Dark Honey

Let's descend into the dream of the huge hungry bear who blocks my way to the singing room -- a tower of fur and fury, hot for the dark honey hived in my heart. Surely there is terror, but there is also awe, the awesome strength and vitality of Mother Nature -- this is a she-bear -- and a shaggy sexuality, pubic hair soppy with female fluids, striated with the spunk of my own spume.

What door does she block, thus guard, thus warden, thus invite me into?

(For details of the dream, see the post "Homer Simpson in Hell," from a couple of days ago.)

***

WILD

... to be wild
means nothing you do or have done
needs to be explained.
- Stephen Dunn, "Hawk"

Words that feather
and fur, seldom seen
and darkly souled.

Motions allowed
their caterwaul
without a victor.

Not a poetics
of meaning
but a true wind.

A geometry of
reversals and
descents.

Blue tatters
of silk flapping
on a dead oak.

Cold clear water
up to my chest
and rising.

Great hooves of
thunder this
a daily roof.

Grand exception
to the house I
wait outside of

with no key,
all proof of residence
long rotted in the rain.

Ape of my former
life, thumping one
bone against another.

Ecstasy's rictus,
plenitude's wrath.
Horse you'll never

tether much less ride
though each poem
keeps leaping,

keeps missing.




I CANNOT FORGET THE WOMAN IN THE MIRROR

Sharon Olds

Backwards and upside down in the twilight, that
woman on all fours, her head
dangling and suffused, her lean
haunches, the area of darkness, the flanks and
ass narrow and pale as a deer's and those
breasts hanging down toward the center of the earth
like plummets, when I
swayed from side to side they swayed, it
was so dark I couldn't tell if they were gold or
plum or rose. I cannot get over her
moving toward him upside down in the mirror like a
fly on the ceiling, her head hanging down and her
tongue long and black as an anteater s
going toward his body, she was so clearly an
animal, she was an Iroquois scout creeping
naked and noiseless, and when I looked at her
she looked at me so directly, her eyes so
dark, her stare said to me I
belong here, this is mine, I am living out my
true life on this earth.


****

I swim in a lake, dark murky waters: and see a white fin huge in the water, arrowing towards me -- a shape of annihilation and hunger, predatory, after human flesh. The shark seems sure to get me but plunges by, or goes through me. I escape or resurrected after having been eaten. I'm on the shore, wildly screaming for swimmers to get out of the water, but no one heeds me and the shark opens profane jaws and chomps away, swallowing children whole, then turns on a young woman, feasting ugly and lustily on she-flesh. An older woman hauls a red-wagon-load of babies down to the water, wholly ignorant of the danger, the terror. Into the water they go. I watch from a dune, way away from the danger, flapping my arms, screaming "get out, get out!" The old woman turns in the water, trying to figure out what I'm saying, and I can see behind her a whiteness materialize, sharpen into gaping jaws like a door about to suck her in. The shore proves no protection; the shark swims out onto the sand to catch prey, tail thrashing in ecstasy.

-- Nightmare, 1993



Rilke distinguished between the river and the woman, the desire and the beloved - and the distinction is cruel, a blade:


... what does she know
of the lord of desire, who often, from the depths of his solitude,
even before she could soothe him, as though she didn't exist,
held his head, ah, dripping with the unknown,
erect, and summoned the night to an endless uproar.
Oh the Neptune in our blood, with his appalling trident.
On the dark wind from his breast out of that spiralled conch
Listen to the night as it makes itself hollow ...

from the "Third Duino Elegy," transl. Stephen Mitchell


***

LETTER TO JOHN KEATS

Jack Gilbert

The Spanish Steps - Feb. 23, 1961

What can I do with these people?
They come to the risk so dutifully,
Are delighted by anecdotes that give
Them Poetry. Are grateful to be told
Of diagonals that give them Painting.
Good people. But stubborn when warned
The beast is not domestic.
How can I persuade them
That the dark, soulful Keats
Was five feet one?
Liked fighting and bear-baiting?
I can't explain the red hair:
Nor say how you died so full
Of lust for Fanny Browne.
I will tell them of Semele.

