the writing machine

House/Fire :

An Oratorio in five parts

march, 2019

“The floor is gone, the windows gone,

And where there should be roof there's sky” W. B. Yeats

0 Procession/Prelude

Gravel road on county line

wooded lot with septic tank

tinsel tattered spruce

crazy tilted mailbox

primer red and silver

with numbers 1368

scratched on with a case buck knife.

Ditch clotted with dead frogs and mosquito larvae

wild onion and gravel

woodpeckers on the power lines

crows in the willow.

Way down yonder in the meadow

Lies a poor little lambie

Bees and butterflies, picking out its eyes.

Grass grow thick over the charred foundations

ash black clay and rusting iron nails in the dirt.

Broken glass in the gravel half moon drive

cinder block, crumbled chimney, dead well.

Unburn. Uproot. Unrot. Undark.

Ghost ship bright with all your greasy windows lit

unburning. Unvisible. Undark.

Rise dripping from the black mud

and grave pit, gravel arc,

muddy hole under oaks.

Black wings and smoke

coil tight back into stones and spit

worm riddled beams and tangle of mouse nests.

I. Kyrie

“Therefore hell hath enlarged herself,

and opened her mouth without measure:” Isaiah 5:14

Have mercy and appear,

loom of the starless dark

reweave this:

Tin-roofed vestibule

first phantom limb of the house to die

rough painted planks and rotting steps;

Stage where once we sang, beat drums with metal spoons

and broke their heads.

Broken mouth of the dead leviathan

nest of serpents, habitation of owls.

O’hare flyover meteors and lightening falling overhead

have mercy:

Have mercy and appear

visibly, affably, without delay.

Rise now:

Living creatures and sea of glass.

First failed fix of this faltering house

tar paper roof rough lapped over shingles

torn down by my father and never replaced.

Step to the threshold too high

from a cinder block that replaced your three steps

too far for my sisters legs.

Tall grass gone to seed and foxglove

where I caught quick black garter snakes and toads

cracked granite and worm rotten wood.

Foxfire and glow worm, fungal light

habitation of jackals

Rural Route 3 box 1368

have mercy.

Way down yonder in the meadow

have mercy and appear.

Unburn, from the trash fires and bonfires

from the black smoke of burning tar paper

from the scrap piles, from bellies of termites

and carpenter ants.

Let each disgorge their portion

rear up from the mud into the lightning

to disclose your hollow-core door

with its three windows, your cheap lock.

Let the mice spit back their burrowed tunnels

the cotton candy pink insulation

have mercy:

Bees and butterflies, picking out its eyes.

Your shining Celotex™

the gleaming teeth of the house

stretched wide.

The sharpened window glass incisors.

The grinding cinder block molars.

The cellar door.

The open throat.

Open wide your mouth and I will fill it

II. Gloria:

‘Our prison strong, this huge convex of Fire,

Outrageous to devour, immures us round “

Paradise Lost Book 2

Glory to Pepto-pink and crumbling arches

mid century faux-Moorish, the cheap paneling

chained oxyacetylene welding tanks beside the door

and a cluster of dead sewing machines.

Glory the rotten pumpkin of a year ago, collapsed to dust

the dry death of a mouse in a trap

milk crates of phone books and newspapers

discarded tools, rasps and files, teeth for the mouth of hell

glory possums in the dark, their red eyes.

Glory a question marked box with the entrails of radios

a television with no back, tubes and bags of pulled nails

and through the arch, the stagnant air.

Glory the piano never tuned

rescued from the trash

topped with a loose slide of papers.

Glory the snap and crackle of the burning harp

(remembering thee, O Zion)

of car parts and coils of wire.

Glory the cracked windows and their host of dead flies

flicker of fluorescence

that lured the wasps to a false dawn

who covered the walls.

Glory death angel mushrooms growing in the moldering sills

the bridal shrouds of curtains on cheap rods, flyspecked lace.

Glory the black cat and her bloody newborn kits on my lap.

Glory the raccoon grabbing crackers from our hands on the sofa.

Glory the bats in the attic.

