I. Auspicious

                    i. Anointing with Blood

Scorched with scorn, don’t mourn me when I’m gone,
when I’ve outgrown your porcelain world,
cracking through its whining cunt smiling,
fist-pumping and defiant, punching
out perverse Morse with Titanic force,
throwing elbows like an unwrapped corpse,
or some Lazarus, casting off his
mourning wood’s hideous shadow thrown
onto the pile, limping with shrinking
form into your weakest minds’ deepest
furnace, don’t mark my tomb when you’re stoned,

                    ii. Dating the Preface

don’t seek me out tomorrow when I’m
burned in your bio by a ghastly
hand, a ghost-writer with a gas-lit
lamp and a limp wrist, hired like some
lawyer by corporate, to lower
my life’s standards and invalidate
its purpose, taxing my resolve’s bold
reserves, her or his command of our
same language suspect, political
and auto-corrected, imperfect
and autonomous in its reform

                    iii. Posing the Charge

of one mouth’s most inconvenient
little contradiction: my marriage
to this pain and my public image
strips from monogamy’s myth any
credibility, legacy as
reliable and questionable
as a calligrapher’s pen’s lisping
flourish, when I’m reborn my readers’
fevered fingers will tear through, to raw-
ridden bone, life’s layers of concealed
meaning thieves deceiving reason fight

          II. Inauspicious

                    i. Anointing with Blood

monsters for, impaled swordsmen riding
nightmares like apocalyptic whores,
when performing what this charcoal soul
keeps my heart’s hurt from learning, Sadists
dressed like prophets playing archivists,
rehearsing and rehashing lost lines
of pain worth preserving, ignored scars
your commotion concedes to demons,
whose groaning need to be noticed screams
goëtic circles around my own,
you tragedians who expect me

                    ii. Dating the Preface

to act a fool or the clown, you tools
so pathetic you drool tepid tide-
pools of piss-warm beer, mourning forests
you cut down climbing high your social
networks’ cloud-piercing tiers, but not at
all the morals you kill for the thrill
of “#trending!” and trading your free-will
for a cheap crown, you sibyls of boned
oracles, fishing around ancient
wisdom for new flesh to hang in when
you finally go down, lynched by that

                    iii. Posing the Charge

same insignificance you chased and
outran, until its death sentenced your
heads’ cluelessness to a swinging band
of rebranded nooses I pride my
Self in having fashioned, like new, from
uselessness your frivolous pursuit
of youth’s lawlessness cast to the ground,
the same patch in the smoldering ash
of which I crashed and almost drowned, but
who’s going to admire you now, when
no one’s around to follow your fall’s

          III. Prognostication

                    i. Anointing with Blood

frozen account, or avow having
known a crowd whose dreams floundered, having
been underfunded and overfed
on platitudes, fattened on public
opinion, coughing in their coffin
of a cloud, nothing ever what it
seems, yet always the same when what’s gone
comes back around, things never going
your way, or away, because forays
into the unknown throw the cold shapes
of what’s been thrown out into flagrant

                    ii. Dating the Preface

evocations, renditions of change
denigrate with dark revelations,
stark emotions enmity strips bare,
faces painted primitive can’t fake
a consequence’s congenital,
and primal, initiative when I
take up my pact’s clause and cause damage
no one else’s brand can cauterize
or suture, because truly, once you’re
wounded, there is no future or life
for those tools whose complacent eyes were

                    iii. Posing the Charge

blinded before birth, before some knife’s
abortion those kids survived, before
ignorance entwined its curse’s grip
with idiots’ spines, enforcing through
assholes its relentless paradigm,
implausible and unwarranted
unkindness itself punishment more
than enough, and justified, for your
efforts at transferring worthlessness,
when such pieces of shit heap onto
dignity steep Everests of their

          IV. Provocation

                    i. Anointing with Blood

own insecurity, fiends neither
artists nor activists, these deprived
sheep of paralyzed escapists, whose
crutches act as hatches through which they
grasp at and paraphrase Paradise,
bullet-wounds for brains, Platonic caves
where, comfortably pigeonholed, they
impair themselves beyond repair, all
the more, by each bending over and
opening wide for their Führer, balls
sawed off and tossed aside like marbles,

                    ii. Dating the Preface

choking on parables filling their
windowless prisons with smoke, blown out
of proportion by contortions their
addictions mirror, repackaging
reflections of their own bored shadows
laughing at them, and selling it as
hope, those mongrels unaware that they’re
the punchlines of the joke, the boning
of oracles what strips the comic
from the tragic, skinning from mundane
existence its sustenance, since men

                    iii. Posing the Charge

need their meat and cannot live by bread
or prophecy alone, so when I
speak, know by what dread and by what deep,
unrepentant woe of whom you, dear
reader, are to be consumed, for these
things will soon come to pass: the attack
of your status by those symbols my
pathetic little poem’s antic
and unrelenting punch packs—brute force,
prosaic panic—in other, though
fewer, words: if you can, watch your backs.