*
my pruned tree love,
with without the fruit
i am allowed,
and not allowed to eat,
my cherry bush
that burns but does not burn
with words that leap,
but never leave the mouth,
between the plum unborn,
the plum consumed,
the candied flame that dies,
to be inflamed,
between the ashen bloom,
infernal honey blooms,
red candy opium
heirloom charms,
i wait for fire fruit
to burst from poppy lips,
between the bite that is,
and that is not.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
poem from muse candy
*
its seems your lingering trace
now makes the fickle muse,
who left me in a barren place,
for weeks of years and years of weeks,
approach for what she excavates.
she bleeds my verse so she can have,
a sex slave salve to tweak her cheeks.
dark and darkness are her mirrors,
she reflects the sun at night.
mirrors mother daughter mother,
caught within beguiling lights,
mirrors mirrors of delight.
we cleave so tight beneath her sight,
like bullets in a smoking gun.
she loads me to your knees on fire,
inflames the light’s desire for night,
until we’re wrung through mirrors hung
with vexing sexy razor wire,
until your verse from her from me,
is flung out like a pistol’s tongue.
your verse her verse now fully free,
secures the children’s future house,
destroys the loveless golden gyre.
and from your muse’s mouth i bring
a coupled bed to breed our blood,
and to conspire poet’s schemes,
and baptize with cream fire.
my red mouth is your mother muse,
i use with tender sex abuse,
that forces silver dire verse
to kiss your kin convert the worst,
and steal you from the wedding hearse.
its seems your lingering trace
now makes the fickle muse,
who left me in a barren place,
for weeks of years and years of weeks,
approach for what she excavates.
she bleeds my verse so she can have,
a sex slave salve to tweak her cheeks.
dark and darkness are her mirrors,
she reflects the sun at night.
mirrors mother daughter mother,
caught within beguiling lights,
mirrors mirrors of delight.
we cleave so tight beneath her sight,
like bullets in a smoking gun.
she loads me to your knees on fire,
inflames the light’s desire for night,
until we’re wrung through mirrors hung
with vexing sexy razor wire,
until your verse from her from me,
is flung out like a pistol’s tongue.
your verse her verse now fully free,
secures the children’s future house,
destroys the loveless golden gyre.
and from your muse’s mouth i bring
a coupled bed to breed our blood,
and to conspire poet’s schemes,
and baptize with cream fire.
my red mouth is your mother muse,
i use with tender sex abuse,
that forces silver dire verse
to kiss your kin convert the worst,
and steal you from the wedding hearse.
poem from muse candy
bird candy
root of my seed,
she’s the fruit of my need,
and the peal of my cry.
i quell the death knells,
in the chimes and the bells,
and i steal the crime sky.
the flower of youth,
and the nectar of truth,
will be cultured relief.
the sleep she will reap,
with a seed heavy breeze,
is a wet dreams’ unease.
she comes rule of thumb,
sighing thigh after thigh,
from a knot i untie.
and by drums she eats plums
when the sugar bird flies
to the tree fruit in pies.
root of my seed,
she’s the fruit of my need,
and the peal of my cry.
i quell the death knells,
in the chimes and the bells,
and i steal the crime sky.
the flower of youth,
and the nectar of truth,
will be cultured relief.
the sleep she will reap,
with a seed heavy breeze,
is a wet dreams’ unease.
she comes rule of thumb,
sighing thigh after thigh,
from a knot i untie.
and by drums she eats plums
when the sugar bird flies
to the tree fruit in pies.
poem from muse candy
*
i garland your slender swanlike neck
with hungry licks and kisses
pressed from candy lips,
where legs intersect,
and crown your pouting head
with phallus candy erect,
and offer breast shaped thoughts
to feed your need,
and sate your evil impulse
with infinite love and sex.
i garland your slender swanlike neck
with hungry licks and kisses
pressed from candy lips,
where legs intersect,
and crown your pouting head
with phallus candy erect,
and offer breast shaped thoughts
to feed your need,
and sate your evil impulse
with infinite love and sex.
poem from muse candy
*
i'll make the floor,
beneath the golden table,
where you cherish
the perishables,
the bread of rising babel,
the stable where i'll whore
my poem's beat,
until i perish
from the heat
of our unstable wars.
i'll let seep deep
into my bone
the tiny drone of meat
you might release
from high heeled feet.
even dogs drink
what their mistress sneaks,
and poets too,
take scraps that pass,
in worlds crass,
for pearls folded into grass,
beneath the outcast sea
of well heeled feet,
that kick at love,
and shove at licks,
and stoop so far
to let their pet neglected kiss
the dripping fat
from calves and bliss,
that must be kept.
i'll make the floor,
beneath the golden table,
where you cherish
the perishables,
the bread of rising babel,
the stable where i'll whore
my poem's beat,
until i perish
from the heat
of our unstable wars.
i'll let seep deep
into my bone
the tiny drone of meat
you might release
from high heeled feet.
even dogs drink
what their mistress sneaks,
and poets too,
take scraps that pass,
in worlds crass,
for pearls folded into grass,
beneath the outcast sea
of well heeled feet,
that kick at love,
and shove at licks,
and stoop so far
to let their pet neglected kiss
the dripping fat
from calves and bliss,
that must be kept.
poem from muse candy
*
i'm a scolding smith and wesson,
loaded with slick ammunition,
cozy with three fifty seven
rosy burns from poesy heaven.
i'm a magnum burst of verses,
in your covert purse of purses,
smoking from its cursed uses,
and worse lunatic abuses.
in your hand a fiery lesson,
in your hip a burning weapon,
to conceal until your questioned;
terse protection from love hearses.
holstered gun for just in case
the legal way you cannot face;
all the insincere confessions
of the manicured professions.
i'm a pistol whipped obsession,
who's possessed by your possession,
with a magazine of metal,
bloody steel inspired petals.
and its hot from rehearsed shots,
but to your lip its curse is not
directed at your vital spots,
unless you want a sexy prop.
its business is your trigger finger,
and its lead a drop dead ringer,
to protect you from what hurts you,
and to enter whom you choose to.
i'm a scolding smith and wesson,
loaded with slick ammunition,
cozy with three fifty seven
rosy burns from poesy heaven.
i'm a magnum burst of verses,
in your covert purse of purses,
smoking from its cursed uses,
and worse lunatic abuses.
in your hand a fiery lesson,
in your hip a burning weapon,
to conceal until your questioned;
terse protection from love hearses.
holstered gun for just in case
the legal way you cannot face;
all the insincere confessions
of the manicured professions.
i'm a pistol whipped obsession,
who's possessed by your possession,
with a magazine of metal,
bloody steel inspired petals.
and its hot from rehearsed shots,
but to your lip its curse is not
directed at your vital spots,
unless you want a sexy prop.
