Here’s a sonnet concerning portents from my private stock (for an auspicious beginning):

A vagrant star disjoined the heaven’s host,
cast out no last sidereal glance; bright white,
for five or fifteen fleeting beats, at most,
the sliding lambent speck bescarred the night.
A vagrant star arrived today to beg
our eyes, to fix its place by wonder in
the sky; as if our gaze could put the egg
to rights again, send home the horse and men.
A vagrant star left us today for parts
unknown, unknowable, turned tail and streaked
away into the vasty depths, the dark
and empty folds from which no light may leak.
Fixed stars arise and fall in their redoubts,
unmoored they wander, founder, and wink out.

— Written while star-gazing [or VOID-gazing, depending on your perspective] and listening to Portishead

Ill at ease again; here’s one from the archives for another long night:

Long nights, the burning dust, the hollow sky,
the sable sleeves adorned by cinders sown,
the firmament, the yellow moon, and I
will turn our face to greet the dawn alone.
The morning light will bring a carnival,
with music and the flesh of beasts still red,
and e’en though, like the moon, I feel its pull,
I shudder and refuse to leave my bed.
I see the tents collapsing into hell,
the animals run off and wild with fear
The jongleurie incanting darkling spells,
a festival of rust and blood and tears.
Abashed before the ill-starred veins of night,
a thing of beauty pauses and takes flight.

— Written during a particularly disabling period of anxiety, while listening to Cirkus, the first track of King Crimson’s third album Lizard.  Cirkus began its life as a poem (before it found it’s musical setting) so I’m really just helping it return home (as it has helped me so many times)

Apropos of our earlier conversation about making excuses to duck out of terrible parties, a sonnet from the archives about exactly that:

Exhale, draw long, draw deep and stub it out,
and tuck the heat and quiet cold away,
return to boiling crowds, sick talk, self-doubt.
My iron lungs, a bathysphere, allay
the fetid heat, the awful weight. Two fists
of air and smoke to hold me ‘til pin-lights
and faintness force me enter social lists
and beer in hand, knock down another night.
Pale morning spark, a draught, slow, still, and raw.
A cleansing air, burnt cleaner yet by smoke;
I’d rather swallow soot than think of law,
small hearts, bad beer, conceit, and awful jokes.
King James’ vile weed, my blessing in disguise:
A chance to walk away without a lie.

—I had fled a party (by “going to smoke”), and was home listening to Radiohead’s The Bends detoxifying (no better album for it), when I wrote this one.

Another old sonnet for a too drunk evening

I lost you there among the waves and wine,
the tidal pool of run-off amber foam,
and brown wood-liquor bottles-of-the-line
that always turned our ruddy prows to home.
I lost you there in ferment on the sea,
my slowly sinking hollow heart capsized,
and rose again, obscuring you from me;
Adrift and drunk, I fled, ignored your cries.
I lost you there and left you lost to drown,
and plied intoxicating seas alone;
all your best hopes for help in me let down,
down to the bottle’s floor atop your bones.
I left you there too drunk to swim by far,
still stealing empty hearts in empty bars.

This one was written when I realized (for the third or fourth time) that drinking more than half a bottle of whiskey on a Friday night wasn’t helping me make friends and influence people (and in answer to the Gin Blossom’s Hey Jealousy, which I won’t bother linking to, since I’m fairly sure almost anyone reading this (over a certain age) is probably hearing it in their head already at this point (whether they want to or not)).

One more (to fit my mood) from my original sonnet project:

Men seldom question Fortune when it’s good;
they pass through days with bright unclouded brows.
No will I? Can I? Rather, if I should?
Well-pleased and placid at their feed as cows.
No man finds fault in him when Fortune smiles,
but should the fickle finger point away…
How quick he finds his conscience reconciled
to fault all other persons if he may.
When much reduced we blame ourselves
and in poor conscience call ourselves to act.
We tax our motives, learn ourselves, we delve,
and find a form no longer found intact.
The mirror heart is flawed in this respect;
a glass that must be broken to reflect.

— Written in answer to Rush’s Emotion Detector after a particularly bad patch of intellectual dishonesty.

[Yes, I’m aware that liking Rush in 2012 is about as cool as, say, writing pseudo-didactic metric poetry; However, when the Priests of Syrinx take over (between now and 2112), I will be well equipped to engage with them in a battle of turgid, moralistic verse.]

Another sonnet from the archives in honor of a spectacularly mercurial week:

Old Solon said “Judge no man pleased till he
is dead,” for fickle fortune turns away
her glist’ring eyes. Her favorites, fools to be,
becalmed upon a distant sea, betrayed
in foreign lands, or chained to their own thrones.
Inchoate joy, no joy at all says he:
true joy, pluperfect, found among the bones,
new men must tell my happiness to me.
I say, mistrust a man more than his fate.
Good men do wicked things in evil times,
brave men break ranks beneath too great a weight,
few hands stay clean in universal crimes.
Instead count no man good ‘til he is done;
few trees grow straight alike in shade and sun.

— Written in answer to Carl Orff’s famous adaptation of the medieval Latin poem O Fortuna;  I hope you’ll forgive me if my interpretation was a bit more literal (and more packed with grammatical puns and other detritus of a classics education) than usual.

