First Cut

(for Maurice Cox)

I honed my razor against the rock that was you,

Guru, who showed me the power of words,

The mystery of creation, the glorious chaos

Distilled from the destruction of order:

Out of fusion, you said, comes confusion;

And from mud, the essence of so much colour.

Into Arcadia then, you led me, an innocent child

To barbarous meadows of riotous flowers;

And I was cut with the rhythm of song, with lust

And with the undying flame of conviction.

I wanted to become the laughing Anti-Christ,

The demon who tore the world from its clinging,

From its useless worship of mindless comfort:

I wanted to burst in a corona of reckless light,

Burn my entrails in magnesium flare

And dance in the kingdom of insufferable delight.

Like those before me, I chewed the bitter root

And have succumbed, as you feared I would,

To the blinding strata of hallucinated sky

And the dark, striated pulses of moon blood

That stole the tranquillity of sleep from my soul.

I lost the Gods in the land of long shadows,

In the underground Absinthe bars

Where the forgotten drink poisonous dreams

And are doomed to tear themselves apart

On the ragged shards of wretched dawn, forever on.

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