Stephen Ellisfrom FULL TILT FLYWHEEL
POOR MAN’S CHINESE SHADOW
In collaboration with moonlight on raindrops, ingesting
something stronger than water but weaker than kykeon
from the cup of another’s devising, I see in the future
a sheer rock face with no toeholds command the present
whose nameless aspect remains postponed in a lyric of
the endless Cycles of Epiphany love, vanity and betrayal
portend, nothing more than complex effort, the simple
array of light and shade shifting with the times of day
through convulsions both heartbeat and breathing bring
to broken utterance, something far from fact of supple
comprehension, my pink cloud is black, naught but tincture
in manifested shape of what I will not know, before me,
rising to a sensual tic whose bloodless coup thus breeds
the day as yet withheld, impregnates it with spectral grey
EPIPHANY
In rehearsal the cycles all circle back to ground zero, today
could be any day, the particularities that define it lived and
passing at the point of ignition into the spark that brings
destruction to the fore, the first insult to the brain alive
unto the forms of its passing into the present forever as
a desire finally to be rid of its defining circumstance, how
the days thus pass with no definition but what’s given as
the painted totem of each taboo in every encounter with
the world, a first and final form of abuse shaped by inherited
treachery, a token paid for admission to the communion
revolving around the long-term stay of pure heresy that is
the only means of release, encoded in the precipitant body
honed for both hate and love, inspired by the spook of
having been by sense in all this crashing down before
QUEST
Light another cigarette, leaving things as they are,
knowing now that from tomorrow, looking confidently
back, you will have left things as they were,
from here, enjoying for a moment a sense of
accomplishment, as if time’s passage were somehow
your own doing, life breeding life and life left
wanting in the selfsame measure, preliminary history
of absolute collapse which the billions of persons
on the turning earth notice not at all, and
against whose presence you continue writing
to the purpose of your own inner ear’s plangent
evagination, as if sounding good could equally sound
true the false regard in making light of a preference
for plunging ahead in the dark
INDUSTRIAL WORKER IN SEARCH OF A UNION
Solitude is for everyone, national boundary with no natural
bounds for human bondage, committed as one may be in guiding
the flow of emotion to a result flickering somewhere between
pain and pleasure, we are, together, one pale figure come to from
intimate distance toward relation, the while in lip service to,
and paying through the nose for, feeling, gone in arrears $6,222
for the wholesale transfer of a regard whose ownership ultimately
remains as questionable in possession as exchanges of body fluids
toward a Chancellory banked on the good hope of imaginary resolve,
and who are we then? asked by mouth from between spread legs
remains the call to form, answered only by the echo of making it so,
the ancient regime of recurrence as the old toodle-doo aimed
two ways straight up and down the spine in complete receivership,
the end of things that never end, chaste to the point of submission
MAGIC CIRCLE BURIAL MOUND
Sodality is in the stars, and the fact of Adam like any man having eleven
brothers, some of whom are fathers, sons and cousins, making from a sense of
location among his own that place in which to get down on his knees (before),
defines the creation of the first void, prayer, wherever it was man came from,
woman in that respect always prior, literal seat in which the echoic and mocking
semblance of fire-as-memory from Adam’s twin Iblis falls into the feminine
comforting guise who weans her perceiver from Milk Maid to relation rendered
teachable yet resonant with the phenomenology constituting all previous Cycles
of Epiphany, so it remains the solidity in her hips alone that makes her call to order
within the frame of all discursive and exoteric qualities of man’s sense of "world"
capable of producing that four-fold suite of earth, air, water, and fire through
the esoteric intervention of timing and of space that elevates our earth-bound aspect
toward the broken hymen antithetical in blood yet commensurate out of generational
entropy to the kinesthesia of all kingship horsing it knee-deep in Boot Hill
LAY ME DOWN IN THE DOORWAY
There are no symbols that aren’t clothed to become thus guiding
qualities of identification between celestial and earthly worlds whose
signification takes place as White Goddess adolescent ritual drum-drums
of attraction to the first and always Girl Next Door who tracks the meta-
physical status of a spiritual continuum that flows through the timeless
correlation between the dense Qabbalistic crown of flowers erupting from
the canopy of the catalpa grown out of the clavicular Eye in the (backyard) Heart
and the Milky Way that forms the rabbit-run into the glade out of which
at dusk emerges the Lightning Rod Man Doctor Faustus tried to trope
out of the hands of the selfsame human mind that perceived the first flash of
god life after circumcision completed the sympathetic Kundalini body
under image to Draco where Christ arose on growth rings of perfect Dodonese
oak in order to maintain in the hollow core of the Argo the electrified
jawbone and kneecap of Agamemnon wrapped in the cape of his Red Wife
HYMN
You can think in the 90s about listening in the 80s to the Stones
in the 70s singing songs from the 60s in response to life in
the 50s until your limbs go numb, and they will, as common
sentience runs the gamut, snow up to the windowsill one minute,
grass grown over your head the next to accompany the silent
increments of mortality separating one by one, fiber from
fiber, drowning in an absence gone too slow to notice but for
an increasing tightness in the torso, the selfsame insult to the brain
splintering into the flower of the first light remembered now
forever casting shards of shadow inwardly like little arrows
drawn out on the map of one’s being to show a way neither
forward nor back, right nor left, up nor down but more to a kind of
pollen of mourning spilled from within, bright and all too brief,
