CONTENTS
REQUIEM FOR A COSMONAUT
THROUGH A LOOKING GLASS DARKLY
THE GIRL FROM BLUES AND FUGUES
INDUSTRY OF FEAR (AND LOATHING)
A GEORGINA WEEKEND
CANTICUM SUBTERRENUS
TRANSPARENCY OF FILMIC DEATH
NAOMI
TIMESTEPS SHE
NIGHTS ON EARTH
MAYAN CASTLES IN THE CLOUDS
BLUSH AND BLOOM
BEWAREHOUSE
MISS DYS
DEATH AND THE INDUSTRIAL NIGHT
THE BEGINNING OF THE END (AFTER THX 1138)
WE
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
[Image from SOLARIS – Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972]
REQUIEM FOR A COSMONAUT
Convulsions of an immortal mentality
Felt through the cosmonautical agony
In zero gravity
Suspended Slavic limbs
Levitating Earthly dreams
The collected unconscious
And the cosmonauts’ fatal reflections
Their mirrors of common thread
Are invisibly directed…
By the willpower of the unknown
A blurred paradigm over aeons
An indiscernible mental storm
Requiems in foetal form
A death sleeping
Human memory slipping
Merging
With an alien emerging
Through the shards of glass
Comes a phantom of the past
Wooed by an isolated occupant
In apocryphal reveries somnambulant
Window on galactic space
Rhomboid of light on her face
Wife of an astronomer
Transposed closer –
False rebirth of a past adventure
Her presence –
A product of his essence
The planetary mind
In time and tide
draws on the oceans
the continents
of his conscience
Sentient gravity on the bloodstream
Earthy yearnings for her hills and streams
Terrestrial appetence
Not celestial indifference
She
An amorous poltergeist
Seemingly real
With sudden impulses
And little tragedies for fingers
Penetrates through the barriers
Corridors of steel
Chambers of this maze
Alpha-Omega of this satellite
Fixed in the unblinking gaze
Of the planet’s light
Astronomer under a cosmic microscope
Eloping with necromantic hope
But…for the cosmonaut
isolation is the torment
Mistress to space travellers
His renascent wife wanders…
…Labyrinths of space laboratories
Libraries of trigonometry
She
Corporeal yet not wholly manifest
Summoned by the languished
Bleeds light impulses across time-lapses
Mimicking the memories of elation and anguish
Paroxysm of paradox – she collapses
The womb of time out of control
His tomb of memory released
Iron enters the soul
Across the pre-natal vacuum
Before and after a requiem
Once enraptured
Now captured…
The planet’s mortal mirrors of storms and sea
Face to face with the portal of infinity
Between nullity and eternity
As human sentience under the gaze of this sphere
Is appropriated then disappears
The final evolution?
The ultimate execution?
The roar of Aion………………..
The silence
© DMR
© Epoch Collapse
March 31, 1979
Inspired by the film ‘Solaris’, by Andrei Tarkovsky, and the book by Stanislaw Lem. Written after seeing the film, and also ‘The Silence’, a film by Ingmar Bergman (though the above only makes reference to the latter in the last line).
‘The ineluctable modality of the inaudible’ – James Joyce
[Image from THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY – Ingmar Bergman, 1961]
THROUGH A LOOKING GLASS DARKLY
Leaning against the eyes of the wallpaper
The noses and ears of the torn images of themselves
The anxious girl
Feeling dragons
Rosaries of tongues and tails
With her blind fingers
Her cheeks aroused by the hands of the wind
The gust of a past external moment
She turned toward the wounded verticle
Her Swedish eyes trace the cutaneous decoration
The paper peelings licking the air of the chamber
The wallpaper is applauding the ceremonial wind
Affording a hole in the wall – the language of breath
Her nimble nervous fingers
Flirt with the torn orifice
Flap-flapping in
The inhalation of the adjacent window
This dark gaping wound
Its plasma is the shadow it casts within
A negative circle reborn
At the whim of luminiferous agents
She is curious
Quivering with apprehension
Her Swedish breasts are pointed
With the chilling winds
Tugging at her nightdress beseechingly
And then the expected spectre
The apparition imminent
Entreating her from its lair
Of punctured paper…….
