PART 1
A blank page. He sits to write. And begins:
The shuttlecock bounding in white flight; tails, crossbars, and bowls keep beat and back while hammers crack––the rabble rousing machine whipping and droning til’ the tune come clean and clear from the miser’s favored instrument of self sacrifice: the rack, in desktop form.
Passionately engaged in battle over every wave of wood grain, it’s rubber feet threaten the far edge of the desk with each St. George’s lunge for the fiery throat of his dragon.
All this, these dramas with their braggarts and moralists, just to loose our madman from his self-shackled toil.
It be ever in vain in his own estimation, but here he sits, prisoner and guard in-one or as if he as some brawny courage of a man, had discovered the physical coordinates of the one true magnetic north of the human soul,
and as this hyperborean proud Hillary, felt that he must also be the man to bear the burden of its exposition, turned inside out by its great power -a sadistic self-sacrifice, but as we’ll see, also a great self-deceit–
he hunch the whole of his body over her secret glowing light –siren muse of all ages and tempter of all sages– for none else to see it; cautious even to pin elbows to sides tightly, in that odd half crouch:
“Contain the light” his demons whisper to him. Perhaps worry and conceit, the voices of those two ominous Platonian shadows, are the true source of every Madame Curie’s glow.
Never a more fitting name, the dead cat of all dead cats, cooked inside out by her own manifestation of Cupid’s interrogatively curved cord; the fate of bereftest of lovers: to be left befuddled and yet, intrigued. For what is it that kills all such felines, and what better a surname to coin the phrase?
Should he hope -and he does hope– for this place to bear his name alone ––golden plaque, baroque and barren of any trace of a second claimant–– for some length of time commensurate with and again redoubled perhaps, in measured multiple of that self same misery -hope- by way of his own generous estimation; why then, he must make it a confining and solitary affair, risking all his biscuits in the necessary soul-mining of that mortal element. But hope is often deadly to the hopeful.
Atoms on the outside turned in, and vice versa, perhaps he could return home from his icy heights, fingers crippled and swollen at joint; worse for the wear but as such, all the better for the creepy recanting of his inward mountainous journey to the would-be little ones he’s necessarily contrived for the hope they represent to his lonely mind, and at once has forgone in all his years of desperate and weary-eyed Grail-seeking.
Isolation, even if it be not his life’s primary consequence, certainly merits centering atop the masthead of his empty familial ship as it stare into cold waters forever ahead.
But seek he not for the handsomest transom crest, nay, only the stamp upon his own chest as conqueror of thickly layered white satin sea.
Long now hath he needed the mirror to find his proper badge (and eventually himself with any luck) but dare he not a glimpse above the neck -not for now- not whilst still in the hunt; there’s no time for reflection,
and certainly no time for the monsters that lie within; most men cursed always to fight the whale, never the minnow inside him.
PART 2
But does it sound like Truth to your sensitive ears that such a place as this cold mountain, could exist without claiming every curious soul that ever traipsed its boundary?
No. Never dividing its winnings, ever consuming those brave idiots for the meal of its own combinatorially grandest narrative—the story of all stories; that of every victory the cold has ever claimed over meager man, sealed in leather-bound compendium, an everlasting silence from softly hushed bodies stacked beneath the permafrost mountain—perhaps comprising the Mountain Herself.
Never mind the few enshrined names of the ages that wither on the flags atop her like old straw hats—long forgotten, if well-woven in their moral fabric at start;
for who ever does she see return to brag of their escape from her cold clutches, and how often? No, her pride remains intact. It persists. She’s taken the fingers and toes and noses and worse from the very best of men as her own trophies; and what else does one call the severed head of her opponent, staked at castle boundary in both confounding glory and warning to on-comers, but a trophy?
No, those escapees’ ligatures are her grandest glories, simply exceptions to prove her rule; the rule being something like: “Pursue my gleaming treasures and charge and plunder my castle, curious child, if you dare.
But I delight in your flesh. I dangle my worm at your mouth, out of my own hunger and fickle interest. A nibble here and there, or even a loosed worm, these are all the same to me, to my stomach, to my legacy. I am angler and ocean in one. And ye? Ye are mere fish.
And what is your small nature to mine as the properest Noun?
Worms of past human victories I dangle, and worms ye are to me.”
Slowly she teaseth her secrets for his pages, and only in exchange for the life he be willing to trade in deadly and unholy asymmetry.
PART 3
No such starving hubris be tolerated by his fellows either, this writer. Any such a figure is crucified before too much damage can be done to the delicate dark by early light brought back from the horizonal brink of the bucket’s brim,
climbers-out, pulled back in. For these animals are all nocturnal, these writers and poets -all fellow potted crabs, and as such is their planted temperament; to fight for darkness despite the light;
not for darkness sake, but in an owing to their ancient ascetic duties, in keeping with their melancholic spirit, and not least out of self-preservation.
