Agony

These black days, in shroud. I have seen the filthy hearts of men; spat upon animal flesh. The dew of the lawn of the epiphany of the end; The glittering of salt tears.

There is no going back to origins. Merely the trudging through the corrupt, Agony inducing — gazing back upon a flat surface of avarice. Impenetrable, immovable: the lust of mankind.

I walked through the desert. There were guitar hymnals, beds of bells. I attempted the lustre of revelation. In the brothels. In the lowlands. I chanted and I pled with devils; tugged at their heels like a child.

I now see the eclipse. This blood red moon. I have laid my agonies at the pulpit and stamped them in thorns. Given death sanctimony. Carved this message across its eyes In laughing contempt.

This low animal among the plains: lawless and bleak-white. This simple tribelessness Grinning with bloody meat between the lips of dawn And the expulsive hole of oblivion. Greedy star — you model of the universe. No scales defy you. Hidden in plain day.

Measureless. There is no tearing the guts from the stars, Nor is there war to wage to spring you, Hydra, from the mouth of this world. Black pits pronounce you; I see your face, hear your moans. Deep beneath the earth; writhing in the skinned belly of the infernal world.

Your blood is my dressing; the stakes are null. Flatten blood to red. Even now there is music — relentless clarity Which soothes the mind like wind billowing cloth.

This daemon is rule. I drew him out of me and wrested him to the cliffs. Water lips up and chars my face. Blue, black, spilling from the golden moon. The shifting eyes of the emperor. I took this knife and flailed as a child; As a man I gut him swiftly.

This silent accord. I felt you in the cobblestone pathway. I felt you in the glade. I felt you in the lie of prayer. I felt you in the dawn, disrupted by the plotting; the pleading. A knife in the back; a knife to the throat. Shades fell over the agora.

Where shall I now carve, in shadow? Where shall I now carve, in shade? No flesh to make my mark, No blade to sever the black air. You draw no body, yet, wretch: Your eyes are the infernal mark that springs this world.

There will be no metal; there will be no stone whence we go. Tumbling, destiny. We rose for millennia for our eyes to meet. You gave me no parlay, Only the opacity of an infant gazing into your teeth.

We are a thousand sorrows. Numbered alone, for it is useless to name. I am the spade that rose from the grave and gripped your throat, Murderer where there is no light. You have dripped filth from the trees; their branches. The leaves are stung with the poison of your black evil. The draught sickens us.

What makes us men? Awake to cruelty, In a frozen camp with shattered light: where dirges alone raise us to dig. This march where tears freeze in the snow; this march where all flesh is torn. Passions! You marble angel — stare now so solemn at me. I wept over the unmarked grave; stole the last gold mark from this world.

It is all now shadows and oblivion. I have drawn the coin into my eye; Now proclaim you inferno.

Absalom

As I gaze back through time, I perceive the feet man stands upon. An effortless breeze could end this precarious rhythm. Species blink in and out of being like stars in the sky. This churn that we do not feel, because it is writ in rhythm so deep in our bones.

That this could be the poem that frees me from man and puts me in direct communion with the stars is excuse enough to write it. That this could be the black velvet hand that touches the axis of heat And spreads it like butter and epiphany across the womb.

Must we bleed much longer, waiting for Absalom? The absolution of this ossuary of bones, clinging to feeling. Nervous bleating, Bell tolling; laval pouring Over the cask of mankind. How much longer will we whittle away our days? Sharpening soft leaf upon willow’s beak.

Pour the cool water of poesie upon me, mistress of light: Baptise my soul with the inner purity. Clarified, beatific, diamondine. I reach toward the romantic ideal like a stele in the night sky, Far away from this urbanity.

This is what it is to be cleansed, in the soft eye. At last alone, Venal, placed among the fluttering cheek of the elk, Or the pasture of wavering sunlight.

These tunnels of shaking time, Absalom, lilt me towards the stars. Their indefinite promise. Made me meek, cut me from clay and stone Imprisoned in chambers of light. How I long for their freedom in the burning, The truth of their ineffable word — Unspoken, effulgent, embodied.

How far it feels now, away from this ground. Cast me back up into the stars — Make me clean.

The Unvanquished

Pared away, with tarrying blows

My soul unmoving, Rooted in the plum breeze.

Shaking fruits from the galilee.

Sing, rider – sing forever. Collapse and dive, like gull into sea; like stag into mossy earth.

We have exhausted songs on the narrow road Where bodies cleave And shall not pass.

Night guard – raven of the unseen. Perched atop the ribs. Rippling, Take flight in thunder. Bear not words.

To walk in the land of the shades. To drift in a fitless ecstasy.