Jaguar Tree / Bardo

The Jaguar Tree (Kali)

All culture dies in the mud.

All blood-smeared stone washes away.

These are the cold facts.

What voice remains is spoken into the soul like direct resuscitation to the spiritual center

Or autoerotic asphyxiation.

Life leaves the body and hangs by a tantalizing thread.

Spirit and form is a glittering sinew that catches light.

Inside, a woman frees herself from decades ago.

An eon is remembered in a kiss, or a small bit of language.

Lives are replayed like scripts, or film reels

In the moments of breach before life and death.

This camera of the soul. A brief fugue. Haunted by trance – between sleeping and waking.

Death was the narrow road wandered;

Life the aspect in which the soul was altered and changed.

Fate is a promise of birth. We are called into carving.

Love’s flint indelible memory.

Blue dye stained on the soul’s immortal cloth.

Torches deep into the pyramids.

Eye-lit recognition amongst the wastes; spear-marked elephant graves.

Tanks of druids. Our oaths have gone underground.

The earth is transformed into a war machine and still we touch.

Spiritual destinies leap over Roman columns

Burning in the panther’s eyes.

The way the light struck your face in Alexandria. Lizard-like, we crawl. Small measures of eternity, pulsating, lingering about the bone. The lingam; my face in your volcanic hair. A fire turned black stone.

In the spinning we are remade. In the central force we are pulled to and from bodies, culminating in the sexual act of ancient retrieval. This is what we are. Divers in the mist of a momentary eternity.

In this water we are gasping for air; seeking for memory. Eyes in a musket trench, eyes in a dark, Icelandic cloud.

The shadows blanket and fell the earth in a covering and removal. Flashing – we glimpse, glimmer, grope. For what is buried. For what is submerged within us. Must love be this sword to bring it all to light –

To cleanse this haggard innocence.

To bring us close to marrow

With spiritual tongues gleaming.

From life we remember the dream.

We walk with death; with arms outstretched.

Buried beneath stone is the journey of eternity; the lovers who wade through endless sheathes of bodies To be cleansed once more in unity.

The eye of your breaking, budding lily.

Colorless, red and black breaking orgasm.

The ancient scream,

The ashen centre of the mortal wound.

I cover it with my mouth.

Again and again

Souls clash in great chambers of flesh.

What is fear but the space before the forgetting of the body?

Forgetfulness… in flesh the soul adopts animal language;

Functions with animal historiographies.

Lives in shanty towns. Sharp, hooded voices. Spreading fires,

Deep in a Normandy night.

A distant lightning storm in a southern swamp;

A mask dance of wood and smeared yellow pigment –

Now transposed upon your fingertips.

Each memory a fragment retrieved from the history which shapes the face of the psyche, first mirror of the soul.

Thus we fly. I remember the old jaguar priests and the torches. We stood under the mangled African tree in the midst of the savannah and copulated. No summer, nor winter, nor dawn. The mummified tombs and the rituals of death. Our twisted, removed sorrow. A tempest rain. The crocodile gods painted with my fingertips upon your cold, abandoned body.

The psyche is condensed into the quarters and corners of this body and room. The dark womb of the stars. We are their ancient story.

Blood and gene is a tool of the universe. The soul wears but a cloak as it steps into this world. Beyond death, beyond impermanence. The ancient memory that slips like a thread between bodies.

Remember me through the eyes.

Lay with me, here…

In this mud.

Smeared with the red-black earth of our blood.

Penetrate into the region of the first unity.

The ovum of the sacrificial, leering plateau.

The flesh that is judged and scattered into separate uterine bodies.

The discourse of dust, carbon, and light

Shuffled quietly into form by planetary surgeries.

The subtle electricity of a mind on the precipice, being opened;

A cool, sarcophagus wind.

Blown open, the body:

This ancient drama of meat and lightning.

The clashing elements of phallus and womb,

The two bulls among the festering red wound of the stars.

Gather here among the twisted vines;

The desert rat. The world’s gape holds her bones.

The caverns painted where there is no light;

Where man was first made machine by hypnotic nature.

First hypocrisy — flesh,

Then blinding light.

Then opacities;

Mute forgetfulness. 

Why the world was barred,

Energies straddle their cage, rattling the bars.

This is war, the unsettled temperament of weathers

Which pass like water upon rock.

Do not linger here, deathly narrows.

This violent strait of blue-black waters,

With their impenetrable depths.

Each year on earth was a sacred murder,

Where meat and blood were remade amidst tallowing cries.

