twitter being so hit and miss, nobody’s looking for it — but I find it a good place maybe for knocking out a first draft.
– When I’d written it I thought Love is a lonely land was a new phrase but then I checked and I saw I had actually lifted it (subconsciously…) from an old, sweet song.
– This was Billie Holiday’s beautiful, mournful Deep Song (by Cory and Cross), which includes the line:
Love lives in a lonely land
and ends:
Love is a barren land, a lonely land/A lonely land.
– That’s a song I must have listened to more than a couple dozen times since childhood (my parents also loved Billie Holiday).
– At any rate, my haiku chain has ended up as a sort of retort — a positive echo if you like — to the somewhat bleak sentiments of Deep Song…
– So thanks to Billie, Cory and Cross!
– And here’s their song in all its glory:
moon and bay
In Dorset last month one evening after tea – and till well after midnight – there were some excellent meteor showers.
Spread out on our backs, on a tumulus on the clifftops above Higher Eype, we watched them.
I wrote this haiku chain about it:
earthgrazers
(meteor showers over the dorset coast)
peckish at tea-time:
pot warmed, kettle on the boil
as the light draws in
around the cottage –
fog furling up from the sea
all this moist evening
our minds soaked, softened
in warm cups of reflection,
dunked choccy biscuits –
scones with clotted cream
and jam, gentleman’s relish
on hot buttered toast.
we climb up the hill
to the clifftop tumulus,
sheep and cows around –
the sky inking in
those unscrolled constellations
crawling with time’s myths,
scanning heaven for
asteroids and meteorites,
bright trails clustered in
radiating lights,
mirrored waves, blank deep waters
where night takes a breath,
and then we look out
– wide-eyed, longing no longer –
appetites replete,
scattered meteor showers
sketch the intermittent sky
with points of parting:
radiant perseids,
earthgrazers, cosmic debris –
while we watch, starstruck,
and only the dog
is still on the hunt for more,
chasing her own tail…
dorset, august 2013
coco looking for her own tail
starry night, vincent van gogh, 1889
Van Gogh is often seen as the epitome of the tortured artist – misunderstood, rejected in his lifetime, and only slowly building up a posthumous reputation after his early, self-inflicted death.
This supposed obscurity has been shown to be a myth before. But that legendary image still clings to Van Gogh, helping to make him one of the world’s most popular, iconic artists.
vincent van gogh
Now Dutch journalist Sander Brink has unearthed the first mention of Van Gogh in a piece of fiction. It throws up some fascinating insights and surprises.
Because Van Gogh’s first appearance is startlingly early – 1903, in a novel called De Winkeljuffrouw uit Oiseau d’Or – Chapeaux pour dames et enfants. (translation: “The Shopgirl in Oiseau d’Or – hats for ladies and children”)
The novelist, Cornélie Noordwal, far from being some kind of avant-garde writer at the cutting edge of modern art, was a hugely popular writer of mainstream (arguably middlebrow) bestsellers, romances and childrens’ books.
Van Gogh’s fleeting mention in De Winkeljuffrouw will thus have formed the first exposure thousands of readers ever had to the artist…
cornélie noordwal, dutch blockbuster writer in the 1890s and 1900s
What interests me first is the relative standings of Van Gogh and Noordwal.
In 1903, Noordwal was a famous, rich, successful writer (albeit one many critics despised), whereas Van Gogh, thirteen years dead, was only just beginning his phoenix-like rise from obscurity.
In the 110 years since, of course, their positions have radically reversed. Like most middlebrow blockbusters of bygone ages, Noordwal, for all her merits, has lapsed into relative obscurity, while Van Gogh has become the elemental incarnation of genius, whose works sell for hundreds of millions.
The second thing which interests me is the nature of Van Gogh’s fictional début. Because he is sketched in terms remarkably close to his alienated, self-dramatising self-image (as expressed in his own letters), which has driven another core aspect of the Van Gogh myth.
