The Fireclowns (Book I)

Book I: The Intricate Theogonies Of the Damned

1- Disruption

An allure for disruption,
what a calming terror that beauty brings
forth from the shadow of the most
common myth-- perpetuated and
habituated by man

That nature holds to any court of law
or conventions of science--
nor that civilization is anything
more than it had already known
a thousand times before

Sitting curled and her gaze lost in the
dark furls of her own hair, a chair
poised, aesthetically in an open space
of the room filled with acrid scents and
senses that were anything but natural
Soaps and disinfectants, lotions and salves

...such unnatural smells were the easiest to find in the wilderness-- both within and without walls; that it made her stomach lurch and crawl

as she tried to look away,
outside of this strangeman's little world,
and see something beyond
the stone and glass, devils and dust--
to find one, something familiar
to all of creation

"How are you this morning?" she did not
have to face him to recognize that artificial
smile, a mask of compassion perhaps set
to hide or over-ride the infection of indifference
to anything that fell outside those imaginary lines
humanity placed themselves between.

She could smell something from deeper below
that made her smile-- only in that those reactionsf
or which he had no control were, indeed,
wholly common to all creatures

"It doesn't really matter, now does it,"
her head cocked and her hair parted that they
might, for the first time, actually see eye to eye.
"Little matter to how I may feel, you will try to fix
it I suspect"...

Dr. Coleman blinked away his disbelief, for
the girl had been here for over a week and
had yet to speak a single word to anyone.

"Do you think that you need to be fixed?"

She laughed darkly, tossing back her head
and staring up at the many small patches
of white-board that formed a ceiling or lid
to this man's little box

"Something's gotta give," she smirked
as she lowered her gaze back
down toward his aging face.
"My sister will be very upset
that you brought me here,"
she brought her gaze lower, fallen
away from his and into the palms of her hands;
where she scratched deeply at the lines that
said things she did not wish to be told to any man.

"I see, and why is that?" Keith Coleman
asked, as a peculiar compulsion rose up
from the hollows of some unknown place--
such urges are often inexplicable, but to
Dr. Coleman-- violence was an anathema.

An allure for disruption, what
terrible joys that beauty brings
forth from the shadow of the most
common myth-- perpetuated and
habituated by man...

"Isn't this the place where
all of your crazy people come
to become... sanitized?"
A malicious smile played at her lips,
though it was not directed at him so much
as her play upon the words and their meanings

"A place for all those unpretty emotions
that upset your fragile little balance;
of how we all should think, feel... believe?
But what if what your patients feel is actually
more natural than how you might wish, or
desire to feel. What if what you believe they
should be is wrong, and that you never really
knew them at all... beyond what you tried
to turn and misshape into... something other
than what it really was."

"Those that come here are not happy"...

"They're lives too disrupted," a nasty sort
of giggle followed his comment as he looked
back towards her to see that she was
watching him very closely again-- and
his face flushed slightly,
another involuntary response to what
she could not know, nor
could he explain it if she should know
those seemingly unnatural compunctions
those rose up hotly, and refused to be
brushed aside with such sensibilities of
who they both were and how he was supposed
to behave and feel toward her...

An almost fear-like instinctual reaction withdrew reluctantly by a perpetual force of his will to act other than how he felt-- something dark, foreign and hostile seemed to have been just newborn within him... seemingly in some strange reaction to her presence.

Something that gradually settled
into small controllable waves of discomfort--
rising and ebbing back,
yet never fully gone
and threatening in each
and every rush to overwhelm that rational
and logic that had always served him so well in the past.

"Rag-doll," she spoke as if from out of the blue,
her voice startling him
away from his own thoughts,
and leaving him bewildered.
"That is what the last man I knew called me,
and it seems as good a name as any other"...

"What did your Mother call you," Dr. Coleman
interjected, almost angrily, though restrained
tenuously within his voice and demeanor.

"Now I can't tell you that," she giggled, curling
up her other leg beneath her petite frame and
the over-sized shirt she had been given. Neither
that, nor the baggy pants, hid her over completely.
"Mother would never forgive me."

"Why is that?" Keith Coleman forced his gaze
towards the file on his desk, and the small notepad
where he seen his pen quivering in his own hand;
though it didn't seem like his hand at that moment--
the hair and nails seemingly magnifying, as if to remind
him that he was just another mammal--

A species of creature that
no one really fully understood--
that for every control and law
that was implaced and was broken every day;

that such as were considered outlaws were dumped away in cages; and then there were those, such as she that were sent to him-- who hadn't really done anything wrong, but did not act right...

