†           †           †    

A quorum of biblical scholars
turned their doubts into thousands of dollars.
Armed with Document Q
they revealed nothing new
but the dirt neath’ the white of their collars.

A proud “health & wealth” Oklahoman
was renowned as a gospel-tent showman.
While the scriptures he twisted,
their tithing assisted
his rise from poor hick to rich Roman.

A sexually diverse professor
(assured he was not a transgressor)
spoke only of openness
glossing sin’s brokenness;
rainbows and tolerance—yes sir.

A Mormon, who lost his own ephod
Realized he was running quite slipshod
and invoked Joseph Smith.
(Yes, it may be a myth—
but it’s not like misplacing your I-pod…)

A Christian whose faith was prophetic
held to views that were truly pathetic.
This crazed Pentecostal,
not quite an apostle,
had taken an End-Times emetic.

A sober and staid Presbyterian
was distrustful of thoughts millenarian.
After smoking some bud,
he awoke with a thud;
in his sleep he’d become Rastafarian.

A preacher who fleeced his disciples
overdrew his own balance of scruples.
He was finally captured
(defrocked and un-raptured)
and rent by his destitute pupils.

A sister who waxed Pentecostal,
mistook herself for an apostle.
Speaking pure glossolalia
she sure could regale ya’
with prophecy; crazy—but docile.

Chapter 1

There was a woman. The cost to love her was your life. No other payment but a sending off, a revolver cocked to your temple’s side.
There was no spite in your death, just business.
Hell of a business to run.

I was protecting someone. Never been one to stick around, but this drag had carried for the past year. That gang-owned joint lay but two doors and a cold alley away. Popular place, maybe not the classiest but it had its patrons. Packed with your essentials: pool tables, dirt-licked walls and chairs, mean folk mixed in with the nice. Old fashioned joint with a history. You could almost feel it when you walked in. That small pressure when it’s about to rain? Felt like that had been building up for a decade there.
Some Madonna owned it. Names elude me, but she was just another front; as was the barkeep, the hired bouncers and those mean-eyed slingers that spoke loud in company, silent alone. Heh, almost like an old-fashioned saloon. Who the hell am I in this tale of cowboys and crooks?
I was holed up in that apartment block for the winter. Stiff drapes covering a stiff cold that seeped through the cracks anyway. Cold chills to wake to, and the whiskey don’t warm a **** thing. Maybe it was the ache of a past flame that led me to her. That old touch had languished and misted away in the night of some long dead memory, leaving an old kiss from a young lover on my shivering body. It grew faint with every year’s passing. I struggle to remember this keepsake.
Every night.
I was a no name protector protecting a no name ghost of a man. Yeah we knew each other. I’m no stranger to keep past talking terms . . . but, hell if I remember his name, how we got into this **** situation and why. Mind’s a little off. Been like that for years.

It was a stumble through the wrong door at the wrong time. Some spiteful voices in the back of the joint or the back of my mind telling me I’m headed for hell and ain’t coming back. See, every day is a crossroad, and I happened upon the worst one yet.
I remember that flaking paint; grime-covered white on a moulding door **** near off its hinges. That suited me, and I hated it. Maybe I grew sick of wandering the same way and turned my life on its spinning head. Spun me all the ways I couldn’t face. Saw a glimmer that fate had readied for me. Don’t think I’ve looked at anything with such eyes since; nor have they looked back at me.
The room was a cramped, dilapidated hellhole like every other room, but with her laying on that bed of hers . . . she was the only clean thing in the whole of this cursed city. Save, she wasn’t clean. No such thing exists; no such thing as clean since your adolescent innocence, and even that went up in flames. Hell, in a city like this I wouldn’t be surprised if the skeletons we kept so tightly locked in our closets outnumbered us ten to one.
Should have remembered that when I saw her, but my mind lay a blank canvas and I couldn’t help but fill it with all the details of this pretty bird. Even those that weren’t there.
No Name yanked me out quick. Never seen him so pale, ghosting further and further from a human being. He’d been running so long I don’t think he even knew what he was running from anymore. His past? Some cop chase from years back, ending with blood stains and shaky hands? A dead kid in the arms of a suicidal wife? Maybe he’s running from himself. Fear in the capacity we contain, and fear in the ways we unleash it around loved ones. I don’t blame him for running. If I was a worse man I’d run from him as well.
Now No Name has it all figured out, even if he won’t let on; and that bird in there ain’t part of the plan. Cash cash, first train out to some no name city for this no name man. In this together, he keeps repeating, like some broke down record player that only plays one song. Well I guess we share more similarities than I’d like to think so.