from Views of Jeapordy (1962)





THE BURNING BUSH

Men build strong roofs
& lock their doors & windows
seeking to prevent those
shafts from Cupid
but (and because) let
that puff pastry
guzzled on Venus milk
find an opening
in the phalanx
(of course he can)
& watch a man
shot by fire
exhaust and ruin
his mortal days
trying to fuck her
(or him) (or it)
but good, if only
for just once.
You'd think
that gold barb
sails straight
between the ears
to see those fools
gambit and gamble
for just one lucky
roll, pushing all
their chips to the
center of the felt.
Amazing how their
fire burns a city
down to fumes &
ennui just to
hasten the inch
of one kiss, one
clench, one sweet
soaring rail of
of unholy,
uncompromising ire.
And then it's gone,
freighted off in
that suckling's quiver
to zap some other fool
through the next
Achilles heel.
Nothing of that fire
remains in the chill
of first raw light
where waken empty
and stilled, bankrupt,
all former intimacies
frozen, tossed, dead.
And the men
(or women) wander
through what's left
like lamps without
a wick or fuel,
their eyes harrowed,
hallowed maybe,
by shadows of
that brilliance
which presumed
to ride the sun
for just a second,
maybe two, long
enough to kiss that
fire & melt and
then come to
watching the world
take shape again
in a dark spot
at the tough end
of one long horrifying
fall. O that we could
be like the bush
that God enveloped
in a voice balloon
of flame and yet
stayed green when
He had said His fill.
That our wick dipped
ever in that pure fuel
welled from our
former nights.
That each
poem I launch here
could burn paper mast
and keel all the way
across to you, and
yet still unfold
in your pale hands
enough to spill
wind and wave
all over every shore
burning beyond
this I and Thou.




BURNING


1.
she sits at the computer
he stands behind her
afraid to touch her hair
unable to resist the fire

his fingers are matches
stroking her smooth cheek
she accepts the touch
eyes closed to all
but the music of the fire
opening unfocused
fluttering on wings of a bliss
she must cage

he breathes her in
like a man underwater
for too long
like it is his first
and last breath
(it is, you know)
he smells cocoa butter
and spice in her hair
he smells something
deeper than smell
and his cock leaps
up into his heart
on a dolphin spouting flame

They have worked so hard
to resist this moment
she willed to another
he willed to himself
but their kiss burns
with a third will
violating everything
affirming only
that they
passionately care

A kiss is a word
only here; when lips
part slightly and soften
all language dissolves
in the wet hot touch
of the unspeakable other
their breath is
the space of a vowel
a room a moon a sigh
a wave of unbearable sweet
sweeping away
every reason they
have to resist


2.
I'm writing this poem
desperate and drowning
in a desire which
never reaches shore
never exhausts in foam
between your thighs

I knew full well the price
I wrote this poem
in that kiss
knew where
this slick slide
of letting go would lead:
to everywhere and
nowhere; to this
page with its leaky
singing bloody words;
to yet another
morning's long walk
back to silence.
I knew, I knew
you couldn't stay,
couldn't let go.
So fucking what.
How could I resist.

I asked for this
chalice of flame
when my hand
reached down
your jeans to
cup your ass
I knew I'd burn
into cinders and soot
this is my sulfur road race
pumping hellbent again
from surrender to sorrow
what a way to burn
what a way to learn

she sits on the shores of the world
her red hair the wild sunset
I sail toward without hope
the sea a foam of writhing fury
the sky so blue
like her eyes
I'm trying so hard to see
in the dark of this morning

when I touch you
I am a poem
of burning poppy
exhaling your sweet fuck musk
down every dark corridor
singing through the lonely night
that stole into this room

when you pulled back
when you walked out
I'm burning baby
a pyre of pure beginning




THE DAZZLING DARK

If it blazes, it has worth.
- Rilke

There is a God (some say),
A deep,but dazzling darkness.
- Henry Vaughan

The upwelling sea carries
in its cold hands a
mineral haul
beyond all price.
That fraught wealth
was minted in a cold
deeper than ice,
from compressions
of sky on sea
and sea on rock.

