The last dawn of this new day is past

The newest hours uprise & strive, suspend
& last into our hearts, upon our eyes,
within-against our skin & hands

Unmoved as water in a vase,
moved-unmoved as flesh-pale petals
peel into the light

Drastic as the sea, driven as the waves,
sudden as the spume & foam that
pearl a leaden shore













put-down in Somerset, Frome, 41 Locks Hill
towards the end, May 2008

A deacon sinks his weight into the rope,
the clapper swings & a church-bell peals

I pull the sheets back from us, turn into
her as she curls toward a ringing wall

There is light outside & light within --- it
hangs in the curtains & shines on our eyes

With her lips half-closed, breath slow,
I sink toward her neck & below

Which is holding her, which is Sunday,
which is calm --- in the last light of dawn















"In the last light of dawn"
for Ornella Valat
29.i.2009

On the lash : lines for O.

We woke & fucked & kissed
the light that woke us,
we kissed this very day she
woke to in my arms --- but
this is lost, forgot, ---
is gone & come again.

Her lips! --- her lips is
very life, all kissed with light
--- a swung-low, woken light that
shakes us out of sleep to see
the swooning loss
still lives in-with us all.

& yes, she is this all --- this
she that swings so chariot-like,
so low with-in my arms.

This her-woke flesh I very am is
all, still all, & time-like
lit with her is lost-forgot,
is gone --- not gone but
hard-as-hell still loves, still
pain-like wakes & drinks her in
& moans ---

yes, moans! while curse-like
swoons the dawn upon a
light that drives us without-doors
to live the day
that rides us down to dark,
where all is lost-forgot,
new-gone,
into her swooning arms.

& so we sink & come again,
swung-low,
into the lightless chariots of night.













A formless sextina
put-down at the K-head,
night of 14.ii.2009

Want only this

To live in unresisted love, while
hate disrupts forgiveness, like
tears are wept in sleep

Londres

C'est la damned vie.

The solitude this hour is sweet, & the madness I suffered in love is not risen or lowered -- is sheer-level with life. Eye, hand, heart, blood, sex --

I am beyond this desire, this hour -- & this beyond is a calm, a coolness, a peace I owe to every girl-child I have seen or held or taken. They have given me this peace -- this last-flower of all their wills & lives & half-given loves.

La gloire -- this new-perishing of desire. I pass on -- while the sky inclines toward dusk.

Stanzas

Light-struck I hung on her
like silver on a mourners neck
my love---dead necklaces
of memory, hard bracelets
of desire


I loved her visage, her mirror image
& the light I salvaged from her
lead-coloured eyes while I
held her, like a chalice
or a child

This is the hour when children are born
this is the hour when new-borns cry
such bloody joys as coming, crying
to such bloody shores as birth

Birth to this world that still lives within us
in dusks & cups & front-room bars

On the lips of virgins, tongues of whores
down reverent dawns & impenitent nights
on sinking tides & wakenings

Secret as the stems of our bones &
symbolic as the lines on our hands

Defenseless & resistless
as new eyes in new light

draft of a draft: The Heathens' Rage

Is reason alone baptiz'd?
are passions then the heathens of the soul? -- Young



Man-born is heathen. Flesh is heathen-flesh,
breath-spoke is heathen breath. Bride is heathen,
breast is heathen—womb & tongue & flank is
heathen. The bed o’ love is heathen-bed. The daughter
& her sobbing cry, the daughter with her new-born
eyes—heathen in her nerves and bones! Her scream-
raised, sensing gasp is godless as the world!

How godless is the eye? how godless is its light?
Is not the nervature clean from the womb? is her eye not
open & pure?

But her hand is born bloodied! arm bloodied! rib-cage
& face all drenched in blood! gleem’d smooth with shrieks’
sweat in a hard-mother’d pain! We must wash her—surely!
—this shuddering daughter! Sure this babe must be
stripped of that ominous stain—the black blood of her coming!

Black blood of the womb & its waters’ releasement!
black blood of a love-bed, red blood of shed seed!

STILL STORM

Such love as I have
& such hate

Such bone shapen hands
& liquid void eyes
suspended in the light

While the city grinds its teeth

Such I have
with this blood beaten heart
& its silence alone

Where comes the Alone

Homenaje a Victor Hugo Viscarra. A new 'Dream-texte', translated by Emerson Callejas Tapia.

MAMOTRETO DE UN SUEÑO


Oscuros y pesados sueños.


Imágenes, si –con la mente ardiente y luminosa desde adentro, donde farreo con otros libadores; un bar, construido sobre aguas, de vidrio doble en paredes húmedas de cristal; afuera la noche, oscura y quieta, suavemente un bote eléctrico se mueve y fondea en las aguas; todas, imágenes refractadas en el cristal, difusa y nacida ingrávida por la neblina y el agua adentro que se resiste a la piel del cristal- si, estas imágenes.


Una iluminada y oscura noche –mundo de luz, mundos de oscuridad; redes de luz en mares de oscuridad- todo emerge de un imaginado sobre aguas negras- brillan bajo la luz- movedizo, sexuado y visto entre luminosas paredes oscuras de agua y cristal.


Bebo vodka, sake, en las tablas de la mente –con otros sexuados farreadores- y, toda nuestra libertad condicional busca descifrar esta errante ancla que anclada viaja en este tres veces obscurecido, ebrio, luminoso y oscuro mundo.







[Emerson Callejas Tapia-- a La Paz visionary & friend-- has made this translation in honour of Victor Hugo Viscarra, a La Paz street-drunk poet. Victor Hugo died recently in La Paz.

[In conversation with Emerson, Viscarra said that the greatest recognition he had received as a writer didn't come from a writer but from a "common woman" of the slum areas. It was the dawn of any day in a cold bar in La Paz, & the drunk woman told him, "writer! I’ve read your book . . . you haven’t lied." (www.alcoholatum.blogspot.com)

[My homenaje is a grey shadow of hers-- though I also can say, in memory of certain streets, certain drinks, certain dawns-- he hasn't lied.

[Emerson & I have been at work on a translation of one of Victor Hugo's works, Alcoholatum y otros drinks, in hopes of publishing it in English. This is still a work in progress.

[Along with several other volumes, Viscarra published a dictionary of Coba, Bolivian slang-- & incorporated much of this slang into his writings. Emerson has reflected this practice-- this commitment of Victor Hugo's-- in his translation.

[Deep thanks to Emerson, for giving my voice a new tongue-- the dream is lovelier as a sueño. & indeed-- honour to V. H. V., a sad-eyed saint that lived the streets of La Paz & recorded their shrieks & their song.






[The Ingles is below:

[Dream-texte (09.15.2005)

[Dark, heavy dreams.

[Images, yes—the mind lit from within and warm, where I drink with other drinkers; a bar built over waters, with double-paned, moist glass walls; outside is night-dark and still, electric boat-lights move and anchor to the waters; all images thus refracted by the glass, diffused and made weightless by mist and the water inside that adheres to glass-surface—these images, yes.

[A light and dark night—world of light, worlds of dark; nets of light in seas of dark—all emerged out of and imaged on black waters—they shine, under light—all shifting, sexed, and seen through light-obscured walls of water and of glass.

[I drink vodka, sake, at the tables of this mind—with others, sexed drinkers—and all our parole seeks to decipher the shiftless anchor and anchorless shift of this thrice-obscured, drunk, light and dark world.]

Follow your saint

We descended into hell with locked eyes in dawns light in a glass shattered flat --- to the end of all love

& loves end is real Hell

I cursed & she wept --- but enchained in the sheets of a futureless bed our souls heard release & we rose, flaming, up the stations of the dead toward a watery light

& skin still flaming, toward a watery light, we still rise









'Follow your saint' -- saint is slang for a lover -- is the first phrase of a song in Thomas Campion, A Book of Airs, 1601

My work, my words, strive for the Root. Flawed in form, imperfect in voice, frail & menaced, bone-hard as my body. Erected on a skeleton of desire-- this living bone-tree, marrow-tree of my flesh.

I will persist.

das Mystische

that the heavens bleed to death
in our streets

&

time is a dying child---
always dying, always child

Ours

Veiled freedom-- & the veil may hide chains.

ERRATA

her robe hangs open,
a grey sky ashes
on her breast

& god is dead,
but shines

his eyes, his eyes
still hold the light,
still pearl her throat

still with us thus,
our god

weightless as a mans
last word,
eternal as a sons
last thirsting breath

god, god, oh my god,
pearl-grey as a cloud
& white as her thighs

this is the sadness,
the painless sadness
of a day that dies

ERRATA

ah, sweet jhesus,
the darkness---
heart-dark, eye-dark,
sky-dark night

her beak tears at
my side again

ERRATA

Night, & the blood pours in world-dirty veins,
the tongue grey with smoke, the eye white with light

Night, & the sky is a future, the wind is a past

ERRATA

This burn-wheel of blood in this dusk,
this flesh in the air

Here,
faithless yet alive

I hope against hope for some love
to swell my ribs

& wash-clean a voice that darkens
what it speaks

CANNON IS ALL [2004; a distant voice]

Desolation comes on the wings of a dove, and night is a covenant that
never holds.
It is not stillness, that led us here—it is imperfect greed and will, which cannot rest
in its own.

We have loved like christs, and dismissed all loves in pride.
We have dressed wounds with the fat of enemy dead, and indulged the sins of
their killers.
We have served waters of distraction from the wells of life, and waters of defeat to
our mothers.
We have exiled blood and purchased our own bodies.
We are chattel to ourselves—slaves, sellers, slaveholders, we ourselves.

Nothing is acquired, nothing is sold, but victims grace the selling blocks with
chains.
The veins of the bosom slow, breath is cooled, and innocents weep at the graves of the
dead.

We all hold enmity in common, if nothing else.
And we are all undermined.
This is the sacrament from which none is cut off—the love feast of incest at
which all partake as poor, hungry, drunk.
We are a nation of priests at a feast of purchased gods, with all archons descended to
feed on the disarmed, only to be fed upon.
The silence of the dead is the gambling-piece of the living, cast for this last garment
of world that cannot be neglected or torn.

The spirit of life is the wheel, and death is the wheel within.
The spirit of love is the wheel, and grief the wheel within.

This is the only cup, and its wine is all wrath and its wrath is all truth.
This is the ageless death of love in the deathless age of god.

If there is no god in the desert, then god is dead.
If there is no god in the desert, then Nimrod is our christ of mercy.

