ventura beach revisited
*
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.
valentine possibilities (haiku couple)
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)
salle des pas perdus – poitiers
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
come to me – sonnet
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
new year 1296, the hague – floris wakes in the binnenhof (five haiku)
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
shoredays, yoredays: seven haiku on a beach
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
who am i (lana wachowski)
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…)
endings & beginnings
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