One night, about a month after settling in that old apartment, I hear raised voices. Not uncommon, but something about this still night woke some fear inside me. A fear I needed to meet with my eyes, a score to settle with myself. Sounded like some ******* outside was hoping to bring down the sky with volume alone. No type of gentleman, just a no ***** kid who doesn’t know the difference between command and screaming like a babe.
One gets you respect. Now, the other. . . .
I open those stiff drapes with stiffer fingers. Brush that layer of frozen breath and mist to find some mid-twenty good for nothing punk holding a struggling figure. The apartment ain’t exactly ground floor but even up here I can spot the difference between a gent and a sally. Some broad was in trouble.
Grab that six shooter, old man. The holster smooth from years of wear, small frays on the weathered jacket rubbing against goose-pricked skin. Comfort clothing that never really brings comfort. Not anymore. Guess I’m as bad as No Name. I’m just repeating routine.
Out the hall, no doors left in this apartment block. Stolen, broken, ain’t exactly your family fun lifestyle we’re living. No Name’s holed up in this fortress of upturned furniture and dresser-barred doorways. Lights flicker from between the cracks. The devil ain’t gonna bother with the door, I tell him. He doesn’t reply. Maybe he’s a religious man with one too many sins above his head.
There’s another yell and I feel my blood rise, hairs picking up static, a storm brewing inside that clenched stomach of mine. Take a tumble down the stairs in my haste. **** crooked balsa wood. Those stairs are gonna end me one day, I swear.
Ground floor. I slam that kitchen door and it cracks against the brick wall outside. ****. No Name’s gonna burst an artery. Call out for that ******* punk but he’s already eyeing me up. Only a few steps away and I can see the white in his eyes. No . . . those are his pupils. Wide, all cloud-like, he’s ******* dusted up. . . . Almost like looking into the past. Thrice-cursed ****. I’m in trouble.
This ain’t some lover’s quarrel, some twisted ****’s thought of a good way to end the night. This is a dusthead addict and I’m out of my league. His mid-snarl distorts and stretches past his cheeks and that devil grin sends an electric jolt from the wires of my brain to my heart.
This six shooter is as good as a pea gun against a Smiley.
He’s spouting some glossolalia drifts, layering it like an abominable duet. The coked-up boy in me yearns to understand again, but stiff joints and washed-out dreams have made me a cynic. Ain’t no beauty when you’re tearing things apart to see it. ******* Smiley’s on the edge and he’s ready to pounce right off. If that broad’s sobbing didn’t **** at those heart strings of mine I’d be running for my ******* life.
I lift that pea shooter and aim it straight at that devil smile.
He howls. Glass shatters from above. Some black monstrous thing comes speeding at me. I leap through that apartment doorway in time to see ******* Smiley consumed by it. All sharp, all solid that beast slams into Smiley, screaming loud enough to wake this dead city twice over. Smiley thrashes, he splays out to the ground, the beast’s seared flesh erupting in front of me. A piece slices past my cheek and I’m on the ground in tears. I hear No Name scream an incomprehensible curse above. I’m bawling now. Through my tears I spot that chunk of flesh. ******* balsa wood. Thrice-cursed balsa wood.
No Name had thrown a piano out that barricaded window of his. Tears of pure comedy, that’s what left my face. A Smiley taken out by No Name, I’ll never live this down. His mangled body lies under polished wood. Someone’s yearly worth gone in a second of frantic panic, reduced to twisted wires and cracked ivory. To see something so beautiful destroyed in seconds makes me wonder if the Smiley had gotten the better of us after all.
That broad’s in shock. Splinters covered every inch of ground save that around her; looked like a comet, trailing emptiness behind.  Should have noticed it then that something wasn’t right with that scene. Perfectly unscathed beauty sitting there with not a single scratch nor splinter on her, but I was too **** amazed I was alive. Knelt close to her and caught a whiff of some exotic scent on her skin. Some flower. Saw her face and it added another colour to that filling canvas of mine. This pretty bird from the joint. The one men died for. At least No Name had saved one life worth saving, funny it happened to be the one who could take yours in a night.
Names elude me, but the way I remember her . . . the way I remember her is Blossom, for when she came into my life she gave colours to my black and white memory, colours I didn’t know existed, and my black and white morals took a turn down some dawning grey-blurred alley.
So I’m a ******* gentleman and I walk Blossom home while No Name shifts furniture above us. Scrapes of hard wood against wood, filling that void in his once impenetrable bastion. I told you No Name’s got it all planned out already. Guess I’m just here for the ride.

