Forms enter into being, they dance,
They explode, dissolve. White light's
Broken irreparably in the prism glass,
Hot souls condensing from churning
Soupy mists, they cavort, they move
Under mysterious self-volition. Old,
Familiar forms freeze up, fall mute,
Unvoiced, inert as dirt, rusted over,
Their fluttery flag tongues cloven,
Disjointed slam-bang utterances soon
Neglected and gratefully forgotten.
Too long Ymir has slumbered, now
His giant body's duly carved up in
Life-giving chunks, this indolent and
Half-conscious, anti-transubstantiated
God. A primal matronly abyss yawns
Wide, beckoning, this pink horned
Cornucopia chasm from whom all
Nightmares and reason issue, awash in
Blood clots and amnion flow. We look to
Heroes to sever the inward parts, the air-
Filled belly of the dragon-mother, and
Tread upon her bloated liver and spleen.
These long-hoarded seeds implanted in
Too rocky fields; this bubbling cauldron
Catching every squeezed out drop, every
Final fragment of limbs dismembered
And hacked out softer organs; these
Faces with shining scalpels precisely
Excised, or with much-worn gelding
Knives, glove-slipped, inter-traded,
Exchanged and street-bartered and
Rearranged; these ruthless hours for
Self-reflection, for reintegration, for
Reconstitution of the inorganic and the
Dead, animal, plant and mineral and
What's been claimed as human; these
Ghosts of fallen warrior-kings and fools;
These accursed memories both exploded
And stirred by merciful forgetfulness and
Operational disregard; these uncounted
Stars raining down like orange autumn's
Withering litter; these much prized but
Worthless exchanges of monkey-chatter
Voices in their insect points of view;
These harbingers of disaster and after,
Cryptic calm; these long absent and too
Soon returned, deplored, never fully
Exhausted or satiated; these monstrous
Chimeras with their ridgebacks bristling
And yellow tusks curled and blunt, but
Deadly; these vicious scorpion-men from
Distant deserts returned and restored;
This admixture of the real and surreal
Inseparable, now got indistinguishable;
These mysteries, these murder-crowned
Majesties, these dialectic catastrophes
Recast in piebald flesh and glorious,
Sun-burnished steel; these chrome-
Plated hearts of the merciful; these tired,
Wheezing lungs dipped in credit and
Unchallenged avarice; the open wounds
Of midnight's velvet sky still weeping,
Weeping; these slaughtered archangels
Evermore creeping in this God-forsaken
Realm, their golden-feathered wings
Short-cropped, their visions crippled;
These hobbled horses of bay and red
Forcibly led by all too familiar jesters in a
Stumbling idiot's parade; these violent
Thunderstorms of sin and shock with
Their mutagenic lightning bolts; these
Systemic mutilations to which everyone
Is subject; these odd old friends now
Reduced to flapping ribbons; these cut-
And-paste travelling companions whom
You believed you recognized, who
Misremember what each one's unique
Crime is or might have ever been; these
Barbaric reconstructed artifacts of buried
Civilizations once imagined that maybe
Never will be or have been; these
Transitory ephemerals, shriveling jewels,
Temporary exchanges of warring,
Mangled views, regurgitations from the
Glossy production of evening news, all
Shattered vases reglued precarious;
These mismatched and restitched china
Doll faces and their serrated fragments
Stretched across unfamiliar mastoid
Bones; these hurtled down thrones of
Failed messiahs and the half-gods of
Technicolor advertising and political
Sermonizing; these princes become
Paupers and beggars put in charge of
Society's most dangerous attack dogs;
All fall now as these raging seas burst
Free and invade the lands. We watch
The towers tumble, smoking stoves
Belching flame and brimstone. All the
Planets rupture and disintegrate, they
Trail their crumbling guts beyond their
Orbits. The sleeping dragons awaken
From deep subterranean lairs and take
Flight. The swords of men are bared
And whetted to be about the requisite
Business of hewing limb and bone.
The tongues are hacked out, the eyes
Are all gouged, the noses cut off and
Dropped in place, the ears dried like
Leather shells and strung into hideous
Necklaces. All hair is set in flames.
