Thirteen Black Roses: Gothic Romantic Poetry by Christopher Courtley
THIRTEEN BLACK ROSES
Gothic Romantic Poetry
By
CHRISTOPHER COURTLEY
Thirteen Black Roses: Gothic Romantic Poetry by Christopher Courtley
Copyright 2013 by Christopher Courtley
Cover design by Christopher Courtley
https://www.christophercourtley.com
O Rose, thou art sick!
~William Blake
CONTENTS
To A Sick Rose
Descending Angel
Addiction
To Lilith, Queen of Darkness
Medusa
Nosferatu, or Despair
The Ghost
The Comical Tragedy
How Frantically We Clothe Each Naked Day
The Layers of Illusion
My Garden of Proserpine
Wedding Night
No Swan Song
About the Author
To A Sick Rose
My Rose, O thou art sick, but it is I
Who wrap myself in shadow to escape
The noisome day and to thy bosom fly;
Who bite thy lips and from them kisses rape—
My clutches desperate, my head a swarm
That buzzes with a thousand sleepless nights
Until I rest inside thee soft and warm;
My secret Rose, whose crimson bed’s delights
Alone can still the howling of the storm
That rages with a thousand anguished cries
And spends its fury on thy trembling form
Before it once again begins to rise
Up from my core corruption, roiling thick,
Devouring my life—Rose, I am sick!
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Descending Angel
Through the rain’s grey haze I sometimes see
An angel sail across the night’s deep ocean
Wrapped in sombre swathes of mystery
Feline and ethereal in motion.
Surreal, she glides, with sweeping eyes exotic
Concealing more about her than they tell;
In havens strange she weathers storms erotic
And holds some phantom lover in her spell.
Or perhaps she walks this world unknown
Adrift like me upon the seas of time
Wandering deserted streets alone
Until the morning sun begins its climb.
I’ll never know, nor share my secret pain;
She passes, virginal, just like the night
Descending with the dark clouds and the rain
To seize my heart before she takes to flight.
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Addiction
She stalks the shadows of my mind
And the dreams she leaves behind
Taunt me with her memory
Haunting nightmarish ecstasy.
A sickly lust, a prick of fear—
The night descends and brings her here
Naked and untouched by man
A moon-white virgin courtesan.
She is all and I am hers
Abject slave to a heart that stirs
For no one—so I nightly sit
In paradises counterfeit.
Loving her is poisoned bliss
Her kiss is death and still I kiss;
So banish sun and harsh daylight
And come sweet angel of the night—
Come upon the moonlight’s streaming
Come and light my darkest dreaming
Come and fill my veins with pleasure—
All I want, and all I treasure.
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To Lilith, Queen of Darkness
There’s a sweet, sharp knowledge only gleaned in the night
Far from the noise and the noisome light
Of day and distraction, formation and fight—
The dark and the silence that nurtures delight,
Healing old wounds and soothing the spite
That attends our struggles and impedes our flight.
Night is for lovers and liers in truth
Sweetest of tongue and sharpest of tooth;
The eye of the day brings the harshest of lights;
So to hell with my days—only give me your nights!
Give me your darkness to nourish my soul;
Give me your nakedness, plain, pure and whole—
Give me the sweetness my sharpness desires
And give me the sharpness my sweetness requires.
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Medusa
Once greedy for her golden hair
I plucked a strand from her fair head,
But fixed in her medusa stare
My feet to her stone floor were wed.
Now ever standing frozen there
Impaled by Cupid’s leaden dart
I watch her with an eyeless glare
And weigh her with a statue’s heart.
How swiftly once the hours fled,
But now they stalk; a lion’s share
Upon my weary soul has fed
And laid her sordid secrets bare.
Within her chamber bathed in red,
Clad only in her golden hair,
As alchemists make gold from lead
So she makes love without a care
To any who will grace her bed
An hour or two and then depart.
