Saintliness  

Mother Teresa is a saint now
The woman who loved poverty and death
But what she did is a truth
Like the six million dead Jews
It has been hammered
Into our heads no need to argue
The truth is told by historians and some of them
Are sent to jail for the sake of truth
When a big lie has been established as veracity
Anyone who gainsay this
Is vilified shut out of the tame press and
Given no credit
Mother Teresa has reached sainthood and
Is in the best company of the untouchable just as
It is impossible to discuss the holocaust 's
Secular saintliness
The truth is what you make of it

Our embrace lasted too long.
We loved right down to the bone.  
I hear the bones grind, I see  
our two skeletons.

Now I am waiting
till you leave, till
the clatter of your shoes
is heard no more. Now, silence.

Tonight I am going to sleep alone  
on the bedclothes of purity.
Aloneness
is the first hygienic measure.  
Aloneness
will enlarge the walls of the room,  
I will open the window
and the large, frosty air will enter,  
healthy as tragedy.
Human thoughts will enter
and human concerns,
misfortune of others, saintliness of others.  
They will converse softly and sternly.

Do not come anymore.  
I am an animal  
very rarely.

could you ever, with your ears, express a piece of music, as: fluffy? dark soho's piece is fluffy; and by god i was the pretentious one at the beginning of the 20th century critical of the emerging music... but i'm the one merging at the beginning of the 21st century: and it's a T.S. Elliot scenario: the overload of rhythm: industrial core due to the industry being foetal sieg heil! and so many have fallen for the nostalgia trap... it's not coming back: against the thump thump gyroid reproductive muscular we emerge from... for whatever lack of drums in the orchestra: we're paying for it with an excess of techno techno Bob the goldfish cardboard box dance sequence... or as some would suggest: filling in the gap about the joke concerning a triangle being a part of the orchestra and the person educated in it, rather than the harp.

