April-August 2006

We have heard and seen much
But it is a tasteless fruit
To remain in the garden
With bliss's and horrors we cannot touch

No secret unconquered beauty
In all things equality
The sphinx is beheaded
Enter the city
Into the temple and holly of holly's
She waits behind a torn veil
The face of justice without her scale
Lying jeweled with beads of sweat
and covered with ritual ash

It passes over, pale and inconsequential;
To plumb the depths
Free from the clinging white specter
Of emotive understanding,
That would reveal my descent into the abyssal
A bioluminescence that lights the inches and obscures the miles
Unseen
I am not ideals, or ghosts, or romance
I am flesh and bones starving
And privy only to chemical enlightenment
And prey to the monsters: geology and dimension

It is that ancient voice always speaking in a modern tongue
There is an absurdity that liberates us in the moment
The moment and momentum of the physical world
That grants to us this torch of youth in the dawn,
that we use in the day
and diminish in the night
and moan for in the dusk
We are asked to expend the light so rapidly
So the teenagers light themselves on fire in the dark
with an un-scathing flame
Beside the dunes and beneath the boardwalks
I stood on the beach and felt them there over my shoulder
And saw the glow
The water pulled beneath my feet and at my foundations
It is a fearful yearning

My father is the lighthouse he looks for me in dreams of snakes
The ocean calls and pulls
Sleep in my arms and I will carry you to a shore
A call to the arms of young lovers
She lays on my bed like a cave
With pearls and a promise

A continually changing and progressing landscape
a scent and emotion contoured to these changes
At the dance she is wearing these black spider webbed gloves and shawl
I had said too much to her,
and she smelled like fake leaves and red candles
it was Halloween and we danced

She lays on my bed like a cave with pearls and a promise
I swam too deep on my isolated myths and found myself alone
And began to see my permutations
Governed by these pressures and too conscious of the self

With trembling and devouring and profane effusions she speaks;

"I am not ideals or ghosts or romance
I am flesh and bones starving
When did you first discover that you were an animal
Humanity and godhood being political assertions"

-Apes Blood

Seek after your dead

Seek after your dead
Who have dissipated in the view of the sun
Their lunatic dust drifted to the moon
Its light borrowed in a Promethean way
Souls drawn by a lesser gravitation addressing lesser forms
Once wed to the earth as the moon remains,
A priestly concubine
charged with holding the embalmment's spiritual effluents
Floating jettisons
Drifting and transfixed on a dusty, rolling, silent sphere
They are here, dry
On the back of this white Moth
Feeling the humming of the wings beneath them
A vibrational membrane between the energies of life and death,
The propulsion for an aimless hovering, feeling thin and confused
Caught in the receding memorial tide
Mulling over dull and fleeing recollections of the earth
Waiting for a wet ressurective proxy
Waiting for the moth to fly into the lighted pool
Waiting for the moon to crash into the ocean and be bathed

-Apes Blood