Letter to Emilia no. 1

How fresh and recent you are in my memory, dear heart, though I have not spoken of you in a lifetime or more and though I would not be writing on this page if there were a chance that you should read it.

Summer turns to autumn but the air is hot. The national conversation is a rhetorical nightmare, my countrymen on the island of Puerto Rico are devastated by storm and sea, and the Rohingya are dying in Burma. I have been spending nights accompanied by thoughts that sprawl formlessly over my bed and sink through the carpet and floorboards.

There is no woman for me now and I find this terribly comforting- without the constant worry of betrayal my life becomes more calm and controllable. I have not been drinking for some time and so I have not been trying to be a poet, either, which is no loss to poetry although it feels as loss to me. I am aware that the touch of man profanes and my own hand seems to have this effect with great speed, and so despite my lost and discarded relics I try to smile as I go through my days.

I have been thinking lately of the last time that I had guns pointed at me. It was a little over two years ago and one thing led to another and the police were suddenly inside my door pointing shotguns and rifles and pistols at me, which I found surprising at the time. I remember the rush of cold as my blood froze in my veins and I said “This is my house, don’t shoot me” and I was aware that I looked like a madman, shirtless in basketball shorts with sweat glistening on my shaved head and an axe by the bookshelf and so much brandy on my breath that even I could smell it, and although I had wanted to die or thought I did I suffered the supreme indignity- surrender to the threat of violence. Though I had committed no crime but madness I walked from my house with my hands over my head and once outside I kept my hands over my head until an ambulance arrived because the police had shot a handcuffed man in the back of a squad car earlier that year just a mile down the road from where I sat and I knew then as I have always known that if a policeman shoots me there will be no justice. They looked somewhat amused or embarrassed or ashamed when they asked why I still had my hands up and I told them I did not want them to kill me. They said they didn’t want to kill me, so I pointed out that they came into my home and pointed guns at me, and that is what people who want to kill people do. I do not know if they were prepared to concede the point but the ambulance arrived and when the paramedics’ boots hit the ground I knew I wasn’t going to die so I started crying and I do not remember too much after that except sleep.

The first question, and it really is the only question, is “would they have shot me if I was black?” My luxury is that I never have to know.

I shall do my best to never write to you again. I may write to you tomorrow.

Letter to Cordelia no. 3

One day long ago you and I were riding in a car and you were driving of course and I had just been ranting about something that I probably didn’t care that much about and you had been patiently listening. We drove in silence for a few minutes and then I asked you what you were thinking about. You reacted to my question with suspicion, not because you were hiding something but because I had not asked you what you were thinking for many weeks. I often think of this event when I have failed to meet my obligations to someone, especially if my failure is an expression of a habit that I have formed.

For some reason I was thinking about these things today as I sat near a fire-pit on a large stone, wiping bright blood from my hands onto the dirt and grass. They were driving the backhoe around the house to collect the corpse and I figured someone would have to move her so I picked her up by all four feet and her four wounds like metal fingerprints moved along with us and I threw her body into the loader and that was when I walked away and sat down and I almost started laughing although I didn’t want to laugh at all. It was not what I thought I would be doing on my lunch break. I tried to be careful when carrying her but I ended up with bloodstains on my jeans anyway and so when I went back to work for my second shift on Labor Day I did it with the blood of a dog I liked on my clothes. Maybe it was necessary. I was not there when she was shot so I did not know. Anyway it was not actually my business. I do not know why I am telling this story.

I forgot to make my bed when I left for work this morning and so when I got back to my little room I stripped off my shoes and socks and shirt and the pants stained beyond repair and pulled the sheets tight and put a quilt at the foot of the bed. It is a fine quilt I suppose but mine is being repaired at the moment and no other quilt is satisfactory in comparison. When I decide to search for sleep tonight I will slide in beneath the sheets and toss the topmost sheet up in the darkness and wait for it to gently coolly fall on my body and that is not the same as having a good day but it is better than it could have been. I do not control the past, the present or the future, but I control the sheets. That is enough. It has to be. It is what I have.

Letter to Cordelia no. 2

The fallen tree grew a few apples but not many. Fire ants make nests in the hollow of the roots and soon they will burn, and the tree with them. The days grow so hot and it seems that the garden wilts each afternoon. I so rarely dedicate attention to the weather that summer is a bizarre occurrence to me, though it happens every year and I should be expected to anticipate it. As a boy my obligations were subject to the weather day by day and so I was preternaturally aware of what the wind and swamp air promised. Now I only wish to know if it will rain, so I can decide if I must mow the yard soon or if this labor can be delayed.