ah, the blank, and i have to work on it: let's imagine i was just
cooking a pork stew for my father and you don't
bother to ask why someone's surname is written
Raßer - and you don't know how
to pronounce it: and you end
up with razors - which you end up saying
racer - or how about sharpening
the s into a zed - how's that?
this is surgical activity while you you're
at at the butchers: necromancy aplemty:
when god speaks, the devil whispers -
American divergence of the pronoun
y'all / you all -
                           we the safeguard
and they the paranoia -
                                    take it slow,
imagine yourself living in Alaska:
you're exposed to the elements
and Prometheus isn't handy:
  all you have is west London drool
that later translates into easter in London,
Ld: isn't even an postal code:
given Greenwich, bellybutton on the world
they're bound to abuse / feel special
                 about, it's just a John Bishop
          Scouser type of beating.
                  ya - i say i aye, you frostbite of
culture, ya yarn ball of ****!
    oh 'ere we go: the red-coats are hunting
foxes: sort of scenario -
   the sooner they ******* a killing
the better for me: 'ave that one with a grizzly:
             some say the longer the yawn
the greater the applause -
      yo! Yogi! turntable of Las Vegas
says you better gamble on hibernating in the
effing Hermitage!
  - we say a lot of y'all when we imply the
plural, don't we? terrible, ****** thuggish
'n' all, to say it.
   i have five pages worth of notes,
and even though i'm drunk,
i came across a foundation, i'll never be ask happy
at i am right now,
   i signed a copy of my book (look! i don't
have a publicist, i don't have the ******* swagger,
i have the inferno that says:
  when the writing dries up, get a proper job;
if the writing doesn't dry up?
             you're less than necessary than a
supermarket shelf-stacker...
                 there are succumbing reasons that
explain the affair later) -
      no i'm about to sell my first copy -
  i say to her: when you working this circuit next?
Friday night? i'll tell you how much i'm selling
for, well: i'll never be this happy: ever -
it really doesn't matter how much for how little:
   i'm not exactly a family animal: farmed -
i'm political: through and through -
   by the time i finish this whiskey i'll be
demanding something new...
    i don't think your able limbs do idle chores:
i just think admire that they do them
and hardly complain: i blame it on the workers'
encouraged banter - and that's called solidarity.
still, right now, it's all about
dark soho's: dark moon in stonehenge -
       or why you never take l.s.d.
   question arises with Bach...
and polyphony - again, non-linear polymers:
   back when the Germans were at it
music sliced through the air
                   - or the modernity of lost
string (quartets) and woodwinds -
          only the thing plucked rather than in slicing
stroked kept from the strings:
    it was truly a devolution via brass -
   you can have the iron age,
but this is the brass age -
                   and subsequently the evolution
or filling the void of orchestral percussion,
which began with jazz: how orchestra was stripped
of woodwinds and strings and elevated
the humble triangle and enforced drums
and the rhythmic transcendence of limb and heart
and less ear and mind -
           oh the spontaneity thus involved:
forever the enigma of the composer's ability
to say much more than *A, when saying in A# -
oh hell: music used to be the Mongolian horde
of all things imaginable,
                  the screams, all the entrenching
embodiment of battle: soothed -
  but in our apathetic guises: music is a variant
of the once exfoliated, thus hushed:
music is expressing a war in waiting - or a war
that's not to be - once music music ascribed
wind and tornado toward its elemental composition -
these days there is less wind, and more earthquake:
we are exposed to a trembling -
           an overt percussion methodology:
that's not fire and the storyteller / poet by
the lonesome huddling of nomads by the fire
with oud and recitation of the to come Quran:
we are experiencing a complete reversal of wind:
here we have dark soho's tectonic cardiovascular:
over stating the percussion until the eventual
obliteration of breath, and subsequently
the flatline of the heart's rhythm: to reach the zenith
of a flatline: beehive musicology.
         it's all earth: and the quaking
rather than a waking into.
                  sure: to the alien ear outside the populace
of those that listen to that kind of "****":
but let me assure you:" you can intellectualise
anything beyond the guilty pleasure:
or else - care to disclose your opinions about doggy?
once we were slicing and ******* -
these days? we're hammering, Soviet committee
said: hammer hammer hammer...
            gravitational drilling against the Catholic
lessons of worldly-detachment akin to a Gagarin:
and all the world's problems morphed into
an image of moving away from earth...
    far far away...       well: we're grounded, like it
or not.
              i love that: y'all -
                          it's as if we all need to agree, ~.
and what better way to actually open a poem up
if not to say how prose is a miser and poetry
the mad spender, or compose: he had / another thought
he wished to take / but...
           originally
                    he had
                  another thought he wished to take
                 but...
saving an Amazonian tree, suggesting that: one by one.
i'll sell my first copy on Friday,
i just need to know how much money was put
into printing it -
   and it will be the happiest i'll ever be -
who cares that it's only 1... if i were selling
100,000 copies i'd be thinking of buying a Mercedes
to do away with the capital...
      oh right, the poem (six pages of notes):
the question, what does it all mean?
       i'm thankful that the all means very little,
or at least enough for physicists to take a bother
in answering:
               i'm just thankful to say that at least
bites / bytes / isolated units have more meaning
than the whole... i.e.?
do i care what the universe means, more so
than i known what the word darkened means?
                 pause for thought -
the well established organic search engine that memory
is: and never will be: an algorithm (engine) -
           still the organic variation of accessing it
reveals Rodin's statues -
                        post-Rodin (Rho-dan: ****** iota!
why so naked in the first place?!) -
            the point where it's not so much enigmatic that
you wish to replicate: but entomb, and mould
a statue worthy of the perpetuated cut-short
and mediating the idea that thought has also
the faculty of imagining and memorisation
that hardly translate into being via ergo...
       if that's the case: you're demented via the
ergo of memory... and deluded via the ergo of
imagining -
                      or Frankenstein / Disney respectively:
but never the extinguished cogito, somehow,
oddly enough:
                          and by the way - no one is going
to question my opinions because dialectics was
giving the hemlocks... my opinions
will only become passed around like Bulgarian
Versace copyright thefts, or because they
were never ideas: attachment .pdf
                   will never entertain someone else's thought,
or because they were originally always opinions
will be consecrated on the attachments of .jpeg:
ever wonder why the crucifix always
mobilises so much emotional foundation to
react and protect a torture-filled instrument
worthy of worship? me neither.
                but that's the whole beginning:
we ensured our memory is eroded by an easily
accessed algorithm - we prefer the goggles to
mensa -
                   and if i were a technophobe: e ah e ah oh...
McDonald would turn out to be McTrump:
'cos' i wouldn't be using it.
              then how to synchronise the senses:
you surely can't leave one the prime consumer of
all the things around you:
     i guess that as stated: you can't live out a life
whereby one is polarised, and the others recessively
make your thinking into potato -
   then again: not polarising one of your senses
will leave you thinking that old fantasy that
you live in a hologram "reality": which i mean by saying:
if one of your pentagram limbs isn't polarised
like a blind person, your thought will claim a sixth
sense status - and subsequently you'll experience
either a second chance of allowing one of your senses
to be stressed / polarised, or all your senses will become
overpowering your non-sense: that's thought into submitting
to a polarity / vector: kindred of
the manual worker feeling his trade take
perfect replication -
a composer polarised by "hearing" -
a painter polarised by "seeing" -
a poet polarised by "speaking" -
a chef polarised by "tasting" -
   a perfumer polarised by "scenting" -
and within the sixth sense extension:
a politician polarised by "thinking" -
  the first antonym suggestion comes within the latter's
parameter: mobilising or puppeteering:
would i care to find variations for the latter? no.

