This new sonnet riffs off Shakespeare’s 18th:
…for all those whose love is so fresh and strong it can seem unreal, here’s a sonnet for each and every one of us – Happy New Year!
Coming Together (haiku chain)
29 January 2020 by 6 Comments
In the still soft hours
Of night I wake as if alone
In bed although we’re not
*
Still there in each space
Between kisses in each breath while
We sleep love completes us
*
When we’ve way too much
Unsaid we want to say and
Much unshared to share
*
Even in silence
Our closeness warms us fills us
Speaks us forever:
*
Coming together
After time apart too long
Fills a voiceless void
*
Our lovers’ talk so close
Lasts longer far than mere remembered life
Never really ends
*
While we’re together
Hold each moment hold each one
In fullness of love
*
Even in silence
Still warmth eloquence love
Speak us forever
*
**
*
Freddie Omm
(very loosely translated from an original Meditation by Philippe de Saint Maurice)
*
**
*
I took the photo of the sunset through a window, quite dirty, in San Francisco.
when we make love a billion cells break free (villanelle)
13 December 2019 by 11 Comments
when we make love a billion cells break free
our bodies flowing fluid like disgendered
creatures of great beauty growing unbound gloriously
*
although we’re only human too and so quite ordinary
we spiral into plasmic dust as spores sprinkling our eggshell world
while making love a billion cells break free
*
in some identities we hardly see
among us – beside, within, beyond us – enraptured,
creatures of great beauty rising upward gloriously
*
like stars that gleam and glow in space and transiency
like birds in deep still forest undergrowth unheard
love is made perpetually so billions of our cells break free
*
our love in life is that which lets us be
ourselves in an intensity of moments scattered
creatures of great beauty growing unbound gloriously
*
we find new freedoms freeform ecstasy
now top and out of mind and sight no need for thought nor any word
when we make love a billion cells break free
like creatures of great beauty growing unbound gloriously
*
**
*
griffith park
LA
again
1 December 2019 by 4 Comments
we had such careless loving times back when
we sheltered on the shore as storm and sleet swept in –
we hugged each other hot and close again
*
and with each kiss our mouth and tongue would send
such warm and wordless blissful touch and then
we’d find each other’s joy in hot wet carnal time again.
*
those deep cold nights of storm that draw us in
together closer than we’ve ever been
to kiss and fuck each other warm and well again
*
against the pain that cuts us deep when wounded by a friend –
we long to make it up but can’t begin –
we miss those carefree loving times back when
*
so young and fresh, with sunlight prickling our skin,
we spread our arms and let the sunlight in –
we hug and hold each other hot and close and mingled up again.
*
so to pick up the heartloose wreck of storms (which time will also mend)
our edgy lust and love that longing doesn’t end
we’ll have such careless carnal time and then
we’ll hug hold kiss each other hot and close again.
*
**
*
freddie omm
december 2019
we come alive
12 November 2019 by 11 Comments
from the way we act
when we’re in love you’d think love
wounds and hurts us most
*
in life – though things far
bitterer are daily thought and done –
love hits us hardest
*
– at times though we seem not
to even know we’re alive
while we’re here living
*
we can’t remember
our births, don’t believe in our
deaths – all too human
*
errors throughout life
shape our being – our delicate
small blue fragile world –
*
it’s quite likely that
love changes us because love
makes us come alive
*
as time goes past pain
fades but love’s the thing that lasts
to save us from ourselves
*
when we kiss and touch
our loving tenderness makes
hard living softer
*
we come alive then
love ourselves into being
loving mortal gods
*
**
*
freddie omm
*
**
*
This haiku chain is loosely translated from a Meditation of Philippe de Saint Maurice.
moving
10 October 2019 by 6 Comments
we humans stand alone and still in life until
love takes our hand and kisses us and helps us walk and talk
*
loveless, the passing hours through which all things must pass
stand still the days succeeding days stand still
and all is focused on ourselves alone
as if the universe herself is holding breath
*
we humans stand alone in life until
one day we find our love and it is good
while loving lasts all lives are rich in joy
and come together we all taste the fruits of heaven.
*
so can we forget a while that sometimes
a human stands alone in life until they fall apart in death
and make our wishes all come true with hope
and faith in love to keep us humans moving?
*
**
*
freddie omm
venice beach
september 2019
narcissus
15 July 2019 by 4 Comments
i see you my love
as clearly as reflections
in dark water
*
as clearly as the light
i see you stark and unblurred
in the noonday sun
*
perfection of love
that shatters into ripples
when i kiss your lips
*
**
*
omm
*
haiku by freddie omm; painting by john william waterhouse
woke like song (haiku chain invocation) – for all the lovers everywhere
5 May 2019 by 2 Comments
I
open up like song
let music play us sing us
melodising us
*
we two wrapped in heat –
loose entangled limbs like riffs
of carnal melody
*
interlaced and lit
lasciviously dangerous
lullabying life
*
our bodies pick up
the pumping of each other’s
heartbeat rhythms
*
in our love for us
we’re lyrical and languorous
climax in chorus
*
wild music wakes us
enchanting and shaking us
open like song
*
our skin pricked with notes
glissando licks quickening us
like a morning shower
*
in our love for us
in trust in truth we give tongue
to life’s loving song
*
II – envoi:
*
for all the lovers
who grew lonely as time passed
silencing their space –
*
music of the spheres
come join us close together
sing us woke in song!
