The Lover's Discourse

(The world is full without me, as in Nausea; the world plays at living behind a glass partition; the world is an aquarium; i see everything close up and yet cut off, made of some other substance; i keep falling outside myself, without dizziness, without blur, into precision, as if i were drugged. "Oh, when this splendid Nature, spread out here before me, appears as frozen as a varnished miniature...")

The resistance of wood varies depending on the place where we drive in the nail: wood is not isotropic.  Nor am I; I have my "exquisite points." The map of these points is known to me alone, and it is according to them that I make my way, avoiding or seeking this or that, depending on externally enigmatic counsel: I should like this map of moral acupuncture to be distributed preventively to my new acquaintances (who, moreover, could also utilize to make me suffer more).

In order to find my exquisite point, there exists an instrument which resembles a nail: this instrument is a joke: I do not suffer jokes lightly...even everything the world finds amusing seems sinister to me; you cannot tease me without danger: irritable, hypersensitive? -- Let us say, rather, tender, easily crushed, like the fiber of certain kinds of wood.

Alchemy

I.

The lowly poet
in his heavenly ascent
doth contribute to man's
opus magnum

In examining his
crown of thorns
a budding wreath of laurel
he finds

...and thereafter:

The aurum philosophicum
               or
       aurum non vulgi.

Perhaps the alchemical gold
in the stream of
forgetfullness.

(the aureum flumen?)

II.

According to the alchemists
First we must meet the chthonic dragon:
spirit of nigredo
and it is thus that we suffer

Until this dragon
is overcome, the
shadow of melancholy
enchains us.

Entombed until the
Aurora of dawn
is announced by the
Peackock's tail.

To overcome this death:
Albedo, the ghostly
Whiteness, must draw blood.
Must take the redness of life.

III.

A new brand of listlessness
befalls the lowly poet:

Caressing his chains of freedom
Link by link

enclosing himself further within
an inexpressible conundrum:

metonymic escalation of
practical obligations

In a golden stream
of possibilities

Perhaps the aureum flumen
is the very opus of forgetting itself:

why remember, when what lays ahead
is the true elixir: the elixir of transformation?

Helicon

Is it true that upon Mount Helicon
You hear the god-like Muses?

Their voices trembling like
mirrory waters

Coursing through two sacred streams
High above the loftiest clouds

The very waters, which trapped Narcissus:
forged by flying Pegasus' hoof.

There, will the poet find his
liminal revelations

Apart from reason:
Above reason?

Amidst his exquisite
abnormal, inner experiences

Poetry rises like flamed concupiscence

from the ashes of an inevitable purgatory

Flowers and Things