     interlude... opening of page 3 of notes on a windowsill...

and how often is soul ascribed a sensual dimension?
i guess as many a time thought isn't ascribed one:
necessarily made into nonsense.
soul? what do i mean by that? the part of you
that isn't indestructible, but, rather,
the part of you that feels that ease: the uninhibited
correlation (verbiage necessary, darling,
if you want the gist of it) -
when at ease you're not really ascribing to yourself
thinking, but a narrative -
  hence your notion of being indestructible,
or young.
      when thinking is easy we're not actually thinking,
we're narrating, hence the majority of us
are clogs in the machine, and once the machine works
we're upbeat about it, because we prefer to narrate
ourselves into life than think ourselves into it:
primarily because (even i included):
we lack a public addressal attache to make
vague concerns over our: inhibitions -
we are entrusted with inhibitory encrusting
for the sole purpose (we should be afraid of
suggesting): let's see who falls off the ferris wheel
first and we can entrust our congeniality toward
the joke: thank **** it wasn't me, later...
          but still:
if were were really intended to think
rather than narrate we'd be given global warming
solutions everyday...
   there's nothing in us that suggests an 'ought',
a moral choice to later say: thought
                      that could fish-hook us out of
kissing the narrative goodbye -
  narration is an undisturbed faking of thought -
as such the 'ought' is never thought of:
because there's a narrative going on
that's more important than anything requiring
even the most basest obligation.
       we are never obliged to be, because we are
never obliged to think: it's strange how the
two are anti-synonymous due to the ergo disparity:
as if one produces the other, or the former
the latter.
              thinking you're good never precipitates
into being good - and vice versa:
   for all i know i know fake rather than falsifiable
saintliness: the power of the scientific
  suggests that i should be Baron von Scorn
when it comes to the ignorance of testifying
         against people who abhor science
and reproduce, nonetheless, with failure to
transcend deformities: because deformities are
glorified and all forms of ability demonised:
so it looks quasi-Vatican-e.
                   preface to a Michelin star:
start with a ******: work your way down:
enjoy your meal, bygones-be-bygones:
you very happy people.
                  but i never understood why
the idea of thought has never the opinionated phrase:
me, exponentially, to no book's avail!
        p.s. as to be ever written!
    thought conscripts man to rubrics -
for example? examinational candélabre -
  some call it i.q., other's call it: for god's sake man,
****** shoot! shoot!
                        and the flying toes and digits:
thumbs away: booh booh Blitz.
                        first thought: that Jersey song:
fifth of November - that Fawkes ****
who almost.... n'ah.
                            in case you're narrative:
thought has its narrative: it's transcendental -
phenomenology comes into play with
narratives and Lady Gaga and how you're an
"individual": thought is acquired trying to transcend
atomic electron orbits that says: electron clouds -
or it's there, but it isn't there, but it's not there,
but it's there: huh?
                         narration conscripted to the rubric
of school exams at school: palpitations, sweat,
nerves... in this scenario thinking is actually
regurgitation -
                          actually we're still doing the Elvis
Costello hope: while narrating we pass from
these shackles of having to think lessons through
when in fact: we're gearing to having no need
in having to learn them primordially, period!

