Leveled, Beveled, the Lover
The people I love absolutely love to bevel my love.
The people I cannot help but love make me question
everything called love, and that which is not.
And the people I cannot love
push me to find those that I do.
I believe that love is a thing that eventually turns thief,
then slowly, then very quickly, turns killer.
For what I have figured about love is that
it always wants something more from us,
and when it cannot get more of what it wants,
will destroy all that we are or have.
Or love is a thing that sets decay into everything
we have called precious and dear,
until all we have left is what we loath to have loved.
Stars in the Twilight of the Gods
I have a crowbar. Not just any crowbar, but one given to me
by the God;
the High One, Odin. He put me in its charge before warning
me of stardust
getting into my eyes. The crowbar was only for prying stars
from the night;
they haven’t invented goggles in Asgard yet, and though I
try to explain
to Odin what they are, he won’t listen; won’t have anything
To do with it;
thinks I’m trying to trick his only one good eye. I wonder
if he’ll ever
wear an eye patch because the bad one is growing maggots;
but he stomps,
sternly warns me with his good one; and I’m off to the stars
to pry them
from the night—from the firmament; from their starry place
above the plumes of Ragnarök—
above the evaporating Giantlands, Godlands, Humanlands,
Elflands, Spiritland; all Lands.
I must climb up the boughs of Yggdrasil to reach the heavens;
and so, I climb,
and I climb, and I break branches, ripping pants, shirt, pride,
and flesh on
that ancient underworld rooted tree that reaches through sky,
above everything.
I need a ladder that constantly snags; it’s an awkward, difficult
climb to the Stars.
Though my body is faint my spirit is not weary; and though space
is difficult to breath in,
when I reach the top of the world, I feel myself to be the thing
that threatens;
that makes people both awe and fear: the shadow superseding
moon and dawn.
But the moment fades, darkness engulfs me like a fog sweeping
from the abyss;
for I remember, I am a dumb laborer who traded time and wealth
for a single draught.
But it wasn’t for any olde drink, I’ll add—but the one and only,
Mead of Poetry.
Oh! It pools my tongue, makes a hollow well of my heart just to
think of it—
as I start prying the stars from their firmament. One after another,
no two alike;
they fall, corral, like snow from the deep twilight of winter; they
spin, shed, like mysteries
that will never be caught; for their revelation is a concealment of
sorts: a ritual of play.
I pry all throughout the lonely, oxygen-less, night; hands blistering,
neck stiffening;
the stars rising like screws from their blackholes. Sometimes their
light flashes or slithers
out all sublime or monstrous, like coiling fire: like hellacious snakes
with vacuums for skin.
Flakes, sparks, and stardust gets into my eye, and though I worry of
going blind, I don’t stop jamming,
twisting, searching for little slips, threads, corners, crooks to press my
crowbar into; to pull, pry,
cork out the stars; to make follicles for the light to drip and descend
to Earth.
And the stars drop from their excessive corporeal caverns, like
Angels thrown to Earth;
each star from its twilight, from its labyrinth of constellation, winds
a crooked path to Earth.
I have a taste for the impossible; a thirst not easily quenched; and thus,
you see them spiraling,
shooting down to Earth. I have traded everything I am for something I
can only name.
I am prying out Stars in twilight of the Gods, the further I go, the harder,
the darker it is.
Soap Opera : Love, a Karmic Consequence
All parties coming to query the queen died
with their horses in the snow. The prince that
she had loved laid his pale cheek into the bitter
earth, his tears taking frost as his eyes formed
into wickedly wide, white voids. When she
found his party she wept, then told her guard
to bury the corpses with the others, but to leave
the prince to herself. She later embalmed him
with more snow; with the last tears of the night—
the last night she would cry within this lifetime—
then kissed his forehead and bade him goodbye.
A thousand years later, he saw her at a party;
she was drinking white wine, and he was
drinking whatever beer he found in the fridge.
Gravity, motion, the holy spirit if you well,
all called, culled, guided his body, his breath,
his inspired voice to her ear. Two weeks later,
after making love to her, she wept into her pillow,
her face frozen with memories she mistook for a
dream, for a childhood play with bad role models;
for the lovesickness contracted by former lovers,
not by former days. The weeks, the months, the years
evolved into matrimony, and all was flawless
until the day there came an early winter blizzard.
On that day she called a name that drew a blush
from him; that quickly, but quietly divided,
froze, itself into shadows that seemed livid,
hateful, and all too often, too frightening for her.
Her love, her heart, was divided—devoured—
in that countenance’s fixed and pitiless shadow.
And he, not knowing his anger, grew to cursing
himself, her, all of existence; eventually taking
himself to the range to take a look at the disgusted
shadow in his face. And starring at himself, he
found himself sad to behold; taking in his own
image, he found it frighteningly lacking—wanting.
So, he took to the mountains, to realms of winter ice
where every image confounded him with another
facet of wanting. Did the queen know how he
sought after her so long ago? Neither remembers
of course; no one remembers their past lives, and
if they do, they are a shaman or a sham or both.
