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NOISE
John
Xavier
Someone who, dreaming, says "I am dreaming", even if he
speaks audibly in doing so, is no more right than if he said in
his dream "it is raining", while it was in fact raining. Even if
his dream were actually connected with the noise of the rain.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
A CACOP HONY DIVINE
And?
Too much,
Always too much;
E ven for the best of us, the bravest,
Because to grab hold of a single dream
Is to let a hundred slip by
Run
Nothing
A NOVICE DROP OF BLOOD CONCEALS ITSE LF
The blade,
Like a stilled drip
From my drooping hand
Is a strange thing;
Gleaming in the shadows
As a fish might in dark waters
So they
Continue their search,
Sifting shadows rift across the
Spectra of alien infernos,
Wondering,
"What doomed civilizations
Do we witness
Unknowing?"
ACTING COOL
Not me
Not them
ALETHIA
We who are
the grapes ignorant of the wine,
ready to die when we are ripe –
our tragedies
intoxicate the gods
she paus es
vaguely grasping
at nebulous thoughts
before she begins
time recycles
Joy is fire
Leaping, spreading;
Enveloping the world
Flames sizzling,
From the burning marrow
Leaking, through skin
Crackling as it’s
Peeling away in glowing embers,
Drifting off into the wind
Exhale aeons,
The life left from
Ancient empires under sand;
Our lungs, the darkness
Swallowing civilizations
Invisibly
Trans formed and returned
Veins of fire
Running across the Savannah,
Gorging on the grass
And twining through the trees
With ease and delight
We arrive in splendor
As was promised, even in the desert
Luminous shafts
Are rising from crevasses
Among the dunes
In a last shattering of mystery
You sojourn,
A single sprig of clover
Against cosmic and final nightfall
E ven the willow trees, pendulous amid the fog soothing its way in,
Radiate a certain sable allure that owes its lineage to
Sacrificial innocents
And the murderous coteries they appeased
Raising this she levied war against the English garrisons, afi re
With triumph right up to the culminating trial
Outside the bastion of Les Tourelles
Vicissitudes of grass,
a golden yearning among the last,
hearts contrast with the disarray
of deciduous remains
clinging together
in their brittle fluttering veins
How like
the human soul
brought to God
How casual
and harmless
all suffering is
Prayer then
should always be directed
to the hope that
our Lord sleeps in
BARELY EVEN FORGOTTE N
Promising themselves
Forever to Oblivion
Because possibility
Because if
BECOMING SOBER IN THE NIGHT
(in homage to Bai Juyi)
it affronts them,
the calmness of deat h,
the wellbeing of the celestial desert
swollen-hearted monsters
hurt to see it,
they gnash their teeth and
cry foul in inarticulate fury
Occult trees
on tendril knees
whisper through the depths,
twisted hungers
sustained on tears;
alchemists of my breath
Antlers sprouting
From the foreheads of lost causes
Scavenging
Knee deep in moonlit ponds,
Looking for lotus flowers
Air dissolves into her and, wraith, she is incarnate without blood;
Skinless desire unfurling into newly starving flesh
His heart can rise from the abyss only with her ardor,
And she gives him this, leaning in to impart her cataclysmic kiss
And the sand is also gray blue with only the slightest
hint of beige, and the massive felled logs
scattered on it are smooth bone gray
And courage,
to try themselves in
every lot,
to divide themselves so freely,
is a courage beyond us
because they are more their children
than we and so
live only in those hardships
Cosmically soon
they will rise again among the
shattered relics of our skulls
DEVOTION I
I pour
myself out
completely
exactly
as they did
before
DEVOTION II
Love is the
shattering rod
Give up
your wretched body
Give up
yourself as flawed
DIRE KRIS TALLNA CHT
From a distance
The fury of flames
Is an idle curiosity
No less then,
The dark twisted forms
Crumbling within
My enemies,
My friends,
One after the other
Shall be marched into the fireplace
There is a complexity in
all things but
it requires patience:
the texture in a
blade of grass does not
shout at us,
the song of a common finch
is unremarkable to
busy minds,
and I doubt that
very many conversations
have abruptly ground to a halt
because of the
idiosyncrasies of a
random cloud
This sky has nothing to say about the origins of the universe
an electric splinter
penetrating the densely ensnarled
conduits of the cerebral fles h:
becoming
a formless thought,
power above
the shape of things that are
Eureka!
