He is a prince of the other world on his travels through this one[.]
—Waite1
*
In these difficulties there is a doctrine.
—Crowley2
i. The Magician
The trouble with being god is
that you have to create every
part of your Self, fabricating it
all without being false, and yet
my art does not have periods,
it bleeds secrets in alchemical stages:
red, white, and black changes painting
the progress of my transformation as
I shed my masks, shading hideous
faces in various states of distress
o. The Fool
coloured with experiences I do not
regret but refuse to let me
forget who I truly am, even
if not yet, this is The
Work, every attempt sequences words to
the beating of my heart against
the gridiron of these ribs which
imprison it and grill the way
interrogators do any prisoner, why the
hell it puts up with the
ii. The High Priestess
heat of my hate’s fulminating swell,
this telling of all to a
world which will not hear too
well or care too much after
I holler all I need to
howl, is the rhythm of a
pain which dwells within that only
I can bare, getting by without
dwelling on what must go unspoken,
even still, it syncopates between each
v. The Hierophant
confessed transgression just how down I
was until I tossed off my
cross, took up my pen, and
began writing with my balls, beating
the system which wrote me off,
the abyss exists between the ideal
and the actual, bridged by that
which pivots on the axis of
the fantastical, evil is liminal, a
voyeur watching your voyaging soul walking
iii. The Empress
over the threshold of consciousness, bad
and good, like the opinions to
which they are attached, like the
battle between thoughts and facts, can
only ever be subjective, never proven
or disproven as either This or
That, there is a war What
Strangers Want You To Be wages
with What You Already Are, the
tongue of the vulgar is the
iv. The Emperor
language of the vandals for
whom rumour is a weapon used
by those tools to weaken what
they cannot damage, what makes You
more precious than any gem or
metal, your resilience the stench of
their breath seeks to hamper, ridicule
their hammer your self-confidence bends with
a spirit criticism cannot dampen, scent
of cedar smoulders on the lips
xii. The Hanged Man
of imminent destruction, sulfur flavours the
mouth with stinging desolation, voiceless poison
intimates the secret which animates the
process without revealing any conceivable reason
for its chaos, I am in
my season when rearranging my elements,
dividing and uniting with writing recombining
with lightning-quick incisiveness what peaces of
mind might have been lost had
I not committed my Self to
xvi. The Tower
the synthesis of opposites, recognizing in
reconciling the differences between Us and
Them, that from the oblivion of
such nothingness as the shit they
say to over-compensate for what fears
of theirs we reflect, comes something
from which we can make worthwhile
this struggle of ours to become
what we already are, what they
have never been or will be:
xx. Judgement
gods impervious to mortal troubles and
concerns, neither threatened nor imperiled by
lessons they will never learn, let
me be your teacher and the
only thing you will ever mourn
is not having come to me
sooner, I speak what has already
been spoken and ignored a million
times before by wiser men
more versed in suffering than them.
__________
1A. E. Waite, “Part II: The Doctrine Behind the Veil: Section 2. The Trumps Major and their Inner Symbolism: 0: ZERO: The Fool” of The Pictorial Key to the Tarot: With 78 Plates, illustrating the Greater and Lesser Arcana, from designs by Pamela Colman Smith, published at Mineola, New York by Dover Publications, Inc. in 2018; page 76.
2Aleister Crowley, “Part One: The Theory of the Tarot: [Chapter] II. The Twenty-two Keys, Atu, or Trumps of the Tarot” of The Book of Thoth: A Short Essay on the Tarot of the Egyptians: Being The Equinox Volume III No. V: by The Master Therion [Aleister Crowley]: Artist Executant: Frieda Harris, published at San Francisco, CA by Weiser Books in 2018; page 22.
Jono Borden 