All poems copyrighted © Noel K. Anderson

(Remembering Philip Rieff, 1922-2006)

All poems copyrighted © Noel K. Anderson

            PART I: PAGAN

Fate

Me sex, me feel

me urge, purge, and speel.

Desert altar and pagan temple,

pulse and passion—all pithy and thick—

and a voice says Kill!

Fear, awe, and suckling maw,

we are watched, we are inflicted,

inflected, flecked, and infected.

We are maculate manikins

subject to grumpy mugwump gods:

the bird-headed giant, the great goats of all-knowing,

a pregnant mother earth beneath star/angels glowing;

the irascible temps of the thunder-man sky lord

protecting his properties, cursing all trespassers,

redressing, repressing, all sinners transgressing;

in despair we are ruled.

We reach in order to breach,

we climb for the sublime,

we make gods to wake gods—

to refresh, reawaken, and renew—

to please and appease their powers

for our hours are harrowingly few.

Art gods

Me and my gang

sought a pop medium,

black and fluid,

maleable and tangy

with a life and secret will of its own.

So we left our parents’ homes,

went down to the sea

and mined the dark shores

for mucky clay.

Around the fire

we shaped them—

made gods like us—

breathed into them

life and authority,

and let them rule our code.

We wrest words their mud-caked mouths

to settle our differences.

We tell the gods to be

and beg them to say all we hope to hear.

When we hear, we obey (as we like)

or break the gods and start over.

Selling Soul

We sell a feeling, selling soul,

tying our truths to a nerve:

awkward experiences packaged as novelties,

proffered and priced on the curve.

Subjective apprehension: a tingling up the spine

Divine re-condescension: the gods are me and mine.

From a logic hypnogogic

and a doctrine copraphagic

looms a cosmic chorus line

selling soul, selling soul.

Transgressions breed permissions

of irreconciled oppositions—

the pride of pride for pride

abolishing all the past contritions.

Refulgent joy, refulgent bliss—

a world of siblings under a kiss.

Baptisms on the beaches:

what preaches is what reaches

(mostly prickly pears and peaches),

selling soul, selling soul.

         PART II: REVELATION

Faith

Truth speaks:

I AM

out of the pointless, empty otherwise.

The truth is order, ordered to the truth:

I AM ALONE.

There is none other—none to be made,

none to be imagined, and nothing left

to say about it.

I AM ALL ONE

self-revealed in self-sacrifice

as proof against the grave;

the order: that grace should save.

I AM

revealed as love.

The new order:

LOVE

all one.

PART III: THE THIRD CULTURE

Fiction

Deranged derision mistaken for vision:

down in the Castro,

a kind daughter in the prayer circle

pleads with God to spare a few more.

A naked virago steps from the pride parade

to caterwaul and wag his head

at the faithful for their sinful judgmentalism.

He spits on the back of her head as she kneels

to pray and demonstrate humility—

its foamy, pearly goo creeping like a slug

down her light, silky hair.

She sets her bible down

to clasp her hands beneath her chin.

He sees a weapon,

goes for it, and brings it down

hard on her young head,

smearing the spit,

knocking her flat to the pavement.

Paraders cheer and the pray-ers pray

as the hand-basket universities

fashion luscious fratricide—

gender genocide—

and the new stories emerge

as Deep Earth spreads her thighs

(yes, this current fiction unifies).

Dining with Panthers

Bless me, oh bless me, and give me respect—

Give me a truth than I can reject.

Among the empty chairs,

in the gaps at the table,

angels in absentia

slink into Elijah’s seat.

In the gaps between readers

of written words—

words once clear now clouded

by shifting grounds, crumbling contexts—

slouching nefarious, skulking ravenous,

the panthers gather,

sniffing round the edges of

intimidated acceptance.

On the table, a fulgent horn of plenty

glows golden with the blessings of fertility and delight.

Then up from below, like a geyser of shadow,

come claw-swipe, snarl, grab, growl, and fight.

Destroyed by their empowerments,

the weak-kneed cognoscenti,

un-souled by their mugwump morality,

succumb to panther chew and chaw—

pride and prejudice masticated—

lost to tooth, jaw, and maw.