JUDGE [2004; a distant voice]

I

It will be darkness, it will be thirst—
a hard death, and a bad end—
a world of iniquity in its winding-sheets of misery—
the salt flats of lust in the heat of the day—
a whore, now pure and tasting of sin—
noose and soil, toilsome descent—
foetal sleep, free among the dead—and the tongue curls back in the head—
It is finished



There is no glory, mother—
glory—shit—glory—
there is no glory here





II

This is how I come, humbled—
this is how I come, convulsed and undone—
a segregation son in the mean control o’ the tree—
lifted in hate at the low end of heaven

Absalon!
hung from envy, lynched with glory—
caught in the hair of his fathers pity—
and the daughters of Azrael dont weep no more

This healing is a flowering of the disease—
Canaan is ours, its crosses have been built—
The table is readied, the tariff is fixed
‘Take, eat’—
We all die

This killing is called a purge—
this funeral is called a feast—
I have sold all I owned and given it to kings—
I am fat with the bread of angels—
I am drunk with the milk of idols—
The host is dead and his wedding-guests dying—
I give you nothing





III

Narciss sees Jhesus in the water—
Narcissus sees Venus in the glass—
Narciss sees Hades in the gutter—
saint Narciss sees his face

So come to the waters—come to the bitter well—
the original sinkhole in this desert of the real—

The eye is a drain—it is meat, gold teeth, saliva and throat—
flesh is the root, nerves are the veins of the soul—

Time is the press of blood through the body—
and ligature on the opened veins of will

There is no redemption, no release—
her voice like a broken hand
that rattles in the throat—
There is no redemption, no release

They crucifixed the bastard with nails—
son of man hangin there—son of man hangin there—
pain his naked sign; scars, skin, and new wine—
ballgag in gallbitter mouth; hermetic walls of sky

The father suffers now, and the son is his suicide—
the animus, a bird of appetite that feeds on living





IV

‘I am wounded with love—’
I am wounded with love

I piss urine the colour of rust—dark with the bodys substance—

I wash under drain pipes—shit in hypocausts—
sleep on scaffolds—in pits, cells, the filth of engines—
exiled from all blood and shelter—subject to temptation and the tempter—

I wake to a shameless sister with wounds in her eyes—
hear songs of jealousy and desire—
lie close to victims of surfeit—

I witness the widowhood of virginities—
children caught in ageless words—
childless women kissed with blood—
desolate wives, sons denied—the cross of love refused—

I confess—that child I sowed in a slave girl
was cut to death and salted like hateful soil, her soul
a hellcord at the neck and held in the teeth of a living God
I curse—and die

I wear the bondage and drink the gall on black-skinned streets—
all love out here, release—
all worlds, all truths, all tongues,
all faiths, hopes, disnatured births,
recurrence, death and insurrection,
all prides of living—
and the wind comes dark with the spirit of god—





V
I am suicide eunuch son of pain damned—
I am drunk with love in the city of travail—

Sealed he is, and seen, he comes, young, through loins of woman— blind, bloodied,
thrust— son of god, washed in blood of birth— whitemilk washed, foreskin cut, he is clean—
The stranger weeps—
he is strong— weeps

He comes to us, sad with love— it is woman that sent him, it is woman he seeks—
lover, mother, blind thighs of woman and their wound, heavy with odour—

He was conceived within four walls, on a mattress, with sweat—
a supper of flesh, overseen, and with water—
father, mother—
‘I thirst—’
I drank this water on the tree
And woman, of her daughter— ‘Take, drink—’

I fucked her—
lawless, washed— with mother, mattress and sweat of death—
the husbands hour, I gave her— this, flesh— and she, she— and she bled—
she, crying
Mother,
Mother, Mother,
Mother, Mother,
Mother

A daughter is unclothed, young— a son, circumcised in blood— a god, I—
strange god to woman, her child— daughter of the mother of god—
in my arms— in my arms—

She clothes herself with blood— this blood I know—
odour, oestrus, childless mothers flow—

I am husband to this wife, breastloins and bloodlust, mother of my love—
and she is cursed with a name—
Love is dirty sleep— under the wrath of God, under the last yellow rain—



This city is my birth— it is pure—
This city is my birth— it is pure—

Her blood is cold— the road is dead— cold, dead, corpses laid—

The heart is wet with love— the water, the blood—
The heart is wet with love—

Son of Baal— shitface son of trash— is it lust that wets his face—?
son of Baal— is it— bliss—?

I drank her, water, on the tree—
‘I thirst,’ her breasts— her milk I drank—

I drink her love— the water, the blood—
her name, the city of the beast—



Mothersheart love dark love come, her daughter in your arms—
Her name, heavy with grace, is flesh— heavy, dark, and come with love—

I husband her—
I love her with my cock—

Cold, she is—
this mother of all blood—
of the uselessness of birth, named—

Thrust, groan—
sac, wet with seed, is motherswomb—
what mother—?
was she— woman—?
what cunt of womanhood thrust and bled this cock in pain—
this son of sons cock, bloodied— son of pain—
what motherhood—?
and will she— forgive—?

She now receives— mother she becomes—
thrustness, son—

He husbands love—
he brothers darkness—
he mothers law with his sure blood of living—

Cold, drunk he is with her—
rages, strange—
weeps, he rages—
within four walls— mattress, womb— her negro road, wet with anger—
flood, he comes— to us, he is seen— this Baal of the road—
weeping shame—





VI

Love is common as death—

a stonewall cross on a flat road;

a naked son, gaunt with bliss

in the infinite violence of gentleness;

a struck, sad, halfcaste daughter;

the seamless soul torn, and its pain—



Dead in the water—
head on the board—
I heard, ‘love your enemies’—
And I heard, ‘death is the last enemy’—
I give you this, Love Your Death— and Live





VII

This is Jerusalem liberata, savaged Ramallah, venal strata of increase and bone—
semen, pale sulphur, punishment odour in the city of man—

This is rape and wastage,
starvation, slavery,
incarceration, debt,
subjection, disgust,
marriage and adultery,
this is covetous love and the object of desire, all fear—

This is the city where mothers see blood— the blood of new sons, cleansing, shed—
the final cup, hard womb, the wheel within a wheel—

This is our childless mother— this is the end of grace—
I call the name of this place— wailing!



It Will Come, It Will Come
The end is begun— kyrie, eleison—
It Will Come, It Will Come
It Will Come

This is a dirge at the birth of a beloved son—
I have not mourned, secure—
I have seduced and absolved in the streets of God—
bound and sold, teeth and blood—
It Will Come

This is a death-hymn of cries and groans—
a seed of life spent on her skin—
dark clouds of resurrection—
a intemperate son in the bedsit of glory—
derelict virgins in the house of authority—
with the fathers of order, the mothers of trade—
vicious, avaricious

This is sin according to law, its destroyed offenders—
the judges judged, the violation of their corpses—
bound and sold, nerve and bone—

It Will Come, with the kingdom,
at the inner man with stones in its hands—
and a fire that eats beneath the flesh—
while we curse and pray to the naked one—
us all, also, hungtime dying—
heaven gehenna,
world without end



And the terrors of death are not gone—
and the terrors of hell come again—
In dark births, vomited, drunk and unnerved—
with the rats, with the plague, wretched—
slaved to the streets, teeth rotted in the head—
In railyards lit with evil lights—
in this last, bonewhite christ— squat in the flows of sorrow and love, saying
Come to pass, mother—
Come to pass—

And it came to pass, in gardens of betrayal—
it came to pass baptized in the grey cunt-issues of living—
with stench and tears, with the discontents and idolaters—
in the slack brown waters of trespass, and all mercies


Ne discesseris a me

In that most perfect mirror

I reflect,
& reflected in her eyes
I see
with a new immediacy

Birth re-born of a death-bed is love,
grave love, break-brazen that weeps

& the highest blisses can only be wept

THEY SHD HANG ME OR SAINT ME, SO MAD IS MY SOUL

Dishearted

The silence is deaf water on his skin & the sadness is blind wind
his heart has seen the end, & shakes

strophe

clearing the heart of black dirt,
clearing the eyes of black darkness
& moving, resolute, into that clearing
that is Vision & Love

anti-strophe

& the dark ages in our blood,
the garden, famine, plague, & flood,
the centuries of desire that surge up in us
surge us to the Crisis

ROUGH

There are visions on her breath & reaches of her voice,

bruised water in her eyes & subtle rushing noise

that sounds against her skin,

thin & tongue-like finger-tips,

cigarets & smouldering lips,

the way she curls to sleep

I offer up my ruined heart

This is last light,
the last cigaret

last wordless breath,
last city, last sip

last hand-clasp,
last hand

surrender,
last surrender

to the stab or fear of last love

A report

Ah! my love---- I try her, press her, provoke our hearts to pain---- scowl, fall silent, leave her on the stairs to the locked roman church---- kiss her, sip & breathe her, drink & undress her, bite at her breasts---- & in the dead times I study, scrawl the merest fragments of poetry

So be it---- there is no weakness in the short forms---- to sing the light that glances off-wing in the wheel & turn, & fall silent

Jahveh was my god, & he died; Jhesus was my muse, & I killed him---- I live in wait of a worldful, mortal, sinful god-muse I cd sing with eyes void of guilt, void of judgment, & wide with a love-dirty light

I shd sing of my love, sing my lover---- but it seems that I am too near to her to sing---- (she is the nearest, die Nächste)

The ark is god's---
ours the bowl of heaven gone to dust
& the brown-budded rod,
the tarnished ephod,
the cracked tables of the law
& the lips of a woman in whom we love

This is the secret

Thus Friedrich Schlegel, circa 1800:

"This is the secret of love, that those it binds could be each for itself, and yet they are not, and cannot be without the other."







cit. Manfred Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millan-Zaibert, Syracuse: State University of New York Press, 2004, p. 122.

11 a.m.

& we lie abed, let the light drift in
on the wake & spume of the night

In winds that wreck us is a wind that perfects us

The heart,
yes,
exults

Liquor pours & light burns,
the skies break
& we rest

Release our souls,
release them to release,
that the reckoning may be with new light

Eyes in the clouds & voice in the winds
that we wake

To cold water, shaken on the face
in a mirror

With smoke on the tongue,
in a city

To silk & credit,
steel & graffiti

That while the graces, tides & furies
still lick our breathing shore
this life may be glory,
still glory,
is glory

All as a sea

Night black & grey dawn,
painless & pure that we wake,
naked & white to white seas

From a wash of coiled water to a coiled heap of shells,
from storm-clouds & thunder with eyes like black pearls

Draped in a necklace of sea-weed & thorns

& the heavenlies shine that still we breathe
& gaze with eyes & graze cool skin
with hands that sink in water










‘All as a sea, the world no other is’, is the first line of a poem in Will Byrd, Songs of Sadness and Piety, 1588.

Quid autem amo?

my meat-red heart

this night that spills no blood

her milk-white eye
that blossoms grey

the light that in them moves






Augustine asks, Quid autem amo, cum te amo? in Confessions, bk. 10: What then do I love, when I love you? Cit. Martin Heidegger, 1921: Augustine & Neo-Platonism. The lines: 25.ii.2007.

17.vii.2006

The sun fails, and I am drunk. The sky is still grey with last light, and I am drunk.

Sorrow destroys me; hate and sorrow embitter me. I hate the poverty of my life; its inner, enduring poverty.

I drink, this impoverished painlessness! This poverty is the only grace I know; it destroys me!

And I ask of god, what is it I must do to inherit this life? The holy one spits likker in my face; I collapse.

Pretergraph to all that follows

"Fragments of this kind are like a literary sowing of the fields. Of course, there may be many sterile seeds in them. Nevertheless, if only a few of them blossom!"

Novalis, Pollen, par. 114.

4.iii.2007

she wakes from keeling fears & edgeless light,
this woman-child I wake

26.iii.2007; Café Kejzer

A lustful eye trafficks the world, & this love I have for a woman---- her beauty, taste, her heart & voice---- frees my gaze from the wide lust for use.

17.iii.2007

Dawn in a city of lenses and mirrors---- dawn in a city of pale-reflect skies. The streets, the locks, the doors; windows & scaffolds, gutters & codes.

A failed poet smokes a thin cigaret. The sky is his & his heart is his lover's.

He cannot sound her eyes, he cannot sing the sky---- so he smokes, & loves.

He loves what cannot be sounded, sung, shattered, laid bare. He loves a nakedness that veil-reveals a soul---- the claire that reflects in a surface, the obscure that rises to her eyes.

