Haecceity

Never trust the sound of rain upon a river rushing through your ears.

-Arriving Somewhere but Not Here

i

“What, father, does continue in the great beyond?”

Above the crackling fire stared back shadowed eyes.

Refracted words; air gravid with paternal bond:

“If from refuge of firs you wish to seek the skies,

you first must drag this flesh through thorns that blindly rive.

Inside, these strips of meat will suppurate and sigh,

clandestine wounds – malignant mantises – will thrive.

Infested, sick with bear traps, still will you traverse.

Penumbral slantings, astral stirrings – night arrives.

Around your dreaming body shades will whisper verse

as vespertine enchantments seep beneath your soul.

Benighted dawn awakening unconscious curse-

determined, chained, you forge on under decontrol.

ii

Inchoate ipseities, through verdant curtains we

careen upon the stage to play schismatized wholes.

Then will you shield your eyes and squint beyond to see

a witless lowing mass, impassive cattle, each

quite glad with nose in neighbor’s ass and insight-free.

Lush womb’s susurrus whispers under barren speech:

“Return and burrow into beryl warmth. The earth

is sepsis; life a vice.” But crushing hours teach

us brutal axioms – our callous lords since birth –

and tyrant regnant of these, Rex Torquet sits on his

tectonic throne.  Unceasing seismic waves shear worth

from flight of time’s bewitching arrow, cleaving IS

for all those blighted by awareness staring from

a fractured mirror showing selfhood’s masked abyss.

Apostate son, pray sinistral ear hear the hum

that thrums beneath Ephesian soil and echoes in

celestial descant droning, “No return. Become.”

iii

Manure and dust.  An ark awaits across the din

and filth.  So swallowed to your guts by fetid dread,

proceed against the suck that tries to keep you pinned

on hands and knees – the bovine gravity that weds

your will to tribal whimsy.  Now observe ego waves

collapse and raise concrete cathedrals in your head.

Cry ecce homo!, sovereign boy to man enslaved,

contingence carving valleys out of granite fate,

our habits – channels – digging troughs toward private graves.

Life’s subtext, then, lacunae moonlit that create

their meanings by projecting absence in forlorn

white rooms between our words.  Boy, can you bear the weight

of chasms riddling ‘I’?  Yes. Oxen are we born

to dumbly draught the burdens our retrenchments bring

until we either fit the frame or spines are shorn.

iv

And some must launch alone in ships of bone and fling

themselves against the breakers that do smash intent

of lesser men.  So when the strand begins to sing

its double-edged psalm, lacing into the consent

withheld by the dense ebbing throng, redouble your

green vestal vision.  Stationed at the cruces Lent

by warp and woof of tide and time at shuttling shore,

select your sailboat by its anchor.