Betrayal

“If I wash myself with snow water, and make my hands never so clean;

Yet shalt thou plunge me in the ditch, and mine own clothes shall abhor me.”

—   The Book of Job 9:30-31

“I think I was just a dream of yours and you never wanted to know me, really.”

     —from a dream

                            “And the swine turn and rend you.”

                             —James Hillman, “Betrayal”

              “We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .”

                           —Thomas Jefferson, “The Declaration of Independence”

i.

Watching liberty go down the drain

hurts, especially when its death throes

leave your neighbour shot dead in her car

by authorities authorized by other

authorities to terrorize anyone

deemed to be a fucking bitch or otherwise

too free and in need of a reminder

who’s in charge (it ain’t you)

a bit like being

scraped off the sole

of love’s shoe leads to inflicted

hell of endless equivocation and lies,

cruel kindness seeks to maintain its

innocence and fraudulent embrace

of the one it stakes through the heart

        The truth is

Hell is not pretty and no innocence

can survive power’s pulverizing fantasies

of freedom and chymical weddings

suitably arcane but always miss the point

buried in heart’s

cling to the dream of touch.

The dream of together’s

touch shattered within and beyond touch, 

to-belong-as-not-belonging, you and I

in the agora beyond communion’s dissolved 

meld, at work, extends loss’s excruciation 

into zones of pain no constitution can touch, 

primal excision’s echoing plaint

in soul’s folds, howls at the loss, 

second gnosis after love's deceit, remains

when sky splits, earth heaves, dark waters surge

and rise, when so sweet, a whisper of sea churn

in eyes across the Void, ancient contract, turns out

to have left a long time ago, bored,

in quest of old powers, new opportunities,

gnostic adventures in consciousness

so that only liberty’s desiccated

carapace remains

   scraping and scraping 

the shit off its sole, pretending

it’s honey

ii.

after Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci”

When she beckoned,

seduction’s union opened

oozy depths of bullish

passion stunned him,

left her excited, swept up

in its power she invoked

old rites, pet names, memories

of first swollen flesh, love’s

burn, called down energies

filled them with love’s fire,

rituals of sweet words led

to hot words touch

They wandered together

through mythic lands

where ancient powers

welcomed them

among divine company

   Violets clutched

in one hand, the ring

through his nose

in the other, she led them

through fields of anemones,

hyacinth, cyclamen, poppies,

violets, bathed them

in perfume of her mother’s

luxurious earth singing

of May

Till one day

she sang a new song to him,

a song of love’s end, sang

sweetly how only love

can unbind love’s binding,

how unbound love, sacrificed

was still love even though

unbound and dead as she

walked away whispering love

love, love, moved on

while he, reeling from the loss

of being unbound by the love

still bound him found he

couldn’t breathe, choked

by a violent underworld

paroxysm, the dead flocked

to him, poured into his mind,

left him to sob in the wrecked

night her unbinding had wrought,

a cleavage she thought

was just part of the game,

the stuff of a warm memory,

a dreamy poem, the dance

she knew, unbinding

the binding, her steps sure,

love’s choreography

unbound and no hard

feelings at the end

because it was all

love’s doing, it was a swell

chymical wedding she said

and now love must sacrifice

itself, don’t you get it?

It’s gnown

by all this rite will dispel the fear

of death

He wondered what

that meant as the dead

swarmed him, howling dead,

whining dead, pleading dead,

gnawing, sucking, pounding,

left him senseless in the moonless night,

mobbed by eldritch forces

awakened in the dark

which surprised her

who wanted only a little

unbinding—but he couldn’t stop

the loving so she was forced

into prolonged psycho

catastrophic abortive

unbinding procedures,

to peel back

finger by finger his heart’s clutch

at the memory of her touch

while she sang how binding love

loves unbinding and he should get with it

and unbind too so

she could get her life back

while he

fell in a stupour among the violets,

overwhelmed by their perfume

awoke to a world love had fled

left him to grieve in the ruins

iii.