Glory the black phone confessional booth

between the overstuffed green chair

the wheezing compressor of the refrigerator.

Glory the penciled scrawl of numbers, palimpsest of names

erased and redrawn.

Glory the green and black television and it’s wire hanger rabbit

the late night monster movie, the physics and botany.

Glory the tables with their cheap chipboard pressed in acorns and ivy.

Glory the bottled city on the mantle, its dead Philippine breath

the beer stein filled with my father’s college love letters

the sandstone roses my grandmother brought from Oklahoma

the war-prize carpet that my grandfather brought back from Ethiopia.

Glory the oscilloscope and the voltmeter, their black needles spinning

the transmission disassembled, it’s delicate gears in melamine cups.

Glory the picture tubes and radio dials

Glory the threadbare carpet, the plywood sub-floor.

Glory the nude, playing pipe beside the water

the badly painted bouquet of flowers.

Glory the kitchen, blood red and black.

Glory Fat mice that ran along the sink tops

that drowned in the dishwater my sister wept into

her hands slack in the cold soap.

Glory the crimson carpet, the growth of gutted seeds in a bowl

the whiskey and water above the stove.

Glory the frozen ducks with shot in their wing

the goose with one leg, the venison and king’s buttons.

Glory the sizzle of butter in an iron skillet

sparking the stove with the welding ignitor

and the spatter of bacon fat.

Glory the hams boiled in the chipped yellow pot,

Glory the raccoons, that broke into the flour

leaving hand prints on the walls,

Glory the possum, the salamanders, the raw, rubbed spot where the dog slept

Glory the broken washing machines

the screwdriver slammed into the sensor so it would run with the lid open

the diaper pails, the door to the dirt floored hall

the never hot dryer.

Glory the dirt floored room where I communed for hours with the devil

and his plastic yellow smile,

his hollow eyes.

Glory the ancient smell of long dead chickens

the truck tires and rotting crates

the trailer slat windows rimed with grease

the tar paper walls.

Glory the twine of blind roots under the wall

the scurry of swallows in the eves

the never closing door and the riot of elephant ears

and thistle outside.

(outside, a riot of fallen garden,

Way down yonder in the meadow

Glory outside, snakes and toads

and the rain filling the pond

until the catfish swam across the grass

Glory hornets and wasps crawling over rotting pears

and the smell of wine, the septic creek

foaming with detergent, the dead tadpoles cooked in drought

into the clay banks, the falling willows in the rain, the lightening blasted oaks

the dead and blasted plum tree, wild onion and sour grass)

Glory the ruined room, where the shallow rooted willow fell

and drove branches into the earth that grew

where Warnie and Nolda Risener’s ancient portrait

glowered in the dark, in gilt edged frame.

Glory the leaf filled rooms, the possum grapes and ivy

pulling down the great orange glass globe of the sun

till it rested on the floor in iron chains.

Glory the dead lamps and their clusters of grapes

the fireplace and its secret room behind it

the false bottomed drawer of the bureau, swollen

and stuffed with golden fish.

Glory the dead dry aquariums and their spiders

the burst roof and the explosion of stars.

Glory the stars, and the silence between them.

III. Credo

“Ye are of your father the devil”

John 8:44

I believe in the hallway that ends in mirrors

where I hovered outside of my body in a thousand night terrors.

I believe in the bookcase of millwright manuals and Lewis CarrolL

the water-logged exhibition guide to Tutankhamen

cutting it’s pages open with a knife

like a cartouche seal

to flickering candles and invocation.

I believe in the grimoires and the Psuedomonarchia Daemonum

the Hammer of Witches and Demonolatry of Remy.

I believe in the beet red devil

that stamps his feet and curdles milk

that old bargainer with farmers and guitar-pickers.

I believe in the linen closet with its pornographic toilet lid

the water bottle filled with change

in anomalous artifacts, the leyden jars and Greek mechanisms

and the cursed host that fell from the stars

the bestial dweller in the lake bottom

the green children and hitchhiking ghosts.

