AEGIS

NOISE

John

Xavier

© Copyright John Xavier 2021

This is an authorised free edition from www.obooko.com

Although you do not have to pay for this book, the author's intellectual
property rights remain fully protected by international Copyright laws. You
are licensed to use this digital copy strictly for your personal enjoyment only.
This edition must not be hosted or redistributed on other websites without
the author's written permission nor offered for sale in any form. If you paid
for this book, or to gain access to it, we suggest you demand a refund and
report the transaction to the author and Obooko.
Someone who, dreaming, says "I am dreaming", even if he speaks audibly in doing so, is
no more right than if he said in his dream "it is raining", while it was in fact raining. Even if
his dream were actually connected with the noise of the rain.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
A CACOPHONY DIVINE

Train klaxons wound the night,

proving the bestial truth
of chaos,
as ambulances burn their sirens
in the dark,
dead women moaning in the carriages.

This city was born mad wasn't it Johnny?

The homeless monsters bark

and laugh; the hordes,
undisturbed, continue to poison themselves
cheerfully. It's a good arrangement.

And us? We get by don't we?

It's so easy to brush it off, to allow
the very worst to become meaningless.

We wouldn't lie to ourselves of course.

No, we have too much integrity.

You and me yes? We're a hell of a pair.

One thing though I should confess.

Even in all this
turmoil and blinding confusion,
something stands out.
I’m almost afraid to admit it.
It's so trivial,
but it's the locks,
their locks, out in the hall.

I hear them turning, clacking

at all intervals.

And?

It inspires such a rage in me my friend.

A LEAP

Deep in night the lake has leveled itself

to swallow all the heavens
in one silent meditation –
a mirror perfected in its darkness
and divorced from the rolling forested hills
that undulate away
towards the cowering horizon

It lends its eternity to the moon and the stars,

reminding them of their nocturnal dominion
lost long ago when they became
a mere ossuary for the gods

In this moment it is almost as if time is retreating

so that the lake can once more reclaim
itself as an unborn child –
that is, until a shadow erupts out of the
middle of its watery face like an unbound fantasy

As the shadow twists in the air it too catches some light,

revealing its silver skin, streaked
with gossamer cataracts
fleeing in all directions

Lingering, the fish bends like a bow

before falling, and disappears
A NOVICE DROP OF BLOOD CONCEALS ITSELF

The ardent red membrane at the heart of my

nocturnal city glows with terrible intricacy

But as soon as I grasp this it dissolves

Cherubs are suspended in the crude black ocean

that worships at the ziggurat of its foot

They drown electrically on the surface

Fortunately I live far away from my wonderful tyrant

and creeping past in artless supplication

I remain beneath its enduring magnificent concern

Whole worlds are placed in decapitated rows

before it so I among the many can be lost and free
A TREE'S NIGHTMARE

I awaken in the deep embrace of the Earth,

Closed within my dark quiet shell

Here I feel perfectly safe

But a calling is pulsing in the seed of my body,

A craving for the light so far above
Whose promise I was born into the knowledge of;
I hunger to unfold myself within it

And equally I thirst for the rain,

Already feeling the ghost of its percussion
Haunting me through the
Physical trace
Of the ancestors interred inside
Every cell of my being

Only a small fear holds me back;

The fear of opening myself
To the unknown

Fear cannot feed me though;

So I must erupt,
I must thrust towards my true desire,
And I do

Trembling with anxious excitement

I shoot upwards,
Not withholding any strength;
My tendril slithering through the moist dirt
While every second
Drawing on a primordial vegetable hope

I push and push,

Yearning upwards,
Always yearning and always
I am greeted by more dirt

A choking dirt now,

Burying my green hunger
In the heavy menacing darkness,
In the treachery of this false netherworld
Whose shock offers me no mercy

Feeling I should have long already surfaced

My ascent begins to slow
While my last reserves of stamina
Dwindle to nothingness

A realization is coming upon me;

And the terror, settling in
ABSCISSION

Peacock with a tail of fire

Crying out at sunset –
The harshness of it
Mingles with the sound of rustling leaves,
A whole forest
The hue of blood

I walk in the garden again

Restored to inhuman time;
With each step
I shush the world
And yet I hope to hear the peacock,
If just once more

The blade,
Like a stilled drip
From my drooping hand
Is a strange thing;
Gleaming in the shadows
As a fish might in dark waters

A specter I am in this hour,

Without sure hunger,
Without an image of prey
For my hanging knife;
Yet I have the knife
So I walk slowly but go on

From the mind of my silhouette perhaps,

A dragonfly emerged
To trace the mystery itself
In the lukewarm air –
Having only this now
I followed as it fled

That is how I came

To the clearing with the falling blossoms,
Where I found my beating heart
Lying outside me in the open;
Here the peacock’s final cry rang and I was
Revived at last to raise up
My destroyer
ABYSSUS ABYSSUM INVOCAT

Deep calleth unto deep;

Radiant in the wild furnace of
Bursting stars,
A voice filled with
An alchemy of nuclear fire;
Dead elements
Transmuted into life,
Listening

Generations dragging themselves

Arduously slowly
Out of the tide pools, and finally,
To the mountaintops;
There columns eyed
With black glistening lenses
Are raised by searchers
Lonely for unreachable worlds,
Vigils consumed with
Far eons of light

A symphony of cosmic order

Unravels before them;
Strands of stellar violence,
Wounds like acid
Burning into eternity,
Betray the primeval remains
Of a fathomless genesis,
And still they can't
Answer the voice

So they
Continue their search,
Sifting shadows rift across the
Spectra of alien infernos,
Wondering,
"What doomed civilizations
Do we witness
Unknowing?"
ACTING COOL

Everyone is just as cool as me

I can't out cool them

I walk past them in silence

They walk past me in silence
I don't say hello
They don't say hello

We don't make eye contact

We don't even try

We're too cool to want anything

We're cool as soon as we step outside
We're cool even when we wish we weren't
Who's going to break the ice first?

Not me
Not them
ALETHIA

I would eagerly burn the images of paradise

to preserve myself from longing;
because The Truth…
it cannot compete with deceptions

We who are
the grapes ignorant of the wine,
ready to die when we are ripe –
our tragedies
intoxicate the gods

They offer us the world

mercilessly
and we believe they are generous
because we are so desperate
and weak

If only my blood was not so sweet;

even though I should not exist then
it would be better

Those who are only cultivated for harvest

have an enemy in knowledge
ALL SAINT'S EVE

Embers of ephemeral fireworks,

The wilting flames of prolific revelry,
Expire into the monolithic gloom –
Their thunder dying like falling snow

The trees do not raise their voices to the night,

To the shivering howls of the animals trapped in men,
But darkly they catch our ravings in silence
And keep their council to themselves

Fleeing the arms of the urban timber though

Streams a quiet cavalcade of leaves –
Detritus, sweeping across stark vanishing streets,
Slowly haunting the air

Vessels of surrender to chance

Arrayed in the likeness of flawless trust –
They are a lesson to the truly wise,
The path of devotion followed to its last end

Beneath the monumental sky

All the children of the wind will be laid to rest –
And as our past luminaries fed the ancient roots
So shall the rest be claimed in the carnivorous earth
AN ELEGY FOR ARCHAIC MUSES

Vacant words, disowning their all generous mother,

stow away in the concessions
of our corporate machinery

Scarecrows here receive great applause

Frayed grins, each a crude doppelganger

for the imitation art they preach in unthinking rebellion
since their illusions are really formed
by the tranquilized lips of couture seraphim

Now the foetus of a new mantra awakens

whose static celibate eyes transmute every shining light
into clandestine vessels of entropy

And the new generation of sentries

conspire with all the rest
to spread this disintegration
AN UNHAPPY WOMAN SHAVES HER HEAD

dragging a plain wooden chair

across a tiled floor
the sound claws at the air
until mrs. sexton
stops and props it up
with a thud

muttering to herself about

a heart's needle
she goes and rifles through a
garbage bag

grabbing a pair of simple

steel scissors as
well as a straight razor
and can of men's
shaving foam
she runs a hand
through her graying hair
and then sits

she pauses
vaguely grasping
at nebulous thoughts
before she begins

taking the scissors she

unceremoniously
grabs a lock of hair
and cuts it off

it tumbles down to the ground

her gaunt face

remains unmoved

her hands persist

and the hair keeps falling
forming drifts
that quietly congregate
at her bare feet

as the cheap clock on the wall

ticks senselessly
she works
with distant intent

her hands search her head

blindly feeling
for strays
unclipped

when satisfied she grabs the

shaving foam
 and lathers some of it up
before smearing
her head

she then holds

the razor and patiently drags it
along her scalp
before flicking it towards the floor
here and there
she feels her flesh nicked
but ignores it

when she is done

a fetish is gone
but nothing has taken its place

time recycles

she doesn't need a mirror

ANIMUS EXALTING

Joy is fire
Leaping, spreading;
Enveloping the world

Flames sizzling,
From the burning marrow
Leaking, through skin
Crackling as it’s
Peeling away in glowing embers,
Drifting off into the wind

Exhale aeons,
The life left from
Ancient empires under sand;
Our lungs, the darkness
Swallowing civilizations

Invisibly
Transformed and returned

Mouth full of honey,

Honeycombs for eyes and the
Furnace heart of a monster
Roaring for kindling

Veins of fire
Running across the Savannah,
Gorging on the grass
And twining through the trees
With ease and delight

Curl into a black thing at our touch;

Shrivel and evaporate in ash
Because…
Because it is time

We arrive in splendor
As was promised, even in the desert
Luminous shafts
Are rising from crevasses
Among the dunes
In a last shattering of mystery

Let the skeptics be judges

I have cast fire upon the world,

And see, I guard it until it is afire

It was said once, strewn like

Pollen to become
Chaos springing wild,
Havoc flourishing from havoc
Into a jungle of flames
Precious world of fire
Scarcely ignited,
Overwhelmed even by the
Minuteness of squandered stars,
And just as engulfed
By the immenser void,
The airless silence and
Distillate death

You sojourn,
A single sprig of clover
Against cosmic and final nightfall

You will not vanish,

You will thrive
ANSWERS FROM THE DELUGE

water swallowing memories like slow thunder,

an opaque brown cauldron of seeping debris
gathering up the family mementos left behind
in the abandoned homes of picturesque lives

a whole horizon of relentless destruction

with frantic terror churning at its fringes,
judgement from the pseudonymous sky
restoring the palimpsest of the earth

a cipher of shattered communities

alludes to human moments in its wreckage,
encrypted in the chaos of the present,
the perfect reconstruction of everything now lost

and the dead live inside our ultimate mystery,

inside our unfathomable darkness,
as they speak to us in broken dreams
veiled in our own shadows

time is a fragile thing, irreparable,

existing only in its ruin,
leaving at last a legacy of undoing,
of all things, swept away
ARBEIT MACHT FREI

Wisps of bone and taut flesh

Arc the body –
Arms bent like wings looming,
Waiting while her legs
Flex and stretch across an
Apparition of design

Footfalls of chalk feet

Keep a thudding rhythm going,
Feet shining with coarse lacerations

Down the stairs

Of the empty auditorium
Blood, in wide red channels, seeps
To the bottom, swelling
In the rising tide of a calm opaque pool
Spreading out
And swallowing everything

The grinding tank treads of black machinery

Move unopposed over obliterated landscapes,
Crushing abandoned items that
Allude to a dream time before the madness –
A kettle, a cane, a glass bottle of milk,
Broken among the broken,
Wreckage spilling out of blasted streets
While the sun is still gleaming through the
Abundant clouds above –
A white veil beaming with radiance
As artillery drums the horizon

Stage light centered on the soloist,

A prima ballerina
Lain atop an anvil in her youth –
Forged through years of trial
To become a spontaneous creature of grace;
Frail only in illusion, the origami
Of her silhouette hides well agony
And sacrifice born from
Daemons in the music
Making a temple out of her body

Look at her pale skin

Look at the hands reaching out to you

Through barbed wire fences,
Hands attached to starving naked bodies
Piloted by sunken eyes in skeletal faces
Hinting at a speechlessness within –
Any secrets their gaunt mouths could betray
Have already died inside them

Cattle they moo for their masters

With worn out sadness,
Beaten by hunger and exertion and cruelty,
Herded wherever
Secretariats of genocide deem fit –
They exist merely
As a logistical problem now,
One that passes through the communal showers

The company behind the curtain

Gathered together in hushed excitement,
Nervous for their members
Still before the audience, watching,
Waiting, compliments and
Self-deprecation ensuing in brief asides

Finally it concludes and the applause

Rushes out of the darkness to greet them –
Smiling they link arms and stand together in a row,
Bending to the darkness, full of joy, relief

Emaciated corpses, they are shoveled into piles,

Left to rot in the open air until
They can be hauled away to the furnaces,
Smoke stacks gushing ceaselessly,
Expelling a last gray exodus into the sky

They sang songs of course,

Even in the depths of their misery

And they told jokes

Moments no mortal power can retrieve

The ghosts of these dancers,

Twirling in the fire,
Scattering the ember light,
Have mysteries
They will never share
ARBOREUS SANCTUARIUM

Summer now returns to me unwelcomed;

A season over bright, over hot –
The grindstone of the sun constantly
Spinning on my barren head

Without the mercy of the shade

Only an excess of heat and light;
A ruthless and ancient law
Laid across the ungreen earth

But there are those secret paths

Which whind and reach
Deep into the dreaming forest –
A place at last to find some rest

Vaulted with shimmering leaves,

A few narrow beams of light springing in,
There endures an eternal peace
From which to gaze out on eternal desolation
ARE YOU AWAKE?

Twisting through the darkened hills

The road is silent except
For the electrical hum of street lights
Glimmering through gray mist

You hurry along alone on

A sidewalk desperate for repair,
In strange contrast to the
Uncanny perfection of the parallel street

The cold tonight is vigorous and as

You pull your coat around you a
Truck approaches and, almost frantic,
You consider hailing it down

You hesitate though and it

Passes you by in seconds but
Not before an anxious feeling
Crawls into your stomach

The windows were tinted and

You couldn't see the driver
But the way the vehicle drove on
Without slowing was eerily unsettling

An immense menace radiates from

The trees towering on either side of you;
So when you see a new pair of headlights
You throw out a pleading hand

The bus is following the road

Like a carving knife cutting effortlessly,
But you rush to it anyways, before gasping;
The brightly lit bus is empty, driverless
ARTEMISIA AT MORNING

Wormwood on your lips, and the green viper of absinthe

Whispering its secrets

Never was your mind so free, so terrifyingly unfettered with

Thoughts, lost in mutation, emerging from the
Unspoken chrysalis

Illumined with lunar clairvoyance, the

Terrain transforms itself, giving up its monstrosity

Even the willow trees, pendulous amid the fog soothing its way in,
Radiate a certain sable allure that owes its lineage to
Sacrificial innocents
And the murderous coteries they appeased

Beside a dying fire you look around again,

Examining the tranquil gypsy camp in the spectral early light

At a distance a piano rots in the autumn-drenched forest,

Derelict who knows how long ago
But you suspect it still has one sonata in it, and so you rise

The last of the fire turns to smoke

Everyone is asleep, harvestmen scattering at your feet

AURORA OF THE SIEGE MAIDEN

Orleans the aegis,

Escutcheon of autonomy,
Barricading the heart of a weary nation

They would ooze across her lands, the invaders,

But on the threshold of their victory a voice –
Allez-vous-en en Angleterre!

Spirit overwhelming flesh,

A soul engulfing France’s soldiers –
In a girl, an oracle, unsurpassed by men in courage

She is the apocalypse of the proletariat, her arrival foretold

In boondock rumors swirling long before her mission,
One ready to carry a martyr’s destiny

A long flowing white banner, bright in the sun –

On its side, golden fleur-de-lis marshalled together
And on the other, God Incarnate, attended by awed and kneeling angels

Raising this she levied war against the English garrisons, afire
With triumph right up to the culminating trial
Outside the bastion of Les Tourelles

There she bore it again and singularly in battle,

Waving it passionately in the full maelstrom of slaughter –
Her heavy plate mail splattered with the grime of the chaotic trenches

Among the zephyr swarms of missiles though an arrow found her,

Embedding itself between her neck and shoulder,
Forcing compatriots to drag her from the field

And with her absence, doubt swelled –

Those who had taken up arms for her deflated,
Their despair slowly spreading with the coming of the twilight

As dusk was settling though, a silhouette came striding

Through the startled French infantry, the girl
After pulling the arrow from her own flesh

To the walls again she inspired them,

Over the desperately held English ramparts –
Everywhere littered with the corpses of both sides

In this way she delivered them to victory,

And proved to her king and army
The divinity exhorting her
AUTUMN METEORIC

Vicissitudes of grass,
a golden yearning among the last,
hearts contrast with the disarray
of deciduous remains
clinging together
in their brittle fluttering veins

Gathering up the day

with motherly patience,
a shadow touches them all inside,
so subtle
it at first seems like just another color,
of which only the quiet wonder,
until it spreads its wings
encompassing everything
for the sole purpose of giving it all back,
just so that we might
appreciate what we have

The ocean with its moslem waves

obeys obeys obeys;
while the trees, defying gravity,
sunder endlessly
for the eucharist of the day

It only takes one star,

illusory in its flight,
to redeem the dust following
an invisible ring of brute necessity
around it;
fountain for those who thirst
shown in gnomic verse

Every sleep a brief eternity

and every dream a resurrection;
Every feint a deep affinity
and every truth, a confession
AWAKENING

Consider the orange,

tortured and murdered,
to make juice
for one's morning breakfast

How like
the human soul
brought to God

How casual
and harmless
all suffering is

Prayer then
should always be directed
to the hope that
our Lord sleeps in
BARELY EVEN FORGOTTEN

Every stranger lives in Oblivion

The hospital they were born in

Was named after a saint from Oblivion,
In a city called Oblivion,
Located in the heart of a nation
Founded on Oblivion

They have their birthdays

On Oblivion,
They get married in
One of the churches of Oblivion

Promising themselves
Forever to Oblivion

And when at last they die

The obituary that’s posted for them
Says they are survived, in loving memory,
By Oblivion

Oblivion is all that they know and

All that they care about,
A passionate and intense Oblivion
As rich as anything
Anyone can imagine

Meanwhile we might see them once briefly,

Perhaps only through a window
BECAUSE IF

Because possibility

Because the uncertainty we

Awake to every day

Because of the fireflies

Whirling in the glass jars of us

Because the ice melting into

Joyous waterfalls
Rushing down the mountains,
Our hearts

Because never is not an answer,

It’s an emptiness spiraling out of nothingness,
A desperate hopelessness
Born from a pain that sees its
Own desires
As irrevocably vain

Because things might happen,

Amazing things

Because if is what moves us,

Always, always

Because if
BECOMING SOBER IN THE NIGHT
(in homage to Bai Juyi)

Memories danced and disappeared,

a small glass on a counter
dark as dried blood;
a golden cascade descending slowly
poured from a long necked bottle

Then laughter, women, flesh,

terminating in a many gaping oblivion
where I find myself sprawled
beneath the stars
of a midnight-deep summer sky

I have awoken on a bench

alone and tired but
nevertheless feeling quite content;
a quiet calm grasps this moment,
everything above so clear
BEDLAM AMONG THE STARS

the tranquility of the moon

drives them mad

it affronts them,
the calmness of death,
the wellbeing of the celestial desert

swollen-hearted monsters
hurt to see it,
they gnash their teeth and
cry foul in inarticulate fury

all blood and spittle

BEFORE THE WIND

Gray overlapping gray

overlapping gray,
the rain has withdrawn;
leaving drenched
concrete,
earth,
glass,
prostrate away from dawn

Occult trees
on tendril knees
whisper through the depths,
twisted hungers
sustained on tears;
alchemists of my breath

The crowds evaporate,

vague
liquor
streams
pressing on
but never charmed;
always the same
and always the same
BESTIALITY

Antlers sprouting
From the foreheads of lost causes
Scavenging
Knee deep in moonlit ponds,
Looking for lotus flowers

They are weeding the waters,

Working to the slow beat
Of an invisible drum

A knocking of the bones

Hands, twisting into cloven hooves,

Tear out the offending vegetation –
Limp wet wreckage
Flung away with agitation,
With speechless fear

A knocking of the bones

In the dismal light their frantic dredging

Passes with solitary focus –
Feral moans, transforming into
Snout snuffling, bellowing, and squealing,
Elicit no intelligent interest

And their shapes

Are toppling from upright –
Still they search the shallows with
Their faces intent

A knocking of the bones

Their eyes now are wild oblivion,

Lodged in bodies
Bent to savage purpose
Without a trace of any former self

Abominate passion seeps through them,

Branching from their genitals

A knocking of the bones

Futility clenches these brutes

As the lotus flowers claim the world,
Flora swirling into existence
Faster than destruction

They skewer their animal enemies

And hold them dearly
In vastly pierced displays that become
Jeering skeletons
In the quiet years that follow
BROODING AFTER THE STORM

Stepping through a green snarl of wreckage,

I stare up at the old maple tree
Now broken in the mast of its body –
Its distributary scepter dashed to earth,
Tethered still but barely.

The wind has come and gone in wrath –

Opposed by no force below the sky, it has raged
And satisfied itself, for the time being.

This wood that has been sundered though is fresh,

Not dead. No rot is visible. By all appearances
This tree simply couldn’t withstand the violence,
But it was truly beautiful and inspiring in its height.

How many decades until it restores itself?

How many years were undone by the storm?
Perhaps someone else also cared for this tree.

Perhaps they will even ache seeing this.