Her flesh crawled with the mystery of its gesture
A silent giant
The stony face of Odin
Grimacing at the light fractured by the shredded paper hanging
She retreats
Assisted by obedient light
But her image is captured
Her vision is captured in the grip
The mythical shade’s hold on her mindful disturbance
Besmirching her naked perfection
Pallid and pure under tenuous fabrics
Seizing her forgotten doubts…
Like discontent bed linen miming in the lunar light
Silhouettes of her emotions
At his beck and call
The stony face of Odin
Staring from the punctured wall
Generous in silence
Clothed in static arabesques – ad infinitum –
The eyes of the wallpaper
She clasps her thighs
Her wrists pressing the folds
The calligraphy of her sex
Their eyes meet
“Oh my…!” she panted
Deranged with dissolution – the daughter to desolation
Astral blood in her heart
Astral turf at her feet
Psychic burial of resonance
An aural divisionism
The dappled palette of the rain
The soundless captivity of the phantasm
Outside
The Gotland Sea heaves –
A grim face at the window
Distant wrinkles on the oldest countenance
She heaves too – as if in assent
Her trembling breast
A sea within a sigh
A sigh of uncertainty
Odin’s face: a dark swell on the sea
Obsessing her
With cravings like shavings
The mute beast is unseen
Transfixed
The walls between
A hovering helicopter
And a convulsive fear in her
The stony face of an imaginary magician-god
Clouded in menace
Shadows on his visage
Mimic the arachnids
Now obscuring the conspiratorial sea from view
The morning’s spectral diversions
Answered with a monstrous metempsychosis.
© DMR
© Epoch Collapse
June 1981
Written around the time I saw Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Through a Glass Darkly’, and, in fact, the narrative and imagery are inspired by the film.
THE GIRL FROM BLUES AND FUGUES
A society of Indian music
University lawns hiss with mulitphonics
Strings of distant strings
Venturing forth to Mademoiselle Michelle
Elegant though ample
as she bends over the records turning
She
Stripped bare by the bachelor’s apartment
Post-prandial port
Superb subrette sibilated sagaciously
A domain of desirous duologues
Clutching in the aftermath
She whispers a promise
She faded into the night
cloaked
She slipped behind the curtain of farewell
As the coolness of the night
croaked
Long playing afternoons await
Dressed in leather and dark hues
The vinyl turns a fugue of fate
Into howling hopeful blues
© DMR
© Epoch Collapse
August 1, 1980
INDUSTRY OF FEAR (AND LOATHING)
Matter of factories…
Offices often
The unspeakable
The more-than-disagreeable
Pallid people of the industrial treakle
Bureaucratic smiles
Plodding through the aisles
These are men and women of lament
in the fabric of estrangement
The Pavlovian volunteers
They wag their ears
at the thought of a few beers
to quench their fears
Convert those tears
and salivate
That’s a good primate
“There goes the bell, Bill…
back to the treadmill”
With apathy they plod
Through uncaring passages they trod
A game
Dealt by the architects of despair
Engineers of anxiety
The manipulators of society
Graced with impunity
Laced with insanity
Designing a tragedy
Prolonged by the pawns of passivity
Not to mention the military
© DMR
© Epoch Collapse
May 13, 1981
A GEORGINA WEEKEND
…closing the book
Beethoven looks into the winter streets
The Archduke retires
Images of German cinema evanesce
Like smoke around the cornices
Of memory – in a living room mist
The din of the tin drum
Stops short….
