Hieros Damné, or The Saints of Violated Woman

Hieros damné, or, The Saints of Violated Woman, two volumes

Volume I, Hieros damné: Greek Poems, Les étés damnés; Ἀνάστασις: Praticiens du rêve (three panels)

Greek Poems

Πάντα τὰ εἴδη, τὰ φῶτα, τὰ ἐνύπνια, καὶ αἱ περιστάσεις σῆμά ἐστι τῶν θεῶν.

Panta ta eidē, ta phōta, ta enypnia, kai hai peristaseis sēma esti tōn theōn.

"All forms, lights, dreams, and situations are a sign of the gods."

Πάντα ἴχνη τῶν θεῶν ἐστίν.

Panta ichnē tōn theōn estin.

"All things are the tracks of the gods."

You are like a golden stag

In the green brush

That I covet

With all the thirst

Of my incarnate soul

Toward the warm heat of your body

And the passages whispered by the soul

Into your flesh

I stand, like a hunter with his bow

In the forgotten dead time

Of the world’s myth:

Hunter of the gods

In the boroughs of the cities;

The brush

Where the birdsong

Reveals my beloved bathing, naked

In the evening light.

We are at the world-fountain

Where the shining eyes of the drinking gods

In the form of animals and flowers

Hunch over the bloodwater

Like darkened spectres,

Gleaming out

From behind

The wild night.

I approach

With the fruiting of

This sacral eye:

The golden nectar.

Souls: that hunt in this world

And move the dial

Of the hidden procession

Of the secrets.

I. Saint des Nuages

The clouds loom.

Her hot body, within which I sit;

am sipped, the ancient drum.

Measures of blood flow through me

into a stream I do not know.

To this world

I feed the tree of changes.

Living: spit and saliva.

Dead: the creepers of blood.

White billows peek

from the blue that hides the stars.

I go—in the white dust

like smoke.

The grain, sung from me

like water.

Green-gold of the trees.

The rawness of my breath

keeps the blood.

The electric nerve

turns the eye,

coloring my perception

of the infinite gape

of the stars.

II. The Time of Hellas

Beach of Crete:

Golden-brown pebbles in blue crystal water.

I know the secret haunting the stone

tumbled from Demeter’s temple ruin.

This is the land where gold

was bottled by the poet

amid the ruins.

What stone keeps

is memory—

unlike ours,

but no less true.

The spirit holds time

like Nature’s watch.

She does not know

the Spanish grove

or Gothic church-bell tolls—

She is within them,

ringing with a strange might

that pierces the air,

Like one possessed by Time,

singing differently

at each approach.

III. Beautiful Girl

I have walked

the land beneath Knowing.

I dwell beneath the mountain pass

where shadows cross the cleft rocks

like dials of the sun.

There I whisper to the eagle.

I write upon the walls.

The shade of letters cools

while men dance upon the plains

in the blood-rite.

Caught in a swell,

their spirits shake in the wind,

sprinkling bits of gold on wheat

gathered

in an unassuming pile of earth.

Touch the hand of the girl dancing,

drinking wine

under the Aegean sun.

The sea breeze cools my blood.

There is a sense, in Nature’s whisper,

returned to me

in small measures.

If the whole sight were sung,

life would be over—

crashed on the rocks

of white misery.

Her skin, golden-brown,

pierced by olive light,

dyed by the heavy boughs.

I sit beneath them

and compose my poems

leaflet by leaflet.

Her beauty, young—

Ardors unsplit

by haunted questions.

IV. Circe

“There, hero, you must go close in and do as I command you”

Aye, Circe

Give your blood and libations —

Fill this body to the day

And speak your unknown directions

With the breath of the blood.

This day’s kykeon, I drink.

This day’s katabasis, I walk.

A drink of blood, in a pitcher,

For the sacrificed one.

A hungry insect, perched upon the flesh.

From the crest of the sun, to its fallen place,

You mediate my arrival

And direct my movements. Fate —

What is this, but awakening to the divine motive

Behind all of your earth speech.

Drag me where you will, drag not —

I go willingly.

Reveal to me my woman,

She with black hair,

The sensitive child

Behind your Valkyrie.

I dig this pit, the body

And hear your sacred motive.

The woman of sacred literature

Who cleans the temple floors.

The cat, grazing, with the marble eye.

The old warrior in the gymnasium.

To heed your summons

Is to go

To the true life, indeed

V. Voice of Athene

Some fear the gods.

To step into the river of Death,

Muddy your shoe.

I work poems like locks,

In the ruins that are simultaneously historical, and mythic.

Athene speaks from above, as the sky rotates.

A dream about the native man’s daughter.

The window to her room; his fury.

I was displaced, from the stars

And thrown into a historical situation

With certain directives

Which are screamed, like spiritual bones, into my blood

You can hear my rattling

All the way down — across the Peloponnesian isles

As I prepare my descent

By burning ashes in a small grave,

Puddled with blood and wine.

Deep in the earth, elder lizards

And the phoenixian dead

Are breathing through my flesh and eye-holes.

I eat — body after bodies

As I bore

To the centre of the earth

And speak with hells.

My rusty sword kicking dirt.

This is the beach at rest. The girl Anita,

And all of her haunted Venus.

Before I could hear,

The goddess Sophia

Simply pulled my move.

The marble of her temple breathes:

Which is the sight behind my eyes

Steer,

In this world

VI. Awakenings / Summer in Galilee

We wander the land

Of the already-dead.

Awaken your noos,

And live again —

Or for the first time.

I discovered the spirit behind the body

In a degree of meditative suffering

Which actively tore the veil.

Subjected, at a higher level

By a preparatory station of the soul,

Ripening,

Like autumn fruits in the Galilee.

There, I fell,

Fruitful, with sweet blood

In song.

Spiritual breath hitting the body

Like the moments before opiated death;

The newborn.

The serial drift of dreams

In the guttered minds

Of stars.

Who knows how many thousands of years

I plotted in hells. Wasted over petty nothings,

Nothing that stirred the soul to speech.

The breeze that opened the blue eyes.

I find no record of it

In the books of the dead

Waking up in flesh,

I am surprised, again

That I am not in Parnassian halls

Sipping the blood-wind of my trials

And laughing at the past deaths

Of my soul attempt

With Hermes or Demeter,

No longer stringing my bow

Or else wandering toward her voice

As she casts it in my mind’s ear

Over the sandy shore

VII. Impregnation

A certain movement of the hands

Or breath of the spirit-wine

Moves the dragonfly

Which seeks to merge with my mouth.

In a greater distance, my beloved turns in a dark sleep.