its business is your trigger finger,
and its lead a drop dead ringer,
to protect you from what hurts you,
and to enter whom you choose to.
poem from muse candy
*
i am the underground
of how her body dwells,
the founding sound
of heartbeat bells,
that hide in wars,
behind false walls,
and hidden doors,
or coyly kept
in ample laps,
where cards determine
who will rise or fall.
i am the underground
of what her body tells
upon the tabletop
of what appearance is,
and what its not.
i'm what is found
when lip is
to thigh's lip,
upon the quickened breath
of stolen bread,
beneath wet gowns.
i am the underground
of where her body sells
its guiled styles.
i rise and thrive
in fascist times,
and gagged and bound,
as sexcrime mate,
i won't escape
massaging hands
that pierce my plans
with raw hide sounds.
i am the underground
of how her body dwells,
the founding sound
of heartbeat bells,
that hide in wars,
behind false walls,
and hidden doors,
or coyly kept
in ample laps,
where cards determine
who will rise or fall.
i am the underground
of what her body tells
upon the tabletop
of what appearance is,
and what its not.
i'm what is found
when lip is
to thigh's lip,
upon the quickened breath
of stolen bread,
beneath wet gowns.
i am the underground
of where her body sells
its guiled styles.
i rise and thrive
in fascist times,
and gagged and bound,
as sexcrime mate,
i won't escape
massaging hands
that pierce my plans
with raw hide sounds.
poem from muse candy
*
there is no choice,
there's just an inner tide,
that rises up and floods
whatever else i hide.
there's just a voice
that chews a candy cud,
and ruminates on wide eyed
lack of choice.
no choice but lust
that drives the inner flood,
and vomits up hot blooded
poems chewed and moist,
and full of suds and noise,
likes seas of lasting joys
splashing on the grass and mud
of what we're forced to suck.
there is no choice,
there's just an inner tide,
that rises up and floods
whatever else i hide.
there's just a voice
that chews a candy cud,
and ruminates on wide eyed
lack of choice.
no choice but lust
that drives the inner flood,
and vomits up hot blooded
poems chewed and moist,
and full of suds and noise,
likes seas of lasting joys
splashing on the grass and mud
of what we're forced to suck.
poem from muse candy
*
i'm bound and burn with fever,
and i beg to be delivered
to asylum,
where the stakes are driven hard.
fences are erected,
so that i might be directed,
to the candy earth
asylum in your yard.
in syrian delerium,
from a crazy maid mysterium,
comes the candy muse
i cannot overcome.
in a rubber suit i'm dying
to be driven to asylum,
with your mid-east love
repeated like a gun.
i'm bound and gag with fever,
and i beg to be delivered
to a rubber room,
where i can nurse your verse.
perfect me with rejection,
or with any wet injection,
in asylum
where your juice can make me worse.
i'm bound and burn with fever,
and i beg to be delivered
to asylum,
where the stakes are driven hard.
fences are erected,
so that i might be directed,
to the candy earth
asylum in your yard.
in syrian delerium,
from a crazy maid mysterium,
comes the candy muse
i cannot overcome.
in a rubber suit i'm dying
to be driven to asylum,
with your mid-east love
repeated like a gun.
i'm bound and gag with fever,
and i beg to be delivered
to a rubber room,
where i can nurse your verse.
perfect me with rejection,
or with any wet injection,
in asylum
where your juice can make me worse.
poem from muse candy
*
then jacob's son
stumbled on a bush,
that burned with tongues
of candy apple flame,
that licked at him
between two thighs
of troubled stone,
cradled in the crotch
of hot commands,
where ishmael's daughter
drew her water,
and where her mother
was no other
than the thought that burned,
and turned to jacob's son
with prompts for him
to stake himself
to words he could not slake,
nor could escape.
the candy apple flames
adeptly leapt and licked
their heat upon
the troubled stone
of hot commands:
she would be the one,
incarnate sun,
in flames of tongue,
inflaming love,
and what that would become.
hers would be the word
the world heard,
that he would hear,
when she drew near.
then jacob's son
stumbled on a bush,
that burned with tongues
of candy apple flame,
that licked at him
between two thighs
of troubled stone,
cradled in the crotch
of hot commands,
where ishmael's daughter
drew her water,
and where her mother
was no other
than the thought that burned,
and turned to jacob's son
with prompts for him
to stake himself
to words he could not slake,
nor could escape.
the candy apple flames
adeptly leapt and licked
their heat upon
the troubled stone
of hot commands:
she would be the one,
incarnate sun,
in flames of tongue,
inflaming love,
and what that would become.
hers would be the word
the world heard,
that he would hear,
when she drew near.
literary theory for post-modern writers
whether or not my father raped me is irrelevant. raised by alcohol’s arc, a thousand such small stabbings found my flesh... and its ever raised, embittered blade violated and slew my memory first. to compensate for the loss, i nurtured and conceived a double dose of the other great power given us; forgetfulness.
i remember only that i’ve forgotten, and i’ve forgotten all that’s worth remembering. i remember odd moments that make no sense and have no timeline. i remember events that probably happened, may have happened, and likely didn’t happen, as if they were facts set in stone, or flights of fevered fancy as nebulous as ether.
raised in contradictions i live in irony, where hope is found in a poetic sensibility, which needs no historical timeline for its successful emanation.
in my teens G-d created the heavens and the earth. and i was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. and G-d said let there be light: and there was light.
and this light shone into my exiled soul in two ways; through the love i felt for a girl and through the sublime poetic truth of the prophets. i discovered both together, and my life has since involved the two entwined as i make my way up this latticed vine toward a blinding voice i cannot comprehend. a voice i have tried to apprehend in verse.
the poetry of love and justice fixed its gaze upon my razed soul using women and books for its bait and drew me toward its inexorable eternal maze where beauty and truth cohabit in a contradiction that slew me to life.
raised in blind ignorance, i did not hesitate but to immediately set my hand to imitate the prophets. i knew no better and knew not what i conceived. but i thought to employ their eloquence for more pressing matters. i wrote to win a woman’s love. i plumbed my imagination and mind to find metaphors and ideas that might give justification to my enamoured state in the hope of winning her affections.
ironically, as i combed the recesses of my mind in search of metaphor to praise the object of my affection, poetry auto-plumbed the depths of my past and the black numbness of my unconscious. it illuminated every dark corner that lay paralyzed or sleeping and quickened the memories or sensations i needed to make conscious.
indeed, it was the original intent of the prophets, flowing through the same source of inspiration, that set itself to work in my denied spirit while i believed i set it to work for more juvenile designs.
this began a contradictory cycle. as decades of deliberately forgotten feelings and experiences rushed to introduce themselves to my awareness, it created a state of ongoing crisis, which shipwrecked my love life and threw me into a lifestyle of confusion and poverty that reflected my childhood.
