OVO

for Ira Cohen

I
off to the beiad what ho for the Fayyum & Egyptian solitude. This yearning for renunciation out-seduces other Lesser lusts & becomes our secret vice our coenobitic luxe. Our athletic asceticism is crypto-aestheticism

our grottos

coat our grotesque bodies in mother-of-pearl we grow a few herbs nudge nudge & every day wink wink a raven arrives with a loaf of “bread.” The desert so monochromous to jaded urbanites offers auras & auroras to the

anchroritic eye

Our nothingness is a giant suck-hole

that

re-appropriates the world & our friends the devils

Little Anthony & the Temptations we succumb to every one of them

especially

the succulent succubus of dolce far niente

which the worldly call prayer.

II
Juice for Jesus

You yourself are a kind of food of love & love a kind of spiritual cannibalism – & not so totally spiritual for those whose taste in love runs to precious bodily fluids. Jesus is the juice of your genitalia your tears your underarm sweat et cetera music at best the sauce High Church Victoriana pompous as beeswax & ammonia.

Appetite

would never feed on itself if it could lick the dirt from your shoes. Real food is based on you like distant emanations from the Platonic kitchen

caviare

champagne

& other disgusting sacraments of the Libertine Gnostics

They laughed at Yeats because he never missed the dinner bell at Colle no matter how

entranced

with swans. Fools

the food of love is actually food.

III
Everyone talks about negative capability but nobody ever does anything about it

Every day

we cram ourselves with juicy disasters

planning

later to dry out our heads with whiffs of some bodhisattva’s farts

or Art

or ideology or shopping

hoping

to forget what the wise old elves always stage-whispered to me on the most radical afternoons of unreconstructed Summer

Psst! hey kid

come & eat clouds like us eat emptiness & feel the scintillating buzz the enticing somethingness of a rich

long-ago nothing that can hover in mid-air like a

dragonfly

or Jesus the water-bug.

IV Twelve Steps to Hell

1.
Abraham & Eggs
vaudeville duo advocating
the meltdown of monotheism
in a maelstrom sweet as treacle
Breakfast of heretics shed for me
blackpudding mushrooms kippers
rashers of bacon & lashings of tea
because it’s not what enters the mouth
that pollutes as the Borborites say
or pale Carpucrateans with their sacrament
of precious bodily fluids
but what comes out of it
language as puke

2.
The Sevenheaded Cobra demands
immediate re-paganization of the Abrahamic Traditions
or hostages will be shot
out of circus cannons & bounce
like swans in widespread nets
with Theosophical warps
& polymorphous wefts
too complex for even the most advanced
generation of military computers
to map with any degree of inaccurate
inaccessible mountain somewhere
in the almost Martian landscape
of Waziristan.

3.
Why should the Right monopolize
mystic runes groovy grafitti
skull-&-crossbones or the color black
Ice shelves of Arctic unreason
are melting melting
leaving behind
only a pair of red shoes such as
vegetarian spirits like to sport
hobgoblins haunting Europe
with nastly recrudenscence
of funkadelic thaumaturgy &
illiterate syncretism
the snakes cult to end all snake cults
return of the never quite sufficiently
repressed
in the form of goat panic terror
& shameless idolatry.

(from OVO 16 ANTICHRIST January 2006)