a fire feeding on itself,
stronger than immutable
darkness
EVERY THREA T BECOMES A MIRA CLE
A moment
of
simple accidental
reason
can destroy a whole life
The flesh
makes a nice home
for a bullet
to cool down in
Until then
my secret thoughts will keep it company
E XEGES IS OF JOY
A young man sees a young woman in a grocery store and she smiles at him
and later that evening she lets him take her in his arms and
they wake up together and have break fast
naked and unselfconscious
while they get to
know each
other
E very desire
A creature of the deep,
A thing slithering
Out of lost epochs
Perfect love is
A small crustacean
With glittering eyestalks
Scuttling along
The rim of a boiling thermal vent,
A soft translucent denizen of the
Floriferous aqua,
Waiting to be eaten
FAWN OF THE DAEMON
I.
Spring and the chill rain falling,
Softly drumming the trees,
Bushes and their leaves,
The world as gentle as a thrall
II.
Summer exploded in yellow daffodils,
In a whirl of warm breezes,
Like oriental dragons, translucently rushing through the trees.
Yacht traffic clogged the harbors
And the beaches were
Swarmed with many brandished bodies –
E very where abundance manifest
IV.
Winter is the conspiracy taking away everything in secrecy.
It will not be spoken of and it will erase whatever it can.
But at some point, truth is destined to overpower it.
Spring is the enlight enment that puts fear into the church.
Voices rising up in a great riot of debate and assertion.
E very opinion will flourish according to its own merits.
I.
Each step
Brings its own gravity
Silence
II.
Chimes rustle
It is immaculate
But it is upside down
III.
Stalked
Insect blades
Static electricity
A harmony of iron halos
Churning
Ponderously
Devouring the souls of the dead
The living
While faintly the monasteries sing their ecstasies
Harvest eternal
The deserts
The fields
So far away
The mystic
A memory only dreamed of
A drill
An electrical arc
Extended ac ross the mist
IV.
Quivering
The senses retard
Flicker
Naked children writhing under translucent plastic sheets
A phone
Hung up.
FROZE N CROWS
while I remain
as usual
pensive
HAVE YOU FOUND THE LORD?
"What's happening?"
whispers a strange voice
Ashamed too
Forgive me
And my weakness
I am a dervish spinning
in your perfect darkness
Your pudendum,
visible beneath your tight clothing –
A sorrow in me
almost better than joy
I NEVER MEA NT ANY OF IT
So I capitulat ed and
slowly just let the dogs eat me
Praise me
Yes, I am
I am rich
Photographs
Desperat e for me
I keep swelling
And I am rising
But suddenly
Unpopular
Return my call
Now I am ex ploding
***
He awoke sweating,
Drenched in his own bed –
The white noise of the blood inside him
Throbbing in his ears
His parents,
Sitting across from each other
There he was,
A child standing before horrors
JESUS AND SIDDHA RTHA
we'll make it
a good
war
JOKES FROM THE DRUNK TA NK
All my predecessors
Tried to see as far as I have
And failed
Gratitude?
Dishonest John
Made a promise
That he would fetch
The zoo some llamas
When he didn't
They were livid
And so they fed him
To the iguanas
LIV ING IN THE SHA DOW OF TRUTH
I am the air
Waiting in silence outside
Empty store fronts
Dark in the undawned morning,
The atmosphere over
Dim streets
Receding to lonely ends
Haunting
Always haunting
I alone
Dare to peel the shame from them…
To incite
These tongues of fire burning
In the mouths of a
Shadow people,
To split open their
Dark skulls
E ven as All Hell is gushing fort h
From their bony jaws
And gutted eye sockets
elongating
contracting
the worm half burnt
stranded
on solid ground
Enlarging supernaturally.
More. More.
Shatter all to ruin.
E very portion of destruction
Adds to me.
I am swelling into
Something inconceivable.
I am tax. I am debt.
I take and take and take.
A vault.
