"I pecked a worm, 
     then a friend joined
          and he pecked a worm.

     then a romp and pummel
          through dry dirt

     an unsure hop 
          on some man-made 
               abomination—

     and we ate 
          and we made our escape."

sacrifice while you can, for you are fated; either to a heavy cross, carried but chosen, or a light grave of belated burdens with no time to make good.

it must be hard and holy, 
     this love
or it is secretly abstinent
     in love's secret heart

a stow away
     awaiting a shore
a mouse breath
     beneath the floorboards 

there is no proof 
     without difficulty; 
and all that is holy 
     has been hung on some tree 
     in offer of nothing else 
     but proof

a dream wrap't round men's hearts
a whisper pulsing its constrictions

a tickling half-truth:
     "I am" 
becomes a thunder

just for the lightning, 
the gumption

a clay man
divorced from dirt
rain without water
earth dry of heaven's myrrh 

how long can a skeleton shake
how long can dead men dance
finally, any dream will do
mad devils all a'trance

hot on the coattails of unity
     a duster don'd ghost
palms burning with puddled poems
     ever hungry for a host

soon a convert marches
     faith across his brow
trading tomorrow's dream
     for totality in the now

here's a story of man
     impatient for the win
ever externally seeking
     the one found only within

- meditations on Camus' The Rebel, pg. 97; written in a cigar shop in Asheville, where I met a homeless writer and carpenter, Joseph.  2/6/2024

Can he yet be saved, this sugar-addled addict? We feed the mass man as we do the herd from which he eats—the corpophagic masses. And that hungry mental organ? What does it know, too, but its diet: sui generis foie gras—the cognitive animal produces its own feed. Mouth to mouth, slave to slave, “truth” to “truth” maketh sick any species. Knowledge cannot save the knowledgable.

Man now has before him a choice, and only barely so at this late hour, and only if by grace he can dare see it, and by God —if he could bare to believe— divine it:

Slaughter, sheep, your temporal shepherd kings, for by your bite he leads you, stomach to cliff; or court yet that ecstatic cannibal rush he offers and perish of blind mens’ sweet knowledge.

Can you decline your sugar? Bathe in cold baptismal rivers? Starve for higher love? Can you dream freedom?

Freedom: but for a movement toward what sugar forgets and the slave abhors —that a new man, yet harbored within, and truth unsubject to false shepherds: yes, suffering is salvation. Surely, in suffering, we can believe.

thank God for his distance 
     every instance of nearness 
     visit us a contagion 
divinity revealed 
     madness 
     meager finite vessels, we

to crucify the madman is a favor
     compassion 
     for the overfull of spirit
     release 
          of an outbursting desire 
          uncontainable in the mind of man

what were we to do
     end the empire?
     all become polishers of empty thrones?
     floors all scrubbed
     now tenders to the lame?

if the final knee is to bow and tongue confess
     all desire toward being
          for becoming will have vanished
          to a permanent fullness
then all will have become 
     a divine un-wanting

and God Himself
will He have finally become his becoming 
     no longer to birth
     no longer zealous for men's hearts?
what sort of pleasureless hell might be imagined 

emptiness...
     isn't that the devil?

and you say "God is not here" 
he cannot therefor...

yes, that is His proof
     his kindness
     that you may exist only half-mad

were you full, so full
     and emptied of desire
     isn't that the devil?

I cannot face you
how could I permit
     early moon
     to such a happy sun

I do not reflect you though
when I see you wane
     all my darkness turn good
     for hiding bright pain

and so, how long could you burn
how long can I stand, float
sadness on bright tides
pillar adrift
     on you 
     on hope

forgive my pitch and yaw 
I do hold fast in my own way
and may the tide truly will?
     she too rolls of day

to one of breadth
to one of depth
     who moves 
     sun and moon
and pillar by tide and tears
well swept of daily dread
     by night 
     and by noon

I will not
to be measured by man
ruled by 
those killers of well-spring

daughters turned doubters
wrung dry of belief
blighted aliens

     a Jubilee!
     a coup!

from measured madness 
a desert flood
     by tears 
     for a God sorely missed
robes torn, heads dusted
thorns pressed crown to brow
wonder working power

we will to bleed for this:
to live again
     wet in rain
     wet in life
     wet in blood
in belief's full heart
we will to will less
to be measured
yes, ruled
by God and not men

have you swallowed God
rejoiced in final bloodshed
power in lamb and shepherd's strike
lead to golden understanding

have you found Cain in your hand
ruling lately and poor
     king without a kingdom 
pauper's pride and pomp
hiding the earthly urn

measure kings by treasure 
or better by the cubits' stretch
     as stories of men's hearts
from first to last

healing humble robe
wrap round our cold hearts
point our feet home
fill our bellies

feel guilt too deeply 
and sin too sharp
fault inscribed 
upon his heart

not a word in counter
of moral pagan silence
rise to writhe a'mourning
a nothingness so violent

turn the day
and dread the night
enact the sacrificial rite
but have you heard
or perhaps read
our sacred sacrificed 
"god is dead?"

leapt not to sky
for endless search
but into man 
to heavy earth

what sort of beast
with heart of God
can know forever
and earth still trod?

