LUMINOUS WEAPONS (A work in Progress)

The distance between who is desired and who desires, and what aches between them with the invisibility of a forest fire in an astrological field of impossible theories, is all that is required for the sound that light makes when it doubles its gender and wanders off in search of a mirror. No reflection at all, no resemblance, no ‘eternal returns’ to tempt you, but by breath to command, to splatter stars, pull threads, lift lakes, bleed glances... Now you can sleep and open doors with uncanny accuracy. Now the circle opens past the hour of witching. What is desirable is the gauntlet, the shimmering outside, the savagery of graceful resolution, always interrupted.

*

All the additional movements and spaces filled and charmed with tenuous hands of wisdom, casting long shadows that flower with the purity of ruthless fictions and tender explosives, passing through the reclining nudes of the illusive ramparts of sacrifice and obsession... and passing through the castle walls of provocation, the fire-seeded lizards of persistence, powered by visionary feminine motors, spine-tingling attachments and hermetic handshakes, hesitant closeness, agonizing touches, radiant greed for healing breath (passed back and forth from one moth to another, mouth to mouth, from summer to summoner), raises the green of candles chasing the sun into the crossfire of absolute certainty.

*

From the ampules of a lighthouse throwing waves of vicuña slightly above the levels of the trees, where the swimmers find refuge, not far from your spirits burning in the wilderness, in the celluloid fields of that lofty observation tower protected by freshly scattered analogies... consciousness is attracted to your dreams and stays awhile, surrounding your maneuvers, gliding dust-wise through the scenes of that magnetic reality dropping its eggs and its shawls, its midnight octopi and other erotic vessels chasing you through the underground passages. If for the sake of argument, you feel you’ve come too close, there is always the branding iron...

*

She follows the designs of dark hives and diving with lunar ratios out of the exhaled liveries, breath of dark and dark energy seduced out of wish-fulfillment, bracing the essence of each doorway, against the game of sensuous appeals through which you pass, alive and along the paradoxical lesbian sage of jewel-thought and owl-rigging that calls from the street where the orchards raise the sea-level in the fuse of her name, slithering across the plateau towards mist, swinging anvils.

*

Often, when the howling opens the rose at peculiar hours, levels the despair that only invites a confused exit from the maze of perception (when, instead, it is the heart of the maze that knows you from outside), where the Aurochs playing chess with the Priestess mimes the windmill of an improper move, tattooed, pierced and marked with light, burning like the water that identifies a pagan needlework of purely transparent utterances, marked, lanced and laced, bathing night with manic precision; dream-wax burnt directly into flesh. You have nowhere to go but through it, a random Tarot-throw of mysterious gestures designed to intoxicate and feed with power. You caress the negative, your twin, aroused with antlers.

*

She assumes the disguise of controls worked with uncommon expertise, and her gown is the pilot of cherished promenades, longhaired spores leading your mercurial triangles through esoteric folds of nomadic tribes casting impossible tales of a luminous flow of blood. You share the distance with her whirling shell, a pulse of death passing, expanding between arteries of a backward glance that throws pyramids, torches that resemble her when she sleeps, absinthe flowing from her lips onto the ladles of arousal, and she crawls to you, her landing gears tearing up the curtains... her signals overwhelm your reticence. Watchtowers are abandoned. In her refusal to compromise, she forms the eclipse that covers your tracks. Night is visibly shaken. Night rains in exile, profound and innumerable.

*

The groom is grooming the sand with his questions, the horses, polishing his bones, the windows, springing from his well with anointments, the wheels, firebombing the bells of sleep, he is glowing the wind for his hoar-faced objects, the sirens, that interrupt the oval rigging of distilled rubies and identified as you, as in the ghostly passageway, in your more refined moments, slowly sinking your teeth in the rind. The nature of things that stoke the iris being assaulted by the landscape, and the fleeting nature of your purity, however sinister and sensual, what remains to be discovered, pleasure is glass in restraint, and the tyranny of desire igniting in the center of a world and burning outwards...

Secret Games

Softcover 104 pages.
Publisher: La Belle Inutile Éditions
Language: English

$11.95

AMAZON

Following The Wolf House, Secret Games is Book II in the ongoing series of prose poems exploring the sense of the marvelous mating of science and erotic metamorphosis as a form of landscape in which the real becomes imaginary, and forces itself into visible nature.

Selections:

In the last quadrant of the city held intact by the light of stars, there is blood flowing from the beauty of her intricate invasions. The Night-Keeper dreams of his negative solutions so long ago ignited by those randomly spinning signs of life having taken up residence in the gardens of a periphery encounter. Visions were like golden pebbles among the roots of the tree of night, slowly moving behind you, breathing heavily, ripening, obscene...

