i. A “done deal” done Biblical?
Apostates,
heretics, and schismatics excommunicate automatically.
Priests of pity, poets prey
differently. Writing the perfect victim.
Postmortem priapism. Inherited obsessions. I
will make ink of your
blood and write curses against
your family to be read
and repeated for generations. The
Devil whispers your name in
shadow-tongues. These are true things.
Communicable diseases and
excommunicable offenses
accompanied by a ceremony wherein
a bell is tolled (as
for the dead), the Book
of the Gospels is closed,
and a candle snuffed out,
hence the idiom “to condemn
with bell, book, and candle.”
Encoded in a way legible
only to those in the
know, what’s another beggar at
this feast? I have to
tongue my way through the
different tastes of each guy
already inside to get to
you. Condemned to myth. Fundamentally
unrecoverable. Excavatory and excellent. Reading
this, I enter your body
through your mind. Scraping an
acetate portrait of your faith,
facing my pen melts away
every trace. The character of
the protagonist is fictional, but
his memories are my own.
Known for going about in
strangers’ mouths as a sizzling
quote, as that poet who
gets more shout-outs in suicide
notes than Pulitzer does laureates.
Pants down under a searchlight
moon, excavation concludes pooling through
a bruised cloud, rewriting my
own fate through making my
own art the unpunished vice.
Writing as a labour of
sound. As writing is the
best therapy, and every gay
writer is possessed, led, by
his burning desire to confess,
to justify being himself, to
exorcize the demon that is
what others mistake sex to
be, some demon needing to
be repressed. Setting his work
in the future permits the
writer to express anxiety about
his legacy. There is no
liturgy in this space, but
there is reverence more sacred
than any sanctuary. Verboten as
a
ii. A “done deal” done Mythological?
black-faced
Cher doing “Half Breed” at
a Racial Purity Picnic. Hyper-pathetically,
as a matter of course.
Rooted not in dogma, but
in dirt. It’s difficult to
respect your boundaries when you’re
the fortress I want to
be in, yes. The percussive
elegiacs of mellow-tinted malcontents, you
replace memory with electricity. Pain
is a god the body
worships. Emptiness of space an
acknowledgment of loss that has
taken place in this place,
poetry is a museum of
human nuance. Misery a revelation
written with nonchalance, rinsed of
the colour of the world.
In silence and exile, the
author who dare not speak
his own name advises you
all now: never die in
a place with no stars.
Chance taking on the universe
when you take off. Ghosts
are best met in solitude,
presence and pasts our present
passes through. The only home
that I can ever have
is the one that I
can never leave. Love-lorn and
touch-starved, violent in my want,
art is a wound that
bleeds me, feeds thieves, deceives
by belief in what I
come to see my Self
never be. Sorrow is just
a failed echo, poetry regret
too hard to swallow. God
is the word that is
not spoken. Worshipping in the
vacant open what component of
language goes on unknown. The
revolution will not be televised,
no. Instead, it will be
streamed and you won’t be
able to skip the ads.
The visible chorus of stars,
death as an entity and
a necessity, hungry as any
consumer is for his commodity,
he cuts a cosmically monstrous
figure. Swallower of sinners, open
your mind and swallow your
Self, for self-destruction often follows
knowledge in its pursuit of
truth. Travellers of the afterlife:
hips or lips? Where do
you want to put it?
Arsenal of knives to mark
the
iii. Or, a “done deal” done Historical?
passage
of the hours through the
night when, like Echo, my
body slowly fades away and
leaves nothing but a voice
beneath a swarm of cherubs.
The Hollow Sleep between dream
and regret looks Death in
his sightless eye’s bold, IMAX-sized
ambition. Black Orchard Ritual, the
sacrifice at the orchard’s core
gores open all the more
melodrama’s Glass Vein. When a
reclusive performer’s reflection begins acting
independently, reality fractures. Voices rise
from charred ruins, recounting the
collective memory of a forgotten
catastrophe. Bullets in the temple
to open closed minds tell
of a fable whose moral
was more accidental than a
miracle: a surgeon with a
scalpel in a chapel toying
with the idea of playing
god removing from his throat
Adam’s apple, who, doctoring the
knot in his wallet miscalculated
wealth for an emptier stomach,
then fell to his knees
feeding his faith an unwavering
belief in taking away what
remains of man’s fall, expressing
inside mimed syllables the sentiment.
I guess I’ll talk you
off with my breath smelling
of you. Locals throw flowers
before my coach as I
go about infuriatingly florid, no
doubt. Whispers in an ossuary
choreograph a manuscript, as regrets
gather in a memory palace
waiting to be built, enveloped,
yet, in Valium and vellum,
unpenned. A slow burn but
with a pace that didn’t
keep. Falling for the angel
of another, no escaping Cupid’s
dark Eros. I’m not famous,
but I’m not finished. Ever
an antagonist, a villain’s plot
to save himself: never to
be read again for the
first time. No abandonment by
silence, since silence is not
a waiver of sovereignty; it
is a security classification. Your
beauty seizes all love, braids
it into our beards, leaves
it to die. Sighs without
a subtitle the truth of
this lifestyle’s lie, «Ars Moriendi.»
