Ocean Seeping Eyes

7/26/2019 Ocean Seeping Eyes

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Ocean Seeping Eyes


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Unde igitur suavis fructus de amaritudinevitae carpitur gemere et flere et suspirare etconqueri?

Augustine, Confessions


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For Heather


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OCEAN SEEPING EYES

Nicola Masciandaro


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OCEAN SEEPING EYES Nicola Masciandaro

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy ofthis license, visit: http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-

nd/3.0.

ISBN-13: 978-1508968207

ISBN-10: 1508968209


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I

Only the unendurable stillness falling from your eyesMakes this lone world breathable. It undoes my still lifeInto a new alien silence no black death will ever quell.

The moon is so jealous of such light. All day she hides, readingHow humans think her into their obscurest sighs, simply notTo forget that everything in the end may still be alright.

When the world ends, as it suddenly has, there will still beNot enough time to meet. Now children play ever younger gamesWith their own bones, sing like birds above dusty golden streets.

My hope is not for you or me. Tis for the weird tidal waveThat will liquefy time and drown space in a spiral abyssOf endless . . . a perfectly still, truly perfect tsunami.

Survival is a curse we abandoned too long ago to the born.This still birth happens without us, in X, a crosswise spaceOf blackest unseen glancingour immense secret forsworn.

That which is swallowing today never dies. A real serpent,

It flies darker than anything, piercing every place, swervingAtoms beyond the black specular curve of the cosmic sky.

Listen to me because I am not to listen to. Hear meStill as I cannot speak truth, only words meaning nothing,Nothing more than a knowing of anything none ever knew.


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II

Hang me by the heels until your pail is overfull of my tears.Not from me does this liquid come, limpid crystal waterMore self than minewhole sea seeping through two small spheres.

Once in a dream I drenched my whole body in weeping. The dropsCascaded down in constant flowing from the crown of my head,Washed the universe into oblivions deeper than sleeping.

Give me a lachrymatory for my birthday. I will fillAnd empty it diurnally in terminal futile attemptTo cool the overhot coals cracking open the hearts clay.

Or preserve all the saltwater in a deep secret cellar.As miracles happen it may spontaneously becomeWine enough for everyone to laugh their heads off forever.

Not that there is reason to worry over how things turn out.Tear itself alone is the deep truth and everything elseBeginning with these words is abysmally open to doubt.

Tears prove truth the only way possible disproving all things

Including themselves, distilling the real and illusoryInto singular oneness of an evaporating syllable.

I see the bucket is barely starting to fill. Please returnAs infrequently as you wish, for I am happy to hangHere plunged upside down in deep sorrowit is my will.


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III

Bury me in the floor of your temple, embalm me inYour skin. Whatever happens, find a fate to so enwrap meInside the most inner boundary of all that you are in.

Lifeless things also miss you. So communicates the floorOn which one rolls nearly all day weeping, blindly wonderingHow union will ever become itself forever from two.

To the ocean bottom I sink until it becomes ceiling.To the sea floor I float and drown to a degree that no oneWho has never done so will find at all appealing.

Time now to say anything, find the nothing there is to say.Here is the place honestly to embarrass yourself, to floorThe lone audience with feats of being a self-eating clich.

To watch your life fly out the window from the safety of home.To walk flying through your fear of falling with the chaoticAccuracy of an auto-targeting predator drone.

One day we will forget how to spell our names. O lovely mess

Of sitting close on the serene floor of unlocked syllables,Knocking over all towers of Babel with our tiny games.

Someone prays no one to think who my verse is for. He fallsAll the way down, kissing the closest horizons black abyss,Prostrate in paradise, upon the un-enclosure of a floor.


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IV

Everything is upside down, hanging by a thread. Only tearsFlow in the right direction, only weeping is alive, hereIn the realm where nothing is real, where life is truly dead.

Not here enough even to be falseexcessive zero. ThisWorld is . . . never mind what anyone alive says about it,Never think again to bury your brain-void in that pillow.

From where I lie, the live teardrops rise. One after anotherThey follow the golden filament, spiral to the unknown,Like ants ascending a subtle liana into your eyes.