I believe in the central bedroom, windowless

whose door I stood outside of with a flashlight

and knocked and never opened

never opened

cradle of the pistol and my mother’s furs

hot throbbing ventricle of bedclothes and dark

hissed secrets and the worm blind eye

I believe in the communion of saints:

Elizabeth and her purloined eggs that never hatched

Rachel and her silver teeth, drinking sticky soda from the carpet

the web of chewed gum that stuck Sarah to the wall

where she screamed until we cut her loose

the nest of open-mouthed dolls

the clot of ghosts on my tongue

catalog of crime, of shriven tongue

laughing and laughing in the dark.

I believe in my father, the faceless man with his black book

Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem,

who I built this burning chapel to invoke

with his steel toed boots and the smell of Coke plant sulfur

his rags and his stained yellow undershirts

factorem cæli et terræ, visibilium omnium et invisibilium

who pulled the main floor beam apart with his hand

and showed me the fat earthworms swimming in the wood.

I believe in the woodlice and yellow jackets, mud daubers and newborn mice

I drowned with the wooden handle of a spoon

devour er of children, Cronos bloody mouthed and

Tereus with a severed tongue in his hand

Philomel steadily stitching regardless.

Who taught me the world is an endable thing.

I believe in the room with the door in the floor

to the pipes and the darkness, the wet crawling of things

the mattress in its plastic, the drywall

the grinding wheel, the devil and his angels.

I believe my father Cannibal, leering old witch in a sugar house

of broken toys and chicken feet,

of pocket knives and string

gleaming nickels and melting ice creams

and spraypainted bicycle parts in heaps as tall as the garage.

Acknowledging no redemption

“only say the word” and I shall be healed

He said, says

waits on the word, mocks the silence of the dead stars

and the dumb lips of the crucified.

and Christ rots eyeless on the cross

and Mary weeps dust

and the devil coils green around St Michael’s ankles

in the dust motes of St Liborius

I believe in the monster at the heart of the labyrinth,

the demiurge, the chained titan at the heart of the fire.

“Wood from a vampire’s coffin” he said,

and showed me the foxfire glowing

luminescent rot, decay

the lightening bugs in the tall grass

the plywood box I buried him in dreams

on the property line

the hedge that hid our windows

in our shared bedroom, where the warped conquistador in his golden helmet

stared and saw nothing, the hole into the bathrooms

the tub on blocks, plumbed by garden hose run from the kitchen

the toilet on it’s pipe, the holes to the crawlspace

the walls torn down and scribed with a million messages in crayon

to be read only by the fire

where he shed his skin and crawled along the pipes in my dreams

where he laughed and laughed and laughed until his skin came off

leaving only the bright tube of his organs with the laugh inside

a bright and horrible animal that could not be released

convulsing on it’s own silence.

I believe in the corpse I carry on my back,

whispering into my ear,

the priest in his jangling bells in my nightmare

the drowned chapel on the lake bottom

the voice of my father in the dark

his cock in his hand

and the hushed voices behind a locked door/

I believe this chapel of whispers reared up from the mud

this shame, this bone-heap, this abbatoir,

I believe at the heart of everything is this, is only shame

only terror, only cowardice

only failure to protect those who could not be protected

the ever falling dominoes of lies we told to protect each other

who all were devoured utterly

with no survivors.

I believe in we blind, mute worms of decay

in the crumbling wood

his hammer and his wrenches

his cutting torch

his knives and string and wire

and little birds lying to each other,

to not invoke the wolf.

O my people crushed on the threshing floor

my mad and broken mouthed sisters

and the oceans of poison we have drunk

the deaths we have chased

the dream of death and the undoing of all things

and the starless dark I have returned to, again and again

death clicking his teeth in the dark

black ocean between the stars

last wave falling over the edge of the world.

Holocaust of fire, lift up the world in offering on the horned altar

The stone in the center of the field

the lightening

my brother dead already

outside my window with blood flecking his lips

car crashes and overdoses

throwing gravel at my windows

all the army of the dead

god of hosts.

I believe blood makes the corn grow.

I believe oil and blood lure catfish from the muddy bottom of the river

I believe

I believe in

the communion of saints

the divination of lost objects

the arcade Ouija, the legerdemain of the thieving spirits

that the horrible is commonplace.

I believe in the ocean at night

the tar road in the sun

black phone to pandemonium

and whispered directives that came while I slept.

I believe in the urging of this body,

of the blood of murderers that sings in us

of the serpent’s song in our sleep

upraised in brass, host and monstrum

I believe in the lamb, and the slaughter

and the sins of the world.

ecci qui tollit pecatta mundi

V. Sanctus and Benedictus

“And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity”

James 3:6

spitting

Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Tzevat Elohim Seboath.

barbarous words of evocation once I shook at the devil like threat

God of hosts

God of destroying armies

God of the army of Seraphim

God of motionless armies, of thrones, powers, orders, dominiations

ever silent demiurge and architect of hell.

Mute and answerless god who regardeth not persons

silent listener on the black phone of my prayer.

O ink black turnip, o holy goat,

O holocaust

O God of my father

who glories in the blood of children

O ravenous wolf head and grave mouth

O burned city, O blind designer

O blind creator, Ialdoboath,

shoplifted black candle

bloody-handed watchmaker

Adonay. Baal. Moloch

Crowned Paimon, Triple Headed Asmoday

broken vessels of uprooted trees

in the spiralling dark, in the starlit mire

in the black sea, that falls away to dark

over the rim of the world.

O brooding chaos before the starless

O hungry mouth, O holy starveling ghost,

O devourer of offerings

fattened on smoke and doves

o hell’s mouth, o dis, o Babylon

Heaven and Earth are full of thy glory.
Hosanna in the highest.

While we writhe in the mud

Hosanna in the highest

atop this pile of corpses

Hosanna in the highest

sung from the sick, from the hospital bedrooms

Hosannah Hosannah

from this tumor, this fire, this unlanced boil

hosannah from the dying stars in the entropic black between the stars

from the dead cosmos and this small puddle

these scrambling unicellular choirs

Hosannah from the blue shift and heat death of stars

Hosannah, from the mousetrap and the spiderweb

from my father’s stinking bed.

Hosannah from the violation of children, from the infant’s tumors

Hosannah, the improvised explosive, the minefield

the lead water of Flint, the cancerous earth.

Hosannah, the poison river.

Hosannah, Hosannah, the broken heart, the still tongue and shaking hands

the mute, the tongueless song Hosannah in the highest

Glory in the knife edge, in the atomic fire that consumes

at the heart of a dying sun, from the house fire

the smouldering ruin of the fallen world.

O ash and bread of ashes

O cold fire of praise

O grave dirt in my mouth

Hosanna Hosanna

Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord
Hosanna in the highest.

V. Agnus Dei

“And I will shew wonders in heaven above,

and signs in the earth beneath;

blood, and fire, and vapour of smoke”

Acts 2:19

Burn everything,

let the black holocaust of smoke blot out the sun

let the burning vinyl siding melt and crackle

and the rotten rags and papers

the tanks of gasoline

the oil and oxygen burn bright

let carpets boil in melting synthetic

let the picture tubes explode

the library burn

like Alexandria, Atlantis, pandemonium

let the house slide down into the mouth of the abyss

and burn in atomic singularity

O conjured throne

I release thee

slide back hellward, widdershins, counterwise

burn bright, and let your timbers collapse

so many ruined teeth

and your dark throat

open as a song

open night and day

(smooth the descent, and easy the way)

ever-burning house

black cloud that hangs above the horizon

burnt siding, exploding tanks

ragged sheets and boiling steam

black goat, sin offering

holocaust and devourer of holocausts

go back to your wilderness

your darkness visible

your cracked mirror

your backwards song

sin hanging on your back

o he goat, o eye in the dark

you stunned ox, you owl

you habitation of jackals

o bright and ever burning house of my father

o my burning father

o burning

o

Way down yonder in the meadow

Lies a poor little lambie

Bees and butterflies, picking out its eyes

fire