Inauguration’s Balls

Camelot’s inaugural proposition

starts to look a little peaked this far

downstream and that’s not even counting

JFK’s scam got him all that back door

nooky but changed nothing where it matters,

now down to some ragged band of poets

group online chatter resistance

to dominion’s inroads into poetry’s

restless language

But they’re all still there,

finery a little worse for wear, blurred

outlines in and out of focus where blur

coagulates another world

and focus is a face here or there across

a table, faded Guenevere being a figure

recurs in dreams of passionate union’s

unquenchable heat’s incendiary outcome

as if scorched bloody end of the whole thing

tables, cups, Kings, companions

scattered in the light of love’s

Black Sun, the end of the world, and Lancelot

stupid look plastered on his face

wonders what hit him but gives thanks

it’s not that other story where Abelard

has his balls sliced off as punishment

for dallying with Eloise, still the round thing

kaput, friends cut loose, quests

canceled, no more damsels, dragons, grails

usual swath of illicit love’s twister wreckage

through trailer park reality

of hobbled Camelot being-together, Gwen

returned to previous orders unchallenged

ease among floral arrangements and fame

behind walls of untouchable silence

pissed off that Lance failed every last test, the guys

with axes, tomb’s stone slab, sword bridge

and failed assignations

the works, then ruined

everything, the whole sweet fantasy

up in smoke of his passion’s unleashed blast

left her to stagger singed, frightened back

to some other story previous to their first

gentle touch among shared love

of words

while barely coming to his senses

Lance looks for the old gang only to find

no king no buddies no Gwen no nothing just

an image of himself in flames rise from depths

of pain and hunger nestled in crannies of soul

redraws the edge of the world much closer

than he recalled among morning’s dream tatters

of an underworld banquet, a dead child

and the fading memory of sea surge

in eyes across a table

Inauguration’s Augmented Auguries

How much sense you yield to G

depends on weight delight bears

in sounding’s jubilation, whooping

and yowling being a bit over

the top for a little alliteration

but expressive of expanses

of fragrance in a different mode

Blake had at the centre

each flower opens to eternity

in tonic resolve despite chaotic

avian sky inscription soul reads

in blank January dome

Og and Anak

sneak into the poem through the Blake

door along with swarms of vultures

rise out of auguries into formations

roil with malice dedicated regimes

of pain and demonic release shaped

world in self’s paralytic image

WhataboutMe all dressed up

as monetized christian lollapalooza,

mostly because their names are cool

Og and Anak, which is how they got in

here trailing unknown clouds of Ugaritic

inscriptions, old Amorite theology,

and Nephilim’s Transjordanian

monolithic giants’ Cyclopian walls.

Augmented auguries continue

to overproduce alliterating thrills,

hope for sense to justify alphabetic

jouissance, more than just relief from

bowl-of-shit-news’s daily dish as Empire

once again crumbles around us as did

the Achaemenid, Ayutthaya, Akwamu,

and Angevin Empires and we’re not even

half way through the As, get used to it, waves

of resentment’s engorged rage and lust

for inflicted pain’s intimate contracted self

affirmation’s satanjoy, that and unrestrained greed

seem to be the order of the disintegrating

day, an Ahrimanic energy flare leaves

channels out deported and abandoned—

enter Og and Anak

to lock down further glimpses of sky’s

sky and strip G’s repeated delight

from orders of knowing.

No question, it gets downright nasty

out there, a world of pain and suffering

but claims

the world is broken

serve the same old inflated sty

in your eye loss of vision leaves

Perfection (Human brand) to lurk unspoken

in unbroken’s necessary Whole

which just happens to hang out right

around the corner, it’s a kind of well-lit

whine, really, that they could have done it

better given newly inaugurated body

of knowledge’s collectibility

and same old blame it on evil matter (mother)

sleight of hand

What you see is what

you get, a lot of what you can’t see, too, all

of it, and the goat god could care less for your moral

loveandlight schtick and fantasies of salvation—

salvation? really? save what?

through a “body of knowledge”?