"Take it or leave it, as it is
the only name Iwill give you."

He became more agitated with
himself as he involuntarily startled
as she spoke again.

"Why did he call you Rag-Doll?" a knowing
smile remained steadfast upon her face.

"You tell me," her gaze seemed to relent
as she kicked the shoes off her feet and
stared calmly down toward her toes. "I
really don't have any control over
how a man thinks... nor what he wants from me."

Her gaze shot up and Dr. Coleman
nearly flinched back and away from it

An allure for disruption,
what a calming terror that beauty brings
forth from the shadow of the most common myth--
perpetuated and habituated by man...

"I really don't feel comfortable calling
you that," he put his eye to the page,
his eye widening as he seen what his hand
had scrawled deeply and heavily into the
frail flesh of the paper.

"Oh well, we can't have you feeling...
so uncomfortable, now can we?
How's about bitch? Or maybe whore...
Slut or cunt...
I haven't really been called
a wench in a while, but you can choose
from them whatever makes you feel...comfortable."

"In situations like this, I prefer to use Jane...
as in Jane Doe. If you refuse to tell me your
real name, I hope that will suffice"...

"Oh, I doubt you've had a situation quite
like this before-- and that seems just a little too
cute for my tastes. But it is your comfort we are,
so concerned about, so I suppose that it'll suffice."

"You were saying something about your sister before,"
he redirected her away from him, in hopes
that he might recover his senses in time--
and find some wayto crack through that hardened exterior shell...

"Not really.
It just seemed like a fair warning--
if you keep me here, she'll come for me,
and then there will be Hell to pay."

"She might think we were trying to hurt you?"

"Not 'we' Sweetheart, only you."

"Now why in God's name would I
ever try to hurt you?" Keith Coleman smiled
that same sort of smile he had worn
when he first spoke to her...

An allure for disruption, what
a terrible rush that beauty summons
forth from the shadow of the most
common myth-- perpetuated and
habituated by man...

"Funny that you should say that,"she grinned,
almost sad-like, but did not even try to explain
the comment beyond a sigh and a shrug.
"Just so in as I know
how I should plan to spend my day;
What is God's name this month?"

"It was just a common expression,"
Keith Coleman studied her reaction
more closely as he seemed to have
struck a more sensitive sort of nerve in her.

"Are you religious?"

"In a manner of speaking, I suppose that I am--
whether I actually wish or want to be is another question."

"I'm confused," Keith brow knit
closely before she began to nod.

"Don't worry, I am kind of used to that.
It really doesn't become too upsetting until
you will try to kill me."

"Kill you?"

"Yep, and then you'll try to blame me for it."

"Now why would I do that?"

"I don't know exactly--
You're the new witch-doctor,
you tell me," her head cocked aside, but
her accusatory gaze never veered away from his.

"Is that what happened with Mr. Travis?"

Dr. Coleman turned his gaze back towards
the file, where in was kept a record from the trial
to find the name of the man whose body
was found in the same house that she had
been found.

"More or less."

"Did you kill him?"

"No, that was my sister that did that."...

"Because he hurt you."

"For the record, he was actually trying to kill me."

"How come you didn't tell anyone--not before,
not the police when they picked you up--
not even the judge.
It says that you haven't said a word
since you were taken into custody, and
if you are innocent"...

"Now-now, I didn't ever say that.
There was really no reason to say anything to them."

"Were you trying to protect your sister?"

"She hardly requires any assistance from me,
but to answer that question a little more directly--No."

"Then why wouldn't you tell them what happened?"

"So they would bring me here."

"Why would you want to come here?"

"This is where you were."

"Do we know each other?"

"Kind of a one-sided sort of deal actually.
For instance, you calling me Jane is tolerable, I suppose...
as long as I don't have to call you Tarzan."

"If there is something else you would prefer"...

"Do you know what the name Jane means?"
she blinked at him, incredulously.

"No, I am afraid that I don't."

"Typical," she rolled her eyes and sighed
before going back to playing at her toes.

An allure for disruption, what
a love for possession that beauty brings
forth from the shadow of the most
common myth-- perpetuated and
habituated by man...

