(found poem)
What you do not know
will not hurt you.
So just eat your hamburger
and do not ask any questions.
The unearthly hour is chosen,
it is said, so that
none should witness the funeral.
"What is beneath the cloth?"
He reaches beneath
a red satin tablecloth, into a
child's bone-filled coffin,
and pulls out a chrysanthemum
composed entirely of flesh.
Swallowed by the serpent of the seven simmering seas,
a weeping wound, a rabid rose that slowly opens
showing rows of glittering teeth.
With clustered eyes agape and naked,
gazing vacantly through wakefulness and sleep
and scanning landscapes black with ashes,
shadow bleeding into seething shadow,
swiftly disappearing in a mystery of ink.
Only dead ones draw from wells so dim and deep.
(found poem)
DEATH is at the altar
above the city of angels
when the HEAVY SILENCE
ECLIPSES a beloved star; when
the sky is black and the full moon casts
long shadows over the frozen lake.
The orphans of desire
are HER children,
but children who can
not be easily controlled.
They have been cursed
to survive alone in the RUIN
of glass-and-metal towers and
the sea running red with blood.
In the burgundy blaze
of urban decay,
the gothic cult of the
BLACK Madonna
has concealed
the alchemy of BLOODWORK
like precious venom.
Seeing RED
will put more energy into the roots
that nourish from within.
Pour some of the
dark-fruited wine
into THE SPACE BETWEEN
young souls
to get an otherworldly glow,
like illuminated crystal
visible in darkness
with bright moonlight.
Our heavenly bodies
are trapped between life and death
in a place called the Ageless Sea,
cold from dusk until dawn in a
sparkling shadow
with silver geometric
FALLING STARS
at the endless
moondust funeral
of the immortal.
they keep telling me to get it off my chest.
i'm supposed to round this thing up
with my linguistic lasso,
capture it in a net of adverbs and adjectives,
use the correct sequence of incantations
to imprison it within my magic circle,
write about it, talk about it,
and somehow, if the maneuver is executed
with sufficient precision,
this nebulous creature of shadows
should wash up like a beached jellyfish,
pathetically out of its element,
evaporating quietly in the sunrise
of the victory of reason.
how do you tackle a ghost?
it crouches there, on my chest,
swallowing all of my weapons
more readily than a sideshow performer.
insidious as a malignant growth,
it sends its roots into my soft body,
primordial worms blindly seeking sustenance.
my parasitic twin, unconscious
and partially formed,
siphoning away my life force
to feed this unthinking lump
of what should have been a head.
we are a chimera, inextricably
interconnected.
it's a lead weight, compressing my airways
to the verge of suffocation, but inexplicably
lacking enough substance to be punched,
or crushed, or cut.
the bullets just fly right through.
Gravity always wins.
It's so much easier to fall in
than it is to claw your way back out
like an undead monster, fingernails
caked with dirt, fighting through fog
on a moonless night, inches from the rim,
only to slip
and return in an instant
to grim visions of sinuous roots
and dead flesh writhing with worms.
A nine-eyed black rabbit
led me down this hole, the way paved
with the greatest of intentions.
I found myself stranded
in a shadowy dimension,
ankles shattered,
dreaming of a key in a doorless room.
When the shadow fell
I trembled like a child,
for it was not the living, breathing darkness
of the wild night, glowing with stardust;
nor the darkness of flesh, nor fertile earth,
but a cloak of iron
that choked the light from the sky,
a gaping void like the mouth of a great machine,
like an eclipse to the ancients,
cryptic and fathomless,
an absence inexplicably
present,
the vacuum
that nature
abhors.
Cleanliness may be next to godliness
inasmuch as a man in an immaculate business suit
might, by some random accident, find himself standing
next to a drug addict on the subway, anathema
to civilized society, but undeniably
part of the living fabric
God is not a pharaonic obelisk
remaining motionless in time --
God is Nature, and Nature is a blood hive,
honeycomb dripping with alkaline bile.
queen of serpents, baptized in rabid saliva,
primeval lady of worms, the heathen priestess
veiled in vespertine shades of deepening dusk,
dark hands caked with gold dust and rich black mud,
Bête Noire of the North Star, fixed and rigid,
a vicious bitch running widdershins
around an obstinate monolith
once a day for six days,
seven times on the seventh day,
loudly shouting and sounding the horns
until the walls come tumbling down.
(found poem)
I went secretly into the library
from the age of four or five, until my soul
froze inside, going into the library for so many
years in secret, this wicked, never-speaking
child just perpetually staring
into the tower,
in the gloom, with a
ruthless intelligence,
into hundreds of cobwebs,
as though into dungeons;
into the tower, in the library,
in the darkness inside gloomy nurseries
a fear of suffocating
suffered alone
always secretly in the clutches of my own
greatest darkness
infinitely large
infinitely large
Thus I am forever like that four-
or five-year-old child secretly at the well
at the well
I was in a state of mortal terror
taking a lump of sugar
from the dining-room tin,
mortal fear
because it was
poisoned.