I launch into the sodden street
Meandering passed the aromas of terraced dinners
Those residential layers
…and some potential anosmiacs saunter by
without a thought of it
And now it is raining monarchs…
I imagine the houses
Floating in a Mediterranean soup
Sullen symphonies shuddering through
The shivering inhabitants – building bridges
Discarnate characteristics
Hover over the pluvious corners and pavements
Greeting my footsteps
And the limits of my eyes
At the end of the street
near the Ashton warehouses
Is her sumptuously empty home
She is alone
She opens the door…
Sweeping strands
She brushes the house’s ghosts aside
Jostled by a stair descended
Gramophone is a jumpin’
Trumpet kings crackle
As they revolve
Rising in succession over the sofa
In quarter tones and blue notes
She with cool passion
Greets me
Embracing
Steamed to the act…….
Effervescent on the goose feathers
Outside
It is still raining monarchs
© DMR
© Epoch Collapse
June 5th, 1982
CANTICUM SUBTERRENUS
The silver screen
Hallucinating
Old boots and old clothes
Threads of circumstance
Decaying conditions inspire
A throbbing metropolis
Of dark corners
And crumbling mansions
Blinking
Neon
Faces
In the Sixties
Smiles of a feverish night
Shadows of New York counter-point
Etching boogie-woogie out of joint
© DMR
© Epoch Collapse
February 21, 1984
TRANSPARENCY OF FILMIC DEATH
Death recorded
The moment immortalised
Computated
Fate’s witness
Memory modules
Etheric bubbles all surrounding
Molecular models
in shifting geometries
Auras
Arcs
An astral projection protracted
Beyond the wall of sleep
Beyond the wall of living cognisance
A clairvoyant site seer
Now seeing the vainglory of Earth
Simulated death sequences
Took their toll
Bubbles of deceased souls
And discarnate minds
Suspended beyond thoughts of disbelief
All seeing the vainglory of Earth
© DMR
© Epoch Collapse
November 5, 1984
NAOMI
Eye of camera
Animation stilled
Willfully instilled
Distilled
Perplexed
A theatre in cracked masonry
Peering with the pores of paranoia
Naomi skips
Middle Earth names adorn her offspring
Conceived in a fantasy
Californian politics behind windowpanes
Jostle
She huddles in an angle of the quadrangle
Agitated dialogue masquerading as a monologue
Her tartan skirt whispers huskily
Almost as a breathtaking warning
Connoting the contingent antagonist…
The limits of rodential businessmen
Their media molehills
Disturbed by free association
After midnight the pipes gurgled
Like androids treading water
© DMR
© Epoch Collapse
1984 (?)
TIMESTEPS SHE
(aka AMBER IN WONDERLAND)
Just as the Kubrick film rolled
in timesteps
the clockwork
of oranges squeezed
dripping
measure out the degrees
she and I shared
tripping
minds
bodies
Lady Hunt
in skirts of Baroque clouds
with English glee
with marmalade lips
with Alice Liddell’s
wonderland smile
mingled with mock-turtle bewilderment
scurries and scuffles
in body-consciousness…
to embrace in clover
whatever will move her
…as Freud slips out the door…
preferably on the hoover
The dies irae echoes with electricity
Beethoven resonates in high fidelity
She and I on all fours
Through the garden doors
An invisible cinema unfolds
Set aflame by her tangerine drawers
The desire echoes electrically
The bliss of synchronicity
© DMR
© Epoch Collapse
June 10, 1985
NIGHTS ON EARTH
One more might on Earth
One of many more
Caffeine-smeared moments
Wine-stained rag where the ink dragged
Whisky threatened sketches
Of naked wenches
Escalators
Laced
With anecdotes serrated
Metropollinated responses fractionated
Weeks went sailing by
Sent a note to a wee wench waitress-wise
Soup steaming feet apart
Unmeasured unspoken unknown
Another night on Earth
A murmur of the heart – a Danish whisper in art
Another night on Earth
And she a grinning virgin
From Lebanon
A virgin of mirth
19 years on earth
Another night on Earth
Kraanerg
A semblance of equations
String unknown worlds together
Grind the Earth
Capture the dark matter
Through the portals stars scatter
Is Earth room enough?
