© James Henry Allen III 2012


The Psalms of Hell


Preface


Now, having only nearly escaped from Hell,
with several vellums,
a folio of yellowed parchments,
a blood stained water-colour block,
thirteen copper plates
and twenty three type written pages
of some lost soul’s manuscript
secreted away
in a leather briefcase
I’d somehow slipped through customs,
I’ve returned to the flat abyss of the five senses.
Here, the howl and snow-blinding gelid of Cocytus
has given way to the soft rain of a mild winter.

The house is cold. I’ve hung my coat
and shaken off the wet of Alameda.
Eyes peer from beneath the bed,
Shadows move on the wall.
With what I’ve brought back,
I may never be alone again.




But, I have no fear of devils;
and having spent some time in their country
I’ve come to appreciate their talent for Irony
and the pretense of feigned self-deprecation
that comes with the pride that cloaks their shame.

Home now, I see the face of a solitary devil,
reflecting back from a flat sided steep
that illuminates the present world.
“I swear I recognize your face!
Older now, but still the same.
I’d seen you! I’d seen you,
as I reached for a book stuck high upon a shelf .”
I was startled as I balanced on a footstool
over the open balcony
by those same haunted  eyes
peering back at me from the thick stained glass
of a Romanesque window through which I'd spied
Benjamin Thompson.

The Argument


When I was a boy,
a clacking, black monster lived in the cellar;
I was fascinated by its machinations.
My mother said her mother bought it
to land a job during the last Depression.
I played with it until its ribbon ran dry.
This I'd then pull gently through my fingers.
I never mastered typing.
Pen to paper, scribbles in a journal.
Watercolor stain and the hum and drum of
an electric typewriter—cacophany of auto-correct.
Twenty three pages of some lost soul's manuscript,
a manifesto of a mad cabbie
all tucked neat into a leather folio.

Ultimately, it was at data-entry on the late shift
in a server room in Hell, where knowledge
cast into the expanse is arranged
by men into libraries of magnetized living metal
that I Iearnt to write in the Luciferian Method—that is,
by bending pixels of light.

Invocation


Singular Queen,
before whom
all sprawl
in love
and fear,
She from whom I proceed
and to whom
I will return,
sing to me.

Leviathan


“The condition of man...a condition of war of everyone against everyone.” -Hobbes


As if I’m not to fear it
cruising the lightless deep.
So massive as if not moving,
‘ever eats and never sleeps.
Consumption its religion,
redistribution is its law;
and all that happen to swim near it
are ground down within its maw.

Is the ocean big enough?
Is it he that moves the tides?
Is there life enough in the sea
as on the typhoon swell he rides?
But, here there be other dragons,
(among them) the other fish and me.
Can any dwell in the shadow of Leviathan
and still count himself as free?



I retreat between the coral,
guarded fast by tooth and scale,
but in forever terror of my fellow fish,
I, then, meekly swim out toward its tail.
And so, now, I am amongst the many
dwarfed by its  enormity.
Though sovereignless, a commonwealth, 
so is this great and wide, wide sea.
So is this great and wide, wide sea.


The Keep


The sky is filled
with angels
falling
from passion,
grace and faith
to streets where devils born of suffering
congregate beneath the James Lick Skyway and 8th.

From our tower,
together,
we scout
the desolation
and defend the castle keep.
Down in the dungeon check the locks
of the cell where reason sleeps

where truth denied 
murdered wisdom , reason's gain
and silent witness, logic, bound,
is tortured first, and too, is slain.

Kocytus


Down here
in the shadow of the  glacier
where  the river Lethe icily congeals,
the run-off is polluted
with the very sins of the world.

But, still stoked, the fire burns.
And when boiled to steam
all this dirty water turns Hell’s great
mill-works round.

Cataracts of melting downrush
deepening the bergschrund.
Ice recedes
and reveals
Hell’s new mason’s quarry,
all the stone that fell with them from Heaven.



And still stoked, the fire burns.
In all my travels,
I’ve never seen
a city quite like Dis.
Oh, the promise of
every cobbled alley—every
creature comfort seen to.

We strolled along the iron palisades,
my friend and I,
hand in hand.

We witnessed empire’s nativity.
We witnessed the morality of order.