The minute knowledge is assigned

its body, body-experts arrive, elbow

knowing, transitive, out of the way

and tell you what it means and which whatever

came first as if it was written down

a long time ago and all that remains

is to read it

                   and then

                                 transmogrify

                                your apocryphon,

an obscure arcane ritual known

to juice up the gneo-gnostic purple prose solution

to some unfathomable metaphysical

problem, if that tickles your fancy, and leave

the broken world behind on your way

to unbroken world, the secret in plain sight

Og and Anak hide behind 

Augmented auguries inaugural

silly alliterating jubilation

may not be enough to get you past fallen

if broken is your thing, but in the cosmic churn

of Duncan’s What Is nothing’s broken

because everything’s as it is becoming

and to stay tuned to all the horrors and joys,

pain and ecstasy, war and peace, ignorance

and knowing, broken and unbroken, cruelty

and kindness, rage and tenderness, all the

darkness in your own soul that you find

around you, to get beyond that Olde Book’s

compulsive divisions requires a leap

into further’s blossoming augmented

inaugurating fact

Auxiliary Augmentation

“Pan’s rape, like Pan’s nightmare, is a close encounter with the animal force of the body. . . . The language of rape usually speaks of deflowering, the paradigm for which is Persephone picking flowers when seized by Hades. Deflowering too must be taken metaphorically for we are not speaking of the hymen rupture of actual virgins, but the flower consciousness broken through and its death.”

     --James Hillman, Pan and the Nightmare

 i.

No more Magical Queen

to rescue lost words from soul’s

hidden drawer where King’s curse

and the ghost of Christmas past’s

Florsheim assault on youthful Orc energy’s

go-fuck-yourself-and-your-fucking-war

too, had banished them, the fucking part being

a good start but then finds itself looking

for the right answer’s bearer of O.K.,

and when it turns—

and it always turns—

he’s not there as invisible dark

repository of uncertain’s toxic

paralytic choke slams it shut

till she touches it

and it opens free

of all disdain

reclaimed

and sends him packing

The Magical Queen resigned, left

dreamer to dream alone, no one

to lift the spell cast over eyes

and mind’s arrangements, she has left

being a sign resembles faded image

lodged somewhere near heart’s

memory of a touch and to reach it

gets analogously incomprehensible,

a word also applies to this brutality

outbreak batters tenuous hold otherwise

lost already to anima disorder her departure

suggests meant something though residual

power obscures clarity of resolution

with a cloud of uncertain determination’s

former lingering odour and ghost face

pops up in morning mirror as explanations

circulate through fantasies of lost

chymical weddings and reconstituted

heart which is yet another constitution

returns us again and again to augere

via auxillary augmentation, and

author, to make grow, so now the question

is who’s writing this thing anyway,

now that they both

are on their ways home

ii.

“Perhaps the recognition of Pan as a psychic dominant implies a lessening of the tribute we pay to love, either as Eros, Christ, or Aphrodite.”

                     --James Hillman, Pan and the Nightmare

The goat foot thumps at the edge

of dream infused mind in thrall

to Eros’s come-hither glance as mom called it,

or was that bedroom eyes, anyway a promise

of dancers, a dance, and dance’s end

in sweet love’s parting as love is wont

to do even as love’s light dispels shadow’s

threat of other penetrations

unwanted brute knowledge

For instance, the rape of Persephone

is not subject to amelioration

in the interest of love eye revision, he

does rise out of the bowels

of earth wrapped in writhing shadow,

rips her from her flowers, drags her down

to rule the dead, actual fucking

no doubt occurring shortly after

their return to Hades so what

else would you call it though what else

rape remains is unclear

till he shows up

rank unwashed crusted fleece reeking

of cum looking for something to fuck

a nymph or maybe a doe whether they want it

or not doesn’t matter not that they know

 that or even exist outside the walls

of the poem’s rickety temple but the force

required to burst love’s settled rites, gentle

postures, sweet comforts toward further depths

of body’s animal need leaves wreckage

makes the last Florida hurricane

look like a June breeze, both in-here

and out-there, flower consciousness

that holds the line against creature-mind’s

indifferent ignorance of love, deflowered

as the “dance” loses its way, leaves human

behind in ritual penetration and release

fouls love’s virgin barriers shadow

irrupts black shreds of passion’s other

face of love’s song dissolves in uncanny

reeds’ numinous horror and panic

iii.