poetry won me love and lost me love. it gave me my past and scuttled my future. it rushed me headlong into ecstatic arms only to entrench me in issues that left me alone in a stagnant swamp of bogged down memories which demanded attention.
poetry taught me that truth does not need historical fact to reveal itself, that there exists something more supreme that cannot be erased, that keeps its own account of events, and measures the magnitude of injustices by a standard above and beyond man’s common law which relies upon a kind of proof that is easy enough to undermine.
poetry set me on the path of rational reality, moral outrage, and imaginative beauty. poetry saved me from ignorance of the past and future by penetrating both with an irrefutable presence that revealed the meaning of justice and irony. i gathered the crumbs of clues from the four corners of my compromised mind, and stitched them into a work of art.
once conscious of the nightmare of my beginnings i burned everything i had written related to it. a great body of work exhumed to be properly cremated. the conscious intent of the act removed much of the power of the unconscious crimes passed down from generation to generation and perpetrated personally against me.
this time forgetting wasn’t about mindlessly obeying subliminal orders buried in me through arbitrary terror. nor was it about managing pain by escaping what my life so urgently pressed me to recover. it was about realization and decision. the realization that i could remain within my family without myself or have myself with the pain of losing my family.
i chose myself with unending loneliness and pain. i chose the freedom of exile over life that felt like a thousand deaths. i disposed of the stinking corpses rotting in my mind, which my family insisted didn’t exist, yet equally insisted i live with, like they were sacred relics to pass on.
and when i confronted, named, and burned them for the sake of my liberation, my original family, along with every relative i knew, fled from me, casting all manner of spurious suggestions at me and among themselves to coax the devils back into their hiding places so that they could continue to deny and cherish them and cling to their horrors still.
what remained for me was doubt and the desire for a woman’s touch. poetry also remained and reassured, just as it had revealed and ruined. i trusted its conclusions, which used imagination as a medium and irony as proof. i apprehended that it embraced the intent of rational thought, and arrived at truth from an entirely unexpected angle.
poetry was my refuge, as it once was the refuge of those who are tortured into mental institutes. as it was the safe haven of those who have been driven out of their souls and into realms no one knows, by those who feed on the blood of the broken, while they seek those whom they can break next.
and because it can cobble a soul out of infinitely small shards of fragmentation and alienation it is the eternal enemy of evil. what evil perpetrates, poetry, in the hands of one who yearns for moral love and tender justice, penetrates and dis-empowers.
for this reason the guilty fear it. their crimes stand naked before its searching eyes. enigmatic, arcane, allusive though poetry may have necessarily become, due to mutilating circumstances, the criminal, like the injured poet, reads the true reckoning of his wrongdoing, and receives his sentence within the words true talent records.
throughout time, whether one ventures to the left or the right, among philosophers or politicians, acme artists are anathema to the functions of necessity and organization, which rely upon the law of crime, though it be perpetrated in pettiness or collusive permissiveness, for survival and aggrandizement.
thus the true poet is born an enemy of the world and can expect only that which i inherited from the moment i drew my first breath and entered into a family which neither knew me, nor needed me.
destined to be an enemy of the world i was delivered to lunatic alcoholics who had a proclivity for carnal cruelties. it was ensured that ignorance, every orphan’s birth right, was my only teacher. i would learn only by blind impulse and the inevitable ensuing disaster. abandoned to the state and the bare minimum, my future was left to chance without mercy or assistance.
unconsciously perpetuating their bloodline’s traditions, my parents marked me in the same manner they must have been marked. driven by a nefarious and urgent drive to legitimize and justify themselves they reproduced their own likeness in their children, and sealed my fate with a genetic gravestone they themselves could not open.
they destroyed my youth with the coarse abuse so common among drunk catholics. and my teen years were butchered with the religious hypocrisy known to accompany fundamentalist protestants.
they took my mid-teen discovery of the prophets and my jewish bloodline and turned my moment of triumph into another form of abject slavery. they chained my soul to the protestant church by perverting scripture and used it to excuse their need to further bind me to their own petty designs.
my soul was decapitated and in its place was born an undead devotee, which lived in my place, and which still seeks to overthrow the urgent emergence of my person.
this man who i was and wasn’t, lived where i couldn’t. while the man who i wasn’t yet, hibernated and waited for freedom’s spring thaw.
meanwhile i grew under a fierce shadow of malice, a vacuum of knowledge and wisdom, a strange and utterly terrifying superstition that gripped my parents and magnified itself through the drunkenness and hypocrisy they sought refuge in.
they ravaged my body and mind, taking reason, imagination, memory, emotion, even love as hostages to ransom to their bizarre anti-christian christian god who appeared, like moloch, to require child sacrifice in exchange for favor.
i was too terrified to resist their dominance. i embraced it with abandon. i lived without thought. i was perfect in my faith. i was not troubled by questions for there simply was no mind within to ask any.
lifeless, i became life moving as if it were dead. i moved as a perfect contradiction, an irony incarnate. i became both a mirror and a black hole. i reflected every expectation and reflected nothing at all.
the untenable contradictions created untenable contradictions. in this way my parents set their design into perpetual motion so that with or without them i would find a way to continue to abort myself through negation. from negation to negation i was inert inertia.
inert but for the need of a woman. nothing or no one could staunch this unquenchable yearning for beauty. i blindly followed whomever i loved. she went to university so i went to university to write her poetry. soon we were married and divorced. soon i had left school to flounder aimlessly among the broken.
but not quite aimlessly, and not quite broken. always the whispers of the prophets played in my mind. and when i found myself falling away from the one i had lost, they were there with their threnody.
it was as if i was being marched toward poetry’s supremacy with an alternating current whose right hand did not know what its left hand did. i poured out my human love in my verse while the prophets filled me with words written with such a perfect hand that i was comforted and continued to chase love.
poetry gave me women and women gave me poetry. through them i was led to examine the history and future of myself, the world and nature. it was through my desire for beauty and love that strength and courage found me. courage to confront myself in ignorance and deprivation. strength to overcome the ensuing despair, awareness and knowledge brought with it.
though i had applied the prophet’s craft to more sexual ends, those same ends inevitably led me back to the original issues of justice the prophets spoke of. it was as if the pursuit of love led to justice and vice versa.
i began to suspect the two must be linked. love and justice. the seers’ grand demands might be implied in the rise and fall of love between the sexes. i began to believe that to perceive and record the movement of romantic relationship would lead to a universal understanding of every social, political, or personal movement of importance.
but the modern poets contradicted my thoughts. they wrote of love and failed to inspire anything other than cold contempt. they waxed poetic but not prophetic. their poetry lacked even the eloquence the most casual prose assumed.
here was proof that romance led to nowhere elevated. even when they addressed social issues directly the poets did so with the dull drone of drudgery which fed my apathy and my yearning to return to the numb cocoon of my ignorance. poetry appeared to plunge poets into a nonsensical world of self inflated whim, where strings of pretty sentences led to classrooms where children were forced to swallow their frothing spit.