Flesh that we do not need clings to earth

While mind festers in temporum.

The black scream at fire is a brief memory.

Let psyche emerge first; soul to move the animate form. We must hold no burning garments; wander along the black way like runners in a primeval storm.

The ancient sign is illuminated by thunder;

We are drawn with resonance toward impenetrable dictions;

Incomparable epiphanies.

We must be thrown from the dungeon;

Set before the great powers in their cacophonies.

Initiated into the face of the leopard

Behind the mask of fearful hypocrisy

BLOOD STONE

I.

I am on the pilgrimage from hell,

You will know me as the wanderer in black

Who walks on stilts

Through the war of this world.

From my perch I perceive

Men tearing at the flesh of their souls.

One unto the next,

Falls to the blade of the wolf.

I am carried through the mists

Through the vague memory of a war that I cannot remember.

My soul is scarred by an ancient regret.

I engrave this unknown pain upon Mexican stone.

Heed me, grief:

Carry me in flight from this dimension.

I have read in the old stone, what you have left me.

Worlds, carved with blood and bone.

II.

I place my hand to the stone, and feel you — hell,

The skulls of your daughters you have feasted,

The braids of your ancient hair.

I press my hands through the stone,

To feel your narrow vice.

You who have dilated,

Like pincers around the flesh.

Where the marrow and the mountain are equal

I heave breath,

Perpetually born again

From the ocean of death.

This cold dimension… this tomb.

The heat is melted from shocking faces.

Today, your grassy fleece is made

From the blood and bone below.

III.

Your grip on the world is insufferable but pure.

You are in the secret mind, hidden behind the mask.

Let me peel your face back out into the open, into the light.

O’ ancient prince,

O’ ancient one.

You to whom the world is the only price. All is demanded for you.

We have thrown the trinkets of kings, our cotton dolls,

Our daughters down into the well.

Let you take them, breathe them, O’ harvest.

You, like a nightingale upon the womb,

Impossible, hungry, fanged tooth.

You let them become stone, laid upon the cold pyre of this earth.

Mine eyes pierce yours,

Share your fury.

Like you are born through me.

IV.

Let this earth bear us away, like a wooden body.

We have built the stone pyres to feast on our dead.

The night will take them; the stars will bleed them.

And yet, this must be enough.

Is it true that I am called again, through the stars

To take this death march into your bosom?

Where the light does not bleed,

Where sight is blocked by pitch?

I lash with my empty teeth. Worlds crumbling into broken marble.

False gods tumbling from their deceitful heights.

Take me unto this fire,

Rend me from flesh until only soul remains.

V.

Eyes are what is revealed of the escape.

We take our last belongings upon our backs and evade the coming smoke.

Fire is hunger for that which is beyond speech.

You are the growl that emerges from the animal that is unmade

In the black pits of tar;

That hungers in the belly of the unspeakable.

Extend your hand toward me, mask of black smoke.

We tumble together in the infernal abyss.

Your eyes are my own;

I have pierced your gaze without mercy

To spare death of its lowly demise.

I am this elevation of life. To take the star into hand

And clench.

To squeeze the juice and blood

Of a writhing aeon

Upon my lips.

Anti-inspirational, is man’s condition doomed to be this?

Languishing, hidden, among blue, opiated clouds?

Are we to amount to nothing but dreams… entranced by images of the mind.

The culture is dull… a baroque thumping against age old mosses.

Our projections but a corrupt door

To a seeping, indelicate boredom.

Fearful language is spoken by the animal condemned to death;

Time gallows the meek and corruptible.

This contemporary philosophy is one of the lemming:

Educated only by the failures of those before him.

Instead, let us consecrate this brief island, and all of its delusions.

Populated by grandeur in a desolate party – a flotilla of champagne and private miseries.

Let them spill out of the faces of those wasted by gold coin;

Equally by the absinthe of an unmade dream.

Stone watches man build the pyramid of life. Up to the gods;

Collapsing again like a furious wave, driven and compelled by the currents of nature.

From these icy cliffs I ordain newborns, beggars, cowards alike.

This ragged beard of grass and moss — this bard of the earth,

Is the cradle of heathens and filmmakers as well.

How we strive for the vision. Out from the bleak grotesqueries of life.

The tea kettle, the dining set. The miserly arranged cabinets; the mirrors which we opaquely avoid.

Gone are our Victorian days; slumbering in a gowny death. Unconvinced of the costumes which mask agonies.

