Echolalia

THE MONOLITH III. (Original version
from 1993-94, after I edited the text.)

Preface
As a journey of the countries of the soul.
Dedicated to all Mankind of every flesh
and form.

I. Beyond the ebony river of the Voienar
and the acid seas of the Anderan in that
country of midnight suns, that place of
barren lands the Monolith, a titan of the

ethered skies rose up to heavens of
angels’s height, like an onyx raven of
shadowed realms and the gardens of the
night, traveling across the bleakened lands

of steel as vaultless spires of iron arose
in some vain attempt to touch the sun like
the greying roses of paradise or the leviathan
of the neptuned sea, while the Monolith

sailed on, it the last and final ship of heaven.
It was forged in the fires of the Tyxemian peaks,
the lava oceans of silvered glass, a blackened
wanderer upon the seas of the emerald sun

striding out upon the fortraned wings of the
dawn, sailing beneath the golden crimsoned
morn, its cry resounding through a million
lands as the Monolith soared in endless

flight from the height of the Heaven’s sand
and stars. Then it fell to the phoenix plains
of eden’s fair rebirth out above the Ksadis
reeds where the sleeping Thsui dwell and

streams of ivory milk do flow. Trekking from
the wasted mountains to this gentle sheltered
place, where floating on the tranquil perfumed
breeze butterflies of mosaic hue and the

size of Shialian cities, their wings a golden
cloak vast as the lakes of Larnark, descending
to the azure flowers upon the eden floor
drinking of the wine a ruby dye, unaware

of the silent visitor passing through as a
shadow in the night, an all seeing watcher
from the skies right into the valleys of the
nile and the mortals land in Dorovar.

From the floor of eden the Monolith
came, pausing but a moment above the
lush savanna’s grass beyond those phoenix
plains, gazing on as the Melicors with manes

a stain of red hunt out amongst the ziggurats
and devour hapless prey with fangs of steel,
their claws a glimpse of sunlit death as
they rip the hinds to blood, unaware that

they were like wise being hunted by the
Thynn, those crystal spiders a hue of topaz
stone, their legs the length of Renalian towers
of frozen glass, stalking beneath the gates of

the sun to kill the winged beasts of Jiadic’s
realm, racing phantoms upon the veldts in
flights of death, as they catch the Melicors
in talons of diamond and topaz stone.

So on the Monolith did go, uncaring of the
conquerors’ demise, continuing on to Dorovar
and the Turtle Nile beneath the moons of blood,
like an explorer amongst the countries of the

unknown, or a child with the awe of a mortal
man, sailing past walls of poignant earth where
only the fiery dragon clouds watched this
invader’s march, as they lazily trod the ivory

realm gazing past the heavens silent as the
sun’s departure from the varied lands of
Zana’an. Then the Monolith rode the ancient
winds beneath the port of Syhar beyond the

peaks of Kran, a sprawling citadel of endless
height, and upon the top most spire overlooking
a thousand lands the Lady Ryenil did stand
in robes of darkest purple night, aware of

the titan’s arrival upon her kingdom’s scape,
alone but for the quiet stars as she watched
the onyx raven coming on gothic wings of
ether, weeping for this was a sign of her

mortality yet she was centuries in age and
fell to the marble floor for nothing more
would be the same. So on the Monolith
sailed in sight of the city’s inhabitants

as it flew above the Turtle Nile to the
Caldanian isles of Rumath, uncaring of the
threat it held to all mankind for it was a
stranger in mortal lands beneath the cries

of heaven, where stood the city states of
Verras in the grip of madness and renaissance
with the seas of change reshaping its fair face.
The Monolith came upon Rumath, isles

of greying steel and stone, their inhabitants
a race of Elfin sages, their cities formed of the
scholar’s hand, watching the Monolith
ride upon the silken breeze, startled by

its presence and relieved as it left for the
raven was seeking something near the heart
of this shifting vale, near the heart of the
nile. To Allanis it approached, passing

merchant caravans and herdsmen with their
animals, peaks of steel and glass. To Allanis
it came and descended to the plains, resting
before humanity as an enigma for mankind.

II.
They came upon it as insects upon the
boulder’s scape, trying to assault the
heaven’s reaching arm yet could not
cling upon those fortraned wings of

the dawn nor enter into the Monolith,
seeking to answer what it was for it was
alien to all mankind, all but one. She
hurried from the port of Syhar rushing

to the ships of lanthan design, sailing down
the Turtle Nile as a speeding arrow of
silvered light. To Allanis she came beyond
the isles of Rumath, to Allanis and the

Monolith for her fate was intertwined
with that wanderer upon the plains, the
Lady Ryenil was locked to the wanderer
of Tyxemia and she could not escape it.

She stood upon the plains beside the onyx
raven and touched its iron hide. A door
opened as she alone entered and it sealed
again before the view of Allanis’ great race,

appalled and amazed at what went on. She
strode across the corridors of sunlit steel,
frightened but still she went and sat upon
the onyx throne at the heart of the final

ship of heaven as it rose up, ascending from
the plain onto a prize greater than the mortals’
maddest dream, onto the City of the Stairs
beyond the heaven’s reach where all of Ryenil’s

people, the Star Keepers, waited for her to
come home again in the heart of the Monolith
once more. Yet this was the last time she would
leave her dwelling place amongst the suns,

this was the last time she would rule her city
as her own. To the City of the Stairs she came,
a monolithic realm beyond man’s conceiving
where the Star Keepers waited, where she

departed from the ship and stood in the midst
of them all again, but one immortal amongst
infinity’s canvas, while the Monolith departed
back to its home and the peaks of Tyxemia,
beyond Voienar and Anderan. Aug 14/09.

ADAM AND LILITH

He sits and ponders all that he has
done and all that he has made
among the burning forests in the midst
of night, strangely white on a sea of grey.

She hates herself and hates the world
and hates all things around her, and each
wantonness of her making enfolds itself
upon us.

The little bit of life left in him leaves
and wanders amid the burning forests with
her trailing after him, and trailing after her
we go to a sermon of sparrows on a sea
of grey strangely white. Aug 4/09.

WHERE THE COOL DESERTS ARE

Where the cool deserts are lie buildings
whose shapes I can’t recall anymore

and in the gardens of Mithra-ja the dark
idol Malhroda burns himself squat and fat

as a lusting toad between the lotuses where
Drajada feast on human bones with their

mayfly teeth then ascend on insect wings
where the cool deserts pass away to the

fires of another place, between the stars. Aug 8/09.

I UNIVERSE
(A first poem recovered.)

I Universe; forms so fluid within my being,
life itself a testament of God,
my cells are galaxies, my blood the void,
I am the battlefield from which all battlefields pale.