With my Roman girl
Yearning unfurling
As we left the hall
of Mycenaean kings
As we spun from the harbour
With inspiration and ardour
For another sensory parlour
Another night on Earth
In the heat of the October evening
Rubbing rubbing
The invisible into sight blinking
She ambled in again
lights off and on
Bringing scents from Lebanon
Gingerly yet curiouser and curiouser
With eyes of blue steel
I turn to her
and gently feel
© DMR
© Epoch Collapse
1988-1989-1990
MAYAN CASTLES IN THE CLOUDS
Climbing
Etching in memory
The glyphs of lost cities
In my steps ascending
Turning
Winding
Right-shouldering a smooth stone wall
Like tracing neural pathways
In the distance
Over stone
Can be discerned
Half-obscured by clouds
A megalopolis of pyramids
The extending remnants of which
Wriggle like serpents through lagging mist
The closest edifice of past eras…
Active with sandalled ants
Peeved expressions on the builders
I turned
Angered and scornful
The tourists scaling the stairs below…
Appetites for human sacrifice on their lips
© DMR
© Epoch Collapse
February 2, 1990
BLUSH AND BLOOM
A brush with the unblushing
She
A visual soliloquy
In soft geometry
In arches of moving stillness
A yearning curving parabolae
Of static kinesis
Irony and finery
Kindled in a gesture
Of woodland women
With conjecture
To stoke the fire
In night vision so lush
Grey skies
On Bloom’s Day
Books and bookmen
Bundle away
A shared soliloquy
Pulses through reminiscence
From printed word of automatic thought
Into the breast of our beasts of vicarious retort
© DMR
© Epoch Collapse
1990
BEWAREHOUSE
Vagabond van facing the yachts
The tramp with a thousand places
Leafing through the Hero with a Thousand Faces
An unanswered question
now in autumnal avenues
and dissonance unquestioned
Anthropological afternoons
With harbour view half-truths
There was a Yellow House over yonder
With a walk-through vulva
What a wonder
With a labyrinth to plunder
A cinema of one’s own Mind
With black lights you’ll find
Travelling surrealism beckons many a pedestrian
Spanish Revolution carves its beans of human meaning
In macabre neural palaces of atrocities
Hispanic cinema rolls nocturnally
Under the canopy
Of astronomy
Mounting visions of our planet’s roof
© DMR
© Epoch Collapse
1991
MISS DYS
She was home
I caught the falling key
Opalesque rectangles of warehouse barren
I climbed the shattered Polanski stairs
We met flights above
Her life-drawing curves drawing near
Near to eye and hand – My corporeal collaborators
With them I had searched her landscape…
Figuratively speaking
What the eye had seen the mind had plundered
Like an Achean in a lost holy city
Round the corners the domes
With blackened finger
Making palpable the temple fountain triangular
Her blue Aztec Calendar eyes
Sweeping over me with their ambiguous consent
My body language dilates with diluvial intent
She shakes a leg quickstepwise
Steering me with invisible cord
From Welles floor
On to Huston floor
Noirish stories door to door
A syncopated melody nipples aria tickled by
Fortunate golden tresses
Almost argentiferous articles brushed to the bosom
Dainty dancer’s tap tap limbs
Magnificent in their feminine formidability
Impelling an invincible itinerary
Proud of her hobby horse – she points her milky-whites
Like moist marbles my gaze rolls down her porous pallidness
To meet with the object of her gesture:
A palingenesis of Apuleius
(Orohippus Satryriconus)
Lucius transformed
Her toy Trojan awaiting
her Valkyrian vulva
Diffusing gold dust
She
Guiding my musings
of ancient amusements
Through a gilded sculpted mist of myths
Warfare beyond death’s door
Troy
Valhalla
Madaura
L’age D’or
To her boudoir
A gothic shanty town
Mingled with Parisian bordello bawdiness
Rocking horse bedroom farce
Here we go round the plaster cast
Antics and acrobatics with alacrity
Antiques lands
in the aisles
Her nymphetique hands
Venetian smiles
She on scarlet silk waving the seventh veil impishly
I drag her across my face tantalisingly
My carnivorous fingers forage