One night she looked at me and said:
“Ah, what a fragile work of art
You are, my dear.” Then I with dread
Perceived how she could break apart
My body as though it were bread,
Crumble to bits my statue’s heart
And crush my frozen eyeless glare
To dust beneath her august tread
For winds to sweep from out her lair.
But she just laughed and tossed her head
To kiss me with her golden hair
As turning she went back to bed.
And still she keeps me standing there,
A figure neither live nor dead.
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Nosferatu, or Despair
Now once again Despair hath sunk
Its rotting teeth into my will,
And of my aspirations drunk,
And of my dreams taken its fill.
Upon its rank and icy breath
Is borne the stinking waste of years
Infecting everything, like Death,
Whose robes are steeped in blood and tears
As stooping over all my cares
It throws long shifting shadows on
The steeply climbing, crumbling stairs
Of my ambitions, almost gone
And quickly fading from my sight
Into the stalking mists of time
Like corpses drained to leprous white
Deep in a pit, heaped o’er with lime,
The plague victims of my intent,
Those hopes and dreams I once held dear
In slow decay lie impotent
As I do in the grip of fear.
And those inverted creatures, my
Unrestful thoughts and nightmares, bring
To life a scream born from a sigh
As shadowed night doth give them wing;
A sigh so deep that no abyss
Nor even the unfathomed sea
Nor even Death’s cold, endless kiss
Can rival its profundity.
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The Ghost
As I walk the sodden banks of this river of human souls
That hurry onward to their common destiny
I observe them as they say their lines and play their little roles
And dance to the tune of a tragic symphony.
I haunt your world like a ghost mourning the life it lost
A shadow watching from the corners of your envied existence
For I cannot cross the river you have crossed
And so there lies between us an infinite distance.
But sometimes in the ocean depths of your eyes
I can see the shimmer of a shining yesterday
Like something you just couldn’t exorcise
That left its silver lining amid the grey.
As through this carnival of souls I move unhurried
The baggage of my former life left far behind
Gone but not forgotten, though deeply buried
A priceless treasure none will ever find
In the masked and painted faces of the figures passing by
I read a thousand books that say the same damned thing
A thousand different ways, and with a lonely sigh
I seek the solace solitude will bring.
So here I stand alone, and here alone I stay
I cannot enter your world, nor will you enter mine
My one remaining hope is that one day
They will once again collide and recombine.
And sometimes in the ocean depths of your eyes
I can see the shimmer of a shining yesterday
Like something you just couldn’t exorcise
That left its silver lining amid the grey
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The Comical Tragedy
we bring our demons with us
lying as we go
inviting all our evils in
visible transparent show
and ever so obscure
the exorcising of the cure
never to be grasped by us
who hold ourselves so clean and pure
as we primp and prance and pose
parading in our emperors clothes
pointing fingers in secure
assessment of each others woes
arrayed in naked faults we grin
and snicker at our fellows sin
for as without us so within
the fun house mirrors we abjure
too tempting is the ancient lure
to gossip and to some add vice
all guilt with virtues to assure
that we are all so very nice
to bring our demons with us
in this traveling circus show
acting out a freakish mythos
crying as we go
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How Frantically We Clothe Each Naked Day
How frantically we clothe each naked day
With every ornament that comes our way
In masques and revelries adorn our time
Ridiculously prance and pantomime
Like clowns who with their antics hope in vain
To drown out for one moment all the pain
That shrieks beneath its costume nonetheless
As in its former poverty of dress.
The ghost of winter in our dream of spring
Still casts its shadow over everything—
The phantom at the ball who does his best
To make himself a most unwelcome guest.
We make a show of shrugging off our cares
But laughter is a mask that trembling wears.
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The Layers of Illusion
The world and we are semblance and no more;
Beneath each different mask indifference lies—
The layers of illusion we adore
Conceal a dull despair that never dies.
Behind the masquerade that life puts on
There yawns a vast but empty banquet hall
Where echoes of a chorus long since gone
Give rise to forms like shadows on the wall.
Loud pageants pass, and thrill, annoy, or bore;
The games we play at best serve to amuse.