I Galaxy; my arms are open wide to let the travelers in,
my million eyes are watching as my brethren
slowly depart, lost Goodbyes wasted
in the Sunless Country, farewells foolishly spent
for we will be together again
as all who are crafted of God return to the Maker.

I Star; I shine like a diamond amongst
the void so cold, God has given me a fire
to warm the universe by, and that has made
me a lantern against the dark.

I Planet; covered with the dew,
washed in the cold white rain, cities grow upon me,
foreign structures fashioned by the least and greatest
of God’s beings while I give life to all upon my world.

I Man; the least of all things I am,
frail as a leaf, tiny as dust on the shore,
my existence sustained by all things before
yet it is my kin who will enter God’s domain. Aug 14/09.

MY PERSONAL ABYSS

The loss of hope is the first step toward the abyss.
There is no great wonderment in the loss of hope.
It is writ large on every accomplishment of life.

All that I have done has come not through some
sort of suffering but through the absolute need
of some struggle to take away the uncertainty of

my life. I have spent my days aware of how little
my life has meant to me, yet I struggle on, not
because of God or even the fear of death. I live

simply because the alternative is unknown. Yet
so too is hope. Hope is an unknown once one
has spent enough time in the abyss. This is not

because of life’s pointlessness, nor is it because
of humanity’s lack of direction, or its pure and
inescapable evil. It is because, once the days

have piled themselves on you, once every insult
has been tallied, once every mild and subtle act of
cruelty is considered, when every single instinct

is burnt through only the drive of living is left.
That drive however is not a positive; it is a weight
that never leaves you or forsakes you. It is the

weight of knowing, after you’ve experienced the
abyss, that if all flesh were to die, all people were
stripped of their lives and cast into oblivion

and afterward only you remained alive that even
this would not be enough to break you. Imagine
seeing the bodies burnt black, smelling the charred

incense of billions set ablaze, and after witnessing
this holocaust continue on with life, without hope,
or joy, or peace. But still continue on.

All of my life has been spent only in the struggle
of avoiding death, of facing my darker half head on,
not because I sought to defeat him but only because

his existence, his madness gives my life meaning.
The abyss is not knowing that life is cruel. The
abyss is knowing that even in the midst of all

possible cruelty you will endure and survive and
never, ever be broken by anything. But to do that
hope must die. And joy as well. Still, I want to

live and more than live. Nature abhors a vacuum.
And what else is a vacuum but another name for
the abyss, that sea of nothingness in
those slender darknesses of sleep? Aug 14/09.

IN THE COUNTRIES OF THE SUN

In the countries of the sun
I walked small footed as a child
over stones that bled and seemed
a while sharper than the light
above my head.

I fell into the pool and sank
with all those others above me
on the water. I rose and felt
surprise that I arose. The
sun beat down upon me
all the hotter.

In the countries of the moon
I tried to strangle a young girl,
because she and another
tormented me all the while.
Instead I grabbed her breast

and ashamed to have missed
and worse to have attacked
the weaker of the two
I hung my head in shame
as the moon clothed all
in secrets of her own,
without a name. Aug 18/09.

OCD AND ME

When disease stalks its host
eventually, as must happen
eventually, the host gives in,
because disease in whatever
form is relentless in its need
to live, and feed, and live.

And so, in keeping with the
knowledge of disease, in
breaking down I take the
sure purpose of a sickness
and weld itself to my needs, til
there is no differences in need.

Sooner or later I start thinking
from its point of view, viewing
how disease exists and thinks
itself to being. And of course
what else must happen except
that my thoughts bleed away?

Weights and measures, things
and times and numbers and
words, life and death. It
takes and pulls on all of
these til I forget they have
a meaning beyond whatever
meanings it thinks they have.

So that, you see, I identity
eventually with it. There is
no choice and its strength,
its force dominates til I use
all of my force and strength,
to accept what it is in me.

And in payment for this I am
allowed to linger on, without
purpose or direction. Perhaps
it’s time for a change of things.
Perhaps such changes are an
impossibility. Who can say?

At any rate I am not merely
the sickness of my flesh or
of my mind. I am more than
the sum of what it is. The trick,
the pure deception of the trick
comes in knowing this, at last.

For if the disease comes not of
me, and if I am more than my
disease why is not my disease
more than the sum of what it
is? If it is more, and I am more
than it, than why are we together?

Sickness is not a collection of
cells feeding on blood, and disease
is not a few microbes stumbling
in the dark. A virus is not a tyrant
and the plagues of a thousand
blackened years are not housed in a
few beakers from some scientist’s lab.

There is a palpable sense of malice
in the act of being deprived of one’s
own mind. There is the sense of
pain which knows itself as intimately
as lovers, and knows the soft caress
of flesh torn horribly at moments not
of anyone’s choosing, but its own.

And if I am not responsible for this,
if the screaming and the torture, if
the sense of panic and loss of control
is not mine, than whose is it? I take
up what he lays down, and there he
runs, my other half. There he smiles.

The sounds and feelings of panic
subside, the rhythmic beating of
words dies down, but in those times
what is left for me when he gives me
nothing at all? For after all, in fighting
him I have used all of myself up.

What is left after he is gone? Who
am I if he has left me? He is neither
lover, sinner or friend, but I am told
he is not me, yet he crawls in my skin,
buries face beneath my face, makes
me run through the lines of poetry I’ve
read, and in all of this he is with me.

And say he did not exist, say I was
spared him, well what then? I have
nothing left to keep me here except
the words I write, and my knowledge
that in being sick I can avoid the
fate of healthier men, who’ve died.

Yes healthy men have died for all
their sins remembered, and here I
am, diseased and broken, moving on
and should I not be given a parade?
Perhaps all the world should applaud
for me, but I think not. They suffer too.

All of those within the world suffer
and they suffer often. What does it
mean? I am more than suffering,
but I am also less. He is my only
captive audience, and I am only
his. We are locked together.

Yet he doesn’t even exist, and is not
part of me at all. So I feel trapped
because my disease stretched taunt
my face over his and yet he has no
face at all, so of course my face is his.
It is the dilemma of the cancer man.

Have you not heard of the cancer man?
Let me tell you of him. His bones and
skin were cancer, and all his eyes and
hands. Everyone wondered how long
he’d live, but because he was cancer
the sickness never ate at him.

In fact he lived to a ripe old age,
alone because cancer is not loved
by anyone, except of course by cancer.
And he died and was buried, and no
one ever remembered him, or his name,
except for the name of cancer man.

Now I must try to subvert myself, must
try to see with other eyes that are not
his eyes, or even mine. I must think
like other men, and live like other men.
But I am afraid because I am not other
men. I am just one man alone in all
things, save this disease sparing me
the loneliness of being the man I am. Aug 15/09.

