Inauguration’s Balls

Sweet Melinda
The peasants call her the goddess of gloom
She speaks good English
And she invites you up into her room
And you’re so kind
And careful not to go to her too soon
And she takes your voice
And leaves you howling at the moon

—Bob Dylan, Tom Thumb Blues

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 volitile 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

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 faded memory of sea surge

in eyes across a table

Compostable Monuments — A Collaboration

Our Lady of Compassion’s harbour

from passion’s wild seductions

hear our prayers rise from wreckage

of love’s passage, grant us Hearth’s refuge . . .

Inauspicious Intimate Augeries

“If you break it in some way, the marriage situation, all hell will break lose. What happens when the un-coupling happens? Out of the goddess of marriage itself comes this violence, the Mars, Hephaestus, the monster, Typhaon.”

--James Hillman, “Hera, Goddess of Marriage”

“Once gone down the hell hole

there’s no going back

golden reversion”

--Gerrit Lansing

It’s a long way from the Pleistocene

to the airport parking lot below

spread out against the ground like a patient

spider's lunch, husks dotted along radial

hunger’s drained ruins of predatory

Given’s blunt fate

silence beyond silence

dead love a sign seeks to mean in morning’s

mirror finds pain’s pool deep in dark of passion’s

convulsion in adhesive web of soul’s

formation where being stirs in forms unseen

since time began

It’s not that world

any more and tender whisps of love’s

touch across a fading table burn off

dissolve in furious heat unleashed

by seduction’s gentle quest to summon

Her to touch as if no consequence

could adhere to love’s play and some day

a sweet memory would drift across eons

to light age’s fading fires with a bit

of beauty in the thickening dark till

ruined it made its entrance

in passion’s tapped gushers unexpected

Blowout, reminder of the autonomy

of the Inhuman bound with us in

adamantine chains right out

of a Blake poem, still

she was no monster, I was no child

and gifted First Time’s thrill in rituals’

aroused passage through elder

beauty’s promise of penetrant touch

beckoned

a word suggests the lure

of mermaids on rocks, and in fact the wreck

of the Edmund Fitzgerald couldn’t hold

a sputtering candle to ensuing passions’

Category 5 leveling of several states

of mind left love lost in maze’s baffled

silence and distance beyond

any possible touch

Auspicious Inaugural Dustup

“The devil image still haunts in our fears of the unconscious and the latent psychosis that supposedly lurks there, and we still turn to methods of Christianism – moralizing, kind feelings, communal sharing, and childlike naivete – as propitiations against our fear, instead of classical descent into it, the nekyia into imagination…” 

—James Hillman,

If you put Persephone up against Jesus

10 rounds, no holds barred,

both responsible after all for inaugural

moment’s lush magnolia profusion this

bright April morn, the day after Easter

which you’d think would be simply

joyous what with the Star back and green

world popped again, but with Jesus it gets

tangled up in onward Christian soldier

war vibe, all vanquish this and conquer that

where this and that mean Death which apparently

is really bad to the point

Jesus has to beat the crap out of her

every year, vanquish her like he did

all those heathens, and all the Jesus fans

perched ringside yell sock it to her or whatever

they yell these days when they think their boy has

Death on the ropes which might make sense if Death

stood for eternal money worship soul-death

screams from the side of the road

waving an AR in terror the loss of their stuff

would mean when meaning has contracted to a small

angry protuberance on history’s oversized

American ass, but it doesn’t, instead

expresses horror at moving on when you’ve

done nothing here but foul the earth in the name

of holy accumulation of more stuff

than you had before and really hope Jesus

can vanquish the motherfucker who wants

to take it from you, or maybe you from it

tho it doesn’t matter cause it’s your stuff either way

and He’s dancing around, bobbing, weaving

then suddenly

takes a right jab to the chin

from Persephone who uses a familiar

trick to burst out of the earth just when Jesus fans

think he has conquered Death and pop him

in the snoot

Slow down, lover, she says

shaking off shadow shreds, what’s your problem

with death, anyway, and I don’t mean

soul-death, Jack Spicer’s death-in-life, not

my bailiwick

I mean the plain old dust-

unto-dust business feeds your enterprise

endless stream of souls terrified my soft

touch will interrupt them before the finale

of White Lotus season 12

I think it’s all

that really nice lightandlove stuff you sell

to hold off the dark, no, not just the dark

but who you are (you’re telling me you don’t

have Daddy issues?) once the border slips

its leash, containment strategies collapse

and hungry ghosts boil up, demand

to run the show

but Jesus dances

out of reach, smiles, bobs, speaks

of fishes and watery wine, the Kingdom

of Heaven hanging over the whole thing

like some bank of big old klieg lights shining away

somewhere in space where you get to be

once Death is vanquished

but Death she says

as she caresses his bloodied face, plucks

a thorn from his brow, makes it so sweet, faded 

lilac memories in fragrant April’s acute bloom 

and since you were nothing before you popped 

into the world through mom’s spread legs 

why should you be more

when you pop out

into my unvanquished

arms

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 

Silly augmented auguries

inaugural jubilant alliterating

may not be enough to get you past fallen

if broken is your thing, but in Duncan’s

elemental churn of What Is nothing’s

broken since everything’s as it is

becoming, horror joy pain ecstasy war

peace ignorance wisdom love rage broken   

unbroken cruelty kindness and tenderness

all the darkness in your own soul

you find around you and would ban

from touch according to protocols'

coded commandments, to get beyond that

Olde Booke’s

inscribed exclusions means  

to leap

into blossom’s augmented

inaugurating fact’s 

petal perfect open

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