In the novel, Jan, a poet, is writing to Nora, his beloved, and he mentions Van Gogh as being similar to her:
Of course you won’t know who that was. He was a man who was nothing but soul, like you, and his life was violently troubled by it; he painted and drew things, considered laughable and insane by laymen, and yet showed himself more of an artist than a mass of famous painters who create impeccable landscapes and pictures.
The third interesting thing is that this figure of Van Gogh already seems fairly close to being a stock character, a Romantic literary archetype of a sort popular in the period. Think of the Les poètes maudites (1884), or D.H. Lawrence, or Leonard Bast in Howards End (1910), or a host of others.
It may sound fanciful, but it is almost as if literature, by means of this dainty little novel, were co-opting Van Gogh to join this gallery of characters whose noble sensitivity ejects them from society…
The final interesting thing, one which also intrigues Sander Bink, is the part played by letter-writing in this story.
Van Gogh’s letters had been published well before 1903 – indeed Albert Aurier’s famously influential article about him (Les Isolés, published in 1890) was heavily influenced by Van Gogh’s letters. Noordwal, who lived in Paris (she died there in 1928), may well have read the article, which appeared in Mercure de France, a magazine popular among lovers of modern art, as well as extracts of the letters which appeared in Holland and France throughout the 1890s.
All in all, a fascinating insight into how consistently, and from its earliest days, Van Gogh’s iconic international image was shaped by literature, as shown in his very first (so far!) fictional entrance.
This little parable, like a fairy story, is utterly unlike most people’s idea of Kafka, reading like an enigmatic tale for children:
a place where jackals and arabs might meet
Reading this story to his daughters – and seeing their delighted reaction – inspired Matthue Roth to create My First Kafka: Runaways, Rodents, and Giant Bugs, which is published this week.
The idea is long overdue – for almost a century, Kafka has been imprisoned in a Kafkaesque prison not of his own making.
It’s high time someone set him free.
eduard von keyserling’s masterpiece of literary impressionism, waves (wellen), has never been translated into english before.
it is now being attempted over on oomkenscom…
the bay of puck on the baltic sea, setting of keyserling’s “waves”.
Hilarious debunking, by Kathryn Schulz, of The Great Gatsby.
If I don’t agree wholly, it’s because I think the novel’s iconic stature is deserved. In persuading us of its greatness, its shortness helps, too – allowing readers to supply a lot of the thematic power Fitzgerald merely sketches in.
Having said that, Schulz does land some telling punches – “third person sanctimonious” is good as the narrative voice Fitzgerald gave Nick in Gatsby – and this was something which someone just had to say roundabout now, with the umpteenth (well, fifth) Hollywood treatment hitting the screens.
Her brother was only 16 when he stabbed her more than 100 times, in April 2012.
She’d returned to Sweden a year before, fleeing an arranged marriage in Iraq.
Knowing the possible consequences of her brother’s concern for the family “honour”, she always slept with a knife under her pillow.
Local authorities, terrified of upsetting sensitivities, ignored repeated warnings from the anti-honour-killing group Tank.
The boy duly killed his sister. Originally sentenced to eight years, that sentence has been halved in light of his age at the time of his crime.
Court slashes sentence in ‘honour killing’ case – The Local.
david foster wallace–lavishly admired depressive and novelist who killed himself eight years ago–is the subject of three new books now reviewed by thomas meaney, who concludes, in a mixed metaphor of baroque exuberance, that:
to be the master distiller of the times for a generation is no small feat. It requires a willingness to dirty your hands in the culture to a point at which most novelists would flinch. It means being willing to swallow boredom whole.
wallace’s greed for drugs was, apparently, as epic as the taste for tedium meaney ascribes to him, but neither could numb his life-consuming depressions.
he poured his preoccupations with modern life’s minutiae into knowing post-modernist prose, intellectually flashy, emotionally absent.
his reverential treatment of items which used to be thought unworthy of such (TV pre-eminent among them) is getting tired and dated today, but his books are beautifully emblematic of his time.
 |
I was in the Musée d’Orsay last week and took this picture of a striking sculpture by Barrias (Nature Revealing Herself to Science).