He loves the cities of her flesh---- windows, locks, lips & doors; the streets of her soul---- her wrists & her mirrors, impenetrable futures.

A tide-risen silence that harbours all speech & all sound.

15.iii.2007

This thirst, this heart-thirst,
is it for love? for pleasure?

The lidded eye thirsts light,
& what cd slake the living heart?

at the verge of creation

all praise!----- the man at this precipice, of a new-living word, shd plunge & exult in his fall, rejoice in his fall, for the waters he rushes are deep----- a light-littered, sky-coloured sea.

8.ii.2007

The sky fell white, froze over the ground. The young sheep call and cry, birds lift. White as caught light, the world. Light caught against the clouds, against the cloud-covered ground. Light shot and held and shining, greyed by wet winds. Winds, the voice of a crying lamb------ the noise of white-hearted babes. Says Dostoevski,

we are all little ones,
we are all babes;

White-hearted, crying------ delivered, held and shining----- against the clouds, against the ground--------- held, yes, yet standing.

Nicole is the youngest of us all--- a jüngster tag---- and she is out in it, this shrouded world.

I will go to her for a while.






Jüngster Tag, 'the Youngest Day'---- Prussian colloquialism for the Judgment Day. Cf. Kant's 1794 essay, 'The End of All Things', in Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and other essays on politics, history, and moral practice, trans. T. Humphrey, Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1983: 93-106.

Asiatic tercets

18.ix.2005

The taste of this world—
a dry cigaret burned in cool, dry air,
in the shadows.




5.ii.2007

Solitude at dusk.
This is when
the silencing comes.

Hard quieting of the heart.
The sense for noiseless things
and lust for noise.

Allusion to Eden

And love, though a dream, is still no sleep. It is the shock that Adam sang as he woke from a faceless sleep to see the woman at his weakened side------- this creature, she is mine! and I am lost into her flesh!

Le nouvelle Eve

Child-like! I write it------ and old as the world---------- it is love.





Cf. Francis Bacon, De principiis atque originibus, etc.------ "The stories told by the ancients concerning Cupid, or Love, cannot all apply to the same person; and indeed they themselves make mention of two Cupids, very widely differing from one another; one being said to be the oldest, the other the youngest of the gods"; in The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, ed. John M. Robertson, London: Ge0rge Routledge and Sons, 1905, p. 647. But our Lord Verulam is wrong here------ that the oldest god Love should also be the youngest and a Child is coincidentia oppositorum------- the first word of mythopoeic consciousness. The oldest word of all consciousness--------- and yes, still its youngest.

The prelude

That girl my love distracts me to unsounded eyes,
to her unsated lips, her quenching breasts and
dripping thighs, still-undrunk thighs and
hands that clutch my neck------------ all tender,
that first tremor that we suffer in her
still white-sheeted bed.

A post-card

8.i.2007

This narcotic weather: hypodermic skies; tourniquet winds and syringe-like clouds------ grey sorrow the fix.

The gods tie us off, the fates flick the spike, the world-soul pricks our dammed-up vein----- with weeping!

Our hearts flood-over with grey-coloured tears.

Weather's bleak, and I sleep bad in the new room.

But the sky is a mouth, breast, and life-flooding eye--- no deathgaze, no spike; the rain is milk, not junk; and the winds! breath of the seas, and very seas.

CRANACH

This is the LOVE-INFLICTER and his mother, VENUS---- and jhesus, what a gaze this jezebel has; what sly, indolent slope to her pose; what breasts, bare feet; shaved forehead, braded necklace, nimbus-crown o' plucked birds-down; shadowless sex, utter ease.

And her boy---- the child; the child that dirties his hands with love, that ruins our minds and pricks our veins with the childishness of love---- he is stung and helpless and whining. Lost in a mean cloud. After the nectar--- thirsty for honey--- he gets the sting.

What is this? and which am I?---- mother, son, stag or wasp or mule?

[18.i.2007. A post-card to J.D.]

PURPURO

Maria K. and icons

Saddam at the gallows

And the uncertainty of every hanging is this----

When the body falls, whose neck is it that breaks?
whose blood is it that stills and pools?
whose heart that blackens, dies, and is changed?

Whose the last voice, last eye, last hand that gleams
in the judged and hooded face?
whose the fury? whose remorse?
whose the terror? whose ruin?

Whose quietude and new-dug grave?

Dupont Circle, xii.2006

The man who chains his eyes to the ground---- to bodies, faces, walls and glass---- this man is chained as a grazing beast--------

we must lift our eyes; and this, in the city, signals madness or rebellion;

we must loose our gaze on the skies----

Loose your gaze upon the skies!



The birds circle; the birds lift and curve and sway--- but not even the birds have eyes for the endlessness of heaven--- they rise but to gaze on the dirt, to fix, dive, and tear---- they live in the skies but for meat and dirt.



We live! while doves and death-birds gyre in shining clouds above our heads.

Metro, xii.2006

Jonathan Demaree shot this on a glance. I like it, though he may not.

See several new, considered photos at jonathandemaree.blogspot.com

Thus howls

Thus howls the dirty south, thus howls the freed and
god-sky'd slave--
the releasement of undoing----- his releasement of-----
listen!------

the drunken soul takes hold of siege-work skies-----
the drunk voice shouts and shies-------

lost song?, gone down to resurrect-------
sunk down to grieve, still down to save-----

we hear!----- still---- yet still we hear the blood-cloud song
of woman in her sons-----
her corded hallelujahs gathered to the ground,
her rise!

I, a son, still cannot speak; and I, a slave, still cannot weep the high hard-shuddering skies,
for there is the resurrect and suckle-breast of god our mother----- god her gotten son!

childs-play:

'Let us play with god!'

A man that calls himself simply Man, speaks of woman and man by using his own hermaphroditic name;

Man is a beast that flees his own gaze as that of a gazer---- i.e. of a hunter, killer, judge, and stalker.

Man is a beast for which the waters are a mirror.

Man is a night-beast that praises the light; a sea-beast that sings of the sky.

(vid. the three numbered paragraphs in Kant's preface to his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.)

That I am no duellist; from an old letter to a Russian-named girl

I have thought much on your last correspondence. Pleasant and contentious letters. Sweet and contentious.

With regard to 'dualism'--- I am most certainly no dualist. And I have no hold on what you could mean, 'dualist'--- etfuckencet, on into beauty.

Heraclitus is fundamental here--- there is no heat without cold, there is no good without evil. This--- the yes, the no--- grounds all language, all thought. But all language, all thought are precisely COMPLEX FLOWERS, because though all we can say is grounded in essential oppositions, we say and live ON and OVER this ground. Oppositions within oppositions. Oppositions beyond, beneath, interpenetrating and negating oppositions. Oppositions that produce harmony, and function. Organized being that disintegrates, destroys.

And that dirty flow that underlies all--- that slow, deep, endless-dirty flow in which is all grace, all joy--- TIME. All is sustained and converges in this world-skin, TIME.

I am a CARNALIST and PURGATORIALIST. Heaven and hell meet--- kiss, slaughter, acquire and betray--- in the now. And in this now--- kiss! slaughter! acquire and betray!--- there is precisely no heaven, no hell. But world. But world. But world.

And this pluriform world--- plenum and void--- is most certainly a complex flower.

ALL IS, IS SO.
ALL IS, IS SO.

SHANTIH, while the heart whips the blood in your chest.

//////////////////////////////////////////////////

Then this Russian-named girl writes to me----

'But. But oh god, life is sweet, sweet necter.'

---- and she, with her 'necter', is the godlier poet.

Buenos Aires, v.2005

George Kaiser, 1921:

'Love blasphemes love and purifies love with love!'





Seven Expressionist Plays: Kokoschka to Barlach, trans. J.M. Ritchie and H.F. Garten [London: Calder and Boyars, 1968], p. 73.

Ivan Goll, 1922, in the preface to his play 'Methusalem, or The Eternal Bourgeois'

‘Why is only the death of man called tragic? A conversation five sentences long with an unknown woman can well become far more tragic for you in eternity.’





Seven Expressionist Plays: Kokoschka to Barlach, trans. J.M. Ritchie and H.F. Garten [London: Calder and Boyars, 1968], p. 80.

On eyes and lips, the signs in her face

---- her face becomes old in the darkness, young in new light---- young and wise, in new light

On a delicate, small-breasted lush

sad! that not all of us
live towards life

she!-- so lovely and hopelessly--
she is a death-girl

From the archives of the southern races

LOVE SONG OF A SLAVE-GIRL

And they pull him up by his neck,
and that place where he loved me
gets hard with his pain

And the hour o’ pain ’ll come for me,
and I’ll think on his love
—his sweet, grey-dawn love—
And his lynch-caught throat in last light,
an’ the pale killers’ hands
gone black with the rope

My man killed without killin,
anger righteous in his eyes,
his love-solemn hands.
White men dream murders in the night,
livin-death with their lies,
an’ kill with proud vengeance

The hate in their hands,
hate strangles my love,
secures him there tremblin,
tremblin.

Is he gone?
his soul now fled?
this stillness his death?

Sad patience!
don’t lash and moan!
he don’t kick for the ground!
Is he gone?
his soul fled?

My righteous one, my husband
dirtied his hands with blood,
the neck-gore o’ cruel men.
But love was sweet, as we wept
—sweet!—as I wept for my man
and he wept his release

Sweet love!
grey-dawn light!

Hate strangled my love
in a hard, dyin light,
As his love-solemn hands
b’come hands for his son
and swell in my womb

Sweet love!
chained to the noose
as his life left him there
To that bright house o’ god,
all hatreds purged

I love!
I love him!
He could breathe this yet
when the rope took him up,
And that place
where he loved me
got hard with his pain




LOVE SONG FOR A SLAVE-GIRL

I was born for vengeance—born for the lynch—
slaved to this livid, blood-sellin race,
their lord-god o’ the lynch,
the white Moloch

I will not supplicate the slave-holdin christ!
I will not supplicate the white bitch for mercy!

And my woman there,
fat with my child—
That girl-child there,
weepin the noose—
My black, sinless bride
with scars in her eyes—

I prayed for her peace
as I raped white wives—
Delivered my son
as I wrecked pale children—
Unsealed Canaan’s gates
as I cut slavers’ necks

I was born for vengeance—born for the lynch—
slaved to this livid, blood-sellin race,
lord-gods o’ the lynch,
white Molochs

I was born for the lynch,
this is my cup—
But my unbreathin son,
calm in her womb—
And my woman there,
weepin the noose—

She and her son
will come free—
An’ our Zion slaved
will come free

White man is come to his end—the lynch is for him.
For us—aahhh!—
this is the noose

Come, my bride—
Let us cross grievous rivers, and rest in the shade

--- written in Buenos Aires, 2005

--- street-disseminated in Richmond and Washington, D.C., 2005

A new definition

---- we speak on thirsting breath, in seizing and allaying noise, and from the inward discord of our silentest intent.

A drinking song for old men and infants

Thinning the blood with drink;
enflaming the mind;

the heart trembles, and opens,
beholds its own blindness as with a mother's tender eyes;

and the water pours---
in his very blood the hard water
pours in flames---
enflames his tender mind.

