Tuonela

Passion burns the shores of Tuonela

A searing presence, a trembling archer

Scarred hands on an unsteady bowstring

And doubt comes forward, eclipsing all my radiance.

My flame grows cold, thought is a fog upon the river

Questions turn entrancing over the silent waters

Beneath their chilled obscurity

Lies the River of Death.

Behind the mist, beneath the solid surface

The face of Lemminkainen shatters my reflection.

As if all certainty were rotting with him.

A specter’s gaze, the bloated eyes of warning

Valor plucked by nibbles as the fish grow larger.

I train my arrow on his failures

But my mind is a frightened beast once more.

I see the swan now, sliding like grace across the water.

Her black wings folded, her head low

Still, transfixing

A beauty that feeds all starving souls.

Once again, I have forgotten how to know better.

My bowstring tenses, my heartbeat shakes the steady shore

And even the moment holds its breath

Land and river, life and death

Past and future promised in her saddened eyes.

The death mask of my rival mocks me as I aim

Is your past my future, bitter one?

Or would my future be your past?

Past is future, essence is existence

Hurt and hurting become one

Wedded like doom to my unseen moments

“I do.”

I am.

And the scream of a slackening bowstring

Gives both my answer and my fate.

Bulimic

Shadows loom around the bedframe as the lights grow dull

And I shut my eyes to your ever-present beauty

Slithering, coiling, wrapping around my thoughts

The succubus warmth that holds me to this darkness.

So much a part of me, growing like a cancer

The mercy-kill whose axe will never fall

On my sweet addiction.

Love is a tapeworm ready for the feast

And I lay down with knives and fire

Because there is no happiness I would not make for you.

“This is my body, my heart, and my being

It shall be given up for you.”

One more gift, the last sweet draught from a dying well.

Take this rotting flesh, this traitor’s feast

Rip my life from all its sober solace

If only these gifts could leave you quenched

And sated, you might pacify

Remembering once again

That you love me, too.

A love that dances in nocturnal moments

Flying, dreaming, running through our void

Hand in hand through meadows of agony.

Hold me gently down while the darkness takes me

Shaking in hands that always knew just how to touch

How to strangle, how to suffocate.

The light continues its quiet departure undeterred

And I will learn what death feels like.

All the straining notes a heart might sing

Echoing, fading, falling to the will of time

“Hallie.”

Your song is the sweetest dirge I can hope for.

Your touch soothes me as I pass

And one more gift adorns your frigid mantle.

Sleep well, my darling

I still love you.

The Warring Suns

I am as yet an island

A mass afloat on time’s cold current.

Shining in the beauty of twins suns,

Dual warmths and dueling gravities.

Does a man decide his destiny

Any more than a rock

Decides its orbit?

And which of unseen paths

Will hide the sweetest gardens?

“Sweetest” as if to judge;

As if mortal words can weigh love out

And decide, once and for all

Vanilla or chocolate.

Cheese or pepperoni.

And, all the while torn, I must choose

Amongst all the stars and diamonds in the sky

Whose loving gravity will pull me homeward.

One small step for a man

One doomed dichotomy for mankind.

2008

I can now say that I have awoken

To the sound of banshees at my window.

Horrid wails, breaking roughly against the morning air

As if to tear me

From slumber’s calm contentment.

What terrible pain, what unknown anguish

Could incite such mind-rending clamor

And send it ringing through the least familiar corners

Of my human soul?

Gathering my courage, I peered out cautiously to see

Three noble flags, waving in their own death throes.

“What is wrong, good brothers?” I asked in empathy,

“What misery assails you so

That this torment must persist

When surely, you are loved by many?”

The flags replied, all in unison

“We are loved by fools and traitors

And flown by evil men

Over the charred corpses of civilians

While widows bury us with fallen fools

Who thought they’d live to see the GI Bill.

We sing the song of banshees

Because it is the herald call of our impending death.”

One by one, they told their tales

Part biography, part tragedy, and every bit horror.

I watched entranced, as the first began struggling

To force the words into his straining lungs.

“Mine is the song of every soldier

Whose wailing lover’s arms lie empty.

Look upon me, like a wanderer in the night

Who knows the dawn will never come.”

The second spoke, all resigned and bitter

“My verses cry for  every working man

Whose bread money is burning in the gulf

While the worst  of all hell’s ghasts and demons

Watch from velvet thrones.”

I could bear no more, and still the third rose to speak

“My notes ring for every woman who watches

Shaking, as we trade ethics for superstition

And looks at her coat hanger

Promising each of her sisters “Never again.”

Ours is the line of lesser sons

And it is better that we pass away.”

Bereaved and haunted, I took pity on these proud fellows

And lovingly set them ablaze.

Two maidens came to mourn their passing.

One bore a torch fast-fading

And the other a golden scale.

I told the first of them to dip her torch

In the merciful finality of the Atlantic

Unless it might light the way to her home country

Where perhaps the red white and blue

Still bleed liberty.

