The Single Nether Eye
(Jean Baptist)

We can all be entered, we are warm inside,
            there is a spiral form which runs the length of me:

in this place of power you can travel these welded web-work catacombs, if you dare your life could be immaculate testament to the dreaming of every hour, have you ever found yourself afraid of the next instant as though it would explode in complexities of silence

(I will shield you against this my sweet dark-eyed child).

 If you can find my single nether eye
            with your finger you can poke at it, I will laugh
I will drowned in thick fluid beams of laughter, I will
            celebrate the odor of laughter Everything I know  at once I destroy, it is farce, this world of hate and love, this eye with which
            I do not see but that is my vision, I am blind to understand anything
but what I understood from the beginning:

            The single nether I
                    which is my only guide.

 *

 Jean could force the thistle through
            the nostril of the dying Christ, a thorny
crown for the bastard child, kiss him laughingly,
                        triumphant -- naked teenagers in a locker room performing ritual.

 Who amongst the stars plays poete maudit,
            a rich odor arresting in its self awareness

 Who would steal from his best friend the thing he is most proud a portrait of Matisse, impossible to ignore such passion, cold love, selfish beyond understanding

            in his soul a wanting to celebrate
extravagant tendencies which are
         ultimately a
            philosophical conclusion worthy of long memoranda.

(aesthetic of betrayal murmurs the critic)

 Dirty
            costumes worn 
                        all symbols collapse onto themselves 

a penis spent of energy and charm

 *

 Cyclops of vast concentration and inward thinking
            the inner eye immobile, dreamless, anti-causal gestures
nobody finds conclusions worth responding to, arise in a state of torpor, wave hands                 vaguely...mumble, return to bed, cough, rise to urinate...

 a sterile lunar landscape, only a rocking horse with an insipid smile, an Earth laden with sulfur smells gives messages with

secret hand signals portraying the lives of criminals (historical implications in each
            fingering  
of destiny)

 Esters of self bring me off in volumes of
            pressurized ambiguity:

 Everything I write is therapy,
            every lonesome tongue drips a poison, that is
less pain within me, that is my bleak recognition

I love the taste of his poisonous scrawl
            the iambic licking of his stone:

                         which is black

which is obsidian, which is a smooth cypher

for the dead who are suffering in silence

who are webbed with indifference, and for the lesser

lights and stars barely in the sky seen

in their pale ceremonies broadcast

furtive apologies (and surrender to an uncaring

sun); who are waiting to become

who feel nothing but an eyeless bleating in their bones

In this cathedral of swollen archangels, these

chosen who have been strewn along narrow streets and

celebrate their shock of recognition

the Divine moment of truth, in facing the sweet eternal

the beautiful angry apostle, the carriage filled with

dead drawn by four golden horses, parading on a luminous background:  and repeating,

and repeating a certain gallop

a motion both infinite and quite common

a fat peasant woman selling flowers, a very

            ugly old man on a train, a set of teeth found

in the dust, a crow's eye burning with marrow lust.

These things could be repeated, or only once occur with exactly the same gestures, the same extravagance of motion like a corpse tumbling down a hillside....and tumbling

© 2002, 2003 Perry M. Lindstrom

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