Artimaeus / The Young / The Gales

 _Artimaeus_

What is this mad, sudden hand of power
Which flew over Alexandria and London; 
Ground the River Nile and its blood into dust?
Our heathers, extinguished by the cool scent of death;
The haunting lingering of desert sands,
Hushed over broken symbols.

Cower close, these ill torments
Which strike men deaf, dumb, and blind.
Cower, these cacophonies which shine
To mumbling silence.
At last, these bloods course;
These hushing murmurs are like waters:
Dull; absinthe of mind.

Give me this ill — commanding thunder;
From stars fallen into hearts of men.
Give me this ill and brandish it,
Blood around the electric cage of the heart.
Let stars turn and turn away, admonished.
Let them turn away from us and consume oblivion:
Bloodied liver mouthed
Ferocities.

I did not know the dead until they sung into my ear,
Screaming, joyous noise.
I did not know them until they stung my side with poison arrows; hung me there upon the tree of life.
To languish in falling suns and incontemplate silences.

The living beg for absolution;
The dead are absolved. Resting without clothes.
I did not know them from the screams in stone,
Or the resting west wind that billows the hanging moss.
I did not know them from the tyrants, nor their coming graves.
But only from the blood: which there was transformed into thunder and stolen rain.

There was no judiciary, nor last court.
I saw men hung mad, from bridges or else dreamed away into cold opium death.
What use are seers when future is yawning death — gaping, with canine teeth?
I stepped inside the mouth; sewed it shut,
To forever dream in darknesses without stars.
Wedded to the shining pits of black.

It is this tar from which we draw the earth’s blood;
Loll it about our tongues — sip it into the smelting ore which breaks the body and writhes flesh.
This operation, against which our sexes press and finally combust —
I heed not the empty days which break in somnambulist’s trance,
Nor the willows steadily dropping flowers.

In the midst of the mad changing,
I was seed, bud, Minotaur; at last, devoured breast. Chewed with the cud of the dew;
The chattel split by the aching bellows of the coming dead.
Waves and waves upon them,
Thrashed like sacrificial waves of blood upon stone.
That great sacrificer:
Not upon us like masque, but within.

This is what we have stole:
Pure broad thunder, condemned to rattle alone in bones until it breaks the flesh;
Crests in sweat or else in blood or twisted cry from mouth.
Simmering heat from suns, passed through man, bird; calf’s blood.
That this meat holds the ungraspable;
Starlight slipped from hand into the coming dawn — 
We are the bridge that breaks oblivion;
That we are come down from impossible tides
To split the gape of infinity and the commonplace.

I stole away for the great trance:
To sip the blood of flowers and rejoice in a reprieve from the silent agony
Which finds no trace in the letters of man
Nor the cities which stand, quaking in centuries of confusion:
Split, mutilated statues; faces defiled
By ages of invading bands.
What is this? To shape time with desire;
To burn away the cask which envelops the limitations of man — his foresight; his terror:
To break us over the fist of the lurching, glacial sex which throws off lone bright sparks?

All of this I consume, with equal terror:
Abreast, wrested to the heel of time,
And about it like a serpent in rags.
Our world’s trance — I know this, for I stepped upon it, to a droning lyre
And broke the infernal spell of nature’s grove.
It is that devil, or else it is transgression:
Knowledge of mankind’s slumber. It is a dream that withers the flesh;
Bites away at the terror until at last it is left with a silent, toothless core — 
Consumed unto mellow, resting seed.

As cells must find mates; break apart and scatter,
So too is this lowly doom — stitched together with a face
And beckoned toward the morays with only intimations of a name.
I give place: Eudaimonia, or the living judgement.
Goodness and gladness is in the sun alone,
Or else Absalom: the mute moors of death. 

We are smeared with peat and tar,
Then like fools must denounce that from which we are made;
Smoke the blood of the dead —
Endlessly revive the coffin of this universe:
A door slammed shut upon infinity.
Know this wide silence, almost smirking.
Refute.
Unbreathable air; tarnished, taunted, injurious eye of the maiden in white.
Stained by youth and lusted by time.
We crawl back to the gates of death; foreward into the blink of an eye:
How life was born from shards of fyre;
Stitched back into moaning refuse,
Scarred bone.

Come, call these accounts. Become born like the rest of us,
Wide eyed and bored; consumed by fancies,
Drawn by desire to the wick of the flame —
And at last to know the tome of it.
Books, all writ in this same blood,
Blood beneath blood; at last bloodless.
Grasping, drained, white hand upon the spinning dial which consumes wicker —
Haunting, burning away hours.
Stealing backwards toward the lost heat,
Burning forward toward fated hungers.
We are spun like tigers from yarn,
Haunting the moonlight,
Caving into the days:
Eyes flickering breathless and dying before the starlight tips from earthen grounds to shade and shadow
Consumed by terrors and worn from the tether of the body.

For these are dreams, as are nightmares:
The living day; what stands before us and death,
The ornate, carved, wooden doorway of our fancies and pernitions:
Our perjury, deceit, and self injury:
Our victory, our trial, our time
Wound into philosophy.
Maidens and sprites, satyrs and demons,
Goblins and souls who tear at our flesh;
The blood in the meat which we breathe,
The sex of the flowers which bud and litter our lungs.
We are stolen by the great gaping cave of the aeternum.
Not even flesh or men but dispersion.
This is our fate: to be broken open absolutely;
Never mended, but expanded into the destiny of all things — 
The oblivion of an exploded arrow, into all corners.

