The Myth Of Masks And Origins Poem by Barry Van Asten

With half a mind for metering,
We all must wear the same mask here.
Where sorrows mapped upon our faces
Are lines written on our hands.
And here, I find, I will be wandering
Those dark and silent corridors,
Holding on to girlhood's pigtails
And touching her bronze limbs once more,
That quickly turn to powdered chalk
Beneath my wild and roving hands
That draws death nearer with each stroke
To smudge over our yesterdays and our origins.
Yet her lullaby lips would not say yes
To my chosen words - those foolish things.

And I look towards the mirrored doom
To see my own soul shown in selected time,
As the hawker in the cosmos climbs
Behind some womanly vision,
Like a gold and ever flowing stream -
A Xanadu of imperfection
Vanishing down the long gardens
Into the passage of time,
To scribble this mess of life away
And write the damned lot from my brain.

Years later,
The bitter ring of puzzled myth
Stopped me loving someone.
And through my own unnatural vigour
I thought: why can't I be free;
Free from one's own cellular making
Where we are preludes of invented
Evolution's mockery?
Free from this thick ether we breathe
And free from one's dreams, forever.

I

Under correct lighting, she is
Venus in trouble;
Thrusting herself into opposites
By the green light that glows.
Within her lips a universe:
A chapter-house of indecision.

Dimensions change and ghosts listen
To the jet boom and march of pensive time,
As crossed Demeter, by broad meadows,
Matchless in her unstoppable decline,
Turns over her cosmos and dreams once more
Of some Hercule's at the coal-face, again.

And there, by the rivers of sharp time,
A day of words, worlds away
Along the red rush of madness, where I find
I am under eternity's watchful eye
That cannot see past dawn's perfection,
Or this intrusion that cannot love or die.

Cathedrals groan with a sea-ward glance
Where words repeated softly chime.
I make this mask my own, and find
I juggle the sun and the moon through space
That whistles through my afterlife -
A delicate obsession in its prime.

Yet her rose hath bloomed in womanhood,
Cyclones away...so far away...
Sculpting herself under daydreams
Where through our eyes we are exchanged.
But the black woe of the tide has called me:
Movement of the Seine.

These hours locked in solitary ways;
Stung in animal death (come soon)
Have spared me. And by degrees
Nothing changes, or so it seems...
You're worlds to me -
You're worlds away.

II

In artificial light, he is
Adonis - adorable,
Flinging himself into opposites.
Upright in Arcady,
One sees oneself and retreats
Into a Northern vale, and poison.

Seducing under my skin, eels glisten
In this jet age where early mother's blooming.
Between the light, I fall away
Into a day of black suspension
Held by a devil with a slow hand.
And in my anguish I grasped passing time...

Like angels in swansong darkness, I find
The winter trees and I glow.
In the grandeur of our dreams, we are there,
Yet who sits with me but cannot know
That a machine has declared itself our god,
And we are dreams, dreaming there?

The life I lead bleeds me dry and fire
Beneath an altar warms a jar,
Changing my dimensions within;
Singeing nerve-endings and soft tissue:
You keep me always ruined, I said,
Wrapped inside this endless skin.

In his sterile, easy slumber -
He wants me: thief of beauty.
Dead inside, he has drowned me
In the wide orbits of his cobalt eyes.
He whispers and wants all of me:
Movement of the Thames.

My living tree - genealogy,
Holds secrets of statues and stones.
And to the changeless tide, I will go,
Because I cannot stay, I know,
In this mask always and look on you
Worlds and worlds away.

III

How I am damaged by the afternoon's light
Where larger worlds than this resist
To crease in the depths of love and death.
Yet, through the laws of alchemy,
I am a blue monkey and I glow
Like a torso full of gypsy rhythm.

And I am gold and I flow through the midsummer fires
That engulfs the head's accumulation of lifetimes.
And at the stroke of midnight - a vermilion swan
Is wrenched from purple veins that rot;
Concealed within a moated mausoleum -
I hear them signalling under my skin.

And in baroque splendour - Death,
Is snorting in corners and dunging,
Shuffling by sorrow's robe of regret.
While a eunuch in the monument is searching
The darker regions. Nothing sleeps -
A violet panther through the midnight creeps,

Shaping itself by the light of this room.
Here, Behemoth's squat frame dangles wax fingers,
Dripping like sodium candles aflame.
There, in macabre rutting, a red bristling pig,
It's eyes broken in the morning sun,
Performs staggering routines by outside force.

And in antique times - Babalon,
Is transfixed by the light of the moon,
Longing for the kiss of madrigal lips,
Only to look on Sodom's pink gaze again:
Am I dimensions dreaming in your skin,
Where this black owl's flight weaves its bygone days?

Watched Hector, cold, like Sunday morning death,
Hiding family secrets in every crease...
I must unravel time and go beyond this wilderness;
Beyond the governable by instruments and iron marionettes,
Where womanhood has tumbled to activate in me,
Response, as we hunger through the centuries.