Dining with dilettantes the panthers now eat,

down-hatching the morsels of remorseless defeat.

Ceremonial Leopards

Vile liars, live wires, silk-bound bliss hounds

denying the light to serve heretics, charlatans, Pharisees,

and all their cherished, high-horse heresies.

Chin-wagging, wobble-throated, gut-bloated,

mammon-holy, chesty vagrants—

blinder-sided, sight-blind, blunder-footed,

trip the nights (and now days)

wealth-wallowing or sword-swallowing;

fatuous, fictive spirits glowing venomous green—

a momentary, narcissistic phosphorescence

oozing into prominence:

Let us now make

a new faith to unmake old faith,

a market faith to hawk pop fictions:

what each one wants is God!

[not the God of Jews and Jesus,

but just the deity of desire].

The table has long been prepared,

waiting for us to ravage, ravish, or savage.

The leopards—strong-shouldered, quick-skulking,

lean-ribbed, ravenous and lusty in disposition—

slink in through the temple doors

awakening neither caution nor suspicion.

Bread, blood, bewilderment and innocent slaughter

(a sacrament of death sans catharses of water)

a ravage like rape—skin and hair in the jaws—

the tongues of offenders lick-cleaning their claws.

The toppled, crumbling statues, the urns overturned,

the lampstands up-ended, the tablecloths burned—

all leaving less than the ghosts of sigh-dried wines,

a mangle of flesh, a tangle of charred vines.

This once-holy habitat lies feral and spare,

beyond recognition and all hope of repair;

the blood of atonement is nowhere to be seen—

every stained stone now leopard-licked clean.

These ritual intrusions have long ceased to thrill,

Men and virgins of late all but yawned with each kill.

The priests, lax and indifferent toward the gods they invoke,

eyes blinded with blood, heads fuddled with smoke,

sit stirring the ashes of collar and yoke,

ever deaf to the Word: the all-one awoke.

Ficture

We love

the novel lies we love:

love of falsehood, false pillars,

the ghostly, non-ghost fillers.

The lie is a lie is a popular trope less than truth.

The popular song Truth is a Lie is a lie

building an unmaking, unmaking a building.

The warm gun, the religion of dissolution,

slow suicide—we-icide, us-icide.

Stupidity: ignorance crowned Queen of Heaven,

world of spoilage and soul seepage.

We are being sold and being souled.

Turn

Hope to turn, Hope to turn

The myth of the future is that there is a future,

that there is an ahead toward which the present points,

a next for progress toward becoming

the lie of time/space.

What has been is.

What would be or could yet be are present fantasies—

persistent anxieties

to suspend us from the

superlative anxiety of now.

What is is now

and it feels just like now,

just like now,

just like now.

Love of seed,

devotion to self-seed, the self projected

into the collective selfhood—

the all of self—

the all called God (that is not God)

submitting to the rituals of demystification.

The final fiction,

the fictive foundation for the novel lies we love,

a ficture: the agenda to conspire—

to formulate a future,

to fulminate the impossible agenda

of a Christless future.

Theocide

Swarming elites

pleasuring themselves

on the temple ruins:

pulse and pulsion, the boundless human spirit

awash in a pluralist pash of snapped values—

a plash of elapsed virtues.

We are building un-religion,

renouncing ghosts for guests,

unmaking all requests,

raising fists at mystic mists,

denouncing all we once confessed.

Doxologies of destruction

in the names of Lady Liberty,

exchanging whim for wisdom

in the aggravation of chaos.

In solitude we are connected,

in isolation, bound;

in our emptiness is our fullness,

in our lostness we are found.

Steering True

Had the pagans killed the leopards

would the myths persist today?

Had the panthers been abolished

would revelation have its way?

Should we act in hard resistance

and determine every change

or is the provenance of evil

too almighty to estrange?

And the little birds answered:

   Who says so? Who says so?

   Who says true is true?

Beyond the course of history,

beyond our sacred texts,

divine immutability

shapes this world and the next.

Futility may trump our works

and vain may be our ends

but steering true defines the course

on which our world depends.

And the little birds answered:

   Too true! Too true!

   Too, too, too true!