god and sinner 
     reconciled
divine made dirty
     through a child
and washed clean 
     in simultaneity

reconciliation by the rock 

the god-man dilemma 
     a  going in two ways
this the passion 
     ancient of days

man's mind is proof 
    white whale within 
hunter or pray 
    true north to sin

how to win but by losing
    ourselves 
          unto this whim and wind
"bring me the whale!" 
     we Holy cry
          but each man's whale 
               within 

closely, I am undeserving
from far I can worship and fear
sin brought near by truth's fire burning
infinite shadow cast me bare

call me Phil; 
I do fear the summer sun
and ask me again in six weeks
my answer will remain: 
—run! 

so the devil's veil man seeks

no wonder man can't stand his god;
he cannot stand before him
this way a day of yahweh comes?
Jesus Christ! 
—run!

signs and wonders
     lain at your feet
but your confession lay pursed
     behind tight lips
no breath fills forever
     justice demands admission

nations as nothing
     consumed on cud
     with last breath 
          cry out the glory
          admit the life that lives you
               and dances your bones
          and be happy in God
          
          or last pride across hungry lungs
               and choke on want

ye vile of all nations
     you signs 
     you wanderers  
          you stolen breath

whose Name sounds your wretched breathing?
     pity the kingless court
     pity the courtiers
          for they are poor of spirit     

look within
     and know your distance
without
     be cast and placed

but a dizzied dancing 
     dandy you've become
     a god self-effaced

spun blind 
     adorned in modern beads

darling, a religious whirl
     lust for the swirling senses
     a beast

why can't I tasted deservedness
    bright yellow palms of fruit
    gratification in their shiny wax
    real sugar really grasped
in palms of my own

these fingers, false
    in hunger's haste or else
    giants' footsteps brooding

no meat however fat
    nor idea in heaven's dew
    technique torn between
man, dilemma in two

a becoming of bread
    a coward's cracking
    pulled for parts
    for fruit of labor
for lacking 

retire thyne illusions
    grandeur being poison 

life, simple in a field
    love lain on a supper table
    love on the altar

by hands 
    holy-made

men and god
    and bread between

this is grandeur's 
    illusion slain

a return to huger
    first by mouth
then further
    unto hungry bellies 
    and bones

unto petition's last first plea
    my God
    my God
    why hath thou...

    "Stop there my child
      you are not forsaken.
      
      By hunger I call
      until you call me 
      from your belly
      from your bones
      
      and have but the word
      alone we speak
      on emptied pride
      thankful for 
      this bread I hide"

how then is one to be great
    on time's scale 
    or only humanity's

what is it that can be said for all ages —or all men?
    survival is the statement
    offspring,
    life its clamor

funny, the stir-stick of this desire 
    for lasting
    which 
        no, who
    sets man's mind in motion

though it springs eternal 
    few are we who echo
    whole lakes dry in desertion

to be the centuries' fodder
    and to know it 

no man the text himself
    only context 
    for canon's mouth
        its thirst

what is due 
    of morning's dew
    not to mourn that day
    but love his sun and source
    to dance his evaporation

man is not captain
    but course

saddest gift to give away
gratification
desire
faithful lust
haughty simplicity
sweat and feast and dinner
today
a quiet mind 
full and sated bellies
pagan love
innocence from sin
from thought
laughter! at tomorrow
for what is he but More:
a plump ghost
blind love
surely even the sin-counting god
rejoices in us
this is the devil I flee? 
—Joy?

Did I miss it, the point of life?
falling for that big lie and loving it—love?
If I skipped the heartbreaks, the silent monotone misery, 
traded for silence and monism, 
was this such a terrible trade?
Sure, I'll have robbed another of lightened load,
buying enlightenment instead.
And if I acquired that sacred host, 
with an account of loneliness have I not paid my price?
Pity the fallers in love, 
for their god is in a man;
ours is higher, more mysterious, endless!
Yes, bad gods are those predictable beings; 
rising and aching, beggar of the sun all her hours: 
for chips, for want of rest, for commiseration, 
hiding behind eyelids tilted down
never daring the true glance.
Yes, I have made the righteous trade
surely — only, they demand their misery, and mine.

a touch of knowledge
and tumult come
of leavened gold 
bellies bloat
a second day in seven
spines repose to sloth
man sick, want for work
for heaving yoke we yearn
but too long upon unyielding line
and by distractions turn
far afield
and put to pasture 
on setting sun 
he wince 
in painted pride
unsaddled
youth inside un-rattled 
such value to man:
the fence

is there really no god?
into who's eyes does a groom gaze?

and no heaven too? 
into who's arms does a bride fall?

is there no Christ child?
who is our hope to be born to this divine pair?

is there no prayer to the heavens?
these words we promise to one another in secret tones?

do we all deny this non-existent god?
and 'amen' that very idea in communal spirit?

He is in her eyes. He is in his arms. He is in the hope of every wishing heart in this room, for a babe that might shine truth upon us. He is in your quiet promises. He is in our gathered love for you. 

tonight may we party like heathens. 
but on tomorrow's sun ride our secret prayer: 

God bless this bride—might she hold her groom's gaze forever; and this man too—with mighty arms of Eros catch her love. 

If this union isn't sacred, then nothing is! We wish you, together, that oldest idea of divinity, our gathered love and a blessing: We are for you—may therefor nothing be against you. 

