J’accuse / Daphne

J’accuse / Daphne

Raped by time, 
Phantom without eyes, nose, face.
Grinding the wheel of the mill of corn;
Centuries of maize.

Willing blood and seminal fluid to cold stone:
This mask of destitution, unblinking,
Churning beyond apparent parts:
This world’s oblivion.

Dried, the well. Dried, the air and tongue.
Putrefaction and ash.
Flesh thirsting for the wide breath of the lung,
A valve closed:
Constantine; crumbling.

Alas, phantom:
Creep through Octobers of black death;
Months with no name but proximity of suns.
Reach out — immortal twin;
Embolden this flesh.

Where have they tossed the guillotines;
The sharpened stones?
The whittled bone which marked cold asteroids
Tumbling, unmarked into oblivion.

Braid your hair, Daphne,
Braid your hair, Gazelle,
This earth, mulled over for a little while in the hand
Of dumb inquisition; tossed into a junkyard
Dribbling whisps of blood.

This little hour, give me fish and steel.
Give me blood and bread. Hovering, you apparition,
Steal away from the body and enchant death.
Unbeholden to that which chains us here.
Pure light, chaos.

Does the blood feed the corn? Is this ray of sun
A morphine dose? Alleate the flesh.
Blubbering, withering:
Shot through with red arrows.

Eros, bastard:
Son of the shipyards which birthed heroes from the dead Gorgon’s head.
Pure muscle buffers the waves; pure sinew alleviated the electric pulse.
Child of the deep, nonsense song.

Cries: will you redeem us?
Lighten this flesh, this burden, this load
Distributed by a thousand workers’ songs;
A thousand spades in a chain gang of angels.
Broken, sooted.

Granted the fat life of a priest;
Sunken, blackened eyes.
Give me the doll, Amazonian, buried
Lost empire.
Give me the ancient dream, contained
Mad

Preempt death by granting it providence over this world.
The hidden, shadowed god.
The fire dragon. This last keep, buried beneath the city:
The last, marrowed record of our blood.
Muddied, rat infested.

Time is no scribe, no sacrament.
Unsentimental. This is our task of time?
To keep juvenile songs.
To sing them with the irony of distance.
A baton of eternal corrosion.

Alas, the child — it is you, the phantom,
Reapparent, nuvile:
A blankened slate of intuition
Covered in the blood of aeons of defaced noses;
Silent iconomachy.

Give me Babylon, give me Osiris.
Give me suitable parchment, scribe:
To rend the jest like juice from a peach;
Feed it to the last prayer of a dying pantheon of whispering gods
Amidst an erupting volcano.

Without urgency, like a bursting grape; a suspension which at once shatters and reveals
The sacred heat which runs through ocean’s glass.
All that which is taken is revealed
With fundamental smoke of dreams;
Visions of fulmigation and heat.

Breathe, Daphne,
Breathe the sacred fire of the ophthalmos; 
Reveal the vision from the poisoned air of the earth’s pit.
Breathe the serpent of death and reveal in your gasping:
The dream that pierces night and shows the hidden face of the demon.

Oh how we have carved in blood, devils with torches and rope.
How the scripture corrodes and fades:
Oh how we have sighed, discontented, shortness of breath.
Grasping at shovels and stones, dirt and dust.

Dig for the warmest flesh, closest to the sun:
Maiden — you who is destined to die.
Take this blade now, or else later
When you are contented,
With a stomach full of stones.

Take your wagon into a field; seek for strawberries and milk.
Take your wagon into a field; witness the flagellants in masks of comedy.
We are in the bowels of the old theatre;
The admission is but a few drops of blood from your rosy wrist.

Nubile, this innocence.
Pretentious, this breast.
Within it, the stumbling breath of a silent death:
A death flitting, shuttering through eternity.
Glimpse brief pictures of the winding thread
That links the two of us in destiny. You, life:
Myself the cold, coming, creeping of death.

Milk — sour and rotted.
Wine — stained and empty. Give yourself to the gutter;
Beg like a slave woman at the whining gear of a great machine.

Might we move fast enough at the wheel
To conjure oblivion in a casing of metal or steel,
A death machine to vacate the bowels of our slow moving treatise,
A vaccination of the sun’s seductive contempt.
We gyrate here, Rwandan, a hole in the earth, a cornucopia before man.

We gyrate here, in limestone caves
Unseeing, hundreds of thousands of years of prayer and vacuous urgency
Grinding the same gutter of the flesh,
Paved with pigment and visions of the sensual gauge
Tumbling into formations of mind.

Will you take to me, and I to you
And die to this endless cursing rope of energy?
Our hands clasped around the fuse that will die us:
Both give us life and take?
You struggle in a cot, a straw bed
To birth what?
A beast of mixed blood?

Give it your eyes: consterning, knowing
Of the nothingness that howls in the winter of our souls.
Give it the swirl of an age which collapses into eternal chaos:
Inertia and ennui cut with fear and slit throats.
We fuck oblivion with the coarse hair of wood that begets mute fires,
Flickering into disparate, lost stones
Tossed from the dying orbit of a hungry, effeminate sun.

Recede forever, or else come toward me;
Commit the meaningless violence which binds us in creation.
I take the sun in my hands; it turns to gravel
In the pit of the quarry
Which birthed this electric speech
Writhing letter in mud
Struck by sun;
Emboldened, twisted into unknowing face.