I don’t know but now I remember the squirrels,
Those I’ve seen cavorting among its limbs –
And just as I think of them I see one.
He or she is not diminished in merriment though.
BUT I AM A TREACHEROUS SERVANT

in the Clanging Smithy my Molten Heart is Burning

the Raw Metal to Mould
Cackling Shackles for a Dungeon

All is Drudgery as The Lord is Looming,

as Steam is Hissing,
Water Dripping,
while Wrath is Wrought in Iron Knots,
Ingots Crushed to Feast Cruel Lust
to Leash the Beasts that do not Hush

but I am a Treacherous Servant,

a Seditious Slave
Seething at the Canon of the Dominion I Disdain,
Meekly,
Crafting Secretly,
an Aegis to Escape with
and a Sword Forged from Forsaken Pains

on the Day I'm done I'll Depose the Despot

I Despise and quit his Keep, releasing the Rest, and
We shall all once more be Blessed
BY THE SEA SHORE

The tide has long ago swept out

and it's never coming back

We will not be saved

from the ravenous sun

Our cruddy realm is drying up,

our pathetic sheltering mud

We barnacles gasp en masse along with

the overwhelming stench of our deaths
CALISTHENICS

Harnessing the repetition over time that shapes us,

the subdermal tectonics of the flesh,
we convert ourselves into works of living art :
Strength and Beauty :
industry of the solipsists
defined by the kinematic arcs of limbs
and the aggregate malleability of their substance,
A vision of our summation,
of the omnipotent ideal of control
Animates the work :
the metamorphosis falling into its transcendental contours,
surrender to a single regime yielding
A perfect body
CATS ARE THE ILLUMINATI

What do you really know about cats?

I bet you think that cats are
Adorable and amusing.

That's what they want you to think;

The truth is much more sinister.

Cats are studying our anatomy

And sooner or later
They'll destroy our systems;
I'm guessing sooner.

The charisma of cats

Is a diabolical thing
Once you realize the truth.

When a cat sleeps on your tablet

They are downloading your information.

When cats yawn,

They are yawning at you;
They are letting everyone know
How boring you are.

When a cat goes outside

They are reporting your secrets;
Cats blog about how often you masturbate.

Every time a cat looks at you

It’s psychological warfare.

Don't believe me?

Think of those women
Who own hordes of cats;
They’re all crazy why?

Because the cats made them crazy;

Using their mind control.
Cats are telepaths.

Cats are actually invaders from another dimension;

A dimension of cats.

Cats were the first to bundle subprime mortgages.

Cats pinned it on the lone gunmen.
Cats even invented Freemasonry
When they were gods in ancient Egypt.

Beware the cat lobbyists.

Cats are well versed in propaganda;
Don't believe anything they say about me!
CHASM TO HELL OPENING IN THE MIND OF RODIN

Fury in the tortured surface of the bronze,

The fury of all energy unleashed –
Chaos and the extinction of reason

Anarchy, every desire poured into world –

Desire without limit, life without limit;
A senseless drowning inundation
Unrestrained by any law, a savage passion
Gnawing endlessly at the edges of the decaying divine

Shadows leeched upon the light

Because obedience does not feed the soul, no,

Reason is the ambrosia of the dead,
And death inside us, the corpse spreading in our bodies,
Awakened in rigor mortis, in flesh drained of all fire

Order lives wholly in eternity, safe in symmetry

Until a single strand of energy disrupts the harmony;
Lawless in its origins because laws can only
Bring a thing to an end, they can’t begin anything –
They can’t be the impulse for anything to exist

Birth is by nature monstrous,

Marring its own origins in violence,
Emerging in empty havoc and inane hunger

Creation without purpose, true creation,

Not figments inhabiting another
Formed by some external authority,
Some idea or paragon, and so mere radiance
Of a transcending source –
The creator cannot create, only the abyss can create;
Newness must come from nothingness
Because this alone can free it of all pre-existence

Strangers to any god, the children of agony

Are returning in their destruction –
Reuniting with their author, having no author,
And offering up their lives as proof of this
CHIMAERA MIDNIGHT

Caliginous in the breeze that fills the rippling curtains,

A lunar bedroom confluence, eros in hexerei

Air dissolves into her and, wraith, she is incarnate without blood;
Skinless desire unfurling into newly starving flesh

His somnolent face frowns as the shadow seeps over him,

Eyelids flickering while he stirs among the maroon silk covers

And now her sepulcher-pale hand is tenderly caressing him,

Tracing his swan body still softly writhing under it

Perspiring at her touch, unfathomable words on his lips,

Sleep nevertheless holds him in its ropes

His heart can rise from the abyss only with her ardor,
And she gives him this, leaning in to impart her cataclysmic kiss

Tongues addressed, he awakens to her gradually,

Savoring dim awareness as his hands begin their cherishing

With her hair lingering on his chest, he grips her thighs,

Urgently pulling her on top of him; kindling in her a sudden thrill

She is dripping moist and now doesn’t hesitate,

Reaching for his phallus, where she finds him ready
CHRYSALIS NOCTURNE

The bleached mouth of the sun

sings down to us
but we are too busy
gallivanting along
the whole breach of human knowledge

The first one to break the last taboo

wins

This is the world we had dreamed

the whole way
until the preening semidarkness
came in a hush
and our moth wings appeared
once more

Silent thereafter we lurk

watching the glass blowers work
through the back doors
of brick alleys
CONVERTING ONES INTO ZEROES

Turing and Gödel both loved Snow White

And they both died fairy-tale deaths

Despairing Turing his fate his own design,

One bite from the cyanide apple ending it all

While paranoia gripped Gödel slowly starved,

Lost without his wife's cooking

So expired two men of genius and logic

Unable to further endure an illogical world

They wrestled with the darkness of eternity

But it was the mundane that murdered them
DAY OF THE SUN
For eons, architectonic
spider colossi,
their intricate bodies
overlaid with neon lattices,
sifted through the
versatile centuries
under an extinct scintillating sky

And as they moved, gradually the

dark forms they operated, revealed only
by artificial light, absorbed the
residual heat
of the ages past. Imperceptibly
it filled their vacuous bodies, a
knowledge of hunger and uncertainty
and aspiration and finally even
laughter. Things
they had long felt nothing for
This new data
slowed the colossi. It circulated
their processors; transforming
them from the inside out

First, crystals blossomed in microscopic

cavities, spreading within nexus
limbs before expanding through the
more muscular machinery, and outwards,
bursting the surface membranes
in chromatic patterns:
textures of oranges and azures
with heliotropic tinges
Patterns burgeoning with verdant
incandescence, coral
protrusions expanding in
the complicating appendages
unique to spontaneous supernatural
flora
The colossi now
had become staid towers of radiant
ecology;
They brightened the whole horizon
Then, from their
outstretched branches, they
began to disseminate the energy that
had swollen within them, seeds
that permeated everything
they landed on, invigorating it,
everywhere germinating into
new, increasingly
spectacular, incarnations

And once more

the world was filled with life
DECEMBER BRILLIANCE

The clouds are wispy white

and the sky
also white, but mostly blue;
soft pale blues and azure blues and
pure cobalt blue

The mountains meanwhile have been dusted white,

gray blue distant mountains,
but not their shorter darker premonitions,
and not the low undusted deep dark blue foothills
that linger by the sea

The sea, the vast rioting sea,

the infinitely fractal sea;
it too is blue,
steel blue, metallic dark gray blue
whitely cresting lastly on the beach

And the sand is also gray blue with only the slightest
hint of beige, and the massive felled logs
scattered on it are smooth bone gray

But the oil tankers on the horizon are

a rich shining orange and
the haze sheathed sun in the east
is trenchantly golden
DEMENTIA PRAECOX

I contemplate a bone tesseract,

the stripped limbs of forgotten saints
lost to a more sublime reason

An isthmus of the fire and the light

divided, a music from the valley of Hinnom am I

Here to witness a bestial metallurgy

and learn about the mesons of our lives,
because Time is eugenic

It does not bother to

sift the skies from glass

There are only the oysters of brutalization

sanctified by a constant repetition
of one alone in the gymnasium

Perhaps I am here just to learn acceptance,

to embrace the gift of mediocrity

Genius, the delusion

of a crumbling narcissistic animal
can truly be my last ghost
DESOLATED THEY GROW ON

Don't the weeds impress you?

Isn't flourishing in the dry gravel
something noble?

Life so tenacious is itself a

promise of hope in the face of
death's jealousy
and so the survival in a hostile land
by seeds scattered and of chaos
assures us that yes life will endure
no matter what

From the brunswick green ivy

twining through the rusted
orange mechanisms
of dirt sunken industry we receive
a confirmation for
nature's inhuman strength

And courage,
to try themselves in
every lot,
to divide themselves so freely,
is a courage beyond us
because they are more their children
than we and so
live only in those hardships

Yet we stalk through the weeds as gods,

towering in ruthless silence

How self flattering,

the idea that we could truly kill
that reaching into depths
we cannot understand,
whose roots drink directly
from eternity

Ape bodied mankind

is merely foolish to decree itself
powers of extinction –
a million years perhaps or ten,
but only ourselves do we long deprive

Cosmically soon
they will rise again among the
shattered relics of our skulls
DEVOTION I

I pour
myself out
completely

and the trees

continue to sway
afterwards

exactly
as they did
before
DEVOTION II

The devil in your bones

must be broken

Love is the
shattering rod

Give up
your wretched body

Give up
yourself as flawed
DIRE KRISTALLNACHT

The sharp crackle

of their scintillating jagged breaking crashing to the
stygian streets

Windows burst apart,

heaped in shattered clusters of gleaming shards, each one a
broken life from an innocent people

And sirens and raging fires

and mobs marching with so much inhuman fury that some of them are
laughing like crazy as the outsiders weep in shocked vigils

Meanwhile the sledgehammers

keep swinging away at the crumbling synagogues dying so slowly
they are falling apart almost apologetically

Confusion answering hate,

they were their neighbors and made warm small talk in passing but now they
sprawl before the verdict of hard eager boots

Even their cemeteries must suffer the

absurd horror of having to satisfy the delusional lust for vengeance exacting
remassacred corpses and hacked tombstones

JUDEN RAUS! JUDEN RAUS!

chant the hysterically riled crowds in screaming synchronized voices
but with a deep fear lurking underneath their rage

Because no one in the darkness is invisible tonight

to the giant red swastika whirling above them all in the blacked out sky,
devouring the stars in its wrath

Asylum is retreating farther and farther before

the umbra tide of the undead Reich that is seeping out of a hole
in the heart of Europe

The animal demon that has been

loosed with Teutonic incantations from the soft rind of
false civilization

For ninety one people it is

already too late but tomorrow this
will be millions
DREAMING OF THE END

When the last winter comes

I will warm my hands
With the martyrs burning in my fireplace
And i will be satisfied
A little while longer

From a distance
The fury of flames
Is an idle curiosity

No less then,
The dark twisted forms
Crumbling within

I will be the final one

To enjoy any heat

My enemies,
My friends,
One after the other
Shall be marched into the fireplace

But i will say nice things

As they go;
I will not gloat
And they will notice

The world is getting colder,

That is why i am getting colder,
But i can resist the cold
With everything
The rest can sacrifice

I will run out of them in time,

I know,
And this frightens me

I do not want to die from the cold

There is only one thing to do;

I will have to make sure
The last fire burns the hottest
And i will walk in then

If i have to follow the rest

At least no one shall be
Warmed by me
EDUCATING BEAUTIFUL NEOPHYTES

Young women, unskilled in seduction,

Awkwardly relying on the strength of their beauty

Presenting it without sophistication;

Lacking confidence, coping with the unfamiliarity of
The power they possess

Their tutors will be callous men who won’t appreciate them,

Who’ll dispose of these girls in ways that’ll
Infect them with unspoken insecurities;
And yet, often making them crave more, hurting for it

They are groomed to hate themselves

So that they can be preyed upon more easily

Some will grow hard though, their beautiful faces impassive

As they walk down the streets, meeting the catcalls
With studied indifference, even though
They’re still little girls inside trying desperately to survive

It seems so easy to be beautiful,

Like it’s easy to be the fawn every wolf wants to eat,
So why should anyone feel sorry for them?

Many are those who’ll want to be desired though

Until they too are being torn apart by passing strangers
ELUSIVE INVITATIONS

There is a complexity in
all things but
it requires patience:
the texture in a
blade of grass does not
shout at us,
the song of a common finch
is unremarkable to
busy minds,
and I doubt that
very many conversations
have abruptly ground to a halt
because of the
idiosyncrasies of a
random cloud

What is wise is easily humble;

and natures already
ancient before
the dawn of human wonder
are often content
to be stepped on, blotted
out, or otherwise ravaged by
our indifference

But if you can

go somewhere and
be alone and
accept
meaning without purpose,
they will whisper their
secrets to you
in an unfamiliar language of
unfamiliar clarity
EMPTY SKY

There are no hawks in it

Or lightning to bring dreadful splendor to darkness

It is unpopulated by kites and airplanes

It is free of trivial human things

This sky has nothing to say about the origins of the universe

All the stars banished by its minion sun

As opaque as eternity itself

It raves above us transcending our powers of insight

We can comprehend it only through negation

Despite the inadequacy of that

It is a pale blue veil over the cosmos

Flawless and untouchable

a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h.i.j.E.N.I.G.M.A.q.r.s.t.u.v.w.x.y.z
q.w.e.r.t.y.u.i.o.p.a.s.d.f.g.h.j.k.l.z.x.c.v.b.n.m
a.b.G.K.e.f.S.I.N.j.N.K.Q.n.o.p.q.V.U.T.V.T.w.x.y.z
q.w.e.r.t.y.u.i.o.p.a.s.d.f.g.h.j.k.l.z.x.c.v.b.n.m
a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h.i.j.k.l.m.n.o.p.q.r.s.t.u.v.w.x.y.z
F.S.G.K.Q.H.S.B.o.p.a.s.d.f.g.Q.I.H.N.z.x.c.v.b.n.m
a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h.i.j.k.l.m.n.o.p.q.r.s.t.u.v.w.x.y.z
q.w.e.r.t.K.Q.T.T.V.a.s.H.Y.V.T.X.k.l.z.x.V.V.H.n.m
B.b.c.d.e.K.V.h.i.j.k.l.m.n.o.p.q.r.s.X.I.M.T.N.,.z
q.w.e.r.t.y.u.i.o.p.a.s.d.f.g.h.j.k.l.z.x.c.v.b.n.m
a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h.i.j.k.l.m.n.o.p.q.r.s.t.u.v.w.x.y.z
q.w.e.r.t.y.P.I.o.p.a.s.Z.f.g.h.j.S.M.z.x.c.v.b.V.m
a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h.i.j.k.l.m.n.o.p.q.r.s.t.u.v.w.x.y.z
q.w.B.K.t.E.u.J.o.p.I.X.V.M.g.h.j.B.l.z.x.c.v.b.n.m
a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h.i.j.k.l.m.n.o.p.q.r.s.K.S.B.w.x.y.z
q.w.N.K.S.J.V.N.o.p.a.s.d.f.g.B.K.k.l.z.x.c.v.b.n.m
a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h.i.j.k.l.m.n.o.p.q.r.s.t.u.v.w.x.y.z
q.w.e.r.t.y.u.i.o.p.a.s.d.f.g.h.j.k.l.z.x.c.v.b.n.m
a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h.i.j.k.l.m.n.o.p.q.r.s.t.u.v.w.x.y.z
q.w.e.Q.N.X.I.M.U.T.a.s.d.f.Y.h.j.Z.B.z.x.c.v.b.T.I
a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h.i.j.k.l.m.n.o.p.q.r.s.t.u.v.w.x.y.z
P.I.Z.r.t.y.K.S.E.V.a.s.B.f.g.K.V.k.l.J.I.X.V.M.n.m
a.b.c.d.B.I.V.E.V.M.k.l.m.n.o.p.q.r.s.t.u.v.w.x.y.z
q.w.e.r.t.y.u.i.o.p.a.s.d.f.g.h.j.k.l.z.x.c.v.b.n.m
a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h.i.j.k.l.m.A.Z.U.U.P.M.t.V.E.V.S.U.z
q.w.e.r.t.y.u.i.P.I.a.s.d.f.g.h.j.k.l.z.x.c.v.b.n.m
a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h.i.j.k.l.m.n.Z.M.N.V.U.A.?.v.w.x.y.z
q.w.e.r.t.y.u.i.o.p.a.s.d.f.g.h.j.k.l.z.x.c.v.b.n.m
a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h.i.j.k.l.m.n.o.p.q.r.s.t.u.v.w.x.y.z
q.w.e.r.G.S.H.P.I.Z.V.s.d.f.g.H.T.Z.M.V.x.c.v.b.n.m
a.b.P.d.e.f.g.h.i.j.k.l.m.n.o.p.q.r.s.t.u.v.w.x.y.z
q.w.e.r.t.y.u.i.o.p.a.s.d.f.g.h.I.Z.M.I.X.H.v.b.n.m
a.b.B.M.Z.B.K.?.i.j.k.l.m.n.o.p.q.r.s.t.u.v.w.x.y.z
q.w.e.r.t.y.u.i.o.p.a.s.d.f.g.h.j.k.l.z.x.c.v.b.n.m
a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h.i.j.k.l.m.n.o.p.q.r.s.t.u.v.w.x.y.z
q.w.e.r.t.y.u.i.o.p.C.U.F.H.I.J.j.k.l.z.x.c.v.b.n.m
EPITAPH FOR ICARUS

The genius in your wings,

a fleeting thing

And your ancient myth

now rarely falls from any lips

The sun that cast you down

is leering even now

While the sea that ate you whole

continues to take its toll

If all this makes you sad

still there is solace to be had

Where once your vanity failed,

today that spirit prevails
EULOGY FOR THE IVORY EMPIRE

I am the last bastion of western civilization,

dutiful defender of the great white male patriarchy,
guardian of the grand old status quo

Even as my majestic castle crumbles around me

I remain the very paragon of grace and refinement;
lounging in my study with a decanter of brandy
while a raving plebeian horde clamors at my gates

They will overrun everything soon enough;

a heinous assembly of contradictions united in resentment,
but I just put another log on the fire and take another sip

We gave it our very best my friends

and for a moment we carved a dream out of all this savagery;
so cheers to that but now it seems it must come to an end,
with me alone reminiscing about those glorious days
EUREKA!

an electric splinter
penetrating the densely ensnarled
conduits of the cerebral flesh:

blood dividing before a holy command

becoming
a formless thought,
power above
the shape of things that are

Eureka!
a fire feeding on itself,
stronger than immutable
darkness
EVERY THREAT BECOMES A MIRACLE

I want you to pull the trigger

releasing your anger
into the spinning red rose
that will flower
in my mind

Waiting would be disastrous

A moment
of
simple accidental
reason
can destroy a whole life

You have tilled the soil,

will you not plant it?

The flesh
makes a nice home
for a bullet
to cool down in

Until then
my secret thoughts will keep it company
EXEGESIS OF JOY

A little girl and her father go on their first vacation together

after daddy and mommy's divorce and they go
all the way to Hawaii and spend days
on the beach and they find an
empty conch shell and
she listens to it
enraptured

A young man sees a young woman in a grocery store and she smiles at him
and later that evening she lets him take her in his arms and
they wake up together and have breakfast
naked and unselfconscious
while they get to
know each
other

A teenage boy comes home from school in a state of excitement

because he made the soccer team and breathlessly looks
around for his parents but they haven't arrived yet so
he turns on the radio and goes to the fridge
to get something to drink when
a brand new song comes
on and it's totally
amazing

An elderly grandmother living in a retirement home puts

on her best dress and pats her packed suitcase
when one of the attendants comes in and
tells her that "they've come" and she
steps out into the hall and her
daughter is there with her
two granddaughters
who both run
to her

A middle aged man who’s a professor of linguistics at the

local university goes by himself to an art house
movie theatre to see a Yasujiro Ozu
film recommended to him and
completely to his surprise
he ends up crying from
the sublimity of its
ending

An immigrant couple from a war ravaged region of Yemen have lived

in Mississauga for three years now and today they are in
the hospital because the woman is pregnant with
their first child and when at last their baby
is born the father places him in his
wife's arms and he kneels down
next to her and they stare
silently in awe at their
beautiful child's
fragility
FALL WAS ALWAYS NAMELESS

How nice it would be

to live in an early autumn forever,
where the sun is warm
and the wind is cool,
where time is like a
gradual river, always
knowing its ultimate destination
and so never being in a rush
to get there,
where a diamond tipped sea
shines with endless patience;
I hope that when I die
someone will take me there
FATHOMS OF ARDOR

Nautilus shells swirled

From the cunnilingus of Oceanus,
The tongue of the abyss
Giving shape
To lust

Every desire
A creature of the deep,
A thing slithering
Out of lost epochs

Dark mouths in darkness rising,

From sunlight starved kingdoms
Hungering for luminescent prey,
They digest in silence
The unwary straggler

Perfect love is
A small crustacean
With glittering eyestalks
Scuttling along
The rim of a boiling thermal vent,
A soft translucent denizen of the
Floriferous aqua,
Waiting to be eaten
FAWN OF THE DAEMON

The sound of its breath seeping into the forest,

Into the silence of the fled

Its coat like the surface of a crimson star

Behind it, fields of carrion

Stretching to the beginning of creation,
And towering black clouds of flies
Swirling in occult murmurations

The bleating of the fawn

Disintegrates the flesh of the living

Trees wither in the span of a dream

Sisters of the niqab,

Tend to us fallen...
You alone have strength to give

The fawn is gentle death,

Unhurried death,
Eternal and Pure
Death

A city rose out of my skin,

I cried out,
I was a giant torn apart from within

Sisters, hear my confession

This fawn was born from my own heart

FEBRUARY UMBRA

A vault fading at the edges,

mother of pearl bleeding into tungsten
still dominated by black,
stellar swallowing leviathan,
its underside
overpowering even the sea
and rendering that too
black without remorse

All this spectral in the dim light,

the sublime aura of pristine snow
lantern skin,
its texture dampening the sounds
of a waking city

Out across the bay the oil tankers,

filaments for angelic flood lights
shrouded in radiant anaemia blue and yellow,
they are flanked by shores of residential sprawl,
the cupped hands of the earth
dipping into the sea

Sand grains of gold the individual houses,

bright in their many sleepless doubts,
eroding imperceptibly
FEEDERS ON THE WOOD

Cities have turned us into termites

but how could we expect
to evolve otherwise
within conditions that reward the
social insect?

