Thu, 19 May 2005

I kings 13:24-28
once, just barely no longer a child
i was asked to lie in a field of wheat grown on charnel-blood.
my body’s shape marked by bent and broken stalks,
i was to look between specific stars
until a message was spelt for me in the heavens.
there were half-birthed animals, out there in the fields,
dogs with cracked cartiledge for paws,
calves without eye sockets.
they were made sick by the pull of the stars,
searching the ground for a hole to die in.
i could hear the slow slack breathing of other people,
searching the same skies,
the light broken by the tears turned to hoar’s frost in their eyes.
years passed, and we collected moisture in our lungs,
decayed memories of ligotti, ruysbroeck,
the index left of our shared carnal sin,
you asking me to identify the stains which remained —
cloud-bodies, ink losing form in water.
when they had left me, when i had emptied,
i beheld a vision of the horned moses.
betrayed by jerome and cursed by the eternal memory of the church,
a mumbled exegesis as to my misunderstanding
of elijah as the first of the weather-prophets,
of which i may be the last
(should these truly prove to be the end days).
were i a prophet, i was told,
i would be sent to fufil deed and premonition,
not to make speeches and frayed book-parts.
what, then, i spoke through cracked lips and dried throat,
of ezekiel, of jeremiah? what, then, of you?
my tendons severed and my limbs grown as roots,
i ached to turn myself to face him,
but my eyes would only lie, my sight mislead.
you know nothing of which you speak, he told me,
and i knew to the bottom of me that he was right.
in the distance, i heard the approach of the beast.

these is but one moment,
and all things contained within.
my name has been stripped from me,
betrayed by kings and cursed by the eternal memory of the church,
and now i am but the blood from which the wheat feeds,
and though my imprint remains in the grain
we know, all, it is over.
(12:09.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #