In my Dreams

This hyena laughter rings and rounds my mind
and if I should repay it, bladed and armored and in kind,
my own laughter shall find itself owned
by one in wilderness alone.
Terrible and wonderful and all those other adjectives
do not begin to describe my own reality, objective or subjective,
universal or unversed or otherwise
for all this scale is brought down to size by the dwarfing corridors
of my mind.
And all my enemies will find themselves stored away here,
their challenges ringing between my ears, for:
"Any who threaten my home or my family will soon have a place in my dreams."

FUBAR

They are all of them FUBAR
who cross this river, not knowing that it is a Styx
or a Lethe for they have forgotten.
The briefing told them:
"Advance to the river bank,
dig in,"
but there is something cowardly and against their warrior-ethos
in digging in the dirt like dogs,
and so instead they advance on the citadel,
its black and oily war-smoke rising up like a banner
above the battle-plain.
Underfoot crunch the bones
of those long-dead warriors
who fought here long before they died,
the marrow sucked out in great slurpings and gnawings
until nothing is left but the brittle remainder
of a warrior who almost never-was,
who is FUBAR too.

Mask Yourself

Mask yourself
for maskless we are mortal
and made in an image we should not share in
and cannot shake the feeling
that our vigilance
and our valor
is the lesser when victory serves violence
and not vice-versa.

Though ye beings of pure light
may shine down on all of us
it is from the unlighted
corridors of the mind
that we strike.

The Man of Metal

There he stood, the man of metal,
encased in his armor and enshrined in his own glory
through deeds beyond the ken of mortal men.
But what of the man?
Why his thoughts and the abhorrent images that spring for his mind?
For these valorous deeds are the work of a titan
beyond any of us,
and it should be terrifying to be in his presence.

The man in armor is man no longer.
Now he is a deific expulsion of truth and justice
beyond what we can withstand.

There's no image or idol like the beams of light
he sends to illuminate the world.

Remembering Iason

Let us all remember him
who was a mighty warrior once
who strove for life at every chance
and who was brought down by treachery.
Golden-clad he seemed to me
when we placed him on the pyre
though I know it was my own sweat
and tears reflecting the wasting light.
Not hero-born but hero-blooded
and I wish I could have seen him then
held up by the dead he laid to waste
ennobled by his furious rage
and terrifying to behold.
Remember him to all your enemies
in the sound of your war-cries
and the beating of your hearts.

The Empty Throne

Troglodytes and terrors from the dark
do not haunt and howl so forcefully
as those thoughts of mine which blissfully embark
and target my sanity remorselessly
for he abandons (or Abaddons) his post, the arch-
angel who guards against them sightlessly
and underneath it all, the fall of kings
in their great halls, givers of rings
and dolls and precious things
does hole and harry my heart.

My Rood

Upon their wings they paint the roses
of all yesterday's tea-parties
and all yesterdays beheadings.
When I wake I see them still,
the ironic flowers of war,
ferric in their ferocity,
their cross to bear.
And would that the rood re-transformed
and flowered again
but it is an already-deceased tree cut down to craft the cross.
I saw them cut it yesterday.

All the Thunderous Rage

All the patients in the world could not satisfy these doctors
who poke and prod and have them lie
and steal and cheat and are instrumentalized
by their towering but collapsing intellects,
these epigones,
these eidolons,
these foul cruelties stretched over
and over and over
until taut as drum-skins they beat out the beat
and it pretends sublimity, this thunder,
but does it know it is a thunder of the mind?

Artair's Bears

There they are in full panoply of war,
all of them sons-of-bitches,
dog-men and dog-warriors,
brothers one and all.
Their claws gleam in the noon-bright sun
and their fangs gnash and grind
and their pelts are snow-blown
and wind-wrapped about themselves
for they are but beasts,
alone in the wilderness.

Let them all come, those whoresons
and vagabonds, who like their
namesake bear up the burden of the world.
They are Atlas-ed in their shame
and bow snout down to the earth
to sniffle and grumble at their fate.

Bears, how I adore thee
and wish to be armored in the certitude
of fruitless victory
that you bear so nobly.

Snake Tongues and Bear Thoughts

I with my split-tongued personality
do find it atrociously difficult to speak
in ways that I myself understand,
let alone for all you who are not divided
between the snake tongue and eagle eye and
great ursine paws that rent the earth beneath their claws.
A mighty doom is laid upon him who,
unable to speak straight and mammalian,
must think like a reptile or a hawk
(or worse still an insect, a thoughtless ant, able only
to repeat that most basic of commands)
and I who swear by bear or boar or other beast
do find myself split.

Hiss hiss, caw caw, what interminable noise they make
within my mind, and pay no rents there,
no obligation to feudal lord or longship captain
among even one of them.

Drive Them Into the Sea

Quiet Gildas tells the story
of our swords sharp and reddened with
the blood that must be holy
for it springs from martyrs whose death-gift
is a saintliness that enlivens only
ecclesiastical history
like the venerable Bede's
for we drove the saints into the sea.

