Poems Opus One (17) by Charles Bryant: Thought & Form
Channel: brychar66
Date: 03/06/2011

This is the penultimate reading from my Poems Opus One of 1963. Since the poems are somewhat 'heavy' I have read them to the accompaniment of scenes from my present infinitely more relaxed life.

THOUGHT AND FORM

With beauty lies the only love I know.
I cannot love the face that has no form,
the eyes devoid of gleam; the cheek of glow.
I will not kiss those lips that are not warm.
Now will I worship form devoid of thought,
for thoughtless beauty poisons glow and gleam
and shapes a viper's maw from tender mouth.
Through beauty's song must run a vital theme
of living thought. Or else is beauty naught
and all her state unending, sterile drouth.

To ask so much perhaps is not to gain
what one desires to find in all one's loves.
That lover must be sought. The rest is vain,
like sparrows seen beside a flock of doves.
Mere beauty lies discarded in the dust.
Mere thought alone can never touch my heart.
In isolation these are nothing much.
And one or other standing each apart
can never make me love, but only lust.
And lust nor mind nor heart can ever touch.

Myself, not long ago, could think I knew
the meaning and the merit in my hope
which centred on a certain person who,
though being but a giddy downward slope,
was in my eyes a firm and concrete path.
And all too late was beauty seen as pain
where beauty, dressed in nothing but its show,
revealing nothing but an empty gain,
was seen to be the tepid aftermath 
of lust. Where nothing but more lust could grow.

When shall we learn that looks alone are vain?
O lovely legs and arms you cannot know
that mindless flesh and bone construct a pain
of hell's design that cannot cease its flow
and ebb till love and lust, one mould, one form,
are fashioned from a common stem. And then
shall beauty lie in dust and thought be dead.
And when that day has come, my fellow men,
O lovely women of my race, your norm
of love or lust shall be: a stinking bed.

DRUM BEAT

Tired at last with the eternal vacillations of my mind,
the non stop pendulum of thought and feeling,
slowly running down, slow to be rewound
and reach that final clanging, strident note which I call life.
Life only in that frenzied note, that vast quick pulse
which titillates the bowels and inward parts.
Tired at last, as with an old man's bones and mind.
And only in my twenty-second year.

How shall I wake that inner beat,
that anvil clang? And who will drum me?
Who shall draw the hammer, beat the throb
upon me? My skin is tight. One touch will awaken me
to song. One blow shall ring my throb
and beat my beat and clang me to metallic chants.
O drum me fast. O drum me.
Awake me. O awake me.
My voice is longing for the bright wide plain.
My beat awaits its answering clang from stone.

Draw near. You undeniable, unworthy presence.
Draw near. I know you will. Too well I know that smiling face.
Too well I know those skin clad hands. Draw near,
come close and ever closer, sardonic drummer with sardonic eyes.
Prepare your beat to beat me to a frenzy. Prepare your bony hands.
Prepare your lovely lips and lovely thighs. O drummer.

AN EMPTY SHELL TO BE FILLED WITH LUST

A myriad birds are singing the setting sun.
A thousand voices, detached from the children, their originators,
echo with a hollow sound within my skull. As if my skull,
devoid of twisted brain, were nothing but an empty, hollow shell.
A myriad contradictions bar my heart from love.
And edits of the intellect, that wonderful yet stony god,
command that lust alone may walk within my halls.
So shall it be. For I am tired of love.
For I am tired of seeking for that perfect concrete sphere of being
which only love may build. O be content, slim body,
that other bodies yet exist to crush and batter down.
O be content, my being, with knowing you can never love again.