Crucifixum docet veritatem
I am there now, the place where
I can say to you directly
What the tricks of language
Can hinder or form,
I know that to keep it interesting
Is the price of attention, you go
Variously across the field,
It’s a show, and a tell, but the main fact
Is talking, some sharing, a gesture
Out to another, maybe a friend
Who is not even real, yet,
An apparition of apprehension,
Expected attendee at the imaginary
Reading in the heaven of elsewhere,
That place without pornography,
Alcohol, violence, pills, and screaming;
That ice palace of peace, unlike any
Genuine mind, I am on the boil,
A lobster reddening, on ferocious
Pain attention, it’s all apart now,
Break it open, and they mock it up,
The they are you, and elseward to the world,
You know I am hated, have felt that slap;
Have been kicked to the concrete
And licked a boot; had a cigarette appoint
Itself its red dragon my maker;
Thank you, masters of the cruel quickening;
I know now a meaning, a need
Greater than religion, war or surgery;
More compelling than sexual congress,
Or rock-climbing; falling, even more freely
Given – here I am, yours to arrow,
Ribbon me with stripes,
I give good Christ.
Not yours, not mine, just a body with soul
Tied to it, as they say in poems;
I am the messenger, do not spare me;
Show the crowds your un-empathy;
It’s strong to be empty and immediate,
Do the navel now; I am pierced daily by
Memory and experience; epistemology
Proves that the facts are solid, and sharp;
Lie on the gurney and leak
Into the bucket like a butchered animal
Grateful for love; for how we touch them.
I am the message and I come to say
You’ve been petty since foundation day;
You’re scared, but cut it out, we see through
The fear, the protecting ranking of the sickly canon;
You kill the art that you feed on;
Go home and consider your positions.
You’d ignore the babe in the manger
And bow to the jackal king, you’re about fuss,
And what you think you need, grandeur –
Look again – the spirits of any twisted age
Are grotesque, strange, margined, and shy,
Not dressed to thrill the jockeying spittle stage;
I resign the page if it is your page;
I vomit words if they are your words;
I want less than minus thirty-three from your
Bodies, towers of recognition, and parades;
Your floats are maggoty, the horses are choking
On a bit enmeshed with human shit.
Jesus, you’re the pits. I’m moving on.
My sheet lightning, will light the way
To forty years of worthless compositions;
I ride to Valhalla on a dying chimera who speaks
Latin like she knew the gods are waiting with feed;
She is winged, kind, powerfully magic, and given to song.
She sings to me that about my beautiful little lines
You were always a silly-billy, and so sad-wrong.
I was the stabbed child in the crowd
Granting an audience to the loud papal legate,
Bringing tears to the desert in my icicles,
And my husky-dog pulling a million sweet books;
You spared me few looks; you were busy being critical.
You missed your chance also, as did Lawrence once,
With one of the Lords of nature; you had power,
But not the gift of seeing the gold beneath your shod feet;
Shod in snakeskin, but the socks were pure lamb;
Poor lamb. You stood on God when you walked over me;
Just as you walk across God every time you forget
That the boats coming bring the archangels
Across the Channel, to drown for you, to die to teach
The only message any magician worth their salt
Knows, Deus cecidit ad terram dico vobis
sunt iam deo
tibi stultus
reges, ut sunt servi.
Love the upside-down
fire and kiss
the inserted grail.
November 13, 2021
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