Convince us otherwise

Our mythos too distant
Heroes dead and gone
Nation lost to the instant 
Flags lain on lawn

Convince us otherwise

Children can’t believe 
No regal fathers extant 
For whom to behave
Truth of state to chant

Convince us otherwise

Spirit of the law
While liars are winners
Scraps under table 
From thousand-dollar dinners

Convince us otherwise

Your suits are in peril 
Threads turning bare 
Truth from a barrel 
Soldiers a’scare

Convince us otherwise

We need that great hope 
Brothers are warring
Sickened by dope 
No light in the morning

Convince us otherwise

While we simply dissent 
Cities in rubble 
Bodies for rent 
You’ve burst the bubble 

Convince us otherwise.

I wish you luck in love

I wish you transcendence of self 

I wish you a hug encompassing of your mother

I wish you wild political success in the face of your accusers

I wish you grace in your own fruition

I wish you your guard down, and your hair

I wish you innocence in a lover’s arms

I wish you spring babies

I wish you life abundant and comedic tragedies for contrast

I wish you amen in singing surround

I wish you gardens from which to emerge

I wish you bleary eyed bliss

I wish you peanut butter everything waffles 

I wish you well

A Chiasmic Cavalcade and Calamity

Mono enojado toro domado

Creyéndose dios

Hermanos en muerte Agarra fuerte

los cuernos por querida vida

O deja que la bestia pace todos sus días

Y por siempre ambos durarán

Mad monkey, tamed bull

Thinking themselves god

Brothers in death hold tight

The horns for dear life

Or let the beast graze for all his days

And forever they both shall last

A church of dimes I begin. A dime at the door, the exact replica of the tithe, the tenth.

Kataboles placed in the epitomic dish, above it the only righteous sign to hang reads “change.” Business first, then you get your salve, your salvation.

Yes then I blaspheme for an hour. A rant of consciousness, payments of attention, the eye of Ra, and the sacrificial murder and it’s glorious cover up story.

Then the recovery akin to after-care, a relation to the lay who have lain down their coin—and yet I will ask them for their lives to boot.

And they will praise and gregariously worship the light and the dark in fascinated confusion of their own symbolic dissolution. A weeping and a laughter, the Cry-Laughing Christ, the ridens deus—for thankful we are when the face of god no longer reflects our self-enmity nor reminds us of our original victim, our “survival” of Abel.

I will weep with them in all sincerity at our broken altar—our collective determination to fore-give rightfully due penance, to absorb violence, to give the coat when only the shirt is required.

And we will ready our own persecution somehow, by some insane human flaw, because even when of good intention, Gentlemen, we are not the keys of the piano.

And we will fall off our spirit rock, our pride, having made our profits and killed our prophets—for they are antithetical.

May god bless us Esau’s portion atop our own stolen birthright. May we forward the light one name, in our accursedness.

And all the murderers stood and confessed!

“Amen!”

It was the beginning of payments. It was the cessation of payments. It was consciousness and rest. There was new man and old man.

Old man was strong, but new man was clever. While old man grunted and groaned and fucked and took his tear, and warred and rumbled and held sacred his hair; new man plotted and scribbled and drew and in so doing thought himself a new.

The old way of the old man, brawn and buck and stew, and hunch and wander all day long, fighting three for two.

The new man rode on the shoulders of these giants, standing ever tall. Mushroom hungry, mixing barley, fire-stare-ers, all. Around the blaze, in dancing haze, a terror did befall, his first eye-dea, an aim, an arm, and beside him, big brother, and a fall.

Now write his wrongs and cover coal and tuck and run and hide, from the face of god behind the cloth, and burn the rams fat, blood a’side. Tell all to sacrifice, to the god of shame and guilt, ritualize and sacralize and be thine house built.

“Katapauses! Katapauses!” cry Cain to Seth’s God. “Kataboles. Kataboles. Forever must we trod.” “It was you who killed old Abel, Osiris did he rise, and ‘strength to strength’ as you heave and hoe, but work won’t make you wise. Gnash! Gnash! whip and bow and give the devil his due, and Caesar his, and the priestly ours, skinned penance to garments, blue.”

Acting always we wakened ones, indeed “all the world’s a stage.” And thus we strive, and striven, we, and bottled up our rage.

To he who hath, more and more, from our trodden working beggar Cain, and finally maddened, like the days of old, a letter shorter fell his name.

But Israel! Israel! for stories outlast men, and distance makes for blurried books says a trickster with the pen.

“Lápiz philosophorum boys, hunt it down and bring it nigh!” Discovering nothing, sadness fell them, blind eyes of peeking pride.

Kingdom of god on camel’s back through sand and stream and strife, rode the secret of the one true god, the secret of the mind.

But sand kicked up a spirit as the wanderer trod home, through darkened Jacob’s desert echo whispers: “Kataboles. Kataboles. …perhaps from even Rome.”

cf. Hebrews 4:3, Matthew 13:36

— the ramblings below are my trying to explicate the ideas I’ve conveyed in metaphor above— “As above, so below.” —Jesus of Nazareth (and for 13,000 years before him, all of Egypt)

For we who have believed enter that rest, just as He has said,
“As I swore in My wrath,
They shall not enter My rest,”
although His works were finished from the foundation of the world.

Hebrews 4:3

These are the antonyms of each other:

of the word for ‘Rest,’ (Katapauses) used by Christ to describe Both the ‘laying down’ of the original foundational pattern of man—man forever at ‘payments’ (Kataboles) of his attention, his work, and to the world in exchange for his existence in it, his penance symbolizing his ‘place,’ despite his curse being to have none—as the coyote, the trickster on the road, the wandering Jew; and paid via god’s people, of course; and to describe the laying down, the rest, the Katapauses of the cursed wanderer and his burden.

