23 Insta: @darrell_landstrom

[dillon-lynch]

In The Temple of Jupiter

In the temple of Jupiter,

I listen the way fog rolls off water,

The way lungs fill with blood,

To the garrote of eternity

Scrunching into its own heights

Here, its cantos cresting

Where land dares to meet the sea,

Approaching now past colonnades.

You come this far

To choke away ghosts?

Strangle me knowing this, then:—

Once on my head, the sun

Mingled with the smell

Of moon touched streets,

Promising the kind of freedom

That only gods can whisper

Through the hair of dying pagans.

You cannot end the man

Who burns himself down

The way the night forests do;

I am the shipwreck all dawns collect.

[dillon-lynch]

The Gorgon As Moon, As Death, As Life

Atop the head, serpents invoke

The running of shorelines:

Vectors of life fomenting above

The shield-like face, moonbeams

Caught in oceans of black scales.

Sliding downwards, beauty cracks

Ruptures within ruptures.

One dies from the airy thoughts

That appear like foam, like

Webs opening across horizons.

Crept the layers of the spine,

Stone encases the perdition staircase.

Cicadas strike up only to fall

Among my books: I wake, seeing

All things touching all other things.

[quotefeeling]

“If the highest aim of a captain was to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.”

— Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica

[dillon-lynch]

We Slosh

We slosh and foment

In mockery of stagnant pools:

This, Demeter knows—her skin,

The all flowering cadence, expending

Her touch to thaw the Decembers’

Of our fate, recoiling in the moment,

The push, the pull:

The objects of what overthrows.

Night parodies convalescence:

Our fruits will reach for what

Disallows them — arm them well

And they will grow fat on the days

Which have bruised them into gold.

[dillon-lynch]

Here I Hum Along, Moon

Here I hum along, moon,

To the rhythms of your feet,

Your turning shores, your face,

Veiled, then unveiled

In this erotic dance of confluence.

Easier by far to hum the tunes

Of the life of some other

Than the life of ourselves;

Easier by far to write about

The light always perishing

On you than the one in us;

Easier by far to be

Someone who no longer hums:

A fool in the dark —

For the dark, eventually.

[dillon-lynch]

Our parasite is that so little destiny has been left in our hands… we have marched in centuries of transparency, losing so much to connivers and “innovators”, left thin by dependency, dogma, and bourgeois hatred.

What are we now losing to these modernizing spirits? —

Dimensionality — the ability to hold our depths and secrets; the love of sin, yet the strength and self-knowledge of restraint; the ability to impart narrative to our sores, to witness the sweet germination of skin, sky, and space, knowing they all point, like plumbs of smoke, towards the same fire…

What we are losing, really, is contradiction itself… we are living the fall into translucency.

[dillon-lynch]

It was a force of decay

Which erected their cities,

An invisible hatred of life

Now in centrifuges of concrete.

So many places to waste ourselves in,

So many corners to be absorbed by…

The whirring of these places,

The factory’s contumely,

The air buckling in pipelines,

The wage, paid and unpaid,

They are all the death of you -

They are the annihilators of all which is.

True domination is a thing of silence,

A spectacle of divinity -

There is a way out,

A way from the whip of capital,

A way from the macabre of state…

We fashion our indulgences

Into lawlessness, into a dance of joy,

Into the bloom of the bomb,

Illuminating this piece of death

Into a fuller place…

[dillon-lynch]

Eckhart

Feeling spent, eternity hid you away

Within its voluminous clutch,

Yet your reams reached forward to lay

Before us its sight, its touch;

Its blood, the horizon’s leaping -

Its skin, netted up in warm breath -

Its drunken rumination, our sleeping,

And its unborn silence, our death.

[dillon-lynch]

When divine night gave way

To these odes of wrapt bones,

Lifelong schism, opened in decay,

Arose between their moans:

“Once everywhere, I fell into shape,

Knowing that such cannot be.

Soon redeemed, I return to drape

Myself above moon and sea.

But soon that sphere, and soon

That sea, will diminish - blow away—

Time, ineffable, is an honest boon,

Dousing the false fulminations of day.”

