Strange Dancers pt. 5

5. Supplicant

Aisha fucks in pornographic style

Legs astride what may be our own flesh

But to sleep-bleary eyes is as likely her own

Bronze breasted like a statue her patina is glossed 

Clarified as the sun returns to its office of

Eleusinian distinctions amid a fugue of hallucinations

Bronze skin aglow again with sweat as she fucks

Herself as she leaks coconut milk, its clear serum

Punctuated with white liquids somewhere between flesh

And fluid prenatal

Fist and forearm snaking into her depth

   Fuck you for making me do this 

She says

   I must fuck myself as I've no one 

   To do the favor for me

She says 

Pregnant and milk-breasted and as a hermaphrodite in dispute

Under the watch of the Mirage which creeps like night 

Around us blocking the whole of the sky save for

The punctuation of the sun flexing under its reluctant gravity

Its halves drawing apart a millimeter further with every crest and trough

Of our physical dispute with hands slapping and grasping

Slipping with sweat off the other’s body.

Under the watch of the Mirage which creeps like night:

   Here is your shame

Aisha impregnates herself, autosexual

Her cock thick and massive like a banyan trunk 

Turned inward upon the lips of her own wet space

Which a tangle of black wiry oilslick hair

At once conceals but compels notice

Adorning what must be hidden and unmentioned

Peace being never upon it in this land and it is

Her only weapon so she brandishes her pilose mound

Like razor concertina black with venom Aisha dares any other 

In her convulsions to take the place of 

Her own bronzed scepter, enveined

And it is then I see we are joined at the knees and 

Growing out of one another like mirrored images

It is I fucking her either prostrate upon her or on my back reclined 

But no ground forms a bed and we are aspatial

Only the position of our shared perception creates 

A horizon to which we may refer

Divorcing us from the possibility of masturbatory emission.

Aisha’s eyes crease in tortured delight

Her ejaculate covering our bared muscle and bones

Nerves resheathed in foundation but as we are

Made whole those three who complete our entangled trident

Find themselves ejected like splinters of sun above

It is a loneliness less strange than any company I have known.

This is a procreation beautiful even before the Mirage:

   It is vulgar

Aisha and I resplendent in orgasm as her

Pleasure milks supplication from I her partner

Our joinery all that separates us from the Mirage 

We are both besieged by this watching form:

   Holy though are we

   Loathe are we to admit

   Our divine arousal

Thus ends the image and the division of the world complete

Hewn by the fissile sun split now fully and our shade

In perfect accord with the boundless expanse of the Mirage 

Two suns overhead in darkening correspondent halves

Over this contested land and lightning brighter than the day 

Tears and grasps and slaps the neon ocean and beneath

These fissile streams of electric filaments I am

Dissolved beneath the sun.

This is apocalypse

This is apocalypse

There are reverberations of breath

This is apocalypse

And it is breeding.

Strange Dancers pt. 4

4. Witnesses of the Dialectic Convulsion

Here is a moment:

The sun splits in half above the recovering Mirage, each fissile

Drawing itself to full height and sending spindling fingers sunward

Its sloughed skin finally too thin, the solar corona absent

Its gravity finally defeated by its luminosity

It renders us bare of skin at last with atomic compulsion

Sundering magnitudes of astronomical space

It splits with a vacuous howl which only our eyes witness 

Blue sky bending to violets and reds in its wake, Platonic

But which all present, Mirage and subsumed populace and we four 

Cognize as though it is our marrow boiling

Our diatom-scoured trident fuses in fleshlessness

We are one now 

We are one

And as Aisha lifts herself to steadiness

She sees wind bluster ash-spots on the Mirage

They blend into a reformed perfection

Which seems now faded by its exposure

Less the perfect midnight shade it was formerly.

Listen: there are eyes upon us and

A flash throughout the sky is a

A rejoinder to the flickers of moments before.

And now we four who are one in fleshlessness

One body alone but strange inbound mingling invigorates us 

Within this body still is the shore and the argumentative ocean

In its final moments

A voice overtakes us, we friends of this one body listen:

   Is it true you are critical of us

Mirage qua Reporter beneath heavy glasses 

Like insect eyes and black shadows pulled into a balding crown

Its white prism gleam a shining head like waxed linoleum and liver-spotted

And we are in a space floored with hard carpets like sandpaper

A ceiling instead of a sky, and flaking asbestos tiles 

The fluorescent bar-lights having replaced for a moment the splitsun

A flashbulb recovering as our dilate eyes recover from its optic clap.

