I don't usually explain my poems, you may not understand them, but the explanation is almost always redundant. However, this is one of the odd ones out.
Years ago I got rid of all my early work, deliberately losing at least ten years of poems and then, by accident, lost some more. The other week, thinking back on some of these poems, I thought that, perhaps, I could recover something in a slightly less ghoulish way than Dante Gabriel Rossetti recovered his poems from Lizzie Siddal's grave. I found words and phrases and lines bubble up, but mixed with my concern over the increasingly psychotic nature of the public realm. I jotted as much as possible down and then, unexpectedly had a crisis in my health that nearly killed me.
A week later, at home I assembled the fragments in some kind of order. The word 'unlost' rang a bell and I think that a translator of Paul Celan used it, but am at this time unsure. It seemed better than 'rediscovered'. Anyway, there are fragments here of very old work, held together by faulty memory along with fresh yammerings of an uneasy mind. You may still not understand this poem, but that is the context.
Poem Unlost (Fragmenta)
Between these parallel lines
I can neither live nor breathe
The squeezed space
Matters not
The crossing is infinite
Alternations of black and white light
*
Great Pearl-of-Light
Fallen
fallen
Into the Place-of-Shells
And our burning world
Locked in a skull
*
Opacity
Your hidden face
Your lost face
Gone and gone
In the frazzled glass
Broken
*
The great evil of little men
Grotesque dazzle
Of the burning world
Broken
*
Terrae of lost words
Within submergence and abandonment
The long crawl to terrestrial paradise
And the cthonic urge
Where the tongue is a desert
