deepundergroundpoetry.com
Absinthe Strips Grey From The Skies
Absinthe please take my mind:
Sweetly, sugar bends the spoon
Stirs fragments of parenthesis
Piss and green stained
Words roam on unstacked shelves
In libraries of attribution.
In absentia, memory lakes
Buckled by tidal locked limbs
Belted & broken, descend
To bloated bodies,
Sunk at cathedral depth.
Haunted by the colours
Of the night’s soul, the
Asylum For Dead Artists
Paint their walls fifty one
Shades of gunmetal grey.
Everything may go green –
Everything may go.
Washed in sleep at morning edge
Somewhere, a hunted whale
Begins to learn to bleed.
Dredge bundles of ocean ribs
Reposed on pebbled shore morgue.
Breeze burrs a song of dew drops
Duets with decades of decay.
Rain will rot all timber.
Heavy tanker heaves to her harbour
Sea birds sleek thru’ slender oil streak
Soon they will be stripped of flight,
In sight of tapered jet streams.
Old lady busking along rusty railings
Wears bees in her hair
Sings Sinatra and
Of nothing filled eternity,
She remembers the bright city lights
The iced days the traffic died.
She remembers to forget.
Deliverance comes
Steals what is owed
And takes its leave:
Crucified
Aboard
Vessels
B(i/e)rthed
In
Chaotic
Lines.
Should the sea care to remember
The names of each uninvited guest,
In perilous pause, only this,
Of me, for me,
Begin to learn her name
And sing unto you bleed.
Pic. Victor Oliva
Sweetly, sugar bends the spoon
Stirs fragments of parenthesis
Piss and green stained
Words roam on unstacked shelves
In libraries of attribution.
In absentia, memory lakes
Buckled by tidal locked limbs
Belted & broken, descend
To bloated bodies,
Sunk at cathedral depth.
Haunted by the colours
Of the night’s soul, the
Asylum For Dead Artists
Paint their walls fifty one
Shades of gunmetal grey.
Everything may go green –
Everything may go.
Washed in sleep at morning edge
Somewhere, a hunted whale
Begins to learn to bleed.
Dredge bundles of ocean ribs
Reposed on pebbled shore morgue.
Breeze burrs a song of dew drops
Duets with decades of decay.
Rain will rot all timber.
Heavy tanker heaves to her harbour
Sea birds sleek thru’ slender oil streak
Soon they will be stripped of flight,
In sight of tapered jet streams.
Old lady busking along rusty railings
Wears bees in her hair
Sings Sinatra and
Of nothing filled eternity,
She remembers the bright city lights
The iced days the traffic died.
She remembers to forget.
Deliverance comes
Steals what is owed
And takes its leave:
Crucified
Aboard
Vessels
B(i/e)rthed
In
Chaotic
Lines.
Should the sea care to remember
The names of each uninvited guest,
In perilous pause, only this,
Of me, for me,
Begin to learn her name
And sing unto you bleed.
Pic. Victor Oliva
Published 6th Jul 2020
Author's Note
#ERULGCT 60. Umanoidxx Inspired when woken suddenly by fleet of ambulance sirens. Haven't seen the sea for some weeks. Miss it. Only link are dive-bombing seagulls. Very belligerent these days. Which all adds up. Absinthe has no hallucinatory properties - just a myth. It holds no familiarity or interest to me. ALL STAY SAFE
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6th Jul 2020 11:54pm
I’m reading this over and over Rob.. .. . I love this image (belle epoch spoon, what’s in my head, sugar cube)
Sandwiched between take my mind and piss green .. fragments of parenthesis.. words tossed.. from the green 🧚♀️.. I bartended forever.. and am familiar with the myths surrounding absinthe. What I find very interesting about it and how it adds volumes to the atmosphere in this piece .. are the bathtub effects (like gin in prohibition and meth these days) that one endured just to dissolve and escape..,
The images were terrific Rob.. the woman brusking.., Bees in her hair.. a Sinatra song .. remembers brigh lights to escape a dim reality.. whoa.. for that alone I loved this so much
Sandwiched between take my mind and piss green .. fragments of parenthesis.. words tossed.. from the green 🧚♀️.. I bartended forever.. and am familiar with the myths surrounding absinthe. What I find very interesting about it and how it adds volumes to the atmosphere in this piece .. are the bathtub effects (like gin in prohibition and meth these days) that one endured just to dissolve and escape..,
The images were terrific Rob.. the woman brusking.., Bees in her hair.. a Sinatra song .. remembers brigh lights to escape a dim reality.. whoa.. for that alone I loved this so much
7th Jul 2020 2:20am
Alright you had me by line 4 of stanza 1. In the opening of stanza 2, I picture this place inside where the absinthe has formed an atoll around memory, it seems such an interesting way to describe the fog of intoxication most of us will sometimes seek. The repeat in stanza 3 has a kind of forlorn sheering away about it that touches heart strings. I thought perhaps the Asylum for Dead Artists was a painting or work of literature, but I couldn't find anything, so I started considering it as more of a metaphor, the absinthe a place artists, in the brilliant torture of madness and inspiration, go to escape and to die. Stanza 4 has a dreamlike abstraction about it in particular and also a sense of the harrowing of life that leads us to try and lose ourselves. It's a strikingly lonesome image. My neighbor feeds these stray cats that I used to feed when they were kittens. He provided better food or something, because they moved over to his house a couple years ago. He's been out of town a few days and the girl cat, now grown, came mewling up to me on my back porch, so piteous were her cries of hunger, I told her I'd help her and immediately went inside to fix her a plate. I guess that feeling is lingering and influencing the way this write strikes me. Stanzas 5& 6 seem to carry this steady rotation of dimensions forward, the decay of time, pollution. The old lady, making her way through this world, frozen into silence, she remembers to forget, which is a statement that seems to permeate the whole write, come to think of it. To consciously let go of memory. The close has wonderful gravity. You paint this imagery for us, in slow measure and then this final address, this epilogue. I find myself quite moved.
7th Jul 2020 5:17pm
Absinthe ( verte ), The Green Fairy, the Star of Anise, the Nectar of the Muse. Been a very long time since she's blessed my lips, but reading this has prompted me to put a bottle on my wish list. I think I still have the glasses and spoon in my china cabinet. Wow, been such a long time. It truly is the drink of memories. . .
Beautifully done, Rob.
Beautifully done, Rob.
7th Jul 2020 9:08pm
loved frigging everything, contains all that perfect feeling and beat
.had that green pleasure after-hours in a London pub of which we were friends with the owner, one of my very best treasured memories, and it is not a memory but a feeling, and not for us stripped skies, but old stripped oak, rough and smooth skin and the unfathomable secret layers of under garments.
that "gunmetal green' is perfect. the last 2 stanzas more so. "sing unto you bleed" that heavenly pain, that risky exultation... 'should the sea care to remember' its dark green fingers.
a joy to read
.had that green pleasure after-hours in a London pub of which we were friends with the owner, one of my very best treasured memories, and it is not a memory but a feeling, and not for us stripped skies, but old stripped oak, rough and smooth skin and the unfathomable secret layers of under garments.
that "gunmetal green' is perfect. the last 2 stanzas more so. "sing unto you bleed" that heavenly pain, that risky exultation... 'should the sea care to remember' its dark green fingers.
a joy to read
