This Pale Cavern

[image source]

Smoke darkened roofs
This old skull
Forum for my soul

An empty lantern
In darkness
Rattling

The old tree
The family
Uprooted

By the creek
On the stones
Words overturned

A Saint's preocupation
Rippled rhymes
Sounding

Then the stumbling
Discovery of the bone
And laughter

Rings around the bone
Carved by human hand
Images of god

The whispers in the web
Singing of silver fish
These deep dreams

Lord Stay Sweet

Like honey
Like cream
Like a dog's paw
Like a cold beer
Like candy
Like a peach
Like a hot shower
Like an hour in bed
Like a cry
Like a kiss
Like your skin
Like a lick
Like honey in your belly
Like sugar in your mouth
Like cream on your thighs
Like a dog's paw on your bed
Like a cold beer after a hard fuck
Like candy on your tongue
Like a peach in my palm
Like a hot shower deep inside you
Like an afternoon in your bed
Like the cry in my ear
Like a kiss on your spine
Like a lick on your hip
Like honey between your lips
Like sugar dissolving in your eyes
Like cream creaming in my hand
Like a dog's paw sleeping twitches
Like a cold beer after a slow fuck
Like candy in your soft hand
Like a peach split open
Like a hot shower after coming
Like a year in your bed
Like your soft cry in my mind
Like a kiss I can't remember
because it was so goddamned good
and so goddamned sweet
Like the breath of god breathing in
as I am dying again and again

Skeleton Baby

So I went out to the Desert in search of the Fugitive Gods. After many weeks, I found the traces.

Coming out of the Dark Woods, I came upon a Wasted Land. It looked as if a fire had recently come through and burned most of the trees.

Black smouldering stumps in a world of grey white ash.

And there, directly ahead of me, were the traces of the God Ox.

I stepped out the Dark Woods and into the Waste Land.

I followed the traces up to a small cave where they disappeared into the pitch black of the interior.

I hesitated going in.

So I waited. Wanting with each passing instant to enter but knowing that I should wait. For what I didn’t know.

But then, the night came and with it, the Moon. The soft blue light entered into the cave, illuminating the interior.

Slowly, I entered.

The first thing I saw was a strange pair of wooden stilt-like shoes. At the end of the stilts were carved ox hooves.

These were the traces that I had been following. I realized that some devil had lured me up here. Suddenly scared, I backed out of the cave.

However, I stumbled and fell into a pile of burning white bones. A beautiful skull tumbled into my lap and sent waves of ecstasy through my spine.

I lifted the skull up and looked into those dark eyeholes and instantly fell into an abyss of love.

Ah, Skeleton Baby! I whispered. I have searched for you for so long. And now, I have finally found you. Ah, Skeleton Baby!

In the cool light of the Desert Moon, I collected all of Skeleton Baby’s bones and laid them out on the floor of the cave.

I lay on top of her, shivering in wave after wave of joy. But I needed more.

And with my sharp blade, I cut myself out of my skin, laughing as I slipped Skeleton Baby’s bones into it.

But this still wasn’t enough.

And so I cut off all of my flesh and stuffed it around the bones inside the bag of skin. I tore out my tongue and put it in her mouth. My eyes in her eye-holes. My face on her skull.

Now just a skeleton myself, I lay down again on top of Skeleton Baby.

Ah, Skeleton Baby, please, please, come back to me, baby.

And sure enough, I felt her drinking in my soul, slowly, slowly, and her lips moving against the white teeth of my skull.

And then Skeleton Baby wrapped her legs around me and broke me into a pile of scattered bones. Ah, God, pure bliss!

She laughed and picked up my skull and threw it far into the darkness of the cave. Then, dancing in circles, she scat-
tered all of my bones.

Then she strapped on the fake God Ox shoes and ran screaming out of the cave.

And I still remain, lost and scattered, a skull burning with the blue flames of love for my Skeleton Baby, my Sweet Sweet Skeleton Baby.

“If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your
closet, you’d best teach it to dance.”
- George Bernard Shaw

Whipping us with Time...

The Moirae's Tools

There is the notion that
the star's alignments
have influence on us.

Implications of a beautiful connectivity
between the worlds
of the heaven and earth.

A thread here of the Greek Fates,
of inescapable destinies, lives intertwined,
perhaps knotted, with each other.

To try to unravel yourself
from someone or thing,
the more twinned you become.

After a time,
perhaps,
the only recourse is dialogue....

Then again, I have always had trouble
with these notions conveniently born
out of human imagination.

But that the stars might have tied us down
to the same bed so to speak,
that the Fates are whipping us with Time...