*

In that place where life and death pass by unnoticed, the Messengers without their shadows light up the fabric of unauthorized expectations, like vague recollections of thoughts that were never yours, or another form of magic, or perfidious logic, when it multiplies your body out of the space that occupies your body, out of the circle of your ageless metamorphosis within a further space more paradoxical than the others, when you follow the births and funerals of a consciousness that resembles the sea, like a fire-propagating game of chance...

*

The flow of light through the body of evidence follows the path taken at random by the sleepwalker down the stairs and into the face of a dangerous moment in time, where great risks are nurtured, and the moon provides the color of your blood when it flowers in the garden and intensifies the sense of fear, or loathing. There are no moral principles comparable to pleasure worthy of violation. Absolute recklessness prevails.

*

The pure fruit of an emergency landing, is a last ditch effort, a glowing hunger strung up by its ankles from the rafters, and impersonating the sputtering compass when it loses all sense of direction, kneels and licks your precious feet... then dashes off, exhilarated and beside itself. There is humor in the word: “precious.” The fruit is a night-light for the children who walk in their sleep––and therefore, the night is a narcissistic diversion... an act of irony that makes for intimate conversation between total strangers, when hidden meanings are always appreciated... when no one is present.

*

Reality is the amorous disruption of the wedding night, its fables and narratives in the black glass of the zookeepers’ promiscuous twin, the leopard’s robe of ingenious escapes, and the promenade of wonders...

*

Love is subversion of the senses, the negative light of magnetic sensations that cover you with the black dust of wings in the continuous vessel that reproduces your presence, and overflows. A singular plurality out of which are coaxed the drops of poison, of light, or words, a language of dew in the early morning, the dangerous clairvoyance of the body that swims in the bright water of its own two-way mirror. The psychosomatic eggs of an open window. Black honey, a pure black stone with a faithless heart of fire. Illusive and impeccable intervention.

*

When the laws of nature intercede on her behalf, footprints are sent scurrying in every direction, and when the coordinates mimic the exact measurements needed to trigger the alchemical vessels that seduce the weather, that whir and hum like simian lanterns held up to warn of impending dangers and invisible locks, she enters the forest from behind, where the spirits speak only Spanish and the nights are without equal. It is necessary to harness these wonders. The minerals of distraction, molecules of light.

*

Her flesh of poppies reflects the sun while her shadow impersonates the moon. The history of perversions is the gold of science. She is an endlessly bathing light.

*

The owl’s cape on the throne of the King, where tigers fight for the mirror and spill your royal blood in the afternoon, in the middle of the 3^rd hour, in the reflecting pools that pour you back and forth till the riddle is solved in the 2^nd half of the space of an ordinary day. A privilege for the yearning that gambles, claws and tricks every groan and sigh out of desperation... The mask that sputters around on the floor like a haunted scepter. The impossible flying machine that attaches itself to your hunger, and throws the switches that navigate the shallows. In the photograph, only an empty landscape where one somnambulist meets another... They bathe together in sleep.

*

“Amethyst and accomplice, precious arsenal of wandering, my adoration of you and your dizzying properties follows the sirens of intangible fascination, precious denizen of looting... It is to your credit that the stilts which accompany your divagations and prerequisites are musically inclined enough to scour the living and light up the dead. Splinters of your memory follow the black target of disruption, and I have followed you to that irony and golden alkali of doorways through which your web-like body passes, dressed in fog and calculations, engaged in the most perfect exploits. Your eyelids in the shape of my desires, your feet of dust for my incense, and the watermarks of your heavy breath in my invisible writing. The chaste striations of irreversible hunger. Improbable fuse..."

*

Amethyst of exchanging blood that ravages equality in the mother tongue, when the moon is a cat’s cradle in the sea of consciousness, of civil war in the telepathy of rebellious spirits, lovers in the fields of lunacy...

*

The poetic spirit of disconcerting chimera guides you, playing games of delirious wedding nights scattered like spores, or knives thrown long distances with painful precision into targets of receding conflict. It was that moment that heralded the invention of fire.

*

Often, the imperative measures to evade the negation of identity, wherein the wheelchair conversing with the swan, in an almost transparent state of immoral behavior, stunning in an embryonic sense, became a sunrise in a battle of wits with the Milky Way...

*

She was conscious of the purity of revenge, and he, the color of Central Asia at noon, always knew the mirror of her arousal. Together they avoided detection. Together, they were distant treasures.

