Selected Poems (Absolute Vol 5)

Name: Selected Poems (Absolute Vol 5)
Author: David Bussell

VOLUME V: SELECTED POEMS

CONTENTS

Dead Myths Shaking from the Trees
Elegies of the Damned
The Furnace of the Heart
From Death to Death
The Herculean Cycles
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DEAD MYTHS SHAKING FROM THE TREES

between the love of the flesh and the love of the spirit is the river of god.

there, on the battlefield, krishna reveals his true form to arjuna as his soldiers copulate with their mistresses obscured by a storm rolling in from the west and i’m on the mountain calling her in with my graveyard soul locking lips with eris as she scours the dead plane for clean blood

in her temple i offer this rune of my sex the psychic energy of my turning flesh on the block of severance; chopped off like an arm it finally lives.

i was born in the dark of the moon; i too, watched her shed blood mourning the death of her daughters and burying them in the backyard of consciousness where the dead reach for the sky on the bent backs of bare trees, moaning softly in the breeze i went down beneath her and held my hands out splashing her warm egg on my face painting my body and waist with it

the sword of my cock is alight in the glint of her growing fullness and every two weeks i die with her heaving on a bare mattress screaming in a bare room

and then nothing.

II.

i went there, mythless and emerged with a new arm one commanded by the spinner goddess discharging her tangled riddles from the wing of jupiter like a shadow-beast crouched and ready for combat

as the red sun rises i prepare my exilir of discharge and ready myself for combat springing into the affairs of men like i have seen a gazelle or smelled blood

i meet the earth and torture her like an animus she applies the same pressure to my face, spine, back, and legs - so i become a spider to slink away from her wrath in old age and defeat.

the god time is not like man but amorphous meat rotting in the creek of fate wafting up the vent of olympus into the nostrils of the feasting gods hermes vomits in his soup and i drink his vomit as a rite.

how long now for the cold earth? i ask the rotting thing, with no answer but this putrefaction itself the word of god pronounced with a cruel twist; a sneer of the mouth and waving away the entirety of man’s creation for the timeless beauty of scorched earth these are the new aesthetics razed of themselves and boiled alive with the silent scream of an animal, on a meat hook without a mouth

III.

i evoke your name, beloved i, incarnate on the total eclipse of the sun witness to the blood rite of hecate soul given to the blood rain and erinyes avowed wrath of fate all of the dirt between the fingernails of a benevolent god cannot save me what comes next my beloved!

and even now, brought to my knees in this lower decan of hell this slum of hell, where i am reduced to bending shadows into iron rods even this, my love is paradise

for i go willingly and suffer pain like spring breathing or a kiss from your lips, my love i beg pluto to take me down to his depths and raze me of my sanity raze me of my knowing and the last of my hope; shave me down to the brittle marrow of my existence render me pure elemental pure spit of the gods

IV.

i have gone insane in the most perfect way; pluto, my love, he tortures me with you the one thing he knows will kill my heart the memory of your touch and the dagger that hangs over our separation like a pendulum i lie here – strapped to my bed like a gurney and the dagger of my hope, my love for you swings back and forth over my flesh – to cut me across the length of my spine and make me perfect oh death, make me perfect!

i would make love to your corpse, if i must spit of the rain, shower from my mouth – where you are going it is all watery depths the blue black of neptune’s embrace; she knows us best she knows the hate of our love, the blood that does not come off and the slow suicide of our time. i twist myself inside you and break the final seal opening the black gate of hell where mangled dogs whose faces became scratched by serpents emerge from your breasts leaving dirty scars and drag me down into the painter’s red of your flushed body where i rot for seven years.

the gods grant me small gifts and paint on the walls of my cell shadows like lovers and hope and dreams litter my own dreams and paint the walls of my own chest while i am submerged inside of yours incubated without your knowing i am buried alive in your knowing.

you love red and are loved red, so quick to leave me so quick to tow me on in infinite silence so that my first crime becomes the crime which is etched upon the stars of my name the crime which digs its claws into my soul gripping it like a gravestone.

VI.

as i am passing through nothing into nothing i reach out - and touch maybe a bit of you down at the essence of your soul

having already loved the world i can give you nothing; no solace for the sad joke of it the dirt road of offerings which falls even now before your lips gold turning to shit ambition turning to shit and the death of dreams at the hand of time - but perhaps this lack of solace is that which provides like a lock without a combination or a hallway without a door.

having already known the tricks of love; having played into the games of words and images and the chess game of loss which masquerades as death i cannot play it with you, nor may i play you with it these words fall to the floor like bodies emptied of life - and calling what i feel for you ‘love’ would merely be a denouement where the actor is called upon to hold up the body as the last letter of a dark alphabet.

i cannot be human, no for the end of that sentence is the dissolution of this volatile compound into its elemental parts earth and water smeared back from clay and fired into this form fired and smitten in the kiln of desire breaking and unbreaking at once and these words are that rogue element which i breathe - some call this love,

but to them i wager the witness: a dying star, a decided collision of atoms spilled from the knocked up womb of fate into this plane to accomplish her will then fly apart a thousand years too late.

lovers always do this like birds that have decided against an allegiance or the disasters that god breathes into the skin of his creation, cracking it, flooding it, and laying waste to us. (this is just one of the laws made up on a whim, i’m sure - by a trickster god and left untouched until it too was shattered by the weight of time.) the gods live like us, die like us, love like us, and fall into the shadow of belief; their higher octaves are the song we always hear: the fire dance of passion.

the disasters of this body are just markings of that rite being done, inscribed with each passing day etched and painted with new wounds, new burnings borne with the silence of a dismembered tree, or a stifled stream. that which is deprived of itself is without dignity; alive in name only. the tree is hollowed out; thus one may hear the echo of god within it, and this is how instruments are made.

i played a tune and it swallowed the sky of my mind; soothed my broken soul for a moment, then the pain returned louder and brighter than ever, flashing like a bomb played over and over again on a rhythm a remembrance of that which was not mine i heard the pain of the world

the pain of the world that became me.

VII.

marching through the marshlands of this autumnal world we do not vanquish the vanquished body, no, it lingers here like a ghost mountain in its essence - curled up in the fetal position.

siegfried laid down the dragon of the body piercing the illusion of its flesh just like men seek to conquer the world outside neglecting the barbarous soul; the tendrils which cling to the body like a parasite refusing to budge

do not look to worldly things to appease the moloch of the flesh always demanding more always arcane; just out of reach of the wandering mind struggling to grasp the carnal dialect - bring the body into the fold with understanding total, piercing the night of finitude.

we who dig out the sand from this understanding are not bookish, no, we are rogues of consciousness beholden only to self knowledge knowing no totem, no religion, and no obedience to the world we watch the world burn and return to our work feverish and bold even in the setting of the sun history, to us, is the sense memory thrown up into the mouth - the complete return of love.

certainly, i need nothing not even the clothes of the body which i shed like a dying knight under a tree

or the light of day. that which i need is below the horizon the dug out myth of my soul.

it tells me of impossible rooms filled only with symbols - the wax candle of the body and the letter body the organ body and the nose body gorged with imagination; towering over the hurt world.

what does pain want with me now? old friend - it has walked several blocks to watch me die dressed in a petticoat; shoeless but i slip out of the room quitting the deathbed of it all under the cover of darkness.

VIII.

i have done with the gruesome idea and find myself in an empty room sitting in a chair overlooking a window the room awash with starlight; the window adjourned to oceanic space molasses straits of stone organs and planetary bodies, looming like gods

this is the house of the gods the seat of divinity where light casts itself to and fro like sound bouncing off of stone; a message changing in the perversion of the encounter – the sun inside your soul

i have no mind to tell of this no flight of fancy nor dirge into the depths of my love for death nor must i sour over a plate of food to know of these things. they pass before my eyes like banished titans sheathed in the upper consciousness of beings; sent up in the storehouse of smoke where they linger hazy and withdrawn until revolution, like a train throws them into action doing their patterns like chores about the house of the cosmos.

IX.

I have forged the body of the iron flesh The body that will not be made, nor truly undone The iron flesh that sits both dying in the shade And out, beneath the sun. This dying body has submerged into untold life And carried the muse from beneath; A song she sings This dying body has emerged from untold life That place where angels earn their wings. From the shadows it has stolen youth Stolen love, stolen regret From the shadows this body commits its final crime And passes into another world A world without breath.

I have forged the body of the iron flesh From which the goddess of the underworld will emerge She comes to me in the dark of sleep And whispers to me the forgotten word In the shallows where I weep Lost to hated time and the absurd Where men tear men into meat And pleasure is lost to passage; Immortalized in the dirge I steer this ship toward infinity Where she speaks so soft and smooth Into my ear the sacred rite The mind pregnant with her commanded mood.

I have forged the body of the iron flesh Where locusts fly and praises are sung So shallow is the world From the depths where I have sprung. The ashes fallen on her breast The deathly tome which in silence cease My word unto her; My life turned in to seed.

Buried in the ancient womb Smothered with dirt and rendered grave The muse twists her face in the ruins of time And her beauty comes to decay My seed rots in her womb; Cities fall as they may This passage so drawn out and revoked That I scream under the whip of her name. Chained in the cellar of the flesh I have gone into the cave Where living things are tortured And dying things are praised.

Why do we pretend that all of these stories of kings mean something? As if they were more than a collective dream; The violent struggle of living and dying in the world.

Let us push past all that into a different place Where living is not the force of metal scraping flesh The thresher of what man has made.

I have no interest in great civilizations, progress, Or the time of the world. Its clocks spin wildly, whipping all into the riotous frenzy of work. What work must be done in the face of god? The fates laugh at such a man. I am the directionless wanderer, all animal and all knowing

Composed of the sutured poles of the magnet known as the real, The all world, the all things. I draw them unto me like souls enticed by my lyre; Fire dancers to a flame.
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XI.

The whole of human culture is nothing but theatre The dance of living and dying set to a tune Of remembrance and forgetting.

These dolls buried under the earth Pieces of these vessels which once held souls These chinks in the caverns of our hearts

For if the soul is all at once Then we have no need for time Nor for the distinction of the holy and unholy parts – Let this from now on be known as The play of the imagination.

The rulers of men scampering Over beds of hot coals and gloating mountains To claim and possess definition That slippery thing which slips from the tongue of the ocean wordlessly That slippery thing which slips from the hearts of men.

Do not deny it in your hearts That you, too, wanted power. That you, too, wanted to rule with controlling knowledge; To provide the dictates Of a god.

Even now, I fall away from this poem Like a spectre of consciousness Which can claim nothing. I lean my ghost hand out the window Toward your heart.

XII.

We could talk of this dream We are living This dream where there is separation So there is reason to war or despair –

But you, you who know all too well What this dream entails And the death it demands You call for something more The succulence of that life force hidden behind the skin of the ripe fruit The ripe fruit we call ‘the apparent world’. For this succulence rests in dormant solitude behind all things The oneness that beckons the senses To the underworld Of nonsense.

I too, beckon you there So we might discuss nothings of a different tune Speaking in complex dissonance and shaking off the laws of our time Like a horse might shake off a fly.

ELEGIES OF THE DAMNED

TO SERVE DIVINE LOVE TO SERVE TRUE LOVE

love is not the mere playing at of roles, nor is it the small deeds, or the sum of a lifetime - but it is the raw and passionate act of two animals locked in the embrace of a desire that does not belong to animality

it is that which killed rilke at the rose bush: the brutal secret of penetration and the subsequent island of two strangers who cannot be totally subsumed but by the union of all things in god

it is that love is not the play of images, nor is it the fantasy of perfect union - but that perfect union itself as the only sensual law the frenzy of mars and venus locked in immanent orbit the poles of a magnetic engine ripping into flesh and the delight.

the trouble with this love is that it is by nature unstable when two poles, irreconcilable - meet in the compromise of embrace sunk beneath the surface of afternoons and yet different souls brought together without reason but true nonetheless -

the wedding of unlikely forces into the deepest pleasure.

