“Our artistry starves, as ever, for the next course of mankind, and we must perfect its preparation or waste away. With this in mind, we must move to reincorporate into our self-portraiture the body’s fleshly conditions, which capture and respond to rhythms and structures beyond the profile of thought, as the mind, in its affectations of echoing infinitude, repeats forms with which we have, by now, grown sickly. We have learnt that spiritual paradox is far from palatable, and nutritious in pitiable measure; it is instead the wordless, dimensionless chaos of the body that will train in us an understanding of the world’s true size, and revive our capacity for growth within it.”

This body soaked through, in palpitate waves, with sweating convulsions of nerve
Has turned in the grip of the fidgeting soul to a marbled and smudged revelation
Of bliss melted deep into layers of fat, and cuneiform-ridged indentations
Where seizures of feeling that stunned personality linger in knotted vexations,
Presenting a story to fingers and eyes of a mind shaped in tides of sensation
And reciting the path of the wandering foot, redirected with each scratch and swerve.

Now crises of orientation
have halted the urgent scratchings
of those who depict the world

As crises of malnutrition
distend our gaping culture
in which poets feed on people.

The notes of melting psyche
waft irresistibly
under hungry nose of those
who starve for some contingency;

Their carnivorous minds prowl the marketplace
wined and dined
seduced then sobered
and hungovered,
picking pieces affecting freshness
sucking marrow from bones
rattling names and juicing words
fed til empty
then forced crawl
deeper into Logos’ maw.

For witful quips make fine aperitif
but our muses ache to use their teeth –
to bite through the image and feel the hot spill
of bodies and symbols erupting at will,
of willing as blood in the fingers of meaning,
and drinking the songs that our fingers are bleeding
and tasting the sign in this new act of reading
that tears at the skin to enact its revealing;
our bodies fan open in tomes to be read
by the wandering eyes of the numb and misled
whose gaze we demand be directed onto
ontographical poems spiralling through
the widening veins and slow-bowing of ribs,
whitening hair, the crease-cracking of lips,
apertures in through which worldliness slips –
the breath of fresh air by which words uttered, live

These alien gusts give our mind its sharp edge,
and while shaping our limbs to the path that we tread
have sculpted the shape of the world in our head,
allowing one’s will to be mutely inferred
from the frame of the moment, its angles and curves,
which we alter, in turn, with our firm navigation,
thus subjecting our body to new mutilations –
each step an act of scarification
that enriches our language with novel vocation

So cast down the tablets that hold speech inscribed,
let tumble the pillars that keep sense in line
and dictate, with their mighty tradition and beauty,
the watchful constraint of the tongue’s weary duty,
and replace our hard words, with their stale design,
with a world-inclined dance of action and time,
taking as partners the body, its mind and
the sense-making whole with which they’re entwined
to make art of the instants in which they align,
gestures profound with coherence divine;
elevate the world with your bold intervention
and the whole will exalt in your body’s dimensions,
drawing beauty anew from the act as you steer it
to share it with others, who will already feel it.