36 Chambers: Canto IV

Canto IV

From Lethe lept, conscious
breath takes surface suddenly
the roar of this place, its cacophony

of angelic howlings, oh i’ve seen
the letter of law: now pass we
liminal jaws: the great scaled

hall we crawl upon, who goes
empty handed. the boundaries
of a god are doubt and danger

inscribed Hecate, her crows
keep time clawed. we practice
low we move carefully

no crowbars, no flashlights, no
clever ideas: language be so
fleshy, so jealous             fire

three of swords, she draws
etched here: if my name is part 
your name how shall we walk

it, how shall we play the game
“a man was shot for asking a woman
to wear a mask. a mask protects.

a mask conceals self. a mask is a debate
inside the circles of no evidence to contrary.
your self is a mask on the unconscious

the masking we do to fit in, the masking
we do to not fit in, the masking we do
to be other, the masking we do to be

truth. cahun sd: under all these masks
other masks. do you know you cannot
talk to dragons—we have no idea

what year it is.”  uncoiling beneath
us the serpent’s color rainbows,
it is the color of everything, and you

are it too. “you come from the world
of angels” forked licking at the air
“oh winged things—there must

be some symbol that speaks
to your soul about why you suffer
would you whisper it

into the beast. and so be it.”
the slithering holds lighted
cues in charcoal tongues: “repetition

does not exist. you can’t return to
any earlier place in the poem.
you can only move one way now.”

and the caging descends. we both
know how to make a pattern. all
this time, all this time estranged

the caught notes, if you have not
cultivated love on this side, you go
through the portal empty handed

it’s all that will pass
can you imagine coming
into this place, hands emptied

of what we thought we held
two of swords, she draws: balanced
blindness, you better learn to hear

water at your back. they remind 
the stars of other stars. funny
when every song counted

it took everything to move
forward in the lined horizons,
a story is a beginning and an end.

love the language flabby
white America was protesting its right
to die. the way we’ve always done

before. the fourth chamber is degrees
in listening. how does the system
operate. we all receive same vibration.

you must frame me when i’m finished. 
you can’t really create considering
every thing that’s been done and yet

imagined. you can’t think at all.
so you make a container. to hold it.
that’s the extent of the magic. so far

and the invocation. and the calling.
well of course, and forgiveness.
yes, we put it all in the code.  i broke

the gargoyle. again, remember you forgot
to add the part about childhood
it’s really just a reflection

of what you were. the sadness
mirrored out. karma is our DNA.
just sit here telling myself all these stories

the “plandemic” flies through the wires
do you know truth when you hear it
or do we listen too often to one another

a poem is a landing. this river where we
poured dead, do you remember we held
grief in each arm, pulled it so close, to taste

the tremble of life leaving, there was nothing
man made about the way the body knows
how to take care of its own. remember that.

when you get over there. the delusion of division
will be set against the delusion being human
is a single species experience, not the complex

fragmenting that occurs within each one. each
cell erupts from division, division is what makes
us and division is what life struggles to overcome.

Insert I’s aubade in the epilogue. to light
we went on thus as far as the silence
kept us, the great worm taking back

its sleep. the gentle wound we laid down
for it to keep would be our treasury, wealth
for the coming travel. you have to seed

the path so you can map it home
seven times clockwise you round
whispers: i see you changed

mark the eye of that lizard as it slips
into sleep, mark the eye of that cold
heart, as it carries the rivulet of fire

you spoke into the program, enter
seven portals and as the old year
descends, let us walk along the path

to a bridge, where she will pour
water over your head, she will
incant by name: poet, i see

you, and deep in the eye of another
for as long as you tread where eyes
are used to catalogue, you will be

held in that light. echoes and reflections
are the glamour we use to entertain
here, the delusions we spin to keep

the matters at hand, to sort the macro-
and the microcosm into a balance
we could call up by number and name

To be lonely tightly until still sleeping
eight of cups, so we walk away from
what we know towards what is empty

But I’m still awake with eyes open 
like two triangles it is natural
to be deadly, but oh, humanity

a country is divided in earnings
as much as in compassion
how many have to die before

we recall the connections that boated
us shore to shore. and after this
cycle, did they arise like smoke

tendrils curling in the dome above
the numbered beast, ninety three
counts round to escape a housing

Who could lose their skin and still 
own it all could you break them
with one song: we are all abandoned

by love, you’ll repeat it till the bands
of fear loosen, while the bands of fear
On the teething field. It’s all over

grasping, still we ache but trespass
as intended from the snake, her dreaming
and from her dream of us in the belly

a morning where we wake to a nothing shine.




