MUSINGS OF AN INVETERATE CROW

MOSAIC

Musings of A Soiled and Inveterate Crone

ELEGY ONE: LILY’S WHITE GLOVE

Expressing the inexpressible endeavors of illusion.

I am not broken by the rhapsodic apparencies of the blessed,

The blissful occupation of minors

In their dreary preoccupation

With nonce.

But scale matters.

The arbitrary nature of it all is not really my concern:

But scale matters.

Also, diction matters.

And the style of the verb.

Tense.

Heritage of utterance.

Syntax.

Yes, these also matter.

Who dictates!

Who endeavors to rule!

What is the collection of ideas by which matter re-gains scale?

This matters but not nearly so much as those who believe would believe.

Scale matters more than do the endeavorers who would attempt to rule scale

By meritorious imprecations and annotations to unkempt scriptural law.

II.

A blessing is near.

And the antiphons of access approach and predict an embellishment of fact.

Making actual occurrence almost insubstantial in the process.

Talking in the guardian's phalanx set:

Amenities most obligatory in the seance-crowd's winding epithet.

Tempest!

Tempest to come!

Tempest to dominate rational thought!

The chants of the birds; the chance of credentials in the pulpit.

Honorary vouchsafing: the loose trajectory of vobiscum.

A pox upon the hemophiliac cadenza.

Words for the tarnished octifier.

Uttered; muttered:

Unending; bending.

Precocious vast hermitage of being: rescuing parts from the voided whole.

Nothing else matters.

The whole does not matter.

The broken non-blessings of matter do not matter.

Some gems exist in the furious domain - -and these apparently do matter.

And the gem-seeker finds each with his docket and his calculus.

Finding those who matter,

The true seeds of something greater,

Something intended to endure:

He carries these seeds two-by-two, up the plank, into his ark.

III.

The special grip of isolation enhances the cryptic accolades of the archetype:

Associating the grim with the living and the choral,

By the thread of the black acolyte’s peach: sutratma.

Ezekiel's first cross appears in emancipated heaven;

Undoing the calendar's imperative.

Nothing else can even be conceived

At this moment of utter surrender.

Chromium forsaking of God's unclear shadow,

And the message that correlates Time with evocative duty.

The manufacturer of Time: tempos ground out of formation.

Analytical groceries: I walk, and, in walking, buy momentum.

You say: “Abstraction is not your coupled toil.”

Drink up, then: immediately!

Bawd homes sopped!

Isolation grips even the heavy-handed and the literal,

But in a different way.

Some it makes angry; others it makes placid.

Some become beasts, and, in becoming beasts, self-destruct.

Others become giants of self-prognostication: Prophetic Utterances.

Others merely nod and begin to acquaint themselves with torpor, or sad expectation.

Lynching themselves when alone with a thread cast down from black heaven: sutratma.

Ariadne, are you still listening?

The elements act in accord with other elements but remain, themselves, untouched,

Pushing force back and forth,

Pushing air alone between fortresses of spheres,

Manorhouses of molecules and sub-molecules,

Pushing with maximum farce and with heavy-handed literal ambition,

But never touching, just grimly suggesting,

Like uncertain lovers cancantankering on a dance floor:

Like billiard balls condensing air-area in spectacular non-collision,

With air touching each ball but with the balls themselves ever separate.

Cloistered like celibate human archives;

Cloistered like us, in fact.

IV.

I can walk in the ways of these centuries of learning:

Preconditions to the Almighty, and the veritable conscience quenches of law.

I weep for no one.

I listen only to ghost cantatas

Orchestrated by Echo

And passed to my wife in forms of orgiastic belief-systems

Which she translates through the flesh

Into gigantic orchids and fluorescent lobster octaves.

I understand.

I comprehend.

I associate Luck with the finest of achievements --

Luck being not idle fortune;

Luck being, instead, the Fatalities' association with man (a man’s name)

In a very personal way,

Like ravens drawn to carrion.

Noah: Is the Night-Cycle done yet?

The guardian angels of Luck appear to issue directives to the ears of the one

Who can hear such dialogue clearly and deeply

In the language of Archaic Night.

Disciples to the grim clarion of D’Ark Nets.

Others, as these, are not associated for Luck.

Their ears do not hear.

Their eyes are not heavy enough to allow their ears

To function as primary instrumental instructors.

Poor bastards are not blind yet.

The atmosphere means something to you.

For it is inside this atmosphere that thoughts are projected

(Small images),

(Small billiard balls),

(Rattling air, and condensing meager utopias into nothingness,

Into atoms of rattling orchestrated psalmodies),

In which one sees (hears) his own ideas

Reflected back to him,

Reversed once, like small thoughts,

Like ‘thralled smuts, in a mirror,

Held within his atmosphere or envelope

By the will of sheer gravity

Which thrusts thoughts in to visible orchestration,

The brightness of each, of course,

Dependent upon the level of light each can generate,

Either directly or through the mediation of another

Mothermatter or brothercontinuum.

One can produce within himself

The very light that illumines himself,

And, thereby, his ideas.

And essentially give birth to himself, thus;

Participate full in auto-generation.

I am the flashlight fish.

I am the flashlight fish; and you cannot catch me.

As the light grows brighter, the thoughts grow more clear,

For better or for worse.

As the Soul becomes more illuminated,

All kinds of gargantuan sins and virtues

Intertwine, and spill out into consciousness.

In this way one reads the book of his own life,

Becomes aware of his own conceptions,

Some immaculate, some roundly received,

Inverted by cadence:

Ideas hammered out with Vulcan-like precision.

The ideas are then projected onto this material, this atmosphere,

Which holds the ideas in a sort of negative sequence

(Negative in the photographic sense),

Awaiting the light to rise up and expose them

And turn them, once again, wrongside down.

The light must come from the thinker, however:

He essentially analyzes his own photographs.

VI.

It is good to be able to look inside things

To understand them.

But sometimes it is not enough to look inside things.

Sometimes one must look away from things to understand them.

Sometimes one must look at the clouds, at the ocean,

At the face of a beautiful woman;

At her body even.

Calculate the precision of her hidden fluids.

Sometimes the picture one seeks

Is not in the object being studied

But is, instead, reflected in some other object

(A re-flection),

Which original photograph cannot be seen clearly

Except through the intermediary

Of another form and another sequence.

The dream has an olfactory nature

Which presents to the unseeing eye

The staff and stuff of unseen thoughts

Through the cursed gift of scent.

This sense presents, in symbolic motion,

The suddenly naked realizations which are, in themselves,

Something precise but somehow rendered invisible,

Except through the intercession of the dream grid,

By which their tenuous material is made explicit

And, for a moment, apparent.

Framed, and associated, as counterpoint, through odor.

The grid of seeing: it is a very thin material,

Almost like gauze, but with no texture of gauze.

It is a texture of something smooth and deep,

A woman’s skin:

Ever deep, darkened by shadows, almost cubic at times,

Smelling at once like rubies and like marionberries.

VII.

The first time I looked I saw a fresh blonde face;

Later it began to evaporate.

The long legs became a memory.

The notes were gone.

The clouds whipped up only images of bulls in a field;

Of bears in a stream, under fire.

The girl who came to me

Wiped from my lips the imaginary cotton-candy.

The Ferris Wheel’s laughter echoed;

Then, all sound was dying out.

VIII.

I do not feel the same joy each morning when I awaken.

Something heavy has come to weigh upon my chest,

Something moral-bound, and moribund.

And more abundant too, weighted by granite.

The void.

The crushing, through compacting,

Of each element back into the primordial mass.

That is Death, is it not?

Subtraction of matter back into its original state of Chaos.

The void inherits all and remakes all

And accepts the prayers of none and prays for no one.

It circulates and re-manages, re-edits and re-compresses, ad infinitum.

Beware that you be caught in this eddy, this maelstrom.

There is no escape from this for most.

Some are caught here for ever, ever churning, undiscovered,

Unable to find footing, whirling endlessly inside the stew,

Capable only of chaos, capable only of crime.

Capable only of un-emancipated convention.

Yes, Lily, in this I am speaking to you.

He can give you things, Lily.

All he can do is to give you things.

The crime against faith,

The crime against hope,

The crime against living.

Can you believe that some would choose this satisfaction,

Churning in the sea,

Frothing up some canine fallacy of reason

And logic’s greased slide into marital oblivion,

Rather than to move swiftly through the Door of Love

I have opened for them?

It is so, Lily.

Some choose despair,

Some choose self-deceit,

Some choose the hatred of the Sun,

The cosmopolitan disgrace of fair-value

Rather than say yes to Love’s unerring treasure.

IX.

The future is no longer real, no longer tactile.

It moves, becomes dim; dims light.

This is the descent.

The mountain has a path which leads down the back side into the woods

Of the surly Black Forest.

The twilight approaching.

The passive nature to learn from experience.

Seeing.

Comprehending.

I will look for skysigns by which

I might light my understanding in my walk.

Some imprecision of metaphor unlocking my sense of direction.

I am blind, but I can still read such signals;

And it is this ability to understand symbols

That will reward me and save me, perhaps,

In my wandering in the creosote Night wasteland.

Truth bleeds and expropriates value.

The wounded one, Tammuz, can raise himself, again,

Into the sky after Death gloams.

Feeling first the immobile experience of despair,

A heavy-weightedness in his addendum;

Next, a rebellion against such pardoning deadness;

The Father he has loved, who has grown rude with corruption,

Abolishes his best-loved son for treasonous writs

Published under a false name but with a noble seal.

A rising into light, into the light of myth:

Truth bleeds; Truth approximates value.

It is not an act so much.

It is not a failing of value.

It is luck, blind luck, truest luck, valueless luck.

It is what everyone must want.

It is what the moon may provide

When it has finished torturing the Soul,

When it has moved the Soul into its first quarter,

Where all forms of alchemical magic

Re-commence slowly.

It is nearly Easter.

Is it a wonder that each soul is tortured by the elementals?

Fire remakes everything and everyone.

It is no mere historical notion, or coincidence,

This crucifixion of the Soul.

It is a symbol for what actually occurs, in oneself,

Through oneself, by oneself, for oneself,

In one's own Soul

When a man reaches his firm finiteness

At the end of the seasons

At the beginning of his recapitulation.

Golgotha becomes the man’s middle name.

Valkyries have cleansed him.

XI.

The scale of operations begins to contract.

The burgeoning of the merit-calling

And the contracting of patience,

The shrinking of tolerance.

This is the mean-season, not the magic-season yet.

The cost of re-animating the predating fashion.

I am cold; and the world speaks of merits –

Everyone likes merits,

Everyone smiles when merits are being re-nouned.

The world knows nothing that matters.

I am fragrant with pains and unaccomplished feats.

But nothing else happens,

Nothing but the coming in of Spring;

Ahab’s wetness vanishing.

Noah’s wetness being sun-baked again.

Dry land suddenly appearing as the doves announce

The Earth as kiln

Has been menu-fractured by angels

Just in time for Jonah’s reconfiguration.

It is enough, I suppose.

Something has been lost --

But I move always toward something new.

Trying to find the Future again,

Knowing failures lie below me

In the fallow Past.

Lily, you lie in my fallow Past.

You know this; but you do not like to think about it.

It is a great adventure when I move toward something unseen, unfelt;

The void absorbs me.

And I must surrender to it;

For it is good to me.

The Void teaches me

Who I am

Who I once was,

And who I am still to become.

XII.

I grieve that the sky has become old and tortured by unvalidated claims.

I grieve that the fecund gives way to the arbitrary

And then the weak and rigid.

Lily, this is not your sin.

I grieve that the summer of love passes

And becomes a summer of arbitration,

A summer of self-defense,

And then an autumn of retrospection,

A winter of remorse.

But grief must not be merely the rhetoric of verse.

Grief, when real, is rarely spoken.

Do not forget this.

If it is merely the rhetoric of poetry, then it is unfelt, false.

If grief is poetry, if grief becomes the language of poetry -- that is different.

For that is the difference between the soul and the Mind’s image.

Between speaking to speak and speaking in order to listen,

And then speaking silently to be heard.

So it is writ.

XIII.

The time for freezing is gone apparently.

The man puts on weight and begins to explore the ocean of experience.

But something remains near him, beyond him, behind him,

Hovering in his elements,

Approaching him with non-obsequiousness

But only with great care.

His daemonic precognizance?