GAMES THAT THE SHADOWS PLAY

These are the games that the shadows play,
each shadow so beautifully self-contained.

A stealer of souls has none of her
own; she looks so deceptively human.

A glint of death has no edge to own;
it exists in a moment of itself, and in
its single, stilted breath.

These are the games that the shadows
play, each so lovingly self-contained,
one to another perpetually.

Nothing else has any shadow by a glint
of death, sliding by into all eternity, lovely
as a dream the shadows once gave to me. Aug 25/09.

TO GAZE INTO A CROCODILE’S EYES
(From a comment by Louise Delahaye, Aug 22/09.)

There is a primal formality in her green gem
eyes, the old stare the dragon gave before
crushing vagrant warrior neath her feet.

At once we return to older worlds caught
in her gaze, to the scent of dragonflies larger
than crows, bleeding yellow ochre neath younger
suns than ours.

In her eyes, in her gem like green crystalline eyes
there is but finally the primal formality of being
devoured without any malice in the act,

only the clean hunger of an animal older
than our conceptions of the stars. Aug 25/09.

IN ONE CITY

It is always the assumption that those around
us must be more normal than ourselves.

But in one city, surreptitiously arranged,
every sociopath was placed without their even

knowing. But more than this, only those who
had killed someone, either stranger or love,

for no reason at all.

No one knows the others are just the same as
they are, so everyone pretends to be normal,

even while at night they all go hunting,
one for another for another, without ever

being caught by anyone at all. Maybe someday
the masquerade will fall away, but for now

everyone is pretending they’re all living
normal lives, having dates, becoming husbands

and wives one to another to another, never really
catching anyone at all. They’re all just

waiting for someone’s guard to fall so
they can kill them all, but no one’s ever does,

in one city somewhere where masks have full
sway, and being what one is not is all the rage. Aug 25/09.

JAKTALU

Poor Jaktalu reared by sorrow knew no joy,
neither pride. Raised to be a slave forever
he only found peace the day he died.

As for his master no name have we, nor have
we found any other name. In all of a city of
five million only the name of one

remains, the name of Jaktalu reared by sorrow,
who knew neither love nor joy nor pride, but
he is all we know of his world, his name
and his story is the last witness of his time. Aug 25/09.

CHRISTINA RODENSKI (See Rosseti.)

Christina Rodenski wrote a poem
about the first man in the whole wide
world. She called him Shimmer, for no

reason, and had him raise the first true
dog, had him train the first true dog
in all the whole wide world.

That was a poem she loved
to tell, or if not that than the one
about green stone continents, riddled

with tunnels, and in those tunnels lived
men made of cheese, or else the
marshal Bass Reeves hunting

a giant rutabaga across state lines,
into Mexico or the state of Do as You
Please. Anyway her imagination is better

than mine. All I can do is write about her
and her successes, give her a copy of my
efforts and hope that she is pleased. Aug 25/09.

GRINNERS (From a very long time ago.)

I had a dream, or almost a dream,
and there were two people at my
door that night.

They appeared perfectly human,
until they smiled, and then their
teeth were bared

and their smiling mouths peeled
back and their faces seemed to
expand, outward.

They had sharp claws I remember,
and those smiles reached as far
as their ears, while

their eyes became obsidian black,
and their claws were bright yellow
as diseased, parched

skin. Nothing happened. They
neither attacked nor seemed
interested in

attacking. The thought passed
away, as all such idle thoughts
do, but still. Even

still when people smile I wonder
what is behind those smiles. Aug 29/09.

FLESH GARDENS

Play the game with no substance,
with cremation stories that have
no reason, pull at flesh hanging
from the gardens til you have had
your fill of another’s treason.

But still the flesh gardens hang.
Still are left the bodies of the
slain made by you in times of
plenty, in times when war was
yours to claim. Oh what sins

you’ve bore, in shame. And yet
the crime is not your own. You
cling to the sins of better men.
The gardens reek of violence sown.
The girl was your lover, and now

she is dead. Rest her head upon
your shoulder, and make sparrow’s
nests from her hair. The garden
moves on in unseen seasons. The
garden is formed of the treason you

bear, against yourself because
you warred and lost, and so are
bound to a thousand cares of
dying men in No Man’s Land,
haunted by your lover’s haunted stare. Aug 29/09.

THE LOGIC OF CATS

I sometimes think my cat and the neighbour’ s cat
across the street are discussing us.
My cat has a white stripe of fur across her left eye
while my neighbour’s cat is totally black from head
to foot. I think it’s some kind of conspiracy.
Late at night I think I almost hear
them talking about how to get the two of us
together, my neighbour and I. Maybe they think
we’ll feed them better if we’re together;
I don’t know. Anyway, just to keep them quiet I’m
asking her out on a date. Should make them happy, I hope. Aug 29/09.

SCYTHIAN LAMB (From the medieval bestiaries.)

Scythian Lamb: of the plant family,
also of the animal family. Unable
to move, yet given four legs.

In appearance a lamb, connected
via an umbilical cord to a plant,
making it unable to leave.

So trapped the lamb starves,
as does the plant, supporting a
living animal, providing its needs.

This explained, to the medieval
mind, the existence of cotton. This
also explains why the medieval period
was so often called the dark ages. Sept 3/09.

THE CALADRIUS BIRD
(From the medieval bestiaries.)

It was said, and I heard it so, that if
a caladrius bird nested by a sick man,
(though never a woman as they
weren’t so important back then,)
that the white plumed creature would
take the sickness unto itself, then fly
away, spreading the sickness
out, defusing it harmlessly into
the world about. That was what
I heard anyway, so that when I grew

sick they brought the bird to me, but
it didn’t look at me, or stare at
me, or even acknowledge me,
as if I wasn’t there. So, with the last
of my strength I snapt her neck, and
then the neck of the caladrius, but
only after I knew my mother was
dead. As I said, in those times men
were always more important than

women, and it was my mother’s idea
to cure me this way. Shame,
that she was right. I recovered,
but my sickness recovered too, and
with no other place to go it hasn’t left
my side in twice a hundred years.
I think it’s just waiting for me to
apologize, but kings never do, even
for their crimes. Still, I catch such

glimpses out of the corner of my
eye of a white plumed bird
laughing in the company of
several blood tinged crows, feeding
on my armies and my subjects, laying
waste to my kingdom whose
name no one remembers, and
no one knows. All I have is my throne
and my sickness as the world grows old.
But I will not bend. Kings never do,
even in the face of the caladrius, that
other mask the Christ has worn
in this blood tinged, dreary world. Sept 3/09.

IN THE LAIR OF THE CALLITRIX
(From the medieval bestiaries.)

She was supposed to love me.
We were twins and she was
meant to love me. Not him, me.