*
**
*
freddie omm
may 2019
*
photo by spencer imbrock
veneralia (love changelings) – haiku chain
31 March 2019 by 7 Comments
love is unchanging
but like the moon looks different
with each month coming
*
from bright new closeness
of a full worm supermoon*
illuminating us
transfiguring all
the sleeping world with budding
love awakenings
*
as each mood succeeds
mood and sad and happy mix
we’re changelings in love
*
our inconstancy
moves, begets us, forgot in
guiltless venery
*
our loves’ festival:
bathe in the pools of Venus
crowned with myrtle
*
rediscover the
endless beauty of new fresh
never ending loves
*
**
*
omm
- Veneralia was a festival held on 1 April in honour of Venus, Goddess of Love (Aphrodite to the Greeks). Women bathed together, crowned in myrtle, in the goddess’ honour. The festival was specifically focused on Venus’ attribute as Venus Verticordia – alluding to an aspect of the goddess as a “changer of hearts” – in this case, her ability to transform lustful love into chaste or platonic love. In this poem, the changing of hearts is seen in the context of a constancy of love that continues even when the love objects change.
- *On 21 March 2019, the Spring Equinox, there was a full worm super moon. Looking from my window in The Hague, I saw an irradiated sky of swift moving clouds whose intermittent gaps opened a flood of stunning illuminations. They lit up everything like the flash of sudden universal compassion that can come with a new love, undermining cynicism and suffusing all in a bath of warm golden light.
- Photos by Timothy Dykes and Guzman Burquin; Venus Verticordia by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
grounded – a thing for me – split-line sonnet
23 November 2018 by 3 Comments
not for me
those clouds that fluff the sky and
shift their shape like ghosts
*
haunting heaven,
inhabiting while whiting out
our snowy floating formless hopes –
*
not for me
the worn-in practised phrase
that targets
*
some soft weakness of our stricken hearts,
but always misses,
misses
*
tittle-tattling flattery that bigs
us up
yet disses, disses –
*
o not for me
those chilled and flaky
trout-lipped puppet tendernesses
*
nor for me
those strung-out wants that need yet never do,
they’ll never do:
*
not for me a life that’s lost for lack of you.
*
for me then what is left to make my day?
for me your hand and head and heart and kiss
*
that permeate
the mark of love which others miss,
miss
*
mashing us while world spins on around us in its feckless way:
*
but all those flakes
who flurry through the sky, who
flourish infelicitously
*
without a touch from you
to ground them cannot be
a thing for me.
*
**
*
omm
november 2018
come to me – sonnet
18 May 2018 by Leave a Comment
Come to me in the blind and breathless passion of a night
Spent loving free full feral without thought
For morning – climactic darling hours that brought
Us here as one and yet so other, clasped tight
*
As here in bed between these warm and crumpled clinging sheets
We bask our bodies in the glow and gladdening glory of the sun
Each rapt and untamed moment which our lives have left to run
Each moment while in each of us our wild heartbeats
*
With that loping looping rhythm pulsing love
Outpacing secret cadences of time.
*
Charged with that beat, may tantric rhythmic rhyme
Flow through our coupling, energy-infused from high above
*
And let our inner powers grow and set us free:
May we become ourselves again, each time you come to me.
*
**
*
Omm
song of the morning muse – sonnet
2 May 2018 by 6 Comments
Every morning I sing – the birds above
And earth below move in those dawning musings –
Those twists and turns of dream and thought, those swings
Of mood that drive us off course when we love
*
But when we think we have the lives we hoped we’d live
We sometimes see ourselves as creatures that we feared we’d be –
Monsters of imagination, whom we
Fed because of what we dreamed they’d give –
*
We travelled far through countries strange, and stranger time
Wore out our wishes, blotted all that dreaming shaped in rhyme:
Our vital hopes were blurred – still, half-asleep –
Although throughout it all our vocal passions stirred: racing deep –
*
Till one fine day (like now) we wake, we rub our eyes and then
Realise we’re singing songs of morning once again.
