I.

If it’s true we needn’t doubt this day extends itself in infinite embrasure, our ruins mutual and proving so very wallowable, I’ll – what I will – give myself to that acropolyptic merriment, open wastes condensed to diamond bottom-ocean scoured, the gleam between our eyes pressed hungry to devour this self beyond all remainder. The muck that we admire in the other spills in bridge across our tongues in Quetzalcoatl coital foldings, the sweetheart traumas we produce to build a nest in. There’s no app for that. Inside the capstone as in an uppermost room the plushness of the platform moves unseen between worlds worlding, how an altar bites itself into a bruise or laps at its spreading under its skin in the invention of a private cult. An incision marks its own tumescence as the tablet gives lift to its own effacement. Likewise one might observe in reverence the Supreme Female Form bukkaked while breast-feeding, or the Weird Dad ravished by what monolith is constituted, but what that means for us in the pocket sewn of seed-and-furrow in the rafters interceding is what’s rooted in our tuning moan-to-moan, this ongoing intonement, and the golden tomb it sings for us to swim thru in a single breath.

II.

I could be a blues – the cold blues so bad – and was – but why brag. It’s ROYGBIV who knows how to live… supposedly. I’d always rather barter the dregs and aftermath of a given atmosphere for a new kind of prism entire, its spectrum immolating each of my organs onto separate planes ten updates distant. The politics of obliteration may not get the clicks, but what’d that be to a human-shaped vacancy ?  the inky shiftings of the sum of all absences ?  Xeno Nemo bivouacking Calypso’s isle in the middle-Hymen, a long warm wall that won’t alarm the worm. I was a teenage palimpsest swallowing that distance, a malt liquor-spattered codex of hornet wings saddle-stitched with the thread of loose lips three shits to the wind and counting, piloting scorched orchards. This is my landscapes heaped in a wet tangle at the slime plug of a drain, fingering threads in an attempt to undo a soup primordial and bent on making out. And although I did not attend the academy for learning how to fuck real good prior to the dawning of my second bat mitzvah, I won at mortal kombat enough to make up for it. Even now that mound of corpses is still swelling on the stage’s background, and I pour one out for my wizzards. If ‘Go Big or Go Home’ isn’t the inscription of every epitaph you’ve ever eaten, there’s a workshop I’m teaching you should take. Regardless, here there isn’t any avatar or residue left to aggrandize, and the boundaries overtaken in the efforts of pure movement stitify and shatter even as the artifacts of a memory grown indifferent to its having gone uncategorized. The aeon desert weather hammer does its work on the justified and left-aligned alike, and what this is will cease to be beyond that labour of love trapped in time in an open circuit spiralling to the terminus of a spark of hearts in caves struck like flint flaring bareback, the emoji of everything known in its threshelm. 

III.

Take this world away

You have so many for you and have hewn

The ways that those might offer up their most perfect season and have seen

In wretch & wastrel stars conflated to most awesome crown

Still burning invisible in the mad day in shade and breeze naked on the desert porch and this

Nothing that won’t be taken in Hestian embrace to claim a home never ceasing to be breathed however distant or in dream stoked as embers folded

Into the cloud of glow of horizon dawnset same, huffed exhalation

Of its name, preserved in deepest amber nest we weave releasing still

A loudest silence kept

Clung in sweetest secret met we meeting there that hidden

Spring and glimmer that tends itself perpetual disgorging circuit of self-watering plants

These loins oasean, Elysian, given utmost height of dimension in all returnals of refrain that bodies make

In space to taste each other in an equal

Giving grace

White dog and double round the altar

Tile disinterred it place-beyonding rode

Across abyss to witness tight against a plateau’s pelvic shelf I sing thru in this sewing sun to sun

As way it shown,

That face caressed so there defined as etching

The hand it too as bare extension there as puddled light in creekbed sheets

Under aegis of the suckling calf

In reconciliation of our single body clapping in gold ray of westward-facing sanctum chamber

With our elixir by tongue intermingled to meander thru this house anointed thereby with our waftings

Honed and given from a sound resounding from twin-pressed mouth, I’m drinking it, I’m trilling

With coyote choir wild god among gods to see and bless celestial

I tear with mine own diamond tooth

This heart to prove its value

Truth to see reminding truth

And promise kept with feather writ across its sky entire

IV.

The beggar bathes naked in the fountain at night amid the fits of lightning

Heat stuck slaked loose for a dark and quiet minute in the park at wild hours

and no issue no notion nor need of notice or allowance

The ruins baked in the blood-mother light of mankind’s fading, cock spilled over its rock this altar singing its contained and cleansing rivulets, the playing of rivers, time-overs, of all ways to the earth’s own remaking navel

Beginnings winded
Struck sharp in the dawn-hearth same

Of from in the disgorging green
I floated crowned and crying

Whispering furnaces to widows reunited and delighting 
leaned back fondling in chiaroscuro relief

Flooded with significance’s parent
in the shared game of moaning ourself

There is nothing left to give when you live inside its present

And it arriving, and arriving

Let me trestle these summons in the flow

Nothing conjured just revealed

A reverse-churn unstagnating and seeing enough then to chart the chaff from the curd to forgive, to have no need – pivot back primed – no need to forgive in that pristine blankness it seems inexhaustibly to offer pressed to our likeness in the satiating washed-out blaze we’d always hoped for,   milked surrender 




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Garett Strickland is an ordealist and liminalogist working in text, sound, ritual, and speculative semiotics. He is the author of UNGULA, available from Inside The Castle.

*Image credit: Still from Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’, 1927.