Does the image of my face enter her mind,

Or like a sacred fire

The bush of my burning words

Of poetry —

Carved, behind her eyes

Like a calling, rears its head

Up from ancient, stone tombs

Of spirit-body.

Does the dragonfly of my mouth

Wander in the tolling-bells of the wind

To reach her heart

Which sings in dreams

And draws her forth

Through city-curtains of misery;

The dark labyrinth

Of her wandering.

VIII. The Young

At the docks

Where I saw your naked body

Pierced by the moonlight.

All of the girls were silent

With a fear of life.

We kissed on the wooden bench

And I wanted to know you

Impenetrable mind.

This world

Cut with silences

Of awakening.

Kissing on the circle of ritual rocks

As I cupped your breasts

Flesh, grappling

With spiritual blood;

The rise

Of deeper awareness

IX. Nekyia & Nostos

I climbed up the same hills

Which once held Hector’s army, in their full force

And his slave wives. Something in the ground reverberates

Like the vision of hot-air’s bending.

I saw you by the river, in your white dress

Hanging the clothes upon a line.

So far from home, we, in dream’s ardurs,

Collapse by the beloved

In the sign of great struggle.

Suns and moons climbed these same hills

With a frightening pace.

Nights and days circled my corpse, like vultures

As I fermented in the burial ground rite.

From horse to man, I was changed; the spiritual mind leapt out

Like a blue panther —

We become what is beneath the mask

And glimpse the seething air that settles upon the imprint of the sema.

The hot spirit, smoking

That shows me the naked white light of your soul,

Hinted blue with melancholy

As you stand, all of your child

Before me.

You, woman, whose mask falls

Like the slip of a sundress

In my presence,

Your wet, full lips

Pressed passionately

Against mine

X. Goddess

Guide me — one who is blind to the world,

Yet full of your sight.

I cannot see firm things, but the spirit

That leaps out of them. Soul colors.

Drift as I may, I must know love,

Pressed up against me

Shattered my ghost

So that I can breathe

The aetheric colors

And sip the smoke

Of shattered stars.

Put me in the girl’s bed

Whose soul is wedded to mine.

The tears of the drink of her breath

Drip into my mouth, my blood

And feed my spirit like an elixir.

Entangled,

Let the veil between us fall

And copulate

In the blinding light

Of true soul knowledge’s

Ecstasy

Steaming

Like a shadow

Of passion

At work upon this earth

XI. τὸ ἔργον τοῦ λόγου

to ergon tou logou

It is the whisper of the gods

That works these texts.

You who breathed into me, at birth

A tapestry of bloods.

The red of Ares, the blue-black of Saturn;

The blue thunder of Zeus — which haunts my art with a melancholy

Ripped open by the golden flute

Of the lungs of the spiritual heart.

What is beneath me

Is the soul glimpsed, below and beneath the eyes

In the agony which rent spirit from body; hovered above the corporeal form.

It is in this gape that the gods speak,

The auric, ethereal space —

The bridge between matter and spirit.

Thunder, come down

And hit the brain like a drug. The lungs, pulsing

Wet with chemical dew. It is that we are struck by life,

Like a hammer against the lungs

Awakened, screaming

From the dream

Into the quiet, streaming billows

Of the rays of the sun

Which torch the flesh with the passionate ardors

Of a lover

XII. The Presences

Sun of the red-yellow clay

Warms my blood —

Makes it orange

With delight.

The touch of the destined lover

Heats a purple, blue-gold

Within my soul;

Beats outwardly

With the clear favors

Of the gods’ choice.

From swamp to swamp, pit to pit

And heat storm

I travel, with my band of gods

Stitched about my coat;

The mask,

And the inner missive.

Without wares to trade; with only Eros

To clash within my bones

And expose deep, timely truths

About the essences.

Nature, wrap yourself about me

Like a vine

And make me one with you. The way you do this

With most glory

And the gold apparition

Of the sun within the blood

Is with the woman.

Yellow porch light crashes

Upon the Aegean seas.

We watch, with the gulf that breaks

In olive-golden arms

Wrapped in olive-golden arms

Until there is no sight between,

Only the blackness of Bliss

feeling-unity.

XIII.

Timeliness:

I act, as the gears slowly shift

Upon the great clock. Lights

Open and close the gates, wrought

By the hands of the gods.

Whisper to me, as I break against the curtain,

Beneath which is hard stone.

Reveal to me, as I speak, peer, and swim

With the black arms of my eyes

Into the gape, which opens

In the wide splendor

Of the dawn.

I sniff your traces

With the nose of my spiritual senses:

The form of the color

Of your breath.

The dog-saliva

Of my heroic soul

May this lock of the summer be

Like the hair of Demeter

Which falls down upon her fertile breast.

My mouth cupped about her

Milk-wine

In the form of the young bride;

Her olive skin

Like a tree-bough

Against which I sup

The golden world-ardors

Of pure light.

The milk and the meat

Ring down upon my blood

Freely, from the hot trance

Of the god-star

Which sings the goddesses

Into my flesh-ear.

This soul, like a gleaming shard

Of the ancient forge

Which births eternities

Into seething fixtures.

In this temporum,

Our birth-temple, where souls meet

And swap the secrets of mouth

Touched, in the wet kiss of blood and tongue

Upon this world’s agora.

XIV. Jason, or, The Duat of the Living

I travel to your earth-temple, like a Jason

On a quest I do not truly

Remember.

You whisper to me in dreams,

Aspects, fragments.

And in dreams I walk in this world —

With intimations of your sight.

Veering, courses:

Ships and detours

Upon this water of delight —

Poseidal, this world turns

On this mist of perceived favors.

This mind, a buoyant sail of light

Which turns toward your golden horizon.

You — who either rises or sets

In the land of the birth

Or the land of the dead.

The stone remembers your yellow-gold

Passions.

I, too, am carved within a game

Where my soul must journey in the black wilds

Or to the end of the world

Where the waters of the dream

And the gold sky of the gods

Kiss

In the aethers

Of spiritual form.

There, I receive the vision

In the form of the woman.

Her body,

A golden cloth:

A moonbeam

Of the sun’s hidden mystery:

Buried in the silvery ground;

Singing upon the sacral dirt

Of the dream-form

Of the soul

Les étés damnés

I. Virilité consumée

Will I be born again to see this hot blood

Of the star of youth

That burns through me?

This fuse of summer

That I witness the body,

On the furnace of the star’s belly

Voraciously consume?

This alights the mind:

Blue-bodied fury of genius.

The gleaming heights

Visible, in the male cardinal’s

Fuming headdress;

The rippling body

Of the powers.

I have learned to survive

In every tongue

II. After Paul Delvaux

At the train station

Waiting for Death

In the shape of the woman’s face

III. Thunder-storms

In the storm, comes the dream.

