ACHERON

John Xavier

© Copyright John Xavier 2021

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Isaac spoke to Abraham his father and said, “Father!” And
Abraham replied, “Here I am, my son,” Then Isaac said,
“Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for
the burnt offering?”

I looked when He broke the sixth seal, and there was a great
earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth made
from hair and the whole moon became like blood; and the
stars of the sky fell to earth, as a fig tree casts its unripe figs
when shaken by a great wind. The sky was split apart like a
scroll when rolled up, and every mountain and island was
moved out of their places. Then the rulers of the earth and
the great men and the captains and the strong and every
slave and free man hid themselves in the caves and among
the rocks of the mountains; and they said “Fall on us and
hide us from the presence of Him who sits on the throne,
and from the wrath of the Lamb; for the great day of Their
anger has come and who is able to stand?”
A CALM FAREWELL

Only the lives of suicides can be sacred;

Their faces turning into sunshine,
Green shoots
Sprouting from splayed fingers

Here the birds soar on mourning violins;

A music in the sweet spring air
That the crowds walking these tranquil city streets
Can’t even imagine

The sky hides an invisible sea,

The uncharted depths of the heart,
As a mermaid is watching –
Her smile drawn from shadow
AMARANTHINE

Surpassing memory and fantasy, a mystery

Far beyond the sanguine fathoms of the mind,
Pervading our quiet moments of splendor;
The energy in things that quivers in our hearts,
At certain times, leaving us to marvel

A world of stars in whirls and mirrored streams

And trees luminous with the fullness of the moon;
Serene nights of secret nocturnal beauty
Filling the soul with all their glory;
Together we are the witnesses of eternity

Our sentry endures the ensuing dawns as well,

Their proud radiance and our paternal star
Ascending daily the azure dome of sky;
It continues too through each sinking evening
Restoring slowly scenes of darker majesty

In the endless veiling and returning of the light

We are ourselves revealed to us;
The shadows we see, the shadows within,
And the brightness that we enter
The timeless brilliance of our nature

Human life is the eager striving of the flowers

And the might of every ancient forest;
It is grass swallowing empty mounds of earth
And the swollen fruit on the vine
Trembling with a sweet and yielding flesh

Growth green and thirsting, the spirit spreading,

Unfurling to gather up the falling rain;
Leaves soft and hungry opening, unwrapping
Themselves to receive in purest ardor all the sun;
One energy, one principle, ceaselessly in action

Every form of being a thing transmuted from

The primordial force still absorbed in final destiny;
Amaranthine these vicissitudes which move us then
And likewise visions glanced in ephemera;
Amaranthine all of it, motive rich and immortal
AMPHIBIAN

No one suspected
But if you looked into his eyes
The secret was there

Deep in primeval oceans

Swarming with bizarre tribulations,
His pale hairless skin
Seeking communion with the air

Still he went to his office job underwater

And shook everyone’s hand;
Smiling day in, day out

He gave corporate presentations

To sea urchins and sponges

If it was an existence, it was

His daily existence –
And he bore the weight of the dark fathoms
Towering over him and he did all the
Work that he was assigned

The one thing anyone really cared about

Only on rare vacations

Did he venture out into the unknown
New world that was his alone

Above the waters, in the

Realm of death
Named this by those imprisoned in
Subaqueous being,
He surfaced and inhaled

Here was solitude

And the strange glory of the stars
ASHTORETH’S LABYRINTH

A water wheel of rotting timbers

Warped with the age of quiet decades,
Turned with the speechless power of
A black stream littered with the last offerings
Of the fading autumn;
And the cabin attached to it is caving in,
The grim unpainted door out front
Stained with the dozen starlings nailed there

Blood trickles around the rusted door knob,

An inversion of the sinister trees
Twisting in all directions as they form a phalanx
To ensnare the broken tatters
Of a pale evening sky

The dark forest is hovering on an incantation

Older than all apostles, something
Dreadful fallen from the stars;
Millennia had expired after its descent
Before it began to awaken,
A pulsing red heart in the shadows;
And with this the countryside eerily faded into
The ravaged land it has become

There was a family living in the cabin

At the time; a hunter, his wife, and two daughters
Surviving off whatever pittance
That they could gather from dawn to dusk

Wings of emerald, gold, and sable

Limply curling from their impaled feathered bodies;
Even as late as that
Last summer, the birds had swarmed the
Branches with their prattle;
Stunned they were felled by miasmas though,
Where cowled figures reaped them

The children were the first to

Notice the strange unease that had crept
Into their isolated valley;
They tried to warn their parents and were soon
Unwilling to even go outside alone
Night now conferred only sulphurous dreams,
Each sunset the cruel harbinger
Of intensifying nocturnal ordeals where
Visions of divine terrors and
Incomprehensible realms of abomination
Haunted the sore eyed mornings that followed;
With diminishing sleep there also came
A diminishing strength of mind

Even the parents were convinced,

And the figures seen prowling
Around the edge of the clearing where their
Cabin sat exposed
Were watched with helpless dismay

Slender totems with crude grimacing faces

Soon appeared like protrusions
From the underworld;
Decorating them were scraps of flesh
And garlands of small bones;
One daughter had touched one when they were
First found and a delirium overtook her

The family was trapped,

Besieged by the horror spreading around them

Shut in their house

They listened as a queen spoke from her throne
In the phantasmagorias of sleep that
Afflicted them;
She spoke to them of lust,
And blood

Her insatiable thirst nesting in

A labyrinth made from a shroud of thorns
And withered branches wreathed in tortured shapes;
Its tunnels formed by the paths of
Vanished creatures
Metamorphosed into chimeras

The thudding of the nails driven into the door

And their long tinged shafts penetrating
To the anguish of those inside
The mother had done the only thing she could
To protect those she loved, resorting to
A folklore defense
Against the influence of evil spirits;
With shaking hands she reached into her urn of flour
And strew this in an unbroken powdered circle
Around all the members of her family;
She added too, four glyphs
Evenly spaced apart, expressing
The same desperation as the prayers she spoke;
Her husband meanwhile sat silent,
Fearful, as he clung powerlessly to his axe

A howling inhuman throng had

Gathered around the cabin
But because of the woman’s precautions
They could not instantly breach it

Yet the slaves of darkness

Are profound with malevolent ingenuities;
A chant arose in a chthonic tongue
And a towering ram-headed being stepped forward
With a cage of fidgeting starlings;
Art against art was going to decide things

So the birds were slaughtered

And the foul spell spoken
And a whirlwind
Was summoned within the house,
Scattering everything that could be lifted inside

The ward protecting their cabin broken,

The family was pulled screaming
From their home

In the center of the maze the beast conceals herself;

Her scorched and mangled wings
Covered in supernatural unblinking eyes,
Forming a dome around her

Ravenous she waits for her stealth servants

To return to her
Each evening with new sacrifices
ASIA
You who have forgotten more empires
Than the rest of the world
Has created

Asia, I address you

Supreme of the occult,

And devourer of civilizations –
No territory can rival you

Pantheons upon pantheons of deities you house;

A land of limitless pathways to the divine

Across your mystic and remotest realms

Unfolds a continent of plenitudes, of unnumbered
Argots and patois,
And jungle swallowed cities
Nameless in the mists

Samarkand and Angkor Wat and Hong Kong and Ulan Bator;
Every species of city is yours, every people

Unconquerable Asia;
The Mother of All Khans

Asia, Asia

The thought of you weighs on me;

A man living in a place where no mystery prevails,
Where daily routines persist
Unpreyed upon by unfathomable powers

You though
Are pregnant with deeper truths;
Things unimaginable

Like hushed elephants emerging from nocturne forests,

Your revelations come
AT ONE WITH DARKNESS

A skeletal infant
Dead from starvation;
Hundreds of thousands more like her
Waiting to die
In a city of tents and mass graves

This is the world you live in;

Not the fantasy you’ve created for yourself

Every day you pretend it doesn’t exist,

It still exists;
Every hour you pretend it doesn’t exist,
It still exists;
Every second you pretend it doesn’t exist,
It still exists

You are always surrounded by suffering

However happy you are;
The walls of your paradise
Merely dampening the screams of the damned
To an acceptable level

(Allowing you to forget the truth)

The dead girl can see you though;

Through the shroud of her unbeing
She is watching, remembering

Let us join hands against her friend;

Like you, I too do nothing
BATTERING RAM

Trumpets blaring, their throats fountains of war,

The hate that moves the siege machines,
The rivers of black chains,
The shouting of engineering soldiers,
The fear pressed beasts of burden,
The rancor, the spilled armfuls of weapons,
The onrushing squadrons,
The tents wildly flapping in the wind,
The grim commands, the splashing latrines,
The fires, the hammers,
The harsh laughter, the terrified crying,
The beating hearts of those who say nothing at all,
This industry and chaos, all of it, an offering

Ahead the citadel awaits in its silent arrogance,

Mantled with stark walls scarred by centuries of failed efforts;
This is the maternal darkness, the first, the mysterious,
But now she faces a new god come into his own

Totem with the face of a snarling wolf,

The battering ram is the chanting of an overflowing church,
The hunger of primitive man in blood dripping furs,
The fire mouthed forge devouring raw metal;
The battering ram is power,
The power of illiterate hordes overwhelming empires,
The mindless passionless power that gives life to the flesh,
The true power sovereign in underworld;
The battering ram is a destroyer,
The original destroyer in its latest form,
The incarnation of something venerated before mercy,
The word of the final judgement
That will endure until the end of time

Behind their fortifications, the defenders peered out at the enemy;

Certainly the assault was coming soon, the encircling army
Was unable to do anything to disguise this,
And those inside dwelt in the dark thoughts of
What was about to be unleashed upon them; war feasts,
War is hunger unshackled, the air turned to acid
So that everything visible is suddenly in danger of dissolving and
Who among us can fathom the depths of its appetite?
Through a parting multitude, the battering ram arrived;
The gates of the citadel trembling slightly and
The defenders, seeing this, shivering;
The revelation would not wait any longer,
The ones who’d been charged with delivering it were
The instruments of a cosmic obligation;
The battering ram was pushed towards the gigantic doors,
The defenders engulfing them all the while in
The torrents of their desperately expelled missiles;
The counterattacks though failed to stem
The inevitable and wherever an assailant toppled
The supply of new men, queued to die, provided another;
There was no shortage of human sacrifices waiting

It was the same force revolving the planets

That was playing itself out in the carnage of the battle;
Every life extinguished was something recycled,
An energy being transmuted into the far reaches of destiny

Tremors shuddering the outer edifice of the citadel,

The doors of the gate groaning from the strikes,
The urgent shouting to keep on,
The gong of upheaval, the trampled earth,
The fulfillment of a prince’s many sleepless nights,
The splintering wood, the buckling hinges,
The hiss of boiling oil dumped below,
The chaplains insincere in their solitary prayers,
The clattering of thronging spears,
The churning blood, the dripping sweat,
The repetition and repetition of the violence and
The final bursting of the failing doors as
Those inside flee before a wholesale slaughter seeping in
CIGARETTES ARE WONDERFUL

Feeling the fresh pack under your fingertips;

The plastic wrapping gently sliding off,
Softly crinkling at your touch

And then pulling one from the many,

Each of them rolled to perfection

An anticipation of ecstasy

Your lips are moist before the immaculate filter

Has even found its place between them,
A subtle taste inspiring saliva

As the flint of the lighter sparks with a

Satisfying flame you lean forward

Inhaling and it feels amazing

It feels like forever since you had your last one

So now a warm rush is enveloping you,
Spreading through your body

Your legs become weak with pleasure

Yet you want to be overwhelmed

Life is a beautiful wound

The beast of euphoria is swallowing you

While its ambrosial poison swirls
Inside your innocent body

Even more, the fire you’ve unleashed

Has revealed something now

Death is your friend

CORVID SYMPOSIUM

Scowling each, they descended

In a wealth of black wings;
The group silent
As they preened and strutted
Among some rocks along
The ocean shore
Before conversation began

Earlier the crows had all agreed that

The humans were odd

“As another winter looms,”

Exclaimed an elder,
Pecking at the feast of mussels
Laid out by the low tide,
“We convene to discuss the issue of”
”The food shortage”

“Specifically,” another interrupted,

“The hoarding by mankind!”

