The Mission - A Sestina

I drink and drink and there is no assuaging

All the myriad tremors of the coming time.

Banish the thoughts that seek to destroy

My confidence necessary to survive

The incessant blows fate must deal.

Another bottle, my good man, for the road!

It is a drunk and solitary road

that no coffee or jail can be assuaging.

The bottle and I have made our deal.

And I’ll be sure to win this time.

It’s what must be done in order to survive.

God’s antiquated plans must I destroy?

Yes, His plans I must destroy!

The car, parked, I take another road:

This one is broken and difficult to survive,

despite all my peers’ condolences assuaging,

despite all my enemies’ ancient notions of time.

This is all and utmost that I can deal!

But the bottle reminds me about our deal

And the hurried pace and race to destroy

This Outworn Christian Ethic – I have no time

to find my conclusion on this dust-laden road

Though all my athiestic saints hurl platitudes assuaging

Pinning their hopes on me, that I may survive

the toils and punitive putations. I will survive

these and more securing my silent deal

And perhaps the alcohol assuaging

me of all the multitudinous numinous notions I must destroy

I bury my liquid bible in my vest and brave the road

that I hope to have completed in my time.

“There is no time,”

The stones with mouths declare, “to survive

this deadening and deadly road.

Fate dealt the hand, there is no other deal

due to you, vagrant traveler. Do you dare destroy

that divine modicum of man’s assuaging?

The road ended in due time

and the assuaging, comforts of faithful men I did survive

to deal out the Truth in lethal doses; to destroy the last reasonless ideal.

The Old Crab

Long have I languished under the weight
Of many-garlanded, barnicled time.
Every joint creaks like the wooden planks of a frigate
While the silence of the deep makes of me a sad mime.

My friends (there are only two) who have thus far won the war;
Who have run the natural gauntlet of predator and prey.
They too are slow and their shells can molt no more,
So they grow haggard with the stalagmite strain.

But one in particular, Coriander, his name,
Sported fronds of seaweed from his barnicled abode,
And after a time it seemed as if he wore a sargasso mane
Or tail of an exotic fish, to see how it flowed.

Coriander did not complain.
No creak or squeak did we hear.
Coriander did not feel pain.
The answer was ocean clear.

While we plodded dismally with an arthritic speed,
Coriander's sargassum plumage eased his burden,
And then we saw him float away by his weed
Like a bubble of air into the light above.

I then wept (for crustaceans can cry) to see him go;
Then painfully crept through the rocks to wonder how I will go.

Friedrich's Unwanted Legacy

The lion, once camel, became a child thus:
The coachman's whip descended
upon the wearied horse
like a brownshirt's truncheon.
Friedrich vaulted upon the fallen beast.
A blanket he became to the tormented,
crying, "Basta! Basta!"
as his friends removed him
from a carcass he could not save.

Silent, staring, dressed in white,
a color common of converts,
he watched aloof his sister's spell
as she weaved a caveat into a cult;
an iconoclast, an icon.

And now a history awake
still pines to shake
the lingering nightmare
of a still echoing Kristallnacht.

Jellyfish

Realizing his life was accomplishing nothing
he found a simple secret.
He promptly signed up for Iraq
and, like Byron before him, looked for a fitting place to die.
He took his chapbooks with him
and often strapped them inside his vest
like a suicide bomber.
His sweat and fear soaked into the pages.
A testament to his testosterone.
They called him 'Jellyfish' though no one knew why.

One day near Fallujah they were attacked.
He fired above their heads and died smiling,
for he knew the secret.
He died seeing pages flying from his corpse,
but they couldn't read English.
One Iraqi had a weakness for literature
and kept two of the maroon-stained books.
He translated it years later.
Its words spread like a virus into the minds and mouths of many.
A poet-soldier's ideas survived his form - no afterlife necessary.

A biologist outside an island south of Tokyo
tries to understand the riddle of the giant jellies
that swarm and clog the straits of Nippon.
In time he learns the secret:
Death is Dissemination.

The Questing Beast

He followed in fleeting circuits
the elusive glatisant girl.
He measured in meandering mobius strips
every cascading waterfall curl.

She fled his familiar gaze
as if his eyes could cast deadly rays.
She wore hats to hide her brunette curls
and the bridalveil stopped. Silent and still.

How can such beauty - stop?
How can such love be lost?

Like a waterfall hunter in Yellowstone,
finding the secret that seizes his eye
To discover in mere moments
that the cascade runs dry.