It must break me from the madness

Of everyday life

And throw me into poetry.

The rote repetitions of the same faces.

Swimming in hell, without the Virgil-girl

Languishing

In detour-summers.

Amant-touché, the devil glances at me sideways

In a straw sun-hat, smoking cigarettes,

In the shade beneath the white fence.

Godless light, that swallows

Broken by the scream, like a bird

Of storms.

IV. Les étés damnés

At the stations of the damned

The women scream

And wheel poor children.

About the hot hills, the men sweat

Building useless monuments

Quick to be erased

To dust.

We stand in the midst of this

You and I

And bicker over nothings.

The heat consumes

And my beloved is no-where,

Shouting beneath the wheels

Of the great steam engine.

Time puts fists of us into his mouth

And chews,

Not even with anger.

Damned summers

Where I languish,

Spent in nothingness

Without mirrors;

Without touch

V. Cursed Watch / Les Sirènes

On this heroless island

Where the sirens fuck, and check their watches

My blue soul pulls my heart down

From beneath my skin

Into a cave

Far away from these hells:

Which process

Like a madman, swinging the whip

Of his penitence.

He begs, angrily

On roads we do not wish to walk.

On the island where Circe beds me

And reluctantly, I stalk hells, once more

On a tireless watch:

A land I have seen far too many times

In a passage I have paid

One too many coins.

And yet, the sun lingers

So ferociously.

How do we sleep, in the noon-midnight.

I must find the beloved

To make our bed

And pass into cool dreamings.

Her hands

Tracing my back

In the blue room.

VI. Fish shop

I will be down at the fish shop, where the dead speak in sign-things, not words.

Only shadows, here, walk

In the nights of the possessed:

Who are picking at chicken skulls; chicken bones.

Prostitute signs flash,

Alone, the poem wars

With unspent aetheric forces —

Mind-samskaras.

Such immense solitudes,

Where graves and the nights stretch outward

Like infinite tombs:

Portals to blacknesses which girls know nothing about.

What do I say to her?

The weather, the news, music.

The one who has been to hells; had his eyes cut, his arms slashed

And wallowed in the blood that the snake gave

To the great grandmother.

There are no coffins for seers.

They burn up in catacombs

And haunt the etheric space

Where poetry shines down

Into the minds of the prophètes-condamnés

VII. Thoughts of the poverty-girl

Walking back, drunkenly,

From the party of the dead. Fondling old lovers,

In a purgation which circles, not spirals;

Time stalks its prey

Before dropping out into black abyss.

The damned scream in brown liquors and haunt my mind,

Below street-signs, below tree-signs

In a brutal silence, I cannot read.

Into the black room, a room which I make red with my mind

And pray for the break, where the light is blue before blackness.

Do you understand

How stars crash horizons?

This is how the body forms

In the veil of the womb.

I sat, entombed, crested upon the hill of the mother

And died before I awoke. These are the shadows in my light blue eyes,

The veil of eclipses, which shine, like auric spectres

Before the tomb of this world.

I, who haunt, and stalk the regularities.

This world, like a drain, which shakes the dead

Shakes their pockets

And breaks their hands and backs over the grave.

Enough of this life, this spit

Drippling out of the drum. Caust, the damned

In their hot mercies

Of another summer: which sings their flesh

Into miseries unspeaking.

Driven to drink, heroin,

The poor girl sips morphine,

At last — knowing happiness

VIII. Traum

In summers, I seethe

And drink liquor with the sons of slaves.

We, here by the great fortune of sex, no less:

The lust of mercies.

Dragged by angels

To the stage of the world

And watch the long draw of the breath of heat

As it bangs against the curtains of our minds.

Wood-death, has sowed me

On the fields of this dungeon

Which are the beautiful view of the cemetery

Over the crystal green-blues of the river, dancing.

How have I become so drunk, so lost, so speechless:

Writing on napkins with prostitutes,

Wandering the world like a siphon, with my mouth drawing

Forced breaths.

It is the hated, who lie in these early graves;

In minutes, in flutes of early hours

Which are orchestras of total silence.

If truly, the gods have withdrawn,

Beauty is a sanatorium-spectre;

Raving, with the last of the mad passion of a young star,

I have dropped to my knees

And drunk only spirit wine,

Which has left me bereft, thoughtless

Without reason,

Suckled to the dream and the chemical blood

Which I lust, with the madness

Of an addict.

Poured into the dream, and the dream alone,

Poetry is the blue night by which I kneel, in prayer,

To the daemonic guitars, strings which sung

My fury, and in dreams, days, and nights,

Made worlds — seemingly impenetrable,

Absolutely whole.

Dream-symbols bled into my days.

I stood on the edge of the knife-tongue of lust

And was unfulfilled.

As heat turns to shadow, I scream at the damned,

Myself the most damned of all,

The madman

Lost to the blue morphine of dreaming

Gold-of-Souls (Racelessness / L'irracialité hiératique de la divinité supérieure)

The souls of the animals are everywhere.

The souls of the animals are a single soul,

Manifest in the eyes.

You do not flee the condition of the visionary.

Where would you run?

You take the pilgrimage to hells

With the volition of Le Héros du Sacré.

Christ was of this kind.

How do you know the devil of the stars,

If you do not sip his blood-milk?

Thus we fall,

Into incarnations.

Thus we fall, down through time

Until our lips are pressed against stones and leper-sores.

I take the sweet milk into my mouth, like a calf,

And am shuttered awake.

Like a blinds, this word escapes my lips

With all syncope-madness.

The spiritual world is just behind the eyes.

Do you see?

This is one-who-sees.

He is a devil, in a blue coat

Who has stolen away for a smoke.

Liquor and girls, good fun.

The ore seethes in a private world

Far beneath the stage of the theatres.

Gladly, each of us takes sips of blood

For amusement.

These poor hells, these amuse-bouches

Before oblivion, apocalypse.

At last, all is light; your game is up:

Player, sycophant,

Muse of the child-god.

Like little balls, he is fed up

And breaks your planet in two;

Your mind, deranged, schizophrenic.

We are in this clinic of the mad:

Where seals clap gladly.

I can see my face in the silver of their eyes.

Their mask is mine. I ate from the same glass

And was penitent

To the same star they worship.

I see the gladness of nature

Purified

From the madness of men.

We are this golden star, race-less:

I came from a place

Of greater divinities; even now, I am going back there,

Escarping the flesh

Through the deepest call of my blood —

A heroic race

Of pure souls

That touch the flesh in a dance of mysteries.

We who must come to know the world

Through all sins, darkness, and the blood-red drink

Of world’s-wine.

Give me your fashion. Stitch me my coat of ragged furs and cow-flesh.

