a song
you said music is the closest thing to
silence
I wondered how close how truly
undivided
realms might be among the avowed for
whom
an utterance would break sacrament not
itself cast the sacred not itself form
of sounds
something more than the unsung the
unsinging
the unsaying the unsayable O is it
true the
not-said is the highest form of song?
On René Lalique’s
“Dancing Nymphs in a Frame of Bats,” c. 1902
(posted on La
Belle Epoque Facebook Group by T. Takagi)
You don’t
realize what absence
until time’s
darkness inhabits the space
I’m listening
to Morrissey and his mordant rants
That melodify
every pain I’ve faced,
Seem colossal
and trivial in measure
— one guy told
me we don’t need to replace
the world
We just need its mirror —
I laughing
churlishly said we need a terroir
that’s both
unfocused and clearer
Look at the
bats!
outstretched wíngs as they haul
the nymphs to
some auspicious recess
Perhaps to
some prelapsarian Fall
Where every
thing fallen unfelled
Entangled us
in falling,
The urge to exile repelled
Fire Not As
Bloom But As Seed
After
listening to Bruckner’s First Mass in D minor
Fire not as
bloom but as seed
How fooled I
have been
By my own
false prophesy
A day of ennui
A day of
unforgetting
A day that
slows time
In A Treatise
of Bees
we are
instructed to fetch
Glory from
honeyed walls
Bees as
tribute, bees as holy
This is what
happens
after myths
These are the
syllables
of ancient
glyphs
The work
begins
Through the
lacunosus clouds
An indifferent
sun shines
over a lithium
valley
O, save me
from myself
I cry into the
valley
O, save me
from myself
The valley responds
A Prayer for
Healing
All that
remains is door, the absence
surrounded by
the structure’s crumbling stones
What soul I
had has fled, left only bones
The marrow of
reminiscence
In my mind, I
place my votive offerings
close to the
spring sanctuary
where others
have done the same
now-rotting
wooden shapes of the afflicted
body parts — may
I place my whole self
near the
waters, the long wooden limbs
Calling to the
deities, Heal me, heal me
Imprecations,
it seems, do not work as planned
An arthritic
man still holds tightly his injured hand
No one is
springing out of their wheelchairs
despite the
beauty of their carved prayers
O, my hated
cloak of pain, do I even want to part
We’re too
familiar now, a common law couple?
Is pain my
destiny?
What even
happened to the dead man at Nain,
or to the
better-known Lazarus?
Raise me, only
to fall
Still I mouth heal me, heal me
* Wooden votive offerings in the shape of parts of the human body, from the spring sanctuary near the Roman settlement at Dambach, Bavaria. Objects like this were given to healing deities.
Foreign Soil
I am not a
citizen of this country I cry
in my dream
located in the fallow
of my soul do
not comprehend its customs
its idioms are
beyond me and seem like
idiocy must I
acclimate to its
weather and
its strange climate where
nothing grows except planted ghosts?
Dylan Willoughby is a permanently disabled LGBTQIA+ poet, composer, music producer, video producer, and photographer, born in London, England, raised in England, Wales, Chile, Canada, and the US, and currently living in Los Angeles, CA. Chester Creek Press has published 3 limited-edition letterpress poetry chapbooks, with illustrations by the hyper-realist painter Anthony Mastromatteo.
His poems have appeared widely in literary magazines including Agenda (UK), Stand (UK), The Interpreter's House (UK), The Yellow Crane (Wales), Weyfarers (UK), Shenandoah, Salmagundi, Denver Quarterly, CutBank, Southern Humanities Review, and Green Mountains Review. His Fiction has appeared in STORY.
Recent poems have appeared this summer and fall in The Laurel Review, Fahmidan Journal, Goat's Milk Magazine (Canada), Sledgehammer Lit (Guernsey), ZiN Daily (Croatia), Melbourne Culture Corner (Australia), Pareidolia Literary, Sparrow's Trombone, Vulnerary Magazine, and Bloom Magazine (Scotland), and are forthcoming from Seventh Quarry (Wales), Amethyst Review and Ample Remains.
His Photography appears in Rejection Letters, and is forthcoming from Vulnerary Magazine. He has directed and/or produced numerous music videos for Lost in Stars (LA Times; Big Shot) and Kid Moxie (Stereogum, Entertainment Weekly, David Lynch Foundation event).
He has received residency fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell, and earned an MFA from Cornell University, where he studied with A. R. Ammons and Robert Morgan.
His music, as "Lost in Stars," has been featured by The Los Angeles Times, NPR/PRI program "Echoes," KCRW (LA NPR station), NYLON magazine, XLR8R, Insomniac, Earmilk, PopMatters, and many other venues.
LA Times feature: https://lat.ms/2Yzit9q
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