the paranoiac "they" are eroding our protective
membrane -
    they begin with memory -
         it's not that we care to remember certain things,
but by educating us in the Pythagorean theorem
they're not necessarily dressing us in bow ties either -
they need to implant an abstract educational
thought to replace our natural assimilation into
a narrative that we ourselves have created -
       they need to create erosion within our
memory to stop us coagulating our sense of memory
within a framework of us imagining backwards
rather than forwards:
      the cinema of the mind means memory utilises
imagination to do cartwheels backwards
rather than forwards: because forwards is always
a Disney pharmacology of the neon hyper colouring.

or how they made us escape the "Alcatraz"
of the couch of cognitive narration into an
iron maiden of thinking -
                    in this realm narrating is disparaging
from thinking: narrative is a comfort zone:
thinking is a discomfort zone -
                       but neither me nor you will
become a Newton in terms of narrating the ideas:
so why the hell would they want us to think?!
       concerning Heidegger:
the problem is not that we're not thinking -
the solution is that we're narrating and have
no urge to write books, and thank god for that!
               or man, as the pentagram of the senses,
reversed into thought as the sixth sense calamity
and reversed back as that sense missing
and the tetra exemplified...
         when learning what is the weakest point,
the audio or the optic-receptive stimulation?
                         i mean, the senses over accuse
thought's complexity as if it were a sense akin
to them, hence the suggestion nonsense;
well of course, thought is actually non-sensory -
     i just suggested that when thinking
i'm not polarising any of the penta -
         i'm suggesting that when thinking i'm
invoking the tetra - as if blind or deaf -
but that means i'm deviating from the superstition
that a sixth correlative mediatory balance exists
between the two dichotomies -
                            the senses will always treat
obscure thinking as if obscure narratives:
even though i know how much a price of bread
costs in the 21st century -
                              what i'm saying is that
the nonsense assertion is also true for the other:
not having had the chance to polarise one
of its senses to point toward the artefact use of
wh

There's a flag hangs over my threshold, whose folds are more dear to me
Than the blood that thrills in my ***** its earnest of liberty;
And dear are the stars it harbors in its sunny field of blue
As the hope of a further heaven that lights all our dim lives through.

But now should my guests be merry, the house is in holiday guise,
Looking out, through its burnished windows like a score of welcoming eyes.
Come hither, my brothers who wander in saintliness and in sin!
Come hither, ye pilgrims of Nature! my heart doth invite you in.

My win is not of the choicest, yet bears it an honest brand;
And the bread that I bid you lighten I break with no sparing hand;
But pause, ere you pass to taste it, one act must accomplished be:
Salute the flag in its virtue, before ye sit down with me.

The flag of our stately battles, not struggles of wrath and greed:
Its stripes were a holy lesson, its spangles a deathless creed;
'Twas red with the blood of freemen, and white with the fear of the foe,
And the stars that fight in their courses 'gainst tyrants its symbols know.

Come hither, thou son of my mother! we were reared in the selfsame arms;
Thou hast many a pleasant gesture, thy mind hath its fights and charms,
But my heart is as stern to question as mine eyes are of sorrows full:
Salute the flag in its virtue, or pass on where others rule.