Paul, writing to the HEBREWS is saying, hey Jews, I am one of you, I have converted, know me as Paul instead of Saul, that’s how serious I am about Jesus’ insight and his fulfillment of the prophecies:

For we who have believed enter that rest, just as He has said,

Paul

Christ believers will have a ceasing of the burden of consciousness upon our deaths (duh.)

As I swore in My wrath,
They shall not enter My rest,

Jesus

In my godalmightiness, speaking for the great ancestors and our god, non-believers in the new way —the use of fore-giveness in place of monetary sacrifice as tokenized and ritualized acknowledgment of the original murder, the instincts of which remain in us even unto this present day, and for whose past, present, and future malfunctionings in the face of ever increasing regulation by the letter of the law and cultural binding, we are disposed toward acknowledging and paying for both in penance and tax, an automated penance— these people shall be forever cursed to consciousness, hell being to live forever under the system of payments so compounded and laden with owing, by what our ancestors have overcome, and in sorrowful acknowledgement of the impossibility of restoring something that never was in the first place —consciousness ‘with’ god, god being a product of consciousness; these people will never find rest from that guilt and sin tax. Consciousness was a real curse to primitives. They avoided ‘thinking’ as you and I think of it as a matter of course. It lead to disruption of the tribe, new, dangerous tools, and social upheaval of a strictly taboo’d and ritualized balance that kept collective tribal possession by the daemons of mimetic violence and our animalic instincts toward resource competition (for sex and food), at bay. So ritual and more ritual, and taboo for peace. Else we must sacrifice a scapegoat or go to war—else, war within.

So to those Christ is condemning, they are cursed to this thirst for knowledge and to the pattern of the world, to wander, and for the tribe to live forever in their ways; forever striving, forever ‘paying’ (kataboles) in cursed consciousness of their original sin—their murder and the unrelenting repression they must exert upon their still murderous instincts, and the guilt that accompanies it. He is extending the curse of the garden forever over the heads of the Jews who will inevitably inherit the earth, but the curse is in that selfsame inheritance: a curse to further labor, to labor over their knowledge and their ever-thirst of it—this is no different than the plight of Prometheus, and his liver, that piece of us that connects to the stomach along with the pancreas (pan-creas: ‘all-creation’ —creation being belief (cf. ‘creer’ in Spanish) real-ized symbol (the sema, the sign that Hermès hung in the barn as a reminder of his deeds and his ability to ‘forgo today for tomorrow’ despite his thriving ways) of sacrifice, delayed gratification — being what can be done by ‘hanging up’ the instinctual appetites (sex and hunger) to regulate Ghrellin, the chemical that governs our hunger response and drives our animalic curse: wandering as a conscious, biped, worrying its way to its next meal. (cf. https://www.yhktherapy.com/en/manage-your-liver/detail/245/the-liver-and-the-pancreas-how-they-affect-each-other)

If “in the beginning was the word…” -John 1:1, and presuming ‘the beginning’ here means the same as ‘the foundation of the world,’ —and I take both as ‘the first founding of culture itself’, then the curse (the knowledge of good and evil, from the bitten apple, the ‘bite of knowledge,’ the ‘Mortis Consciencei’ of the pursuit of further consciousness (the curse of consciousness itself, the thirst (sed, set) for more knowledge—being described by something like Neumann’s Centroversion mechanism describing the conversion of life (libidinal) energy into psychic energy, the energy of Jacob foundational of Israel in its sacrificial forgoing.); if in this beginning, the beginning pattern of procreative man, was also the motif of insemination, then Christ is implying quite clearly (for Christ) that the beginning pattern of man was established by the man ‘injected’ with the word. In-sem-inated; sem being the word for ‘name.’ Christ has said that the world, effectively, began —the pattern was set— with the thirsty for knowledge consciousness Semite, descendent of Seth, Set, Satan, Lucifer, the enlightened, the bright idea having, the thinking, speaking (silver serpent tongued) man began his journey into consciousness; the first man and his word, was the same word in ancient Egyptian for set, sed, satan, and seth, great grandfather to the Semites of Noah’s son’s tribe: “but,” said the clever third child. As for Sem, his name the word ‘name’ itself. This man, the man with the word in his mouth, this man is god, just as John 1:1 tells us: “in the beginning was the word. And the word was with god, and the word was god.” To in-sem-inate is to speak the word into. Gods people are the people with the word, are they not? And if they are with the word, the word they have in their mouths is god. The foundation of the world is built in language. Understand language, understand the foundation of man’s world. The study of symbols, those images of the mind that determine just what we think of things —how we think of things— is sem-iotics.

although His works were finished from the foundation of the world.

Jesus

Although (but) god’s (man’s) works (employment) finished (arose) from (as) the foundation (the pattern of life itself which was an unstoppable foreign conclusion once Adam knew Eve: man was always destined for consciousness)

(more specifically: the pattern is the paternal pattern of insemination [injecting of the symbol or word] of the woman)

of the world (ordered chaos, the beginning of man, tribal cohesion, the instantiated cultural and religious law written to justify the unholy original murder, made holy in its violence and its product, peace, that was necessary to order society initially, and which shall nit be repeated at the cost of our society).

The deed was done when Adam came in Eve. None of this is changing. Death is death. And death is rest from life. Christ is promising nothing but that death is restful from life. The other time he mentioned the ‘foundations of the world,’ in Matthew 13:36, he announces to begin with “I will speak to you in parables.” Yea, well, no shit.

