RAG AND BONE MAN
Misdirection.
Frantically waving
The world tries to warn :
Going the wrong way!
Looking out
When you should be
Looking in.
In the palace
Broken debris accumulates.
(Holding a red, wriggling
Worm of thought.
Articulated, reticulated,
Sinuous, slippery.
Transfixed now,
Sectioned.
It oozes
Phonemes,
It oozes
Pheromones.
Colours of, shapes of,
Moments of, pain of,
Pleasure of.
The demon (daemon)
Of Meaning,
No Archon this,
Nothing but Choronzon –
Crowley’s chaos beast.
Bright bubbles of edge
Bursting into void.
Clasping reality:
The cliff-face, wave-foam,
Everything
And nothing revealed.)
In the palace,
Silent, deserted,
Debris put by:
Collected are souvenirs,
Remembrances, clues,
Identifiers, histories,
Reasons, threats, excuses.
What has been rejected,
Labelled unacceptible,
Exerts as much gravitational pull
As the central proud combustion
Of signposted identity.
At the edge
We place the dark gods,
The Titans, the giants from before.
The ones whose names
We have all but forgotten,
The ones of the earth,
The child-eaters,
The self-generators.
With stick and staff
The thick-lensed caricatures,
Bewebbed stuttering scholars,
Chemical smudged whitecoats,
Steadfastly measure and dissect.
Never looking within
Never stirring the dusty dragons
The leering, prancing obscenities
The brilliant but quite mad molecules.
For, tell me if I am mistaken,
Is not the person but a bombastic dictator?
No democracy there, no credence given
To heart or lung or liver.
A hijacking by a handful
Of slick, white myelin-sheathed johnnies,
Serotonin spivs, smart mouthed,
Cocky seen-it-alls, know-it-alls.
These our trusted advisors,
These our judges, our jurors
Pretending po-faced objectivity,
Arbiters of reality,
Politic grandparents
Guiding us away
From the dark corners
The guts in the cellar
The stains and axe marks
The awkward questions
The nightmare realities
Of distinct extinction
Irreparable re-examination
Of priorities.
The patient sublimates.
The patient projects.
The psychopath, quite reasonably,
Believes a distinct view
Nothing but a gift, a duty.
Fearing that anathema
Of the Irrational,
The horror of insanity,
The embarrasment of pettiness
That dwells within,
A roil of unscientific, subjective
Oddness
(we all know it, we all know it
How can we not know it?)
Sweeping the dirty
And the improper continually
Under the carpet,
Rearranging the tired flowers,
A quite flick of the duster,
A spray of masking wholesomeness.
Spending nation’s worth
Probing the fractions of matter,
Qualifying,
quantifying statistical expectations,
Mathematically generated creatures,
Galactic searchings,
Subatomic manhunts
Whilst
Heroically
Ignoring
That one thing
We can call ours,
The architecture
Of thought,
Pulse of Memory,
Symbiosis of consciousness,
Monster of imagination,
The flicker of
Inward sound,
Power
Behind the throne.
We cannot, m’lud,
Declare the patient sane
Nor their acts judicious
Nor their perceptions true
Lest the evidence is forthcoming
From the Defence.
Is the ghost a demon?
Is it a god?
By their acts shall ye know them
By the world they allow
Not by their advertising campaigns,
Not by their multiple-choice questionaires
Not by their glossy manifestos.
Not by anything
But the evidence of their own,
Lonely, determined dive
Past the mechanoid elves,
Past the phosphorescent jellyfish
Past the trembling glory
Past the irrefutible
Past the last possible excuse
Past the only reason
Past the words and past the silence
At last to the bright halls,
The shining paths,
The alien, familiar gardens.
I hung for nine nights
I hung for nine days
Upon the World Tree.
Naked, I reached downwards,
Screaming I took up the runes,
Word upon word
Word to wellness
World was woven,
One Eye am I,
One view, completed.
simonhlilly 