II.

here is how adamantly i fight to keep my poems from the exploitation of the world going so far as to remove myself from it entirely and even failing to write them down!

for, you see, my poems are my life inseparable fierce, well built and full of violent force. they are the whisper of my life to itself away from prying eyes and ears which would rend these poems from themselves in the dark magic of civilization.

for, you see, i am at once the scholar of your ways and the brute throwing stones at passing monuments and yelling ‘this is made of the same stuff!’ as they crumble to the ground.

it is the aether of perception which widens this lens revealing a chamber of climes united if only by the atmosphere of suffering which permeates the sky like bullet holes. i stand on stilts, overlooking the scene - my ledger riddled with tears.

i am well aware of the consequences of mingling with this world caught up in the lust of things like a wind and as such i do not blaspheme by mentioning the names of your cities or the icons of your culture.

i am a poet too bound to the shadows to even contemplate begging admittance and as such my poems are ecstatic. they do not see themselves in anyone.

with the agility of my youth i evade the temptations of this world and the catch of images. even as i walk by windows, i do not look into them - as i know what i will see.

the cask of the body readymade and sealed into the network of blood one great heart stretching from the axis of earth to the outstretched fingertips of my hand. it has well been time for me to write my great poem like volodya and i do so lazily and without much fanfare between work and chores like any other person.

this time is marked by revolutions of public conviction and policy the stupid war which unmasks itself to reveal a worthy successor so i walk away from this game of every new century the rise and fall of everything and shake in my bed until my soul strips everything from its white knuckled grasp

this is how truth reveals itself to me by the relinquishing of all of this dust i have mistaken for a precious memory the bags of flesh i have loved and the myths i have woven

before my time. the untangling of all of this like a knot in my hair is no task for the blustering of dreams puffing about like an angry cabinet the back and forth of suits and opinions

no, for i who am outfitted like the war god aries or like a bull with a penchant for poems is not mere humanity such an accusation is cause for a scuffle in the streets. the reduction of the smallest speck into somehow something of even less meaning the gods look down at the imposition of human law and barely laugh

the sad joke of history has all but dried up and my tears hash lines into my entries turning them into drawings and spells. what meager task has dragged my soul to this juncture with no outbound train in sight and a storm which blinds my senses? the ticking of the night incites me to rage against the swallows in the rafters of my soul

i jettison the play of my deepest emotions that drove me to mad passion like a clumsy performance i, an actor too drunk to speak smashing up the set piece of the world between meals of wine stumbling up to the edge of atonement and faking my death. i have moved past and future, my dream and they have made love one last time.

i watched them from my window as they mingled with the stars until i grew bored finding divinity in cats, postcards, and other things.

poets are not meant to be remembered only to kill memory, and all that which encumbers the human spirit - which is to say, everything. i took pleasure in the idea of birth and death but nothing came of it other than pleasure.

III.

nonviolence is a religious ideal almost as ridiculous as the concept of progress

IV.

god is a river in which i flow endlessly when i come across a thought i sidestep it; allow it to flow past me when i come across a feeling i sidestep it; allow it to flow past me when i come across an adversary i sidestep, and allow them to flow past me i do not discriminate or judge these happenings; they do not even happen. i am aware of a disturbance and i am aware of a disturbance dying and i am awareness - undisturbed.

i am a warrior who never fights a poet who never speaks a sage who does not know a mouth that never opens and not even a person.

this is no riddle.

i do not pay lip service to law; i do not even glance at belief. perched on the ruins of the world i wonder at the sad fixation of control which grips the hearts and minds of dead things.

i do not for a second consider that there is a curative knowledge or a method of organizing this suffering once and for all nor that there is such a thing as power or justice beyond the game of struggle to create world.

all of the ideas, concepts, and so called brilliant thoughts thrown into the stew of history and mixed into a rotten blend that i would only drink if i did not have eyes to see it, a nose to smell it, and a mouth to taste it. and i am told this is called, ‘reality’.

there are certain things, i’m told, that cannot change - certain rules that must be obeyed, certain obligations i have to the world, and so forth.

i hear these words and laugh them into a corner where they suicide themselves

all of the sad restriction that i cannot pity and the images so carefully composed to represent the deservingness and righteousness that i am supposed to worship and strive towards

i smash their frames and burn their museum

all of the obligations i owe, all of these debts i am told i must pay, all of this imagined community -

i look at the world and see nothing. i see all of this clamor and turmoil over nothing; this fighting and burning of nothing; this apocalypse of nothing.

what decency is there, truly? what law is there, truly? what world is there, truly? what debt is there, truly?

show me these ‘realities’ without justification; without the righteousness of the image you are so desperate to protect.

VI.

how many beliefs held because of dreams of power, beliefs held because of popular appeal, beliefs held because of the desire for acceptance; beliefs that are always incomplete? the sheer number is enough to suffocate god.

how many positions taken out of the belief in what is right, belief in the truth of thought, knowledge, dignity, deservingness, morality - positions which always crumble under the weight of time? the sheer number is enough to suffocate god.

how many regimes of power, built on the backs of the enslaved - carried out with desperate precision only for these great civilizations and their rulers to succumb to death - that which takes all that is not real? the sheer number is enough to suffocate god.

all that remains of all of this is some broken stone in a desert blood reclaimed by the ocean breath reclaimed by the air; flesh reclaimed by the ground.

the relentless quest for pleasure has yielded nothing; this ‘pleasure’ is nowhere to be found, but in the creation of pain. this ‘wealth’ is nowhere to be found, but in the creation of poverty. the cult of the satisfaction of desire has yielded nothing but brokenness, contempt, and empty philosophizing. what superficial legacy is this? what contempt.

VII.

the grace of settling into the vocation of the soul is like water being water. i let myself have it, with all of its terrible grace and wandering away from all of the things that i believed i loved.

this journey - which has been so long and filled with deceit at my hands and my hands alone - is dropped at the foot of this oasis which is the end of longing. i drop to my knees and submerge myself completely.

VIII.

as the fires rage around me i am reminded that the poet is a soldier of no nation but a soldier nonetheless. this endless crisis of existence topples the house of language an acid to the sign which erupts in clouds of smoke.

the alchemist, in a brave feat debases that which is forged by the hand and heart rending new forms. the choir at petersburg sings the hymnal of old which quickly turns to jeering and the atonal screech of the dead who are like bugs or the dead or locusts.

the towers of existence babel or broadway not syria - spiral upward into darkened sky where steam hisses from organ machines and thunder cracks down from the atmosphere like a word.

the birds do not fly here anymore, carrion birds and doves alike mating only on the branches of the mind. i carry a child through the ruins this child is me, in another life covered in the ash of another fallen idol.

the great bodies of human beings mashed up into earthen clay

and the entire lives jammed into words: strawberry, peach lavender, sweet blueberry and smeared thickly onto pages to preserve that which was known to the one who would know.

a story told to a child beneath a swinging gate called heaven bashing up against itself in a strong wind called fate these worlds are meeting; scheming up something to do with ours.

let us also meet - red ribbons and checked kerchiefs circled around a fire stolen from those who would do us in the very ones born from us like clay. the exchange of everything is like children, the poet exclaims and no one understands.

let them laugh at the poets and jeer them out of rooms the solitary, lonesome, down low bunch haggardly, toothless, sallow bunch riding down death like the setting sun all cowboys and outlaws, all of them.

singing outside of the church are the orphan boys disowned and stumbling drunk around in a circle clearly pagan. what to do with these bastards? in the city center where dickens smelled the stool of the universe like a psychedelic and jumped up on a barricade like a fool

there is no medicine for the witness tuned like a piano and no longer a musician struck by the invisible hands and strung up like the one who always loses.

the sexless, destroyed, incarnate beasts of the world rubbing their faces and picking their noses smelling their asses shuffling around, stuttering and penniless there is no aftermath for this love; it too, shuffles on. the ugliness of its clogged vein, damming up speech and driving away lovers.

outside of the city, cast out by the merchants and intellectuals a pool of water forms surrounded by great metal rods, arranged in a circle vibrating; influencing the water. outside of the city, there are tents and inside the city there are tents as well.

at the camp, a poet makes a speech, demanding rations for the lot as, certainly, spoiled bread and rain water is not enough. there is plenty of war to be made if one thinks hard enough about it. the keepers of the cage laugh, jeer, and poke the not-even-animals.

there are reservations for life now, not-even-life where the last of the last go to have even that land dug up from under them. in palestine the roses bloom in receding parks and dust shakes from tall fences where people wave flags

their faces.

nowborn, it did not know or think that hatred could go so far find so many ways and methods to enjoy suffering. how many devices, instruments, contracts, treatises, and laws engineered to become death? accomplishing what not even a bomb could - the protracted suffering of an entire culture reflected again in the generations to come.

the scientist looks up from his work, and sighs. the sample is dying, exposed to air; this climate, even sterile, is a killer beyond cortes and columbus. now, saturn and pluto have come again to reap what the spaniards have sown and what the rest of this plague has spoken in drawn out sentences spit turning purple upon oxygenation upon the tongue.

l'ouverture was also at that camp in a cell without a roof writing poems. there is no parley for the damned and today there are no breaths taken forever and it was like this revolution was a dream. we know him from the paintings and yet everpresent soul it is so hard to know the path of the tortured and the torturer - fanon treated them both.

the sand swirls about engulfing the world but for a moment in its gaze rendering even ozymandias mute, but for his few words in the philandering shelley's book; taking the skyscrapers of dubai and the shores of manhattan

the dream of death has arrived only this time brought by life itself, the earth.

all of these things; all of these great loves that one moment consolidates in the kiss of a night or the scream of dead souls or the gape of infinite plunder thieves rush out with diamonds as the waves collapse and engulf moses. the prophecies have gone all wrong, and there are many more than forty days and forty nights.

harlem is loud tonight, as billie has come back along with duke and the rest joni is back in laurel canyon with her lovers and the weird geography of it all and the delta heard it first passing around the sound like newspapers to anyone who will listen. the music of the earth is alive tonight and we are all lovers dancing with mahmoud and naji beneath the stars and drinking all sorts of wines and smoking all sorts of smokes.

i scuffle with a gravedigger and mutter some coarse words. i must be alone tonight to pen these words and to know them intimately. i, without a lover, without a noon, without moderation - which rends other men smooth and mute as stone

i glide past the baths like a ghost petals opening; men and women alike, gods and half gods alike rapists and saints alike, champions and the dreamer who dreams the alexanders and the muhammads playing cards and fishing off the beaches while children play with empty handguns

priests fill ancient urns with ashes in their last days and push them off into the water depicting hercules battling the nemean lion, isis; the basket weavers the archive of the water filled with downed airplanes and bodies of slaves that which swallows time deliciously and spits out even the most jagged danger

covered in gold the emperors march on the caves of monks bored out like a wasp's nest and without light and without light gold is not gold.