I believe in you
My frustration is
Proof of my devotion –
You understand that don’t you?
artlessly together,
and free
It welcomes me
I am surrounded
I am relaxed
towards infinity
MY LIPS MEAN BUS INESS
My lips desire
The perfect merger between
The companies of our mouths
I am a mortal woman
pleased with
the joy that sleeps eventually
In your nightmares
you cry out for eternity
and I tremble next to you
invisible
E ven when all our life has been desecrated, it’s not enough
to bridle our lust or renounce the truth,
that she loved us better than anyone ever could
Others can see no more than the detailed violence that misshapes us
I. Occultation
It is still happening
E ven now it can be heard in the alleys
Among the locked garbage bins
And abandoned mattresses –
It is a whisper slithering through the machinery
Busy and multiplying, all the omens of economy,
The schizophrenic mass media, every
Figment of imagination and
Worldly discovery
It is ecstasy in loneliness,
The quiet hours, the darkest hours –
It is intertwined in the sound
Of your own beating heart, now harder,
Now softer
II. Initiation
III. Excruciation
V. Revelation
Then perhaps
I shall at last
dream well and sigh
OUR GOD IS THE COSMIC ME CCA
Hard years have fallen on you but even wit h the worst
You still write poetry on your tombs and your delicate gardens
Remain beautiful, testifying to the splendor of the gentle –
Meanwhile in the north, Damavand tall and brilliant, endures
POET FOLLIES
The poetic reality doesn't exist within the form of the words
There's nothing wrong with using words as a graphic medium but that's not poetry
Poetry is what happens when old words are infused with new meaning
A poet is someone who uses the most able means to communicate such insights
The goal here is to see how much can be captured in how little
Ideally it will all be expressed in the purest form that a genius can imagine
When the universe can be summarized in a period the poets can hang up their hats
If poet ry displaced being, all of its light would be lost to the darkness
Without a world to shine on, the light of poetry simply beams into nothingness
That's why bad poems are meaningless and meaningless poems are bad
Writing about poetry is a substitute for writing poetry and so must be unpoetic
Cont ent is the very substance of form so it can't be the other way around
But content, being limitless, poetry is almost as much what it's not as it is what it is
POETS CANNOT BE TA UGHT ABOUT LOVE
Love is self-destruction
PRIMA FA CIE
eyes bulging
hand trembling
I de fy the p a i n
a continuum
from which dozens of ruby rivulets descend
Bright as liquorice
across my pale skin
my quivering fingers
timidly advance towards
the seam
along my brow
and my fingernails warily hook into
the split flesh
I tear at it savagely
a creeping wound
follows
my face
held in chalice hands
I turn it over
to look at
my face
wa
rp
e
d
QUIESCE NCE
Ω
sand;
though in
this pyramid
Fate will swallow
chaos of the aeons;
rage through the brutal
endures all the storms that
wind even as the great pyramid
Each grain of sand powerless in the
its scythe shade cast across the desert;
the vertical tyranny of the vast pyramid and
Irrelevant each grain of sand in comparison to
sands of the desert remain miniscule and divided;
Massive the monolith ascends unchallenged while the
In the weird of the desert sand the pyramid stands alone;
RECONCILIATION
My father and I
hadn't spent much time together in the
last few years and, to be honest,
I only reluctantly agreed
to the trip –
It wasn't until I saw the look on his face
as he first stared out over
Omaha beach
that I started to understand how
much it really meant
It was so manifest
to me –
The bullets cinging the air,
crackling as artillery blared from
every direction,
smoke sweeping the beach and the
sky shuddering with all fire
"From 8 AM"
"Through the night and"
"Into the morning"
"We waited for a counterattack"
Finally he turned to me
"Son"
"I wanted to remember their names…"
"Here… in this place"
"All of them"
"I wanted to hold on to something"
"From everyone"
"But I couldn't, there…"
His voice began to crack so much and the next
words came out in a messy sob
"There were just too many names"
No constipation is constipation –
If you want to escape the cycle of feces
You must utterly cleanse your own bowels
I stretch my wings
And a shadow descends upon
A beating heart
Rendered still
She is inundated
in the swarm of the bazaar
and the musk of twilight commerce
from unrelenting Jericho,
so she looks back anxiously;
He is still there
She presses on
as Caesar's triumph fades in the distance
and sings sadly to herself;
He bumps into a centurion,
apologizes profusely,
and rushes along an emptying street
He desired the truth and so he scrubbed the temple’s floors for the truth,
He desired peac e and so he cleaned piss-pots for peace
Now the temple had become one with the garbage heap
And the garbage heap with the temple
He knew this now and so that night he left for the nearest gas station
Excruciating limbs
reach out,
pleading from their bones;