I, too, saw this vision; made the blood furious; flooded the muscles with cellular waste.

I strove through the mud and made a great battlecry… collapsing in the plastic junkyard of realities.

We are buried among prosthetic arms and the lightbulb. The syphilitic guardian of hell.

The prostitute Medusa.

Proserpine: this at last is your mystery. I dug like a mole into the dirt and found only more dirt.

A preoccupation, a hobby – this divining?

Like a mule, I was a plowshare to your earth;

Like another convicted priest; a felon tied to shovel. My mouth a beak for worms that I could not eat;

Knowing only that I ingested them with a faint chemical smoke.

Was I fooled? The fool… myself, am I?

Gladness, great gladness – to rest in a weary and tired heap before the great mess of the world.

This cinema of elephants and names.

Your captain’s share, your lords and ladies, your kings –

Guillotines and gallows are your kind. Chairs in the streets; great fires and musket rounds are your noise.

We are at a tug o’ war over nothing. Child, childishness…

O’ glad fools. This is the spaghetti of life, or else the ragdoll, or the tin flute.

Bandied about to a great song of sex, desire, and at last – the blissful black sleep of void.

When meaning is made nihil, must we resort to this notion: that your life, that your striving was but one great game –

That we were but players, caught up upon your stage?

This is the excuse given after death. And yet life feels so real, flushing…

As we flail and spark: fusion and reaction within us. The eyes glaze over naked curves;

Startle in primal fear.

This is no dance; the tune is no song, but a mad cacophony. We are lawless; far less than jazz or symphony,

But a sound among sounds breaking, fracturing into time. Signatureless. Take this void and throw upon it your mantle of filth.

Lay your arms and knees upon it; proselytize; laugh.

This timeless fury… this woe…

If there was a notion for it or a resolve, it would not be symbolized, nor made equation.

It would be shoveled like food into the mouth and digested. Made one with the body.

I remember the flagpole; the carousel of the carnival. The mad joy of the forest.

The languishing, howling blue moon. The nakedness of dying trees, just before their resurrection.

There is something cool about the way that the mind is revealed, symbolic of electricity.

And there is something unforgettable about the animal nature that it attempts to leave behind.

Each of us attempts and quakes at the fair shake and measure of life.

To squeeze some juice from the images that shape our eyes.

To draw some vial of poison from the snake’s eyelet tongue.

This window is narrow.

Crickets chirp and factory windows chime against the blows of great machines.

The aura of centuries tumbles down into the thin slip of mines. May we venture perilously down;

Dream of a hallucinatory blackness.

Some salve to awake us from this madness.

Deliver me from this sane humanity. The regular evils which stroke at the hairy skin of an animal eclipsed by its own powers; the powers of the mind.

I heed not the tortures of the language of mankind, nor their delusions.

Deliver me from this evil… that you were possessed in. Made unpure and corrupt.

Your hands clasped around the gold slip of the dress of madness.

We take treasures from this world of fell ills to compensate for our fallenness.

The private, hidden misery. I intend to pronounce it; thus make the world solvent.

This is my sole mission and creed;

To provide a true dissolute to humanity and the notion of the private self.

I have seen the claw marks in the dirt on the way to the dungeon of the grave;

I have understood the true cowardice of humanity and mankind.

Each fears only his own death;

As such, none lives a true life.

Reason… word… symbol… justification –

It cannot be trusted. Only the dead may speak in this world; only the dead may know of truth and authenticity.

Thus, the dead are the philosopher kings who rule solely among the feed lot.

The mass is led to slaughter and daily acts of criminality performed in the name of Christ or the prophets.

Let us not linger in bombed cement. You know as well as I what this has wrought and will bring.

Unless we shed our chains of death. We must abandon the meagre value of the flesh and descend into multitudes of passion. Let this body perish and thus rise in perfect vision. We here are no more than dirt; no less than Godly fire.

Know this… that sight must arise from leaden form. Heat arises of its own accord from within the infernal engine of the body. It is a sigil of the star; less than sigil, a pure incarnate form.

We must draw ourselves into the nature of the body and purify all sight. The world itself is in flames; the body is burning a phosphorescent scream. We must purgate and purify. The world is expunged from sight… from within.

Cowardly artifice…

Denounce it all as madness; thus go as eternal, formless energy. All that is outside is delused movement. We must move from within; in and at the seat of the soul. Leave the rest to charred eternity.