IX.

the coming and going of leaders is like the mines dug out and the coal of burning old life into new movements. i will write, tonight, for some time - hashing and rehashing these old lines like a composer on a battlefield dodging exploding shells and bearing witness to the dying and already dead.

my consciousness is a sheath for the weapon of my hand which i wield with increasing dexterity all of my brain in this one gesture; all of my intellect. i sharpen the edge of my life and prepare it for a baptism beneath my flesh.

this dirty river in which mice float and bodies from crimes i know nothing about mingled with the sediment of a thousand bowel movements from a thousand violent homes where dreams die like raindrops falling from the sky i know nothing of the pain of these lives washing up and away beyond my knowing but the sensation of them beats against my soul like a drum rhythm and i am compelled to speak.

gored by the bull and splayed open before a dispassionate audience i recite my words like a soliloquy before a staged funeral for a staged life; for a staged birth. my voice shakes, stops, and starts, and the bare lightbulb casts a grim shadow over my face. i am the joan of arc and the sad priest

in the moonlit asylum house beating my head against the language and emerging victorious.

there are no other words for men other than the open mouth showing teeth and the violence.

in my room, there is the innocent pope electrified by the painter's brush in his chair and here, i know of the final judgement. he is also david, holding the head of goliath, and also the condemned dante, parting his hair on a rowboat - eyes set against the merciless sun.

the flash of pain sets alight a row of candles at the base of my spine sending wax dripping down into my rectum

the old noise is buried, dead and done with. i am at no altar, doing no praying, and nothing of the sort. the government houses are abandoned but for the library of censored acts like sodomy and love i stroll through the gates of this cemetery where the law is buried like an unloved child dripping lambs blood on the floors and chanting no words

the theatre of sound comes first loud and clear; only distorted by the mind. the ringing of the ears being boxed in or the lullaby of the collapse of an empire or the conjoining of planets each vibration equally unsorted; equally undone by the senses as dionysus prances around in a dress and proclaims the matter

fixed.

here, we do not bet on games. we summon them and bid them to do our will. that force be met with force - and nothing else.

i am beating down the doors of my love for you raving mad and finally institutionalized where i draw on the walls and in my notebooks precise lines which could not be cut even by a razor of light

this fixation on perfect contrast and the boundary which separated the curves of your waist from mine is all consuming; like history, it takes everything from us, even our love.

i wait at a fence beneath a wall of soldiers tagged up by lovers and the psyche of a burning city raining down on us like theses for a new time written in an excommunicated trance, pamphlets falling from the sky IED warnings and propaganda from the national front.

athena the sovereign awaits our arrival, a consulate of poets here to consult with the gods on matters of taxation of the soul our diplomacy is fiery and uncompromising and we are escorted out by a series of threats. the sky does not look dark tonight, and we make love.

there is some other time, carved into stone with the precision of a hand so stricken with mastery it is like a disease so exacting that the hand almost disappears engulfed in a fire which does not burn, does not consume, and cannot be extinguished not even by water.

so it was with our love in the days of knowing nothing like children and the world just being this tract of wood with a flowing stream and a snaking path of stepping stones through which we came to and from love like migrant birds

i cannot unsee the cages, my love nor can i unsee the nights of passion stripping each other bodiless as god and the absolute rose of us and our consummation words fail to describe it; i blush, and turn away.

i tear myself away from the past in perfect time, my head turned by some angel streaking by my side in crude brushstrokes carving up my eyes as i kneel before the unity of my soul.

XI.

driven by despair i am the last unto myself, the final dissident in line for this execution by my own hand; the sun king this extinguishing of revolutionary fire which burns in my breast like gasoline spreading from my core organ to the tips of my extremities like a network of spies whispering, needling away at the enterprise of the world

my breastplate inscribed with an immolated saint uncanonized, stricken from all of the books; gnostic, heretical; desperate with desire. all of my thoughts are of god and thus, they are no longer thoughts.

i place my head beneath the lunette of intuition and shut my senses forever - lighting a candle which burns so bright as to wax a body and forge me new life out of no way.

i press my hand into this stone tablet and draw blood from my palm, as it floods the lines like a tributary network drawn away from this invisible source.

that which lies beneath my flesh hollowed out by the hand of the sculptor that which owes debt to the handless, legless beggar with an enlarged heart the size of a lightless night -

this is my late style. the wild poet unconcerned with being understood only the fullness of communication.

XII.

here i am on the steps of your apartment building and walking down into a cool autumn in a circle of towering history brought down by hands and tear gas like the head of stalin.

spring my body so i may love not bent by obligation, the bread of this day, or the next, no

to be ruled by love.

none of this stooping down this curse of lifting a hollowed out world with a hollowed out soul

laying on the sill and the sunlight hitting your face like a blow which leaves no mark as stunning and youthful as the life i once knew which passes me by like a scar. i am painted with them - marked so clearly now it would take another exile to love me someone cast away from everything unwillingly.

what injury could i do to you? what sins have i kept to be cast down on your body like a leper or a curse shouted from a balcony and down onto the heads of police or the foremen of the world building towers for beautiful women and hoisting works of art toward the sun and shouting, ‘what a gift i have wrought!’ in the iron i saw nothing

and in your touch this flash of light which the sun could not touch and falling back into bed again; set by some careful angel down onto the table of the earth like a great dish from which everyone may eat. i have brought this bounty of your love like a harvest; i own nothing of it, and none of it may ever be mine!

XIII.

witnessing the violent birth of a new world i am old enough to understand what it means we only had these eight years to learn love whistling in the trees and borne in our hearts but we were too busy with the rote dialogues of books and reciting snark passed down in the tradition of our time – the meaningless drivel of a dead century.

the embrace was a dagger to it speaking chest to chest like conspirators is what lovers do; there is no learned mastery here, nor gloating over truths crouching over prizes beneath bell towers and hiding wisdom – here, there is no knowledge except for the word which stands for those who have known love

in the eastern woods i gave chase to you up treetops and watching the world in endless passage over springs and again into the hovel of autumn with wolf spiders and the everyday thrush staring down at your red chest like a sign and there, i composed these ballads of decay which riddle my heart even now in their unsteady rhythm

in the beautiful death that is now i sprawl out all that is left on the table like the backend of a gunshot wound for posterity to witness in the next hundred year revolution in the razing

of the soul when my blood will darken and return.

the poet’s last words are always of love not of social reform or the landmark events of the mind: these brute points are all but extinguished in the vigor of revolution and the striking of the harmonious octaves which shatter the eardrums of popes and agonize the hearts of conquerors

these are the only words that matter, my love - the words which might communicate my vow to life and bring death to death, that bridge of consciousness which moves so ceremonious so clock-like in our hearts and in our minds. the death of history is nothing but the death of that which remains so i incinerate everything except that which cannot be incinerated: our love; our love is doing the burning.

without law, love is always kissing in the doorway, always brusque but true and breaking open in the midst of this storm which makes it so terribly hard to hear.

XIV.

without touch

XV.

today, i am the most desperate man the world has ever seen so desperate that i would become anything for love change forms and die.

an animal with the poetry in my body slinking through back rooms with despair like a shadow blackbird hunched over my chair in the sitting room where i lay consumed with death.

i shave my scalp with a blade like a butcher under a bare bulb cuts in my hands, eyes, and soul like a torn curtain, ripped by the hand of time they are called artists who try to pretty up the truth of fucking and war but i know better than to cast my hand with these sentimentalists - the newspapers and ‘lovers’ and illusionists all with their caged voyeurism and manufactured concern pity them - for they do not know the night that stretches on without end the open air prison of the stars.

let us see how ugly it is; how ugly you are at the root of your soul women cannot walk the streets naked and all these laws to prevent you from your own wild passion this passion that you will never know - well i do know of it, so dark and deep that it would suffocate your mind gouge your lungs and extinguish your dreams without a second thought.

to that place i go; i go alone - slashing through the mud.

i have seen these dreams tell themselves to me in bare apartment bathrooms and whisper their deepest secrets stripped down in the basements of speech where there is no more light and let me tell you they are nothing these dreams of yours and these dreams of mine nothing but shadows of animal lust; the wet mouth growing ever wider, swallowing everything.

for what cause? sweating through these forgotten films which become black boxes of desire

all this civilization to mask the self hatred of beasts dressed as congressmen and bankers socialites and victors of the world in a parlor on all fours carving up her body with a pen. the actors learn at a young age to sniff out violence like hounds trying on names and clothes; a thousand lifetimes at the drop of a hat. this is no magic, just the shameless truth of being nothing but a hot thing bleeding from the teeth and buried in flesh eating flesh and being flesh and living off the flesh of the earth - the carnate, for now.

we do not scamper off, nor do we write poems. we scribble signs on abandoned walls and lock lips in the face of the brute history laughing like hyenas and

licking tar from the ass of the earth while he looks on we brought down to break every taboo, sin, and stone. no sons of the clean god travel here, no, washed in the blood which poured us into this life like an urn and shining with that which you have made chrome cities burning like a network of salvation so sleek and condemned in the bright new life which has us writhing and possessed with these things called ‘values’ which grip us from the inside: talons sinking into the canals of the heart lips and long tongue sucking the mustard seed essence which springs forth there - catching the soul like a worm writhing alone

in your book we prey on our own tongues violators slitting them from our mouths and eating them like frogs talking jibberish and behaving in this world of sad fools and suicidal clerks enraptured by the promise of images; imprisoned by the allure of reflection. i crane my neck down to the pool and spit in it.

today, i am one who commits violent acts without sect with the true eye of judgement shooting up the wet rungs of my spine jamming brass knuckles down the throat of plastic life and sneering at the humanitarians who live off murder and preach nonviolence like a religion while the martyrs burn without end spraying insecticide on the lips and eyes of the judges who sit comfortably in their high chairs

as the water rises salted with bodies

today i pity all belief

XVI.

ripped from love like a raw stitch wound of nothing broken down on the side of a dark road where there is no wisdom where there is no torture only the madman of the night spinning round and round in a shamanic trance caught up in some plane of cataclysm and seeing the unknown, truly without that veil which burns in the breeze the gas fire breeze

breathe deep the air so riddled with toxins and dead things strapped into the vessel so deep and sound the body the infernal womb of creation mimicking the primordial sludge man, dead man, dying man, walking man talking man, suspended in forever decay for when plants were books and animals were taken like prizes we were the same, you and i now stratified behind glass - cinematic.

i take from you the raw materials of existence and call it the divine art clothed in sophistication and new words i stroll the clean banks no longer filled with shit no longer the caca god i worshipped at the stone i become so clean mannequin, so clean doll so stretched over this warrior mask and stumbling into war no myth here and shuttered blinds and closed doors

stuck pistol and a dripping candelabra on revolution night dim sirens and the barricades in a dead city look like shadow animals of the mind centurions hunched demons with red hot eyes we clear the field of bodies and words gravediggers with guns and causes this wound no one can pronounce the hired painters poured wash over maps of the front as the bombs fell sculpting a terror almost as real as the lost arm, the lost hand or the spiraling soul cast back to the abyssal black gate by pluto god of death he does not allow the soul to die, no no soul to die.

barking at the gate the dog body itching at the flea of consciousness ferried by the blind moon and gagged by her light and shadow on the lake the stolen live on the ocean floor never breaking into water, nor knowing the peace of breathlessness tossed from the great slave ship towing its prisoners and doing rounds like the warden of hell here, it is all divine bars where we sit and drink batches of liquors unknown fire stirred into water to produce endless delight and none of the falling away from the sun.

these rogue bandits shot into the horizon with wills of the lion king just ruler of dirt scrambling for a ride into the long ride desert the no vacancy motel of the flesh

stray souls and booted souls three legged souls of agony haunting the parish of the disincarnate begging for meat and transmutation at the hands of angels policemen angels with great big sticks proud angels with a fury of vengeance swirling in the cut umbilical world of passing ghosts passing faces and murdered ghosts

XVII.

every time i wake up in the morning it smells like death in my room like jung i also have the dream of god taking a great big shit on the church; this is me: neurotic about divine love and begging for love like a beggar from everyone who walks into the city of my life and it begins in dance halls and with holding hands on hills beneath the universe seeing everything and understanding none of it filtering images of god like diarrhea all sacrificed to caca and the feverish writing that comes with separation

my love is this abandoned child sprinting through the woods to meet you observing insects, trails of dung thickets of life and still sprinting through them, past them because i don't care about anything other than being by the water with you swimming with you and moments of perilous touch

wasting my time with books and this game my soul has locked up with life like a stupid deal filled with toil, cash, gloom, and false dreams of loving loving this, loving you all of it has faded away to a moment where the corpse is blasted away with the dynamite of consciousness and electric revelation

all this burning and fading! this is not a chronicle of love, no - it is a lament of love

a drumbeat fury of love and the sensation of footsteps leaving a room of dreams just catching the door and again, the revelation of your heel exiting my life with perfect speed bleeding heel, red and purple heel and the incantation i writ to suture its wound the inescapable womb where i am never birthed: gesticulation.

in the library making love to you in the tall building making love to you in the basement making love to you all of my body and consciousness filled up with you sitting in this empty chair – my elijah, my prophet of fire your words like smoke on the ceiling of a church lingering in dark corners and in the flashes of memory where i see a primordial violence which is my true inheritance call it a valley of blood or the birth canal it does not matter to me

blanketed in the nutritive fluid and guided by sightless intuition i make my way through you desperate for you and your ways that which i cannot touch is your beauty and your beauty never stays.

your red hair and running, i just can't keep up; my ragged breath against the bent trees and the sun spinning down onto my face you grew up with my love and my words changed for you invoking you knowing you so full that there was no question of your water, your volume, spilling over the pitcher of the universe into the dirty glass of my body

a thousand times syphilitic, paralyzed, wild, broken by the force of everything but love the gravity pressing against our thighs and the slick movement everything is spit with you; everything is spit with love.

why invoke this memory of you? my eternal god fleshless and yet incarnate in these loves which swirl around my deathbed like a tempest of ripped ghosts cutting in and out of time and implanting themselves into me like a lung, an arm, or a heart. i, the exile of exiles, the homeless lover the perilous lover, the deep dark vagabond lover of your nothing of your beloved silence fling my love at your feet like fruit in the face of a disgraced tsar disgusted with my own ability hated with my own ability and so through with this pain.