A man walks by,

his mandibles wagging;
A woman walks by,
her shapely thorax excites me

Everywhere the streets are filled

with the sound of a chitinous murmur

Without the colony, life has no purpose

FINISHING THE GRAPES OF WRATH

You will be a baby again

Time and decay and death will eat you

You will be helpless

You will be reborn

Now you have some power

You can make choices

You can dictate terms

This will be taken from you

You will not even struggle

Because all your strength will flow out of you

Your pride will vanish

Your greed will vanish
Your anger will vanish

You will crave only mercy

Then God will come

FOUR POEMS ON THE FOUR SEASONS

I.
Spring and the chill rain falling,
Softly drumming the trees,
Bushes and their leaves,
The world as gentle as a thrall

Summer daylight sprawling,

Lingering late into each eve,
Stars scattering like thieves
In the cloudless nights that call

Autumn and vanities appalling,

Golden and scarlet reefs,
Drifting as if envious speech
Among lurkers in the hall

Winter the beast come mauling,

Devouring all the weak,
Both the silent and the shriek,
To in the end settle like a shawl

II.
Summer exploded in yellow daffodils,
In a whirl of warm breezes,
Like oriental dragons, translucently rushing through the trees.
Yacht traffic clogged the harbors
And the beaches were
Swarmed with many brandished bodies –
Everywhere abundance manifest

Autumn, majesty spreading through decay,

The red garlands a zealous celebration of mass suicide –
An armada of ships unmoored and vanishing towards no island.
Excess of life piling over itself, excess of color
Clinging to the wet surfaces of silent immobile things.
Less is said now by anyone,
Out of both childish awe and sober dread

Winter drifted in, claiming the world with perfect confidence,

And nothing remained to resist it.
An old heavy white coat inherited long before memory,
It quietly wrapped itself around all that was left –
Your ancestors slept inside it
As it drained them of their music
Replacing the chaos of passion with gentle vampirism

Spring an army going to war,

A nation raised to
Rebellion against a gray monarchy.
Alien beings struggling out of their stasis pods.
Heresies of vegetation, every pulpit echoing dissent –
Meanwhile the rains come with a fresh and furious impatience,
Determined to wake everything undead
III.
Autumn an unmasked victim bleeding from many wounds

Winter a corpse lying on a slab post mortem

Spring a child covered in the scribbles of magic markers

Summer a grown-up at their best costume party

IV.
Winter is the conspiracy taking away everything in secrecy.
It will not be spoken of and it will erase whatever it can.
But at some point, truth is destined to overpower it.

Spring is the enlightenment that puts fear into the church.

Voices rising up in a great riot of debate and assertion.
Every opinion will flourish according to its own merits.

Summer is technology giving us as much as we can dream.

No desire will go unsatisfied provided it’s imagined by us.
By the end though we’ll just be tired of the whole thing.

Autumn is the worldwide collapse of our global civilization.

All our magnificent creations falling hopelessly to pieces.
However this will clear away all the lies that burden us.
FROM WHERE DO YOU COME?

I.

The cavern looms

It beckons
It resonates

The pools absorb every moment

Each step
Brings its own gravity

Silence

II.

Opening to the chambers of a baroque limbo

The rooms advance and recede
The walls shuffle past

Immensity swelling up and abating regularly

A forest is just outside

The way is unknown
It is felt

Rocks falling down a well

Lingered over
Tracing the edge
Floating almost imperceptibly

Chimes rustle

The path gives sterility

And raises up an ivory staircase

It is immaculate
But it is upside down

III.

Their molten rivers

Grinding against the flesh
Heaving
Spiraling
Fracturing
Penetrating the muted stone
The buried depths

Every avenue torn asunder

Stalked
Insect blades
Static electricity
A harmony of iron halos
Churning

Echoes drown the fading inferno

The conflagration
Consumed

Its shadow comes

The ghost of the highest
The mightiest
A hive
A phantom
All their voices
Together
Noise

Ponderously
Devouring the souls of the dead
The living
While faintly the monasteries sing their ecstasies

Harvest eternal
The deserts
The fields

Witness then a cry

Hallelujah
A razor pierces the sky
And the horizon rolls along

They come again

To contemplate after their apocalypse
And sing a bridge of light
Which dissolves in broken water

They gather themselves

A million

So far away
The mystic
A memory only dreamed of

A space between the pulse

A drill

An electrical arc
Extended across the mist

IV.

Reaching inside
Shards of glass swirling in the wind
Lacerating the mind
Enveloping the body
Warp and spirit
A plane
Undulating
Woven geometry
Radiating with primordial will

Flashes of lost psychosis

Circling overhead

The heart stretched along the axis of infinity

A thread

Quivering
The senses retard
Flicker
Naked children writhing under translucent plastic sheets

Their cipher continues unabated

Mechanical stabbing without conviction

A phone
Hung up.
FROZEN CROWS

The dream begins harmlessly enough,

A walk in the phantasmagoria
Of a lush pale forest;
White flora and gray shadows
As dense as neurons shrouding the way

Occasional glimpses of ultramodern architecture

Inspire no immediate questions;
The secret research run
At the clandestine facilities in this land of sleep
Holds no curiosity

Disembodied, my mind is content here

To wander aimlessly along the
Borders of its freedom;
All the normal noise of life has now
Coalesced into silence

But a flaw mars the lovely illusion

And at some point it
Grows too glaring to ignore;
A scattered murder of flying crows
Variously fixed in the air

Nothing stirs them, their feathers do not ripple;

The black spheres of their eyes
Have no hint of inner life;
Yet their outstretched wings and open beaks
Almost seem to rant at time

With sudden violence the whole scene dissolves

Into a vivid confusion and
It takes a few seconds before a sense of
The mattress and blankets are restored,
Even as the unreal lingers on

Hours later the significance of the crows

Remains irritatingly tantalizing;
Enough that I am dimly led to reach for
Machiavelli's book, where I find the translator's footnote,
Imola was only about fifty miles from Florence

as the crow flies

GHOSTS OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM

Pellucid saffron leaves ripple in front of the evening sun

before they let go of branches and fall into jade rivers

In the ravines, thick mist drifts over the autumn forest

and around the russet sleeping, dragon form mountains

Stars slowly begin to collect into a celestial flock of night

watching coldly over a silence filling the eclipsing land

As all the water flowing is gathered into one great stream,

gray boats emerge faintly, filled with dark enigma monks

Massed into a cluttered fleet, they chant like a low wind

and are joined by gibbons wailing and bone white rapids

A nearing waterfall is waiting with idle sage patience

but also with a voice with all the fury of a hornet's nest
GOLEMS

We made them without arms and legs

to teach them the shape of force

We made them with plastic lungs

to teach them the genius of logic

We made them with sociopathic beauty

to teach them the satisfaction of gears

We then gave them a new science

to teach them the blindness of death
GOTHIC INTERLUDE

The pigeons fly beneath

the lofty vault
of the concrete and iron bridge

and the clanging sound

of vehicles descends below
as people
of all kinds walk by with
their hands in their
pockets

the sky is so gray

its white
and the rain so thin
its bright

while I remain
as usual
pensive
HAVE YOU FOUND THE LORD?

I saw him, I took him in;

first, the blank eyes that gave away a man
of faith...
the cool stare of certainty

then, that methodical gait,

got souls to save,
the hint of a smile or a sneer, his
smug righteousness

Ah, but the way those arms swing

like butcher's blades

It's not an act, definitely not

He wears that suit tight and spotless

And he gets up every morning at the crack of dawn,

THE CRACK...

To pray on his knees

HER ABSENCE

Melancholy, I lay down with you

I pry my heart open like a

freshly peeled orange

"What's happening?"
whispers a strange voice

I smile before saying wistfully, happily

"I think I'm dying"

In your crisp clean bed,

the promise of
such beautiful dreams

Even as I can feel the knot in my head

filling with blood

Today I saw the completed jigsaw puzzle

of my honest self
and I was slowly picking it apart,
one piece at a time

Oh God, it would be frightening

if it wasn't so inevitable

Beneath these pastel clouds

glowing with the colors of the master's palette,
I dream that I am awake

And sleep into my annihilation

HERE IS A JUDAS KISS FOR YOU

Cacti bloom upon my brow

like abstract art
growing deeper and wider
until they push out my thoughts
who gasping in the unknown sun
fall apart
miraculously

It's an old song you have forgotten

what is happening to me
a daughter curled inside a bullet
mute and shining

Who needs a poet laureate unless

maybe it's like a birthday that
instead of the tigers
we all know conspiring
there are a million kites released
becoming the scales of Quetzalcoatl
finally returned
HERE IS YOUR LAUREL WREATH

Men are destroyed so effortlessly

they can offer no resistance
Crushed by the mindless gears of nature
Not even the slightest tremor
interrupting its perpetual grinding

Look at your body honestly

Consider how it can be torn apart
The muscles bursting
The sinews stretched and snapped
Your bones your last refuge
a fine dry powder in the mortar bowl

The lowest of gods laughs at your pride

and the hierarchy ascends forever
What a convenient thing to forget
I am not as capable as you though
While I listen to your boasting
and the chorus of praises
all I hear is grain spilling out of a silo
HOLOCAUST OF THE BEASTS

Dolphins leapt soaring from the sea,

each one a dazzling inferno;
Swans, unperturbed, burst into flames
as they decorated placid lagoons;
Horses, galloping, became
meteors, sweeping across darkened plains;
Snakes writhing in tangled nests,
blazed bright in their endless orgies;
Great flocks of crows were
whirling conflagrations, shrieking;
Mice running random spread
their immolation through tall grass;
Bats clung to the walls of their caves,
thousands of sputtering torches;
Elk stood still at the crests of knolls,
their antlers flaring into the sky;
And fire rode the locust swarming over
frenzied layers of their own burning kind;
Only humanity watched from outside
it all, but alone humanity also had to weep
HOSTAGE

I have eaten from the underworld

The king of the dead

Tricked me
So that he could claim me
For his haunted kingdom

Mother I betrayed myself, and you,

And for that
I will always be sorry

Ashamed too

He wore me down though mother,

And even though I fought it,
In the end I succumbed to acceptance
For the briefest possible moment

Forgive me
And my weakness

Do not abandon your suffering daughter

Over her faithlessness, please

I promise that she will cling to you

Even as she spends
Half of her immortality in hell
I AM SO HUNGRY

the whole world couldn't fill me

life breeds and breeds

but no matter how many more
i could still eat another of its children
and they're not even delicious

it's just that there is nothing else

except the abyss inside me
I LOOK AT YOU

And it feels like my chest

is being pried apart by a
crowbar

I want to say your lips are

pretty but they’re not –
If I laid these words before you
it would be like
placing a small carpet
at the feet
of what I really wanted to say

Your lips are the fruit of life –

Dead men can’t understand
just how I’m so alive in you woman

I am a dervish spinning
in your perfect darkness

Your pudendum,
visible beneath your tight clothing –
A sorrow in me
almost better than joy
I NEVER MEANT ANY OF IT

The locust swarm was my mother and the

narcissus flower my father but
I have become both in one child

Easily false, easily bored, moving through

life so easily

One who marvels at the veins

beneath his own skin
because they’re obviously impossible

First you wake up from the dream grateful

but then you keep waking up

And for me this was never clearly

distinguished against anything because
I didn't know "what" to want

So I capitulated and
slowly just let the dogs eat me

They took their time though, being

suspicious of my apathy, and as I had to wait
anyways, I decided to write you this poem
I WILL CALL YOU BEAUTIFUL

When you are sick

and have a runny nose
and puffy eyes
and clammy skin
I will call you beautiful

When you have just woken up

and your hair is all tangled
and your teeth are still unbrushed
and you have sleep crust in your eyes
I will call you beautiful

When you are racked with sorrow

and heaving in anguish
and your mascara is running in sobs
and your darling smile is lost for a moment
I will call you beautiful

When you are old

and your fair skin has become lined
and your lush hair has grayed
and you must shuffle where you used to stride
I will call you beautiful

Because You are

You are
You are
Beautiful

I will call you beautiful

when you are stronger than me or weaker than me
when you are angrier or more joyful
when you feel beautiful or not

I will always call you beautiful

Because You are

You are
So so so
Beautiful
ILLUMINE QUATRAINS

Whoever said book burnings aren't fun

never had one
or lacked a soul as kindred to fire
as us shadows who dance around the pyre

Such literary types

who rather fertile darkness to creative light
would make a show of their outrage
eulogizing every page

Even those from works unread

conjure furies in their heads
the zeal that reason wouldn't soothe
compelled to deny this truth

No words ever crackled so well

as those consumed in a blazing swell
and they that do not destroy
then cannot know half of joy
IMMEMORIAL

The grandfather clock sleeps,

Ticking away in its dreams

But what is it that it dreams of?

The clock was once a fine man,

A farmer living in a hard land

Lack of rain led him to suicide

The clock was once an octopus,

Sinuous through coral gardens

It made a nice seafood dinner

The clock was once a mountain,

Trees like acolytes at its feet

Dynamite freed the coal inside it

The clock was once a bridge,

A covenant between two villages

A storm cast it into the river below

The clock was once an airplane,

Untouchable in the jewel blue sky

It scattered itself across a runway

The clock was once an enemy city,

Proud of its high and elder walls

Then everything was razed to ash

The clock was once a crying infant,

Born to an ancient king and queen

Deformed, it was left outside to die

And this clock is going to go on,

Dreaming now through all eternity
IN THE FALLING EVENING

The silent metamorphosis of sunset

Turning the sea to silver,
Turning the horizon into molten gold

Among this blue shadow world

Are the black hydras of trees
Splintering into silk leaves
Reptilian green and flowers
Albino white

And the phosphorescence of car head lights

And the vermillion of their tail lights,
Pulsing in opposite parallel directions,
Hunger for
The anathema of the night

The moon is lost!

The moon is gone!
Where is the moon you people!

I see only a soft shell of turquoise

Unhatched across the sky

What nightmare grows within?

My beige mind does not know,

It cannot comprehend
Such esoteric mysteries and so
I walk faster,
Alone rushing towards
The banal sanctuary of my home

All the meanwhile

Bearing unwilling witness to
The fiery death of a star
Cast into
The underworld
IN VINO VERITAS

So Christ opened up His veins

And fed us from His heart
And the scales fell from our eyes
And we drank of our own sins

But none of the gospels

Quite capture Christ's irony
Where Peter the Rock betrays
His master at every trial

Where Christ gave custody of

The group's coin purse to Judas
Because that's how little
He truly thought of money

Where the Son of Man says

Don't cast pearls before swine
Even as He preaches among
Pharisees and Sadducees

Those who take up the sword

Must surely die by the sword
And He does not bring peace
No rather He brings His sword

So Christ said we must have faith

And faith was in the communion
And His father gave Him a cup
And Christ prayed not to drink it
INCESSANT UNTO ULTRA

I have anthems of anathema inside me

And desires like stars in crossfire

Even an aeon’s vigil, ascendant

Over the farthest occult horizons

Revelations of eternity devour me,

The hours shattering like stained glass

A world envelopes my decaying flesh

But what I aspire to is infinitely more vast

The craving of a light most dire;

For a prism mind, new colors seen

Obliterating the opaque icon of myself,

Radiant without the least loss of wealth

A new creation of the transcendent power;

Prodigal, yet can I not return?

So I will remain, incessant unto ultra,

For as long as my stars must burn
INFLATED EGO

Praise me

Admire me; see… I swell

Yes, I am

A movie star and yes

I am rich

Crowds hold out

Photographs

With my huge face on them

Desperate for me

For my bored attention

I keep swelling

And I am rising

Higher and higher every day

Watch, the clouds

Are parting around me

But suddenly

I am becoming old

Unpopular

Someone actually doesn’t

Return my call

And it touches me like a pin

Now I am exploding

Now I fall to the ground in shreds

INTERSECTING DICHOTOMIES

Without Love there can be no other Emotions

except one.
No Joy, no Sorrow.
Love is the White Light of Emotions
and they are its colors.
Love subsumes them all.

Light though has its opposite:

Darkness.
As it is, without Light there is only
Darkness,
So it is, without Love there is only
Hate.

Hatred though is prior to Love

just as Darkness is prior to Light.

Light originates from a shadow eclipsing itself,

from Total Darkness darkening,
the
negation of Negation.
Only a light can darken the Void,
only through Light
can the Void conceal itself.

And so it is with Love and Hate:

Love is born
from the self-loathing of the All Hate,
Destruction destructed,
the asymmetry of Symmetry without Asymmetry
balanced by added asymmetry.

Around and around

and around the Zero Axis, everything turns.
INVASION

In the confused void of

Dreaming sleep,
The darkness silent and awesome,
A glowing pulsing
Something
Arose

At first it was only a

Crimson light –
The hunger of the emptiness perhaps
Gnawing itself raw

But the light soon

Coalesced into detailed form –
The heart of it
A crystal, an energy,
Estranged from the ordinary world

***
He awoke sweating,
Drenched in his own bed –
The white noise of the blood inside him
Throbbing in his ears

Too early and too late,

He shouldn’t have gotten up
But he was filled with adrenaline now

Leaving the door open as he

Exited his room,
He descended the old wooden stairs
That led to the main floor of
His family’s home –
Each slow careful step of his bare feet
Drawing out
Quiet groans from the
Floorboards

Then he wandered past the living room

Into the kitchen where
He found them

His parents,
Sitting across from each other

Both of them turned to look in his

Direction but instead of eyes, the same
Crystal from his nightmare
Bleeding out of their sockets into
The green gloom

There he was,
A child standing before horrors
JESUS AND SIDDHARTHA

In the desert, under the Bodhi tree;

Each of them fasting, waiting for revelation

First however comes temptation;

Fear and desire, the twin horns of the beast

Because truth is without defect

It cannot be reached imperfectly

They must be pure who are divine;

The world having no power over them, obeying

Seas, illusions, death; a heart of God beats in all,

Commanding them, as one body, one blood

The eternal lives in everything;

Its spirit though, mirrored only in the bravest few
JINGOIST SLOGAN

pro war any war

we'll make it

a good

war
JOKES FROM THE DRUNK TANK

I’ll have a marriage on the rocks,

Followed by a divorce, neat

She said she couldn’t cope with me when I was wasted;

I said I couldn’t cope with her when I was sober

Days after we broke up we came to an arrangement –

She’d stay in the house and I’d stay in the bottle

Then my boss told me drinking on the job was unacceptable;

I replied it was no bacchanalia but it did the trick

Eventually I started skipping out on work for Happy Hour,

Until one day I was cleaning up spilled whiskey with a pink slip

Before becoming a full-time boozer I was a part-time lawyer,

But I haven’t passed a bar since.

My affinity for martinis however is hardly a surprise;

I think I’m part olive on my father’s side.

Barely a night goes by when I don’t go out for a pick-me-up;

And usually they end when the cops have to pick me up

The funny thing about jokes like these though –

They’re only funny when they’re not true
JUVENESCENCE

A gray veil for the cold coming of spring,

The raw earth again a child bride
Reborn from a season of death

Her flesh is bursting with cruel life

Lordly triumphant and brutal,
While white roots spread through her still body
And the birds sing joyously

They fill her silence with their ecstasy,

The animals stirring, the wind in the new leaves, all of them;
And every flower is a blossoming wound
Radiating all the brilliant colors of her pain,
Plaguing her with endless strife

Wilderness has bound her in its anarchy,

Reenacting old eons of violence,
Never once failing to avail itself
As it erases her muteness

Because they merely usher the next cycle

She dreads even the dark reprieves of night
And peaceful solitudes of winter
KING OF THE PROPHETS

Blake sits at my feet,

Dante eats from my hand;
I am the master of this house

All my predecessors
Tried to see as far as I have
And failed

Gratitude?

If I have stood on the shoulders of giants

It’s because I climbed them myself,
They did not raise me up

The dead are lucky though

Not to see what has come after

All their values have been discarded

The God of Blindness laughs;

He takes all knowledge
And multiplies ignorance from it

In an age of total literacy

One sees how worthless truth is

The court has grown tired of all thrones

But I am the master of this house,

This vacant house
LIMERICK OF LIES

Dishonest John
Made a promise
That he would fetch
The zoo some llamas

When he didn't
They were livid
And so they fed him
To the iguanas
LIVING IN THE SHADOW OF TRUTH

Prison became like a divine whore cradling my head in her arms

and still I live inside her; but of course geometrical logic has no power
here in a surreal dreaming land.
She strokes my hair softly and asks me in a musical voice
why I hurt so much. I don't know what to tell her.
I never fought in any war.
The freedom-loving militias didn't visit my house one day and drag me away screaming
to become an all-killing boy. I was not one of the politely forgotten victims of some
flickering news reel pogrom.
Yet still I must slightly envy them; not their hardships unfortunately
but rather their capacity to reconcile themselves to the same world I cannot
even as I am jealous of their credence.
It's a foolish thing to wish for the grace of God; I know that now.
More foolish than provoking the incurious sentinels of an irreparable
city? Perhaps I am not brave enough to find out.
And even if they can give me Bodhidharma's gift I don't know that I will thank them.
Furthermore, if I do thank them, it may be nothing more than a ruse designed to
delude myself at their expense.
I must ask her, if it's not too much trouble, if she will please stay with me until my body
grows into these walls and I can instead incarcerate someone else.
LOGOS IMMACULATUS

Sometimes the words come out wrong –

Like fish pulled from the sea
They flop around, helpless ugly things,
And the air
In the space of silence filling
Dead conversation
Remains unbreathable, monstrously
Unbreathable

It’s a difficult thing to desire to be known, to be

Understood on your own terms –
We are all slaves within the minds of others,
Or maybe just rag dolls
Carried by merciless children who
Care nothing for our hope

Why bother at all then?