An impossible thing happened. I was about to eat and so I was boiling precisely four cups of water for my ramen and I had made two sandwiches with turkey and American artificial cheese and mayonnaise and brown mustard and as the water was heating I sat on the couch to read and wait and I looked on the coffee table. There was a photo album on it. It was shaped like most photo albums are shaped and it was old as I am and it was a particular shade of blue just as the photo album of my childhood had been shaded. I thought it had been destroyed. I thought I had destroyed it. I must have planned to do it a thousand times. Through all the unhinged destruction of my past in my early adulthood, it managed to survive and one thing led to another and a decade later Mormon missionaries came into possession of it and returned it to my mother, who returned it to me. I could not make this up.

There are not many pictures in it. I hated cameras then and now, as you no doubt remember. There are pictures of me in my infancy and childhood that exist elsewhere, but many of the photographs that I found flung at me from the distant past have no known copies. I do not know how to describe the sensation of looking through those photographs. It was as if I was proving to myself that I existed. That was why I intended to destroy them, of course, in my younger and more volatile years. I wanted there to be nothing left of me- what a bitter and cynical man I was! What a bitter and cynical man I am.

For a month this letter has been finished and yet it remains. I ask myself a cruel question every day: “What’s the point?” Not so many mornings ago a storm emerged and I walked out into the yard stripped to the waist and raised my arms above my head, as is my custom. It was a beautiful morning and later that day the sky turned to yellow and tornadoes threatened but they did not find me. I shivered and was as tall as the goddamn sky and I didn’t ask myself any more questions that day. I wish you could see these impossible pictures, taken of me so long ago, when within me there was not even the idea of evil. I would be faded by time and vision while fishing or wearing ill-fitted suits or playing in the snow and that is a part of me I fear that you have never seen and I could not have shown it to you because I myself had forgotten it and now it does not matter anymore, except in the way that history matters to an old man. And today I feel so old, Cordelia. Seven years ago I never thought I would get so old.

Letter to Cordelia no. 1

Even those who know me from brief acquaintance know that I am fond of speaking in epigrams. Years ago, I declaimed "Self control will make you a bad poet. If you are not one already."

The apple tree behind my mother's house fell a short time ago, in a storm not of my making. I was going to take the axe made holy by your hands and mutter to myself "How proud! How like the sun!" as I looped the dull steel overhead to devour the fallen tree in flat-toothed bites, dragging the corpse to the nearby burnpile— but more gentle rains came and the season was spring, and so blossoms white as angels or the hair of infant children sprung from the branches even as the trunk lay broken on the grass, and my mother said to me "We will not cut it up yet. Maybe it will be able to grow apples this year. We will see."

Today is May 1st, a day that I bear a special fondness toward. Men and women around the world celebrate May Day each year in commemoration of the Haymarket affair, but more than that is invoked for our consideration. May Day is a day to remember the sacrifices that came before our mothers brought us crying into this world. Good people who loved their lives and their families were beaten and slain for standing up for their rights and their hopes. Businesses and the government colluded to imprison, assault, and murder labor organizers for offenses as benign as negotiating for shorter hours or safer workplace conditions.

The point I'm making with self control is, I haven't had a drink in one hundred and fifty one days. I remember the last drink I had as clearly as I remember all the things I know: It was a frosty-cold Diamond Bear Imperial IPA. My woman had broken things off with me before the bell tolled for midnight and I had just finished a cold Diamond Bear Irish Red and I had four more beers in the fridge and I was going to drink all of them and then see what else I could find to drink and I was going to drink all of that and then I looked at the clock and it was December 1st and I laughed softly to myself as my shoulders heaved in sobs and I took a drink of the IPA and I was crying and the hair on my arms stood up like I had seen a ghost or your face and I swallowed the beer and afterward I tasted ash thick and gritty on my tongue and I started singing, with my voice rumbling as deep as my lungs would allow—

"Come join the youth and beauty brigade
Come join the youth and beauty brigade
Come join the youth and beauty brigade
Nothing will stand in our way."

And inexplicably I was grinning like I'd just got Marquez's autograph and the tears fell in slow cascades down my jawline and I took a deep breath and I said to myself and to the walls and to my books and to the woman (no longer mine) who was in a nearby room and probably could not hear: "Her Majesty, the Decemberists” and I said it because it seemed like the proper thing to say although the song I sang was not from that album. I wiped my eyes and I went to the bathroom and poured the beer out because somehow with my life in shambles around me and December the first glaring sun-red at me from a clock, I remembered or learned that you loved me once not because I was a monster but because I was not always monstrous and I drowned that old devil my heart beneath the frigid water from the bathroom sink and for some reason on this day five months later I sit with a pen trembling in my hand and I twirl it around my fingers until appropriate words can be found.