And now we four who are bound in fleshlessness

One body alone but strange intercourse invigorates us 

Within this body still are the sands and the ocean’s troughs

These moments are infinite as our end approaches

A voice overtakes us, we friends of this one body reply

In chorus we reply:

   For none born into submission to capital or chrism

   Nor those to a yoke empowered state

   Nor any less those who inherit the

   Insights and crimes of others

   Can we be responsible for them or

   Rewarded on behalf of those

   Secondhand efforts

We are returned to the shores which host our dispute.

The Mirage is upon Aisha as the sun continues its split 

It is as a jewel under a hammer, these suns

Laughter from the Mirage even as it coughs and sputters out

Whatever of Aisha remains within its depths 

As the sun cleaves its halves and shards

It slips and splits apart, spat words and cackles

Ensconced in a bestowed light from sweat and the fire which threatens

On naked bone and exposed anatomy beneath the fissile sun

At thirty three degrees above a gross measure of heat we smolder

Aisha’s breasts swell with milk, splinters of sunlight transformed

Her collarbone catches light as its spectrum shifts towards 

Unity whether indistinct or undifferentiated

The light such that even prisms cannot

Discriminate the content thereof

As such her sweat refracts only umbra.

The remaining strength of the sun’s halves 

Creating darkness as they radiate their last

Aisha’s body lit like brilliant oil, her brilliance

Pours from within her as she in her lambency

Divides the form of the amorphic Mirage, it courses 

Regaining Its mass of shadow even as

Its cohort threatens to be laid bare by 

Radiance which so tests our travelers' carapace 

And the Mirage’s thinning opacity.

In this solitary body

Four pairs of lungs will not help us cry louder

Eight eyes do not bear truth any better

Eight arms and attendant digits no better articulate

This strangeness descending from the perverse firmament 

Of our world our shadows have split and have we mimicked the sun

Its shards and glistening remnants slicing through empty space

Transmuted to milk in a lambent virgin.

The Mirage licks its cavernous buccal ingress

Seeking to reclaim its dissident emigre.

Strange Dancers pt. 3

3. Children of Earth and Ocean

Here is a moment:

Domine in the Perhentians

An argument between the ocean and the land

A young boy watches his belly fat and his skin like

Dried coconut husks and he is in the middle of the tug

His boat is red and teal and an outboard motor is choked and ready

He kicks his legs along the measures of the ocean

Its troughs slapping against 

Grasping for the bleached wood 

He has for many summers neglected to paint

His craft is weighted and in lulling waves his eyes close.

Boxes of tangerines and coffee though he desires neither

Overweighted and enduring the tide with anchored bylines

The call to prayer rings out on the radio from

Kota Bharu but no one stops 

Women in their headscarves obedient to the trade that 

Paints the boat and fuels the motors and fills the beds 

And otherwise consumes the business of the day

The women committed to the business of the day

Scarves glittering like jewels on the arms of infrequent tourists

Pale and watching the boy fight the boat’s urge to capsize in a swell

Watching women thick of trunk load crates up narrow stairs

Wading out and back wrapped in glittering veils bearing geometric images.

There is a flicker of the daylight and

Its unquestioned ubiquity is Compromised 

All present are arrested of agency 

For a moment too brief to grasp

Amplified by the break in the sunlight the Mirage 

Rises from each cardinal point and sands rear up beneath us 

A wall of white sands our trident with entangled arms

Diatoms grazing us and lacerating our final boundary

Thrust towards the sky and below us all are

Enveloped by a cackling Mirage.

The Mirage convulses and It like the sky flickers

Grasping Itself, Its gut and like rolling dusk Its dark veneer

Lowers towards the horizon along the entire circumference of the sky

It wails and a sucking sound of such proportion so as to subsume thunder

And cracks of gunfire from belligerents unseen

Pulls our hearing outward into a reverberating vacuum.

A newly naked virgin girl spills from the black Mirage

A labial vibration ejects her as a vomitory slipstream

Into the argument between ocean and land and into the boy’s boat

Her head is wrapped with a nearly fluid film, a remnant 

The now sun-spotted constancy of the Mirage’s veil

Even as the sun raises boils on the girl’s body in her nascent exposure

Her former cohort trembling as they perceive their own exposure

Her eyes of a striate palette and flesh accompanying and they see they are

Her left iris black as the ash-speckled midnight which hems the Mirage

Her right iris the tarnished gold of our own skin beneath the fissile sun

And its nuclear gleam of white sheen of tears glinting on her corneas

Her placental veil choking her as she spits up oxygenated amniosis

It is her vestigial propriety which alienates her in this exposure

Even as to her we are endeared by the subjection we now share.