“Men are sick with love.”

         --William Blake

“Pan the raper is a potential within every sexual impulse. Every erection may release him, implying a need for psychic deflowering. . . There is an attempt at transgression going on, an attempt to move across from one level to another, bringing sex and death to a part of the soul that is altogether resistant to that kind of awareness.”

—James Hillman, Pan and the Nightmare

“It is not bad / to be pissed off.”

         —Charles Olson

The stories around stories breed

more throws mess into conundrum

of inconsolable reinterpretation

as story becomes explanation

of the story that breeds another becomes

story of the story before slipping into it

those nested Russian dolls except in

at least six dimensions and inside

out as irregular clarities compete

for possession

In one I is torn to pieces

ripped apart by motherfuries

scatter chunks of him all over

the place, shattered voices of him

contest, turbulent ages of passion

speak and speak, interrupt, scream,

 whimper, cry

reason

In one I tells a long journey

through love’s difficult terrain,

littered bleeding heart wreckage

left from surprise cardiac

disaster, to wait for him,

I got lost

he says, and let the road slip away

In one, she cries, slayer of yourself

slay me, but when the goat god roars

out of the bush stinking

of shit, piss, cum, sweat

rank earth, monstrous, sinewed animal 

fuck howl, death howl

she’s gone

and the story can’t find her

One fades into shades of blue

In one her love offers itself on an altar

of grace and faith in other stories

of Aphrodite’s sweet gifts, lucimeles

said Sappho, breathless, limbs

languid thrill rises each cell limp

with honeyed beauty, he embraces

her transitory touch and across

the world they dream

of each other

at peace

In one, I grows right through her

to an afterlife where love

cannot be ruled or ruled out

rules over them and forgives them, they

shrug off love and fear, disheveled

promising

and she is my sister

Augur’s Auspices

“We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.”

—W. H. Auden

“To be quite honest, it’s just a fucking brownie.”

—Chef Kwame Onwuachi commenting on The Cosmic Brownie

Birds scatter into the poem every

which way, swallows, wrens, vultures, and geese,

eagles of course, etch indecipherable

prophecies on the sun's face

as raven’s stark slash

interrupts the sun, speaks of god

knows what, fire perhaps

quickly erasing whatever settled illusion

of happy mastery in the roar

of our own vast indifference to light

stone, water, earth, scent of smoke

the news, travels fast littered with Hittite

names for house and tenebrous allusions

haunt chiaroscuro implicated

announcement of earthquake, plague,

tempest, corruption, war and collapse,

a veritable catastrophic kit

and caboodle, ultimate doom prophecy

undone by children’s laughter

down the beach on the verge of the Bay

Yeah, but what

do kids know about the Council of Trent

and inquisitory constrictions condemned

art’s knowledge of humandivine  

matter-of-fact-god-joy’s last

supper’s good food and good 

company, one eye on Gethsemane, 

the other on the wine to a feast in Levi’s

house (landed Veronese on the Hot 

Seat, too much imagination 

for the Bishop) opens a geography of world 

secretes its own light, earth of emerald 

cities, geosophical co-ordinates entwined 

cross-roads’ limbs heave with joint passion, 

a word emerges from suffer to point 

to mind of uncertain compass in heat

 of caring’s embrace of matter of fact

That old butterfly flap to tornado yarn

haunts current street’s dawn peach glow,

so still, waiting for the wave to hit, far away

joyboys disconsenting the liberal consensus

to activate lower regions of imagination’s

infernal geography disgorge gangs

of pain monkeys, impish creatures pour

from Moloch’s anus to inflict

maximum suffering on the poor

suckers who empowered them in the first

place and turn the joint over to

The Lordly Ones ™

who aim to reconstitute the Constitution

in the name of Divine Right of the Strongest

to kick the living shit out of everyone else

and make them thank God for it