Old certainties
never die, just fall
to lower ones
Below our knowledge
truth teems in
the ghostlike teem
of lost myths and deaths
-ensoulings which dart
and trigger the
cracks of doom.

And when the sea lifts
up these martyr wolds
in the mineshaft of its
deepest currents,
the feeding is richest
-plankton on
celestial whorls of mineral,
a million seafowl
on ten million fish.

So I must trust haulings
as this bone hooked
from abyssal heaps;
mineral and glittery
as cold Moby's eye,
a poem as this is
surely not ours to keep,
no family jewel, not
even a totem sire,
unfit for anthology
or canonic ire.

This poem is
the wave which
ferries a book
discarded long ago,
a seal-breviary
embedded with hard
gems and inscribed
with squid inks
by hands long vanished.

"There's a divinity
that shapes our ends,
hew them how we will,"*-
the wave is deeper than any
I tried to swive or swill,
richer ensoulings than
any entrusted to heaven's
keep or jail or till.

* Hamlet vii 9-10


***

LIONS AND TIGERS AND BEARS (OH MY!)

from A Breviary of Guitars

"My hope has been
that I might fetch /
Reproaches from
my former years,
whose / Power may
spur me on,
in manhood /
Now mature, to
honorable toil":
Billy Wordsworth
again, "Two Preludes":
An apt jingle
for this wrangle
perhaps: Outing
the damned spot
in a 3-part
harmony composed
of testicle,
vesicle & ink:
Of muscle,
pustule & spume:
Of past errancies
amid present
lunacies hatching
future perdition:
Anyway I take
all of that thrash
and smash which
has been long
down under &
haul it up with
4 beat buckets
& spread it on
a narrow white
beach: A
postmodern
zeitgeist giggles
at calling this
"honorable toil"
or even poetry
(forget compression
economy &
similar horses
which should have
reined all this
to one hundred
HA one thousand
pages): But I've
been far more
attentive in
writing about
those guitars
than I ever
was at playing
'em: Song, at least
as Rilke calls it,
had a power
then which dove
underground &
nourished long in
darkness like a
cicada: It rose
5 years or so
ago & tried to
find expression
in "poems" whose
tightly angled nooks
all lacked
accommodation
of the wave:
And so this
daily hour
standing on a
ledge with my
pants round my
ankles looking
out and down
into a guitar-
shaped valley
with alcoholic
mists and
shockingly
naked nymphets
still calling me
into the darkened
weeds down there:
Aren't you glad
I decided to let
all that rip here
in the words of
a middleaged sex-
sappy happy guy
working the salt
mines beneath
them thar foothills
of decline? Hip
hip hooray! The
critics and
publishers all
cheer, bearing me
on their shoulders
to six-figured
full-time poethood
and a berth
in unmouldering
canon: Of course
how can that
be so in this
unpublishable
and necessarily
anonymous work:
You can't! That's the
joy of this:
It's an absolutely
impossible foray
into literate
seaweed: The
ultimate sandbox:
The perfect memoir:
My biggest gift
to the world given
to no one at all:
Jam on that oh
dirty white boy
as you peel off
hot licks on your
blue blue Phantom
guitar: William
Logan said
recently in
The Paris Review
that a great poem
leaves wounds
every time you read
it and scars long
after: Though he
also said, some wounds
make you laugh
("It would take a
heart of stone
not to laugh at
the Inferno"):
Well at least
I don't go
through the door
marked "Lecture
on Wounds" do
I? Nothing but scabs
& scabies &
rabies here:
Lions & tigers &
bears oh my:
Triple-mooned
ululation in
the silver gray
break of an
astoundingly dark
wave: Surf's up dude:
Time to party:

***

TUTORIAL

Ted Hughes

Like a propped skull,
his humor is medieval.