*
**
*
Omm
May 2018
holy ghosts – haiku chain
19 April 2018 by 4 Comments
all our holy ghosts
live in us, and we in them –
love’s eternal haunting:
*
blithe spirits spook us
from deserted dunes – singing
sands, rustled by winds –
*
heartbeat-storms roil round
the beach, rouse stomping wildness,
clamour in our veins:
*
we are the children
– and parents – of the past
in love’s family
*
whose children succeed
give birth to generations
for eternity
*
mother father child
live and grow and give their love
timeless trinity
*
all our holy ghosts
live in us as we in them
we are love eternal
*
Omm
Spring 2018
st valentine’s eve – anna and floris: 1270
13 February 2018 by 1 Comment
at dusk she kisses him
mushymouthed and clinging breathless breast
to breast their smooth commingling
hard then fluid tender melting
*
cool hot creamy sex when two
so made so shaped for one another
couple up as one in one
*
dissolving her in him in her like milk in tea
and in the pearl-pale moisture bleeding from those honeyed lips
and in the sweet salt sweat of thighs and loins
*
she cries he too
for in that kindling consummate moment
they come consumed to be together
*
all thought given up
yesterday today no more tomorrow
she wonders how such mindless mindfulness surrenders
*
she wonders is that it then when valentine dawns
*
when is tomorrow then
when I and you become us
and she conceives as day in night is born
and fused and found forever lost that moment
*
when together now
we come as close as one can be to one
then is tomorrow and tomorrow’s past
*
Omm
valentine’s eve into day 2018
winter solstice: christmas blessing – five haiku
21 December 2017 by Leave a Comment
this winter solstice
as I love you, love me –
our Christmas blessing:
*
living loving both –
if life means anything
let our thing be love.
*
longest, darkest night,
while Wodan hunts with ghosts all yearning
through skies of glowing spirits
*
may that night purge us all
those ghosts be at peace, in love
again with living
*
in shadowlands of love:
as I love you, love me
this winter solstice.
*
Omm
winter solstice 2017
sex and being (three haiku)
10 November 2017 by Leave a Comment
pulsing passion fills
our veins – our bodies
cleave together, one.
*
now in our oneness
grows a seed of otherness:
each of us is both
*
oneself, and a part
of another being born
of us, though not us.
*
Omm
endings & beginnings
31 December 2013 by 5 Comments
my new year’s message this year is this quaint little ditty. i was writing out the fair copy this morning when i was interrupted not by a man from porlock but a mother-in-law from neuss bearing presents. so i had to finish it on a fresh sheet of paper which i then stuck together so you can see that the interruption came at a pertinent point:
for those who cannot decipher my writing:
endings & beginnings
(in a winter’s garden)
BEGIN with the word that comes first, like light
from a twilit winter’s garden, when soft rainfalls
drop on dewy, leaf-pocked grass, showering bright
like a sudden flow of MOMENTS through the calls
of a goosequilled V tooting past, this starry night…
*
I sometimes try to freeze TIME, so it stops
and in an INSTANT feel and think all blend
and merge within MOMENTS—consciousness drops
like heaven’s rainfall in a winter garden—
inconsummate, unbegun, word without END,
*
but now SOMETIMES I forget such somethings,
and in your love I’ve found SEASONS to care
about the here, NOW, not some perfected place where
there are no more ENDINGS and BEGINNINGS.
freddie o
viersen, 29-31 december 2013
love became a lonely land: autumnal haiku chain
12 September 2013 by 12 Comments
leaves like love let go
spiral down to snoozing earth,
dark, russet-brown loam.
*
when fall took those leaves
love became a lonely land—
warmth withdrawn, wan sun’s
*
waning light bled slow
blind trails of mud and sodden
footsteps veined with ice
*
where ghosts shadowed past,
skulked all through that leafless land
to haunt our autumns…
*
stark, unfelled, strange-boughed—
love’s remains in lonely land:
bare old beeches, clumped,
*
storm-ridden and gaunt,
sheltering our homeless hearts,
winterblown—like us,
*
love’s a vagabond
wandering to a nameless place
of endless leaving—
*
on tracks untravelled
from fall to spring, we will see
leaves, let go, return.
leaves, let go, return
___________________________________________________________________________________
– I originally wrote this haiku chain on Twitter — a bad habit of mine — poetry on Twitter being so hit and miss, nobody’s looking for it — but I find it a good place maybe for knocking out a first draft.
– When I’d written it I thought Love is a lonely land was a new phrase but then I checked and I saw I had actually lifted it (subconsciously…) from an old, sweet song.
– This was Billie Holiday’s beautiful, mournful Deep Song (by Cory and Cross), which includes the line:
Love lives in a lonely land
and ends:
Love is a barren land, a lonely land/A lonely land.
– That’s a song I must have listened to more than a couple dozen times since childhood (my parents also loved Billie Holiday).
– At any rate, my haiku chain has ended up as a sort of retort — a positive echo if you like — to the somewhat bleak sentiments of Deep Song…
– So thanks to Billie, Cory and Cross!
– And here’s their song in all its glory: