*******BREASTBEATERS*******
Berkeley Pamphlets
1963
I
POEMS OF BERKELEY
1961
Reminiscence of a Lost Childhood
Creatures of the Night
The Last Journey
Pinnacles of Hope
II
POEMS OF APTOS
1962
And I a Running Grave
Chartered Streets
The Hand of Lilith
Prufrock's Lament
A "D.T." Poem
Another "D.T." Poem
POEMS OF BERKELEY
"…a difficult birth astride an open grave."
REMINISCENCE OF A LOST CHILDHOOD
i
grandure of grey dawn in transparent gold.
Miramids of restless weary wanderers
to play the harpstrings of youth
and separating a bright red bar
held by a square bolt.
Did you ever think the world was swinging
to and fro
and you, my love, were standing still?
It's true, you know, and what is more
the yellow sky begins to change with day
and clouds appear
it doesn't hurt one bit
till one discovers the strange delight
by which we hang forever,
and that tiny chasm of delight
becomes an abyssal depth of horrors untold
where phantoms hold their young
and nourish on the ecstacy of children's prayers.
It matters not what desolute and deserted thoughts
wander in these caves of dark,
for where the fountainhead of
predetermined truth abides,
the pestilence of earthly cares
can render not one scrap of purity
from its incesstial breast.
Time has stopped and all stands still.
Rust has formed around the bolt
my Mother told me I'd be late for lunch
and the green, green grass has grown so tall.
Only yesterday, my dear,
we played and sang and danced
till twilight forced an evening's rest.
We had no cares then, you and I;
we worried not about this and that.
Grey nuptial haze has blotted out
the norstalgic past
that had no vivid core by which to grasp.
We wandered long and weary were.
What has become of all our youth
with vigor and courageous feat?
There is no hope for us grown old
to change Time, that accursed foe,
who in her fathomless depths
has managed to strangle hope.
And what of noontime rides in wooded glades
where forest creatures came out to play
and the grass was glisening with noontime dew
and all was real, my dear,
all was real?
Whence came the evil serpent
of lustrious woe,
killing tameness in the bestial heart,
filling all with drops of dread,
and plaguing ancestrial tombs
with blotches of coagulated red?
From depths below, my dear,
from down within the firey furnaces
of the earth's lucid soul.
From where ebony blends with pearl,
and ivory is stained with soot,
creeps hence the foul fairing thing
which is the accursed disease, distrought.
ii
here I lurked in narrow hallways,
while from musty corners,
forgotten by dust and flesh,
there came in fast, thick motion,
strange luminous shapes,
draped in gowns of gold and dark.
I cried out in fear
but nowhere a salient hand to hold
these childhood tremers
as terestial as the barren earth.
My mind in exoplasmic quivers
gave up at last
and subsided to view the final form anew:
vast torrents of carrion flesh
of indescribable consequences,
of indescribable significence
rained and ripened the tremulous trepidation
of that spherical world below.
What caused
this nightmare of forbidden thoughts
to trace itself across my wearied brow?
What cause
but that firey plane of infenitesimulitude
and dearth,
that dearth of unquenched souls in Hell.
CREATURES OF THE NIGHT
The din of turbulance in cacophonic melody
resounds in abyssal viciousness.
Forsaken by all devine,
mindless of even that
granted by the grace of God.
Turmult of passion,
and then
a sleep of never-ending forgetfulness
…until,
with soft, sweet strokes,
came it by way
of musty depths and frosted filament
and homeward drifted.
Nor with vague persistence
for tired, worn tissue,
erased its way from side to side
in absence of forlorne embrace to cloudless sky,
where screened by rays of curling sea,
loomed its way to dark and death.
Turbulant distance,
pinned against mask in drumming harshness,
and fear,
forced, formed, and no release endowed.
By way of March,
crawling pinnacles leap from nest
to canyon of crowed myramid
and back.
THE LAST JOURNEY
Onward, wedged in cracks of darkness===
Into eternity.
Where dark meets light,
The effulgent quality of life,
Bleeched white with pathos of forgotten Gods,
Reflects the horrid bareness of a logic
Lost upon departure.
Crepusculance.
Fear of summoned insanity.
Given reason===artificial omnipotence:
And then indifference to the link
That strains the enduring truth.
PINNACLES OF HOPE
Four days, two years, and one wretched night,
suffering agonies of tortured souls.
Crimson,
flowing in vast currents of never-ending strife,
to drown thoughts of vibrant light,
like mamouth palms forcing vision downward
into the abysmal depths of consciousness,
was,
as one remembers long ago moments of pleasure
and pain
and joyous frustrations of intimate understanding,
covering and overbounding
and forcing its way into vibrant crepusculance.
And here,
within the effulgent quality of halucination,
stands one solitary upon the brink of clearness:
knowing…partially…not knowing,
and back with pendulum stroke,
seeing…fading…
and again into the black opaquness of thought
to be wrought of greater strength,
anew.
Fur-lined clouds of clouded whisps,
modulating faster, ever faster,
in confusing colors,
where shades prevail,
and one perceives the essence,
as if always known,
as if from where living substance
brought forth primary,
had been granted by some devine Miranda
understanding, innate.
Opaque transpearance of contrdictory light
and shades of grey and depth.
Here,
where all known
adds superficiality
to the poignant truth of nothingness,
absolute is only relative to absolute,
and being potential
is known before birth,
an aftermath of failing sounds and constanance.
Contrasts of shades of colors of fuming grey,
curling, covering, uncovering…seams of ebony.
And then away.