"Our time for today is done," he
filled the silence they had left behind
as he had waited for her to tell him
what the name meant--
but she obviouslyhad no intention of doing that.

"I would really like to know what you think I have to do with you coming here."

"Long story," she said as she popped up
quickly from the chair.
"And our time for today is done," she made
as if she were trying to impersonate his voice,
deeper and nearly to a bellowing that sounded
nothing like him.

"Very well, perhaps next time." Dr. Coleman
stood up and moved around her to open the
door for her. "You do not have to be afraid of
me. I can assure you that I would never harm
you in any way."

"I never said I was afraid of you," she winked at
him as she moved past, and then down the corridor
towards another door... and then she was gone.

Peace,
Po

The Fireclowns (Opening Verses)

1. Pandemonia

The unabide of what little vanities
one may endure-- the test of the
inordinate creature, to each suffered
by some small degree of time
and life, is what the mind or heart
chooses to remember

Beyond the drop of a lash, within
that blink an infinitismally brief
nod to peer beyond all of this angry
toys

As the locust wept a fiddler's lament
sate upon the summer's spend
of energies and passions that now
lay cold, undone within the devils' field

"Come down off your throne
and leave your body alone--
Somebody must change"...

A restless calming overtook him
after he had long unlocked the spirits
hidden deep within the colored-glass
bottle and they swept through him-- mercilessly

A possession of the heart's own vampires
fallen and taken aback to a place, not so
unalike the grave-- another rebel of gravity
stolen from Heaven's eye and thus transfixed
and mesmerized by the glittering dancer
locked deep within the stone

"You are the reason I've been waiting here so long--
Somebody holds the key"...

Naked, save for the mask; a grotesquerie
of a clown's face such as the old Europeans
may have designed such an inhuman
feature to make themselves feel...

A marionette of the intangible fed
those bare soles into the grains of the wood,
keeping herself away from the floor and
frantic (perhaps) to escape the lights
that defined her presence, without shadow

So oversept and mis-spent, he had become
one more of the helpless audience to the
nameless, seemingly hapless, creature
behind the silver mask

"Well, I'm near the end and I just can't find the time"...

Hidden unto these dark charms,
and thus to appease the cabal
of those engorged, lustful daemons
that the creature-heart will call upon...

The bloom of fresh frenzies
drawn and drug out from the earth
from the bottom-less pit of the insatiable mind
and small fears too numerous to separate

From the spirits and angels
cold and distant as the wind,
A punk-tooth mis-grown
deep within the back of the head

"Well, I'm wasted and I can't find my way home."

"The Rose," the name trickled forth from
his lips as soon as his mind had seized
upon it again

That, as near as soon as some small
piece of memory had been recovered,
did this perversed passion play rebegin
by the entrance of a figure in white.
Over its chest was a painted green slash;
masculine and mercurial...

"We're a ship without a storm
the cold without the warm
a light inside the darkness that it needs"...

He, that was known as Punk-Tooth
felt a sudden urge to laugh, and yet
his breath forbid it's escape from
inside of his lungs, where it grew
darker and swelled like an incurable disease

As she that was the dancer Rose
tripped and fell backwards... away
as if trying to hide from the Light
of another peculiar being

"We're a laugh without a tear
a hope without the fear;
and we are coming...
HOME!"...

Punk-Tooth felt his eyes grow heavy,
and dull as the robed figure extended
forth and accusatory finger, pointed down
to where she began to writhe, as if it had
somehow touched her, and buried itself
somewhere deeply between pleasure and pain

"We're off to the witch!
We may never ever come home,
but the magic that we'll steal is worth a lifetime!...

We're all born upon the cross !
in the throw before the toss!...
You can release yourself
but the only way to go is down!"...

Punk-Tooth's eyes narrowed slightly
as he the dagger flash and turn outwards
within the white robed figure's hand

"We don't come alone
We are fire!
We are stone!--
We're the hand that writes then quickly moves away..."

Punk-Tooth's eye widened as the
white creature rose over the naked
woman, itself wearing a similar clown-like
mask of gold-- and laughter, like shock,
erupted up from out of his throat
as that unforgiving blade
plunged downwards upon her.

"We'll know for the first time... If we're evil or divine we're the last in line!"

