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Fascist Conclusions
At the beginning of the war
there were waves that dipped
below the surface of my body
and trapped panic in scores
of gilt fish. The illuminated
manuscript of my body
was rapt to those watching
in delayed fascination, hoping
for more of this sensational
distraction. We were, all of
us, distracted from seeing how
money could transpose desire
into reality. My desire is not
worth more than the seaweed
that obscures the dubious
features of something without
a face. It watches me from
eyes without a face. This
might have been a 1960’s
French horror film, though
I am not sure if the end will
grip us silent in our desire
for the hopeful dovetail to
ascend. A dove is the total
of all its features and this
face does little more than
impress its glint onto bodies,
looking for more bodies,
sanctioning bodies who desire
delivery. At the beginning of
the war I doubted whether
there were still such fatal
creatures determined to rise,
waiting to devise the future,
the surface already concluded.
Censored Conclusions
The censorship you speak
to my body divides me
with doubt. You devise
living renditions of human
forms from incarceration.
You quiet my humming
mantras of coded respect
for those who are quieted.
You say you know what
is best for me, body, soul
and mind all divided. I am
thinking of you now, how you
are wrapped up with fear
for the harmonics of kinship,
its multi-vocal drawl. Fearless.
Before the war there was
solace hiding a tumult of
discontent and malintent.
Now that my enemy speaks
loudly without restraint
I know they have made
their closed conclusions
about me, are already so
sickly to the idea of my
existence. I will it louder.
Politic Stimuli
Its system is to remain intact
and consistent within itself.
Then there must be our rule
& order, our order. It makes
itself and continues itself. It
wills itself into another system.
It wades you in modes, chains,
logic, and coherency that bind
in money, reasonable enterprise.
But the cogs and wheels are full
of rust and soon found patinated
from lack of treaty with rueful sky
whose eventual abrasion leaks.
Your progression of human use,
man-made lust of keeping things
the same, unchanged, and sessile
inspires my admonition, chaotic lick.
You say paradise for all is in our toil,
is for the good of the system’s stride.
The system runs on human energy.
In all honesty, and beyond doubt,
the stimuli for this system are
wholly and utterly motivated by
the dictums of the system itself.
The body being just metaphor.
Threnody
This is a threnody for
myself. I am not to be
reborn and have yet
to be buried, though
am, still alive. It is
not an original thought
nor is it one I wish
for you to feel sympathy.
This is my only address
to the reader, and as
such let us make it
a short one. There are
visitations and proofs
of a beyond in the adret
minds of those wrapped
in the insulating dogma
of power displayed.
Let us think. If the
world is indeed perfect,
as the Lord created it,
with all the creatures
made from holy plans,
then why not live as
though this life is worth
living? Nietzschean
formalism aside, let us
revel in the good work
of religion as a system
for peace, though with
reserve. The threnody
states that I will be
remembered. Let this
be no threnody then.
It is the system’s weak
attempt at my destruction.
Fear
It tussles in coils of vines around
throats in wild vertigo. It warns
of vivisections, making waning bits
of human soul now left. The system
bites through itself, ouroboric
and ready to repeal good faith
into paranoia as a last resort.
The fear has gripped me now
in growth like dueled aeonium
whose devilish tendrils rise
in infernal orations of the sun
-chirping carnal black canaries
with cherried chest outspread-
Maybe not ouroboric, no, not
held so close to the infinite yet
is it me to undress these weighty
systems, all taxidermy of living
technology? It must be, I do
my work out of fear that nothing
will arrive from lament of history.
And you do your work in fear
of the unknown, plastered in it,
the fear of your own subtropical
climate, that it might one day
draw the histrionics of the jungle.
Presidential Conclusions
No death for you yet. You cannot
have you, and I will not let you.
I will take from you the dawning
bloom, call it my blood, a lasting
dying, yet, yet never alive. You,
your red bloom, I put it inside me.
You, deep in my sauce, maudlin,
total bill of madness made to rile
into the violence that is brick, red,
bricked. You secretly put the rusty
bloom of inevitable death in me,
permanent, brick, unnatural and
red, blood red. My eyes bleed
your blood. The bloom is perfect
and blends, bled, blooming like
Dr. Jekyll’s crepuscular sore, raw.
I steal from him and from you,
Mr. Hyde, unable to escape self
or beauty of self, if only, if only.
If only bravery of self could carve
the ribald color from you. But
that is not bravery. You exalt
in a register fit to carry history
but the jungle in me is riling,
is no Tropics. I will burn you
until remains are only the burnt
nothing, if only. Me to burn more.
Ray Osborn [a Creative Writing MFA at Syracuse University] is sick of writing these autobiographies of the soul stuck in hell, for lack of a better word. In general, Ray is interested in not talking about one’s self and, if you must know, Ray’s work focuses on ekphrasis, elegy, and visibility.