The Tarot Vision II
Alex Oliver 23.02.24
Even rigour has relinquished its grip
on this long-passed, free swinging,
wind-chastised fragment of forgotten existence
A charnel of blind gazing,
out past its own tumbled limbs and detritus,
rot-tumbled from a disintegrating chapel of rest
Tongue of dust does not taste ashen eddies
singing cricket-dry songs
Might they be mouthing
words distant from memory
whispers missing simpler sympathies
yet familiar as the lurch
of your heart at an old photograph?
This shimmering illusion,
whirled up by mindless wandering winds
Is turned and taken by baking horizons,
damp vapours, and its own mad fanning.
Forming, as dust, it disintegrates
before these empty globes
of dead, dead eyes
Is it the monarch of souls
the fruit of an unloved womb
or some cloven castaway,
caressing the mad thought
that binds its eerie existence
to the shiver in our flesh?
Or a Bogey Mojo,
rolling and droning,
as nuns sworn to silence might
float an idea or passion
that Jesus frowned upon?
Is it the sitter in an unfinished canvas,
Reversed
Chimera Obscura
Divinity
A Nothing
Or a Something of overwhelming dread?
Am I awake in this dream?
Or is it that I also
am dead?