On the one hand, I want each one to arrive. On the other,I need the salt of my life to corrode the perilous cord,Snap this small universe into ultimate swan dive.

Never more alive, the whole body cries. So I feed its heartWith opposing hopes of climbing and falling, growing memoryBackwards into a future formed of arborescent sighs.

We all know what will happen. The totality of these tears

Return to their source the moment I implode in paradise,Like a marine Marysas, or the men in Under the Skin.

Let this undo surprise at not being alive. It is scrawledBy a life making all else less than dead, pressed by the puppetHand of one whom only the entire ocean will ever revive.


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V

I fear I fail to remember, I forget. Everything isTwisted into simplest horrornot this, not thisall is fogOmnipresent, one far unscalable diaphanous net.

Always further I remember, far too much. Across horizonsThis eye intersects within itself more than will be known.Inside the oblique sphere of every line our glances touch.

Forget that I never not knew, forget me. So far too longHave I already lingered, am lingering still on the shoreAs if it were not, as ifas if it were (not) itself the sea.

Now dive on the count of three to the bottom of tears. LeapInto the black starlight of the nearest far, the abysmalOcean of love swimming beyond itself under all fears.

Less I remember more I know. All things are far too clear,Too obvious to think about, suffused with a blinding candorLike death coming to a victim right before the final blow.

There, where all speaks without me, there. Here, only one thing

To do, burning forever in the midst of all else: weep tearsOn its unimaginable feet and dry them with our hair.

Is not written he who writes. On the day you at last meet himIt will still be first, in faraway newness past fantasy,On an earth lit by itself, moonlike, beneath suns of nights.


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VI

My eyes are submarine caverns, seeping what they cannot see.Are your limbs anemones? If they are, what is the chanceOf understanding them, or ever again falling asleep?

There is also music in this sunken, floating tomb. It soundsLike a spiral mountain, or a crystal storm, or organ fuguesConducted to a pale embryo in our dark motherswomb.

If only the caverns could talk, these void spheres speak. If onlyMy eyes comprehended all they project, saw the cinemaOf each atom, all suns and galaxies . . . Instead, they leak.

I see no space for a real kiss here, no truth. For lifetimesWe grope in speechless caverns, finding less than oneself to eat,Tasting nothing other than the dull sting of my own tooth.

Still you are here, silent in the blacker cave of blacknessThat speaks a name. As if I care what anyone thinks, as ifAnyone has understanding of what is never the same.

The drops that keep me up forever are like shimmering gems.

By losing all of them I will eventually, impossibly, win,Namely: overflow with wine more drunk than Rumi for Shams.

Until then, you will have to listen to me. Or not, and justWalk on, not worrying at all, much less about what babbles,Drowning in its own breath, down near the bottom of this sea.


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VII

There is nothing worse than not weeping, for you. And for you,What is worse, weeping or not weeping? Tell me now to yourselfWhat is really the case, tell me a silenceyoursthat is true.

Without tears I see nothingblank! Without drowning in thatLiquid invisible light, suffocating in pure silence,There is only this, hooded and bound, inching along a plank.

I know you know all that these words plainly mean. I know you knowI know all that I want to say. And I know you know I know you knowAll that stays unsaid, touching the razor loop of silence so keen.

So that not weeping cannot not open into weeping higher.So that one only floats still further upon the spiral sphereOf all tears ever wept, rising like a flame from ones own pyre.

This morning my tears took a straight line, plumb. No doubt silenceDrew itwould have split everything like Bulleh Shahs alefIf I was not so thick-headed, if the heart was not so dumb.

One wept tear seeds a million unwept more. When the eye retains

The ocean, I will gaze worlds past silence from my pupils.Closed all the way open, I will no longer peer from the shore.

For the moment, tearlessness seversa dry torture tearingAll things from themselves . . . until suddenly now the spring flowsForth again into vision, and all is well, worse than ever.


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VIII

I follows I up the mountain, unable to move. Now pushMe to where I may follow, roll me down to the steepest path,The inexistent one where we climb with nothing to prove.

Heart-sound to heart and breath-scent to breath, I followed. NowBeat I on the black gate of my own mouth, begging it to openInto some eternal level of eating that will never be swallowed.