Let me go about the grave

And count the coins

You men, utters

On the great beast,

Her shapeshifting colon, lungs, eyes.

Screaming, without names,

Slammed into oblivions. This small plot of the red wound, an ounce of flesh-meat

I will draw from it the blood-seal

The drug

That produces oblivions

IX. Ravings

I will sing the poem outwardly from my tongue

And make the conjurings of the burnings visible and apparent; as such,

Make them a solve to this world

Of brief nothings

Which I have swallowed

With all the reluctance

Of one forced to live,

With my eyes stitched open

To demonic pictures.

The world’s film, this grave of images, without imagination

Spat from the tongues of lizards; screaming from the back-brain

Lots, isles of death

Languishing, with broken toys.

Sup upon this rock, burning.

Poetic fugues are all we have, the burning sign, which I must take

With all the literalness of one

Swimming amongst the dead

In great vats of dull

Dream-song.

May the poem be the burning knife

Which carves the air

And reveals the goddess. She is of flesh and blood;

I have beheld her with intimacies

That have drove me raving mad with passions.

I stand on the edge of eternal blackness;

To you, this simply looks like

Every-days.

She must find me, be with me

In the white flowers of summer.

Their blood nectar is like healing water

Upon my tongue. The forever-life is always here.

For now, I will take us,

And absolved,

Solitudes.

End this night, and breathe into my mouth,

In holy, erotic Oneness. The sign collapsed-touch of your hot

Blood-flesh

X. Persephone of Parties

I crave the black streets of night — the warm gold yellow streetlights

Where only the cats are awake. There I write in my book

And walk until my feet bleed. Smoking the last cigarette,

Naked, in a room with only a bed and a mirror.

I miss being hopelessly lost, swallowed

In an utter lack of identity. To houses, to endeavors

Swallowed in masked balls, winding, dark rooms

Where I sink into the walls; bleed impenetrable songs

Of pure emotion, without words,

Without tongues.

Forever, I have danced, out on stone balconies

Beneath blue moons; lingered there

Like a hungry spirit, to be perfectly drunk

On maroon wines; to catch the eyes

Of the woman who will break open my soul;

Lick the fruit and seeds

Like the pomegranate, on the black tongue

Of my divine lover. Like her, like a Persephone,

Her wild black hair desires, timelessly

Unrepressed

The furies she digs from beneath my skin

With the claws of her soul

XI. La chute de la lumière damnée qui attire le sang des prophéties

Bring the black storm, so I can drown my sorrows

In the draught of Memories.

Bring them, the black drum that I bang and beg

On premonitions which may and may not fruit,

Black oceans, within which I may or may not drown.

Fates — to the wind, I string my sails

Like a cheap guitar. I met the blonde girl on the violent street, by the convenience store.

I haunt the lights, beneath the bars, unable to lie still

In Death-repose. I must draw her into a blacker night, suck the blue juice from her lips, her tongue;

The fruit of her mind — the articulation of her perfect dream.

Thus I wander, wander, damned;

Wander, with the fruit of my tongue parched of water.

I must find the party in the labyrinthian room. Her eyes flash, young beauty.

Are there ever chambers enough to contain us,

Is there ever enough skin to drop from your eyes, flesh from your body,

Flowers from your dress,

Which I ravage with the tongue of my eyes;

The cup of my hands which holds the gold-blue water of your breast;

The ardors of your warm skin

Which I smear across my eyes

To hold forever in passage over hells.

It was not a river, but a house

Overlooking the slave market of the long dead. We trappings,

Of a greater hunt. Like mice, the low mind

Ripped by tempest-squalls

Which would make Poseidon scream, wet with the dream water

I emerge out onto the city streets;

In narrow yellow night-alleyways, my lips and teeth stained with red wines

You stare at me with the terror of a girl

Who knows I am doused with the blackness

Beyond your wildest night, caught with the net of your hands

As the daylight crests over your window.

Damned girl, I am your private prophet, in a private love

Which is drowned between us, in a carriage of souls:

What secret covenant will know of our life?

The stars don’t speak, damn it

They burn, they burn forever

As we are entangled and abolished

In the smoke of the end of this world

And fifteen, next.

Whatever ennui is broken between us

Is a secret pact, we may or may not carry

Forward into different lives. Let us rip the mask, come what may;

Break me in your storm.

I am tired of this

Nothingness

XII. What is there to say?

You did not know me, your blood did not speak or seethe

And yet I required you, your face

To languish over in a room which tripped and spilled

As the sun penetrated into further ethers.

It is your picture goddess, you, common girl

Over which I anguish; spill my blood and milk.

Over and over, my idolatry

Is the slave of life: that which chains me to this world.

Over and over again I fall before you,

As the narrow muse of my salvations.

What else is there to do,

Tumble this life full of stone. Hot markets, too much light;

Not enough of the cool black room,

Where I can meditate on my private fire, which simmers

And produces visions.

Might you be a model for a deeper hell, a deeper woman,

With gleaming black eyes; haunted by a red glow.

We, of the deepest sin, laughable

That we met in a school; your timidity

All over your face.

We quarrel for awhile, and my sullen face over your neck

In the moonlight. Let you disappear, like a faded shadow.

You cannot even haunt this room.

Spectres, spirits, shadows

Tumble over me. This smoke, this wind of your face, not even a kiss upon my cheek,

Not even a life to mourn.

Desire transmigrates to the state of the dream:

A lord in the station before death. The black shadow where we first live.

Even in this world of waking light, the dream breathes

The black and red blood all over the affairs

Of this suffocating, humid room.

You and I, vaguely, I might be your priest.

Vaguely, you might be the woman whom my genius slaves over,

Like a daemon at work in the fires of the hell of my soul

To shovel some coal

Then disappear forever, far out of the range of my subjectivity;

Perhaps to briefly haunt some later dream

As a station of my descent into the black breast of the beloved.

Do I ever grasp you? Do I sing and scream

Beating against the flesh of the chest of the earth. I have not seen you,

In the land haunted by sallow girls. Timidity, surely

Is the death of our hope.

I — slumped over our lady of sorrows,

My tears mingling with her blood,

Erotically,

Sexually

XIII. Rogues

The haunt of the black night,

I who lingers ghoulishly, in the parks

In a solitude which ferments my poems

Like a deadly wine.

The shock of the thunder of the breath of your mouth

The intoxication of your wet tongue; my fingers inside you.

Spring flowers, summer-wilt;

You make your desperate play for immortality.

How often my eyes have darkened

In this brown world, in this hood that has been built

Over this earth and stars. The word has been squeezed

Of juice and blood. I took from you, everything.

Your name, your place,

And threw it all into sexual ecstasy.