(From this angle her limpid marble eyes have a disconcertingly full, yet vacant look, brimming compassion yet somehow indifferent – although that may be a fanciful not to say pretentious notion…)
Coincidentally, I have been working on a poem called She Lifts Her Veil.
It consists of three rondelets – a charming medieval French lyric form.
The subject of the poem isn’t medieval exactly nor is it really about the grand Victorian personification of Nature Unveiling Herself to Science. It’s more about modern men and women and how they see each other:
she lifts her veil –
a vision: blank, dilating eyes,
she lifts her veil.
you breathe, the smell of her inhale,
flushed lips mouth fire – as flames chastise
brazen flashing immodesties –
she lifts her veil:
*
they see her face –
fragrant and nude, beyond the pale:
they see her face
itching to put her in her place –
frustration makes them bluster, flail,
so helpless – lewd and sexed and frail –
they see her face:
*
she drops her veil
lets it float, fall, fade where it lies…
she drops her veil
to speak her peace – a piece of tale
embodies what she prophesies,
when in the mirror of our eyes
she drops her veil.
freddie omm, spring 2012
My best-selling thriller “Honour,” published by Mad Bear Books, is available in paperback and e-book from Amazon stores worldwide:
Paperbacks are also available from Barnes & Noble and CreateSpace e-store: Honor (USA edition) – Honour (UK edition).
Shocking, darkly funny, edgily post-feminist, “Honour” is about men who kill for honour, the girls who “drive them to it,” – and love in an age which consumes it…
Paul Berman, in the New Republic, reviews Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide by Paul Marshall and Nina Shea.
It is a disturbing book showing how Islam is being corrupted by an aggressive and intolerant ideology.
The late Abdurrahman Wahid, once President of Indonesia, described radical Islamist political and terrorism as the product of an “extreme and perverse ideology.”
This ideology, as Berman notes, contrasts with
other, more tolerant and traditional currents of thought within Islam, more compatible with modern liberal ideas—such as the peaceable Sufism endorsed by Wahid, together with sundry humanist currents that descend from Islam’s medieval Golden Age.
Yet it is the radical Islamists who are making the political running in Islamic societies worldwide.
They wage a campaign of violence and intimidation whose most high-profile events were gruesome – the hacking to death of Vincent van Gogh on an Amsterdam street, the murder of Salman Rushdie’s Japanese translator.
But less high profile victims (Christians in Egypt, Somalia and Algeria, for example) abound, and the campaign’s success is partly the silence in which less spectacular events pass us by:
Incidents in which artistic or intellectual presentations have been cancelled without any accompanying violence or arrests have become fairly common: the sandblasting by the Dutch police of a mural in Amsterdam protesting the murder of van Gogh; the removal of artwork from London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 2006; the cancellation of a display at the Tate Gallery; the cancellation in Geneva in 1993 of a production of Voltaire’s play Fanaticism: or Mahomet the Prophet (followed, a dozen years later, by a minor riot when Voltaire’s play did receive a French production); the quiet removal of artworks from display by the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 2010 (though I wonder how Marshall and Shea would judge the Met’s ambitious new wing of Islamic art); the removal in 2009 of the Danish cartoons from a scholarly Yale University Press book about the Danish cartoons; the cancellation in 2009 of a German mystery novel about Muslim honor killings; the flight underground of a threatened cartoonist, Molly Norris, of the Seattle Weekly; the decision by eight hundred newspapers in the United States not to run a syndicated cartoon by Wiley Miller. And so on.
Meanwhile, campaigns against “hate speech” and “Islamophobia” proliferate, often based on quaint paranoia about Western intentions:
The doctrine postulates a conspiracy theory, according to which Crusaders and Zionists have been plotting to annihilate Islam for many hundreds of years—in the case of the Zionists, ever since the Medina controversies of the seventh century.
