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DANNY LOVECRAFT
INSPIRED BY NAMESAKE H.P. LOVECRAFT...
"Danny Lovecraft" and his charming Muse appeared on our doorstep in Providence last summer, and we did the official Lovecraft tour together, including a visit to the Lovecraft archives at the John Hay Library. From a heap of chapbooks gifted to us, we have chosen a sampler.
Of himself, the poet writes: "CDWL lives in Sydney, Australia, with wife, Margaret, and feline, Pussy, in a house of clouds and mists called Unexpected P'rea-Jul. He began writing in approximately 1972, but more properly from 1975 onwards, when fallen under the mystical spell of the Wizard from Providence, Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Published ten poems previously under the names of C.D. Whateley and Jack Lance in the 80s and 90s decades, in magazines such as Eldritch Tales, Fantasy Tales, Nyctalops, Australian Magazine of Fantasy and Horror, and The Australian Writers' Journal . But since the millenium bell has been ‘dong-dong-donging' a little more prolifically, finding publishing success in fanzine Pablo Lennis , and forthcoming poem from Hippocampus Press to be called Time Machine .
– the lifting of breeze – a stygian verse –
( Short Bit about when Styx turned up and the breeze lifted and the water sound arrived (as if awfully together, and secret mysteries were just about to open their lotuses) and I suddenly remembered Yog Sothoths out of time, and of trees lain flat pressed flattened by unseen ponderous things in the awful godless night ...)
The lifting of breeze
The sudden sound of rushing water
Meandering as if dolefully along
Purling suddenly out of nothing
As if out of space and time
The breeze and the water then both
Arriving and arising (and cursing)
Together as if they were one thing
As if they were two separate things
Meshed as (muttering) one
And the only coeval certainty being
The scary reality of it all !
In the sudden rising eerieness of mistyness
I felt the mad compulsion to run
To just blindly flee and skedaddle
Into the rising damp mistiness flown
But half way along the ‘escape' route
I thought: Which way was that??
An Nother Styx Bit
In the lifting of breeze
In the sound of rushing water
In the noise of blasting firmament
Fragmentary and imaginative and wistful chaos
Of breathless and opaque magic-mystic-mastery
Of saliences beyond time and falls of eternity
From which the rich black waters flow
From adamantine portals of the past
And past even where the west winds blow
Ensorcelled by asphodels
And beyond scope of space and era
To dismal dark caverns in Death's place
To dismal tarns dark
Set like crawling holes in Death's face
In Dis's primordial palace
Set with blackest hearted jewels
Vast as obsidian windows in all the chaotic walls
And opening forever without shutters ...
In the gaunt lifting of the breeze
In the sound of rushing dead water
In the noise of blasting firmament scree
The eerie hair rises
Even on the back of the neck
And reminds one one is going ... un-home ...
A Little Sci Fi
Residual analysis?
Check
Megaton source?
Check
Low speed count?
Check
Deuterium levels?
Check
Plutonium rods?
Check
Red button?
Double check. – Sorry.
Press.
Che–
Arcturus Starry Love or
Kisses For Andromeda
Arcturus bound her hair with silver star
And then kissed Andromeda
Whilst Hercules tore on Leo's jaws
And Orpheus strummed on mad forsaken lyres,
Plucked with a plectrum from the Pleiades
Daughters of the spheres wild space naiads
Whilst Bootes (risen to her knee)
A garland garter made of asterie,
A porphyry a loving cup
From which to quench and thirstily sup
And burst upon the ruffled scene
Like a stark nebular queen ...
When went at last the stars a-bed
And the morning gloaming raised her glowing head
With a tiara-crown of inwoven turquoise
All was lost ... in the early earth's panting noise ...
Over The Hills And...