I do not know why I write to you these words and I am well aware of my perverse habit of adding dollops of sugar to the truth. I believe that I send this disjointed message to you, in vain hope that it may reach you on this or any other ocean, because I am a dreamer and I am my mother’s son. 

Pulcher

One hundred days ago I was half-done drinking a beer and thinking about drinking the rest of it and then getting another or another ten. Instead, I poured the beer out and I have not opened another.

My niece looked at me yesterday. She burst into tears. She fled the room, as she was unable to bear the sight of me. She is dramatically prejudiced. She is prejudiced against people with beards. I am no longer a person with a beard.

I have never liked the sight of my face, but once upon a forest I must have been young enough to laugh with delight at my visage rippling in a mirror or a pool of water. I knew how to smile at the sight of my reflection once. What else have I forgotten?

Chaoskampf

face flush with rage cold as ice on high mountains
ears bloodred as the spit in my mouth
I crawl in silence to a corner of the cave

I think of all I wish to say—
my voice would split the sky as I roared
the lips of a cool breeze would brush against my neck
the corpses of a thousand insects would turn further into dust and winter
the chariot of the god would cast its gentle heat upon the earth on a cloudless day

as I imagine expressing myself, apprehension chills me and I shudder
my nailbitten fingers trace over the stone
as if it were a skull or the body of a lover

some ask why I would shelter in such a dismal place

they say the world awaits me
they claim that all monsters have been slain
and perhaps they even believe their words
but even now I hear the storm of wings
and the ground quakes with the heavy footfalls of clawed feet

innocently they insist that it will be safe to emerge,
but those who do not make their home upon the borders of the map
know nothing of dragons

Heresiarchy

I.     Genesis

Though she has many sisters, the Muse of music is without question the oldest of human gods. From the beginning of our days and in each of our cradles, she has bestowed courage to the afraid and hope to the downtrodden. She is the light in the darkness. There were not ever Gods in heaven, but divinity on the face of the earth is yet alive.

Every human except the most severely debilitated participates in the rapture of song.
Even the deaf can feel purity and harmony vibrating through their very bones.
They experience the presence of the goddess because their body connects to the land and air.

Architecture requires mathematics.
Literature requires language and language has many requirements.
Sculpture depends on knowledge and availability of materials.
Drawing and painting are constrained to creating ephemera until secure shelter is found.
Only the art of music is implicit to the world.

The miracle of music is the heritage of our people. Proper exposure to this sacred phenomenon transmutes the soul into a pillar of the temple of humanity. Wonder and triumph threaten obliteration each time the raw power of the Muse comes rushing from the molten rock far beneath my feet into the poisoned clouds above. Her voice is every wave upon the sea.

II.     Anathema

The immediacy of the perception of music presents a danger to those who seek unity of spirit among the human societies. The vast deviations in personal or cultural taste imply an elemental difference that separate the kind of people who enjoy listening to pop country from everyone else alive. Acknowledging this difference leaves us with the terrifying knowledge that an entirely corrupt and malignant genre can fabricate the illusion of beauty into the minds of millions, or even billions. Further inspection makes it clear that the separation is far deeper than one deplorable genre of music. The divide in humanity’s ability to enjoy art made outside the blessing of a Muse amounts to nothing less than the chasm between the righteous and the wicked.

A disastrously warped perception of one kind of virtue eventually prompts foolish men to create cruel and misshapen idols in celebration of many malevolent ideals. The veneration of blasphemous shrines quickly grinds any mortal spirit to dust- and into the empty space within the body where the gods give us the sacrament of beauty, the hollowed men force the sacrilege of images that claim falsely claim divinity. As soon as a heresiarch becomes strong enough, they condemn their children and lovers to this same monstrous fate.

 Their descendants after one generation have no opportunity to avoid perdition, and the few children blessed with genius and commanded by the gods to create beauty are beaten until they dare not speak again of dreams. After three generations a people can never be saved from their fate and brought back into the light of the gods- any who reject the faith of their elders suffer madness, for what man or woman could live surrounded by demons and not be broken by the knowledge? The uncountable heretics eat and dress and smile and fuck like normal people but they are shadows wearing human skin. They make a mockery of holiness and do not ever know it.

Though historical warlords and their philosophical heirs have succeeded in establishing minor princedoms and empires for a few thousand years, our species under the guidance of the gods has been tribal since time immemorial. Artists (and especially musicians) living and dead are the makeshift high priests of our makeshift tribes, pressed into position by accident and necessity. They serve the gods by continually reminding humanity that beauty and transcendence are birthrights- not accidents.