Never think a moment I will forget. Nay each syllableOf spoken silence will remember more than all, recallingIn utmost inner scream everything that cannot happen--yet.

Keep following your sigh to ghazal street, where the gazelles die.I am there in the dust, on a breeze stirring the ghetto palms,In the light now gently seen, not touched by too-human eyes.

Keep following tears to the sea floor. There where boundariesBetween eyes and tears and thought and being will never exist,Where extremophiles dance carelessly near lifes burning door.

Best to fulfill by escaping the fate of Lidwina. Best

To follow the better worst, to outsurvive ones own graveAnd sport freely, far more astonishingly, like Christina.

Still, I do fear all this is only wisdom of a victim soul.Good thing nothing is mineparadise against my willThis is, a walled garden severing singulars into a whole.


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IX

Do not hesitate to eat my flaming heart, fear consumingIts golden ember fire. Nothing will alter its true substance,Nor defile the whole of which it is far greater than a part.

The world is a grave, this we always know. Is there somethingElse here, past impossible to describe, a thingless thingSweet and strong like the breath of a panther, ancient-new?

I see you wing through the crystal window, coming or goingI cannot tell. Still, there is the river of the whole visionFlowing, a neither-here-nor-there total unstoppable swell.

That is why my eyes are swollen, why I strangle myself onThe breath of your name. Because all is far freer than it thinks,Because I needs to lack the whole, deny-affirm the selfsame.

Please make poetry stop, kill it in its sleep. I do not knowHow much more of it I can take, how many more tearsBlindness, blind to everything other than itself, can weep.

If only a way to spontaneous and omnipresent

Surrender. If only everything would simply give up,Stop cutting itself off from the glory of its splendor.

Do not worry. Not antithesis, this is less than sub zeroConsolation. In a weird way that escapes me I amWholly free, in bliss, the indifferent source of all temptation.


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X

Being able to do something is nothing. It is not youWho ever does, but a softer, irresistible instant breeze,Something happy and forlorn, a weird trustless trusting.

Deep in the zone of tears, who cries for whom? Is anyone thereAt all while I swoon to the floor, tasting the sweet saltDregs of myself on the rug of the overfamiliar room?

The total solipsism of tears touches the feet of God.Or so I think in prophetic folly of my patheticFallacy, hearing the noof my own reason as a nod.

I weep over myself weeping for you. Personally ISeduce each syllable of silence from the ocean, coaxingIt into vapor of unknowing, then distilling the cloud to dew.

To exit melodrama through itself, to dive. Thats the kind Of appalling imperative I am following these days,The general command of trench warfare keeping me alive.

At the end of the day, of life, of the universe, there is

Little impressive about tears. There is only the endlessFleeting taste of a permanence that will never pass into years.

Please wipe your mind-slate clean of these pale rainbow hues.Nothing was, is, or will ever be written on the black slateOf the soul, another do-less doer, a mere who knows who.


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XI

I tell myself thisnot the way it is. Here a man walksAlone in spiral circles, looking for a scent that hunts,Haunted by a center that makes him no longer his.

Looking for where it happened, for blood. See my feet knowWhere to walk without me, touching just what they must,Abandoned to simple easy skill, stepping on frozen mud.

Everywhere I walk is snow, blinding white. Where is the red?Where is the open secret portal to the site, a bed of earthWhere she severed my skull forever in the middle of night?

The few drops of oxygen in questioning are not enoughTo sustain life. And now there is gas in the veins of thoughtBecause of love, constant murder without victim or knife.

Now there is walking in a circle that goes everywhereAntarctic perishing, freezing of breath, hyperopic dreamsOf sublime crystal thrones and prism-castles in the air.

Step by step by step the story goes. When apocalypse comes

He will be still be walking straight to the center of the bombsWhite death, as if it were the empyrean, his own celestial rose.

My secret is mine, or so I say. When the last step is takenAnd these wise feet refuse to go, neither here nor there willIt be, neither yesterday nor tomorrow, not even today.


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XII

Sunk in memory of eyes, world is turning marine. Too drunkTo talk about it, I swim now in pure drowning, drinking inThe sinless delight of underwater sighs, so dark and green.

