simonhlilly

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.

Read Full Post »