Why strive to win when no one’s keeping score
And more to gain is simply more to lose?
While we in relays run our bootless race
To build our lies upon another’s lies,
Our weary feet can only serve to trace
Wide circles in the sands of enterprise.
As clouds drift by, and neither stand nor fall
So sail we on to some imagined shore
Until time strips us bare and of us all
Makes clumsily an end, and then no more.
Thus frenziedly we whirl as in a dream
Through shifting seasons in their endless round
Where all we know of things is how they seem,
To spokes of Fortune’s wheel forever bound.
So scorn the world as but a painted whore,
Or love her—only pay her and have done.
The lies we lived, the truths by which we swore
Will lie with her and in her and be one.
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My Garden of Proserpine
Sleep’s the soothing balm for scathing time;
To lie awash in dreams, half-waking still
Between the never-land of bliss sublime
And lucid labyrinths of what-you-will;
Such sleep is sweet. But bitter gall is better,
For honey-slow, this syrup sly as sin
From its first slinking serpent-subtile letter
(Kiss-shaped whisper, worm of saccharine)
Slips in, a silken silver murderess
To shrink from as I never have from pain—
That heroine of Nod whose cold caress
Once drew from tainted blood the sons of Cain.
So you slip in, my garden of delight,
Golgotha, grinning skull of pale-horsed Death,
Through scarlet tears in skin once virgin-white,
With flowers, rot, and grave-dirt on your breath.
Such sleep’s a comfort I cannot endure;
A cipher like a circle to confine
And pin me to your wheel of cause and cure;
Your milk and honey and your sour wine.
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Wedding Night
The dark night softly calls to me and beckons me to bed
With promises like sand grains tinkling through an hourglass
And whispers of sweet nothing upon which to rest my head;
A pillow of oblivion beneath the even grass.
As dusk had drawn its velvet curtain on the world’s unrest
The veil over my eyes was lifted; darkness shone like light
And then a lifetime’s longing rose from deep within my breast
As I prepared to give myself to my eternal night.
How soothing and seductive, these caresses formed of bliss;
The life that once entranced is ravished now by Death’s allure,
For he has breathed into my bosom with his endless kiss
A shadow of that consummation I cannot abjure.
No more is time my enemy; I’ve put away all pride;
Hence even hope has flown, with all the burden of my cares—
And now with pure abandon will my soul, that joyous bride
Embraced by her Beloved, shed this garment that she wears.
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No Swan Song
I have no swan song; words desert me now
That I have lost my youthful poet’s soul.
I have no will to sing one anyhow;
My heart’s as empty as a beggar’s bowl.
Such poor unhappy lines as I might pen
Cannot but show the dearth of feeling there,
As they fall flat and fizzle out again
And again, without their former flair.
And though they aptly show my poverty
Of spirit, passion, and creative fire,
This alone does not make poetry,
No more than ashes make a funeral pyre.
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About the author:
Christopher Courtley has been spinning tales for nearly four decades. He wrote his first poem when he was around eight, but it wasn't until his late teens that he became a prolific poet. Born and raised in the slums of New York City, he has come to appreciate the finer things in life, such as cutlery, napkins, music made with real instruments, sophisticated women, and good manners. When he is not languishing in an absinthe-soaked torpor, or wandering between the worlds, or being irritatingly distracted by the vicissitudes of earthly life, he spends his nights writing furiously, occasionally remembering to shave, bathe, and eat.
Also by Christopher Courtley:
TROLL STEW: A STRANGE BREW OF DARK FAIRY TALES AND POEMS FOR ADULTS
THE TEMPLE OF BAAL-ZEBUB (TALE I OF THE VALRUNA SAGA)
THE BONE DANCER (TALE II OF THE VALRUNA SAGA)
Connect with the author online:
Official Site: https://www.christophercourtley.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/courtleymanor
Facebook: https://facebook.com/courtleymanor
Blog: https://courtleymanor.blogspot.com
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