Poetry by Christian Weaver

Bitter Seed
By Christian Weaver

I. Let us slip through a fold and abysm of time
Wherein fate into destiny turneth the hands
Of old Chronos to yesteryear, moving so fast
That his innards dissolve into wavelengths of light…

II. Flies the crow lime a portent-bird, wheat fields below
By three reaper lanes forked into black-trodden paths…
Only one doesn’t veer into madness and death;
Only one has a point of true vanishing. Ghost

III. In a headpiece of straw spooketh all but the lords
Of black plumage and plunder-lust: hateful, unclean.
On my shoulders they perch, more surreal than a dream
And caw curses on love from Heloise to Lenore.

IV. “Only mothers adore…” more than vanity, this:
That she can’t slam her heart on what opened her womb
To the curse of the curious. Eve and her fruit
Hatched the bitter seed Cain and its bludgeonly kiss.

Reflecting Clay
By Christian Weaver

I. Not for naught did we heave to the weight of that name
When together we sanctified HURT.
When divided we bled with ineffable pain
(For the tombstone of Christ is a Church.)

II. Know ye not that the crow on a rib-prison sat
Wherethrough violets and Love-me-nots grow?
Chooseth one to betrothe; knoweth this one from that
When the winds of adversity blow?

III. O what lover is mine, which hath scalpels for eyes
To dissect us to marrow and heart?
O what lover is ours, in eternal disguise
So that even His surface is art?

IV. Probe thy skull under skin. Yesterbreakers hath crashed
On our castles of sandgrains declined…
By the waves of Eternity buckled at last—
Still He longs to be loved by His slime!

V. Only those who dive DEEP touch the sky, blue-to-blue;
Only those who hold Emnity pure
Can experience bliss with Divinity…sooth:
By both kingdoms is vehemence lured.

VI. What to do? What to do? Must each terror from hell
On a she-horse of Leprosy’s shade
Come a-charging with lance hypodermic to quell
The Megiddos at war in our veins?

VII. Where to go? Where to go? Both before and behind
What our flicker flash vapor detects
Is eternal, chaotic, and God-forlorn night
(and the specter of judgement ahead!!)

VIII. How to reason on back to the cause from result
When both cruelness and poignance we see;
How to not shake our fists at that iron-clad vault
Where whereunder we wither like leaves …

IX. What of faith can abide, when Methuselah’s dram
Rusts our bodies like iron in rain?
Death at death stareth bard: Hamlet’s skull in our hands
While our own back-returneth the gaze!

X. Not before all we love comes to madness and doom,
The circumference and center detached:
“Dust to dust,” it replies. “There’s your ‘….stomach for food.’
But they both are devoured at last.”

XI. Make our soul like a tree: though is blasted and cut
Yet its roots drinketh life from deep;
That when Spring time arrives with her blossom and bud
We our found Deimmortal as heaven above,
Woke at last from mortality’s sleep.
 
The Heel
By Christian Weaver

What shame represses while awake
The dreaming psyche rides …
Achilles’ heel of father’s strength –
Its hidden, desperate vice –
Reveals itself inside the son
Grotesquely magnified.
 
Paean to the Goddess
By Christian Weaver

To miss Johnson, the siren, the Lorelei, nymph:
You’re the hottest young think on two feet;
Ariel to the life, Cleopatra-on-ice –
Stress n’ storm to the stormiest sea…

Lady Johnson, thou goddess, thou princess and doll:
You’re the hottest young thin on ten toes …
Tiny dancer in one, chambered heart like a gun
That with passion-shaped bullets explodes.

Belladonna thou art, hypnopoison and wine,
The most sparkling thing in the flesh
That these eyes have beheld without candles and spells
To grow flowers in gardens of death.

Black Madonna thou art, like the Virgin herself;
Every day doth I pine from afar …
Would it bother you much if I DIED for your touch
And sold heaven for hell in your heart?

Red on Black
By Christian Weaver

Mark the vision I had! ‘Twas a crucifix, black
With the circle of time both behind and before.
“Chronos Christi,” I heard, like the wind at my back
Or a knock on this heart-cavern’s door.

“Is that you?” I replied, and a briefing of light
Split the dark like the thrust of a spear or a nail
And I saw bloody red, as though painted outright,
An Emaciate cruelly impaled.

And I wept bitter tears like Miss Magdalene did:
Liquid diamonds of gratitude angel’d my heart;
and I inked Red on Black on my soul, on my skin —
What a canvas He chooses for art!

God’s Lonely Man
By Christian Weaver

The fettered soul consumes itself.
No flesh for which to lust
Turns back the sting upon itself –
Rejected just enough
To dream a girl and build a god
And perish at her touch.

Dead Flowers
By Christian Weaver

The psyche rots before the shell,
The spirits ere the flesh.
The flower mowed by Reaper Time
Continues pink and fresh.

‘Til, life-bereft, it wilts to brown
and dieth at a kiss.
(So many humans dead and gone
pretending to exist!)

Ozymandias in Blue
By Christian Weaver

Magnosis Dei! Though chained to stone
Colossus’ legs bestride and roam

The hungry earth. And lo, the links
Of broken shackles drag and clink.

Through city streets … and seers sigh
To see how wretched Freedom lies:

Her body sprawled on couch or bed,
By hypnospirals strobed and fed …

(Or swept away by tides of greed
To choke and drown upon the seas
she loved the most). Dead sailors, all
Who chose to heed the siren’s call

And let themselves be swallowed whole
By charnel thighs, undone and cold …

Whose bodies whisper from the rocks:
“The hand that feeds, the heart that mocks.”

Bruise
By Christian Weaver

I noticed first when I was young:
The worm inside the fruit;
That gardens sometimes hide a snake
As make-up hides a bruise.

Those brawny limbs that bear you up
Can strike the mortal blow…
That joy returns on wings of time
But one-way flies the crow.

Solitude in the Garden
By Christian Weaver

That you use even death to unwrap precious gifts:
We’re the skullful of dirt, you’re the flower that grows
From a soulscape of sickness and heartache and grief…
Every thorn is replaced by a rose.

Every dream decomposed pierces earth like a seed
Sprouting Hope for eternity, flora to sky…
Every heartbreak ascends on a mountain of scars
To a vista of ecstasy, galaxies-wide.

Fear and hate metamorph to the boldness of Love
Like a child or puppy dog, cracking the stone
Of a scar-hardened heart. Laughing butterflies fly
(Laughing butterflies burst!) from their tomb…

Who would think that such Narnian magic was real?
That the curse of slow time lived our lives in a day?
Who would think that all decades and eras at once
Are alive as the blood in Eternity’s veins?

Though the vector must change, our immortal self glares
Like a sunbeam through foliage, flashing but true;
Like the imprint of time on Eternity’s face
So the wrinkles and corrugates move.

How much orders of magnitude greater, how keen
The designer appears next to grandest design!
What a sensual God could engender such curves
That the devil himself flushed with virtue, and pined?

How amazing thou art! Cosmos firmly in hand
Like an orb of rare glass with bright speckles and hues.
Can you feel the enlightened ones gazing back out
For a glimpse of the Mover Unmoved?

Killer Time with his scythe mows us down in our youth
Else the dram of Methuselah, foaming and white
Turns us half into dust while still standing, and numb
To the black-trodden leaf and the angst of decline…

Maddest genius of Man veering towards the abyss
Spews I AM at the Infinite. Ruins of stone
Still protrude from the sand like a Ramses of pride,
Too extinguished to utter a groan.

Stacking slime-mortared bricks to the heavens, thought he
Manunkind like the demigods, drunk on the hive
Of sheer power and hubris in numbers – struck dead
By a bolt through the chest and semantic divide.

No collective survived. “War of all against all…”
But they lumped into factions and armies of hate
Whereby put to the sword, or made savage with might
Each became their own fiddle and flame.

…scattered hopes of the godly like corpses, asleep
Till with angel-flesh clothed like a broadsword aglow
They embrace holy boundaries and wared away imps
From the orchards of innocence, whiter than snow.

(Each returns to the Garden alone…)

Prison Psalms
By Christian Weaver

I.

1 Blessed is the man who loves God from his dungeon and who lifts up his hands from the cinderblock shadows.
2 Like the grass he grows tall, like the grass his green hands split the concrete in two.
3 Though the thunderheads fall yet a light pierces through, and a voice echoes back from the darkness:
4 “How secure is the man who seeks God in the morning, ere the rasp of the key and the shout of the door!
5 How secure is the man who learns how to adore, and whose soul has been freed from its prison!”
6 Such a soul, though entombed by the lance of its wounding, resurrects and ascends on a mountain of scars.
7 Though it’s torn into bits, each creates a new heart…and a yellow shaft pierces the darkness.
8 Bless the soul whose fierce tears soak the feet of the Messiah. Bless her glory of hair hanging heavy and black!
9 Let the room be perfumed with the scent of her love, and the concrete itself be anointed.