I wrote a new “sonnet” this week (in quotation marks because I’ve been meddling with the form again):

Beyond the tidal pool into the sea
of stippled years and accidental hearths,
of lost hearts, halting steps, and muddled lees,
of unknown knowns, unmissed friends, ungrown growths.
Then light’s desire gutters, but still burns,
and casts its shadows farther than its rays;
with hooded heart and empty hands by turns,
with gnawing spasms, worrying my days.
Consuming and consumed, age-entangled;
the net of yeses past has closed: a choice
bereft of choice, both loss and glory dulled,
and guileless rancor swallowing my voice.
Though in at last from out the outer dark,
I fumble (still in darkness) for a spark.

— Written in answer to Zola Jesus’s Lick the Palm of the Burning Handshake (and as a more general mediation on the theme of her album Conatus)

Although I’ll confess that some of the lyrics are hard to discern and there are no sanctioned lyrics available.  Which means I may well be answering an entirely different song than the one penned by Ms. Danilova, but sometimes misunderstanding art is a way of making art too.

This was a week I wouldn’t repeat for love or money; here’s a sonnet from my private stock for everyone out there waiting for something (or someone):

“I’ll come to visit Sunday morn,” she said,
without a trace of guile, and so I took
her words to heart, and, Sunday, made my bed.
And when eleven came and went, no look
I wasted on a clock, of course she’ll come,
today, if not this morn. One passed without
a trace of bile, I felt a little numb.
No pressing business called to me, no doubt.
And I, still idle, found the hour of three.
I will confess, at five, I loosed a groan
but seven stole it back again from me;
and nine did leave me colder than a stone.
At ten I left the house at last; an act
that should have come ten hours before the fact.

—Written about Blondie’s wonderful cover of the Nerves’ Hanging on the Telephone after a particularly unsatisfying Sunday.

Another (unusually apropos) sonnet from the archives:

When low and small I learned the subtle Art,
the seeing beyond sight, the hidden hand,
unanswered distant action, cupid’s darts;
each little gain, Faust-like, my fervor fanned.
I spent my blood, my evenings, and my youth
in chasing secret potencies divine.
In time the power palled, and rather truth
compelled me speak the words and trace the signs.
In time my Art collapsed beneath my sighs,
for though my will be worked upon all men,
which fulcra and what pressure to apply
remained obscure, and fixed beyond my ken.
The Lesser Key of Solomon once learned,
cannot coerce the Greater Key unearned.

— Not (consciously) written about Force the Hand of Chance, but, on reflection, sums up my feelings about the album/project perfectly.

Here’s another sonnet from the archives. I’m working on some more new material, I’m hoping for this weekend, but no promises:

With yellow-angled crackling tongues, the sky,
dark-eyed, in gracious condescension licks
my little island light, and douses: sighing
forth from tortured wires, burnt walls, black bricks.
But klaxons scald the night and drive us forth
into the rain to wait for running men,
in rubber pants and boots, to prove their worth,
and soothe the rough alarums down again.
The ground is dry(ing), shelter found at home,
the matter mostly mended. Trying times
made softer by this smile, that laugh, those poems,
these books (though slightly singed), your jests, my rhymes.
Fall now the dart of heaven’s blindered rage;
its heat we’ll face with wit, as on the page.

—Written (loosely) about White Zombie’s Thunder Kiss ‘65, shortly after my old apartment building was struck by lightning.

I’d been struggling with a new sonnet for a few weeks over the holidays; I’m not entirely happy with it (fitting given the subject matter), but I decided it was time to just bite the bullet and be done with it:

I know I promised a new sonnet last weekend, but I couldn’t make myself happy with what I’d written  Hopefully I can stop playing tangrams with it eventually and put it up.  Meanwhile, here’s another from the archives for tonight:

Endless sonnets, until you’re all quite bored of them:

Pale, drenched in blue-veined light, benumbed beneath
December’s frosty blanket, Night, enmeshed
in four dead winds. They howl and chatter teeth,
nocturnal exhalations, with’ring flesh
and shrinking hearts before their hollow rage.
I hunker down (inside my coat) and pray
for morning sun, and warming light; my age,
my bones, protest (they ache!) and wait for day.
I search the sky, the stars, as though I’d find
among their ranks some finger of the dawn,
but still I only see the half-chewed rinds
of night, her stars the seeds of winds, undrawn
as yet to earth. No heat will stand this lash
of storms, nor earthly flame will kindle ash.

—Written about Blue Oyster Cult’s Astronomy which is itself a musical setting of an excerpt from Sandy Pearlman’s poem cycle Imaginos.

[That sound you just heard is cross-media interpretation vanishing up it’s own ass like an Escher print of Goatse]

Here’s another piece of my sonnet project:

Five ugly words pour forth in times of strife:
‘with you or without you,’ it will be done
by fraud or force, the not-so-subtle knife
(laws silenced by the muzzle of a gun).
And men grow foul(er?) when the heavens split,
(the stars cast lances to the bleeding earth)
in blood and tears, in semen and in shit,
in beasts of monstrous cunning, awful mirth.
Good men are eaten: wicked, blind, or dead.
Refusal can be answered in one way.
Soft men, like cattle, are then meekly led
to death or exile; leave, or leave the day.
Recalcitrance, the virtue of the slave,
the gold with which the road to hell is paved.

— Written about KMFDM’s Disobedience, at the conclusion of a summer spent as a research assistant reading, annotating, and summarizing transcripts from various war crimes tribunals. 

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