or worse, it led to an avant-garde opinion of themselves which devoured even the pretty sentences of the state and school sanctioned baying and neighing, in a self imploding whirlpool of auto-cannibalism that the poet recorded for G-d knows who.
i noticed that everyone wrote poetry yet no one read it. i wondered at this until i understood the difference between the prophets and today’s poets. i concluded that while all prophets are poets not all poets are prophets. there existed at least two unique sources of song and the song i preferred hadn’t been uttered by anyone for a very long time.
having substituted the pursuit of the aesthetic for the meaningful, the holiness of poetry lost its potency, leaving its practitioners to foster the belief that poetry, like the other arts is about appearances, which it is not.
poetry, i realized, was not meant to be an art. it was meant to be the connection with the invisibles, the conduit with which they gave men their direction. when man severed that function and took language into his own hands, thinking to manipulate it into his own image, true poetry escaped into the ether where it ever seeks someone through whom to speak its siren song.
john’s gospel opens, ‘in the beginning was poetry, and poetry was with G-d, and poetry was G-d. he was with G-d in the beginning. all things came to be through him, and without him nothing made has being. in him was life and that life was the light of man. the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not suppressed it.’
perhaps, i reasoned, it wasn’t poetry that plunged poets but poets that had plunged poetry into infantile whining and arrogant apathies. perhaps originally, poetry reflected G-d, and man received poetry and conceived poetry’s half brothers, the arts and the sciences.
and perhaps some men took poetry and raped her and gave her identical bastard children of the arts and sciences: the consumptive arts and crafts created with the belief that man was the source, and G-d a mere work of his hand, with the design of dominance at its heart, and cunning technique, artistic deceit, mechanized awe, and infinite financial backing upon its sleeve.
perhaps this was why true poetry needed to be silenced or discredited or marginalized. co-opted as an art form, men could manipulate the demands poetry makes upon one’s conscience, until it could be used by occult artists, priests, politicians, technicians, for ends other than what was intended. it could be effectively castrated in order to neutralize its original ability to uncover that which is invisible and thus expose all the slavery and torture and soul murder conceived in conspiracy to inflict upon man.
at last i understood...prophets, once heaven’s rebels, whose purpose was to defy tyranny, found that the writing craft lent itself to their purpose. from this application poetry was born. from the dawn of culture, first the prophets, and then the true poets claimed the craft for the liberation of the people.
but another rebellion, a rebellion against rebellion, tyranny’s rebellion against liberty’s rebellion, usurped language and has ever since pressed it into the service of the dominators who work feverishly for the disappearance of the invisibles. they use inspiration to subdue inspiration, use god to overthrow G-d, and thus they’ve silenced the word men need to remember their origins and understand their outcome.
after thousands of years of mis-appropriation, poetry appears as it is today: irrelevant, emasculated, effeminate masturbations or obfuscations. a forgery, and a bad one at that. the ignominious art on death row awaiting execution. the expression of the mad, perpetuating apathy.
meanwhile poetry’s bastard children rush unhindered in their age old attempt to fashion for themselves their golden man, shaped from the artistry of their hand. at last, they think, they will throw down G-d’s supremacy and his prophet’s rebellion. by co-opting poetry’s ascendancy with beguiling crafts, they now push to visibly recreate that ancient distopia where the few will rule the all.
near the end of this long war between the invisible’s legitimate children and the bastard usurpers you find the place where i fit in. the inheritor of eons of abdicating poets who sold their birthright to sing pretty ditties for citizen pimps who turn them out to whore their worthless masochisms.
but unlike my forbears, who rejected their origins, for effete affectations, i surprised the visisbles and invisibles alike by seeking the prophet’s poems, which filled me with the desire to attempt to fail at a great undertaking, rather than succeed at a mediocre task: to return poetry to the invisibles, and the invisibles’ poems to the people.
i conceived my commission to become the present day incarnation of the ancient world’s search for holy beauty.
as if this wasn’t arrogant enough. having found the song of songs in the bible, that great celebration of sexual love, i returned to my belief that all the urgent woundings that need mending are forseen in the struggle for true love between a man and a woman.
i decided, therefore, to re-experience and rewrite solomon’s ‘song of songs’. i imagined that this would intimately intertwine the two currents of inspiration that tied me up and set me free. i thought that i had found a way to submit myself to the same inspired flow that had arrested the prophets without needing to shift my focus away from the overwhelming beauty of women. i could thus make available to all men a reiterated way in which each person could celebrate love.
fool that i was, i thought this self imposed mission would provide a metaphor, the love relationship, from which people could derive an understanding of every relationship. i would give them a cryptic manual they could resort to, to discover and correct their own defects, help others better themselves, while fulfilling the search for the beloved.
wouldn’t this modest ambition, then, console the outcast, succour the grieving, comfort the jilted, guide the lost, enlighten the confused, liberate the oppressed? in short i would reintroduce the passion of the prophets through my love poetry.
yet i, the author and finisher of the text, was not consoled, comforted or enlightened. it did, however, reveal my unending shortcomings, the shortcomings of others, our inability or unwillingness to address them, and their ever growing concentric implications, as these evils move out into our world to become the harbingers of the doom that looms over us. the doomed culture, which is both mother and child of the corruptions we incubate in the closets of each other’s injuries.
beyond this unsought for effect from my poems i utterly failed in my self appointed task. my poetry chose its own direction and conclusions without me, and used me as a mere vessel of dictation.
ironically, in my failure, i proved my own apprehensions. and the more i reflected on the distance separating myself from my beloved reward, the more i came to understand the age in which i lived and was called to address.
the bridge between personal and social issues had emerged through my romantic inquiry. my delusion, or rather the shattering of my dream, led me to desire justice and love for all.
it led to a refusal to accept the status quo discovered in my journey away from ignorance toward awareness, which denies love and justice for anyone except the chosen, who sit upon their mounds of glittering trinkets without either love or justice, withholding the goods and services heaven wishes to pour upon our heads, for the mere pleasure of cruelty, which is the only form of love they have and the only concept of justice they deserve.
my failure to win any object of my affection forced me to master language which revealed all that psychology and psychiatry focus on as subject matter, namely the self. everything related to romance and women came hard on its heels. last came an understanding of the social matrix both men and women are born into. and with this knowledge i understood how ourselves, our lovers, and ultimately forces that control both self and others subordinate love’s passion so that it can enslave all to the black appetites of those few individuals who own the earth.
i came to see that my work reflects no more than the profound alienation that exists between us all. it represents the complete breakdown of communication, the usurping desire of self love over the need for the other, the abandonment of abiding affections, the betrayal of confidences and trust, the consumptive drive to devour anyone and everyone for pleasure, sport, power, distraction, or whatever else motivates someone to incarnate the limitless faces of suicidal murder that i cannot grasp.