That’s how it works. She gives
birth to twins and loves one
but hates the other. That’s what’s

supposed to happen. So what
does she do? She loves us
both equally. When we were

hungry she’d give food to us both.
When we were sick she cared
for us both. When he cried she

carried him, and when I cried she
carried me. What kind of mother
loves both her children equally?

And worst of all, I think he loves
me as a brother would. That’s
just not fair. If I loved him

too that would mean everything
I’ve known is a lie. I want
to hate him, and hate her for

not doing what she is told, what
everyone tells everyone in
this world. If there’s no one to

hate then what’s the point in
loving anyone, what’s the
point showing someone else

they’ll never be cared for, not
because they did anything
wrong, but only because the law

cannot be broken, not by anyone.
So why can’t I say I hate my
brother? Why can’t I say I hate
my mother, if even she hated me? Sept 3/09.

THE NULI, OR GOING
BACKWARD IS EASY
(From Greek legends.)

In between the waking and the dream
I sat upon the mountain and watched
men walk down with backward feet,
watched them carry ancient totems of

some other farther place, beyond
where the sun has set in a black
rough sea. There was a woman
who sat beside me and I noticed

her cloven feet, noticed the smell of
horses’ hooves burnt by blacksmiths
in vanished places. The men with
their backward feet neither stopped

nor noticed us, neither spoke nor
seemed to breathe. Instead all
their eyes were fixed upon were
the totems of strange insects

carved on golden beams of trees
metallic as bronze dipped armour;
nothing else in the world was seen
by those eyes lost in haunted dreams.

The woman spoke a silent prayer
of sorts and the mountain seemed
to answer back. I could only hear
the whispering of something my

mind could not comprehend. Again the
procession turned from the mountain’s
top to the mountain’s base. They moved
upward to the way that they had come

without a single trace that they had
ever been, besides their footprints
which made it appear that the men
had come from the plains below

and returned to the plains again. The
woman stood up with her horse’s feet
and said goodbye politely as a child.
Then she turned and walked downward

to the plains below where cities lay
scattered like jewels on seas of sand
or savannas where the grasses hide
terrors of their own. I think I saw

a woman come up to her, although she
had no head, instead her face peered
out from her flattened chest. Perhaps
she was not even a woman after all.

I turned from mountain to plain and back,
and then decided to walk upon the skies.
Below me a man on one great leg came
hoping by, then turned his foot upward

to where I wandered, to shield his face
from a burning sun on high. Or maybe
he didn’t like me at all, and was just
trying in his own special way to be unkind. Sept 3/09.

CALINGI GIRLS (From
the medieval bestiaries.)

For her I suppose I must be immortal.
When I was twenty years old I first met
her, on a street corner of some nameless
city, somewhere lost where the maps
don’t show. I thought she was joking
when she told me her age; she was three
at the time I met her you see.

Of course she looked like she was thirty
or so, and her father when I met him
look eighty, but really he was only eight.
Every year I lived she lived ten. By
the time that summer ended she looked
almost forty, and it showed. Lines began
to form about her eyes and

she said that if we had a child together
he’d live and die long before I’d ever turn
old. But we made love anyway, on that
last day before I had to leave. She knew
and I knew we’d never see each again.

The war got in the way. That’s what I
always told myself, but really I was just
afraid to watch her grow old. But
as the years passed I felt myself
yearn to go back, and when I did
twenty years after the fact of loving
someone I knew was dust by now

I saw her on a street corner, of some
nameless city, somewhere lost where
the maps don’t show. She said that she
was three, and I believed her. She
looked just the same as before, all
except for her eyes, which were like
my eyes after all. She even showed me

a picture of her great grandmother, and
her great grandfather was myself of course.
I had dissolved into some kind of myth,
some god from across the waters who
had met a beautiful woman, who had given
birth to a child with strange, haunted eyes.

“And what of your people?” She asked me.
“What of all those gods like you, so far
away?” “They’re all gone to seed,” I said.
“Don’t go beyond the waters my child.
There is nothing there.” She turned

and seemed to walk away a moment, then
came back and hugged me as a granddaughter
would hug a grandfather who’s lost and afraid,
and we sat and watched the sun go down
where the bodies of my people lay. Sept 3/09.

MAKHLYES BIKER
(From the medieval bestiaries.)

Leather fits on her better than a sword hilt.
The motorbike fits better on him than a sword.

Did you know that the very first hermaphrodite
was a worm? Earlier than anything else

alive on the planet Earth this was the first
forerunner of everything to come. The Makhlyes

move from town to town, neither male nor female
but something both. They took their name

from old mythology, and I guess it has some
truth in it, for now. Anyway it’s hard to figure when

or if I’ll change my ways, and decide on whether
I have to change at all. Things are moving

so fast is all, people are going from one sex
to two, to three, and on from there into other shapes

I can’t recall as ever seeing before. I wonder what
my children will turn into when the Makhlyes become
too tame to ever recall. Sept 3/09.

HYPNALIS

Had Wimund the eyes of a sparrow
he would avenge himself on his foes.

I. In the jungles lurks the hypnalis snake.
It needs no poison but kills by swiftly

striking from the trees, downward as an
arrow through the victim’s heart, or,

failing that will move quiet as a shadow
and while they sleep plunge deep her

fangs so that they will sleep forever. To
some such a creature has no equal, in
the desire for revenge.

II. Cambion always despised being the
child everyone assumed was fathered

by a demon. His mother never confirmed
or ever denied anything about his father

and so he grew up with a lingering taste
of bitterness in his soul, which ate at him like

cancer til he was too old to change. When
he was a young man an older man came

to him and said he was his father returned
from some forgotten war no one had dared

remember anymore. Cambion killed
that man without a second’s thought. I

think it was his mother’s desire to make
the boy kill his father by spreading rumours

about herself, til everyone was poisoned by
the words of her own mouth. Or so they say.

III. I don’t want to avenge myself on her.
Let her go which ever way she wants. She

betrayed my heart and made me bleed til
I was spent of tears. But I will not follow

the example she has set. Maybe my heart
is blind enough it needs no sparrow’s eye

to see the greatest punishment I can do to
her is forget that she is there and let her go

along that road that leads to nowhere, with
not even the lingering bitterness of my

hatred for her as legacy to all those lost
and once beautiful days that we once shared. Sept 4/09.

THE BALLAD OF AZAZEL SEVEN

Raime Susquet was a killer. He took
the lives of six young women. When
the police found him he had almost
finished with his seventh.

Azazel Seven took him then, some
where the police don’t talk about.
They say he has no eyes or mouth.
They say his face is not a face.

In the galleries he began his work,
injected Raime with a special venom,
and then began to play, without concern.