Going down knowing’s drain

is a funny thing, and gnosis

    knows it, hence the lack

of rules, or say holds barred as in none

leaves hands free, all the better to grasp

at images whirl in flow’s surge and ebb—

better days, tender touch, betrayal’s sting,

abandoned, empty shell, perpetual

hope

gun shots in the street

outside your home is a layer of awake

sharpens interminable betrayal

otherwise known as normal

and your neighbour’s body

sprawled on the asphalt delivered

by good old Uncle Sam indicates

climate change extends well beyond

radical redefinition of rain wind heat swirl

into scales we’ve never known, promised

New World left to bleed on the street,

blow away, dry up and burn, as if Demeter

finally had enough of our bullshit,

pulled the plug leaves tangled wreckage

formerly known as home

but hey

who knew?

And knowing’s drain always yawns,

unavoidable, where void holds it to creation’s

null and normal shatters into abandoned

children in the ruins

   left by the war in the heart

Nature

“In eternal Nature the absolute becomes, for itself in its absoluteness (which is sheer identity), a particular, a being, but in phenomenal nature only the particular form is known as particular, the absolute veils itself here in what is other than it is in its absoluteness, in a finite, a being, which is its symbol, and as such, like every symbol, takes on a life independent of that which it means.”

               —Friedrich WJ Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature

“What in Marcion, as in the majority of Gnostics, arises out of an undervaluation and condemnation of nature as the work of the bad Demiurge, here (Benjamin) leads instead to a transvaluation which sets it up as the archetype of beatitude. The “saved night” is the name of this nature that has been given back to itself, whose character, according to another Benjamin fragment is transience and whose rhythm is beatitude. The salvation that is at issue here does not concern something that has been lost and must be found again, something that has been forgotten and must be remembered: it concerns, rather, the lost and the forgotten as such—that is, something unsavable. The saved night is a relationship with something unsavable.”

—Giorgio Agamben, The Open – Man and Animal

“This hardheartedness shows an integration of brutality, thereby bringing one closer to nature — which gives no explanations of itself. They must be wrested from it. This willingness to be a betrayer brings us closer to the brutish condition where we are not so much minions of a supposedly moral God and immoral Devil, but of an amoral nature.”

               —James Hillman, “Betrayal”

“13. The material world, or its collective objects and phenomena, esp. those with which man is most directly in contact; freq. the features and products of the earth itself, as contrasted with those of human civilization. 1662 STILLINGEL. Orig. Sacre ut. ii. § 17 According to the Atomicall principles, no rationall account can be given of those effects which are seen in nature.”

         —Oxford English Dictionary, “Nature”

i.

First recorded use 1662, a dead giveaway

and pitted against rational accounts

of imaginary “effects” that crowd out

former inhabitants acausal manifestations

which had a home in the cosmos bound

each to each and every between, Kosmos

being the very order of the world, ours

and all the other imaginary domiciles

includes fairies, firewood, trolls, as well as

stars and dragons, each also more in the mutual

touch of creation’s weave, while Nature, outside

the scope of soul’s limit is the first step

toward Natural Resources Management

 and Domtar

ii.

Light dappled maple 

fallen across morning’s 

path is a poem—it’s dirty roots 

dangle just like Olson said 

they could

                     if you want 

your words to touch 

light dappled maple 

fallen across

morning’s path

iii.

Rescuing sub-lunary from perfectly

reasonable distinctions of dark

and light where light is always summa-

cum something or other, no questions asked

and dark gets a boot in the tush on the way

out the door (where it grows scaly wings

and a bestial tail or maybe dons a ten

thousand dollar suit and several offshore

accounts in the Caymans, a bad rap

while Light’s perfection radiates downward

and dark becomes not dark but

NotLight, love withheld, terrible wounded

Perfection, also known as Sin, order

wrecker where order is always Light’s

preserve and moonlight doesn’t count,

changing all the time, breeding suggestions

in shadow when more Light knows

everything, lays it out, splayed

and pinned down with perfect

understanding’s order, enlightened

in the ways of making large ovens

and organizing efficient, orderly routines

to purify the world of disorder’s

contamination and share the Light

among those deemed by Perfection

worthy of its unflawed beauty

And if you don’t got it, you best get it

else Sin will find you out in your broken dark

and the next thing you gnow you’ll

be babbling of redemption and looking

for a way out and into pleromic purity’s

welcoming arms, all Light this and Light

that, redemption being a measure

of restoration, a delusional macro

nostalgia for quantum level positronic

time travel abandons sublunar world’s

troubled finitude

leaves it

beyond redemption’s judgement, the redeemed

having split for Perfect order’s Light show,

unsavable world remains in the light

of Her unreflected glory blurs boundary,

breeds nocturnal enigma, and nightshade’s

deadly purply blue stars, nihscada,

atropo belladonna, sacred to Hekate

and her daughter, Kirke, good  

for turning men into swine, Empress Livia’s

deadly politics, and Dionysian ecstasy, bearer

of visions and death, tender beauties

of enraptured darklight in heart’s knowing’s

rhythms, telluric mind’s sub-lunar

reclamation of Perfection’s animal lust

into souls’ sub-lunary touch

Blue

“Trouble in mind, I'm blue / but I won’t be blue always / Let the 955 / ease my troubles out of mind.”

— Richard M. Jones, “Trouble in Mind”

“The dark blue of the Madonna’s robe bears many shadows, and these give her depths of understanding, just as the mind made on the moon has lived with Lilith so that its thought can never be naive, never cease to strike deep toward shadows.  Blue protects white from innocence.”

—James Hillman, Alchemical Psychology

“Blue has no dimension. It is beyond dimension, while the other colors have some limitation.”

         —Yves Klein, “The Monochrome Adventure”

“They said, ‘You have a blue guitar / You do not play things as they are.’ /

The man replied, ‘Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.”                 

                                  —   Wallace Stevns, “The Man with the Blue Guitar”

i.

She returns from dream

                   stands still in brittle winter night

                   hooded face

turned to the Moon,

her cloak white

as snow-covered earth

    nothing

stirs, no

animal scratch

no howl or hoot

no wind clatter

in naked trees

                            moonlight

and shadow cling to hieroglyphic

branches between, sacred

writ of sun, storm, twiggy

nets of Time’s mystery

scrawled across black sky

She knows the Moon,

      cold, January Moon,

She and the Moon

are one thought

of this deep yearning

toward frigid night’s

mute blue rapture

ii.

The mystery of the blue moon echoes

through stories of stories and fun’s

face to face with Truth’s rectitudunal

restoration of volcanic emission’s hard

particulate matter to honour’s seat

in Hall of Knowledge leaves tales of excess 

lunar measure to languish beyond 

the pale, then mystery slips into mastery 

and the jig is up for the trees, etc., 

even the jig itself, a mystery 

of dancing measure, vanishes in shadow

They say a squirrel could stroll 

from Lake Erie to Louisiana's bayou 

and never touch the ground 

before we abandoned Cosmos 

for Nature, left the world out there

belly up by the side of the road, so why

not cut it up, wrap it in plastic

and post it for sale

in Facebook marketplace

though if you listen 

once in a blue moon 

magic still summons mist shrouded

forest floor, shroud bringing 

unexpected visitor through moon’s 

muted light, persistent death,

and Artemis’s revelation

in monthly intervals aperiodic

surplus whose rhythm is beatitude, this

excited repose

iii.

Late season chiselled chicory

petals hang on long after death

of sweet peas, boarded up seasonals

headed home, frigid roadside ditch

dotted with pale blue stars, reminder

of beauty’s cling to ruins

accompany us through day’s rounds,

invisible, wreathed in shadow, a kind

of seasoning, noun and verb, related 

to recent encounter with melancholic

frenzy, a state of the Blues epistemologically

pulses to distant train whistle’s whine

and visions of Hank’s whippoorwill

a being of immaculate sorrows

Demeter’s sorrows, left earth ravaged

consequent to

   too blue to fly

iv.