II. 1 Through the concrete and steel and the bulletproof glass – through a legion of noise – I perceive you at work.
2 Holy laser of Light…how you skewer the darkness. How you move soul to soul while the demon-hordes flee!
3 Though there’s some who grow blind from the darkness they crave, I am dazzled by Light in abundance.
4 I am blind to the imps who devise my destruction, lacking eyes for duplicity, blind to deceit.
5 Though a beast on each side lunges hard at its chain, I see only a highway of Light at my feet.
6 Bless you, Lord, for your love, for your lightning of truth. Back to diamonds from coal did you crush me to life.
7 My worst nightmare a dream and my dreams coming true: I am wounded by mercy…such Love is traumatic!
8 Only you and I know to what depths I declined, how I ravished fair virgins and slaughtered your saints.
9 (Superhighways of suffering blackened by smoke…saw their bones under sun in the distance.)
10 But you brought me to life, grew me young with your Love, led me out by the hand from this tomb that I built
11 Brick by brick long ago…and I sealed me inside…till a Voice called my name from Abaddon of worms…
12 And my dead spirit squirmed…how intense was the Light! Eyes befuddled as Lazarus, fresh from the grave.
13 And the welkin was bluer than blue for awhile, and the grass was an acre of heaven…

Never
By Christian Weaver

Never beauty I found but a star that implodes
To a backwards continuum, raising the ghost…
Where the crone once again is presented a ring
And the sparrows of Hope
Gently sing.

Never death I embraced but the hero’s rebirth
From the ashes of circumstance, smoking with grief…
Where more precious than gold is each vein on a leaf
And each second of heaven on earth.

Never filth I discerned but decrepit of soul
From neglect or disharmony, spreading like mold
Till the cancer of hate leaves a corpse in a cell
And the hopefullest toll
Is a knell.

Never health I achieved but the ego was shed
Like a husk or a serpent-skin, empty with grief…
Where more precious than God is each vein on a leaf
And each second of passion on earth.

Sylvan Weaver
By Christian Weaver

From Capaneun heights do I blazon and roar
To the rubble below … rolling smoke of my doom
Flingeth ash to the stratosphere, blacker than coal
Or a sackcloth of hair that emboldens the moon
To turn red as a blood-clotted sword.

Not for naught did I swing between bliss and despair
But to conquer posthumously, body and soul
What was black-veiled as Sylvia, weeping and mute
As a funeral pall (or an inverted bowl
That inhaled every hope from the air).

Hefted power like steel in the palm of my hand;
Knew the joy of command and the sympathy slain;
Learned to climb my dead selves like celestial stairs
To the apex INFINITY … lighter than air
In the soul that succumbs to its very own flame.

Resurrection is pain… not the meatcloak or shell
But the torture of egocide. Tragic and true
That they aim for the soul by attacking the flesh
Till some shored against ruins are all that is left
Of a Sexton or Weaver, by madness consumed

(Like a corpse by the light of the moon).

To a Photograph
By Christian Weaver

“Scarred and twisted, in disgrace:
This heart, this mind, this soul, this face.
I want within your heart to taste
The killer born inside of me.”
– The author, age 12

“Recompense! Recompense! The old blood-curdled shriek
Haunts his heart like a ghost. How ironic and strange
That the corpse that he sowed came to life in the spring:
That his destiny grows from another man’s fate.”
– The author, age 30

The photograph I remember was when my family moved from Florida. They’d bought a farm in Tennessee. It was a redneck family portrait, with barns and hay bales in the background, rolling pasture in the distance, lots of overalls and boots and grinning yokels from the city. In the front my little sister had a baby on her lap; they both were wearing denim skirts and cowboy boots in girlish pink. My mom and dad were in the back. They tried  American Gothic pose (the way he somberly held a pitchfork) but with their looks, their florid youth, they seemed impossibly romantic. My twin and I were in the center, side by side like paper dolls and close to visually past distinction. Our long-sleeved flannels matched annoyingly and we both wore “trucker” hats.

But now I see a vital difference …

Now I peer through Future’s eyes, through retrospectacles of loss, into a 12-year-old whose face was as hard as Ramses’ with contempt. The hat was pulled a little low, the flannel open to the chest, the heavy shotgun in my hand a middle finger to the world. Even the pipe between my teeth — a corncob stab at rural living — bedangled scornful and rebellious as a freshly-smoking joint. I see my FUTURE in that image,the Moving Finger of my destiny, like iron wheels through stony grooves of opportunities never taken, somber warnings never heeded …

But how would such a cry resound?

One time I heard some haunting lyrics that seemed to probe this very issue. “Dear younger me,” the song begins … and then the narrator asks himself (or both his “selfs”) some poignant questions, using irony and rhetoric to reveal a shocking truth. He learns that all his worst mistakes are warped and woofed into his character, into the man he is today. To get to change those bad decisions he’d have to change his present self, the very self who feels remorse and strives for growth and transformation. Such a will would not exist without mistakes to train the soul and reimprint one’s LIFE PERCEPTION. This shouldn’t deaden our awareness of how our deeds have damaged others, but it acknowledges their role in our destruction and rebirth, the tragic ashes of our Phoenix…

The Reflectress (or Twelve Questions)
By Christian Weaver

Can you show me the language of fire and pain?
The semantics of suffering, syntax of grief?
Can you riddle the soul who is bent till she breaks
And the Eye that perpetually sees?

Have you channeled a river of tears mixed with blood
Were the wellspring a wound from the spearing of Christ?
Have you heaved your own earthquake and wept your own flood
And become your own Phoenix by burning alive?

Are you deep in the wounding like Nietzche’s abyss,
As exposed as a mountain, betrayed by its height?
Does your dignity HATE such a lowly estate
For a spirit so terribly high?

Can you show me the language of death and rebirth,
The semantics of indigo, sky-domed and vast?
Can you riddle the soul who was swept from the earth
By the arms of a Suffering Dad?

Have you loosened a torrent of gratitude’s tears,
Your worst nightmare a dream and your dreams coming true?
Have you built a cathedral from fought-against fears
And a courage like sunrise that ever renews?

Are you strong in the healing like mountain of scars
On which heaven is striven towards, seized by the eye?
Does your dignity HATE such a lowly estate
For a spirit so terribly high?

Sea Nymph and Sailor
By Christian Weaver

Hypergrieved to infinity, hurt beyond help;
Not for naught did I sigh, “ex-nihilo to naught
Is the sum of our everything.” Heavy as hell
Was the weight of the love that we sought.

I was Jude the Obscure, failed in labor and love
Architect of thy misery, lost in the flames…
You were Sue the Exceptional, born from above
To be broken and driven insane.

Not a rose but it’s climbed by a ladder of thorns,
Crimson petals of agony, tragic and true
As the vows of our ignorance, wilted and born
To a knowledge that ever renews.

Self-eclipsed by intensity, snuffed and accursed
By the black winds of passion that buffet and weave
Through the hell of intemperance, dying of thirst
For the strychnine those rat passions drink…

What is love but the lust of a spirit that burns
For emotions that climax — then shrivel and die?
What are lovers but fools that dissemble and yearn
Though as distant as ocean and sky?

Each to each but a gap that the other one fills
While creating six more … exponential increase
By the sum of complexity, makes and unbuilds
Higher towers of treason and grief.

Gone are Sue and Isolde and Juliet, too;
Guinevere and her sorcery, shining and cleft
As the Devil himself, split between like the hoof
Of the goatliest form of grotesque.

Not a king but was captive to tresses of gold;
Not an Adam but Eve wrapped her serpentine thighs
Round the head of virility, draining his soul
Till the only thing left was a rind.

Mark the wisdom therein: all these girdles and locks:
Keep Pandora in chains ‘fore her reckless amor
Frees the dragon itself from its suffurous box
And turns Magdalene back to a whore.

Oceana, she is, sinks the sailor and ship,
Swallows Antonies whole in the grave of her thighs…
Both the siren that sings and the boulders that rip
Through the hull of this mariner’s life.

Hooded cobra is she, spiral-irised and bound
By the soul of the reprobate. Judas’ kiss
Was an EVEning affair, Adam shipwrecked and drowned
To the wave-rolling sway of her hips…

Daughter of (for Chelsea)
By Christian Weaver

“An American scream that will curdle your flesh …”
Was the language I spoke – nothing more, nothing less;
And the demons that roared, though absurdly grotesque
Uttered oracles born from a future unblessed.

Highways littered with souls and vestiges of sighs
From a million dead dreams stretched for miles on end …
Like a supercharged Dragula, smoking and high
And unfettered by loyalty, lover or friend.

I was MAN THE MACHINE, pistons pumping like hell,
Shrieking grief to the stratosphere, tolling like bells
From cathedrals of loneliness, dirged with a knell
That made worm-eaten corpses sit up with a yell.

Never pictured one day beyond this one. I died
To the thought that tough souls are as luckless at this:
That alone of them all they were cursed to survive
With the thought that they could have been better than this.

Never strived for one goal but I failed at them all
Save some plump little pears that I held in a thrall…
And I tasted their fruit like a garden’s, enthralled
By the nectar of innocence, moaning and lost.

Now it happens sometimes that a seedling will take
With no help from the hand that entombed it to birth:
Burnt by lightning and sun, chilled by billows and rain
And with only itself as a standard of worth.

So you grew like a tree … my how graceful and strong!
Tearless willow of solitude. Far from the throng
Did you sing like a nightingale, plaintive and long
Till the rarest and best found a home in your song.

Daughter of, daughter of – had I BEEN THERE to fail
Then at least we’d have relics and photographs left.
Daughter of, daughter of, must I drown in or sail
This uncrossable ocean of tears and regrets?

While I sailed on a Persian wing carpet, you yearned
For a father to hold and be held by. Love burned
In a self-immolation that spread like a germ
To consume every oak, every maple and fern.

But your branches were lofty as starlings, in sight
Of a crow flying west to the gates of the dead.
There we met in the clouds, at immaculate height
To redeem what in bondage had labored and bled.