I can endure.

So How Many Times

So how many times
Do we go through this
Slow sad dance of the Flesh?

How many times
Do we kneel down
Before the altars of Love,
Of Beauty?

How many more times
Do we sacrifice our very souls
For a warmth
We cannot generate on our own?

Is it ever worth it?

Always the spirit hopes and prays
And searches for signs of Truth
In the other.

This is about Redemption.

This is about Crucifixion.

This is about the love of angels
For stars and planets,
For gravity… gravity.

I am falling.

There is the Fool

From PanosFX

There is the Fool
Holding up the Godhat
There in the Godshack
There in the Desert

And here is the moment
Upon which all things turn
The stark cry of the hinge
As the Gate opens.

And who am I amidst all of this?
As foolish as the Fool
As Holy as he hopes to be.

Who am I amidst the drama,
Within these sayable words,
Underneath this insanity.

We drink to the night.
This night so like all the others.
And yet, what arises
To our benedictions?

These words,
Can you even call them words,
Ring as hollow as all time.

I speak and listen.

I say nothing.

Who drinks with God?

Who drinks with God?
Who waits upon the other to sing?
Who dreams the Goddream?
And who awakens to find the bones of love
Beside him?

What is the sort of thirst
That consumes even itself?

Drinking with God,
Who will get drunk first?

Intoxication from intoxication

Drinking, a thirst rather,
That seeks to slip this Flesh
From these Bones, right?

To every two sides of a bad coin
There is, of course, an inside

Perhaps, as T. Waits says:
“There ain’t no Devil
That’s just God when he’s drunk.”

So why not just go ahead
And lose everything?

Fuck. The. You.

In the End We Had Dust With No Life

IX

In the end
We had dust with no life
We had given our lives
To the Flesh
Not to the Bone
And in the end
We slipped away
With the wind
Diminishing the Dream
Like sand falling
Through the convexities
Of the hourglass
In the end
There was only
A Nothingness

***

What desolates a Town?

Forlornness
Thrownness

Forget – Forgive

We lose what is at hand
We forget about the Bone
The inner structure is taken for granted:
That there is Being.

Mississippi Pickup by B. Jones and Hunter Kennedy

[Rare mp3 audio file of a young B. Jones playing a ukelele, singing Mississippi Pickup - 4 MB]

Deer heads in the back of a Mississippi pickup,
I wander up the back way to ask her if I fucked up.
I slept in the swarming Houston headlights,
Gotta find a way to get it back on tight.
I took a walk down past the dumpsters to the dog pen.
I'm watching those old men watching it right then.

Two bears thrown in with those deer heads.
Clean 'em neat mount 'em on the sleeper beds.
A black man offered me a piece of brain:
Said, it looks sunny now but tomorrow it'll rain.
I hit a jack rabbit spun like a flower
And I'm checking my lifeline trying to guess the right hour.

Got the Big Bend high-speed vibrating body,
At an Elvis convention I'm drunk in the lobby.
The moon thrown shadows spilling over those long legs.
Daddy got his momma ten time before the song ends.
Tents peeling off - bones in the wind,
Twenty-five bananas sitting with no skin.

And the javalina sleep oh yeah,
And the javalina sleep oh yeah,
Checking those cards, playing for a paw print,
I'm praying and I'm hoping, mostly hoping for deliverance.

And that eight-point buck with his does and his sweet grass
Waiting for the daddy with the season pass.
He's got time to spare now in the back of that pick-up
With a thousand-yard stare saying why did I fuck up?
Well, momma don't go hanging it up on the wall
Say I'd rather be lucky than any good at all.

Well, momma don't go hang me up on the wall
Say I'd rather be lucky than any good at all.

On the Table of the Gatekeeper

Here is the bloody business of killing...

From this:
to this:
to this:
to this:

"Star"

At the Gate of Bones,
The Keeper carves his words out of the Flesh
of the Fugitive Gods,
Cutting to the Bone
Again and again,
Blood running through the ruts,
Heiroglyphs upon the Table,
The Altar of Sacred Violence...
The Heart of Religion.

The Birth of Tragedy.

[Middle English tragedie, from Old French, from Latin tragoedia, from Greek tragōidiā : tragos, goat + aoidē, ōidē, song.]

Old bluesmen,
Bent and broken over the Wheel,
Singing still, saying:
"As long you can sing about it,
It ain't that bad."

A life made just bearable enough to keep singing,
Standing knee deep in blood,
Surrounded by bones,
Watching the Keeper carve.
Waiting for the silence between screams
To sing again.