Thou lord of a thousand acres, with heaps of uncounted gold,
The steeds of thy stall are haughty, thy lackeys cunning and bold:
I envy no jot of thy splendor, I rail at thy follies none:
Salute the flag in its virtue, or leave my poor house alone.

Fair lady with silken trappings, high waving thy stainless plume,
We welcome thee to our numbers, a flower of costliest bloom:
Let a hundred maids live widowed to furnish thy bridal bed;
But pause where the flag doth question, and bend thy triumphant head.

Take down now your flaunting banner, for a scout comes breathless and pale,
With the terror death upon him; of failure is all his tale:
'They have fled while the flag waved o'er them! they have turned to the foe their back!
They are scattered, pursued, and slaughtered! the fields are all rout and wrack!'

Pass hence, then, the friends I gathered, a goodly company!
All ye that have manhood in you, go, perish for Liberty!
But I and the babes God gave me will wait with uplifted hearts,
With the firm smile ready to kindle, and the will to perform our parts.

When the last true heart lies bloodless, when the fierce and the false have won,
I'll press in turn to my ***** each daughter and either son;
Bid them loose the flag from its bearings, and we'll lay us down to rest
With the glory of home about us, and its freedom locked in our breast.

feminism is pretty much a failure like communism... the latter wanted the workers of the world to unite... but they didn't... each working man took too much pride in his earnings an expenses to the extent that he sought no idealistic solution... the self-preservation element... feminism is very much alike to communism... it comes from the same source, the bourgeoisie caste... which explains why prostitutes in France defended their pundits... they basically said: ******* little Freudian undecided *****, with us it's 100 ***** a week... with you it's only about 100,000 interpretations of a **** in clingfilm at a Hollywood premier: your choice, either 100 *****, or a ***** and the cinema of the would-be agonies or a man resembling Richard Burton, sober, and being a Swedish patent for a house-husband, and a closet poet, and a chef, and a, and a, and a... can i suggest a kaleidoscope as the safest investment?