Aisha she is and a virgin with rough husked breasts

Henna'd toes in the tide in which her feet hang limply

The ocean rinses the rocks below her feet of afterbirth

Her head covered, a diaphanous gauze

Embroidered with copulating pairs of creatures

Geometric in their adherence adverse to true depiction

Her form and physique an hourglass of sun-roasted brown

Her time already internally ticking in unseen granules 

Which duplicate the boils Aisha’s youth sloughs off

Sun plays on her breasts and belly

Her limbs likewise in geometric proportion 

Like an embroidery herself along the shore on the boat where once

The replaced boy was before and perhaps in Aisha’s presence he persists.

Strange Dancers pt. 2

2. Mirage

And yet we are little more denuded than before

By eyes on us upon our shamelessness 

Glittering eyes emerging amid stones and scrub

Surrounding us a shrieking Mirage dark like night

It as as being throttled by space

   Look, you

A many-faced Mirage that is as many-voiced

Enveiled and piercing the quarry walls with a treble wail

   You vilify yourselves

   You in your ample prostrations 

   Your mere body 

   This is repugnance

   Entertained at the expense of 

   That of which we cannot speak but with peace upon it 

   How you ignore and defile our creed

   How you affront goodness on these

   Our shores 

   Where is your shame 

Night-veiled Mirage sweeping towards us 

We are rooted still in the ocean’s advance

It punctures the dull contiguity of day-sky

The Mirage waves its many arms more terrible than 

Sexless Kali of nightmares Its arms winged with ten thousand fingers

To root out and excise our essential nudity

To clothe us by stripping further still than those rays of the sun unsheathed

Whose fires penetrate a thousand thousands

Of vast absences layered between us, we and Mirage 

Such distance It imagines It can surpass to

Excise agency and unselfconsciousness

And yet the sun, that fissile orb

Does not ignore the cloth of Its uniform righteousness 

It too festers beneath the blinding prism

Waters lap at our toes, we trespassers rooted in contested waters

Lazy like one made mindless before an incomprehensible disaster

Voices within the Mirage no longer speak in harmony

For the first time Its interior faces regard one another with wonder

It regards Itself for the first time and rippling through those faces

Is sheer wonder and terror as that which once was indivisible recognizes

The agents of its schizophrenia.

For the moment our flesh holds fast

For the moment each of us holds fast 

Freckled in our infinite imperfections before the 

Rarifying veil, the fractal cloth of the faces inhabiting the Mirage

Those nuclear rays spot the Mirage’s cloth with white ash

And for a time we are, my lambic-drunk friends and I

At an impasse as the extinct and fossilized

Vegetation springs upwards from our shadows which like water

Our fissile umbra a shade of darkness enlivening stony ferns

Our shade separating Earth and hallucinations of the heavens

This is our unity.

The Mirage reels as though drunk as our shade

Strikes and divides the world

Black and many-limbed and in motive advance Itself caught 

In our fissile shade we inherit from our lysing star overhead

The Mirage reels. 

Glittering watchers gather like wave-swept agates on the ridge

Pebble-skinned monitor lizards an arm’s length are only juveniles

Their scales are sapphire and opal and eyes like polished jet

Among the fluctuating foliage which returns to its ancient fullness

We seek no shelter behind it

And despite the intensity of the sun and skyfire 

Fossils rejuvenate and turn from stony grey to verdant emerald 

They encircle us on this contested shore

The Mirage and us, we four

We are naked as we begin our counterstep.

Sky Burial

We cut off his fingers 

Joint by joint and then at the wrist as well

Then cleaving from sockets and sinews his elbows and shoulders 

His flesh was tight against our blades and our hands were

Greasy with blood and viscera and gristle after hauling up the fresh

Death upon our backs to the peak above the village where

Amid dry weeds mummified by endless winter

The bare steep face of the mountain looks over the valleys

Which surround these empty wastes

Fingers greasy with his death and his body and sinews

He whom we knew so much of or at least well enough to mourn

And thangkas drape awnings of lashed bones and stretched skins

Rich with color glowing under the funereal blaze

Every design an imitation of the view

Though does the sun die for him

He our friend in a binding of vines

Dry like his fingers would be three days hence were it not

For our practice which we've undertaken

He of golden skin muscled in memory

Thangkas like national flags of the handfuls of houses in our village

Scattered like the digits and segments which we cast

Strewn about these cliffs which we know so well

But which know us far further than any of our memories permit

The thangkas

Flags of a nation fivefold and individual they bear

The patterns of the family which made them

They flutter in the wind

As we pass with calloused hands which smell of iron

We tattoo ourselves with sharpened bone-picks

Inscribing and instructing those who

Must cut us up as we have done

For our friends those most dear

For they will not know 

Those who come after

They will not know the methods so we demarcate the lines and

Joints and diagram the sinews of ourselves and indicate

As best we can over fires and alcohol to

Allow tears and the clarity which follows as we indicate

With ink of macabre origin the places a blade must navigate

We are cartographers of the corpses

We must eventually become.