And I said: “Can these ashes to romance be turned?
Can our scar-hardened hearts find the passion to burn?
Have we come to the point of despair or return
To the glory of innocence, praised and affirmed?”

“Can you ever unmourn such a fatherless youth?
All the daughter-Dad dates and discussions of God?
Will you ever feel held and protected?” The truth
Is more broken than any one spirit or heart.

What I offer you now is a START …

The Divine Comedy in terza rima
By Christian Weaver

I. The Inferno

At the midpoint of life, lacking rifle or rood
I approached a dark wilderness, savage and bare –
By necessity driven to enter that wood…

Though the hillscape outside was yet morning, in there
Was blackness so thick that it swallowed me whole,
Leaving only the knowledge of weakness and fear.

Metaphysical cowardice siphoned my soul:
In the path was a beast so impossibly thin
That each soul it consumed made it hungrier grow.

Then a Roman of old, prince of poets, my kin
Turned me back from my turning and showed me the way
Long and hard up to light from the night I was in.

“Recognition of sin imparts worth to this place.”
Thus did Virgil explain why my soul must decline
While alive through the circles of horror and hate.

Then ABANDON ALL HOPE…tore the lids from my eyes;
Felt the black winds of passion that shuddered and weaved
Through the shades of the Lecherous, raping the night…

Other whims of the flesh were thus punished in scenes
Of the grossest lucidity: slathered in trash
Were the Slothful and Gluttonous, rank and obscene.

Men were boiled in blood, cruely scourged by the lash;
Gentle snowflakes of fire and maddening itch
Made them tear off their skin for the crimes of the pasts…

Saw the pitchforks of demons and blackest of pitch
For the Grafty and Fraudulent, nameless and blind
As the generous spirits they swindled had been.

The schismatics were next, deeply cloven in kind
For the psychic division their heresies sowed:
Yellow guts stained with blood dangled over their thighs.

False messiahs and coiners denied what they owed
In the language of fire, distorted by pain
Or they rotted and reeked with the death of their souls.

At the lowest abyss, where the weight of all blame
For the sins of the villainous settled like lead
Was a Hades of ice and a great frozen lake…

Some were frozen like insects in amber, not dead
But unable to roar their rebellion and spite
Like the ones who were free to move torso and head.

Two were fused like a popsicle, brothers of night
Madly bashing their heads like two billy goats. One
By his agonized tears froze the lids of his eyes.

This the hell of betrayers: no warmth from the sun
(Not an atom!) shot down to Judecca’s despair
But the Devil on Judas voraciously munched…

Chewed him up like a steak…kicking legs in the air
Mutely bellowed his torment and jerked him in fits—
But vortex of wickedness suffered more there:

Dragon wings like the sails of a three-masted ship
Self-deceptively thrashed and attempted to rise
But the wind made the ice more impregnably thick…

Filled with horror I was, trauma-shaken but wise
When my mentor and master emblazoned the way
Long and hard up from hell to God’s glorious light.

II. Purgatorio

Rising up from the sea, past the edge of the world,
Where Ulysses went down with a wondrous glimpse
At the Babel of God, Jacob’s ladder unfurled

To the highest and holiest purging of sins.
Mount Olympus and Ossa and Everest glared
At such lofty infinitude, distant and dim.

Not a soul would have stirred, not a shade would have dared
‘less it willed to immerse in the purest of flame
And ascend its dead selves like celestial stairs.

Trusty Virgil, my guide, human wisdom unchained
Picked our way through the rocks of that arduous climb
Up the mountain of recompense, purging and pain…

Heard the groaning of shades being crushed and refined
In the mills of their vice in its spiritual form:
Some were sewed by the lids of their envious eyes.

Saw Capaneun giants and monsters unborn
By the pride of their foolishness, struck through the chest
By a thunderbolt hurled from Omnipotent Scorn.

Souls neglected in life for the lusts of the flesh
Were reduced to mere skeletons, spectral and blue,
Madly starving for virtue and beating their breasts.

Men who’d vanquished whole cities and lassoed the moon
Worked their penance for centuries, faithless in life
Till the end’d made them pious as clergymen. Soon

I perceived that my steps were less leaden, not light
But unshod by iniquity, striving from sin
Like a bird from the fowler, wings to the sky.

Ever brighter and longer the dayscape within;
Ever briefer the night and the terrors it held:
Ever weaker the strength and magnosis of sin.

Near the peak was an Eden untainted by hell,
Growing fruits for eternity, instant and new
On the branch where one plucked them, as plump as a bell.

Full of sleep I became, lulled by indigo blue:
“Comes the fragrance of romance, nostalgia, and loss…”
When I dreamt of a serpent that whispered and wooed.

Iridescent and glittering, smooth to a gloss,
It approached with impunity, standing upright
As a man will a man whom he wills to accost:

“Hast thou gasped under boulders of soul-crashing pride?
Passed thy flesh through a wall of the holiest flame?”
Thus it filled me with doubt and uncertainty. I

Looked aloft when a starling, a great bird of prey
Like an eagle of gold freshly molten attacked,
Dropping down like a thunderbolt, righteous with rage…

Seized the snake like a worm…I awoke with a gasp
To a girl like a nymph who tripped lightly and sang,
Picking armfuls of flowers that painted the grass.

Like the rivers of Lethe overflowing its banks
So my fears evanesced in a brook called Eunoe
And my memory of GOOD gathered poignance and strength…

On the crest of the mount, filled with passion and hope,
I beheld Divine Grace as it stared at the Sun,
Bright as steel being welded and whiter than snow.

III. Paradise

In the vision I had, Beatrice gazed in the eyes
Of the beauty that blinds every mortal attempt
To transfigure oneself and only walk by sight.

All of Latin and lore seemed to picque her contempt:
When I quoted St. Thomas and Augustine, she
Sharply chided their thoughts as a baby’s attempts

To perambul unaided. Celestial beings
Sign in tandem with planets whose music revolves
Without engines or intellect, Mover unseen.

God himself is a riddle no human can solve:
An unthreadable labyrinth of poignance and pain;
An unscalable cliff, an unbridgeable gulf.

Nonetheless, did I rise, did I burn like a flame
For the knowledge that sates and enlarges, as well
The ineffable longing to witness His face.

Through each spherescape I rose, spirit clear as a bell,
Primum Mobile in sight like the bluest of skies
Turning swiftest and highest and furthest from hell…

Many great ones appeared who on earth’d been despised
As a leper or Lazarus, common as sand
But as precious as pearls in the Lord’s Paradise…

Saw the starry candelabra, sevenfold branched
Like the spirit of God reconnoitering earth,
Seeking diamonds from coal and one virtuous man.

Mother Mary I met, of the sacredest birth
Who’d held God in her arms with a rapturous face:
“Did you give Him a cosmos to play with?” With mirth

I accosted and questioned great souls of the faith
Who despite their great flaws (or perhaps who because)
Had a passion for God that was equally great.

Supermanic and burning, ecstatic I was
When the one Jesus loved and the only one left
From that furious martyrdom loomed like a judge…

“Revelator!” I gasped, nearly losing my breath
(For his book was wonder and terror of earth
And his gospel of Love even deeper than death.)

Then another appeared, small of stature and girth,
Stooped and twisted with injuries, scarred like a tree
That the lightning has ravished for all that it’s worth.

The apostle, near blind, seemed to silently weep
For his failure to strike at the heart-roots of Rome
And convert the great Caesar to Jesus. I beamed

With the thought that seclusion and shackles alone
Were what blessed him with time to time to scrawl letters that spread
Like a fire through centuries, warming with hope

Several billion of those who’d been frozen and dead.
But the greatest to me, the most flaming of heart
Were the ones who were marred from their souls to their head:

Magdalena the Harlot, encrusted with scars
Who alone understood why her Savior must die;
Violent Petros, who practiced that two-edged art

On the ear of His enemies, larger than life:
Comes the Light of empyrean, sphere upon sphere
And the Love that moves stars in their orbits…divine!