The legal systems of the West have been instrumentalized to silence Islamism’s critics. Geert Wilders in Holland and Mark Steyn in Canada are well-known Western victims of these bizarre and shameful prosecutions, but many more are from Muslim backgrounds:
the Anglican bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, who converted to Christianity; the brave and morally precise Italian-Egyptian journalist Magdi Allam, who also converted (at the hands of the pope, no less, such that his middle name is now Cristiano); the writer and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali in Holland, until she left Holland; Necla Kelek, a German feminist from Turkey; Ekin Deligöz, a German Green politician from Turkey; Souad Sbai, the head of Italy’s Association of Moroccan Women, and too many others to list.
Finally, perhaps most fatally, the campaign is leading to self-censorship of a kind which cannot bear even to acknowledge itself – a literally self-effacing cowardice.
in daniel johnson’s hatchet job in standpoint, umberto eco is accused of flirting with anti-semitism.
johnson says eco tries to pass off a chesterton quote as his own (When men stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing: they believe in anything) – a moot point, given chesterton himself didn’t actually write it…
johnson has no time for eco:
His novels are case studies in postmodernism, which elides all categories of truth, beauty, morality and politics into an esoteric game.
the article’s payoff:
The doubts sown by the book fall on fertile soil, for ours is a culture that long ago lost its bearings, thanks to the prestige of postmodernists such as Umberto Eco. He stands for the intellectuals of the 21st century who, like those of the last century, commit trahison des clercs by flirting with anti-Semitism when their duty is to take a clear stand against it.
if postmodernism truly is nothing more than a futile, meaningless game, it seems harsh to accuse it and its practitioners of fanning the flames of anti-semitism.
robert moore’s article in n+1 explores the e-book from its inception in 1971 to future adumbrations, including interactive texts and those which rearrange themselves anew with every reading.
impressive and involving as a lot of these are, the future of linear text and storytelling is still (- i think, and i think robert moore thinks so too -) bright.
as moore puts it: Writing is a miraculous technology all its own—a code that, when input through the optic nerve, induces structured, coherent hallucinations.
article by alan levinovitz (in the millions) looks at the history of the blurb from roman times to now.
the template was set by erasmus of rotterdam’s puff for his friend and fellow humanist thomas more:
“All the learned unanimously subscribe to my opinion, and esteem even more highly than I the divine wit of this man…”
george orwell excoriated blurbs, describing them as:
“disgusting tripe,” quoting a particularly odious example from the Sunday Times:
“If you can read this book and not shriek with delight, your soul is dead.”
the ubiquity of blurbs by generous writers like (say) salman rushdie makes some readers wonder about their sincerity.
even so, a blurb from a famous writer for a new one must increase sales, otherwise no one would bother.
 |
| a goldfish |
 |
| james patterson |
Rumours about James Patterson and his voracious appetites take on increasingly bizarre forms.
Patterson shifts more books than anyone on the planet (14 million copies in 2009, says the NYT).
His books straddle the thriller, YA and romance markets.
With his co-authors, he publishes 9 or more new titles a year.
If he didn’t invent this “studio” approach (it’s reminiscent of Rembrandt, Van Dyck, et al) he certainly practices it more successfully than anybody else..
But he always wants more:
When sales figures showed that he and John Grisham were running nearly neck and neck on the East Coast but that Grisham had a big lead out West, Patterson set his second thriller series, “The Women’s Murder Club,” about a group of women who solve murder mysteries, in San Francisco. (quoted from NYT article)
When he heard that he was a key player on five of Hachette’s six imprints, he asked which one he was missing. Told it was the religious imprint, he said, “I can do that.”
Patterson’s aggressive branding and marketing supports books which millions happily devour. And he gives back, too, with his ReadKiddoRead platform to encourage literacy among the young.
Combining his unquenchable hunger for success with his intolerance of others’, however, it can surely only be a question of time before the headline James Patterson Swallowed My Goldfish – And the Bowl With It! appears.
Because Patterson doesn’t want to be the biggest fish in the bowl. He wants to ingest the whole bowl – gravel and plastic props included – into his insatiable maw!
Edward Docx says Postmodernism is Dead – in this article in Prospect.
Appropriate that the announcement should come via an exhibition, at the V & A no less.