Peace,
Po

Today, As We Rise

Where that every human structure
lean't by curve and intention to wrestle
the heavens with an inarticulate manner

Awakening soft;
one can never untrain the soul
to seek a mortal nest from the
dreams it collects, and recollects

Beauty without a face, but a gentle
warm voice to rise and unbury the sun
from those shadows before her eye
has opened and sing to her

A song that had never been created
before you knew her there, sleeping
soft and far away from any part of you;
save the memory she left for you to find

A smile, tucked beneath your own lips
and a melody for the sunrise.

Peace,
Po

Fingerprint

Struck by an inordinate and precarious sense...

An awakening by degree from
those shallow depths and arisen
from the most simple organism;
a child's first words are craft
of a more sacred sense of need
than those wants that must be
afforded for its survival

Drawn away from those obscure
impure lights of my wicked carnivals,
a purge, not in of some sense of loss
as the cautious & ridiculously timid
drive-- off and away from the
primitive highways that nature
endures everything man has ever
created

... of the self, this imperfect reflection
of paradise cannot hold every image
and charicature that has moved away
from the earth unto memorae's most
sacred ground that the heart keeps
fertile and green-- a noble sanctuary
comprised of such ordinary people
as the heart has known before the
road, together, upon this world
ended.

For those left behind,
a hallowed pause to mark the loss
with a mark; like a scar that will
ever hold more than merely what
pain was caused, but a place to
return what never truly ended
since they were lost...

A depository of whatever beauty
the eye adores as significant or
unsual...

There are ne'er anybodies kept
closer than this, an all too intimate
graveyard where the road weary
soul is want to come in those quiet
hours that it is safe to feel anything

Again, though it can never the same
as it once had been before...

Moved away; beyond this past and
the gate that memory shall always keep
sacred. For there shall always be those
reasons kept that anything had been
begun. Immediacy, that proximity
grown further than anyone could touch--
even its keeper, a Vestal-like flame

I can still see its light in the rear-view
mirror as I had found a new machine
for which I could move, only to stop again
and pause at this unknown river's edge;
a fresh cigarette to feed those hungry
cancers of such emotional decay that one
can always wonder if a new life is truly possible;
from here, until tomorrow

Maybe I will sleep in old Bablyon
for a night or two; or perhaps...

It strikes me as selfish to leave
this dark solitude as my mind's eye
returned towards the
reckless calliope'an sounds--
comprised of such mad-flitting
melodies and what sights
of a lost chile's wonderland

It would be untrue to say that
nothing can ever touch you there,
so much as wounds are rarely
deeper than the flesh.

How vain to strike a match
to memorae, as if these are lesser
creatures than the ones that you
had once convinced yourself
you must love;
and a slight return, at best...

They had told you that they loved you first...
And would say it again, as of it were some
kind of obligatory mantra or sacred rite to be
observed whenever it felt weak

I have always been a firm believer
that like any other god, no one ever truly
knows what heart is-- save that it must
be discovered, naturally and alive-- growing
not in some horticulturist's store, but lost
somewhere within a field

the heart is like a wildflower that cannot be altered
to transform it into some greater vision of
beauty than it was before...

and there are other times that I have convinced myself
I do not know anything about it at all.

Ignorance often seems safer than the unknown,
though I have never been known to spare myself
any harm for the loss of something that seemed
to hold my attention and keep it, longer
than a glance, steadier than a daydream

"Do no harm?"

She asks me if I had ever heard
trees shiver when the first winds of autumn
stirred, and shed away from itself that part
that it could not keep from dying

As a shiver passes through me as if
to harken me back to the carnivals of the dead.
One can always belong their, and perhaps
even believe that they have become some
necessary part of the troupe

Terrible are the passions of the Fire-clowns...

Claws of depravities torn deep
into the back, until your rage is
spent and your body is drenched
in blood and sweat--collasped
into the slender and pretty arms
that may keep you wamr and still,
or strangle you in your sleep

One learns to accept the risks of dreaming...

Dylan cries me awake, my eye
caught by nothing more than the
heart of this unknown river

"Been so long since a strange woman has slept in my bed,
Look how sweet she sleeps, how free her dreams must be"...

Dylan says--
son of a bitch steals all my best thoughts
and then sings them back to me.

"Yeah, I was getting to that-- you ass!"

I grumble as the song, "I and I", ends
knowing I will probably have to buy it now--
What a pushy bastard...

There's more dear reader, but to know
what else Dylan has to say-- buy the fricking Cd!
I'm not giving him any more of the glory...