Proverbs and Augeries
By Christian Weaver
I.
Roses white as the skin of Madonna in stone
Droppeth blood from their petals that water the loam.
Virgins frail as a rose lacking thorns to defend
By that virtue attract both corrupter and friend.
Friends to beggars and cripples descry through the years
The unlikeliest blessings and driers of tears.
Tears of harlots, like dew, blanket the earth and arise
To return as a flood from the angriest skies…
My what beauty from hopelessness, healing from hurt!
Like a flower that grows in a skullful of dirt;
Like a chasm of years being bridged in a day;
Like a hand in the dark and the sound of your name.
Lay thy hatred to rest – not for mortals to bear;
‘Tis the heaving of Sisyphus, beating the air…
Cooked alive in the blood of thy boiling rage,
Frozen stiff while you gnaw at the stem of his brain…
Vast the dome of thy consciousness, painted and weaved:
SuperBlakean auguries. Angels and friends
Shake the pillars of heaven for one to corrupt
Or transfigure through pain to a flame-smelted god.
II.
He whose art brings to life vile thoughts for a price
Of his virtue is robbed in Eternity’s night.
Those whose ethics align with the laws of the State
Shove the Jews in the oven and Africs enslave.
Men who live to defile pretty daughters of Eve
Sell their own to the serpent and vipresses breed.
To forgive is a river of tears, but the salt
Keeps the soul free of slime and reptiles out.
To retain an offense breeds a dragon of wrath
That no Beowolf can slay without striving and death.
What to do? What to do? You must swallow your pride
Like the hemlock itself—all but charity dies…
Make thy bed in the flames and to heaven come to:
Your worst nightmare a dream and your dreams coming true.
III.
Out of sync, out of time, more unspoken than said:
When connected we hurt, when divided we bled.
Though the ocean and sky are impossibly far
They connect with a passion that dazzles the stars.
Every doctor and lawyer and Indian chief
Was a poet when young, tasted failure and grief.
Who is great is on time, rides the crest of the wave,
Doth inherit his crown from the loins of a slave.
Who is great is accursed, let them say what they will:
Every mountain is loathed by the valleys and hills.
See that eagle whose eye stares unfazed at the sun?
All the sparrows believe he’s no different than them.
Though he conquered new heights, all they hear is the splash
Of his Icarus-plunge into madness and death…
To exist in an age that despises thy art:
Even Shakespeare grows cold in a grave that’s unmark’d.
Even Dante and Milton were lauded with hate:
In the hearts of their countrymen burned at the stake.
To the far-sighted heart all that’s near is despised
Though the wings of a seraphim cover his eyes.
IV.
Retrospect hath a curse: one perceives his mistake
Through the prison of consequences, bars of his cage.
On the crest of the wave he is frozen in time:
Sees his origin and end through Eternity’s eyes.
To the man who’s afraid of his shade on the floor
Every meeting of eyes is a terror of war.
Even beauty’s a curse to the thorn-lacking rose:
She is stolen by panderers, eaten by goats…
Nothing lovely can last ‘less a sword-wielding flame
Strike the holiest fear into locusts and snakes.
Said the serpent to Eve as he parted her thighs:
“Glides the serpent of truth through the Garden of lies.”
Like an emerald thrust in the fire doth glow
Through the ashes that cover it: so shineth Hope!
‘Tis a bird of the wing, hard to capture and tame
Yet it whispers great secrets and sings in its cage.

Stars and Comets
By Christian Weaver

Once more the flaming fool of Time:
A blaze of passion rapes the night
As brief as woman’s love and lust
It starts with fire, ends with dust.

Whatever bed will hold the print
Of golden head and magic hip:
Behold the bitch! But do not say
How long in heat her soul remains…

How long those deadly terrors clasp
The golem’d soul inside her trance ;
How short the spell her spirit wove
Around this demon-lover’s soul.

How short, indeed! But yet, how bright
Through Chaos blazed, and endless night
The hellish love of Christian’s heart
That self-erased. Christine, depart!

(Thy love, though long, is cold as space
And distant as a star.)

Ecco Homo
For My Wife
By Christian Weaver

Behold the man who loved thy soul
Beyond his soul’s amor
(For self-despisers self-enchain
The heart that would adore
The fairest heart to drip with blood
From roses lacking thorns.)

Behold the man! But do not ask
Just what intrepid will
Coerced this heart and mind to love
(And how they loveth still!)
Thy soul beyond what sanity
Delimited my skill.

Wherefore, this will outlept its flesh;
This heart outlept its brain
And if such physics repercuss
To drive the man insane
Behold the love that led him there,
A madman in the rain.

Freezer Burn
For My Wife
By Christian Weaver

Once more the foaming fool of Time:
A flame in crystal, spark in ice . . .
Once more a moment’s passion breathed
Commitments to Eternity.

Immortal promise ‘scaped the lips
Of he whose brash impulsiveness
Did vow in earnest, knowing not
That even now its vitals rot.

What magic’s this? What cyclic trance
Deceives and redeceives? What dance
Disturbs the bones of buried pride
And tells the heart it’s still alive?

Enough! Enough! The passion’s gone
And thus the promise made: anon
If kept becomes a soulless shell
Whose only flame ascends from hell . . .

Unvow it, then! Unbreathe ye must
They soul’s amor. Return to dust . . .
A foaming fool of Love and Time
Thou’lt be no more. And if the crime

Divorces life and love, recall
From what extremes ye fell, and fall –
Enjoy the type but shun the name
The species wears. Each facet-face

Distorts and hides Eemina’s whole
And seeks to freeze thy soul.

Holy Haikus
Condensed Mysteries for Christians
By Christian Weaver

# 1 To will Him one’s will
is a back-giving gift
that unwraps Christ Himself in the giver.

# 2 Christ touches the seams
of our soul’s hidden scars
and then shows us His hands and His feet.

# 6 You can love God completely
while acknowledging this truth:
that He allows the most monstrous suffering.

# 7 The pearl of great price
was a grain of sand once
on the banks of the River of Life . . .

# 10 Accepting Christ as your savior
means a life of sheer triumph
(shortly following your bloody crucifixion.)

# 11 Young Mary, was it strange
to cradle God in your arms?
Did you give Him a cosmos to play with?

# 12 Guilts cherished are maggots
dropping onto the Christian
from the corpse he keeps strapped to his shoulders . . .

# 78 Guilt, not sin, is what enslaves
the man of God to strive in vain
against the Devil’s oldest chains.

# 15 Like a freshly cut rose
that appears to be living
is the zombie-souled corpse of the godless.

# 17 The greatest miracle
to the godless
reflects coincidence in hindsight.

# 16 Not that God demands praise
but that He stoops to accept it
should confound thinking men and amoebas.

# 22 Free will without evil
is the Lord’s rubix cube:
it keeps Him busy for centuries!

# 27 God competes against Himself,
untying knots
of the impossible.

# 28 Spiritual laws
have repercussions
just as merciless as physics.

# 31 Christ memorializes
our betrayal,
remaining mangled for eternity.

# 37 Through choice by choice
and brick by brick
eternal homes assemble . . .

# 39 Could godless souls
ascend to heaven
they’d find its pleasures worse than hell.

# 43 That God allows profound suffering
for no graspable reason
creates infidels, madmen, and saints.

# 44 Even God
to not burst
requires outlets for His blessings.

# 45 Life itself?
A letter signed
from God to human beings.

# 49 Carnal Christians and spiritual
are more distant in heaven
than the rich sinner was from dead Lazarus.

# 52 God has wisdom enough
to not grant Midas’ touch
to our prayers.

# 53 Burn this flesh at the stake –
I will praise all the same
(though my song is the crackle of flames.)

# 56 Light years and microns
crowd together in an inch
on God’s ruler.

# 58 If God were frail as a moth
He yet would merit our awe
for His morals would still be omnipotent.

# 61 One cannot be assured
that he needs only God
until all that God’s not has been pillaged and burned.

# 69 The universe is a pond
and every choice
a thrown stone . . .

# 75 The faithful memory
faces forward,
thanking God for future blessings.

# 77 Seize the day
improve the man
and hone the spirit razor-thin.

# 79 The ones who run
will fall behind
the ones who rest and say “I’m there.”

# 89 Behold the cosmos in His hand:
a speckled orb of living glass
that gazes back in awe!

# 88 The smoking ruins of your plans
prepare the real estate
for God’s.

#102 Circles end at their start:
so the farthest from God
may in fact be the one who is closest.

#105 Myself outside myself beheld
our natures fused inside the fire:
water, wine, and blood entire!

#118 On the other side of fear?
Goliath’s black,
dripping curls . . .

#126 The creation of empathy
is alone a great argument
for the value of undeserved suffering.

#133 A life with God
like any marriage
includes heartbreaks and fights.

#136 Even Jesus,
after rising
could not part with His scars . . .

#139 When God hides in plain sight
and self-eclipses His radiance
be prepared for a Hand in the dark . . .

#144 Ten divided by three?
The most magical number!
An infinity of Trinities!!

#143 That crushing rock, that stumbling stone
to he who wills His will becomes
the surest place to build a home.

#140 A God of infinite love
will self-experience our suffering
as unending in length and degree.

The Paraclete
By Christian Weaver

Who discovers the Grail and hath courage to drink (slaying fear of what faith that intrepid might find) tastes the wine retromorph into Jesus’ blood just as richly as when He turned water to wine. Such a monster of faith brought a dead man to life…flaming quiver of speech like Ulysses in hell doth provoke from the sky jagged lightswords of hope that reverse every fate and unring every bell. Shoreless ruins of man resurrect Eden’s gods where The Paraclete hovers and dwells…

The Awakening
By Christian Weaver

O sterile walls of zombie white! O stainless rails so cold and dead! O spiral-eye of life’s illusion flashing worlds from screen to head! Just who designed this living death? And who or what presumed to speak for how mnemonic death deflects its silver host to feel and think? For one who’s mute enrapt’ may sing (with holy lays that haunt the skies) while one whose legs are chains may dance like Isadora in her prime – (The dreamhead can’t recall his name but nightly prophesies…)

Mary Mary*
By Christian Weaver

She was damaged and marred beyond human repair:
“Magdalena the Harlot!” to kids on the street;
Sorrow-haunted by demons of merciless grief
And as lost as a windblown leaf.

She was wild and lost as a windblown leaf,
Nearly stoned by the creeps who embraced her by dusk;
All too ready to die as she sprawled in the dust
To perceive who her rescuer was…

She alone of them all understood who He was
And anointed and wept for His nail-riven feet.
She alone was transformed as she christened Him king
From a harlot to virgin again.

*The word “mar” is in “Mary” and “damage” in “Magdalene”.

Heaven’s Flowers
To my niece, Breanna
By Christian Weaver

Ignore the “can’ts”, the “won’ts”, the “don’ts”:
The “nos” and “nevers”, “nots” and “nays”;
Ignore the ones who dare to say
The sky’s too high and far away.