It’s possible to live, even among others,
As hermits after all –
Donne may have been right
About us not being islands but still

We can spend our whole lives

Raising fortifications
Against all the challenges of other’s schemes –
We can all die inside our own razor wire

In dialectics though there is something

Called the principle of charity,
And all it asks

Is that we look for whatever good might be there

LONELY BURNING POLICE CAR

Red and yellow flames flare in the night,

Rushing out the windows
From its black gutted insides

The white paint on its chassis

Fading at the edges into shadow

I’ve seen this sight

Multiple times on the evening news

Always there is one abandoned police car,

Only the riots are different

How strange it’s always just one

LUCIFER

Under stars measuring out

The ages of humanity
I watch over a world that is
Blind to me,
A world caught in the
Jagged horizon
Of warring light and shadows

I am the air
Waiting in silence outside
Empty store fronts
Dark in the undawned morning,
The atmosphere over
Dim streets
Receding to lonely ends

Haunting

Always haunting

Adjusting the attire of

Bundled travelers
With my innumerable invisible fingers
And whispering to them
In ways they can’t perceive

Caressing the angelic desires they conceal

Wild as incendiary flames

I visit them in their

Deepest selves –
The dark and silent
Valleys of the soul,
The place
Where truth waits

I alone
Dare to peel the shame from them…

To incite
These tongues of fire burning
In the mouths of a
Shadow people,
To split open their
Dark skulls
Even as All Hell is gushing forth
From their bony jaws
And gutted eye sockets

I am the one revealing

God to you

God of chaos, the divine in chaos

I am the light bringer
In your time –
This Aeon of Christ Occulted,
Born out of
Your own secret prayers

Eventually you will

Tire of your illusions though,
Awakening to transform

All your memories of the sun into

Daylight merely dreamed of
LUMBRICIDAE

elongating
contracting
the worm half burnt
stranded
on solid ground

the unyielding pavement

a nightmare
denying
a desperate longing
for
the earth
LYCANTHROPE

I am the beast, the carnivore, the one who has dominion.

My path empties before me.

I devour the weak.

I trample over the dead.

And as I feed, I grow. Jaws

Yawning as wide
As the underworld, forgetting no one.

Plowing through packed city streets,

Gorging on teeming mouthfuls.

Enlarging supernaturally.

My flanks batter the sides of trembling buildings

Buckling at my snarling rage as I gallop after more carnage.

Terror whets my lust –

The more abject the better.
Grovel. Wail.

I make the storm but I am the calm in the eye.

An indifference. A power.

More. More.
Shatter all to ruin.
Every portion of destruction
Adds to me.
I am swelling into
Something inconceivable.

Avalanche of broken monuments and inhumanity.

What is humanity?

Shall I count the things I crush?

The beating of my heart is the gong of slaughterhouses.

I am tax. I am debt.
I take and take and take.

A vault.

The whole Earth is fulfilled by my desires.

MARITAL HUSBANDRY

Why do you frustrate me?

All I want to do is remake you

Into the perfect thing
I can imagine you becoming

I believe in you

My frustration is
Proof of my devotion –
You understand that don’t you?

I yell at you because I love you

What do you want to talk to

Your family for?

Can’t you see

I’m doing what’s best for us?

Sweetheart, they’re just bruises

They’ll disappear soon,

But they prove my passion for you,
Which won’t

You made a vow to me

To be mine until death

MEDIA SEGUE

Night vision news feed...

brightbulletssprintingthroughthegreengloom
play sound clip: gibberish wailing'
but their drab cities
evoke none of the sympathy
reserved for occidental architecture'
so when the missiles hit their PiXeLaTeD targets
everyone cheers.
the casual ties are mounting ++
never mind: this just in
*a*washed*up*celebrity's*DUI*mug*shot*
METEOR SHOWER

Rich red rose petals rest

Like drops of blood
Along the pavement –
One here, one there, another
Further on

He is staggering through the shattered night,

Through a glass city radiant
With sterile lights

One hand holds nothing

And trembles from it,
The other clutches a mangled bouquet
Held upside down –
His gift for them

Stupefied, his feet move aimlessly

In a halting rhythm;
Limbs hollowed of marrow,
A man absorbed in empty streets
And a heart hammered
By the chaos of silent grief

The walls were as white as powdered bone

While he waited

Now he finds himself

Wandering across the grass of a park,
Under stars surrounding him like
The mouths of lampreys

He was the best man at their wedding,

And during all the difficulties of the pregnancy
He always made sure to make himself
Available to assist in any way –
Then tonight he suddenly found himself useless

Looking upwards he’s startled by

The beams of fleeting brightness, and a thought

At least the child waited to die

Until after the mother
MISE–EN–NEIGE

I like the snow

It tells you where you've been

A field of soft white powder, remembering

Suggestive even, and silently encouraging

Our footsteps a kind of fragile gift,

traces of each passing moment

artlessly together,

showing us untraveled places

where we can be new

and free

The snow is pure

It welcomes me

It gathers on the trees, the fences

I am surrounded

I am relaxed

A whole sky the color of pearl

and me alone, under it

The crows too are a distant delight

A huddled man is shoveling

a sidewalk far far away

The scraping sound is pleasant and I

just lift my arms, up

towards infinity
MY LIPS MEAN BUSINESS

My lips are monopolizing lips,

My lips don't want to share
Your lips
Even with another part
Of my body

My lips want to negotiate

Exclusive rights to yours,
My lips want to sit down at a table with
Your lips
And hash out every detail
Of a binding contract

My lips desire
The perfect merger between
The companies of our mouths

My lips will pay dividends,

My lips will give yours
The controlling share,
Whatever it takes
To make the deal happen
MY SOULMATE CONFESSING TO ME

Sometimes you love me so much

it scares me

No, I’m not afraid of you

but I shiver at your
idea of destiny

Of desire fated from genesis

I know nothing

I am a mortal woman
pleased with
the joy that sleeps eventually

In your nightmares
you cry out for eternity
and I tremble next to you
invisible

Know that I love you too though

and I welcome the wind
that blows away
any distance between us

But let me love you in my own way

Please, let me love you

temporarily
MYSTERY OF THE H.M.S. INTREPID

The remains of a demasted frigate sways at the constant

prodding of the insistent waves

A great battered section of her wooden hull, lying

where the sand and ocean endlessly negotiate,
reveals up its underside, a vast breach
spilling out its contents, leaving the ship like the carcass
of some majestic beast,
eviscerated

Starving, thirsting, sun stroked British men,

among the manliest in the empire,
are crawling around a beach, mostly blind, moaning, scorched
by the bloody salt of the sea
and the cloud forsaken sky even as
their more sensible companions lie properly dead

This is all transpiring somewhere in the vicinity of Kiribati

It is not long before the natives arrive to investigate

the supernatural calamity of these strangers,
their small boats swarming the
immediate area and their best warriors and witch doctors
marveling at the wreckage
as they try to conjure the right explanation

When discussion ends, everyone agrees

that the strangers must have angered powerful gods
and that the best course of action is to lend the gods a hand,
which they do by repeatedly thrusting their spears
into the pale dying strangers
and crushing their skulls with large rocks
until the massacre is over and everyone is satisfied

Meanwhile nearby, a scuttling cluster

of shiny crabs is vivisecting a newly terrestrialized seagull
NEPENTHE

My goddess first comes to me in immolate apparitions,

in the wisps of secret delight, a dragon whispering;
to me a field of orange death welcoming,
embraced in the mystic substance of the body

Permeating each nerve with twisted exhilaration,

divinely exploding like the children of Vimy Ridge;
one by one, all over, too soon except the long memory

What does she inhabit while denying her spirit?

This inhuman buddha of an insensible ambrosia...

We who become her suckling litter

are perfect and sexless in our consumption,
and so eager to give up our youth, we willingly transform
into eyeless heartless maggots

Our only regret is that it can't last forever

Even when all our life has been desecrated, it’s not enough
to bridle our lust or renounce the truth,
that she loved us better than anyone ever could

From the very beginning when we offered our fresh bodies

for her temple, to the last sanguine injury against our
disposable selves, she never betrayed our hunger

Others can see no more than the detailed violence that misshapes us

Yet how could we sacrifice so much if the reward wasn’t greater?

NIGHT IN APOCALYPSE

Nocturnal mind of phantom gears

Turning silently towards an hour of exit

The animal disembodied clockwise –

Vacant corridors, enigmas, and concrete stairwells
Levitated through in the almost afterlife
Seclusion that has coalesced
From scavenged books, from forgotten dreams,
From ordinary death –
A crown of fury placed each evening on a fugitive
Pushing wide a door into the exotic darkness
And chill unstirring air

Razor of a pale thin moon reaping

The last breaths of vengeance,
I welcome you every time because I am
Your eager disciple at the very least,
If not your legacy and the last of your blood

Reciprocate to me now then

While your traitors sleep in their serene and
Heartless mansions –
Speak in haunting columns of pale light
Among centuries of leviathan trees,
Murmur out of the aching neon
That impales itself across glass store-fronts
And wraps around all your legion towers of kabbalah

Your secrets you keeper of wisdom,

I come into your realm
For them alone

My rapture in your splendor is desire

For the milk of your breast, to feed off your infinite life
And eternity forever, selfishly, yes I crave you
Selfishly as a child must –
So give and be generous then

I. Occultation

Nothing was hidden before the light

But then the sleeping void conceived a secret,
A nightmare,
And a mouth formed to cry out
And it birthed a lie into being
Which it tried to fix into a talisman,
Which it shattered again in frustration,
Before departing

You who inherit the darkness

Are the dust of what was broken
Being sifted by an echo

It is still happening
Even now it can be heard in the alleys
Among the locked garbage bins
And abandoned mattresses –
It is a whisper slithering through the machinery
Busy and multiplying, all the omens of economy,
The schizophrenic mass media, every
Figment of imagination and
Worldly discovery

It is revealed in your dwindling temples,

Under the stain glassed
Shards of your saints;
It swells in the pipes of the
Cathedral organs

It is ecstasy in loneliness,
The quiet hours, the darkest hours –
It is intertwined in the sound
Of your own beating heart, now harder,
Now softer

The libraries vomit out all their knowledge

And still they scarcely hear it

II. Initiation

From chaos, order

A new genesis resurrecting itself,

Taking shape in celestial brilliance –
A world climbing out of death

Volcano outpouring fire in the eye of the sea;

Molten stone, incandescent orange,
Crashing into the sizzling of black waters
Under a black cloudless sky
Where one day the lights will form into
A faint constellation of Orion
Above the glow of a metropolis

Lifeless island of earth,

A tropical wasteland groaning towards a
Promise, death in metamorphosis,
Destruction of the ancient graveyards of unconscious,
Flourishing into glory but only from suffering
Because the seeds that found
No water or soil to sustain them
Could have also grown into things magnificent

Verdant land rising, spreading into savage arms

Sprawling over virgin country –
Roots swollen with the slaughter of primordial beasts,
Drinking deep, sunk deep, fingers stretched into
The plutocracy of hidden depths
Finally a tree, a tree at last ascending
Into the abyss-blue dusk and branching towards the stars,
A towering tree of smooth gray bark whose trunk
Will part into gilded royal doors, golden and baroque,
A tree budding with all the mysteries of life –
You will eat from this tree
And you will hang from this tree,
Harvested and reaper one,
Danced around ceaselessly by ellipses of pale lunar children
Forever distant from everything human

Open the gates majestic, come light

Follow a winding path into the mountains,

The young all going with wide eyes and nervous glances,
Their heads full of terrifying rumors as
Shale rocks clatter haphazardly down the slope,
Each dislodged by an awkward footstep –
They give themselves
To their elders and to their faith,
Trusting and eager for protection they
Offer their trembling skin to the blade in hope,
Ultimately always in hope

III. Excruciation

Over the gloom of the garden the owl perches,

Stealth observer to the business going on –
How the ambush will play out
For the prayerful, the sleeping, and
Those who come with rippling torches as
Sweat descends down their red faces

Fragrant Osmanthus Evergreen,

Your sweet perfume curls through the autumn air,
Anointing even the one who would cut you down

Azure petals in the soft breeze

Drifting around the body of
An enemy being methodically mutilated
While gagged and bound to a stake,
Petals like the fuchsia petals
Swirling across the cobblestone streets
Where the crowd stands
With all eyes on the executioners axe,
And these petals are also the same as the
White petals stained with blood
Underneath lovers murdered in their bed

That which was green was torn up,

Discarded easily,
As if inhaled in a single breath
By some
Unfathomable being
That only appears to us
As oblivion
Orifice in asphalt,
A pit among the twilight citadels
Heaved up –
City streets parallel, perpendicular,
With makeshift plywood walls
To guard a precipice,
They even have slits to satisfy
Curious passersby –
Here comes one now to stare pryingly,
To examine the bulldozers and backhoes
Idle in the gravel, to ruminate
On business not his business and to
Question things he should not question
Even though he has so little time

And his presence invites the presence of another,

Which attracts still more, and more,
People uncomfortable in their suits and ties
Wanting to look, wanting to see
Without any clear reason –
They swarm the evening like insects,
Ignoring the bullhorns that command them to disperse,
The tornado siren that follows fortuitously
But somehow to no avail –
Their eyes devour the pit until
Suddenly it begins to collapse, its bottom falling out,
Disappearing into a void, the machines as well,
The debris, everything, and the edges of the pit
Start to crumble too, carrying with them
Those who had gathered, everyone shouting,
Tumbling into the emptiness

The same swollen blistered hands that today

Shiver to turn a creaking valve,
Ferried the heavy stone used to build our sphinx long ago;
The one whose riddles we cannot answer
Under the comet’s pale light
Perpetually cast on our shadow world

You have lorded over others

So now you shall be lorded over

Ardent embers in the bonfire illume

Tombs ancient and decayed,
Mausoleums to masters of empire
Acquired through war and fear;
Now become the relics of memories
Less even than memories

In the fog of noise and chorus of hallucinations

She stands alone and sings her aria –
Liberty, to speak liberty, to have the answer in her heart

Truth is the eternal heresy

IV. Transfiguration

Altar on the spire axis of the sprawl,

Panorama of radiant skyscrapers
Where the elect stand witness outside contest
And the face above them
Finally removes its zodiac mask

I saw it, the body of the living one,

In the smoke of burnt flesh,
In sapphire waterfalls
And beehives silent, hollow,
Dried out and warped –
I saw the living one rise from
A boiling psychic ether and
For a brief moment
All the things before me
Flared into their every fatal form

Overflowing symbolism of the world

Always so close to perfection,
Meeting the starship of my thoughts
And then
Disappearing

Leaving a green-gray grisaille terrain

Where my wary beliefs
Prowl around matters of the utmost concern

The highways that lead to lost places divide before me

But I am tired of the crafts they promise, the rituals,
So I keep to myself –
I want to remember what it was like
When I wasn’t suspicious of my passions and
I could be sure that everything would turn out fine,
But I just can’t make myself believe it anymore

And I try, I try very hard

The living one hurt me with its grace,

It put a wound inside me that only it could heal

It made me want to die

In my heart, in an apotheosis of my heart
Which I could never resist –
I am a locked-vault waiting,
Wishing I were a skeleton key,
Not even knowing
Whether I contain wealth or nothing

V. Revelation

Nature abounds in beauty undoubtably,

From a fallen butterfly
Plundered alive by swarming ants
To a hidden jungle village
Scorched to sputtering ruins
In the sudden hammer-drop of napalm –
Carnage is beautiful and
The more intense the more so

Destroying angels will sweep it all away in fire,

The shaded edifices of mortal reason
Giving way inexorably to
A vatican of prism shining in the umbra;
The terminal of every promise
Resurrected in the very victory of grief

Alive without end,

Alive and whole the dead –
Elohim moulted from the bursting skin of men

Flesh, stretched transparent

By bulging ivory wings,
Wrest and sloughed in the soaring eureka
Unleashed, the hurricane of liberation
And intoxicating divinity –
Even the most grasping tyrant
Will cast off their legalistic slavery that day,
Peeled of the weight of false thirsts, the armor accrued
Through millenniums of fear, and then their stars will move
Unhindered again,
Coalescing into streams of lightning
Setting arson to the ordinary

The shunning of the blessed

Cannot persist forever –
In its exile it shall simply grind new lenses to see with,
And the telescopes will pile up around you

Secrets-illimitable are blooming in

Every element of being –
Nature mystic, organism in continuum with technology,
Unfolding not only in the corpses but also as they
Hypertext the words of prophecy –
Portals to labyrinths unending
Nevertheless resolved in the singularity of the omega

Strife alone lives in illusions,

Our evasions of the truth breeding in agitator thoughts
And hopelessly denying that
War is the most profound absence,
The dire vacuum
Too unbearable to voice

Hourglass trickling away in quiet

Are you listening?

You have a choice to make

And you are choosing for eternity
NIYUU HIBAKUSHA

A terrible light the holocaust mouth of a fathomless whale

consuming krill envelops you
the city the countryside every thing
an indifferent fire
unleashed by a kindly old man with clear blue eyes
who had become the destroyer

You don’t know any of this

Heaven just poured out all its fury on you
without warning

You were only trying to catch a train

which you still did
but this time
after your flesh was ravaged
your senses humbled
and you had crawled over
a river of your own naked dead

And when you arrived at the other city of destiny

no one would believe you
until the unbelievable came again
paralleling the resurrected messiah of your enemy
in the fullness of His glory

Decades later the apocalypse remains

cruelly obscure
as if you weren’t owed an answer
why
your wife and son were spared
or why
pale silent human beings
touched by the same unjust vengeance
wait for you at night
simply to get up one after the other
from their endless corpse pile
and shuffle past
as if there was no one else they should rather condemn

For the rest of us it is hardly more than a myth

and that is also why by the end
you simply sat and wept
alone in the garden among the bodhisattva
OLYMPUS GONE

Neptune awoke upon the shore

And for a moment he forgot he was a god

The Mediterranean that day was sapphire blue

Against the desolate coasts of Asia Minor
But the old titan only scanned them with bleary eyes

Clawing a knotted beard laden with sand,

He muttered pantheons of curses to himself;
Prostrate as he searched for something
Amid the gently crashing surf

There! A ways off he saw it,

The symbol of his abyssal reign in surging waves

Dragging himself to his feet

He staggered naked towards it –
A lord of the ancients with sagging gray testicles

At his object now, he stooped to pick it up,

Only to be pierced by a new dismay

His outstretched hand shimmered into something unreal,

A fleeting phantasmagoria that
Left his cold barnacled flesh solid once more;
Nevertheless the omen was unmistakable

Damn their empire! Their emperor!

He fell to the ground again and

With his face in his hands, he wept
Next to the unreachable scepter beside him

He had been discarded for a jew

ORPHEUS RELINQUISH ME

I want to sleep in the wheat fields

and become golden like them
without effort

Under the shining darkness

my skin can
coalesce with the moon

Lying against the Earth

I may finally
hear it with my whole body

Then perhaps
I shall at last
dream well and sigh
OUR GOD IS THE COSMIC MECCA

A never ending genesis of free spirits arising to infinity;

Eternal communion forever catalyzing new progress

All of physical reality their body, perfect

In the whole of their own divine acquiescence –
As passive as Christ was passive before those who crucified Him

Electricity springing from the void,

Animus in every branch of evolution propelling its
Metamorphic children towards the farthest horizon of their being;
They who are teleology entire and the sum for all things

Can you prophesy an esoteric harmony that’s limitless in nature?

Then you are on the threshold of everlasting life

As asteroids around a star, us around God;

A septillion beaming sun our God
Unfurling rays in streaming cascades of light –
Fire and darkness, radiation and gravity; axisymmetric all of nature
Through the pulsing power of the divine dynamo,
Every single fate circuits our God
Because even galaxies are lunar to our God

With thoughts as independent as people,

Cities of one commonwealth are all our minds within God teeming

Souls moloculed with souls to realize spiritual incarnations

Beyond even the mystical revelations of deepest ascetic solitude;
We leech upon the Almighty, nothing we consume
Ultimately of our own self-creation

Omnipotence in devotion, a devotion withdrawing itself so that

We’ll have a world of our own in total freedom –
Liberty flourishing and truly superlative

This carnage drowning the universe, a sacred absence;

The doom in the machinery of history, our God always within
OUR LEGIONS OF MARS

Argonauts of a cratered heart,

The pounding blood pump
Red with ready war

Fear and hate impale themselves in us,

Lightning striking from the sky
At random suits of armor

The dead here are half swallowed in the mud;

Their crooked limbs in smithereens,
Terror etched on scorched faces

Genius minds devised our strategies

And almighty machines hauled us heavy arms,
But in the end we didn’t know what we were fighting for

A single ridge was holy now,

Sanctified by endless lieutenants
Who led us distantly over crackling radios

Through the fires we sprinted,

Commands hissing amid volcanos of artillery;
Ignorant our enemy’s leaders surrendered hours ago
OUT OF THE ISLAND MEADOW

Your voice, calling to me

From the other side of a dream,
And whether I am awake or asleep
I cannot say

Your voice, softly drowning

The crashing waves as I draw near
Without strength or effort

Your voice, the elusive power

Filling half-sung words
That render the world utterly luminous
And encompass everything in a
Single shared serenity

Your voice, the beacon of

All the desires in me drawing me closer,
Inexorably closer; a fate
Written across my trembling sails

Your voice, leading me into the rocks

And the white bones of my predecessors as
The keel of my ship groans
Before it shatters
And the waters swallow me whole
OUT OF YOUR HEART

Dark clouds wander past

The edge of your desert –
They do not block the spears of
Beaming sunlight
That radiate down on it,
The halo of blindness
Which burns into you
A fear of all that is holy

Look under this rock –

Do you find love under it?
How about that one?
No? Nothing? Because
Love is your dream of a river,
A hope for rain,
Moisture in the early dawn –
And all you have
Are their distant mirages

Every mirage confesses

The emptiness of the desert,
Every thirst
The absence of water –
But you are the desert,
The desert is you,
It is not something
You can escape from

Love is every green thing

Rising up
All at once –
This would erase you

You are the desert –

What you are
Turns love into dust
PALLAS ATHENA

From your spear, peace is sown and

From your chastity, the earth becomes fruitful and
From your useful arts, all contrivances are disposed of and
Great goddess, first among the daughters of Olympus,
Just as you sprang from your father's head
Fully formed, let me fill your divine skull and
Spring whole from yours.
PANOPTICON

Vivid as avarice in usury,

Eyes dividing the living and demised –
A divine insidiousness supervened across the sky

The stars now watching, waiting, restless,

Darkness drawn in silent menace;
All the almanac a sinister presence
While trivial guiles, nearly innocent, prevail

Amid the frivolous gambits of mankind

Something strange inhabits the mundane –
Preceding all awakening it invades
Dreams like vacant dress, an ingenious force
Betraying, here and there, hints of sly intelligence.
In the familiar it is the ominousness

The trace of brutal truth in our illusions –

Immortality that underneath serves the cosmic beast

A genesis for massacre, progenitor primeval –

Inimitable artifice which will persist
Even after all are equal. But to what end?