Translational references & context

—or Καταβολες and κατάπαυσις

—or payment and requiem 

— phallus and bowl

— infection and cure

— man and woman 

— a pattern (pater) and mother (mater)

— a specific foundational plan, cast (the work of man done by paying specific attention to mimicking the pattern of the great ancestral fathers, moving forward our consciousness and our heroic undertaking of the work implied in our survival which we call god’s will) over the earth and over woman, to subdue them as he sees fit, and to call it the will of god—the god of all gods, the gods of man’s ancestors, and his totem spirits, patterns of action, all; patterns true to the masculine spirit of mankind functional enough to develop the secrets of the earth, order the chaos produced by a half conscious, half mad former beast contending his damndest to bind his animal impulses through the religion and the culture (the religious cult’s formerly taboos expanded to society at large) he finds himself in. All this a gift, consciousness, and a curse, the foreknowledge of our death, and the deeply implicit and final death, and modernity’s future tense: the death of even our instincts. A grand plan cast by man’s deepest urge, reunification with god: a plan to beg borrow or steal his way to all-consciousness; omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence; all knowing, all being, all able.

And able, who was pleasing to god, was killed, made unconscious, given reprieve, Katapausis, rest from payments, Kataboles due during life. The truth is that the old saying is ill-emphasized. It’s best understood: either death, or taxes.

We strive to be able with cain’s blood coursing our veins. And the cool handed man calmly takes his portion in place of his place, this man who has no place. The birthright without the scepter. But perhaps he’s got it all now. And all through the technology of the narrative and that of its distribution mechanisms, comes the writing oneself into the pantheon, like Hermès. I believe that Seth is Hermès in every important way. He’s the late born son, he charges at the crossroads of liminal spaces, he is favored by Yehweh as Hermès is Zeus, he tells his story from his own point of view, the theft and founding trick of violence, the tiny portion hung as ephah, sema, sign, reminder of his guilt, ritualized sacrifice as a remembrance, the acquisitive mimetic object, meat, being the contentious object causing brother on brother violence that, if not quelled, whether by a song played on the lyre or a story of guilt and shame hung round the heads of a dead man’s hopeful brow, the taxation motif that persists, and the innocence demanded of their hands while soaked in blood.

If you intend to be alive, do not. forget. to sacrifice.

The gib hanesseh is what Jacob gave up in order to found the tribe of Israel. This is the sacrifice of his animalic procreative instincts, the socket of his thigh—this is ritualized to this day in the practice of circumcising boys into the tribe as men; men of god who do not forget (gib hanesheh translates: ‘to forget’…the organ that does make one lose his head, his consciousness, his commonness with god) to make the sacrifices of animal instinct for pursuit, for their wandering.

All tricksters are wanderers. All men are tricksters. All men have bellies and cocks. We are all cursed into our last days, and then, relief: Katapauses at last.

The only way to curse a tribe forever for their evil deeds and their awakening into godlike consciousness —the curse they themselves earned— is to consider ‘forever’ in light of inheritance, generational sin, generational punishment: kataboles, payments forever. If we finally put up our animal instincts —if we became the perfected man of god— we would die of starvation and lack of procreation. To die, finally, all defendants included, to die as a people, a tribe, is the only recourse we have to join again our ancestors in final rest, peace; and we refuse final hunger and abstinence—we cannot turn away from those ‘sins that separate us from god.’ Thus, we are Cain’s god-cursed wanderers doomed to pursue a place in this world. Seth’s coverup story for our collective founding murder, and Judea’s laws are all that make our guilty lives bearable: lies and laws. Hence Christ: an acknowledgment of our sins, and a final sacrifice to emulate: “If you would have your life, give it up. Those who would keep theirs will lose it.”

Are God and Set, the enlightened tribe of Seth, forever juxtaposed against one another? Is it only the Canites’ curse? Do the tax collectors also have the curse of paying? Or is that done in that infamous curse of knowledge: the knowledge of their guilt? Perhaps each has its Pyrrhic victory: man and man’s god, his conscience, in an infinite wrestling match, Jacob and his Angel. If ‘god prevails’, and Jacob-Israel and his conscience are both god (god via a vis ‘god’s people’), then this is not a final prevailing but a continuation: life.

In my dream I can feel her. She is in the next room over—just across that threshold. Anything can happen before the crossing, but after, everything is set neatly in stone.

I forget she is there; lying in a bed, awaiting, atomb in hopeful blindness for some king—or a prince at least.

While I clamor pots and pans about and compose my days of busyness and noise, of nonsense and ramblings over the variegated meanings of life found in the tail feathers of the male peacock, she awaits this same bright-plumed idiot she’s dreamt up in all that time spent on her back, thinking —no— wishing him a hero, a dragon slayer.

I near the threshold again and the smelling salts of fear and infinity strike my nostrils with consciousness. A midnight and moonlit glimpse of her cracks through my mind, like a strong thunder unnerves even the boldest hound. Would I trade her that place in the bed? Is that mattress not stuffed with feathers just like mine?

I must awaken from this dream and return to my own sleep. A different dream, a different room, a meal bereft of salts. A meatless feast without dessert. A lonely room. A shut door. A preservation in as much, and a solar stare despite the beauty of the gorgeous moon.

We are not men any longer.