Docx gives his definition of Postmodernism and says its death is heralded by
three ideas, of specificity, of values and of authenticity, (which) are at odds with postmodernism. We are entering a new age. Let’s call it the Age of Authenticism and see how we get on.
“Authenticism” (to me) sounds rather too worthy but it’s a persuasive line for all that.
Although I sometimes wonder whether there isn’t as much of value in the concept of Trash as Authenticity. Put another way, what, au fond, is more authentic than trash?
But maybe those are post-postmodern questions?
life is a ghostwritten script
a half-heard whispered soundtrack
of cues and quotes we’ve ripped
from old remastered notes, unverified facts…
*
life is an unwritten message –
never sent, unborn, undead,
relating a world without age
where words merely babble, only read
*
to alter their sense
and scatter random clues which give
us relics of self, and change the tense –
a poem of birth to live.
*
and we retrace our poems of birth
alive in love in every time
and every breath
whose heartbeat pumps our rhyme –
*
our poetry mutates
us and those who heed
our words in altered states
wake love out of need.
freddie
june 2011
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| saturn at equinox |
*
**
*
when darkness fades, and dawn lights up your eyes,
deep in the morning silence we make love –
melt in the dream of a day as night dies.
i come to life in your love, and realize
you’re the sun-cusped girl i’ve always dreamed of
when darkness fades, and dawn lights up your eyes.
you turn me on each waking hour, sunrise
to sunrise, all radiating love –
melt in the dream of a day as night dies,
as earth tilts, night and day merge, and we rise
at the equinox – emotion’s axes move
when darkness fades, and dawn lights up your eyes.
spectral in the shadows, dark matter flies
while we explore each arc of our subsolar love –
melt in the dream of a day as night dies.
we find ourselves – feverish fantasies,
bodies in ethereal motion, orbiting love
when darkness fades, and dawn lights up your eyes –
melt in the dream of a day as night dies.
freddie
this is the third and final part of this triptych of easter poems.
i mean to illustrate them with a tasteful and beautiful picture of easter eggs.
who knew when they loved how to love?
wasn’t love being the same as the loved
one – one – one could never disentangle?
and being apart, wasn’t it not like life
at all, unwhole, the atom split in two,
something alone no one could do?
so was this whole undoing then a way to become whole
when they loved – but who knew how to love?
*
who knew when they lost how to lose?
wasn’t losing it all the only way to find your
self: self – selflessness being everything to have
in nothing, and to gain by giving it all
away for a kiss of the air
and find our heartlove beating everywhere –
we love and feel our lives a universe
which when we lose, who knows what we lost?
*
who knew when they lived how to live?
or be the one that wasn’t just alone to
live: live – live recording loops unending
till the next verse overwrites us?
to be reborn’s to think those other unbecoming lives we had were fakes
being we alone have now got what it takes –
maybe another life to be the ones
who knew when they lived how to live?
freddie
easter 2011
i dreamed a dream of life, and lived it in my sleep
and when i woke i saw through a ghost’s eyes:
a scrawling world of vacant cemeteries,
queasy seas of memory, reflections deep,
and muffled beyond purple coral banks, skies
unfathomable as eternity…
… i thought it was the vanished i could see –
void significant nothings, truth-packed lies,
unrisen suns, eclipsed in tenseless space.
for i was a poet of when
and now and then
saw written in your face
love stuff that words forgot to write –
while palpitating in our hearts tonight
are words in blood which leave no other trace
but of another self, another place
whose vanishings recur, but always out of sight.
*
we live a poem of when, but otherwhere
and othertime – like ivy spread on vines –
creep through our veins: chance, undeciphered signs,
runes and symptoms of things which are not there.
like shadows in a maze of moonshine
we black out, eyeless and pale in the night –
but when cold dawn dissolves us, hold on tight
together, two syllables that overspilled the line.
being alive at all
even hearing quite another call
is being blessed
in incomprehension, in difference;
and inner reflections on our innocence
are inattentive to our interest –
all to the good – beyond reason and rhyme
we live a poem of when, that otherwhere and othertime.
freddie
easter 2011
i snap happiness
and in an easter egg-hunt
i happen on it.