Finally Azazel wheeled him away past
so many killers who had come before.
They were all meant to live a thousand
years as mockeries of themselves.

And so Raime Susquet was placed
between two killers no better than himself,
his eyes slouching downward to his jaw,
his fingers sliding upward through his

shoulder blades, creating such a brilliant
pattern of new scars, while somewhere
far distant from the galleries Susquet
could swear he heard the demons play. Sept 4-5/09.

THE DAJALUM

I. No one wins against time. The legacy
of years is not the sum of dominion. Rather
we slide toward oblivion, all of our existence
blotted out in the space of seconds
between seconds.

Yet this too, this oblivion, must itself give way
to oblivion, for without an observer, without a
consciousness even the abyss does not exist
nor have substance sans the presence
of an audience.

II. As such we are caught on the hinges of a
conundrum. Life must inevitably give way to
death yet death without life ceases to exist,
just as oblivion ceases to be unless one is
aware of oblivion.

Will the stars shine after all life has perished
and no one, no not even a microbe is left to be
aware of them, or feel the heat of the sun?

Will gravity remain if nothing is there to
appreciate the subtleties of orbits without
ending, or even without beginning?

III. The greatest of empires is as dust upon the
desert sand, a scattering of fragments without
direction carried by an indecisive wind

leading to a whirlwind without dimension
for none can comprehend the ending of their
world, unless they have first gone mad.

No, not mad, transformed from witness to
prophet to god, before becoming bones too long
bleached on the desert floor. That is the sum of
history, to the uninformed.

IV. If all we have done were to linger after
our lives have been finished with would the
sum of all our days equal an eternity under glass,
like butterflies or scorpions in amber, or would it

become but one second in a gallery of seconds?
The question must be asked for is not a single life
broken to miniature, a metaphor for the whole?

V. The disease of eternity has no cure, nor the
longing to possess all that will come after us.
Plagues have stricken even kings and in the mind,
in the cunning of a disease I imagine their strategy,
listen to their prophesies.

“I will consume this country without end and when
this world ends I will escape into another space, I
will arrive at the beginnings of another, and I will
start again.”

Yet no matter how the plagues try they cannot consume
all flesh, and so some worlds, some lives escape their
grasp. Time likewise escapes our grasp as well.

VI. If I speak I am condemned by my speech and by
my words, for any word however twisted on an enemy’s
tongue can be used against me.

If I am silent then I am likewise condemned for my
enemy conspires to accuse me of my silences, and use
what I have not said as justification for my death.

The realization of this truth is not to speak or remain
silent but to recognize humanity, as an enemy, remains
unmovable if it desires an end to one small part of itself.

VII. The governance of the world is maintained by
swarming insects and flocks of locust. The governance
of the world is taken up by them as easily as it is taken
up by us.
How do I know this?

I know this because they came before us, a mighty
army of ten times a trillion strong jewel armoured
soldiers, and they will remain after we are gone.

Why then do we build and struggle if the very insects
will cheat us of our victories over them, in that they live?

VIII. It was said that certain tribes of cannibals, certain
captured men, would sing before death how they had fed
on the flesh of the kin of those who held them now,

and so in the eating and the taking of their flesh they would
take also the flesh of their fathers and brothers, sisters, wives,
mothers and children. All history is but the cannibal knowing
he devours his own kin in the taking of his enemies.

IX. In reaching for the stars we ignore the subtle truth
that we are wrong, not in reaching for the stars but rather
in believing that by doing so we can possibly change
the sum of what we are.

I do not speak that our bodies will not change nor even the
changing of our minds. I speak rather that the hunger for
eternity will not lessen no matter what shape we wear

or mask we put upon ourselves, in any age that is left
for us when the stars are ours, all ours, finally to claim.

X. In the end when all the stars go dark, when all the worlds
have become husks of their former selves it is possible that
life may continue to survive.

There is some irony in the thought that life may outlive the
universe, that the thought of stars may exist longer than the
stars themselves.

If that is so than it is not the fate of the dead to enter oblivion
but rather the fate of the living. If so then what will greet the
living, those living in oblivion, after they are dead?

XI. A shadow on the sun cannot be seen if that shadow
exists because of the sun. Yet if the sun were taken away
the shadow likewise would not exist, and so would not be
seen. The future is no different.

If the future exists because of us then by definition we
cannot see it, for it is the product of what will be and
not what is. If we do not exist then by definition we have
no future and so there is nothing to see.

Yet in one reality, though undetected a thing exists, and in
another nothing exists. Hidden beneath is the difference
between hope and despair.

XII. The greatest you will have will be taken from you
if there is no darkness in balance to your greatness. Flaws
and weaknesses; it is in acknowledging these that we ascend,
not in our denial of them.

All things can be improved upon, or changed. Stagnant
and unchanging is only the grave. It is for this reason
that a society endures, not by its greatest actions but
by recognizing its greatest sins, and then, and only then
moving on from them.

XIII. Deeply unhappy, deeply pressed for sorrows and
all the world joins in sorrows. But in a trillion years
what will it matter whether we were consumed by grief
but only that we were. Beyond this and out of this is the
sum of what we call life.

XIV. In the end there is no end. Time cannot be
conquered but only endured. Time will linger after
life or death, oblivion or substance, something or nothing.
Yet it too requires an audience to exist, even an audience

of stones. When all is done time will move on, silent
and unmovable, a stranger caught in a strange land
that is no land at all. And no one will be there to greet it,
and no one will be there to watch it depart and walk away. Sept 11/09.

THE BAKU (From Japanese mythology.)

Baku devour the blackest of dreams, so they
remain by the houses of children. Sometimes
you see them, those wisps of black smoke
curling like cats about the houses of children.

The darker the dream the greater the feast,
so the Baku remain where places are darkest.
But they can’t ever harm the source of their
feast, so they protect at all cost all the children

they meet. Never oh never frighten a child,
because after the Baku have taken their fill
then they find the ones who frightened their
feeding and reward them all night with

fears of their own. And why you may wonder
would they do such a thing? Because only the
Baku have the right to make fear in the hearts
of the ones that they feed upon. Sept 21/09.

SLIT (From Japanese mythology.)

I’m wandering the streets where the women walk,
where hair, her hair becomes sharp as a blade at night
and all the spiders cry for the milk of their mother
playing her lyre against the backdrop of the fire that
goads all men to evil in the deepest pits of their heart.

A woman is singing and she has two voices with that
other mouth on the back of her head. Her first voice
is of a woman but her second voice is of a child, a small
scared child begging for some bread. I think the woman
murdered the source of that second voice somewhere
in the dark where the shadows walk alone.

