Stockholm Syndrome

Beloved Captor

From this solitude of sin, I long to
break through to the heart of you, but keep
getting stuck in your honey. The only way
to impose your will on the world is to
cease being willful. Surrender this, then:
at the point of trap the trapper is trapped,
ownership an inescapable
dichotomy of possession. False truth.

Free me to own me. Liberty a rein
from which none rebel. Trust me or leave me
to die of freedom. Having been caged here
so long, my heart cannot fly beyond fear,
beyond that love which safety taught; unchained,
we long for that hated security.

 David M Pitchford, 10Jun2011

Not sure this is finished, so please feel free to comment. Would quite enjoy some constructive feedback. Thanks.

For Byron and the Romantics

Flown from Chillon

When will the Truth be on my lips
and the Light be on my brow?

—Leonard Cohen from “Argument”

 

This is the human heart, uncorrupt. This
is divinity’s heart, the world’s soul.
What the altar; what sacrifice? Nature
receives her own, yet we in our myths, our
illusions as fallen beings, eject
ourselves from paradise, forfeit unlost
for lacking soulful strength and so reject
innocence as a softer state too gentle,
too soft for survival . . . and thus we die
to Truth and Beauty as soon as it touch
us deeper than the need to feed, the urge
to satisfy flesh. What has Truth to do
with deprivation? And what has Beauty
to do with self-denial’s strange commerce?

David Pitchford
20 July 2010

Sky -n- Earth

Gathering Electric

lightning in gestation
clouds, earth, friction
fornications of sky & earth
how the low belly of heaven loves

this prairie — rubbing against
it to create towering clouds
and maelstroms of hot-meets-cold
thunderclap drip of rain and
wind scrubs her for another go . . .

A nod to Nietzsche

Nodding to Nietzsche

They say that god is love: yes, then, Nietzsche,
god is dead. Its bloated corpse is my heart—
my mouth and stomach fill with these buzzing,
stinking maggots and mind crawling, creeping,
lurching in broken swirls of worms and roaches
eating the carrion of my thoughts and
feasting on dead idealism and
corrupted vows—corpses of guardians
slain beside their dead god, angels dancing
no longer on the pin’s head, but rotting
in the fetid stench of human frailty
and failed faith. Yet death feeds life. It cycles
in apotheosis even stone dead.
As maggots become flies, so love’s death bears hope.

David M Pitchford
21 July 2009

Caveat

Caution to Readers

My heart knows of despair,
my mind keenly perceives tragedy.
Lines I write speak of these many
black moments, these desolations.
And yet the light in my eyes remains,
for they recognize as well each silver
lining, each lesson to learn of failure,
each hope concealed in shadow:

it is the heart’s purpose to pump blood
out into the world, to bleed into life,
and it is also the heart’s purpose to pump
blood from the world into the flesh
that the flesh might recover, might heal,
might retain its ruddy resilience.

David M Pitchford
17 April 2009

Rokeby Venus: Ekphrastic Sonnet

 

 

"Rokeby Venus" by Diego Velasquez c. 1650

What Within the Looking Glass?

Is it truth you see within your looking
glass? Or merely that shallow reflection,
that skin-deep self, flesh manifestation
engineered of cells divided, cooking
DNA’s unique recipe—working
toward our next, our better(?), evolution,
and victim to fortune’s machination
toward Nature’s mysterious re-making?
 

Venus, do you see your truth? Burning flame
lit by unseen sun, burning bright within
eyes shadowed by doubt, self-immolation
to protest yesterday’s beauty—that same
beauty as marks you today, looks akin
to Ideal, yet perceived sans admiration?

David M Pitchford
6 December 2008

Gravity Conceit

Nature’s Gravity Would not Stop

More and more, and less and less
this world to me seems real unreal
unfathomable in its unreason, treason,
fantastic in its natural logic and rational
order—and yet it is this unreason, this
human element, that defines not merely
human, but life, reeling in what’s real,
and all the living universe, all that
herein holds significance—to us,
and to all like us—and unlike, yet
similar in these irrational needs
for reason, for order, for excuses
to deny surrender, to deny the most
natural gravity: Death—and his
permanent dominion for all we know . . . 

David M Pitchford
6 November 2008
Rev 6 December 2008

Agony: sonnet on a Ligozzi painting

"Agony" by Jacopo Ligozzi

 

Gardens of Our Own Agony

“The Kingdom is within you.” And Satan
shakes his little fist within my bruised black
soul: sinner! sinner! His guilt an attack
only I inflict upon myself. Can
God hate himself for being All? Satan
sits back in his shadowed corner to crack
gallows grins of gleeful pride—yes, he’ll stack
the evidence neck-deep—cannot withstand

shadow, for he is Morning. What wise men
know, is that the shadow fears the light less
than light fears that which covers it. But, see,
we are offspring of the Divine; our sin
is separation—dwelling in darks’ garden
when we are made and dwell in ecstasy.

 

David M Pitchford
18 November 2008