A cigarette is a near perfect excuse to stop,
as the cops just wouldn't understand why
anyone would even give a shit about some nameless
river... let alone stop to see it

Like I really care what society expects
what I should feel or how I should react,
as there have been only a few that allow
any room to kick up their muddy boots
and track up my dirt-floor palace

Or to ride with me down a back-road
world-- as it is rare that I find any need
for speed, as it kills the endurance and
how long you're going to last. Not like
I am really into survival so much--
Yeah, I'll light another one in a minute

Not like I really into dying so much neither...

I watch the cigarette drop, spilling
and tumbling down into the current,
where it spills over the rock rapidly
and turned away around a bend

Of an electric and neon bound,
out and off toward the desert sky;
and a sunrise that threatens to be beautiful
with such colorful clouds, that
tomorrow will rain

I wonder if somewhere there grows a desert wildflower.

I can create a fanciful story of a man and
a woman in love, I can even make it last forever--
which is where the story will likely have to close.
I mean, no one really wants to hear about the rest
of the day to day existence, and doing what one
has to do-- an everyday world just doesn't sell
in the romance department

She had asked me if I ever heard
the trees shiver, when the first winds
of autumn stirred, and shed away a
part of itself that it could not keep from dying

I wonder that she knew she left a fingerprint on my memorae

I wrote a lovers-story once, though I cannot
see Harlequin beating down my door to buy it.
They both had issues and other hang-ups,
no grand sweeping whoop-de-doos
really (though the li'l gal did have some fire)

Now it's not like I am one to go around peddling morals,
but I suppose this story had one-- or near enough to
make the pass at something respectable leastwise.

The deal was that the guy took the time to figure out
something that her heart & soul really wanted
(beyond his time & company)
and then proceeded to make it happen...

This struck me as a love story, though
by a fairly twisted, and not always pleasant path
it did wend around to one single day and event.

I had considered writing a sequel to Cathedral,
but I just can't find anything more to say about it;
not that anybody is ever going to care to read leastwise.
I have never editted it, and so it sits with all of its flaws
intact-- which happens just a little bit too often

I have always been a firm believer that
like any other god, no one really knows
what the heart is-- save that it must
be discovered within one another...

It would be untrue to say that nothing
can ever harm you there, deeper than
the flesh...

I wonder that she realized she had left such a fingerprint on my memorae.

Peace,
Po

Nether-dweller On the Fringes: Citizenry

Slipping away by all of this silence
driven toward a small, dark and empty space along this midnight drive...

Confession: hear these
dreams of the willful heart
shall overtake us and
recreate us, over and again
Over, when reason reinstates
its hold over every sense

To this account of what is
gained and what has been lost,
emerging back to where we
were, once before, and recomposed
Dust seems a far more common
and comprensible matter

I had driven all through that
darkness, racing against the
night wind and those
innocent shadows
that I have kept-- willingly
but mostly unwillingly

a blackening rosary whose
pearly beads are fashioned
by every breath,
to sin again until we had both
become too breathless...

Confession: hear this
memorae; a vacant desire closing
its weary eye e'er too slowly,
and slow to resist those
restless provocations of old devils;
to relent without repentance
for what had once grown
full of such precious imaginings

to retrace those lines within the
palms of our hands, and change
this most familiar and sure course
of every outlaw and pariah, cast
out, farther and further away
to spare us both unto a brighter,
if yet still e'er imperfect world

"I'm going down, down, down, down
I'm going down, down, down"...

Springsteen echoes and sways
to steer away and around, then
back again toward what some
old idlewile that was lost

... such is always the cost of all this dreaming

Confession: hear this, the unquiet
of the mind and body is only
the trembles of the soul, as it
shivers and then delivers up its very
last hope for salvation in a single tear

"We come home early burning, burning"...

Slight quiet, to this return to damnation alley
where I had once been reborn, a'back
and floating within those shallow shadows,
where nothing is truly gained nor lost
but the time you spend, never really
wondering about tomorrow-- as death
will ever be there waiting, patient and
methodical gray hunter

"I'm going down, down, down, down--
I'm going down, down, down"...

Confession: Turn, and returned to
where all those hapless creatures go,
the bitter luxury of sorrows sea
reminding of who we are; tranquilized
by nicotine and other abandonments
of the flesh... I would release you there
if it were in my power

A Roman Candle burns, reminding
me yet again of the war and still wondering
what the hell is everybody fighting
and dying for-- and why am I there
with you, when I should have been here;
fighting and dying for...