He is hurt perhaps;

He admonishes himself,

Uncurdles his temperament,

Beseeches his sake of reason, balance, self-accord:

But nothing matters, no prayers are enough.

Lily has abandoned the dream.

The flower has been unearthed and now lies beside the road,

A demented furious promise lost,

A suggestion misunderstood as an oath.

An oath for an oath; a truth for a truth.

You start; and when you begin to speak,

When you are not watching me

I will vanish,

Knowing this will please you most.

The law strikes, sending him on his way,

Chaos earning emoluments;

And he surrenders to a void of structure,

In which he too has possibilities.

He thinks of Saint Paul, and the road to Damascus.

Lily is the blind eye of the sun that strikes him blind.

He hears her voice at the moment lightning demolishes

His sense of the incorruptible.

XIV.

The apparencies of belief also matter.

But not considerably.

The raft can crash into rocks;

But such a crisis does not stop the water.

The unsociable contamination of love and luck

Proceeding from Time's elastic plan.

Unforgettable association of clan-polish and the regional metaphor of religion.

Mountains which separate worlds nearly as completely as does water.

Some go to live in the hills, kings of the world,

To prohibit free travel between the lowland globes.

The articulate managers of oblivion;

Small gods of local custom and local warfare.

Spreading the campaign against the small rivals

On whose head each casts glances of admonition

And then an axe blade.

It will not be pretty.

Lily was pretty.

Lily was beautiful.

Then Lily vanished.

The world gleams and creates green masters;

And weaves token stories about clouds moving on concrete edifices

In order to obliterate the penance of the masses.

XV.

The masterplan is not coherent.

The addiction to sound alleviates the pain,

But also prevents one from hearing other voices

Which might assist in clearly enunciating one’s current circle back toward Eden.

Hearing is a means to health, afterall.

The rumbling of the oddest sentence, the most lyrical screech,

Is pregnant with meaning,

Even when empty of logic to the one who exclaims it.

Did Dante know his own genius when it was speaking?

I think not.

Did Dante understand the hidden nature of his love?

I think he did.

Beatrice, meet Lily;

Lily, please say good-bye to Beatrice before you leave.

This should mean something to me.

It does not mean a great deal.

I am variegated by turns;

I anoint the participle climate

And understand from it that the hypnotic urge

Has come again to adopt me

Through sound’s verbal vibration.

And I let it adopt me;

I must let it adopt me,

Being the one who is exclaiming and genuflecting before

Meaningless re-occurrence.

The sweep of that great sea does not allow one to suffer;

It suffocates one with a sweet blessing of unconscious instar-dwelling;

Chooses one, not from supplication, but through tonic understanding

That toxic breakage cannot be avoided.

XVI.

The dividing of white and black begins.

This makes vision possible;

It makes warfare with oneself inevitable.

Mars enters.

Mars judges.

Mercury signals to Chastity to get Venus away

Into the clouds.

But Venus is somehow addicted to Mars.

Blood and bone; violence and semen.

Venus cannot live truly with only good sense,

And a protected pocket of surrealism.

The one wishes to blame; the other wishes to achieve.

Division of worlds into the dramatic, and into the restive.

One world rebels and enjoys division;

The other world finds division weak and primarily self-destructive,

Find the nervy Anna much more to his liking,

With her silent night, holy night reproduction of the vamping character:

Winter Solstice.

The two lights divide

And evoke to each man his brother and himself as a tent composed

Of one skin,

With two separated poles:

The same man and his many opposing ideas of himself,

Each battling for a kind of supremacy,

Each battling to kill its alternate true being,

Which, through Time’s constant shirt-cleaning,

Hour-butting,

Will become himself.

Ability to vanish transparently on one side;

Cannae, along the battle-ground.

Nothing passes.

The ritual of uncovering the god of retribution

Beside the god of annihilating remission of sins.

Tere are Gods for each hour.

Minute gods for each 60 particles of time.

Seven Hundred Twenty gods of labor.

Producing vast monuments to the salvation of Time’s armory.

Monuments to existence.

Monuments to progress.

Evolution happens by and through Daylight only.

For it is easy merely to wrestle with Life

And to proclaim Death non-transitory.

But what of he who can wrestle both with Life and with Death,

Proclaiming each transitory,

Proclaiming each an abyss,

Within which exist truths.

Gems for a new discovery.

Mercury rises when they world starts to boil;

Falls again when the cold female Moon paints the pale.

When one is found, one is lost.

When the other is found, the next is lost.

New gems for an old discovery:

Prescience in every step, every facet of uncovering.

Manipulating the broad hammer of excelsius dei.

For the sake of good and for the proclamation of

Nonblinding livinglight,

Or nonbinding lightliving.

One claims he Abbot;

The other says he’s Costello.

XVII.

The appearances change

But the voices remain unchanged.

The voices which inhabit dreams,

Small psyches, small and large,

Each indicating some desire at once immediate and subtle and invocative.

Each voice is a life, complete with a set of impervious, imperious queries,

Ratiocinations, calculations.

Each biding time; then invoking demands,

Determining scales of vision,

Directing the legs and the bodies for tempo.

It all harms no one -- this Life thing.

It evokes queries as to the true nature of progress.

And some blanch at this.

(This word, "blanche" is a pun, of course.

Understood by the Anglo-Saxons.)

Not knowing its full meaning,

In a philosophical sense,

But doubting not its apparent ease:

Progress is no failing, to be sure.

It is the essence of opposition to recessive satiety of the Black Madonna,

Descent into resignation;

Descent into surly dreaming.

Perhaps that is enough.

The appearances change.

There are voices everywhere;

Some even begin to call your own name.

Michael John Clark.

You must understand that this means something.

The force with which the voices insist on your hearing

Is equidistant from your own desire to attain insight

And the inner need to now have secret keys

Allowing you to meet with your inner ancestors,

Who now are calling to you from the blood

And demanding that you expand the brood,

Expand the clan.

The hypnotic state of transferring pain

Out of your immediate region of experience

Into some expressive mode of conception,

Distanced by an intent to find safety:

Scarlet penance associating itself with the lust for motion,

Bound up in the rosary’s circularity,

Incorporates motive;

And motive drives the Hercules’ myth;

Motive drives the standing man into action.

Lock hair and all.

Heart of steel and chromium slipper.

Making flight possible.

Making flight gentle and even associating flight with the regal.

Nativity of movement breeding logic and a grasp of the chorus.

I shall call you Tristan.

Tiresias, the blind man, speaks:

I shall call her Isolde, until you know her.

Innocence is a state of mind,

Not a pattern of behavior.

XVIII.

The first goal of all production is self-reproduction.

The historical shadow of annihilation moves above all other ingredients,

Yet it is only the shadow, not to be confused with the substance, animating the tale.

And animating the tail’s shade as well.

In an intricacy of language, that is always loved

By the gods.

This may not matter to you -- but reproduction of self drives many wheels,

And many animal-wheels groomed by Instinct’s grainy rainy dictate

Of Love’s embodiment.

This generates the world of motion.

Movement being the state of agitation from which life is ground,

And in which life begets categories of knowing,

Grinding two cores,

Two mortars and two piss-stalls,

Into aggravated collision,

Aggravated tense intentions,

Unconscious ecstasies to animate a third.

A seed being planted,

The insane dialogue then blanches (that word again!)

Into rational accord, and grim habit to resist.

The Shadow follows slowly, not understanding the Sun’s new language;

The Shadow follows slowly, shyly, at Dawn, following orders,

Honoring the striding god;

The Shadow rises up at Dusk

To greet the weakening white ghost,

Now emancipated from his own proud bearings,

To be greeted, grained, groomed, greeked, and led

To Hades either in shamed chains or in handsome hands.

Crimes, of course, will have to be addressed;

Arrogances will be measured;

Genocides uncovered;

Empires are built on the bones of the shadow-races,

And on their female coordinates.

Did your God, the Mono-God, the Sun, the only God in the Sky,

Enlist totalitarian systems to annihilate resistance?

Or did your God, the single Light-Body in the Sky,

Generate Love as a system of accord in opposites?

If the former, Hades will be rude for you;

If the latter, Hades will turn you back into Mercury’s ransom;

For Mercury escorts souls both to Hell, and then back

Into Heaven.

Self-remonstrance and self-reproduction are two motives

Which create Death; and then re-create Life.

Self-hate; followed by self-love.

Self-love is the form that Arrogance takes

When it wants to believe that it is

God’s Master.

Still, it is only through the loving of one's self

That can emancipation from Death become prolific;

And generate light.

On this side of the Mountain, there is light,

There is a covenant,

A promised love, a cunt and candle.

I promise you this land if you fill that fatherly body;

If you redsurrect the rose-erection,

And devastate Disorder at the Father’s direction.

I will give you land if you do this.

I will give you a land to make your own,

Which you can steal from another clan:

Abel’s clan.

Mars: Cain is your outer sanctity.

Use him well.

XIX.

The scavengers appear and calculate the potential of light in an environment of dread.

Happenstance being the incalculable impression of tears wedged into tiny spaces

For the comfort of being small

And for the comfort of small beings.

But in tiny places, large tears dominate and distort perspective,

Creating floods, verily, tsunamis.

That is the way it is with scavengers.

In a small space, they dominate, and distort perspective.

And tears are confused with oceans.

XX.

The oils of thought produce the calories from which

Articulated drama emerges

And takes on coherent form.

The reception is made by the light half of the soul,

As it takes on dream matter and transforms pragmatic ritual

Into an organic ritual of pragmatic song.

* * *

But which is which?

If Light is Matter, then is Light’s Absence actually Incandescence.

Is the Sun’s light most pure

Only after distilled and purified

And made coherent through Luna’s

Concentrated Reflection?

How do I view myself, then:

In both aspects of youthful vigor

And in age’s reflected transmission?

How do I view myself?

As a barbarian, in fact.

The coils of satisfaction are usually imaginary;

And the silk is of minor import;

But the fight to achieve the mountain,

To climb above one's own limitations,

With one’s fear being the most primal of one’s limitations:

That is essential.

The erudite dictaphone.

The omniscient calculator of bones played on a whistling stele.

Holographic metre, enabling the stylus to pronounce quests

In sounds wholly analytical and presaging the grieving moré of social sorrow.

The trumpet sequesters virtue;

And builds a wall of bodies around a patriotic noun – the Noon Moon.

The consuming gale eats giant holes in a castle of imaginings,

Leaving the solitary stone uncovered

By the four seers who now abandon soliloquy,

Hoping an awakened sufferer

Will prove more beneficial than a sleeping saint.

They preach to one another on justice amid the claimings of the clay.

Fatality.

Fatal ear-rogation.

Fatalistic and fatuous feline amulets.

Amour.

Lily’s last lingering soiled evocation:

“I hope you will be able to look upon us

As an honest and honorable memory at the very least.”

Men love for Truth.

Women love to take possession of additional memories.

Yes: a memory is a tonic; but it is also a debilitating toxin.

It is not a memory I wish;

For a memory is a ghost;

And being haunted by your presence reminds me that

The Past is an unremorseful grave.

XXI.

The frenzy calculates itself but becomes nothing over time.

All is said and done; and nothing trumps only more nothing, in the way of quaint phrases.

Trepidation achieves nothing but constant self-recrimination.

Attitudes vary;

Congenial tendancies do not prevaricate, in the actual sense.

Letting the broken vow break itself and become globular:

That is the essence of wisdom;

But, being an essence,

Is unknown really, in reality’s logistical sequence;

And cannot be known.

One twists Chance into pieces of Ezekiel's rainbow,

A beard of thought,

Color,

Precise knowing:

Then casts pieces of clay at the sun;

And makes a man who can walk tall and proud;

And who also creates controversy

With the systems in his brain.

Let’s call him Cain.

XXII.

I can walk in the land where nothing is known,

And, knowing nothing,

I can thrive, being equally poor and rich,

Equally poetic and filled with knowledge of practical, scientific things;

For all is illusion;

Nothing is really known;

So nothing known is really true.

There is no hierarchy of minute things,

Or knowledges possessed by pawns.

The basic truth is the foreknowledge of great lore.

Administering the provocative nature of luck,

And making it work for thee, small child of luck,

Small forefather of immense dimension negotiated to scale.

The image is done.

Calories appear, repeat, become something more;

Heat transforming itself into shape, into body,

Into moving form, into complexity.

Mars emerging from out of Saturn, again;

Mercury motioning Chastity that it is time to rise.