imagine sitting in a brothel waiting room,
there's about 10 of them -
and they're looking at your like you're
their father and they're about to skin you alive
like piranhas with their eyes -
it can be quiet intimidating,
what for £10 entry fee and £110 and hour
baggage of silenced ******* -
you're basically ******* Ferraris and Lamborghinis -
but it's worth the while,
you genitalia turn into a pavlova before
it's baked mush - your testicles are soaring
angels with the ticklish bits added
to what feels like a shiver of goosebumps -
you sit there for a while, it's the hardest time
to be making choices, you ask for a cup of water
(i always did),
you get it, Keith Lemon is doing his talk show,
the older prostitutes are un-amused -
they're the ones who'd skin you alive,
pick one and she turns into a sadistic
vacuum cleaner in the realm of oration -
you think these terrorists and so-called
martyrs would have the ***** keep up with an ante-chamber
like that? these women can sniff out perversity
like they might sniff out a woodlice in damp wood...
or the spiders that complete their weaving
and never take the central role on the stage,
but ****** their spiderweb before scuttling
into the frenzy of making a body of other insects
into immobile dough to **** into on the sidelines,
they're the out-of-body experiencing their architecture,
there's no ego in them, not central nervous system...
i always thought that spiders compensated the
cartesian problem with their spiderwebs -
they extended their nerves through their *****
into an architectural project of nerve endings / extensions...
see, that's the thing about poetry: pure narration...
no technique, no nothing, no need to create a
third person or first person ******, no characters
to study and incubate into a thrill ending: poetry
is the purest form of narration, easily a ricochet
into digression that in fiction would only mean another
grey matter character to involve in the plot.
. and - (dot and hyphen, as suggested by Nietzsche,
is steaming along forgetting the semi-colon).
- i swear insects are the perfect telescopes into
alien life... on that micro level you get to
understand the many hazards of differentiated life
elsewhere... it's the microbes you need to
mind as the real hazards and blizzards -
but this one time i broke the brothel rule
denoted as choice: i didn't make one.
i asked for one to make a choice for me...
one talkative gall said i shouldn't be asking...
so i replied: well aren't you the talkative one...
you'll do. told you a butcher's supermarket -
i turned myself into a piece of meat -
the ***** butcher said: he'll have to do,
he prompted me to talk the heretical *credo...
the outer-body experience, prostitutes are the experiment,
i asked of the 10 present and my penguin **** solo
shrivelled up newspaper of ******* to chose -
and she did... it's funny giving choice to someone
who you payed to choose from... these Muslim martyrs
will find it had to keep it level headed like Solomon -
these boys will really struggle to reap their rewards...
they just blow up ten people but never sat in
the company of ten prostitutes...
ten blown up, in the company of ten prostitutes...
you really don't know what it's like trying out
whether you could stomach a harem, let alone keep
one like a walrus...
ever stole a kiss from a ******* who's saintliness
involved never giving one but merely ******* more ****?
hmm? oh i can get pornographic after all...
it's a joyride troupe of force in thinking the joys i
nourished in such places... although i have to admit
Amsterdam would never feed such poems...
it's just common place everything's worth clapping
(or too much clapping by the serfs at a Bolshoi ballet),
you need the thrill of something being illegal...
in the case of itemising England it's the brothel owners
that are the culprits, not the prostitutes, nor the pundits,
which is why i asked to perform oral *** once in a while
for the extra undocumented 10 quid... that didn't fall
into the hands of the madame... so it ends...
feminism alright for you, in that ivory tower of yours,
unscathed, belligerent and with sulphuric toxic gas
to **** out from your mouth as the proper argument?
the heart not steady? i see... i guess you have a hard fight
ahead of you... young men go to prostitutes undiscriminating
their age and **** as **** would do too,
but young women don't go to prostitutes,
professional women do... and they'd always probably
**** some young dude... see the difference?
young men go to prostitutes... young women have all
the eye-to-**** candy they can have... older women order
**** and limousine, a night out, a date, a dinner...
young men are like: broken pipe, need a plumber,
stillson pipe wrench! and where's that ******* spanner?!
and contrary to popular beliefs, cats have
a second weak spot other than petting their heads
and playing with their whiskers... the point
between the evolve coccyx and the spine...
they really love a rub when the coccyx turns into
a tail... it's almost like a reverse test for prostate cancer...
every cat sitting down when rubbed in that area
will do a marching army band salute of raising its
hind in anticipation of a rainbow -
and yes, urinating with ******* is pretty much as
exciting as a woman massaging her ******* with
a shower head with pulverising pressurised water.

This is neither history nor theology;
this is Romance:

                                       A Liturgy for the Emperor

In memory of
Patrick Joseph Donovan,
Stratiotis

Processional

How, then, will we find death?  With rifle in hand,
Perhaps, or flowing with the warm, worn prayers
That slip with beads through one's fingers and soul.
Rifle or Rosary, either will do.
One's death might rise in the boldness of youth,
Or in the wearied wisdom of old age,
In wild combat against ancient evils,
Or softly, while planting a red-apple tree
For grandchildren to summer-celebrate,
In wild red martyrdom, or obscure white.

The nights still whisper how the Emperor fell,
Fell with a faithful few upon the walls,
The old land walls of Constantinople.
But we are not to speak of martyrs whose
Transcendent beauty reproaches our times,
Our drifting dark age, drab, dreary, and dim
Our tomb-like lives cluttered with small darkness,
Our talk all common, colourless, and cold:
The thoughts assigned programmed into our souls,
Daymares programmed into us for our good,
Pitiful, pattering, prosthetic prose,
Cacophonies of casual cruelties --
No brave iambic lines for golden dreams.

But dare we also whisper truths, and speak
Of what a wind-wild people once we were,
And we will want our syllables to sing
In honour of the Martyr-Emperor
And those who followed him into his death,
And in this knowing of him we can live
Among those souls who are forever young.