at the same time my verse also reflects an unregenerate world’s inability to drive from my inner life, the dream that love and justice for all is a reality more real than what my senses and experience gleefully force upon me. that it is only the bastard sons of some diabolical god who withhold the universal blessings from us due to the attachment they bear nihilist cynicism.
with albert camus i have concluded that “the artist’s rebellion against reality, which is automatically suspect by any totalitarian revolution or state, contains the same affirmation as the spontaneous affirmation of the oppressed. art thus leads us back to the origins of rebellion, to the extent that it tries to give its form to an elusive value which the future perpetually promises, of which the artist has but a presentiment and wishes to snatch from the grasp of history... the two questions that are posed by our times to a society caught in a dilemma—is creation possible? is revolution possible?—are in reality only one question, which concerns the renaissance of civilization.” to this i can add nothing. let my work be its footnote.
no longer a fool, i remain fool enough to believe in what almost everyone casts aside for immediate foolishness, that is, the belief that love and justice will prevail. even though, with alexander herzen i can also say that “i no longer expect anything. after what i have seen and experienced nothing will move me to any particular wonder or deep joy. joy and wonder are curbed by memories of the past and fears of the future. almost everything has become a matter of indifference to me, and along with this i experience the loss of all my beliefs, all that was precious to me meeting with betrayal, treacherous blows from behind, and in general a moral corruption of which you have no conception.”
even so i cannot be turned aside from my original course. broken i’ve become unbreakable. denied i’m now undeniable. forsaken, i have not forsaken myself, and cannot have my love of true love and justice overcome by all the worlds’ cynicism heaped upon my head and forced to grow like cancer in my body.
i still believe, as john ralston saul believes, that “it is through language we will find our way out of our current dilemma, just as a rediscovery of language provided a way out for westerners during the humanist breakthrough that began in the twelfth century. for those addicted to concrete solutions, this call for a rebirth or rediscovery of meaning may well seem vague and unrelated to reality. but language, when it works, is the tool that makes it possible to invoke reality.” to this end i have striven. let my effort be no more than an attempt to compel others to succeed where i have failed.
perhaps confronting, naming, exposing evil, whether in our selves, our lovers, or our world, whatever the negative consequences, is the only optimistic act left to us who have abdicated any responsible involvement with loved ones, neighbours, or fellow citizens.
perhaps it is now too late to complete anything worthwhile such as personal revolution, or ascending the stairs to the beloved’s bedroom. perhaps all that is left us, because we have left doing anything else worthwhile, is the final overthrow of fascist corporatism which has subsumed every art and science. certainly its arrest must be made now, before it subdues the furthest shore of civil society, and renders the issues of love and justice moot.
let others take up the task. i am worn beyond repair from merely struggling to get to where i am writing this to you. if i have not constructed that elegant sentence which will act as a crystal which precipitates the crystallization of the whole, then i have at least laid out my scheme in plain speech so that you, who are stronger, more courageous, more gifted than i, might achieve what i could not.
a sentence rightly written, timed, aimed, released, is all it will take to begin our civilization’s end and our culture’s rebirth. “both nature and history are going nowhere, and therefore they are ready to go anywhere they are directed. having neither programme, set theme, nor unavoidable denouement, the disheveled improvisation of history is ready to walk with anyone; anyone can insert into it his line of verse and, if it is sonorous...” said herzen, who knows what the outcome might be?
those who rule us sense the danger. this is why they have subdued the arts and rule not only our bodies, but our ideas and imaginings. perhaps this is why not only the ruling class oppresses us, but the majority of our intimates also seek our silence. they wish not to have their prescribed imagination disturbed, though it cost them their freedom.
men now live without complaint, indignation, cursing, protest. critical speech is lost, sorrow anathema. what remains is a fairyland of false optimism which, we are told, will be the panacea of all negative fears and outcomes.
while distracted by the bread and circuses, this thoughtlessness lets the worst among us pave the planet black, hurling us toward a hell of hitlers marching over our complicit minds toward oblivion.
“after monopolizing everything else,” herzen said, “the governments and corporations have now taken the monopoly of talk and, imposing silence on everyone else, have begun chattering unceasingly.”
artists and their ilk no longer call men to true love or their true selves but bray in the marketplace, enforcing their owner’s agendas with billion dollar allowances, or a tawdry government grant, and an array of technological tools, from the ancient word to the most modern media breakthroughs, like avant-garde ass shadows of mammon whores.
all, especially art, is false, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. but if you turn down the empty volume, the glamorous white noise, and listen, really listen, you can hear the horrors they’re hatching in the subtext of their get rich plots. don’t doubt they wish with relish to release those self same plots in your name, upon those loved ones you cannot love.
unless a critical mass wakes up today, rediscovers their true selves reflected in the true word, and takes to loving resistance, tomorrow will see the rise of a fascist sun over a corporate reichstag that will not set until we’re led to our deaths, or a box that keeps us breathing, forever separated from those we're meant to love, for infernal experiments.
but today still exists, and today’s sun, while waning still shines its free light over our decline. so i celebrate true love and self revolt. i accept that these sublime pleasures are mine only if i also shoulder all men’s righteous cry for justice.
so i speak for those who once spoke but speak no more. i sing the song of songs. i echo osip mandelstam who understood ‘they’ve taken the seas, our running start, our flying start. they’ve weighed our steps with earth, with bars. but still we have our lips, our moving lips.’
mandelstam, acme poet king with prophet’s crown and pole star eyes knew what was coming should all be left to roll on inexorably without intervention...
your slim shoulders are to redden under whips,
bleed from scourges and to burn in frosts.
your child hands are to lift hot irons,
lift hot irons and sew mail bags.
your tender feet are to tread on glass,
barefoot on glass and bloody sand.
and i’ll burn a black candle,
burn like a candle and dare not pray.
i remember only that i’ve forgotten, and i’ve forgotten all that’s worth remembering. i remember odd moments that make no sense and have no timeline. i remember events that probably happened, may have happened, and likely didn’t happen, as if they were facts set in stone, or flights of fevered fancy as nebulous as ether.
raised in contradictions i live in irony, where hope is found in a poetic sensibility, which needs no historical timeline for its successful emanation.
in my teens G-d created the heavens and the earth. and i was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. and G-d said let there be light: and there was light.
and this light shone into my exiled soul in two ways; through the love i felt for a girl and through the sublime poetic truth of the prophets. i discovered both together, and my life has since involved the two entwined as i make my way up this latticed vine toward a blinding voice i cannot comprehend. a voice i have tried to apprehend in verse.
the poetry of love and justice fixed its gaze upon my razed soul using women and books for its bait and drew me toward its inexorable eternal maze where beauty and truth cohabit in a contradiction that slew me to life.
