Today we feature an extraordinary poet and Wordsmith Par Excellence. CASSANDRA SWAN is a Versatile poetry and literary artist . An Accomplished Performances Poet with her writings featured and performed at home and abroad. Her writings are laced with spats of brevity and doses of boldness. FEARLESS. Swan has won several international poetry accolades and her writings have since sparked dialogue , debate and criticism in high political corridors , church as well as in the global periphery. Her imagery is disinfects super power corridors from thuggery ,metaphors is the chlorine washing away the dirty laundry in villages and streets. While the satire is the acid burning corrupt fingers to cinder. Currently her EPIC POEM“Candy Cotton Kid and the Faustian Wolf” a THEORY on the LIFE and SUICIDE of AMERICAN POET, SYLVIA PLATH has been accorded an opportunity to be choreographed and featured at THE MARGOT FONTEYN BALLET ACADEMY , USA.CASSANDRA SWANis an internationally acclaimed, widely published, award-winning poet, author, artist, revolutionary, visionary, political activist, medium, clairvoyant, PhD student and former highly successful hypnotherapist. She delves deep into the human mind and condition in her intimate, confessional poetry to explore the human psyche utilising voices, landscapes, characters, images, emblems, motifs, myths, symbols and archetypes, which embrace death and re-birth. This collection of selected works reaches back as far as her adolescence. Some of her works are tragic, humoresque, ironic; some serve as a map to her own unique, imagistic journey, addressing existential, social, sexual, emotional and synchronistic insights, which emerge as an awareness of the unavoidable stages of life from puberty through to middle-age.
CANDY COTTON KID AND THE FAUSTIAN WOLF
Did Uncle Frank violate Candy Cotton Kid?
Pragmatic necessity, he crafted a sturdy xebec,
sailed with the child virgin, the trireme a perverted dais.
The ocean bouncing, a senseless liquid witness.
Drail hooked cold-blooded eyes, dying fish shared the secret.
Uncle Frank said the wind agreed, no tears,
it would upset the sun; evidence trickled, as bitter syrup,
over a vulnerable, dwarf coition odalisque.
Out with Sivvy’s tonsils, more space
for the stripling’s incestuous, pubescent swollen asp;
laryngoscope phallus, all seeing eye.
Taciturnity carved into dried semen,
Sivvy fought against latent, vomit-ridden memories.
Would the rain whisper in her sleep?
The fog knew everything,
heavy as old flannel blankets,
linen cupboard full of rattling skeletons.
Mummy called the doctor;
Daddy had rotted in a diabetic dementia.
No goodbye, why?
Absent heart, Mummy must not
get married again, sign here!
Smart Sivvy, published proudly,
at only eight years young.
Siblings artistically entwined,
creative happiness prevailed.
Compositions, sketches, riddles;
secrets hoarded and repressed,
infernal chasms of the cunning blind mind,
the veritable store of amoral vulgarities,
intrinsic; psychological safety mechanisms
safeguarded Candy Cotton Miss.
All would be decorticated,
as writhing worms beneath a mossy obsidian.
Sivvy a prodigy, saltus to Smith College.
Blood, sweat, tears, fears, menstrual melee, hormonal hood.
New York hailed, electric chairs,
spies, nauseous sizzling flesh, hazy heated June.
Sivvy awarded Mademoiselle magazine guest editorship;
poisonous crabmeat, botulism, hell.
2/
Intermittent sinusitis, seppuku haunting.
Wellesley cellar crevice, narcotics,
overdose, head wounds scarred cheeks.
Ms. Genius lost in a timeworn tunnel?
White walls, institution, wired up,
Sivvy’s copious brain fried as a portion of charred chips,
smothered by blind eyes and smoldered whiskers,
recoiled as a foetus, trapped in amniotic vinegar,
conviviality, unprocurable.
Her psychiatrist engaged in fiducial transference
with Sivvy’s restrained memories,
a tombola with no lucky prize,
ignominious secrets spiraled violently
as sycamore husks in the drum.
