BEACON

Against a wall of yellow like sunlit wheat, neurosis cartwheels in jack tumbles, snatched up and spun time and again, larking in the likely lunar histories within each hour as it passes. It is a plucked strand, root and all; a shelled nut; a dried clove in the palm, kicked away by flicking fingers into molten sand to cook there and stink, even as thick, rainbow-shimmering black tar and asphalt clot and roll over the dunes-- even as the tough, lacerating grasses are pasted down with fossil mucus-- they too become the road, the holographic car-park.

Everything gets smeared underneath a dark horizon, the terminal sweeping-under-the-rug. Hands are dusted off and discarded spices and naphthene volatiles mingle in oozing perfumes of a dying, contrapunctal erogenesis with the lavender, roasting meat-- the people smells delivered by faint-hearted breezes from far away.

Divorced to life then, in non-memory; in blackout, it grows like a child of the skull, replete with nervous roots, probing the flaming, choked sands for water; replete with the skull's all-experience, and caving about, hidden and encrypted in a tar-slow dance of shorn-batwing hemorrhage. To ascertain it there, below, is to create it as an untruth. To breathe this seed into life again is to indulge in vicious fiction. Let it hang in earlier memory as an almost-star; a sun that, having the choice, chooses to die against the veil, staining its fabric with hydrogen light as it slumps to the bottom of gravity's bottle.

Wise one.

As soon as there is no sign of stopping within a thing, that thing itself is in its death throes. The worst thing possible-- to realize potential, triggers an acute stress response-- cutting, plucking, breaking hands with hammers-- pummeling a ribcage into submission-- insurance that the heart inside will not fuse; will not transmute iron into gold, least of all in its death.

How shall we then live?

It becomes necessary to manufacture idolatry from its precursors, in the furnace of the Cartesian burlesque, once the colding, deeping flows exsanguinate in the fullness of entropy.

Oh, would that Hedetet had taken up discarded, mammalian wings to match her innoculating, bejeweled breasts! Such a fine pair-- a dilemma-- a trilemma for self-exaltation in fondling-- for self-stinging-- the third leg between her legs, not a leg but the entire sojourn of women-- the ascending, pyramidal flightplan.

She casts about in late panic at blood she could not have lost, yet still lost-- not menstruation, but transpiration-- the roots of travel; temporal paradox shuttering alien realities.

Now she is a robed, trudging figure like so yawning many others, doomed to interlaced slices of possible worlds, possible selves; branches of acausal reality snarling and ensnaring and fickle.

Now a Baltic woman, married, with kerchief and brooches and shawl, digging with a wooden slat into a nest of wood ants and dumping the hole full of gasoline.

Now a molecular biologist, sabotaging the ATP cycle in the bodies of brown mice by day and retiring with a bottle of Shiraz and Thomas Friedman by night.

Now an Inuit grandmother and granddaughter both, rapidly fluttering, shifting with one another, flipping in indeterminable positions-- one in the snow, one carried by that one; one on the lap, one on the sealskin floor, providing the lap; one just beginning life, one at its end-- and both of them toothless and grinning in wrinkled, rank Love's whale oil light.

At last, covered in black and mute, she waits as all the babies of the desert attend their ears and moan as the scorpion responds, chittering, to the heartbeat of the world-- where is our goddess, they cry; where Inanna our protectrix; where might Nehushtan appear in the low sun of the valley, for we are envenomated by lies, colloidal with neurotoxic machines-- militarized by syringes full of little black fictions like little black books-- little black ink marks of pulverized ash and sheepfat-- the killing salve pumped into us by martyrs. Oh would that she who might have saved us all been able to reform her excised wings, not to have left us in this clandestine, final war with the ashamed and their material alacrity.

In this sweet time, the sweetness of nothing. The sweetness of not speaking, of not being spoken to, the sweetness of no foot on the stair, no clink of key or snarl of motor. Death is always rubbing her nipples against the ear of the poet, teasing in velvety silences a billion shades deep.

Death takes Hedetet in all her guises away, having been written out on the tongue of the dark road. The scorpion responds by becoming plush, stuffed, squeaky-- a toy tossed on a child's bed. The rise, turn, and rasp of happenstance, of clothing-- urinary reminders of the body; the smile of the stomach-- holes never empty and never filled-- a perfection state. No wants, except for the words to come close, but never arrive-- never unify with the murk of the real underground rivers from which all roots must drink; all stingers poison.

How self-satisfied.

How smirking is the poet.

That he becomes the savior goddess by pretending with words-- is only diminished by its reality; the reality of his transubstantiation. That he puts her away without a care, for later use maybe. It's as easy as jerking off to closed-eye visions. Cocks and tits and pussies, mouths and hands and fingers and asses, bat wings and historical garb-- all splattered with red honey, honey.

That's how Religion comes into the world-- by means of a nervous beacon, buried under the roadway, waiting for the signal to explode.

Always end everything with a lie.

Always.