-

Painting is Philosophy by Gustave Klimt

[dillon-lynch]

The alarmists, the predictors and prophets of doom and sorrow through the scientific and the theological, I owe them all my comfort. I build my walls - it will all end in ruin, they say. I construct my own Sphinx to speak riddles to myself, some have answers, most do not - it will end in ruin, they say. I cast away daylight, I cast away the moon’s faces, and I cast away the glow of the stars, each into the dark - it will all end in ruin, I say.

This coming ruin fills me with certainty, it relaxes every muscle through and through. It hooks my mouth into a slight smile devoid of cynicism or malevolence. In chaos, each thing expands outward into ruin, and then back into the order of Nothing.

[dillon-lynch]

Fragments #5

-

Matter and energy are refugees; is their extinguishment done in cold collusion with Time, or do they shriek themselves into nothing in cosmic rage? Does the inanimate house individuals of other regions?

-

My obsession with concept, with scale and distance, really - eliminates everything nuanced and minuscule. I break down the face of the passerby: away with the furrows, the pocks, and the asymmetry of the eyes. I walk further still, their shape melding into waves of white heat…

I loosen the bolts of this world, seeking the comfort of a sinking ship - the sublimity in the weight of a suicide vest.

-

I may praise the minute only so the expanses become bearable in waking, sleep being the only vastness I can maintain cordiality with. To live is to practice a form of abhorrence.

-

For a moment, the thought of speaking to another fills me with echoing panic. Then, invoking the impossible, unperturbed course of death, my face lightens and I open my mouth, joyous with impermanence.

-

There is only one thing I have ever cared to learn from Christ: crying is natural, for the horrific contents of life guarantee its happening; tears are not a sign that all has gone wrong - in fact, it is the opposite: if the son of God wept among the olive groves, then what could not befall every human? What happens to us is no more than life, and life is sorrowful, it is a wound on us, the soul of everything is inherently melancholic... What marks the strong and the unique is not recognizing the so-called immediate and plentiful joys of life, but taking the sorrowful nature we are destined to, and enduring each of its episodes, crippled yet fragrant of ourselves...

God, encompassing all, gave in, hence our being… the divine thing to do is surrender, to act no more, to freeze even our tears in night, the final night…

[dillon-lynch]

Fragments 4

-

Literature is an admission of our powerlessness, the foothills of our weakness. The word, and its scaffolds of letters, are a capitulation of action, each a death of our muscles. At the mercy of our fellow man and the gnashing of nature, literature springs from us like blood - all of us a Dostoyevsky, abiding in mutual kindness, or stood straight before the firing line, wooden post bloody against our backs.

-

The authoritarian in me: burn whatever book dares to proclaim what is “natural”. We shall only know life, the most unnatural of all - the still, quiet pond reflects us best.

-

“…..day resembled an abortion of night, unwanted, unneeded, no longer conducive to our further survival - man would eventually reject itself…”

-

Life will never comprehend the darkness it arose from, nor will that darkness ever comprehend life. This is our unique quality, one we must share with the rocks and sky.

-

A deeper nothingness is needed for our obsessions, an eastern nothingness…

-

Hell is the dynamism of life - where the formless becomes form.

-

The void gazes in confusion, this is your triumph.

[dillon-lynch]

Summer Reading

The scaffolds of my reading:

Summer: this maelstrom of petals

Slipping eternally downward

Into these many warm nights

To rise again in the failure of day.

Tu Fu, your words are deaf

On my eyes now, just as they

Are meant to be to my mind.

These choices, these miles,

These harrowing distances,

In you, I find the ways of men

Do not shorten their pain

As they uselessly taper off

Into their own time. Rest near,

On my shelf, there in split

Sunbeams, for I will sleep soon

And finally taper off into

My own time, pleased to do so.

[dillon-lynch]

spring to autumn

my marigolds watered

by their dying

[dillon-lynch]

after heavy rain

silence rests

atop my hyacinths

[dillon-lynch]

Two Haiku

three lines against

the tug of night

on my collar

above this line

and two below this

the face of the holy

-

[dillon-lynch]

Philosophy

At the soft orchid's early breath,

I trailed the yawn of this world entire

To the stone seat of soundless death,

And swelled on wisdom and formless fire.