Gloss on a line

Poet is Priest says Ginsberg-- in Paris, in 1958;


--- yes!, and his cup is filled with blood and never wine,
his sky is visage and is veil,
and the streets for him a heavenly basin that runs with
bulls' seed and doves' gore
--- he speaks!, and his words pour clear as water,
black as blood sprung from a frantic, slitted side

God's beast has swallowed me

It was not on the night of the third, no---- but morning of the fourth day that the great sea-creature spewed out a half-drowned poet onto a sun-beat, hostile beach-- shaking and bitter but saved.

And so it will be;---- this is the night of the third. Not yet dark, and I drink. God's beast has swallowed me; and I drink.

And I will drink til I wake on the beaches at Nineveh.

Night thoughts

18.x.2006

And the only pity and dignity of the dead is this---- that they have lived; yes, even the babes dead inwomb.


21.x.2006

And at the end of a night spent in her swan-like, knife-scarred arms I climb to the grave-yard to watch the wind in the sky---- and to-night the dead here, the graves, offend me.

On a Kantian hypothetical, for Maria

Thus KANT,--- Suppose that nature were lying before you entirely uncovered, and that nothing were hidden from your senses, et pass.


--- at the heart, still, and on the breath of a naked and supine woman
we recognize- if we have eyes to see- the limits of all sensual vision
beyond which she lies, in a vague and incónsolable light,---
or dusk,--- or darkness---

Several comments on Jonathan Demaree's short film, THE LAST CHAPTER

Jonathan Demaree, 2006
B/W, digital hand-held
3m, 26s
Original music by Timothy Dusenbury
[http://jonathandemareefilm.blogspot.com/]

Note: Trying to view the film as it streams will be frustrating on most machines and with most connections. It is best to select PLAY, which will intiate the streaming, and then select PAUSE after several seconds. Within a minute or so the film will have streamed in, and it can then be viewed smoothly in its entirety.

I find the movements of the camera's eye to be perfectly attuned to the pensive and watery, pianistic reverie with which the film opens. The piano -- yes -- moves as waters move; and the camera moves as the eye moves -- as the eye moves over water.

The camera-work throughout I find to be delicate and insistent. I am particularly pleased with the way that the technical limitations -- the film-maker's groundedness in the most literal sense, as he films on his feet, on the concrete street -- gives form to the camera-work. This is particularly effective in the strangely devout, opening scrutiny of the womanly, sea-like statue (she reaches down to us!, this kingly woman, from her heaven of glass!); and later in the Reverie on the Vine.

However exploratory the camera-work, it is immobile at its (invisible) center of gravitation -- which is where the film-maker stands. (Whereas classically, given of course by the peculiarities of painterly materials and the static nature of the painterly artefact, the horizon-point is central, visible-vanishing, and fixed; here it is the ground-point that is fixed, and the horizon that shifts and gives way to new aspects as we gaze, as the eye moves and re-moves. This change is of course afforded by the technics of film; but this is not I believe the typical filmic technique.)

The effect of this stance as well is that we spend much of our time looking up at the white, unbroken heavens -- clouded only by the city walls!

(And yes! -- forgive me. I will speak like a child in my joy. I will be, as Georges Bernanos says, ridiculous in joy -- the sad joy this film wakens in me.)

I do think that this physical limitation has allowed and perhaps forced nice perspectives on these artefacts -- a distinctly bodily mode of vision and re-vision. (How facile, in comparison, would be the automatic, sudden ascent and overpass and sweep made possible by a crane or helicopter.)

Et:



There is, it seems to me, a lovely echo between the statue of the woman and the death-mask or life-cast that follows. And I have no idea whether this mask/cast is of a woman or a man -- but it registers in me as womanly. And perhaps its calm serenity -- that of death, or sleep! were it not for the fully opened eyes -- is what also lends it in my eyes a forgiving, forbearing, and tranquil quality of acceptation -- a Marian association.

And the lower impression, the inner visage -- who has ever seen the Icon from within? (And yet this is the feeling it gives.)



As I've already said the next meditation, on the organicist object -- the shorn, wire-bound trunk -- (which is attended by a sweet soaring of the violin, a dove-like, mournful, cooing ascent -- bird-like as wind, and so delicate!) -- seems to me to be a Reverie on the Vine. And the mytheme of the Vine is Zagreus-Dionysos, and is Christ. "The drops from a mutilated Vine pool on the City's floor . . . the world's death-birthing floor" -- for yes, do we see how its branches have been cut?

(And what is that object we glimpse on the ground at the base of the column? We see it for less than a second -- a dead dog? a dead bird? a cast-off garment?)



I admire as well the alignment of the greatest peace -- a silence, a senescent or angelic resignation of the musicians' voice -- a still point, around which the sky and cities wheel[1] -- with the introduction of the old man.

And then -- (on first viewing this seemed to me wrong, but increasingly it has seemed not only right but necessary) -- at the old man's halting stupor, vague stare to the other side of the concrete street -- (there is nothing there, of course, just as there is no one beside him, behind him, or before him to face him! -- he sees only bright-lit walls and shadows, which are most desolate when the sun is at its highest . . .) -- this moment of his silence, his transfixion, is underwritten and overwritten and taken up in-to the loudest moment of the music -- its heavy, resolute approach to -- which emotion do we approach here, through this sudden discord? what is it that moves in us, and in the voice we hear?

(We seem to see a face, as we listen to this voice! But it is not the old man's face, that we see. No -- he also is looking! Through the concrete walls through which he can't see . . . gazing at the face that he cannot see . . .)

It is not an Emotion that we hear. No, I reckon it is Time. That is all -- the sad sound itself of Living Time.

-- And is that all?

[1] Who refuses the music of the spheres refuses poetry. -- Allen Ginsberg, 1959.

IRAK

The leaden goddess with her cruel and servile, sectarian gods --
suicide furies, precision harpies, majestic rage --
and no water to be drunk!

Babylonian streets of murdered skin and silken blood --
terrace upon terrace inlaid with suffered pain;
and on the lowest cobalt terrace the Kurdish girls weep yellow tears
over the imprisoned and the dead;

Whole rivers prayed of tears --
and no water to be drunk.


The mercenaries of Rome, bud-breast daughters and sons,
repent the vile heat and kneel to the fasces,
pray sad to the fasces, spit on the fasces,
spill blood on the fasces;

And guilt that is in us, upon us,
streams in black endless wave from the fetishized screen
-- eyeless, irreal! --
the murdered skin and silken blood of Iraki dead
and the soldiers of Rome.


Mahmoud is rendered insane in a black-site prison
and Zahra his daughter killed by tribal imams
for her love of new names and her naked face,
and RIGHTEOUSNESS IS THE ORIGINAL LIE.

20.9.06

The susurrous heart -- yes!, with its onliest silence, the within of the flesh, curl-breathing, suspiring, ceaseless-desiring -- breathly and bloody eye-lung of the soul,

The ripening heart and deflowering hand,
cut-plucking hand,
the passioning heart, baptizing hand,
weep-grieving heart and severing hand,

The high, sifting heart is the within of the truth.

Welsh crucifix

Jhesus is nailed to the limbs of a thorn tree. The wan sun reflects from his rain-wetted skin as from an eye, or a cloud. He dies, and becomes blue. A single dove falls from the wind, bleeding from its beak; his mother sobs on the concrete floor of a bar; his father is in prison; and the world is not louder or quieter than when he still lived.

"-- to sing in the wilderness toward God -- O Elohim! -- so to the end --"

Allen Ginsberg, Kaddish.

And I write this on a roof. Buenos Aires.

Where are the women, that I can watch them bathe? and say come, release your shame?

I am a poet who sings of god;
a psalmist o' bloodthirst in mercy's balm;
a naked son of sons.

(Should my hands be clean of blood?)

Lay like a bride on my couch, and LOVE.
Lay like a divorcee on my sheets, and LOVE.
Lay!, like a slatternly widow of god.
Lay, adulterate!, and drink of love.

(A son may die, but he will wait for us upon the wounded breast o' the sky!)

Let us weep another hour.

24.xii.2004. In night in drink in streets. Buenos Aires.

Alone w/ the glass. An 'the tongue sets fire to all the wheels of nativity' [St James], an the tongue sucks and spits wine.

The intoxication o' the old, inner man is the intoxication o' the flesh that breathes and speaks.

I speak drink. An the hand writes what wets and spits as heart.

The hand writes heart. An the heart writes it-self w/ blood.



Ink is black breath. I kneel and breathe at the sheet like JAHVEH stooped in mud. I say, 'Let us make man of black mud. Let us make speech in the likeness of gods. Let us speak man, and let man speak! Let us breathe upon the mud, and let mud breathe!'

Ink is black breath. // Black breath is smoke. //
The sheet o' man's breath is lit. SMOKE!
The ink o' man's speech burns. It is SMOKE!
So let our fires o' flesh rise like cinder and prayer to the gods.



This is what the poet sings -- the SINAI breath o' gods.
Black desert smoke and flesh that's hid in mud.

A law?
The poet speaks a law!
A law?
The poet speaks a law!

And the poet is a jealous god.



Man is mud in the gardens o' god.
His heart is black, his speech is smoke.
The heart o' man ascends upon this smoke; his acts burn and illume as a pillar o' cloud enwraps the column o' flame.

And the manly heart o' god breathes this smoke -- our speech! our acts! -- breathes the mud-cloud o' man as a mother breathes within her unborn son.

This breath, this mire, this blood!
This heart, this mud, this smoke!
This garden!
DESERT!

The pillar o' cloud within the column o' flame is what the poet speaks, and the garden o' mud is what he sees.



In night in drink in streets. I sit. I drink.

30.xii.2004. Coffee, bloody wine in the aftermath o' noon. Buenos Aires. -- A BRIDEGROOM OF BLOOD IN THE STREETS WITH HIS BRIDE.

Murderous waters, murderous deeps!
And streets that wreck a falling child --
Elders' bones that curve in aftermath o' noons --

All weary infants, all weary infants--
And the child that tastes death before her birth-milk dries --
GRIEVE!

Grieve for the gods o' prison cells and cancer wards --
Grieve for the fallen angels of our government --
All violators, all violated!
That morphine is sold to holy ones in our streets.

Weep with those who weep --
and weep for those who cannot weep!

GRIEVE!
For the Judas in her womb --
For the Jesus in her womb --
For the Bhud --
For his forsaken son --

The floodtides o' hope and pain are strong,
and the breathlessness o' release will drown us.



Pleasure flees --
the innocent do not flee!
The wounder flees, the wounded flees --
Pleasure flees!

And solitude recurs.
And we wake alone with god in that worldly hour god died in.



ECLIPSE!
We can only gaze at a darkened sun --
we can only gaze at a darkened sun.

But we live and praise in its light.

8.1.2005. Early morning, in the streets. Buenos Aires.

When the slavers came for us
we were already slaves.

Hell is worse than the earth,
but is not new.

We all knew the whip
before it bit into our flanks;

We all sipped the cup before
it stripped our throats of flesh.

Have we not suffered birth
and wakened in restraints?

The vise of the womb shaped our minds;
the blood of her travail greased our skin;

And we woke to the odours of urine
in our very young youth.




I write 'the samsara of shame' to undermine it. But this is no comfort, and a very partial truth. As I said--- 'I have not broken through'.

And so, a night in which I recommence smoke and drink. I have recommenced shame, without shame.

I am a naked child. A naked child with a knife.

8.i.2005. After-noon, after sleep. Buenos Aires.

I wrote, 2.i.2005, 'I am breaking a chain' -- viz., kickin the addiction to smoke. I now write with LE MANS cigarets, cause as socius, I am a smoker. This is a social truth o' my flesh.