XVIII.

tortured by the metaphysical wound caca caca caca strung up three times by loud crows in the fog morning of language crouching pantless on a wire beneath a frigid breeze cawing three times caca caca caca and this is the wind, unobservant parties raining down on the shit cafes, the shit houses, the shit circuits of bureaucracy and courtrooms the unintelligible noise of expulsion catapulting like thunder from the ass of the eagle god the turtle god the sun god and his thick rays which rip through the organ systems thick rays, thin rays, dagger rays, spear rays the blood unknowing of evil unspeaking evil things.

on the red mountain the caca hut filled with red shit and red word projected against the sky like a screaming jet the ugly word flies and collides against the skin book skin, human skin, flayed skin, map of hurt caca caca caca

XIX.

the monkey goes, ‘oooh oooh aah aah’ and slicing through the shit of representation forms the true language away from the university prostitutes whoring themselves out for admittance to the gout-party of self important intellectuals; away from the management parasites gagged in black leather on the leashes of bureaucrats with v shaped grins, and the hat of buying and selling despair

the true artist raving on the podium of nowhere and no audience the beating on the chest and the internal berated, verging on hemorrhage - the monkey finds its mate and fucks it to death chanting

for what cause is this desperation other than to balance the scales of dalliance and boredom ritual sacrifices sanctioned by the church and useless works shaken from the tree of mediocrity like rotten apples riddled with pesticides and oration like a sick euripedes, dumb euripedes plump with dumb imitation and just beneath the surface, writhing with worms

this is the dug out graveyard of constipation believing themselves to be superior to the castrated dogs, these pigs that cannot sweat out the pestilence of humanity invested so thoroughly in the black market of righteousness

the scholar belching up, ‘equality’, ‘rights’, ‘justice’, and ‘law’ like a hostage forced to read a list of demands or a traitor held up to a microphone

the squares of the university so jam packed with throngs gladly prepared to ridicule this gesture of the grand intellectual a tomato is thrown at the oeuvre providing the true sustenance.

XX.

the naked soul she, too – the lord of the plains the lord of wild dogs and mad starving birds the return of light cracking the hard clay of the plain- ground from which the howling of infinity does emerge she casts down lightning from her cold throat the metal throat of before-invention before-time, before-speech the impossible technology of her metal body fucking the orifice of the earth softly, with her legs wrapped around the dying carcass of man the dying fetus of man the dying nothing of man

and standing above the total war of history victorious, a thousand faces, a thousand heads twisted in torment, twisted in anger, twisted in greed she proclaims the land hers for all time the final conquistador the final sacrifice as blood drips down from the mountain like the dregs of a reservoir the last oil field of her body fertile womb from which these cursed babies have crawled unformed dictators, unformed slaves, unformed spells of the night whose bodies she manicures bathing in the yellow water of wasted life the yellow water of that which has come to pass and the blue water of that which is to come

her nightfall is that of a violent lover by the fire of the stars the gods look on as she ravages the body twisting it up into a mad crucifix

howling at the wind like a chained patient ravaged mind and boils like ideas forming on her body which she excavates with her fingers and feeds to her young

the ritual is that she is fucked by every young man in the village spat on and disdained and buried beneath the church with its spiraling citadel and mad science eulogized without name in its red books ripped open with the dagger of knowledge and thrust out under the white sun eighty arms ripped from her flesh flesh ripped from her bone and turned to scripture; made totem.

XXI.

the modern consciousness is a disease which i eradicate by way of negation; now i understand what victory of the soul means victory over the asylum the locked cage of the mind with all its haunts screens of abjection and brutal administrations of the curative where they watch me shit in a room with no knives.

victory over the university work parasite lording over day, a black sun scouring a tower of bodies, broken glass for that which it may utilize in its return to meat bespectacled carrion bulldozing the forests of intuition to make way for a new hall of bureaucrats; the debt field.

victory over the spirit of the time which haunts the soul-prey like a wolf spider or the ghost of a dead father telling hamlet, ‘my name is the ghost of your father’ and so on, knocking at the back door of the mind like a debt collector after the fount of life hidden in the jungle of flesh.

XXII.

i reek of death; this soul has piled how many bodies burnt and shaved away to the rafters of consciousness where they bloat with their gases like a playhouse

the blood running from them forms a tributary dribbling out into the sea of the earth mother like an offering made by a desperate plowman when the fields of the three headed body are stifled and stopped the frenzied plowman tilling the arms and legs and genitalia with seeds of memories and dreams; her rectum is the study of death.

this votive offering of the body is shat on by fate she who weaves my plan she who is so indigenous to my soul that she is both the land and the offering; thus, she shits on herself striking a match to the field and it is ablaze and abundant in the screaming, generative heat from which plants like spines with eyes, ears, and noses spiral up to the red heavens like towers spilling man from her orifice and heaving man from her lungs.

thus, i spill over onto myself all of my words ground down into fire flailing wildly like a reject from the birth canal an exile into the world of her toys; directed by her gaze and returned by her hand.

XXIII.

her psychic hymen pierced god of the whispering throat piped by the wind and catching the sick tune of history drumming the mellow rape of every moment every day disdain and the turned away face as orpheus emerges from the cave of hell carrying a symphony of the body played to the lusty time as she devoured his soul

three sisters fate trapped in the shadow play of fire dances crawling about on their genitalia and crowing for more curative vomit the great harpy lust; her talons around the little heart of a child smelling of the underworld and ripping from sunken chest purging her fluids in the madhouse groped by prisoners of the flesh groping themselves, groping god in the throes of hellfire ecstasy wherein the prison gates open beneath the waxing moon - itching for pleasure like the black tar man delivering his wares to the doorstep of the poet black tar man with his delivery slipping onto the doorstep and leaving an empty package wherein spirit slips into the home spirit into the mouth spirit into the lungs spirit into the blood

XXIV.

between the thighs of flesh and god so tightly as to explode the organ the horizon littered entirely with jagged orifices of stone penetrative devices drilling into the earth and her gaping lips wound around the totem in the causeless embrace of desire the heat breaking into abscesses of the flesh and face the blood driven out of itself and spurting from her great wound called volcano his great wound called being disemboweled by the great womb atom bomb and the birth of a new child of ashes new child of stumbling around screaming unraveled like a bandage torn from the moment of copulation a script of life jettisoned from the loom of the outer spheres bid by moira into this world bid by moira to suffer for the breakage of the past so fractured like a lost planet a planet lost to war a planet lost to miscarriage soul fumbled in birth and died to itself.

XXV.

now that i am down here with the depths of the soul there is nothing more to do than to make friends with it to bathe death to walk greed to wipe the ass of lust the children of this tall body clamoring for release in my breath, in my gesture in the song of my voice but i am no siren, nor am i swayed by the siren’s song nor his word no sweet syrup of desire could make me walk against god to move from the path of true love and the stripping away of the unchaste skin of sensation touched by the sun, brief lover scorned by the moon, silent lover and left to die, wailing; moaning alone

no, this true love is left unraped - untouched by the sands of disintegration and unturned from infinitude. i do not linger here; from this place of arid temptation i fly to stolid ground to the garden of the soul where the mustard seed remains in perfect fixation - where no breeze may unshrine me and no image may hold me. there, i am free; unmade.

XXVI.

i have no intention of killing peoples’ bodies nor do i have any intention of killing their souls. i have been sent here to kill their belief - that which keeps them from life.

XXVII.

i am the black oedipus when my mother asked me for pleasure and my father beat me i refused them: instead slinging the rock of fate into the face of the giant which haunted my soul the giant which towers over human conception.

i am the black oedipus for when this giant crashed down on my gates and blinded me to the world my life began; this was no ending of sight, no merely the beginning of the illumination of the soul the hades planet switching on the internal light box full of organ springs and shadow mechanisms the charnel house where the death labor ad infinitum like the dying words of the poet, ‘et cetera, et cetera’ shoveling the coal of the arm, the leg, the mouth into the fire of the moloch

the sacrifice of children goes on beneath the new towers the new deities; now humans are placed on the eyes of coins sent down the styx by the charon moon the hate river that we all know it is in this fashion that hades was usurped by he who played dead the best and david became king of his own private underworld; jerusalem was that kingdom of music played so long that it became a mechanism of torture; a method to obscure the mortar sound of a new age.

i am the black oedipus:

for as a child i leaned over that well of consciousness and fell in so darkly and so deeply that i emerged on the other side of a shattered mirror groping around in the nightmare of genitalia and the costumes of flesh the many roles i had played and lost - born before as a woman who now become my soul, guide me across this ocean of peril to the safety of your breast.

THE FURNACE OF THE HEART

Virulent denial Is that which drives genius to suicide Injected intravenously or Into the ass, stomach, abdomen As a good cure While the madman convulses on the table Possessed by the siren Of hearing

And the fomenting ill will of those who have damned themselves To the regularity of the bowels And the pointless endangerment of one’s own life As a sport of the flesh

Throws rocks at the utter instability of genius Flayed out with the true fragility of emotion And bare like an open meadow Or the simplicity of a crow And again damned by the cruel brutishness of the unknowingly cruel And brutish Who are perhaps not so unknowing.

Back beside his spare bed With a blown out stomach The painter stares up at the white ceiling Uncastrated; thoroughly without birth. Who would come and snatch divinity from the divine? The hateful; those fearful of their own shadows Bumbling over barbiturate trip wires and Sneering in the sheer emptiness of their own souls

It is as such that the suicided laments the suicided before him In an endless procession Of those taken by the sin Of others.

II.

The ingrate for beauty Holds up the spiteful reign of inheritance As the chief arbiter of the real Atop his throne of the sanctified order Of dead art, dead reason, and dead time.

His seat is adorned with the organs of the perished hungry, Encased in amber and bejeweled with rotting teeth. His robe is composed of woven human hair, ripped indelicately from the Scalps of those lost in the great wars Ordained for his survival.

His waking corpse is the tomb of life; all possibility For he does not breathe, nor does he move. He stares with the flaccid eyes of a traumatized dog, Stricken by the memory of the deeds of his youth In which he rose to great power and fortune.

At his feet lies the gold of the world, For which he has no use As his cock is broken by the battle of time And his flesh Battered into total submission By the worship Of pleasure.

