I write the devil so he may appear.
He is gone before I feel his tender flame
Or the stroke of fear.
I write oxytocin deep in the vein,
And as the ersatz voice whispers her name
I am gone before I appear.
Letters coil around my neck,
The Balrog’s whip, tight,
Asphyxiated, I give in, confess
“I am no writer, and I cannot write.”
Yet I must write, and write, and write.
When I sleep, my parenthesis sheets
Erase the amateur soul beneath.
My dreams but footnotes in a bracketed room;
Foam without waves, tides without moon.
I try to garland her tender frame,
My heavy verse crushed her bones.
Her limbs synecdoches on a bed of stones-
Breathing punctuated to a fault-
“Stop!”
She said, “I clawed at your heart,
Found five letters trapped in their cage.”
She said, “I cannot fuck this pallid thorn
Dripping broken ink on the page.”
Silence.
I collapse, or melt, hear neither footfall nor thud.
Only echoes haunting my floating limbs.
A silent scream vibrates ‘long the threads.
Pulling the strings, I envy the marionettes.
I weave the t, fickle crucifix of time
Whose trembling torrent tears through beauty and truth.
I pull the d, dangling noose of discourse whose dance
Delimits, defines, divides age from youth.
Until all is split then reformed
In a concatenation curling ‘cross the storm;
My own name among the elements that strike
The sands, and hurl them to the night.
And where they touch the mist- a screen,
Forgotten objects pass into being,
Like waves returning to their source,
Resisting the speech of a speechless world.
I behold my works, from great height,
With Mephistopheles in my ear, softly-
“You are written, you do not write.”
Yet I must write, and write, and write.
So I leap, the pull, the coil rewinds,
My fall broken by neither storm nor mist
But into darkness where shapes beyond words persist
And dreams in thin tendrils are strung;
Still the coil pulls me, the serpent’s tongue-
I fall through the limbs of a madman,
Mad like the needle in my spirit’s gauge,
Mad like Icarus’s burning rage,
In silence I fall.
To where a nameless being once said
“Let there be light!” and there was light,
I am spit forth, free, and now the blindness is bright.
Notes from the wreck 