Monday 13 December 2021

Five Fabulous Poems by Dylan Willoughby




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

IG: lostinstarsmusic
Twitter:  lostinstarsband
FB:  lostinstarsmusic
SoundCloud:  lostinstars

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