Ignore the scaly “Can’t be done!”
Lest teeth and claws thy courage slay.
The ocean sails the ship away
To worlds of wonder every day…

Let God Himself direct thy paths
To heaven’s flowers on the way:
A pearl from sands of yesterday
Adorns the posts of heaven’s gates –

(May God Himself become the dream
From which you never wake.)

Day of the Fool Rev. 9:6
By Christian Weaver

On the day they seek Death it shall snicker
and hide; it shall flee with a laugh as they
madly pursue…it shall change from a hag
to a virgin in white, to a maiden whose hair
bloweth mocking and cruel –

On the day of the wickedest fool.

Stunner
By Christian Weaver

Mary Magdalene was stunning;
Damaged things often are.
Even Jesus, after rising
Could not part with His scars…

Maxims from Hades on Asceticism and Self-knowledge
By Christian Weaver

1. What you loathe the most fiercely is most attractive to your id, the most seductive to the wolf.

2. That Nietzschesque glorification of self-sufficient solitude, those permafrost anemics in their ivory-wrapped towers; though I am the one with their ilk, I’m quite ashamed of the fact. They’d trade it all for a girl if she would have such a creature.

3. Posthumous-born – Greatness in the arts is very seldom on time. Behold the altar of the future!

4. Asceticism is only noble when it’s a freely chosen option, so all these eremites and hairshirts, all these saints and grizzled scholars with their spectacles and canes…could they have actually done otherwise? Is all their science merely this: a means to sanctify their cowardice in avoiding the arena? Were they to quit their lofty terrace – were they to leave their mountain ashes and bring their fire to the valleys – were they to swing their empty lanterns and bellow “God hath really perished!” – could you do anything but chuckle? Even the deepest, bluest soul would be obliged to call the doctor.

5. Great balls of feeling –

• Loneliness pounds at my crumbling walls. A deluge of madness awaits…
• And what shall we build? A cathedral of romance, a castle of commitment.
• I was desperately lonely, sick with the feeling. I needed the love of a woman..

6. Sickness and profundity –

Question: Why does he invent illnesses and chambers and wormholes of the mind?
Answer: He’s in love with his psychology. To get well would be shallow.

7. What to you is most difficult, the most awkward and painful, the most alien to your nature and your greatest source of terror: this alone is your imperative. This alone leads to greatness.

8. The redemption of cowards – Your virtue, Mr. Rabbit, lies in plunder and stealth.
Go to war!

9. The Butterfly

• The great self-despisers hold the patent on success.
• Who loathes himself the most deeply will change himself the most radically.
• Who’s content with himself has no reason to grow.

10. Horseflies – Great souls do not war against little souls. They swat them like flies and move on.

11. What’s the artist’s greatest grief? To lack the talent of his vision.

12. He built his own tomb, brick by brick, while alive.
And its beauty, by death, he completed inside…

A Stunner
By Christian Weaver

Mary Magdalene was stunning;
Damaged things often are.
Even Jesus, after rising
Could not part with his scars. . .

Mary, Mary (note: the word “mar” is in “Mary” and “damage in “Magdalene.”)

She was damaged and marred beyond human repair.
“Magdalena the Harlot!” to kids on the street;
Sorrow-haunted by demons of merciless grief
And as lost as a windblown leaf.

She was wild and lost as a windblown leaf,
Nearly stoned by the creeps who embraced her by dusk;
All too ready to die as she sprawled in the dust.
To perceive who her rescurer was. . .

She alone of them all understood who He was
And anointed and wept for His nail-driven feet.
She alone was transformed as she christened Him king
From a harlot to virgin again.

I, O Frankenspectre, karma-birthed: Colossus reared by Nordic hands
Returns to reap the hate they planted, eye for eye and tit for tat…
who reads the scroll observes the rest, perceives just where
Fortuna turns to lift the prole to lofty heights and roll the bones of high n’ first.
Revolving spectres thrice-occurced… the shaggy, witless beast
Returns to soul’s dominion clothed and sane to find his former
Self in chains of hammered gold and Caina’s curse. The slave enslaves
His owner first, betrays the goat beneath the skin, reveals
That spirit-chains enchain the freest body, yang for yin.
Behold, Teutonic plague, thy kin! As tall and sinewed, clever, stout…
Impoverished ghost of regicide impales the sun in all its pride
And bleeds the thunders blackness out. Its basic math, without
A doubt: Consume the cake and shrink the rest. Behold the fools
Who sloshed their blood with whose they thought the lesser of –
Then panicked when he pulled ahead…much more in brawn, in brains
No less: this Afric king we lynched to life returns
To reap the hate we planted, tit for tat and eye for eye.

His broken shackles dangle, dripping, , merciless as knives…

Aphorisms on Addiction …
By Christian Weaver

Ever A Woman
For Christine Weaver
By Christian Weaver

She is ever a woman, and loveth the man
For whom Triumph and Destiny meet with a kiss
(By her warrior’s side doth she silently stand.)
She is ever a woman, and loveth the man
Who awakeneth hope with a kiss.

She is ever a woman, and weareth the scars
Of innumerable battles and wounds to the heart.
She is ever a woman: the rarest and best
For whom Ilium smoked for her burning caress
And Pompeii bore the roots of its heart.

She is ever a woman, seduced by the screams
Of the monsters who ravished her time and again…
She is stitched and re-stitched with the reddest of seams.
Not for nothing awoke from impossible dreams
With a hammer and merciless peg.

She is ever a woman, resplendent but torn
For the rose in her heart has a ladder of thorns.
And her guilt is absolved by the blood of her pain
(Of whom virgins, like dolls, are to lifeless to claim
Just a trace of her primal allure.)

O she’s ever a woman! The rarest and best
For whom Ilium smoked for her burning caress
And Pompeii knew its fiery end from the start:
She is ever a woman at heart.

She
By Christian Weaver

I. When first her gaze impaled my eye
With lightning’s jagged flash…
As bold as teal on butterfly
Or iridescent glass…
Cerulean blue as sky above:
She knows exactly what she wants.

      II.   With halos pure as oceantide
Of turquoise-beryl blue
Lapis lazuli, azurite —
So hard to name the hue
Of eyes ablaze with burning love:
She knows exactly what she wants.

III. With soul sublime as indigo
As bright as morning star
She paints the dawn with rising hope—
Horizons of the heart
Reveal a voyage just begun:
She knows exactly what I want.

Vena Cava
By Christian Weaver

Since I’ve served you my heart on a platter of blood
And its valves are as throbbing and red
As the chambers that weep immemorial love—
Will you drive it back into my chest?

Gilded flames of desire as bright as the sun
Round my ecstasies crackle and burn
Yet this hard doesn’t shrivel or die on the run
But remains inexplicably pure.

Never roots off embitteredness shrank from the sun
But redolent ambrosia of bliss
From thy ravendark hair grew a garden of one
Where for ages we mingled and kissed.

(From the moist of your thighs an oasis of love
Where the fruit of felicity lives!)

Magnosis: Selected Maxims and Aphorisms

Twin Warriors
By Christian Weaver

I mourn for our loss like David mourned his friend Jonathan, like a woman for her warrior who was slain on the heights;

“And you, my brother, there on the sad height:
Curse, bless, me with your fierce tears, I pray …”

And if we must die apart, then let us perish in the manner of old enemies and comrades…with INTENSITY, that is, and not the leathery dry stuff of old wineskins and feuds.

Let us rise and burst asunder  in hot confetti-bits of lightning, for we are rockets, not sparklers, and we have everything to lose if it should make us more courageous in the face of the impossible.

Let us rape the night sky…

Let us lacerate the darkness and punch holes with the cinders of our raging death fires, our inferno of rebellion, ever stubborn and defiant in the face of no hope. For what does having a chance of winning have to do with the warrior? And when did zero chance of victory make him curl up and die?
(Just like Kronos himself, we only move in one direction…)

There will soon be time enough to graze on fodder and sunshine and to live like gentle fauns in verdant meadows of clover, for whom the dread of black forests has evaporated like dew.
There will be time for these, too.
There will be time – soon enough – for scented hugs and caresses, for peace treaties and open hands, and for the Grecian horn of friendship to splash ambrosia down the beard
and soak the beasts of chubby maidens who will soon become wives.
There will be lavender days of tributes and wordy elegies of reverence never showered
upon the living (and when their spirits, parched from battle, surely needed them the most!)
But we are not among the guests…
At dusk the mead hall remains empty, the barge a jutting silhouette against the blazing red sky of slain sky-gods still bleeding. The deck is loaded to capacity, the conquered dragon’s vast belly stuffed with hoards of Danish gold and silver goblets and jewelry and heavy victuals and clothing of fine cheeses and linen. These are smeared with black pitch that awaits a single arrow.

A lone flame for the Twins.

The Dawn of Libra 
(for Christine)
By Christian Weaver

Reveal it, Love, what trembling inch
Of white, Victorian flesh on thee
Hath not, with strings of fervency
Converged in one orgasmic rush
Of liquid pearls for me?

What ivory fangs hath pierced thy throat?
Consumed thy melancholic blood?
What poet’s passion breathed within
Decrepit Hope an Eden’s mist
That grew it wet and plump?

…Serene and pink, infused with life
And free at last to flap with glee
(With sheer, cerulean ecstasy!)
Thy Phoenix-wings so far above
The ashes and the dust…

And bind – ecstatic slave! – thy will
Unto my own, as tempest-tossed
As foam upon the waves of fate
That, heaven-hurled, subliminate
Into that fiery heart of God’s.

