Love is the martyrs’ beautiful hallucination.

Love is the martyrs’ beautiful hallucination.

David Castleman

© 2002 by David Castleman


Cover Photo: by David Castleman


Published by The New Formalist Press


XHTML & CSS design by Leo Yankevich

Who’ll be awed by the stars without us?

Our mothers and our fathers worked this earth
and bore those dreary rites no land denies,
and in our hearts and in our minds is dearth
of every strength except the strength of lies.

One salty tear upon one crumb of sand
sans morals, manners, and humanity,—
describes our plucked globe cleansed, of humans banned
despite the definitive race we’d be.

In this our life one prayer we would ask
the eye of the cosmos that impels us:
grant full ancestral memory in one task
we gather to ourselves, till dawn fells us.

Echoes blossom with remembered prayer.

Must we be blamed if dreaming wrong
and against society’s grain,
and guilt confer consuming pain
beyond expressing in a song?

What is the value of guilt we
carry like stones about our necks
until it wrecks our lives and wrecks
the truth of our heart’s charity?

Is guilt the triumph of the worm,
and Cain’s and Judas’ ill mirth
to spite us beast-folk gave ‘em birth
and solace through the crowning storm?

—Our voices float the universe
like whisperings in a dream
and arbitrarily they seem
sometimes to bless, sometimes to curse.

Bloody moons hatch in a spectacle of innocence.

Splashing round our globe of understanding
those angel-plumed mists so coil about us,
deepening as into one holy ring
surrounded by holy rings past notice.

Beyond are unknown clouds as dwellingplace
beasts invest with a divine mythology,
as contemporary bias and race
defines who’ll be dwelling there, who’ll not be.

No hopes of human soul lack a favorite
picturesque absolute to be honored,
with gods abhorred, and gods of cleanest light
whose eyes awakened worlds and wept and bled.

—For each, one’s neighbor is the lesser martyr
vaguely preliminary as was Christ,
and each one is Judas, born to barter
substance too real for a substance of mist.

Without dreams our world is mindless death.

Of those beasts that bite on the blooded earth
and those beasts that swim and those beasts on high
in the imagined wonders of the sky,
humans acknowledge only human worth.

Of what interest are the stars of light
and the stars of dark in surrounding streams
but to encourage hungry human dreams,
in silence out-howling surrounding night?

Of what interest the earth’s beached rubble
and heart-pounding mother-of-blood brute wave
and proud whales bounding by a cold gored cave,
till our footprint introduces trouble?

Only when our human psyche ponders
is wonder provoked by the world’s wonders.

taxes and the dam.”

“First be we whores,” Saint Money saith,
“and fear, and faith, and likewise mores
as well are zilch:  worthwhile matter

makes us fatter, as when we filch
a neighbor’s bread and mouth’s sweet meat
and always cheat a gentler head

and grab its guts to swell the pod
we use as god, that beast that gluts
and gores, gobbles enemies, friends

toward private ends, glides o’er troubles
slick as bubbles, yet to it real
as wanton zeal, morning stubbles,

bone wrath

Our songbird is neglected but for jeers
and yet sings out these holy songs all night,
and when by day the weight of duty shifts.

These songs are for the dead and the undead
and sometimes for the living, if the bird
can forgive the living for their sealed ears.

In the night the bird tumbles with our earth
pulsing amid selfless maternal stars
in a blind womb, and like a human heart.

Solely in repose may the happy seek
this human solace in rich song, and then
release the blood-songs through the brain again.

Silent is the night to those beyond night,
silent as the echoing fates of the birds.

Dignity inspires the blessed gift of blushing.

Life’s profoundest issue is not of death
but of that disquiet we burden our souls
by, and which is shared with none else of breath:
it’s the bell that in our mind’s silence tolls.

One puny word we said that we should not
have said, might wake those chapels ringing hard
with bells announcing contrapuntal thought
and vicious rapture that will not be barred.

One gesture through the lit moon of an eye
might damn this heart of ours we watch within,
and we can brood for hours on one slight lie
cast in the black significance of sin.

Dignity is wounded by deep nothings,
annihilated by imagined stings.

Whose daughter?  Whose mother?

Of monsters there are many on the moors
and in the crystal forest under trees,
and skulking in the caves by ocean shores
where they whimper in the sea’s coldest breeze,

but unworldlier far is that haggard ragged hag
rummaging the refuse of our city
like a rat, till God’s Benign Moneybag
spills out the sun, human truths and pity.

The garbage she collects becomes her food
and cloth and lamplit daily amusement,
and she prates and she animates her good
night’s pickings, in adequate tenement:

she maunders to flowers found last night, a stone,
a picture of a pert maid, or a son.

Dylan Thomas

This was no madly blessed auld Keltic bard
so pathologically alcoholic
and frighteningly apart in his heart
of hearts, denied love’s enlightening tonic.

Neither was he a bard learned and sage
nor a god-like boy with one golden voice,
nor robbed his youth to fortify his age
because his blood flowed cold and without noise.

He wasn’t one of those randy blackguards
conceived as lightning stung some leech-swum swamp,
whose mystical affinity for words
mantled a grim heroism in pomp.

