Poem

John Amen & Daniel Y. Harris

Apotheosis

Who is it
mumbling behind us
in the Old Testament air?

The endless echo,
a rupture in rapture.
Ανάγκη.

The book of rain dries on the shelf,
hardened black as basalt—
                               I recite a page
                               while the dead in transit play chess
in the safe house
on the corner             
                               of Shiloh and Sheol streets.

I cannot tell you what day it is
or what season is upon us;
even the wind is a refugee hiding in the oaks.

I still wear the world, its weighty demands
for a new and improved stag to hunt.
My siege towers are being overturned,
boundaries disappearing in a wake of breath.
Some say the universe is a palindrome.

Often, to lift the veil is to
know oneself as the eternal stranger.

             Clarity forsakes me;
             my plans crumble,
my analysis a collapsing scaffold. I drift
             through forests, along dirt roads
that lead to sumptuous plantations.
             I see the mare at the trough, the bull
                      stamping in the meadow.

The dog on a chain in the courtyard.
Bougainvillea exploding on the stucco.

Here, then, is a language of scabs petrified mauve
                   over unaired wounds:
                                  fated to incompleteness,
I beg the dark mother
for a drink of water,
                                   a song I can call my own.
I choke on the hook I have swallowed,
                                   blood and mucous
spilling from my mouth. Let me sacrifice myself
to my father’s Fisher King
on a cutting board flanked by smoldering bibles.

Three strokes and a splash.
Four dashes and an ellipsis.
All the mantras of a lifetime still with me.

I understand
           the meaning of justice.
I have nothing left to peddle.
Smoke wafts from my ears, my eyes.
I sleep the sleep of the vain. I press my thumb
           to my wrist, my neck, but feel no pulse.
                                                   I have traveled now
beyond the realm of breath—cross-legged,
bent, reductive, a simplification, caricature
of the clown, thief, messiah I pretended to be.

Visitors keep entering and exiting
through pauses in my inner dialogue.

Devoid of form, I still glimpse sunlight on the leaves.
I hear a veiled woman reciting urgent prayers outside
the synagogue. There is no language I cannot comprehend,
and a thousand samskaras unravel, Mind exposed like a
face reflected in a mirror after eons beneath the scalpel.

What remains clutches at what remains.

I ride a vortex in Jupiter’s shadow. I have retained
nothing and have nothing to impart, neither through
the gravelly drawl of metaphor nor the crazed gestures
of metonymy. I am simply rising, expanding, dispersing,
about to dissolve into a thinning sky of purgation. 

What fades simply fades.

I encounter no threats, and yet I am terrified—
terrified at what I am becoming; or more aptly,
that I will never become other than what I am.
I am no longer hungry. I have no future or past.
I am neither compelled nor repulsed. No more
will I age, yearn, grieve, or dread. The truth is,
             human suffering was preferable to this.

Ask any immortal: “What do you want?”
The immortal will answer: “To feel again.”

I am a vacuum of absence.
I am cold ash and the final illusion of the dying ember.
I am absolute love and the purity of horror,
an implosion without reference,
an incubator for what will never be born,
what will never die,
what can never be conceived or concocted—
a prayer of moot semantics preserved in a sealed ark,
decoded, encoded, condensing, compacting,
ever-shrinking ouroboros of impossibility repeating
never and forever after.

“Only something other than God,”
said the teacher, “can free God from Himself.”
“But isn’t God everything?” asked the student.
“Yes,” replied the teacher, and he wept.

John Amen works for Cosmos, Inc, solving calculus problems, dismantling semaphores, and resolving domestic disputes. He is also the founder of Psychodramas by Request, a traveling theater group that regularly performs in nursing homes, bank lobbies, and randomly selected cul de sacs. He is currently organizing a four-day arts festival to be held in the Pacific Trash Vortex.

Daniel Y. Harris is a metalepticist and cofounder of TranS/MigrAt International. He holds a doctorate in Unitive Minutiae from the University of Ort. Dr. Harris lectures widely on the dissimulation of complex, hybrid systems on unsuspecting automata. In fact, public opinion has increased its suspicion that Dr. Harris is actually an automaton himself, having absconded the body of the real man.
pedmagazine@carolina.rr.com

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