*

When she releases the bright oils and fumes of her immaculate printing press, her gears cast shadows of mirrors grinding up endless nights and mornings in the quicksand of dazzling exploits. She spreads her lobes, dripping mouth-watering syrups out of buzzing hive entrances, where elaborate spyglasses unleash a fury of hummingbirds that drain the light out of every nook and cranny... A dream is like a flood taking everything in its path. Candles are lit for ritual scarring. Twins become precious minerals.

*

In this place there is a fear of fading, and under these leaves there is the mint of insomnia, when it becomes unstable and brilliant and passes through walls littered with feathers and promiscuous daughters with beautiful voices.

*

Lovers are more dangerous even than murderers. An engaging kiss between assassins, a sweet-tasting poison...

Reviews of The Wolf House

The elastic mutation of alchemical insight

In the alchemy of coupling, the text unfolds in hallucinatory outbreaks; the shadows are slayed with nocturnal snapshots. In THE WOLF HOUSE, the real becomes evocatively surmounted: "reality is the faded area of reconnaissance ... when fire was shaped by internal obsessions ..."

J Karl Bogartte's poem-sequence alludes to distillations, transformations, notations ... composed in the hypnogogic zone, the twilight of consciousness visited before and after inhabiting the dream-space. Images are reiterated in surreal loops and flashes, edging the night with the day - the alchemical transduction of language into image. THE WOLF HOUSE displays the crucible of transforming presence - a wedding night dance of light & dark, where rare substances are mixed in pursuit of the alchemical shadows of phantom lovers ...

The dream narration flows between the channels of a You and a She: "she is elusive, you are cryptic". The She is the wolf who savors your blood; she licks You until your eyes roll. Yes, She is armed & dangerous. She licks, howls, glowers ... all in her feral majesty: "the animal kingdom is in her eyes". She is the huntress, a Diana who sleeps with her prey as she lures with "her flesh of fireflies" and "the ordering of light".

THE WOLF HOUSE is a poem sequence of "incorrigible desire"; of mirrors & the veils of appearance; of the obligations of mystery ... an assemblage of poetic notations, daily distilled in "the hissing of light". The echoes of the European surrealists, their legacies, live on in this book. Through J Karl Bogartte's language of fire, the alchemical transformation from word to image is vouchsafed; a displacement of being where "the wolf ... is your envoy in another structure of being". The gift to the reader is the elastic mutation of insight from these amazing dream fragments ...

Matt Hill August 28, 2009

Selections from The Wolf House

Your language of silver-white crystals, anomalous pigments, the flash of knives under the arcades, the tripod of swinging jackals, that woman dressed in colonies of bees, in the madness of daring angles and close calls, of falling and flying, and long, endless corridors that open in the coliseum of unnatural revelations that change your disguise in the blink of an eye, from one conjuration to another. The danger of liaisons in the chamber of the bride with her tuning fork and her fissures of enchanted disproportion...

*

The tendency to violate the order of visual transition between the ruby’s fluorite of the background and the pale luminous quality of the emerald’s mysterious shawl (the long dark hair, and how it extinguishes in the shoulders; the delicate trace of a cheekbone meeting the organic gold of the air––always a figure of increasing speculation. The lassitude of a lit fuse. She remains nameless and potion-like, her insolence the glow in the eyes of wolves. The river knows her breath, as the wind makes her scent an eclipse.

*

When she dreams the black moths come to sip from her aura, and the largest of all Lepidoptera comes to land on her, the length of its body the length of hers, fluttering its wings with her, and when you notice her trembling with sudden and ceaseless abandon, it will be the moment when she assaults the heretic fountain of your sublime compost, where fragments of the Milky Way take up residence, shattering the windows and spreading like poison oak, or your chimerous presence among the birds...

*

There will always be the great treasure aching beneath the X, always the impossible seduction, always the unforeseen cosmology of delight, and always the sumptuous sundial of finely-tuned volcanos, and fabled cross-hairs, and further, by comparison to the purely accidental fortune of the witching hour, there will always be the imaginary revolutions spinning ever faster out of the embryos and larvae of the landscape, the deluge of fire-washed bones in the anesthetic forge of unreason, and always for you, in spite of yourself. Time to destroy the season of light, time to vanish...