You burned for awhile, thankfully, thanklessly

Then silence;

Solitudes.

The embers in some spare peonies

Or flowers with eyes

In the tomb of your desires

Which you spoke to me, and fled

Woman-of-fears

XIV. Demon of Eros Who Breaks Open Worlds

It is that same street, with the hot light beating down

Not knowing if I would see you, come up into some hot apartment

And die a little, small conversation, something to drink

That would tip me into the land of dream-poetry. A bit of music

Drips from my mind, into song

On the black tar of your balcony, the stain, the juice of copulation

On your window,

The strewn books on your floor, light through your window

Which breaks against our bodies. The passions of youth

Which now fall like rains

Over my memory

What is there to say? What is there to do —

These little messes we leave, so often forgotten, in some dark corner of the mind,

This life which I have called

Loving you.

Gladly, foolishly, cast, spun

Into this loneliness — once more, again, into the breach

In which I swim, the mad elixir of memories

In which I bathe, verging on drowning, their warm ointment

Tingling my flesh, my bones, and the warm blood of my heart.

You were the woman I loved; I could drink your warm brown skin forever,

In the drink only my lungs can drink;

In the breaths I take, which swallow the air of your soul,

Which radiates off your flesh

And the ecstasy of your twisted mouth

And your eyes, breached

By my gaze

Into the very heart of the little girl

You keep hid from the world — she who I took in my arms

To an unspeakable place, that would kill me; that would kill the both of us

If we had to bring it into this world, more than the minutes

Which stung our communion

Into eternity

It is Death that stops the breath; I put it into our sex

With a surgical spirit

That slows and softens the breath

To the last imprint of ecstasy

Upon the eyes:

Your lover

L'anticipation des vœux angéliques

Blue siren angels copulate

Under solar fire

This is the breath of souls

Writhing

In the cast of flesh;

Breaking, combining

Against the green bows of stone cliffs

And the angry passion

Of black oceans of space

We swirl in this hot beaker

And await the meeting.

Clouds softly drift

Like scrolls

Upon which I read, divine

Your devilish blue eyes;

The touch of your soft lips

Across the pillow of my skin

Which fades into silk oblivions

Upon your entreating mouth

Finis:

Demon — you force me into the narrow hells of your blood:

This birth,

Among shadows and stone —

You — swallowed my youth

And bid me fester

In years of deserts. Now I teethe on the memories

Like scraps of bark, to draw the sap of spirit-water

From the long dead.

Bright and sharp, the years

Punctured by the appearance of the desired one.

I thirsted on her image, even as she threw me glances

In the shadows of my room.

Dream-girls, the never-real

Haunts my life. Days after days, the bright sun shines

On a nothingness. My tongue is about bare droplets

Your body pressed against the earth.

Death-pilgrimage, how long I have fermented in my body;

From the spit of my dying blood

Figures of poems emerge

Like haunted beasts

From dreams unfulfilled.

How you made me suffice

On the images of girls, loved

Only in shadows.

It is you that I swallow

In the bright revenge

Of one torn asunder

In the bright vision. You — Fate

Are stabbed in the blood

Which I have drawn, laughingly

And injected

Into these poems of the heart,

Cleansed of the black juice

Of your purgatory hymn.

Suckled me, on this hateful solitude,

Fat and strong

Upon the blood which sipped the dream of wild desire

And chewed, in the second stomach

Of Hopes — until they break

In Furies:

These poems carved

On the scarred belly of the earth: drawing out time

By which to signal the beloved

One marked with the back of hell,

Inscribed with the brand

Of fire,

Writhing in the body,

Desperate for consummate witness

Ἀνάστασις: Praticiens du rêve

This is the dream of my soul — and your own.

Where we meet in the alligator swamp, with trees like tentacles in the water.

The forest breathes deeply, then plunges us into touch.

What do you know of me, or I of you —

We were forged in the mysteries,

By the hammer of a volcanic god

Who sits in the forge of stars

And spins fates.

Between planets, you were changed — as was I

As the universe expanded to accommodate different forms.

The twine that winds your body

Is in my hands like a malleable serpent of life.

The breath of your back fills my air

And I shiver the body away

Like time dissolved to eternity.

Beneath us there is a breach, deep in the earth

That I have rent with the hands of a smith:

To reveal to you the world beneath our own.

It is more than dreams.

It is a stage for souls

To fuck until they are split open

In the spirit light.

You take the bison meat in your hands,

The weeping breath of the trees,

The blue well water behind appearances

And force it into your body.

The soul — it witnesses in horror and delight.

Do you understand this?

That angels war in our world over who will collide and die

In brief bodies of light.

But rather — there is no war, but a strife:

In the ball-game of Eros,

Carried as wounds within the breaking body.

Have you walked the road of blood,

Sipped the green juice beneath the yellow peach nectar

Which swings so perilously from the trees?

That the fruit might fall in your golden brown breast

That I ravenously devour

In the agonies of cities which break

And crumble into stone-dust.

Here we are, at the collapse of mysteries.

The cloth of myth reveals your spirit-blood —

You, Isis at the Euphrates,

You, my forest-nymph, whose back and curve haunt like a separate face of skin.

Turn your head, as I wrestle with the blue serpent

Which is the agonies of the stars

In the pocket of this world.

Like the speech of the seething forge finds steel

I hammer the body into form,

Only to watch the soul escape into your lips.

Is this tragedy? You, by the water —

Your face not merely like a perfect dream,

But the precise relic, the fragment

Of my wild mind. You smile, and break the worlds

Which I draw down from my blood, the flue of my veins,

And open aerial spaces in my poetry

Where spirits hover and witness this world.

Upon a stage, you were sewn for me, as I for you, in the chorus of the stars,

In the hum of the great planets as they leapt

And the ancestors called them gods, rightly,

With their breath cast in stags, stones, and the fertile breath of you,

Beloved —

With your impossibly soft skin,

And your hands that cradle the electricity you incite.

What use is this drink, this drug, this katabasis,

When in your arms

I am returned to the cradle of the stars.

Perseus cast up there, Herakles —

The half-god prophets who whisper divinities

Which scream in the dying world.

Through them, I weave gray, ghost-carved faces,

The hot pulses of your blood, like a bloodhound,

To hand my entire body over in a sacrifice.

Give you my skin, so you can dine on my soul, ancient maiden.

This I require of you — to take bites

Like the aetheric bread

That haunts the reach of my time. Beneath my eyes, painting my bones,

Rests the artist — neither man, nor child;

Not any recognizable plant or animal.

Given time, he will shapeshift

Into whatever vessel nature provides.

There is something in him that takes language,

Knows your body even as you hide in this brief skin.

