[A]nd remember
the belly of the whale is laden with
great men.
          —Bukowski¹

                    i. Live from Tarshish

Language is just negative space,
a false flag planted in a thirsty place
aching from the changing of the old guard,
a vacuum abhorring the changing of

a mouth’s shape, sucking up silence
which is the poet’s true medium and
the prophet’s game, asylum filling in
the vacant embrace the augurs of your

thoughts mistake your mask of words to
be, what seems comforting to some conceals
a weapon, fire in the blanks, this is not
even some consolation, some conceit

to make its spoils seem more sweet, no,
this war between letters coming through your
speakers is something different than theirs,
your gnostic radio’s purr another

matter scattering those putting
on airs, peripatetic static that’s
never complacent, its pathos playing
out its pivot, seeking a better path

to travel from the center to
the edge of the Universe whose circle’s
circumference is everywhere, your
beginning whose end does not exist, not

yet, impatient revelation
wandering like a comet gaining flame
as it falls from the top of heaven to
the bottom of this planet’s candle, or

a vagrant camel left to stray
between shattered towers, a beast burdened
with a storm’s leftovers, a lover’s voice
carrying showers lightning fuels & thunder

powers, peeling from fools and cons
the tattered tarot of their touring smiles,
torrents of miles unaware-wolves patrol
in hard-won style, ithyphallic dog-men

                    ii. Live from Nineveh

boning the Nile with sentinel
skewers, dapper as they lower into
the underworld’s muddy waters big heads
they baptize with barbed wit in the spirit

of your devious gnosis, quips
deflating egoists, leaving only
ghosts as your servants strip from idiots
and dilettantes the pretty petals of

their lily-white glowers which were
only ever sentimental, glances
which were never expert, those who hear your
answer question imposters, deflower

with bombshells of scandals you plant
well, the bad intentions of those fools who
only pretend to know what you tell us
all to uncover, burying under

lowered opinions of them what
no other god before you has uttered,
this truth you’ve let us discover ourselves,
hieroglyphic syllables spit out hard

into the shape of a hit take
up your mantle, but weigh down with sounds and
additional symbols, your cryptic veil
no one can lift unless they possess the

gift to decipher this message
which burns like a bush and hurts like a bitch
in the heads of us who get it, secret
consciousness was once almost lost, all but

obliterated in a cloud’s
reddish glow when it was rescued not so
long ago by the few who knew and gave
a shit, by swift metaphysicians who

operated then on the same
frequency as we do now, and to think,
at first, even Jonah resisted this,
tuning out before turning sainted.

__________
¹Charles Bukowski, “advice for some young man in the year 2064 A.D.”, [Stanza 4, Lines 20–22], in The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems, 1951–1993: Edited by John Martin, published at New York by Ecco in 2008; page 122.