He was undemocratic and a poet
and laughed with horror, and a droll wit.

no houri from kriss kingle

Of late no fawn, our play’s a thousand stages late
thusly to woo the idolatrous rub we beg pardons of
since we’ve sallied in through the innocent gate
and so dallied among the dreamy sweet gardens of...,

but no, let’s not, indeed perhaps we should refuse
to manner it with Love, or Heaven’s Own Mirror, or use
any silly demonstrably innocuous labeling such as
Our Relationship, since too unkindly it untouches...

In staggering visions of our strife a myriad ships
swagger and founder on mangled breadths of red skies,
while elsewhere we magnificently stranded and our lips

impotently writhe as if to proclaim a dying enterprise
an opportunity for trumpets to woo the harrowing night.
Little is light or heavenly within Holy Heaven’s sight.

Time like fruit hangs.

Such is the endlessness,
yea, the intolerableness
of all earthly effort,

that sane men would consort
willingly with Beelzebub
(damned be the promised rub)

if but the beast existed,
but all real devils are dead,
as well as angels, alas,

and none but the crass
hollow unsophisticated
dolts submit to any god

holding forth from vacuum,
elysium, or sheer pandemonium.

Gods damn a witch.

My love’s a whore who rapes my mind,
yet none might more want if refined,

for thus to me this whole’s complete,
and i’m dryly used to defeat;

beyond which is no queen so fair:
a fine bitch is ungodly rare.

She mounts a rose home on her dress,
but falls the rose and i confess.

Gods damn a witch.

My love’s a whore who rapes my mind,
yet none might more want if refined,

for thus to me this whole’s complete,
and i’m dryly used to defeat;

beyond which is no queen so fair:
a fine bitch is ungodly rare.

She mounts a rose home on her dress,
but falls the rose and i confess.

Black is the stone of the breast.

Dark is the mind beyond the blood:
deep rolls the wind of a dark mood.

When men are dead as animals
else, blood is red and the blood thrills.

The blood is mild or blood is rough
and man’s a child to bawl, “Enough.”

The blood endures deeper than stone,
shame, grief, or years beyond the bone.

epitaph

Pinocchio with a nose-job, neon past,
our well-oiled Pentagon’s projectile of
megalomania’s murderous love,
Ronald Wilson Reagan is dead at last.

Was a puppet ever his mother’s son
and his father’s beloved enemy,
a strength for his brother in rivalry
and a dad for his kids, all men in one?

Did ever a puppet strive for neighbors
and disdain to assist the bad, the cruel,
those who would butcher the goose for its jewel
and throw children a pittance for labors?

We toy with a dragon’s talon on a string,
yanked from the imploring impotent thing.

the improbably conceited cat

Infamous is one babied feline beast
who snoozes life away o anywhere
his clump of hairy baggage lands.

                                                      His feast,
should he deign to partake and could he steer
his fawning human toward such, (and habit,)

devours fat fish and fatty fowls most rare
and marinated barbequed rabbit,
and such endeavor makes a nap most fair.

And in the night (o prime delight) his friends
and his enemies especially, sneak
from human reach and from people’s houses

and the night’s crossed with an unholy shriek
from a zillion beasts on feline errands,
as Infamous with his peers carouses.

Love is the martyrs’ beautiful hallucination.

Yesterdusk your soul was truer
than psyche’s gods who earthward peer:
ah, moon-shadowed dreams were newer
and early hearts beguiled each fear.

Those yesterdusk dreams wouldn’t fail
until the bridge of heavens cracked:
ah, silly as a lover’s tale,
we hoped the saints held ours intact.

Toward this crucible dawns led us
and fed with death those hopes we’d fanned:
our mad cosmic butcher fed us
angels’ milk, with one poisoned hand.

Is the psyche proud in its cloak of mud?

Hammered through the mines of soul, the living
artist created himself in this form
selected during spiritual storm,
body and mind for dying and thriving.

Emulating DEITY, the artist
emerged through his own canvas, and his brush
portrays himself, just.  Holy was the hush
surrounded the selecting like a mist.

Emulating DEITY, stony will
probed among immortal corridors
patterns of character.  One holy force
guided our human touch and guides it still.

Our earth is trod holy by living feet
and by the sea’s echo in the heart’s beat.

Unholy emanations whisper.

...now i plunge my pen against the page
and scribble toward a purpose unperceived
for now, in breathful, placid tone
i am no more a poet than a rose...

...but images i view, although receptive
to my bid (my muse is busied elsewhere
nursing other selves), and i desire
exercise, enveloped by pleasant melancholy...

...enabled to imbue with tactile sihouette
a bit of pesty matter, from so faint
a place as this, i would label it as mine
(ostensibly):  mine to brag of, mine to burn...

...but when i feature feeling from the dream
it flies from me, like writing on a pond...

Dead men tread silently.

Perish soon or perish late,
nothing will abate:
that same old bloody bait
compels our fate.

About the author

David Castleman lives in a shanty in a redwood grove with two improbably conceited cats, listening by evening to John McCormack and Billie Holiday. His poems, tales and imaginatively critical essays have appeared in hundreds of small magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. For money he labors in a lumberyard north of San Francisco. His novel “Death is my Shepherd” was published by Artword in 2002.