The point is that it was not her but him; it was not
his fault, but the image, the shadow in the mirror;
it was time and all the stupid, dull, lizard-like men
that were querying her from dawn to dusk. In truth,
she, like he, died as a virgin in that life they are both
glad to forget but not less mad, only a little more
wise, to have it in the repertoire of things we keep
behind the iced walls of desire’s fictitious fixations.
Pigs in the Sky
It is not a matter of running away or to;
but of lost ships coupled with the mad,
and the found still floundering with their
survivor’s guilt. The whale has got him
by the snout, obsessing him with the worry
of never making it to legacy’s table;
which, for the whale, is good and natural
long life. And his snout, having the pig’s
congestion—or lack of dietary restriction—
the glutton of all metaphors, beguiles him
into a worldwide plague of despair; a
whirlwind of sentiment to attach words
and so much shit because that is his
vocation; because how else may we
contain an experience, extract the raw
feeling, if not with the artful, sometimes
all too mechanical, manipulation of
mere words; if not with the pig’s misguided
scent to befoul us? It is for this, as for other
things, why we call the wordsmith, the
poet or storyteller, a magician; and yet
this does nothing to explain the wisdom
of those that never seek out a magic show,
nor of they that do. This does nothing to
help pontificate on the modern or mundane.
What I mean is, I am not running away from
or to anyone, but am steadfast, pendant,
eventuating upon the right set of words
to make my paltry claims into a real pardon.
Running—No!—I am chained and find
no other way to reach out into the night
except by ponderous words, which,
however lucid the extension of all
their riddles, can or will never grasp
all I wish for them; for their intimacy
is a coldness that warms only to the reader:
and what that sounds like is what any ship
may sound like when it is gathering
water, before it sinks; and which is no
way for the pig in me to die, or I am
not a pig, and this is not my death but
a meditation on the pigsty of the world
and our precarious place within its
ever encompassing prison-like stare;
a sinking with no sublime whale or sea,
and only the pitifully snorting, groaning,
stinking pork belly rolling in his slime.
But the real whale of our imagination—
not that of our realist metaphor, which is
all piggy and hopeless—goes on
ever elucidating the elusive pride of all
the text sets out to evince yet only evades.
And in that ancient, endless, enchanted
course that no one no longer wanders in
(gets lost within) her voice catches me
leaping from the pigsty, and yells,
“You’re running!” even as I leap over
ship, out of the world’s slimy puke
of a pen, and into the cold deep sea;
and she that called me the runner—
she that threatened, condemned my
freedom—begins running, almost flying,
from her pig legged prison and into the sky.
St Joseph of Cupertino
Your father died in debt, leaving you to
be born in the stable. But you were fine
with that, for it allowed you kinship to
your savior, and therefore closer to Mary,
whom you loved not quite like a son—
admit it, Joseph, you didn’t masturbate to
anyone else half as much. They said
you were too mentally slow and uneducated
to be a monk in all their orders, so you
became a stable man instead, offering to
show your superiors the superiority of
your simple but anything but mild faith.
And thus, you became a monk, for they
saw that what God declined to give your
head, he had abundantly filled the heart with;
and then, your dream now fulfilled, you
you begin to fly—fly—and fly: to levitate
above the plains of man’s unfeeling brain.
Yes, you squeezed out tears, devotion,
seamen and freedom from the mother of
God, causing your body to roll and roil
and ascend up to the pearly vaults where
flesh and passion and spirit and desire are
born and dissolved into a single flying
object unidentifiable by us, who think with
the brain and head and not the fire, the blood,
or the inexhaustible engine of constraint
that is spirit’s tension and releasing; cannot
think with propulsion, but always grounded
by gravity, believe in only what our feet
can step on, our hand touch, our mouth eat,
our genitals fuck, and what our mind can name.
But they could not name your power, and
thus the inquisition threw you away, your
life passed alone, making you immortally
ascetic; no longer susceptible to spontaneous
levitation. And because your flight took us
by like many sparrows racing from a burning
sun into a nest of shade; like the cool wind
that follows a flock of gawking geese
winding North, then South, then all over
as all seasons become one. We are left richer,
but no wiser, of your ever having been; thus
making you again like your savior. Such
simplicity; such grace such as the world has
not known, with sincerity quite unparalleled;
all of this beauty just more reason to call
you mentally handicapped if not also insane.
But such is man, such is the world; neither
are what we would like them to be, and yet,
because of those like you, there’s reason to,
if not believe, then to keeping going; whether
ascension or ascetic chains becomes our path.
Because the immortal beloved lives on in
the immortal young bosom of Mary, in Christ,
in Joseph, in you, in me, in everyone we have
ever loved, there is hope that our decision
to bear our evils, and situations of gravity, were
not born of naïve fantasy, but the wisdom of
the fantastic; that our kindness were not mere
show for spouse, society, boss; and that our
mercy were not insipidity, but the hand of
the Master untying every doom weighing
us to earth’s deep, unyielding, bow.
About the Author
Galen Cunningham has been published or is forthcoming in Literary Yard, The Creativity Webzine, Blue Unicorn, Ink In Thirds, Sparks of Calliope, Apocalypse Confidential, Fresh Words Magazine and IHRAF. Originally from New York (the North Country), he lives in the foothills of Colorado.