May just be prattling
But I’m still making a sound
Like the tree in the forest
That no one hears falling
I got the intensity
But you’re measuring pitch
These words speak volumes
Keep up with my speed
Embrace the melody
Of wounded lips
May just be a façade
Never wanted to be language
The talk of angels
Or something else heavenly
Could be Pentecost
Could be a tongue roaming free

“Hello”

The sudden garland of a voice
like mild rain on a searing day;
refreshing invigorating.

It is a calm mercurial accent
Bolivia or Macedonia?

But there were so many
and “how they do vary.”
Distinct and irregular voices.

I took their lips for my mask
And played their words
like new dances for my breath.
Their garlands rooted in my throat
spoke a whispering cadence of euphoria

So when I speak
the graffiti of their lives
is scrawled across my tongue.
In all the rounding sound of my scattered vocabulary
each and every relationship utters it words

From the cradling of my mother
to the last beady threads of goodbye
not one word belongs to me.
I speak with the tongues of men
And of angels

You asked me why I must speak in tongues
I answered only with a smile
Devils know no other way

Malcontent that you are
you asked me again
so I replied

"The devil
only
knows"

now, I will try to abandon time and space
in this form of truancy.

what is this abandonment trying to measure?
  the abeyance of presence.

what is the measured variable trying
to dissect? the impossibility of absence.

a poem aspires to be something concrete. a poem
   is what is real and imagined in the same context.

I try to invoke Abad -- what is imagined is most
   real.  this shall be its leitmotif.

now, i imagine the horizon as a point

of origin, or a template to some familiar projection,
  or a tagebuch summarized into a fine line
of allegories and denouement.

what this line tries to prove is that

an enjambment is a mimesis.

acknowledge the sublimity of a
  creation. notice that the sequence that will
be promised is diegesis of absence as form
     but not a poem as in a poem that enshrines
lucidity -- but the lack of it.

there is only the photograph of horizon
   as hypothesis of perpetuality. this now

is a subject, a speculative undertaking rearing a
   poem -- writing as preparatory for absence,

finishing a line as pursuit of thesis, gravity of
    its heft as tabulation of emphasis, or
verbosity, which may be telling of meaning or chronology.

a poem that is not a poem,
  But poem as a form of absence

that aspires to be a poem.

what is transpiring now is that i am assuming
   an utterance: utterance as being here,

and perhaps voice as sound of becoming but not finality
   of presence, and sound as disappearance

post-peak. its point-source silence and formation
   of thought, and then a poem is written as

evidence of disappearance in deep and close
   contest with a vision coming from another

audience as an objective supposition or
   reaction that may propel an exchange

but only when silence is entertained does
  silence happen, and so this may be dismissed

as a monologue among dialogues insofar as
    only to pinpoint this arrogant feat:

i may be speaking glossolalia, or in tongues,
  and that i seek no reprieve nor vestige,