Chastity – Lily Chastity – choosing to hesitate.

I walk.

Everything is undone by walking.

Talk is transfixed when walking.

Everything falls:

Everything unneeded,

Everything false.

From Noon to Midnight all of Nature empties out.

Walking cures paralysis.

Walking heals insomnia.

Walking fixes feet to the jungle,

To asphalt asphyxiating mongoloid misjudgments.

Walking alleviates boredom by re-awakening primeval cadenzas:

Fight; or flight.

Embrance the warrior’s death; or prepare to run.

It is a simple matter of working energy down from the crown,

Into the paradoxes of the footpath.

A choice between this and that: a clandestined descent

Down the Tree of Arbitration, to the soil.

The seed inside the soiled fruit,

Descends in its dun-marked state,

From the air to the earth to the water to the womb.

December will not be kind.

The god of December will be rude and rigorous and reptilian:

But he will be teaching the seed its first lesson

In the Art of Rebirth.

Vulcan: fashion for this boy a sword –

Not an s-word, for that comes next,

Only after he finds his God

And slays the grim Black Dragon

And carries his severed head back into the kingdom.

This comes first.

And movement, continual, a scent brought on, a sound,

Death passing in the wind,

Passing away, furious and wind-driven,

Down toward the River,

Down into the bruised plain,

Where He – Death -- will kill tiny fragments of being

In a lament on life's uncopious rudeness toward Him, the Great Death,

For which he must have sufferance.

I walk when I am waking from something rough

And when I am looking for something coaxial

And mitigated by callous happenstance.

Lily: you became callous happenstance.

XXIII.

The fact of the matter is that the dream comes

When the nightmare is forensic.

The fast message incorporates the feeble core

And the frozen lore of the ammonia.

The capable men all gather around the forest

And begin to nibble on the leaves,

For they are hungry and cannot imagine it otherwise.

They cannot imagine that there is more to eat than leaves;

And, so, they satisfy themselves with nothing,

Believing that they have it all

That leaves are all they can hope to have.

These are the capable men.

The savage men destroy many things;

And build a bridge over which they will travel to loot the kingdom,

Building the bridge through the hands of the men they enslave.

These are the savage men.

Savage men own banks eventually.

They all live on Waltz Street and have wives who appear to be queens.

They become skilled in the arts of embezzlement;

And turn democracy into a circumstance of greed.

These are the savage men, the greedy men,

Now wearing ties and suits – before they were all barbarians.

The men of justice all gather in the meadow

And devise special training by which the lowly shall be raised;

They gather scales by which the proud shall be lowered.

They are men of justice, who impress most with their gentle knowledge,

Their sense of fairness.

Yet, when it comes to exacting law to enforce their edicts,

Their meadow is enclosed and they cannot hear the sounds

Of continuous gunfire.

XXIV.

Embarcadero in the trees.

A menagerie of forms which are not friendly

And which do not speak your language

Appear and demand ransoms.

Appear and begin demanding your daughters.

The first association is with fire.

Your first association with fire,

Which can lift you up to contain something meaningful

(Fire being the element of nightvision).

Can also light your way amid symbolic lands

Precedent to carnage.

A forecast of stationary beings.

Articulate friends of phobias and colleges.

So articulate that they increase a numerable constancy,

Multiplying a sense of wealth

From the peace inherent in the cradle.

Fluid in the presaging of past events.

Fast enchantment with the words of blessing

Until self-intoxication overtakes them.

Some of these men are here,

And they are rough with colloquial obsessions.

The heated verdict does not stand;

It alleviates the real virtue of shame,

Hiding the real sameness of proxy

Inside of the valediction of neutral expediencies.

It is better to be silent, they decide;

Than it is to risk the raining down

Of military masculations.

Peace with honor.

Someone smirks;

Anyone smirking will be punished.

This is not a laughing matter.

Indeed.

Lily is not smirking.

Lily has begun to cry.

“I’m not missing you yet,” she said.

“You will,” he replied.

XXV.

The same tone is not applied to every discordant voice.

Each tone has a piety not matched in elevation

And density of flagellation.

Each square of protest is unique,

Even if measured precisely by four sides.

For the tone is essentially rare;

There are untold scales between thee and thou,

Each precious, like a fingerprint.

Yea, we are fingerprints of sound

Walking with our histories combining to elicit songs.

XXVI.

Some "times" are virtual empty bridges

Connecting nothing and still

Extended and vulnerable, ephemeral:

Ideas as a premise of what might be,

What might have been.

Connecting vast stretches of alien lands

Only with the webs of thought,

Without actual connections

Which might draw fore to aft,

Drag past into future;

For the bridges are empty:

Not empty of traffic, but, themselves, empty.

XXVII.

Pardon the ecclesiastical menageries in my midst.

I am calibrated for trouble and vouchsafed for the delinquent unpardonable miseries.

Miniseries on the high water of pitch,

Cascading in the elemental froth,

Containing the rich purgation in the playthings

Of the armory,

Drinking muff and caroling croys,

Abutting with brokers whose only signs of life

Are signals of strife and the constant cannonade

Of cloying.

Fish are gone.

The sacrificial menagerie of form:

Casting shadows on the presumptive archons

Who gloam and ploy and really, in the end,

Believe their own machinations.

They become the moving shadows they once

Mistook for demons.

For they think time will be real enough to them

To make them somehow bereft of fatalities.

Clean of obstructions.

Classically adapted to dreams,

Fastened in the heritage of progress

By ropes and pulleys and gangways and wheelhouses

That cannot fail,

That cannot faulter.

But it is not so.

Man’s machinery runs a downhill plane

When the energy that fed it

Turns toward women,

Turns toward Love.

I walk and see vague forms, nightmares,

Classically grouped, classically gripped, not near me,

Wishing to perform some trick of horror,

Which would be glory in their eyes,

Since the equator’s quarreling expertise

Dips the image in a pool of moon.

This means the image will be

Not only upside down

But also turned inside out.

Judge the mirror by its mere recitivism.

But they cannot move.

They are trapped: they cannot pass down,

And only are felt when the world moves to them,

In their spool of Night,

Clumped around Midnight's ample castle,

Where they have temporary power only.

They are waiting to haunt the living.

But they are stuck in a place where the Sun

Visits not by choice.

XXVIII.

Indoctrination of the billy-blues.

Orchestra of formation of credentials.

Emerging and letting the articles of thought be broken.

Making an emergency gratification out of the facts of luck and temptation.

The forest is seen and made a multiple of each tree.

The nipple wagon is drawn not by horses

But by thoughts which animate thoughts,

By desires which indoctrinate behavior,

For the sake of Life,

And to make the world move;

Drawn by horses in the stars alone,

The symbols of equine-linear endeavors of romance,

Man to woman,

Woman to woman alone,

The heart being a savage hunter of stars,

Orion in a vertex of gray alabaster,

Seeking Isis in her bell-jar,

Isis in her Serious Isis trajectory of astral glassiness.

A hornet in search of horns through which

To blow the nectar’s lore

And suck deeply the sweets

That intoxicate the swollen glands;

For they are new, these long-haired girls,

Black hair;

They do not know their own limits;

They only guess at their own depths,

For they need the admirer to fill them

And plumb them;

Only through you, their conqueror,

Do they find their depth,

The mythology of their living.

The cavern is plentiful,

Especially when you expect something round to appear,

Entailing obituarial cleanth;

Gleaning emergencies out of non-emergencies

Is the intent invoked by those who breathe and breed through crises.

There are those to whom life must be a near catastrophe.

Epitomes of the franchise.

Epic tomes of almost-Greek misalliance,

Bringing one to the oral capacity of stones,

One’s diminishing grit to the heart of the vacuum.

XXIX.

Listen to the engulfing ways to bring emergency to the forefront.

The production of blades and the circulating images.

Ways and means: an emergency of thought.

Evoking the time of life, emancipated fury, indoctrinated weight,

Calorie of form and the heraldry of motive.

All moving together,

Winding the carrier within the pre-nascent

Products of an amphibian cure.

The lock is made to be broken

Even as the key is made to be lost.

Someone knows me, has some sense of my imagery;

Even when I look to find him

The silent icon is moving upward again

Fleeing,

Driven by a hidden emergency

To vacate the arid

Binocularity of my vision.

Listen to the engulfing ways to bring the decade to a close.

There is something magical in the decade, the round ten-piece of Time.

Ten of ten: one of an entity of Time.

It brings one to the full realization

That the tempest is reserved for those able to walk in time with the torrent

And sing in line with the season of disbelief,

Believing always, in the face of discontent,

That one's own beliefs are real and will endure

Especially in the face of those who abhor them.

For the silent icon is moving upward again.

The silent curve is arching:

Light strikes the magnetic field of the earth,

Bends a bit, but passes on,

Touching earth but never becoming earth.

They are one in a magic field of time.

At the same time they shall never be one,

Merely separate elements touching,

Each condemned to wander in ways described

And demanded by the logic of each's own structure.

Rilke smiles.

He predicted the appearance of Lily

On that dreamy day in August 1976.

He predicted the appearance of Lily;

And also her disappearance.

He explains this: “God was hard to persuade.”

Listening to thee, thou Wind, who art capable of carving mountains,

Creating streams,

Driving herds of horses mad

And birds of thoughts into early extinction:

I move not against you,

For there is no future in such opposition;

Rather I move in time with you,

Learning to use you to my advantage,

I learn to make you work for me.

After all, the servant can create the master as his emissary,

Build the master as is front-man.

And, this, the Wind, too, knows--but does not care much

If it is so.

He only moves, blows, execrates.

He can do no more.

To do less is for him extinction.

XXX.

The heart is prepared for anything, because it is under fire.

It is not prepared for the first season of peace,

Which is now behind it,

As it prepares to manufacture something dreadful from the fire,

To extinguish fury: the dance shall be golden.

The heart is prepared to run miles and to achieve almost anything;

Practically the sky is attainable,

Practically the earth may build globules of portentous brew

Of which the heart might drink to find its facsimile of honor.

Eternal wife is the goal;

Eternal life is the cajoling figuration.

The talker achieves godhood.

The manipulator of rhyme builds a circumstance that obviates chrome,

And develops for the top-minister of the seance something incredibly alive and real

Yet puffed with air and unimaginable, and manageable, as a system.

No one knows how much of this is real,

How much can be included,

How much will be top-heavy,

How much will float.

The arcane pragmatic forest is arcane enough,

But bullied by love into the forsaking of grime,

The forensic of sex,

The re-development of crime.

And all the lovers opine their beliefs in frail poems on leaves,

Turned words and happy sentiments, written on Nature's own frail garments,

Passed around with sighs and sakes of bliss,

Like the opium it is:
By loving we all pay deadly homage

To the Opium Goddess who smiles

Only for a moment, before vanishing.

We can collect good humor and pass it around for vouchsafing,

All the moral ones, the good children of the deep,

Who are not deep at all, but who believe their knowledge is real and certainly enough.

Lashing ashes with their brooms.

The household filament of gooe nutrition.

Penniless and fraught with a sense of holy expertise;

The enlightened crew operates the world from the seat of its pants,

Beside a fire roasting marshmallows which are not marshmallows

But something healthy and good for you

Which only appear to be marshmallows.

Soymallows, perhaps.

Friendlymallows we shall market them.

We shall all be rich before long,

Because the Marshmallow God has proclaimed it.

XXXI.

The fantasy is richest when it is least close to reality.

For the beauty of the fantasy is that it does not conform to nature;

It is anti-reality.

The dream conforms to reality, and seeks to shape reality in line with its own formations.

The fantasy is, of itself, isolate, private, and distant from any plan of conformation.

It is like masturbation;

The goal of masturbation is not coitus with a woman;

It is replacement, not ambition.

XXXII.

I dream of a place where no one else is,

Where the wind cannot enter,

Where rain is forbidden,

Where God alone walks,

And talks to no one,

But to His God,

Who talks to His God,

Who talks to His God.

Odd infant item.

XXXIII.

The velvet showcase is an oriental woman

With black kinky hair and too much flesh

Stuffed inside of too few jeans

Showing too much clean force of animation

In her atmospheric cavern.

The perfect word is not made;

But the smile of the woman,

And her eyes moving on a canvas,

Are enough to make us accept the imperfect word

As an attempt at least for some form of grace.

The velvet showcase cannot be known.

It is a showcase,

Something to be seen, not touched;

Something to be looked at, not held.

The velvety aspect is tactile to the eye;

Again, it cannot be touched,

For to touch it is to spoil the cloth,

And to spoil the rough hand with its

Contrast to such gaelic precision.

XXXIV.

The adamantine will is more precious than one might believe.

It makes everything within reach, in one manner or another.

Nothing soft; no continuation of dross.

The amazing grace of the toiling shrew, coiled in the cloth of networks.

Ready to strike.

Ready to strike at the impervious glance,

The glamour of the tripping name,

The wire of life,

Through which the town talks

And tells the town one another's secrets.

Imaginary bliss.

Imaginary craving for words and secrets and other playthings of feigned authority.

He is golden, at noon;

But he is black by chance and by midnight's eerie candle-mass.

Architectural grieving.

Immaculate authority.

Imaginings which are not totally blueprinted

In the forethought of one's Makers’ minds.

Relieving no one.

Causing many to wonder at the powers of belief.

No one knows the real limits of this power.

Because, simply, Belief has no limits.

The earth is carved out of protoplasm:

A mental carving,

A thought evolved through Will,

Trumped into flattered form,

Clumped into motion,

By which it drives itself toward completion,

Void; completion; secondary void.

Binary system of clandestine emanation.

Every wheel shall so inherit

What Vulcan is told to fashion.

XXXV.

The inherited wealth is not real somehow.

What is missed is the most important part

Of the accumulating of wealth:

The triumphs which are themselves the essence of wealth.

Money matters little.

The goal, and the achieving of the goal:

These are the essential elements of life.

The absentee harmony provides a Moons-worth of the gallery of dreams.

Opening the discreet merchandise to the less discrete antimony of

Flirtatious thought.

Indoctrinating everyone:

The Gallic frenzies; and the pale ocean-dwelling masters of vocation.

The water drinking elementals all assemble at the gate

And penetrate the gaze of friendly girls anxious for retribution.

The capacity of the giant to see all and to appreciate

The recompense of the play-zones

Appeals to the girls who understand that when he is angry

He is dangerous to them

And when he is loving

He brings pleasure in to their beds.

XXXVI.

The castle is never really far away.

The castle has a precise way of mentioning itself,

Forming itself out of some substance of thought.

It is a dreamy thing, this castle,

Less hard substance than volatile entity of romance.

Less manacle of stone than beaming eternity of conformed Chance,

Structured by vaporous blooded swords and gowns and common hierarchy

And by Love's rude summer occupancy.

Although the blade is steel and real enough,

And the blood spilled for the sake of power is eternally regenerating,

And equally re-orienting,

With a capability for reversal,

The castle, itself, is made, not of stones, but of clouds and dew and of the imagery of dreams.

XXXVII.

Elfendahl's soft gift.

The blonde carbonation, inside of which a woman begins to grow.

Light hair and a girl's frame slowly, ever so slowly,

Becoming womanized.

The hard girl's edge begins to vanish as her sex grows.

She becomes more vulnerable to desire.

She becomes rounder.

A more full girth of experience.

Soft surrender to something hard.

No longer the hardest thing in her environment.

More managed to receive pleasure,

And to gain wisdom through being resourceful and full.

The magic by which Time changes a frail entity

Into a being of robust feminine clarity.

Harkening to the pivotal claims an annuity.

Drama is achieved, afterall, not in clarity alone,

But also in conflict.

In clarity arising from conflict:

Which is regeneration.

Say hello to what is destined.

XXXVIII.

The grimacing crane stands lonely in the wake of past cadenzas.

He has heard of these great celebrations.

He does not partake of them, for he is lonely by nature.

He does not endure his loneliness;

He enjoys it; he occupies it;

He lets it define him,

And, in so doing, becomes it,

Becomes Solitude itself:

And, by doing so,

Elevates Solitude into a philosophical precondition.

Perhaps he fools himself with all of this.

But who can convince him otherwise?

Being lonely, and whole from loneliness,

He does not believe what others are saying,

Because he has heard it previously,

And it is only a shadow now.

Nothing frightens the grimacing crane.

XXXIX.

Participating in the grand siècle,

The grand fin du siècle,

The meeting group of millennia.

We are near.

The 8, the grand symbol of eternity,

Shall rise above the shallow ground,

And fasten itself to the silhouetted sky,

Producing vapors and wars and galaxies of consternation.

Harbingers of shadows.

And then the shadows themselves.

The colloquial menagerie of the tomb.

Men standing in robes on boxes made of cardboard.

Shouting out the words of previous eras,

Warning against men and against shame and against greed.

The passing era has made a religion of greed;

The resulting contagion does not lionize business theft.

The woman's voice rises up as well,

Rises up against the Immoral Thief

And against his heritage of destruction.

The Earth falls; the Moon gapes.

Turning on a void, an orb in the graceless vengeance yearns.

The trouble with oracles is that they speak too much;

And they acknowledge almost nothing but the incendiary greed.

Seeing a very small outline of the world,

A darkened image out of proportion with real discovery.

The darkened image is green,

And blackens when the light is removed.

Fantastic voyage of lore:

An adventure carved out of proverbs

And out of the mythological horizon.

Forensic motion and non-motion.

The arbitrary concealed manner of the fashioner of anger

And the real tempest in the broken vow.

I walk and I look up and I see only stars,

Only vague images in a land of real intelligence,

Real beauty, not the feigned magnificence of the world

In the breech,

But a real justice,

A real magnanimity:

In the sky, all things are ruled by prescience.

LX.

Concerned with the logical nature,

And its inability to suffice in the presence

Of too much arid motion.

Looking for the well,

Which may present itself in the form of an oriental woman,

Eager for non-arid motion,

Eager for non-intellectual pleasure,

Eager for a swim in the uncontrollable intoxicant

From which their bodies take instruction.

Logic is not enough,

Although it is profound in its own half-haven.

In the larger addictions, it is small, and frail, and stiff --

And it is longing for extinction.

LXI.

Caliber of thought is relative to arena of exposition.

The smaller the field, the more subtle and detailed the method becomes.

The larger the scope, the more sprawling, untamed, and imperfect the work can be.

One leads to the path through the garden, essentially cultivated.

The other leads to the hunt in the ocean.

One lives with tea; the other with a harpoon and a compass.

The one that you prefer tells me much about the size and nature of your own perspective.

Talk to me, and I will tell you of Ahab,

And the great white whale who instructs the entire world

In the nature of the nature of the black secrets in the deep.

Nature.

The one tells me of Man’s intellectual gifts;

The other speaks of Nature, both as catastrophe and in elegance.

One is Japan and one is China.

One is Britain and one is America.

LXII.

The rich felicity of the broken dam.

The girls in their plenty all manufacture smiles and indoctrinate the glories of beatitude.

Preparing themselves for the seed.

Seeking a man to make their beds in,

In which they might find a god, re-made by them.

Naming them, she can so rule.

Artificial sleep.

Consanguine creation of the burgundy breed:

Love's blood and love's bloody breaking of form.

Form which creation folds open.

Haplessly.

One at a time.

The flower unfolding, the petals emboldened.

One lyric at a time.

One association with shape, with indoctrinated pallor.

And another association with essence,

That idea which shapes shape,

Which forms form,

Through the number of the eternal essence,

One through ten.

Sending into exile the petal

With a message of creation in proportion.

All other considerations, smell, color, extension,

Being secondary to number,

To shape, to accelerating form,

Which is, itself, the essence of history,

To which we are still blind largely,

No thanks to Mister’s Vico, Ficino and Spengler.

And if you believe all this,

Then maybe I could interest you

In a used car which runs almost like new....

LXIII.

The artificial impediments to growth.

Ambassador of plenty, indoctrinating the riding

And the overriding virtues into the cabins of dreams.

In an attempt to proclaim something true,

As if truth were something which merely resides,

Like a rider, upon experience,

And not something which must be dug up,

Out of grime,

Out of the earth

Like a treasure or a corpse

Awaiting exposure to the writers

Of history.

Artificial.

Impediments.

LXIV.

The virus is a compulsion to believe in something finite, fixed, finished.

Trying to chain the moving planets into a metastasis of stationary force.

Truth and non-truth.

The fast nature and the punished imprecision

Which turns fact into isolated myth.

Disarming it of initiative or progress or an ability to adapt.

Wanting principles to be stronger than individual formers of principles.

That is a problem,

For the individual makes patterns,

Which are then confused as principles,

Taken to be fixed things,

An inter-relation of beings and things and harmonious preconditions.

But the exception surfaces.

The exception is really the entity which creates impressions,

And horrifies the ones who believe most in absolution.

Daemonic imprecision in a conforming mass of precise conditions.

Time embellishes formulae by presenting them first in their satin clothing

And next in their naked horror;

First in their naked beauty,

Next in their anonymous beatitude,

Next in their camouflage and their wig and bravado,

None of which is helpful to tact, to truth or to friendly formations.

The hemispheres of associations:

One brother is in the light and then the other brother believes he's right.

One brother is in despair; then the other brother comprehends black air,

The substance of Satan, the metaphysic of destruction,

In Saturn’s black and grim insistence on material essence.

Not so much Day and Night, which is East and West,

But Winter and Summer: an annual trajection.

North and South is the violent traduction;

East and West is the more principal ascendancies of human dominations,

Sun Mountain following Sin’s Moon.

Sin-Clair: born under the grace of a December Moon-Light;

Yes, I will begin to mythologize myself;

Yes, I will turn myself into a God,

Verily in to the Son of God,

In to Michael first;

In to Jesus Christ after.

In to the hero-warrior first, defender of heaven,

Army of the rich and chosen,

Those threatened by the Black Monster;

Then in to anti-hero, shadow producer,

Who turns his back on the rich and the sinful,

As Buddha did,

As all Solar-Heroes do;

Who lives with the poor instead,

Teaching them the way out of the Valley of Death.

Psychopomp.

The Unity is the Psychopomp.

The world’s Savior is the guide

Who escorts Souls from one dying world

To the next living world.

To the rich I say: “Fall on your knees and pray!”

To the poor I say: “Prepare to rise up and become kings!”

LXV.

Enlistment of the ruinous credentials appeals to some.

Others are bolstered by the imaginary recompense

At which they arrived at an early age.

Hoping that all love was not restricted to early moments of life

Or to those who understand the traditions of loving.

Hoping that the ignorant also qualify for sweet moments,

But suspicious that sweetness does not last long

And that bitter acuity and conflict also wear a ring

And insist others wear it too.

Meaning has a foot in every door,

But it also has a hat for every occasion.

So one does not always recognize it,

As it has a propensity to shift shapes at odd moments,

Even as it has a capacity to arrive unannounced

(Wearing odd, unsanctioned, unflattering hats) --

It is oftentimes not recognized.

Enlistment of the ruinous credentials appeals to me, at odd moments.

At even moments also, the great sylvester of bribes,

And the light documents of parentage and preoccupation with rites

Is also great –

What is in a name, Stephen --

And the uncouth and the golden and the arbitrary

Are also, at once, or on some other moment, appealing.

The truth is: all depends on Time.

For each season belongs to me, in a rite moment,

As each is my spelling rival in a moment not right

And not clerically appointed.

For we wheel together, but on odd planes,

At different angles,

So that we fight ourselves,

Not understanding that they are ourselves,

Tricked by Time;

Also, when understanding that they are us,

These adversaries,

Then not liking ourselves

And, so, striking out at our self-memories,

Hoping to eliminate our own sins, thus.

We are always now right

As we were always then incorrect.

We are always now hones

As we were always then duplicitous and confused.

LXVI.

Let us embrace the troubled encapsularies,

Who are people afterall,

Midgets of themselves,

Raised on the brusque paradox of the franchise,

Crippled by the rudimentary apocalypse of thought.

Thought cripples; likewise, it invigorates.

It makes one free; and it enslaves one to its forms,

Which are mere descriptions of that thing which cannot be described.

That thing which moves and shifts shape and changes to ethereal capacities,

Moving always beneath a thing,

Under a thing,

Inside a thing,

Ghosting.

Amenities are forgotten.

The calendar builds shapes which are local and act accordingly.

In line with the catalyst and the dream bargain which emancipates locale from localism.

The chains are broken only when the forest is renamed the bridge

And the bridge becomes the lifeline between

Several parishes that serve the journey.

The hammer can remake the name

But it cannot rebuild the existential form of the name.

The sickle builds nothing;

The sickle harvests, not names, chaff surely,

Not the essences of names,

But the undeft forms of that which impels

Names toward formation.