Concurrents of misty forms
yet unrecogizable as the child's first sight
in bronze twinkles of forgetfulness.
Partial appearance in one dusty, desolute corner,
gaining shape in undulating turmoil,
rising with tides of nostalgic images
until complete.
Time crossed, never ceased,
a fluctuating figment of remorse and fear and strife,
a paraphrase of captured past,
to hold,
to fall in wonderment,
and at last accept.
Epidomized blossom of fragrant eternal fruition,
lost in self-amelioration and deceit…
lost in degradation and apparent end…
and now recaptured in hedionistic contraception.
Decour of flowing lavender,
wrinkled grey carressed by abruptnes of line,
where new efidence overlaps into old.
Abundance of undivided line
prominent in folds of saturated green,
dripping, dripping till they
"fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion."
And from afar, with floating fragments:
a voice.
Distorted,
yet distinguishable from rosin,
sundried notes of acient lute.
Soft wisper and louder: still a voice.
Name once called; then without response, "Alas!"
Again the voice,
like a wearied violin
in sustainance upon a single chord:
tone of ghastly irratation deep into marrow,
where,
having gained momementum,
searches out all cringing stone.
Petrified, frosted grey-brown ore settles,
soothes the overall annoyance
till agony remains in unborn form,
the fetus of perpetual nourishment.
Dull orange of sandstone to flourescent sheen,
and curling still.
Constriction of fibers,
moist with bloody presperation.
Couragous uplifting: strenous movement and tension,
hope and enlightenment
through "trepedation of the spheres."
And all about they grope and crawl and slide
deeper into darkness, till faint shadows,
as pebbles in gliding
towards bottom of sideless wells,
become the only sight one sees.
Here they groan
and suffer torments unkown to those above
and real.
Here they stare
with blank sockets into surroundings twice removed,
and then, with heavy lung,
heave up the groans of forgotten anguish.
Upon reaching the outermost crest,
flashes of glaring light prevail
and, blinded, dig deep their talons in vain.
Salvation from within,
lost by eons of incoherrent conflict.
Lugged down by age and trial,
forgotten by their fortification of rationality,
fall in muck and drown,
only to regain footing and begin again…
palpatating in endless cycle.
Here, among lost pinnacles of hope,
Here, lost among pinnacles of hope,
Are those that God himself
Remembers not.
Here men with tainted lips,
Sealed by Fate's dread curse,
Waste and bide their time,
Till Remorse in Torture's gown takes hold,
And they are forced to drown.
POEMS OF APTOS
"bababadblgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!"
AND I A RUNNING GRAVE
The force that drives the flower
Drives the flesh; that makes the winter wither
Is our guide.
While seeds in putrid furrows fall to dust,
The veins of life resound with Pagan pride.
The might that moves the spheres
Moves the soul; that changes night to day
Is our command.
The sea’s tormented tiers force us to rest,
While each wet rock lies rancid in the sand.
And I, on the jagged beach of Time,
Transfigured in a running grave,
Await a shrouded metaphor
To soothe the moonlost wave.
CHARTERED STREETS
the honeybreasted beauties bite my breath
and in the bite, drive themselves to dust.
in each patterned street,
the roundmouthed hollocasts we meet;
in each breast of fire,
the fregrance of desire.
and as I wander in these streets,
old, withered, dry, dusty streets,
as I wander in these streets,
these streets of fire,
the fire of my desire is dissolved to dust.
let me sleep; let me sleep.
and in this final sleep,
I will return to those never-ending streets.
and as I return,
a hollocast of hail will beat my breast,
harpies howl;
and death, dismal death
will pluck the eyebrow of dispair
from my mind’s eye.
THE HAND OF LILTH
Five secular signs, sounds of trustworthy love,
Replenish you with paralytic breath.
Five harsh chords, redundant in their strain,
Foul my atlas-cherub winds.
I forked the virgin zero from my globe;
Five firey footsteps to the grave.
PRUFROCK’S LAMENT
I see my life in seward lie,
Gold tread bare to my mind’s eye.
A mummy’s cloth to my bloodclot soul,
I break full tilt to the moon.
A “D.T.” POEM
“I gave my soul a blind, slashed eye”
and the blood came forth in slow, thick drops:
steel-blue blood with a firey heat,
ice-blue blood that burns the quick,
animal-blood that curdles the nerves,
a translucent-blood that breaks the day.
I gave my soul a blind, slashed eye
and redoubled the misery of the tomb…
I gave my soul a blind, slashed eye
and each red sense cried out in pain:
all perceived the crisscrossed staves;
all perceived the crosseyed fields;
all perceived the black war doves,
the black war doves that temper my steel.
I gave my soul a blind, slashed eye
and redoubled the agony of the tomb…
I gave my soul a blind, slashed eye
and my wax flesh gave up the ghost:
the firey-cold, the worm-worn womb,
the shrouded sails of sargasso days,
left life in thelurch and an albatros.
I gave my soul a blind, slashed eye
and Eli, Eli…was the sound I heard.
ANOTHER “D.T.” POEM
Apple-eyed Adam with a jaw for news
bit into the shriek of a mandrake root
to give birth to the sea and the long-legged bait,
the long-legged bait with hooks for limbs.
Evey-eyed Adam with an eye or for orbs
rapped himself in a clover patch
to protect his youthful look.
Womb-eyed Adam made a flight to his grave:
and the burly-eyed boys with the blood-red loins
hovered, and carressed his birth;
and the Lilithine harpies with horns in their heads
redoubled the cry of the seed;
and wherever he went in the firey-eyed night,
snow covered his quivering prints.