Like man to woman, we are called in this life

By compatibilities which wet both of us into the impossible water

That dances between tree and stone, panther and star,

In the dance through which we both dissolve.

Move through my gyrating, hot flesh like tinder.

Through your mouth let me speak

The song that holds the soul of our shared body.

That we were born from this molten pouring, cooled in a hue which sets our scene:

A summer's day where you approach —

My eyes catch and cannot turn away.

All the beauty in this world is a great magnet

Where souls draw by greater forces,

Clash and combine in bliss.

We are thrown into the sink

Where heat obliterates

In measures of passion, escalated

To terrors of unity

And a blinding white light

Of ecstasy.

This is our epic, sung as you grow

From a little girl knowing nothings

To a woman who has walked the full length of this world.

Through the body we pass briefly

To touch. You know my words like a madwoman in an even madder world —

My Delphi, my girl

Lost in a sea of the dead, the sucked-dry,

The without mystic.

I gave you my prophecy, my blood, before birth.

Did you feel it swirl within you like a drug —

It colored your eyes

And made you insane to all who saw you:

Seeing the spirit in the stag, the serpent in the stone,

The writhing blood of the sun.

In heat you walked as you aged

And the sun was your master, your body, your blood.

Did you swim among the stone of empires, did you bleed

In useless taxes which drew your blood and made you pale —

Girl, I came to fatten your blood in the hot wetness of the belly of the earth,

The moment of the brightness of the star

As it was buried closest to the center.

We crawl toward the breast of the equator

And wrap ourselves in the heat which is our reunion with that which would destroy us.

Not too close, yet not too far

To be entangled with oblivions.

Around us, frogs and leopards spring.

Statues of the unbroken gods twist in human faces

In the midst of the changing.

Let us pray at the Olmec temple,

Or drink the milk-water,

The sugar that runs through the fruit.

Everywhere it is spring.

I feast on your body as you gladly feel

The sensation of my hunger.

Palm trees wave, kissed by light. In this mist the worlds are shattered

And unified.

I have seen your face in the dream, thousands of times.

Your eyes hold the whole light of your experience —

Body, words and worlds that we forget

Yet simmer within us and produce visions.

Yes, you were a little girl once, but you were also an animal for which they had no name,

A plant which cannot be recalled

But in the very fuse of your body.

And the soul — it is not an earthly thing,

Nor can it be bound to time —

But to see through these eyes the mystery

And scream in awe and wonder, delight.

You know my touch without words.

My face — that which collides with an ancient promise,

The covenant you made before you were born.

We meet outside of time, in the midst of the ruins of history,

Each of us with something to share, to learn.

I shovel fistfuls of your face, arms, body

Into all of my senses.

Stuffed full of you, I can see the blue-orange candle which glimmers

And turns worlds.

In the dream we are drawn forth

Through the labyrinth. Each day ripens me, I grow mad, crazed,

Ripe with longing —

I am your fruit, and I feed you in the glen of our destinies.

I require you: swallow me whole,

Take me into you

As I nibble then devour

The corners of your lips,

The tongue of your ear —

Where I paint the walls

Of art.

This is our quietness

Beneath all the affairs of the world.

I know the truth as I have seen it

In the madness that drove me beneath birth, beneath the dream

Into the mysteries of the path

As arranged by the stars —

The madness that required me to write these poems,

Haunted by the elixir of your blood,

The life which divines me and steers

Through the trials, stations, islands,

And detours of this world.

This is our only journey,

Love — priestess of my blood who is also my girl,

My oracle of Dionysos,

My Artemis.

My fruit grows heavy on the boughs of the ancient tree.

The swamp-swallows whisper and scream silently.

There is a magic that draws forth that we cannot hear,

That we know but cannot name —

Call it simply: fates and destinies.

The dragon I hear, henceforth, is the soul, reaching

Like a blue dagger in the red passions of the body

Through this world — to rent the veil

Of humming air

Which is a doorway

To the oblivions we seek.

Passion, and passion all —

As I plunge myself into you

With all the fury and abandon of the devotee

Who has waited decades, centuries,

To be consummated in the open doors

Of your warm body,

The licking fires of your flesh.

Volume II, Livres de la poursuite de l’être aimé (or The Saints of Violated Woman)

Every day, you live the rape of the woman-of-the-world.

Every day, it is her violation that hangs over you

The violence of the black cloud

Of silent torments

You cannot name

Or breach

I. Sun descent

This golden-brown light

Which flits from the stars

Down into the burrows

Of green

There is a deep beauty which sings

In the still-presence

Of the hot air

Like a suspended time

In which we bathe

In the golden flesh

Of the shade

Of the temple of the soul:

Nature, like a cast

That the molten blood, pours

In divine, quiet measures

Of light from ancient source.

This world — a veil of beauty

Where sun seeps, like a hiding child

Through the softly shaking leaves

Of the trees —

Little girl, you made your nest

In the breast-arms of Nature

Like the bluebird —

Your song, this world’s song,

This golden nectar song

I sing

II. The Blackness of The Seer

We have no choice but to descend — and work our madnesses like a craft.

What — stay up here, with the deranged eyes of soul-veiled women and their blind dog-suitors?

I speak not to you, those who make their beds and lay in them

Until my friend Death eventually makes the same demands

I make upon you in living.

No.. we must have visions, and visions are costly. They demand all of us,

That we are shattered on the rocks of Time, and reveal the precious gems hid within.

For we are all stones, polished in the long march — that we acquired eyes and marked us.

Without oblivions, this world’s mind is sick.

Without unknowns, we are submitted to mediocrities —

Dreams and vague perceptions of lesser men.

This is how the world works:

A procession, an order, a hierarchy of dreams,

Which are The Powers:

That command like lightning, thunder, rain besides.

All follow the greatest dream they can comprehend;

For most, utterly vainglorious illusions.

For the tradition of the seers — we balance between the dreams past and dreams present. Between, there is a narrow thread, where the soul takes:

The incarnation of the soul.

Everywhere we walk in flesh, the dream is within. Falling poinsettias, over and over again the shard of the beloved,

The broken glass of her face stitched into a mosaic of the grotesque.

Who will grasp the real and wring its neck, but the greatest dreamer?

The shamans knew this and threw the world away,

Like a bauble, for the newest toy, Imagination.

In the hand of genius, flesh and blood, stitched with the powers,

Imagination creates and destroys whole worlds.

And yet, mediocrities turn within the slow awakening body of the whole world and of the earth.

This same hubris, marionetted by the stars.

Seers have always sulked in dark caves for dreams. Baudelaire with his opium, the philosophers with their cave-walking; the ancients with their rites and drawings. Stones, bones, and bowls.

We walk in the shadow of living Death, blackness,

And from it emerge with the vision.

