Deep Enhancement. Dark Wound

Deep enhancement. Dark wound. Ancient pain.
Estranged childhood. I hurt. I hurt. To no good purpose
At the end of things. No timing. No content.
And the body mourns the broken wings of the words
That once rose to the occasion like startled waterbirds,
The wind in a prayerwheel that didn’t know what to ask for.

And the heart, stubborn enthusiast, homely shrine
The gods don’t enter into anymore, used razor blades
Scattered like the pages of an unbound holy book
That cut all five jugulars of the fatted calf
That bawled like a guitar at the use its innocence
Was put to like a musical sacrifice to the tone-deaf silence.

And the mind, that Mephistophelean shadow
That lives in the wake of the dead angel that said
She died for my sake until I saw who showed up
At the funeral. All those black umbrellas, bats in the rain.

Achievement without consolation. Fulfilment
The scam of a false idol. My clothes are soaked
With the tears of ghosts that blew in my eyes
Like smoke from a burning sundial. Bad house guests
In the ghost town of the zodiac I once lived in
Like a gold rush in the mindstream of the mountain
Singing to itself as if the stars were listening
To heal the ache of an old fault line in its heart
That sends a shudder through its foundation stones
Like an avalanche across a narrow road winding
Its way between a high place and the certain death
Among the ice-floes of a jade-green northern river
Coiled like a green mamba below. Sad to see
The roadkill of a wolf that had no other place to walk
Below the timberline of the life it was hunting for.

Dangerous to stop. The bus hurries on toward Prince Rupert.
Another poetry reading. How long ago was that? Where
I’ll howl at the top of my lungs like the death lament
Of my lupine melancholy in a lunar solitude where
My voice carries through the deranged emptiness
Of a vacuum that’s come to abhor its own nature
And the most highly disciplined severities of insight
Aren’t communal enough to cope with it like a happy face
On a moonrise instead of the usual prophetic skull.
Blue Flower. Black Dog. Sunbeam and nightfall.

Hydra-headed snake fire. Death to release it.
Death to try and hang on to it all. The agon of life.
The struggle to live. The struggle to die.
As raw at the entrance as the exit is refined.

I struggle with the angel in the way like a mind
That lost an eye to the ferocity of the encounter
Trying to see past the halo into the black hole of the vision
It was grappling with like a choke hold
On the throat an experienced shapeshifter
That keeps eluding my grasp of the light
Like fireflies without starmaps in a hoax of dark matter.

Between the mountain and the river, where
To be held up is to be cast down like an ostrakon
Into the abyss where the victors live in exile
Throwing their bodies like gauntlets of roadkill
Along the side of whatever road they’re on as they
Raise their voices in a deathsong like a challenge
To the quixotic echoes that stand in their way
Threatening to bring this house of life down
Like a handful of starmud on the impromptu graves
Of the losers brilliantly infamous for fire walking
Their spinal cords like acrobatic spiders unravelling
Their silken safety nets like unnamed constellations,
Across the moats of the mountains, scapegoats on a drawbridge
That lets its guard down a thousand times a life too often.