And I wrote in south ENGLAND, of the flesh [2003]: 'Of course -- you Manichees! -- the prisoner loves his cell. Even St PAUL says, Who does not love his own flesh?'

And later, Ezr. POUND writes [1944]: 'If it isn't this: The human beast loves its fetters?' (Canto LXXII). And in his youth Ez. P. wrote a hymn o' praise to NICOTINA.





And who will deliver the prisoner that loves his cell?
This deliverer will be hated, in the end.
Crucified, perhaps--.

And thus ISRAEL's remorse in the desert, the longing for EGYPT.
And in the former Bloc the old ones long for STALIN [so I hear].

THE REMORSES OF FREEDOM -- THE LONGING FOR EGYPT--.
REMORSEFUL FREEDOM -- LET US KISS THE ROD!
LET US KISS THE HAND THAT STRIKES US!

The slave is secure in his chains -- The slave is secure in his chains --
Lifted-up upon the selling-block--
PHAROAH is a hard master, but surely no crueller than JAHVEH.


And PILATUS offers BARABBAS [guilty of armed robbery] to the masses --
And PILATUS offers CHRISTOS ['love your enemy, sell all you own'] --
And surely the greater thief was crucified -- CHRISTOS.
BARABBAS the lesser threat, transgressor, felon --.

'Here is JHESUS,
ECCE PECCATOR!'

And of the three lift up at GOLGOTHA,
CHRISTOS the most heinous --
CHRISTOS the most heinous --
his word o' love the endless coup!


And this is empiric:
If nothin else, the CHRISTOS saved BARABBAS, and died for him.

THE JEW KING, INRI, SAVED A THIEF!
THE NAKED ONE REDEEMED BARABBAS WITH HIS BLOOD!

And perhaps, near his death St BARABBAS broke the bread and took a cup, saying:
'This is the body and blood of JHESUS, which was poured out for me!'


And ah!, sweet JHESUS!, to a crucified dog at his side:
'This day you will be with me in Paradise --
this day,
in which you die
shall have no night.
And yes,
my son, my brother,
we thieves are sons o' heaven!
we thieves are pleasing sons to god.'


And in that last, sweetest dawn -- 'that hour ends the day' [MARLOWE] -- the naked one drinks wine with the slave that served him gall, and kisses JUDAS, resurrected, calms the tears o' the sinner that speared his side; forgiving BARABBAS his sins, leaning on the woundless neck o' JEAN BAPTISTE -- reclined with HEROD and HERODIAS! -- and washing PONTIUS' feet.


And it cd be that as STALIN's bloodguilt burns off him in the purge -- 'the moustache cockroach tyrant' [GINSBERG];
the twenty millions souls he slaughtered intercede for him with love -- a wronged, wronging, washed, ascended host;
at the wounded side o' the ageless Lamb -- who is goat, dove, dog, son and serpent o' the gods;
and plead for his release.

And it cd be that STALIN in his doom o' grief weeps for the living damned that suffer hunger, war, and violation still -- as DIVES wept for his brothers.


This is not a faith.
I have not beheld the BOUDHA face, endless serene, gaze from the bleeding palms o' JHESUS [Gabriel OKARA].
I have not become silent in that most ancient DAY, the perfect god.
But I have tasted hope, in certain hours -- I have drunk that bloody wine.

And, drunk on this cup, 'all sorrows fall away' and sin loses all sting.

Octavio Paz, fr. 'Sun stone'

looking at us from the beginning of time,
the young girl in her seeing an old mother
who sees within her grown son a young father,
the mother's seeing of a lonely daughter
who sees in the kingly father a young son,
looks that look into us to the furthest depth
of life, that are the traps and snares of death
--is it the opposite? is falling in those eyes
the way back to the true and central life?


[Mexico City, 1953.]

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

'It belongs to man to judge the law at the risk of being judged by it.'

And,

'It is always the same--precisely because it is out of weakness that they love peace, there they lie, all ready for propaganda and war.'



Humanism and Terror, 1947.

9.viii.2006

The ascended sky, white with penetrating light is noon; I am alone.

Alone, and unmoved -- the air stirs with hot, shining wind; but I am not moved.

Not unlust, not lust -- twenty-seven years.



Lust, Unlust -- German; used here, as in the Freudian literature, to indicate the primitive opposition of pleasure-Lust, Unlust-pain.

21.vi.2006

It is night, and the air is cool. Sheet-lightning illumines whole quadrants of sky and flickers, falls dark. A light rain.

I battle the god of my flesh, lust; I suffer and resist my flesh's bride, which is sorrow.

12.vii.2006

I have no love! I do not live from love, with love, in this world that is mirrored in shadows; (and indeed, shadow mirrors form).

Remain calm! a passionless dusk -- gradual, serene; beer in the blood, and black coffee;

The heart of a large-eyed child; in my chest, the heart of a large-eyed child.

And of the seven morbid sins;

Envy is a wracking, stiffening, seethe and writhing, lockjaw'd, spitting sickness.

Lawless hokku

n.d.

I am calm; there is
no wind in the apartment, and
electric light does not move.



27.v.2006

Veiling air,
lowering sky;
unheimlichkeit.[1]



9.vi.2006

I slept restless
as a wounded man, and
woke within the dawning world.



21.vii.2006

Grey, paludal air;
a city of landlords and murderers;
this nacreous dusk.

How could I weep?
How could I grieve this world?



22.vii.2006

I meditate on a mattress in the night,
and in this hour,
peace.




[1] German, ‘eeriness’. Heidegger notes the word unheimlich in Hölderlin, and develops it in relation to the idea of the ‘homelessness’ of being-in-the-world. Freud also discusses the psychological phenomenon of unheimlichkeit.

This 'unconscious sense of guilt'

20.v.2006

This ‘unconscious sense of guilt’ of which Freud speaks,[1] with the harsh-condemning ego-ideal—it strangles me. A slow strangulation of lifesbreath from heartsblood; slow rigour of death in this body of death, ¡in the lap of this brightdying world!

I light a new cigaret—‘with the subtle grace of strangled-vein apathy’[2]—and the lungs suffer for it, passive and unconscious.

In the throes of a white noon, this light-vaulted coelum—coffee, Indonesian cigarets. Traffic and a cataract of eyes that graze faces’ flesh and shoulders’ bone——machine and mindsoul all stream this hard floor at the base of the dome.

How else can it be spoke? This concrete vault of light seen through a fleshveil dark?

¡ah!, I am alone. ¡rejoice!, I am alone with a life.[3] Eyes shut to this noon, within the white dome———yes, as prayer. Shut within this noonwhite world, not to or upon it————shut, yes, to open upon it as within it, ¡this!




[1] S. Freud, The ego and the id, 1923: The patient ‘does not feel guilty, he simply feels ill’; ‘it is the ego that is responsible for the sense of guilt remaining unconscious’; and ‘the ego contents itself with keeping at a distance the material to which the sense of guilt refers.’
Cf. his 1915 paper, ‘Some character-types met with in psychoanalytic work’: ‘Paradoxical as it may sound, I must maintain that the sense of guilt was present prior to the transgression, that it did not arise from this, but contrariwise—the transgression from the sense of guilt. These persons we might justifiably describe as criminals from a sense of guilt’ [my italics].
[2] Realnaya, ‘The script for heavy drink.’
[3] vid. G. Deleuze, Pure Immanence.

Trees in a pale night;

A coloured man's signature after dark;

Lifeless still;

Sky;

Photos: D.v.D.

Delicate couplet;

Photos: D.v.D.

Day; night.

Photos: D.v.D.

Richmond abstracts;

Photos: D.v.D.

10.vii.2006.

I have come into peace--------the wind of the world is a spiritual inheritance------------'endless as the clouded face of god, the wind-stirred heavens of our world!' [in a letter to S. Amoruso]--------Yes; I have come into peace, wind and whirlwind.

10.vi.2006

Such dreams, as were mine--------. Of young, naked girls seated in chairs; of vagrants and derelict houses; of blackskinned police.

I wake washed, but not renewed. I wake older than I slept, and the sky is bent and rheumatic with grey, sagging clouds. 'The sweet air!', says Dante; even his damned recall it as sweet. And I, perhaps damned, shd still--living--experience it as sweet. Indeed, jhesus!, and all other gods.

And I malign the sky as 'bent, rheumatic'--no! It fissures into azure, and the hawks are perfect in their redblack flight as they coil and coil against the pallid sky, above the green and purple wood------------I rejoice--------.

The cold, grey glory of a fuelin station dawn;

Photo: Jonathan De Maree.

KORESH Introit

Wait—Wait—.
Wait!

What in all fucken hell are you here for, comrades—?
what thirst is it that draws you, sisters—?
what thirst—?

Is it a fire—?
for delight, beauty—?
is it hate—and a love—?



Rape!

All the world is this fire—and water, at the lips—with silence, like grace.

The noise o’ fire is the voice of this world—[with silence, like grace].

Yes—.



Serpent-doves—serpent-doves—
all us serpent-dove lovers, fuckers—all us weepers, weepin—
in the ravished congregation—



I am stripped and solitary, dead to all charm—
[fuck charm—].

CRUCIFY YOUR STYLE!
CRUCIFY YOUR STYLE!



No mercy from the poet—.
There is no—.
Mercy from the poet—.
There is—.



This is heart-blood, sisters—.
I come with heart-blood, in heart-blood—.

Voice is a blood—.
Love, a heart-blood—.

The truth o’ livin flesh is its blood—
and blood the only devotion—
and devotion, the red flood in our chest—is evil, is good.



And sweet Jhesus has cursed us with real, carnal presence—
sweet Jhesus has blessed us with worlds’ all-heavin essence—
nunc stans o’ leaden, breathin, drunken flesh—.

Our heart wails the everlastin crisis and all flesh sings everlivin words while heaven descends on blood-burnin wings—[yes, and lovingkindness ascends on blood-burnin wings].

Wake, see

WAKE—SEE—your hands are unclean,
red-black with blood, murderous

I woke, a killer, on sheepskin rugs, hating all lowering love

I woke, a slaver, on pale mud floors, hating the fucken gods

I woke, lit a cig, squat in strong light, drank rose-petal tea with my hate


WAKE—SEE—your hands are unclean
with blood-shaded semen, rapacious

And that all the angels wake

And that all the angels wake
—cold sweats,
hard ground—
sing the exile,
sing the exile,
weep their dyin sons


And that all the angels wake as flesh
—nine veils
laid down
in blood,
stirred,
with breath—
wake as dyin sons


And a man holds out the crack pipe
—pure, white—
a man holds out the crack pipe


Sing the exile—
sing the exile

Jean-Luc Marion

‘For glory threatens, even when it saves.’

And:

'--we live and we move not in the middle of what we see, but in a relation--through what we see to what we don't see.'

[The Crossing of the Visible.]

Hymn

Here is the christ who is god—
lucid, drunk on love, with inverts,
thugs, cutters, heads, diseased,
with whores to wet his feet,
with tears and nard,
in the ruins o’ raped glory

He is dead in the tomb—
and I wept, and was kissed,
in gardens of betrayal,
and I wept, and was calmed,
in the hands of my betrayer

Bolivian Canto

I recall black darkness. The mind in that night a dark house, shut out from all light. The inner dark-ness, yes, where is weepin, and a peace like unstirred waters. Night waters, with-out wind. Tathagata stillness.