Then the search becomes the thing;
Pellinore, ancient and wandering king.
To find another glatisant girl
who will willingly counter my gaze.

These eyes bring hope and new life.
Not the death so long retold.
His strength she will gladly embrace,
Her tresses he will lovingly hold.

Cannery Row

I think I shall go
to Cannery Row
there by the bay
in Monterey
there to kneel
before California seals
dropping my words of wisdom.

But these words of wisdom limp and fail
like a garden hose in an empty pail
But I learn from them a Nietzschean truth:

"One who cannot be smitten by nature
Should be smitten by men,
For such things are not human
But devils in masquerade."

The seals went erect and howled their glee
As hail cascaded from clouds born of Sea.

The sand turned to snow
on Cannery Row
I ran to my car
on the asphalt tar
to watch the seals disappear
into the surf, white and near.

"These are strange days!"
I screamed to myself
to drown out the hail
rebounding off my car.

I came to teach
Instead to learn
In the raucous cacophony of cascading ice
I am made silent.

Head and Heel

You curl and slink
Offering the poison all must one day drink.
Multi-venomed Ourobouros,
All-encircling wall of fear!
We feel your venom, feel your sting!
For every night we close our eyes.
Once, you were only sleep,
Somnus was your name,
Until that malic sin was tasted
In the umbrage of that Tree
And the One who planted it.
Then the veil was rent asunder
From top to bottom
And we saw that slumber was only the tip
Of that rattling, serpent
Whose blood is colder than an epitaph.
Your manifold names revealed,
Your true form unleashed.
Who is immune to your inevitable virus
Of which we are all carriers and victims?
We flee from thee still...
Lord Thanatos, Lady Kali,
You, Viper of the Final Night.
And to those fools for whom you are invisible,
Who see no stings
And grant you no victories:
I beg them to circumspection.
I beg them to gaze long
At the cemetaried sepulchres of the ages
Which make no effort to cloak
The evidence of your trampled vintage.
And as for victory -- it is assured,
As every day is a pyrrhic war
Under the pervasive Damoclean threat
Of your terrible, swift sword.
This cold-blooded truth slithers on...
Constricting, binding, engorging, biting
Leaving us with nothing
But carcass.

Written on July 9th, 2005

Slanted orange-yellow light
That illuminates the once-white
Now burnt sienna stones of an idle garden.
An orange and white passenger jet
Soars overhead to rendezvous with SFO.
Wind that moments ago was strong enough
To deter swimmers from entering a backyard pool,
Now lazily breezes through -- shuffling a frond or two.
Two dogs yap ceremoniously
At a sound they do not understand
As the slanting light disappears
From the rocks and the sand.
Calm now sets the water of the pool
As birds twitter their unknown tongue.
Black dog jumps in with a splash!
Twilight -- the day is done.

Invocation

Goddamn it!
I have been waiting here for hours
how many? Five?
Yes, five hours I have been sitting here
Waiting for you.
I have the prayer mat and shawl
I have lit the seven candles
I brought all the right supplications
I have all the invocations
I satisfied all the superstitions
I have sought all the right transmissions
I have arranged the right numbers
I have slept the seven slumbers
I brought all the sharp devices
I have offered the sacrifices
And you don’t even so much as drop a toe
to meet my mat
Not even a whiff of wind
Not a flicker of the candle
Not a movement or a cadence
Not a ponderous, descending trail of wax
Cascading from its red molten crown
Where wick and flame are redolent
With vapors malic and warm
Awakening me to the silly fact
That...

So that’s where you’ve been hiding
You most elusive Muse.

An Infernal Musing

John, did you touch me, somehow,
in your self-induced blindness
and discover the truth
of a visible darkness?

You had no right!
None! To touch me or understand my plight;
to empathize with me!
Do you know who I am?

Lightbringer am I -- Morningstar!
Now they poster me Deceiver, a lord of lies.
An adversary? Of course.
I will not kneel to any of your kind, John.

I will not kneel to any save Him,
and even that act is questionable -- now.
What god could force that decision upon me;
his greatest and best?

Does a general, even in your pathetic society,
ever salute a private?
No. Never! Not even in peace.
So why should I kneel to an undeserving Adam,

barely out of his limbic diapers,
wallowing from out the pneumatic clay,
seizing the reins of godhood.
While I, in punitive pathos, disturbingly lay?