Do not remember against us the iniquities of our ancestors[.]
          —Ps 79:8¹

                    *

To say that God turns away from the evil is like saying that the sun hides himself from the blind.
          —Sallustius²

Invocation: I pray, Lord, for
the repose of the souls of my
ancestors, for the forgiveness
of their sins; do not punish in
me their transgressions. Direct my
actions to honour them. Amen.

                    i.

Ancestors, you are my blood, I
am your flesh; your legacy in
this world, you are mine in the next.
Nourishment, you flow through my veins
and in and out of my heart with
the frequency of recurring

                    ii.

thought. Every memory is
a complement the imbalance
of my mind justifies with your
stained heritage the persistence
of which life’s living against time
redefines whenever faced with

                    iii.

self-created strife. It changes
my perspective and somehow we
survive. Always thriving the most
when striving the hardest, when the
circumstances are not the best;
when I acknowledge the doctrine

                    iv.

hidden in every moment
of difficulty—the truth which
exists because I persist, this:
that I am not a thing but am
a system. The spirit of Christ
Consciousness ordered by divine

                    v.

law’s logic into rational
substance your rebelliousness so
ingrained in me seeks to dissolve.
By way of stubborn defiance,
by always denying someone
any power to alter our

                    vi.

story with their wor(l)d’s polluting
patter(n)—that poor man’s version of
the soul’s own descent into dense
matter—we transcend accidents
of history with this command
of narrative they all call our

                    vii.

Norman adaptability.
I learned from the best, could not have
been better prepared to answer
whatever spirit appeared in
the form of a friend’s criticism
to conquer like an enemy.

                    viii.

It is just in me to conjure
a way out of every last
vessel they use to bottle me,
every pigeonhole’s walls their
want of understanding what I
am fails to pin me down; on air

                    ix.

no weapon travels swifter, does
more damage than a tongue of sword
whose flame burns to their core those my
pen’s fame spurns. No love lost in such
poisonous endeavours as this:
writing the wrongs you wish me to

                    x.

address. Such love is the savvy
mediator from whose quick lips
our curse’s remedy begins
to progress; whose step spans the chasm
which divides us, makes whole again
those cavernous halves of our home’s

                    xi.

shattering into fragments no
statistician or taxman can
reduce to what fractions our own
dissatisfaction with our Selves
has. Without remorse sewing shut
cold mouths whose sores another’s war

                    xii.

opened before you could return
what fortune your talent borrowed,
this divorce of ours from heaven
clothes our cloven hooves in such wide
and enormous shoes that even
competing covens feel the warmth

                    xiii.

of the devil coming; his wrath
an inheritance of a debt
I can only hope this wealth of
suffering can fulfill. Promise
me you will never let go if
I refuse to forgive my Self

                    xiv.

your failings, that truth still counts for
something in the age of hollow
compliments. Unconvinced by praise,
nothing enrages me more than
painting on the page depictions
of our strangest circumstances

                    xv.

publishers will commit to print
only if I make some changes,
such as your names, to protect them
and the innocence of strangers—
idiots ignorant of the
symbolism under hints of which

                    xvi.

what makes this melancholy most
meaningful sits, the worth of its
wealth’s worst indifference
implicit. Not so expedient,
how fully my strife brings your
sacrifices to holiness.

                    xvii.

Purchases, in fact, any
satisfaction left to be had
by a son rising after all
of his father’s ashes have cooled,
fallen down from (t)his phœnix nest
in my flight from which by grief’s fire

                    xviii.

have I been schooled. Attracted to
its opposite, fast toward the
antipodes of reason, far
beyond the reaches of a crowd
conditioned to believe any
difference of opinion or

                    xix.

belief—deviation from their
script of life’s living into which
they have been indoctrinated—
as madness, in my hand’s pursuit
of pleasure wisdom has pursued
my mind with even graver fervour.

                    xx.