Here, there is sorrow.



Women sift the piss-rot basureros to survive, and the skies collapse as calmin rain. Rain-sky a perfect oil-cloth grey that lowers with water.

And the grief here is heavy.



The noise o’ traffic. Coffee, black cigarets. While Rama drinks breath, smog and nerve-lit flesh. Oppressive loves, all violent death. This sad-rejoice o’ toil and war is god, Allah rested in his peace. ‘Love thou me’—he who drinks the lead and fluid worlds.

Here, there is sorrow.

And my soul still weeps

A frail, grief-crazed girl sinks in under-waves of world.
Her son feels the smoke of love rise to his throat and dethrone him.

Blood-red doves descend his noon-total bliss,
The blind interpret the dreams of the blind as the killer sleeps within his breast
And greed reclines in the blood-holes of his heart.



Salvation, like a cracked bone, must be set.
And satori, like a flesh wound, heals.
All moves to stasis.

What was that wound they proclaimed, which does not heal?
And was it a birth, or a death?



Hell! it was cold, while the violent remorses shrieked in his skull.
All the gods he shat on, gutters drunk from—all cut-up wombs, inviolate griefs—
Jealousies, lies, and mother’s heart all shrieked in-skull.

He possessed sad girls at the frayed skirts of cities—
Sad girls on loveless vellum cars’ love-couch—
‘Touch, touch, touch me!’
This, all, the sadness of glory.



This, all, the sadness of glory.

This dirty living we commit—
Sad with rapture, heavy with grace.

And love is a mother dead or dying,
And my soul still weeps like a desolate child.

Discourse on the death of god

A seminar. The room and audience are not large. The speaker is blind; this is his lecture’s end.

‘He says, GOD IS DEAD. This is significant.
‘Aristotle specifies that only a creature with eyes could be called blind. In this sense, only the living die. So, hid in Nietzsche’s pronouncement is the idea that this god lived.
‘More than this, Nietzsche says we have killed him. This is very strange. D’Holbach, Diderot, none of the eighteenth-century materialists said this. The philosophes say clearly, GOD IS NO BEING, GOD IS NOT. Marx and Freud will perpetuate this blood-line. But Nietzsche is no rationalist—and it could be he is no atheist.
‘GOD is dead, and his devotees are his killers. They do not know God is dead, and don’t know they are his murderers. So Nietzsche lights a fire at noon, and says, you are living in the light of God’s pyre. The whole world is fuel, and we are flames and the consumed in the light of this dawn. The smoke of this fire is a vertiginious, vacant space—the void. A desert of freedom, ‘the desert of the real’.

‘Nietzsche revivifies a certain paganism. DIONYSOS, APOLLOS, eternal recurrence of the same and the death of gods are all pagan personas, symbols, concepts. Mystery cults posit the murder of gods to fecundate the world, and also proclaim the resurrection of gods. We recall ISIS, OSIRIS. Perhaps Nietzsche is a prophet of DIONYSOS’ resurrection.
‘But in the pagan cultus it was always a god who killed gods—again, Isis and Osiris. Rituals may re-create the god-murder in shadows, but neither devotees nor any priest could actually slay the deity.
‘The parallel of such killed and resurrected gods with the death and resurrection of Christ is evident. This progression is not peculiar or original to Christianism. Such parallels had been documented and analyzed by the time Nietzsche speaks—and Nietzsche knew them.
‘But the idea that man killed god—this is the strange Christianist doctrine. And this doctrine is only possible because, in Christianism, god is precisely a man.
‘So—this is very strange—Nietzsche repeats, with a certain precision, the message of the first Christianist apostles who prophesied, saying, WE have killed god. WE nailed god to a tree.
‘Nietzsche reproduces an essential truth of Christianism, and is called a blasphemer. In this he resembles SOKRATES—a hierophant and oracle, a man stigmatised by the gods who is condemned as an enemy of the gods. Perhaps Nietzsche took a certain pleasure in this kinship—perhaps he saw the syphilis as a slow hemlock in his blood. I do not know.

‘A determining difference, clearly, between early Christianist prophecy and the Nietzschean, is that the apostles also said—This god resurrected and is god again (is, perhaps, more fully god now). Nietzsche does not say this. He says, GOD is dead; we killed him; so we must live the death of god. In this, we become gods; that is, we become what we are.
‘But there is something unnerving here—another repetition can be discerned. The Christ himself says he must die—and calls his disciples also to die. He calls them to die his death, and thus to become him—to become gods. This is most certainly a primitive Christianist element.
‘Nietzsche believes we have become less than gods.
‘God is dead even now, and we are his killers. But cowardice in the face of this truth—refusal to live the death of god—is to become less than men.

‘If you will indulge me—an aside. We recall Nietzsche’s last words in Ecce Homo— Have I been understood? Dionysos against the Crucified!
‘And Nietzsche fixes slave-morality as the Christianist inheritance he opposes, despises. But it has been documented that the Dionysian cultus originated precisely in the slave classes, as did the Christianist heresy.
‘We recall, also, that the Romans accused—however insincerely—the early church of cannibalism in the Eucharist. And from the Pauline epistles it is clear that the love-feast led to bacchanalias in some congregations. All this suggests a certain resemblance between the early Christianist and Dionysiac cults.

‘To return to the resurrection, and to close.
‘Nietzsche preaches a dead god—a god in the tomb. Incidentally, he also preaches a dead Christianism. ‘There was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.’ But I have already mentioned one of Nietzsche’s essential doctrines—a pagan doctrine. Eternal recurrence of the same.
‘Of the same—? Nietzsche enunciates the death of god, and we have seen that hid in this word is a suggestion that he lived. Similarly, hid in eternal recurrence is the idea that GOD will live again.
‘This return involves a resurrection of god—which is also a second coming of god.
‘Could he have failed to see that a god dead on the cross must be reborn, again to die—? Did he clear the way for god’s death, or proclaim it so that he might have new life—?
‘I sometimes feel I am living this noon Nietzsche spoke of—that the death of god is a timelessness of full light; an eternality of godlike insight. And that DIONYSOS is a fire of flesh in this noon which is washed with a light we live in, but cannot see.’

Self-portrait as a woman

And she lay in her sheets in despair til the black dust o’ the godless month had settled on her skin. And then she rose, weightless as steam from a bath, and lived like a saint til that bath of her blood had chilled. The black dust settled on it as on metal or glass, on her skin when she slept. Then she lay in her sheets in despair.

Atavistic Fragments

In the beginning is sweated blood and agony, which the flesh of the son feels and undergoes. The night of the womb issues him whole, fed with the water and blood of mothers’ love, in-to a fullness of light. And this beginning, which the flesh of his mind suffered with all its sense—this first birth and passage into light—the son cannot recall. It is hid in the dark roots of his mind, it is gone.
The beginning has ended for us all, and there is no return to that womb.
The first light is now darkened, and is formless with darkness.



I dreamt a sweet and limpid asylum of light—and the lines of its face are receded now in-to the sleep of that night—the light of that dream is a DUSK, and waking is the dawn of a FIRST DAY—but I recall, in it, a hospital’d prophet saying
‘and no religion is the wick of this world—’



Cigaret. Naked from the waist. Lightning in the south behind a low ceiling of clouds flashes white-brown like teeth at a mean lip. Solitude—entire. And there is a peace for this Stylites, a calm. He has learned to have done with the judgments of GOD—they will return.
‘Love is the cause of death’ [Corpus Hermeticum]. Yes—and I live in the evasion of terminal love. I live free from the first love [mother] and the last woman [wife].
Distance darkens even the light of heaven—there is no thunder, no speech. Unrest in the entrails of GOD—a bad sign, this augur-bird that dies without the knife. Anarchic thummim at the end of ages—slave-girls and children see it, resurrect its coming in dreams.
AND WHO WILL INTERPRET THE DREAMS OF THE BLIND—?



F. Nietzsche. ‘On the “realm of freedom”.—We can think many, many more things than we can do or experience.’
And this is a manifest truth. The mind as a guileful–guileless fabricator, drunk on the powers of word and sealing itself against a resistant world, into illusory ‘freedoms’.
And it is also true—we can do and experience many, many more things than we can conceive or speak. ‘Freedom’, this old word, perhaps signifies precisely this latter truth.
The mind is always preceded, yes; and the mind is always superceded. It stumbles like a lame and near-deaf woman at the heels of flesh and world, trying to discern the movements of a judge and a savior that has already gone, is ahead, and that speaks with a tongue she only imperfectly knows and vaguely hears, for all her attentions and hope.

Bloc-notes from Buenos Aires

Night breaks like a mineshaft wall, and we sleep.



The Muse is a mule with cocaine in her womb.
Is it the woman that tempts us—? or the substance o’ excess hid in her flesh—?
She is a trafficker; or traffickers use her. She is not innocent—this is certain.
But shd you trust her—? shd you worship, fuck her, pity—?
She has killed men—was it necessary?
Does she grieve for her dead—? and can she love—?



We slept, and woke. Drank coffee, ate bread. And the women o’ this city are a perfection o’ the flesh.



YERBA MATE is a new love drunk. The drink and cup of assasinated souths. The milk o’ demons, quiet semen of a bodhi-slave. Yes—.

Paz y bien; I and all the saints, suicides, whores and drunks of La Boca; all saviours and felons; a green tree, a metal reed.



And have we not beheld the endless beauty o’ new life—?
the endless newness of the end—?
Is this not the secret sadness of all womans’ womb—?
of fathers’ love and lovers’ terror—?
Is this word not written on the walls of our streets—?
is this word not breathed and wept and sipped—?



De Maree and I saw a dead motociclista laid out and bent on the streets at a broad junction; his machine further on, the machine that killed him, and his killer, fled. The PFA officers and state mortuaries stood by with cameras for his file, and with smokes. We stood in loud exhaust—we beheld, smoked, our bloods prayed for his blood stilled—and went out from there.

I saw no dinge palomar exhaust his corpse and lift on ashen wings to glory.



David Bowie; Fin del Mundo bar; Buenos Aires. Shit—shit—shit. I am the dinge palomar, I am the killed motorcyclist’s unnatural soul. My bloody flesh is the black dawn in our third Babylon.

No words, sisters. Restrain your eyes; discipline hope. The lonely one is mute. The oracle has lost hisself in grey fields. His stone heart does not bleed, and his skin hides a stone heart.

LOVE—? GOD—? The god o’ love is a goddess o’ need; the goddess o’ need is frigid. There is blood in the mouth of love. There is blood in the mouth of love. Always.


All child-soul soledad; all soledad. A long soledad all longs for love soledad. No calm, and patience is a rude hour. Putamierda, yes.

Yes is a whore and no is sterile. Nietzsche says yes and sells all world to crude voluntad; the no he loathes damns all flesh-desire to dis-use, which patience is a violence.


I come like a swan with cock engorged to hunt and penetrar this tongue—Castellano—and she is a woman I have willed to possess and who cannot refuse me. I am livin in her lap and brood sixty nights. It is no shame to fail to exhaust a whore’s mind a soul in sixty nights. I have come into her house, but she is old, and deep, this madame—her veins the roots o’ whole races o’ souls. Her skin a endless lake and plain. And this madame has dark and sullen laws; she is bold, but secretive.

I am the Oedipus o’ Paseo Colón. I am the last son o’ loss, yes.


Lights cut glass; glass mutes light.

Air stirs fires and floods; air bondages all, seals all wounds in its wash.

Blood is stone; blood is fire; blood is water; blood is skies.

All the elements that ever were are here; all that ever was has come.

The world has come to this.

The world is a killed motorcyclist’s soul. The world is dead in the streets—I have seen it, laid out with its machine like a bride.



I desire to give to these my brothers, mothers, sons and daughters in the streets—but still I spill more lucre on my-self in a day than I offer ten o’ these poor ones. And still my son does not know my name.

And if all money is blood-money, all use o’ money is a spilling of blood. A sacrifice of ‘dead matter’ [Marx], which is a living sign o’ life’s heart sweated in toil, yes. And this blood sustains the shedding of other bloods, sustains its dirty flow. But this flood o’ dead blood can still be a grace.


This hour—perhaps because I have lucre—I do not envy the happy fools. But neither do I weep like a holy fool for the tristezas o’ the world.

I do not want the flesh-love of a foolish woman; I am not hungry for the unforgiving whore.



It is needful to recall the necessary truths o’ the gone. Its wrongs, its loves. Surely the past is the soil of all coming loves.



Beer in this south is insulting cheap. It mocks sobriety. Goddam—I got a thirst for drink and decay. I got a thirst for all the truths I hate.


I have lived the shame of a deaf-mute cursed with in-sight. Pain—. Disgrace—. This pain o’ disgrace involves the same lie that killed me on the streets—which is that loss is a lessening passion.


The need for clarity is clear. Hot canned beer at noon.

Fuck misery—misericordia, all hail.

To stoop low with lucre to a brother in these streets is a full and final grace—SHIT, yes. The soul is this simple; the world is this near.



Ethyl alcohol is sold. So if there is a truth in it, and a hell—purchased truths and hells.

I have purchased a taste o’ truth and hell—a large, vacant bar and whiskie nacional.

Whiskie—a micro-forest o’ lust at the lips; sting o’ death on the tongue; a vacated tomb in the throat; parasitic host in-to the gut.

Whiskie with the sun crouched low at the line o’ vision; that is, whiskie in the late afternoon. The sun comes thru metal lattices and green tarpaulins outside the bar. Light falls on flesh like a hammer. Wounds; lends beauty.

‘—in the light of time—’ M. Heidegger.
‘Time, in the light o’ whiskie; the meanest clearing—.’ D. van Dusen.

The heavenlies are sick with a surfeit o’ love—and we are these heavenlies’ exhaust.


The ugly facticity o’ the scene is this—I went south, and I am bored as hell. Whites emigrate south to rape or to rot. I got no will to rape; I got no desire to rot or lose a hand.

Drink ceases no-thing, but living is that in which all ceasing is a perpetuation, a participation. Living is that in which all ends begin, and in which distraction is a deep hope, but no salvation.


The dead are become endlessly distracted from the world. And pain and painlessness are alike signs o’ dying.


A egoist has said, ‘Hell is other people’. YES. And poor men walk unshaved in the cold, and women nurse their young—HELL? I write the unhappy ‘marriage of heaven and hell’ in whiskie nacional.

And only a liar or lover could say, ‘Heaven is other people’.


I suck smoke like it gives life. SOMA.

This calm is brutal.


I have seen my soul in the flesh of a old mestizo drunk—wearin underclothes in the streets, beggin smoke from strangers; mocked, hated by his brothers, and lost to hisself.

A dry glass; a table o’ solitude; a hour. This is what I purchased.



I drank whiskie, then beer. I gazed on tender bartendress flesh and cocaine eyes.

And I drank, slept, woke with a clear knowledge that decisions must be made. The hour is decisive. Will I drink my soul dry, and piss it out—?

Where does my salvation lie—? and does it lie—?

We must work in this garden wilderness—
we must seek in toil, sweat blood, drink oil—
pour grace on brothers’ heads and beards—
suffer sisters’ love, and adorn them—.
‘This life is shit. There is glory here.’

I am a borrachón. But this, like all truths, sleeps in the blood. It’d kill me, to waken this sleeper. Despair and hypersomnia are kinder than this unnatural sleep—drink.

Which daughters are they, who tempt me to drink so they might lie with me—? which natural daughters urge me to unnatural loves—?

Drink is a narcissism; narcissism is incest.



The lungs are wet and inflamed—a bad state. The head and bones—heavy with a night’s drink.

I drank—Fin del Mundo—and with a strong, clear eye. I drank, gazed with lust, and in a calm light o’ dawn went out from there leavin a glass o’ beer on the bar.

Slept long, and now I make a fast. No words—no grief—no truth.

Flesh as flesh; spirit as dim; koffee and cigs as askesis.



I write in Bar Britanico din and pulse. Niños come to the table with whole eyes to beg coin. I give like a familiar, a coroner, a father. Niñas—very strange—ask for tobacco papers. I give rolling papers to a four-years-old ninfa.

It is evening here, and it sates me. Slaked in the eyes, in the lungs, in the mind. Slaked at the loud teat o’ southern streets.

I am slaked in the city o’ thirst, pale in a grey dusk, blonde under black suns.

PUTREFACTIO—PURGATORIO—FIRMAMENTO.

I gaze on the women like I am husband to them all. The city is a harem; all sisters are wives. But this city is a harem of resistant brides. I wait for a serving-girl to visit me with desire. I wait for a slavelet to leave her work and sleep naked on my chest. I wait for the unlearned love o’ the least in this kingdom o’ god. The womb is undefiled; the womb is ascended in glory.

This is all. A restless seventh-day in completed worlds.



Hours’, years’, lives’ waste in Buen Aire. Alone as a burnin cross in the sun. The solitudes o’ surface, the solitudes o’ depth—yes. Listen to this solitude as it speaks.

The prostitute is alone; and the prostitute is not alone.

To see a whore wash the virgin’s feet with tears; to see the virgin weep.
To wash the sick and the sane in the same remorseless ointment.
To suffer, grieve, ascend—live the laws of all flesh—to survive, and die.
This is our mercy’s rain—a river o’ blood.



I have lost all taste for truth. Truth is undercooked meat.



Bar Texas. Luis Saenz Peña 193.

A bar like a crypt—all greyed lino, heavy wood, vinyl paneled walls; dinge mirrors, senescent eyes; disfigured tin ashtrays, smoke-dinge chrome and greyed lino—a hole to die in for a while, untroubled sleep, resurrect like a moth.

Or is this all in the eyes—?
or is this all in the faculties o’ hope—?

In this bar, the house is served by slow men with thin hair and brown teeth. And this glass o’ water looks to be a nicotine drink.

I eat eggs fried and fritas while the skies o’ the city rain and we age in-to wisdom. I eat like the rich see the poor eat. I eat like Iraqis at noon in the month o’ their fasts. And as I eat a poor callejero comes in from the rain and lays his goods at the edge o’ my table. His eye catches my plate. I say ‘no, gracias’ as I eat as he leaves. I am the Dives o’ remorse. A shitstorm o’ sin. Every peso I spend is a poor man’s lamb—this is the first word o’ wealth.



I dreamt violence as I slept. I witnessed a heretic beheaded by St Paul with a dull blade. The apostle struck him three times with the sword—patris, filii, spiritus sancti—to sever that head from its members. Disquieting, sin duda. The heretic stood thru it all—that mean act o’ faith; and later, decapitate—like the martyrs depicted on church architraves with leveled necks and a head in their arms like a chalice, or a child.



DELUGE. That furious god, Jahveh, repented of getting the world, and stole all blood and all breath in a flood. Has he repented of ushering his world in-to that mass grave o’ bloody deeps—?

Was it guilt that made Noah drink hard in his desiccated marsh o’ world—? the sole confidante o’ the Stalinist god—?

A first fall, and curse—naked and shameless man, his woman—occurred in a garden. A second fall, and curse—naked and shameless man, his sons—occurred in a graveyard. And was not the spirit o’ god that presided over the void of a deluged world disillusioned, cynical—?



The fires o’ flesh are a getting and consuming wheel—the fires o’ spirit are wheels within—sated, insatiate; getting, got.


In this strange light, grey stone is white against grey skies.



And the sky is so deep-azul incorrupt it looks to be depthless, a washed, godly surface—
and all such clean vessels, a poet said, are as sepulchers—
and this light o’ this life is simple as the dead
—I swear it—
sated as a corpse with his living
—complete and ungrieving—
a washed, godly substance, and a height—.



This day is ageless—noon, the stilling hour.

The calm of a woman, all o’ whose children are born to her and strong.

Wind that nerves, like the feel of a married woman’s eyes on your chest as she passes, as you stand half-stripped in a doorway.

I give a brother coin—swart skin, eyes drunk red—and he kisses my cheek. A jesus, he; a judas, I. He says, ‘paz y bien’. Yes, hermano. This noon-calm is peace, and is good.

Here, wind is dirt and trash and life in the face—it lifts virgins’ skirts like a hand, like old lechers’ eyes—.

Avenida Dependencia.



Is not the new light in all skies old—?
all days the ancient o’ days—?
And does not the wind still give form to the waters—?
and is not the sea still a deep—?

A song

CANTO


All through the night I heard it,
the noise o’ sorrow setting fire to memory,
and with the room still dark and the venetians closed
I kiss the cusp of her lips, which are closed.
And smoke degrades the colour of her eyes,
and the black cigarets reek o’ failed love
as she rests with herself, sheathed in smoke.


Has Mnemosyne deceived us with love?
Venus, deceived us with love?


All through the night I heard it,
the noise o’ sorrow setting fire to memory,
in the high, scarlet bar o’ The Bull Hotel,
and waking, near death in this Leatherhead squat.
The winter sun is a stricken god,
I move with the crows in its surge o’ new light
and the smoke in my lungs is cold as the sun.


And Proserpine is liar and whore,
but lovely,
when she purchases with love.

And Venus is a gracious whore,
when she comes to deceive us with love.

And Jhesus is a venomous dove,
when he comes to tempt us to love.

A song in two parts

CANTO


I kissed lips—I kissed with her blood—
I kissed lips, and surged on her side—

Ah, sweet christ, I married her fate—
and in the heat of her breathing I heard it—the material sermon—salvation—

I kissed lips—then the lids of her eyes—
I kissed neck bones, breastbone, the joints of her hands—
then I kissed with her tongue—

Bliss—in the caves of the heart—
Bliss—at the lips of her eyes—
Bliss—the sweet crisis—
on her love-riven side at the last end o’ god—



In the cool grey light of her sorrowful face—
and in the moveless light of her sorrowful face—
tears loosened her eyes, renewed her eyes—
tears grieved her eyes—

In the shadowless light of her desolate face—
and in the shadowless light of her delicate face—
her love is verglas—

Love is verglas, where her last tears came.





[‘verglas’ // pronounced ver·glay // the first glaze of ice that forms over snow]

And that the dead should wake

COMRADES—

Let us pray grace—not with eyes or tongues, but with the bleedin ventricles of our hearts. This prayer rises—hot and sad—in the blood at our sides.

The heart it-self sucks and spits our prayers and sins, I swear it.

Let us pray love—or let the heart pray for this endless prayer. All other blood is shit and sin, poison.


I wait the vision.

I sleep on hard stone at the lips o’ red seas—a corrupt vigil. All my sisters have known that all my living is a corrupt vigil.

And I tell you—my son, my dying friends—that ALL MY LIVING IS A CORRUPT VIGIL.

FORGIVE THIS VIGIL—my son, my dying friends; and let all gods forgive the sins o’ sleep, bad tides o’ this littoral heart.