The senses which he so prized And which ruled over his will - Have ceased to function Leaving him without the internal law Which jettisons all into the field of action And duty.

His life is the pitiful example Of the raging passion which overtakes man That for which he enslaves, rapes, and pillages. He, Unthought and unexamined,

Into the paralytic exile Of hell.

III.

I have nowhere to go in life; No urgent business to attend to Other than the total liberation from suffering.

This life to me, Can be so diligently lived, or not at all. What do I care? I reside behind it In the permeant sigh of the wind Or the leaves themselves In their untold form.

Why would you approach me with riches; Why would you approach me with the promises of the world? I am already dead to these things; I have no want for them.

My want is given Where it belongs In the desire for freedom everywhere on earth And the death of the generative Belief Which populates the mind Of man and machine Alike.

IV.

These are wild poems Poems torn from duty Torn from faith And reason

These poems cannot listen - For they are without ears; These poems cannot speak - For they are without tongues.

I do not know whether these tongues were cut Long ago In a rite or in a moment of pain But what I do know - Is that this moment is a stalemate of forces A shadow turn in which the entire perceptive mode shifts; Our eyes meet And we fall in love.

I have been done with reason Since I understood that there was something within me That was unreasonable. I heard the name of all things And I too, was a child once.

These are wild poems: Raised up from nothing but the seed of shorn will; Sprouted from dust, death, and the dry heat of desperation Hollowed out to resound This basic force.

In how many lives have I tried to love you; In how many forms did I struggle to find water where there was none, Fire when there was no friction And the landed sensation of being two and one Mooring me to the sacred.

I am the third: Behind the billowing sheet and watching You watch me and the film rippling across the white As tall trees shake about us –

How many times did you fall away from me In distance, in time, in other lives In cities with new lovers And new ways of being?

I try so hard to hold onto love And lose it In my desperation to bring my love outside of myself In a song, or in a caress. All of these gestures pile up in their own graveyard In their own recitation;

Memory is always childish –

But so is love.

VI.

The study of time is the study Of a myth of that which is, Fundamentally, of an unchanging essence. I pour over these charts and graphs The mixture of time Often harshing the page with the viscosity Of molasses But sometimes performing a wash.

That which does not change Is the cruelty of degradation: But here, I choose to see angels; Here, I am away from the earth and Without it Entirely.

This map is of light; Perhaps it is clearly seen If not obscured in the later hours of the day But for the candle kept Improbably lit By god

VII.

The degree Between one body and another Forms a resonance;

Perhaps this is why it is so hard to love From an uncertain distance Where there is no insight other than the Blindness Of being grounded.

That these bodies merely channel vision Bringing about a striking of multiple Chords Dissonant, assonant, consonant, And of constellated value to the one who hears This passing song.

That the echo of passage Shakes the image thrown onto water And distorts perception; The wailing, groaning, shaking, and Twirling That the earth performs in its wild dance Through the stars.

How can anyone know of that which is Always being born, So much that it is being birthless? How can anyone know of that which is Always dying, So much that it is deathless?

Even the acid of time Cannot touch these things.

VIII.

I have been so broken to myself That not even the shards of glass could Cut my skin So split open and atomized that there was No friction to my will No form by which I could call myself By way of the suffering which snaps my Back like a twig And to remind me of my nothingness, Stands over me And laughs.

I asked to see the truth And I understand now Just how brutal these changes are But when I speak of them They are just effervescent Words.

IX.

There are no words which could quite Sense The absolute violence which is existence So I will dance around it with a drum Beating it til my eyes bleed And dancing off my bones Until they are bleached and bare In the sun.

They are sharpening their shivs in the yard of consciousness, Mother, And they will kill me there in the rose garden Tagging me up with wounds until I am spent and exploded like A mortar shell.

And all of these godforsaken wounds And all of this godforsaken suffering That I am useless in the face of Other than to throw my body in front of it Like just another barricade In hell

These are no longer poems These are the last missives of a condemned soul So berated by suffering and so lost to time That it could not possibly be redeemed. What is this? The difference between this soul and all of The screaming souls with and without Meat Is nothing but the petty sack of organs and shit Strutting around like kings and gods and conquerors

This, perhaps, Is what has brought my soul to tears

XI.

This new moon has brought about a change in me It is that now I am so broken I can barely speak Or laugh, or move, or breathe – It has all been a tempest So abrupt and jarring That years have been encased in this Amber of my heart like mere moments And by the beat of the hummingbird’s Wing I fall in love and die all over again This time more wounded, more desperate, More vulnerable and now more open to The poetic heart of all existence The slit open breast of a warhorse The charred remains of a dream And sifting through the rubble of that Which was Always already Ruins.

XII.

I have never cared for your conventions Your scripted laws and sick theatre Your pornographic art and celebrations of Wealth I bare my soul in hateful reproach And wage war against your game With the conjured heat Of a scream so deep and primordial That it shatters all pretense Cripples all idea And breaches all borders. I am so filled with this seething hate that it Spills over onto the page And I assure you, reader, That I will do nothing to stop it.

XIII.

I have this revolutionary fervor all built up In me So ready to be discharged and its so Damn hot its burning my bones – To be this jumped up and ready for war is Nothing less than damnation And I bite my tongue and taste this blood Of a thousand years The blood of my elders and everything to come And I smile

XIV.

You will never understand this deadly pact I have made with god Stripped of everything I am lethal To your gods, to your world To the clean streets of your empire

I am so bloodthirsty That it would take all of the legions of your Army to quench my thirst But for a moment.

This fire with fire Is every breath with me Every moment with me; Every silence

XV.

I have nothing in common with anyone Except this: My hatred, my love, and all of my other petty, small emotions Which I struggle to express.

Life is a war of nights And I am running out of candles This siege on my soul will not lift And it starves for air They bring this horse into the city to kill me and call it ‘love’; The gods bring rain and thunder To cloak me in an apparent misery To mirror the condition of my heart.

I have been a king, a beggar, and a woman in my mind And this jeering crowd is the judge of it all. My bag of tricks is washed up And life is this lover I cannot please Anymore.

XVI.

I was born to write these poems; This body built to bear their burden, This heart to compose their song And these eyes to turn inward Tending the fires of discontent Which birth them.

With a blood-soaked blade, I hold up the head of a calf Against the vacuum night To the sun A sacrifice of the sacrificer For all to see.

XVII.

I serve god And god alone. God is not your money Your icons, your idol worship Your coverings, your garments, your paintings of life I burn them with my words, regardless of how much they are worth to You To show you that they do not exist. I melt you down like the jewelry and adornments That I spill into the fire Until you are that base element Stripped of all of your law and righteousness Then what will you hold onto? Then what will you claim? What Violent sect will take you in when your world is in ash? There is no rebirth for such things Illusions pass through the fire and Perish.

XVIII.

Now that I have slain even the memory of the gods With the blade of language I turn it upon myself To disembowel the thinking system The snaking intestine and voice box

I have seen the past and the future And operate from the foundational awareness that Nothing ever happens and the body perishes immediately. History is intimate with me; We sleep together Often.

Now that I have bragged enough about The power of nothing As it rips its way through the chambers of the flesh Vibrating the meat mistaken for ‘life’ until it explodes into light or Melts away peacefully I will show you.

XIX.

The two snakes breeding infinitely And between them, the seed of life The spheres of their coil Heated electric in the gyration of this union And echoing in all directions. This sound that emerges Unlike life in all ways But that it is life The low hum of a thousand generators Whispering the name of god

XX.

The fundamental opposition Is between the sign of those who cannot Bear the thought of the death of the body; That which they conceive as ‘themselves’ So they kill and exploit whenever they can In order to preserve the rotting flesh -

And those who understand that there is a current Beyond the wanting flesh and the sign A running through all things; As such, Murder and exploitation are not conductive.

They understand that the body comes and goes, At once timely and infinite; intercoursing - That this awareness Is the true self.

XXI.

Mars is thirteen years old today And he has come bearing gifts Tears in the bathroom and music so loud That you can’t hear yourself think. What is it that brings children so much pain?

Is it that they do not understand, Or that they know too well? I, myself, Think it is the latter That children are so close to the quick They have been cut from That all there is to do Is scream

XXII.

These are poems of glorious love Poems that will never die I let them from my heart With the glory of god Like a young lion Sweeping all else aside And loosing The seals

XXIII.

There are very few who live for freedom; The only freedom is total freedom – Out from under the yoke of all law, All habit, all faith, and all thought. Those who live for freedom must be very Brave; It is not just words.

There are many who speak of freedom Who know nothing of its simplicity; Still more who seek to reform the world in The name of freedom Like a dog chasing the shadow of its tail.

Freedom is all within that which already Exists; But it takes eyes of the heart Untarnished by greed and the temptation Of self engorgement To see it.

XXIV.

These poems At their worst Are works of art; At their best, They are more destructive than atomic weapons; They are always immaculate Because they are discharged by god.

Not by the rapist Zeus, No By a force much greater than that Than myth Than force.

At a certain point the poet dies, utterly And completely.

XXV.

The military exploits the desperation of the poor; The anger of the desperate.

XXVI.

All of these industries cannot manufacture Love So what good are they? Churning out all of the latest fashion At the cost of great suffering Is this not apparent This great industrial debt?

All of these smokestacks saying nothing Meddling in the affairs of the clouds; All of these assembly lines dictating life And desire – This play of life is through!

What good is all of this if it is not of the soul For the soul, by the soul; So stricken out and away from the currency of The busy world?

There is nothing I can buy to bring me Closer to god. This food and this bed are enough to keep The body warm Long enough for my soul to speak these words: Can we not see what greed has done?

This ocean of tears rises to meet the great cities Of the world And overwhelms them with ease As if they were made of cardboard and Matchsticks The iron gods melt down with the touch of A human hand Revealing their hollow insides Where sacrifices were placed Some time ago

XVII.

Those in agony Are truly the children of god So born into each moment; Every breath gasping and Clutching at the body for release From this trial Of the soul

Cast upon the wheel and Raised into the intermediate realm Yet still with knowledge of The lake of fiery clay From which the vessel was spawned

For each soul in agony Is like the penitent for all of history The lot of the ecstatic is but the yard Where slaves pull blocks to build useless Pyramids for selfish gods Forever

It is not that those in agony have sinned, No It is that they have been born with the Intimate knowledge of history Sewn up with the hot knife and sent out Through the mouth of the womb into a World where the soul is deranged Until it breaks from That made In its image

XVIII.

All of the suffering Will be redeemed. That is the work of those brought to earth In order to devote their entire lives to the Difficulty of existing amidst great violence And upheaval

Throughout history it often appears as Though history is ending; This is precisely because such a thing does not exist, Nor does the world. There is such a breach in our knowing That the one attached to knowing Is wounded Unto death

The physician of all of this Inspects the heaving body Writ across with the scars of passage and Inscribed with centuries of inherited violence And sees that the word of history Which is also the word of god Is writ large there.

The conveyance of this word And the uplifting of all who are suffering To their rightful seat As worlds unto themselves Is the task of such a person Who is brought to earth.

XXIX.

You want to maintain some sort of public Respect In a world where respect is used as a tool To differentiate the deserving from the undeserving You use the term ‘humanity’ in a world Where the civilization of life is a process of brutal submission To the concept of the human And ‘justice’ in a world Where only the victorious are just. You clamor for these words in throngs Stumbling over your slogans and bashing Your heads against the gates of the law In your struggle to appeal the loudest and The best To your powerful leaders and governors – And you call this ‘revolution’.

You step out of your home Full of righteous indignation Declaring that the world must change While refusing to change your own self concerned ways. You clamor for revolution And when you have had your fill You go right back to your petty life With your trifles And petty concerns. You call this victory; You call this change.

This ‘revolution’ Is not deserving of the spit in my mouth.

XXX.