The metaphysics of blue balls leads

complex considerations through extended

foreplay into phantasies’ neurovascular

arousal met with brute indications

of recalled archetypes’ deflated desire

and fluid build up’s hard anticipation

of further entrance to mystery’s

release, a state of blue that aches beyond

four dimensions

  which opens the door

to out of the blue also from somewhere beyond

four dimensions though if the blue

of out of is the same blue as the blue

due to mystery’s locked legs then

metaphysically speaking we are

somewhere other than where we think we are

and blue is a glimpse beyond both

usual corner’s constricted muscles’

painful congestive flood’s raging

tumescence and incursions

of eternity’s unleashed surprise,

propels us into weird poem’s physiology

and the body of glorious Blue’s insistent

stuttering bloom

v.

“Off we go into the wild blue yonder . . .”

         —"The Air Force Song”

Jack used to say if you want to write

an epic you have to go live

in the Air Force Academy, a Blakean

admonition that 2-fold will never

be enough if the poem intends

to take you into the world

you can’t get all high and mighty

about peace and love and virtue no matter

how much you think that’s you, the wild

blue could care less and you will miss

the flight to yonder where it all looks

different, your love holding you back,

a protective shell unless you dive down as well

as climb high, Melville’s Catskill eagle

whose heart’s wild soar and swoop into the dark

angels watch with longing.

Down

Introduction: Down

“It’ll be no use their putting their heads down and saying, ‘Come up again, dear!’ I shall only look up and say, ‘Who am I, then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I’ll come up — if not, I’ll stay down here till I’m somebody else’ — but, oh, dear!”

—Lewis Carroll, The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland

“Is there still any up or down?”

—Mark C. Taylor, Erring

The drain yawns in a clock-wise swirl,

faces out of dark claim, clamour, hoary

pain beyond child’s petulant insistence

on wronged, woven through the marrow

of each explicated world in lightning

flashed coherence swallowed by time’s

maw, imperfectible beauty of down’s

endless throat

You have to start somewhere

some clutch at the whirl of junk—prophetic

images, random poems, initiation

rituals, green eyes through the fog

of love, a cloaked woman in winter

woods, betrayal’s sting, saffron gifts

and the surprise shock of a young heart’s

passion pulsing (the reddest

rose unfolds) in old flesh

Down is not so much

direction as up likes to think, its own

who am I

a fact of the matter, a calm down

after a stormy crossing, 4th and

2 yards to go, or being in a hole, take your

pick, a certain associational

dark renders a cast to the feeling of down

a coldhot black jewel throbbing

in your solar plexus which of course

is a metaphor though I claims to have

seen it himself

If it wasn’t down what wouldn’t be

its different story, and in the end some other

union though unionizing it grasps

at the whirl seeks to clear up the shower

of necessary cardiac shards left behind in wake

of duplicitous colloquium on the return

to 2000-year-old salvational

undertaking (while in the midst of history’s

furious rush past progress’s pale

into a further of yet to be determined

downs

Just try to leave the crazy

syntax to its devices designed to other

direction where other is a verb and neither

up nor a situation wants to know

who you are when pretty soon

no one will know Sophia, neither

Novalis’s squeeze, Loren in this cosmos

of incarnated eros formations

much less the original and Who she meant

tho Aphrodite will endure

and I

will roll in and break on Folly Beach 

arrived from lord knows where, a restless pattern 

moving through sea water surge

till curl and crash when world ends

and long-ago words

wash up on the sand—

fact of wave

moving through

sea water words, too,  

where this began nothing moves

but what's not there

True, up is

usually half the deal, a ritual touching

in fresh light, each morning reaching out,

along a wire of desire

    The Cyclone Racer went up

and up at the Long Beach Pike until it reached

the highest point

    where story has it

a handsome sailor nearing the dark drop

stood up to show he had no fear and got

             his head lopped off by the sign at the top,

           Then it’s just

  hands up and scream

    all the way down

Inaugurational Shenanigans

Compostable Monuments — A Collaboration