Enochian Rituals for Clerks (entry 1 in 'Receipt Dandies' Series)

mucinex, vaseline, and tampons

can you guess what demon I am summoning today?

No, not the pervy Baphomet seeking to impregnate

every bar queen ever to make a pit stop

at the altar of Magnum

I am making a wicker man

of cotton balls and guaifenesin

and glitter glue

to burn away this haunting

of coupon slips that never seem to add up

to more than seventy five cents of the retail total

of a babe caught

in the trafficked chutes and ladders

children’s mayhem

leaves my livelihood

nothing more than convenient store nanny

gotta summon demons

to fight demons

and I’m not afraid to use receipt slips

as papyrus scrolls

to request the aid of Babylonian horrors

to make me a ward

a shroud against broken letters

which rain down

on those of us helpless enough to try

reeling in a living

in the midst of this bloody Nile

the flotsam

of deposit slips surge by like a watery omens

an emblem of time spent

hoarding roasted dollars

never to be tasted

starlight

deflated of breath

you are the doom

at this drugstore crossroads

before Cerebus  comes to call for his nine to five

buffet at your confessional

or his sunday sacrifice

This Hades likes to think no one

whispers of him to the White House Muse

She knows he’s buying the skirt out from around her thighs

but a girl has a right to bitch, doesn’t she?

you can only steal Persephone so many times

before we open our eyes to see

Wallstreet Demeter, hanging limp

from the platform of the infernal marquee

Etched Facets Along The Strasse

I faced away from the window

but the blinds were projected onto

the inside of my glasses

trying to make a spectacle out of

AM nothings

sunlight filters in, a dance

I’ve long since grown

used to

as it shines in a pirouette circle upon a carcass

we called it a feast

but it was a extermination

of a pest in my bed

wearing my skin

I once went outside to discover

that changelings were the new vogue

Bodies along for the ride

while our eyes read the story

of a nativity in which the infant DOW

was hallowed, wrapped in streamers of Nasdaq,

and endless marquee of wealth, lined in the thread blood

of our veins

I sit on my patio, drinking my share of imported blood mocha,

and wonder how does one’s skin always return it’s shape,

with so much writhing always undoing its attempts to reform into self

as the beast that longs for more tries to always remodel it’s design

waiting to see

if you could at least

somehow bargain to get your eyes back

in the divorce proceedings.

The Well

What do a pile of submerged pennies mean

to an aquatic fae queen?

How does a cent turn into a wish?

Do you trade them, pawn them off

as golden tokens of a secret network

of well wishers, a society who grants open doors

at the sign of the copper?

Or are you a dragon, biding her time,

less inclined to ravaged

and more interested in

the story of a pauper

wishing to be king

You collect dreams

You give wisps of hope to the barren

they sprout up children with five heads,

only one survives,

weak, returning, allowance in hand,

to you

the dream gatherer,

the hope counterfeiter

but once in awhile

you throw in a doozie

a warrior’s vengeance

a queen’s demise

And as you slumber between visitors,

you weave a tale of humanity

with your scales, each one imprinted with a wish

each  a refraction of desire

and it holds in your fire

like a holy vessel

Poetic excerpt from story in progress

About a month ago I began working on a story based around the question: What if ancient Greece had never fallen? What if it became a hegemonic power, subsuming Rome's military culture, utilizing the technology of myth and magic to create a society rivaling any science fiction tractor beam or ray gun? What if Jesus never actually died on the cross, and his followers became more about monastic living than crusades? And yes, I will confess, I'm potentially dabbling in the frequently, badly done domain of ill advised steam punk.

And predictably, like with all my stories, it came to a halt only ten pages in as I ran out of steam (no pun intended) and interest, as my love of the daily ritual of poetry took me away from the focus required to put out anything as substantial as any form of narrative.

But then I just had to say fuck it.
Let's throw the narrative into a blender and add a poetic angle.

So here is a bit of the madness ensuing when the prose breaks down, decides it no longer wants to play with prude sense, and gets naked in the grit.

(the main character has been divided into three parts. This is one of those three finding it's way back home)

All the while the argument raged on, Sophia slipped out of consciousness while the healer examined her and she immediately transgressed, or perhaps, transcended, into a point of the triangle she could only vaguely describe as the partiel her spirit had begun to rotate in. Like a warschak test finally fulfilled by focus, she felt the blade of the Hera-kind in her amygdala, running, just running, until anything seemed familiar enough to make the blue fire recede into the background.

I smell the originator..

She whose skin is our skin, but yet is not at all us

I mean me

I mean...how

how am i?

I am she, and yet she is not me

She smells like sex and dirt,

she is a rutting stag and yet she wears the garland of asphodel about her hair

Am I a daughter of Spring,  a bastard of Dionysus?

No, she is not god kind

I smell her sex,

it is not metallic like the merging that made me

I must go to her,

surely she knows why the moon no longer echos my song back to me

(see silverbeam too knows what it is to create out of craters, to make the pock marks of one’s face the most grandiose cameo of all - a lunar visage)  

surely she knows how to help me vibrate again

until I am the sword the cuts the night

into a thousand palatable experiences

There is her window, these are her people. She sleeps like Endymion.

