"sixtus" poems
This is ancient land, this is
hallowed ground, this is
21 kilometers worth of tunnels.
Blood stops flowing after death
because the heart is no longer beating;
no longer forcing blood to gush through veins and arteries and vessels.
It gets lazy, becomes stagnant.
Slowly slides down to the
lowest point on the body; creates a
reddish purple discoloration on the skin
similar to a bruise, but not quite the same thing.
This is what I imagine the fifth level of the catacombs to look like:
a reddish purple discoloration
spread across my mother’s back.
This is what I see when I close my eyes and rub them a bit too hard for a bit too long. This is what I see when I look into a hole in the stone walls that is big enough to fit an infant. This is what I see in the reflection of the Trevi Fountain. This is what I see when I try to remember the shape of my mother’s sleeping body as it curled in on itself on top of a flat hospital mattress.
The color of death is not black, is not white. The
color of death is the color of blood: the way it looks
through the skin after having
hours and
days and
weeks to
slowly slink down into the
lowest bend of the body.
This is the reddish umbra of the earth that the
eclipsed moon hides behind.
This is my body given for you.
Take and eat.
Do this is the remembrance of
me.
Jan 26, 2016
Jan 26, 2016 at 6:40 PM UTC
Hitherrealm is here and there,
The Highrealm past the sky,
The Deeprealm underneath us all,
The Sixtus are nearby.
The Farrealm is a nightmare,
The Lowrealm hates the heights,
The Midrealm is the world mundane,
The Sixtus dim the lights.
The Crossrealm makes connections,
The Underrealm survived,
The Overrealm is greatest,
The Sixtus have arrived.
May 29, 2016
May 29, 2016 at 8:39 PM UTC
but of course, the three families of a continent,
and many aunts and uncles and distant relations,
as if to say: but in the flood of swarm
whether by twirling zephyrs or foaming seas,
whether certain inaudible sounds of the seen things,
hinging with a creak or a squeak as a condensed
copper, whether it was man who's history
was bound by a envious hunger for the alchemical
crown, from rotting in oxidation iron,
to mandible copper, then through to the metalloid
age of silicon - to the stiff-winged birds of aluminium
and elsewhere still the blood metal desires:
the blood metal of ****** piracy, ransom,
or necessary imitation and all kinds of fraud -
if to mesmerise the human eye and turn the human
heart into a magpie's, if not kept in check by the
voluntary beggars of appearance, as those great buddhas
of the renaissance, under borgias or a sixtus or a julius;
*'he who desires to possess the earth,
let claim by only sitting in silence.'*
(adam mickiewicz)
Feb 11, 2016
Feb 11, 2016 at 12:42 PM UTC