Eleusis Redux 2: The Door

What of that hoary arch which
spectralled every door I hurried
through into the lustral night?
Surely Heading Out meant
escape from the rude cage
of my weary bones, leaving
behind the fuming ruins of
the day, that awful sum
of all I'd failed to become,
siloed in my bum history.
Yet to flee such sordids
for their oblivions gave
that door the power of
inversing magnitude,
firing wild the blue neon
bulb of noir descents
in my imagination
with that first drink front
and center, the sacred
key by which I tossed
one self away and sprung
its wicked, the one
who opens every door
in the descending night,
jumping bed to bed in
jackal glee, knee-deep in
vodka brine. Reverse a
Tarot card and you get its
truth the harder way,
a sacred text read right
to left bottom to top,
across a sea which
does not wash here to
home but rather toward
that beach whose
features are defined
in the drab particulars
of coming to the next day
after another night of ruin.
That wild dark and
emptying door read
my heart for its vacuities,
a caliber of willed
unknowing which
changed night to
night; as I rushed
through it noired
me with a measure
of its cold phosphor,
lamping to all
the true amount of
wad I had to blow.
I thought my looks
--Rod Stewartean,
rail-thin, spiked-hair,
somewhat familiar
yet not--were what
rolled the dice
for me each night;
a single blade of hair
not spiked made
all the difference
between which lips
I'd taste that night.
Now I come to
believe that my
luck was fated
by that door,
by how much it
spoored over me
according to my
need. That's what
the others saw in
my blurred red eyes
standing at the bar --
the eerie shadows
of that door,
signalling how far
they'd fall in
reaching out for me.
And thus those nightly
motions of hand to
glass and cock
toward ass around
the midnight clock
were ciphers that door,
ruins of a ritual we
lost so long ago,
naked of the sort of
grace which clothes
us from below.
And like a movie
read to its ends
in negative, off the
outer screen, the song
of that door's
mystery is still voiced
in caricature,
out in libido's merry
throng, upside down
and errant, sexy,
clueless and wrong.
Out there in the press
we stole cherries from
each others' drinks
& used brassieres
for baseball mitts
playing catch with
a lost god's balls,
marauding on toward
dawn's brute shore
where desire found 'em
long ago. What a grand wild
feeling there always
was in whooshing
out into the grand
arch night, so full
of springlike expectation
no matter how
bad the season,
not knowing what I'd find
or where I'd find it
or if I'd find anything
at all except bad luck's
snake eyes again,
that usual course of
drunken nights which
set the main, above
which all good luck
rose in benippled isles.
The door welcome
me out into that
vast warm disarray
in Your blackest embrace,
the one in which
You slowly wombed
the door which opens in.