*
i happen on it
like an egg under a bush
in springtime hatches.
*
snip-snap-happy now
a shutter on opening
floats in reflections.
*
float on in a flood
sun seasoned petals swirling
butterfly wings past.
*
i happen on you
no matter what the season
springs of happiness.
freddie
easter 2011
nicholas carr, in the shallows, says the internet saps creativity.
by altering neuroplastic highways in our brains, it erodes our memories: thanks to google, we don’t have to remember anything anymore.
it is a sinister form of cortical re-mapping.
for, if creation is combining cognitive fluidity with intuitions and memory, a dependence on surfing is bad for it.
carr’s book is well reviewed by jim holt in the london review of books.
bunny de neude is a burlesque artiste in the thriller i’m writing.
by coincidence, there’s a square in utrecht called de neude, on which stands this statue, thinker on a rock, by barry flanagan.
it is a cross between rodin’s thinker and bugs bunny.
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| Bunny de Neude (Thinker on a Rock) by Barry Flanagan |
i’ve loved les tres riches heures du duc de berry, by the limbourg brothers (in dutch: de gebroeders van limburg) since i was a kid.
here’s february:
(this is the first poem i wrote on my bebook)
can’t feel – no sound, no birds
here in the verbosphere
there are no stars
(except as four-letter words)
nothing rough nor nothing blue
no knives to hack you scars
no coldnesses of words untrue
uncut the story clear
(we are all a missing clue).
but what could be more dear
when we is me and me is you
than this silent verbosphere?
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| angel, by melozzo da farli, c. 1480 |
“… be satisfied with your Lot.”
a highly unfashionable, heretical notion in our age of aspirational discontent.
(and yet, one would do well to ponder what one’s Lot was…)
i’ve recast the line for a cult-leader character of mine:
“… take your Lot lightly.”
in line with g.k.chesterton’s curiously new-agey:
“Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.“
(which, in turn, was given a spin by our current pope, benedict: “Die Engel können fliegen, weil sie sich leicht nehmen.”)
chesterton was brilliant with that idea of lightness and not taking oneself seriously:
“For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.”
i have been tinkering with the poem, past lost lies, i put on this blog last week.
i remember when i started writing it, it was with the intention of writing a sonnet –
(and maybe it is fanciful but as i posted it, it did seem truncated – the truncation however, being somewhat apt to the subject, didnt jar too much in my head.)
but now having tinkered, it is duly a sonnet, and completes a procrastinated teenage impulse, a true embodiment of what it is about…
here’s the text:
past lost love (procrastination)
… i have spent my life procrastinating
each hour postponing the next, so sad
to be without the love i want so bad
as my past lost lies, insinuating…
a sense of wantonness into my head,
her warmth between my sheets –
– i remember
fucking and kissing in cold november…
the smell and feel of her fresh in my bed
and she so unexplored, driving me mad
with lust to be once again without lust
to lose her, let her go in timeless trust,
the best i had, or ever dreamed i had…
… but you today are all that time postponed
and past lost love deferred but not disowned…
freddie omm
this review (god’s equations?) by john leslie of new books by roger penrose and stephen hawking/leonard mlodinow, deals with penrose’s theory of cosmic cycles:
“…infinite time doesn’t look infinite to photons, “particles of light” without mass (more technically, without “rest-mass”). To a photon, traversing an infinite distance seems to take no time at all. Particles possessing mass are tiny “clocks”. The photon isn’t. It doesn’t “tick”. And, immense ages after all black holes have evaporated entirely through the process discovered by Hawking, the universe may contain nothing that could act as a clock. Particles possessing mass may one and all have become massless very, very gradually. Well, in Einstein’s world clocks are crucial to measuring distances. If eventually there were no clocks, just any distance could readily be traversed. Not only could the universe stop getting older and older; it could actually lose its vastness. This would allow things to carry over smoothly into a new Bang.”
leslie also discusses hawking and mlodinow’s ideas about the many-branched universe:
All branches are equally real, for despite appearances superpositions never collapse. They instead grow to include whomever observes them; any observer develops seemingly incompatible properties. In a complex sense, the observer splits or branches. Well, scientists in the “quantum cosmology” community mostly accept this. However, they would typically reject the book’s idea that all branching depends on observations. Suppose your double, your “other half” with seemingly incompatible properties, inhabits a universe-branch where a cat is alive. In your branch a double of the cat is dead. Looking to see which branch you inhabited needn’t, most of them would say, be what killed that cat.
