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
20090607
Deserue Corne Gratis?
Ill-baked republic high castled in the round,
the stage is set for tragic skirmishes between
rising power-hungry tribunes and gray-head
aristocrats. How soon the prattling plebeians
forget the scars your imperial service earned you!
Dare they now so soon demand demonstrations of
humble fealty, that you be made to prance around
for them like some sick and swaggering pony,
to seduce them of their tawdry, volatile ballots?
But are you so haughty that these seething skies
have gone transparent before your warlike eyes,
which now fail to apprise how hunger churns the
unspoken, recondite climate? You misread the
oracle in the sheep's bowels, the flights of crows
beyond the fields, an interpretive miscarriage of
your own changing times: anger itself's become
the true meat that calls the peasant mouth to water;
anger over disparities long since presumed the
noble born's just due. Aristocracy, through no
misstep of your own, has grown synonymous with
tyranny, but this new dictum you can't quite work
your mind around, can you, Caius Martius?
The meteorology of republican politics is an infant
science, vagaries of loyalties adherent to no
apparent pattern, honoring no familiar convention.
The words are muttered with obvious passion, but
coherent significance remains elusive, and you
write it off to lower-class foolery. But secret
Powers are afoot, well-versed in how to stir the pot
of Citizenry; how well they plot, these grinning
marionettes whom you despise and dismiss, their
hollow heads not now so straw-stuft as you long
presumed; they're conspiring cautiously calculative,
pulling new pragmatisms near into their breasts
with close, whispered counsel. They wit well how
they may hope to plunge their puppeteers down
into the pit. What's become of the truism that
the belly must purvey and sustain first the princely
head lest all be slaughtered? But: see! Now the
master's mastered! And is that not the way it
should be in any rising republican democracy?
Heads must be made to roll.
Ravisher of ringed cities, monolithic penetrator
of curving battlements, beware: the very milk
which suckled you to strength cannot but bid you
treason yourself and reason with these lesser
mortals a way back into their hearts, tainted
with the low grit and grime of local realism, to
coil there like some cursed worm after love from
holy Rome, which so recently without pity or justice
cast you out. You have no city now, you traitor,
you banished thing flung backwards to a narrowing
appendix, a tight cul-de-sac in time, where your
bloody wounds, so esteemed by your hungry dam,
must now be put on base public display through the
rapturous streets of Antium, whether you would or no.
20090605
Cheap Seats
"Lord, what fools these mortals
be!" Puck declared, and I, from
the cheap seats, was sudden-
struck by such simple wisdom.
We're all ensnared in visions
blind, or binding brute bad luck.
Should you, by chance, one day
become unstuck and waken
from your nightmare in a
dream, I hope you'll pick a daisy
and then pluck its petals,
weighing what my love might
mean, for though I know you
can't believe it's true, you'll
know no greater love than
mine for you.