Introit

In Nomine Partis, et Filli, et Spiritus Sancti

We will go to the Altar of God
To God, Who gives joy to our youth
We will go to the Altar of God
We will go to Byzantium

Kyrie

Lord have mercy -- when the shadows surround us
Christ have mercy -- when we forget the Three Romes
Lord have mercy -- when we forget You

Gloria

Glory to God in the highest
And peace to His Byzantine people
And all His peoples
Lord God, Heavenly King
who once blessed us with Emperors
Send us another
Send Your waiting people their Emperor

The First Reading

As Constantine his walls he watched, he wept,
Lost in the Gethsemane of his soul
His tears they fell upon the ancient bricks
Warm with centuries of sun, saintliness,
And the passions of a glorious race

The City!  Long reigning on the Golden Horn
The Summer Country of our childhood dreams
There playing, praying, working, selling, and,
Yes, sinning too.  Passionate *Romanoi --
What a magnificent people we were.

(fast)

When armies marched to the Byzantine beat
Sophia ruled from her Byzantine seat  
When Byzantine sails sheltered Odysseus' sea
The wave-roads of trade were open and free  
When Romanoi feasted, blood mixed with wine
Daggers drawn over a dancing concubine
A newer Helen who provoked desire,
She seared men's eyes with her own Greek Fire
When Blues and Greens howled in the Hippodrome --
Such rowdy citizens in Second Rome! --
Then even Emperors in purple shoes
Feared stoning by Greens or hanging by Blues
The rough, loud democracy of the street --
Mobs also marched to the Byzantine beat

The Second Reading

(slowly)

But –

Above all rose Justinian's gem
The holy place where God called us to Him
The Mother Church of dawn-lit Christendom
Sophia -- the Queen of Byzantium
Where Patriarch, patrician, people, and priest
Gave worship.  Then the greatest and the least
Abandoned sin to hear the sweet bells ring,
Stood penitent before our God, our King:
In consecrated hands, through wine and bread

Christos Pantocrater fed us Himself

And then all hearts were cleansed, all souls were fed

(Very slowly)

But centuries passed, and this City of God
Heart of the Empire, became the Empire,
As lands and peoples were lost forever
to the creeping new age.  When Constantine,
The last Constantine, was called to the Throne,
All that was left was The City herself,
The Morea, and islands, and memories.
The fleet whose sails had shaded the Inner Sea
Was but a few hopeless hulks in the Horn

From the dust, dark shadows metastasized,
Shadows who stole and slew their way to power
And swept the land bare of free folk and fields
And more and more the shadows grasped and held,
A dead world of slaves whose backs were bloodied
Beneath the whips of masters, slaves whose eyes
Were cast carefully, cautiously to the ground
Lest demeanour manly and bearing proud
Attract the executioners' busy blades.

Finally, after devouring lands and souls,
The shadows coveted Constantinople,
The Red-Apple Tree where continents meet,
The City they could never build for themselves
And nothing stood between them and their lust
But one bold man: Constantine Dragases.
The faithful few who stood the walls with him,
Gathered around proud, stubborn Constantine:
Workers and monks and nuns, beggars, merchants,
Proud, arrogant Byzantines, and the few
Wild Latins From the barbarian West
Whose Greek was in their hearts, not on their lips,
Who gave their loyalty late to their liege lord,
The Emperor, who could have safely lain
A shadow's golden-caged slave, obedient,
Well-fed, well-bedded from the shadows'
Catalogues of pretty girls and prettier boys,
A memory of what had been a man.

But Constantine stood proudly on his walls,
Defiantly, bravely, sadly there on
His crumbling ancient walls, and gave his faith
To God and the City, to his people,
Even to the faithless ones, even to his death.

And others came, From Rome and Spain and France,
From Germany, and even from the Turks,
Brave, lonely men with reasons of their own
For ending their lives there on the Land Walls.

