It was sex that rotted him. It was sex, sex, sex, sex, sex all the way with Crowley. He was a sex maniac.
          —Cremers¹

Divine with one tongue the meaning
of the way this rush of lightning
runs from the column its eruption has splintered,

from the temple within spilling
secrets no one else’s mouth has
better summoned, lap from pulsing base to trembling

apex this liquor the taste of
which pricks lips, whisper with wintered
conviction how such drops of wisdom have weakened

the sweet sting of reason’s sleeping
season, awakening in our
primitive purity a scourge of furious

words worrisome to fathers in
a land whose law it is no child
shall die a virgin, white dew perverting with ease

their undefiled vessels this oil
enters and empties of any
innocence, leaving thirsty those Aquarian

water bearers whose deep cups this
poet’s coldest intemperance
filthies with such preposterous revelations,

unveiled threats, that these kids stand no
chance against being affected
by what anyone else would dress in signs much less

explicit and only mildly
suggestive, so provocative
is this truth that its heat consumes not with fire but

air the drab garb of decency
naïveté wears, laying bare
every hideousness these idiots thought

they hid under their pretensions
to perfection, inconvenient,
is it not, that what one wants badly enough none

give, delighting in it when it
comes out of the whore’s throat of the
unwashed, after the monuments the flood conquers

the hearts of those people for whom
conquest is but an unexpressed
thought, my sword sheds from the repressed the sheath of feigned

respectability’s greasy
shield enveloping any brash
temptation of the flesh its cracked mirror fails to

deflect when my translations of
profane prayers embraced as sacred
by the ancients this tumescent pen champions,

encouraging every man
and woman to be the stars they
are and accept what everyone else tells them

to resist, that there exists yet
only one law, ‘Do what thou wilt,’
all for love, to never stop becoming themselves.

__________
¹Vittoria Cremers, originally quoted in Jean Overton Fuller’s The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuburg, published at London by W. H. Allen in 1965; page 46. Reprinted in “[Chapter]: Six: Sex and Magick” of Gary Lachman’s Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World, published at New York by Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin in 2014; page 179.