Men rode rough seas and rougher horses—into dark places they brought their callous human light. We cower and tremble in silent —and all the time more loudly— petition of kindness, grace, acceptance, hoping our shaking or our shaking voices will garner us safety from even the slightest shades cast by the dimmest suns. No we are not men any longer.

Our women strengthen themselves. In our dishonor and submission to false authority, they must. If her protectorate becomes the faceless force of state and your men are chosen for compliance, preferring plebeian prosperity to true vigor, if he softens his edge to a dull blade, if he signals he’ll only feign war, if he is too fatted, a danger only unto himself, a mumbler and fat-pursed courtier, a flatterer—who then would protect her? And thus the strong tyrant comes with her invitation across the threshold. No we are not men any longer.

Our boys, impulses feminized, every teacher a wrist, every moral a secret disguise to chain him while the girl flows freely—a girl who because he will not be be able, will not be able herself to love him in, through, his weakness, his learned helplessness. Kill the quarterback and laud the leader of cheers for equality and hair dye. No we are not men any longer.

Our cities, littered with human garbage and their refuse, millions on the brink of joining; our cities burn and rot with fowl smell and carrion awaiting the early morning searing smog hour. Statues toppled in service of should-be asylum patients and steer. In faggot fear and weariness of wailing women, wraiths of their mothers, who should prefer to cower more, our men let all of this happen. No we are not men any longer.

Our authorities author exactly none of their bills, absentees in our hollow hallowed halls. Elected by their peers and cronies, thin-chinned skeletons of Ebeneezer all, keep balances and favors in black books blacker than their tarred hearts. Men did this. No we are not men any longer.

Our companies: We are no longer forming companies of troops, but corporations, bodies of drones, but of weaker will and lessor vigor and higher desire for satiation—for there is no world left to conquer and so we must down breed the conquer and demean the conquest. We have become incorporated —‘into the body’, that is— we form a hive, drones in training, and we perform all of the honey dances madly, but for reasons we do not understand, magnets of modernity pulling at our senses, and for fake nectar too. No we are not men any longer.

Our teachers teach molestation and sing praise to Sodom. In the name of sameness and the death of the striver, the standout (unless she is a he and sure of they’re confusion: in all cases a ward of the state to-be) this factory of false promise promotes its daddy’s forever stale propaganda. Forever they are ruined. Men did not dane to teach. No we are not men any longer.

Men of old, rough men, who murdered and in bloody victory, carried the best spearer overhead and handed him over to the shapeliest young girl for holy savaging; these men sit in soft chairs now, behind steering wheels of fast cars who go only the speed limit. They sit atop boards of direction twisting hypotheses around their mustaches —were they able still to grow them. Yes they have conquered, but which species have they done in? Not one has stood, hard chest to weak shills and charlatans. Now, we will all suffer for a time.

No we are not men any longer.

Love is a margarita. A belief in love is love. I agree with you and I’ll fight on your side is love—when you’re probably wrong I’ll fight for your right to belong; in your anger and falsity and hope, through the worst hell in you, into the best of you. I’ll believe in you—your most outlandish stories too. I’ll tell you the truth, perhaps, even when you’re wrong. Grace when you lose your mind. You can hate me and I’ll tell you the ugly truth with soft words—ones you can hear—that soften a heart even when it wants badly to harden. When you’re fat I’ll worship you. I will kiss that ass of yours, because it’s mine. And it is mine—remember that. I want you when you’re pregnant. I want you when you’re bleeding. I want you when you need pinned down beneath heavy mass, and when you need wrapped in warmth. My heart needs to beat chest to chest with yours. My veins throb in sync with your pulse. Love is the push-pull, push-pull between us.

And maybe love is the trick of nature, a falsity who serves her own greater driving truth—survival. If she is a trick, then I love her too, and her sorcery. We should be so lucky to witness the show, edge of seat and front of row. Die to her, die to the magic. Die to the queen and honey gathered. To live above it all, to be more correct and cold in our assessment; what good is rightness at the cost of penetration? What does it profit a man to gain the whole truth and lose his soul—the soul of the honey bee. Nevermind the buzzing hive and workers and their dying to life. Nevermind the monotony and crime, we live to a queen, a false ideal and idol; and that’s how it it ought to be.

And when that dies? When we all mourn in circles and wale and wallow, but beneath we hide a grin? Why then, like the man but longer lived; off with her head and crown her next of kin.

Life is the prime mover, not the living. It’s the gathering to bring something home that is doing the doing. We think so highly of ourselves because there exist among us a few kings, but in their kingdoms—painted vases and red rugs despiting—the same winds blow; their reigns and reinas turn and wither, paper books recycled along with their myths. Not even Caesar stands, nor Alexander, nor Rome herself. All extraordinary and extraordinarily mighty, but all: bees.

Here is to the honey and these lives of ours that we pretend to govern, and to the true governor outside us all, the magician, her love, her death. Here is to the queen.

I have done every wrong thing, but in the name of right.

I have cheated women. I have twisted truths. I have admitted only for the effect it brings. I have returned things thieved only for the benefit of relieving my guilt. I have made solemn promises and found rationalities for bending them. I have profited from grace while stringently withholding that necessary virtue from others. I have lived on the scraps of Hermès as a traveler.

I have wept at my own unfittedness, my life’s incongruity, my loss of hope in tepid love. I have become the books I eat. I have said the truths that serve no one but themselves in honest and harsh words so that if nothing else, their effect will be remembered, and perhaps one day examined when the world slows down for a deep breath, a campfire in the desert night–for a coyote’s tale.