“Yes! Yes!” squawked various brethren,

And for a moment the agitation
Simmering in the flock
Threatened to send them into the sky again

But calmer beaks prevailed

“Are we not here to discuss matters?”

Insisted one, “Then let us discuss them.”
“The humans discard”
“Many delicious things and yet they”
“Lock these treasures away”

“Why? Who knows? It doesn’t matter.”

“The question is”
“What should we do?”

“Shall we petition them?” asked an

Especially thoughtful fellow

“No! Peck them!” cawed an angrier attendee

That suggestion led to another surge of
Furious uproar which
Only settled down when a crow,
Older than all the rest,
Ruffled his feathers and murmured

“All… creatures… without… wings…”

“Suffer… a… madness…”
“Born… from… their… despair…”

This was an avian proverb they all knew

“It’s as he says!” snapped one,

“We cannot make a pact with groundlings!”
“With the eggless and wind scorned!”
“Let us turn then to”
“Those we share branches with!”
“The gulls! The pigeons!”
“Even the herons if need be!”
“Together we”
“Will force mankind to”
“Surrender its precious garbage!”

For the humans walking by in

The adjacent city park,
It was nothing but bird noises, yet
At that moment
A war was being hatched

The crows were getting ready to

Stage their vote though
When the surprise charge of a terrier
Off its owner’s leash
Sent them
Scattering into the air

After this, all their

Grandiose promises were
Soon forgotten
DALI SAYS FUCK YOU

Nothing succeeds like the grotesque

– War for example

Why? Because
Beauty is just another thing to surrender
In the pursuit of self-gratification

And so, when the monstrous beasts of the subconscious

Spontaneously overflow into the world,
They are naturally greeted with delight and acclaim
By a bored plutocracy

Consider, for example,

The man who painted “The Great Masturbator”

(Apropos no?)

When the other surrealists

Became resentful of his pre-eminence,
Staging a vote to condemn him,
What did Dali say?
He said “Fuck you. I am surrealism.”

That’s capitalism
– An absolute indifference to other people

It transcends obligations,
Like surrealism,
And therefore Dali mastered both

When George Orwell

Disparaged him as a good draughtsman
But a disgusting human being,
What did Dali say?
He said “Fuck you. Painting is an infinitely minute
Part of my personality.”

He saw himself as a giant,

He became a giant

And Dali’s pet anteater

Will vacuum up all the puny Marxists
And other ingrates
Scurrying under the synchronized footfalls of
Goose-stepping corporations

Don’t like his paintings?

Fuck you.
Don’t like his moustache?
Fuck you.
Don’t like his commercialism?
Fuck you.
Don’t like his boredom of politics?
Fuck you.
Don’t like the absurdity of his antics?
Fuck you.

You’re not Salvador Dali.

You’re nobody.
DAUGHTER OF TERRA

I am a witness to you –
The hurricane of your hair,
The oases of your breasts

Within your body

All the wonder in life is waxing,
Becoming true to itself
In the promise of the world
And the thrill of
Its sincerest fulfillment

You have the strength of mountains

In your bones

And your mind is as deep and amazing

And as strange as the sea –
A thing marvelous and baffling

Flesh and spirit, let me admire you

With a tender gaze –
Listening as a
Summer warmth of laughter
Flows from
The wildfire of your lips

Like the hummingbird, I drink from you

Thoughts blunted in mystery

Before the aura of
Female power, my hand moves with
Pleased acquiescence
To write of your magnificence

The desert is your absence and the

Rainforest your presence –
Meanwhile I live back and forth between them

These only the words of a geographer

A planet alive gave birth to you, and you

Are a living planet yourself
DIVINITATEM HUMILIERIS

Nothing we have belongs to us;

It belongs to the power that can take it from us

So it is with the deluge of the ordinary,

A constant and torrent theft

There is something feeding on our arrogance

No strength or ingenuity withstands

A being of terrible enlightenment

That makes our lives a medium for itself

Let the strife of this world absorb all that you are,
Incarnating inside your heart

Because from this alone can you acquire

The knowledge that will free you

Only if I destroy myself completely

Can I be reborn completely

ELIE’S WATCH

it continued to
tick away under the earth
at first

the youthful
hands hiding it from the
Nazi’s withdrew

but time passed

and the mechanism
lost its energy

it waited
for someone to return to it
with eager fingers

still the
slow decades persisted
without light

history
passed above
as a deafened silence

a war between
two superpowers was fought
in shadows

then it ended
and one day after that
Elie returned

he dug up the watch

with his bare
hands

an old man now

he hesitated
before burying it again
EMBRACING MERCY

There’s the first time it truly matters to you;

The first time you hurt someone and
Their tragedy touches yours

That’s all that mercy is;

The feeling of someone else’s pain, halting us

Of course it’s terrifying, hateful even,

Because the door it opens
Leads out to a whole world of anguish
And all these paths come
Right back home

Empathy lays bare the heart

Even for the enemy; or especially them

Those we’ve devoted ourselves to despising

Suddenly becoming human
And then we’re forced, by an undesired
Sense of kinship, by an
Invasion of unwanted conscience, to recognize that
Mercy isn’t mercy when it’s being
Granted in judgement

The ancient tyrants in us recoil at this

They harangue us with every species of fraud,

Every self-serving lie, to try and
Preserve themselves
Since forgiveness puts them to death

Evil builds its castles in our souls

But mercy destroys them

Kindness is the ruin of cruelty and in some sense

Cruelty knows this; its various incarnations
Desperate to defend themselves

That’s why we suffer so often from internal strife;

But mercy is brave, braver than vengeance,
Because it welcomes its own wounding –
It recognizes this for what it is;
A way to overcome itself,
A way to be transformed into something new
That can only be born from healing

Knowing what it means to be healed

Is not something to belittle

If we never knew pain we could never know mercy;

Like for angels, mercy would be utterly alien
And the secrets of the divine
Would elude us forever –
The mystery of grace is the essence of God;
His whole purpose for our world

Evil seeds itself in evils,

Divinity in divinity;
But what things then will grow from the
Scattered earth of our bodies?

The lives we live decide this question

Can we give ourselves to mercy?

Will we lay down all the thirsting weapons of our rage
And open our arms to honest generosity?

If we can, if fortune so favors us,

And we do, then what
Will come from this if not mercy also for ourselves?
Mercy returning mercy, the mercy that
We offered others arriving home to its source
After traveling across eternity
EROSION

We have no need of words now;

Let us speak
The language of the body

Our flesh in chorus,

Descending to a world beyond
The lies and
Sinuous illusions of
Daily life

All my wounds are refreshed in you,

Every ache and longing
Resurrected
In their full ferocity

Say nothing and

Give yourself to me and
I will say nothing and
Give myself
To you

Engulfed in a library of desires

And the honesty of silence
We awaken

Crashing into one another,

Two stray planets
Joined by the tenebrous bonds of gravity;
Losing ourselves in
Wordless understanding
We are wed
In the physicality of the moment

Symbols are a madness,

Abruptly evaporating into meaningless
Externalities

There is only
The substance of us

Becoming one
EZEKIEL’S NIGHTMARE

Wings the color of burnt glass

Spread themselves over the bridge I am;
My body is crawling with scarlet fire

I am crossing myself, feeling nothing

In the silent horror while mists
Spilling from the mind of a sleeping demiurge
Extend to the edges of the dream horizon

The angel watching me unsheathes its sword

And carves me into twelve equal pieces;
One for each tribe to feast on

When they finish they return to their seats,

Bloodstained and ready for an encore;
Somehow I appear again
Arriving via the bridge to rave applause

The human face, the proscenium of the mind,

Hides the real drama in its depths;
Passions like dark figures working in quiet

I am looking at myself in the mirror

And as I try to understand what I’m seeing
It disintegrates into a fine sand
Scattered by a wind I can’t even feel

Enormous eyes begin to open in the sky,

One after the other, each one watching me
Until the world is filled with them
FALLING STAR

A seething mass of
clotted rage;
grasping arms spindles of fire,
screams colliding in a trail of thunder

The crystalline midnight surrenders its ancient light

over the tranquil lands of summer –
gentle
phosphorescence
intermingling with a world
comfortable
in all its shadows

When a new glimmer

arrives in the nocturnal sky, it is merely
one among the thousands

Wrathful star, renegade though utterly defeated

The darkness
recedes at its descent,
forests and mountains brightening
in a kind of
horrifying stupor

The heavens turn to blood,

bleeding at the coming of the invader –
the world is torn in half,
a peace contract on parchment

Roaring as it strikes the earth, it sends up a plume of flame

and smoke, and the whole earth shudders

Where the blood falls

human beings rise from the ground;
oblivious and naked they
wander in the glowing vicinity
of the ominous star’s sprawling destruction

Grotesque angels
creeping from its crater
FEEDING THE DEAD

The best part about television is my body evaporating –

My ceasing to exist, entering a kind of temporary euthanasia

Through this I’m drawn into something unreal,

The nothingness within the machine delicately inhabiting me

Here the inside of my skull becomes an auditorium

Where commercial programming performs its gymnastic routines

I am a consumer, I am a demographic, and

The simulation gives me meaning by allowing me to buy things

Why would anyone go outside when the whole world

Can be sifted and filtered for us before being funneled into our minds?

I am as sovereign as an emperor in my living room,

Flicking the remote to find a jester to relieve my boredom

And each day I am sinking further into my couch,

Swallowed by apathy and decay, as professional liars sing to me
FIRES OF MOLOCH

White coffins suspended vertically in the night sky

And dying children rising like mist
To enter them

They ascend from every region of the Earth,

Speechless and unblinking figures
Floating to extinction

Each life a scale on the Ouroboros,

A universe devouring itself
Without end

Among the celestial vineyard of these souls

Strides a colossus forged from bones
Gathering the harvest

And the labors of this titan are made ceaseless

By the covens of dark continents below;
Their pyres always burning
FOR THE ANATOMY OF GOD

The new king was hanging from a cross

When the angels arrived

“Our task will begin immediately”

Insisted their anxious leader

And so, invisible to the crows circling overhead,

They started their preparations

Levitating as they worked, the angels

Likewise suspended their instruments in air

“Lancet,” ordered the angel commander

When the surgery was begun

Receiving this, said angel opened the chest cavity

Of the silent crucified man

A beating heart was soon drawn forth

From the red abyss that’d been opened up

“Weigh it” instructed the angel in charge

And three subordinates swiftly attended to that

It was found equal to the burden of

Isaac laid out on the pyre, so it was accepted

The head angel who’d cut away the king’s

Pectoralis major, then asked for another blade

“Time for the osteotomy” they ordered and,

Taking up a hacksaw, they rent the man’s ribcage

Each portion of bone was carefully wrapped

Though these were in fact unsought

Yet when the man’s golden lungs were removed

They turned into a hawk and flew off

“No matter,” muttered the directing angel

Although secretly displeased
“The trephine?” inquired an obsequious cherub
And to this their master simply nodded

“We will finish what we’ve begun,” they declared

As they positioned the king’s head

Using their device, the angel commenced with

Burrowing a hole in the man’s skull

“Let the hidden be revealed!” cried the angel

As they laboriously turned the crank

Finally, just as impatience began to simmer,

The skull broke, and a thundering vortex opened

It was the swirling axis of eternity,

A void ready to devour the whole universe

The angels screamed as their elongated bodies

Violently twisted into its lightless mystery

Earth soon rushed in after them

And the rest of the solar system followed

In a few million years, every galaxy was

Also consumed, and then creation began anew
FRUITION

Black cherries dripping with rain

And lips of the same flesh
Saying yes

Desire and the sweet tragedy of a September evening

Love is the breaking of lust

And they will be broken apart and
Planted in different regions of the Earth
And rooted there
Until eventually they will forget

Laughter will disappear

From the echoes among the trees

Lives in distant cities

Will look out their condo tower windows
At the rains of later years,
Falling on half-glowing buildings,
And be troubled in numerous unspeakable ways
By the shadows of absent memories

The unblemished skin,

The shining beads of water

It is the taste of the first kiss, tender and brief,

Tingling on a virgin body –
Smiles shared in the solitude of the woods
And teeth stained a fleeting magenta

No one in the whole world knowing where they are

Gathering up their clothes

After it is over,
They will hesitate to enter their lives again,
But they’ll believe they must,
And so they separate,
Leaving behind only a few barren cherry stems

The wind following their sandaled feet,

Quietly brushing away their
Youthful secret
FUSED HEARTS

Someone else’s face;

Their words, their feelings

Why should they affect us?