Chatelaine de Vergi

And tell me Chatelaine whether or not
that little dog that might have stood guard
over your virtue
had a loving hand to care for it
when all Burgundy wept for you.
The knight fallen through heart-ache and heart-split
and all the candles lit in Vergi chapel,
one grave for both the lovers
and another for the deceitful not-quite
stepmother,
who the Duke promised to hang.
Did he take you with him, little pup,
on his way to templar-dom,
or did they all leave you behind out of sorrow
till you became the wolf again
and haunted all Val-Du-Loup
like you should have done from the beginning?
Oh wolf-born one, howl for all who howl no longer.

How the Tale is Told

Thereover the moor and heath and heather
there comes a ringing and a singing from a voice
that needs no announcement beyond itself
for surely you know how the tale is told.
All the roses, red and white, sway in the morning
and in the light they seem to glimmer with dew
but it's only diamonds on their petals
left there by those weeping souls
who know how the tale is told.
And in the gloaming there are whispers
that ought by rights to be howlings
as the wolves are cowed into a false obedience
by those specters of another life, another death,
who heard how the tale is told.
Tells the tale within itself
of the wolves, the roses, the nights, the gloaming,
for any who would hear and listen and know
how the tale is told.

The Ophiolaters II

They stand in a deeply malignant circle
sketching out the limits of reality
as no other group is willing to
or can.
And false as they are they shed, not skins,
not the cloaks that cover their bodies,
but all higher language and thought
speaking only of the simplest things
and in the simplest terms
and quietly too
as if their snake-god-who-comes-from-the-earth
winged(?)
will not devour them in recognition of their reverence
but how could that be true?

Remembering Beowulf

Remember to us that good king
who goes now over the last whale-road
on his way into matchless fame and oblivion
truly the way of kings.
Remember racks and racks of shining mail
and arm-rings and wrist-rings
handed out to his men, that gift-giver who knew no equal!
Remember the gleaming of his swords in the gloaming
and the way they shone at sunrise, and how
the spear-points glittered at the noon of his glory
not so long ago.
And remember to us the whomp-whomp-whomping of his helicopters,
gunships black and silhouetted over the deserted dunes
the formic acid carried on their little wingtips.
And remember the rumble of his panzers
as they rolled though and over and across everything
that stood-
          -Tiresome, isn't it?  Now the young men have gone to sleep
and dream of the clatter and cracks of bullets and the stink
of viscera, that never really leaves your mustache.
And the old men, who should be mighty,
are no more than granite faces that are unmoving
in the firelight because they match the twists and turns so well.

I was in St. Michael's salient
when all Hell was let loose.

The Ophiolaters

I remember walking up that great bald slope with him,
mentor and friend Mentor whose visage Athena stole,
who walked with the slow plodding of the damnable,
and who, I wish to reiterate, was my friend.
But I went down the mountain alone
preparing in my mind to be my own Mentor or else to be,
in the end, sacrificed as he was,
like the priest at Nemi, like Balin and Balan,
like Odysseus ought to have been,
by the worshipers of the antediluvian gods who shed their participles
and leave behind the slime of their trail
and writhe about in the dust ever since they were punished
for a crime they did not commit.
The ophiolaters stood encircled by their own
swords drawn and downpointed beneath the hoods they wore
as they waited to sacrifice my friend
by torchlight.

The Lion

Across his lips are flecks of gore
like Bagdemagus king might have wished
from all my friends found wanting
by the strength of lion rampant, Nemean,
insoluble and mighty,
whose wrath and hateful breath inspired the dragons
as I read argued in a book so very long ago.

And now he graces the crown of that immortal,
Hercules or the Cypriot Lord-of-Beasts
with leonine posture and a mane to match
and the cub and club in each hand.

In another well-argued and should-be-ancient-now treatise
I read of that club and its affinity with the pillars of Ithaca
as Odysseus had brought or sent it home with him
alongside the armor of Achilles which graces
a statue that pales before Hector's majesty.
He does not bear the icon of the lion.

The Branch

There upon the plane that does not exist within the moor,
far too false and facile for any home but the maze or home itself,
lies the aborted offering insubstantiated upon itself,
the wooden table altarized for what-is-no-longer-wooden,
that thing which has gone on enduring from the time
when deathly father and deadly sons sealed from sunlight
only to corrupt the seals placed upon their graves.  How could they not?
Lord of Graves and graven images whose wordless wonders lie beneath the earth
down barrow-ways, beneath the stone uncarved and caved
And I remember that tutorial I saw long ago:
"How to crush slav(e)s and frogmen."
Take up your axes and lop away the nefarious polysemy
of all branches but this one.

Introduction

Hi all, this is just a post to let you know about the new blog.  I'm planning on posting anything that might be better read than listened to (or for which the written version might be a good supplement).  I'm imagining that'll mostly be poetry but I might also post short stories or essays (if I end up writing any anytime soon).  Thanks for reading.

Arlen