The Fourteen Degrees of Venus

All of this is said with the understanding that the inherent corruption, as stated by Baudelaire, is only a temporary fallenness of Nature. We have been purged in darkness and lashed. Have you seen the beast that springs from faces? Even common places, like the cafe. Opium dens, where the lurid rears its head.

We are all beasts stalking one empty, primordial cage. Grasping at electric bars.

Now there is something real and legitimate to be said… and this has been passed up through time, much like the Black Plague or the days of London when shit littered the streets. All commonplace faith is like a car deviating on a roadway, driven by a wine-addled drunk. We are in time briefly, with all of the chaos of one who admonishes science. That we do not know, we are haunted by the unknown. The body is the great driver.

I do not want to write about a woman, or a roadway, or a siren – as much as I want to write about the truth. The pure, animal truth of humanity. And we can only see this truth through attention to the contorted mask. The thin lie is within the face of an animal that grips to life and sunlight like the grave itself is an unspeakable perdition. To fear death is the last bound of the human life; as a monk meditates upon the funeral pyre, we must breathe in the smoke and stench of death, the lung of meat; to heave to and fro, incensed by the pyre to speak. These are the fourteen degrees of Venus.

And for myself to explain to you these degrees, there are many different ways – aesthetics, poetry, science. For myself… to give you a vision of this grand sign, which shines like the light of the sun and crafts beauty and destruction and strikes fear in the heart of the lover – you must be strong. You must be like Hercules in the face of a Nature that kills. For it is in her nature to kill.

Do you see? That death is merely a consequence of the powers within light, to which all beings are drawn toward like moths to a flame. The nutrition of a cattle. What do we mourn, but the memory, the distant dream? Flitting chemicals, brought together in a kiss, laid down in a bed of fertility whose grounds are first and foremost the death of the former; the rolling out of the last text, gobbled up by the young. This text being the genome, of course.

And I do not mean for this to be esoteric. It should be clear and defined. And as such I will state to you that Nature is a sculptor, a painter, and a mistress of heat all at once. And all are convinced of this grand play. From the prostitute to the beggar to the burlesque, we are animals to heat and bleeding of it – just as we stand before the great radiant ball of flames and worship back towards our first birth. First before man. So did the Incans, the Mayans, the great civilizations of old. And this is what is meant by a battle of light and dark. It is a battle of the powers of the emergent mind against the primordial darkness, the lapsing back into the infinite death of the animal. We have waded… so far across a black path. Each animal now is broken from the tribe by a modern world of accelerated chaos; each is thrown back into and upon oneself. The hunter. The sole exile; the one who must survive. All the while, the nerves and the mind are aglow, transmitting messages; writing scripture upon the walls of the cave.

To be between light and dark is a simple matter of heat and fertility. And this is what one must know of Venus. For we must be close to God and enriched by life; thus ourselves given entirely to the body. Man’s hubris, with utter simplicity… is that he thinks he is anything but a reaction. Anything but a heat and light and chemical profusion – out from which bursts all true genius and innovation of humanity. There is nothing, truly, but the code of nature; from within the code, emerges capacities, capabilities. Neural firings and chemical reactions. And from this, we are gifted such Michelangeline capacities. This is the angel within all mankind.

To know this simple fact is to reorient us entirely. And thus we must choose to stow away our fire or give it to the world. It is an imminence of fire. An imminence of the force of life, which crests and bows like the riddle of the Sphinx to Oedipus. We are cradled from within this brief period of possibility; as such must speak from it.

And understand… this, truly, is radical freedom. There is naught else that exists but in this electric God, this God of fire and light. And from it springs the wellspring of all forms. If we were to put a map of radiance, chemical and electrical and elemental – upon the world like a tapestry, like a sight of eyes which could penetrate into the substratum of existence, it would be made clear. To show you… to peer into the cavern of the real; from the sparks, chips, and shards from cooled radiance, to sculpt mankind. To slowly weave the genetic vine; the neural root and network of electric communication.

This is what we see, sense and feel. And it is what is projected into each great art, each great tapestry of mankind. From the caves to the papyrus to the modern graffiti. It is one great, big reaction – spiralling out through time; documented in the scribe of the nervous system of the human body. It is a reaction of all that has come to be amidst all that which is. The great, long scroll and tapestry of the human body set to meet the grand state of the time. Such words fail… as it requires a total compendium of all of history to elucidate. So language as such must become lazy; admit failure to the true practical openness of the thing.

This is our encounter with the world.