It’s simple — this:

You either stay with the rest in the flat circle of purgations or break the pattern

And come with us

Upon the blade of this world and the next,

Casting off the coat of your body

To dance in the mysteries.

Know the seer: world of death and dreams

In which all others sleep.

The stupid agony of this world is unbearable,

It simply repeats, by minds that are programmed by a deep history in the body.

Nothing to do but recreate it.

Can you find and hear the mind

And beneath it the one who speaks:

This is the mystery. And perhaps, one day

The world will wake up to it, en masse

The dreamer beneath all dreams.

For now, we descend into the soul;

Fornicate with the nameless powers

That speak in the breach between this mortal world of shades and forms.

Each soul, containing within it, the whole of the world, the whole of the stars.

But asleep, man is simply a flat thing,

A means to another end.

The line always ends with us — the seers.

We break this world and in the bend reveal the immortal fluid, that which I have called the blueness,

Which rushes through all life. It is the energy, carefully measured and spilled

In doses of time, into each soul-form.

Too much, blinding white light, the vessel shatters.

The seers are those who have expanded their nervous systems

To hold increasing doses of the total beatific nature of being.

To observe each plant and lizard and beetle

With the total fixation of attention

As to rend space and time and to reveal the infinite.

This world is overthrown, as was said in Blake

By the one who grasps the immortal root; twists it at the vine;

Up the spine and brain stem.

It is the gift of the dream, thrown into the form of ripe souls

Who train the body in the art of cultivating oblivions

And rendering them legible in speech.

We bring these forms out into the earth; break, shatter your worlds incrementally.

We are, in this way, the mortal enemy of kingdoms of slavery,

As we are kingdoms of mortality, drudgery, dullness, and blindness.

This is illumination — the seer is the fist that breaks as ordained by the stars.

It will not be understood by anyone who is not prepared for the breaking.

They will simply be broken by it, in meaningless despair.

This is what is meant by measures, as in the light of the sun,

Making legible and possible life on Earth. Those who live closest to the vision

Live on the threshold of the knife of Death, and live in communion with the powers

Illegible to sleeping life, that is on the great chain of being.

Awakening to this power will break everything you knew; a servant to the blackness,

A servant to the dark. That you do not know this as the true light

Is the nature of your sleep.

Seers: our line is elsewhere. The golden line, which extends as far into the stars

As the thread which binds them all at their common root. The human is a brief manifestation, through which we exercise our powers, as stations of the stars. Becoming visible, we are the light to the world; reveal the mysteries behind the domesticated normalcies of life and language. This is what makes you a slave: that you have accepted conditions of unreality, and made them your home, your bedside. We take your reality and break it over our knee, to reveal the gold within it. The dust, the gems, the diamond fluid: which we breathe, and it makes us high. Such visions produce further visions. And yet, as your mortal science has shown, these visions are ordained. Not just in character, but in the very root of being from which they are spoken.

What do you know of gravity? Do you know the soul which pulls the threads and arranges forms beneath the appearance of falling stars? What do you know of love? The arrangement of the revelation of immortality from behind the coat of colliding flesh?

This is the state of the damned, in the fallen world which we walk, a world evacuated, obliterated, of the sacred function. The seer is profaned, damned, enlightened, liberated. This is the gift of the mind which sees natively, intuitively, behind the veil of forms. Even from you, I see the light, paling outward, transfixed by delusions, draining the force of your star. You bleed into the mouths of fictions and call this life.

We are the nadir, and we burn, eminently, ominously, over life. The great force of the exercised mind in full hand of one who descends into darkness and ladles the black onto canvas of the great art. Your days pass, as do ours. The visions mount, and form the great tapestry through and within which we perform our operations. It has long been such, and it shall long be. When you are ready, we are here. The world to come is not the world it was, nor will it be the world thereafter. For the blood of the seer is handed down in measures; ripened, to be discharged with increasing ferocity, ability, and crucifixion upon the world of the everydays. It is in this way that this world will be illuminated with the soul, in all of its grotesque, carnal, divine beauty.

We are the beatific ones, who speak the breath of life

Down upon dead, fell ills

And awaken the dead.

This is the world of the living, not the underworld. We walk in the shades — here and now.

The chief function of the seer is to breathe sacred life back onto this earth. To return the life of the soul to legibility in a world whose bowels have evacuated the one thing that made incarnation reasonable. The incarnation of divine love in the corrupt, mortal flesh. And this is precisely what incarnates immortality and perfection upon the earth-body, breathing through the wind of the form.

That you do not know this, that you do not see it, that you revile it,

Is the condition of your sleep.

Otherwise, you, we, are the damned. The dead walking. The self-idiots, who stroll about in suits and names, profaning existence even as you pray to cheap gods. All of this is evacuated in Death. The true evacuation. The ancients knew this. The Egyptian magi knew this. This game was always over; it was played with the stakes of your divine life: the waste of your soul in this world of wastes, manufactured by petty toys that scarce penetrate the world of your truest fears: the nature of why you are here; the purposes which you serve; the world which you must surrender to fulfill the true world and the arc of your soul. The arc of promise, liberation, and real duty to the great self.

This world is fell; you breathe fell air. That you defend it, is that you defend your misery.

The seer, in all time

Draws the quicksilver from the blood of this earth

And breathes it in ecstasy.

This world is a procession

Toward immortality

Incarnate on this earth

In living perception of the infinite, immortal powers

Legible, writ, inscribed

In the body

The poet’s charge

Is the plants, the animals; the trees

The murdered

The avenged

His black song

Is the song of hells

Unforgotten

Screams

Remembered

Through his tongue

Songs

Of the silenced dead

Lingering in the breeze

III. Chants de la poursuite de la bien-aimée

Some of you must fear god

Because you are godless, you know nothing of god

Chained to the body

Slaves to earthly things.

We burst

And scream

On Eleusinian, black hearses

Aweigh, light

With prophecy

Dandelion seeds on the wind

Of fire’s fury:

I breathe the daemonic drink

Which fashions your nightmares

And allows me to speak with the deepest utterances

Of guttural hells

Which are the diamond light of truths

Spat from the mouths of the damned,

All before me

In the great well of the dead

Cursing the sun

Beneath their watery graves

Of blue blood

Damned

From the damned rise

Eternities

IV. Roses of the Damned:

Junk-girl, with your eyes of death, loitering until this sun takes you

In the slow obliteration of the cast of this flesh

Chaud-condamnés — your world, your wine

Your child

And the songs we sing to prevent your facing oblivion:

Little girl, wide eyes, that you live, certainly,

No more than a hot vein which drinks. We cannot give you a name.

