Invitation to a Contradiction
“For you the women of Athens
plant seeds in broken pots
then leave the sprouts to die
on the roof in the sun
as they mourn your death
in what they call your gardens.”
“Much Gesture, from the Pulpit—
Strong Hallelujahs roll—
Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul—”
“Your eyes look like two catacombs
And make me think of furnished rooms.”
i.
Best understood through my fires,
disasters which trigger the rhythms
of my instincts, excoriating and
excruciating, the wrought and the
ruined, reigning bruise-dark and blood-bright,
fusing my done-with-it attitude to
another doing-something musing, going about
my latest existential crisis Googling,
‘how to get news from
the dead,’ no fooling, I
ii.
while away doom consulting the
oracle over and over until
it tells of what failure
I want my pain to
take away, to paint more
eventual, more inevitable, the wasting
away I feel, this being
so miserable that I need
to bleed onto this tool
what the Three of Swords
iii.
finally appears to deal, tapping-out
onto this obsidian shard of
an altar-hearted smartphone brandished like
a weapon of art in
lieu of sitting chained to
a desktop, I ruminate on
ruin, type in pixels an
invitation to a contradiction, envision
my shadowed Self a victim
of an identity, knee-high blood
iv.
flooding these towns, broken in
the home of these bodies
we build ourselves, a lamp’s
light really paying its way
through the room’s night, casting
glamours between horror and heartbreak,
I would not be so
down on myself if you
were going down on me,
ghosting a morally grey character,
v.
entering the temple seeking Heka,
speaking Ma’at, doing Ma’at, becoming
gold, beheld as a god
holding-out on no one, offering-up
justice just like a poultice
for those fleshly sycophants whose
wounds are ego-sized and hewn
from inside, heart-holes where hell
is papered in your hide,
paid for by lies, allow
vi.
me to betray now a
bitter truth: politics cannot take
away the way taking a
pilgrimage route, the way bathing
in the Devil’s lake, changes
by not changing but staying
ingrained to staying that chaotic
in exchange for what calm
takes place within, the calm
you carry when you trace
vii.
the path back again, the
way Rome falls ten times
a day, the way Nazis
are always seeking grails, the
original of which is the
jewel that fell from Lucifer’s
crown, the Emerald Tablet of
Hermes Trismegistus the pièce de
résistance of his diadem, the
letter of the law which,
viii.
only when written in breath
on the mirror of the
spirits, draws near to them
who quest the reward for
being bravest facing their own
demon, knowing they alone are
the only Satan, that is,
if you get what I
am now saying, catching the
drift of my riff: when
ix.
you accept that your struggles
are not random punishments but
purposeful forces, your past will
reshape itself to symphonic textures
with cinematic dynamics, glamorous and
tumultuous, manufactured to manifest, we
are wired for generosity and
educated for greed, cut from
celluloid and latex, seed splattered
under the bloated belly of
x.
soiled sheets carpeting the jagged
expanse of a junkied alley,
the real disaster is that
you treat rejection like a
Biblical event when your maxim,
mantra, mood, and vibe should
ever be, ‘If you can’t
beat ’em off, then join
in!’ Never give your Self
permission, but forgiveness, and then
xi.
some, to become the heroin
of your own ＃WhoriginStory you
allow your craving to pen,
media, martyrdom, and marginality letting
the elements eat you, consider
disintegrating instead of corroding, do
not let complacency defeat you,
do as Neil did and
trust that rust never sleeps,
time sweeps everything by, Young
xii.
forever echoing a sigh, ploughing
an idiosyncratic furrow in which
to sink and sow the
sick and sorrow of my
blown mind, receive with bafflement
my black-and-white fable’s moral: weapons
of education enable cruel beauties
to perform heartaches more miserably,
my public face is on
the page, raising to surface
xiii.
my rage the mistake your
glare is about to make,
a synonym is not a
definition, a symptom is not
a death sentence, more Altamont
than Woodstock, I am a
novelist not an optimist, and
I am finally fine with
that, or almost, for once,
dissonant hymn to ruinous whims.
