In Copenhagen's winter twilight of 1972, Cornelius Climatus emerged into a world he would later describe as "already too bright." A distant relative of Kierkegaard—though he rarely elaborates on this connection—Climatus spent his early years moving between continents, leaving traces of himself in various academic institutions where he studied literature, mathematics, and philosophy, and what he cryptically refers to as "the patterns between things."
During a three-year disappearance in South America, he allegedly lived in Neruda's abandoned house, though no local records confirm this. He travelled extensively in Asia, especially China and Vietnam. During a stay in Taiwan, he vanished into a monastery whose location he has never revealed. These absences shaped his theory of "conscious detachment," which he also explains as a reaction towards the emerging age of technology and AI.
Now based in Cambria, California, he currently pursues a doctorate in mathematics and explores Northern Mexico in the footsteps of Carlos Castaneda. Climatus produces spare, mathematically precise poetry that explores what he terms "the edge conditions of being." His 2015 chapbook "Transient Light" emerged from a period when he claims to have lived without electricity. His forthcoming "Edges of Being" draws heavily on Robert Musil's "The Man Without Qualities," particularly its exploration of mathematics and mysticism in human experience.
He also cites the influence of Benno von Archimboldi, a writer whose existence is shrouded in mystery. When asked about this connection, Climatus only quotes Benno: "Where is the line between fiction and reality in anyone's life?"
Though difficult to reach, Climatus is a dedicated activist for environmental causes and human rights, regularly participating in Greenpeace campaigns and supporting Amnesty International's work. He advises young people to study mathematics, claiming it offers "the satisfaction of truth." He has a minimal online presence in social media, and he responds reliably, if slowly, to genuine inquiries.
In a soft falling light you turn,
each movement singing —
While deep within, where secrets burn,
new life is springing.
Your silence dances through the room
like morning rain,
Your steps weave patterns through the gloom
of joy and pain.
Dance now, while evening draws its veil—
you're not alone.
Some bonds grow stronger, cannot fail:
heart, blood, and bone.
Dance, for the music never ends
though words may fade.
Dance, while the future softly bends
to the choices you made.
Who speaks of rivers? In their silent flowing
lies all we cannot name—yet deep within
each current moves the mystery of knowing:
where solitude ends, miracles begin.
Look, how her voice transforms the ancient singing
into pure being—while his Northern soul
mirrors her joy, their separate lives now bringing
forth that third presence making their world whole.
And in this space between two worlds' sweet yearning,
where love transmutes all longing into light,
their child already moves through time, discerning
how hearts can bridge the distances of night.
Salt-traced lips,
Each gesture a new cipher:
Your eyes decode distances,
Your hands map territories unnamed,
Your thighs bear histories
Written in sweetness.
Each "yes" an affirmation
Against time's erosion.
Could this sanctuary
Hold against entropy?
The future - that brilliant fiction.
You state with sphinx-like certainty:
No return to former selves.
The present needs no exegesis
When dreams speak clearer than dawn.
In riddles of flesh and memory,
She asks: Is this autobiography
Or beautiful delusion?
How should I speak of missing you?
Perhaps the way a bell speaks to the endless air—
each tone a question that still echoes past
the space between what's here and what's not there.
You ask for proof. As if love could be held
like coins within a palm, or weighed like grain.
While deep inside my chest, a darkness dwells:
vast spaces where your absence carves its pain.
The you of my dream—a mirror's distant ghost—
dissolves in morning light. Yet something stirs:
beneath your heart, a rhythm runs almost
too faint to hear, yet truer than all words.
A Woman thinks.
Look, darling, it’s eleven eleven again
and I’m lighting candles for the good ones—
the ones who didn’t turn out to be wolves
after all. Strange, isn’t it? Like finding
pearls in the garbage disposal.
Remember that man who kissed
like he was solving a math problem?
Not him. I mean the other kind:
the ones who know how to touch a woman
like she’s both a bomb and a flower.
I had a husband once. Then twice.
(We all make mistakes, don’t we?)
But I’m talking about the man who comes
to your life like a surgeon with clean hands,
meaning to heal instead of cut.
Let me tell you about desire—
how it sits in your belly like a cat,
purring and purring until you think you’ll die
of wanting. The good ones know this.
They know how to stroke that cat.
At the witching hour, I count them
on my fingers like rosary beads:
the gentle ones, the true ones,
the ones who stayed until morning
and meant it when they said forever.
God’s a woman, I think,
and she’s playing matchmaker tonight,
dealing men like tarot cards
across the kitchen table while we sit here,
drinking wine, blessing the rare ones,
and praying silently
for the fruits
of our wombs.
Here, where the strip malls end,
and evening spreads its emptiness
across the parking lots, I begin
to understand what you have always known:
that we are not ready for what we are.
The surfers emerge from the waves
like thoughts from deep sleep,
carrying their boards like questions.
Who can say what the seagulls circle for?
Their hunger is older than our seeking.
They descend on what remains
when all our words have failed.
The waves do not arrive or leave.
They are the gesture of something
that has always been here,
that we, in our fullness, cannot see.
Night comes to the coast like breath—
so simple, so terribly simple.
The dunes hold no prophecy,
the motels shelter no truth.
And still we build our wharves
into the darkness, believing
something must be gained. As if
emptiness were not already complete.
This is what the buzzards missed:
there was never anything to find.
The sea enters and leaves us
like time through an empty room.
And so we stand at the edge of night,
where all our certainties dissolve.
The darkness comes not as an ending,
but as the truth we’ve always known:
that we are this too—this vast absence,
this emptiness that holds the stars.
That we have always been nothing
but the space where light parts from itself.
The redwoods, ancient as philosophy,
Have witnessed loves both tragic and divine.
They guard their silence with such dignity
That I feel shame for sorrows I call mine.
What is this human need to mark our days
Upon a coast that measures time in stone?
The ocean’s patient voice forever says
That all we love, we never truly own.
Yet in this knowledge there is strange release:
Our brief, bright passion set against such peace.
Darling, listen to this mystery:
The mother does not give birth to a child;
she is where the birth occurs—
as the shore does not create the wave
but is where the ocean meets the earth.
This is how the soul comes into being:
first as a whisper of perhaps,
then as a wave of certainty
breaking on the shore of time.
In the ocean of her body
a pearl forms, or doesn't form—
she is not the maker
but the sacred place of making.
She is the threshold
where possibility becomes being,
where being is becoming,
and where silence becomes song.
Darling, please let me hear your song.
All Poems on this page are copyrighted by @Cornelius Climatus, 2025.
We received the Author's permission to publish them here.