What are all those tomes? Tomb-boards
Pressing the drying remains of men.
He brings some out, we stew them up to a
dark amber and start sipping.

His is fat, this burst bearskin, but his
mind is an electric mantis
Plucking the heads and legs off words, the homunculi.
I am thin but I can hardly move my bulk,
I go round and round numbly under the ice
of the North Pole.

This scholar dribbling tea
Onto his tie, straining pipe-gargle
Through the wharf-weed that ennobles

The mask of enquiry, advancing into the
depths like a harbor,
Like a sphinx cliff,
Like the papery skull of a fish

Lodged in a sand dune, with a few straws,
Rifled by dry cold.
His words

Twitch and rustle, twitch
And rustle.
The scarred world looks through their gaps.

I listen
with bleak eyeholes.

***


After having caught their first sperm whale, the crew of the Peqoud cuts the head off, chaining it to the side of the boat, and begins the work of removing blubber from the body. In a lull, when the crew are retired below deck, Ahab comes upon on the deck and looks on the head of the sperm whale which had been severed and chained alongside; and looks upon it, reflecting morbidly, seeing into its darkened doorway:

It was a black and hooded head, and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the sphynx's in the desert. "Speak, thou vast and venerable head," muttered Ahab, "which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet hear and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is within thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. The head upon which now the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid the world's foundations, where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot, where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned. There, in the awful water land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went, hast slept by many a sailor's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insensate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed -- while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to make an infidel of Abraham, and no syllable is thine!"

-- Melville, Moby Dick




WILD SIDE

Priapus is said to have
been both father and
son to Hermes.

