Amomancer:

On tour last week, I read at the Monongalia Arts Center (MAC), for the first time publicly, the crown of sonnets from QUINTESSENCE known as "The Sonnets of Grace":

The Sonnets of Grace: I

Than any spring of deep earth! Beauty sure!

You are the nature of passion and peace,

argent angel made manifest to cure

the sorrows of my brittle soul, to cease

my greytint memories and bring colour:

Fields of bright blossoms to the horizon!

Fed by the cold mineral water, pure

as a virgin’s first kiss, a kind reason

to shield the light of brisant meander

that draws our eyes from the prize of real joy

to find kindred soul to inspire wonder

and break open my heart as an envoy

of fantastic land of dreams envisioned.

I shall surrender worlds unimagined!

The Sonnets of Grace: II

I shall surrender worlds unimagined,

to pale the Duke’s gift to his courtesan.

You are more than flesh and fantasy, sinned

and again, altar for my desire, plan

of a seduction to the royal line.

Temptress arcane and alabaster, heat

meets a sweet defeat in your fire divine.

Your flesh is as soft as angel’s kiss, sweet

and otherworldly. Penetrative promise

and the persuasion of your innocence,

oil and water heated to precipice

with the true language of romance, defense

I tear aside the lace and silk, false skins,

abdicate my throne and atone my sins

The Sonnets of Grace: III

Abdicate my throne and atone my sins,

ruling in façade, fallen force majeure

to make request to test the truth of skins

in contact to merge, sacred and impure,

lightning in your mouth, your lips are prophets

in the desert of all false lovers’ dreams,

the blasphemy of chalk oaths, epithets,

the shadow of panthers and curdled creams.

Ruling from the boudoir, iron scepter

and velvet throne. Lesser immolation

to sheathe heat against the pagan specter

that makes mockery of subjugation.

I would lay aside my red cassock, sinned

to be within your grace, to be the wind.

The Sonnets of Grace: IIII

To be within your grace, to be the wind

that passes through you, leaving trace eddies

that empower and deflower your heart, spinned

dust devils riding out the decades breeze

and cyclone, hurricane and zephyr blown

from the clouds of your beauty to summon

all manner of mischief and legend known

to future generations as some one

who inspired poetry and envy, lust

and worship of pale divinity brought

to life and placed among us to entrust

us with the secrets of the holy, taught

in emancipated flesh, feral skins,

in a desert of barren bones that pins.

The Sonnets of Grace: V

In a desert of barren bones that pins

you to the ground. The sound of the sorrows

of failed lovers, timid tale of the sins

of inadequate passions, tomorrows

cast away for the moment, yet unmoved

by the logic of the heart or the touch

of hands and glands that had not planned unproved

strategies, dependent on blind luck such

that even the gods laugh derisively.

You drew me here to make my sacrifice

on your pale flesh, the spill of white wine, free

of constraints that might taint the boatman’s price,

shackled by lips that kiss and hearts that pound

the bravest and the boldest to the ground.

The Sonnets of Grace: VI

The bravest and the boldest to the ground,

bound and tormented, rebellion fomented

in the name of a goddess, an unsound

faith based on predisposed and demented

oaths of belief, grief for lost years and tears

shed red in crevices of memory.

Cinnabar sins, we are yet crippled by fears

that grind us down like harpy’s emery,

sharpening the poignant poniard that will

penetrate more than willing hips, the rush,

the crush, the flush of release, little kill

and faint awareness of endorphin push

through to paramour of the romanesque,

we are flesh and blood and the arabesque.

The Sonnets of Grace: VII

We are flesh and blood and the arabesque.

Inconsistency, our consistent trait,

our beauty and grace conquers the grotesque

remnants of our sod-bound uprising, fate

and the sound of dripping wax as time burns.

But your soul is, itself, beautiful.

Time may mark its passage in twists and turns

that lay tracks around your eyes, terrible

demolitions of our bodies and minds,

cursing us our mortality and more.

Even stilled and cold, I would hold the binds

of ancient oaths to your flesh and heart, lore

of my mythos, passion will not unbound

in visions from Poe and Lovecraft, each sound.