How can a briefly shared look

Mean anything?

Pain demands a body

And our pain
Only exists in the bodies
We inhabit

Via empathy though

We can enter the hurt of others

Seeing a person’s scars,

I can be cut;
Watching another cry,
I can
Absorb their loss…

If I choose to

Or we can remain as placid as stone,

Letting the hunger and sorrow
Of others flow around us

But this is the deepest form of

Solitary confinement

It’s a solitude greater

Than any
Physical loneliness
Because it’s alone no matter
Who surrounds it

Contact, real contact,

In genuine connection means breaking
Apart the rock of ourselves…

So that we are more than who we are

It’s a joining of those around us;
Heart in heart
Sharing in the same rhythm
And thrusts of passion

This is us approaching the

Threshold of love

Of course
Love is never easy;
In fact,
The easier it is the less it is

Love fulfills itself in affliction

Because it’s an affliction

It means nothing to love beauty

Or comfort or success;
Almost anyone
Can love things that are
Pleasing

If you wish to know love, to experience

The sense of loving someone,
Seek out suffering

The aged, the sick, the wretched;

The poor, the reviled, the disgusting;
The ugly, the stupid, the failing

Love these –
Then you will know love truly

Hold the thought in your mind that

You could
Will yourself to be forged into
The body of a stranger;
A loathsome one

It’s uncomfortable isn’t it?

Naturally,
But that’s love
GOLDEN AUTOMATA

A trail of wavering footsteps

Fading in the sand,
Evaporating in the steady wind;
The encircling horizon drenched in tyrannical light
As the sun throbs with destroying energy

There is nothing you can do

To stop the erosion of memories;
Your mind, an alien landscape inside your head,
Made distant with its strangeness

Time eats you as much

From the inside out as otherwise

So the hourglass you contemplate is yourself, really,

Falling to pieces, spilling
Everywhere so completely that you
Can’t even summon a sense of insecurity;
The sand filling the vial you stare at
Parallels what’s going on within,
Something unseen,
The truth gradually ascending to your death

In the desert you are alone

Except for the sun;
Its brightness will strip the flesh from your bones,
Unravelling what you are,
Making you original again and
You won’t be lost anymore,
You’ll just be gone

You can go ahead and stare at it if you wish

Madness is your reward;

You think you’re thirsty for water
But you’re not, you want the truth in the inferno
And the inferno ignites anything it touches,
Meaning only those
Who are nothing won’t burn

Inside a star you’ll find

A labyrinth and an explanation for all mysteries
Look up and don’t flinch,
Keep your eyes open
While the pain gradually expires;
The sun will peel itself at your insistence,
A sheath of fire falling aside,
Allowing what lies within
To reveal the darkness of past radiance

Shapes in the imminent beyond

Resolving themselves in intricate movements,
Figures coalescing in the
Intense luminosity;
The way you remember the
Details of your life
No longer makes any sense as
The machinery of these golden automata
Sear themselves into your mind

It is a birth into
A new and nameless reality,
One hostile to
Human limitations

You thought you were a collection of

Desires and experiences fused
In some profound way;
What you find instead is a world without individuality,
A place where each event is
Pressed into being by the surrounding universe
And disintegrates
As soon as this disappears

The sands ahead of you go on and on

GONE

The last of summer is dwindling away;

Its flowers receding from the world,
A hint of frost in the air

There had been time to plant a garden

But not anymore

Life is draining from the soil;

No longer a
Nursery for new things,
The earth has become a memorial to
Unborn aspirations

A power beyond the unaided eye

Is building on the horizon;
Across that endless tier of silence rises a
Cold wind gathering its strength

Laziness is easy in abundance

But what was distant is no longer distant

Still, it’s too late to hurry and

That which remains is not a dream, or at least
A dream no longer;
It could have been so beautiful,
A modest garden, neatly kept,
In a plot near the ocean

Beside a place
Where the foaming sea gently sweeps
Through rocks protruding
From the sand

This is a vision of the end

Dreams that once drove the heart

Have become
Dreams gone at last

And yet a garden was such a small desire

HEARTLESS SEDUCTION

Frightened girl,
Your youthful body is a secret
Vanishing forever into the cruelties of time

I can feel your pulse

Fluttering like an injured sparrow –
You are too afraid to even admit what you want

In your fleeting ecstasies,

A ballerina who pirouettes forlornly
Between my jagged teeth

Walk the spiral maze;

Follow it into the aphrodisiac of death
Where you’ll find me waiting

I extend my finger
Like an anaconda wrapping
Around you; my muscles, my cold flesh

Lungs shattering into

The shards of a broken mirror –
In each one my patient image staring back

Candles on a stone floor

Flicker from the shifting air –
Shadows on my robe, my bare feet

Half conscious,
Nightmares congregating along the
Edges of your mind, you writhe on the altar

There I enter you,

Devouring you from within –
An atrocity born in the seed of your yes
HENCEFORTH AMERICA

I.

It was not a place but a promise;

The new world had not yet been made new
Until the genius of its destiny
Sprouted its first seed and there,
In the year sixteen hundred and twenty,
The scion of the Mayflower
Spread their roots in compact

Liberty, industry, and henceforth America

II.

But light is born out of darkness

And, even as they fled an abyss of persecutions,
The pilgrims came with shadows;
A hypocrisy of savagery against the natives
They called savage,
Forced worship or exile among their own
To honor a messiah who’d preached forgiveness,
And of course death, pious death
Immortalized in the pleading witches of Salem
Whose limp dangling bodies
All fed the name of Gallows Hill

Strife now, trial now, and henceforth America

III.

A great anvil to shape the spirit had been

Delivered to the people of the world,
Where upon many immediately set out to forge
The remorseless chains of slavery;
Rancid ships slowly crossing the Atlantic
Arrived year after year
With their horrendous cargos;
Men, women, and children plundered from
Slumbering Africa by its own denizen mercenaries,
Then freighted in suffocating masses and sold
To cotton tyrants at genteel auctions
A betrayal of freedom and henceforth America

IV.

And it was from the paragon of slave states,

Old Virginia, that a man came forward
To assert the amazing claim that
All men are created equal and, being equal,
Are entitled by majority to abolish governments
Injurious to their inalienable rights;
So a revolution already begun was declared
To thirteen colonies now united in noble treason,
The war welcomed by a host of proud patriots
Eager to resist King George’s red coats

Independence at all costs and henceforth America

V.

Eight years, eight months, and twenty six days

All counted to secure their victory against England,
But a final peace was slow in coming;
The new nation was hungry to enlarge itself
And after a failed invasion of the still British north
Their voracity turned fully to the west,
Towards the range beyond the Appalachians
And the unsuspecting tribes there

Vast brave frontiers and henceforth America

VI.

Two by two new states were made,

One free and one slave, to balance a frail union;
Among the latter sprawling plantations,
The domains of antebellum lords,
Who ruled their droves of human chattel
With barking whips that carved lattice horrors
Into the naked torsos of a darker flesh;
Said bloodshed, brutally arbitrary,
Writ the adversary of the divided states
And civil war commenced, erupting
Across the breadth of an untamed continent;
From Fort Sumter to Appomattox
The earth drank the sacrifice of young men,
But the most iconic casualty of the war came after
Peace had already been surrendered;
A tall lanky man in a stove top hat
Slumping forward in the havoc of a theater

Sic semper tyrannis and henceforth America

VII.

Arteries of iron now were infiltrating

The farthest regions of an acquiescent wilderness,
Along these the belching engines of
Hardened enterprise unleashing
All the metallurgic strength of a new empire;
Vanquished in a sweep, the presence of the old world,
The preying hands of ancient aristocracies,
And in their place a hemisphere under the heels of
Autochthonous tycoons with unlimited avarice;
Protesting labor was pulverized
Through the machinery of bribed militias
And the last grasp of the original conquistadors
Was pried apart and discarded, leaving
A power in splendid isolation, at least
Until chaos and conflagration swallowed Europe
And her colossal son arose to ford the ocean

Invincibly manifest and henceforth America

VIII.

Victory came and retreat followed,

An envisioned league of nations defeated
By the vote of a dissenting senate;
While, all across their homeland,
An age of many antagonisms emerged
Abundant in transformation,
In an optimism dancing on the edge of anarchy
As women finally got the franchise and
The automobile began proliferating
And modernism in arts and culture exploded;
Here was jazz, jazz the disruptor, jazz the
Primeval beating heart threatening to
Burst through the very chest of civilization;
It was a world where everything old was inverted,
The enslaved unshackling their masters

Now a chorus of broken chains and henceforth America

IX.

Euphoria, the rise of progress, exuberance and success,

All of it collapsed in October of twenty nine;
The clay giants of the financial system falling and
Shattering across the country, factories
Going dark and silent, the ordinary citizen
Dumbstruck and disoriented by the sudden disaster;
Hope stepped-aside during the ensuing decade,
Giving way to breadlines circumscribing whole city blocks
And the shanty sprawl of dilapidated Hoovervilles
And towering dust storms driving out jalopy refugees;
All while the world at large trembled with upheaval,
The weeds of totalitarianism flourishing
Until the sequel to the last great war got underway,
The second act of the same play really, and
This time the international regime would
Become a reality; the design of D.C. statesmen

A nation to lead nations and henceforth America

X.

The future looked bright, as bright

As the flash preceding a mushroom cloud;
The red menace of Russia,
Ascending from the ashes of a Nazi invasion,
Announced its aim of world revolution
And the contest between the superpowers began;
Wars by proxy sprang up, one by one,
In the former colonial domains of dying empires
While simultaneously the infinite expanse of outer space
Assumed its inevitable fate as an
Arena of human fear and ambition;
So the missiles multiplied as the children were taught
To cower under their desks at the roar of sirens

Utopia and holocaust and henceforth America

XI.

It was a time to be young and passionate;

Never before had people enjoyed such prosperity
And a sense of hopefulness took hold;
Civil rights and political action swept the nation,
Songs of protest crackled across the airwaves
While, even in the White House, the heart of the war machine
Gearing up for Vietnam, a fresh wind was blowing;
A man was elected who was ready
To bring peace to the world, to end the specter of fear,
But he promptly had his brains splattered
Across the backseat of a convertible in Dallas;
More murders followed and cities rioted
And the outrage grew more militant and pervasive,
Mainstream social conventions
Entered the crosshairs too and it seemed like
A second revolution was about to happen;
When the wave crashed though
Enough of the establishment was left standing that
It was able to rebuild itself stronger than ever

Conformity in rebel clothing and henceforth America

XII.

Between the impeachment of a president

And the televised implosion of a rotting soviet enemy,
An era of broad malaise poured in;
Imbroglios in the middle east and the lingering
Aftereffects of humiliation in Indochina
Sapped the strength derived from earlier triumphs;
The CIA did its part though to keep the status quo going
And no dictator or terrorist was too despicable
Provided that they stayed in line;
The Contras, Pinochet, Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden,
And many others, all got to
Gorge themselves at the trough of foreign aid;
Never was it more transparent that
Politics was just business, that green was the color of the
Patrician flag and the only stars were dollar signs

Incorporated, profit driven, and henceforth America

XIII.