The book’s ideas about creating the past render matters worse. “Observations you make on a system in the present affect its past.” This is proved, the authors say, by “delayed choice experiments” where any question to be asked experimentally is decided at a late moment. Yet couldn’t you instead claim that past events merely looked as if they’d taken particular forms, or else that they took them, but only in a universe-branch into which the experimental decision helped to place you? Either way, nothing ever reacts to a choice which hasn’t yet been made.
in limiting our consideration only to dimensions which are known, however, we must all be missing a few tricks (not that i think theories should be built on unknown dimensions…).
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| past lost lies, by f.k.omm |
it’s an old poem i wrote back in the day.
it is an octet and goes like this:
. . . i have spent my day procrastinating
each hour postponing the next, so sad
to be without the love i want so bad
as my past lost lies, insinuating
each one into my soul, driving me mad
with lust to be once again without lust
to lose you, let you go with timeless trust,
the best i had, or ever dreamed i had . . .
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| books, by ian britton |
this article by onnesha royschoudhuri sets out a familiar tale about amazon’s aggressive marketing of books as if they were cans of soup.
twisted algorithms recommending “books you might like” lead you to books whose publishers have paid for the privilege, it isn’t based on previous purchase or personal interest alone.
publishers who don’t play along and give amazon the discounts it demands are delisted or have their books’ “buy buttons” removed.
it is a depressing, predicable tale of market dominance and the arrogance it spawns.
although happily for consumers, writers and publishers, of course, such arrogance tends to lead to its own destruction.
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| page from prelim draft of “the dark gospel”, by f.k.omm |
*
**
*
our selves are narratives written out of (or into) our experience.
each self is a story, or a series of stories.
neuroscientist michael gazzaniga writes: These narratives of our past behaviour seep into our awareness and give us an autobiography .
this is not quite joan didion’s classic “we tell each other stories in order to live” line – it is less causal, less contentiously debatable, and more scientific:
the left hemisphere’s language areas draw on information in memory (amygdalo-hippocampal circuits, dorsolateral prefrontal cortices) and planning regions (orbitofrontal cortices).
damage to these regions disrupts narration, leading to such things as unbounded narration (our narratives are unconstrained by reality) and denarration (we are unable to generate any narratives, external or internal).
john bickle and sean keating suggest the narrative self is written by “our little inner voice”. they specualte that as traditional narratives are joined by digital ones, our sense of self may see a corresponding change:
Digital technologies… are producing narratives that stray from this classic structure. New communicative interfaces allow for novel narrative interactions and constructions. Multi-user domains (MUDs), massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), hypertext and cybertext all loosen traditional narrative structure. Digital narratives, in their extremes, are co-creations of the authors, users and media. Multiple entry points into continuously developing narratives are available, often for multiple co-constructors.
even so, they concede that “Unbounded digital narratives, unconstrained by familiar temporal, causal ordering, seem psychologically implausible as sources for enduring, communicating selves.”
and yet, “the self as a story on social media” – where millions of people are both writing their own narrative selves, while being concurrently influenced and reshaped by other narratives – is a self that is fundamentally different to the selves that were possible before the digital age.
having said that, the kinds of narrative selves thus created do not necessarily deviate from pre-digital story arcs, of course. our urges, motivations, personal growth, dreams, conflicts, ideals, resolutions and melodramas still exist as before.
defining the self may still be a matter of projecting our experience onto “classic” narrative templates.
but perhaps digital intercourse and storytelling do create new storylines and templates. certainly there will be a greater drive to simplicity in the stories that become widely popular.
and this may be true of broader narratives, too – the ones about groups of people, not just individuals, but shared identities, or regions, countries and the planet – the purpose of (and our place in) the universe, even.
link to bickle and keating’s article in new scientist:
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/11/storytelling-20-when-new-narratives-meet-old-brains.html
in my new book, the dark gospel, the main character has the skill of psionic projection.
 l |
| lorenzini pores on snout of tiger shark (pic by albert kok) |
this has set me thinking about electroreceptivity, a related function channelled (in sharks and other elasmobranchs) through the ampullae of lorenzini.