Ugly distortions, masked faces, laughing,
taunting lasciviously, in Sivvy’s child envisioned ghost train.
Mother disliked this; her daughter concealed the truth
among a mountain of rotting fairy cakes
and cheese, in the Bell Jar forever.
Sivvy lived as a Lilliputian; a Borrower in a glass house,
who screamed, climbed, stumbled
then choked among facts;
they echoed with indignant certainty,
muffled by raisins and an avalanche of crusty crumbs.
Lackadaisical, hour by hour,
her bed a slab of warm cheese,
grated, it divulged pandemonium!
The panacea? Confront the stunted emotional evolution;
alas, Daddy died too soon!
Trapped in a chrysalis, her nascent cocoon,
a unique metamorphosis occurred;
emotional epeirogenesis produced
the pristine extension to Sivvy’s personality.
She finally emerged as an adult,
remaining, however, a child to her Mother.
Silken perfected wings, flapping,
colourful patterned dust clouded the jar.
Shrouded by her own vulnerability,
Sivvy created an alter ego, Aryan gate keeper;
great white shark dormant in unconscious realms,
gliding beyond dark recesses, a centripetal force,
avoiding residence in either cerebral hemisphere permanently.
3/
Sylvia devoured men: it helped until Cambridge,
where wolf loitered; he slumbered as a sociopath.
At the St Botolph’s review, lightning struck,
a pagan demon emerged, love ignited;
wolf empowered his prey.
Plath responded with a styptic bite.
Dark domination, violation, the sequel, second sitting.
Wily ruffian, baptized by Lucifer,
accessed pleasurable comfort from Candy Cotton Miss.
The available, lonely poetess was momentarily shark-less,
the emotionally crippled child, transparent butterfly,
had flown beyond the jar.
Sylvia’s fatal needs were prevalent,
her ideals a target for the black eyed, conscience-free Northerner.
A wedding in June; lusty ocean whispered to the occult luminary.
Yorkshire vampire fed well, he devoured the emotional banquet.
Hughes became the thief of his wife’s theological virtues
and replaced them with his evil deeds.
Sivvy’s cathexis, her devoted gift.
Sextonian and Lowellian eddas,
priceless similarities, strong bonds forged,
new friends witnessed all.
Plath’s edifications exposed her desperate blindfold.
Machinated Ouija board lure, writing on the wall,
skeletal wife, grizzly bear growled death,
the shaman’s warning!
Rambling hills, whistling dales,
Court Green, confused crowds of wayward daffodils,
chopped stems as broken oaths.
Creeping cloudberry climbing the trellis
as clueless as the sun.
With new-born, Sivvy became a perfect wife in a domestic play.
Unexpected clandestine scenes ensued at her grey, stone-clad theatre.
Unwelcome visitors, bees in her bonnet,
disturbed the status quo, feline xenophobe
the floozy with heinous thighs.
Amoral wolf, the highbrow mystic,
nose-picking slammerkin skald,
ensnared a second dupe.
Adultery permeated as still as hanging fog,
with a sickly stench, Chanel fragrance perfume.
4/
Duplicity, dreaded symbiotic-association
of post-natal blues, clung as fluted mushrooms
to a towering silver birch tree.
Sivvy burned with rage, hellfire,
miasmal injustice, punctured pride;
Ire, seeping through as blood on fine lace.
Ancient wisdom, kinnikinick flamed across Cornish skies,
ravens choked to brittle matchstick bones:
feathers floated and crackled amidst smoke and scorn.
Pungent rituals of destruction curdled as succinic acid,
Chanel cocktail whisked with neological wolf sweat
and recently written foliated manuscripts.
Words, words, words, words!
Testimonies, promises, warnings, speeches of anguish,
prophetic duties to fulfil, Sivvy stirred her cauldron of hope
with only a dessert spoonful of faith.
Flight of night, London hailed,
Screaming, loud as Roethke’s Big Wind.
Recollections imperceptibly thawed,
arid ghost flour and ice dough, kneaded into cacophony bread.
