Happy Dust poem – Aleister Crowley poems | Poetry Monster

A poem by Alistar Crowley (1875-1947)

For Margot

Snow that fallest from heaven, bear me aloft on thy wings

To the domes of the star-girdled Seven, the abode of

ineffable things,

Quintessence of joy and of strength, that, abolishing

future and past,

Mak’st the Present an infinite length, my soul all-One

with the Vast,

The Lone, the Unnameable God, that is ice of His

measureless cold,

Without being or form or abode, without motion or

matter, the fold

Where the shepherded Universe sleeps, with nor sense

nor delusion nor dream,

No spirit that wantons or weeps, no thought in its silence

supreme.

I sit, and am utterly still; in mine eyes is my fathomless

lust

Ablaze to annihilate Will, to crumble my being to dust,

To calcine the dust to an ash, to burn up the ash to an air,

To abolish the air with a flash of the final, the fulminant

flare.

All this I have done, and dissolved the primordial germ

of my thought;

I have rolled myself up, and revolved the wheel of my

being to Naught.

Is there even the memory left? That I was, that I am?

It is lost.

As I utter the Word, I am cleft by the last swift spear of

the frost.

Snow! I am nothing at last; I sit, and am utterly still;

They are perished, the phantoms, and past; they were

born of my weariness-will

When I craved, craved being and form, when the con-

sciousness-cloud was a mist

Precurser of stupor and storm, when I and my shadow

had kissed,

And brought into life all the shapes that confused the

clear space with their marks,

Vain spectres whose vapour escapes, a whirlwind of

ruinous sparks,

No substance have any of these; I have dreamed them in

sickness of lust,

Delirium born of disease-ah, whence was the master,

the “must”

Imposed on the All? is it true, then, that

something in me

Is subject to fate? Are there two, after all,

that can be?

I have brought all that is to an end; for myself am suffic-

ient and sole.

Do I trick myself now? Shall I rend once again this

homologous Whole?

I have stripped every garment from space; I have

strangled the secre of Time,

All being is fled from my face, with Motion’s inhibited

rime.

Stiller and stiller I sit, till even Infinity fades;

‘Tis an idol-’tis weakness of wit that breeds, in inanity,

shades!

Yet the fullness of Naught I become, the deepest and

steadiest Naught,

Contains in its nature the sum of the functions of being

and thought.

Still as I sit, and destroy all possible trace of the past,

All germ of the future, nor joy nor knowledge alive at the

last,

It is vain, for the Silence is dowered with a nature, the

seed of a name:

Necessity, fearfully flowered with the blossom of possible

Aim.

I am Necessity? Scry Necessity mother of Fate!

And Fate determines me “I”; and I have the Will to create.

Vast is the sphere, but it turns on itself like the pettiest

star.

And I am the looby that learns that all things equally are.

Inscrutable Nothing, the Gods, the cosmos of Fire and

of Mist.

Suns,atoms, the clouds and the clouds ineluctably dare

to exist-

I have made the Voyage of Thought, the Voyage of Vision,

I swam

To the heart of the Ocean of Naught from the source of

the Spring of I am:

I know myself wholly the brother alike of the All and the

One;

I know that all things are each other, that their sum and

their substance is None;

But the knowledge itself can excel, its fulness hath broken

its bond;

All’s Truth, and all’s falsehood as well, and-what of the

region beyond?

So, still though I sit, as for ever, I stab to the heart of my

spine;

I destroy the last seed of endeavour to seal up my soul

in the shrine

Of Silence, Eternity, Peace; I abandon the Here and the

Now;

I cease from the effort to cease; I absolve the dead I from

its Vow,

I am wholly content to be dust, whether that be a mote

or a star,

To live and to love and to lust, acknowledge what seem

for what are,

Not to care what I am, if I be, whence I came, whither go,

how I thrive,

If my spirit be bound or be free, save as Nature contrive.

What I am, that I am, ’tis enough. I am part of a glorious

game.

Am I cast for madness or love? I am cast to esteem them

the same.

Am I only a dream in the sleep of some butterfly?

Phantom of fright

Conceived, who knows how, or how deep, in the measure-

less womb of the night?

I imagine impossible thought, metaphysical voids that

beget

Ideas intagible wrought to things less conceivable yet.

It may be. Little I reck -but, assume the existence of

earth.

Am I born to be hanged by the neck, a curse from the

hour of my birth?

Am I born to abolish man’s guilt? His horrible heritage,

awe?

Or a seed in his wantoness spilt by a jester? I care not

a straw,

For I understand Do what thou wilt; and that is the whole

of the Law.