Rack of Bones

despolue
(1/7/01 8:22:41 am)
Rack of Bones
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Hanging on the rack of bones, bent by old, remembered winds, burdening truth and the rusting links of what is called sin; he is strangely walking strange. A life of dancing in the shaky embrace of spectral desire, of knowledge and denial, of tasting and spitting, of taking and purging, of creation and destruction and of touching and losing. Compassion, the only angel, brushes enough colour over him so that he may be seen by willing eyes, by those passing or those who he has passed, by flying vision or groundsight, by sun, moon or false, standing lights, or by unexpected reflection that wonders, by proxy, if a soul resides within that polished man or whether, as we wonder all, if the world and all of its corollaries are becoming at this wakened moment. Then, oh faith, as faith invades and takes it upon itself to ruin construction in a theoretical model twist of easy neural vines that operate by power of the engines of doubt, question and perhaps by error now; so we follow on prophetic paths to hope of revelation craving time, as if it were finite, to lead us away from the temptations that bring us here to look around and shop from new or dusty catalogues of saintly sureties and dogmatic kits and formulae. Then back to he who is blinking now in overwhelmed reaction to the words on the dirty windows that may be something of how he appears, but words that resist finality by their worn aspects or that speak certainty by their seeming recognition. A, B, C and so forth; he disorders them to clarify the rhythm of his speaking pulse; a voice that he hopes is infinite. He has some influence with movement and so he goes a little further with his objective, kinetic guide following the easy walking symbols as they appear, chanting a name in the intervals. This, unchanged since his birth, is the porous rock that soaks up the groundwater of identity. He could have made a nation out of his nomenclature; a tribe out of his label but a dream had arrived and stolen seed that was far too heavy for the wind to bear. Rather than a tattered conception, nothing is conceived by him and so he understands himself to be holy then waits to bring immaculate beings like a god or a magician thinking that, either way, there must be a trick or a secret that he could learn if only he could think along those cross hatched lines that form old lithographic images of bearded alchemists, of sages, of gods and of demons, all who reside in places where he dare not go. The clowns have all shouted for him to follow them, crowded into the tiny car and to take a little trip subterraineously, down you understand, below, for it will be just fine like a winter in Florida, like a sunroom in flames, like a kerosene beach party or a barbecue that loses control, hosted by one who has no control. He strains hard to fold his ears closed but in his wildest imagination he sees himself liquefy, a momentary candle, a true flicker exposed in the totality of complete consumption.
He shivers. His teeth are drummers, his eyes are strobes, his legs are bamboo splitting, his hands ungoverned metronomes, his feet magnets of similar polarity; he waits for disassembly but expects nothing and is rewarded by his expectations as ad nauseum infinitum he finds the counterbalance of the anti-clown, the Kemmet Elly, the reverse polka-dot spiral square, the impossible patterns of plain vision, the gyroscopic, compass bearing genial jinn, the deft horizon and the mason’s squaring level. Nothing but the gravity of gravity and more, he thinks, do there embrace unlike in this man’s barren empire peopled by glossy lipped and papered ladies whose irritation defies prescription.
The next window is broken; scraps impale themselves, like fictional birds upon jagged points and in the dark spaces between the teeth he knows some splinter of personal history was played on the littered stage, unswept, unflourished, unclean but resident in the memory of the players and company; the flotsam lines of an unscripted, improvisational opus Magnus, the ether conversation of uncatchable skip transmissions that do a gypsy journey one step ahead of some natural law.
He is now being drawn up into the hungry sky, the frightening remover of sorrows, one bad scene to another, realities in conflict, an equally matched contest that draws him like pus to a poultice up to a surface of some sort where he recognizes nations, houses from a distance, trees in their faulty seasons, birds in stasis, animals that hunger and the residents before their eyes and motion.
He blinks and blinks and blinks …….corneal implants by insane ophthalmologists, previews of Dali’s death work dream, Salvadorian masks, condors on waiting trapeze, Pennsylvanian iconography, sub-titles from Antediluvian films, torn strops, hesitant lemmings, a stained rose on a Belgian carpet, five wooden beads and a key spinning upright in a floating bowl..
He once knew the lotus but even, and ever, those who trail their roots must change their addresses so that he who has no number is he who acquires the most easily lost paper.