I saw I had a vision once amongst the fleecy hilltops
The coloured and colourful hilltops woolly soaring hilltops
Barely obtruding upon the air it was
Save for the pointy spires and high turrets
In its steeply grace and elfin light
So barely faintly obtruding upon the air as it was
That it seemed but a trifle or ruffle or crease
In the quilted eiderdown of floaty flighty hilltops
Made out of nimbuses and thin blue parfait air
I stopped to stare miracle-ised at the inordinately
Beautiful magical realm just sighted
Like some uncharted isle of the clouds
Some Atlantis of the spheres
But already it had fled miserly miserably dead
Adown the melting ice-cream draperies a-run
And drooling causeway memories of time
Like a delicate golden ice-cream fairy floss
Blowtorched by the sun
HPL (Take 2)
Whenever I read Lovecraft once more
I drift those olden spirals again
Spirals of loved lore dark temples bleak sightings
Forbidden cults unfathomable phosphorescent abysses
And fluorine-litten groves of poisonous fungi
Under the screaming earth glossy dark stairwells of black
Pleading fear with ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber
Forbidden traces of splendid colour
Set over a completely alien and unknown
Hitherto-unseen congeries of colouries trashed
With the splintered personalities of the spirited silver key
All the while shaking with awe at the same time
At the daunting shuddersome prospects of
Stumbling nihilistically throu'
Ghoul-guarded gateways of grue
Shoggoth-haunted antarctic holes
Abaddon-scourged trapdoors of chaos memory fear
And cthulhoid-infested portals of living squamous horror
Following surreal entities down phantasmal chasms of chaos
Of titan arcades of deceased diseased misshapen swollen trees
Chasing diamond shapes of a luxy irradiance
Through diaphanous arches of sweeping sweet dream
And weirdly touching weird chaos diamonds
And bottle-sized rubies through dusky decks
Of broken cards like broken shards of scattered stars
With the millennias and kalpas yawning beyond it all
And behind it all like startled horrendous faces
Whenever I read Lovecraft again
And the dripping black ichor of earth's putrescent juices
Flows thickly clotted and blankly dripping black and horrible
Over and adown slimy stone steps carved from the wrong direction
Carved from beneath OUT thru insane epochs of pre-forgotten time
With ghoulish winds frothing and leaping up at ye
And gnashing and tearing at yer face and hair
From the frigids of ultimate dank space
Then he reckons his realms of “beckoning beyonds” unto me again
Reaching out their slim feely paws of forever firm infinities
Like a whirling causeway of ancestral dreams
A wizard dressed in streams of cosmic midnight
And steeped in reeling realms of ultimate delight
And I go out across that ole bridge of moonbeams
Of special spectral moonbeams beyond all limitations
Beyond all outer limits of comprehensions
And understandings moribund and so earth-bound
So go thou too to HPLovecraft and shudder
And O those beautiful shudders ...
Elmos
The hoar-frost gleams
On the gardens and the castles of Elmos
Like the frightened lonely castles on the Rhine
Are the lonelyized relics of Elmos
Who passed away many a year agone
Yet who poises always as if
As if just about to waken
But never actually quite does
Whilst thru the bleak windswept
Moors of corridors
Of its leafy ruin rune
And down the cold frozen arcades
Of its loathsome dead trees
Museums and galleries
Of arborial horror unimaginable
Pause ... as if waiting
And listening ... for return
But no foot ever trod or passes
No one has been there for millennia
And what is bleakly more
No one knows how they all went or where or why
No one knows what happened to them at all
Whereof a nameless plague of evil sentience
Or mad disappearances en masse
To don white robes of soul
No man might say
It is eerie in the environs of Elmos
That no man hath seen
Eerie in the environs of Elmos
Where no foot hath trod
Eeriest in the hellish environs of Elmos
Which no man hath seen nor trod nor ... understood
Returning to the Fabled Lovecraftian Dreamlands
The shining spires shone out upon the opal air
The silken coloured clouds unravelled like opiate fare
And I was dream-tossed dream-bound dream-driven
Beneath a wide glassy skye so star riven
On the wild-moving Cerenarian Sea
When on a sudden Sona-Nyl rose to the lee
Stuff Is Pouring Out Of Me
stuff is coming out of me
like a squeezed brain
like a perspiration
out of a sponge
like those dead lungs
with the black hideous nicotine
squeezed the hell out
of them on tv
dripping brown nasty
brown-black
dead ichor juice sludge
in a fist
off an elbow
and
into
a
shiny
metal
pond
er
bowl
of
metallic
fright
In –
i
In a calyx of nebula
In a furious flurry of astral storms
In a brooding coven of colourful cosmic mists and gases
Have I sought dreamers' refuges
Have I found fabulist evasions
And drifted down their warming wondrous spirals
ii
In a corolla of firestar
In a fulgent flurry of magellanic clouds
In a coven of magenta spirals gases and beams
Have I dreamt and then walked waking dreams
With which to mantle the psyche of my soul
With the delicious accoutrements from beyond
iii
In a rose calyx of very large dwarf
In a vertigo of soft moody obsidian
With wilder sparks breaking through and in from all sides
Into fonts of prismatic hue and cry and spray
Have I wandered glossily adown
And wondered whereof and how I stayed
iv
In an orchid of pulsar paradise
In a dizzying bending of thronging galaxies and planes
In a congeries of opalescent fantasias
Have I extempored with ex oblivione
And returned to tell the tale the tale to tell ...
Well, leastwise before becoming permanently gazumped!