Cherubs slept, soon to be Motherless.
Predatory visitor, the Yorkshire shaman,
Libertine in Yeats' house cajoled and hypnotized the poetess;
her subconscious binding burst, human computer on overload,
Sivvy re-lived vile rape: Uncle’s adolescent serpent
hissed, fork-tongued at Sivvy, two long decades later.
Puss spurted, flooded her emotional dam,
torrents of curdling, rank, volcanic vomit,
crashed against the barriers of deceit!
My! What bold truths, baked courageous mouldy buns,
exploding bitter poison veins.
Brusque afflatus revealed the culprit,
silent screams echoed in the jar.
Wolf, green fanged, hot breath,
dribbled his auto-suggestions and flimflams,
Raised the Bell Jar, wafted in gas
the unconscious programmed perfume.
Sly-boots sneaked away, his insouciance with stratagem,
bubbled as a brew of death; confutative as a voodoo master,
cloistered, the evil vulpine wizard awaited the vixen’s implied,
self-possessed slaughter.
5/
Alvarez, the Anacreontic critic, visited Sivvy;
she recited fantasias, her angst-ridden soul vociferated,
echoes were not loud enough.
Dearest of Mothers controlled the volume from America.
Mama designed the invisible emotional calipers,
a nubile infrastructure, psychological scaffolding which collapsed.
Oh! Great Statue of Liberty, transformed to a drowned Triton.
The Girl who thought she was God, disabled by her own miracles;
crucified by the nihilistic canine woolgatherer.
Subterranean secrets surfaced and floated as an oil slick on a vast ocean.
Uncle’s misdemeanors totally overwhelmed her Kon-Tiki.
Alvarez, faithful fox, was he messenger of wolf, a stool-pigeon?
Soon crept away stealthily into biting ice, white candy-floss.
The depths crashed in Sivvy’s head
and gushed down her swan-like neck.
A regressed infant,
she prepared her volitional Nazi gas chamber.
Apathetic, resigned as a Jew,
her fragility bruised by life,
a wretched, inconsolable pallid waif,
poised to drift ephemerally.
Huckaback towels remained a barrier between two worlds;
curtains which would unveil this ultimate tragedy.
Uncle Frank’s debauched, noxious, untamed viper,
shriveled to a flaccid elastic band.
Daddy heard Sivvy’s caterwaul
suddenly pierce the ethereal plane, fractured yet resonant.
The Bell Jar smashed, inevitable glass shards of driving winter sleet,
and bees swirled as a hurricane;
Yeats' spirit, as overseer, offered his withered hand.
Karma exposed, Otto knew the fates
had absorbed his daughter’s vinous pain.
Virgilian words, no longer dry, or rider-less,
but wild and frenzied;
wisdom stampeded great literary divides,
florilegium published truth.
Critics subjugated, as entropy created complicated pleonasms.
Sivvy’s spellbound spirit escaped,
back, back, back to Daddy! Electra immortalized.
Primal darkness shrouded her heathen spouse,
odious destroyer of memoirs.
Faustian wolf, spurious basilisk bard,
6/
Tip-toed with Sivvy’s eclogues, through a crisp blanket of snow,
a satisfied smirk of completeness straddled his egoistic maw.
Hoodlum pilferer, utilised the premise
he protected his children
from Sivvy’s Pindaric final words.
Pity the coward should have shielded them
from his irrefutable, dispossessed foul play!
A psychotic, who embroidered his faults
As pretty little roses! Such a cavalier madman!
He unhooked all the hooks, as all great crooks!
Hypnosis and finesse left no fingerprints,
only callous, carefully chosen linguistics,
evidence dissolved into nauseous gas,
death by mesmerism and suggestion!
Veracity? Still buried among schistose tectonic plates,
shifting with each new theory.
Sylvia? Troubadour beyond the grave;
scarlet bones, indigo heart,
seraphim goddess with an infinite soul.