it's the best part of you,
this suffering,
an artist being born
into suicide
on a canvas
As I pose you
in the arc of your despair
I know I'm the villain,
I sold you the
gift of love
before I held you up
to your parody
in the mirror
Why you
had to become so boring
I'll never know,
but I don't think about it
Handles splayed,
dull fingers twist your rotor
unhurriedly
and one of your gears revolves
in response,
its empty rusty teeth, futile,
as a screeching noise intermittently
fades in and out
like some poor dumb rodent
skewered in a cruel trap,
slowly dying
Of course
you are not just the redeemer
of strangers,
you are my patron friend too,
the steadfast companion
of my endless quiet nights,
the one who nurtures
the enfeebled dependency
gifted to me
by my civilization,
the one who waits patiently
as I fumble with
the measly hoarded
foodstuffs
in my pathetic pantry,
thank you
for not laughing
Gathered at my shoes
like sycophantic little courtiers
they plead for my attention;
each one whispering
the name of a dead child,
a stolen life,
offering up each name
as proof of fealty
I yawn,
I adjust my sable wig of
mellifluous curls,
I relax into
the ornate gilded throne
that is my right,
the red velvet cushions
that soothe my weary majesty;
my silk robes
bleached as white and pure as
the bone fields of
genocide
Hauled onwards,
Blood fragrant in the exhaustive deep, a calling
Like that
Who says I could even get out of its way fast enough
If I saw it before it crushed me?
Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll be rewritten in another form where I can become
Something else, something lasting
Finger of God like fire tracing out the dead across the sky
My dreams
the meat grinder mouths of empty eyed golems
I burn quietly
Turn away as I go
SUCH A GOOD BOY
Just for me
I swear boy
I’m so sorry and I’m sorry I’m drunk right now and
I don’t want our last moment together like this
i’m sorry
goodbye beautiful
SUMMER ALMOS T OVER
This nice pretty girl, rubbing her hands in her apron, will only find
life bearable because it is impossible for her to know that she
is destined to die wit hout once tasting romantic love and
that the meager roses she hungers for will only find their way to her
in the paltry few placed, years later, on her grave
THE ALL GIFT
this is freedom
I accelerate
instantaneously,
the world around me
contracting
I begin to soar
above the exquisite wastes
an ethereal
mandala
upwards
beyond even
the reach of gravity
piercing
the firmament
I soar
towards the stars
until there is
no
oxygen
THE CONVENT OF MANÃNA
Infinitesimal nuns
travel inside and out
A Measly Face
slap it
and your hand would
bounce right off
The
expression
never
changes
plus he's pretty much
everywhere
THE FIFTH OF NOVEMBER
it is monotonous horror
a never ending arithmetic
Eroded outcroppings
Illuminated against the black horizon,
The starless hidden reaches
Above the tenacious cholla cacti and coyotillo shrubs
Spitefully scattered across the wastes
A silent power
We cannot hide
in our hunting canoes
So sleek we glide
but the spirit can read the waters,
the slightest ripple
words in a primeval language
Enmity is
vanishing
Blind gazes,
Limbs haunted with agony,
And torsos, almost levitating –
All under judgement
In their emergence from the marble
They wait
For the touch of the Master,
Some shrouded,
Others barely formed –
Creations aloof to one anot her,
Squandered across
The silent immensity of the studio
Adulation
Was not enough though –
A competition grew
Within the fawning masses
To receive the favor of
His gratitude
Who though
Could sculpt the Master?
From then on
The statue became the m aster
And no one ever noticed
A single difference
THE SELFLESS ART
My work is private
because if I were to seek patrons
or try to give it away in gifts
that would be a crime;
the betrayal of innoc ent creations
to thoughtless masters
By God!
If they send me to the wrong war
I'll do my damnedest to win it!
For my dead friends.
For my country.
I am ready again
to kill and die as oft en as I must
for it, for its children, for their dreams
THEODICY
Right ?
Therefore
Asking why He
Does nothing
Only reveals our own
Hypocrisy
We can do something
To condemn the
Suffering in this world is to
Condemn our own
Inaction
Enveloped
in a sweltering darkness
Naked
she is more than a prophecy,
her skin the divine
unmediated,
her bones
its mortal frame
Question…
Answer…
Mumon’s Commentary…
Because it is Good
Because this divides the Darkness and the Light
Because doing so gives form to the Void
Because there is Truth in it
Because otherwise there would be no disbelief
Because without it Life would be too easy
Because such prevents indifference
Because Adam and E ve were just the wineskins
I am lost in you,
forgetting my own victory
His body fit easily in an oil drum too and it burned real nic e
freedom of belief
versus
belief of freedom
neither is
freedom
The first one wit h the smouldering cigarette dangling from his lips
blew some smoke out of the side of his mouth
before
leaning over with the lighter
to
ignite his partner's.
