I perused through the catacombs
gliding my fingers along your innumerate spines,
picked you up where you blossomed in my palm
and breathed archaic mysteries into my face.

I felt myself trembling
as I dared enter the hallowed corridors,
opening doors and peeking inside
in hopes to catch a semblance of your touch,
your taste,
your voice.

A fingerprint,
a coffee stain,
clues and the origins of bricolage
that left me breathless
and teary-eyed
as the weight of this sacred place
bore itself entirely upon me.

A part of your soul
encased within each one of your treasures:

I heard your stereo in a jazz history,
heard you ponder within Dostoyevsky,
saw your wry smile and charm within Fleming,
and your humor within Vaudeville--

and as I perused onward,
and the archetype bore itself naked in a holy privilege,
I closed myself within that impalpable bubble
and wept at the gates of Eden.

As I removed my hands from your ribcage,
and withdrew the breath from your nostrils,
walking away with your words and fragments of your soul
I soon realized--

You Are What You Read.

You were draped across a girlfriend's bedroom wall
where a cross would be,
your arms held out loosely like an ambiguous invitation,
shielding your countenance from extraneous intrusions
under which she would sleep soundly
in the shroud of your incantation.

Your fallen angel wings beating back bad dreams
slain mercilessly
and falling at your feet.

Your lips slightly pouting, eyes dark,
obfuscating the madness and ***-crazed hallucinations
they harbor.

Hair purposefully unkempt,
disheveled sensuously atop your head,
tufts of hair brushed across your broad chest--

Bare muscles taut and taunting,
placed topographically on the poised temple--
those ready to worship bow their heads
in reverence to the sonic alchemist.

The modern adonis,
sculpted out of the Mississippi Delta Blues
and Dionysian wet dreams--
brought to life with the electric current pulsating through the microphone and its stand upon which you straddle with skin-tight leather pants--

Your left hand around its waist,
your right cupped over the phallus--
your lips part and your cataclysmal eyes
envelop the darkness before you--

Your image,
tormented and tantalizing
in an open invitation
to prostrate ourselves before you
and succumb to your hypnotic stare.

The door opens.

The hopelessness in a foreseeable car crash--
an emotion lasting a split second--
is unlike the crippling anxiety of a passenger
who fears the leather-bound mobile mercy seat.

Yet the mirage renders the victim just as helpless
in the impalpable facade of doom.

To never leave this room.

My friends and I
are forlorn fabrics
haphazardly stitched into a quilt.

Comprised of different textures and fabrics,
frayed at the ends,
rejected pieces meant for the trash,
not good enough for made-to-wear mall clothes.

My friends and I
fit like a puzzle
consisting of pieces from various other puzzles--
found under coffee tables,
between couch cushions,
tossed into the bowels of forlorn toy bins--
forming a collage of something
disoriented and ambiguous.

Crammed together,
smashing our appendages,
leaving crooked gaps,
wrinkled, torn, ****** up,
but feeling better here
than in our small contribution
to the bland image of our factory's design.

My friends and I,
outcasts, rejects, punks,
convening in the junkyard heap
where we dance and laugh among trash
that makes us feel clean.
Pure when we're filthy.

Quilts and puzzles,
to instill and befuddle;
****** treasures.

It is my first and only belief
that I truly know nothing.

That every truth is relative,
that every reality is a perception,

and in time these perceptions may shift.

It is from this footing, therefore,
that I can begin to
ascend towards illumination,
                 or descend into madness.

But
if I am first to believe
that I must indeed know nothing,

how is it
        that I know
                    up
           from
down
?