Air... from the depths of this sea's
a fiery stillness hovers, flickering
on the mirror surface
and a willingness to breathe all of it
inside, to drink or drown it own
before the light fades away upon
perhaps one last Independence Day

And we are only left with dark that
surrounds us, until the next morn.

Peace,
Po

Affliction (Cantos 5-8)

5.


To witness it all before I can allow it to die...

through what horror,
born the exudiate
of what terrible affectations
will mask a soul

yet, beneath the skin are darker things
the keep of memorae
and the bask of this midnight
disease which corrupts with
nothing more than a touch

hidden within the heart
of this world, insensate to
the golden symptomology

we can be reborn or die
in any given moment—
one another's devil or savior,
whatever the season requires of us
to suffer these convictions,
like addictions...

there is still e'er too much untold.

6.

The pain drive--—
shrieking in the hallowed dungeon
of the heart; cursed or condemned
to the truth

he came down from the hill
heir unto those ancient houses
of the Moon, another chile
borne of Mother Night

there is always the presumption
that our own daemons are the most
corrupt... prone to a uncontrollable
blindness, our own heart and
its actions untested to either cause
or effect

the Moira are not so fortunate
as to dream of our own salvations--
only to submit unto the
current evil that a greater one
mightn't befall us all...

which will haunt and torment the heart and mind forever.

7.

"the warmth will eventually reject you,
but this coldness shall never release you"...

Borne unto the seclusion
for in all of those imaginary
lines-- a lover that sought
to keep and protect her

her mind was always suspect,
as that she perceived the world
merely through that stained window
of darkly colored glass, a litany
of truths within a house of a such
a fragile heart

she would never have
deliberately chosen him,
only to submit unto
such a debauchery was
more of affect of her own
self destruction

she might have forgiven his
indulgences, save that there
was no deliverance

"let Heaven have you, if it wants"...

his laughter would not be
her final memory of him,
as he caste her battered and
broken body unto the sea

likely unaware of what a horror
he had created inside of her
as he watched her-- a'float
within that small pool of her
own blood, which eventually
disperse into the vaster humor
of the tide

'Mama,' that child's prayer
unspoken, yet still heard--
her delirous and still mortal
body recoiling downward
as her spirit was lifted away
unto that dark, beautiful of
Mother Night

8.

And become her this
dark lady of the tides...

the Moira are more vast
than the heart may want
to tell, the sophisticate devils
that mankind had unforgiven
to forgottenance

an incredible creature to all;
save the eye that is willing to
stare on past its own thought
of what could and what should never be

we are a small and wicked voice
of such an infinite cause...
of a temptation
to escape the heart and lungs
that which will never relinquish
us from the fate we, Moira and
man, had begun within the warmth
of flesh

screaming our prayers of watery torrents,
tasting our own idols of malicous fruit
and of that which can never be recomposed
once it has been bitten by the death-worm;
which infects us all with such painful disillusionments

That we must be forced to create
fresh allusions of those phantom-hearts,
that all once held sacred becomes
once again, composed of dust
and diverser devils than we had ever
sought to communicate
into language-- and suffer that it
may ever be spoken of

dreaming aloud.

Peace,
Po

Affliction (Cantos 1-4)

A small wicked voice--
of an infinite cause
of temptation
to escape the lungs,
as that which it will never reliquish
us from the fate that we
begun in the warmth of flesh

screaming our prayers of watery torrents,
tasting idols of malicious fruit;
for which can never be
recomposed once it has been
bitten by the death-worm
that infects us with such a painful disillusionment

as once, when we could sing for one
another; to sleep in bitter-sweet
sexual melodies and
a subconscious malady
of the heart,
which was still ticking
when I left

the floor of regret.

2.

Summerside--
the high before noon,
when the sea-birds seem angry
at the invasion, and stubbornly
refuse to lit upon the sand

you cannot really teach any
creation about shame unless it
owns some share of your pain

there is a young woman
eating an apple angrily, the
Bible on her lap open to those
latter day creatures not
apportioned to any day,

save that when night approaches,
the moon like a pearl,
she becomes a goddess
in high-heels, the vivid old
lipsticks of seduction and stain

lady vampyre-- the ghost in the
amphyorae, chained to the
flesh immortal-- just another
angel of desire & pathos

the catalyst of another downfall
in the shattered mirror of paradise.