that follows no consciously set pattern, adheres to no belief
GIST
Where black female pants roll down, dawn and dusk
enfold upward in apex dismissing time and space
by understanding them as an inverted alluvial channel
or yonic matrix entered as if unto root trunk branch and
wet leaf tips forth to contexts of traffics in exchange, love
analogous to nature’s evident drift and intent gone the way of
going all about the body, sunlight in the dappled canopy of
a lifetime’s remembered trees, not in image of, but actively
under hand, sex a continuum impossible to depict in
any aftermath of reference and homage but for the human
tact of having been ground for the simple pleasure of
another’s complex quest to feel a like mammalian heat
with which to clasp to their own moment’s notice
what then arrives as monumental, if passing
FORGIVENESS AS
A body bright is white lightning is the pale serum of mother’s
milk in pale breasts swinging blue above the white belly swelling
with breath that feeds the swollen labia surrounding the red
star between legs spread on knees like an arc up over and pressing
down full weight upon the cock that disappears into the space it
makes as given too, to be taken in and taken up into that realm
or region or electromagnetic zone of weightless rise to occasion of
putting an end to Tantalos, making tropes of Tartaros something
more than the torture of endless reaching after satisfaction, giving
the body away in training toward plowing up all masques of congruent
forms just that swiftly slow come out of loggerheads broken
open down around an entire curve of wind in grass with wheeling
stars whose nave and pole define the day brought forth of total
penetration to the true, in maximal descent to what comes due
CALL
In the rush to feel one’s way through the emptiness of
attention emptiness itself fulfills, the question remains
double, what are you before and what do you bring to it,
an uneasy mix of perception and intent the only guide
to temporal definition, who goes home with whom as
temperament in part removed from habit and relocated,
inhabited as a desire to take to a moment’s passing play
of incidentals, the sucked cock and spread legs of a pressure
toward release through the inverted muscularity of
acceptance, as if fucking itself gave access to a figure of
concupiscent homage split into imagined halves of
self and other understood as preliminal and conditional
to the act of being overwhelmed by the primacy and
singularity of mind’s increased yet very steady gaze
HELEN AIN’T COMING HOME
Beginning with a wound gone far past the point of no return are voices
out of Mars broadcast through the present to the end of establishing just
such theoretical colonies rising from the elemental heat of low and sexual
things to Bronze Age dark Parvati Ava Gardner’s ethical reciprocity settled
into a widening empire of dictatorial hedonism, against which image
there’s only a pair of blue and white striped pyjamas high in the treetops
masquerading as a Vietcong sniper in 1971, speaking in turn through
the mouthpiece of a ravaged daughter of Metacom out of Indian maiden
Yassir Arafat Algonquin girlhood to bring forth the hematoma to the head
from a 90 mph Bobby Parent beanball thrown in 1963 that put blood
completely around the edge of every treeleaf in the county, to the two eyes
looking down the past through a stereoscopic viewfinder to know how
the body that is love and its image made of armor are interlocked to define
the mark at the forebrain seen with forever yet never completely seen
TAKE A HIT
Up the klieg lights on acts of kleptomania, persistence
turning obsession turns into the object of its own heresy,
found in anything you touch, the ever brightening greed
of Midas ruining the world by turning it into a site for
further accumulation through days dissipated in answer to
where did the time go?, as if it had gone anywhere other than
straight up the 360 degree "hole" defined by the automated
flywheel of the total horizon rimmed in every perceptual
moment, a "set" you can only get on by getting on with it,
as if it were only a set-up through which the first and final
insult to the brain can be seen as one’s own prime survival
mechanism, turning up the heat and turning down the lights,
and the reverse, going for balance rather than the full tilt of
uneven distribution made clear only after the flood runs dry
SWING SWING SWING
No evolutional or developmental paradigm of vegetating matter
grown out of mineral earth into animal mobility culminating in
ultimate human will can get with the Kepler cut on the Trigon
defined in the swing of the Jerusalem Pendulum that transforms
manic depression into a continuous exchange of measures from
Saturn to Jupiter along the Kronos line that snips the sinews out
of Zeus’ thigh and returns them to the "timeless" suspension marked
on the sexual calendar as exactly that moving likeness of eternity that
is the necessary dead weight of the "Swinging Betsy" that wakes the Monkey
Man every 2383 years to descend the pearl-drop path that
brings the New Day out of the Lotus of the Deep on the self-same
thread thought forever to be lost in homage to paternity whose
Hanging Man simultaneously falls out with yet still discloses to the
Divine Child the parabolic balance-beam of the Utnapishtim ratio
ELIXIR
Long low banks of cloud at dawn extend east to west to the end of time
(everybody’s already pissed on "this" floor, saith the newcomer)
and if there is a figure of Death, it slides in on a wave of sensual greed
undisclosed in the steady blinding gaze behind the darting eye that
runs for cover back and forth between the sequential and the simultaneous
rather than flipping up and out and settling in the ether vortex of prayer,
within whose vertical the inert is identical with the active as inversely
proportional to how the whole of death leads to the fragmentation of bright
desire in its stead, knowledge thus a scattering of language that may not
always bear witness to any form but the singular blaze of day come from
a place you can never get to, as if there were real pressure between the carried
life and the world to which it’s brought that won’t happen one at a time or
all at once, didn’t happen in the past, never will in any future, and
isn’t in the meantime completely either now or never