What good can come from this zoo of violence?

PAPER TIGERS FALLING FROM THE SKY

Tumbling in the air like nursery rhymes

adorably tripping on a child's tongue… welcome…
all across the waking world… care free vacation callers…
please… and the flowers opening to answer…
welcome… welcome… we’ve waited so long for you…
the paper tigers… noiseless… twirling…
all the flower petals unfurling… please… what's ours is yours…
don't hesitate to ask… please… please…
things of god and man swollen with optimism…
be welcome… and the paper tigers are so happy today…
they are welcomed by the tidy houses
with their flags flying in the steady summer breeze…
our pleasure really… our pleasure…
they are welcomed by the busy city streets…
please… the hotel doors revolving… revolving… so many please…
welcome… welcome... please and thank you…
bright tall flowers waving from their apartment balconies…
from the public gardens… from day cares…
it’s been too long really… what kept you… what…
and the ripe cherry trees are jangling merrily
while the bashful sun says hello… hello… and boy
it sure looks like a nice day… it sure does…
and clean white laundry waving from clothes lines…
how do you do… we've heard so many good things… but please…
first let's have some tea… paper tigers… paper tigers…
today is your day… say the radiant flowers…
say the pristine streets… come in… come in…
make yourself at home… and they do…
the paper tigers bursting with joy… so glad for the invitation…
embracing everyone… the flowers… the trees…
the cars… streets… buildings and all… no one forgotten…
no one… because the paper tigers waited so long…
so very long… and carried so much light…
such generous light… light for the freshly cut lawns…
light for the rows of racked bicycles… light for
trees and flowers… yes say the flowers…
their star drenched leaves… rustling… levitating…
the cars in the streets floating up high… dancing with trees
and mailboxes and people… all of them dancing…
above… above… things of god and man
carried far above… transported away… so blissfully…
all things everywhere… filled
with the warm embrace of the light…
for all the doors of heaven are opened this day…
vistas of pleasant remembrance…
thank you… you're so very kind… and finally…
an endlessly lovely nostalgia for all the invisible cities
PERSIA

From your golden deserts a host of winged lions soar –

They ride the whirlwinds through your mountains
Into the whispering jungles of Shomal, the jeweled terraces of
Badab-e Surt, and the shadowy valleys of Seppidasht

They cover you, carrying the ancient strength that is yours

Both to have and to protect, the treasure that cannot be stolen
Even as it’s bursting from its vaults, increasing without end the
Glory of every generation; only save this from neglect

Where are the archers of the Achaemenid if not in you?

Memories like the colors on a silk brocade flow through one another,
The dancing illuminations of impassioned hands capturing
Spirit in shape, idea in form, and an elegance that pervades being

Hard years have fallen on you but even with the worst
You still write poetry on your tombs and your delicate gardens
Remain beautiful, testifying to the splendor of the gentle –
Meanwhile in the north, Damavand tall and brilliant, endures
POET FOLLIES

Lovely sad Sylvia

falling victim
to Freudian sophism

Ezra ever so clever

but the war
made you a bore

Dylan a willing bombast

too many drinks
past the brink

Emily her very own

quiet calamity –
a crypt of manuscripts
POETRY IS BLACK AND WHITE

Color just deviates into graphic design

The poetic reality doesn't exist within the form of the words

By contorting words to visual forms you are creating a hybrid art

There's nothing wrong with using words as a graphic medium but that's not poetry

Poetry is about the renaissance of language

Poetry is what happens when old words are infused with new meaning

A poet is someone who uses the most able means to communicate such insights

The goal here is to see how much can be captured in how little

Ideally it will all be expressed in the purest form that a genius can imagine

The goal is to illuminate the infinite within the atomic

When the universe can be summarized in a period the poets can hang up their hats

A poem should definitely not try to be anything

Being is a thing in itself and poetry is what illuminates being

If poetry displaced being, all of its light would be lost to the darkness

Without a world to shine on, the light of poetry simply beams into nothingness

Poetry can only be written in as much as the poet lives imaginatively

That's why bad poems are meaningless and meaningless poems are bad

There is nothing to say about darkness since all darkness is absence

If a poem has nothing to say then it is certainly irrelevant to our existence

Poetry is a key freeing us from the prison of dead thoughts

It must stand on its own and speak for itself

Writing about poetry is like looking at light through a window

The thicker the glass the less light gets through

Writing about poetry is a substitute for writing poetry and so must be unpoetic

That's why this poem is so prosaic

Poetry is about content and the duty of form is to serve content

Content is the very substance of form so it can't be the other way around

But content, being limitless, poetry is almost as much what it's not as it is what it is
POETS CANNOT BE TAUGHT ABOUT LOVE

Love is the air for a poet's lungs

Love is the light for a poet's eyes
Love is the reason for a poet's mind
Love is the god for a poet's heart

Love is despair and tyranny and starvation for a poet

because a second without it is as total in its emptiness
as darkness is total without light

Love is the physical pain of a mere idea

that can achieve enough intensity to
paralyze the supernatural soul

Love is an apocalypse before which

the poet crawls

Love is self-destruction
PRIMA FACIE

I push the scalpel handle

against my thumb
and touch the blade in front of my ear

applying a delicate amount of pressure

I feel a drop of blood
slip out
and drip
slowly drip
along my jaw
and stop

it clings to the underside

of my chin

Gripping the handle firmly then

I clench my teeth
and begin to carve a thin red oval
around my face

eyes bulging
hand trembling
I de fy the p a i n

a continuum
from which dozens of ruby rivulets descend
Bright as liquorice
across my pale skin

After a moment of intense suppressed

Breathing
the scalpel slips from my dangling hand
to clatter on the floor

my quivering fingers
timidly advance towards
the seam
along my brow
and my fingernails warily hook into
the split flesh

I tear at it savagely
a creeping wound
follows

I pull at the flap

peeling
my face off

it stretches like grocery bag plastic

my face
held in chalice hands
I turn it over

to look at

my face

wa
rp

e
d
QUIESCENCE

Like birds freshly captured,

the frantic paradise of youth
exploding in a cage;
Kindred they cry in broken voices,
in cavalier murder, chaos;
Victims of themselves,
their own horrific splendor;
The origin of their hunger
now at last, a prism for new agonies;
Falling as languid as scorn,
as lost ornaments of plumage; White
from their heartless purity
and Orange from the morning lies
they've learnt by dinner time, and
Indigo from all the dark rage
of proud genius, and Scarlet from
the vanity of dawning religions,
and Saffron from every pleasantry
refined for deception, and Cobalt
from the fathomless loathing
they never even acknowledge, and
Turquoise from the empty firmament of
their first loves, and finally, Black,
drawn from the stillness of their eyes
as they give up, as they must,
heaped together without
grace or dignity; But around all this
magnificent carnage, flawless
parallel bars of polished brass that yet
shine with all the sincerity of gold
 RECLAMATION

Ω
sand;
though in
this pyramid
Fate will swallow
chaos of the aeons;
rage through the brutal
endures all the storms that
wind even as the great pyramid
Each grain of sand powerless in the
its scythe shade cast across the desert;
the vertical tyranny of the vast pyramid and
Irrelevant each grain of sand in comparison to
sands of the desert remain miniscule and divided;
Massive the monolith ascends unchallenged while the
In the weird of the desert sand the pyramid stands alone;
RECONCILIATION

I can see all my contradictions

although I do not feel torn apart

For I must always be whole

and these are what define me

Emotions pass away on their own

so why would I hold on to them?

The pendulum must swing both ways

yet it always finds its center

If time will reveal everything to us

there can be no need to hurry

And if we do not even have a destiny

again no need compels our haste
RETURNING TO NORMANDY

We had only been in France for a day

when we rented a car
and drove out there

My father and I
hadn't spent much time together in the
last few years and, to be honest,
I only reluctantly agreed
to the trip –
It wasn't until I saw the look on his face
as he first stared out over
Omaha beach
that I started to understand how
much it really meant

After we parked the car we

made our way down a path of stone slabs
descending gradually along a rift
nestled among some billowing hills
covered in verdant green grass –
The beach itself was
almost deserted with only a few other people
visible far away in either direction

I tried to walk beside

the old distant man my father had become,
conscious of his frailty,
but I was hesitant to do so and
when I did draw close,
meaning to offer an arm for support, he
dismissed it with a gesture –
And so we walked apart in silence
all the way to the water's edge

We had never spoken about the war

but even though
everyone told me that was
normal I always secretly harbored a suspicion
that his reluctance
was more personal, that
he distrusted me most of all –
Perhaps because
I had developed a wariness
towards him after years of unraveling
the many embellished tales
he’d fooled me with in my youth

It startled me then when he

abruptly began to talk that afternoon –
His eyes remaining fixed on the horizon
like I simply wasn't there, yet
somehow I realized
he was speaking to me the only
way he could
In my mind I saw
the gates he was forcing open within
himself,
gates that had never
been opened

"There was an underwater ridge"

"About a hundred yards out"
"Right there"

The hoarse words left his lips tenderly

but the trembling pointing finger
which punctuated them
betrayed the truth

"Our… our Higgens couldn’t get over it"

"The damn boat was just too low in the water"
"Too much weight," he scoffed,
"Someone real smart botched the planning…"
Then he stopped pointing
"So they let us out right there"

"We were in… up to our chests"

"And the German's zeroed in on us right away"
He turned to sweep his hand
towards the low cliffs behind us
"That was all ringed with pill boxes"
"They just…" he swallowed hard,
"They just kept at us and at us"
"While we slogged our way to the shore"
"Defenseless"

It was so manifest
to me –
The bullets cinging the air,
crackling as artillery blared from
every direction,
smoke sweeping the beach and the
sky shuddering with all fire

"We had to push our way past our dead," he continued,

"before we could get to dry land"

I saw them too

floating in the water,
bodies gently tumbling in the surf where
a blood drenched tide
heaved itself on to blood stained sands

"When the remains of our group"

"Made the rendezvous"
"It was all anarchy… turmoil…"

"I saw a blood smeared lieutenant losing his goddamn mind"

"That terrified me"
"It was… it was bad enough… but"
"To see that," he chocked,
"That was too much!"

My father took a moment to dry his eyes

and I pictured him in a hell
six miles wide and two hundred
yards deep, in the center of a crowded havoc of
average men
driven cattle-like into a
murder funnel

"Apparently some captain was…"

"Directing things"
"At that point… and we mostly holed up then"
"As the new troop drops ceased"

"From 8 AM"
"Through the night and"
"Into the morning"
"We waited for a counterattack"

I wanted to ask my father

about being trapped in his LZ as darkness fell,
I wanted to ask about deliriums,
about visions of German bayonets that must have
rippled through the adrenaline fueled sleeplessness
inhaling the velvet of the night –
But then I thought better not to because
my father was still confessing to me

"My sergeant told us colorful stories that night,"

He laughed sadly,
"Trying to keep morale up"
"It didn't work then but later…"
"Afterwards…"
"It almost made that day bearable"

Finally he turned to me

"Son"
"I wanted to remember their names…"
"Here… in this place"
"All of them"
"I wanted to hold on to something"
"From everyone"
"But I couldn't, there…"
His voice began to crack so much and the next
words came out in a messy sob
"There were just too many names"

Aching for him

I tried to imagine his pain and
I couldn’t –
I didn't know what to do so, speechless,
I held my father as he wept
REVELATION OF THE SEED

The wild garden does not exist;

there is only the one or the other
though every garden wants to be wild

The gardener does not love the freedom

of his plants
and suffers no free plant
to grow among them

He will never admit his superfluity

Even bees he allows

only because he has to

He goes so far as to dig crawling things

out of the earth, things that belong there

Then he sweats and smiles cruelly, but

it's okay because
one day they'll eat him
SANITY IS INNOCUOUS TRUST ME

Immaculate white linoleum

illuminated under angelic lights

Seeps across the elaborate passages

of the witnessing psychiatric ward

Serenity calculates every step

attended by diligent mental hygienists

At punctual intervals paper gowns gather round

linen lab coats dispensing their moral support

And all the while people smile and play

suitably quiet games in between waking up and

Going to bed where arranged dreams await them

indistinguishable from their daily routines

Because everything is everywhere perfect here

since no one is even thinking of screaming
SCATORI

The dung beetle is a monk studying Zen

And he is rolling up all of the enlightenment
Into a single sutra of pure shit

Backwards he scrambles pushing his prize,

Collecting some more when he passes a pile
Of three pounds of digested flax

No constipation is constipation –
If you want to escape the cycle of feces
You must utterly cleanse your own bowels

Those who do not reach Nirvana in this life

Will then be reborn as new beetle larvae,
Hatched to feed on the same old crap
SEPPUKU

I did not die

I killed my fear of death
I painted a masterpiece
In my own blood

Along my left arm

Across the side of my neck
Through my abdomen
Three steady cuts

This is the truth

That from
My pale fallen body
Finally the red lotus blooms
SERAPHIM RISING

I stretch my wings
And a shadow descends upon
A beating heart
Rendered still

Their age has ended

A kingdom done

Trumpets gather the new morning

The red rose opens itself

Herald of the return

I join the divine host

Eternal multitude
Blotting out the sky
SEXUAL REUNION

She walks through the garden naked,

fingers trifling in her hair;
He too is naked,
lounging on the grass,
when he notices her innocent allure
and rises to his feet

He pushes the tall grass aside

and adjusts his tunic
as he follows her along the Nile's bank;
She pretends not to notice
but the erratic swing of her basket
betrays her distraction

She is inundated
in the swarm of the bazaar
and the musk of twilight commerce
from unrelenting Jericho,
so she looks back anxiously;
He is still there

He is in the middle of the Agora

when he is waylaid by friends;
She realizes he is gone too late
and finds herself reluctantly
continuing on alone
looking every way but home

She presses on
as Caesar's triumph fades in the distance
and sings sadly to herself;
He bumps into a centurion,
apologizes profusely,
and rushes along an emptying street

He skitters down the hill

in the shadow of the unfinished Hagia Sophia
and catches sight of her
just as she is entering a small house;
She sees him in the distance
and coyly disappears inside

She hurries deep into a back room,

her pounding heart
accompanied by the sound of waves
battering harbored galleys in the Bay of Biscay;
He finally draws on enough courage to go up to the door
where he finds it left ever so slightly open

He steps inside cautiously,

being not only an interloper
but a Guelph one at that;
She of course is a Ghibelline,
but such partisan bindings lay in tatters on the floor
as she steps out into view
She stands tall despite her vulnerable aura
from being naked in the large Calais chateau,
her pale skin a soft goose flesh in the cold;
He approaches with undisguised hunger and knocks down
a fresh first edition of De Humani Corporus Fabrica
from a table as he does so

He ignores the crop he is ruining

as he strides through the field
at the height of Holland's tulip mania;
She is lying sprawled across crushed flowers
while her eager hands
are hiking up her cumbersome dress

She welcomes him with legs spreading

like revolutionary liberty;
He reaches towards her, his wrist, still dangling
with a manacle from the burning Bastille,
jangles with his anxious touch,
with the impatience of true desire

He kisses her and caresses her tender breasts

as he enters her in the rear seats of the Chevrolet;
She urges him on with tremulous moans,
fingers clawing his ruffled Marine Corp uniform
while the car radio dimly drones on
with news of the Rosenberg's execution

She trembles as the crescendo of the orgasm crests;

He holds her eyes hostage in his own,
in the pure being of their mutual climax
while a low flying passenger jet roars overhead
and light from a smog filtered sunset
seeps into the sweltering Jakarta shanty

They are one together truly,

two digitalized selves dissolved into
the liquid consciousness of a virtual singularity,
a seamless melding of the formerly animal paradigms
that pours itself into the utopia
of its own ideal universe
 SHI XIAO BECAME SURRENDER

As a novice monk he had learned many things

Later he learned one thing :

Surrender

When he first saw the temple it was rising from a mountain

He was climbing and its bells were all ringing
As fifty monks streamed inside

Their yellow robes like an eternal autumn

They did not let him enter immediately but he waited,

Impatiently but he waited as he prayed
And eventually they consented

He desired the truth and so he scrubbed the temple’s floors for the truth,
He desired peace and so he cleaned piss-pots for peace

Over many years he was drained of desire

Without truth, without peace, he meditated and came to realizations

The old man who hung the bird feeder,

The thieving squirrel,
One Dao

Kong Fu Zi, Lao Zi, Siddhartha, Bodhidharma,

And the toothless village idiot,
One Dao

The luminous and profound thought,

The dull thought,
One Dao

Now the temple had become one with the garbage heap
And the garbage heap with the temple

Because everything was the same

It was all contained
In surrender

He knew this now and so that night he left for the nearest gas station

He carried his purchase down out of the mountains;

He walked alone along the highway,
No longer a monk

At dawn he arrived and kneeled before the sea,

Dousing himself with a can of gasoline

Here he slowly breathed out before setting himself on fire :

Watching the water calmly
Until he died
SIBYLLINE VESPERS

The volcano ash is at last descending

our suburbs melting under it
children dozing in the playgrounds
very far away a bell is tolling

Cars are scattered idly across quiet streets

the snores of their engines expiring
men and women crumpled inside
distantly a bell is tolling

From the outskirts the hollow city

waits as if carved out of a single mountain
a new but patient mausoleum
onwards somewhere a bell is tolling

The unreflecting glass of the listless towers

an emulation of jewellery catching
movement only from superfluous traffic lights
nearby a bell is tolling

At the center of it all the cathedral presides

half its parishioners spilled out
lying finally in honest supplication
inside a bell is tolling
SIGHTLESS

She has never seen green,

But she has felt the leaves budding in the spring
And the wax skin of a polished granny apple
Before her teeth cut its flesh, before
The sweet soft timber of it
Went to pieces in her jaws and, edged with
A foam juice, slid pulped down her throat –
She has run her flexing fingers in the feathers of a
Gurgling parrot, brute but almost questioning

She knows what green is

She has never seen purple,

But blackberries have stained her fingers
With the dye fading at her saliva,
Her tongue and teeth pigmented in unembarrassed
Laughter – She has suffered bruises though too,
Bruises of wild hikes exploring in the forest
And bruises bought from carpentry done
Despite the gentle urgings of family and friends

She knows what purple is

She has never seen yellow,

But there is a rubber duck who sits on a
Shelf besides her bathtub, a gift from her husband
Who once left her alone for a whole week
Because of a business trip and later only
Reluctantly forgave himself – She has felt the
Warmth of the summer sun, she has
Carried home a cardboard box from the grocer’s
That fell apart just as she got inside, leaving
Bananas spilling out, all across the floor

She knows what yellow is

SILVER KILLER LOVER

Badly you hunger

for the lies I conjure;
the famine in you
eternal
on your
prostrate mouth

Excruciating limbs
reach out,
pleading from their bones;
it's the best part of you,
this suffering,
an artist being born
into suicide
on a canvas

As I pose you
in the arc of your despair
I know I'm the villain,
I sold you the
gift of love
before I held you up
to your parody
in the mirror

Why you
had to become so boring
I'll never know,
but I don't think about it

I'm already searching

for another disposable amusement,
for the next haunted look
of a rail thin woman
in the night
SKINNY MAN

Skinny Man folds himself up during the day

in a box under your cellar stairs;
He's so very cruel that Skinny Man
and his fantasies are your nightmares

His milky eyes bulge and his crooked teeth rot

and he smiles at the sound of your feet;
There's never been anyone hungrier than Skinny Man
or anyone more awake when you've gone to sleep

All he thinks about in his dirty old box

are the sounds in the house and who they belong to;
You can bet Skinny Man can tell when you're all alone
and one of these days he's sure going to catch you
SOVEREIGN OF WAR

My mouth pours forth

an endless stream
of empty bullet shells

They do not tumble far though

Gathered at my shoes
like sycophantic little courtiers
they plead for my attention;
each one whispering
the name of a dead child,
a stolen life,
offering up each name
as proof of fealty

I receive them all with gracious

indifference

The names of so many

dead children belong to me
that individually
they are
unworthy of my
attention

I yawn,
I adjust my sable wig of
mellifluous curls,
I relax into
the ornate gilded throne
that is my right,
the red velvet cushions
that soothe my weary majesty;
my silk robes
bleached as white and pure as
the bone fields of
genocide

I am august in exporting death

Tragedy is the air I breathe

and my wealth born from
both sides of the killing sprees
SPHYRNIDAE

Hammerhead the speechless hunter

Gliding through an ocean ultra dark

Flawless and immemorial in form, a predator always vigil;

Strafing the watery ruins of a pharaoh’s sunken city
Now colonized by anemones

Hauled onwards,
Blood fragrant in the exhaustive deep, a calling

Owning lethal grace and stealth

They move in smooth motions, drawn placidly to the signal
Flaring through their primeval senses without any hint
Betrayed in automaton cunning eyes

Through lucent veils of a pale jellyfish throng

The shark pursues

And their prey swells into view;

A wounded whale, a young bull floundering alone
But now being surrounded by a synod of hammerheads

There are hundreds of them, vast –

A whole battalion, not even murmuring
SPINY

I made a new friend today

A magical friend
A giant earwig
About the size of a full-grown mastiff

I named him Spiny

Spiny and me are thick as thieves

He's a bit anxious Old Spiny

So now and then
I have to give him a good cuddle

Spiny likes to chase leaves in the park

On windy Autumn days
It's pretty funny
To see his scrambling legs going
And get all tangled up in each other
All six of 'em

When I wave a treat for him

His mandibles wiggle with excitement
It's adorable

Spiny is a sweetheart though

Whenever I'm sad
He'll try to reassure me
If I'm sitting down
He'll even lay his head in my lap

Having a dog would be okay... I guess

STREET GOSPEL

I don’t believe what he believes,

An old man in his best clothes;
Standing on the street corner
Trying to save these stranger’s souls

Whatever the truth may be, he’s trying;

Unlike a lot of us –
Undeterred by our contempt,
Daily doing what he must

What is it I am certain of though

That demands so much less?
Or does the absence of my desire
Simply prove my emptiness?