3.

She teaches her lovers of rage
with a kiss; pushing them back
beneath the rising tide, and
deeper still with those unforgiving
depths of sufferage

caught up within an undertow of pain,
drown with merciless imperfection.

4.

It is a perfect darkness,
undefiled by any source of light--
the heart plunged through
a wall-less corridor
of senstivities, damned
to another's instinct

an abomination, misbegotten
eternal- the night rains soft, the
womb burned sterile as the new
ungrowth is removed by fire and
tears, eventually destroyed by
erosion

there is some benevolence
in his arrogant contempt, that
he had only acquired a taste
for beauty, and accept no
lesser creation to his table
of self-destruction

his love is pitiless,
a desires for what
he most loathes in
the man he was before

afflicted by
The Sorrows of
Young Werther


"the warmth will
eventually reject,"
his whisper a smile
of loathing-- "but
this coldness shall
never release you."

... a spilled match
and all memory of
her is consumed.

Darker Than Wonderland

Low, and to what other
diverse daemon thoughts
may like torn from a book
of breaths and lie shattered
on the shore

A glassy surfaced oblivion
unfixed within a quiet stare

Beyond the thick citrus after-taste
of sterilized lemonade,
through the hazy screen of imitation pine

... Lingers a human scent.

This eye,
coaxed and cajoled
like a timid animal,
crouch deep in dark pools

the other eye
a spiritual acuity,
taste a spectrum of color
in a world of black and white

A bitter pill,
to never feel anything aloud...

Savage messiahs,
purge with fire- anethema;
say what you really mean
even if I still don'treally understand it

I think I can show you
how to be real,
when you're scripted
into the part of a dreamer

When we are incurably sane.
It's just a little darker than Wonderland.

Heart In a Basket

The highway spilling like an asphalt corridor
and the urge of those dissonant strings
snapping like a cracking whip at my back
and spurring me on into this unknowable wilderness

A blank and impenetrable wall of a wild darkness ...

Scribbles, graffitti near like a past-life,
runes erode heavily about those road-weary eyes,
hidden only by those thin and colored panes
of mirrored glass,
and the dreams that they echo

An imitation of civilization reflects back
the near sacred images of power, sex,
and any other mortal allusions to those
creatures of pain

Tomorrow, some of them will likely be found floating...

Adrift and away beyond the panache
for which they had come to adorn
all these tympanic high-walls
of some hollow form of noise & righteousness,
are merely another nameless portrait of loss

When nothing touches deeper
than any other given moment,
there will always have to be
those small sacrifices of truth

Something like the infant-Moses in a basket...

Drawn away by those river devils
toward some ancient great house
of an old foreign god--

Raised and educated among
the wonders of both good and evil;
a silent child of all that civilization

Thothema... the name breaks free, alive
and orphaned from modern thought
which had little been considered anything
but dead... or impotent

Such as are always left for those keepers of night and its secrets.

Peace,
Po

Window of Time

The traveler, drawn to beauty of lush shadows and heavenly bodies
the ecstastic mad-laughter of Aphrodite, borne and swelling upward;
the percussion, and repercussions, of another's heart-beat
felt within the pulse of a murkier tide, withdrawn into an undertow
into those imperceptible depths

Two young lovers at the midnight bridge, where only one
will be able to walk away and the other must remain--
like a ghost, clung and held to that finite space of a living world.

... Yet neither will cross to the other side, ever again.

Peace,
Po

Almost Pointless

Led along another dead-end road
where I left my vehicle behind
to test my brand new shoes
upon unlevel ground

I think I only fell twice,
but I quit counting after the first time
Where I met a woman
whom was counting the petals
from fresh daises
that were called black eyed susans,
but they were still really daises
that meant something different
than daises should ought to

She was feeding the stalksto her pony-
She said that she thought
all those love me/love me nots
were probably toxicto wild creatures.

I thought she had her pony tamed & trained
until it got full
and then turned and walked away
alone

I wasn't really sure if she was sad or not,
because she had left too.
But I picked up all of thepetals
of love and hate and threw them in the air
It started to rain.

I hadn't really intended
for that to happen,
but it did anyways.

I thought there would be more
daises here soon
because that happened.
I heard they like fresh water.