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Tuesday, December 5, 2017

Guest Blog Post By Australian Poet Michael Fitzgerald-Clarke

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Guest Blogger

Australian Poet Michael Fitzgerald-Clarke

The Jesus Suite

***

and immediately all the doors were

opened and everyone’s chains were

unfastened

Acts Ch. 16 v 26

Percy Bysshe Shelley (left)

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Necessity of Atheism knocked

on my sterile nineteen-year-old mind. Heaven some sort of

irrelevant stalagmite some sort of dark object passing

beyond consciousness—stalled years morphed into nothing

an orbit bleating as consequence as colours of perception

contract then flower then move to a now shared in coming

from something—I am miles away from supper—need is a

quality of still point of poetry sudden in discourse. This

Age is early, a brilliant cornucopia yet souls flap uselessly

as days form, unform kiss the sensate veil, let wholeness be

under longing each fey mountain of belief

*******

King Solomon

So I turned to consider wisdom and

madness and folly

Ecclesiastes, Ch. 2 v 12

Vanitas attributed to Pieter Claeszoon

Inspire each rise, let life be pure imagination borne by

smoke vague and calling my heart the blood ever coursing

a few steps ahead. Wise man, why can’t I bottle joy why

must I build with sticks as I kiss each beautiful leaf each

silent friend baring their past handfuls of time white rose

petals a sixfold music peppermint-flavoured bitten from

difficult knotted wings—this system flawed and beautiful

buried somewhere in clouds, each gentle molecule aware.

I am a creature of skin of erect edges of folded, old

beginnings. The sun is old its dreams are older than GOD.

Nothing coheres quickly.

*******

Book of Job

He does great things and unsearchable, marvelous

things without number

Job, Ch. 5 v 9

Begotten in word and style, an alphabet curved into water

three times drunk as art and sun play as carnival—pass

under future history replete with cirrus clouds and the

festivity of the colour yellow, each mask lengthens with

sunset, lakes in eclipse cleanse an urge to Heaven

belonging to a ladder in a world touching silent scars a

birth with stars growing in space elegant with search and

number—missing from September’s guise perfect wise

allies soak their sails under bridges and I am covered by

foam, to emerge as poetry pink in spiritual heat, intricate

as prophecy that lets my surfaces syncopate in form

*******

Painting attributed to Margaretta Angelica Peale

Sustain me with raisins

The Song of Solomon, Ch. 2 v 5

Left: attributed to Salvador Dali; Right: Joan Keats attributed to William Hilton

Be a poem that erodes swiftly, let dust never be rock, else

day not erode into sound Percy Bysshe Shelley loved

raisins, almost super sensually—a Red Sea moment parted

his ink, it rose in beauty in mystery as deep as forming a

universal heart chaste with song Give otherworldly songs

air—each star is invention high, implied & sacred. Be shy,

each soul recovers their promises blown into skin, and yes,

time mystical and exotic direction. Let us drink the cup

of John Keats, it is all we knew, and as heaven offers

birth, the pieces contend for a quilt of light to adorn

a mild spirituality replacing objects for words

*******

1896 image of David praying

Turn, O LORD, save my life;

deliver me for the sake of

your steadfast love

Psalm 6 v 4

Left Weeping Coconuts or Coconut Tears attributed to Frida Kahlo; Right Moses on the Knesset Menorah

Time is perfected in wayward sway, muscular galaxies

completing their poetries weave & explosion, dark with

extent to claim the sky—below the future personality

muddied by etiquette offering repose in its fruits felt as

tears, a style, a class of taunt thousands of years said—let

us ask sleep, else we dream invisible pyramids made with

broken stones. Is that you coughing Moses. Was the

sunshine too sweet. Manna and cranberry juice forty

years delicate music within the trek of breezes It’s hot

in pink places, style a language of taken breath, vegetables

of our youth that decorated water with light, & burden

*******

None of my words will be delayed any longer, but the

word that I speak will be fulfilled

Ezekiel, Ch. 12 v 28

Fruits and Strawberries attributed to Salvador Dali

GOD, toss your three-sided magical coin—I claim your

Antarctic strawberry magic as a certainty flowering in

angelic history that shuffles from art to cure, from answer

to a hymn of skies in another somewhere usually clothed in

another way, vows making butterfly wings stronger than

guns. It benefits a view of being—let us visit idea in our

soul’s essence, as several phantasms from decades ago

sew themselves black cloaks in time. Barely has belief

registered any wandering sensation—let us shoot our

great-grandfathers’ yellow sense of time as the tide ebbs

again, as magic seizes the new reflections once lost

*******

Encampment of Isrealites on Mount Sina

1836 Intaglio print attributed coo J.M. W. Turner

all Israelites shall retain the inheritance of their

ancestral tribes

Numbers, Ch. 36 v 7

A crisis. Six copies of The Necessity of Atheism are extant.

