first, you will find your insides spinning outside you like guardian schools of fish. your lungs will turn into makeshift coffins barely still afloat on the wake of a passing sea beast. back in your room, a shadowy figure will greet you by offering to kill all the spiders in your home if you’d just let him in, and you will refuse (by now, you’ve learned what violence against your benefactors does to your bones). he will conjure the scent of burning frankincense, bringing you to bed with your favorite lover, but again you will refuse. you will then find your thighs on the floor of your room and the fish will become hostile bees. an illuminated figure will greet you and offer to ease your pain if you’d just let him in, and you will refuse (by now, you’ve learned the wisdom of your bones). legions of light-footed imps will tingle up your spine and out your pores three times in all, and at last there will be no figure to greet you, nor deceit to get in your way.
if the devil’s light comes to greet you, or, an exercise in self-exorcising
October 13, 2009 by j.
another clumsy poem. i think i like it, but i have talked about wanting to be understood – yet i can’t imagine this poem being so at all. i have written some esoteric shit before and this is among them. so let me give you some context.
on friday night, i turned off the lights, lit my favorite homemade incense, played deathspell omega’s “fas…”, and meditated the entire length of it. what you just read is a curt summary of what happened to me in those 45 minutes, with a few fictions added to fill in the gaps. that help?
i understand that telling you that takes away the mystery aspect of the poem (which in this case basically goes like this – “what the fuck?”), but i believe that that’s the name of the game nowadays. there is no such thing as mystery at this stage of human evolution, so why fight it? (if you are familiar with spiral dynamics at all i am talking here about the yellow vmeme.)
withholding information in order to maintain some air of mystery is something you could get away with before the internet came along, but culturally the internet has changed our whole landscape. so i’m just rolling with it.
anyway, i feel like there are a million whys you could ask me about this one. and i hope to have answers for them all. why 2nd person for instance? and in the future tense? i decided this poem would serve as a guide/warning for the next person who does what i did that night, though that’s a pretty ridiculous statement given the chances of that actually happening. maybe it’s better that i think of it as a warning to myself for the next time i decide to freak myself out like that. in any case, neither 1st person nor 3rd person felt like the right person for this poem. making it first person would have made it more of a stoner’s journal entry, which is not what i was going for, and third person would have made it too impersonal. with 2nd person i get to have a personal connection with the reader, who is presumed to be crazy enough to want to sit down with incense and the blackest black metal there is.
anything else you’d want to know? (maggie i’m basically talking to you haha!)
i’m listening, except this one wouldn’t be for me, he’s already been one of my clients and moved on his way having nothing to tempt me to that i’d not already figured out on my own, but i’ll conjure up a why or two for you anyway, gotta play this one backward on the turntable first
l.m.
this reminded me of some angel dust i did back in high school.
meditation is definitely not far away from ingesting hallucinogens sometimes!
my first question is not a why one but what the response is when you reach the point where there remains “no figure to greet you, nor deceit to get in your way” which can easily be his most deceptive disguise and where the illustion of the absence of deceit is the most lethal deceit of all
and i might not get back to any why questions since this sounded more like a typical good morning wake-up call sun is a-risin’ time to start the day job sort of experience to me
hm, well i guess i hadn’t thought of that
. but i can tell you it felt like peace. i mean, when you’re in this dreamspace, you’re making it all up. the archetypes of the devil and angel are in us all, and in this case the devilish one came to say hi. rather, i essentially asked him to say hi. (black metal is not something meant to conjure happy, flitty things.) so i don’t picture this devilish thing as a foreign entity at all, nor something to be feared (tho i was fuckin’ scared at first haha!). so, maybe that’s something i’d need to consider in the next revision. the tone skews towards a “me vs. evil” theme but i don’t think they are combatants at all. they might even be allies. thanks always for making me think through that.
by the way i’ve seen all your poems lately, i just have you in my google reader so they may not show up as pageviews.
i have to add that i nodded at each greeting, was a shared authenticity, but then again there would be wouldn’t there, this having been so, and i ain’t on drugs either, just felt all too familiar, and well described
on the by the way, i don’t keep track of the stats anyway, but if you do want to keep up with where i am, make sure you have the comments rss loaded into your google reader’s chamber, since although i have comments shut down for certain personal control issues, that will be where all remaining traffic of my own passes through from here on out
now for maggie’s why question of the moment, although for now i’ll reserve my own why about why i ask, but: why spiders?
spiders… i have a relationship with the spiders in my home. i used to kill them at first sight (did that for years, considered them the enemy!), then decided to make friends with them and leave them be. i’m somewhere in between now – i’ll give them a warning and say i will kill it next time if it doesn’t leave (i only warn the ugly ones, the harmless looking ones i just totally leave alone). so far the ones i asked to leave have either left or hid themselves better
.
anyway, the shadowy figure offered exactly that – he offered to kill all my spiders (including the hundreds that live underneath my home, i live in a trailer so it’s all open under there) if only i’d let him possess me. i considered this. it seemed like a good idea to me at first, then i went back to a holistic view of things – and that at a deeper level of being, i didn’t actually want to kill the things. so i refused him, recognizing it as a trick.
anyway i’m glad something so esoteric felt familiar to at least one person! i do get nervous sometimes about alienating my audience rather than including them. it’s nice to have you aboard!
RE RSS, i think google reader automatically takes care of that, but i’m not sure. seems to be working ok so far.
just that i asked because spiders are always coming and laying their eggs in my food which is why i don’t eat unless i absolutely have to but besides that the worst deception in all that is that the devil hates them worse than any of us do so his whole offer was counterfeit to begin with because he’ll nuke ‘em all without a shrug bargain or no bargain, he was just trying to get something for nothing again, go figure
l.m.