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italicized lines:

Spite, Danielle Pafunda
Sleeper Cell, Michael “Quess?” Moore
Death Industrial Complex, Candice Wuehle
Fake Moon, Alban Fischer
Some Notes on My Programming, Anselm Berrigan
Lizzie Speak, Kailey Tedesco
Sojourner Microcosms, Anselm Hollo
The Romance of Happy Workers, Anne Boyer
In the Key of Those Who Can No Longer Organize Their Environments, Stephanie Anderson
All the Garbage of the World Unite, Kim Hyesoon, trans by Don Mee Choi
IC, Serena Chopra
Something in the Way, Obstruction Blues, John Duvernoy

36 Chambers: Canto III

Canto III

“Through here language will be both poison
and medicine, love as well, harnessed
as healing and wound,  through here

loss of clarity, through here the word
champions over the sound so you will
believe not what you hear, here truth

hides inside the symbols compromised
by echthroi, that which unnames
we call this the great undone of time”

and so in the third chamber, we did
come to the gate our fury did make
us seek, and sometime did we long

to flee, close the doors/ twice as often
as you open them :: who are you
to ask what anyone would bring

to the crossroad. you better be able
to bare that story Love lives just sit 
there on the sidelines. what have you

learned about being still.  And we
led we on, among the secret things
a slither in the streets shapes us

how can you let go fear when fed
by fear is all we’ve ever known, might
ask us to spread wing and fly, might

say language was our first undoing
the word cementing us to be
for i am, i am, i am the echo of see

is it warm enough here for you.
Your music makes me feel lonely. 
i mean, how have you trained

to hear truth. & what is listening
inside all of this. you might consider
these things as you decide to cross

over. what kind of line have you
drawn down the middle of life
what drags against its meter

of nagels, the metal wrought that cages
how do you recognize
the name of what we walk within

that liminal beast, we hunger toward
sensate, a compulsion towards attach/
ment heaviness letting go, against 

heaviness itself  think of the choice
to enter this realm. the heavy suffer
of manifest. to slip into the quantum

fixt state: time will make it seem
as though the flow is consistent
and linear… in the echo of split

so that all is apparent and none
at once, and when I turned my palm
up to heaven/ they flew off 

let us not tarry thresholds, let us
gather our courage, swift to the pawing
we scuttle across the sands, poemed

as we are to a telling: round the fire
ever shade, ever shadow, imagine drums
and the way the light flickers so that we

dance in these caves of light, we dance
in the caves of light There are a million 
and one ways for me to look, but I only

want one do you know why we guard
portals, why every door is a riddle
do you remember how to sound

your way back home. there is one story
about a winged murder, the crow of delight
lies and nightmares, the horror of all upended

but chaos is many-sided, and tender too
to know the sweet breaking of joy
to be awash in the miracle of separation

calling us down into realizing
there is this deep net’s worth of imported
data, of being human. of experience. we

travel within the scooped access of collect.
we bend against time. it fractals. infinite.
a gate rides an answer to a puzzle

you meet later in the gloaming
because you have always been one—you
DJs played every day and night, the net

lit up with the oddity of entertain and be-
ing caught in the myth of productivity
there was a death toll and we counted

it up and down the peaks of fortune
and fate and threaded we shook our
selves loose and stood to ready depart

to the river. for the river is what holds
the crossroad in the crook of its arm
it’s a crescent smile, we step lightly

call up the operator of time: when
you hear ______________
which is to say language is noise

we do not withdraw, we pull up
to the shore’s wet lip and wade in
lapping into the drum’s beat

this breath, this foot by foot, curb
the vibration into push and pull
the cell is a combination of heart/

beat mazed in the lines we reached
into those waters and cupped palms
scoop me, the sound of the hands

the sound of the line, create
life in the stamped into water
chatter stammering between two places

chaos is a burning wheel you choose
to step into its center, you choose to
pass from this veiling to a new skinny

dream where death edges, death
the last drop falling between
the fingers: everybody once

coiling inside the program designed
to collect data: this matrix is a cell
to keep, a cell to contain in lieu of chaos

let there be light. and this is the word
we used to soul. to angel this winging
do you know how words coalesce.

what matters the tempo if the template
shatters. rounded convolu---    it pipes
the doctor has upended the trial

what is a virus that you can get over
and over again. what is the level
of herd immunity needed. and how

do we create a vaccine. and what will
we remember to bring to all of the funerals
never held. what said we to future touch.

we downloaded the calendars of tomorrow
invented a new word for every imagined
damage, there was no thing we could not

define: look language made this all possible
we invented the theater of politics
to protect investments in what seemed

revolution, but what is revolutionary
about working to death the many
so a few may thrive. what is revolutionary

about a country founded on murder
and rape and slavery and lies.
where did we slip the sacred in with

the profane except in the making:
as I said, I was dead we swept
into the river’s flow :: shatter

and now within, the characters weep




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Quoted lines in italics:
D. Victor, Kith 
Dara Wier, You Good Thing 
Ariana Reines, Mercury 
Joe Ross, Last Days on Earth 
Irene Mathieu, Grand Marronage 
Oliver Bendorf, The Spectral Wilderness
Sink, Desiree Dallagiacomo
fault tree, Kathryn l. pringle
Every Living One, Nathan Hauke
The New Sorrow is Less Than the Old Sorrow, Jenny Drai
Butterfly Valley, Inger Christensen
Equivocal, Julie Carr