I love Percy Bysshe Shelley, but he is not my saviour. A

solution in the heart of a tree—echoes, the fragrance that

colours persistent fire. The saints of five hundred years ago

are friends of woolly soul. Let us fall sweetly, with

coincidence and skin, with writing a place where hope

is waterproof, and nourishes the roots of trees, transmutes

them through air—listen as wombs hold love and other

decorations won from patterns. There is no stopping.

There is a potential death. And another believes in

souvenirs & south-westerlies

*******

I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the Lord God,

who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty

The Revelation to John, Ch. 1 v 8

Jesus Christ was my personal saviour, oh but that I had

known my insane mind was His. I was an atheist, loving

nothing but my spiritual blindness—and His holy delight

someness excited my soul even whilst the sun, delicately

poised, agrees to winter. The cost is between us. Let us

sail into seasons evolved into smoke toked by monks and

thieves. Let us steal geometry put it into a canvas bag,

destined for Russia’s clumsy perhaps. Oh, purpose, as

Christ bursts my heart. I was mute, overcome. My

juice slaked my shallow courtesy and fruits and flour

and halva were a halo

*******

I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the

beginning and the end

The Revelation to John, Ch. 22 v 13

Fitzgerald-Clarke's handwritten notes of Jesus Suites

Auditioning for death each day, Jesus Christ will be my

personal saviour, I just don’t know it as days offer their

marrow as air troubles a music disturbing thought. For

each cloudy, quivering soul night raises quiet with, Jesus

is more than psychological truth as his steps pen a

manuscript of starry light that travels from heart to heart.

A complete and immense beauty of purpose. A love an

unrestrained vastity. And no words find me alone—the

streets of the city might be unforgiving, so let us sing

resurrection, let us fly to a oneness of perpetual blossoms,

where faith given fruit a moment to be generous.

*******

Heart Illustration with circulatory system attributed to Bryan Brandenburg

my heart stands in awe of your words

Psalm 119 v 161

Is there half a gate. Is there a three-sided coin. A journey

of will missing a wayfarer, be equipped with a thermometer

and a femininity of mind. Let us love endlessly unsettled

between act and falling. The knowledge sleeps through

many weathers chipped with unusual dust Priests of the

secular dream change your money invest in pomiculture

and marry the piercing wind purveying opposites—let the

Age meander away from urgency to the forever ambivalent

landscape a few words cannot form. Please learn the ethics

of gruel, as a jazz riffs mythic lines noctilucent in Mary’s

womb. Peer into the insides of sight, grip and hold passing

months

*******

St. John the Evangelist by Domenico Zampieri 1620

And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent

his Son as the Saviour of the world

The First Letter of John, Ch. 4 v 14

The Red List attributed to Marc Chagall

A pleasant poetry is not enough. I take my soul in my hands,

and fling it into Jesus author of flowers and heart dancers and

the gamble of skies. Let us hug time, call its husk an escape

from confusion, the genes of a bird made from air imagined

and led through cloud. Jesus, this clumsy nothing is young

with prophecy flowing into its past. A design thin with

intimate instances of heaven, the opportunity to be steadfast,

and other. Immersed in truth, yet terrible, narrow warfare

remains difficult—sour wine in a coffee cup, a bird pecking

at a sacred cake. Let us taste butter straight from the churn

as we reminisce, and cherish eternity

*******

The first page of Colossians

If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the

universe, why do you live as if you still belonged to the

world?

The Letter of Paul to the Colossians, Ch. 2 v 20

Attributed to Salvador Dali

Ah, the airy murk about the tree of blood. Rest in fallibility smeared between women and men equal in inner pink as seas mutate, clasp fingers, see innascibility as both divine and new syrups from names floating near hurricanes. Let us skirt ancient continents, and follow string theory incanted in candlelight. Let us open windows, trace curlicues in the ways to holiness. Let us number affections forcing equivalence from air to soul to the New Testament of the Holy Bible—sing our humanity, its sweet currents layers of Paradise. Meanwhile Christ becomes word becomes earth becomes mountain—love becomes infinite contraction, awakening.

*******