Each on the noble mission to escape, but none willing to see another shine his light, even if that light light his own path,
for he is an escape artist who may only paint the way to escape––never to dare the deed itself.
No, all crabs are selfish (as cursed bastards often are), inheritors of the sins of their fathers, same as you and me, just un-luckier.
Perhaps these years of simple stale solitude are what make so delicious their meat to we similar-acting creatures––cannibalism of the curmudgeonly.
PART 4
What story, then, can he tell that’s worth the telling? What tale is worth the life of the teller?
Surely, only the tale of the telling of self-sacrifice as sacrifice itself is the crown-worthy king in this ancient duel by campfire light.
That underdog orator telling tales of embattled gods, mincing human bones for their namesakes––religions we call them.
That sacrificial king; surely he becomes king only after the letting,
for no man can be counted upon to relinquish his throne once seated,
and thus his throne sits at the right hand of God, in abstract space, lest its earthly legs be sawed off by the terrible twin termites, revolutionary resentment and seductive shame, from below.
And if he dies at the hands of his own creation –the petrified, wooden god he’s become– in their tinkering and poking about with the sciences, for instance:
In their patricidal act, do they not damn their own fates, one and the same?
The fate of all usurpers, usurpation. Now just to rebuild their gods in their own image,
pray for rain and reign alike; for blessings and curses.
Is this not yugic karma in practice, and have we not collectively been practicing, as such, for all our storied history; repeatedly whacking that circular snake upon his brow to entice him –by shame or otherwise- into temptation toward some other meal besides we, “the innocent,”
as he did us with curious jealousy, that ripe-red malum, that “bad light,” once upon a time in a high-walled garden?
And if he hath not a true brow to beat or with which to plead, and we cannot find innocence beneath the scale…why, what more need we say about such a creature? If he hath no brow to shelve a hot coal then he is surely for nothing but the beating; but then there’s the blaming.
Our serpentine stories and fallen fruit; these are the means of our endurance and our truest tails, and therein our follied author must surely seek his inevitably slithering story.
And so to weave this careful narrative, sidestepping all preamble for reader’s and simplicity’s sakes; for both appreciate their key task being made clear even despite never having drunk the wine found redest and deepest down the barrel like that of the crimson in Melville’s great beast,
for as he has it; once pricked, the valveless pump, for all its vigor, empties itself completely––a flat devastation of mammoth glory in mere minutes.
Such a story might be counted feintworthy upon soft and small ears, and thus only a sprinkle of the good stuff. Perhaps from the surface layers, and preserve the mystique of the meat for the truly hungry
––for who on standard stomach can slay the grandest beast and drink and devour all his blood and blubber in one sitting, but the indulgent man?
Yes, a literary ‘one and two and one and two’ is in order.
PART 5
But surely we know him better, this monomaniacal tale hunter and teller. We see his indulgences, even as he hides them from us like Judas and Brutus, those timely twisted twins.
The very stakes of his self selected slavish profession belie his temptation toward such feasting.
His kind is of weak resolve in this manner (and perhaps only in this manner). His compass points him toward indulgences at True North, be they coin or his face upon it,
and so; upward the flight upon Icarus’ path and downward he dives into the seductively scented oak noted barrel; to that wine-red reflected sun he seeks in drunken aphorism, readers and shallow lovers be damned.
PART 6
Isn’t it just such a drunkard in whose cold wandering through desolate streets ––Zarathustrian mountain air more-so than a god-man parched in desert temptation––
in possession of that red-cheeked, and timely, if temporary, confidence, as only one warmed by self-indulgence has, who inevitably stumbles up steeper mountains than others might risk in the search for truth?
We look down long noses at the drunkard’s morality but he is indeed more sincerely searching than we; is he not stomping out a holy mission up hill?
Are his cheeks not shone with the light of his savior?
Isn’t it only the indulgent man who can disdain himself enough to muster the hatred to look for the ugliness inside him, and stare into his own abyss––some men even with a grin and gallows humor?
Perhaps drunken determination is the broken Madman’s redeeming characteristic; the consummatory courage and the glare.
And if he redeems us or is especially crucified for trying, then at the cost of his own damnation, and even in self loathing, wouldn’t this make for a qualified Christ?
PART 7
This is what all writers are doing: piercing their sides, so that with cup drawn near, he might dam up some painful truth –red truth–
as it spills forth in proportion to the life going out of him –to his givingness of his shame,
and in undoubtedly sobering self defeat; He offers his chalice to the cracked and blighted lips of those who in their own thirsty, shameful cowardice show their contempt for the mirror gazer.
His chalice is too cheap and especially too reflective. Blood-wine is so bitter, they join in the piercing themselves, whether by spear or by science, for they are the same instrument.
The exposition of his shame lays bare their own.
