Seeking Byzantium Poem by Leon Moon

My mind is a wasteland of eternal fantasy
And to see, is to hustle mirages of old age
Bowing to youth in despairing barbarity.
I am no more than a silhouette evoked with rage;
Under this thick leather and malleable soul
Lives the magic of the young, the magic stole.

I sink into the intellect of my chair,
Brashed in rose-mahogany spines
Spreading crooked, latching onto my limbs.
I configure a forest, so vague that it must be a dream;
Extinct birds whistle temptations and erotic songs
As palats of vision fall as dust in throngs.

I will craft this soft, stiff flesh,
Sturdy with poseur wrinkles lost in memories and emanations,
Into a boat free of loose reflections and mutiny
Which are carried in each wave of the Sea;
And the horizon of youth shall beckon me
And Horus' Earth shan't scorch me as I run free.


I called myself grandfather of the formless
And played the role of a child with no reason; -
I seek myself in all things, skinning dust to less

Than sight under bitter eyes, a fault in the sailors enterprise,
Wicked with salt and unwoken mystery
That guides nothing but this boat I adore.
I know all Captain's seeks the clarity of death;
And so, I will know, that channeled paradise, that worthy-of-silence empire
Struck with golden mosaics that make flesh light through fire.

Here, I find nothing but soles within soles
That whisper proverbs of death in childhood,
Bare head in hands, blood marinates modernity.
Sweeping me off my feet, laying me empty and covered in water;
I remember once, I stayed afloat, and became a deep-set alchemist
Where I knew what awaited me, souvenired myself a pessimist.

Wisdom in age is but a feeble myth
Contrived by raped minds of Alice-Clock gyres
That spin in the minds of men lost within themselves.
They're burnt by world which encaptivates them, their youth's infernity;
They blow Ash and rubble onto necks, their cells are black with smoke;
Andink is their ‘repentance', Pan is their face of hopeless guilt
That is the face of a malicious child, of whom only I have built.

My Dense appellations emerse from the matured apprehensions
And my aim, the desire of will, is a forgotten revolutionary,
Truth seeks itself obvious as it's immortalised dimensions.

Visions stoop into their play,
And so I accustom myself unto myself:
Horizons seem to melt and flood the day,
I figured wise to surrender unto myself;
And so have I lived in eternity's squalor, through stains and masks
That show no sorrow to the dimensions of mirrors or tasks.

Apollo's burning eyes chiseled into the vulnerability
That constructs the fleshes of maturity
Teethe my brain upon the unconsidered shore.
Congregations of golden chains and grains crust the Picasso-lined rocks
With the gleaming warmth branded upon the wet gums of memory;
The illusion of age is created by the loss of loving instinct and mummified dedications.

Within the city square, past the narrated shore, a hybrid structure stands
And the ineffable transition of intellect that immortalises a sense of stature
Is made fierce, loyal and resolute, glass-eyed by an attentive Wolf.
Although adorned in shining abstracts of streaming gold, his teeth seem shaven;
I bask in the entransing waves of heat, seduced enough to only be surprised
As he poses to me, an oration unexpected from a God, a memory.

Nothing can't be so, and I have found intellect in compromise:
His chest ages like parent sorrow, relinquishments refined out of importance,
For the idol beckoned out in what he would philosophise for no one:

"We relish in the sorrow of age,
It's unwelcoming surprise and empty accustoms
Though, it is no more than a prophesied idea within the barrage
Of, like your age, spurring intellectually squanched desires and communals;
Pass beyond the impending Moon, beyond the twinkling appendages and Saturn's viridescence
And again, beyond the light which will burn."


My ears seem to fit the head of a confused child comforted in trust,
I hold the past within each locked cell of my youth, a prisoner's devout grips
Unify my salvation, I am embodied by the bust.

Familiarity is so classic I almost hurdle to my knees and dance,
The bronze of youth seems bold enough to make a statue of my prime,
And the natures of man are being made hysterical to vain wisdom.
I seem young enough to curl and cry, brave enough to hurl and fly;
But the reason has arrived again, bleak and unformed in it's reign
And it's the fact I can't express myself, or those who I am, that causes me pain.

Age loses the senses in cultivation
But senses are the compass of imperial naivety! -
So strong that denial is pride in a shroud.
Skulls stare and scar hearts by that reason alone;
Infancy still lives within me as agitations
And those beguile and solid implications.

I want to unravel from the cycles of self-mind hierarchy
Where I am a student, a crystalline connoisseur
Of self-loathing and prosecuted tyranny.
I will strip myself from this waste and fur;
Mirrors call to the radical pariah's pain
As doubts and friends call Thoth insane.


Life is a cycle of derangement;
Where the most-part is the seeking of a conclusion
That can only justify a belief for the grand arrangement.

Since I am blind to detail and unable to articulate my youth
I shall thread the common desires and worn respect
Unto the tight viscera that shows my definity in the making.
Embroideries hide my soft skin and hang like buntings;
My wrinkles scape across the fervour of my skin, decking the clouds, outside-within
And I am made Ancient Greek by a red-spotted, fulgent white chin.

The vessel of thought is the home of the soul
And I reverse back into the bilge, claws burnt to hazel stretch-marks,
Growing unto the natures of the accounted common man
On which I have accounted my putative of life;
With a baton for the heavens and grounding fingers hung
I confine within the bindings laws of the old and young.

And I have no memory of Byzantium
Nor of what has hindered me and made these thoughts come;
But my youth is now something different,
My old age is defined only by faithful shoulders and torment;
Rejoice has no need to be
For it exists with me, with eternity.


And before I set out, I wrote
Of the unintended secrets of the journey
That I should find within this boat…

"Advanced thinking may be the parent of posterity
And change shall not be stained by infant nobility,
By itself, or for now, the damp light that whispers;
One may seek death in all its forms, and be an actor of all life,
Death is the defining nature of life, the bleak necessity of breath
And my youth would never have lived without age, or death."