We are met with the rock-face that is older than human speech. The tree that is stoic beyond the passage of civilizations. The ground in which is buried the Roman centurion and the plesiosaur. It is a compendium of remixed life. To sip the charred oil and bones of the lizard in the modern inferno. An industrial vat of steel and metal. To build the bones of glass buildings, themselves modern pyramids – aching towards the sun.

This is what we have done. We are born from sacrifice and blood as spillage that is for the gods to sip. We are spit of the gods. We look and work back towards the sun. Build rocket ships, temples, flying machines. All of man’s genome aches toward the eternal. But we are infernal things – built of fire – ourselves like a star with shorter wavelength. We amble around the principle of our life in slow gesticulations, circling the primordial unity; live, die, and grow weary under the lullaby of Earth’s gravitational pull and force. We ourselves are like the falcon or the vulture of the Sun, lingering upon the Earth to sip up the great scrappings of the lion. For this life and world are too big too kill; death too great to contemplate.

In this… truly, we are a vision. Man’s life is all projected outwardly from this cinescope of the creeping veins of the synapse. The world is sculpted from the possible vision of his sophisticated former template. We are built upon a foundation of ancient recombinations… call this ancestry or call it the deep well of time – into which we peer and know and form and see only nothing. The bare fragments of brief stories of life passed fervently hand to hand… without knowing why, knowing only the animal call toward the passage itself.

In this, you cannot call mankind knowing, only dreaming. This is perhaps the greatest degree of Venus – the dream. That we wander entirely informed by the patterns which were formed in an ancient substrate to make sense of forces far greater and with a vastness that marks mankind an inkblot in a Saharan scroll of sand. We wander… making temples of permanence and seeking this great liberation from death. A liberation which will unite us with unity itself, as a principle, long before we must submit to it biochemically. Life is a brief fluid which is alive and sees visions in the sand. Rippling in the water. Contemplating the creeping bacterial movement.

And this is what we call life. Sight and reflection. Capacity to perceive. Movement in relation to perception. Like a dandelion leans with her full body towards the sun. This is the dream, friends… that we are all inside. Moving, as we think of our own accord, toward a sensate oblivion which will free us from the chains of death and dying and the experience of cell organization within the body. Like a stone is slowly weathered by rushing water, we are…

And from this, the most intricate visions. That Nature emerges as a beautiful woman, a shapeshifter… entrancing forms. You entreat her; she is a rock, an ocean, a sea breeze, a great willow tree. She is always running from and in life – evasive if you can spot the current and flow of her energy. Where she whirlpools and erupts.

There is something devotional to this; to this life. We are among the great party of transcendency. Man is born to exceed man, just as life is born to exceed life and become something different. We are always already migrating from the spot in which we were, looking back to it and toward it with a mixture of agony and delight. This is the path and passage of infinity – an entire relinquishment of the seeming state of being; of life itself toward that which is to come; an admission of the present as a rushing in of the current of the future.

All life must flow, undammed. It cannot be beaten back or breached by fear, thought, idea, or otherwise. All energy must flow cleanly within the body, the mind, the heart – as blood is to water; as shit is to the colon. We must be free to move and make passage of life. And this is, in the greatest heart of Venus – what it is to relinquish the image of death.

We are where we must be – a temporary gape between eternities. And even this vision of time is itself a hallucination of chemicals, atoms, molecules; the sophisticated electrical structure which allows the eyes, ears, and mouth to function like hallucinatory gears towards perception. What applies to man, an apple, a fruit, a nectar – is something profoundly alien outside of his vocabulary. And thus these words do not grasp at truth – they are but a doorway and a veil to perceive it.

We are never who we thought we were or think we are. We are on a pilgrimage to unity through vessels which construct the beaux arts, tapestries, and frescoes which adorn our brief empires. Men come and pillage and deface our idols, making them ever more beautiful. Destruction is an art which lashes Goya, Bacon, Artaud. Our most beautiful museums are in ashes and ruins. Like Aphrodite’s temple, the stone ceilings have caved; the birds have nested; the vines have climbed the stone pillars like beacons to the sun. We must experience great death in life to know the truth underlying death. For that we are lost in oblivion is that we form the capacity to sense the latent soul within the nematode. Do you know this soul within the nematode? Have you watched the creeping syntax of the synapse move, lost in the wild under microscopic gelatin?

