Indigo of the Spirit
Poetry by Arthur David Spota
Was it a question of hallucinating beauty
as we veer across the carbon corpses
filled with beautiful signs of Elysium?
Is it as simple as the first solitude
nestled amongst the lily beds
over which our sugary evening sets?
I walk tiptoe along the meadows of my sloping enemies.
I rush into their banquet and swing on their pendulums,
their mad echoes open like goblin bone marrow
spilt and humming prehistory.
In Walker’s bed the vivisects have doubled in procession.
An architect of space, he made their clocks turn black.
I couldn’t believe in the Funnel of God
until It poured empty beings into a vessel
high atop a walled city in Turkestan.
It emptied its gruesome cup of sub-simmering
into a glowing oracle of wile and complexes.
In this frontier indigo is the spirit of chance;
the crack in the door to where the light escapes.
The silences lay prettily amongst your pearly laments.
I enter and am tottering in the face of the wake-up bird.
Not easily enticed by the intrusion, he does not sing,
does not rule in the tropics or the trees.
His lair is the annihilation of the night in the lead city air;
the grey pissed stained alleyways where he cannot get a leg on civilization.
My thoughts went swimming with the Chatterton bones
on this fucking heap of sod.
Cursed by its mother
the simple child struggles with the cold,
lies in the crimson salt swirl of moon
I drift with the early light in a shutter less room,
shattered by the radiant depths of myself.
Just imagine, if you would, a great journey,
where the future is an orbit less decibel
burning away our delusional forays
into ghost breath and electrical intent;
or a conspiracy to never sleep again
that is met by the distrust of twilight
where you must fall (can only fail)
into a slow intractable trance.
The sky revolves around a child’s confections
exquisitely kindling the summits of her forest
where white and gold torrents
drain the colour from her spirit.
Set her violets in a jar in the middle of an ocean
Watch her sea flow through the eye of the hibiscus
To mask the birth of death is her weapon of intent
and I am entering into her on a road of manacles.
Was I the one who had spoken to the nightingales in the mist
of vertical lacerations pierced by the stock of cataclysmic refrains?
I held the door open only as a diversion for the ghosts
on the steps cursing us in French.
They claim to have been freed into darkness
enabled to drink from the plains of half seen vistas.
Theirs is the balance that overflows the rises in the ruins
where the stones open like an axle of days against death.
I lose myself like a treasure, first in the clouds, then in the earth,
then amongst the vacillations of one’s telepathy that envelopes
a fleck of hope amongst the astral flares.
One moves and the brush sets off seismic drifts,
One breathes and a long voyage becomes a mistress of conquest.
I’m living beneath a murderous Ramses whose wings have lost hope,
beneath a reductive universe of belladonna minarets;
a conclave of ominous sunlit vistas draining colour
from the life of men summoning their lying riddles
without definition
into the middle of day,
their miracles vanquished to weapons
of their reason on display.
The artlessness of the simple deception
And the first word is yours
Arthur David Spota is a writer of Surrealist poetry/prose, musician, video editor, and a native New Yorker to boot. Several years ago he was a member of the Collaborist Surrealist Group, whose core membership was primarily US based, but shared affinities with members of the French group, and others from Australia, Germany, Romania, England and the Netherlands.
As a member he initiated many automatic writing collaborations, created and initiated games of an Exquisite Corpse nature, and others that explored the psychological landscape by creating trance-like scenarios for the members to reflect and respond to. The results were exciting and insightful, and he compiled and documented many of them on various web sites available at the time, particularly Surrealville and Surreal Now.