Derelict preoccupations do not lead to a binomial appearances.

They lead instead to a constellation which aborts its animaladies

In favor of its condescensions.

Isn't that wry?

They make me absolute without making me cry about it.

They make me profound without making me pay for my profundity with piety.

They are true dears, capable of insight as well as of anniversaries of truth.

(Not of Truth, itself, however!)

For Truth abides with Reason,

And with Reason's patronymic appellation: Poetic Vision.

Truth is given to very few;

Only those locally real, and capable of Life,

Are given the thing (the gift)

Which alone gives back its essence,

Which is Life itself.

The truth of the living dual nativity.

Thank you, Mercury, for this caduceus.

LXVII.

Calling into the void achieves very little,

Except, of course, allowing us to hear our own voices in echo:

Not our voices really, but the shadows of our voices,

Our anti-voices,

Bouncing off the wall of empty space

(There is no such thing of course) –

Boucing off the wall of full exotic atomic space --

Back toward us with each inflection reversed,

Of the same mass but of opposite electrical charge:

And, so, we can hear it,

It being alien to its original:

Because it sounds foreign but still familiar

We tend to believe it is ourselves returning.

LXVIII.

Something in the blonde women

Makes me want to holler for pleasure.

The anxiety for pleasure is akin, afterall,

To the anxiety created by the spectre of possession.

Freedom has one hand and love has another.

And, in the use of the two, a whole world develops,

One which is this and that and not the other.

Is Constance Jones really the wife I was meant to have?

My ancestors seem to suggest this.

The clandestine imagery of form and formation:

The formation is closed and clandestine;

The form is not clothed in clandestine formation

But is open to interpretation.

Freedom on one hand; love on the other.

Nothing clandestine in freedom, except for its effect,

From which we are often hidden

(Ideas are not clandestine;

Yet the causes of ideas are clandestine,

Hidden the most from those who use them,

Like clothes in which to hide,

Or in which to beautify nakedness.

The real hidden reality behind ideology

(Which is the form of ideas,

That is the thinker who is aware of his ideas

But not aware of the cause(s) of his ideas)

Is a demon who controls

Through the powers of logical thought.

Constance Jones: you were clan-destined;

It was arranged by the clouds,

But the clouds were drunk

And misused us sequentially.

LXIX.

Listen to me; and I will dictate to you certain changes

Which I believe will be for the better toward your own ample understanding.

It is not that I have wisdom or knowledge about these things.

Rather, I am clearly impressed by the scale of absolute precision

Inherent in the median of behavior

(Proportion is almost everything afterall).

The fascination with clans is not something new in man;

It springs from his capacity to foresee difficulty,

And to see in an advanced family

Greater opportunities for survival.

The owl is seen and not heard.

The owl knows things that others cannot know;

He does not fear the night,

For the night provides the mind with unencumberments to his understanding.

Leviathan of knowing: both primitive and cultured;

Documented and classically unclassifiable.

Proud mentor and solitary evoker of dream and nightmare.

The ruler of the kingdom by night; silent watcher by day.

He is good, knows more than he should;

He can inflict great damages against the children of the floor-earth,

But does it not for the sake of glory

As much as from the unjudging prejudice of motion.

Athena is good.

Mercury’s Obstinate, Static And Insists on Chaos.

The ambassador has arrived.

Time comes in, envelops itself in currents of thought.

Spasmodic reference in the habit of tomes.

Books at large.

Books to come by, buy enlarged.

The exotic ritual of self-analysis gives way to

The procreative bliss of partnership rituals.

Apples come in.

Venus is not heavy.

Baggage in the carping metaphor means:

Not too much to carry, but many things to remember.

(Apples to be explored, eaten,

Even more than apples to be toted, engorged.)

The indoctrinating clan is a vegetable chorus.

(Apples are not eaten, are not the fruit of pleasure;

They are the correct method to a better world.

Pleasure is not sacred and eternal.

A full stomach is a right, not an effect of eating.)

LI.

I am not always clear, or even motivated by clarity.

(I am writing by Night, as a good read can tell.)

I am not always lonely, and certainly not always alone.

But I am able to experience dread;

And to be a captive of the dreaded categories

Of loneliness.

Empirical understanding of the vocation of lox.

Captive heritage makes for captive expectations

Makes for captive audience

Makes for captive calculations.

Heritage is gracious and makes captivity emboldened

By the rich management.

Raising the incompetent mile into the futuristic platitudes.

Encompassing the rural nature and making of it something more,

Not urban,

Certainly not urbane,

But intelligently ruled.

LII.

The drinking mentation comes along and embraces the unencumbering dream.

I dream and the world begins to weep.

I drink and the world does not grow merry.

There is nothing in alcohol that makes me alert, or funny,

Or comprehensive, or even more relaxed.

It is all myth.

Some are victims of the myth.

Others embrace the myth, destroying the powers of destruction

With their ability to grasp and to engender light with thought

Hidden in myth’s rosy acorn.

The arcane ways of the mobile:

Excelsius dei: all things being equal.

The carburetor in the cadillac in the pink car nation in one fell swoop

Careers toward inebriation.

The cadillac is a venture:

Bold and open-hearted and billowing toward the sea.

The eunuch is gone.

The bride desires something grand:

A great house, servants, an emancipated dereliction.

It is a fascinating brew.

It is a collage of truths, pasted together in a swift castle of images.

Making the dank world somehow unimaginable,

Disappearing with the wind --

Making the clumsy politic less than important.

As the world turns into the brevity of the sky.

Harsh entity of belief.

Calendar of emotions: doctor of symphonic abbreviations.

My God, hold still: you have a Cadillac in your eye!

He walks into the harbor, and shrugs his shoulders

And begins his hollow walk toward the garden throne.

He is capable of all comprehensions;

Yet he is weary, and does not rightly understand

Many options he has within

Before his blindness full sets in.

Capable of obliterating all causes of folly.

The underground message rescinds the equilateral surge

In the valley where the gulls obtain pennies for each positive thought.

Nothing is given for negative thoughts, except laughter

And cries of "Open Port!" and "Faith Never Cries!"

Cries, which mean nothing to most people,

But which mean something to me.

For I am lonely myself.

And I am prone to understand things which only lonely men

Can comprehend,

Which only lonely men can fix in weary minds.

Nothing is accomplished by notorious pillaging.

Grace is ever faithful, as you understand yourself.

For you are fixed and able to comprehend words

Which do not mean what they seem to mean.

Meaning more, and, at the same time, meaning less.

Complicating the fringe element of chance.

Producing the extravagant manager with the ritual combat of too much ecclesium.

Another dry penetration of the vast countenance.

I listen to the dreary ways of discovery.

It is a solid sound, which penetrates the insouciant smile:

Insatiable recovery of wits,

Through the intercession of the Blessed Mercy,

Who alleviates the monetary ingredient

To shower rice from the highest heaven

On the girl with the ferocious dream.

LIII.

Words mean nothing.

Words mean nothing when they are typed out of an empty head

And splattered across the page like some Jackson Pollack epiphany.

Chaos is not art.

Art is the organization of chaos,

Out of its flat random condition,

Making a shape out of the shapeless immensity.

Making form out of the undifferentiated mass.

I argue this, knowing it is not true.

The undifferentiated mass is Wisdom – but has a frightening aspect.

The appeal of beauty moves us.

Beauty is not empty, not an invalid feature of Life.

Beauty is that formation of an idea within a heart of chaos.

The colloquial menagerie helps to provide an immense elocution of creation.

All things rise out of the abyss and take on form.

Devils and angels, friends and imperative creatures of rules.

From the Chasm we all come,

After the Ore-Chasm is achieved;

And to the Chasm we return,

When the Hour-Chasm is reversed.

Words mean everything.

In the midst of the churlish mannerings of the dreaming physician.

Looking always at the high tempo of the brave.

Making me feel every bit a part of the lucky stationaries.

The standards by which solutions are drawn in the mind,

Knowings both solitary, isolate, and mixed with fraternities.

Coaxial fronds in the mercurial mile.

I can drink from the fountain which knows eternal maneuverings,

Occidental waverings,

Spasmodic abbreviations of behavior: the conscience.

Always there to re-direct; always there to intoxicate the ever-ambulatory.

Inharmonious brigand of choice.

I am able to harbor my love for the winds,

Able to anticipate my intoxications with the seas,

The seasons of brevity,

The metaphors found on the vine.

LIV.

I am not a surgical fellow,

Not armed with machinery for enunciating cures.

The machinery of the mind: tetra mini vobiscum.

Ancillarius cohabitus.

Making me laugh into the farmhouse clot.

Glamouring the boiling cadences of thought:

I imagine rubles scattered from the wheelbarrow,

And understand that such scattering, itself, attracts flies.

This makes me happy.

I am a happy sort of clown.

Armed for the abbreviated kaleidoscope of harmony.

Nothing can change this, at least for a moment.

Happiness passes, of course.

But that does not change this,

Does not eradicate this perfect moment,

In which happiness exists

And I exist in happiness.

It is the way a painting captures time and can never be lost

Merely because the next moment captures an entirely new time,

A novel emotion,

A different quality of light.

So, it is with happiness.

LV.

The grace of the living is enough to help the world to see itself in a righteous manner

And in a way which might distinguish itself from chaos.

Arbitrary self-healing; the rite of essential gravity.

I prowl the empty tracts of nations.

The wind comes to help me, escorting my thoughts over liberties of grace,

Atmospheres of grand operettas.

All for the sake of joy to believe.

I am troubled over the graying of the principles.

Yet something is gained here; something is good in the coloring of all the notions into freedoms.

Freedom from knowing too much.

Freedom to let the world unfold, according to its own plan.

It is enough to watch the flower blossom.

It is enough to see my own destiny unfolding, three-dimensionally sound,

Even if difficult sometimes to relinquish,

Even when it begins to go weary

In the isosceles apparancies of triplicate emancipation.

Walking the day sequence, and anticipating some relief from exhaustion.

Walking and waiting; wandering and wishing,

Understanding that something will rise from this vacation,

This dreamy vacancy:

Some understanding, some new direction

(For clarity is given only when the Sun begins casting shadows;

For there is its precision).

And here, for the moment,

There is no shadow.

And no companion.

LVI.

Abomination comes ‘round the heritage of questing.

Abomination and nothing else.

Nothing more.

The essential dragon inside the heart brings a lens to the boy so that he can see numbers.

It is all easy to believe, like a fairy tale in some red semenous mime.

Mining the land for figures and interests.

The banquet and the storybook sequence:

Something given for the sake of clarity,

Which outnumbers even the draft and the whistling of the void

And the hemline of the city's evening

And even the stoicism manufactured by waste.

(I see Lily walking in the even alone, wearing in an amber dress.

Lily, why hast thou forsaken me?)

Heartfelt and enraptured by precision.

A heart about to evaporate and bulge.

In myself.

I am wise.

I am wedded, bedded, raptured, complete.

Colloquial entity of mite.

Consequent to the nation of words.

Herbicide makes the world evolve.

Triplicate manner: all souls are made of cheese;

And the stupendous riot inside the rain is for love.

Luna forgets not.

(Lily, why hast thou forsaken me?)

Normal satisfactions are fleeting,

For the maker of the calendar appears and exacts some noble emotion,

For his right of standing in the lion’s dark extension.

All stupefaction is enormous.

All hesitancy is emotive.

The calendar proclaims a jealous sort of annihilation.

Previous to the spoon and to the constancy of Time.

(Constance Jones is smiling.)

Primate; and the peculiar animosity of the cleavage between brains.

The one who walks and the other one who only listens.

Exacting the considerable observations among the diatribe.

Tome to thumb through, jealous maker of the beast and the number 777.

Tom Thumb and his wife used to perform sexual excess inside a bottle of coke.

Making everyone happy; and making Walt Disney imagine that Snow White could fly.

(Lily Marlene: I know that you can fly.

I have witnessed your great flight.)

Turning in the bitten smile.

Evocative performance of the Whitsuntide walk and the Pentecostal persiflage.

Harbor inside the fly; luck inside the moving of braids.

The furling of the tempest tenor in the shoe.

A dance made of poor porridge and girls raiding the loving jar.

Too juicy to evoke words; too warm not to evoke the candle to be proud.

Emancipating the girdle and the pandoran prevarication.

