I have suffered the Ain Soph Aur,
my mouth’s like an open sore, all over
you & it glows, it glows with his residue,
no saint, it’s true, but what I do
moves through those circles other creatives
unglue, artists and makers who destroy
love, you who bring the desert with
you, poets are the high priests of purpose,
bold slayers of prose giving language its
focus, all the deities whose
voices have fallen below notice like
civilizations dominating thought
and dominoing before us

                                                                                know this, floating back into contractions
                                                                                of emptiness, the past is a flash of
                                                                                divine fluorescence crashing
                                                                                into glasses, taking on their shape, but
                                                                                remaining unchanged, the same flickering
                                                                                things inviting us to consult
                                                                                the sun’s origin, the hand turning it
                                                                                burning into this galaxy’s long-term
                                                                                memory the charred charcoal scrawl
                                                                                of the annals of another world, to
                                                                                blow through a library of thoughts, a sneeze
                                                                                in the coffin of our Selves, stars
                                                                                buying their own myths, getting higher than

gods burying us in their sickness, we
many-mouthed prophets whose two types
of faces cast us in unkindest light
only brassy punches of wit can hit
out of night, opening the sky
with tongues whose shouts part lips heaven never
lets men kiss, not unless they first pleasure
each other, licking the gilded
fore-edges of some volume no one has
anymore, that rarest edition of
living this modern condition
kills when it gives too much love & gets too loud,
punished for having a wealth of wisdom

                                                                                & experience but no regrets,
                                                                                cashing in on history’s dividends,
                                                                                my only offense has been repeating
                                                                                its beginning without reading
                                                                                how things end, logos and a word pinning
                                                                                a pen to my hand, a gun to my head
                                                                                bulleting a list making of
                                                                                my sins a brand, stigma my skin wears well
                                                                                marking me for an author starving like
                                                                                a supermodel, but in the
                                                                                name of poverty not beauty, my life
                                                                                an unread library staring at me,
                                                                                dreading death’s great uncertainty.