Thursday 31 January 2013

Ignimbrite Mite

This is Pyroxene not Ignimbrite, but real Ignimbrite is fucking boring in photographs.
 
Tiny bells of dying fire
igniting single signatures inside the stone
a burning word that locks the blazing choir
and opens if when called and then is gone.
The churning flow begs prayers from the crust
whines and curls the continental shield.
It learns a metamorphic spoken trust
and spells the planets voice, the sphere must yield.
Annihilation vacation, lava's jubilee.
A stone-thick fog rolls liquid on the land
a fluid fixed, the mountains squealing glee.
Your lungs boil in your chest your skin is sand,
your culture lost to time, your shape preserved
a last life's moment frozen by the blaze
and, crystalled with you there, the mountains word.
That secret sentence sounded over days
learnt by magmatic tides, in plasmic voice
with whale-length wavelengths whispered to the rock.
Each living, breathing syllabic choice
had mind and impish thought to spurn and mock
but held in slow pronunciations chains
it struggled until spoken, then was free
and danced and raced before the welding rain
and saw a cities death and laughed with glee.

Like spheres cast circles shadowed on the page
their shapes are three-dimensioned silhouettes,
ghost verbs encoded by a world-less mage.
A song from higher spaces whose laws let
the sound-imps seem to shift their forms in ours,
like sparks and flickers, burning words, or birds,
some sealed within the rock that builds the tower
that tombs the town and and plaster-cakes the herd
like curls of black inside the stone, ash-flowers
to be released when Tuff is cut or falls.

But, some un-bonded phonemes dodge the blow
and, wisping in a zig-zag seek earths call
they hunt around the halls where monsters go
they sing and cackle, mocking endless night
and bounce around the heads of questing fools
joy-smug for not embracing ignimbrite
that slowly-flaking grave of living words.

If cunning minds should trap them, learn their words
and lantern them in braille-rows to regard
the sentence strung, a row of readed crowns,
those same minds grasp the speech that mutters far.
And un-knots the earth
and kills it in the night.

2 comments:

  1. Thank you for this poem. It is beautiful and very scary.

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    Replies
    1. No Tom, thank YOU for actually giving a shit about possibly my least popular recent post. I hearby appoint you Poetry Editor for the Blog

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