Strange Dancers, pts. 0 and 1

0. Frontispiece

My friends are strange

 talented writers

 musicians and actors

 lovers and mad 

 like lambic-drunk monks 

My friends are strange

 basking in the sun

 the sex of its golden rays

 we are bathing on the shores

 on the beaches of contested lands

My friends are strange

 dancers:

1.  Entourage

These shores are also naked

The sun having stripped them of vegetation as it strips us 

Unclothed beneath the nuclear sun, the fissile sun

It dissolves as it pours its rays over us like rain 

Its internal convections shearing off its own skin which

Sloughs slowly off and ripples outward 

Its mass finally exhausted with the burden 

With the weight of symbols enumerated

By millennia of symbolic hyperbole 

Its flares in our astigmatic eyes render us half blind.

In the distance immense thunderheads shimmer and quake 

The sky in its opal vastness trembles and blue bends 

Across the spectrum it bleeds into violets and reds Platonic

Over oceans whose inverse percolations resupply the thunderheads

   Enough to power the history of us

She whom we call Mei says 

Ancient gods cower amid perpetual rumble and roar

Our other mouths still and mute her voice drifts among us

   In even this much of a moment

She whom we call Mei says

Her name a tripartite declaration of heritage

Her temporal origin

Her infinite possibility 

Her voice a shallow shrug. 

We lie on fine sands ten thousand years old 

Worked still by the kneading ocean 

We four lie backs bare in the pattern of a trident

I the stem and my crown in the sea

She whom we call Mei

Medial of these three worthies

Arms interlocked and the feet of

This my self upon her crown

These three worthies

Above my underfoot.

We will soon be likewise stripped of our skins

As we have been already of our clothing

He who calls Mei his but not his alone

He a frank participant and august lover and

Instigant and acersecomic fallow-maker of language and shameless 

In decoupage he spat his name into the cresting waves yesterday 

He now goes without it and binds his locks with wooden combs

His vestments no more than sheaves of happenstance fabric which unwind 

Beneath the force of the sun and arms outstretched in riotous embrace declares

   It gets to one’s head!

Likewise another is his complement our sinister tine

Her androgyny in her Roman name July

They three are a dynasty in accidental reference

Though with them in this respect I am apart

Named instead for one who slept fearlessly

Among carnivores with golden hides beneath the Arian plain

We honor the habit of our names in prostration.

We are golden and olive and white 

We are speckled bronze and freckled

With constellations we reflect the blue blindered heavens 

Which the sun sequesters behind its crowning flares which meet their quantum

Twin entangled in the corneal glare against which only a lofted hand can shade

Shimmering in sweat and oil below the arcing bolts 

Our sweat flashes white as liquid prism

Chrism upon us it is the Undifferentiated Color 

But we ourselves in feigned sin are the alloys of a thousand

Baser metals on these contested shores 

Which ring with the echoes of gunfire from beyond the shoreline ridge.

These shores are bordered on three sides by quarry walls 

Rocky they are and even their primordial vegetation 

Remaining only as calcified periphery

These shores even have been stripped of mineral history

And what remains is only flesh as noumena both

Our compound projection is only ideation as flesh

Calls of voice echo in increasing volume beyond the mined bedrock

Echoes punctuated by firearms unseen compete even with thunder 

Sounds in factious combat cause our white sheen to tremble.

  

Mei she is extends her tongue languidly 

Along the collarbone of either neighbor

But not I who lie rooted in the ocean

Which kneads at me as it does the fine sand 

A hundred miles distant thunder answers the rhythm of 

Destructions cellular and psychic and borne by clarified will

On these contested shores.

Lying now as we do now our vestments in ashes 

Ashes with which we mark lazy crosses

Across each other’s foreheads  

Navels and breasts bear these fractal depictions 

The horizon and its ocean source and thunder

Beneath eyes and above sweat smeared brows

Paralleled strikes smeared on taut common flesh 

Fingers dress fine ash upon Mei

Her face and her eyes are as tarnished gold 

Lambent even in the shade of a hand brought to her brow 

Her fingers open to grasp loosed hair

On these contested shores.