O Minne Amor… my fair Isolt!
Thy wild beauty intertwines
Its leafy tendrils through the ribs
Of former selves that loved, and died –
(While curious tubers probe the skulls
Of young, eternal, weeping brides)

My SOUL OBSESSION – flaming torch
In Nero’s gardens… demon-bright
As torchlight red on sweaty faces;
Swiftly darting fireflies
Cannot illumine more than thou:
Thy love is Paradise enow!

To paint in words that triple-muse
Of shrieking colors, Devil’s wine…
Cathedrals move like gears in motion;
Symphonies of frozen time
Express untold emotions.

And I, whose shriveled leather heart,
Not cruel but deafanddumbandblind
Concealed itself from virgin tears
That ran in blood down virgin thighs…
A princess, left in chains alone
Atop that slab of stone!

But now, long-last, strong lover’s hands
Have shook they girlhood dreams to life:
Where every grief is but a dream
That fades with Dawn’s canary light…

(And Love, though caged, has learned to sing.)

What I Know
For Christine Bauer

Do you know what I know?  For your soul is too huge
To be stuffed like a crab in this nautilus-tomb –
Even tighter it grows with the more you retreat
From the roaring without
And the deafening shout
Of your Destiny there by the sea.

Do you see what I see? For your Destiny runs
So much faster than sense – than your sanity – does
And your instincts pursue what your intellect shrieks
Is the Eden abhorred
For its fiery sword
And the death of those golden-haired dreams.

Do you want what they want? Yellow grass without rain
Lilliputian their pleasure; Lilliputian their pain.
See them flow like a brook to resistance’s least!
Ever mocking your loss
As a self-holocaust
And despising those ponderous wings.

Will you rise to your height? From before you were born
You were bred for the lightening and led by the storm –
Resurrection’s reserved for the rarest and best…
Few are chosen, its true
But the fewer than few
Through a lifetime of heartache persist.

Will you fight what you fear? No Goliath so tall
That it doesn’t crash harder than Jericho’s walls.
Only madmen and fools do not tremble, aghast
At the blood-curdled screams
Of impossible dreams –
Only heroes are up to the task.

At the last, at the last, be it demon or man
It shall flee from the fear-tempered sword in your hand.
Not the dauntless or frozen inherit the crown
Only she who defeats
Every innermost shriek
With AUDACITY louder than sound.

AGAPE MYSTERION

What is Jesus to me? The aroma of hope…
See how fiercely she weeps as she kisses His feet!
How the house is perfumed with the scent of her love
At Messiah revealed
To the deepest unhealed
Ever conjured from Spirit and dust.

What is Jesus to me? He’s the maestro of souls
The usurper of fate… yellow sun in the gold.
Through His magic alone does the wreckage of sin
Back-assemble to romance of legend and myth –
Only realer than diamonds from coal.

What is Jesus to me? Vivid colors from grey…
The deceased come to life like a dogwood in spring
Where impossible fantasies rise from their graves
Growing young and immortal again.

What is Jesus to me? Omni-power restrained…
See the galaxies spin in the palm of His hand!
Where the gavel and scepter divinely succumbed
To a gardener’s spade
On that mystical day
Just outside the unlikeliest tomb.

What is Jesus to me? Indestructible love.
Never wavers or fades or returns to the dust…
Like a fire it burns irresistibly hot
Like a flame it consumes everything that is not
Of a purity finer than gold.

What is Jesus to me? The most giddy with joy
The most shredded with sadness and heartache and grief
At the children who hear, and who follow, His voice
And the wolves who devour His sheep.

What is Jesus to me? Holy laser of light
Ever piercing the darkness with quickness and ease
How His freedom invades every dungeon and cell
Breaking shackles in two
Leading out from the gloom
Who in bondage hath labored and dwelt.

What is Jesus to me?  Both the journey and goal
The salvation of Sisyphus, rest for the soul –
Through His magic alone does the mortal arise
From his mattress of worms to inherit a life
More amazing than diamonds from coal.

What is Jesus to me? Vivid colors from grey…
Where the dead come to life like a dogwood in spring
And impossible fantasies rise from their graves
Growing young and immortal again.

BLACK WINE

Let the shadows descend! For I dwell in the shade
Of the white-headed mountains of power and fame
That my future demands…so impossibly high
That I tremble and gasp
That I shudder and cry!
At the brute, inescapable fact…

Let them whisper and point! For I carry the head
Of Goliaths yet slain by their very own sword
And I clutch the black curls of that Nephilim-goat
And I feel the warm blood down my ankles and toes
Like the richest and rarest Merlot.

Yea, I stroll like the ghost of a hero long dead
Through the halls of his triumphs, all studded with pearl.
And I roam the green fields of the wars that I fought
Just above the bone-soldiers that mutter and rot
With invectives forever unhurled.

Who on earth was as riddled with shyness and fear?
Yet I dragged the pale ego through canyons so sheer
That it died with a shriek…undisturbed and alone
A Colossus of WILL
(As unyielding as stone!)
Fell in love with the courage I’d built.

To that beach-headed warrior, scrawny at nine
Marching tall through Megiddos of breaker and foam:
My how boldly you crashed (noggin-first!) into sand
Undeterred by the endless, green-fisted advance
That sent bigger kids sputtering back.

Not for naught was I laid, linen-bound, in a tomb
Not for naught did I roam the graves naked and scarred
Not for naught did I hang between madness and death
But to rise like a god with a double-edged pen
Dripping wine that is ancient and dark…

Thunderhead

I.
Like shadows cast on cavern walls
The world we see we think is all

There is, or was, or shall become
Till, lo, the dread MYSTERIUM

Disturbs a few to pierce the skin
Of gears and atoms, peer within

The soft machine to glimpse the Breath
The dust had once commingled with

To spark a SOUL…beyond the range
Of Sense Perception´s causal chains

Exists a world beyond sublime
Outside of Space, outside of Time.

And lo, thereby, the earth was born
Its verdant face, its molten core –

Compelled to life by LET THERE BE…!
Whereby, a singularity

Exploded light…primeval man
Like sodden clay in master hands

Possessed the earth. Beloved by God
And Christ-begotten, lightening shod

He strode with Eve beneath the eaves
Of purple plants the size of trees

And wrestled bears, and ran for days
Euphorically, without a break

To catch his breath, and wounds were healed
Before the blood had yet congealed.

The terra-lords of Eden ruled
Without a backwards glance…

II
A shame, perhaps, that willed unchained
Arrests themselves and play the slave

To beastly passions, selfish pride:
A mindless brute or brutish mind

Was Yahweh´s choice.  And angels, too
Through sickness, age, and maggot-proof

Can yet be warped by will to sin
As did the lucent cherubim

When, dipped in jewels, one led the host
(With pipes and timbrels in his throat)

In praise of God.  And once, mid-song,
His eye surveyed the mighty throng

And narrowed like a cat´s, and gazed
Upon his own majestic shape.

And, filled with sheer, galactic lust
And envy green as emerald-dust

He craved the throne. Wherefore, by stealth
He drew a third unto himself

And stormed the very gates of God
His beauty fled, his glory gone –

And thus the dragon lost his place
Like sheen of lightening flashed…

III
The monster hurdles, comet-like
Exploding on to Space and Time

Erupting like a super-star
And, in his wake, a cosmic scar…

Enraged, he tumbles through the black
And soundless void of Heaven´s lack.

In searing pain from freezing space,
His bony scales irradiate

With solar death. He shrieks and burns.
The atmosphere of primal earth

Is ruptured clean, and rolling smoke
Enshrouds the heavens like a cloak.

And giants die while chewing food—
Their babies partly hatched.

IV
The Word that fathered Father Time;
Indeed, the womb that loved to life

The causal infant, burped and held –
The archetype of life itself –

Declares that all we see or seem
Returns to dust, a fading dream…

And that which natural minds despise
(“Judeo-Christian myths and lies”)

Is more than real. The irony:
That brittle, Lilliputian beings

Are graced by God with sovereign might
To move the angels left or right

Like Heaven´s pawns, and every thought
And every good or evil wrought

Disturbs and moves the cosmic hordes
To win or lose the cosmic war.

And lo, the sons of men are doomed
Or guaranteed to win or lose

By if they chose to will their wills
To He who loved, and loves them still.

But most prefer the ancient snake:
The spiral of his trance.

V
The garden yet remains a myth
The poisoned fruit of innocence;

The naked children, weak and dumb
To crafty serpent´s cloven tongue.

And here the gnostics dig and root
For veins of gold and golden truth

To build them calves of twisted words
(Iconoclasts of sacred verse!);

Where wooden dolls must needs to steal
The agency that made them real

By flouting God, and curse’d tree
Became the Cross on Calvary

That saved us all. But hear the truth
Of primal man´s infinitude

Of health and wisdom, verve and life,
The self-renewing lightning strike

Appalled the serpent, made it gasp.
Enough to break a dragon´s back

Were Adam´s arms in rolling bands
Of fibrous muscle, crudely flexed

To bend the trunks of trees in two.
Primeval Grendel saw, and knew…

And crouched in terror, hid by leaves
Of purple plants the size of trees;

And there bethought his mortal heel
The secret heights from which he fell

And later tumbled, head and wing…
With craft, applied successfully

To lift the hearts of Heaven´s third,
Who echoed back: “Why should we serve!”

And lo, his thinking kindled coals
(Perhaps he had a chance.)