Deeper into themselves the orbs flow. A sponge from beyondVision is soaking all things into seeing, ocularizingEvery lucid surface into blue, self-observant glows.

It is obvious now why you are not here: for the expressPurpose of seeing you everywhere, of plunging my wholeThree-fold body faster through the pupil-portal without fear.

Any who see what is happening will faint. WhoeverComes across this uneasy, incommunicable gazingWill have no idea what to think, no image at all to paint.

I see no way backto where? What way or method for turningRound is possible for a coral-boned being, a sunken emberOf soul-flame bubbling its self away in spiral spheres of air?

He was seen once, when you never stopped looking. Now his eyes

Are liquefying all things in the sun of that glare, enflamingThe earth into a cauldron sea, this long turbulent cooking.

No wonder I sink to depths, fly far below. The air aboveIs too hot to breathe, and were it possible to surviveThe inverse journey, there would be nothing, no place to go.


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XIII

All I would say, all I would feel. More than the anemoneHears in a sirens song, than the mermaid may conceiveIn her most secret mind, more than sea-longing of the seal.

The ocean is only infinitely compacted layers of skyDying for itself. All day it drowns in stratospheric love-Sickness, hungry like a shark recalling once being a sylph.

Snow is the sea reminding you to weep. Too much I seeFrom my window, view never mine where too much is thought,Where thinking everyday resembles the worst possible sleep.

Fact is, none of this is for me. So what? If this specificDeath-by-individuation event were not happeningSomeone might still be reading cosmic pessimism by ET.

Perhaps there is a real party somewhereparadise! The wineMust cost a fortune in freedom, the beauty beyond belief,And the song supremely synthesize all aspects of fire and ice.

Now love in me tells poetry not to go to hell. It flattens

This soul called mine into a kind of lace, an ornamentUnintended, gentler than anything you will ever feel.

Lower than earth or water, Nicola isalaslava.As for what remains, who knows? Search your own heart,Follow the sigh from the empyrean into your vena cava.


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XIV

Because nothing is enoughequals everything is too much.So the next time anything happens, notice how everyoneIs wearing a black executioners hood, and how they blush.

You and I will meet once the body resurrects from me. ThatWill be the day, the way there will be no more stupid fussAs to who is who or why it mattersonceto not be free.

Today melted timeanyone else feel it too? They say thatAwakening has this uncanny aspect of not beingAble to distinguish between your false and my own true.

The moment I welcome spring in every form, dragons appear.Does that mean anything? I mean anything less than that loveWhose hyper-human summit ignores every cloud, forgets all fear?

Cosmos was destroyed at the moment of creation. AllThat we experience now of the universe is simpleLoneliness, the long waking sleep of its pure preservation.

There is no greater fortune than this, none. There is nothing

Anywhere that will ever compare to the thrill of such speed,The infinite acceleration of what will never have begun.

As if the maker of this possesses a voice! Therefore hearAll the more nearly what is spoken, with both ears growingInto the ground of silence, where the word is without choice.


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XV

Drop the umbrella of time, let it fall. Let the shining sunEclipsed be by the light of the darkest sky, the one thatRestores space to being a supreme minimum of the all.

How I scream beyond hearing today. Thats how it should be,Given there is only silence, simply this unhearable tuneShattering the air per se like glass and blowing it all away.

Crystal this wound is, deeper than matter. ImpenetrablyIt shines with a kind of frozen solid fire, a mirror-like painCrucifying every color in the sweetness of its laughter.

Now see that my body is only a seventh shadow. So whereDoes that leave tears? Are they a mere penumbra or the clearSap of our deepest unseen sea, its darkest transparent glow?

Hold me beyond myself, in safest danger of striving. ThatIs where I am anyway, playing in all-owning poverty,Killing being killed on the battlefield beyond surviving.

Worse theworlds arrows do is whisper your name. And this

Is no different from the best, namely, to record in sheer delightThe never-ending day one glance realized the hearts secret aim.

Let the whole universe whizz by, what do I care? NothingErases that which long ago erased all erasing. No lightWill ever darken the ancient blackness, the one never there.


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XVI

Everywhere I look, for someone never seen. Are my eyelashesYour hair? That might explain why I blink and stare like this,How I never stop starting to wonder, why my irises are green.