The ampullae of Lorenzini are complicated and extensive specialized skin sense organs characteristic of sharks and rays…electroreceptive units in sharks. They are jelly-filled canals found on the head of the animal which form a system of sense organs, each of which receives stimuli from the outside environment through the dermis and epidermis. Each canal ends in groups of small bulges lined by the sensory epithelium. A small bundle of afferent nerve fibers innervates each ampullae; there are no efferent fibers (Murray, 1974). The ampullae are mostly clustered into groups. Electroreceptors enable the elasmobranchs to search and locate prey and navigate through the earth’s ocean and seas. Electroreception allows these animals to sense the presence of their victims long before the victims have the chance to see their predators. This awesome advantage has made these animals into one of the most threatening predators on earth.
(faramarr samie, “electroreception in elasmobranchs”, full article here: http://wrt-intertext.syr.edu/ii2/samie.html)
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| lilith, by john collier |
lilith was created at the same time and from the same earth as adam, according to 13th century rabbi isaac ben jacob ha-kohen.
she left adam to find herself, mating with the archangel samael.
to stop lilith and samael’s demonic children lilin taking over the world, god castrated samael.
today she is often associated with demonoid lore and with the kabbalah.
i am in the middle of writing an alternative opening for my thriller, the dark gospel.
lex, the hero of the book, has recurring dreams which come true, and this opening describes one of them at the moment of becoming so…
i’m rather down on prologuey type openings usually – it can spoil unity and flow – so i may yet discard it.
as i am interweaving past and present throughout the book, though, it may work better than usual.
an article about speech codes and hate speech and the notion, quite established nowadays, that
to be really tolerant, to be really multicultural, you… suppress hateful, mean, cruel, discriminatory thoughts and speech. To ensure civility you… suppress harsh or hurtful speech…
‘I always like to put the Buddhist argument for freedom of speech’, says Lukianoff. ‘Buddhists believe life is pain and they have a point. You do someone a tremendous disservice if you teach them that pain in life is a distortion of life. Because as soon as you start seeing hurtful things as being aberrations rather than part of normal human existence, then you start to see robust debate and disagreement as a distortion of the human experience rather than a part of the human experience…
Lukianoff says we have to move away from the idea that ‘words are like bullets’, that speech is a form of physical assault, and recognise that being argued with, even vociferously, is not the same as being beaten up. However, he says, ‘maybe words should wound. What’s so bad about that? The fact that words can hurt feelings, the fact that they carry emotional charges, is all the more reason for protecting them from censorship. Because the whole point of free speech is to have deep, meaningful, robust debates. We have to have deadly serious discussions about deadly serious things – and we can’t do that if everyone is listening out for potentially offensive words rather than thinking about and responding to the ideas being expressed.’
link to the full article in spiked:
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9905/
mr wind reminds me there was once a calvin klein be, too!
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| a long time ago |
rereading lady with lapdog again (in translation) i was struck by the brilliant omniscience of chekhov’s narrative, and then enraged by the inconsistency in the translations of the lady’s hatgear.
in constance garnett’s translation it is a béret, in david magarshack’s penguin translation it is a toque.
berets are fairly ordinary working class items; toques are much more glam – napoleon replaced crowns on family crests with a nicely codified system of toques:
a Napoleonic Duke used a toque with 7 ostrich feathers and 3 lambrequins, a Count a toque with five feathers and two lambrequins, a Baron three feathers and one lambrequin, a Knight only one ostrich feather. (wikipedia)
i wonder what made constance prefer the beret over the toque?