Looking for a place to swim
Her milk and honey swivelled and skipped
Through the Jodorowsky door unhinged
Fringing the Latin quarter…
We nearly tripped
Tapdancing to the Fellini area
Her child-sorceress hands gleefully leading me into the Rank Xerox foyer
Where her painting of vulvas swings
Her Venusian perfection sings
Breathing breezing
The paint still drying
Scampering down the Kubrick corridors
The feverish images of woman
Flaming leaves in the tree of all seasons
Still glowing in the mind’s eye
Pedestrian flightpath receding Hitchcock corners
Her hand clutching mine
Still with singing sex in mind
Through the fire exit
This beauty delivers her pointing finger
To a lone memory
Here in the rust inferno
A fallen circus sparrow
A comrade – prey to urban erosion
Fate had chosen
The blood of an acrobat
A hole in iron corrugated
A soul confiscated
A twinge of remorse in those Clair de Lune eyes
Living for the memory of the night
…A chapter ended
A flight ascended…
In another niche of this wayward concretion
In a derelict shower room
Where many moons ago
Anonymous dogs met their doom
She demonstrates her rustic ablutions
With derring-do she administers a cold onslaught
With my lathered hands I build and contort
Glissanding around a flesh city supreme and thinking
Creaming succulent pink and twinkling
Squeezing kneading
With burning need
The boiling–point of seed
Staggering with her garments of lust –
we leave behind us –
the Buñuel department
Ahead of us –
the road to the Roma
Black coffees and Slavic cinema
And to dovetail the night
Vodka and brandy under stellar-light
We: figures in a lacerated landscape
On Antonioni observation decks supine
Look for Venus in the mind of the sky
© DMR
© Epoch Collapse
June 1991
DEATH AND THE INDUSTRIAL NIGHT
Sitting in relative darkness
Ruminating
A window arched
Reinforced glass
Arched before me
A hundred hexagons
In vitreosity
Iron bars – Staves of dead music
Bridle the wall
Vines of lattice life curling
Gnarled yet elegant
Scrawled scrawling
Creeper’s pen creeping
Straddling the rusted bars – Like a lover
Her branches of an unknown life
Sounds in the ear’s farthest fields
Particles of these
Abrading the air
Each cry utterance howl groan
Industrial yawn
Leaves a fingerprint
A wound
Leaves evidence
Of its offence
On the walls of silence
When the blood dries
The resonance falls – the shedding of dead cells
Distance is the styptic
Solitude like a knife in the dark
The landscapegrotesque
Beast of concrete-brick-steel
Dogma of surfaces
Making unconscious martyrs
Of all who walk
In its stale breath
The blinking sarcophagi of materialism…
The big sleep
Chilled by the industrial night…
A chain is pulled
And it seems by that motion
a signature is carved
in the bedrock
of this cataleptic townscape
Only silent pauses gave respite
The moribund organs of industry
Leave a pitiful echo
Outside…
The plants assembled
in conferences unheard
…In sublime detachment
they muse on the gibbous moon
A ritual in the dark
© DMR
© Epoch Collapse
May 5th, 1992
THE BEGINNING OF THE END (AFTER THX 1138)
Crumbling warehouses
Wornhouses
With no warning
Till the next morning
The dregs of Thursday 10th 11.38
Light bombardment…
Sensorial particles
Of late
Wonderment
Fade
Monochrome memories on stone surfaces
Carving a path
To the garden of peace
A hedge grove
Passed the mountains of hope
She in velvet darkness
We explored a labyrinth
Abbreviated
Pebbled ledges edges
Bifurcated
Ocean view through hedges
Lacerated
© DMR
© Epoch Collapse
March 5th, 1994
WE
Suicidal birds sing in the burning branches
Photogenic clouds clear
Laughing
Glistening …maybe listening
Our vision is a naked song
Our vision is a naked sword
Stripped of syntax
Laced with distance
We go down to the See-sawing Sea
Mouths of blind unseen shores
We go down to the See-sawing Sea
On the swings and roundabouts of distant shores
The terminus of Kronos
© DMR
© Epoch Collapse
1995
Epoch Collapse 
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