You are going from nowhere, and came from less:

Out from the provinces, you with your milk pail and broken teeth:

You, girl of death, in the slum of this world

You kiss and it means nothing: you speak and it means less —

I sorrow, for that you hide

The open wound, bleeding everywhere upon your face.

Have you read wounds? We speak and you read your wound

In the mirror of my words. Never again,

Among you — beer-drunk follies

Of the collapsed

Upon the pyre of the dead

V. Les petites victimes sans nom

I sorrow for you lost women; these are my Mary-tears

That form a river, on which the condemned built a boat;

An ark, to hold your troubles, your worries

In this flitting life.

Beneath, the dead groan, in this predictable fervor

Which beats out in a series of dramas into a stillness, a silence

Before the yawning tomb.

You give and take, in equal measures,

Dance in your blood, before the weight is too great;

The furies of your parties

Propped up against little white powders

And whispers that amount to nothing.

Girl, these are ancient sorrows. You busy yourself

As the weights crush you. Gravity, sin

Bear down upon you. Again and again,

Large stones assert their dominance.

Your flesh, pinned

And from this situation

You speak to me.

I cannot be dead, this slow world

In which you creep, with your lovers

In the sadness of your words

To the marrow of the bone of your speech:

This, I hear: your horrors

VI. The Murdered

Girl, your eyes are raped: starved of passions

Beat, or abused out of you

Like an animal, your wound cowers in your body

Your neck coiled about your chest

In a protective position.

Your soft body

Subjected to the whips of violence

You, the penitence-object for mens’ souls.

Little girl, stuffed in the tomb of your body

Far before you were ever born.

Given but moments, before the life was beaten out of you.

I saw you on the London streets, a pauper,

Pushing a carriage in the rain, attempting to hush your starved child

Embarrassed, humiliated

By the violence this world has wrought.

I see now, your redemption.

I saw you, drunk, raving, homeless

Stripped of your clothes

For the pleasures you must forget,

Pleasures never-yours.

You are the diamond that spins

In all the ripe ignorance of this world. Your youth —

Bursting at the flesh that stitches all womb together.

Your screams of pain and anger

Drowned in the laughing selfishness

Of the mesquins-condamnés,

Who drink your blood

As a token

Of their boredom

And titillation

They throw out your dead body, sewing in the factories,

Selling your body on the streets.

Like a husk, you are tossed to the grave.

Not even for a child,

Silenced, spirit

Who wails in the wind

Like a banshee:

You who are the world’s true name

VII. Girl

Girl, the men and women laugh at you

As they kick dirt on your dying body. We will not read about you or see you

As you exist, for them, to be used and discarded.

Not even a memory,

Not even acknowledged as alive, or existing as a being.

Slave-girl, master who held you down, whipped you and you bled

For the child.

Slave-girl, whose bones were shut in, screaming

As you were broken, bleeding

By these violent hungers. I looked on, I could not speak;

In the horrors, I wept; swung my hands

At the march of this world-madness

Felled, like timber. Bedded, like a slave:

You scream to no ears, silent ears.

Everyone looks away as you are gutted, destroyed

Thrown to the life of the streets.

You take to drugs. You take to drink. You take to men

Who drain the light from your eyes. And in all of this, in all of your shame

You learn to believe that you deserve this.

Ripping your limbs like branches of trees.

Filling your body with poisons. Stripping your gold

For vapid, broken, twisted desires.

This world has made you damned, my sacre-coeur

The blood of my heart, black oil

In your tongue and lungs

Makes you gasp to breathe

Girl, all of my beloved is within you. And this is the story of time:

You were murdered to this world. They laugh with scorn,

Picking at the pockets of your bones

As my tears of love

Fall over your corpse

VIII. Les Filles damnées

Girl, I tried to save you, damned girl

I tried to stop this sting, that went into your body. Now you are silent and cold,

Young, little girl

Before the grave, already — too soon. I heard you in the drowning

I heard you in the smoke of overdoses; I heard you in the names

Erased from gravestones

We stumble over you with the awkward ignorance

Who know we have commissioned thousands of suicides

By privileging pleasures

As you died screaming. The world's words are words of forced ignorance;

The disgraced silence of distraction

To drown out your agony.

And yet, you sit before me

Waving a sign with your child, truly damned. No one will save you,

This knife that carves you open and forces you into the sacrificial position

To be defiled by the murderers

Who have no name for you to forget. I know your name,

Soul girl. I know your name

That screams in the nooses of the trees.

That writhes in the blood of this earth.

I know your name — that calls in my ear:

My deepest love

Is within the still breathing spirit

Of the sacrificed girls, today, and their agonies

Spill from my mouth

Like a vessel

For the words of the black poison

You have injected:

In gas chambers, in slave-rapes, in prison-camps, in money wars

And denied

With the gladness of one

Stuffed with unspeakable violences

Which I speak.

IX. La vengeance de la femme

At last, this world is your crucifixion:

Grave drowned, upon ships, stuffed in quarters

Where you bled, excreted, died

In the silence of hulls

To row you to prisons

The little woman taken

By the men who burn forests

To use her body.

The rest of her life, she screams

To a world without ears

I hear her revenge in the wind, in the rain

In her tears of the abused animals:

The dog, the whale, the ocean.

I hear her fury

In the little silences which imprison girls forever

In the locked rooms of their minds

Drowned in the knives

Which slowly draw

The blood of unlived life

I hear her collapse

Upon this world of falsities

To reveal the agonies of one whose body, whose mind

Have been deranged

To a madness

Which rises like a wave

Over the joys

Of the murderers

Her anger is in the tears of the doe

In the blood of the bison

The eye which sees through to the worlds

Which cannot be ignored by the prideful, the lustful, the greed-hungered

For long.

She is in a league with Night, with Death; foremost

With the body and blood of the Nature

Which owns the dying pride

Of the delused, violating

Marche des péchés

X. For Mary Shelley

You who became woman, human, genius

In relational loving; education

In the house of a great man and a great woman —

You are the lodestar of the coming fate

Of womankind. For you to rise

Is proof that they may rise

In kind

The Black Song of the Bottom of Hells

Raped woman, in your abyss

I found the golden arms of heaven

Your sallow, broken body

Pressed against mine

In the dying act of your child.

Come near, the tears

Of the woman cornered by murders

Violences she may never speak.

It is this darkness, of your mind

Which haunts the crags, the cliffs, the nights

And the animals hear

Your pain, your fear, your sadness

I live in your dying body, as you live in mine

And the whale bone

Is the song

Of my music

This is your black song

Sung with the eyes

Of one who sees

With the unrelenting passion

Of the avenged

The one who loves you

The one whose tears of blood

Seed this earth

For your new tomorrows

For your birth

From these ashes

Of hell