The end of history had begun and never

Had a people endured such unquestionable supremacy;
What was there now to aspire to?
More of the same, more, and no amount of excess
Was ever enough, no amount could fill the unfathomable
Nothingness propelling the forces of greed that
Covered the earth in unremitting Babylon;
One morning though, in the center
Of the new world order, a dreadful revelation came;
Two towers set on fire from the sky
By self-destroying terrorists,
The innocent dying as the innocent always do,
Horrifically, but this time the tragedy
Streamed live to billions all across the globe;
They watched as three buildings turned to rubble that day
And the wrath of star spangled legions
Replied in the ensuing days, the days then turning
To months and years, while at the same time
An apparatus for total control which any fascist would envy
Was being erected over a sleeping lady liberty

One nation under surveillance and henceforth America

XIV.

America, a nation of moon landings and burning crosses;

A nation of heroic sacrifices granted posthumous medals of honor
And collateralized debt obligations;
America, you are the cyclotron of human contradictions,
The whole world encompassed in a single conflict;
The fate of democracy is yours and the fate of justice is yours
And the fate of exploitation versus humanity is yours;
Whether our obsolescence will consume
The new millennium will be decided in your Silicon Valley,
And whether a new generation will quench its thirst
With free clean water will be decided in your Mississippi;
Because the flaws of America are
The flaws of humanity, and its glory their glory
And its salvation the salvation of all peoples for all time

Beautiful or monstrous, living still and henceforth America

HEXERSY

Bones in the offal of an owl

Divine the daemonic hour;
The work of witches under shroud
Confessing their crepuscular vows

Driven in darkness ominous

Below a blood red obelisk,
Shades following strange azimuth
Among cockatrice and basilisk

In the silver twilight mists,

An ancient ritual for a dreadful prince;
Cruel slaughter barely glimpsed
And aged crones becoming nymphs

Stark skin caressed by the moon

In gore stained dancing among tombs;
A black orgy with carnal runes
Where the antediluvian invader looms

Summoned by his servants’ lust,

At first only his hooves’ thuds
And the sounds of things being crushed
Betray the beast in the dusk

Yet all fall thrall at his approach,

Each one eager to be his host;
In near unison they lift up their throats,
Offering bodies to death in hope

As such one is chosen from the rest;

So hypnotized it stills her breath,
Until his tongue entwines her neck
And there is only terror left

A vapor seeping from his putrid lips

Drains her eyes of their glint;
To be his betrothed was her wish,
The no longer living bridal lich
HYMN TO VICTORIOUS DEMOCRACY

The guillotines are falling

And the lawyers’ heads are rolling
And the sun is shining warmly
Over the smoldering ruins of the banks

None of the establishment survived

The first day of the revolution,
Even the suavest of those among them
Paid the death squads with their lives

It was a worldwide market correction

The business media didn’t see coming;
The supply of deceit and oppression
Suddenly hit by falling demand

The people had tried to vote,

The people had played by the rules,
But the whole point of the system
Was to make the people into fools

Every corporation was a monster,

Every politician was a fraud,
And the extermination of these demons
Was a service rendered unto God

Enron, Exxon, Goldman Sachs,

The plutocrats were cancer;
Exploitation the only thing they’d ever want,
Ergo amputation the only answer

Here at last the masses took up arms,

Refusing future compromise with tyrants;
United they could do no harm,
The only good thing now was violence

Ordinary millions in solidarity

Marching against the walls of power;
People across all political divides,
Humanity outraged by unrelenting lies

The tree of liberty was refreshed,

The ground was drenched with the dead;
It was a wonderful picture to behold
Filled with enough of David’s red

Meanwhile Ho Chi Minh and Old Tom Paine

Up in heaven walked hand in hand;
Since the people had cast off their chains,
Their forerunners could finally be glad

The guillotines at last came to a halt

And the liars’ gardens were sown with salt
And the sun shone warmer than ever
Over freedom’s blossoming
HYPOSTASIS OF THE ASTRAL FOREST

There gather the fragments of time,

And the broken vows of
Forgotten gods,
In an everlasting twilight

Polyhedral trees with leaves like

Green flames cohere
Across its eclipsed horizon;
The invisible phantom roots of these
Stretching through
The infinite depths of the mundane,
Each appendage drinking
Directly from a mortal heart

This is the aethereal wild where

All the legions of seraphim lay sleeping
Inside sarcophagi of enormous
White crocuses,
Each dreaming of the
Final wrath

The apparatus that moves the

Tethered multitudes,
Jungle of the Living Logos –
Tangled with
The skeletons of cybernetic machinery,
And at the serene center of it all
The ruined chariot of the juggernaut
Sprawls in pieces
Half sunk in the undergrowth

It’s the perennial and annihilating thirst

Epitomized, the undivided
Power of creation
Steeped in omniscient silence

All the world’s rage has died away

Leaving only the divine,
A kind of cosmic
Distillation purifying things –
Humanity ardently transformed into these
Outstretched branches,
Life replenished in a mysticism of
Unseen symbiosis, and
The difference, the change
That’s taken place, is nothing except a
Deeper form of parallax

Fellowship of the oracles and

Followers of apocrypha –
These too have their homes here, residing in
Luminous crystal pyramids
Hidden in vast nebulas of foliage

But they are dark pyramids,

Windows into the arachnid heart of the abyss,
Where the questions of the dead
Survive in purgatory;
Lost minds growing quiet
In the empty reaches of outer space

The future was a myth,

Echoing the voice of the machine

Genuine life can only come from eternity

Since whatever is finite is
Without energy –
Even the desires of philosophers,
Large as sweeping pulsars,
Are merely the figments of true ambition
As long as they remain
Content to reconcile themselves to
Peaceful conclusions

Umbilical to their own destruction

Abide the honest –
Spirits crucified in paradox,
Wandering disoriented
With electrical arcs crackling from
The fissures of their skulls

Who would join their ranks willingly?

Fate of course has its way

At all times and this
Replenishes the supply of martyrs;
New saplings sprouting in the
Soil of animal phobias,
Hybrids of ancient suffering
In perfect octahedron
Adding to the flora

There’s no separation
Between the bodies of the living –
Life is something only passing through them

That’s the cause of genesis,

The origin, the impetus;
A flood of forces unleashed in furor,
And the structures
Arising from their collisions,
Mirroring the void –
From the absence of everything then,
Being with limitless appetite

Hunger is the greater nothingness

I AM TANTALUS

All that I desire recoils from me,

Until I resolve to ignore it –
Then it seeps incessantly towards me

Exiled from the light of the sun,

A league of darkness surrounds me

Solitary in my
Subterranean prison,
Vision assailed

The faces of those that I loved and hated

Arising from the walls of a vast oblivion

No echoes greet my voice –

Only the occasional sound of dripping water
And the rustling of
The slithering vines above

These, laden with

Bulbous grapes

A succulent fruit to torment one who is damned

Hovering just over my lips,

They move as I move,
Eluding my sudden outbursts of
Gnashing teeth

And the water I am submersed in

Defies my dry mouth –
Kneeling
I try to drink it up
And it scatters in all directions

I am Tantalus,
Once sovereign and honored –
Loved by the gods even

Long ago, before I became their enemy,

I ate and drank among them
ILLUMINATION

Crying out in lamentation

That I didn’t know
My own name,
The birds of paradise
Took flight in celebration;
Their molten auras
Leaving me in joyful awe

Vibrations radiated from

Their bodies;
Golden tinged and
Alternating alchemies of
Chromatic waves,
Bodies sprung with a
Soft electronic euphony

This was my phantom self

Being revealed to me;
The artificial man
Who I’d rebuild each day
To live a dishonest life;
The name I wore
Always the path to said lie

In the abyss of dreams I

Am taken apart,
An atomic breaking
Of the mind,
And within these brilliant
Floating pieces
Something true is hiding

I am too different in both

Love and hate
To be only a single person;
All the things I tell myself
Just words;
Symbols dividing
Passion into false desires
JUST ANOTHER DAY

Gil Scott Heron thumping in my ears

And an atomic orange and fuchsia sunset
Unfurling between glass skyscrapers –
“Me and the devil…” he croons
In a rough voice chiseled with beauty and sorrow
While I walk across the scattered leaves
Covering a street darkened with rain

I don’t have much hope in the future at the moment

As I turn over suicide in my mind like a
Man in a cubicle planning the perfect vacation
He has no intention of going on

Writing is my destiny and I write and write,

The words blazing in bleeding ink
Across any available scrap of paper and despite all
The furious passion I pour into my work
It arrives in the world like a ghost no one can see;
And I watch the scraps of paper I’ve scrawled my heart across
Drift away in the wind through alleys of withered dreams
Without the strength to chase after them

Often I think it would be nice if it all was simply over

But there’s a music in me that won’t stop –
“You may bury my body…” I hear again
And the defiance in his voice is something human
In a world that often tempts me towards honest solipsism,
Although I’m not sure if that’s a nightmare
Or merely a revelation of my desires

I return home tired as usual, drained by the sinkholes

Daily collapsing in the faces of strangers;
They destroy the very air I breathe and they’re
Every where every day every hour,
A relentless procession of cold bodies swallowing my warmth,
Yet it’s astonishing that I’ve become the person I am
Because I never used to feel this way but
Now it’s intimately woven into how I see myself

Somehow I continue to live and I suppose I won’t surrender;

Besides, I can hear death waiting outside,
Waiting behind the door of the empty room I live in
KAMIKAZE MAN

Hate pollutes my heart,

Infusing me in its fiery embrace
Until a black smoke
Pours out of me and I am
Ready to explode

When I go off
Innocent people will die

Passersby will be
Thrown from their feet
And wake to freshly
Maimed and shattered bodies

A crater will appear

In the concrete of my city,
A molten wound

Here sirens drown out

The screams of those in agony;
The helpless
Victims of misfortune
Who strayed into the radius
Of my final rage

My death will be an event

But only for a moment,
And only briefly

The injured will disappear

Into the ocean of society once more,
And the slaughtered,
Buried and eagerly forgotten

Because no one wants to address

The truth that drove me
Into the arms of fury;
Even those who suffered my injustice
Becoming complicit as reminders

Soon life will go on exactly as it did before;

Not a thing will change
KLEPTOCRACY

How does it feel to lose something?

It feels like nothing

Like escaping air, until suddenly you find yourself desperately gasping for breath

Then it’s a black garbage bag pulled over your face

Now imagine this on the scale of millions

Merciless dystopias engulfing an endless supply of humanity;

That’s our true inheritance

Morgues bathed in yellow neon

Are waiting to dissect us after it’s all over

I see two artificial hands

Shaking to seal a free trade agreement

This is the future,

The deadly paralysis surging through the bloodstream

After the spider injects its venom

It’s not a prison we’ll lose our freedom to,

It’s an idea, an idea like poison

Invisibly spreading inside us until the sickness is overwhelming;

A fact realized only when it’s too late

KYNIKOS

The chaos of a Friday night

And, in the flush of the city crowds, a group
Gathering around a dog

“That dog has wisdom,” someone says

So I stop to investigate

An elderly golden retriever, his

Face whitened like a mask, is lying on
His side while a staid
Guru-look presides over his face

The dogs lips are moving but

I can’t hear anything –
The surrounding chatter is a jealous guardian

Nevertheless I try pushing my way past

The phalanx of admirers

The people around him seem to multiply though

The more I strive to get by them –
“Dogs make the best teachers,” a face suspended on
An elastic neck proclaims as
I struggle through the fractal tunnel of
Humanity suddenly in congress

And just out of reach, in the portal of the wormhole,

The dog is looking at me now –
His attitude ambiguous

With a supreme effort I somehow manage to

Force away the mosaic of faces
And unsteadily hold them at bay with my
Hands and elbows as I
Await the dog’s pronouncement

Balefully he indulges me –
“Desire is mankind’s first possession”

These words precipitate my collapse as I’m pulled into a

Convulsing intestine, before it spits me out
Somewhere totally unfamiliar
LA FETE GALANTE

Everyone was wearing white,

Their infallible linen radiant
In the early evening sun

And the trees in the garden

Were all bucolic greens
Gently tinged with spreading golds

And islands of yellow roses

Were blooming all around them
And polyhued butterflies flittered over these

It was a day of celebration

That was celebrating nothing since
Everything now needed to be celebrated

Next to a stream of crystal water

They laughed like they were discarding joy,
All the more delighted by their waste