God is the non-existence of friends. So whoever is my friendIs God. Get it? Do you understand that if you understand thisThere is nothing at all over which to ever make amends?

I love youthat is how perfectly everything works. But whoWants to believe that? Perfection seems to be surroundedOn all sides by miserable monsters, projecting pitiful quirks.

Guess who is the one I cannot think without thinking of? NowDo you know who you are? I am sorry for only confusing myselfAnd everyone else further by attempting to talk about love.

How to keep the secret that will not stop talking? I do,By letting nothing constantly happen, by listening toThe silence saying this is not it, now continue walking.

Someone knows whether it is stranger that you or that I

Exist. All day I hear that person telling me during a momentToo long to last, an instant too eternally swift to persist.

This is written for that which listens in loving fear. ButIt is spoken for another, screamed more quietly for noneBut the one becoming ever present in the blur of tears.


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XVII

No onenot you, not meknows how much I love, only silence.The reality of it is so abysmally hidden, eclipsedBehind everything in a kind of infinitely gentle violence.

To be hopelessly pinched between immoderate cogitationAnd the need to stop the mind. That is the kind of infinitiveThis life is, a breathing death of thinking (you) all the time.

When the shards lodged in my heart-flesh start to pinch, I weep.And when the adjoining scar tissue grows enough to numbThe pain, it is off to bed to reopen the wounds in sleep.

Anyone who does not love to be tortured this way has notFelt it. And anyone who does love to be tortured this wayIs either absolutely insane or a total idiot.

Madness of love instructs in love of madness, and contrariwise.One nice effect of this loopy self-eating education isTo unveil the true charm of things I would formerly revise.

So that is what the real reality is, the unknowable truth?

Is itwithout is-ing or it-ing at allsimply the thinglessThing refining in pure instant science whatever is uncouth?

By its grace neither I nor my words is sophisticated.Even the maximum nobility needs its minimum,A peasant to show off from where it never originated.


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XVIII

Leave abandonmentthat is what it said. And the mountainWas suddenly another mountain, not the one we must climb,But another peak, on the sea, like a paradise isle of the dead.

Less peak than a vast living throne, less throne than a garden.Yet still a mountain, higher than anything, lovely clean stone,Adamant and breathing with something time cannot harden.

I cannot tell you how happy I am and do not know why.From its inaccessible summit one easily dives flying in fallInto the real Mediterranean and from there into the sky.

Intoxication at the thought of it cannot be separated fromThe thing itself. Such is the nature of a realm, the real MWhere wine is kept in vessels none other than yourself.

Yesterday, for only a few seconds of yes, I openedThe friendliest invitation to die. And look what happens!Today I am walking your limbs on the inside of goodbye.

To become permanently established past space-time

In a complete field of creative forces. That is the kind ofObvious silliness one says while riding winged horses.

Human crossed with thought produces Daedalusa thingDying like sunset upon the horizon. Now multiply by XYou and mewhat do you get? A new species of Pegasus.


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XIX

The tear trickling into my ear whispers no secret. It isA secret itself, whispering what it really isthat this wholeUniverse is only the solid shadow of missing everything in it.

There is a scent I remember, that was never a scent. ItStill is what it never was, the sweetest memory of itselfFilling the room of the world with a kind of floral lament.

And no lament at all. The roses of it are gold, and its goldIs rosesroses and gold of an invisible order havingZero to do with anything occurring before or after the Fall.

Forgive me for indulging in any other expertise. KnowThat whatever it is, my heart is not in it, for there isOnly so much space from finish to start for losing the race.

All things whatever are pain (to me), a master says, except . . .As if anyone worth his saltwater would desire it otherwise,As if there is another way to rise from having so long slept.

Who wants to say anything anymore? What kind of illness

Causes a person to not stop exiting the home of oneself and stayOut shivering in the cold, ringing the bell of their own door?

However circularly I stray, at least my bellybutton movesElliptically with me. Nothing shakes off the tears or the scentThat must be coming from own navel, underneath the sea.


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XX

How old you are, ancienthow old areyou? Nothing I can seeWill answer, nothing I can say will speak, nothing I can hearWill sound where the beauty of unbirth shines, the species true.