This is of earthly desire: like target to a point;
Reached and widened in orgasmic fervor.
A hole which widens, opens, expels:
Chemical expectorant; violet hue,
Sewed shut to temporal silence.
Cast back down to earth — to wander among the beggars, vagabonds, tired deaths of empire.
This world sleeps unto consummation:
A fervor which breaks open the wound of time; smells of the primal fear of blood;
The felt intimacy of death.
Then it is forgotten; returned to everyday’s tirade.
Nobody’s balladeer; nobody’s song.

It is the useless, the worthless, the disjected which consumes us.
The petty squall, the unending storm of no consequence.
Turned by the mind; crueled by its ills. Poisoned by the fear of its uncontrolled will.
Death is the stone that draws us,
Our attractor.
Death is the stone and gall from which all of our fallenness is flung.
The wounded are of chess: a game to which there is no victory, but the clear sight of day with which to play.

We sit down with the young love, her idyllic skirt: black as the moon, white as the moon —
Her stars knowing nothing of fallenness.
I drank the poison from the oldest cup of life:
Sight which betrays, sucks from day;
Consumes, mortal blood.
To drink the agonies of every step made o’er and once more from the dawning bed of babes, lit by fires of adolescence,
Sparked by chemicals: potions of consequence and direction.

Who controls this divine, infernal machine?
Which draws us like necessary magnitudes, like spells; tortured obsessions.
Inscribed upon a goblet — lifeless, yet moves?
A fresco of unfolding almost predictable, yet wild, an orgiastic chaos: an organ of arrows in a dawn war perennially on the verge of dusk, tipping toward obliteration?

We, yet millions of stars upon a ground,
Waging, like skeletons or panthers upon a plain of fading lilies and dying lights. Consuming, cropping up and forth,
Exploding from vaginal canal, river, or fulmigation:
Frictive birth from star or cell, fission, fusion, and formation.
This dormant, Mayan sacrifice.
This calm, leopardine wilderness:
Which guts once it spots and consumes,
Naught for drops of blood left upon the dirt.

I remember the guillotine, the Michelangeline fresco, the diamondine wilderness, untarnished by the impression of man’s reflective mind.
Here was the birth of philosophy; here was the scrawl of pigmentation’s blood upon cave stone. I saw the image of the buffalo; as in the ice caked bone of the mammoth beast. I saw we were changed by fire, even as it consumed us.
I saw us haunted by stars and their willingness:
Fated to change within us and the necessary doom of their myth.
That they turned above us;
That Saturn exerted the final bound of man’s vision into oblivion.
Come metal, come birds of fire, come the black glass:
Through which we gazed and produced ever deeper visions.
What spell, what trance will alleviate this curse of flesh?
This wound of time, quickening to the gape which will scatter and wipe the last breath from the cooling hand?

Thus, this fist. Aye, the nature of war.
The smell of blood, the red lust. All things must come together to be made. Seed within stomach; guttural cry; the churning of formations and birth.
We are spilled from the perineum of time:
Guttered, abyssal, Abraxian.
Kept code. Time — we must wind up it like a great ladder;
Climb where there is only death above us;
Energy quakes into pure oxygenation,
And at last the creaking wind of the door to oblivion opening before us.

What is left is the glyph upon the door,
Slow etched wind upon the stone which takes the obsidian blue; the map of the dial which turns above us, before us;
Within us.
What is left is the caving temple of Diana and Osiris;
Athene, Artemis.

Gone are the toppled, mad few. Men do not scale these heights. Their symbols only survive. We, who are born from dawn heat;
Leave only our etchings, the intimations of the infinite,
Upon the stone which cannot catch fyre:
Yet only drift —
Equal, among equal oblivions.

 _The Young_

Struck, as Nature's youth is the flower:
As the high lights burn from above —
But a fixed star penetrates the flesh
From terrains of pyre's burning.

Cast — this fever without knowing
That burns wildly and without mark.
A writhing — fertile embryo.

As sun kiss'd skin,
Dew and dew alone —
To burn and burn alone, anguish and anguish alone:
Turned loose by summer's nights,
Impenetrable.

It is at last this dance, that is no dance;
Yet stronger than all arts
That takes hold and consumes.

This is the whole world: sexed at a peak of dawn
That turns to lashing midday's heat —
The mating bed our pyre which consumes even death.

From image, maiden takes fascination
And consumes world. Long, black corridor of hair,
Torn and swallowed by the distance of a black hole
Which balances consummation and eternal hunger.
Even after death we lust,
Like ghosts of stars — for the union which supersedes
Divinity and fallen form.

And yet: bring me the young lover; like blood,
We are drawn and pound to the crevasse of eternity.
Incised and incensed blood — drawn out of its root and stem
Toward expression upon the eyes and tongue.
A leopard from out of darkness:
Is the myth of love.

Born and born again,
Dawned, and dawn again —
Youth must peak and burst beyond speech.
Crumple and die,
Lie these clothes —
Mere garments of infinitude.

This is the song of the young, then sparkling,
Green rivers of sound. The crystalline flicker of sun,
Made form in the cresting of clear waters —
Shapeshifting in the light.
On we must pass, on forever into the cresting
Of young stars mated with death
And thus deathless.

Brief cloud, swallowed in the red passions.
Temporary silence.
Gone are sounds, gone are the frictive hours:
Birth of union —
That must reside eternally in our pregnant flesh.
That must burn and burn alone:
Fire feeding upon cresting fire.

 _The Gales_ The song of the gale: first breath
Cut with the ember's knowledge of death.

Bloodbeating,
Driving light through the scar of the body.
Nerves twitch;
Rattle awake the geodic skull.

Legs of a headless falcon
Wild, break against the film
Of the black womb.

Gripping air;
Splitting the night
With tongues of bone.