Sometimes a boy laughs to the sound of a girl laughing
and is ripped away like tatterings of prayers and a few
soft moans. Sometimes I catch out of the corner of my
eye women and men together in the alleys, but always
before the passions reaches their lone crescendo does

the woman’s features change, her body grow thin as
skeletal wires, while the man, bulging with his eyes too
wide to really see shrinks into oblivion neath the woman’s
too white hands. There isn’t even a moan at the end, just
the sound of a moan stifled from a scream.

And then I see her, her fragile form cast against the lamp
light. And she always asks if I think she is pretty before
pulling away her mask to reveal the slit which runs
from ear to ear, leaving a frozen smile of skin along her
cheek. But I know the old stories well and so ask her
what she asked me, beg her to find me handsome,

press myself close to her and beg for one small kiss. And
as a hundred times before she is shocked and stilled and
doesn’t know what to say. So I press closer still, beg
her still to come home with me, call myself her lover as
if it were the truth, while spiders cry for milk from their

mother’s tears and women listen to the sound of their
other voices carried along the wind from open graves, but
she still doesn’t know what to say. So finally I give up and
walk away from her with not even a wound to my name, not
even the scent of blood on my clothing. It’s always the same. Sept 21/09.

YUKI MURISAKI (From Japanese mythology.)

So there was this girl, right? And she got cut from
ear to ear by her lover. So now she’s dead, because
I guess he killed her too, and what does she do?
She waits hundreds of years, then puts on a surgical
mask and asks people if they think she’s pretty.

I guess it’s supposed to make some kind of sense,
but really it never does. And anyway, why should
she be the villain of the piece, huh? I mean
she doesn’t even have a name. So I’ll call her
Yuki Murisaki, dress her up nice, drop that whole

samurai back story and make her a modern woman.
And yeah, she gets cut up by her boyfriend, but why
should that make her some monster?

I mean doesn’t it make more sense for her to become
a protector, a woman who gets her voice and her
strength back and says “No more!” I mean that takes
away the guy’s power over her, makes her brave, makes
those scars into something to shame him with after all.

Maybe she goes into law enforcement, or better yet
starts her own self defense class, or helps out other
women beaten by their lovers. I don’t know.

It just seems kind of crazy to me that the person who
gets cut up should be the monster when the other person
did it and all they suffer through is a pointless forgotten
death. Like who even knows the name of the man

who cut her up in the first place. There’s less written
about him than there is about the weather for the next day. Sept 21/09.

OLD WOMAN DATSUE-BA
(From Japanese and Carribean mythology.)

When the dead arrive at the river Datsue-Ba
strips them of their clothes, or, if they’re naked,
of their skin. She sets impossible tasks for them,
for those who are dead.
So one day a Douen
arrived at the great river between life and death.
Faceless little girl she was with her backward feet,
from another host of legends
across the ancient seas.

“So what are you doing old woman?” The Douen
asked, with her tiny slit-like mouth, barely larger
than a spider’s thread. “I am waiting for the dead
to impose my hardships on them.” Was the reply.

“What a shame for you.” The Douen said, whose
name was Rebecca in her mortal life. “And why
is that?” Old Datsue-Ba asked her.

“Because the dead are all used up,
and no one is left to feed upon.”

Datsu-Ba rose up high above the soul of the little
girl. “Well, if that is so then at least I will have you
to play with for a while.” “Oh, I think not,” Rebecca
said. “And why is that?”
“Because I am not waiting
by the river old woman. I am just passing on, while
you remain.” And so saying the tiny soul moved on,

while Datsu-Ba sat and counted the bones of her
lost children, as the skins of lost men hung
suspended high above her, where was heard the
sound of muffled laughter,
like the black songs the crows once made. Sept 21/09.

THE BAKENEKO (From Japanese mythology.)

Gaze into a killer’s face long enough and it’ll
look the same as yours. I don’t mean that you’ll
become a killer, nothing so cliched. Rather

I am saying that there really isn’t much difference
in appearance from an ordinary person on the streets
or someone who’s a killer, without a conscience.’

Maybe that’s why the Bakeneko haunt me so.
I have read of great cats which transform to the
shapes of men, and sometimes, just sometimes

they will choose the form of a murderer before
killing that very man. At other times, oh at other
times they will go into the police station, confess the

sins of the killer or rapist or monster, and lead them
to the sites of the killer’s slaughter before slipping
away. And of course when the actual killer is

caught, obliviously hiding his true nature from the
world there is always the stumbling stutter of his
innocence, until all the evidence is presented to him

and he has no chance of escape. I have often wondered
afterward why they do such things, why those creatures
play at justice so half-heartedly or simply erase

the killer’s life themselves. For you see they never
stop the men or women from their crimes, never prevent
the actions from beginning. Perhaps in this they are like

police officers everywhere; unable to stop a dark action
beforehand and content only in punishing the victim and
the violator afterward. Or maybe they simply

give all flesh a chance to redeem themselves and atone,
or never redeem themselves again. At any rate it doesn’t
matter anymore to me. My daughter is dead

and her killer is dead. What justice is there for me? Sept 21/09.

TWO PROVERBS

1) The rat has eaten of the grain
in the storehouse and is blamed
for the plague of the miser king.

2) The trees have no
recourse against the axe
but only the axe handle. Sept 12/09.

GOD IN AN HOURGLASS

God in an hourglass has no taste of years,
impotent all the while surrounded by the
night frost of uncounted dead and dying stars.

Surrounded by a plague of suns sliding
from one gender to another effortlessly
my life as music becomes an education of

shadows, bloodied wings of fire dissolving
to the shadow of an hourglass where a god
sits and pines, impotent all the while in what
he’d done, to mine. Sept 21/09.

EMBRACE THE SHADOWS

Embrace the shadows of your face.

“They blunted her wings.”

Take to your bed o woeful
humanity, I am coming soon.

“They blunted her wings.”

Trace the shadows of your face.

“Her wings are broken now.” Sept 21/09.

TIL WE’VE OUTSPENT OURSELVES

All is shadows til we’ve outspent ourselves
of bloodied wings of fire and the moon hangs
fitfully like a hanged man, til time has overspent
herself at last and nothing remains but a thread
cast into oblivion, and out the other side. Sept 22/09.

THE WORLD OF KASQYELIS

In the world of Kasqyelis the mountains
curve upward to the sun like fingers from
a grey and dying hand,
while the oceans peel
themselves to a blackness deep as tar and
cower in the secret countries which grey
and splinter their sins upon the ground.

I have even heard the crow Galijimoth
call outward to the stars some arcane rune
which no mortal nor god
can understand
who has not learned the secret language the
ravens speak when the twilight
of Creation falls, putting an end
even to the world of Kasqyelis-Mon-Tara. Sept 21/09.