I write for the deranged The mad exiles of the world The hated, the sick, the almost Disincarnate Considered by the busy world as even less than meat As devils, lost souls, and obstructions to The machine of everyday life

The sick and mad hold the truth of your brilliant world Reflected in the impossible chrome of your skyscrapers Your finance buildings – The true cost of your dealings. The wise men of the world have always called you The mad ones – the bankers, Obsessed with the myth of money; The politicians, obsessed with the myth of power; the priests Obsessed with the myth itself Chasing your violent dreams at the cost of That which you perceive to be your Shadow – The suffering in the corner of your eye.

The yard of the world is full of men Obsessed with power; This is the true asylum. The gated hospitals where the mutable and different Receive their treatments In order to survive your gallows hall of a society Are the last vestiges of truth In a world which has rejected such a thing In the name of casual violence

XXXI.

The celebrity culture is dictated only by lust Your idols can barely be said to have an art Or a novel thought Besides preening for a camera And regurgitating scripts written by failed socialites This culture that you consume so ravenously Is the modern idolatry You turn god out because you do not look within Begging for attention and receiving Pleasure when others beg For yours

These are the same people that see life as a game And dabble in seriousness for aesthetic purposes Their worlds are sheer appearance; Anything that enhances the status of this Appearance is included, And anything that does not is rejected.

This is where the grotesque and the plain have their place – When something is either so simple it cannot be assimilated Into an aesthetic reasoning Or so grotesque, perverse, and taboo that Only a deviant would find it desirable – These things become the true art In times of such pitiful shallowness And ugly obedience To fashion.

XXXII.

As this chariot races through the sky It becomes clear: It is time for the world to be wedded, Entirely And now, I am not talking about a Symbolic marriage Or a legal bond.

Gaea sent me During a difficult time To slay the boastful Orion Between the horns of the orange star and My spirit flows through it Forever

Chasing the undying variant The destroyer of worlds, I am that which executes the murderer And condemns him to a fixed star. The hunter of hunters; This jurisdiction Knows no bounds.

I am drunk up against the heavens Telling this story to every child Born within my sphere of spheres Swinging from the chords of all things Like the axe of death.

XXXIII.

On this cosmic racetrack Where we are running down fate You and I are blind drunk and betting on Horses Hitherto unseen by the naked eye; Swept into this total darkness where we are so at home We might as well fall asleep to the happenings of the world.

It is here That we make love in the light of The indivisible reflection which is god Spurred on by the caress of a burning star; The hard stare of a lion’s Head.

There is no severance for us here; These myths that we share Are indivisible and true And the night welcomes the day With the kiss Of a lover

XXXIV.

Perhaps If planetary bodies are the myth Icarus was a comet Burned up Before birth And I never existed Except in relation To love

This orbit marked By the perceptive point Upon which all bodies converge forever Forming gapes of light And the crevasse of frequencies and pulls Which is the song of my heart

Orpheus is the one who strums The constellations Telling and retelling the stories which Become our lives Playing out these loves that we know in our hearts These trials that we know in our bodies And these fates that we know in our souls

His lyre is that which draws the animal Close to the fire of existence Always already stolen from sense And put to lyric This impression Of the sun

XXXV.

With the body of a man And the heart of a woman I am like Tiresias forever Changed by my encounter with the orifice Of knowledge; That trench which has no depth But formless resound

Entangled between the war gods and on the spiraling ladder Of life I weigh the worlds of heaven and earth On a golden scale For the play of law; in my jest Am blinded by Hera Over and over Again

These molecules are that from which I drink deeply Swallowing planets like children; Thoroughly unattached to the prophecy of My birth.

Enraging the gods, I let it play out – Like a screen Like a fool

XXXVI.

The gods are a compulsion and Seeing a vision of them Is true madness. I am led by touch, not sight; This is why it is in the weaving For me to be a healer.

This false connection Called ‘seeing’ or ‘looking’ Is only true through the blind sight of the hands The arms And the heart As they, themselves, Weave their way through meaning to Touch Which naturally abolishes definition.

We are entering into a time where We do not need mediums to tell us of god Or of right, or of how we should live our lives. This will put many dealers of death out of business forever – So expect to see shuttered storefronts And desperation.

XXXVII.

Here is a poetic theory for you – That the sense faculty of sight Used as a sense, and nothing more (Becoming the dominant language of the modern) Has created a world of empty appearances; A symbolic hell on earth.

The body emptied of soul, The heart emptied of spirit, The earth emptied of synthesized forces – Now the eye sees a surface And declares it known. This is an indictment of the scientists As well as the mystics – Leaning too heavily on each side of the scales Of the material And of the spirit.

A civilization built in this manner is Destined to fall victim to the very force Which it deconstitutes as an invading body – Real life; The interconnectedness of all things.

Sight as a lexical barrier; the source of definition Creates and institutes a symbolic distance Between life and that which is termed life Which cannot be overcome By way of the symbolic.

XXXVIII.

I have developed this craft to the point of which it means nothing to me What does it matter if I live or die now? I am immortal in this form Contorted in any matter I please The sharp body of a sneer or the curvature of David

I have become everything I have ever wanted by my own means; Thus, I no longer have desire. I have destroyed all judgement; Thus, I have no need for some other god. I sit in judgement of myself and declare the law a joke and Laugh in the face of the serious enforcement Translate or do not translate my meaning – It does not bother me.

I have risen so far above grounds like a loaf of bread that I am like that which feeds upon itself; I eat these organs with gusto. The C-sharp minor and silence – What human composition could match the trumpet which does not Cease?

No breath is enough and to suffocate under the dead structures of lesser men is no longer enough for me. Take everything from me – for I have nothing. There is no name for that which I have become

XXXIX.

I must take this task to its end And stab it in its own heart In a feat of reaching through it To myself.

This task does not end or begin And I stand outside of time With tears streaming down my face As I watch my loved ones die without Abatement.

That which propels me into the unknown End Is that which has already stationed me There, The sentinel of death – Appearing in all things Like an omen, always.

I repeat this word, ‘always’ Knowing that it presents the true paradox Of language to language – Shattering its myth In a great scream Which contorts the world with its sound. The aftershock of this scream is history And I stand around it Like a good mother And weave it a coat Sending it out the door to meet that which Only pretends to be fate – For fate cannot know itself Until it is too late For such things As speech

XL.

My poems kill on command; I unleash them like trained dogs Hounds of hell With many heads And many hearts

Unconquerable poems Poems which cannot be found Enslaved, known, ordered, made, or Demonstrated These poems that live in the dark like Things with piercing eyes.

I cast them onto the world like die and Spells Mixing them with matter and rendering Them so unseen That no map will bring you to them. Always already exploded, These engines function in total separation; Thus, Total union.

They rush to my aid when I am in need of them most; This is where these poems truly become Poems. They are not beautiful, nor do they contain Anything of worth or value Other than the sheer desperation and Need Of a thousand lives brought to one last Moment One backward glance and Total dissolution.

XLI.

I do not want anything with the world And I do not know where this leaves me It does not leave me as anything – Not as a poet, or a citizen, or a friend It leaves me as a willing exile Someone gone from all of these things These things that poison my heart

The difficulty and the sadness Is bidding them farewell These loves that were not mine; These trials that became my possessions The things I saw that became inside of me And festered like graves

I excommunicate them and live without them In my true and full life In a turning out of the world Shaking out my pockets Full of hope and begging

For I was a beggar in this world In a dream of many things I was a beggar And all of these dreams are of attachment And holding on. My vice grip on myself has left me beyond Even my own words.

Outside of this city I do not know what I will do Other than this continued leaving Which might be described as an incessant negation An elucidating of circumstances and Casting away that which is not In light of that which is.

XLII.

Outside of this city I am without a home – But in understanding that this home I have made Was never mine to begin with – I move Forever

Human history holds the sacred truth of the soul; This truth begins with the nomad, and the consciousness Of one who travels through the train of the mind, the body, And the earthly – Merely passing through materiality into some other world.

The settling of this nomad Forced and otherwise, into new models of being, seeing, And sensing world Has created a rift in consciousness Moving the nomadic into the underground of the mind and body Where it struggles for air, movement, elucidation

For it is not merely that the nomad has stopped moving through the world But it is that the nomad has stopped moving through the soul, the stars, the Senses As the world is settled and cordoned off According to belief and borders.

This settling of the mind, body, and soul is an ending of the life process Which propels the being into understanding, intuition, and feeling. This settling is also a holding on – To beliefs, to myths, to dreams, to selves – All of which are manufactured in light of the settlement of the body And of the world.

This change in the way of life seeps down to the core of the soul; The core of the earth Deeply altering understanding

XLIII.

The death of these illusions and beliefs has left me truly free But not of melancholy

This freedom was precisely what I feared The unmooring of every last hope I held for myself; These hopes that were ultimately lies I told myself

Now, without them I am directionless. There is nothing to which I devote my energy; Nowhere is where I am going. This stage is a room And I have exited right –

Without the play of it, I have lost loss and stumbled into negative space It does not act upon the body, heart, or soul. It does not stimulate me, Raise me to anger, pain, or conviction. Without belief, I am swaying in the wind Without being swayed by it.

This flow is the letting of emotions The dying of them as they have solidified as stones And buried themselves within the mind, body, and organs Like long staid calcifications Built up over time into multitudes of repeated feeling The circling back of this same ache, this same urge, This same desire.

The letting of these stones is also the loosing Of the channels which birth the self; As they tumble out of me the self flows without abatement.

XLIV.

There are no books on this – Total disillusionment in modern times I have been living out so many dreams And it is so lovely to be free of them The play of screens Dancing before my eyes like the light before death Suddenly extinguished by the name of light Spoken into my arms and ears and eyes Animating my soul with the wild dance of laughter

These masks – placed on and off the faces Of the newly born and Newly passed Like ceremonial outfits ordained by god To participate in this spinning parade I am no longer with it now Off in some carriage and galavanting through the stars Unsoothed

XLV.

Rarely preserved in text and often spoken in passing – So goes the wisdom of the world Always as an aside A whisper in the struggle of power Which seems all too endless

The mutterings and late thoughts Which pass lonely hours and the stolid Waking of those who have outlived Themselves On a journey which has overshot the mind And come about Unexpectedly In the vessel’s conference With the blood

It speaks with authority In a way no poet or politician can Thumping its way through the ages; Handing down the mystery of pain like a bad gift to the young Who tear it open To find themselves inside

FROM DEATH TO DEATH

I am meant to be rid of this body To fly from it like Orpheus from hell, Only not to be tempted again

For all that is within this body is out of reach Made of nothing but sand and veiled By finitude I do not grasp for the body Nor fever for it, in dreams, In nights of slow agony or crawling Into bed with it to make love, no -

This body is still And dying - Still and restful Gone from the dream of the world And gone from my desire

For what more could i want Other than the banishment of myself from all things, this exile of Dispossession?

And still, I wander with my love Not yet barren, Not yet darkened sky of longings; Though constellations do form, of memory, of feeling; I cast them out, too With a rogue hand A sweeping gesture Which purveys the horizon.

How many of you know of this love? How many of you call out to it? If so, you are among friends; If so, we call out to one another.

II.

I wish to engage in the artless art Lacking in tact entirely So that we might sit together And speak frankly of our difficulties.

This dialogue of suffering Which springs forth like an uncaged tiger Or a rushing river released out from behind a dam That is the truth of us, you and I Of our great quarrel with life Of our short story, pockmarked by time And scattered by wind

We are from all corners of the universe, you and I Gathered from stone, sand, sea, and sunlight Brought up from the leaves and branches of fertile ground and Dropped into being like persimmons We taste so fresh! But for a moment God laughs with us And then we are returned to the soil.

We sit at this table, You and I, Over warm cups of tea - saying nothing.

III.

I write the same poem In order to illustrate That this earth does not change. Cruel and heartless men are still in power; We are still in love Doing this little dance along the rings of infinitude As they slowly disappear.