Have you looked hard enough for life? In the birdbath under the eclipse where time stood still? Nietzsche knew this. Eliot knew this. The sacred is visible. Man can perceive the air with the cultivation of the senses. It lingers like a mirage, hanging over the desert like a moving scripture, a painting. Van Gogh’s dashing brush against the canvas showed the trees dancing wildly with bloody heat. Cezanne showed primordial energy from within the rocks. Baking in the sun; ancient geodes turning wildly within them.

Heat shakes the world like a die and throws the bones. A blind seer, whose eyes were gutted in an Arctic war. She lives in the guts of a lamb and her rickety wood shack is torn by icy winds. Pelts line her face; her hair is stringy with the glue of ages. Bison glue.

Do you see the world as it is worn, going mad about like a victorious Achaean mob, trailing the bloody stump of Hector’s skull? Dancing in a drunk oblivion in retarded festivity? We are backwards facing front, first and foremost toward Goya’s last paintings upon the walls of the Quinta del Sordo. It is man reaching back toward the first cave, the first firelight; the first mystery modeled as myth. All of the aeons collapse in the drawing away of the curtain of heat from the grotesque and stolid grandeur of mankind’s unmoving monuments. Civilizations lapsed into quiet complacency. Stabilized by energetic bureaucracy.

Slowly emerges the mask from the caves of aeonic darkness. Hid only by pleasantries. Do you know this man – who is moved by death so fervently he brings it about? All of his world is a fear. This is what makes the world war. Just as it makes the great presence of the slow silent nature overwhelmed by an innervated fury. The inflamed, who march between birth and death with a red faced spear. Who know only gutting and the silencing of the calm river waters into an incensing battlecry.

Beneath this mask is something deeper than man. It is the fish bursting from the ape; bursting from the great darkness where the skin of the fish was pulled taut over the cellular device. It is man… that is at once a leopard and a banana; as hilarious and grotesque as the unity of a tree and a crocodile. We have moved and danced the letters about in a transmission of flesh and blood, gelatin, sperm, and sputum. Liquids which trace molecular boundaries; coat membranes and record genomic records. Small knives like events and great tracts by catastrophically profound geniuses which recode the human genome from the outside in. This is our great story and our great legacy – culture!

It is culture which achieves the impossible. It is the emergent degree of Venus. The most foundational, fundamental, and transformational. From the lazy bosom of the goddess upon her shelly rock, she carves Guernica and the Aeneids. Summon me this grand truth! The wisdom of the Vedas, spat and spun by entranced monks, rocking to and fro on the serum of the soma. The Tibetan dance of the skeletons, woven into great tapestry.

We are to make the image that frees us from this dance of firelight. It is the call of all great art – first and foremost to break the spell of all time and free humanity from the prison and chains of history towards a brand new eternity. To free all of men and mankind from death and to about face him and his whole world towards a bright, new infinite future of the recombination powers of the stellar and nuclear energy which impel him down to the very spark of vision encoded within him; turning in his synaptic mind; bursting in the color and creation of his eyes.

Each day of mankind is a painting drawn from the eyes and sensate touch; recombined and swirled in the aesthetic register by way of and through the neuron. And this is the great secret! We must groove and regroove, make and remake, mix and remix ourselves with the electricity of our very bodies. This is the very sight which changes us and through which we change. It is as Guernica emerges through the vision of the body in collision course with history. As the bombs drop over London, Camus crafts his Fall. We must find genius within us and craft the great artifact which redeems all of mankind, all of existence, and all of eternity.

It is the completion of the profusion of the powers of nature through us, down through history, time, and the transmission of the radiant architecture and radiation of the nuclear universe down through the metabolic and nervous system powers of the body as a code of translation. We too are here to translate this light – to etch symbol into stone and to compress the entire mad densities of creation down into a single word.

And these are the degrees and decrees of Venus.

Into form and out of form: things are thrown across time.

Nailed to the breach is the gull, or the den where hearths lay

Buried in winter’s cool.

Winking into and out of time is the burial of flashing light’s sign.

For today – we are mortals; eyes,

Brows wicked with sweat. We stand across time; beckon

To formless things.

The dead whisper in shadows. Isles of time dance

Beneath the clouds of furies. Spirit is thrown, back and forth – to and fro

Like waves: torn flesh from flesh.

Sullen, we pray to stone. That which is waking, claw’d

Is a hunger buoyed by blood.

These temples are reunions for light.

In canyons we wait. Furrowed brow of the earth.

Parched mouth of the waiting ground. The dense black heap,

A throat’s swallows.

Like birds upon air, we wait. Absolved,

Wake upon wings.