-- Karl Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks

Along the Trail
there is a border
beyond which
you dare not go
hence cannot resist:
It's that wild side
you drive over to
to cut loose & freak out
& dance with the moon.
Astride all of the Trail's
plebian concoursings
toward work & home
there are illicit lacunae
of wild juice, Circean
nipples, rough and
dark interfascia
of concupiscence shrill
with the hot ejaculate
of self-evaucation.
Sure, there are plenty
of places around town
for vice, but the Trail
is its queen, is mythic
(hence proper for
my poem) for
that daring and danger
which like china white
sprinkles round the
proferred mouth of a
vast bottle whose
bottom, cors delecti,
can never upon entry
be fathomed. Take
the Fairvilla Superstore
near Princeton, a sort
of Wal-Mart of porn
offering vault after
vault of sexual sugar,
leather corsets & whips,
& vibrators & dildos &
flavored creams & cockrings,
& a three-story warehouse
of magazines DVDS and
videos to slake every crotch
thirst -- straight or gay, S&M,
tit-fanciers and butt-fuckers,
groupsexers, cherrypoppers,
cross-racial lust, bestial
burdeners, faux-rapists,
gonzos, all-girlie revues,
redheads, midgets, the shaved
and unshorn -- whatever
coupling of I and Thou
between heaven or hell
that could be sieved through
the sump of the mind and
the heart can be rented there,
The light throughout has
a lewd sickly cast, perhaps
it's porn's bottomless greed for
no hole barred to the eye,
or maybe it's just or the glint
of all that gold stolen from the
hapless helplessly-sex
sotted fucks who slap their
plastic down as they file again
out the door. The cars re-enter
traffic on 441 discreetly
or not; only God's watching
after all, that Lord of
remorseful desire, whose
angels weave blue ice
round the sense of men,
confusing heart with heat
and souls with balls. Drive
on, altaring boys, and
drain the cup well.
Further on down the Trail
about a mile south
of Colonial Drive
in the real urban squalor
is the Parliament House,
that rollicking gay
nightclub and motel. It's been
scythed of much of its
meat since the '80s
by AIDS, yet it's still
amazingly loud, the all-
male reviews like
nightly big bangs of
crossover and put-out
and git-down and shout.
Bewigged and slithery
in dresses of gold lame,
the svelte girlboys croon
faux-Beyoncee and Pink
shaking souled derrieres
more strikingly pure
than the originals, these
freakish nougats of desire,
pure show on the surface
& all man where it counts.
And the crowd of fags
and fag hags and a
surprisingly large number
of just folks inbetween
are just loving it, cutting
loose on the tumescent wings
of disco and poppers and booze,
foraying far beyond those
reaches straight men will
go in their narrow rooms
of straight fucking straight
women -- god the stony
cold silences of
fern bars and titty
bars where sex is served
the cold stony drop dead way.
Their loss, sigh the soft swishy
freakshow boys, riding up
on Priapus' huge phallus
tip like the Trail's true
buckaroos, getting sucked
off in every dark corner
or royally raked in those
ripe-smelling rooms fore
and aft. Praise to
the grinning freak god
up from his savage dark
garden which grows thick
mid this Trail, Lord of
bad desire with his lewd
tongue, gross belly and
arm's length dick saluting
his mother Aphrodite's
milky boobs, the tip glowing
with something like
pink neon, the balls down
at the base bigger than
grapefruit, full of that
awful sweet juice meant
only for spilling again
and again and again.
I got both of my tattoos
at a parlor on the Trail
at different ends of
two marriages --
the dolphin rider in
'93 after I divorced
my first wife, the
Uffington Horse when
I was separated from
my second in '01:
Some imprint of that
Trail's darker hooves
when a wild unquellable
spirit seemed totemic,
could no longer be
hidden or shamed.
And yet Thank God
I found my way back home
this way up 441, far away
from that part of town.
Here an aging man
can grow something
fertile and useful
in the garden. The mind,
the summer, the Trail
keeps it savage.
I woke at 4 a.m. this Sunday
morning with strobes
of blue and red on
my eyelids and the wall --
a cop had stopped
some car in front of
our house -- Got up &
made coffee & said
my prayers on my
knees & sat down here
to begin, grateful
to write this poem
instead of getting
busted by it.
There was a catfight
somewhere in the dark,
short & vicious & then
quiet. The garden
dark & soaked from
last night's rain. A
distant thunder like
falling on their
ass far far away,
Priapus laughing low and
lewd just to the
east as some floozie
from the Zellwood
Tavern kneels in the
weeds just off the
highway, her eyes just
slits of pearled moon,
her mouth wide
as you will go.



MEDEA


Surveyor, sausage
deliveryman, retired cop,
state agent, parts store
owner, unemployed laborer:

all must have thought twice
before turning back to
pick her up: but lust is such a
common stay against the

dreary bloodings of age,
trumping all the suits
we thought to wear. Lust
is that lens which made her

so lurid for the press:
We see the bastards waiting
for her to catch up and climb
in, fingers drumming on

the wheel: feel the indecision
between forking up twenty bucks
for ten minutes of hateful sex
or peeling rubber back to

that job or wife where life belongs:
Feel the false privilege in the cab
of the truck as she climbs
up and in with heavy sigh,

country songs on K92
and a pint of Jack Daniels
now empty on the seat:
She palms the sawbucks

and then pointing back in
the woods where all the
action takes place: Feel
the goatish glee sour-mashed

with dread as they wind past
pine and palmetto to the spot
where a whore gets fucked
but good in the broad,

scadling light of a day
which unzips and rips:
The sense of enactment
is so precise that it takes a

moment to see .22's snout
in her hands: To see beyond lust
to what's really there, those pig
eyes meant to plead now

burning with a different
desire: To hear the gun's
sudden yawps, two, four
times, maybe the entire clip:

Or what follows after all lust
collapses, the rapine
complete in the dripping
cab with the sharp smell

of cordite like sperm in
the air: To feel at last the
sense of justice, in turning the
whole perverse script of lust

on its hairy, indignant ass.
We loved the story which emerged
from the trial, reliving the passion
of her spree. Taking both sides.

