Obsidian Aura
“It is dark in the alley because we have removed the light from those things we would much rather not examine. But the desire to examine them, to bring them to light, to form the unformed thoughts into a logical presentation, is the desire to create art.”
“I’m happy enough not to want to kill myself.”
i.
Echo was left empty in
payment for something not taken,
the way my throat loves
cancer, from the delicate toward
the analytic, pathetic the way
without the why he dresses
like a prostitute who works
funerals, to star in an
argument, beyond needing to be
understood, on the comeback trail,
your voice could fill my
throat, feel nice wrapped around
my chorus, hold out until
I almost choke, beauty enough
to embody a paradox, observed
more than I deserved, overwrought,
talked-of(f), a hymn to
the saffron-veiled goddess of ghosts,
you need the altared ego
to act as a grounded
wire or you would be
shattered, we are always at
the centre of our universe,
provided we draw the lines, an
education in keeping with keeping
my Self forsaken, god enough
for you, tarot is a
silent film that plays differently
every time you shuffle the
deck, the reader is the
projectionist, the alchemist of the
ii.
image, showing us how to
watch the movie of our
own lives, more electrical than
ethical, paraphrasing Didion, these moments
aren’t a movie, each instance
is a cutting room experience,
absence makes me believe you
need me, wide-ranging in my
gathering of experiences with men
whose names would erase them
if given to me after
exchanging our bodies for experiments,
a song to drown flowers,
hell is the fertile ground
from which everything grows, from
there our ancestors answer our
invitations to dinner, spittle in
the blood of dialect, tonguing
wounds of rubies, as the
seed of the sacred blooms
in the sewer of the
profane, it is the villain
who carries the pollen of
change, the ultimate spell isn’t
a curse or a wish,
it’s the hard reset of
a broken spirit, you make
love feel like punishment for
getting something I never wanted,
the empire designed for longevity,
thinking not in pounds, shillings,
iii.
or pence, dollars or bits,
but centuries, land ownership outlived
technology, training outlived paperwork, geometry
outlived guns, why is the
water bleeding gold? Within this
dizzying labyrinth of rituals, cinema
becomes an act of dreaming
the way King’s was just
Brideshead Regurgitated, the cost of
an education an exercise in
expense, aggregating time wasted, the
mystery persists not because there
is no answer, but because
the answer belongs to an
empire that no longer exists,
why the successor state inherited
a lie, under the doctrine
of Sovereign Immunity, state property
cannot be lost or abandoned,
title persists and can be
claimed in perpetuity, the racist
who takes his coffee black,
who takes nothing back, I’ve
a thing for tragic love,
I guess, longwindedness, and guys
I wish I could fix,
you hadn’t the balls to
explicitly reject, but the implication
the silence paints resonates just
as painful exiled to Paris
to die penniless and infamous…
