In the human body there is a very small bone called Luz by the Hebrews,
which is the size of a pea, and is incorruptible,
also it is not capable of being damaged by fire, but always remains unhurt.
According to Jewish tradition, when the dead are raised,
our new bodies will sprout from it as plants do from seeds.
—Agrippa1
You two had something that had to be kept on ice, yes, incorruptible, yes!—
and death was the only icebox where you could keep it.
—Williams2
a. Infra dig
Trashed mannequins, inspiration’s
last flashes coughing codices
of ashes, love’s interloping
highwaymen stiffing hard world-class
museums for one-last/closing-
time glimpses of hieroglyphic
passages inscribed by some tomb’s
ancient robbers on the lintels
of temple portals only our
own hubris can open, or so
we insisted to foreigners
and bored guards, tourists not about
to go home or get deported
for having gone overboard with
our learning working them, over-
educated skinheads, under-
stimulated punks turning West
Germany’s postwar implosion
into our personal hangout
like refugee vermin, we were
the infestation, those highly
perceptive doormen, quick-witted
light-in-the-loafer soldiers armed
only with genius, eidetic
memories, and—by George!—that bold
Hanoverian brand of pure
insanity—madness of kings—
exterminating our boredom
pissing people off with the rich
purple of our myths, not-giving-
a-shit as if being stoned made
martyrs of misfits, porphyry
were a malady, and we were
the last of a dynasty, the
crass emissaries of Hermes
or Sisyphus, Pluto’s wise-ass
descendants going down like suns
whose hearts were set on burning out
together, two wonder-workers
too clever to not be worshipped
or remembered, both shouldering
the heavier burden of our
parents’ (de)generation, of
another era’s worse boulders
those well-hung heroes shrugging off
the lingering chill of the Cold
War, singing of something more than
this, something more than lust and its
politics, fists crushing cola
cans, brick phone-toting shitheads, thick-
skinned cigarettes, smouldering fags
with swollen pricks, rolling bones in
smoking graves, braving cameras
with smug faces and drunken faith
slammed sober by profound thoughts and
underwhelming epiphanies
paradoxes made all the more
perplexing when becoming one
refusing to accept talk of
personal transformation, of
the mere mention of some inner
alchemy, puking peonies
perfuming wastepaper baskets
we are the remnant, the shredded
evidence of desecrated
talismans, the legends or what’s
left of them when the spin doctors
fixers, and magicians draw closed
the curtains, ironing out lies
polishing the whys and parting
lines, Jägerbombing embassies
we had that East Berlin circa
’89 sort of vibe, Lord knows
b. Fraktur
the sort of unkindness, how we
did nothing to hide it or why
knowing time, if not right, was primed
to let slide out our demise, that
words which sound alike, lay on tongues
homophonic signs sighing at
once things unheard of before, and
language somehow so familiar
and unnerving that our birds, when
uncaged, took harder than all of
our friends could, a mouth’s intimate
performance of wet phonetic
cabala locating for us
from within, the Luz bone itself
unfolding like a petal from
inside the prisons of our own
minds, a walled garden of newfound
mysticism whose earthen floor still
burns barefoot whatever truth we
sought and yet seek, whose flowers we
held in our hands, eating seed, palms
filling our souls with the scent of
their resurrection, of our own
nearly-grown men weeping wells while
lifting the veil, dropping jars of
balm crushed by circumstance, ointment
blurring the screen, flesh throwing green
language into blue movies, clay
subtitling our forlorn need to
be somebodies, no one certain
of our origin, wandering
reliquaries carrying some
thing so precious and precocious
our own tribes refused to believe
we could keep so big a secret
scattering its treasures among
tyrants, giving away without
advertising its wisdom that
in some beings some things harbour
a heart’s wealth of substance, while in
others no honour exists, salt
waters the earth as dusk’s bending
brow of light closes its lid on
seas, drowning them in tears, and that
we, two kids, could keep so well-hid
from infectious factions of gods
absent-yet-ev’rywhere-present
yes, even our parents, both sides’
authorities, politburos,
Nazis, and a litany of
other enemies, no less our
own bodies, the root cause of their
animosity, how all things
as Agrippa said, are made from
enmity and friendship, how in
our twenties, we went beyond tides
to divide our Selves into two
scythes our split personalities
reconciled when we united
when the crescents of our cries wept
into a pool of sheets we wrapped
our limbs in, tangled like a grove
of trees when we sweated under
one moon, when, for one full month in
altered states we climbed ladders and
slipped through the barbed wire embrace of
another world’s consciousness, all
our days numbered before the ice-
box failed to cool our heat, before
death nipped at our toes and the wings
fell from our feet, when we broke the
caduceus on our way through life
to celebrate the mysteries.
__________
1Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, in “Three Books of Occult Philosophy, OR [sic] of Magic; written by that Famous Man [sic] Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Knight And [sic] Doctor of both Laws, Counsellor to Caesar’s Sacred Majesty, and Judge of the Prerogative Court: BOOK I[sic,] Chapter XX: That natural virtues are in some things throughout their whole substance, and in other things in certain parts, and members[,]” of Three Books of Occult Philosophy: written by Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim: Completely Annotated with Modern Commentary: The Foundation Book of Western Occultism: Translated by James Freake: Edited and Annotated by Donald Tyson, Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2016; page 65.
2Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Act I, Lines 940–943, Margaret to Brick, in Drama: Classical to Contemporary, edited by John C. Coldewey and W. R. Streitberger, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998; page 903.
Jono Borden 