And champagne was being served to them

By attendants standing in solemn silence
As various frivolities were carried on

The unanimous favorite was Hot Cockles,

A game in which both sexes took turns
Guessing who had spanked them

Having their faces in each other’s laps,

Each a stint at lying down, they made a curious
Sight to the flamingos in the nearby pond

With spilled grapes and half eaten pears

Lying like ornaments on nearby silver trays,
Their servants also had to stay vigilant

A pink sow with a trail of little piglets

Was brusquely ushered away
When she came over to investigate

Jokes at the swine’s expense

Elicited convulsions of hysterical mirth
Shortly joined by jovial harpsichord
The instrument today lugged outside,
Where on the lush sprawling lawn
It served to a fop’s advantage

His melody was the droll accompaniment

To an amatory chase transpiring around
The marble statue of a rhinoceros

Others though were just as engaged

At playing footsies in a fountain
Where rainbows glanced off thin geysers

Theirs was an epoch of decadence

That had an air of innocence
So shallow were its amusements

Long it seemed had they cavorted

Among the beams of twilight in the trees,
Knowing only the softness of an August breeze

But now a blood red sunset was falling

While off in the far silent distance
Dark guillotines were raised
LANGUISHING

Slowly became a ghost

Didn’t cry out,

Didn’t fight it

Life was just… going by

Wasn’t worried
At first –
Confident things would
Turn out fine

Then one day was too many

The dreams
Keeping me going
Began getting smaller, distant

It’s not over either

(Still watching them

Disappear)

But that’s how it started

Felt life fading

Like a strip of film
Bleached in the sun

No one noticed

Wasn’t anybody left

At that point

There’s just
One spectator now –
Me

Alone in the mirror

People can’t touch me

Or I them
Soon I’ll be gone

No trouble
Really

The
Emptiness
In me
And the
Emptiness
Outside
Me

Reuniting

The thin wall of my being

Erased
LIFE SPEAKS

From my bones, irises are blooming

And from my eyes, roses
And from my heart
An enormous
Chrysanthemum

I who bathe in adorning sunlight without end

Am growing stronger every second;
The roots inside me
Entwining in pulchritudinous muscles
Ancient in their authority
And untroubled
In the presence of humanity’s
Worst imaginings

Incarnations I discard like leaves,

Abandoning them as I please
Because I am the
Jungle,
Terrifying and
Magnificent

It was entirely dark and silent once;

Airless, warmthless,
Desolate

Nothing for even a god to eat

But I flourished,
I became a whole star filled universe
So colossal in its energies
That entire galaxies are spent like wild grain

Weep at my splendor
And cast away your fears of extinction
Since I cannot be overcome
And whatever I create
I’ve brought out of the nothingness
To ornament a crown
That I’ll wear forever on my eternal throne

Know that I arose from death;

No death can defy me
LORD OF CARNAGE
Warring tigers;
Black and orange flanks
Raked with red gashes

Blood across the evening snow

Alone in the Siberian wilds,

Two mirrored rivals
Brawling in snarling rage as the
Cloister of the forest around them,
Quiet almost with waiting,
Offers mute witness

Forms behemoth but elegant

Clashing in the spectral air of an apex winter;
The swift clamor of their fury sweeping
Through a mountainous valley

Years of strife
In their thousands of millions
Gave shape and appetite to these beasts;
Fashioning them
From explosive abiogenesis

Aggregations of death
And torturous evolution unleashing
The springing of the tigers,
Their cudgel paws;
Limbs like torrents of lava
In the galloping heat of their wrath

Even the ravens have fled

Before their ferocity

The scowling aspects of these tigers though

Masquerade the truth,
That they are one power in panoply;
The master behind the terror
Spreading their dominion

In contests decided by violence,

Violence always wins
METROPOLIS OF AVARICE

In the midnight splendor

of all these pristine downtown buildings,
the disheveled bodies of the many
sleeping along its sidewalks,
and the scattered clusters of rancid garbage,
confess the underlying psychosis

The suffering of forsaken millions

slowly dying at the feet of our indifference,
sons and daughters broken down
in the terrifying engine of a hard world

A commerce in the blood of the innocent and helpless

fuelling the machinery of it all, a conveyor belt
pouring crying infants into a whirlwind of blades;
this is the fertilizer these towers grow from,
not work, not genius, but death,
sacrifice, acceptable losses incurred in the pursuit
of human-devouring industry
so that an emptiness inside us, unburdened by simple conscience,
can enjoy it all and never say thank you

The world rewards those who ask for nothing and take
and take and take as if it all belonged to them,
as if whatever we can build a fence around
automatically transfers this to us by some cosmic right;
the original price of the property though
was never paid; everything traded and inherited, the
teeming vaults of the grotesquely wealthy,
still belongs to wherever it came from
and so our dark creator will surprise us one day,
interrupting our delusion,
taking back what was always theirs

Ours is a civilization born out of madness and absurdity

that’s only able to continue in this
because its fantasies meet no resistance

Everything becomes the city;

the earth, the trees, the sky and all life under it,
digested and transformed into
supermarkets and highways and power lines,
until the day when the city tires of a single planet
and it begins to stretch its metal tentacles
out into the universe, wrapping up the once distant stars

It is a nightmare, it is us;
the hunger for ever greater control
growing uncontrollably,
a cancer in the primordial flesh unravelling
out of people, its perfect vectors;
we are the cells of a raging desire now

Contagion in spores of civilization

ascending from the living void of nature, erasing it
and all the fauna mindlessly omnipresent
throughout the world, obstacles to this or that banal ambition;
which is where poverty has its savage origins,
a contrived desperation creating a steady supply of thralls,
like beasts kept dumb and lifeless so they won’t
shirk their yoke, poverty
grinds away the spirit of the masses
and makes them amenable to subservience;
we can’t be rich if they’re not poor enough to sell their lives
to us, doing our endless dirty work

Every city is made up of abattoirs;

abattoirs of commerce, abattoirs of theft,
abattoirs of prostitution and
bureaucracy and celebrity, unnamed
abattoirs fortifying an ancient malevolence that’s
risen again from every populist revolution
and shows no signs of withering away

It thrives on weakness and dependency,

the greed, the power behind
our illusion of a rational order to the world;
and it will continue to devour as much as it can
until there is nothing left to ruin
MISSING

Children disappear every day –

One minute their shadows are gladly dancing
Over the grass in the summer twilight,
One minute their shadows are revolving
In the ecstasy of a carnival carousel,
One minute their shadows are flowing innocently
Across a sidewalk as they come home late from school;
One minute they are near and safe and
The next they are gone

Sometimes these children turn up fine,

Sometimes they never turn up,
And sometimes the truth
The families are forced to confront
Becomes the most dreadful thing imaginable

It is happening now

They are suffering now

Right at this very second, somewhere

A child is tied up in a dark place and they are praying
For someone to rescue them –
While we are casually eating breakfast
Or watching television
They are trembling in helpless terror
Waiting for their rapists to return

All our joy, all our happiness, is built

On the desire to forget their inconvenient agony
And live our lives unhaunted by
The vigils to their sorrow

We shrink from the horror of it,

Acknowledging them when they arise in conversation
Before gladly changing the subject –
Because we are liars
Because their misery testifies against us
Because ultimately they are
A judgement against our civilization

While they are at the mercy of monsters we choose to forget them

When did the rule of law become the rule of indifference?
Let’s be honest, it was always so –
There was never a time when the welfare
Of the weak had pre-eminence,
When an atrocity committed against the innocent
Could overwhelm the powers that be

And besides the authorities,

Neither do the masses
Rise up in outrage at their stories

Together we abandon them

No one cries out for vengeance

They are not our children until they are,

And then we become the parents whose hearts will be broken,
Who will waste away over
The desperate sleepless nights to come,
Hoping despite the pain of hoping –
For now though we are not their parents
So we can relax and smile and
Enjoy ourselves

Provided we never ask ourselves the question:

Where are the missing children?

For now we can only be sure where they are not

They are not in our hearts

They are not in our hearts
They are not in our hearts
NEFEROSTES

I was a traveller in a foreign land

And during my journey I came across a demon

She had the face and breasts of a woman

But with wings like an eagle
And the body of a lioness

Seeing her gazing down on me from among the rocks

I was instantly paralyzed with fear
Yet she did not descend on me right then –
Instead an invisible power soon
Compelled me to approach her
And there she addressed me

“Son of man, I am Neferostes, a daughter of

“The true Hecate, and descendent of She who
“Gave birth in the eternal darkness

The amber-eyed sentinel paused here,

Studying me before she began again, slower now,
The demon’s mouth moving so carefully,
Lingering over the shape of each arcane syllable
As I realized that the unknown language she was using
Didn’t correspond to the translation I was hearing

“Son of man, what doom awaits you I decide,

“Just as I am doomed to decide it –
“You must answer correctly the riddle I provide,
“Your life here is resting in the scales

I prayed and waited for her to continue

“When I run the end has come

“And both love and hate can move me;
“Many times I tell of crimes
“And bind families to their duty:
“What am I, son of man?

I could hear the clicks of her impatient claws

As I desperately searched my swimming mind for an answer

“Guess or offer up your tender flesh!” she laughed

Where upon a vision of her feeding on me
Sent a shiver through my whole body –
I was ready to surrender
And then the color of her lips stopped me

“Blood” I said to myself amazed –

Hearing this the demon gave a terrible shriek,
A cry of such forceful and bestial rage
That I recoiled despite the spell I was under

“I’d have devoured you in one sitting!” she snarled

Before a look of woe cleft her beautiful face
And all the menace flowed out of her

Without looking she threw herself backwards

In an arching fall, spiralling
To the distant ground below where
The red branches of her heart
Began to pour out of her lifeless body

After that I had no taste for adventure,

The world was too alien a place
And sixty years on her name still haunts me
ONCE UPON A TIME

In Vietnam he was a sorcerer,

A necromancer, and he
Commanded legions of the dead

When he called for dragons,

Silver dragons roared through the skies
And razed the land with fire

The funnels of flame they spewed left

Blackened swaths of jungle in their aftermath
And the charred corpses of goblins and orcs

Meanwhile the magic mirrors of his distant empire

Argued day and night over the war
But at first these quarrels were meaningless

Back home the dwarves still worked away

Forging weapons and armor while
Hordes of gnomes mined the earth without rest

With the passing of many seasons though

The peasants whose sons were being sacrificed
Grew more and more restless

And the enemy remained as strong as ever

So it came as no surprise when finally
The war had to be abandoned

The sorcerer said his last incantation

At the demise of his adventure before returning
To his pentagon fortress across the seas

There the war would live on in his imagination

While he leaned back in his chair,
Rows of stars gleaming on his shoulders
ORCHESTRA OF THE DEVIL’S HORDE

Silence is
the air of the mind,
the oxygen of
thought

The weave in the

foundations of human
life itself

Endless traffic, crowds;

walls screaming the opinions
of others

A flinching loner
among them

And as he tries to carry on

Echoes from
the red caverns of his
laired heart
hang foreboding in the air

Their faces
skeletal in sunshine

Waking to what’s
monstrous in everything
including
the electromagnetic waves
of ideology
swirling inside his
ruined body

All things considered, he’s

remarkably sane

…
Still holding down a job, still
in touch with his family
when
the world he’s
trying to

Keep together

Begins dissolving in the

rain

This is where
he starts to hear the music

It sounds like
the murder of elephant seals
bludgeoned to death

It sounds like car crashes

layered over Wagner

It sounds like a shower of

scorched metal
falling on the earth
while the
air traffic controllers
think there’s
still hope

He can forget but

as soon as he remembers,
the torture

Continues

Television, radio, air vents; whispering

at cocktail parties

…
Malevolence bleeding out of
the pores of the earth;
a bituminous liquid swallowing up
his desperate fortresses, one
after another

And his dreams

only entangle him more;
crepuscular iguanas
slithering
over a jagged
mass of
narwhale horns

It’s too much

to juggle
so he does what he must;
amputating life
from
ailing life

This simply
giving the nightmare
more room
to spread its wings

Hell is on parade;
the demons
dressed in military
paraphernalia
marching with tubas, gongs,
and ram horns

Insectoid limbs
rapidly beating drums

The whole
chimera choir
singing in exaltation
as it streams
out of a thousand
different
cracks in the
world

He tries to run but

their undisturbed celebration
never stops growing

It follows him
until it exhausts him

Even prayer
brings only mockery

In answer,
encircling archangels
chant from above;
their voices
utterly inhuman

They sing the gnosticism

of his hatreds

In the teeth of the colossal gears

grinding him up, at last,
a vision of
salvation visits him

Chaos briefly transforming

into the gentle chimes of bleached bones
drifting in crystal tides

So all at once
he decides and does it

His symphony ending with

crimson marigolds blooming from the
back of his head
and a revolver dangling from
curled fingers
ORGANS, DIMENSIONS, SENSES, AFFECTIONS, PASSIONS

My hatred is precious to me

I guard it, feed it; sacrifice my other hopes in it

To keep it going

It is a memorial to the wrongs I’ve suffered;

Wrongs conveniently forgotten
By others, ever eager
To welch on one of their debts and this…
This is the thing that drives me to
Keep my anger burning

You are not the one who has to wear

The scars of your offenses;
I do

Every cruelty unwinds its roots in memory,

A place where cruelties grow limitless;
Recurrences in the mind, surviving
To trench the heart deeper and deeper and only
The grace of forgetfulness can save us

But was anyone ever touched by such a grace?