Rooting for her one way,
in some other shadowing her
every bad step toward her end.
Everyone got what they deserved:

The rubes get rubbed out, the whore
our prick in the end. Someone
has to do the job. Mornings driving
in on 441 I pass a highway hooker

who's worked that stretch for years.
She stands out from the dark
as if waiting for me in particular.
Our eyes lock for just one

second - I'm moving fast-
but it's enough to feel that
ancient heat inside the
unkempt, thumbs-out gaze.

Inside every mark's a Medea,
a cistern for paired lusts and
there for the taking, raking
hell on any hot, dreary

afternoon between here
and the next town, the next
enactment flipping its coin,
her tale, our fate.




CONDUCTUS

For centuries the church owned song's
High blue heaven - its psalms intoned
as on the backs of angels who
Finned sea zeniths with their wings, whose
Unearthly fire was for God's heart.
To sing lower risked sulphur's ire.
Then a minstrel risked a new song
Which trothed church airs to a maid's cunt.
No one could resist that devil bray
Which rollicked street to court. Later
Songs pearled hymns to love, courtly tales
Of noblesse silk. The new cathedral
Rose stone by singing stone. These poems
Once obeyed what old angels taught.
They sing now from this funky cot.

***

The triplet form is an exact imitation of one of the conductus, strophic compositions in Latin which had been developed at the monetary of St. Martial, an important musical centre in Guilhem's own dominions. The conductus were more elaborate than the older hymnody for one or more voices. A man like Guilhem would delight in taking over a more religious form and turning it to bawdy uses.

-- Jack Lindsay, The Troubadours and Their World

***

Comrades, I'll make a song - refined, no less.
The only sense it owns is foolishness.
Love, Joy and Youth are all mixed in, I must confess.

Who fails to understand it, a peasant is he:
who in his heart won't learn it deep. We see,
if a man finds the things he wants, he holds it steadfastly ...

Listen, and my dislikes I'll here unlatch:
a guarded cunt; a pond - no fish to catch;
the brags of worthless men, with which no deeds they match.

Lord God, King, Ruler of the Universe,
why not on the first cunt-guard set your curse?
No servant or protector ever served a lady worse.

Well, here's the law of cunt and how it goes.
I speak who suffer through it many woes.
Other things, taken from, grow less. Not so with cunt. It grows.


- Ribald song of Gilhem of Poitou, transl. Jack Lindsay.



MINNE'S CAVE

Hands as big as my lust for You
Surely built this love grotto, deep
Under this hill where sheep graze and
Slumber. The stones which vault Your bed
Could raise cathedrals, but instead
The Old Ones hid them far from view
Beneath the turf, to barrow old
Ferocities of star and sea.
They are gone but we remain, fresh
Heart inside stone ribs. Only here
Can we let ourselves go in the
Star and sea frenzy that first kiss
Unleashed. Here, my love, here we will
Coil on crystal linen and sail
Verbatim into wild blue hell.

MERLIN'S CAVE

(At Tintagel in Cornwall, Merlin's Cave
penetrates the neck of the peninsula
where the castle ruins remain, 250 feet
above the sea. At low tide one may enter
it and walk through to the beach on
the other side, but at the night tide the
sea enters and becomes impenetrable.
Merlin's Cave is an example of a
paradoxical place, where it is dark during
daytime and where the sea is beneath
the earth. - Nigel Pennick, Celtic Sacred Landscapes)

You'll find me far beneath the ruins
Of Arthur's double court: A cave
Which by day leads dark and cold to a
Blue-foamed, crashing shore, and by night
Is drowned in ocean, a door to
Under kingdoms of driftglass and
Coral queens. Step down from high
Ambition to learn what crowns and
Treasures are tides of: Here dream
Dark's plunder of the regent sun,
The sea's upwelling of high ground.
Here I said farewell to men to
Bed my fair feathered Niniane.
Under every throne there's a mouth,
Blues singer of the royal South.