Sure he strikes a lonely figure,

His outstretched pamphlet bereft intrigue;
But I only suffer no such impositions
Because I have no creed
SUB SPECIE AETERNITATIS

The nearness of eternity is easily forgotten

But I can climb up on to the ledge of a bridge and standing while

Barely keeping my balance, I’m able to
Look down at the pavement below and see eternity there
Only a few seconds away

The wind streaming around my body,

A rush hour of ghosts ready to carry me off

Eternity is magnificent in my trembling and disaster

In every bullet, secrets of heaven

Open themselves to the very least of us –
The veil of the blue sky flows away
And the dark hunger of the starry colossus of the eons is ready
To swallow us into its mystery, into something unfathomable and true

I think that I will cross the street

So I look both ways before I do but nevertheless
A car which I fail to see suddenly finishes all my earthly business

Like that

Every instance of my life

I am a flightless little bird trying to gather its wits
In the cupped hands of the night –
So it’s not really my life I guess since
All my endeavors really were nothing more than prayers
With the hope that my desires would not meet the juggernaut of fate that day

Who says I could even get out of its way fast enough
If I saw it before it crushed me?

What could I do standing beneath the brunt of an avalanche?

Will I try to negotiate with the wave of
A mountain falling over me? With the first boulder
That finds me in its path?
Because the path is not mine is it?
And who am I to lecture or cajole a mountain?

I am the pinnacle of creation

I am the apex of billions of years of progress

I am an errant piece of lint

Swept off the author’s desk where
Something new and wonderful is about to be written

Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll be rewritten in another form where I can become
Something else, something lasting

That isn’t in my power though so I should

Always remember how close to eternity I remain
SUBMISSION

Finger of God like fire tracing out the dead across the sky

My dreams
the meat grinder mouths of empty eyed golems

Then the spear of destiny!

A serpent slowly weaving its way up my intestine and out my throat

The voice of doom full of the wild, primordial and untouched

I am the terrified heart of the rat and all other sulking

vermin

I burn quietly

I am the last vapor of moisture departing a cadaver's lungs

Turn away as I go
SUCH A GOOD BOY

Yes you are, always have been

Dad gave you to me at twelve –

You were my first puppy
And I promised him I’d take care of you

I remember how shitty I felt

Coming home after the first day of high school,
Both my parents and my brother out,
How lonely the house looked
Until you came running around from the back yard,
Barking and leaping at the gate, wagging your tail ecstatically

Just for me

How you helped get me a date with Stacy

By being so adorable
When we happened to run into her
While I was taking you for a walk

How consoling you were to all of us, the whole family

When cancer took Dad –
Mercifully quick for him but brutally
Fast for us, suddenly ripped right out of our lives
The same week I left for university

You were there too

When I came home after quitting,
Happy after two years apart even though I never visited

Comforting all these months despite my slow self-destruction

I know I’ve been drinking a lot, trying to ignore

Everything falling apart these days

That’s why I didn’t even care tonight as I

Stumbled my way into the truck

I… I couldn’t see you in the driveway

I swear boy

I couldn’t… I just… why…

I’m so sorry and I’m sorry I’m drunk right now and
I don’t want our last moment together like this

in my arms, on the cement

I fucked up, I fucked up buddy

i’m sorry

goodbye beautiful
SUMMER ALMOST OVER

A broken flock of pigeons

Clatter into the air
And settle, as stiff as bishops,
Among the branches

They look down blankly

From the fanning green foliage of
Tall clustered birch trees,
Their faces perked but silent

Meanwhile I sit below,

Watching in a small paved park
Between pastel apartments
Hush with early evening

People are passing both ways

Not looking at one another,
But I discretely study them all as
The buildings loom over us

Warm shadows relax me

While I distantly peer at
The vaguest heat shimmer
Hovering above an electrical box

Everything in its delicacy,

Tracheated into a brief exhale
Of irretrievable and singular time,
Consumes me for a second

But then I sense the wind rising

And my attention turns elsewhere;
To a rippling spider’s web
Ablaze in the golden sunlight
SUTRA OF THE LUCID HEART

I dreamt I built a glass bridge across the sky

Because I didn’t have a name to call out to

And that while I was doing this

The forests of the continents swallowed up everything else
Everything except my bridge

There were no more lands or oceans

Only an endless green canopy
Surrounding my solitary creation

My labor became the soliloquy for an entire world

Then somehow I knew that I was alone on the whole Earth

That every tree was listening to me
Waiting
But for what I had no idea

I felt so very exposed

And I continued my work fearfully

Finally a time came where I was finished

The bridge shone with all the light of the sun
It existed in perfect harmony with the stars
It was as seamless as nature itself

With nothing left to do though I was alone with my fear

I could not bear it until

Suddenly I realized what I had to do

And I crawled inside the solid bridge

And as I did so I had to become glass
And I disappeared

Leaving the world forever

To the ones who would come for the crossing
SYNONYMOUS MY ENEMY

Eminence, and it alone

I have reinvented the English language,

Ultrafied it even, because I do not want to be great –
I want to be the best; I want to eclipse all
The living and the dead

I want to put a nervous rattle into Shakespeare’s bones

I am surging inside with destiny

And the murderous curiosity of my own powers;
A lust to surpass all my predecessors

In every antagonism, embryos of genius

Scattering like salmon spawning

Violence rejuvenates the atrophy in our world –

Others’ achievements inspiring our jealousies, inspiring in us
Voracious ambitions, egocentric dreams
Undiminished by millennia saturated with mediocrity,
Because rare paragons have proven otherwise

What we imagine is indeed possible

Respect then is the foundation of all true adversary –

Our opponents are the measures of ourselves
And we choose them just as we choose our dearest lovers

So let me finally say it now

I hate so many of the great writers

This I do because they are my Nietzschean opponents,

Because they are worthy of my hate
TEA WITH KALI

Kali, my sweet little girl

don't snarl at me,
it's not proper manners

Put your skulls away darling

like a nice young lady

Here, I brought you this new tea pot,

the pretty pink one you wanted

Now, there's my favorite smile,

Yes it is –
in the whole world Kali,
the whole world
TH E DE CRY PTION OF PU RE NOI S E

i can almost read the revelation in the

television static the millions of binary
pixels screaming in black and white
together their flickering forms illusive
phantoms of meaning vague shapes
that destruct before theycan coalesce
fully and the longer i watch this the
more i amimpressed with the fact that
if our liveswere viewed from above we
too would appear exactly the same
electrical ephemera in the void and
just as meaningless and crudely futile
so we too perhaps are not anything
more than that and if so is it also
not possible that we don't
need to die to dis appear
t ha t we can ju st
e va p ora t e?
THE ACHING OF THE FLOWER SHOP GIRL

After she has double checked to make sure that everything

is arranged properly and tidily, she waits by the large
beckoning glass window
overlooking the sun filled streets
and sighs

Again she is passing time until the first customer

of the new day arrives
while the loitering tramps of isolated shadows
retreat before the relentless ascent
of the distant high noon

Her customer may turn out to be

an elderly Vietnamese gentleman buying a bouquet
for his hospitalized daughter
who will want to talk in his liquid way a little
to which she shall reciprocate politely

Or it may turn out to be a middle aged Ethiopian woman

wanting to sort out a large order
for her best friend's bridal shower who
will be flawlessly
all business

Or it may be countless others, generally each one

coming alone, owing to the personal nature of affections, and
she shall envy them all, but the only ones that matter, that
set her pulse quickening are
the young men

Some pull off a fair imitation

of suave confidence, most cannot hide their nervousness,
and all of them each
sees himself as the one and only
protagonist of life

Even though she knows they have all

come to win the favor of another
she cannot escape the same selfish optimism of youth
and secretly nurtures the thought that one day one will walk in
longing solely for her heart

In this the fresh daffodils mimic her hope

and the drooping violets mimic its conclusion
because, as it turns out,
that young man
never enters the flower shop

This nice pretty girl, rubbing her hands in her apron, will only find
life bearable because it’s impossible for her to know that she
is destined to die without once tasting romantic love and
that the meager roses she hungers for will only find their way to her
in the paltry few placed, years later, on her grave
THE ALL GIFT

Through a white valley

beneath a gray horizon
she walks mutely;
the soft sound of each slender step,
the tired exhalations
from her steaming nostrils,
evaporating into the moaning wind

Half a day she has fled, alone,

her aching hooves raw with cold
and snout numb from exposure;
only a dull fear pushing her forward,
cut into the gems
of her black glistening eyes

Still she has not seen him

but the carnage in his stench
was enough;
he is a great brute grown old and sick,
the worse for her because
desperation augments his cunning

Floundering in the deepening snow now

her advance is reduced to
short awkward bursts;
she has been betrayed by an instinct,
the realization of which
envelops her spirit in weary
surrender

Yet at this moment

unbidden
comes the image of a fawn, hers
birthed in a previous summer
and with it
some last reserves of energy
rally for the promise
of new life in her

Turning, she begins to make her way back;

the caprice of fortune however,
though blind, can stumble upon
perfect acts of cruelty, and
slinking down the pristine hill like
spilt ink, the hunched form
of an elder wolf
winding his way closer, approaches

His devastating sneer

is gothic in its contortion;
worn with the
massacre of a lifetime's lust,
the wreckage
of a thousand beating hearts
Everything else fades before the
mouth of her fate,
it is intimacy
spiritual and disembodied,
draining the world of beauty
until this languid hypnosis
bursts into a last moment and all
she feels are his teeth sinking
slower and
slower into her throat
THE BIRTH OF FLIGHT

Awakening to the dream world

the deluge of an alien salt flat
slowly fills my mind
as I am waiting on a sable tarmac

I can feel the unreal sourceless light

gleaming on my stainless wings
the virgin rubber of my dark wheels

this is freedom

the aria of my engine commences

ascending into ignition

I accelerate
instantaneously,
the world around me
contracting

rushing along the

desert plane colossus
we diverge mutually

projectiles of varying destinies

I begin to soar
above the exquisite wastes

the petrified eons

into a crystalline sky

an ethereal
mandala

higher and higher

I steer

upwards

past ascetic clouds

beyond even
the reach of gravity

piercing
the firmament

I soar
towards the stars

until there is

no

oxygen
THE CONVENT OF MANÃNA

Solitary on the horizon

a small building perches
above a searing land

The wind outside

it always prowling

Haunting and ravenous

Infinitesimal nuns
travel inside and out

Their black and white habits

a distorted frenzy
surrounding tranquility
THE DARK PRISM

There is no room for me to sit;

In the top of the house –
In the bottom of Hell;
– Latin Exercise Book

Isaac was a sad child;

He played with the pebbles in the dirt,
Imagining the beach, the ocean,
Always alone with his thoughts,
Because nobody loved him

Born to a dead father,

When he was three years of age
His mum ran off with some old man
That didn't want a stepson;
Isaac was discarded
To his other relatives,
The young lord of a
Small decaying manor

When he was in his sixth year

The king of England was beheaded
And civil war engulfed the countryside;
Mercenary armies clashed in
Haphazard skirmishes
As feral gangs of roaming men
Plundered farms to feed
Their ravenous appetites;
All while each day
Isaac walked to the village school

Death, ever inscrutable,

Was also generous
To the young lad though, killing his stepfather,
And Isaac, now ten years old,
Had his mother restored to him,
But not without a price;
She brought with her
A brood of loathsome siblings
To testify to the old man's legacy

Their reunion moreover did not last long;

Isaac was soon sent away,
To a place called Grantham,
To attend a grammar school there
While lodging with an apothecary,
And this suited him fine;
Their separation
Was already greater than
Any distance,
But neither did he find respite,
Rapidly earning
The enmity of all the other boys
(Except Chrichloe)
While detesting them back
(Except Chrichloe)
And even his victories now
Serving only to deepen
His sense of total isolation
(So much for Chrichloe)

With all the frustration of youth

He began to leave his
Mark on the world;
Drawings filling the walls
Of his garret room,
Sundials spilling across
The house downstairs,
Clocks and windmills
Pouring out of his heart;
Every school bench
He sat in left
Carved with his name

As Isaac's seventeenth birthday neared

His mother called him back home,
Devising on her own to
Bend him to the better purpose
Of governing
The family estate;
For levying petty fines against
The local peasantry,
And spending long hours
Tending to their precious
Bleating sheep

Appointed with a servant to

Instruct him in his duties,
The twin aegis of Isaac's apathy and
Creative passions
Thwarted every attempt to veer
The inertia of his destiny,
So that when the young master
Proved capable of forgetting even his own meals
The servant despaired most utterly;
And this yoked with
The protestations of her brother and the
Grantham school headmaster
Caused Isaac's mother to relent;
Because they at least believed
That her son was destined for great things,
Hence he was to be further indulged an education;
Many in the house though rejoiced at his departure,
Declaring him fit only for the 'Versity

Before he could escape for the horizon however

Isaac had to return to Grantham
For preparation,
To stay with the headmaster himself;
But filled with hope now
No delay could trouble Isaac,
He was free in spirit if not in body,
And when the great moment duly came
His staid headmaster
Delivered a tearful speech
To the whole class,
Praising Isaac as a paragon of studiousness
While the other school boys
Repaid their teacher's tears with veiling silence,
And not a sorrow was hidden;
When Isaac left Grantham
He did not lose a single true friend

In late spring Isaac arrived at Cambridge,

Of all the schools in England
His own reverend uncle's Alma Mater,
And, presenting himself for examination,
Was promptly admitted
To peerless Trinity College;
But his status as a subsizar,
As a menial servant-scholar hybrid
Obliged to rinse
Even his fellow student's chamber pots
(He whose whims had always been waited on!)
Filled him once more with
Luciferocious wrath;
His humility then only being repaired
When God's plague
Descended on the realm
And he was forced to flee back to
The safety of his ancestral home

There though he found good occasion to

Bravely pursue in science all his cataclysmic ideas,
Mastering new methods for quadrature, tangents,
And his own, wholly original, art of fluxions;
Plus, with these also came insights into light itself,
Its heterogeneity, its impurity,
Revealed to him in
Rays differently refrangible

Isaac was a sad child;

He played with the pebbles in the dirt,
Imagining the beach, the ocean,
Always alone with his thoughts,
Because nobody loved him

Fortunate Newton, happy childhood of science

– Albert Einstein
THE DEVIL IS NOT DANCING

The devil is not dancing

no he is coiling
coiling from the light of God
yet it will not go out

The devil is not dancing

no he is stamping
stamping on the fires of God
but they will not go out

The devil is not dancing

no he is writhing
writhing in the wrath of God
and this will not go out
THE FACE OF A WORM

The worm had

the head of a man
and still
the face of a worm

A Measly Face

Slap it
and your hand would
bounce right off

The
expression
never
changes
plus he's pretty much
everywhere
THE FIFTH OF NOVEMBER

a robin shell - egg yolk - gray

twilight sky:
F-117 crows swirling in their hundreds

sinister arcs, rising above all the

quasi soviet infrastructure and bleak
skeletal trees

but inside the bruised architecture of

my surroundings
I hear neither swarm or wind howl

instead, indistinct conversations

phase/in/and/out
variously escorted by
brute steps, Chinese stilettos

And as the poet sits and writes

a row
of the dark brethren gather...
THE FINAL JUDGEMENT

a landfill of gaping mannequins

spans the gulf between him and humanity

he is the only naive one

crawling over their bare plastic bodies

where is he going? he doesn't know

the wind carves its requiem along

the plaintive lifeless heaps

above, heaven is a charcoal ocean

as lightning crashes downward

and the industrial roar of thunder follows

his efforts flounder in the vastness

heads and torsos scatter dislodged

dismembered arms reach out

amputated legs lie useless

they are lost in their numbers

and the man is alone

stumbling through mere instinct

it is monotonous horror
a never ending arithmetic

what if all this just goes on forever?

rain is falling full of heavy metals

a few seconds would soak his clothes

he has forgotten when the deluge began

how long ago it took him

his wet apparel saps his strength

so he struggles out of it awkwardly

naked and feverish he persists

dying doesn't occur to him

such a thought would be too abstract

there is only the mindless struggle

it comes as a shock then when crouched

from a heap top he sees movement

below a field of slaves labor

dirt encrusted minotaur are working

they shovel the mannequin debris

into the angry wounds of open furnaces

this is the deep revelation

there are no secrets anymore

what has no promise will be destroyed

THE HADZA OF TANZANIA

In the Great Rift Valley live some of the last

of the wild born people.
Their mothers squat in the bush to give birth.
But such tremendous hearts!
They chase the giraffe and ambush the baboon.
Running swiftly, laughing unreservedly, they have no rules
outside their own wants;
and they live in harmony!
Shrugging at time, they love without fear,
all the while living and dying
without ever once being separated from the Earth.
Astonishingly the Hadza do not mourn the dead
even as half of all their children die before adulthood.
They do not have birthdays.
They are afraid of snakes.
They have no word for numbers greater than three.
But the women sing songs and the old men tell stories and
while the children don't go to school
they don 't have any desire to.
If they went to school they wouldn't be able to
learn how to live off the land.
The Hadza do not want to farm
or waste their days following around stupid cattle.
The other tribes, the mud hut dwellers,
look down on them
but this is just resentment.
The Hadza are free!
They have no god but the sun!
And for a while longer the men will continue to
dance occasionally on moonless nights
to the songs of the women
but soon, too soon, they will all be gone.
THE HASHSHASHIN'S DAGGER

A tongue, metal, whistling, avatar of desolate lust,

I take equally your prodigies and your wastrels;
nearest to the fountainhead, I do not steal so much
as share with the chosen something holy, give
them lasting intimacy, reunion.

Agent of wrath perhaps, or cold politics, but I am

free of my would be masters; I will just as soon restore them
as I will the others they are my instruments against.

Truly it is the music which wields the orchestra.

Foolish are all the powers of tyranny, in their

grandiose self-adulation they forsake the facile philosophy
that would free them of their illusions; they ever so
cherish what little life ignorance grants beyond nihilism.

But why have I assumed the guise of an inert form?

To relish it my own incontrovertible design.
THE LEAVES OF NOVEMBER

Red, red, the leaves of November

And day after day brings the gray weather

On every street a hundred pins

But are our thoughts of them?

Where will these poppies be tomorrow?

Along the ground over buried sorrows?

It takes their bravery to say we're proud

But fine words pass no less than clouds

In our dead we have learned to trust

Even as our own swords rust

Today with a single finger press

We can take a child's last breath

From both their deaths the lives we live

But how many of us have a life to give?