Copyright - Cassandra Swan - All rights reserved originally written 2000/1
EPIC POET CASSANDRA SWAN
Cassandra Swan is an internationally acclaimed, widely published, award-winning poet, author, artist, revolutionary, visionary, political activist, medium, clairvoyant, PhD student and former highly successful hypnotherapist. She delves deep into the human mind and condition in her intimate, confessional poetry to explore the human psyche utilising voices, landscapes, characters, images, emblems, motifs, myths, symbols and archetypes, which embrace death and re-birth. This collection of selected works reaches back as far as her adolescence. Some of her works are tragic, humoresque, ironic; some serve as a map to her own unique, imagistic journey, addressing existential, social, sexual, emotional and synchronistic insights, which emerge as an awareness of the unavoidable stages of life from puberty through to middle-age. Cassandra has developed a new Literary/Poetic Style: “Graphorrhoealism” (From Greek graphien to write + rhoia a flow) a written counterpart of logorrhoea. “Graphorrhoea” represents defiance: an uninhibited approach to language; and cultivates the importance of compelling, descriptive detail,This playlist has no tracks yet a fusion of poetry, psychology – often technical terminology -, mythology, synchronicity and often, prophecy. Unearthing and revealing the deep, inner revolution and landscape of the poet. A style developed through the cultivation of the higher consciousness and relationships with muses and mentors in spirit.
Cassandra’s dark poems: “Hammer” and “The Pocket-size Wreath” both won international poetry competitions and the soundtracks are now produced *short films. Her poetry has been featured on BBC Radio and regularly on www.audiobookradio.net. She has been widely published in poetry magazines and gained outstanding reviews for her challenging poetry. She always seeks to bring her beguiling poems to an audience in ways that overlook outmoded, traditional, conventional forms and styles. She has collaborated with composers and DJs. Her work has been hailed as works of "genius" by Honorary Professors and she has been referred to as: “The Underground Poet Laureate”. Cassandra has worked with Turner Prize nominee artists Jake and Dinos Chapman and Sam Taylor-Johnson in work subsequently featured in Saatchi exhibitions and international venues. Her couture standard hand embroidery has been exhibited in Fine Art Galleries and her controversial performance art exhibitions in various London locations. Cassandra is writing a screenplay and a sequel based on her life story and has a Director/Producer for both productions.
The State Mayakovsky Museum in Moscow invited Cassandra to perform her epic tribute to Vladimir Mayakovsky: “The Panjandrum of Quondam (The Epic Grenade)” in Moscow and Sergei Polunin formerly a dancer with the Royal Ballet is now collaborating to choreograph a ballet based on Cassandra’s Mayakovsky epic tribute. *“The Warring Harridan”, *“Beasts & Priests” (about paedophiles in the Church), *“Job Description (The British Serial Killer)” soundtracks, are in pre-production as short films. “Candy Cotton Kid…” is in early development with the Margot Fonteyn Ballet Academy to be a choreographed ballet.
PorCuPineQuill is authored and edited by Mbizo CHIRASHA.
Mbizo CHIRASHA the Founder and Author of the Time of the Poet.Freedom of Speech Fellow to PEN- Zentrum Deutschland,Germany. Alumni of the International Human Rights Arts Festival in New-York, USA.Literary Arts Activism Diplomatie. Globaly Certified Arts Mediums Curator and Influencer. Internationally Published Page and Spoken Word Poet. Writer in Residence. Arts for Human Rights Catalyst. Core Team Member of the Bezine Arts and Humanities Project. His illustrious poetry , hybrid writings , political commentary ,short fiction , book reviews and Arts Features are published in more than 400 spaces notably the Monk Arts and Soul in Magazine in United Kingdom. Atunis Poetry.com in Belgium. Demer press poetry series in Netherlands. World Poetry Almanac in Mongolia.Poesia journal inSlovenia. Bezine Arts and Humanities Webzine in USA. The Poet a Day in Brooklyn ,USA. Litnet Writers Journal in South Africa. African Crayons in Nigeria. Poetry Bulawayo in Zimbabwe. Pulp-pit USA.the FictionalCafe international Journal , Texas USA.