VI
His ace of spades, his wherewithal
Was Yahweh´s self-defeating law:

That only beings created free
Can know the deathless ecstasy

Of Perfect Beauty, Truth, and Love
Chromatic pearls of tenderness

That fall like rain…the heavens weep
To know, that almost instantly

They´ll shake their puny fists at God.
The cosmic roaches hiss and vaunt

With fear and loathing, bloated pride,
Primeval fall personified

And multiplied from Adam on…
That El-Shaddai was chained to laws

His creatures scorned, the Devil knew
And through the things God couldn´t do

Corrupted earth with cancerous speed –
Rapacious violence, theft and greed

Became the rule from Babel on.
Mishappen hordes of Nephilim

Consumed the righteous from the earth –
From bones of humans, built them hearths

To roast the flesh of infants whole.
The Maker wept from pole to pole…

And lo, His sorrow drowned the earth
With righteous vehemence.

VII
The old polemic never dies,
The fountainhead of Satan´s lies:

That God commands the sovereign throne
By right of might (and might alone!)

And this, perhaps, the reason too
Why Heaven´s wheels and levers moved

To shift the cosmic balance back
To wickedness and impotence.

Wherefore, the Plenum drained itself
Of omni-power, wit and health…

Infused and filled a woman´s womb
With GOD and MAN, divinely fused

To stride the earth in mortal dress,
In dust and sweat and griminess;

To laugh and weep with those He made
And know, experientially

The plight of man. Unstained, he knelt
In pools of blood and human filth.

Unstained by lepers wet with sores
He hugged them firmly, pore to pore,

And bore them up on healing wings…
The Savior wept His world to see

So black with horrors, self-condemned
By poison spores that blew and spread

Across the Garden…Dagon´s flies
Assailed the dead with buzzing pride;

The Serpent´s Jeckyl turned the earth
Into a lab of GOOD INVERSED

Whereby he bred deceit and greed,
Immense, microbic death machines –

Unleashed his dreams of tooth and claw…
A world of war of all on all

Became the rule of life on earth:
To die by glut or die by dearth

Became our fate – and man became
A god in ruins, self-enchained

To fallen angels crouched within
The soft machine, discretely hid

From carnal eyes…behold the man!
Whose face was touched by mortal hands,

Who felt the urge to lust and kill
(As all men do, and must, and will)

But never once conceived a thought
To grant it life but Dei-Love

And cast aside his crown and robe.
Humanified, he bled and groaned

To gross dimensions…flayed and scorned
By those His very hands had formed –

Absorbed the weight of holy wrath
For every act of wickedness

From Adam on…demonic hordes
Of trillions entered every pore

With stinging fury, filled with hate
That even now His soul remained

Immune to sin.  The briefest curse
Or lapse of faith to them would serve

To mar Perfection´s bearded face
And crush the heel that crushed the snake.

And too, the Serpent shrieked and groaned –
His paneled den of slaves and souls

Destroyed and plundered, weirdly mute,
Deserted as the Easter tomb –

And yes, through faith we too arise
With nailprints in our hands.

VIII

No mortal mind can quite conceive
The prelude to Eternity:

The vast, galactic judgement hall
Wherein are gathered, each and all…

Like iron fillings meet and merge
The trillion souls in hell and earth

Converge in terror, doomed to face
The One by whom their souls were made

But not coerced… remark the speed!
With which the rebels rush to be

The first in line to face the Lord
(In dust and ashes, self-abhorred)

And boldly, from the heart, proclaim
The justice of His mighty name;

That never once, from crib to tomb
Did He withhold solicitude

From those who asked. And demons, too
No less the struck by blinding truth

Themselves confess. And, bowing low
The Devil too, his rotting bulk

In bristled black and scaly red
(Pathetic, rank, and monstrous)

Before the legions gathered there
Proclaims that God is more than fair.

Wherefore, the damned, in desperate swarms
Attack the pit, Gehenna-born  –

In mad pursuit collide and climb
To gulp His vengeance, mortified

By sin like sap that issues forth
Like fetid slime from every pore…

In self-revulsion tear their flesh
And curse and roar and shake their fists.

And even now their souls are free
To choose cerulean ecstasy

With God above  –  but lo, this pit
Through choice by choice, and brick by brick

They built themselves, and wouldn’t trade
For all of heaven’s fair estate.

And lo, to each, the deathless worm
Is not a flame that licks and burns

But subtle tangents growing vast,
Grotesquely crooked souls at last

Whereby the envy, lust, and pride
They swallowed whole in mortal life

Expand forever… hateful friends
In moral blackness curse and shriek

And shake their fists, accusing God
Of being cruel, capricious, GONE  –

With tears, He sighs, “Thy will be done,
Infernal and extant.”

IX

That acid-eaten sage of Blake
Whose hoary locks proliferate

Like silver ivy hanging down…
 Almighty Moses glaring down

From Sinai’s furnace, stern and cold
As marbled Michelangelo;

Colossal Gavel crashing down
Or Distant Top Hat in the clouds…

Beyond a saint’s dyspeptic dreams:
Anthropomorphic savagery

That marks and mars the face of God
Who, doubtless, wouldn’t know Himself

In such a glass. Wherefore, I sought
Myself to learn (with growing awe!)

The wordless depths of God Himself,
The locked up treasures unbeheld

By mortal eyes… at first, perceived
What OMNI-POWER really means;

What omni-courage, wit, and love
When intertwined, accomplishes

In lives of saints. And every stone
The godless builders pry and throw

Erects a tomb that keeps them blind
To Glory’s ever-growing light…

And lo, hereby, their reason failed:
To think the Lord incapable

Of noting every inch of man
And probing, with atomic hands

His every thought (“For man is small
Amid Galaxis’ endless sprawl!”).

The terra-egg denies the Hen:
This marbled orb of living glass

That gazes back at empty space,
Ignoring That which grows and shrinks

To any size… Jehovah sees
The breadth of every thought and deed

With fixed regard, and grief or joy
Contorts His face with every choice

His creatures make. Emotions fierce
And strengthened by omnipotence

(Magnetic flares of passion leap
From Love’s combustibility)

Reveal a Furnace glowing hot
With hell’s surfeit and heaven’s want,

The highest joy and deepest pain
That any sane and conscious being

Can bear to feel. And yes, there lives
A greater fool than Atheist:

Believing mites that fume and deign
To doubt their Maker’s ways and means

With human, all-too-human thoughts
And sophistries that bare the heart’s

Rebellious, self-occluding wiles
Which can’t (they hiss) be reconciled

With Perfect Love that coexists
With poison-spores of wickedness

That spread with black, malignant speed
Like pounding hooves of pallid beasts

Across the earth… Averse, it seems
To bad results of selfish deeds

Are grey controllers wielding plans
Of freedom without consequence.

And too, they roar, the Maker hides
Beyond the range of mortal eyes

(As if He’ll shrink into a bird
And on their cynic’s shoulder perch!)

For blossom Faith can only live
On high, remote, and heartless cliffs;

Obtained by brave, persistent souls
Who, glimpsing hope, grow twice as bold

To scale the heights the spineless shun.
The heaving rounds of Sisyphus

Reveal an empty, glowing tomb:
“Departed is the Christ ye knew…”

No longer cloaked in human flesh
But, vastly more than intimate

He dwells within thy curtained soul
Absurdly more than tangible,

Enfolding pain and muffled tears
In omni-grief that now appears

To drown the ocean. Bless the marred
With whom He trusts to bear the scars

His wounds foretold (for thee and thine
Alone can draw His presence nigh

To mangled hearts). At last, we’ll see
Through God’s galactic tapestry

That all the longest, thickest threads
Were dipped in rubies, rolled in red…

And lo, to those who worship God
No random grief impales the heart;

Nor tempest-waves attack and roar
But crash them safe on heaven’s shore.

And half our lives, I think, we spend
In laboring to comprehend

Incessant rays of Solar Love,
Persistent beams of tenderness

That, spirit-headed, ever shine
And only fail the ones who hide

In caves of blindness, guilt, and shame
(Who think His lucense shrinks and wanes

With every sin). Behold the Man!
Who probes, with microcosmic hands

Our every pore, and in whose vast
Eternal palms the cosmos rests

Like crystal ball… beyond the minds
Of men to grasp the reasons why

A Being like that would condescend
To mites of dust and ignorance;

Who, furthermore, would dare to crave  –
That is, to value  –  human praise

Enough to keep from squashing flat
Benighted, base, and bitter ants.

And, even more, to shrink Himself
(Abasement of Emmanuel!)

To strive and wrestle with the clay
His very hands had scooped and made

From Eden’s loam, and mouth-to-mouth
And lung-to-lung exhale Himself…

Till now, unseen, He leads and holds:
This One with whom we dance.

The Empress

She approaches like fog from the banks of the Siene,
Effervescing her joy…sandaled feet under dress
Make her form seem to float across cobblestone streets
In a dream-woven wondrousness.

I am sure she exists, for such tenure in dreams
Such DURATION reveals that her counterpart trods
´Tween the wrought-iron gates and La Madeline´s place
Where she glows like a daughter of God’s.

And behold, she exudes a hypnotic appeal…
Psycho-shackled by more than inordinate lust
Are the men, young and old, who impulsively turn
Into troubadours singing their loves.

Aging women and girls, as well, make-up mirrors in hand
Surreptitiously capture her image behind
And behold, even actors and athletes are moved
To impose for a casual “Hi!”

Belladonna she is, Lady Death-and-Rebirth
Washed in hyssop, transfigured, or fashioned anew
Is the soul that delights in the Graille of her cup
And who tastes of its magical brew.