But he nakedly loves truth, perhaps because naked truth looks like him…I have all but called him a narcissist by now, haven’t I?
It’s not the pain, but the humiliation that carries the heavy weight of his message:
Spill your veins to truth. Let rivers flow, and you will quench dry lips.
And perhaps in your death, the vainglory you seek will turn honest.
This is why Alexander envied the vagabond; he knew shame. Shame and Shining are blood brothers in truthful sacrifice.
PART 8
Now, who to cast as madman, and belter of the aria for the ages?
Which ones for the rafters and which for the sages? Naming a thing which doesn’t exist, his creation proof his hubris persist.
Now the dead god, now the devil, now the thief in the night.
And here come charging the king’s men, sockets blinded and filled with orange fervor, thirst for relevance and order whipping forward the conscience of the State in its drones.
Lash! Lash! Whip, and bow and forward the hive-mind in queen-less chaos;
a depraved raven’s cold errand hop-marches two by two in their veins, tick-ticking talons,
then a sun dimming unkindness of bleak and black strategy, a darkly programmed pigeon, nothing more.
Score the war bells and scrub the meager man’s mind of doubt, fill it with haughty rage and pride in star pattern and stripe.
Love and honor are gone. Love and honor: that is what king and country truly meant before the tyrant in him sprang forth like the sword from the Christ mouth, but serpent instead.
Now the love, now the sacrificial lamb.
Now the dead boy and the quiet sister.
Now the stoned witch and her secret love––and secreter king.
The hermit monk in pious ugly terror saying his bent truth into royal right ear.
Dragon and coin and virgin, locked tightly away;
and nothing but a weak prince, chattering white teeth in petition of the bellicose beast.
PART 9
Cleverest words having left his chest, his pages stink and stained, with nervous strain and tiredness creeping, he sends slighted signal with his tattered and dragging pant cuff,
to circle the carrion feast and mark the mountain dirt for mother’s preferred plot.
It is time to approach the cave with his meager offering. Pride in hand and offered up with pious reverence for the priestess,
a genuflection comes to mind, and thus the knee. But she’ll take both. He bows. Now the forehead, now the face. Prostrate and petition
the great mother, her cold rocks, her resting countenance indifferent to the Plebeian’s fattest feast, his cutest kid, his first born son and sorrow, with nothing left to offer and nothing more to borrow.
Her’s is the hate of Herod; she’ll take his tiny toes in mouth as her hood expand for the legs, the hips, the arms, the chest, the neck, the eyes–he cries at her peristaltic pleasure; his sweat, her digestive.
But he has spilled his own veins too; his reams are red and margins run fat with his split passion. Nothing left to give, but in. Into the mother, into that snake’s mouth.
It is time for rest, for retiring now.
PART 10
This is her secret, the secret of all tall feminine mountains of muse and mystique: her children dig their own graves,
they leap into her mouth, aiming for safe womb.
They layer her lush flower beds each season with their own bodies, taking care to line neatly up,
each with its prior, scored warp and woof for the eternal binding.
Each willfully followed here his personal pied piper, mouthing the kitsch of promise and pride; his coin or face upon it.
The quiet across the firing line,
the silence of the rocks,
a cleanly dribbled ball echoing the solemn early morning gymnasium.
Power’s power ever increase with silence.
Despondency well inside the spent barrels of the writer. He has poured his powder, lit his fuse, and taken aim with care.
But to strike a mountain, what does that proffer––even the sharpest marksman? He is only returning the lead to its rightful owner. A silent, cold understanding, a knowing “thank you” he infers, and it destroys his confidence.
He lay his rifle down for the long nap. He submits to the weather, and hangs his weakly woven straw morality on the stick meant for it;
a stick like the others’.
A hat, like the others’.
A layer of fabric to her majesty, like the others.
PART 11
Back home, in what was his best impression of a Sixties drab-green apartment befitting his television-informed perception of proper writer’s accommodations,
that instrument of torture sits a’tomb in its dust, his long-shed skin, awaiting the lovers –those left behind– to come and collect his things.
Her metal keys, and cleverer parts conducting in silent but loudly obvious potential their ziping, whizzing, whistling, dinging drama;
an enticing siren song that appeals to that sojourner who is dying to die for something and is deaf in any case, to all ordinary sounding tunes; another Homer mistaking himself an Odysseus.
No more inviting a hero’s journey, no more intriguing an orchestra than one clamoring wildly about, full in fervor, than one in complete silence.
Yes, someone will catch the gleam and glint of this fast round chaos: perhaps as the front door opens to must,
and its wind stirring long stale particles, whirl the curtain just shy of its sleeve, and light crack in;
that is her song in light wave (as all sound travels in any case). This is the moment the diamond’s rarity greens the heart with hope and envy and wild rage at its unhavingness––in Her next meal.