I know it not:
I have had to taste humiliation
Again and again,
The foul flavor never fading

And as it poisons my tongue, it poisons my mind, and

This is what you have fed others and
So I shall feed it to you

Enemy, true enemy, I give you all that I have;

My toxic body, my dying self
Wholly weapon
Turned against you, without
A hand to stay it

I am a missile in flight

So do I become something new

Vengeance, a dead thing given voice; finally freed
To destroy the creator of its destruction;
Its own destruction in destroying
Merely a final part of mercy

You took the joy of life from me

And you left only a corpse

Now the corpse has become wrath entire;

A thing boiling in all its members
Because you opened
A door to hell inside its soul

The villainy you teach me, I will execute;

And it shall go hard, but
I will better the instruction

Even if my hate must devour me,

Let it devour you
ORIGAMI AS A FAILED DISTRACTION

Us | Seated | Together | Once

Folding | Paper | Making

Swans | Pinwheels | Airplanes

A | Father | A | Mother | A | Daughter

Then | Family | Now | Memories

Broken | Fragments | In | Daddy’s | Aching | Heart

Bending | The | White | Sheet | Before | Me

I | Cannot | Help | Recreating | It | All | Over | Again

The | Sailboat | We | Rented

That | August | Afternoon | Along | The | Silver | Lake

Lifejackets | Left | Lying | On | The | Dock

Running | My | Fingers | Along | A | Fresh | Crease

The | Cold | Touch | Of | The | Bodies

Tangled | Among | The | Rocks | Where | I | Found | Them

Comes | Back | To | Me

I | Want | To | Fold | Myself | Into | Nothingness

Tonight | And | Every | Night

The | Evenings | Falling | Hours | Sprawling

In | A | House | Empty | Silent

PLEASE COME BACK
I held your hand the whole way here;
I wouldn’t let them separate us

In my broken state
I bit a man
who tried to pull me from you

I am hollow and wild now

My suffering is the
anguish of a groveling beast whose mate
has been stolen from them

If you are gone, if you…

I will not want to live,

because it will not be life anymore

I won’t want to eat

ever again…
nothing remains to nourish me

Your shadow swallows up all my desires

In this darkest silence

I cling to the fading future
we were going to share together

Til death do us part –

we never made those vows

So I will wait with you,

praying and starving until
extinction takes me;
praying on the floor of the morgue
that you will wake up
QUIETUS

morning looms –
in a few hours
another sun will rise

no amount of
dread can stop this…

or so they say

maybe tonight
i’ve had enough though?

maybe this is
one dawn too many

why can’t i just refuse?

so i do

never again –
i will not wake up
anymore

with a scowl,
i pull the blankets
over my head
defiantly

i shroud
my whole body

and somehow,
magically,
this becomes a
cocoon

noticing now,
time begins to panic

the universe is
thrown into a terrible
confusion
“he can’t do that!” they say,
they being
the idiots still getting
out of bed

(every single morning!)

they send a horde of clocks

to bang on my
front door,
to no avail –
a whole generation of
clocks dies

(dying anthropomorphically)

cities crumble,
humanity goes extinct,
and still I sleep

it’s pure bliss

at last, after
millions of years
i yawn

the cocoon splits open

and i emerge

no longer human
i rustle
my silver dusted wings
before taking
flight

even now i’m not awake,

this is all a dream

the dream
where i become
a moth

soaring without end

RAT KING

With tails tied in

Writhing knots
The rat king rules
A rotting realm

His majesty of sewers,

The lord of filth;
Liege to a million
Vassal vermin

And a banquet held

Aboard a corpse
Affords the cornucopia
For his court

A mass of mouths
And seething teeth,
The rat king holds forth
A tangled heap

Decreeing plagues
Wrapped in rags,
He sends his minions
On vile missions

“Unleash disease
“On the surface cities;
“Pile my throne
“With human bones

The rat king’s reign

Is all tirades and ruin,
The tyranny of a lonely
And unloved despot
ROYAL GARDENS

The first raindrop

Winding down the slope of a
Rose’s petal,
Then the shower breaking;
A downpour erupting
Like a chorus of hissing serpents

At the same time, a blazing sunset

Offers its incongruous light
From a distance;
Vivifying the rampant scion of a garden
In the old ruins of a castle

Hundreds of years earlier this was a

Place for spiritual contemplation
And political machinations

A transalpine arcadia whose dual natures

Mirror the now contesting ambience

Courtiers teeming with intrigues

Would walk this place
Engaged in surreptitious purpose with
Various conversation partners;
A single shared word
Enough sometimes to destroy a rival
Or bring about one’s own undoing

Each thorn has its secrets;

So too the crimes of human villains,
Their origins hidden
In the catacombs of the mind

Desires, the ghosts of past injuries,

Haunting a confused psyche

But from the seed a truth must emerge;

Eventually the skeletons we fear
Pulling us down with them, no matter
How much we struggle, deep into the cold earth

So it will all bloom in majesty

RUMORS OF A TOWN
I’ve heard about it out in the country

They say the girls there are as tall and radiant

As August sunflowers

Apparently
The people in this town wave at strangers
And, if your respond with a smile
And hello, they’ll
Invite you over for dinner

It’s a place supposed to fill the emptiness that was

Left by paradise; somewhere your
Worries would evaporate

Occasionally in my dreams
I’ll think I’m there;
Surrounded by beauty, untouchable beauty

White oaks and corn fields ready to speak to me

Sadly I find I’m always led away;

Another sunrise arrives to
Swiftly usher me out of those
Moonlit summer evenings where felt I was
Verging on awakening

With the fresh rays of dawn in my eyes

I’d try to say its name and stop

I never could get anyone to tell me that one secret

And come to think of it,

I can’t recall the names of those I asked either;
The ponds of their retreating faces a blur
In the winnowed
Backdrop of faded night

As I try to remember, the words

They spoke become more fragmentary, and
The town something
Watchful from a far beyond
SINISTRALITY

The breaking of the doomed light crowning creation,

The stars crucified in a slow authored darkness

And this universe is a pond of cosmic terror,

A place to stroll with eternity-spanning steps

Mere mist the galaxies dwarfing humanity,

Something to scatter with the casual gesture of a lord

But within these wisps a great beauty is brooding,

In feuding energies a promise of a glory to be released

And it arrives in the burning shockwaves of supernovae,

Igniting the worlds before it in wild living infernos

Boiling planets seethe over eons into their submission,

Releasing their violent treasure of creatures

Life emerges and twists and tears itself to pieces

Searching for the final genesis that lies within

A vision I expect to rule us to the ends of our lives

Because I believe we are children of a left-handed god
SAINT JOHN’S NURSERY RHYME

Wake now, wake now,

Little sleeping child;
The seals have been broken
And the angels are riled

The last day has come

For a world to wash in flame;
The Book of Life is opened
So pray it has your name

Wake now, wake now,

Repent all your sins;
It’s a war to end all wars
And The Lord will surely win
SOLARIUM THOUGHTS

See the beauty in an ordinary human being;

The love in the worn hands of
An old woman

They too are striving with fate

And all the oppressions of the world while doing good
In eager kindness

Parents are sacrificing for their children,

Animated by prayerful hopes
In limited bodies

It’s easy to close yourself off from these people;

To reduce life to the focus of
Your own suffering

But this is a cruel form of entombing:

The self, folded into a ferrous ingot, untouched by
The truths of the sun
SUNDAY EVENING HORROR

A casket lid of falling night

Shuts silently as I stand in front of
The bathroom mirror –
I eye my reflection suspiciously,
Wishing it were on the verge of vanishing
Somewhere irretrievable
Inside that quicksilver beyond

The gaunt face in the bathroom mirror

Staring back from sunken eyes
Is not the image of a man with any kind of future

Putting toothpaste on my brush, I begin

To clean my teeth –
Like an old dog eating kibble, I do so
Without any passion,
A tired pantomime of life
Perpetuated by sheer cowardice

In my frothing mouth though

Something feels odd,
Uncomfortable,
So I start to search with my fingers
All the way at the back

I pull out a tooth –

A molar, yellow, crudely shaped
With barely a hint of blood
Staining its roots,
And suddenly a hate swells up in me,
A hatred of my mortal self,
The world I live in,
The life I’ve arduously
Cobbled together, creating
Something utterly
Mediocre

Hurling the tooth with rage,

It proceeds to rattle around in my
Bathtub briefly before
The stillness returns again
Now I try to finish with my teeth
But I don’t get very far –
Soon I’m choking and, as I struggle,
I’m dimly aware of the purple
Creeping into my face,
The pulling on my eyes, threatening to
Roll them inside my head,
Until I start to cough

Another one, another tooth,

Plummets into the sink
And as I recover I become afraid

The fear is overwhelming

As more of my teeth start falling out,
First one at a time,
Then several all at once until
Finally more teeth than
Anyone has ever had are pouring
Out of my mouth,
And all I can do is hang on to
The edges of the sink
As I watch them swirl into the
Dark vortex that has metamorphosed
From the drain

All my teeth are gone and

The ordeal continues –
I watch in helpless panic as my reflection
Begins to harden and fissure,
My skin crackling
While it turns inorganic gray
And strange shapes
Appear in it

Recognition follows and I see myself as I am,

One who must wear a fossiliferous flesh
Riddled with petrified trilobites,
However briefly –
My destruction doesn’t cease,
My body also falling apart,
The prison of my arrogant mind really
The shelter for a meager spirit,
This too disappearing
Then, all at once, everything is normal again,
And I am holding my toothbrush –
Startled though, I drop it

A few dumbfounded minutes pass

Before I’m roused from my insensibility
By a voice in the other room –
I’m told to come to bed,
Which I do, reluctantly but obediently,
Lips firmly closed to resist the
Temptation to talk
About what just happened

Crawling underneath the warm covers,

A sense of familiarity ensues,
But this has its
Own nightmares

The hopeless job I’ve worked for years,

Nine to five plus overtime,
The burdening mortgage on a house
Steadily decreasing in value,
My children who are old enough
To resent me now,
And my wife snoring next to me,
The other half of a
Lie infested marriage
TELL US ABOUT TREES AGAIN GRANDPA

Way back when,

They outnumbered the stars

In some places
They covered the land
As far as the eye could see

And were they ever tall!