But they were not enough.  And late that night,
After the last Mass in Hagia Sophia,
The Emperor knew that his was the blood,
The blood of sacrifice that would be shed
In remembrance of ****** Golgotha,
For the people he was given to rule,
For the people for whom he chose to die,
Sheltering, protecting, until his end.


A Gospel

No angel appeared to the Emperor,
No voice of God from a burning bush
He parted himself from his followers
And for a few minutes grieved alone

And this was given Constantine to know:

The eternal Constantinople is
Never to be lost, never defeated --
In every Christian flows Dragases' blood
Every village is the Holy City
Every church is Hagia Sophia
Every prayer is a Mass for the Emperor
Every children's foot-race the Hippodrome
Every poor family's poor supper
A banquet under the Red-Apple Tree.
Constantinople will live forever.
Know that, and, laughing, give your last earth-hour,
And your joyful eternity, to God.

Credo

We believe in God's holy empire too,
Byzantium, eternally golden
The Red-Apple Tree in the eastern sun
The City that echoes with laughing light
Through memory and history and beyond.
We believe in God and His Emperor,
And we believe that in the absence of
The Emperor, even then we must be
The Emperor's subjects, stubborn and true,
Wherever God has chosen to send us.
We then must rule our passions and our hearts,
Tend our gardens as if they were Eden --
Because they are -- and care for our children
As if angels were visiting tonight,
Until our God restores our Emperor,
Restores His City where the Earth-halves meet,
And finally, some day, some happy day,
Returns Himself to sit and rule enthroned
In His Three Romes, and in Jerusalem.


Communion

Constantine shook himself, and gave commands,
Commending all to duty and to God.
Above him the dome of Hagia Sophia
Glowed eerily on that last, wild night
While lightning slashed among the sliding clouds
Byzantium rose again for one glorious hour
And the world marveled that such things could be,
That Christ and Rome and Constantinople
Could be found in one man at the end of an age.

Blood, *****, screams, and death;
blood, *****, death
Blood, *****, screams, and death;
blood, *****, screams
Blood, *****, screams, and death;
blood, *****, death
Blood, *****, screams, and death;
blood, *****, screams
The glory is that there is no glory.
Chaos.  Horror.  Stench.  Sweat.  Pain.  *****.  Death.
Hi­s -- His -- body broken again for us.

On that dark morning of a dark new age,
Constantine turned and faced its slithering shadows
With a Byzantine end to his ruler's art,
With the peace of Christ and a hero's heart.

DISMISSAL

The Mass is ended.  Byzantium is ended.  
Escape, if you can -- make Byzantium live.
Escape to live in some peace, if you can.
Escape in peace to love and serve in exile.
Escape in peace to love and serve the Lord.

"O Lord save Thy people and bless Thine inheritance;
And to Thy Faithful king grant victory over the barbarians.
And by the power of Thy Cross, protect all those who follow  
          Thee"1

Not an End at All

1Troparion for the Sunday of the Elevation of the Cross, Divine Prayers and Serves of the Catholic Orthodox Church of Christ, copyright 1938.

Many thanks to Mr. Tod Mixson and others of St. Michael's Orthodox Church for assistance at many points, both liturgical and artistic, to Dr. Dan Bailey, of happy memory, and Dr. John Dahmus of Stephen F. Austin State University.

Stop and start
A beating heart
Boil my blood
Burn my skin
Free my ashes
Hellfire within

This dead soul consumed
By a vengeful world
No heaven or hell
Eternal purgatory
Living cost
So much more
Than death

Strike fear
Into them
Make them good
Because they fear
Retribution
Judgement will come
Did you pay your dues?

Sins wrapped in shadows
The darkness within
Slips out the cracks
Turning innocence out
Guilty pleasures
Everyday trangressions
Just one more
The promise of tomorrow
Be redeemed
Pray to be forgiven

False perfection
Surface beauty
A shining beacon
Blinding saintliness
A matyr to the cause
By living purely
Give not onto temptation