From the fringes of silence emerges the echo This cry of our newborn child Who soon returns to silence, Staring at his reflection in a still bowl of water.

All is peaceful with you and I But this is only because we are at war with all things. All that has changed is that there are new weapons, new words, and New poets who heed the call of love; These poets are nothing and nobody if not the fabric of the universe Caught up again in some brief mischief and sent back To the world of men To remind us of love

For if this is all we can talk about, Surely we have won Amid the din of boisterous governments And tired old politicians We retire to our little home, With our child, our love, and our books.

The saints are simply ordinary people who have had enough of this world - I tell our daughter when she asks; Their greatest wish is to merely exist in harmony with reality, which is altogether different from the world. Maybe someday she will be a saint, you tell me, laughing, someone Entirely unknown to us.

I write the same poem As written by other poets, from other times If only to illustrate that all poems are of this stuff Caught up in the same fire of passion and Discharged from the combatant’s lips Into the engine of power - like this; Spoiling the whole show. We are glad to have this honor, You and I, for it is the highest honor left to man - before man passes Entirely back into that which brought his spirit to speech - In the same way that lovers are destined to find one another In this world.

IV.

I will not join in revolution Unless it demands a full revolt Of the consciousness, of the senses, Of the way of being in the world. It is not enough for me to say ‘Down with tyranny!’ or ‘To the end of this or that!’ without first Questioning the bounds Of this, that, or the other thing.

And so the revolutions of the world pass Not as revolutions - as you call them But as the idle and repetitive spin of a top In the hands of a child Running out of playthings and mischief To conjure - Fed up with himself and the roles men play In their theater of seriousness.

I might say that to revolt Is to demand more of ourselves and To demand all of ourselves Entirely Without compromise or regime And with this demand, The total refusal of all that might stand in the way of total self realization - For one cannot grow under the yoke of stone laws Nor the whip of the master Nor the gun of the policeman.

It is simple to strip the apparent world of its monuments; Account for its crimes - But it is difficult to see how the apparent world is also of another world Inside the hearts and souls of men - A world which Is difficult to see.

There is not enough gunpowder or ammunition Nor language in the world to strangle that beast of the heart, the Deformity which grips it like a vine and declares the heart won for all time Like the land of a nation or a prize -

This is the true victory of what this world has designed; that which has designed this world - the mirror image of the soul.

The revolutions of history have failed Not because we did not try hard enough to change the world But because we failed to demand enough of ourselves, And of one another. We failed to say, ‘this is not just the border of our country; that which separates our bodies and our cultures - but this is the border of our hearts, and here we failed to truly let one another in.’ We failed to say and do these things And so the prisons fell, the borders fell, the governments fell

But all of these things remained in our hearts To be built again under new leaders, with new names - But this was still the same old ritual; We knew it in our hearts.

The worlds of power and discipline rise Not of their own accord, But because of the desire for power And the desire for discipline.

Do not let it be that this time; Hold fast to the letting go of everything The notion of profit, self advancement, power, celebrity, and Influence These illusions of personhood only distract us from the

liberation of Ourselves and our fellow men. Do not let it be that this time.

Monuments to human slavery Compose the entirety of global civilization It is that brutality lies in every square foot of The pyramids, Every inch of the cities – as process and product. This brutality is harder to spot, Because it is not so ‘apparent’ Or celebrated.

The monuments and symbols of the ‘success’ Of civilization – which is to say the entirety Of civilization as produced environment Not only represent the legacy of human slavery But seek to glorify and justify enslavement As a continued means of and toward ‘progress’ And the refinement of the ‘human’ soul In juxtaposition to the ‘savage’, Tasked with building the rails, Tombs, wealth, and skyscrapers of the owners Of the world.

When one realizes that there is no escape from The now total, global process of civilization, From the constant bombardment Of the brutality of enslavement as perpetual process and As product, One demands the end of ‘civilization’ altogether As a method of organizing life And world.

VI.

Do not be for or against A concept Destroy the concept itself. The idea is the root And source of power.

Not the struggle of its manifestation, Nor the struggle over its borders.

VII.

The soul as devoted The mind as a sharpened knife of discernment The body as a ready instrument of the will

VIII.

For this is to understand that Concepts like ‘equality’ and ‘Justice’ do not exist – They never have, and they never will.

These concepts are, were, and continue to be created explicitly As rhetorical tools and are used by the exploiting class To promise ‘eventual’ (or conceptual) freedom To those being exploited

In ‘this life’ or ‘the next’.

As long as it continues that there is and exploiter, And one who is exploited, There can be no true freedom. All else is an illusion of language.

IX.

I am the child of nobody Not disembodied, if only because I have never been, Nor ‘had’ A body. Mindless, and also dreamless. Although dreams, thoughts, and ‘states’ Pass me by like clouds before the sky.

The abolition of prisons, Police, nations, slavery, profit, Borders, and law – is also the Abolition of images, the notion Of ‘the individual’, possession And dispossession, bondage And liberation, the will; all Conception of ‘life’ – that Which is also necessarily not Life, in its very conception.

The death of ideas brings About life, if only in that the Death of ideas, notions, Conceptions, and definitions (Of ‘who I am’, ‘what the world Is’, ‘this is how the world must Function’, and ‘how I must Live’) also die. One is Unmoored from the very concept of mooring; The process and product of the mind is revealed entirely – As illusory.

XI.

What is it to me, Since I want nothing? What can god give me, Or take away from me?

XII.

I die to everything – My dreams, my hopes, my desires, my beliefs, My ‘knowledge’, my ‘self’, my ‘possessions’, My body, my life, my will; My sense of ‘mine’. What I am remains: Lifeless, deathless.

XIII.

As thoughts (civilizations) Arise, destroying them utterly Without any residue in the Very place of their origin Is nonattachment.

XIV.

There is no art Only the use of these means.

XV.

The only theft is of meaning; This is always permissible.

XVI.

If it has been done, it has been done by you. If it has not been done, it has not been done by you. There is no separation.

XVII.

This new way of thinking As always already there, Always-already-solvent to everything, And all ideas.

XVIII.

The soul is never born and will never die. What of the world? Why live in a mere painting of the soul, A facsimile of that which is?

Live within the soul, And see that the world is but the soul as gesture, Sweeping timelessly through the body; Through the mind; Spilling over into all things.

XIX.

Those who live in reverse, Giving reverence to the body; Upholding the mind as sacred and true – Worship at the idols of worldliness Deifying that which is nothing more than a pile of flesh, shit, and broken idea. Are you not more than this? More than ‘your’ desires, ‘your’ dreams ‘Your’ experiences?

The sense of ownership Of life, Of self-possession – Is that very illusion of power which permeates the entirety of modern civilization.

XX.

No, You do not have to give yourself up. On the contrary, you must inhabit the self entirely. Merely discard the idea of ‘mine’. This is the ‘I’ Which is not the I.

You do not have to cease finding wonder at the moon, The stars, wine, Or love. Simply understand that the chair appears as ‘a chair’ But is, in essence, the very soul with which ‘You’ use to perceive the chair.

XXI.

I do not have any ideas; I act to create the death of them. I do not have any dreams; I act to create the death of them. I do not have any time; I act to create the death of it. I do not have any sense of ‘my’ self; I act to create the death of it.

XXII.

Desire as that which creates Possession and dispossession On all levels of the psyche Is also that which creates caste based society And the rest of the willful exploitations of the world. Gladly lose it.

XXIII.

The culture is cheap; The money flows, Pocketed by titans of industry And dunce policemen.

XXIV.

You call them artists and poets I call them flatters, sycophants, and public liars.

XXV.

All that is left is to spit on the propriety of capital Which has for so long enslaved the world; The deification of suffering Which has made love impossible And the image of love Which has convicted all possibility In its shallow reflection.

XXVI.

It was never about the art; It was never about beauty – It was about the execution of that which is already dead.

In your world The Grand Idea – The poets are damned The children are denied And the mothers are sacrificed

At the altar of things And the celebration of the wealth they have wrought The value kills life Before it can begin.

XXVII.

The dead and the unborn are always in Perfect understanding.

Do not mourn them, Mourn the oblivion of the living.

XXVIII.

They educate children like dogs Teach them to shit in the right place And to beg for nourishment – This is called socialization.

The structure imposed is nothing less Than an attempted domestication Of the soul.

XXIX.

I became a great poet In the shadow of another war; Killing all aspects of myself Until only self remained.

There, on the battlefield of everything, I did not renounce, no – I reconciled the death within my rotting flesh With the love that burns Endlessly into the night

The night that is all things The night that is the sacred Pyre of this violent act – The night that is subsumed In boundless feeling.

XXX.

The poet’s art is the art Of the failure to forget. So it is with wars, pestilence, Famine; all that has passed And is to come.

The resilience of the poet is In regard to the falsity of Time; that all that has come To pass is already here again, Always and forevermore. This is also the urgency of Poetic work.

And so comes the lament, The elegy, the dirge – crashing Down like waves without end Form changing hands from one Poet to the next In the silent understanding of duty A duty which disdains even death And the petty opportunism Which pervades each era of history – Itself a pestilence Of illusion.

XXXI.

For when all this has been done, Language, too, must die – Giving way To utter silence.

162

THE HERCULEAN CYCLES

I lift myself out of the body And stare with the ghost of my soul.

I do see the appeal of the bullet of chance And I am killing myself because I am immortal. Do you not see the stain on my soul? The stain on this conscience That floats like - Never mind.

There is not a point in poetry Nor an ounce or weight Or measure to it. Perhaps that is the appeal for some. To me it has become this dead thing Like the body Which I must slough off in my procession To the tomb. There is no pus from it, No cum, no disjecta of pleasure, nor pain. Is it possible to be this stainless? Is it possible to be so torn from the brute essence of life to be rendered Like stone, Or ice? I cannot last that long, regardless.

If there were everlasting joy in magic Or the treachery of light In stories Or any of this nonsense gibberish made up to appease the wailing of Children Or the wanting mouths of those suffering I would have found it by now Having dug up every grave this side of speech; Having fucked silence until its contorted mouth uttered the word of

god What is the sanctity of this? Why would I return to it, or anything else? If not to spit on it, call it names, Jeer it into a corner, and stab it in the heart Like all the rest of my life; Like all the rest of my pain.

II.

The violence of this poem Has carved up my eyelids like a hex So now that I might see Life as it truly is

And no longer slog along Like the unborn idiot Screeching in the ears of animals And wailing for bread

All of these lives turned out Are ridden with maggots Ripped with holes and worn like tattered flags And I am hateful; Upon them I spit.

All walking the streets for sex and all faith Composing the great world I cross out life with a bold stroke and become a blank Fitted into a gun and discharged into the mind Who could play the lines this close? Other than someone who had nothing but hate for them Nothing but hate and disillusionment.

Bursting with images, the grand culture marches on. I fuck the culture and fuck myself. Your stupid, sad parade, Riddled with pricks and policemen; Your world is a broken toy And you all insert your cocks and orifices in it and claim that you saw God, or heard his word. God is ziptied and gagged, and thrown in the back of some camp While you read your newspaper And prattle on about your fucking and your gossip

I have been strung along

My life made a gag in this running line Of circuses and murder And I have had enough This insane game that you play with what could be life: You do not know life. You have never seen it. You would be damned to even mention its name, Knowing your shallow interpretation –

You pigs, I would vomit into a cup and feed it to you, And you would gladly eat it - Thinking it feed or pudding

III.