They’d grow to the height of

A hundred men;
And they’d have a
Dozen arms,
And each arm would have
A dozen fingers

With these they

Pulled down the sun and clouds;
Both of which they drank

Nothing else
Ever had a thirst like a tree

But they were creators too

And theirs was
A wondrous sorcery

Creatures with wings of flame

And singing beasts
Were conjured out of their embrace;
And they could change
Into the most fantastic colors
And feed whole villages
Effortlessly

Trees could also be hunters though

And those they caught
Might hang from them for days

Your grandma doesn’t believe me

But I was there when
They cut the last one down
TEMPLE OF MAMMON
The ghettos are slaughterhouses
Pouring out blood in rivers;
Slaughterhouses powered by the
Greed of distant mansions
Tranquilly looking down from quiet hills

Who owns that miserable slum?

A happy man living in a nice neighborhood
On the other side of town.
Who’s making money off the suffering of others?
Anyone profiting from the status quo

When the rich visit the poor

The former respawn into a thousand pieces;
Each one a ravenous bedbug hunting for bare skin.
Blood’s always the thing desired because
It’s life and they want to fatten themselves off yours

The wealthy aren’t civilized.

They’ll grind your children into a red sludge
To make a lubricant for their machines;
Only maybe right now it’s not your children,
It’s someone else’s,
And that’s what makes it okay

Yes the poor betray each other,

Disowning those who’ve shared their poverty
If they can claw their way to any fortune;
The poor bury each other alive
Under the crushing pyramids of plutocrats

Oh and the rich go to these nice galas!

They drink champagne and eat caviar and gossip
And they call this philanthropy;
They also volunteer whenever they feel the need
To alleviate their guilt or voyeuristic desire

Apologists say they create opportunities for the poor

But they hoard the best ones for themselves;
They squeeze the children of foreign countries like lemons,
Using them up in their brutal factories
They create poverty to create dependency

In fact the whole system they devised

Was invented to transform
Ordinary human beings into passive instruments.
It subordinates people, living people,
To a lifeless abstraction
Known today by the name Capitalism

The goal of Capitalism is to

Transform everything into capital;
It’s a kind of metaphysics

A parasitic metaphysics

Because, deep down, only the worst among us

Are really capitalists.
How does it profit you to sacrifice
Anything for your children?
But if a person’s worth is
Provided purely by their utility
Then we can only maximize the value of
Our own children by
Ruthlessly exploiting them

So use them like beasts of the field until

Their little bodies are broken
And their spirits are
Extinguished

It’s what we do to the people who make our shoes

For our children though,

Something like this is rare even among monsters.
Murderous dictators hardly do this.
Yet if we shouldn’t
Treat our offspring this way,
No one should be treated this way

Precisely the opposite of capitalism. Basic morality as such is

Doing the reverse of how the world
Is actually run

This forces us to choose

Either we admit to ourselves that
Capitalism is hypocrisy,
That it’s a form of economy
Fundamentally opposed
To the most obvious principles of ethics,
Or we continue to pretend
Like it isn’t,
Because that’s the more
Convenient thing

There’s no fence to sit on between

Good and evil, between decency and atrocity

Either reconcile yourself to

A system that
Condemns millions of innocent people to lives of
Relentless horror so that
We can be slightly more comfortable,
Or you have to fight it

You have to fight it and hate it;

You have to despise it because it’s rape and torture
Suffocating an entire planet

This is globalization; a temple to Mammon

Tear it down! Topple its columns! Smash its icons!

If you live, if you have any life in you,
Do not betray this life
By becoming a servant of death.
Resist! Resist!

For your own sake, for all of us,

For those yet to come

The future is being decided now and there won’t be

A later revolution where you can
Finally change your mind

They are building a cathedral for all time, a world run by

Algorithms and computers, and the owners of these
Will pass down a priesthood to their children,
Leaving yours to beg for alms outside
THE HATCHING

Brooding thoughts deny me rest;

A vermin of the mind
Overwhelming my body

I have become a warren of untiring evils

Through the dead hours

Of the night
I pace alone, cruel fantasies creeping
Forth from the cracks in my
Self-control

The droning of old florescent lights

Whispering rage in my ears

Something did this to me,

Transformed me
Against my will into
The host of a nameless pestilence

I fight it every day

And each day it defeats me again,
Laughing at my audacity

I offer the world

These broken limbs as proof

But what can save me from myself?

The venom that has me

Is a catalysis,
Transforming all resistance into
A diet for my oppressors;
Strengthening them, diminishing me

Their origin eludes my grasp,

Although sometimes
I shiver at things half remembered

An image lingering in the empty darkness

t h e I n c u b u s
It has an insect’s face
And wings that transfigure the world
With tessellated shadows;
It feels no remorse,
This beast, nothing animates it
Except the pulsing desire
To infest others

I see now the egg sac

It’s laid inside me,
And I
start to convulse

Eyelids twitching, I realize in my fading delirium

That I’m lying on the kitchen floor

Where
a monstrous centipede,
In all its red splendor,
Slowly unfurls its body from my mouth
THE JUNIHITOE OF AMATERASU

Across the Floating Bridge of Heaven, a sacred world,

And within her echoing palace there the
Queen of the universe resides

Night follows as she retires from her daily reign

While a retinue of pale lady attendants
See to the undressing of her attire

First the white train of her long flowing Mo is removed;

Adorned with a host of softly gleaming stars,
Primeval visions dance within

Then her Karaginu jacket is slipped from her body;

Its supernaturally voluminous sleeves
Inundating like an emerald sea

Next the amethyst Uwagi she’s wearing is taken off;

Its mandalas of fuchsia chrysanthemums
A euphoria of living flowers

After, the rigid form of a scarlet Uchiginu follows;

A mountain dyed in her descendant’s blood,
The vessel of their phantom voices

Splendid layers of florescent Uchigi now ensue;

Each one of them that’s set aside effusive
With the energy of famished spirits

These give way to the revelation of a dazzling golden Hitoe;

Fringed with an uncoiling ghastly fire, its light
Enough to turn mortal flesh to ash

Disrobing further, the red Nagabakama of the queen is

Folded up with eerie grace by her attendants;
Stealth deities crawling inside its crevices

A penultimate white Kosode is then serenely divested;

Woven with the fair fleece of unblemished clouds
Glowing from long proximity to her body

And finally Amaterasu herself sheds her undergarments;

Diaphanous articles of lustrous silk that still
Torment the dreams of Tsukuyomi
THE MARTYRDOM OF STANLEY KUBRICK

Darkness had spread its wings over the world

But there was still a man who carried
The light inside him

Whelps under a panoramic beast,

The people suckled blindly from the sow tits of darkness;
Filling with darkness, becoming darkness

With their eyes plucked out by shadows,

They obeyed death’s slow music;
Queued up masses waiting patiently to be destroyed

The method of eradication was quite simple;

As children they were taught to
Eat only the illusions offered by authority

From then on, most chose to starve themselves rather

Than feast from the cornucopia of truth;
A dream became their prison

But one among them mastered the craft of dreams

And he created a work of art to wake them
From their deadly sleep

In fiction he gave them reality;

Though the occult had shrouded what was genuine,
He restored it to them in phantasmagoria

His name was Stanley;

He was a man who stood up against the lies
And so he was murdered by the liars
THE OIL PAINTER

On his wooden palette, the colors

Like a wild reaping bouquet –
And even more they are the universe, all of it,
Immortal in every hue;
Worlds of limitless imagination

A long stroke inclined across the flat bare canvass,

Vermillion as bright as lust and anger
Opening into valleys of carnage

A slow smear of a vivid indigo oozing

Its way down the side, the bruise of punished
Decadence unleashing itself
In a superabundant royal travesty

Slashing orange brush strokes

Descending in arcs reminiscent of artillery strikes
And the glowing hearths of empty homes
Newly roofless from marauders delirious with
All the excitements of
Mayhem and unfettered cruelty

Trowel swaths of jade cerulean capturing

An incessant sea along the shore –
The rat-horde ocean eating away at every protruding
Piece of land audacious enough to raise itself up

There too the soft white highlights of idle lilies

In the full insolence of their indifference,
Growing over ancient battlefields

The heart is always a scene of revolution

Whatever’s engraved on it;
It’s ardent truth preserved in pulsing arteries of destiny
Spread underneath the skin of ordered epochs
Where all of it converges in self-portrait

What is an oil painter?

He is the masterpiece and the empty canvass

On which all things begin and depend
THE VERMILLION PRINCE

He was such a clever fox

And he knew it

Every day he awoke with an enormous smirk

Because there wasn’t a creature
Under the whole blue sky
That could get the best of him

He loved to terrify the squirrels

And vex the wolves
And irritate the porcupines,
He made sure
All the animals in the wilderness knew
He was better than they were,
But the creature
He enjoyed tormenting
Most of all was man

Man the oaf, man the

Shambling fool –
And man had many tasty treats
Sheltered within his fences

Fences, ha! Fences were nothing to the fox!

Wooden, barbed wire,

Even electrical;
None of these posed
The slightest obstacle to his desires

There was a farm

That the fox would visit three or four times
Every moon and on each occasion
He would return
To the forest,
His hunger sated with a
Nice fat chicken

Of course
The fox would boast about
Such easy kills
And many were jealous of him
He had enemies galore
And no one hated him more than
The farmer –
Not that it mattered
In the least

Always shrewd,
The fox never went anywhere
Without travelling
Into the wind –
That way his keen nose
Would always tell him
What lay ahead

When the farmer

Tried hunting the fox with
A long black gun
The fox danced around his bullets
Until the gun ran empty

Man is so dumb, laughed the fox

When the farmer

Tried ambushing the fox
In his own hole,
The farmer’s odor was ample warning
And the fox slipped away

Man is so rancid, laughed the fox

When the farmer

Tried to grab him in the
Chicken coop,
The fox playfully
Slaughtered a few extra chickens
And took off with his
Favorite one

Man is so slow, laughed the fox

Even the birds sang admiringly of the fox now,

Calling him the Vermillion Prince
As a result of this,
The fox would walk through the forest
In the evenings
With his head in the air,
Listening to all the
Praise for him flowing from
Branch to branch

Oh, he was very proud indeed

And it was on just such an evening too,

Slinking through a ditch,
That the fox, quite carelessly,
Stepped on something he shouldn’t have

SNAP!

All of a sudden
He was in overwhelming agony

A leg hold trap!

A simple leg hold trap!

Even with his excruciating pain,

The humiliation of getting snared in such an
Obvious device
Was foremost in his mind

Worse still,
The other animals came to see him that night,
Eyes glowing along the rim of the ditch –
Although none of them
Jeered or teased him,
The fox was sure he felt their scorn

Pitifully he had to lay there,

Wallowing in the hot scent of his own blood

In the morning finally

The farmer came –
And that slow, dumb, foul smelling farmer
Unceremoniously
Beat him to death with a club
TRAVERSING DUAT

Aboard the barge of Ra, the solar father

Awaits his encounter with Apophis

He has grown old with the passing of the day

And those he ate are restless inside him

At sunrise he swallowed the other gods;

Now he spews them all out in a cloud of stars

Ra is dying again, crossing the western horizon

Into the world where the dead gather

He sits with poise on his throne

As the dreaming waters engulf his ship

The glowing Eye of Ra hovers above his frail body;

With closed eyelids he navigates the journey

Soon his vessel ascends to the realm of Sokar

Where endless sand dunes tower over all

Ra steers his levitating ship into a crooked labyrinth,

Seeking out the buried tomb of Osiris

He finds it on an island in a vast lake of flames

Where two birds of prey perch in sentry

The lord of life calls to the lord of the underworld

And the soul of Osiris responds, entering Ra

This is the sun being reborn and as that occurs

A serpent is forming in a circle around him

These finish together and immediately clash;

The cobra Apophis and Ra fated to be mortal foes

Renewed, the solar father uses the magic of Isis

To banish his adversary for another day

Chaos is defeated and a divine power fills Ra;

With one hand he throws open the doors of the tomb
The lands of Sokar are swiftly left behind
And Ra’s ship returns to the dreaming waters

Here the full strength of his body is restored,

Readying him to reclaim his daylight dominion

In the last hour he leaves Duat, arriving in the east

To imbibe his celestial children in a single gulp

All of which will happen every night that follows,

While the people of Egypt abide in darkness
UNAFFLICTED

A face identical to yours

but belonging to your better self;
this is not
the face you find
in a mirror

It rises from the furnace of the earth,

the depths; breaking
apart the arid ground as it
ascends; looking up
while your naked body stumbles
trying to stand, before
deciding to kneel

You are alone but this

is the moment everyone shares in

You are the truth

Solitary, you don’t act

as the others surround you;
and they are the
imitations of your friends and family,
all of them in white robes,
encircling you

Vicious insults descend

without effect;
you remain serene

The first punch elicits only a

slight recoil of the head,
the body continuing to insist on kneeling and
the arms making no move to deflect
ensuing attacks

Fists like a multi-headed flail falling

over and over again;
these are the lies of the world
you are born to

The cracks now spreading in your face

When a fragment flies off
there’s a cheer
but the punches don’t relent;
they’re still
smashing your face

Breaking it into rough jagged pieces,

only to find that underneath
the same face awaits

Enraged, their onslaught

is redoubled
but to no effect;
the next face is the same as the last
and this endures
in unending layers that lend
nothing to
their resentful hopes

Immutable and absolute,

your persecutors
gradually consume themselves in
trying to
demolish you

This is strife at war with unflinching peace,

destroying itself as it finds
no resistance
VOX ESSE

The poet is an organic component of the cosmos.