"Dose him"
replied the ot her agent, his lips
perfectly conveying
the cold efficiency of his mental logic.
He didn't
even feel it shatter, it was almost as if the vort ex of shards
scattered before him, fleeing the touch
of his higher reality.
I am the cyclotron
Within me
The whole world is crashing
There is no
Architecture
Tomorrow is a lie
And I will shovel it into the incinerator
E ven as I feast on lies
And revel in the
Silent darkness
I will liberate
I will be liberation
Liberating
Forever
UNE POMME
Vanished wilderness,
E ven the wild overwhelmed
As in its place
Soulless matter prevails
Unrivalled in its power
What now?
What in this emptiness beyond despair
Will come?
It’s the only anthem left for the crack shacks that keep cooking
And the suicide riders hard steady banging
And the profiteering prisons now full to bursting
And the slum lords, growing fat, as the nightmare just rolls on
But I watch you; I see the vacant shape left by your invisibility
Baphomet enshrined in the pent house suit and lord of the project towers and
Seated on a throne of cocaine and filling fortress high billboards
Infecting mankind with tubercular lungs, braying your bacterial goat scream
Sending clouds of shrieking starlings frantically into the air –
In orgy with moaning gorgons, all of you a single tumultuous hydra
Preying on weakness and drawing in the unsuspecting,
Factory of false promises used for corrupting the innocent and desperate
You are callous to their pain becaus e you yourself are dead,
As atrophied as every eviction notice you’ve ever placed in their eyes –
You are the decaying tenements you sow, these expressing you
In all of your interior poverty, one who cannot create Eden
You are supreme in deat h, and so filling yourself with death, destine to die
VISION OF THE ARCANA
Inside, rows in the umbra; storage in tall stacks along a thin corridor, a library.
Large identical books without names or number arrayed in perfectly ordered shelves.
Not a single vacancy among them. All of these in mysterious coherence.
Above again, rus hing int o the open, running in terror with no clear sense of direction.
You are the game, quarry in a medieval realm of cruel kings,
Let loose to torture itself as long as possible. Run on.
Breathless as your holy artifact, the stolen prize which you fear to open.
Partitioned just so
Limitless dreaming
If you hang around any place long enough you can watch people go crazy.
Sometimes it can take a while but eventually the madness will leak out of them.
Hordes of tiny demons have built angry polluting factories inside these people’s heads and it spills
through their whole lives in smog billowing out their throats.
Sharp crackling words leaping from their lips like sputtering fireplace logs and cinging anyone who crowds
them at the wrong moment.
Years of frustration and trauma churning inside their bodies in an occult frenzy that’s all leading to an
ascendant outburst of animal rage or angelic sorrow stopping the whole surrounding world at once as it
blasts itself into a host of unwilling witnesses.
So much hunger in all the paranoia and fear and revelation that cuts into these damaged lives and pulls
them away from every healthy nourishment.
The mad are damned and starving every day in the desert of their own thoughts.
Tyrant and prophet to thems elves they tie their lives to the stake and shout the solipsistic orthodoxies that
rise in the flames surrounding them.
They are skies of deluge drowning their families and friends and hopes and careers and everything else
they might one day try to return to after the storm has worn itself out in a rage ex hausted by its own
misery.
The world is falling apart and the world is coming to an end and sinister laughter echoes from a million
invisible sources.
Their only hope is that somewhere a voice of mercy is calling out even louder.
WHAT AM I TO YOU?
And archangels have come down and touc hed our sorrows
Through the intervening ages, leaving us
Mended with new emptiness
distant snowflakes
catching the light
of stooped
street lamps
appearing
as if
dormant fireflies
gently
floating
to earth
i relish this
prior dawn
tranquillity
this
softly whispering
eternity
WITNESS
I would be grateful to be
Worm people now
But no
Strangers? Friends?
But it will also be this day that joy will dawn its brightest,
That, finally freed, the innocent will cherish their innocenc e
YOUR LEGACY
drink it
ZE NITH
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