SEA-WITCHERY

And what of the sea-witch,
my thousand-year bride?
She was once the nun
who prayed matins
like a shore but I
lured her to the dark
waters with the music
of the tide between
these protean hips,
ensnaring her white
calves with a bony laugh
& dragging her all the
way out and down. I
had my way with her
but good, the envy
of every narwhal bull
and deep-diving
spermacetti ram.
And then I lost her in
that keep, & become
an exile of love's spleen
on a hard-smashing shore
of basalt ruins, searching
every wave for a trace
of her seem amid the
drifting dozing
manes of low sea-grass.
I know she's there
but I've lost the way
I used to see her,
or she has simply
wearied of my eyes
and now fins the
arteries of a darker,
deeper man than
I have balls to go.
The news each day
washes in the
battered corpses
of her undinal ways,
naked cyanotic sailors
with still-red lips
pursed to kiss what
you keep drawing
5 more fathoms down.
Look at all the pumpkins
we carve recalling your
raw pudenda's ire.
And oh the darkened
forest spreading round
the heart of he
who finds you nightly,
black stumps creaking
in a cold autumn
night's breeze, a
bonier sound knocking
from your last soiree
into the noirish
tableaux of bars
and cars you dreamed.
I should have rid my
loins of this thirst
for you so many lives
ago -- divorced the
demiurge, renounced
the sea, bled white
my salt iniquities:
Yet this muse of
darkness I call my
own, albeit for
bitter and perverse,
the moony incandescence
inside my every wave's
dying sigh. I am here
for her declision
on shores of nascent
white pages gleaming
white as bone. Her
name is Kirsteen M'Vurich
and she is that much
further out, sprawled
on a bed of chorda filum,
staring in the silver mirror
in which she sees me
in its gleam. I can hear
a high and ghastly laughter
beyond the booming stones,
a twittering of teeth
that picks the pelvis clean
and blots its lips with foam.



LUCERNA EXTINCTA

Few are witness to the
magick of this hour -- a
Mt. Dora cop car patrolling
up the street, Violet our
Siamese who danced tippytoe
for her treats & now
haunts the looming window,
me on my great white writing
chair with its endless
Dick & teeth below.
O but what revels and
reveals at this dead
a.m., the world's infernal
-- internal, at least --
watchworks interred,
crowing loud hell's bells.
Angels above and below flit
to and fro in this dark,
ferrying stones to the
secret sacred island
where churches are
never meant to go.
Eight-ton stones from
Somerset and Orkney
lumber and grind
their heavy loafers
down the street, on
their way to Lake Dora
for a drink at Jack
O' Beard's. Covens like
shadowy scribes furrow
into the garden, lift
the birdbath and go
underground (in loco
subterraneo) to write
the devil's secret book
of love, dancing round
the chambered tomb on
broomsticks til the lights
go out (lucerna extincta)
and the real fucking
commences in royal
majescule, the Horned One
plunging every slot gone
sloppy with black seas.
Who would know?
Few have observed
this nocturnal congress
and thus miss the
world at its wildest blue;
the dreaming suburb
around me is like a corpse
upon a table, draped in
the pale winding sheet of
sleep which lifts,
miraculously, come dawn.
We deem this hour dead,
a zombie zone for blackouts
and insomniacs and
insatiable greenwood lovers.
And while that's true--4 a.m.'s
a flag for every navy
to drown in its desires--
still the night is so much more
than that. It's a secret
world that thrives when
we are lowest, its wattage
rich and fertile when ours
dim most, very old
and much alive, perhaps
more so than we'll
ever know. At least vigils
like these offer a peek. See?
Outside a sole streetlight
bastes a pale yellow what
sticks up out of the waters
of pure dark -- tree boughs,
asphalt, the dimmest shade of
house across the street -- ears
and vertebrae and a flash of
tail of the dragon I here ride,
winging from three bells to five
the devil's stones from mount
to mere, my pen alive, pouring
ink down the blackest throat
to come this way to beg a drink.