As if something else might matter at this moment,

Besides the riot in the loins and the rain in the dragon's chest,

Where he can read numbers

And fornicate with warm fruit-ladened beauties.

LVII.

There is something in the wind that makes the lion weep and makes the child fragile.

There is something in the sun that makes the typology of thought

Apparent to the quizzing franchises.

There is something in the steeples that makes the bells sound in round nobility.

There is something in the woman's loins that makes the world blanche.

There is something in the inheritance of anxieties that makes all humanity one beast of heaven.

There is something in the lax attitude of the dancer that imperils the doctor's daughter,

And entices his son to acts of valor.

There is something in the category of knowledge that builds bridges out of the embassy of music.

Heart building artery building limb building forensic noumenon.

Triplicate incendiary forethought;

And shadow of the corpulent building-man who exacts a fortune from the wind.

Although the wind inherits him, too,

When the wind becomes frozen and makes snows fall, eradicating his dominance.

Horticulture is not for the birds, but it improves the birds.

Metaphysics is not for the logician, but it saves the logician.

Sport is not for the self-conceited at reading, but without it they are not complete.

Sex is not everything; but life without sex is only a shadow of something real.

(Don’t give me that story about celibacy, please!

Although celibacy saves, too, when the world runs down

Toward Nothing.

Saturn be pleased! Saturn be forged!)

There is something that makes the lion weep, in the wind;

But no one who knows is telling what it is.

For it is a knowledge quite dangerous to forecast.

A weeping lion has no conscience, after all.

And a weeping lion has no need of a non-weeping city,

A wind-swept committee,

An understanding superior’s thirst for advantage through proactivity.

(Leo is weeping because he understands about loss.)

There is something in the wind that makes the city weep,

Makes the night sweep over the town and its reckoning citizens.

Soon the night will be over.

Soon the city again will prosper.

For eighteen years and no more.

LVIII.

The prince of vagaries comes to talk about pi’s and commodities and delinquencies.

The heritage of crane, viper of draughts, verity of schooners.

The apocalypse is abrupt.

It comes out of no where like a hurricane called Gilbert.

The venerations are mere prelude.

The skies are built for nominations.

Amber hemispheres in a crown of smoke.

Articulation of the meanest mile, the screamingest bilingual accusations:

Accusers' folly.

They shriek into the void for some especial condition to be surly.

Abrupt consideration of the nonsublime.

They weep; from out their celestial tombs crawl the eighty guardians of rigorous truth,

Ready to kill for a smile, ready to pillage for a word written cleanly by some perjurer

In a dead attic language

Many centuries before.

In the beginning was the Word.

Before the beginning was the Smile.

Truth is not necessarily better than falsehood.

Rigor is better than indecisiveness however.

And, so, if the lie is powerful and profound,

And the truth is weak and pitiful,

Then the lie will triumph, in that moment at least,

Until it withers of its own toxic expenditure.

The weak voice of morality will surface to accuse

And to point out the errors of those who act with vigor.

Always it is the same.

The pitiful live to accuse;

The foolish who act are driven to folly.

It is not always clear who is whom, which are which, however.

For the weak voice becomes strong becomes a voice of error,

Withers, is called on to defense;

Sharing of power, sharing of judgeship.

We are all in this together.

Truth is embodied by some mechanical system

(Mechanical only in the largest, organic sense:

A thought given flesh

And given leeway of the lease

Inside of which parameters

It is free to wander and to bend the law

For a time only;

Until Time manufactures silence again).

LIX.

Archaeus of the franchise of law.

The epitome of the lame ambush as a golden day;

As the evening becomes bold with futurity.

The glass held up to show the lane.

The walker in the sky-clothes;

Going where the obituary cannot follow.

Into the clouds and the glass and the impressions of movement.

(Enoch smiles: “What is your secret name?” he asks;

“Have you met a Tran yet?”)

All couched within a goblet of humor.

Memories of brass; and the British impression, which documents the cane.

Artifice of luck.

Artifice of the collar.

Walking, always walking:

Immense impression of the fallacy of fortune.

I walk.

I seek some bold expression of destiny.

I am hungry for direction;

And I expect to find it, somewhere in the hollow.

Yet one moves and one does not see;

One sees but cannot move.

The expression of expressions.

Impediments to occasions of love.

The warrior embracing the clouds; the glass, the woman in the mirror;

His mind forsaking ambition by grasping ambition’s

Undergarment.

It smells of lavender; and lilac.

Luckiest of pressures:

Pleasure has a hand in all evocations.

And the hand is surely a gift from God,

In that ecclesiastical embrace of dream and dreamer,

Of father offering real guidance to a son.

The hand of plenty.

The woman of love, fresh and blessed for production,

The hand of instinct, infectious affection:

I miss her, this queen of emancipated beauty;

The fundamental equivocation of one who loves and fears

But fears more than loves,

Loves emancipation more than she fears

Losing her man to emancipated articulation,

Through which equivocation she forces him to leave.

Tragedy flows.

LXI.

The matador appears again

And surfaces only long enough

To experience the regal manners of love.

She is the bull;

She charges him, in an electrical sense.

He longs to be plugged into her for an eternity.

She is wearing too many names.

She has a golden ring on her finger.

She says: “I cannot hear you any longer!

“I will not hear you when you shout or cry!

“I will not hear you when you whisper my name!

“I condemn you, henceforth, to silence!”

The lust and the flesh and the conquest of spatial triangles are not here.

The dialogue of spears and techniques of abomination.

Heritage of questing, heritage of blue numeration.

For numbers build surfaces and in surfaces are found logic.

Extension.

Space-depth and the emergence of form,

The tradition of materials.

By which we build the four seasons

Out of the three emergencies of thought.

Until it's time to go home again.

Until it's time to become productive again;

Time to achieve the logistic apparancies

By which Chaos is transformed into Time.

* * * *

Empedocles is star-borne.

The heritage of conquest in the middle zones of neighborliness

And in the oceans of epitomes of good taste and even better judgment:

It makes the hunter wander and look to comprehend

The constellation of Epiphany,

Hoping Diana is not bathing by Moonlight;

Hoping Diana is not angry, embellishing Desire’s blue-black crone

For the sake of getting even.

Epitomes are climactic.

Epiphanies are lonely ecstasies,

Unshared and unpropelled in the world,

Totally vague and meant only for the inquiring solitary mind.

Epitomes are grace moving in a crowd;

Epiphanies are glimpses in a symbolic clairvoyance,

Which do not mean a thing to anyone but to the one who is looking.

In a crowd of ten million, only one, at that moment, can see.

LXII.

The accomplished fact of learning

Unlearns the associated pretense of persiflage.

The talking questors and the vagabond ideology.

Those who know how to save the world

But who cannot save themselves arrive.

Talkers.

Great plans, great ideas, great concepts;

Yet they know very little.

They know not how to make their lives evolve

Into something more than the mere whining at their fathers

Because perfection is not near,

Meaning, hence: the world does not deserve them.

The shroud becomes complete.

They will wear it;

They will vouchsafe their own judgments.

They will proclaim their shrouds (their ideas) holy;

And they will proclaim their persecutors broad.

They know that the world does not understand their own goodness;

Still, they are victorious when despised by the mediocre minds

Which abound in their valedictories but by chance.

I do not know the calendar as well as they.

I do not remember that Time has vanished

And been replaced by the animals of symbol.

I do know these well, these animal-thoughts.

Some time lions come and remind me of what I know.

I am not stationary; I comprehend some things.

Yes.

The heritage I have is one of love, surely,

One of nearness to others.

Yet now, it is true, I feel under siege.

I feel as though some door has been closed,;

And I wish to open this door, no, really,

I wish to, at first, find this door, so I can accost it.

That is enough, in the beginning.

Just to have an adversary to face,

A door to strike;

Someone to tell me what it is that I have lost.

For I am weary.

And weariness grows, and becomes something powerful.

LXIII.

The dragon is here:

The fashionable futurity of supper.

I arrive at the decision to let the world earn its own breakfast,

To let the world achieve its own redemption.

It is clear enough to see:

I am not required to persecute myself for the sake of something gone,

Or for the sake of someone unwilling to prosecute

Lost Momentum.

LXIV.

I must speak a straightforward vocabulary.

Because I am trying to understand myself, not evade myself.

I must speak from the heart.

I must not hide behind my own locution.

I must not hide behind words that cloak their real meaning.

Redemption comes from an honest attempt

To touch the source of one's gift.

Redemption comes from a rhythm

Which one establishes with his Soul --

She who is earthly but beyond earthy qualities.

Redemption comes from an earnest attempt to understand what it is to live;

And nothing more.

LXV.

The fatuous lesson passes; and the catalyst is sought.

To resurrect the flame, to increase the emancipated brain.

To reconstruct the giving being through words and worlds of delicate touch.

Helping to build a world of restraint, without restraint,

A world of order, from the chaos of impermeable rot,

The chaos of total impressions of sequence.

The catalyst will make hidden things appear;

It will make luck shine,

Return the imagery of tokens for the crying wind

And purchase great areas of straw and weave these into hamlets of plenty.

The ark is constructed, not of wood, but of Soul-Matter,

Lunar-Plaint:

Of the merging of twos,

Each family in one armory.

The mystical marriage with Vesica Piscis.

Lily Marlene: will you be with me again

When I am hung from the wooden catamaran, Your Wonderful Albatross?

Will you travel with me, then, over the Asgard Bridge?

The Soul floats on the water, emotional stress, chaos of rebellion.

The waters rise: the demons and the sea-monsters live and thrive within the flooding.

But the one who lives in the Ark of Faith,

The Ark of Love:

He endures, and profits from the rising waves.

LXVI.

The unseeing one hears all the sounds in the forest

And then embarks on his journey which will lead him ever further into the sea,

Beyond the forest,

Beyond sounds even,

Into the land which is a preoccupied world,

A dramatic compound which is both eerie and silently eerie:

Both filled with sounds and drastically void of sound-makers.

The privateers of wrath all provide congestion in the land of trouble.

I know them.

They profit from discord.

They understand most the insistence in the heavens

That the Earth be properly regulated by law.

The un-law is not the law, even if it does propose itself as organization,

Inside the heartland.

But the un-law is not allowed to enter here.

For it has no heart.

Glory is all it seeks, at the expense of any other quality or guardian.

Bankers, lawyers, politicians, real estate developers, middlemen, yea, even engineers:

You are not allowed entrance here.

(Yes, Lily’s husband is an engineer.)

The privateers of wealth knock but cannot enter.

You know you are locked out.

You know that the benediction is gone, lost, has been miscalculated.

There is a code you cannot know.

So you attempt to knock the door down.

And when you cannot gain entrance in the Ark by force,

You merely riot, killing unknown witnesses by the millions;

Then you go away to die.

(I will steal your wife away in my Ark,

If not in this life, then surely in the next.)

LXVII.

Sacred names and sacred nativities.

The world turns toward the dark and the brutal accords.

It is the way of life, when hope begins to vanish.

It is the way of fealty, when fealty's real nature passes

And begins to combine itself with animosity.

Arcane grief and the vouchsafing of the rural meaning of life.

The city and the story-book landing.

The liberal romancing of nature,

Understanding not the nature of nature

But the self-romance of the stone-worry of underdogging

For the sake of Solar generosity.

That is, announcing to the world that one is on the side

Of the small venture,

The one without hope,

The one who is in pain,

The one who has been foresaken..

But worshipping even more

One's own claim to the role of virtue.

Everything for show.

Yes.

Is that it?

That is not acceptable to me:

The performance of "virtue,"

The claims of ascendant knowing.

The claims are more real, more formidable,

Than is the self-understanding.

LXVIII.

The carnival is not here any longer.

The carnival has gone.

Only the ogrish shadows left behind remain,

Gargoyles raised up on Golgotha:

The lies, the perversions, the night surgeries.

The fight is not far away.

It will come, quite soon; and it will make trouble for itself.

That much is known, can be seen by everyone who looks.

What trouble it shall make for you remains unseen, unknown,

Except through your own wonderment.

Keep track of your dreams.

Look for messages in your dreams.

The school of fashion leads and the shadow of truth follows,

Primary to the fashion, but making itself known

Only through the leadership of its twin, its brother.

Everyone knows something about this endeavor.

Everyone knows something about the lion about to appear,

The lion ho will cast you down for a moment

And try to consume you.

But this ruin, it shall be in vain.

For you can best it through valediction.

LXIX.