LIKE SIN

It blisters on the ground like sin,
this memory of the child of mine.
There is no secret safe within

except the knowledge which
blackly burns and blisters all
things to a knowledge

bitter as a seed some scorpion
god received, and made as a
child of his own, that child
which once was mine. Sept 22/09.

MATOPE (“Our Last Child.”)

In fields you are there, and the wind.
In the bark of trees, in the cry of the
heron, in the sound of flies begging
for food. You are there in the tear
of the sun, and the tear of the moon.
You are there Matope, our last child.
But you are not here with me, now.
I miss my child. Sept 22/09.

AS THE RAIN

As the rain misses her daughters
so too does the father miss his sons.

As the sun is missed by the harvest so
too does the poor man miss his fields.

As the soldier misses his life on the
plains of battle so to does the lover

miss the sound of her lover’s heartbeat.
In all these things there is no difference.

In all these ways there is but
a single longing amid the stars
of night and the dawns of morning. Sept 22/09.

HONE-ONNA (“Skeletal Woman.”
From Japanese mythology.)

It’s easy to almost imagine the hate.
She comes to me and tries to tempt
my senses with her form, the scent
of her skin in the night.

There is a palpable hunger to her
tastes. There is the sense of malice
and regret. I imagine that is why
she comes to me so often. She
has to wait.

Monsters die when men lose fear
of them. When I first saw her,
saw her bones poking from that
parchment skin I suppose she
hoped I’d fear

myself to death. At times she
seems to wear my face, at other
times her own. She pretends
herself a woman

or a man, but only half-heartedly
so. She seems obsessed to break
me of myself. I watch her in
my own skin.

Where I walk she wanders
after me. She reaches for my
lips, she comes for me. But I
have no fear left.

I have only dead streets without
names. I have only the grave
where my body is left. I have
only an empty world and another
ghost to share it with.

But all she can do is long to feed
on me, on my torture and regrets,
but I have neither anymore. In
truth I have nothing left.
But I am content. Sept 25/09.

POETRY IS NEVER MEANT TO BE EVISCERAL

Poetry is never meant to be
evisceral. It is too clean, too
clinically calm to really
delve into the darkest heart
or deepest well of human
depravity, or misery.

Words have a symmetry of
truth all their own, because
words reveal nothing without
first being fed, force fed
often as not, down the ugly
throats of those who care
not whatever is being said.

What is war or rape? How
do you define it, give it a
proper shape? Is it enough
to say a woman cries, or
a child weeps? Is it enough
to describe the sounds of
bones breaking, slowly, as
the tanks rolls by, as if asleep?

What is the sound of a scream?
How many shades of meaning
can you glean? How many
ways can a person howl, to
make each sound distinct as the
cries of animals, each different
from the other?

When we speak, or even think,
there is a single view, a pure
sense within us of what we see
or say, or hear, or touch, or
understand as best we ever can.
Poetry is but the scaffolding
of these small things, these facets
of a life amid a trillion other things.

Even words like mine are nothing
more than an echo in the dark,
between what is to come, and what
was already the past of some other dream. Sept 25/09.

THE ACEANS AND THE CHOCOLATE TRADE

They were like giant centipedes, only with
bright sinuous wings of silver, gleaming,
always gleaming when they clicked and
spoke as they so often did, of a single thing.

Everything they did was geared for a single
driving desire, which prompted them
toward us always, as the cliches so often
said, like moths to a flame. What a shame.

The shame was never being surrounded by
them. Aceans were gentle, passive at
certain times, when we needed a break. No,
the shame was discovering why they came.

You see they had arrived from a world so far
from Earth we couldn’t see their sun in
our midnight skies. They arrived because
they could smell, even from so far away that

sweet aroma of sweet things. And I mean
sweet; chocolate and candy, cake, sugar.
They spent their entire history fixated solely
on finding what their senses told them to find.

All of their history, their sciences, their arts,
their songs, even the metaphors they used
were all geared toward developing a way
to reach us all someday. And when they

arrived the first thing they did was set up
shop wherever their senses led, to city
street and African farm, to the corner
baker and the candy bar, and they offered

to pay whatever price we named. So we
asked for them to stay, as long as all their
beautiful machines remained with them,
and they behaved. And they have, in their

way. They have moved as a wave across
the world, raising up the poorest man
and upsetting the common good, which
is never good for anyone at all anyway.

They have linked the world to a single
harmony, because war interferes with
the chocolate trade, and pollution,
not to mention the fact that they love

sharing and it annoys them when anyone
can’t have the salvation which they crave.
They’ve set the world askew; they’ve
taken away the teeth of empires because

empires also interfere with the chocolate
trade. And no one minds, not because
they like the Aceans (though many do,)
but because they’ve opened the universe

to use, for our amusement, to let us play.
Not to mention all their wonderful
toys, and the ending of all disease. Oh,
and the chance to live for a thousand years

or more. And all of this because for eight
hundred million years of their history
they followed the scent of something so
utterly tempting it goaded them across five

galaxies. I wonder what instinct compelled
us all to do less than this when we needed
more? I wonder what instinct will come
next to make us change ourselves some more
when we’ve grown enough to care for more
than the chocolate trade? Sept 25/09.

HONE ONNA II.

Have I not the right to kill?
Have I not the right to make suffer
those I make suffer?
I was brutalized and starved
and left with only bones and hollow
eyes. I was left as a ghost
in a land of ghosts.

I feed on the men who come
to me. I let myself appear beautiful
and when they have
finished with me,
when they have satisfied themselves
of me I satisfy myself of them and
feed upon their flesh
to make flesh of my own.

Maybe in a thousand years
or more I will be given enough and
so sent back fully to the
world of the living,
but I think not, and anyway
hunger has a language of its own.
My hunger sustains the nature
of my bones. Sept 28/09.

DO YOU THINK IT’S EASY?

I. Do you think it’s easy realizing
what will become of us in some
future age?
There is but the
mounting terror of knowing
even the words written here

are less an account of my life
than how some other will
regard my life,
and only in their
estimation will my existence
have any meaning at all.

It is more than this. Every
word or profanity is a lens
from some being
to another

that never ends, so that nigger,
kafir, slut or whore is just the
sum of some
vile attempt to stir
violence in another’s soul. But
what is the point

of words and sentences if at
once whatever best qualities
we have
are diminished
because our values are shifted
and sifted by ages to come,

so that am I a racist for saying
two words while another is a
saint for saying
nothing and being
un-recalled as anything but grass
by the edge of a worn out
and faceless old tombstone?

II. The more flagrant the violation
of a law the less likely one is that the
law has been broken.
But for us
even breaking and bending the law
is nothing but a few sad struts

against straw men who will be as
forgotten as we are forgotten in some
as yet unknown future time to come.