all the more response -- intone of voice
   stilling itself in the tense setting

of being gazed upon, glazed with coherence
  of senses from one identity to another say,

you hear me speak as in speaking
as baring sound.
   but now that i have spoken, i have already undone

  the quiet to stir volumes and amplitudes
to attest sound-fade as vital component of absence,

whereas this poem produces ample sound
  if you pay close attention to yourself reading

in the lull form of reading (your
breathing will have intensified here,

your reasoning will have made so much
  noise here) as i continue to whittle

away in form of verse, verse not as poem,
  verseliteration not as occupancy of space,

but all in all, a body of work
that is a visage of movement - or a trace of absence, physics of space and kinesis of departure.

a delineation of a thing that was once
   thriving in threshold accompanied

by its tendency to wane: sound may be an
     analogue of unheard, as sound is impervious
to quietude but quietude conscious of sound
     and its potential,

that quiet coheres to its inclination to consummation,

this completeness so emphatic,
this allegory as
  absence the somatic, axiomatic,

indefatigable machinery of a presage,
   or continuity -- this poem that is not a poem,

but an excess of sound, a body that
   deserves end,  a punctuation.
     verity of this argument in basest form.

this body of work as absence
  and its completeness, volition

of its enigma: is this the end
  of sound or your silence summoned?

to drag it back, its recalcitrant body,
   is form of revision, then possession

of an absence, a recollection that will have granted
   seamless entry and translation

which passes on from its origin to
  a new clause -- to end it here, now and pass

over as readable only in the background that is
   an embellishment of absence amongst

things in exclusive continuity, to have this produced
   in space as empirical of absence,

and to punctuate this, a mystification,
or say, acceptable fabrication,

to read and extricate as acceptance of an absence
   as form: this poem that is not a poem but

only a physicality delimited -- to speculate
and study
as disbelief, and to have done such simply

demystification of its transition.

There was a funeral in St. Thomas d'Aquin,
And it wasn't in the Latin tongue,
Not English, Italian, not even Norse.
It was unctioned in French, of course.
But it may as well've been Greek.
I sat reserved in my seat,
As many a French rose up to speak.
But the incense was the same,
And the holy water sprayed on my glasses,
And I sat as people knelt
And blessed themselves,
And joined in on the refrain,
I knew it by its name: Le chemin. La verite. La vie.
It's a form of glossolalia,
And it's coming for us daily.
The mourners were onto something more,
Than words, gestures and litanies,
Something greater than any of these,
Yet the translation was lost on me.

Wonder this today, what if
we
are.
We are
existent in ever only in the life we leave
graffiti to prove we examined and proved it worthy.

We swore
to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth
vicariously a thousand times,
because Pop watched Perry Mason,

we were on the bench being waited for,
endurance is encouraged for the same reason faith

is evident.

"Mortgage the farm, Pop, I got G.I. life insurance."
Uncle's last letter, afore he was made sacred

for our own American Dream, it seems, now.

Mortal tyranny
finds little worth in the 20th percentile signed
away in
death pledges held in banks of money
multipliers, who take our thousand and lend me ten

to deposit at interest less than I pay,

this we learned, is the way of thrift
in 1928, then in 1985, then in 2008
after that enough is enough

old men should not
spend no time to find
the purpose of each breath…

we're here to find the reason war is tolerated here.

The days of fewer humans, past now in haps,
left lies formed from living words
in old Sybline rants simple subtle
sublime, impulse urge
twisted in slang to become science
when only insiders are conscious of using
writing to lock meaning in unutterable names
…
Ha. That lie. The unspeakable name game,
perverted priests have played
with passion,
proud, puffed up butchers,
heirs of
Moses guessing, fingers crossed, a word
to the wise is enough.

Say I am,
Popeye.
How long will that be funny?