The Sonnets of Grace: VIII

In visions from Poe and Lovecraft, each sound,

darkness lingers, stingers in the green fields

where lovers would lay, only to be struck, bound

by dark forces, where hope to madness yields.

I seek a deeper prick than mere nettles,

a transient insanity of blood heated

on and in your altar of where settles

only the red blood and white wine, meted

injustice for the soft to the savage,

a passion play of hungry religion

taking communion in forms that ravage

one another, the merging division

decreed by design, heroes picaresque

echoing in chilled depths of souls, grotesque.

The Sonnets of Grace: VIIII

Echoing in chilled depths of souls, grotesque

though our feral entanglement may seem,

it is not quanta or the picturesque

pretense of an ardent virgin’s wet dream,

filled with illusions, misapprehensions

about how it is all supposed to work

when we merge to purge solitude, tensions

uncoiled then soiled in a three-ring cirque

of your surrender and your demands, made

and unmade, the linen, immolative,

consume, itself in shame for what was said

in the ancient tongues of lovers, suasive

in both silence and in eloquence due,

with the malformations we are heir to.

The Sonnets of Grace: X

With the malformations we are heir to

it is miracle that we comprehend

the frailest of our failings, hearts passed through

the baptism of our saddest times, defend

our cynicism with doubt and the cold

calculus of our barnacled souls, hard

as Pharaoh’s damnation, denying bold

prophecy and the word of God, long scarred

by our own illusions that we are fit

to pit wits against the fates themselves, mad

with our own pain and gaining no acquit

in insanity pleas, lost hearts that had

fair hope to re-enter the grand circuit:

affection and desire, the live wire.

The Sonnets of Grace: XI

Affection and desire, the live wire,

funeral pyre, the spire of the temple

we throw down from, fulfilling the desire

to both give and take the waking, simple

in the equation, but the prayers are long

and complicated, speaking in the tongues

old before mortals messed it all up, song

of Solomon and Kama Sutra, rungs

of Jacob’s ladder, electrocuting

inadequate supplicants on their quest,

their pilgrimage, purging the polluting

perfume of forgotten blossoms to test

purest of scalds; skalds speak our legend, true,

that grounds us to the beauty we are due.

The Sonnets of Grace: XII

That grounds us to the beauty we are due,

and this finds our paths a laughing torment.

between the poles and pages we wage new

dogmas: Who we are and deserve, torment

of our inner selves and shelves of scribblings

of mad philosophies of God and love

that burn away and give to the nibblings

of the vermin that infest us, above

the marquee moments we aspire to,

demanding our due and paying our dues

in currency of colding kisses, true

to our pretensions, our hearts we will bruise

before bursting into eloquent fire,

letting slip flip platitudes of desire.

The Sonnets of Grace: XIII

Letting slip flip platitudes of desire.

More on my lips than words, your sweet essence

drips in sated statement of rutting gyre

as you cry out to prove that my presence

meets your criteria for further feasts.

I make no command, no barter demand

of treasure for treasure, for heated beasts

do their natures and I will gladly stand

glad to enter whatever covenant

you offer me, patience is the virtue

of the lover. Reticence resident

shall vacate to make room for me, anew.

Here is proof of my inspiration, sure.

There is truth in my eloquence, more pure.

The Sonnets of Grace: XIIII

There is truth in my eloquence, more pure

than any tantalus flood, a spring struck

by a prophet to demonstrate the cure

of despair is hope and prayer, beyond luck

in the toss of the dice, the price of fools.

Luck is but persistence in random

models of chaos theory, dreary rules

describing a universe near awesome

as the peace of your presence, evidence

of something grander than science, the glim

of the less dim options over the fence

into infinite plains of daisies, rim

of oceans we swim to, more sweet and pure

than any spring of deep earth! Beauty sure!

The Sonnets of Grace: Diadem

I shall surrender worlds unimagined.

Abdicate my throne and atone my sins

to be within your grace, to be the wind

in a desert of barren bones that pins

the bravest and the boldest to the ground.

We are flesh and blood and the arabesque

in visions from Poe and Lovecraft, each sound

echoing in chilled depths of souls, grotesque