Be not afraid of being outside being and time. Is this notThe hour to downclimb the trees of ourselves and find a wayUp the deepest roots, ascending via individuations slime?

It is hardharder than I knowto fall for what only wantsOnes own death. And the easiest thing in the world. NothingIs softer and gentler and sweeter than its love-stirring breath.

Were it possible to make it any easierI would not!Do not ask what has gotten into me, what kind of wormIs striving to eat itself free from the blind hole of my rot.

The pupil in my forehead is starting to burn. The eyesWithin this crystal skull are beginning to melt the mask,So that sooner or later seeing itself will be all that I yearn.

Or so someone imagines, peeping through black phantasms.

Far be it from so-and-do to tell you on zero authorityThat the space between us will not forever remain a chasm.

Reality is reality, and that is totally fine. In fact,Nicola cannot think of anything more astonishing,Nothing whatsoever this bewildering and divine.


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XXI

What wears life out like this, making it unfit for everything?Yet strangely I feel more and more strong, as if weakness were notDebility but the delivery mechanism of an unforeseeable sting.

There are not enough bees in this city. Are they turned offBy the general absence of real secrets in people, the wayEverybody goes around ugly thinking they are pretty?

I have seen a handful of flowers at most. The rest of usMay count ourselves successful if we manage to achieveFor a few minutes the magical status of compost.

Love is a waste of time, but I am more so. I think thereforeIt best to dispend myself in hopeless hope that one dayThe one-way bargain will somehow pay off, find a new low.

Not that I am not avoiding the lover-and-beloved trap.We all know Beatrice saves Dante from himself out of a loveThat needs to silence him, to shut eternally his rhyming trap.

Love is eloquence itself, and so has no need for it. Anyone

Trying to be eloquent about love has abandoned the postAnd ought be dragged back, tied down like a raving idiot.

Life as a goat on a leash is not bad. Only when I hearThe voice of one who feeds this heart does leaping painMy neckthe same one appointed to sever my head.


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XXII

New universes born from the commingling of our dust? ThatIs an odd sort of idea, a strange form of plan, as if oneMight ever foresee the monsters brought forth by cosmic lust.

How long will my refusal of birth last, where will it end? IAm tiring of this degree of novelty, this surchaotic whimAlways nailing being further into itself round another bend.

Something big must have lost control before time to createThis still crashing head-on collision. The radical unityOf such reckless endangerment is beyond division.

I know you want to believe that physics is not love, notReally. But the overwhelming evidence that desire itselfProves is making this and all other wants look very silly.

In the black beyond yesand nolies the illimitable truth.Stars are its dimmest shadows and the abyss its eye,Gazing itself right through each heart like a serpents tooth.

A friend is someone who hears the scream. I mean: a scream hears

And a hearing screams the sound, spiraling into silenceThrough the opening ear-mouth of an immemorial dream.

Ergo, there is no love between things. Beyond force this force is,Immediately past medium, hopelessly outside-in all between.Music could care less what becomes of the dust on its strings.


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XXIII

Our bodies come/came off like light coatstake your pick. IfThe present tense this is an event, if past a story, and if bothThere is a chance at paradise, of getting out of here real quick.

So much to learn from the little moon! See her body moveThrough all phases of itself without relinquishing eitherSide of pupil-being, fixed in the pure life-circle of a swoon.

Sages say corpora come and go as soul remains. Is that notYour secret invisible sense of things, gazing the lunaOf your face into the forest from the window of a train?

We look into a mirror to see what itseesnothing. That is,The nothing which everywhere gives sight to all, blinding oneIn inescapable vision, finding mebefore everything.

Vertiginously dear are your words to me, as dear as the wordsYou never say. The heart aims eternally at the thresholdWhere one and zero both get to enjoy having it both ways.

Nearby, on the verge where sound and body are one substance,

This mouth sculpts itself into a megaphone-receiver ofThe primal scream. Or was it another whispering in my dream?

Now that we are finally here, lets tear away from ourselvesWith a daring no one has any idea of. Let us all swim freeAs pure air, like water evaporating from the tears of love.


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Ocean Seeping Eyes

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