UBI SUNT QUI ANTE NOS FUERUNT?

(poem taken from the Agent 18’s forthcoming book, Mercuric Distillations)

Who was there or here before we were?’

We are the dross of the wave

burst on undiscovered shore

evaporating & ever-present

& all-unknowing

Grand Geographies — The Cartographer’s shrewd angling & lining, subdivisions of the globe — explored within a forefather’s mind

beyond born limits, then seen

expressed & symbolized

as if a graceful arcing

be drank down by the soul

wherein its curved degrees

assuaged & fired at once

the wants of man;

which was the truth.

What new truth do we prepare?

No Poem now soars to break its Prey

upon soft sparkling air

with feathered blades unsheathed

unpinioned

the poems which our peers prefer

coo their condescending similes

promising of easy reprieves &,

feeding off tossed-off crusts,

feign a cultured gratitude

in being tamed

but in secret we are all condemned

No hound roots up thick

dark earth

for what is hound & what the earth?

To us?

Nothing. . . . .

we are the currently dissipate surf

expectant of never falling different

than any wave before

expectant of not fastening on

some expansive promontory

although we may have broken

may still be breaking now-

a specula of foam forms no consciousness

feels no wakening, we are the fitful gleam

& fluid hiss

of a static universe

or lounge gossips

dialogues rehearsed;

THE RICHE LEVEDIES IN HOERE BOUR

click crimson nails on cuticles

clocking a neurotic’s pace

& pout into the bulb-framed mirror

reminding one most forcefully

of themselves, void

of personality

but never originality-

Fools dive within the sea

for pearls of paste & glue,

or horne of trashheap coral.

THEREINNE IS DAY WITHOUTEN NIGHT

it is the sum of negative truth

or the pomegranate’s skin

sewn to hollow wholeness

it is the negation of the living need

Paraded in the part of life.

The Poem, loosed

flew past land & sea

& flying lost slowly its form, its meaning,

& time became as well as we

a dross upon the wave;

also roughness & abstraction

until only the Poem was left

a point of light to separate

world from its conditions

or a node through which contradictions

might surge, connect, then unify

Yet still the Poem did not cease to fly.

The poem above was written by IG Agent 18

IG Agent 18 has a book of mystical Celtic and Tarot influenced Poetry available as a Kindle ebook