And what Byzantine beauty her spirt and form!
She´s enamored with symmetry, daily enthralled
She reflects to the eye what her spirit beholds
And makes wonder-beholders of all.

Synchronicities guide her with crumbs from Above;
What she loves is confirmed by strange omens and signs:
Favorite perfumes and melodies waft in the breeze
At precisely impossible times.

From the bygone she strolls – Renaissance in a dress –
Past the tourists and hawkers and motleys who stare
At this Beautiful Freak who inhabits their midst
And whose SEPARATENESS charges the air.

Yes indeed- and whose holiness frightens the night…
Now do lewdness and merriment part with disgust
Now do addicts rejoice in their spiritual wealth:
Broken bottles and cigarette butts…

There she found me in chains, in a pincushion trance…
Convocation of driftwood and heartache and smoke.
But she brought me to life with the milk of her love
And the honey of infinite hope.

Now have oceans uncrossed…and no longer in dreams
But on statues and paintings and time-burnished coins
Doth she peer like the bust of some Empress of old –

Ever Christian her fullness of joy.

Heaven´s Abyss

What immense, subterranean powers arise
From the foundaries of hell
To the wandering skies…
Ever rolling and seething in anguish of smoke
Is the black heart of man –
But to never lose hope
Turns the soul into something divine.

We who crafted a Rome out of lofty ideals
Watched it burn to the ground in the face of the real
We who fiddled our ashes and martyred our Christs
Never veered from the FALSE to the left or the right
We who ravished our virgins and slaughtered our slaves
Dried His feet with such passion they sweated and chafed
We who hurdled headfirst into heaven´s abyss
(Trailing smoke in our wake, wearing Judas´ kiss)
Left a scar on the face of the earth…

Laughing Lion

Cosmi-comic consciousness:
The greatest grief´s a laugh
To know that life is but a test
That only heroes pass
(That only those who roll the stone
With JOY do not go mad)

Psalm 118

Explain, if you will, what you can´t comprehend
With the eyes of the mind
(Never willed to be blind)
But I felt as the stitches were pulled from my lids
All the people like trees, and the light rushing in
Made me naked and fearless as Christ

Christ, who had willed me to walk on the waves
Take a nap in the storm, reemerge from the grave
Was the one who compelled me to dance like a cork
On the bones of despair, hurling praise to the Lord –
Though my song was the crackle of flames.

Aerial

Saw a ghost of a chance
In a gossamer gown
She was plaintively weeping
With barely a sound
She was runaway angel
All bloody and torn
Just another lost soul in the Quarter…

Revenge

Her beauty was dark as the poems that she scrawled
And her eyes were as burning and black
As a double eclipse of the moon and the sun
Lady Death! There was no turning back…

Little Doña María – they married you young
To a powerful friend of your Dad´s
And you silently wept as his gold-fingered paws
So audaciously stole a caress.

Oh my, what a man! Full of vengeance and lust
Who would murder the sun if betrayed
And he trusted that I – who had rescued him once –
Could be trusted while he was away…

To attend to his wife on her loneliest dawns
Take a walk on the golden haired beach
Or perhaps, hand in hand, make some fresh lemonade
Till our souls, like a tapestry, weaved.

And we knew we were doomed, but the beauty thereof
And assurance that love conquers law
And then too, I confess, steamy cult of the flesh
In my bungalow deep in the woods

“Do you love me?” She cooed.  “What is love?” I replied
And she angrily rolled out of bed
And naked she shrieked as the door busted in
To some swarthy and dangerous man.

“Seize the whore!” thundered one. “Make the libertine watch.
And he opened her cheek with a knife
Then they kicked me to sleep, left the cabin in flames
Dragged her off in the sinister night.

I awoke nearly dead, full of fractures and burns
Crusted blood on my face and my hands
In the home of a Mexican father and son
Who with tenderness nursed me to health.

Bless them both! And I did – with a great wad of cash
Then I called upon some veteran friends:
Crazy Joe, Gunner Dee, fresh n’ smokin´ from ´Nam
And we drew up a plan for revenge…

First we tracked down his thugs, one by one, in the bars
And we hacked off their fingers and toes
One by one, till they talked…and it didn´t take long
Till we learned what we needed to know.

Then a brothel of slaves, taken women and girls
Who we riddled with sickness and drugs
“Where´s María?” I asked.  And I flashed enough bills
To unloose every lip in the slum.

Then I seized the madam by her diamonded throat
Shoved a fistful of bills in her mouth
Shot the panders and thugs, and, to top it all off
Ripped her customers´ testicles off.

And behold, in the very last room that I found
On a sickbed of trauma and grief
With a Frankenstein scar and a well-traveled track
Of fresh tears on her beautiful cheek…

Was the girl whom I loved, barely conscious and pale
As a yellow and worm-eaten shroud
Or a veil for a ghost…how her eyes came to life
When they saw who her visitor was!

“Let the death saint arrive!” And she bitterly wept
As I scooped her up whole in my arms
And she buried her face in my neck and my chest
So as not to acknowledge the scar

But I held her in place, and I kissed it full length
And she groaned while she faded to sleep
“Let it go”, she implored, “Lay your vengeance to rest.
It´s the devil himself that you seek.”

I was taken aback by her dying request
For my love was no match for my hate
And I whisked her away in my trembling arms
While my friends set the prisoners free.

While they busied themselves with the girls getting home
I immersed the bordello in gas
And I roared to the sky as the flames came to life:
“To the death! To the death! TO THE DEATH!!”

I pursued him alone in the mountains he loved
Whereupon, many winters ago
We had hunted and drank and consumed wild boar
By the firelight´s demon-red glow.

Icy breeze through my hair, loaded gun at my hip
Moving specks in the distance revealed
On the yellow-clad grass pair of hunters – alone
So I crept through the woods for the kill…

Then I looked through my sights – and behold, only him
In a jacket of leather and fur
Took his glasses off slow, and his cobra eyes glowed
With an ancient and crafty allure.

Then his demon-lips curled in a sinister grin
And a thunderclap rang in the sky
I collapsed in the dirt feeling dizzy and cold
Lady Death! I´d been shot from behind.

And my thoughts drifted back to the woman I loved –
All our walks on the golden haired beach
Were replaced by his bulk, looming massive above:
“It´s the devil himself that you seek.”

Ariel or the Sea Song

Let the sea-billows roar to the strength of my joy
Let them sparkle and wink; for their whitecaps of foam
Art enamored and brushed by the wingtips of gulls
And the seafarer dreameth of home.

Thou hast lifted my soul from the vortex of death
Though the waves of despair ever swirleth, and pull
With unmerciful force at the wreckage of life –
Hear the curses of madmen and fools!

Thou hast showed me the end of my folly, and lo
Everyday doth the skeleton rattle and dance
All the skulls of my yesteryears, polished and white
Daily grinneth at me from the glass.

Thou hast graced me with powers of death and rebirth
On the corpses of SELF do I step and ascend
And the joy I have found of each birth is increased
By the pain of each precedent death.

Thou hast given me one who is like unto me
Burning Afric she is, of a tropical clime
We are distant and damned as young Phlebas from land:
“What is lonelier, angel, than I?”

She has licked me with lightening. Her cinnamon skin
Hath an odor of oil and lotion and musk
And her hair – o her hair! – is a forest of black
Where I wander from dawn until dusk…

Let the sea-billows roar to the strength of my joy
Let them sparkle and wink; for their whitecaps of foam
Art enamored and brushed by the wingtips of gulls

And the seafarer dreameth of home.

Battle Cry of the Doomed

I have had quite enough of your wisdom and wit
All your gold plated accolades, shiny and thin
And your virtues – as spotless as Pharisees´ Tombs
Insufficient for evil or good.

I have lost my respect for the mellowed and tamed
Though there´s some of you heroes, and martyrs and saints
Though there´s some of you rich and respected as Job
You have yet to collapse; you have yet to explode.

I can only revere who has suffered THE MOST
Whose machine is an engine that tortures the ghost
Who has crawled through a sewer of fish-belly dreams
And emerged with a permanent shriek.

From the bowels of torment is ecstasy born
To ascend high enough for the lightening and storm
To assault who has fearlessly challenged their height
“Have you sunk low enough? Have you riddle and rite?”

All my love for the one who is fated to die
Who was born in a graveyard of body or mind
Who´s aware that he´s doomed – nonetheless, with a laugh
Draws his sword from his sheath and ATTACKS.

Fireworks

Alas! The dam has sprung a leak
The mighty tower groans and sways
The bridge that many millions crossed
On trusting feet – its cables creak
And thousands plummet to their graves.

The raging rivers dry and crack
The scarpèd cliff is smooth and worn
The grand sequoia’s felled at last
By clever, small, insistent hands
And all that´s great is greatly scorned.

The fairest maiden sags and folds
The flowers wilt; the cricket fades
The hoary Brahman muses, stumped
The child grows and moves away.

The chastest flower yields in time
To long, tenacious tongues of lust
The hardest hearts most loudly split;
(Their chasms cleave; their secrets fly)
And all that´s left is bones and dust.

The finest preacher balls his fist
And roars: “God damn you − damn it all!”
The coin rescinds its owner´s wish
It scorns the well it´s falling in,
And all that rises, lo, must fall.

The law of change is grow or die
And both to men are firm decreed:
To rise and burst in motely bits
Of self-extinction, bright and brief!

The Ballad of John Henry, Stagolee and John Brown