It is amusing To make a joke out of the sanctified form While the incoherent drunk world slobbers on its chin and attempts a Clumsy seduction I lower my pants and shit on the beautiful Making a great mess of dignity and the swollen pride of nations And the bumbling guardrail of the law These newborn souls with rotting diapers Need a god to tell them what do What to speak And how to make art

It is my last round with this idiot world And thus I shall play my part as an idiot among idiots Watch me dance! play the idiot entertainer, Or the idiot professor, or the idiot lover Spouting meaningless drivel from my loud, blistered face They are all preachers, the lot of them Preachers of the skullfucked religion called purpose, meaning, Progress, or thinly veiled lust masquerading as goodwill - Take your pick. The stiff pricked monk and the chaste politician huddled over drinks While I strip myself bare and fuck myself in the ass. Is that enough? What is the difference anymore? Do you not take in scum every day, sighing with pleasure while you do it? Shovel more into your mouth.

I am desperate for more pornographic art And here, we will use the true form of the word - shockingly stupid. You are all ill with this disease of the lack of thought;

I shall run it into you like a short, dull blade; Laughing while I do it.

The superficiality of it Is like smoking a cigarette or dropping a bomb The generative act of meaningless destruction A thousand missed orgasms And then what?

I do not see any urgency from my peers So I bring urgency like a gas fire Impenetrable and all consuming

I can’t ask god what to do anymore because he hung himself Or at least they’re calling it a suicide in the news

IV.

A deathless machine is more than the sum of its parts.

I must make an incision I am itching to use this knife; So I sever the umbilical cord Which binds me to the world. I remember starving; I remember the slow walk of asylum overtaking me like the shadow Of death: Sure, exacting, and complete And yes, I remember punishing myself for love.

If this is the lesson I was to learn, Men have died for much less And much more.

I reign over these realms In my ability to kill them;

Thus, like Hercules, I begin to wrestle with higher and higher gods.

VI.

I will let you in on a little secret about poetry The most total and useless of the arts The passionless professor will balefully inform you Of the importance of editing And the spleen publisher will of course Ask you, 'Who is your audience?' You, the poet, must spit in their faces. Spit in the faces of the whole lot; The history of this decayed form.

For hate is the eternal light That we merely perceive as warming us In parks or on the street corner Because we are not close enough to it To be burned alive

VIII.

There will always be the spineless poets Who write in the fashion of the day

These are not, simply, the worst of the poets – But representative of the worst of the people.

IX.

What do I want with ‘the truth’? I am not religious. I strip away illusion – To, simply, reveal what is. Not for one moment does the idea of ‘truth’ come about.

That love stripped me of every illusion I had – every idea of love, life, and self that I thought to be true.

There is no place for it; It is always in rebellion.

XI.

(Any action from thought)

XII.

Why are you afraid to be hateful with words? To lie with words? To brandish them as weapons?

Perhaps it is because you are already hateful with words And that you use them to lie and get your way Throughout the course of the day

And yet still fear being seen As you are –

Well that is my task To shine this light On that which You would prefer to keep hidden.

XIII.

To coax you out of complacency I would do just about anything Defame myself to the point of extinction Spit in my own face And turn everything criminal

I do not care about anything else Other than challenging you to the ends of the earth To the point of each extremity Where blood meets flesh And back again All of your beliefs Cast off All of your faith Cast off

I take my life Or offer it to you To take from me.

This is all I have to give

XIV.

Vishvarupa

Realize the power of the imagined As that which creates and destroys all things This power of making-life: Accessible to all who allow themselves To commune with it.

Now go forth – Create and destroy all things.

XV.

Sometimes The best way to write a poem Is to write a poem that isn’t a poem. Some of us know this all too well In our lives.

XVI.

Repression is that perverted force Which binds modern life to us And to itself – From that which we repress within ourselves To the police forces and national governments of the world To the killing of the earth.

All of these instances Are the same instance. The belief that one cannot be truly loved Without appearing in a certain fashion, Behaving in a certain way, Or having a certain ‘thing’ – Coupled with the belief that this is the way things have always been; Thus, The way they must always be.

It is the task of anyone who cares To liberate life Outward and inward alike – From such a pernicious thing As belief.

XVII.

The language, If it is true, Is always cosmic.

It can be said of the shortest moment And also of all time; The trunk of the tallest tree, And the smallest, most dormant seed of the soul;

One organ in the body And the planetary organ Of the cosmic body.

XVIII.

That we make the borders in our own lives That are often hard to see And filled with assumption, assertion of Individuality, and fear of subsumption – This loss of what little control we have left.

This aspect of unmaking borders Is the night of our action.

XIX.

I burst out in anger Because I misunderstand love Then fall into sadness Because I misunderstood love.

XX.

For each person who thinks there is no harm done Committing a violent action in a violent world Does not understand that the violent world Is composed of violent action

XXI.

Accept that you are always wrong And that there is no correct method; That you will always fall short.

This is also the freedom from righteousness.

XXII.

It is not that there is evil in this world It is that some do not understand The closeness of love; The freedom of it – And in this misunderstanding Commit violent acts In their attempt to get close to that which Has no shape, no form And cannot be bribed by deeds Money Or force

To translate love’s word Is that impossible project Because it is not a word, nor a face Nor a meaning Just

XXIII.

To strive for anything Is out of the bounds of poetry And into Enterprise

XXIV.

Each composition of a music Done by human hand Is not done by human hand Nor is it the song Of the individual

The poetry emergent From the soul Echoes across, throughout, and over time Like a child skipping through the hills Of some home –

It knows very well How to move through the flesh and blood Resounding in cacophony And sometimes aspecting bliss.

XXV.

To have no fear Realize you are that deathless soul Traversing the unseen grounds Without time and passing Through the ruins of history As one massive angel.

And the light emergent From this vessel of vessels Is that same light Which lights the world – Even in times of great despair.

For you and I need that lamp To light our way amidst much sorrow Which extinguishes our knowledge Of the cardinal points And within this light We offer ourselves In our divination:

This queer method.

XXVI.

There was once a dream Of a hallway with painted walls Depicting the scenes of life Many of which With erotic implications And there, We lit the torch of our divining.

This rod Fiery and convenient When submitted truly Brings about that blissful and final sleep Which is knowing-god.

And in that shaking hall Where time turns inward Persephone breaks This accord With pleasure.

XXVII.

In the twelve phases Which compose the birth and death of all matter Hercules dutifully performs the task of Killing illusion, ego, worldly desire, and the want for all things but God It is known that matter is of god But is not god In as much as the child is of it; Light.

That which is seen as being of (Language) Is constantly surrounded by the buzzing of heaven And in that permeant heaven, all knowledge And all works. It is seen that Hercules performs the work But the body solvent; Passing through the head of a needle In the eye of god.

XXVIII.

The awareness says, ‘I am here!’ But the business of life Will not allow it.

The awareness raps at the door With increasing efficacy Demanding entry But the business of life Will not allow it.

The death of the body draws near; The mind grows weak for fear of the unknown. It is as such –

The mind begs for solvency At the door of itself.

XXIX.

Life does not keep accounts; Thus, one may draw freely from its coffers. The great art steals at life: Again, freely – And thus, Beyond measure.

XXX.

There is a deep murmur Like a babbling brook beneath the flesh Which crosses the body and Down into the caverns which house The primordial vat Of the force of life She whispers

So The animal in heat that I am I go about springing these poems From that ribbed cage I call My heart

XXXI.

I am that which keeps passage at Thebes The gate between the old and the new I sing a song no soul can see without Twisted face And play a tune no heart can use

Within this key that I provide Is the sheer bound; All of the law For if there is no conflict (which I create) Why should there be freedom at all?

XXXII.

After Francis Bacon

The saint painter To whom death incarnate Is a dog struggling to shit Drunk wanderer and flaneur of London Is immersed in the solitary chaos Of the city of the mind.

He does not work, no – He slashes away at consciousness With the brush as a knife of the grotesque By which he carves faces

Destroyer of masterpieces; Michelangelo Of the underworld.

XXXIII.

The difference between the student of lust And the student of the lifting of delusions is Everything

XXXIV.

I brandish the conclusion Of my carefully arranged death Like a banner Or an emblem Signifying my willingness to escape myself and my life In the name of that which lies beyond It

The realization that there is no Beyond this Is a crushing weight Equal to a world Or a hurtful word from a loved one

This burden, bourne for all eternity and again In no time By no one Army of the dead And dying And sold

And from the body emergent: The sigh of the Relinquished

XXXV.

This is the purgatory of emotion This chamber of expressed text Which I jettison forth With absolute purpose And conviction.

This accumulated grave Which I have dug And will continue to dig With the blood and sorrow Of the eternal soul Is my blessing And ultimate duty.

I take this gift And let my blood Mingling it With endlessness.

XXXVI.

Through the bramble of my life I can see transcendence. It is not the image of tangled leaves and woven branches, Nor a crown of thorns – But as a method of seeing Again, each time, for the first time; The observation of the light which pierces The image Like a hole in a piece of paper Illuminating that which was merely A painting of what I believed To be true

XXXVII.

As I fail to see the whole I crucify myself; This crucifixion is not the violent symbolic Image But merely a location – A gesture in time and space In which the mind becomes briefly Ensnared This trap – which goes by many names Including Knowledge Has taken me once again, blinded And convinced of myself To the point of which I am prepared to war At the borders of my kingdom Of imagined sovereignty.

My entrails weave down Into this cup which holds the droppings Of this moment Which I drink To renew myself Perpetually.

XXXVIII.

For Antonin Artaud

Sputum dribbles down from his pockmarked mouth And trickling out like a weak faucet Emerges the infant Artaud From the aqueduct of invention – Sliding out of his own womb with unparalleled stench And vigor;

He proceeds to shred the myth With his bare hands.

Unreal as a drop of fluid and rampant as the word Of the damned, He has fled the world and sent post To detail the witchcraft of the heavens.

…

The gapes in Artaud’s soul are Missive caverns within which he has inscribed divine law Written in his own faeces In the language which none speak: As there is no learned passage To or from That place.

His bidden channel is not severed; Preserved like bile and encased in the vial Which contains his essence, Pressed and contorted In the agony of Impression.

Anyone could understand The flight from this wound: For this tomb of the flesh

Which he has diligently left Like a gift for some shrink or policeman To rape with science - Is belongingless And exiled.

XXXIX.

One who is realized says: I am made of That stuff. How could it burn me?

XL.

These poems engender detachment; As I speak them into being I lose them to themselves. With these poems as the expression of my Passing through life, What more do I need? I simply speak through them, Fluidly, effortlessly – And let them die to my knowledge And to the world.

XLI.

It should cause you great fear To think of old age, death, the crumpling Of the body; The fatiguing of the mind. Why should I have to detail the horrors of Such things to you? Know that they strike each body From that which we consider to be life, The brief animation of the flesh And the organs therein.

Rush from the body and the mind And declare yourself past the triviality Of staking claim to dead land In a dead time. That which nourishes you does not grow There So why do you refuse to budge?

XLII.

I am the feet of god And the feet of suffering Although bare; stripped of want I gladly pass over hot coals, the poisonous Fangs of snakes and spiders, jagged Rocks, and the weapons of others – Put against the vulnerable and the Devoted, alike.

I sip poison like the nectar of a summer Fruit Savor the heat of the coals like the rare Appearance of the sun And delight in the use of my body To stunt the powerful and the merciless Alike.

I understand all of these aspects To be god; With my total devotion And action I serve forever.

XLIII.

Like a mischievous cat Or a player who has grown tired of the Game I tip the board off the table And watch the glass pieces shatter Forever On the ground.

These pieces are the symbols Of my existence to myself and others On the plane of ‘the world’. Why do I work so hard to keep them intact? Besides, they were bound to break Anyways.

What remains, The fallen board; The glinting, shattered glass Reminds me of what is real.

211

212

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Selected Poems (Absolute Vol 5)

the sand swirls about engulfing the world but for a moment in its gaze rendering even ozymandias mute, but for his few words in the philandering shelley's book; taking the skyscrapers of dubai and the shores of manhattan

spring my body so i may love not bent by obligation, the bread of this day, or the next, no

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