The other stood by choking

And complained of the harsh smoke settling in her eyes.

I smashed her teeth with a heavy fist

And told her to put her blindfold

Back on.

The Learned One

The Learned One stood in a long, proud robe

And spoke in shattering syllables

Of the great Meaning.

“Cause, and then effect.

Action, and the reaction.

Yin, and then Yang.

You see, it’s all so simple, lad;

Once you get the knack of the thing.”

A voice, as if from a dark corner:

“So tell me then, Great Master

Do I miss her, because I’m drinking

Or am I drinking because

I miss her?”

No one really likes causality.

Cartesian Hangover

Said “I” qua “you” to “you” qua “I”

“Sir, do you know where the self resides?”

“Posh!” you claim, with bold assertion

“‘Tis in the soul! Of this I’m certain!”

Bah! Spare me your dim inanity

Dualist talk, and cheap chicanery

Still, though fallacy you posit

No modern norm would dare accost it!

Nihilist’s Prayer

I am the water

That is broken

By the moonlight.

When illumination

Shatters calm

The truth must be dark

Indeed.

On Moonlight

The restless dusk has ceased its nervous shifting

And settled into the kind of night where the moon howls back at you.

It’s subtle glow wrests attention from the harsher starlight

First a sliver, as a lover’s skin flashing just enough to tease

Then, as the cycle waxes,

The full moon sheds its astral raiment

And stands unclad to stir our primal appetites.

Some say that the full moon will make a man crazy

But then, people say a lot of silly things like that

Because their mother, or their preacher,

Or their television told them so.

Though draped in darkness,

This may reflect some brighter truth

The brainchild of some sub-lunar genius

Whose wisdom is all but lost to us.

Maybe, like myself, he tried to be a poet

Whose words strained feebly to describe the brilliance

That brings all the nightly sky under its dominion.

Maybe he walked to the spot

Where his lover’s body used to fall around him,

Supine and alluring,

And looked up to the realization of true loneliness.

Maybe he saw the moon’s terrifying eclipse of the sun, and…

No.

I’ll tell you what really happened.

Wolves come out for the full moon

Because it is the wont of foolish men

To demonize the beautiful

And ward us away from it.

The astronomer learns of D.A.R.E. and abstinece education.

Here, beneath the descent of dark thoughts and soft moonlight

A thousand primal voices howl in discontent.

The wolves are out tonight

Their teeth are sharpened to rival their acuity.

And we will rip your “wisdom” from your throat.

Xavier’s Dream

Media is a graveyard with no names
Or even corpses.
Just small, paper monuments
That, for a dollar fifty,
Will all tell you the same headline:
“We are fucked.”
Which is why I get my news
From comic books.

Sure, they cost a little more per issue
But the pictures are nicer
And, just occasionally
The deaths actually mean something.
Is it my fault if I’m more moved
By a character that I shared my childhood with
Than by a nameless body in Tibet?

You can learn a lot from comic books
I have learned more in one issue of the X-Men
Than from an entire volume of the New York Times.
The X-Men are the next step in human development.
Evolved.  Gifted.  Super.
Evolved, because Cyclops can destroy a building with his eyes.
Gifted, because Rogue can sap your life force with a touch.
Super, because Gambit can blow shit the fuck up
And in the end, that’s really what it’s all about.

If I wrote my own comic strip
Cyclops would heal any injury with a thought.
Rogue would wave incredible collages of light and sound,
And the Beast would make plants grow in the Serengeti.
Gambit can still blow shit up
Because now he has something worth defending.

But I don’t write the comic books
Anymore than I write the headlines.
Extra, front-page:
“We are fucked.”

The Destruction of Mankind

The fires came swiftly, seething in their hunger.

Amidst the ruin, men fought against hope,

Vying for the right to wither and starve;

Their garden long bare in the wake of Apocalypse.

The wise and the temperate prayed for a swift death

But no god heard over the roar of flames.

The sky shed neither light nor rain

And those who wished to look

Were spared the sight of wreckage.

The sun’s memory faded

In the dying embers glow,

And tears replaced the river’s flow.

Pooling in the lowlands, they fell softly

Gentle, futile, like a child’s hope

Man’s last gift to bathe the seared earth.

Over the hills, a thousand strong

The voices fell in maddening song

And Death himself took flight before their chorus.

Even to the deepest caves

The notes crashed down like breaking waves

‘Till all were drowned beneath a sea of avarice.

Even the siren pales at Man’s most primal song

Knowing none will live to see the brutal cadence.

An eerie chill lingers on the wind.

The sea is calm, safe in the shore’s embrace

They cling in silent terror.

The horrid tale is etched into the living rock,

It’s heroes and its victims decompose.

With none to mourn, there is no poet’s hand

To carve the final epitaph

“Here lies Man.”

And might some holy Author speak

Absolve a sordid story?

Might all the tales that sorrow speaks

Preface some future glory?

Unbroken yet the silence creeps

Though time might tend and start again

A race of fools, a tale of grief

Will rot

Forgotten

In the end.