Apocalypse Border

I

Knowledge is cash and cash is time
To sit in the concentric circles of your bloat
Hedged by psychic minefields,
The simple archaic alphabet of fear and desire…
Lesson One: you have escaped the consequences;
Lesson Two: the consequences are still there,
Fear looking inwards, desire facing out…

My finger is on your shoulder,
Slight, constant pressure, easily bearable --
Except that I require that you simply turn
And face me now: Don't worry,
You have already been released;
I am only reading the record backwards,
As every death most certainly requires.

II

The struggle with the angel -- it changes so fast.
He escaped through my grappling hands like
Snakes of quicksilver. Transmuted into lead,
I lived through the desert of his absence.
If I could fix the angel in stance, in breath,
In finest will, in subtlest practice, O my soul,
You know I would do it. I am nothing but the
Smoke of his gestures. God's is the light;
And his, the solid hand; and mine, the shadow.

III

Stopped for interrogation at the apocalypse border,
All past history rolling in behind me, piling up
For the burning --
All the treasures and the junk of karma,
Farewells that stab the heart, then abandon it,
The vastness of endings,
Heavy weight of rotten fruit,
Huge decadence and fall.

We are the ones condemned to have a memory.
We stand and watch the Sun
On an Aztec altar off the Farallones
Bleeding into the lap of Night....

Death is a completed planet in a distant sky,
     receding
Into the frigid bodiless blue of the Future,
A whiff of liquid nitrogen, acrid and cold…
It's way past time, no question about it.
Whatever is capable of death
Was never capable of life,
So let the fire feed on the slag
In my adulterated soul;
Let death fall from me
Like a city.

    A Visit to the Stone Clock

     Sun Moon and Stars work on wires, across an iron sky
     Over bloody Stonehenge.

     Wizards torture power
     Out of known tensions of conjunction and opposition
     To lay down on Britain
     An iron rule.

     They cry down the Guardians themselves, ground their
     massive charge --
     Till ancient terror of magic sails along the lines
     From stone to stone:
     No mercy, only titanic power
     In those sentinels.

     May we never dare to remember
     What they most certainly knew.

    Voice of the Antichrist

     Inside my own body, my will is law: I leave nothing to
          chance.
     No morality has the power
     To bend the fixed rod of my course.
     I purchase and put on the fiery image that gives me
           power over the stars;
     I admire myself, when day is done, in the frozen mirror of
           cocaine.
     Circumstances fall to me, and jobs, and sales, and deals;
     I reap my profits, invest them in global empire,
     Because man is made to conquer the future, to cut his
          way, by pure self-will
     To the galaxies of his ultimate form.
     The findings of impartial research reveal my word to
          have been inevitable from the beginning;
     The future is assured to my flesh;
     Not another man lives in my image. I cut out the impostors
     With knives, with military interventions,
     With judiciously placed rumors, with massive transfers of
          capital;
     I grip the wheel of the stock exchange, aiming for target
          center with the
     Weapon of mobile assets; the pirates of my right and
          my left hands
     Come from all the finest mafias and universities....
     I am without rival. The sentimentalized face of God the
          Father
     I have limited to residual pockets of sub-colonial
          darkness in rural backwaters;
     The Virgin, too, is abducted by my warriors and bound to
          await my desire;
     Night and Silence have no power
     Over my hard, undying light.

He

Your vision fills the waking world
Like the Sun. The Moon
(as Yeats says) will then be inside us,
"The Antithetical Tincture,"
The true aristocracy, where each man
(as Blake says) is "King & Priest
In his own house,"
Each of us a great Sun Door
In the solitude of his own soul --
Translucent crystal,
Window of fixed air --
Where the whole past is redeemed,
Returns effortlessly to the
Center of its own delight,
The empty mirror, the great expanse of
Conditionless space,
Prajñaparamita, she who is Space Herself
When rung like a bell, clearing a path
For the Lightningbolt, clapper that strikes
Between the root and the crown
Of anything.
His ministers shine out from the central
Void of his kingship
In twelve-thousand rays.

If he were brought into this world
With a heart and a face
He would be, precisely,
You yourself.