The nostrils are split and the breasts
Are carved. The skull is cracked and
The brains are scrambled. The dire
Wolves have come back to haunt the
Forest eaves once more; the werewolves
Scratch at each and every darkened
Door. Venom pollutes the water and
Poison dust befouls the air, and I'm
Become the hoary tree whose long limbs
Bend down toward the river, quicksilver
Gleaming, racing on, on, chasing flashing
Visions in startling reflection. I am
Handfuls of dead leaves, bug-eaten, that
Fall down one by one upon her fickle,
Mutating surface; she takes me away in
My departing sherds and adherent bits
Of glossy glaze. Piece by piece she must
Redistribute me past the green meadows
Under a golden sun, back past a young
Earth, a younger day, into a brand new
Way that you can't imagine. What kind
Of reincorporation declaimed from
On high could untransmit the damning
Lie?
None. None.
The witches stir the cauldron: this
World's all undone. Fair thoughts and
Happy hours attend on you.
20090610
Acts of Dissipation
20090609
The Artist in Killing
The mass has come forward, leaving the hind quarters
disproportionately small and light. His mass, his essence, is
centralized in the great hump of muscle located just behind
the head, the morillo, the focus of all his tension when he is
aroused and enraged. When he enters the ring he sees
and hears the noise of the spectators. He smells the horses,
sees the picadors. The matadors. Two engage in a last
elegant dance whose outcome grows increasingly obvious.
When the last charge finally comes, the bull's head is low,
his eye locked to the muleta, tail held straight out.
And the matador leans in, he leans far in over the horns,
following the sword as it finds its way home in the estocade.
The black tail flips around at the instant when his
pounding heart is burst. The colorful banderillas dangle
from the sagging morillo now. Dark red blood spills down
from his puncture wounds, and the blood is all over
the matador's belly as well.
The swirl of dust particles is suspended in the
white shafts of light, transparent and holy-bright and hot.
He trembles; a shudder passes through him, and he
crashes down in spectacular ruin, the air heavy with
animal musk. He's a blue mountain of silky short black hair,
slain all at once under the white sun's glare. The matador
stands long and thin in embroidered silk, yellow
and pale green, pigtail hanging straight down his
sweaty neck, his long, Modigliani arm still slowly
withdrawing from the pommel of the sword. In this
death-filled moment his dark eyes remain fixed
on the bull, that massive heap of tension abruptly released,
relaxing, collapsing in the center of the ring. How hot it is.
How hot it is.
The artist in killing, the true artist, never loses his fear;
his art is in the mastery of fear, rising on his toes
unflinching when death makes its last fateful charge,
and with perfect concentration and grace he locates
the heart of his well-matched adversary, his partner
in the dance. And this is why the dust particles now
are motionless, and the light is so intense, and he hears
nothing from the spectators, no sound, and there is only
the light and the heat and the buckling of his opponent's
knees and his last blasting breaths from swollen nostrils.
Then he is a mountainous blue bull with bright banderillas
and a rolling tongue and crimson blood flowing like
liquid flame, like an enormous volcano of a quickly
dying animal. Then, as always, the matador feels
the animal connection, feels the truth between them
that very few in the stands, now erupting with cheering,
can see or guess.
20090608
Temporary Like Beowulf
This old brown boat's been tied up at the pier too long under
unruffled, pale skies of aquamarine. The yellow strand runs
flat and passive, untrampled even by happy children, between
a few ramshackle bait houses and deserted gas stations. Her poor
gunwales grow rotten with barnacles and worms; she's been
sequestered too long in a calm, protective harbor where
sandpipers madly scamper and lost grebes scream. She was
made to travel, not rot in place, cut off from space and experience,
with ever deepening texture and character, but atrophying,
infertile discernment.
Apathy of the spirit is subtle; death is not, and the politics
of the moment tricks us into false pretensions we may be
years in penetrating and discarding. This modern art, though,
is made in the moment, not raised like medieval cathedrals down
generational centuries. We inhale, we exhale life; we live;
we must live right now before we die, before we die, before we
have to die, for no one else can do it for us, not even on Lost or
Arrested Development. And when did the sluggishness begin?
When, the spiritual ennui set in? You know. You know precisely when.
You've read your Joseph Campbell, and you're familiar with the
call refused. But someone keeps on calling you, paging you,
pinging you, poking you, beseeching you, entreating you, reaching
out for you, texting you to get up off your withered laurels and,
like Beowulf, disembark on one more dragon hunt at least. Splash a
fresh coat of paint on that lonely boat and let's move out onto
deep water.