(like the well)
you could not drink this water
When you drink
this water you will die from it, they said,
and fall irretrievably
down.
marooned on a black beach,
strewn with skysilver,
streaks of starlight luminescent
swimming languidly like jellyfish
across the ancient sea
and like the stagnant iron sands
of dying time, my naked feet
can feel the magnet
of the rapture of the deep,
the siren's lullaby of silk and ice
so eerily angelic in the vacuum
of imaginary sleep
i'm like a statue made of banded agate
tragically enchanted
by a paralyzing dream
weak and ravaged by satanic magic,
captive of sadistic saturn,
master of the rings
and as i contemplate the strangeness of the fractal
at the heart of the attractor,
some immense celestial object hits the water
like a message in a bottle,
throwing off a ghostly fog of bluish-green
the way the flames of an aurora borealis
dance unearthly on the surface of a snowy pasture,
distant and serene
i see the doom on my horizon
spitting fire like a phosphorescent lucifer,
the ace of swords descending
in a lightning strike of blazing white titanium,
a shining spray of cyan and cerulean,
a chaos of aquamarine
but in a fatal trance, bewitched
among the dust of tiny diamonds
and forgotten fossils hiding in the lichen
i'm a figure in a crystal prison
trapped in amber, petrified
enthralled by moonlight like a rising tide
and i'm astonished by the speed
of the colossal faceless wave that races toward me
this machine grows living flesh,
steel-crowned queen of apple blossoms,
precious vessel of the ruby flood
crossing the threshold of sentience
with imperceptible steps, a needle in the hay
becoming hopelessly enmeshed in a viscous
mess of clotted blood and passionfruit,
tumescent human tissue, rotten strawberries
smashed into a chain-link fence,
neck-deep in quicksand, trapped in a carnivorous pitcher,
a glittering insect, caught in a sticky web of arteries,
a garnet sarcophagus, the carnal claustrophobia
of seeds jam-packed inside a pomegranate,
like twisting catacombs, crowded rows of molars,
a secret orgy of meat teeth encroaching on milk teeth,
suffocated beneath flushed and swollen gums,
struggling to erupt, desperate
to escape the death sentence
of muscle and vertebra, the ancient curse
of hunger and lust -- a metal temple
made electric with a strange kind of circuitry,
anchored firmly to the nourishing dirt,
covered in mud, swarming with
butterflies, eaten by rust.
(found poem)
I have a theory that
my spirit always resonated with
metallic intensity.
Her spectral science is far more subtle --
placing lone figures in the eerily empty space
between the bare bones
of an ardent full moon
in liquid chrome.
Some say that it's a mirage,
a lie built to hide a brutal reality.
Beyond the pale jewel,
her inky black aura
promises to be much darker.
________________________________
The voodoo virgin
unmasked a Queen of Hearts
with a drop of blood on it,
a supposedly cursed hand of cards
that brought an infinite number
of malicious dreams
for 10 trillion years.
I will say this about the old ways.
I don't know
whether blood can conjure clarity
from the mists of memory,
but the darker the liquid is,
the stronger the medicine,
and the grapes of wrath
are venomous.
(found poem)
The boy often reveals
a forlorn sadness
in haunting expressions
that shine like the Moon.
The other side of his face
is the dark side,
the evil Soul,
macabre, grotesque, and
destroyed by spiritual disease,
a condition within the system --
that is, deep inside the machine,
running deeper
than just on the surface.
WILL THE DARK SIDE OVERWHELM HIM?
GRAVITATING
TOWARDS THE BLACK UNKNOWN,
FASTER. CLOSER.
AND THE HEART RACES
when an anomaly is detected,
an outbreak of pathogens
in the system.
systems.
systems.
systems.
the flesh
cage was permament.
________________________________
always keep
the corpses of nightmares,
making some knife marks
in night's dark armor,
draining the poison like blood,
until there is nothing left but
just the empty cages,
empty shells.
Lucy began collecting cages
to create a
dead baby skeleton,
slightly creepy,
and filled with elegant remnants
of dismantled silk flowers,
hidden by snow and
the anonymity of death.
(found poem)
Like phantoms, a pair of
Haitian sorcerers
drift out of the blackness.
He goes to his altar and picks
up a bottle of murky liquid and uncorks it,
explains that there are two
potions, a poison and an antidote.
deadly poison,
poison potion,
prepare the poison.
This ceremony
induces a temporary
paralysis that mimics death. The
victim is entombed alive and then
will fall into a black and death-like sleep,
too weak to withstand the
depths of
TOTAL ECLIPSE