I was born into a tribe that did not honor the gods,
but I never brought their ways into my heart.
I remember my childhood,
knowing that our ways were flawed
and that our faith rested on a foundation of lies.
I knew that our conception of beauty
was not connected to what I felt when I looked upon the world,
aware even at six years old
that there was something severely wrong with everything
I heard and saw and felt
from those creatures who claimed to be my people.
I remember my father's hands around my neck
because I said too loudly that his rhetoric was idiotic.
His rhetoric was idiotic
and he would have known that
if he was still a man,
but like the rest of the tribe he had been dead inside for years before he hurt me.
I remember suffering for speaking the truth in more tactful ways,
before I realized that the others were shells
left behind by a man or woman that had destroyed their essence
and that those who could not hear the gods
would never be able to hear my voice.
I remember thinking that it would be easier to just give in to authority
and obey all commands-
then I hit myself as hard as I could in the side of the head a few times
as a reminder that no price is too high to pay for freedom.
Inflicting violence upon myself was the only way
that I could avoid the temptation of surrender.
I escaped the evil of my upbringing but I paid for it.
I will forever pay for it.

On all sides we are beset by hordes of enemies.
The barbarian leaders insist that they mean no harm
but immediately turn and order their subjects
to destroy or ignore everything that has been created
through the grace of the Muses.
As I struggle to sleep
I can sometimes hear maddened screaming
beyond the city walls
from their voices in the night.
Some have been dead for decades but their hearts still beat.
I would scream more loudly if I bore such a burden.
The bravest of them reclaim a shadow of the courage
that the Muse gave them in their cradles,
and end their lives
rather than languish in their created Hell
where life cannot offer redemption.
Their suicides are judged harshly
by their relatives and compatriots:
the dead are called cowards
for daring to reclaim their humanity.

If the victorious dead had eyes with which to see,
they would never have allowed their souls to be destroyed in the first place,
but not all have the strength when they are young
to cast a devil out of our own body
if it is allowed to take hold.
Very few people of whatever age can recognize the danger of heresy
until it is too far too late to reverse the damage
they have rendered to their own spirit,
but all know the cure for the disease.
Cold gunmetal pressed upon their eyelid,
they think back to their father's belt
slashing through the air,
the heat and knifesharp pain of it,
and how they stopped fighting their tribe
because they were just scared kids
who wanted to avoid agony and fear.
They were praised by friends and loved ones
when they began to starve their souls,
and without feeling it happen
they were soon dust and ash inside.
They think about the belt again
and the terrible price they paid for comfort
and the love of their parents.
They wonder if they would betray their children
as their parents had once betrayed them.
They ignore the tears coming from their eyes.
They put a little bit of pressure on the trigger
and then more
and the sound of thunder shouts throughout the land.


I feel no pity for anyone
who initially buckled under the strain of anguish.
They sold the the sanctum of the gods
to the darkness in their heart
for a bowl of hot soup,
but that was the deal they chose to make.
All who capitulate to godlessness are cowards
every day that the sun rises on them,
but in righteous suicide they show a flash of purity and courage.
They live as slaves
until the moment they choose to sacrifice the body
that their soul was murdered to protect,
and before their brain stops they are brought forward one last time
into the presence of the goddess and just for them she sings the lullaby
that she sang when they were young.

For their bravery, I honor them.
Hail the victorious dead!

As for the rest of their tribe, let them be cursed.
I shake the dust of my feet at their door.
I curse them with long life.
I curse them with good health.
I curse them with fruitful loins.
May they live forever as they are on this day.

III.     Lerna

I am deemed a pagan because I respect the inspiration of the gods of nature and beauty the way that heretics respect the false gods of their fathers. Once my tribe could be found anywhere with freshwater, but now we are few. A storm rages. The true names of the living and the dead Muses have been lost somewhere, I know not where. Nations crumble and the fabric of society grows threadbare, but my tribe shall not vanish so long as a single person with reverence for beauty draws a breath. We did all that could be done to turn the tide. It was not enough.

IV.     Chthonic

Like her sisters of the other domains,
the Muse of music has always given equal rewards
for evil and for good
for beauty and for ugliness
for love and for hate,
so it is logical that many should choose the clarity of evil
over the tangled web of the gods.

She has never resisted our expressions of freedom,
even when a hindrance could have saved our souls.
She allows heretics to love contemptible music
written in spite of her,
even songs written for money
about high school football or Christmas,
with the same intensity and honesty
that godly people feel toward the soaring monuments
she has inspired through the ages.
I shiver to see a god so careless with power.

Why does she bother to keep us alive, knowing the abominations made from her gifts?
Does she believe she will wither with the last of us, just as she was born with the first?
Could she truly fear death so much?