raised in blind ignorance, i did not hesitate but to immediately set my hand to imitate the prophets. i knew no better and knew not what i conceived. but i thought to employ their eloquence for more pressing matters. i wrote to win a woman’s love. i plumbed my imagination and mind to find metaphors and ideas that might give justification to my enamoured state in the hope of winning her affections.
ironically, as i combed the recesses of my mind in search of metaphor to praise the object of my affection, poetry auto-plumbed the depths of my past and the black numbness of my unconscious. it illuminated every dark corner that lay paralyzed or sleeping and quickened the memories or sensations i needed to make conscious.
indeed, it was the original intent of the prophets, flowing through the same source of inspiration, that set itself to work in my denied spirit while i believed i set it to work for more juvenile designs.
this began a contradictory cycle. as decades of deliberately forgotten feelings and experiences rushed to introduce themselves to my awareness, it created a state of ongoing crisis, which shipwrecked my love life and threw me into a lifestyle of confusion and poverty that reflected my childhood.
poetry won me love and lost me love. it gave me my past and scuttled my future. it rushed me headlong into ecstatic arms only to entrench me in issues that left me alone in a stagnant swamp of bogged down memories which demanded attention.
poetry taught me that truth does not need historical fact to reveal itself, that there exists something more supreme that cannot be erased, that keeps its own account of events, and measures the magnitude of injustices by a standard above and beyond man’s common law which relies upon a kind of proof that is easy enough to undermine.
poetry set me on the path of rational reality, moral outrage, and imaginative beauty. poetry saved me from ignorance of the past and future by penetrating both with an irrefutable presence that revealed the meaning of justice and irony. i gathered the crumbs of clues from the four corners of my compromised mind, and stitched them into a work of art.
once conscious of the nightmare of my beginnings i burned everything i had written related to it. a great body of work exhumed to be properly cremated. the conscious intent of the act removed much of the power of the unconscious crimes passed down from generation to generation and perpetrated personally against me.
this time forgetting wasn’t about mindlessly obeying subliminal orders buried in me through arbitrary terror. nor was it about managing pain by escaping what my life so urgently pressed me to recover. it was about realization and decision. the realization that i could remain within my family without myself or have myself with the pain of losing my family.
i chose myself with unending loneliness and pain. i chose the freedom of exile over life that felt like a thousand deaths. i disposed of the stinking corpses rotting in my mind, which my family insisted didn’t exist, yet equally insisted i live with, like they were sacred relics to pass on.
and when i confronted, named, and burned them for the sake of my liberation, my original family, along with every relative i knew, fled from me, casting all manner of spurious suggestions at me and among themselves to coax the devils back into their hiding places so that they could continue to deny and cherish them and cling to their horrors still.
what remained for me was doubt and the desire for a woman’s touch. poetry also remained and reassured, just as it had revealed and ruined. i trusted its conclusions, which used imagination as a medium and irony as proof. i apprehended that it embraced the intent of rational thought, and arrived at truth from an entirely unexpected angle.
poetry was my refuge, as it once was the refuge of those who are tortured into mental institutes. as it was the safe haven of those who have been driven out of their souls and into realms no one knows, by those who feed on the blood of the broken, while they seek those whom they can break next.
and because it can cobble a soul out of infinitely small shards of fragmentation and alienation it is the eternal enemy of evil. what evil perpetrates, poetry, in the hands of one who yearns for moral love and tender justice, penetrates and dis-empowers.
for this reason the guilty fear it. their crimes stand naked before its searching eyes. enigmatic, arcane, allusive though poetry may have necessarily become, due to mutilating circumstances, the criminal, like the injured poet, reads the true reckoning of his wrongdoing, and receives his sentence within the words true talent records.
throughout time, whether one ventures to the left or the right, among philosophers or politicians, acme artists are anathema to the functions of necessity and organization, which rely upon the law of crime, though it be perpetrated in pettiness or collusive permissiveness, for survival and aggrandizement.
thus the true poet is born an enemy of the world and can expect only that which i inherited from the moment i drew my first breath and entered into a family which neither knew me, nor needed me.
destined to be an enemy of the world i was delivered to lunatic alcoholics who had a proclivity for carnal cruelties. it was ensured that ignorance, every orphan’s birth right, was my only teacher. i would learn only by blind impulse and the inevitable ensuing disaster. abandoned to the state and the bare minimum, my future was left to chance without mercy or assistance.
unconsciously perpetuating their bloodline’s traditions, my parents marked me in the same manner they must have been marked. driven by a nefarious and urgent drive to legitimize and justify themselves they reproduced their own likeness in their children, and sealed my fate with a genetic gravestone they themselves could not open.
they destroyed my youth with the coarse abuse so common among drunk catholics. and my teen years were butchered with the religious hypocrisy known to accompany fundamentalist protestants.
they took my mid-teen discovery of the prophets and my jewish bloodline and turned my moment of triumph into another form of abject slavery. they chained my soul to the protestant church by perverting scripture and used it to excuse their need to further bind me to their own petty designs.
my soul was decapitated and in its place was born an undead devotee, which lived in my place, and which still seeks to overthrow the urgent emergence of my person.
this man who i was and wasn’t, lived where i couldn’t. while the man who i wasn’t yet, hibernated and waited for freedom’s spring thaw.
meanwhile i grew under a fierce shadow of malice, a vacuum of knowledge and wisdom, a strange and utterly terrifying superstition that gripped my parents and magnified itself through the drunkenness and hypocrisy they sought refuge in.
they ravaged my body and mind, taking reason, imagination, memory, emotion, even love as hostages to ransom to their bizarre anti-christian christian god who appeared, like moloch, to require child sacrifice in exchange for favor.
i was too terrified to resist their dominance. i embraced it with abandon. i lived without thought. i was perfect in my faith. i was not troubled by questions for there simply was no mind within to ask any.
lifeless, i became life moving as if it were dead. i moved as a perfect contradiction, an irony incarnate. i became both a mirror and a black hole. i reflected every expectation and reflected nothing at all.
the untenable contradictions created untenable contradictions. in this way my parents set their design into perpetual motion so that with or without them i would find a way to continue to abort myself through negation. from negation to negation i was inert inertia.
inert but for the need of a woman. nothing or no one could staunch this unquenchable yearning for beauty. i blindly followed whomever i loved. she went to university so i went to university to write her poetry. soon we were married and divorced. soon i had left school to flounder aimlessly among the broken.
but not quite aimlessly, and not quite broken. always the whispers of the prophets played in my mind. and when i found myself falling away from the one i had lost, they were there with their threnody.
it was as if i was being marched toward poetry’s supremacy with an alternating current whose right hand did not know what its left hand did. i poured out my human love in my verse while the prophets filled me with words written with such a perfect hand that i was comforted and continued to chase love.