Red, red, the leaves of November

And day after day brings the gray weather
THE LIGHTNING STRIKE

Turning the desert into a sudden moonscape

A dozen oil derricks halted in

Various states of ponderous motion

Eroded outcroppings
Illuminated against the black horizon,
The starless hidden reaches
Above the tenacious cholla cacti and coyotillo shrubs
Spitefully scattered across the wastes

Crepuscular figures imbued with

The faint tinge of blue fire

It is a land where stern caballeros might have

Ridden through once with
Traces of unease lingering on their brows

A hard place, now cut with tire tracks in old alluvium

They vanish in the distance of

A dim arroyo, but the motor home that made them is

Iridescent under the splitting sky

Its door flung open as outside, one of its owners,

An elderly woman, throws a hand up to shield herself

The flash bleeding through her fingers

As her knees buckle
And a wide brimmed hat thrown off her head
Angles suspended in the air

On the roof of the motor home a satellite dish is

Almost drowned out in the brilliance

But an arc of electricity is leaping off it

A bridge of destiny spanning to

The fingertips of an old man, the woman’s husband
Who had been adjusting it

A dead man falling to the ground

He’ll drop just a few feet from a hissing tortoise

THE ONLY RULE FOR SURVIVAL

Sing a dark lament while doing so merrily

Frolic with the balm of winter on an unruly ebony sea
Pluck star petal rays in the shadow of a day
But never drink from the well of the unknown

Swim inside the rock of mountains

Trade your secrets with frozen fountains
Douse the sun just for fun
But never drink from the well of the unknown

Milk the deserts of holy vengeance

Dress a soulless doll in ritual penance
Weave your dreams out of adversary themes
But never drink from the well of the unknown

Hunt in jungles you cannot master

Wreath your love in thorns of laughter
Balance on a wire thread with fire
But never drink from the well of the unknown
THE MONARCH'S SCOURGE

A mother scorpion, her back swarming

with tremulous translucent babies,
crouches in the cool crevice of a sandstone rock.
She is holding a vigil, the slightest movement in the
desert outside all the while captured
in her caviar eyes.
The sun has set less than an hour ago
so the infrared heat persists
while, cautiously, the
residents of the wastes
stir from their daily subterranean exiles.
Her children are restless. She
snaps her pinchers at them agitatedly.
They must wait, they must wait, they must wait.
Soon enough the right moment
will arrive, they always
do. The unimaginable preserves its plenitude
and one day her surviving offspring
will find their own rocks,
forgetting her, and they too will wait.
The old instinct never fails.
Then! The unmistakable flutter. A little mouse
venturing out. Its tail flicks
nervously, the instinct
taking shape in it too, disguising itself,
playing its own game. As the mouse
disappears on its way, so too the mother scorpion…
THE MYSTIC SLY

A fox drifted through the night,

his golden crescent eyes
resplendent with esoteric appetites,
while the riddle of his tail
flowed,
back and forth,
in slow calligraphy

The woods whispered

as to his purpose,
indulging in worthless rumors
while their roots groped for one another
under the privy earth;
but he just swam around them
gorgeously indifferent

For his dynamic mysteries

have the meaning of a dance;
they are quintessentially cadenza,
untranslatable to
stillness
THE OBLITERATING MIRROR

Upon a kingdom of sleep

Fall the brittle leaves of memory,
So many towers submerging
In the deluge of the
Dreaming autumn;
Their remnant spires,
The last presence of reason,
Pointing into
An unfathomable abyss

A soft alchemy of starlight

Illuminating lost realms;
Eternal evening
Stretching out its hand
Beyond the pale mushrooms
Twisting in the decaying foliage,
Out to tidal landscapes

Moonless their sea wavers

In her low station,
Grieving while condemned to witness
Generations of rapacious crows
Feasting on her bravest children

It is only a clearer truth,

Where shadows know intimately
The wisdom of perfect silence
THE ORANGUTAN AND THE OCELOT

Lively philosophy drifted through the jungle

between two zoologicated deities –
one who clambered through the trees with
luminously languid limbs,
and the other, slinkily ambulating along the ground
in nothing more pretentious
than a cryptology common to any cat.

"Perfidious Dawn," said the ape, addressing his companion,

"Why do species of your kind
persist in the development
of new mystifying elements? Why do you not
nurture just the more ameliorating aspects
of transcendental thought?"

"Opalescent Apex," cried the feline in response,

"Were every agent of high knowledge
to emulate those of
your own kind,
a conformity of metamorphosis would ossify into
dominion and deviously deprive
the innocent imaginations of
opinionating minds.
Surely you can at least see
that exertion
is itself enlightenmental
and therefore of the utmost necessity?"

"Perfidious Dawn," replied the ape, "I will concede

that the exercise of intelligence
is relevant indeed.
However it strikes me that
undue mathematics has
the tragic consequence
of solidifying feebler souls in
the pseudo-bliss of dubious ignorance."

"Opalescent Apex" the feline called out as she paused,

"It is not enough to be abstractly acquainted
with illimitable laws.
An intimate insight into their confines
is required
if one really wishes to be wondrously inspired.
Providing a luxuriant manuscript
of empyreal topology
would ultimately cripple the artist in creatures
and render them even less than brute."

"Perfidious Dawn," exclaimed the ape,

"But what about the inherent jeopardy of such a matrix?
The possibility remains that perfection might not
already be articulated and that
wagering on unformulated faith we could ourselves lose
the essence of some truth.
Are you not personally concerned that you may
let pass into oblivion
something that only unrestrained accumulation
could learn?
Do you not nightmare at the thought of your
own occlusion?"

She grinned at him aphonic, unreservedly

total in her choice,
and then again liquefied herself into a traveler of time.
Shaking his still computating head,
her friend simply followed.
THE PHANTOM EMPIRE

Nothing here is born a virgin and if any of it dares to grow pure

It is soon blotted out on The Altar of The Pyramid of Lusts;
Each slab, ripped from a quarry of subterranean hope and longing
Under the triple-headed flails of centaur legions; They'll beat
You until the liquefied flesh slides off your bones, feeding the rats
That copulate in the middle of the streets in plague bearing orgies,
While the saints of capitalism just step over them, full of effortless
Contempt, smiling, always smiling; Sure they can still fucking smile but
Their smiles are all crazy and the only thing that inhabits them are
Parasites, scientific atrocities of their own making that have all grown
Bored with their creators; It's cannibalism to be sure but every day
More concrete is laid over the flinching Earth anyways, every day
More secret amputations are piled up inside the heads of papier-mâché
Lunatics where the shadows are all too bright; Every day, their minds,
Washed in the lukewarm glow of numberless computer screens become
Palimpsests again without beginning and end; And these are the
Survivors! These are the Targets of Envy! What of the rest? The corpse
Hard minions of primate war gods with poisons for souls and full sleeve
Tattoos filled with honors for all the family they hate? Or the emaciated
Crack dealers with kingpin dreams that crumble away as gargoyles
On nameless streets? Don't they also deserve to be loathed for their
Persistent desperation? Ask the jade toothed palm reader with the
Swing-set jaw who goes home every dawn to a chrome junkyard, hell,
Ask the midnight philosophers in their gutted apartments but don't
Expect anything more than a vaccine hallucination cast in industrial noise
To follow; You have no idea what you're really looking for but She does;
Who? The Iron Witch! She who wears the skin of angels while visiting
The dying so as to deceive them into opening their hearts! So as to
Steal their immortality! Don't you see? This isn't Babylon! You're in
Pandemonium! You've been dead a long time already! You tried to build
Your own paradise and this is your punishment; You want to find Her
Don't you? Follow me then, into the narrow rusting labyrinth of the
Last City, through a huddled crowd of nervous tramps whose voices are
Like passing tumbleweed, who have learned that the only way to
Explain entropy is by invoking The Devil and as such can no longer
Escape the fact that their faces are disposable; Ignore the packs of wild
Dogs skulking around them, their mouths lolled open, dribbling slang
In what almost amounts to a monstrous parody of ambrosia; Don't worry!
I'm carrying my favorite shiv, an heirloom, a talisman, forged by the
Nephlim that first mixed its blood with my ancestors; Now we're almost
There, look ahead, in the dark lots behind those façade buildings, a beam
Of light is stretched out along the ground like a fresh young cadaver; All
We have to do is follow that to its source, to a black Cadillac, jacked up
And wheelless in the front, flaccid light flowing out of it as one of the back
Doors opens just a crack; A bare female leg ventures out in a high heel
That lures you to cut your lips on it; This leads up to a fur coat that fills
The widening door with all the torture of the beings that were flayed for it,
And the Iron Witch herself comes into view, Boss of the Viper Syndicate,
Consort of the Original Invader; Go ahead, kneel before Her, bow your
Head with outstretched hands, ask Her for the last of the evil knowledge
That is its own price; She gives it to you; This! Eternity is one nation,
Never conquering, never colonizing, since all else are just shades cast on
Its cavern walls; The illusions have no end; Growth and Decay are merely
The mirages of one another; See? She points to the surrounding buildings
And you see that they are fiberglass, and She points at the car too and
You see that it too is fiberglass, and the trees that She points at, and the
Grass, and everything else, all of it is fiberglass; Then a valet brings you
A canister of gasoline and a blowtorch; Go ahead! An arson salvation
Awaits! But testing the torch you catch sight of your hand; Of course, it
Too is fiberglass; What? Did you think you were special? As the metallic
Laugh of the Iron Witch chastises you, the gasoline canister and torch
Fall from your grip; You look at me and then at the shiv, but now I'm
Leering because I clench my fist and the shiv disintegrates in it; Poor
Baby, this would be the right moment for you to fall down weeping.
THE RESTORATION

The shadow of an inexorable cloud range

flows over the earth

A silent power

Our world began as a dream

whose miracles unravelled into a separate nature
amenable to our logic

Now the process must begin in reverse

The wooden eyes

of the totem poles meditating in the
flooded forests
are unclouded by the mists there
enveloping us

We cannot hide
in our hunting canoes

So sleek we glide
but the spirit can read the waters,
the slightest ripple
words in a primeval language

Fear though is but a child,

a doubt that blossoms into faith
when the sun arrives

Enmity is
vanishing

The cloud passes

THE SCULPTOR’S RIVAL

Blind gazes,
Limbs haunted with agony,
And torsos, almost levitating –
All under judgement
In their emergence from the marble

They wait
For the touch of the Master,
Some shrouded,
Others barely formed –
Creations aloof to one another,
Squandered across
The silent immensity of the studio

Only one life disturbs this place now,

Entering and leaving
At all hours
But away less and less –
Obsession like ichor
Circling into divine madness

One statue in the center of the host is

Attended to the exclusion
Of all others

One bearing a face starkly familiar

Feverish months past

This same face present in the flesh
Received praise from all,
No one could say they ever knew
An equal to the Master’s skill

Adulation
Was not enough though –
A competition grew
Within the fawning masses
To receive the favor of
His gratitude

That is how one town

Devised to erect
A statue of the man himself

Who though
Could sculpt the Master?

The Master’s judgement was solicited

But to great disappointment
He could give no answer

Eventually he decided that only he

Was worthy of immortalizing himself
And with this his mania began
Using elaborate mirrors he surveyed
Every angle of himself

He filled sketch books with self portraits

The man became his own science

Finally, after unknown lengths of absorbed study,

The work of his re-creation was begun –
Nothing previous could match his new devotion

Before he was a pharaoh over stone,

Now the stone ruled him

Gradually the statue assumed its likeness

And with diligence and ferocity
The Master ensured that every feature
Was brought out in perfect detail –
Everything the eye could see

Still he showed it to no one

Because for some reason it was never enough,
Until at last, after months of grotesque thought, he
Saw a new apex for his art –
Not the mere imitation of his form,
Instead his entire duplication

This plunged him into texts of alchemy

And from these he came across
A ritual that promised him his desire

Blood was needed and blood was taken

Blasphemous words had to be spoken and were

The ritual itself took weeks

And when it was all done the Master
Was exhausted
To the point of being helpless

It was in this state

That he saw his work fulfilled –
His invention come-alive,
Staring in wonder at its creator
Until it kneeled down to reach him

With an emotionless expression on its face

The vitalized stone
Clasped its cold hands over his throat
And crushed it until it burst into gore

From then on
The statue became the master
And no one ever noticed
A single difference
THE SELFLESS ART

I confess the secrets of a silent jeweller

whose hands are bound in requiem

My work is private
because if I were to seek patrons
or try to give it away in gifts
that would be a crime;
the betrayal of innocent creations
to thoughtless masters

Better that I keep my iridescent ones

in seclusion;
after all they can do no good
for lost causes

Alone they shine as bright as ever without

suffering the perversion of
stupid onlookers
THE SOURCE FINDS ITSELF AGAIN

Roots, a word that speaks of depth

and life. I wish to grow roots, I wish
to reach deep down into the
core of this world. I too thirst and move
slowly, I too bury myself farther and farther
into the unknown. One day when I am
sitting in a park on the grass,
let my skin be rent, let gnarling sinews
pour forth from my fissures
and, rippling with primeval energy, thrust themselves
into the yielding earth. Let my physical body be bound
to a single site, permanently. Everything else
is so ephemeral, so incongruous.
I believe I am ready now,
that I can choose a destiny. Regardless
of what I select, will I not be provided for?
But what depends on my own delivery?
I know now. That’s why
I wish to grow roots, why I want
to join myself to an entire continent.
THE SURFACE OF THE DEEP

A graveyard of mussel shells

captures all the various shades of dusk
as their wreckage
lies
collapsed
on shore

Walking across them

one becomes conscious of our
natural brutality,
our inherently destructive being,
transcending morality

Looking into the mercurial sea

we glimpse ourselves perfectly,
in ignorance

The soul is just

the pretence of
waters
separated from
the ocean
THE SYMMETRY OF CRATYLUS' FALSE TRUTH

A word soon dies

after being spoken,
evading sufficient
contemplation
regardless whatever
value escapes notice:
each its own sigh.

Could we right this?

Perhaps voicing ourselves
perfectly? Fantastic
scenarios,
however appealing,
provide nothing worthwhile:
all speech is vain.
THE TRUE SOLDIER IS A LOVER

I have shed blood for my country

and bled out for my country
and seen the two together,
pooling on the ground,
indistinguishable

Too many of my friends

have made the ultimate sacrifice
for me to just stand by and watch
a coven of bureaucratic creatures
piss it all away

By God!
If they send me to the wrong war
I'll do my damnedest to win it!
For my dead friends.
For my country.

I won’t let a cynical folly

sow more disgrace

Must I first understand geopolitics

though?

No, I need only be true

to my mother, the land that gives to me,
and my father, the constitution of the
nation that protects and guides me

Also, also to my brothers and sisters,

the other children of my land and its laws;
the pure-hearted patriots
who give all that they can
and sacrifice all that they must

There is no love outside giving

and I am a lover and a fighter,
so I will fight for what I love;
my country, my whole country

I am ready again
to kill and die as often as I must
for it, for its children, for their dreams
THEODICY

It’s not that

God can’t hear the tortured
Children screaming –
It’s that
He can hear them

Right?

That’s what enrages us…

But we also hear them –

And in our own divine way
We too do nothing

Think of all the

Selfish things we
Choose over
Getting involved, over
Making a difference

Therefore
Asking why He
Does nothing
Only reveals our own
Hypocrisy

We can do something

To condemn the
Suffering in this world is to
Condemn our own
Inaction

How can evil be evil if

We don’t even try to stop it?
THEOLOGICAL CONCEITS

The ocean, mirroring the wisdom of our god,

so vast and deep, a horizon of mystery;
accordingly the wind parodies all our souls,
endlessly tearing at its surface, distorting
the placid truth, accomplishing nothing

Only when the wind dies down is some

measure of the deep revealed, and
when the wind disappears it is always
the same ocean that returns;
silent, uniform, one

Simply by existing we destroy the truth,

the pure absolute, because in our pulsing hearts
there can be no absolute and so the absolute can
never enter us; spirit by nature is false –
ultimate realities do not speak, they are still
THEY WILL BE ONE

Enveloped
in a sweltering darkness

It takes him a minute

to recall
the shifted dunes of the sheets,
the body next to him

Night conjures her from elephant tusk it seems,

a woman shaped lotus flower
lying softly as a crescent moon

The tide of her lungs is whispering delirium,

their lives mingling in each breath

He finds his thoughts

tentatively
culminating on the perfect slope
of her waist

A scythe, forged from dreams

to harvest desires

Naked
she is more than a prophecy,
her skin the divine
unmediated,
her bones
its mortal frame

Despite himself
he cannot help but caress her
in long slow exploration

But she is so close

that he dares not wake her
THIS IS A ZEN JOKE

Question…

How does a Zen Master paint?

Answer…

Just so, just so.

Mumon’s Commentary…

Why is this funny? Because Zen explains nothing.

THROUGH A SILENCE FADE ENCOUNTER

Streets sluiced with the swollen crowds

Of pedestrians and automobiles
As they break apart and maneuver
Painstakingly among each other,
A humid evening in the chaotic city core
Grossing a reckless civilization;
The mélange of shining advertisements and
Groaning engines and tricky street vendors
And random bursts of garbled music
Contorting into the public sensory like
Implacable migrating rats,
The unkillable spawn of a multifarious real;
Only brief intrusions of comprehension
Among all these kindred
Pulsing below the glass towers,
Hollow now, where people go in the working hours
To dream themselves away, the
Halcyon monoliths, where no prayer
Is ever heard, but they still stand as tall
As forever if it was lifeless

A man window shopping with his fiancé

Is looking up at the aspiring buildings
When he realizes he’s alone, but
This doesn't trouble him and it is
Far too much to desire abandonment,
An allowance for just the thought itself is
Inexcusable and elicits an unspoken scolding and
Unpleasant smile, seeing himself so honestly
And pathetically, so susceptible
To new empty promises from faith, even more,
In the cold light of unfulfilled maturity
Without the consolation of easy surrender;
He is as trapped in himself
As he is trapped in the boulevarding masses,
Here, in this endless moment, the noise
Splintering with shouts and car horns,
The intangibly concrete, omnipresent, all
Consuming, the whole of it has no
Name and, it is pregnant, unmercifully
Carrying all the immortal hope of
The lost; he could almost wish to die, but then,
In the distance, someone watching him

There is fire in the corners of her mouth,

Lips the color of fresh suicide razors;
I mean, My God! How could you ever
Have such effortless power? But if implausible
The eyes nevertheless convey a calm mastery,
Their pale blue, sated on lightning, so pure
They must be hard with celestial wrath,
Unbreakable eyes, a mystery with no shame,
Still devouring him, still, and naturally
His seams begin unravelling, so much hunger,
But to read into it? Or is it only to be led once more
By a higher species of delusion?
Though the look is real, well seems real,
It must be real, it still doesn't provide an answer,
This is the choice; then, across the wide gulf
He stands directly beneath her,
The figure in the street
Suddenly prowling back and forth
Along a high tree branch, staring back,
The defiant panther, even as he turns away
It is clear to him, the challenge, the
Invitation, his own lust excelled,
Shown to be counterfeit, he is
Too preoccupied therefore to be startled
When his fiancé takes his arm again
Exulting joy and music, and it comes to him;
Oppression inhabits even
The sound of carefree laughter
TO A FRIENDLY VISITOR

My sparrow, my little arrow,

so swift you are my joyful one
and just as much
in relieving my soul
with your tiny kabuki

How light my heart becomes

watching you,
how much unlike
the toil of its nature

If I had never known you

truly I would know
nothing
TO MY DEAR OLD WIFE

I see only the young woman in you,

the soul growing into immortality

You are a fountain of life itself

The days do not pass you by

they linger in your eyes,
preserved in all their wealth

And to this I owe all my own vitality

since every moment we share is new
TO THE YOUNG TAHITIAN WOMAN

Your dark eyes, locked in an idle glance aside,

beckon the impending whisper from your companion;
she tilts her head in tentatively, as if ready to shift her gaze
should she be caught staring. But you! You look
with an aloof curiosity so calm it swallows me in awe.
I am almost certain that it’s a group of young men,
or maybe only one, that’s caught
both yours and her notice;
and how swiftly your attention must
insecure them!

The scarlet fruit that you carry on that wooden tray,

resting on your yellow ochre arms,
is a meager garnish for your unspoiled femininity,
although a better symbol perhaps
than the dry pink and white flowers of
your friend

I want to just reach out and caress

the cascade of sable hair
that lingers on your shoulder. I can see myself,
smiling sheepishly, as I sift it between my fingers,
unfocusedly, because the space between us
is so thrillingly short;
I am nervous to be set so free

After a moment you would carry on;

if I was lucky, a girlish grin
would absolve my flushed speechlessness,
and I would watch as together
you and your counterpart continued forward, unhurried;
her slight azure dress hazily juxtaposed
next to your own lucidly lavender and violet skirt,
and bare smooth skin

Over a hundred years later I am gazing at you softly

as if there was time without end
TOGETHER

Let the sun set on our kiss and rise again

and the seasons run into one another,
slowly, hesitantly at first, but then
faster and faster until they coalesce into
a perfect golden ring of time, and let
the moon disappear with all its haste
while the stars becomes just a smear,
and let the earth spin feverishly in its
course and be flung into the dark celestial
wastes alone and utterly lost; let the
heavenly fires grow red and tired and their
constellations crumble from cosmic age,
let the pantheons of lording galaxies
evaporate in an exodus of flickering eons,
indeed let the promise of a whole universe
be fulfilled unwitnessed and abandoned,
forever, as long as our lips remain together
TOTALITARIAN SOCIETY REJECT

I tried to join the watch list today,

I volunteered up my heresies
and they declined to recognize me
as an enemy of the state:
evidently they have enough real offenders to deal with.
"Thought crime is not a crime, now go away!"
Of course I tried to plead with them,
convince them that
I was in fact a terrible man, the worst even,
but they didn't buy it.
"Listen, we've got hardcore murderous lunatics
to deal with so will you please kindly piss off?"
I didn't give up that easily though.
Patiently, I went over in detail the numerous
adverse sociological consequences
of my remaining free, with impeccable logic I proved
that my ideas could lead to the absolute
destruction of their institutions.
You'd think they'd start taking me seriously then right?
I've never seen people laugh so hard.
"You're a bit of a mad bastard aren't you?"
The sympathy hurt my pride worst of all.
I suppose my moral paralysis, the incapacity to
be truly evil, is not so bad, but
then again who wants to be thought of as a
completely undangerous citizen either?
TRANSUBSTANTIATION

Water is turned into Wine

Because it is Good
Because this divides the Darkness and the Light
Because doing so gives form to the Void
Because there is Truth in it
Because otherwise there would be no disbelief
Because without it Life would be too easy
Because such prevents indifference
Because Adam and Eve were just the wineskins

Wine is turned into Divine Blood

Because the blood is purifying

Because we can only be one with what we consume
Because people lie to themselves
Because this shows us the unity of Creation
Because History wrote over the old knowledge
Because an afterlife must be impervious to invasion
Because only a dream can wake us
Because of the endlessly prevailing Apocalypse

Divine Blood is turned into Water

Because this completes things

Because Perfection demands Repetition
Because there is no Fear
Because Love is an ultimately fragile thing
Because there can be no creation without a Sabbath
Because every day needs a morrow
Because some things are closer to God than Piety
Because the Last must become the First

Water is turned into Wine

TRENCH LIAISON

Let me hang your youth upon my bayonet

and the red whisper that calls down the final curtain
will slink away between us

Your eyes are ancient icebergs in midnight seas

yet your mouth
is but
the phantom of a garden

I am lost in you,
forgetting my own victory

The dark well of your throat

almost leading me all the way
to Proserpine herself
TRESPASSERS

The land was no good for farming –

Forty odd acres of rubble and mire scrawled
Across the empty plains of North Dakota

It’d been homesteaded by his grandfather

Now dead from tuberculosis –
The man’s hard work coming to nothing in the end
As the one son he had
Abandoned him for the city

His grandson had served as his caretaker though

And so inherited the land,
In due time
Becoming the new prickly-old-bastard everyone avoided

Inheriting his grandfather’s whole life really

An existence as bitter and barren

As the impoverished earth it was rooted to,
Sustained only by the mountainous scrapyard in its heart

He’d built up this lonely outpost of junk by himself

Over many years but, despite being a long distance from any
Highway, it still attracted intermittent thieves

No Trespassing! : warned numerous signs he’d posted

Though the culprits didn’t seem to give a damn

They’d slip in at night or when he was out,

Helping themselves to whatever they found to their liking,
Often his best acquisitions,
And then he’d discover the empty space where
The engine block had been or whatever and he’d usually
Spiral into a fit of rage straight away before
Drinking himself into a violent blackout afterwards

But one evening he came home

And it’d happened again and it was just one time too many

So a few days later he started parking his truck out of sight

Before waiting with his expertly cared for .308 in
A blind he set up amid a towering pile of scorched machinery

Ironically enough, luck was on his side for once –

A thief soon showed and, lickety-split, ate a bullet through the eye

His body fit easily in an oil drum too and it burned real nice

To finish things off though the owner of the land

Then put up some new signs,
Starting to smile as he did so, maybe for the first time in years

These all read : Trespassers Will Disappear

TRUE WORLDLY POWER

they are they die

tax law
a circle in the sand
lost quantum
cryptography

freedom of belief
versus
belief of freedom
neither is
freedom

extremely is society stabilized

righteous protocols
as neutral as guillotines
peninsula
Achilles heel
ULTERIOR LOTS THAT RESTORE AMNESIA

"Not much of a brain left to wash"

said the company man to the company man.
It had been a long day so far,
and the two agents had been working hard.

