We who are the vision seekers; Will go to any length, incense of Algiers; Sit under any vat of plant speech To hear the utterance of the Logos That sips from the vine Or these wooden doorways.

We who stood in front of palms in communions Or spoke to mountains in the Alps, Bewitched, in drug-combed stupors. The word carved itself like a girl-spirit Before sleeping eyelids Retaining a trace of the blue dawn.

It is to hug the horse-snake Which breathes and commences an operation Deeper and more mysterious than blood. I saw the feet of the crow marks Upon the dungeon-coffin. Little hands Which impressed the wet stone.

The towering, golden hotel Upon the isle Whose staircase we marched up Like soldiers, armyless In laughter. The armless girl Who shouted Beneath moonbeams In Troix.

These were the visions I found Scrabbled in my notebook Of dawns past, which I tread With the efficiency of a waterbug. Decades rippled past my cheeks; I reached before the diamond of the earth To produce and find the timeless thing Which I moulded there with words.

These are our impulses: To fashion the elixir of life from the silent stone of nature. Dead? Not but whispering; With no secrets none can provide But the poet and the seer. This is the essence of our derangement; When there is at last no bull that works in our favor — And the summer matador drops the curtain on the infinite Which is like a red sun breaking Before a red moon.

This is our mirror-dance. You numb, Fixed upon your pursuit of safety from these horrors. That life’s clock ticks in your arms, that the blue and purple face makes you flit And far away. I have eaten Death, like with a spoon And from my mouth is produced The dragon-fly’s wing. This elixir of carefully observed totality. It is the same color of the sky which has exploded And scorched the gape In distances only the soul knows and may go.

Body, tethered to this ground Where the leather skin of ancient beasts crawls And slurps the juice of fat, antler-bugs. The juice I smear across my face Where I go — and I am told it makes me mad By the barrister, by the doctor, and by you Dear reader.

The mask I wear is bug-priest, or leopard-priest, if it scares you thoroughly. He who speaks with mountains, Or is dappled with laughing terrors. My only war has been the raid of the diamond mine of words; I have sparkled with the chain link of a thousand compressed deaths Which I have been buried with like pharaoh-jewels And rose again, mad from ancient killings.

Driven to this window, animal, And look out upon it, Eyes impressed from snout. See the dead, fornicating with their mistress: The crust of the earth In her eternal seduction. What do the living know But the dumb terror Which strikes each waking moment And is the source and site of soul betrayal?

I have watched empires crumble Due to these: pathetic lack of vision. You take what is in front of you And you do not hear the whisper of the dragon, the vicious red thing which is the arrow of time That roars in the blue soul Of the honeybee, the wildflower; The tickling fire of the rabbit As it grazes upon sole blades of grass.

This life is wild, surely. And I can show you visions, The shadow made of stone which lingers Upon the crust of the fire. You are the inside of its belly, scratching it, Idly remarking upon the heat. The lamb’s burrow Where you are assured the only art: Revelations.

We are walking, at last, upon desert sands that have no foothold. Bearing our skin away from the heat. Have you heard of such a flood in the desert? That comes bearing; roaring forth From dreams