But the one, yes, he calls himself daddy,

he is a knife in the dark that she will never see coming

The Moon Chase

The owl chimed at my reluctance to make the moon my lover

Who needs a lunar amour,

when I have the sun to burn away

the engravings left by

fairies to summon the nightshade

they mistook as the real

me

Yes, let this smoke

empty before the moon is full,

or else she will conjure up this roadside demon

that hitchhikes in the night

hoping to find prey

for her white light

all are moths to this infernal lamp

we ignore the breasts meant to infuse

us back to our wild sense

and take the path arcing toward oblivion

hoping it will be a guide for the lack in the

black sky of self

The moon says the sky is not your vulture

that is the shadow you keep seeing weaving on the plains

of your inner sanctum

She is where you recover the art of becoming

You cannot burn yet because you haven’t even brought her

the libations of id and ego,

she will serve them back to you

as a latte that tastes like the recovery

of cinnamon,

this is the sweet taste of kerosene

that finally lets you be the torch you always wanted

to be, hanging on a pillar, in this temple floating

in the dark

Orphans of Medusa

I measured my days by increments of truck stops

the trailer door split wide open

as though the word of god had willed it

(see Aslan’s broken table, exhibit A)

and out poured a veritable army of snakes
( See Mother Eve’s first plight, Snakes vs.

Humanity, exhibit B)

We tried calling Medusa

but she said all her babies up and left

the nest as all children must do

and so here I am, left with

the most glorious temptation of the ages

to allow an infestation that slithers

into the very crevices that make up

the cliff against the ocean mirroring

Self

a populous reference for my new profession

as snake handler

and the miracles I have to give are less

about rebirth

and more of how the serpent swallows the lion of Judah

not out of spite or sport, but sheer hunger

This my children, is my gift to you, that one day

the maws of the cosmic basilisk will come for you,

and will you but submit and feel the wonder that is

the caesura

of your

verse

but a whole new saga for the beast we all ride upon

but one day, inevitably, tumble off of, and must feed

The meaning of life is a cup of wine laid next to

a cobra fang,

knowing that they are one and the same,

my daughter-son, is the mark of wisdom

Will you, with dignity and the grace of Eve,

take your dose when the sun sets on your

adventure?

No one who enters the forbidden is allowed to take its fruits

back to earth and live to tell the tale

we already know the serpent eats its own tail

but no one really knows what it’s actually weaving out of itself

the colors of motion that rock makes in orbit

a mobius strip loom out of which the rest of the world

tries desperately to reinvent the scarf of  life’s ellipse

Brain Scramble

This past Saturday my good friend Subconscious Colours let me basically spew out some of my work with him on stage and I personally want to thank him for organizing the event, being kind enough to include me in his musical sorcery and shenanigans, and for being just the sort of creative whirlwind I really need to feel inspired.

The other artists at the show really blew my mind out of the water, and by that, I mean I think I've lost a bit of my sanity and hearing after the madness that was summoned out of their instruments and gear (as this was a noise show, this seems to be an indicator of the success, not the failure, of a performance). I wrote a poem inspired in part by Derek M. Poteat's performance that really evoked feelings of the beliefs people have about how the rapture is suppose to occur - fracturing, earth shattering loud. 

_________________________________________________________

the bassist went on stage

and in the orchestra pit, my brain was prepped for surgery,

he played the end-of-days anthem,

a lowly tone slammed against metal

that is destined to deafen the sinful

into soundless purity

And the volume, the bassist knew, must be so enormous,

so palpably huge, that it forces one’s atomic structure to break down

and align into new shapes

after hearing all of this, we are spiritually new beings

but I still am scheduled for a nine o’ clock brain scramble

because there exists no galactic level of soundwave

that can compel me to give up this angel

I’m holding hostage between my teeth

She has the four letter word she robbed from me

stored in her vial of Debt she collects from those

who have paid their due to the Almighty

but I never gave her a penny, and

she took my verbal talisman against evil

because no mortal should have such power

So the Angelic band of Assassins figured

if they can tooth pick out my brain,

as though preparing the meat for a sandwich platter,

the part of me where all of my words are gathered,

would spill out into my skull,

losing motor control, my jaw would go slack,

and the angel, with my charm against the devil,

will return unto God what I stole

from the good book’s footnotes.

Fuck.

When Ghosts Become Mermaids

And sometimes I have really absurd dreams, which in turn become poems. Forgive me.

___________________________________________________________________________

In this king of nightmares, I married

an old sweetheart who knew

the science of laughter

but not the magic act of lust,

a stocking gone one minute, the skirt

vanishing the next, how to make

all those blushes turn into good old blood

broiling in the heat of touch

And so I, just as clumsy,  

on this day of holy matrimony,

wore a turtleneck beneath a fabbed up

white jumper

an exercise in the poor Victorian gothic

and every time I passed him in the prep

before the ceremony,

anxiety tore across his face

just as my hands released an ocean

all on their own

all of this was swept under by dos “I dos”

His mood changed from fretting to elation,

and he led me by the hand to a pond behind the church

here was our consummation bed,

he said, “do not be afraid”

pulling me down beneath the algaic green surface

Great, a marriage unwanted seems to have been giving

it’s rightful omens

murder is never so poignant as it is at the first

of new beginnings

but soon, I found he was shoving pills into my mouth

upon submersion,

and I swallowed,

and breathed

“here, we must have our children.

I did not tell you lest you ran”

He implored, with a flick of his tail

and so I finally had the upskirt magician

I always wanted,

but inseminated, now I could not

leave, or the air would kill the unborn

and so this nightmare had me chained

to my worst fear

trapped, sedated by the light hitting the gentle

windblown current,

and full of babies

I cannot even fathom as a part of the pronoun

I

I am the mermaid’s slave

And modern medicine

is the surest way to tie the knot

on aquatic abduction