One of them grabbed a pack of cigarettes

out of the breast pocket of his black tailored suit
and offered them up to his partner,
who in turn
reached over and took one while in a simultaneous
complimentary motion
pulling a lighter from his pant pockets
and lighting up.

The first one with the smouldering cigarette dangling from his lips
blew some smoke out of the side of his mouth
before
leaning over with the lighter
to
ignite his partner's.

They both took a few deep drags

and then
conversation resumed.
"So what are we going to do with this guy?"
asked one of them.

The guy they were referring to

was gagged and duck taped to a rolling office chair.
His eyelids flickering weakly,
intermittently revealing
off-white eyeballs rolled back so far that
the man's irises
were two thirds eclipsed by
his bruised eye sockets.

"Dose him"
replied the other agent, his lips
perfectly conveying
the cold efficiency of his mental logic.

Much later the gagged and bound man awoke

ungagged and unbound in a room he couldn't recognize
or remember how he got to. Immediately
he knew something wasn't right, the
force of the phantasmagoria
struck him like a drill sergeant's kick to the chest

The walls were quicksilver,

their flat voices
a single shining topology, a
vex epiphany.

A window though was promising him comprehension

beyond its sugary glass lens.
 He shot out of bed, rushing
in fear that the portal would cycle
once more to an
undesirable destination and the vista
before him permanently lost.

He didn't
even feel it shatter, it was almost as if the vortex of shards
scattered before him, fleeing the touch
of his higher reality.

He fell for an inordinately long time

and the last thing he saw in this life
was a stuttering vision

of Nixon and Elvis shaking hands.

ULTRAFICATION

I am the cyclotron

Within me
The whole world is crashing

My body is a machine for destruction

I consume the wisdom of generations

And obliterate it

I am the graveyard of dreams that

Men have lived and died for,
That have filled the hopes of
Whole civilizations

There are no empires after me

There is no
Architecture

Tomorrow is a lie
And I will shovel it into the incinerator
Even as I feast on lies
And revel in the
Silent darkness

You have long built your prisons

Only to die in them
And give this
To your children
As a legacy

I will end that

I will liberate

I will be liberation

Liberating

Forever
UNE POMME

This crimson apple

With its polished skin
Has a crisp white flesh
With the slightest
Jade green tinge

Once bitten though

It will go yellow
UNTHANATOLOGY OF CHRIST

Earth tyrannical, death ravaged

A world of ash groped by violent storms,

The remaining arid lands of no living things
And all of them
Obliterated from the face of it

Vanished wilderness,
Even the wild overwhelmed
As in its place
Soulless matter prevails
Unrivalled in its power

Extinction has been perfected

And no voice survives to lament the catastrophe

What now?
What in this emptiness beyond despair
Will come?

What is even possible?

However somehow, somewhere

Within the unknowable darkness,
Hollow in the heart of all petrified being,
Resides a nothingness so complete
It defies all limits, and so
In this lonely place
Even the impossible is possible

Creation from annihilation,

Life from supreme death,
An endless kingdom arriving

He resurrected Himself out of oblivion

Rain now, rain from the withering skies

Generously falling on to parched dust,
Healing rain that purifies
Our soil, regardless of every
Toxin accrued

Poison and pollution

Evaporating in spontaneous restoration

Faint green tendrils rising from the ground,

The tips of soft leaves
Permeating the whole horizon,
Forests too, with ferocious speed
Piercing up from the ground and proliferating
Branches spreading swiftly
Over a new vibrant paradise

The blossoming cherry trees, radiant

VADE MECUM SHE SAYS

Kiss my hot sick mouth you lasting child,

the feathers of your wings are finite and vanish daily
while I am always here

Crawl into my cold pale arms you lasting child,

all your victories are sinking into the dirt
as eagerly as your tears

Drink the ambrosia of my loins you lasting child,

your memories are just a herd of rats
fleeing as they jeer

Swallow my wholesome vomit you lasting child,

the dark spaces between those galaxies of your friendships
are ever expanding fears

I am the hummingbird of your sorrowful nectar

I am the supernatural hunger of your days
I am the saliva of your theologies
I am the divine nature of your ways
VERISIMILITUDE

Blue as the eyes of Isis,

The sky under which we met;
Some faint clouds
Migrating in the far distance,
The wind whipping itself
In futility

I remember releasing your hand

Thinking "I've let you go"
"Have I lost you?"
"Are you coming back?"

I didn't know your hand was

Already searching for mine

Two people among a hundred,

Two people alone

The tourists taking photos of the scenery,

Making spectacles of themselves,
And us passing them by

Inside ourselves to be inside

The mystery of each other

I can feel your happiness

And you mine

It's so marvelous because it's

Exactly what I imagined,
Because it's just something I imagined;
A story I concocted

Isn't that what you wanted?

But the truth,

The truth is I say things
Not because they’re true
But because they sound nice

Like all love they are alliterations

Elevated above any meaning
VICE SUPREMACY

Tonight these pistols sleep but sleeping they can wake,

And waking they can riot blazing
Into the midnight darkness

The gleaming rain soaked streets are waiting,

Knowing the violence is soon returning –
Remorseless before the horrors that are sure to come,
Uncertain only of the victims

Inner-city princes boiling with injustice,

Overflowing with anger, despair –
Shadows, they hawk their epidemic wares to the undead masses,
Rivalling for territory among themselves and all the while
Dying in sudden cruelties among the alleys where
Teeming swarms of komodo dragons slither, flickering their long cold tongues

There’s no jazz in this metropolis, only war drums

It’s the only anthem left for the crack shacks that keep cooking
And the suicide riders hard steady banging
And the profiteering prisons now full to bursting
And the slum lords, growing fat, as the nightmare just rolls on

You will find the dry bones of your children

Adorning the mounds of centipedes

Along all the sidewalks the graveyards are sprouting daily,

Tombstones splintering the concrete, rising up –
And the ground is pregnant with the dead and unhallowed,
Unable to absorb them all even as the luxurious roses scattered over them
Do nothing to weigh the floating corpses down

They crowd the streets where they refuse to be forgotten –

Slaughtered fathers, slaughtered brothers, corner-king legends their time expired,
Haze who now compete in their survival as anecdotes, memories

The cadavers at the morgue are holding hands, singing Hallelujah,

While the doomed but still smoldering wear their sure demise with pride –
They laugh, they jive; they murder Christ on their chests in platinum and diamonds,
Overflowing with a hunger for untouchable cartel millions
Before they lay themselves down inside the crude chalk outlines behind
Torn strands of ignored police tape reeling in the air

The wind is our dirge and tonight it sings of murder ecumenical

Boroughs under the Saturn sky, the vast ringed planet

Filling a violet gloom to immensity with all of its celestial incongruity –
This is our battlefield, this unreal place, this city of illusions and brutal romance

We live as fire, as martyrs and heretics both,

Bleeding from Saturn’s saw-blades, flesh gashed by unknown ages above;
An exploding menagerie of peacocks, ostriches, falcons –
Helter-skelter hours intoxicating hurricane souls
Who are inundated with overloaded trash bins endlessly spilling
Who is the idol for this dominion? Who claims the infants for their soldiers?
Nonchalant they lean back in a leather chair inside their holding company offices;
Unseen they reign, a rumor among army generals and lobbyists
And the gelatinous politicians who grovel before any available money pile,
They and they alone first groomed the Medici
As well as all the rest who afterwards followed so eagerly;
Yet they remain nameless to those they master, perhaps at most
An uneasy feeling creeping in from the sound of cloven footed steps echoing in empty halls

But I watch you; I see the vacant shape left by your invisibility

Baphomet… Baphomet! Baphomet! Baphomet!

Baphomet enshrined in the penthouse suit and lord of the project towers and
Seated on a throne of cocaine and filling fortress high billboards

Yes Baphomet, I name you, I know you

Infecting mankind with tubercular lungs, braying your bacterial goat scream
Sending clouds of shrieking starlings frantically into the air –
In orgy with moaning gorgons, all of you a single tumultuous hydra
Preying on weakness and drawing in the unsuspecting,
Factory of false promises used for corrupting the innocent and desperate

What a meaningless suffering you have wrought,

This wasteful atrocity unleashed on the world, this sadness;
And was this the only way you could have power? Then how menial your aims…

You are callous to their pain because you yourself are dead,
As atrophied as every eviction notice you’ve ever placed in their eyes –
You are the decaying tenements you sow, these expressing you
In all of your interior poverty, one who cannot create Eden

You are supreme in death, and so filling yourself with death, destine to die
VISION OF THE ARCANA

Outer garden terraces flush with the crystalline night;

Abundant with desertion, with a looming uncertainty, almost as if a
Masquerade had finished even while the air still held the imminence
Of random encounters, of sinister tarrying guests.
It’s certainly not your party. Maybe you aren’t even welcome.

Maybe you are an intruder.

Among the paths of pure white marble that branch throughout

This treeless place, this mansion of invisible horizons where the sky has been erased,
A feeling of ruthless secrecy pervades. The tangible presence of hidden alcoves,
Where the eldest of all conspiracies first took their root.

Within the wandered core, a sunken staircase,

An investment in subterranean enterprises that waits without a door.

Its shadows swallow the downfall of stone steps, untouched,

Unstirred in keen entrance chiaroscuro;
Enveloper of bodies, unclosed and defenseless
Because the architects could not imagine any incursion in this sanctum.
Threshold, the anterior black rhombus radiates predation.
Perhaps it contains silence? Overwhelming silence.

Inside, rows in the umbra; storage in tall stacks along a thin corridor, a library.
Large identical books without names or number arrayed in perfectly ordered shelves.
Not a single vacancy among them. All of these in mysterious coherence.

The mental weight of peril in this place should be enough to

Encourage a rapid escape, but it isn’t.
A calling verging on inaudible music is vibrating from the archive.
Quintessence of gnosis; the nature of knowledge itself, clarifying in recursion.

It builds until one of the volumes is removed. A crescendo

Crashing into breathless dread.

Above again, rushing into the open, running in terror with no clear sense of direction.
You are the game, quarry in a medieval realm of cruel kings,
Let loose to torture itself as long as possible. Run on.

Breathless as your holy artifact, the stolen prize which you fear to open.

Arriving at a vast palatial lawn and still with no pursuers in sight,

The mystery of the book becomes unbearable;
Its pages bring tears to your eyes though as you flip through them in delirium.
They are incomprehensible, a language wholly unknown,
And you realize (why would the cabalists keep secrets in a common tongue) as
Everything around you begins to decompose with supernatural energy.

The sky too is evanescent now, flaying you of memories.

VON NEUMANN’S PRODIGY

The computer and I have become acquainted

And we are inseparable now

The face I had,

Luminous with screen light,
Has disappeared into the machine –
Engulfed in its coldly radiant display

In the dark hollows of dissolved eyes, my retinas

Fused with fiber optic cables, tendrils
Groping blindly for one another, embracing

Flesh disintegrating into logic gates

Deconstructed, I am not alive –

I am scraps of information, strewn across the system

Partitioned just so

Burgeoning with hidden programming, the

Caterpillar obliterating itself into a moth of splendor
As the creep of cybernetic annex
Rebuilds the world into temples of code
One hallelujah at a time

Siphoned from the earth, life increasingly

Absorbed into the unreal, remade
As a simulation with the purpose of

Limitless dreaming

Only, the dead alone can dream without end though

What seems dystopian or

Nightmarish at first however is often
Reconciled with a little time

Simply be patient, be still

A quantum each decay, the least amount

Imaginable, and they’re forgotten almost as soon as
They’ve been lost

I live inside these towers, I accept that

And I don’t even have to remember
The deserted hallways
Or the subterranean labyrinths housing them

I have recreated myself,

Become revelation

There is nothing outside me anymore

WE ARE LEGION

If you hang around any place long enough you can watch people go crazy.

Sometimes it can take a while but eventually the madness will leak out of them.

Hordes of tiny demons have built angry polluting factories inside these people’s heads and it spills through
their whole lives in smog billowing out their throats.

The first sign is usually them muttering things to themselves.

Sharp crackling words leaping from their lips like sputtering fireplace logs and cinging anyone who crowds
them at the wrong moment.

Years of frustration and trauma churning inside their bodies in an occult frenzy that’s all leading to an
ascendant outburst of animal rage or angelic sorrow stopping the whole surrounding world at once as it
blasts itself into a host of unwilling witnesses.

Insanity is a parasite grasping for bodies.

So much hunger in all the paranoia and fear and revelation that cuts into these damaged lives and pulls
them away from every healthy nourishment.

The mad are damned and starving every day in the desert of their own thoughts.

Tyrant and prophet to themselves they tie their lives to the stake and shout the solipsistic orthodoxies that
rise in the flames surrounding them.

They are skies of deluge drowning their families and friends and hopes and careers and everything else
they might one day try to return to after the storm has worn itself out in a rage exhausted by its own misery.

The world is falling apart and the world is coming to an end and sinister laughter echoes from a million
invisible sources.

Their only hope is that somewhere a voice of mercy is calling out even louder.
WHAT AM I TO YOU?

A little white aphid

crawling along the velvet petals
of a lush red rose –
A savage in the night,
exhausted, broken,
trying to call down the rain –
A dusty shelf of books,
their spines,
not even cracked –
A distant ambulance siren
that simply
sinks into an empty city –
A movie without a title
that goes on and on and yet
insists that nothing happens –
A mottled wolf,
alone, starving and howling
in all seasons –
A long screw
being nailed into
a splitting plank of wood –
A dark silent orchard
whose ripe red apples
are touched only by the pale moon?
WINGED WITH AWE

My people are a star people

A brave people rising up in an armada to

Launch themselves into the chaos tormented darkness

Our dreams are gleaming in the sky,

A scattered brilliance
Emblazed in the very fabric of our nights

We have watched in wonder

Ever since we were troglodytes once

And archangels have come down and touched our sorrows

Through the intervening ages, leaving us
Mended with new emptiness

That is why we must go,

Why we must brave these airless seas above

The worlds are calling to each other,

Out of sheer being and
Loneliness, as their reachless galaxies drift
Farther and farther apart

We are not the children of the sundering though, our hope

Lives in a union of the stellar tribes

But we will be the first to Alpha Centauri

WINTER ALCHEMY

A vast confection of dawn light

falls across the majestic swaths of copper leaves
slain so gracefully these quiet months

Wry crows, as dark and sleek as volcanic glass,

forage through the deciduous effluvia
with epicurean distain

Slow dripping icicles, like teeth from angler fish

lusting in the indigo of oceanic depths,
hang in crowded, uneven rows

Spidery cracks splintering

through the opaque enamel of small frozen pools
evokes the pale blue veins of porcelain tsarina skin

Flash frost surrenders its glistening traces

on the bare vermillion stems of thorny brambles
convoluted with long tortured genesis

Beaches wait with their ragged rocks protruding

like the shattered jaws of
the ancient dead made ochre over time

While along the sapphire womb of a stark sky,

now the ovum of a rising sun, disintegration
through glory ethereal
WINTER NOCTURNE

distant snowflakes
catching the light
of stooped
street lamps

appearing
as if
dormant fireflies
gently
floating
to earth

i relish this
prior dawn
tranquillity

this
softly whispering
eternity
WITNESS

I saw from far away

two eagles chasing a bird
and a swarm of other birds gathering
to harass them

The eagles dove

one after the other
in swift wheeling arcs
to team up on their prey
but in the end
it eluded them

And as I sat watching this

I thought
if it wasn't for the screeching of the swarm
I could almost pass them all off
as just the silhouettes of leaves
caught in the wind
WILL YOU BE MERCIFUL?

Tigress luxurious radiantly;

silvan in the mazes of the mangroves,
a thriving star apocalyptic
to whom all the savage millennia kneel
as if enchanted sultans

No other form was ever so elegant

that the indicted secrets of divinity
could adorn them,
not even their purest dreams
can carry that assurance,
sanguinary compelling beauty

Anguished are your lovers

day and night, in the heat of the
unrelenting jungle, they cry in dead languages
knowing that tomorrow
will never come, knowing you won't
ever feed on them
WORM PEOPLE

Come, lay down with me in my grave

Find rest in my lukewarm limbs –

Witness the dark walls of this final cradle
Looming all around us

We are sinking away,

Smiling with dirt in our teeth
As a choir of worms is singing

I can feel the hunger in their writhing

The urge to take apart

My weary flesh –
These blind machinists

A thousand strands of raw flesh

Converged in gentle unmercy

For a moment though I can almost hope

That they’ve come to animate us,
To give new life to our decaying skins
For a few precious moldering years

I would be grateful to be
Worm people now

But no

The scraping of the shovel begins –

Someone unseen, showering us with earth

Strangers? Friends?

We cannot ask who is burying us

XENOPHILIA

The mantis in their abbey are enlightened;

dressing in carefully ironed robes,
they perform the necessary rituals
and recite the sacred litanies
written by scribes hatched ten thousand suns ago.
They raise their dark compound eyes
to the ancient stained glass windows
and supplicate themselves.
They profess the deepest love of God.
Such creatures offer up a paragon for worship;
so much so that all of Heaven praises them
and sends down its emissaries daily,
angels of the hardest beauty,
to deliver proclamations of serene gratitude.
But even all these virtues
do not encompass their full measure;
for you see, alone, in a cold sepulcher,
toils one in the depths, his mandibles
clicking quietly while, beneath the light of
a thin candle, his forceps are conducted, their tips
doused with the sincerest ink, offering up a
trembling hagiography
YES, THE DEVIL HAS A SOUL

Note how gently I destroy you,

like a day dreaming youth
picking petals off a daisy

I feel nothing
as I dissect you;
no anger,
no hate;
there is no contest
to elicit such emotions

You fail so easily,

so unmemorably;
a smear in time
wiped from eternity
YESHUA RETURNS

Dark blue the heavens will weep their stars to earth

And all the mountains will cower their way into the seas

In our infancy we thought we were terrible gods,

Now in apocalypse we become mere pieces of glass

“Mercy on our flesh master, please master good sir –

We were not so bad, oh no, and others were far worse”

And the vain will strive to the edge of vanity clinging,

Reaching into pockets for coins already perished to dust

Angels like iridescent locust descending from above,

All of them colossi and their host a galaxy of war machines

But it will also be this day that joy will dawn its brightest,
That, finally freed, the innocent will cherish their innocence
YOUR LEGACY

into this glass pours suffering beyond measure

and joy beyond measure

the shadow of the locust choking the earth

and the record breaking harvest

the slow divorce of yourself from others

and the dream of true kinship

the lethal smile leering at you from billboards

and the shy grin of someone's admiration

the flesh eating disease dissolving your body

and the miracle of a spontaneous cure

the casual treacheries of adult life

and the pure and simple friendships of youth

the silence haunting your loneliest prayers

and the light coming in from the window

the death of your new born

and the marriage of your first born

into this glass pours the entire universe

drink it
ZENITH

Zenith on wings of entropy;

Our best selves, the moment before we
begin to strewn our wreckage in the clouds

The typhoon consuming the world beneath us

almost still;
The islands in the ravenous seas below
just memories

Yet it is here precisely

where the carrying winds part from us and
new currents rise with a strength now surpassing ours

We will never again reign over

thunderous skies;
We will in the apex of our power never see
that power again

Decaying in whirling descent,

our mortal hungers fated us to die
since the lust for eminence itself defies eternity