*

The strangers come and go like phantom sensations in the apothecaries of her nightly charade, when she is pompous and slender, and rich in ambiguity, when her central nervous system idles in its dream-like state of readiness, she licks her claws and grooms her mirrors. Each entrance into the city is triangulated by the green vials of the psyche. The wind is the sea of your eternal flame in waves and particles... where the ruins light up and come to greet you. You are more than one, and touched many times for the invisible light that keeps your presence intact and visible. She eats your fruit. She is multitudinous.

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In the stillness of a marvelous holding pattern, the spine-tingling motors are polishing the mandarin threads of night and day. Where the river ends, the flood begins its joyful wailing, and the hour is luminous. The humor of cruelty is especially beautiful.

*

She moves like a ghost ship on the dance floor, full of springtime and levitation when she turns around, steering the chiaroscuro of brilliant thefts, coincidental exploits, and fitful nights. Her reality needs to end before you are allowed to touch her to the extent that she demands. She and her opposite are a balanced transparency, a talisman of wild dimensions.

*

You unmask a revelation in the woods at dusk, when it spirals into the city square from underground, and you leave no trace of it for anyone... except the mask it came in, that now covers the sleeping woman. Secret meetings were held involving the thief and his lover, their bodies that dream of their minds, and the secret of the universe––all taking place in the wink of an eye. The wolf always takes her by surprise. The owl denies her questions, yet shares her secrets. A perilous resolution doubles in proportion to the analogy of her random pleasures... She has only just arrived, and she is hungry for diversion. A conspiracy of the human spirit is chiseled in stone. The light is stolen. The darkness illuminated only by your breath, your breathing becomes inspired.

The Wolf House

Softcover 102 pages.
Publisher: La Belle Inutile Éditions
Language: English
ISBN: 978-0-578-02609-1
Copyright: © 2009 J. Karl Bogartte

Amazon.com

Prose poems written every morning over the space of a year, these 'dream-like notations" are further meditations on the raw nature of reality as it reforms itself every morning upon awakening from dreams. These are communications, grand exhortations, dark and magical confrontations with consciousness:

"The weather announces the grace of a marvelous cunning, sparkling on the surface which might not even be found in the darkness of the well, or on the roulette table where the candelabra (a lost memory) conspires with the dragonfly (a symbol of unrest) as elegant and lovely as a crossbow filled with early morning mayhem. “I adore you” she whispered, and died in your arms, a small planet, a diamond cutter’s blade, a single kiss, a drop of venom..."

This version also contains the Notebook of the Wolf House.

Selections:

An introduction to the discourse of the lunatic, when he sleeps in the form of a triangle at odds with the nighttime scent of secret flowers and forlorn passageways beckoning to the swimmers… His deductions shine with a brilliance only he can endure. The pain of movement is the pleasure of eagles in midair. When he speaks to his mirror the words exchanged open up new vistas that extend far beyond the analogies of fiction and nonfiction. He sleeps most peacefully when engaged in the most dangerous activities...

*

It is common knowledge that the First Matter of discontent is the water that lives, and it unravels the solace that grinds up the desperate landscape that long ago became luminous with the sense of imaginary beings meeting for the very first time––before they became real. She does not hesitate and releases her red pearl, while he, delirious with fog, conjures up the spirit of forbidden ceremonies. A reflection of thirst is offered, like a spell...

*

In the observatory there were brilliant and obscure clarities in the presence of evening, when she refuses the illustrious purity of his solitude, takes control of the fastidious alignment of sudden fears, and with only a slender thread that joins them for a brief moment in gravity, shares with him all that separates them in the forest fire of conscious singularity. An aberration of spirits feeding. She touches her own illusion, grooms it for his enchantment and encircles the reflecting light of hypnagogic templates... splendid gears redirecting the heavy prisms of awareness between the shipwreck and the incantation.

*

Springtime is an obscure alphabet for the bathing bodies swimming through night, and haunted by the intersection of sudden dreams that detach the strangers from their phantoms, without a scent or trace of hemlock, impeded only by your refusal to sever the black mirror from its bride. While she sleeps, conspiracies undermine the brightness of unnatural acts. Only the sublimely hidden recalls the necessity of a lost gesture, an intimate touch. She is playing, perhaps dreaming of her death, or her birth, with a detailed vengeance comparable only to the phases of the moon…

*

She spreads her body of dark ages and splendor in the physical radiation of crystals that reflect the cities into which are poured the marvelous manias that never fail to awaken the poppies, the black ones, for the voyage home, and the sinister red anemone with the poisoned eyelids, for the winter solstice. She draws the fluids out of your dreams, like one besieged by desires of broken Flemish porcelain. Silence was her Mercurochrome, or her twin sister... She loved you because of your despair.