The finest amenities appear when we are talking about

The gallow entities in the ghoulish shallows.

But the real facts of hard fear are never far away really.

The surface is built for impediments and briefing.

The glancing and the laughter behind the hand.

But when it comes to the breaking moment, the furious fight for life,

Then all is equal,

All is ruggedly built for automation.

The passive rite gives way to the vigorous achievement.

The shadows inhabit the stream but they grow weary

In the Sun of Day,

For it de-vigors their sense of understanding,

Their sense of righteous power of intellect,

Identification with their power of thought.

Yes.

But this passes.

The power of thought is burned by the Sun and grows

Weak with too much exposure.

For the lie of youth dies from exposure in the heat.

LXX.

Where is she now?

She came in the days of glory and spread herself about the Sun

As a radiant beauty -- now she is gone.

The Sun no longer pleases me the way it once did.

I think only of obsessive tasks now,

Tasks that allow me the luxury of forgetting about her,

She who made me understand that there is pleasure not only in entering women's bodies and souls,

But also merely in being in their gentle, charming company.

LXXI.

The hat of the basking goddess is removed

And her clothes are also taken off.

She renders herself naked; and she is lovely when asking for directions.

Because she is so naked now, unable to offer her pride as a weapon

To guard her fear of being exposed,

She even comes to enjoy her exposure;

Enjoys most the way he looks at her exposed feelings,

Her naked parts,

Touching her with his sight,

Penetrating her flesh,

Making her feel creamy and rich and desired and able to satisfy.

And, at the same time, to remain mysterious, unsolved.

The riddle of the prize: loved but unloved; knowing and never really known,

Never solved.

Yes.

She enjoys being naked with him.

Her mother had told her it would not be like this:

Enjoyable to be used by him so.

Now she lives for it; every man is him, the one who can make her feel necessary.

Yes, the man is good; he is good for the woman.

She is now a woman, a real flesh-and-bone woman,

With an opened wound,

A place for his phantasies.

LXXII.

The war comes and goes.

The appetite for invective has not filled itself yet,

And so the lovers of conflict emancipate themselves

And hurl tiny venerations of hatred toward the lives who stand on their air.

The consolidation of fields of anger.

Movements against movement.

The whole sporadic enterprise of war, isolation in a group of survivors.

Talking rank hyperbole with guns and with the guns of the heavens.

To bring down an enemy of logic who has a sight-load on you.

And who intends to kill you.

It is good while it lasts.

LXXIII.

The atmosphere I wish to live in

Contains the memory of She, the one who once

Was dear to me and who now has vanished.

Lily I shall call her.

She is the one who inspires with her beauty;

She is not the one who is near and who groans for you,

And who wishes to give you everything;

This one is far away, untouchable really,

Although you pray to her, worship her,

Enchant even her with your sincerity and your words.

She responds with a silent devotion;

Or a silent non-devotion –

It is not always clear which.

She will flee from you: she is your muse;

She can raise you above the world;

When she is gone, she leaves you empty;

Then she makes your luck turn bad.

Does she enjoy hurting you?

Did she enjoy deconstructing you plank-by-plank

With suggested promises,

With declarations of love,

With watermelon parties in the park

And with kisses and with chlorine honesty

And by letting you undress her partly

And touch her beautiful breasts, and kiss them:

Venus, do not smile so, when I am dying!

Yet, when she returns, vision returns.

She is the giver of vision, more than the giver of flesh.

She gives you judgment,

The ability to distinguish between shades, shapes, contexts,

And to see futures.

Is that not enough?

You talk wildly about meeting your Luck again.

Your Luck is something inside of you,

Something you have misplaced;

Something connected to generation.

And to the power of creating visions.

You must find your muse inside yourself,

For it is in you that she lives.

You may go searching for ever on the streets of this town,

Or in your numerical calculations which tell of trends of movements:

But the real movement is the one within yourself,

The one that allows you,

By the laws the harmony and the disharmony,

To achieve something true.

She is not lost.

She is gone;

But she is not lost.

LXXIV.

The caribou are gone.

Someone came along to spread sand upon the mountaintop.

Some folks brought only dark endeavor with them,

For it was through this dark endeavor

That they avoided the true question:

Am I responsible for myself?

Rather, they ask: is there someone I can blame?

And answering themselves: yes, there is someone I can blame!

They blame another; casting darkness as they go;

Never willing to turn to the mirror, and utter:

I accuse you.

I accuse you of being dishonest with yourself.

LXXV.

The porcelain features of the women from Asia,

with their skin so soft and bronze,

Showing the privacy of their flesh more than hiding it.

So sensual are their bodies.

They are nearly naked always,

Even when fully dressed,

For their bodies are more patterned

After the soft round orbits of sex.

And then they smile.

There is someone special coming to me.

I have read it in the stars.

The other half of Venus will reward me

For the ever-honest love I bestowed on her sister.

Venus in the Dawn gives you the Earth.

Venus at Dusk sends you to God.

LXXVI.

He stood in the round condition of his lust.

It was not an unjust place to be, or an unpleasant one.

He was not a saint; yet he needed not be a saint.

He was not a fretting person of false condition.

He was real, as much a man of desire as he was a man of reason.

As much a man of night, and the night's fleshy dictates,

As he was a man of labor.

He was both: day and night, pleasure and order, contact and the passing of construct.

I say nothing new here.

And so some sane men would, therefore, cease writing,

As if it mattered not that the prose was not as alive as it once was,

Back, when he was filled with desire of another kind,

Desire for the muse and her silvers and her platonic instruction.

Filled with the madness of clairvoyant ecstasy.

That ecstasy is gone now.

The madness lingers.

I shall never give the madness up;

Living without madness is a fate worse than death

But what matters may not be that the words

As much as it is that the inhering rhythm of the speaking,

As invocation,

As worship of one’s God.

The meaning hidden in the words is as proud and as potent

As the meaning the words seek to express.

These two meanings are different, however.

Of this difference realization must not be lost track.

For the hidden meaning is only visible at odd moments,

At times of special light;

As the x-ray illuminates certain otherwise hidden truths,

So this light of which I speak illuminates also things

(Truths) which at other times,

In other lights,

Remain unimagined.

Remain invisible.

LXXVII.

Inveigled grammarian.

The invoking of the high drama and the establishment of right.

The jungle establishes right.

The blissful obituary establishes drama of another kind.

Something adorns the gift of true embodiment.

Rich category of evocation.

Ritual of form.

All beginning at three

And then moving forward in a wedge to capture the higher ground,

The one and the two ever-driving the creation,

But never seen,

Only seen and touched and heard through Imagination.

Associating mice with eagles, for the sake of food and plenty.

Associating the grand sweep of thought as it arcs over the abundant valley,

Exposing the grainy pockets of the living to some heated product.

Auricular evanescence transcends the prototypical brain.

The weary accuse the unweary.

The unweary blame someone else, easing the tension.

It all passes for play, but is, rather, a crucifixion.

LXXVIII.

The arch is built as a thing under which to pass,

A thing representing something high, an arc,

An arching covenant perhaps:

The Rainbow Bridge;

Some ambition, something to be attained.

The arch is a dictum, a transgression of ennui.

Under which the feet pass on their way to ignoble and wild fatality.

And noble and fatuous death.

Wound together ineluctably, strung together as a string of beads.

With the cross as the arch,

Under which pass the many prayers and proverbs and prophets,

The many fears, in a deadly walk on the highwire.

LXXIX.

Consecutive managers of dread all assemble to make predictions.

It is not important to them if they are true, exact, correct.

What matters is that they are able to spread shadows.

Shadows matter to them, for they cultivate the worst,

They integrate honor with fear and seek to render strength into doubt.

They destroy what needs destruction; for they deconstruct the rotting corpse.

These are the new prophets.

And this is their mission;

For to face life without dread is not possible,

Requires a faith wholly unutterable;

Would require a self-responsibility which is not imaginable,

Not acceptable.

So they blame others.

That is their requisite behavior: blaming others.

And in this they are blessed by God.

Because they are the Judges: required antibodies

Cleansing the unclean wound and wounder.

Without them, there is no rebirth.

starthere

LXXX.

Animosity of love forebears and enshowers the grasping idiots

With flesh and a full brigade of fresh memories.

It is the trinkets of which life is made.

The remembrances, which are, themselves,

The Lives beyond youth,

The Lives which refashion themselves through thought

When the blood becomes slow.

Love, danger, passion, war.

Each being the tempting of the gods who order progress

According to its own laws of survival.

Who order something less derelict,

To precurse the emancipating climb toward ambition,

Out of despair,

Violence encapsulating some grainy lust for achievement,

Some dreaded climb out of decay,

Into action,

Into notoriety,

Into pain, fear, shame, encampment.

It is the need to rise above resignation,

That thing which kills,

That thing which freezes panes of action,

And makes them eternal and eternally void.

The flight achieves something, even if it is only anti-negative.

Perhaps that is enough,

Opposing defeat,

Not so much seeking victory as opposing resignation.

Wisdom may be the hat of age, the voice of experience:

It is not the seat of power, the protocol of youth.

We all know this.

The wise live alone in a cave or on a mountaintop;

Wherever they live, in town or city or alone in the woods,

In a cave or on a mountaintop:

That is their desire:

To be alone and speak to themselves about their own wisdom.

But even the mountain falls.

Eventually.

And then everything is gone.

LXXXI.

The hard words pass and the policy of mentation rises and achieves some bounty.

Thought and thought's prevarications are blooming.

Achieving the greatest passenger wisdom in the winter.

On which to ride and to achieve some unblossoming gratuity.

The broken harmony of apologies weighs heavily on the perimeter.

But the perimeter has a fat flat edge:

Ideas are linear;

When they meet flush with the spinning circular orb, Reality,

They are merged, true;

Two into One.

Yet, Reality spins on;

Ideas continue on,

A line, abruptly metrical

Absorbed by the circling sphere wearing snakeskin.

When the moment passes, and its flushness with truth is gone,

Then the ideas do not stop,

They merely sail beyond the edge,

Proving, without a doubt,

That the Earth, indeed, is flat.

LXXXII.

Some look for someone to blame.

Some find only in the scapegoat some alleviation of self-judgment.

Do not listen to these.

They merely accuse others of things they do not face in themselves.

It is easy to see.

It is lost: a mere exasperation of cause.

And an acceptance of what is not real.

Total vacuity of real understanding,

The kind of understanding that allows one to mature,

And to stop hating oneself.

That is the process of growth: to accept oneself;

To stop looking at oneself through the eyes of others,

Through the eyes of strangers,

Whose impressions of oneself, in truth,

Amount to nothing.

The calendar passes.

The clock becomes a banquet.

The one who builds anniversaries out of circumstance

Appreciates most the clinging nature of thought;

And the freedom of self-acceptance.

And this makes him believe, truly,

That he is his own seeker,

He his own guardian.

And this makes him a man of significant power.

For he has no one to blame.

He does not seek his own trauma;

Hence, the maker of his fatality is not an adversary, but a god.

LXXXIII.

Please the one who comes to visit you,

With her mouth open and her lips ambitious for fluid.

The fluid of love; the anniversary of lust.

For the loins open even more, and demand ambitious attainment.

And you fill them; because it is good to enter her,

To fill her oriental vulva with as much cream as you can muster,

With as much electrical canine as your spirit can collect.

You drive her crazy with your movement.

You make her scream; and then she appeals for calm.

The oriental beggar, appealing in her calm demeanor,

Her black raven qualities,

Her hair unbeknownst to others,

Her lusts get quietly inside her,

Until she lets them out.

And then she fills a room with them.

Then she makes the world blush.

LXXXIV.

Hypocrite soup.

Eaten by the vampires who drain blood from the clotting natives in the diaspora.

The driven executives of field fashion driven to the edge of satiety

Now confront the demon consequences of dreams

Who incorporate dreads,

And make them fight for their living.

There are animals of men who conspire to bring about suffering in others;

For they cannot accept pleasure in their own lives,

So they seek to spread their misery,

Through a capacity to destroy.

Eucalyptus engraving.

The hawk is in me, and he lives because I love him.

I will not let him die; for if he dies, I too will die.

Thriving on the tempest;

Making the coequal equations acceptable,

In the form of philosophy.

LXXXV.

New words come forth, and stir the straw with the facsimile of showers.

Earth rumbles and earth rotates.

Evoking fear in some, magic in others;

Canine mystery walks on the moon.