poetry gave me women and women gave me poetry. through them i was led to examine the history and future of myself, the world and nature. it was through my desire for beauty and love that strength and courage found me. courage to confront myself in ignorance and deprivation. strength to overcome the ensuing despair, awareness and knowledge brought with it.
though i had applied the prophet’s craft to more sexual ends, those same ends inevitably led me back to the original issues of justice the prophets spoke of. it was as if the pursuit of love led to justice and vice versa.
i began to suspect the two must be linked. love and justice. the seers’ grand demands might be implied in the rise and fall of love between the sexes. i began to believe that to perceive and record the movement of romantic relationship would lead to a universal understanding of every social, political, or personal movement of importance.
but the modern poets contradicted my thoughts. they wrote of love and failed to inspire anything other than cold contempt. they waxed poetic but not prophetic. their poetry lacked even the eloquence the most casual prose assumed.
here was proof that romance led to nowhere elevated. even when they addressed social issues directly the poets did so with the dull drone of drudgery which fed my apathy and my yearning to return to the numb cocoon of my ignorance. poetry appeared to plunge poets into a nonsensical world of self inflated whim, where strings of pretty sentences led to classrooms where children were forced to swallow their frothing spit.
or worse, it led to an avant-garde opinion of themselves which devoured even the pretty sentences of the state and school sanctioned baying and neighing, in a self imploding whirlpool of auto-cannibalism that the poet recorded for G-d knows who.
i noticed that everyone wrote poetry yet no one read it. i wondered at this until i understood the difference between the prophets and today’s poets. i concluded that while all prophets are poets not all poets are prophets. there existed at least two unique sources of song and the song i preferred hadn’t been uttered by anyone for a very long time.
having substituted the pursuit of the aesthetic for the meaningful, the holiness of poetry lost its potency, leaving its practitioners to foster the belief that poetry, like the other arts is about appearances, which it is not.
poetry, i realized, was not meant to be an art. it was meant to be the connection with the invisibles, the conduit with which they gave men their direction. when man severed that function and took language into his own hands, thinking to manipulate it into his own image, true poetry escaped into the ether where it ever seeks someone through whom to speak its siren song.
john’s gospel opens, ‘in the beginning was poetry, and poetry was with G-d, and poetry was G-d. he was with G-d in the beginning. all things came to be through him, and without him nothing made has being. in him was life and that life was the light of man. the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not suppressed it.’
perhaps, i reasoned, it wasn’t poetry that plunged poets but poets that had plunged poetry into infantile whining and arrogant apathies. perhaps originally, poetry reflected G-d, and man received poetry and conceived poetry’s half brothers, the arts and the sciences.
and perhaps some men took poetry and raped her and gave her identical bastard children of the arts and sciences: the consumptive arts and crafts created with the belief that man was the source, and G-d a mere work of his hand, with the design of dominance at its heart, and cunning technique, artistic deceit, mechanized awe, and infinite financial backing upon its sleeve.
perhaps this was why true poetry needed to be silenced or discredited or marginalized. co-opted as an art form, men could manipulate the demands poetry makes upon one’s conscience, until it could be used by occult artists, priests, politicians, technicians, for ends other than what was intended. it could be effectively castrated in order to neutralize its original ability to uncover that which is invisible and thus expose all the slavery and torture and soul murder conceived in conspiracy to inflict upon man.
at last i understood...prophets, once heaven’s rebels, whose purpose was to defy tyranny, found that the writing craft lent itself to their purpose. from this application poetry was born. from the dawn of culture, first the prophets, and then the true poets claimed the craft for the liberation of the people.
but another rebellion, a rebellion against rebellion, tyranny’s rebellion against liberty’s rebellion, usurped language and has ever since pressed it into the service of the dominators who work feverishly for the disappearance of the invisibles. they use inspiration to subdue inspiration, use god to overthrow G-d, and thus they’ve silenced the word men need to remember their origins and understand their outcome.
after thousands of years of mis-appropriation, poetry appears as it is today: irrelevant, emasculated, effeminate masturbations or obfuscations. a forgery, and a bad one at that. the ignominious art on death row awaiting execution. the expression of the mad, perpetuating apathy.
meanwhile poetry’s bastard children rush unhindered in their age old attempt to fashion for themselves their golden man, shaped from the artistry of their hand. at last, they think, they will throw down G-d’s supremacy and his prophet’s rebellion. by co-opting poetry’s ascendancy with beguiling crafts, they now push to visibly recreate that ancient distopia where the few will rule the all.
near the end of this long war between the invisible’s legitimate children and the bastard usurpers you find the place where i fit in. the inheritor of eons of abdicating poets who sold their birthright to sing pretty ditties for citizen pimps who turn them out to whore their worthless masochisms.
but unlike my forbears, who rejected their origins, for effete affectations, i surprised the visisbles and invisibles alike by seeking the prophet’s poems, which filled me with the desire to attempt to fail at a great undertaking, rather than succeed at a mediocre task: to return poetry to the invisibles, and the invisibles’ poems to the people.
i conceived my commission to become the present day incarnation of the ancient world’s search for holy beauty.
as if this wasn’t arrogant enough. having found the song of songs in the bible, that great celebration of sexual love, i returned to my belief that all the urgent woundings that need mending are forseen in the struggle for true love between a man and a woman.
i decided, therefore, to re-experience and rewrite solomon’s ‘song of songs’. i imagined that this would intimately intertwine the two currents of inspiration that tied me up and set me free. i thought that i had found a way to submit myself to the same inspired flow that had arrested the prophets without needing to shift my focus away from the overwhelming beauty of women. i could thus make available to all men a reiterated way in which each person could celebrate love.
fool that i was, i thought this self imposed mission would provide a metaphor, the love relationship, from which people could derive an understanding of every relationship. i would give them a cryptic manual they could resort to, to discover and correct their own defects, help others better themselves, while fulfilling the search for the beloved.
wouldn’t this modest ambition, then, console the outcast, succour the grieving, comfort the jilted, guide the lost, enlighten the confused, liberate the oppressed? in short i would reintroduce the passion of the prophets through my love poetry.
yet i, the author and finisher of the text, was not consoled, comforted or enlightened. it did, however, reveal my unending shortcomings, the shortcomings of others, our inability or unwillingness to address them, and their ever growing concentric implications, as these evils move out into our world to become the harbingers of the doom that looms over us. the doomed culture, which is both mother and child of the corruptions we incubate in the closets of each other’s injuries.
beyond this unsought for effect from my poems i utterly failed in my self appointed task. my poetry chose its own direction and conclusions without me, and used me as a mere vessel of dictation.
ironically, in my failure, i proved my own apprehensions. and the more i reflected on the distance separating myself from my beloved reward, the more i came to understand the age in which i lived and was called to address.
the bridge between personal and social issues had emerged through my romantic inquiry. my delusion, or rather the shattering of my dream, led me to desire justice and love for all.
