Praised Be the Idol, Humming in its Awesome Power

On the right is the sound of flames licking up the air from the fireplace next to me. On the left, the sound of a television in another room chattering away its endless chatter. Voices and buzzing and blathering faces, building up in my stomach's soul the vile gray nausea of too much empty chittering.

You know what I mean. A culture, a land full of blatherers who Can't Shut Up. They fill their lives with suffocating noise in proportion to the emptiness of their souls and minds. They make the television and the multiverse of screens the ultimate mimesis of their souls, or rather they conform themselves to the empty image of the LED voice speaking nothing to no one at oppressive volumes in despotic torrents. Oh, how we bow down to our precious idols and are remade into their image.

Once we forged our idols from wood and stone and metal, glorified ourselves by casting our own image as we perceived it into dead matter. Glorifying ourselves and our evil, we conceived of what we lusted to be and then cast that desire into earth. We bowed down and were remade along the lines of our vanities. We committed incest with ourselves, masturbation in frenzy multiplied by masturbation. "Hallowed be my own semen and feces in my throat. Hallowed be my name. Worthy is the phlegm." By the sorceries of our imaginations, we fancied ourselves gods and rulers, lords of demons.

Oh travesty of travesties that our revery was broken by the revelation that our idols' great fault was their inability to speak. Grievousness, our croaking terrible grief! If our idols cannot speak, they cannot be gods. If they are not gods, neither can we be.

All praise to Babylon, our wishes were granted. Now our idols can speak! The black box of our deification chatters forever in the humming glow of its own power. We lift up the box with hollow hands and point our lives toward it, bowing down over our erections, over our genitals burning. We must be gods! And the skies must be empty, for the glory is ours to be taken and swallowed eternal. Swallowed eternal! I am the lord of my own seed. I give myself breath; I give myself life. Who am I to stand above? I deign before myself alone, for the glowing box of my own glory chatters incessantly into the night. Who is god if not me?

My flesh is warmed from the heat of the screen, and at last we can writhe together with lust bodies in blood, semen, sweat, feces--the glory of gods! Enclosed by the empty sky as an iron door locked and bolted from the outside seals us forever in a humming, sticky pool of our own tepid glory.

"The Quiet of a Silent Place, part 1" -- (plus a prelude)

The nihilist dumps it all out and fails to act except for a great churning of feeling he doesn't know how to purposefully direct. The Christian still thinks there is value in the whatever, including the expression. The result of this pairing ('x') taken as one function ('f') is the output "poem". F(x). Here's a newer draft of something. Feedback will not be rejected outright. Hint, hints.

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Space cleared out in life for me.
Cutting out rotwood.
Humming head vibration.
Euphoric swelling.
Frisson of giddiness.
My world with sweet delicacy,
a clean taste,
rose petal blossoms
with every inhalation.
Spiraling galaxy of my soul stretching out
far, long.
Blood clean and rich.
Fellows of my life
and friends far away.
Quiet today, yesterday, tomorrow is.
Clean house with clean sheet bed,
empty mailbox,
and a phone not ringing.
Pens silent, small on the table,
a lovely look,
waiting for rapture
by spindle fingers
wrapping softly as lovers.

Never loneliness today.

Ink bottles into wells deepen,
joyfully expanding,
I dipping my drawing cup
into the black milky water --
drinking deeply.
Solitude,
a greatwine.

Refusal to Supplicate Before the New God

I've thrown many of my poems away. Maybe they were worth saving. I thought they were worth hearing, but they weren't heard, and I threw them out. I'm alright with this. I've made my peace. The greatest treasures are buried at the bottoms of oceans, scattered among the wreckage. Only a few divers go down that deep, and only a few will know what they've got when they uncover it.

Most lies in the wreckage. The rest never got spilled onto paper--in the ink bottle still coagulating. I wonder if it's worth pulling the stopper out to let the air in, to let the words out.

There's all this chattering, all around me, chattering almost incoherent from open mouths filling the world with suffocating foam. Little black eyes, fat little ears with cauliflower spirits, the well doesn't go down deep, the wells don't go down at all. Like fake pockets sewn onto pants, stitched up at the top so nothing can enter.

You want to be read, to be heard, to find listening, to communicate something real. I almost feel the response coming automatically. Why should they listen? What is there to hear? Where does it all go? The flow of the river, it carries over the hill, into the horizon, into the receding lines beyond the world of experience, into the burning lava of the sunset and heat lines refracting in the atmosphere--melting all the universe, melting all our lives, melting all experience. The river carries over the lines, but where it goes from there? Does it end in the final place where the overheld breath, blue with lungs ballooning, releases in a lovely sigh of flow past a blockage?

At the end of the day, the readers want what they've already read, publishers want what they've already published. The same stale lives, the same stale words, the same stale eyes staring out from behind the pages. Something pithy, something trite, empty of spirit but heavily vulgar. How profound to glorify the lowest.

I don't want poems for orgies in the sewer. But all the Authorities long ago conceded that beauty is a corpse, and the Lover is a necrophile. But the Necrophile is a poet, a seer, an artist, a prophet. Hail to the new god, hail to the king. His spirit pours forth as black seepage from his bowels, and we supplicate on our knees--mouths open, children watching.

A Greeting for the First

Well, well. Here you are, and aren't we pleased. This is the Nihilitorium, and I'm the Christian Nihilist. Save your applause. That comes for later. Standing ovations given too early are the other kind of premature ejaculation. Don't be offended; I'm being purely denotative. The colorful connotations are your own ingenuity. Reader-response in full effect. Control your own meanings, and I'll control mine. I'm the author, and I'm fenced in according to all the world's Best Authorities. Hand me a shovel; I'll bury myself.

Of course I won't. I have too many important duties, and the nearly-endless scrolls of ancient knowledge strewn across my black-stained teakwood worktable won't read themselves in front of a fire hearth with a flagon of something frothy and biting.

So welcome anyway, even if you do have that sour look of insolent quivering about your eyes.