The New Jerusalem (Sunlight Sonatas in lydian A)

Compassion (And king will my heart be also)

From great freedom I return
With a golden tanned leather skin
Sun-drenched my wildlife gaze

I have seen the world
Entered its greatest chamber of wonders & amber
And danced to strange exotic drums

I slept in open wounds
Laid with the people in their tears
And gave them feathers for their wings

But nothing moved me more like that sad face of yours -

What is it you suffer from, Anfortas, king?
What can I do to cure thy weary wound
And fix thy spirit’s broken wing?

I bring thee an ivory heart & green jade elephants
Overload thee with the finest fabrics in which fate had woven its best stars in
Look, how in emerald chiselled thy future is!

I have always thought of thee so sunset-silently and fraternally fond
Left thy majestic magpies breadcrumb-gold
At each single night away from long-gone home

And sometimes I thought I heard thee call my grail-doomed name
While I removed more mines from the Killing Fields
Till one detonated and obliterated my incautious heart

And I saw Angkor’s Buddha without a head!
And laid my hands on his severed neck!
And learned to let my knightly tears kneel down
In brutal pity and pretty pain!

And a monk came and dug out my bird-buried songs
Tied a red ray of morning light around my prayer-cradling arm
And saffron-blessed me with his abracadabra

And blessed I have been ever since with all my emery tears!

But nothing ever moved me more like that sad face of yours -

And so I left the holy temples where I slept among the dogs
Set out to cross the colossal mountain range
Of unsurmountable forgiveness bold
Fighting my steep way through the shadowed canyons’ black
Back to all that was foam-white of innocence
My shipwrecked roses on thy sea once had

And at Everest’s giant foot the shoe-piercing snow did beastly ache,
From which that winter wail on thy face was incurably made
When I laid with thee, Anfortas, in that brutal cold of my flat-lining heart
Crying icicles on the silver blue eaves of the sun

If here I died I thought
At least I died on my way to thee
At the purest point of greatest possible realization!

When unexpectedly two magpies came
And both copper coins from my eyelids pecked away
I sky-saw the immensity of divine greatness
And breathed in for the very first time

Out here, where everything is seeking, seeing heart:
Pain double hurts! But – hallelujah! - mercy mends twice!

Since then I have stormed the peaks of my faults and sins
And pounded each cross a little deeper into the summits’ shallow ground

Look, up here, the view is infinite!
Immortality is made above this sea of clouds!

See me light-speed run from here
Towards thee, Anfortas, ever-dying king
From sunset plateaus to plateaux du matin
These Myrrh rhymes I write into the thurible of the dawn
To crest the crown of all thorns
To kneel at the rose of all crowns

Look, through whole Creation I comet-blaze my way
To bring thee wondrous gifts from mysterious places
Telling epic tales of a love cleansed and reinvented
By never giving in to the dark side of twisting blood

Therefore, I bring thee:

The discovery of genius
The final covenant of a Matrushkian God
An amphora of clay from which all oceans pour
Into one single tear drop that forms the universe

Look, how Boswellia Sacra scented
The first breath of a newborn dawn
With twin suns rising
On the golden rim of a supper plate horizon
Up into the halo of thy heavy wound

Let me dress thy pyogenic profane sky
With this royal blue gauze of heaven
And clean with distilled dew Iodine
The night’s sorest stellar constellations
For no-one can beat the best out of fate
Without radical compassion
So let me raise my rainbow fist
And punch some sun into the hail of our sadness

So let there be warmth!
And let it be me who puts the hand on thy hell
Healing the Holy by suturing thy shattered psalms
With the golden thread of the grail skilfully well

What is it you suffer from, Anfortas? Speak!
Why did you never say a thing to me?
Don’t say you missed me, uncle, as much as I missed thee?
If I had known thy heart, my king,
Would I have known mine better as well?

And nothing ever moved me more than seeing that sad face of yours
Suddenly become this happy!