Barry Van Asten

In kamikazic state and crisp,
Steered and wrenched from soft illusion;
Terrible, it's fragile, dust-blown shape
That carried it's fat world within -
...

In these nocturnal woods, my heart finds
The sacred light of a forgiving sun -
Her radiance through the wild boughs, winds
To the dark beauty of unending woman.
...

This eye-glass on Byzantine worlds
Of our own mythological fate,
Locked upon some distant star
Like Gullivers' gulping on dead space.
...

Tomorrow, the sun will shine
And look upon our hearts, as we
Build together, a sacred place
To consecrate our love upon;
...

At twilight, I imagine her as before,
Assembled from posted fragments, gathered
Into an alphabet of her ways and more,
Until the female form is covered -
...

The house is empty and seems so cold;
Rooms are dying, winding down, all through,
Where childhood thumbled long ago.
...

To see beyond this veil of stuff
And glimpse the things that I once saw;
To feel the same strange formlessness
Weave its way and create once more.
...

Should this veil between us ever part
To reveal love's course and astronomy,
Where the gentle ballad of womanhood
Sings soft and sweet within my heart;
...

Part IV - The Blossom And The Sigh

From this holy place I go
Unto a wilderness unknown;
...

I am called:
The times of destruction,
By awaiting star-manifold seers.
The room lay in never-ending
...

Struck, by the bornless core of man;
Serpent of doubt and drab dimension;
Bruised bowel of blasphemy, curled anew
And shaped fourfold to our reality and cosmic law:
...

Hanging skeletons dangle like catkins
On the lime shoots, tumult of time
Breathing sleep and sexual nutrition;
Liquid loquation - wonder and wisdom:
...

Dark sentinel of the ways:
My heart has given to the strange;
This ache of sadness torments my days
When I am lost of all your change.
...

A biblical wind opened out
A trackway from the heart that passes
Through a mind mapped by science and doubt -
His life was all acids and gases,
...

Death in Tunbridge Wells - 1682;
Its unbolted memory has never left these walls.
And its iron ghost climbs down the centuries, and walks,
To rattle, blundering through our thoughtless days now.
...

What occupant beats beside a lover's brain?
Who hears the whispers of the past?
It is the old world that comes again
With dreams, softly as a ghost,
...

Under the steed breath and warlock eyes,
His granite stare lifts a Canterbury miracle
And a death... Lips like a drained lake, reveals
A winding path amidst the sunken graves...
...

The day wheel turns – the air is ringed
And teeth of dark assembly grow;
Her flesh lawned in sunned ecstasy,
...

Those seven ages of man, look upon
The star-bashed solemnity, and give ease
As the sky trembles to a canopy
Of ancient trees - the shire-sturdy oak.
...

Muse, thy fair and busty presence
Brought moonlight, madness and song;
Conjurations inspired wise words to mind
And invoked beauty, but you belong
...