Derek J. Brown is a poet based in Glasgow, Scotland. He published his first book of poetry, A Strategy of Mirrors in Nov 2020. He is a member of The Glasgow Literary & Music Lounge at The Scotia Bar and likes to collaborate with musicians, namely Brian McFall . He also makes video poems often with fellow poet Dr. Jim Ferguson. He has collaborated with Ferguson on a book of poems titled Glasgow Jukebox He has had poems published in various literary magazines including: The Red Skirt, The Fair-haired Review, The Banana Peel, The Singular Sock, The Scarlet Bow-tie, The Magic Muffin, The Hierophant, Gutter, The Hieroglyphic Hermit, Fathers and Daughters, The Sacred Mackerel, The Syd James Gazette, All or Nothing, The Magician's Scarf and various other literary magazines. He believes any form of completeness is ultimately deceptive. He considers his poetry to be a war against mankind's paucity of being.
Broken Days
In your cemetery eyes, sustained, in focus
Crumpled petals of an autumn lotus
Your blazing moon, your frozen tower
Aimless wreath, random flower
Broken days of wine and roses
Slender truth no mind proposes
Your passive fears, your violent hopes
Your kingdom fixed by supple ropes
A place I strive to breach, to enter
A final, peculiar, undying ember
Your knight of wands in his last uprising
Your magician's fall so unsurprising
Your swift rejection of earthly power
Fruits held sweet and yet so sour
I wait not for any bell to toll
I climb the slope of your erratic soul
Affections neither cold nor warm
Your trackless heart beats multiform
No question here of what love is
I'll be your prophet, your Orpheus
Cross your underworld, its false negations
Its guileful snares, its infestations
Your boneyard eyes, preserved, in focus
Crumpled petals of an autumn lotus.
The Truth
I've read Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg's Howl
I know the difference 'tween a glance and a scowl
You want to kill me, disembowel me
Throw my body in a dismal grave
Is the thirst you have one to be quenched
Your universe a slave, a sulphurous wench
The god you worship, what's he providing
Even the sheep (bless them) have gone into hiding
Liars travel by sturdy vessels
But truth, it carries its own credentials
No twisted cord it won't untangle
Nothing you build it can't dismantle
I'm no vagrant shadow that craves your light
Not some barren page on which you can write
Safe in your castle, you kiss your own loins
Hands complicit dispense worthless coins
But other hands light unnatural flames
Can extinguish faces, annihilate names
Turn a cobra deaf, blind a dragon's eye
Transform you into an ant or a fly
Keep your licorice piece in your candy bag
Call off your brute, pull down your flag
Shut your mouth, discard your pencil
Truth, it carries its own credentials.
Vespers
We listen to Vespers, we dream of Athos
His grand holy mountain
No soul moves forward
Unless it is forced. It echoes within us
What slipped through our fingers
And yet, somehow, still lingers
Like post-mortem portraits, Greta Garbo
Expressions, monochromatic half-moons
Existence of evil such a curious comfort
My assailants swept under, I owe my small life
To illegitimate waves of monogamous oceans
I’ve spent time on planets constantly twilight
What does it mean to be part of this tragedy
A world inhabited by coarse veinless creatures
Their aspects and hands cunningly disguised
Sometimes wounded but not destroyed
There are enemies here we can’t avoid
At last, we were free, in the sun’s rays
But freedom’s deceitful in multiple ways
We are still in a place where all love decays
The past is the present, it always has been
Where you and I covet one permanent kiss
A kiss that is more than it’s initial sensation
God speaks to people thru mouths of others
Some of us listen, we’ve no other choice
Not denizens of this city, its flesh or its bone
Our ears not tuned to its violins but our own
Nameless instruments concocting melodies
Between stone spaces and ambiguous glass
The stranger instincts are waiting to pass
A neutral sky breached by a legion of ravens
Criss-crossing each other’s elusive equations
That join then detach to then join again
Sentient formulas let loose from their slumber
While we enter dreams in which we must wake
But what does it mean to partake of a culture
A place populated by autonomous animals
Whose purified lips are so skilfully sealed
Their faces and palms seldom revealed
A riddle confounds that’s already been solved
To search for one word that equals all others
Is to seek out an entity that utters no language
And yet still possesses a mouth and a tongue
A countenance our eyes may never perceive
An object of truth our brains cannot grasp
Let us go on a journey through liminal realms
Within our patterns let us harness powers
It is the mind that keeps the world’s existence
Loneliness comes from that tiny awareness
And we walk the walkways, in our own ways
Inadequate vultures on Rachmaninov’s heart
Our eyes in sympathy with shadows that hide
Absorb sweet impurities of myth after myth
Simple light refractions feed off of each other
Let our sustenance be music, let art be our love.
A Personal Invitation (From A Psychic Notebook)
She passed me a personal invitation
Directly from her psychic notebook
While I knelt precariously between
Her lawless thighs, her Catholic eyes
Almost transposed me, her Illinois lips
Bore Gothic fruits, species I knew
Only from books. I sensed a process
The most exquisite corruption
A nectarous form of degradation
I felt a rush, a primal pressure
Her blend of Italian and Irish blood
Indecipherable lines of a secret history
Inscribed across her pulsating face
Like an excommunicated priest holding
The Cup of Christ I held with caution
Her heavenly head. She said, "kiss me"
And I wondered what it meant, what
It meant to her, as if a kiss from me
Could mean anything. Casablanca
Projected on a screen in my naive brain
But instead of going by time is betrayed
By its own seconds, minutes rebelling
In the name of romantic elimination
Ascension in vain to a perilous euphoria.
And so I kissed her and she kissed me
Yet the world staggered on, to the next
Sad but imperative new day of oblivion
And so this is the way it always has been
A dream of a dream that wasn't a dream
Cell upon cell, mutating, meticulous
A fugitive tenderness thrives in me still
An invitation from a psychic notebook.