Timing is perceivable as everything, but so long as

eternity and infinity and twisted paths along the surface
of myelinated axioms,
exist
slick as snot,
it's not.
Now,
here we be. Redeemed. Useless mutterings picked up
in passant

considering the ant, scouting, marking, remaining in the dark
grout
of the tiled counter-top, aware of being brown on sterile
white ceramic surfaces
intensified florescent reflecting high gloss,
-- good god--

ah, Tender-eyed Leah meet Rhea impulsive creative dia
metrically opposed - as
to randomness on any level.
We square?
--
This, I think, is why war is thought tolerated here.

Right angle messages tweaked, to fit
fractures from the days when only evil was imagined
shapeless, having form in
no shape, save some old wives tales all fused with spite
esprit
expressed in rhymey verse
or, worse, glossolalia
its inverse, aha, wordplay, verse-ification

springs hope eternal, spits in the dust, fine-ground red
ochre clay from far away

brought to our place in time on muddy iron feet

A voice arose,
shake the clay from your feet,
-- the feet of them who buried thy lying sack o'
-- those clay clad feet, did I read, at the door, stood they…
-- some translation of Ananias and Saphira,

Uri, Uri! Libsi libsi
Uz zek Sigh-own

libsi big de tipart-tech, ye ru say limnal
sub
dis-error
agent of
Isaiah 57: 2 for the Jesus freaque
frequency of
calm in confusion's unpacking, fission
sometimes
haps
as the firstborn under the cloud of unknowing
emerge afraid to lie.

Nurses whisper, listener listen
emulate Socrates
in knowing
Plato could carry quite a load. But listen,

who admits to knowing nothing? be real, this takes time…

The spit in the clay, rub that in yer eye?
watchasee…
men, like trees… yeh, some say they see that here.

here we spin the synchronic dance of the fluids
that dribble down in aesthetic perfection;
free-flowing from the gullet of creation
into the palms of the frenzied flock.
the grim etchings left by her in the signet
reflect the proper terms for glossolalia,
but the honeyed tones are lost to primitive organs
and a piteous gurgle is all that emerges.

here we were, eaters of shale, chewers of dirt,
warmed beneath the blanket of her shadow,
paled by the protection of her casting murk
that hid us from the vile stars.

pollen, pollen, pollen, pollen,
showering, soaking, deep down in the gut.
Bezoar of my bezoar, heart within my sleeve,
I am waiting for my emotions to return to me.

I didn't intend on joining
Neighbourhood Watch
When I stepped onto my perch,
The elevated porch.
I spied a lad
Trying a car door
In the drive
Next to the cop's.
That's forbidden fruit
In the dark of night,
Under the slight light
Of a quarter moon.
Had I called the cops,
Would he now be homeless
By an ignominous,
Effaced father.
His pride's a tailored fit
From rejected rags.
Friends may post the antics
In glossolalia on FB
For all nations to read
The mark against him.
I didn't call.
The sin of the father
Is exposed in the sun;
Not in alleyways
Under broken street lights
Where a rejected son
Devises a defense;
Thinking no one sees him;
Thought he was alone.
I yelled to him, go home.
Go home, very few can.

This will land like focaccia,
Like the careless 'forgot ya'!

And a man will stand while staring in, through the coffee shop window, going off glossolalia.

The ebullient cashier trainee
remembers every name and mixes up almost all the orders
for coffee,

Cars are lined up for the drive-
through, their voices sound like
didjeridoos, in the ears covered
by single cyborg clip-ons

headset taking orders.

The ****** iconoclast, Street person, bows to the ground, hat off his head, as he prays to the cigarette holes he made in the EXIT sign outside,

his hat remains empty, as each car that whips up the wind that tumbles the receipts tossed egregiously at him, like leaves in the Fall,

While the cruciverbalist sits in the corner in the only soft seat, finger pecking her keyboard while stares at the line and sips her chai tea,

lagniappe of chocolate stashed,

away in her voluptuous bag,  the beleaguered barista has cups lined up over the transcendental horizon,

and she can't wait for her break
so she can eat with Olio Nuovo
olive oil, and Selection Artisan
ged balsamic vinegar, she brought
to dip, her focaccia bread in,
which she forgot almost,
on the counter at home.