But I have left scraps too. I have begrudgingly paid the everyman’s dues. I have given great love and sang songs and delivered towering panegyrics. I have taught my ways to those too straight-laced to consider a bend, and thereby delivered them from themselves or a tyrant. I have breathed excited breath into flattened lungs. I have made resilient my fellows by sharpening their talons and confounding their brows.

I have paid the price for my way. And upon it, I suppose I have no choice but to wander further. Perhaps I will lay down beside this tree. A chance nut may fall and feed me, or a squirrel may need a friendly ear to hear his wisdom, or his woes.

My deeds grant me eternal spirit, exemption, unruliness, a heaven run, a dirty footed grounding, food for sustenance; the oldest exchange—a treat for a trick.

Mother squalls her rage at the thief. Father springs into action, yelling his own brand of fiery throated threat. Down upon the wind he spreads wide to gain his steam and with it, courage.

Larger, cold, and hungry; a broad tipped and brawny bully. The norm of nature, piracy. He kicked in the doors, front and back, and declared his stomach plundering might and moral. No time to digest plump prize; the locals have their anger after all––a weapon of its own kind.

A fervent but boyish pursuit ensues, knowing no court to petition and recompense rare and elusive. Snapping at ankles like a hellbent Pomeranian–frightful in fervor, not fight; quarter sized and half-regal, unrespectable and so, unrespected.

“Goodbye son, I am a failure and you are my dead weakness.”

The killer goes free not from trial but by mass and quick cunning.

Mother is his first thought: “Fuck.” Just meters away and in full sight, his lowly loss. Acceptance of a new reality and a reluctant bounce of the branch. These white tips fly always a spectacle, even in sorrow. The short branch before the second loss; first a son, then an angry mother; a stopping place for small reflection before getting on with it.

Silent upon arrival, head hung as low as it would, go–further even. Too close. A second provocation, he does not need––a silent hop and flap instead, she turns her back, and lands three feet away but a mile in her mind and by the metaphor all mothers make: ignore a failure and punish him. You both need it this way.

Only two remain and they’ve shut the hell up, having had their first brush with life and its wiping away from above, the sky’s talons tearing carelessly through siblings’ hopeful hearts–they’d never seen what’s inside. Red to stain the color of hope; the only two shades these creatures ever see.

Father gives some distance, recognizing his guilt. Its going to be a long week; there is no distraction from his son’s death, no art to be found in a wife’s lifeless rage staring straight through him, into far-off disbelief at life’s cruelty amidst such beauty and freedom. Only the next worm. The sexual act, cold now to repeat. A cold lover after a murder.

And that is how this world works? I refuse it. A hymn to Hermés must ensue: a lie, a comedy, we need! Or we might just as well all kill ourselves in protest of that terribly truer pigment. We measure fairness, and thus we need our love stories and our lying: boastful and ignorant fireworks to do battle with wet tears and apologetics for dreaded misfortune. We need the idea of fortune itself, and fate, and to lie about God, calling him the sun when the sun was his first weapon against wholeness.

Dad never needed to wake us up in the morning, but he did. And now he knows our suffering as his own; a weight to his wings, death of the life he loves–and loves for want of having a commiserator, if he’s honest. Without hopeful lies we act like these white tips; angry at every fucking thing in passing perdition; dive bombers and mad nihilists squalling but never singing. Lowly, we must have our tall tales and mead and cigarettes; songs for our lost sons––songs for our sorrow: soothsayers for a life we cannot possibly live, nor live without.

I hope you have secrets. A paper just blew across my porch. She must have secrets of her own. A cutting, a grinding, a pulp of others ground to powder, turned into a commodity for markets. Then a hard press against her chest, so heavy an unnatural force into bondage with new sisters she cannot resist. Spewed out, dried like rag and bone, strewn about naked before sad slaves; titans before the war on their old groves and grooves and grains. Now for the cutting, now for the running, now for the dark box and the sale of her body twice over to the highest bidder; the new master, pray god of sun and former glimmering leaf of mine, give me good purpose. Find me a Roosevelt, a cannon’s mouth, a sparked ball to hide with fire behind him and pierce the chest of some killer, some cutter, some fiend of markets dare to take my branch and roots by force. Yes, let me set the precurse for vengeance. I’ll do my job; wrap wrinkle over wrinkle, my square I can make round to mete the difference. And keep me dry, dry as that hanging room of my ancestors; drier than the sun in the lean months, prostrate like the savior for his sins. For I was standing there, no more. I spoke the quiet truth of ages. I grew my fruit, I weathered storms. A family, the greats of the man, mowed me down, no doubt. I hid them once. From slithering and soaring from roaming and roaring, I hid them. Growing too high for serpent to bother, I stretched my own displeasure for them. The small ones, too innocent and short lived, circling me below in a chasing game, too sweet to leave low and scared. And cover I made from the winged death, those beautiful killers. They circle and swoop at plump meat, pressing the dusk and dim. I called upon my gods below me, I petitioned the secret source. He answered us both, me and the curious ones, with life. It course up, up, up, higher, and with every drop of magic mustered, I spread wider wings than that clawed killer, til his keen predator glare see nothing but my coat of arms, talons of my own and patence more noble than his; I shamed that bird from his meal. And then the king and queen, those sleek sleepers of day. Roam and rumble and tumble and play. I see them circled beneath me. I shelter their gold coats too, stained by sun and blood. They feign nothing above them, but know better. They wait for that swinging question mark to mistake his folly for freedom. Had I eyes, they’d pour out all my water. With strings tight across my throat I’d send waling siren til they snap. Alas, none of these do I have at my disposal. I’ve been given noble quiet instead, infuriating quiet, and eyes of sorts to watch the feast. So I bow my branches to those lost to the king and his queen. They dane to call themselves pride. And so I have wept, too, for this five thumbed and brilliant stick swinger, this tool maker of my twigs. And now he grows strong. His fathers brave the plane, venturing out, each day farther; more light and land for the hubris, everything his slave in its death. My arms make his bow and arrow alike. The silent swooping killer? His gray feathers now straighten the flight of my broken bones into the heart of the toothed one; a sad vengeance and irony I watch. Surely he’ll go no further. Surely this is enough for his stomach. Little did we –any of us– know that curly tailed saucer eyed sweetheart rather hunts with his eyes. And finally, me: mowed down in all my sorrow, all my silence. He mows me down too. Yes, make me an instrument, young naïve boy. Wrap me ’round poison and take me in your veins. I made them. I made you. My blood and bones and sticks and the stones beneath me, we are your forgotten and smeared source. Inhale my vengeance and let us count you the mulch below my long march back to the forest.