She paid me in kind when I
gave her a piece of it, even
redefined my entire concept
of being until I perceived
Bukowski’s meaning when he said,
‘The crowd is the gathering place

                    xxi.

of the weakest; true creation
is a solitary act.’ That
in my solitude there hides ours,
a singular spark of ancestral
Prometheus thawing as
much as it empowers hearts of

                    xxii.

steel against which philosophers
knock with fists of stones ready to
rocket out of us what we hide
from the eyes of the world. Above
their wavelength, off their radar, moves
this current tossing about those

                    xxiii.

signs on behalf of you I throw
below. To signify what no
one else wants to know is hard-going,
to be sure; conventual
in my cocksure commitment to
cultivating a community

                    xxiv.

of the unconventional,
at crafting controversy I
excel—a consummate professional.
Underlying all these
vibrations is hidden a certain
rhythm’s tempestuous thrum.

                    xxv.

I am a ship in mutiny,
a spectacular wreck. My own
consciousness is wreaking havoc
on the periphery of its
tendency to make manifest,
by way of Eros, those grotesque

                    xxvi.

phantasms my mind dreams up—my soul
rejects, my flesh desires—as if
nothing else will satisfy this
nature of mine to denigrate
any civilized part inside
to a perpetual state of

                    xxvii.

unrest. A phœnix does not beat
his breast at his weakness the way
a pelican pecks at its own
chest—eats out its heart, and starves itself
restless—no, the self-created
are self-compassionate. They

                    xxviii.

are my examples. My aim is
to become their best exemplar.
A season in that Stygian
region where our sins prevent
the light of the gods from reaching—
from shining upon us the warmth

                    xxix.

of their teaching—heats in response
to your touching my thoughts with that
torch no other knowledge ever
before imparted to the dark
of shallower waters. ‘Put your
head above the parapet,’ is

                    xxx.

how it went, sighs of saphhire strangle
flowers sweating under moonlight
ever since. Whispers into
ears of worshipers, ‘Analyze
what you idolize,’ that this gift
comes with a price—obligates one

                    xxxi.

to respond. Such as how desire
grows out of lack, wanting what we
do not have begets what cannot
be paid back. Art as a
profession is the selling of
one’s soul, profiting from its pouring

                    xxxii.

out what cannot be returned
to its source. To be prophetic
is to always be running from
One’s origin into your arms.
Theurgic in my working, this
ultra-Borden aversion to

                    xxxiii.

the modern makes seem less ancient
my burning out going from micro-
to macrocosm before dawn.
Playing down in their hometowns the
challenge we forever face when,
with the aplomb of sages filling

                    xxxiv.

pages with apocalypses
in the digital age of
instantaneous disgrace, we
bomb, and bomb so well; singled out
and shamed for being so shameless
in the handling of our fame. Feared

                    xxxv.

such that those villagers finger
us, instead of the real culprits—
themselves—as if burdening true
Titans with their blame impresses
Atlas—who could not care less about
them—or rids the world any

                    xxxvi.

more of the dead weight of their guilty
consciences. Such fire of mind
impoverishes waters of
soul when so much wit as ours dries
to the barrenness of an abandoned
lakeshore the bowls of those

                    xxxvii.

skulls through which we bore. Trepanning
toward our singular goal whenever,
in my own awful rowing toward god,
I remember you all,
call on your great council
sitting within, and hold in my

                    xxxviii.

third eye vision of victory;
enough to make miracle of
my drowning in misery by
walking on the bones of those whom
I wish never to become. Lost
in a wilderness of some distant

                    xxxix.

generation’s making, by
forsaking them you have chosen
to be forgotten. I am born
again every time I forge
from our bond a force stronger than
the chain of being magicians

                    xl.

either work with or against in
manifesting their freedom from
the persecution of the blind
who deny them the right to be
knowing, willing, daring, silent.
Do I remind you of someone?

__________
¹“The Psalms: Book III”, [Chapter] 79[, Verse] 8, in “The Hebrew Scriptures Commonly Called the Old Testament: New Revised Standard Version” of The Holy Bible: containing the Old and New Testaments with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books: New Revised Standard Version, published at New York by Oxford University Press in 1989; page 597.
²Sallustius, “On the Gods and the World”, originally translated and quoted by Gilbert Murray in The Five Stages of Greek Religion, published at Boston by Beacon Press in 1955; page 218. Subsequently quoted by Patrick Dunn in “Chapter 2: What Is a God?” of The Practical Art of Divine Magic: Contemporary & Ancient Techniques of Theurgy, published at Woodbury, Minnesota by Llewellyn Worldwide in 2015; page 59.