Is it right to blame the world for cruelty?
Is it right to praise the world for peace?
All we have done amounts
to grains of dust thrown
against a dune of sand ten times five trillion
fragments strong, each grain no less and no

more than what we ourselves are. No one
is greater or lesser than another. No one
is more or less in the
grand design of eternity.
Each flawed and broken act, each moment
of pure satisfaction and each moment of pure

depravity is balanced only against itself,
is leveled only by the action of itself.
We are all monsters
in our own very
special ways. If I leave the world with no
more witness to the world than this one

statement than I am content. If you take
more than this go ahead. People tear and
rip apart even the most
banal of things in the
effort to prove something else is there when
only maybe it might be. At least that’s
how I see it, from time to time at least. Sept 28/09.

THE UTTER ENORMITY OF IT

To lose a single word is nothing.
To lose a single idea has not even
the strength of years behind it.

But somewhere, after enough men
and women have been lost, after
enough worlds and possibilities

have slipped into oblivion never
to emerge again, then the enormity
of loss becomes paramount to all.

And the bitter edge is turned against
itself most strongly of all and the
bitter truths are the ones which

ravage themselves the most, but
nothing prepares you for the loss of
everything. Even admitting the most

cruel of truths, even claiming the
most heartless of deeds as the only
sure legacy of mankind is nothing

more than the child crying he has not
toys enough. The utter enormity of
loss can neither be summed up nor

cast so easily into the role of pure
destruction; it is simply the truth that
words and thoughts and lives are mortal.

After you accept that everything done
in life has no extended link to the world
to come save as small intangible threads

and nothing more. Only after this can you
breathe and sigh and understand that in
the midst of this enormity is existence

and however fleeting existence is, it exists.
I am here. Whether I am gone tomorrow,
today or yesterday, I am. That is enough. Sept 28/09.

TU AND EU

There were two worlds,
one of silver and one of gold.
Those of the silvered world
called their homeland Tu,
and those of the golden country,
they called their world Eu.

Across ten thousand worlds
conquerors came, and always
was there the same fate for
them. Always they would be
consumed by greed, til greed
was spent of greed and empires
clashed and perished, always
toward the same ends.

But the silver of Tu and the
gold of Eu neither diminished
nor was spent, and neither the
people of Tu or the people
of Eu ever lost a single man or
woman to the conqueror’s hands.

They always remained in
the end. They would always
remain, immortal as a trap the
gods once set to see who
would first fall to the trap
of their own hands, first fall
to the genius of their own sins. Oct 5/09.

GUITAR MAN

Strumming on her flesh he cuts away at
her, until there is only bone and scraps
of meat, not even fit for dogs to eat,
or notice.

Lilith stands by him always, his lover
and his sole companion as he feasts
on other women, and she with him.
I don’t know why.

One day the Cannibal Man will come
for him. One day the beast of his own
desires will be given form, and it will
seek him out.

One day the guitar man will be taken
and strummed upon, and played by a
creature with razor teeth, and claws.
Til that day

he plays the song himself, and she stands by
him herself, while lurking in the darkness
of the shadows a thousand voices weep,
and cry vengeance
for the deeds of their own children. Oct 5/09.

LIKE JEWELS

Like jewels upon the deep black
water when day has died at last

I take up for myself the workings
of my hands, mold a new world

from the echoes of the old, and
wait til all our future days have
become our past. Oct 5/09.

SISTERS ANNA AND ONNA

She’s got eyes in her hands and a mouth
on the back of her neck, whispering curses
that no one understands.

Her hair is barbed and whenever she gets
mad it whips out and tears small holes
in anyone close enough

to kiss her ruined lips, cut as a jagged
scar across her mouth, ear to ear.

When she touches a man he disappears
and bleeds away, to feed her growing
hunger day by day.

Her body is so thin and skeletal she crawls
through the cracks in the floor and the
small gaps in the window sill,

or failing that she just passes
right through the window pane.

The only name I’ve ever heard her called
is Onna, or “woman” in another tongue
than mine.

Wherever she goes death follows
and death feeds, snatches a few scraps
from the master’s table from time to time.

But her sister Anna also follows after, with
that same scar along her mouth, but no other
wounding touch to count her by.

She always follows, ready to
take away her sister’s life, or mockery of life,
as if she were a blade that needed to be dulled.

But the demon always flies
faster than her sister, always stays one step out
of reach, and so the two are locked together,

never meeting one another, only counted truly
sisters by the scars their lovers gave them when
love was almost sweet. Oct 5/09.

ARCANE

In the last desert she sat and waited,
and she arcane as the patterns left
vacant on the sands.

She held up the winds of a thousand
siroccos with but the outspreading
of a single hand, and threw

out into the stars a tapestry of ancient
songs that have no language any mortal
would dare to understand.

The Xylemer then peeled away herself,
himself, and walked between the worlds.
Left lying on the desert were the

bones of all humanity, lost as
the secrets the devil once knew, and
with humanity once shared. Oct 5/09.

IT’S NOT EASY BEING THE BAD GUY

Do you know why it’s not easy being the bad
guy? Because we always have to play nice.

Being the villain is easy when the hero is there.
Being evil is convenient when the hero saves

the day. But in the real world there aren’t any
heroes left. So we have to balance both roles

in a way. It’s not enough to just be evil because
there isn’t enough evil in the world for everyone.

It doesn’t matter how corrupt we are we’re never
corrupt enough without a hero to balance us.

Only a few sadists and sociopaths get let off the
hook, because there’s nothing inside them anyway.

But for the rest of us we always know if we played
god in some evil way there wouldn’t be anywhere

else to go but off along the hero’s path, or worse. It’s
the little acts of rebellion that get us through the day. Oct 5/09.

THE BALLAD OF THE LONG BOW

In the first of times eleven gods ruled all things,
and made of men the source of all their mockeries.
They tormented him when he toiled and when he
slept. They cursed him when he sat and when he
rose. Throughout forest and plain all men
were thus abused by the old gods.

The gods walked with men and women yet
did whatever pleased them, and so brought ruin
to the world of men and women. Finally a hunter
from the deep forest came, and with a bow shot
at one of the gods, and killed him.

Then arrows were made by other men, and
swords and spears, and though the gods tried
they had no defense against stone and metal and
wood. For the men they tormented possessed
none of these, and gods do not change or grow
or learn. But men change. And women also.

All the old gods, of forest and river, sun, moon,
star and mountain were killed. Only the god of
shadows remained, for no one can kill a
shadow, but a shadow can kill no one.

Thus men and women learned to kill even the
gods. After this, killing each other was too simple
a thing to ignore. It was as simple as breathing.
It was a torment even the gods themselves
did not intend, or understand. Oct 5/09.