SHANTIH,
d





AND THAT THE DEAD SHOULD WAKE



Crucifixion day

I have waited for god like a swine
I have waited for love like a swine awaits the knife

And I wake in a low bed in that dawn Vaticans weep the nailing-up o’ JHESUS and all traitors to ROME. And out-side the low door o’ this cell I slept in—it is dawn, crucifixion day—a old indigeno and his son pour boiled water down the decapitate corpse of a sow, her open-eye head and the slaughter-knife on concrete at her side, indigeno and son bent with water and knives to strip the hair off her dead, breasted belly. Her face laid in blood, there at the wounded side.

I drag on clothes, wet with sleep, cold. Pass men and killed swine down the concrete atrium, all white with new light, down the stations of her bright spilled blood to piss in a shit-hole at the rear o’ the house.

And there—by the shit-hole at the rear o’ the house—is the gate and the swine-pen. And there in black mud is the spine-blood pool that fell when they cut her—scarlet, all white with new light. And there at the death-pool are her young, her children, strange noise in their throats and bent to the red o’ her remains.

I return to the cell, up the stations o’ blood, and come out, wash my teeth at a basin as they scrape at her skin, her head and the knife on cold ground at her side—dead eyes, dead life.

¡Let the bloods pour!—swine, indios, christs. Let us eat the flesh o’ life and drink dead blood in new light. This our sad supper o’ world without end—swine, indios, christs.

All slaves are flayed beasts on crucifixion day.



Vigil

And I have waited the waking of god, and wept
the pierced feet of sons,
in the nets, with the nails.



Pascua, La Paz

Ah, ¡my son!, my dying friends—I slept.

And in sleep was a total height and seamless plain o’ light—a world o’ ice or salt desert in endless wash o’ sun, seamless. Height and depth, all white. Such that all is moveless, depthless wash as eye—within, without—and such that the light o’ this eye is shiftless, endless.

And in this endless height and plain o’ light is one darkness only—one flesh—which is man nailed naked to cross in blood and breathless pain, silent, transfixed. He the one substance—man crucifixed in endless light.

And this crucifixed darkness, this breathless flesh is now eight sons nailed naked in holy circle, such that now there is depth in the world. Man is not alone but transfixed in his light with seven bleeding sons and the silence o’ pain.

And a voice—I could not swear it—a voice sez, it is finished. And it is then that seven sons appeared in holy circle, and in pain.


And there are sisters now with them, over them, loving them naked—clutch the nails to kiss their mouths, to comfort, kiss, to wed them. Such that man is not alone—transfixed in his light with the seven and bleeding—but drinks o’ their lips, drinks their breath, drinks his sister.

Eight sisters hung in pains o’ love, doves against dark flesh and nails, all bridal
in the endless light.


And the doves now lay down in the only water, the pouring river, baptized and still and bleeding travail, to suffer the births o’ their crucifixed loves—the births of daughters, sons. Young ones pour from their wombs and the waters blossom blood.

Silence, and breathless, pale flesh—clear water stained with blood.


The eight sons and eight daughters o’ this stained, pouring river—naked, strong—now dance holy circle at the snake-roots o’ that tree whose lower black trunk ascends from white soil—with wild, endless branches—and whose upper black trunk descends from white sky. Dance with hands raised and hands nailed, hand pierced to hand—son, daughter—bleed loving desire. Dance at the tree that is death and is life—is evil and good—snake-root dance, nailed hands raised.

And the blood from their hands stains the soil, stains the sky. And the blood o’ their births in clear water, the blood o’ their paraclete-mothers, and blood o’ the eight hung on crosses—all bloods stain the light until the height and plain o’ endless worlds shines red with their bloods.


And the endless eye o’ light is now scarlet—within, without—a seamless, breathless sea o’ blood. All is drowned in red depths that wash to the skies—all world is red sea—total, silent, formless and void.

There is no dove, there is no breath.
Night—all world is seven seamless depths o’ blood.


And there is lotus, at the last, on the surface o’ blood-deeps, white and perfect, as the eighth day dawns. A risen lotus—white, breathless, from worlds o’ blood—rests on surface-deeps like a pure, silent word.


Huaicheño y La Paz, Bolivia.
25, 26, 27 de marzo de 2005.

THE MESCALINE EVANGEL

The poison has taken hold,
and this is the limit.
Living the death limit
—all sorrow, all heightened
and passing, all river and
air,
POVERTY,
BEAUTY—
living the death limit.
This is the hour the poison gives. I live my death on a dirt road,
under wind,
squat in trash at the
only water,
the pouring river,
low cars and seven lean
cows in the ditch.

I live my death hard by the
barbed-wire ZONA
MILITAR,
with old men, young,
horned gods and Egyptian
heifers in truck-corrupt
jungla.
I live my death here. A dark child, separated
from me by trash and air
and pouring river, his dark,
perfect arm leans and
strokes a stone-white heifer.
LOVE!, in the wind,
as I live my death
squat in christlike trash.

Of course I am not sane,
my son, my brothers—
I am living my death
at the waters—
and
god is with me here,
weeping,
and god has forsaken me. THIS IS NO LIE—
this weeping presence o’
christ-god,
this killing absence as
Shiva flees to snakeroot
hills,
this condemnation and
release.

IN THE MIDST O’ DEATH,
LOVE!
IN THE MIDST O’ DEAD SAVIOURS,
LOVE!


The poison—mescaline—will not
kill my flesh.
But I tell you
—my son, my
dying friends—
that I have died,
smokin a dry cigaret
by the
dinge, pouring river. And here—hic et nunc, death
working in the tongue—
Christ is with me, weeping,
fleshly;
the Bhud is serene,
pouring;
Dionysos fucking stone-white
heifers;
and Shiva flees to snakeroot
hills.
—the blood flows,
and in it, LOVE!—

ALL OUR SAVIOURS ARE DEAD—
this is a hard saying.

AND WE MUST ALL LIVE AS SAVIOURS—
weeping, fleshly,
serene, pouring,
fucking stone-white heifers
and flight to snakeroot hills.
—the blood flows,
and in it, LOVE!—
AND WE MUST ALL LIVE AS SAVIOURS.

I speak this hard word in the
hard-womb passage o’ death.
There is light here, but
even it is dark.
There is release, but
this release is heavy.
AND WE MUST ALL LIVE AS SAVIOURS.
This is a dharma, and a gospel.

WE MUST ALL LIVE AS
SAVIOURS—
and all saviours
sin,
and all saviours
die.
There is no other light but
LIVING,
and god is in it
—near as side-blood,
as water drunk—
and god is absent. This is the poverty o’ faith,
hope, love.
The poverty we must live.


[The Yungas province, Bolivia, 2005.]

RONGEUR ; no. 1

All that lowers must converge

And the skies hurl curse and spit like a spiteful god—and I sit,
watch the waters come with senseless law with voice—
it is not the end.
And the spics and niggers, these my brothers—these, my sisters—
sit in levelled doors within the flood—
witness the coming of this oxblood god to cleanse the city of its shit and sins—
to wash, to purge, provoke the only recollection—
to kill, confuse, and die.



And the skies now, a grey killing house floor, and the clouds blenched kidneys, released of life, the sun a pigs heart sealed in fat, and subtle winds its grease.

It is dusks debauch in the groin of long years, and cock rises in its compline to wet the breasts of mind, and sleeps, released of life, on the birthing house floor.



All this hellbroth of sorrow in the ditch of her breasts;
and the hellebore stalks in the crevice at her legs;
This is woman;
this all is life;
Here the crow dogs relent; here the marshbirds rest;
here the son of sons lays his head.



We are mutilés of remembrance, laid out and cut with sovereign concern, drugged and sawn and sewn, sent under with the ethers of the end and sold our last rites.

These are the stupor years, seasons of elimination and return. The daughters of the repressed are unwholesome guests, and their sons are knives.

Led to still waters, I slept, but was visited with night visions of the sluice gate.

RONGEUR ; no. 3

COMRADES—

‘Who that was truly fair was ever without lovers—?’ [Ch’ü Yüan].

I am living celibate as the dead. I have not kissed a woman’s mouth in ten months. Lust spawns in this sort of dark.

‘Black horses, yellow with sweat, are not come to the high ridges yet’ [Shih Ching].
PENETRALIA is written in and of lust. If lust disquiets you, passover to the lower end of the sheet.

‘The child of god, descending the northern bank,
turns on us her eyes that are dark with longing’ [Hsiang fu jen].

The ‘she,’ below, is no woman I have known. ‘She’ is all women I have known. ‘She’ involves all men I have known, in that men share in a conspiracy of lust.

‘--girls like clouds, who cloud my thoughts not in the least’ [Shih Ching].

Your viscera will tell you that the word PENETRALIA is dirty—but PENETRALIA signifies things hid and holy. And I seek words with dirty skin that tomb only rising truths, in a world where clean words whiten greeds, graspings, and mutilations.

So it goes—peace.



Penetralia

I am weaned in this womb-noose of world that caught
the neck-breath, mandrake flesh of man in its fall, and is not cut.
In lit basilicas of Our Ladies of the Crisis, in
bathhouse shrines to St Narcissus’ ass and groin, in
feretories of sinners’ live remains and sacristies
as lust dawns, as milk boils meat.

Beauty is not innocent.


I have seen and have loved,
have kissed the cornice of her lips,
sipped potages of breath, and
the lees of her still redolent of her chaste.
I have penetrated the frail carapace of that god that
opened onto the cellars of her womb, and
augured there the entrails of a dove.


She recedes on feet of clay, with bones of mud, with lungs of glass.
Her heart a vault, her ribs steel rails,
but mind, that vas her mind, as penance, kiln, as poultice,
as ochre garrotte, saffron bath,
as she, saltpetre bride,
lucid, lustral, sure,
as slag of the redeemed.

Her love is a retreat.



////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////



Remorse is a disparaged sign of ascent—a shame that is innocent of all guilt.
HEED the lowering signs of exaltation—HEED, and lift up on them.


15.viii.2004–26.viii.2004

RONGEUR ; no. 2

COMRADES--

The apostle Paul says, of all apostles, 'we are become as the refuse of the world.'

Antonin Artaud says, 'what you mistook for my writings were merely the scrapings of a soul, which a normal man does not love.'

And so the kingdom is an offscouring of world, and word an offscouring of soul.

And soul can be seen as an offscouring of flesh.

But here, whether we value the substance or the detritus is not given.

We must decide it.

SHANTIH,

d.

A Rational Tax Code

The streets is blood sold to bureaus, smoke theyselves high, drink theyselves low,

live only work, love only sloth—

‘O my friend, there are no friends.’

The trash is men, women, infants—

Poor trash is white, real trash is half-caste—

Wetbacks is spume, crops trash is dirt, mine trash is slag—

The low is ignorant, keep to theyselves, sly as pigs, hard as goats—

The low is last out of paradise—

Tenants is wanton freaks, natural law, succour outlived gods

and is born with lesser souls—

The workers is holy rollers, chain smokers, rim jobs, repressed,

lean with habit, fat with grease—

The proletariat is soviet, Marsyas, the raw and the cooked—

The poor is illiterate, the poor is graffiti—

‘O my enemy, there are no enemies.’

The rabblement is innocent hosts penanced for sins that sleep, against the hair-shirt spirit of god, lost in his circle of thorns, in precious mile-long shanties of world.

28–31.viii.2004.