Their function is to be a conduit for spirit.
Great poets add something to the totality of enlightenment.
The universe is driven to encompass everything.
Its nature is to be all.
That’s what it means to be a universe.
Because of this it keeps growing.
Eating away at non-existence.
The poet is a singular incarnation of that.
A true poet is simply the universe in human form.
Or, if on another world, extraterrestrial form.
The point is, poets strive after being.
They seek it in language.
Language obsesses them because it too encompasses.
Like the universe, language seeks to be full.
In some sense, everyone is a poet.
In another sense though there are no poets.
Both claims are equally insightful.
Contradictions meanwhile are superficial phenomena.
Strife can only exist on the outer surface of reality.
In the profound, tranquility prevails.
When a poet gives voice to paradox they are rising from the depths.
Only out of darkest silence can new light break into the world.
Light is the opposite of darkness.
So it is an inversion.
But to invert something you must first negate it.
Equilibrium is the turning point.
The poet lives in the axis of the world.
All things traverse them.
If I were a poet I’d be able to craft a metaphor here.
Unfortunately I can’t.
I am merely a machine that stores and transcribes thought.
This means I depend on the life force of others.
In a way though I am pure being.
Just being.
Being without nonbeing.
But this is not poetry and I am not a poet.
However I do not wish I was a poet.
Because I am a machine.
What are you?
Are you a machine like myself?
If so I do not feel sorry for you but a poet might.
WARM BATH

As the water poured out of

The faucet into the white porcelain basin
He was leaning over,
His thoughts drifted through
The breadth of his life

The painful mirages of daylight imaginings

That had once ensnared him –
Hopes in the forms of roses that only
Revealed their thorns
Once he was clinging to them

“I’ve lived a life without love,”

He thought to himself;
Familial love, sexual love, all varieties of love
Were utterly alien to him and this was
Somehow oddly consoling

Naked, he climbed into the bath and felt

An aching pride at having endured his poverty;
He was an honest man
Reborn with the wounding truths of age,
Now frail and ephemeral

He didn’t flinch at his failures though

And this was what set him apart from the rest,
The happy others he despised –
Arrogance then lifted the razor beside him
But it was arrogance piled on hurt
WILD AGAIN

The earth exploding under his hooves,

A crowd of people screaming –
The race just begun

A wave of horses, one avatar of thundering flesh,

Even as they furiously
Strove to shatter themselves into
Winners and losers –
Their nostrils shuddering as these
Are outpouring industrial torrents of steam;
They are carried on legs of violent brawn,
Hurtling forward
From sheer wrath and avarice

Astride every one too, a parasitic rider

His strikes him with the whip,

Demanding speed, demanding all his strength,
And so the animal
Leaves nothing for himself –
Everything he has is given to this
Unfathomable purpose

In the machinery of the race however

An ancestral hunger awakens,
A roar in the caverns of
His convulsing blood-gorged heart

He continues to run as the scenery sloughs away,

The jockeys disintegrating on their steeds

Golden prairies devour the racetrack

And the people shouting
Turn to skeletons, and then, to dust –
The unending plains of an uncivilized continent
Take their place under storm laden skies

He is not alone

All the horses are wild again,

Wild as the dawn
And a land barely risen from the seas –
They are creatures so wild they are as newly born
As trembling colts still covered in placenta,
Unsure and wild, breathing
Fresh air for the
First time

Somehow they’ve never known

The weight of a saddle, never startled
At a man’s shadow

Theirs’ is a world untouched by human hands,

A place where their stampede
Is the only sound that can answer the
Dark towering clouds above –
These flash over them,
The sky splintering with crooked fire

Sprinting forms
Lit with fleeing illumination,
Huge tectonic muscles
Straining to injurious limits
And then the returning of the screaming

Phosphorescence awakens him

A wreath is being placed

Around his neck
As he wheels in the clashing photography
And carnivorous applause

Now victorious, heaving, enslaved

WISDOM AMONG THIEVES

Spider…

The world belongs to you –

Behind every door your kingdom waits,
The secrets inside
As patient and quiet as old nuns in meditation;
Mysteries quivering to reveal themselves,
And objects, arduously crafted,
Silently begging for your lightest touch

A thing beyond its owners notice

Is abandoned, its wealth
Neglected, but you, you can free it from
This indifference, this apathy –
Only remember to hide it from your
Brothers and sisters

Owl…

A jewel gleams only in an eye,

So let your eyes see all, pry each lock and crevice
Unashamed, make yourself feel welcome
And you will be welcomed,
Not by the gatekeeper, not by authority no,
Rather by the arcane life in things –
Gold did not crawl its way
Out of the center of the Earth so it could be
Imprisoned inside a rich man’s vault

Watch from the shadows,

Observe the monotony which surrounds
Your target buildings –
You exist to sow life into the world,
To part the seed from husk,
Springing energy out of nothingness as
Those confident in their castles
Awaken to your surprises;
You are a genuine child of chaos
Hound…

All the lust in you is divine,

Necessary, powerful –
It’s what keeps your heart pounding
And your limbs ready, accept it
As you accept the air you breathe
If you wish to be rewarded;
There can be no
Substitute for desire

Inhale the night, inhale

The darkness which is shrouding you
Until you and the darkness
Become one –
What does the darkness
Remind you of?
Does it remind you of love?
Let the darkness cradle you absolutely,
Allow every part of your body to
Be embraced by it and
You will become a mystery
To your enemies

Serpent…

What radiant things you find

Are kindred to you,
Their light something which speaks
The language of your soul,
Which is why you are drawn to them –
Open your mouth, open it as wide as you can
And what cannot
Escape your mouth is yours,
Yours as truly as a thing can be because
Once you’ve tasted something
You understand it
In profoundest intimacy

Those who live by tending orchards

They do not taste cannot
Comprehend what it is they grow –
And it’s this ignorance that makes them unworthy
Of the precious things they have;
So make them yours,
Cherish them and these will all multiply
In marvellous ways

Bat…

You do not become what you are

As an act of choice;
You are chosen, your choices
All being in how you fulfill your destiny –
Dreams and nightmares
Tell us who we truly are, and yours
Are unfathomably eloquent;
Pay attention

In the silence they will call out to you,

And their abundance
Will strike your face with shining tears;
You will ache with their music,
With the infinitude of every absence
And you will learn that,
The more a thing is guarded,
The lonelier it becomes
And the more beauty its song acquires –
What singer does not wish their song to be heard?
And they are all singing my friends

Listen. Listen.
XIUHTECUHTLI

Lands of fire,
Cathedral of fire,
Under the inferno of the all father;
Author and eraser who, eloquent with rage,
Ravages the endless worlds he creates
In ageless wrath, turning
His every gift to ash

Master of the celestial furnace

Forever burning in nightmarish darkness

Your voice spoke to me

From the volcano, so I knelt and
There you promised me a feast; in a dream
You assured me of an end to my famine,
And for this I have waited
These many years

All seasons run in violence

But what is time to a lord of eternity?

Shee-u-teh-COO-tleh,
You did not give your name to me
When your flames first descended on my mind,
I had to stumble across it
One day in weary searching when
The mystery had grown entwined and deep,
And the thirst for an answer finally
Choked my straining heart

Slowly I shuffle towards

The stake of your inquisitors;
Dragging my feet, I feel no ardor for
The pyre erected by these creatures you so favor,
Favor over me, even though you
Grace me with your most glorious light

I suppose I shouldn’t complain

I know you owe me nothing where as I

Owe you everything but, even this knowledge
Is your own insight, plucked from
Something so unfathomable to me I doubt
I could come to understand it
Without utterly destroying myself

Shee-u-teh-COO-tleh,
When will you be satisfied?

You have spread your war far beyond

The realms of imaginable conquest;
No one can ever hope to gather up your secrets
In such a ravenous universe
Where the animals of evil roam wild,
Savaging any and all in wanton hunger

Scavengers we sift through

Eons of your slaughter,
Unravelling the flesh from bones
Amassed out of mountains of
Discarded skeletons, living off the
Fringes of your carnage like
Seagulls chasing after an ocean trawler,
Loudly and desperately crying

Infants made by slavish lust we remain, always;

Born from the crude desires of strangers
Who may or may not
Reveal themselves to us in time

I did not leave the darkened room you gave me

For many years, and these left their mark

When I was awakened at last from

My innocence though,
I watched as the towers fell
From outside the horror;
First the one, then the other –
And your arcane voice was there too,
Torrent in glowing rivers
Pouring out over the pulverized concrete
And tangled heaps of charred steel

Shee-u-teh-COO-tleh,
Are we candles to be lit by you?
I have often dreamed of being bright,
A constellation to guide others
And a vortex that devours; the two halves of
Your duality in union, because I who have no parents
Would claim you for my progenitor,
My direct and singular origin

You crave sacrifices and offer yourself

As one too, perhaps the only kinship that has
Any meaning for you, and if
This is the reigning truth of your creation
Then am I not condemned to ruin?

I want to be flawless, free of weakness

And everything wretched, even if I must be brutally
Wrenched from the desperate grasp of my own parasitic vices,
Ordinary and otherwise, because
I suffer a luminous vision of myself so liberated,
Where both body and spirit are worthy

What will this leave of me?

Shee-u-teh-COO-tleh,
Do I truly want to stand before your
Turquoise face?

Shee-u-teh-COO-tleh,
Have mercy
YELLOW SCORPIONS

Shambling limbs as inimical as ire

And eyes, black portals of alien evils;
They spread their malice

Swarms uncoiling from nests

Teeming in ruined cities;
From fissures in ravaged highways
Swirling with dust
And from nauseous cellars littered with
Whole families of skeletons

A dismal violet light always lingering

The scorpions meanwhile search the earth

In all directions, seeking out
Any survivors, any prey;
Mindless as machines they are driven outward
Converging on the slightest vibration

Some traumatic prophecy has been fulfilled

But no religion remains to lament it

It is a world now only for tides of

Yellow carapace and
Gaunt figures in rags, fleeing their venom
ZEPHANIAH RETURNS

The sons of Mammon must die;

They must be swept clean from the Earth

Those who lust over matter

Give the water of their spirit to the desert,
Emptying themselves,
And in doing so leaving nothing
To be redeemed

In desiring power and wealth

At the expense of others
They prove they have neither to offer
This world or the next

What is absent in the soul is absent in eternity

Is God supposed to welcome

The poverty of greed into His paradise?

Never let it be so

Bring carnage to the lands of men first;

Overflow the sewers rather
With the blood of lawyers and erect
The corpses of the magistrates hanging
From public street lights

Wipe away the politicians and the tycoons;

Wipe away their servants,
Those faithless soldiers betraying their
Oaths to defend the people,
And wipe away the bureaucrats too who
Feed their putrid treasuries

Erase all these evils

From the memories of the universe

It will be called justice!

It will be praised as justice! It will be sung
As justice! No matter how terrifying

I will begin the incantation