In the first case of seasonal blues, the mother cannot understand her trumpets.

The violets cannot understand the tulips.

Worms are happy only in night,

And after rainstorms leave them basking on warm concrete.

Happiness is a fleeting thing.

I knew it too: when I basked on warm concrete,

Eyes closed, book closed,

Able to love then, for I was young,

And not so hardened, not by pain alone,

But, more, by futurity.

Lily, I remember you.

LXXXVI.

I am not here to underscore the fatality of love.

I do not believe in the brief inhabitations of fury

Or the promulgations of fables.

I have my beliefs, many beliefs.

The atmosphere of prognosis is bold

And achieves something wide and featureless.

But real.

The air being mostly dust but also water and earth and fire,

Combined, giving us life,

Something to breathe, something to unfeeble us.

The category of form achieving the rich reason

To imbue us with vitality and the vengeful

Youth-incorporating vapors

Through which life is tasted and love is made insurgency

And splendid sexual excess.

LXXXVII.

I don't know what to write any longer.

The words come easily; but the meaning does not.

The meaning seems somehow broken, unadorned, unattached to anyone.

Words only.

Settling in to the beautiful realms of unharmony and unlooking gravity.

If the story is not there to be told, then why tell it?

Why not look for something to tell, some real story,

Instead of looking for empty poetic fallacies to write?

Something with meaning for someone.

Not just rubicons of sound.

Not that these are worthless.

It's just that they cannot really be shared.

Because the others cannot hear them, cannot comprehend their value.

The word is lord; but the lord insists that you write something harmonious

For the many.

If you can.

If you can still face re-populated harmony.

LXXXVIII.

The above is not real.

The real epitome of writing is sound,

And meaning inheres in sound.

Music is not without value, even if some cannot find it true.

Think of this.

The real atmosphere of thought is hidden within many clothes

And some times within logic.

(This is a rebuttal.)

Concepts vanish and are found again in line with some brevity of emotion,

Some episcopalian heritage of force.

Leaving the world lean and hungry for votives.

Force emanating from the brittle concave luxuries of the girl-once-yours

The concave emotions: purring in the Easter Channel,

Heart rendered heavy but cock rendered causal.

Animating forethought;

Not that this matters, but forethought comes

From too much stationary fantasy, pre-born union.

Still, forethought is worth something.

Even if it becomes what it seeks to become, not through prescience

But through willing the thing done --

And these are two different methods.

LXXXIX.

I don't know what to believe.

I only know that the spark of genius is not here yet.

I know that the capacity to see has taken leave;

It has not yet come back.

It will.

Like all good things, it will return.

Like all sweet feelings, when least expected,

When not even remembered: it returns.

This is what gives shape to living,

The recurring motifs that are, essentially, moments in our lives

Monumentalized, made non-amorphous.

In order that we may continue with our walking,

Walking over sands and over hillsides and through experiences

Of flesh and passion and war.

We walk.

We have memories.

We have seasons of genius.

We are wise.

We grow weary of wisdom, weary of ourselves,

And see that Life-as-Experience, itself, is enough.

And so, then, we enjoy our own walking;

And we stop making dreary and tragic that which, by itself, is only living.

XC.

The crane can tell many things by merely staring into the water,

Staring at his own shoes,

Seeing the sky reflected,

Seeing the clouds shudder in passing,

Thick with indecision.

He can learn to believe that what he sees in reflection

Is the same image as that which is passing,

Rather than the obverse --

For he does not see what relation there is

Between that which is seen and that which has essential being.

Perhaps there is none.

XCI.

The corporate is not the enemy of life.

The body is not the scrounging element of accord,

Or discord, or Ephesian hegemony.

The love of emancipated desire does not drive the gods into flight.

The contumacious grin and the lovely spell of physical satisfaction

Between man and woman

Is not sad to some precept of law.

It is vanity which dwells alone.

It is laziness which embellishes disaster.

XCII.

The scar of folly describes nothing but trouble.

They walk along the side of the road, these troubles,

Looking for one with whom to ride,

Looking for one to absorb while on this journey.

The ideal pre-occupation does not understand the gathering of clouds.

He is not bold enough to see that courage is not enough.

He is too bold to believe that he will fly, simply because he wishes it.

Time tells tales that are rough and that capture analysis.

But which are not captured by analysis,

For they leave no tracks to be disguised

And no tarries to be untold by dreaming educators gleaning rot from out of health,

Print from out of blooding earthiness.

The sky will not blather wildly about fenestrations.

It is not the sky's purpose.

The sky believes in the strain that will achieve the basted maneuvering

Of the cards,

The holiday of the candle's fairy gleaming;

When one walks doubly and achieves trebly,

Then mathematics is to be changed.

XCIII.

The caller manages to achieve something noble with his breath,

But not with his words,

For the mentor is crumbling.

Ezekiel rides in a camel of stone, within a fire-rim of prophecy,

Knowing he sees most clearly,

Not with eyes of pearls,

But with words of flaming rhyme,

Wrenching fury,

Poetic jurisprudence.

For the judgment comes out of the sky sometimes.

It comes out of the fastidious realm

Which is beyond the recognition of most men,

Normally shallow and shadowed by ethers,

Shallow not in the sense of meaning,

But in the sense of hovering near surface essentials,

Seeing little,

Not swimming deep in the bottomless depths,

Where the monsters live,

Rather hovering on the surface,

Where the light might enter the skies

And enliven the skies with a sense of mighty justice

In the majesty of living.

For the mentor is crumbling.

XCIV.

The production is done and the family is made.

Distinct, at first, as if owing to some genius of craft.

Then, the amalgamas rough context appears,

Containing the grim refusal of apparencies.

All things being equal;

But, in their minds, they are not equal.

There is a rough equality;

But in their minds is a hostility to equality,

Almost a fear of it.

The fever of rough accentuation of the dilemma:

That which I preach is really that which I most abhor.

The circumventing of the squalor.

Valedictory achievements of too much love and not enough luck.

Grand endive appearing in the transient evacuation of the bland,

And redisposition of the chromium.

All for the sake of some true trumpet of scale:

To allow one to walk quietly forward into the honor-guard.

As the thunder becomes apparent but does not alarm he who has vicinity.

The corporal in the vanguard comes to say that he is about to enlarge himself.

Again the trumpet is armed with teeth.

The large vocation of the moving armory.

Incipient valor: incandescence in the troubled arcanum, which is life.

Which grows teeth when it seeds its trouble in the land.

And achieves some sense of grandeur from the sun,

Warming itself,

And creating rain for itself,

By which it drinks and grows,

Replenishing its armor.

Each vow being the full rain of thought

Poured down from a bucket into the minds of men,

Which vow helps them decide which ideology is real.

The red capable of communal nature;

The blue idealized and lionized as sole champion.

He who stands against the wrath and who stands unfolding his solitary, capable lion.

The felicity passes; brothers pass into night sentries

And wait for the alien to strike out of the hills from the darkness.

They wait.

The numbers come back as haunting birds of storm.

Praying only that their calculations will absorb etherized mime;

And give to the stoic race of children, all amassed in soldiers’ gear,

A respite to building their dreams from

Ivory tusks and bloodied skins of beasts.

Coagulating blood; harvest comes,

And harmony, in a gallic braided vice.

The mad gallic storms braid a vise inside a curtain.

Over which the windows fall

When the house is buried by the mice,

After windstorms.

XCV.

The dry franchise is not appreciated

Until the cold wind sweeps over the forest

And the ice-men come in as statues

And replace human feelings and human accords

With dictates of the king's men,

All holy gamblers on law and haters of the lull,

Superstitious for gravity.

Then the franchise is not so dry, not such a callous pretense.

Then, it means everything.

XCVI.

The hazard is not that you will not see,

But that you will see, and not have a response.

XCVII.

I can walk among the rural felines,

Among the harpies who have yet to become self-educated;

And all is well.

The furious cadenzas danced by witches in their stalls,

Unachieving the pure glory of the veil-dance

And asking only that Chance leave them to dusk:

The cadenzas are wild and invoke dreary monitors of the demons,

Who stand and watch and give their approval,

Wearing hats from their uniforms of communistic tribunals.

Everything must be approved, first, by the leader,

Who has given us a small book in which he has outlined all his motives,

Our behavior determined by and our fatality interwoven with

The might with which we can follow

The principles he has laid out for us.

The edict is golden, of course.

The Truth so obvious that anyone who cannot see it

Is either blind or insane;

Anyone who cannot be counseled by it

Is either criminal or counter-revolutionary.

To kill the enemy of the State is the highest good,

Because the enemy of the State is the killer of his own family,

The violator of his own daughter.

At least in intent.

And so he must be executed, for the sake of the community.

XCVIII.

The wrath of the first known messenger is muted over time,

Once he comes to understand that his message cannot be understood.

It is no one's fault.

That is just the way it is.

The temporal verdict of the grave messenger,

The one capable of achieving the archery oblivion

In which the school appears to be ennobled by the fiery

Enabling treasury of combat.

The local shadow in oblivion:

It moves across the tops of the sky and batters down

The door of shame,

Locating the eeriest gods of twilight

Who pelt Draconian images with l’armes.

The tears of Vespasian; the logic of the truest ambassadors of loathe.

The living entity of the very first holocaust in the desert between Abel and Cain:

Associations with grandeur and the philistine garb of essential escalation.

Parchment dreams and the verity associations

Which build harbors out in the lands

Which calculate achievements and then adorn them

With motifs that indicate nothing is true.

The tempests indicating something rural and vouchsafed to some impediment.

True to the delivery of the system of stones,

The presentiment of blasphemy,

The articulation of thrones.

As if it were not known that the college is filled to the brim

With mere watchers who do not wish to play any role

Other than watching and judging;

It is enough for them: they take no chances.

The articulate passenger train system emerges

And decorates the colloquial impression that age is necessarily just.

And the vanquished, who abound on the outskirts of town,

Cheer only the fire that they pray will consume

All the living they so despise.

To make them less vanquished, less manichaean, less hopeless.

Time hampering not only the vaguest threats

But also the most intrepid associations with catastrophe.

Helm-masters all claim to see something strange but appropriate,

Something that will open doors to the fascination of all,

Leading to diplomatic ascendencies and eras of peace and plenty.

But we do not trust them.

Those who predict peace and plenty are never very far from delivering crisis.

Trust the gods of your fathers and mothers, for they are your gods too,

At variance with the gods of some other stranger,

Some other paradigm

Some Trojan Horse delivered by confidence men.

The reichmasters all adore the Russian polyglot,

Who dances in the streets of Bonn,

Much as John Francis did in the old days,

Glorifying enlightened consciousness.

You win the Germans by speaking of Beethoven,

Culture, and honorable idealism.

They have a burning need to be on the right side;

This leads them into trouble too.

But they believe they are right, nonetheless.

They love to blame others for their failings;

In this they are very poor.

As are we all.

XCIX.

The greatest feeling comes not in the accomplishment of a task alone,

But in the proper accomplishment of that task,

That dream,

Which is, itself, but a road to self-discovery.

Yes.

But the product also matters.

To those who say the product is everything: they are mistaken.

Those who say the product does not matter,

That process is all: they too are mistaken.

It is not that opposites must be merged necessarily, annihilated:

Rather, they must be contained, balanced, kept alive,

Used one for the sake of the other.

Too much philosophy shall make you old and unschooled for purpose.

Too much philosophy shall make you believe you are right;

This will bring you moral power, but at a cost;

That cost shall be, in a future time, self-alienation.

For the one who believes himself right

Will come upon a time some day

When he sees things from a new perspective.

And that perspective will render his past beliefs void.

Then he will get to experience disillusionment,

And hatred of his earlier belief,

His earlier self;

His antedated Shadow.

He now also only believes he is right, even in his self-condemnation:

But that is the engine, this desire to be right,

Which fuels the dream and keeps cohabitants moving.

Too much philosophy shall make you old and unschooled for purpose.

But not enough philosophy will make you shallow

And without the entity of guidance in your thoughts.

Structure.

Which can provide for you boundaries within the high wide eclipse

Of the dreams in which thought recoils;

And this can leave you helpless, unless you have philosophy,

That is, a god, to help you live.

Philosophy is not history of philosophy.

Philosophy is vision, gained through prayer,

Subsequent to saddening condition.

Philosophy is heart, and the power to one’s own quest,

Small and large.

And to see personal destiny clearly,

If even for a moment.

END OF ELEGY ONE