it led to a refusal to accept the status quo discovered in my journey away from ignorance toward awareness, which denies love and justice for anyone except the chosen, who sit upon their mounds of glittering trinkets without either love or justice, withholding the goods and services heaven wishes to pour upon our heads, for the mere pleasure of cruelty, which is the only form of love they have and the only concept of justice they deserve.
my failure to win any object of my affection forced me to master language which revealed all that psychology and psychiatry focus on as subject matter, namely the self. everything related to romance and women came hard on its heels. last came an understanding of the social matrix both men and women are born into. and with this knowledge i understood how ourselves, our lovers, and ultimately forces that control both self and others subordinate love’s passion so that it can enslave all to the black appetites of those few individuals who own the earth.
i came to see that my work reflects no more than the profound alienation that exists between us all. it represents the complete breakdown of communication, the usurping desire of self love over the need for the other, the abandonment of abiding affections, the betrayal of confidences and trust, the consumptive drive to devour anyone and everyone for pleasure, sport, power, distraction, or whatever else motivates someone to incarnate the limitless faces of suicidal murder that i cannot grasp.
at the same time my verse also reflects an unregenerate world’s inability to drive from my inner life, the dream that love and justice for all is a reality more real than what my senses and experience gleefully force upon me. that it is only the bastard sons of some diabolical god who withhold the universal blessings from us due to the attachment they bear nihilist cynicism.
with albert camus i have concluded that “the artist’s rebellion against reality, which is automatically suspect by any totalitarian revolution or state, contains the same affirmation as the spontaneous affirmation of the oppressed. art thus leads us back to the origins of rebellion, to the extent that it tries to give its form to an elusive value which the future perpetually promises, of which the artist has but a presentiment and wishes to snatch from the grasp of history... the two questions that are posed by our times to a society caught in a dilemma—is creation possible? is revolution possible?—are in reality only one question, which concerns the renaissance of civilization.” to this i can add nothing. let my work be its footnote.
no longer a fool, i remain fool enough to believe in what almost everyone casts aside for immediate foolishness, that is, the belief that love and justice will prevail. even though, with alexander herzen i can also say that “i no longer expect anything. after what i have seen and experienced nothing will move me to any particular wonder or deep joy. joy and wonder are curbed by memories of the past and fears of the future. almost everything has become a matter of indifference to me, and along with this i experience the loss of all my beliefs, all that was precious to me meeting with betrayal, treacherous blows from behind, and in general a moral corruption of which you have no conception.”
even so i cannot be turned aside from my original course. broken i’ve become unbreakable. denied i’m now undeniable. forsaken, i have not forsaken myself, and cannot have my love of true love and justice overcome by all the worlds’ cynicism heaped upon my head and forced to grow like cancer in my body.
i still believe, as john ralston saul believes, that “it is through language we will find our way out of our current dilemma, just as a rediscovery of language provided a way out for westerners during the humanist breakthrough that began in the twelfth century. for those addicted to concrete solutions, this call for a rebirth or rediscovery of meaning may well seem vague and unrelated to reality. but language, when it works, is the tool that makes it possible to invoke reality.” to this end i have striven. let my effort be no more than an attempt to compel others to succeed where i have failed.
perhaps confronting, naming, exposing evil, whether in our selves, our lovers, or our world, whatever the negative consequences, is the only optimistic act left to us who have abdicated any responsible involvement with loved ones, neighbours, or fellow citizens.
perhaps it is now too late to complete anything worthwhile such as personal revolution, or ascending the stairs to the beloved’s bedroom. perhaps all that is left us, because we have left doing anything else worthwhile, is the final overthrow of fascist corporatism which has subsumed every art and science. certainly its arrest must be made now, before it subdues the furthest shore of civil society, and renders the issues of love and justice moot.
let others take up the task. i am worn beyond repair from merely struggling to get to where i am writing this to you. if i have not constructed that elegant sentence which will act as a crystal which precipitates the crystallization of the whole, then i have at least laid out my scheme in plain speech so that you, who are stronger, more courageous, more gifted than i, might achieve what i could not.
a sentence rightly written, timed, aimed, released, is all it will take to begin our civilization’s end and our culture’s rebirth. “both nature and history are going nowhere, and therefore they are ready to go anywhere they are directed. having neither programme, set theme, nor unavoidable denouement, the disheveled improvisation of history is ready to walk with anyone; anyone can insert into it his line of verse and, if it is sonorous...” said herzen, who knows what the outcome might be?
those who rule us sense the danger. this is why they have subdued the arts and rule not only our bodies, but our ideas and imaginings. perhaps this is why not only the ruling class oppresses us, but the majority of our intimates also seek our silence. they wish not to have their prescribed imagination disturbed, though it cost them their freedom.
men now live without complaint, indignation, cursing, protest. critical speech is lost, sorrow anathema. what remains is a fairyland of false optimism which, we are told, will be the panacea of all negative fears and outcomes.
while distracted by the bread and circuses, this thoughtlessness lets the worst among us pave the planet black, hurling us toward a hell of hitlers marching over our complicit minds toward oblivion.
“after monopolizing everything else,” herzen said, “the governments and corporations have now taken the monopoly of talk and, imposing silence on everyone else, have begun chattering unceasingly.”
artists and their ilk no longer call men to true love or their true selves but bray in the marketplace, enforcing their owner’s agendas with billion dollar allowances, or a tawdry government grant, and an array of technological tools, from the ancient word to the most modern media breakthroughs, like avant-garde ass shadows of mammon whores.
all, especially art, is false, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. but if you turn down the empty volume, the glamorous white noise, and listen, really listen, you can hear the horrors they’re hatching in the subtext of their get rich plots. don’t doubt they wish with relish to release those self same plots in your name, upon those loved ones you cannot love.
unless a critical mass wakes up today, rediscovers their true selves reflected in the true word, and takes to loving resistance, tomorrow will see the rise of a fascist sun over a corporate reichstag that will not set until we’re led to our deaths, or a box that keeps us breathing, forever separated from those we're meant to love, for infernal experiments.
but today still exists, and today’s sun, while waning still shines its free light over our decline. so i celebrate true love and self revolt. i accept that these sublime pleasures are mine only if i also shoulder all men’s righteous cry for justice.
so i speak for those who once spoke but speak no more. i sing the song of songs. i echo osip mandelstam who understood ‘they’ve taken the seas, our running start, our flying start. they’ve weighed our steps with earth, with bars. but still we have our lips, our moving lips.’
mandelstam, acme poet king with prophet’s crown and pole star eyes knew what was coming should all be left to roll on inexorably without intervention...
your slim shoulders are to redden under whips,
bleed from scourges and to burn in frosts.
your child hands are to lift hot irons,
lift hot irons and sew mail bags.
your tender feet are to tread on glass,
barefoot on glass and bloody sand.
and i’ll burn a black candle,
burn like a candle and dare not pray.
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