i. Taking the Torch in the Darkness

                         Many men have knelt under this oaken desk
                              at which I’ve penned my obscenities and from
                              which nest I’ve hatched my wickedest heresies,
                                   these attempts to speak to the reader with an
                                        intimacy befitting two bosom friends
                                        engrossed in secret conversation—put your
                                             cracked lips to the split partition, open your
                                             closed mind, and make your filthy mouth listen: Be
                                             both a window and a door—both a widow
                                             and a whore—to find and become the sacred
                                             force at work in the secular world. ¶ The man
                                        whose kiss opened my heart like a wound, whose tongue
                                        danced and drenched, consuming my silence like wet
                                   flame, burning down what thoughts filled my empty bed—
                              where a tear crawled, tracing his thigh like liquid
                              Demerol® falling from a high, there we’d slipped.
                         ¶ Not just burning down bridges, but poisoning

                    waters over which they figuratively
               spanned—such is the “love” I’d had for my “hometown”,
               where, having met him, my little addiction,
          while each escaping the village’s limits,
     toward exile we’d sauntered, both cackling at
     the cries behind us of all its idiots,
collective blindness becoming palpable
by pondering how we’d evaded their same
fate, that somehow we’d made it. ¶ With this man whose
face fame fed, I’d went, hand in hand (and down pants),
uninhibited, together we’d found it,
     temptation without having been led, our wills
     yielding to no one and everything we’d
          wanted—taking the torch in the darkness, he’d
               said, You can’t pay a whore compliments, and so,
               forward to a new expanse of consciousness,
                    we’d fled, seeking wealth, finding our Selves instead.

                    ii. You Can’t Pay a Whore Compliments

                         Together embracing the fetish of filth’s
                              new moon, Speak to me in parables, he’d said,
                              pulling with iron fist my Totenkopf down
                                   to his hips as I’d kissed his thighs, circling him
                                        to whisper into the winking eye of his
                                        tightest hole more truth than this poem can hold—
                                             licks and sucks translating to quick head what my
                                             passion-starved heart and cross(ed) bones sought to pillage,
                                             replenishing my bowl with more libations
                                             than it could hold (or deserved), words pouring forth
                                             where come should have been. ¶ Typewriter and hammer
                                        pounding out (and into him) substance where none
                                        should have gone, as if by transference he could
                                   experience what lies beyond anyone’s
                              comprehension, since energy cannot go
                              around corners, no—its bolt can only flow
                         around articulations, lightning ripping

                    time’s folds by flickering to spark what warmth touch
               lacks. ¶ You’d said, ‘Put your money where your mouth is,’
               but your ass doesn’t take cash, securities,
          or dividends—only all the credit, I’d
     happened to hurl at him, sobering when dawn’s
     deadline refused any further extensions—
this fickle sylph’s summoning coming to its
end, I’d concluded to wed intention to
intellect and evoke once more that demon
this art’s most-respected grimoires warn against.
¶ Conjuring a glimpse of love, a mere glamour,
     only to fuck it over, indeed hastens
     death—but a necromantic poet must live,
          even if, as an iconoclassicist,
               what he smashes is his last chance at making
               appear “the real thing”, “the one”—and so, drawing
                    him close, within my circle we’d both dissolved.