Here I stand convinced again, sure of what’s not necessarily so. Soul turned outsides in for the diamond glint. And he contains none of it himself. Not a beam or freckled flint does he radiate. No, he’s possessed by his passers by. Each gazing the Narcissus glow upon his naked walls to see their own light fractured and bent by some foreign law –a microcosm of life in light and stone. To see the mundane for its profanities, vivisected and strewn out before us is too much a temptation for the eye, and thus that banal colony, the finger. Take it and put down in ink it’s flaws! Now! each and every! It must be done for we can not bear it otherwise.

The months and I transpire the vapor of hot days and cold, fearing only consciousness –the devil that he is– shuttering a stare at the staff. Prefer we, the vapor and leaves and I, the Moment Himself ‘stead his inclination for leaning and tipping into that longer shadow he boasts. Consciousness as the devil, sure, but who be the Moment? The unburdened beast. Perhaps the Ox can bear any weight but that of knowing the number of his days. Give our necks the yoke, return the lash and lasher, stampede us our innocent suspicions!

We were all innocent once. Cursed not with labor but with Knowing, the bitten cry for return to mother’s belly, to the ashes and dust from whence we came; any god damned thing to forget! To enjoy the days with fickle folly and the candle by night and even that we dane to romance (nay, we demand it) –these are the fodder of all story, all myth, all foundation for the stories that make our consciousness; but why a story at all? What of that can we explain? And if we wake up in such a tale, we’re surely not the author! And if shepherds can be slain, surely it’s not they who slay themselves.

Does he boast -this shadow- after all? Does he enjoy his role, this taker of innocence? Why he must have his own good days, and thereby harder ones too. Is he darkness itself? Surely he is not the light itself; we’re taught quite the opposite. Light casting a shadow, what irony! To be so, WE must be between, and if those two unnerved directors, then also we must be of crucial import; for what is the character of man without one being crucified, the slaughtering of an Ox? Without the tree twixt those soothsayers, liars and try-hards both, they have no game between them, no object to blame, no shadow to entertain their revolutions with its bending and gaining and dying and reemergence. And how numb a place to be cursed with; wandering around aimless. No, they cast the great irreversible curse, the very curse we bear, we and all the oxen however dim or clever. The buck passers, they, light and dark. But the makers of games know not all their pieces. They shouted “dance, dance!” and dance we did, for our bread, but our numbers were never meant this high, and that thief (WHO IS THIS, GOD?), he stole not the water, but the curve and shine of Pisces’ pleasure. And thus: If the pieces make war, well then Eve, Adam and the Early One will have a table shaking good time and order the next round. Perhaps this is their repeated reunion after a long drought. But what of this finger trap for the maker, that oldest circle and serpent? May those two managers vacate? I think not. I think that shadow grows long and dark and heavy. Something perverts it’s edges; the players–perhaps they make a little light and dark themselves. With what other qualities might they be endowed? Did the managers know they’d become diluted in this venture? In all the days of history, did perhaps a sudden gale ever whip round’ the house, and loose a single sheet of capital stock from the kitchen table and scissor it’s way ‘neath the door, all whispy like? Does that certificate have written on its face -or in fine print on its back, more likely- “I am.” Does he issue himself? Does he call forth that very wind, self-endowed, self storming? And if so did he not storm the beaches at Normandy and ride the steel beast down to the very point of impact upon our yellow brothers? Did he not crash every wave that sank every titan? Was he not in the tooth of every lion that just the same, sank our grandfathers’ flesh?

No, these two fickle managers are just as subject as we. Whether pawn or rook or knight or knighted queen, all gale force winds blow across our board with whispered hints that like waking dreams are forgotten upon rousing. Perhaps such dreams are dreamt for the forgetting.

And so are We.

Perhaps the spirit who signed that certificate, who spins the light and dark around, and who animated the wind and the doing of deeds, all; perhaps he is the myth inside that mysterious and preciously reflective rock that charred the cheek of Moses. Perhaps he signs his name not “I am,” but “I am You.”

We must hide if not our face from god, then god from our face.