Journeys end in lovers meeting, she thought; it was my own choice to come. Then she realized that she was afraid to go back across the room.
          —Jackson¹

                    i.

Left-handed Solomon eyeing Baʿal writing-off ancestral
wrongs, how strong their ambidextrous pull
when death’s pallor sets in, guiding
my hand toward oblivion, a beast
of a Borden soldiering forth shouldering
along aftermaths of an incalculable amount
of jagged edges, misery slithering through
the broken-elbow-angled avenues in the catacomb-cataclysm-confusion
of these trenches, dots-and-dashes of no
remorse as rats hurry past us,
my ghosts and me, overneath highways

                    ii.

of bodies trampled by turncoats and
travesty seeking scapegoats to cleanse this
moment of its aching bones, to
taunt our goals, no wonder since
blood is no soap, not the
way these tears flow and roll
over those left out, I go
cold, scrubbing raw with my brusque
flaws onlookers who gawp and goad,
stolen wool steeled by a tradition
of statues, how my beard pierces

                    iii.

more than it blows, mercenary philosopher
flying Stoic, AWOL as my great-grandfather
was from the Battle of the
Somme, coming down with something someone,
no doubt, will spin from an
experience into a symptom of some
syndrome, naming for themselves what they
never witnessed, these vindictive fingers tapping-out
digital invectives from the fringes, ceaseless
head-to-tail existence versed in Ouroboric logic
ringed with living symbols, talk about

                    iv.

getting me off, maybe I’ll go
all Antinöus, drown in the Nile,
become a god, married as I
am to a Scot, brogue coming
out of my throat from him
filling it with his accent’s thick
load, think of this glimpse of
my circular brand of madness as
an exclusive, candid up-skirt panty-shot, genderfucking
firebrand rendering what I tender with
no guilt and nothing under the

                    v.

kilt, no time to Waite, MacGregor
Mathers’ kindred and livid, Boleskine-woke and
spirited, assumed name and mass-marketed image,
always below the belt and how
relevant that, after his own apotheosis,
his tormented lover was the Highlands’
eventual (attempted) Roman conqueror, now old
Hadrian’s going soft, afflicted with an
addiction to lingering kisses and remembered
caresses, mourning flesh, enamoured of a
legend he wrote, more fire in

                    vi.

his heart than his balls, too
into building walls, vainer than a
widowered motherfucker, cutting himself apart from
the universal pulse, not hard enough
on these imposters running mouths, historians,
or so they are called, flapping
albatrosses making ill-tempered with their idle-atrous
libels and slanders our loss, how
Christian of them to traffic in
gossip, Messianic Complexes kicking-in teeth, clogging-up
the immaculate waste of negative space

                    vii.

which is pregnant pause, filling-in silence
with bridges burns lips with songs
hitting home what causes change to
occur, breath is just magic speech
vibrating cosmos at all costs until
it turns thoughts to solid parts
of us another wanted to touch
but was too timid to ask
for from the start, every ritual
is a prayer, a poem haunting
cerebral corridors with hollering calls which

                    viii.

crawl mental halls hallowing the physical
so far its visual solidifies images
too small to account for into
mythologies we eventually fall for, in
the ancient world every written word
was read aloud, never internalized but
articulated for an audience, letters were
the voice of their authors, correspondents
performers in a play of vowels
flirting with consonants, the more offensive
the taunts of my angels the

                    ix.

more effectual the response to my
appeal for my guardians of my
genius to make war on those
who seek to make war on
me, courageous couriers returning to fools
their cruel discourtesy, no one interferes
with a man endeared to sorcery,
not when he nears the completion
of his great work so early
in the morning, alchemizing with subliminal
verve, this horrid, florid verbiage, this

                    x.

logorrhea, dissolving order into chaos the
way Crowley was blackballed by the
Golden Dawn for clawing it apart
from within, only after making off
with every secret he went on
to publish, like him I am
laughing, more bornless than born again,
this way I always win, by
saying into being what I will
to happen, how intention elevates mundane
routine to something divine and magical.

__________
¹Shirley Jackson, “Chapter 2”, Section 2, of The Haunting of Hill House, published at London by Arcturus in 2020; page 45.