DCLXVI (an intermission)


Two, by three squared, by thirty seven.
Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus.
The machine says:
One, zero, one, zero, zero, one, one, zero, one, zero.
Or, Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletian.
(Or was it Timur the Lame?)
These are the names we know.
Beauty will always prefer cads to poets.
Perhaps the best of either are both.

Bioluminessence


i see you in the darkness, love. you are the only one,
a single star in the blackness,
a pale blue, fiery sun.
how can we not know we are forever meant to be?
how can we not know we are forever meant to be?

i grace so softly against your skin, my love
we float free and weightless in the abyss
once glimpsed, i was drawn to your light of  love
i'll never, now, want more than this.
how can we not melt into one?

a touch, a perfect kiss, it has begun.
i was so cold, so lost
a frightful specter in the chasm.
i was so cold, so lost, a grey ghost.
i drift above you silent, now.
numberless, needle teeth sink deep.
my eyes  roll back and disappear.
our love, eternal sleep.
we are one forever, deep...

Sages of the Illuminati


“Non ho scritto la metà di quello che ho visto.”
-Marco Polo


There is only God in my turban.
My third eye is of terrible aspect.
My third eye is nuclear fire.
My third eye is cause without effect.
My third eye ignites the cosmic pyre.

I am and always have been.
I am not and never was.
Intransient across the quantum,
I am effect without cause.

My only love, she smiled.
I waved, “Come to me.”
And she took flight from the parapet.
There is only God in my turban.
There is only God in my turban.
There is only God.


Luciferian Blues


“Io non sono bello, ma quando le donne sentirmi suonare...” -N. Paganini


Train howl tears
through the humid fabric of the valley night.
Late August midnight, orange incandescent light
and the acrid smell of wood smoke,
or is that the taste sulfur on the air?

Aw Ma, in the end the blister bursts:
I saw that walking, striding shadow,
a wide, white, toothy smile on its face
and a blazing, blue third-eye
burning in the middle of its forehead,
like something from the bible—like
a nightmare from the bible. Don’t let it speak, I prayed
(in that field where no prayers are answered).
A whisper of Indian Summer breeze
rustles the corn stalks.
“Do you follow me, son?” the shadow asked.




No, ‘till then I hadn’t heard a word,
“Do you know, now, that it’s been done?”
(in that place where all prayers go unanswered).
“You’re all in trim, now.”
And then the darkness fell: and then the chill.
An unblinking, scarlet, crescent moon
waxed philosophically on the horizon.

Aw Ma, in the end the blister pops.
Hot blood streams down my fingers.
You know our love was, you know our love was—now
I remember! “Play it till your fingers bleed.” he’d said.
“Play it till your fingers bleed.”

Witch Way Down, Triple Sister?


Still and staid,
dispassionate wallflower,
your dark undercurrents
cold as rushing Akyron's.
“Which way down, triple sister?”
“That way, there,
through the ancient gate.
Watch my candle. Listen close,
and I will call sweet Hypnos
to charm away the monster.”


Down, down,
yours is the delight of serenity
that looks to devils like despondence.
Your eyes are closed, love, your soft lashes rest
hiding your drowning absinthe eyes,
but only so you can better hear
the jazz and blaze
in your pearls like Satan's wife.

Drug Addled Sodomites in Hell

Or, a Discourse with the Last Prophet of the Modern Age
on the Presumption of Post-modern Poetry

In a quiet moment
emerging from a whorehouse in Hell,
I looked to the sky
(which of course in that dark country
is the stone convexity of
the inner sphere of our mortal plane)
and I had a memorable fancy:
The sky flashed red, violet, then blue.
I found myself then standing upon a rocky crag,
a jutting, jagged, cutting precipice.
From this vantage I beheld
the panoramic expanse of the whole of the abyss.
I was not alone.
Presently, I turned to him beside whom I stood.
Said the soothsayer, the prophet of the emancipation
of all the daughters of Albion,
"Had I spoken with any of them, truely,
it would've only been to make them aware
of what awaits drug addled sodomites in Hell."

The Second Argument


Lo, tho' I walk through the valley of darkness,
I do not fear.
For, darkness is my closest friend.
Father, if I'd made my bed in Hell,
it'd not be that you'd abandoned me.


The Second Invocation of the White Goddess


Goddess, You are
the light that defines the shadow,
the shadow without which
nothing else can be defined.

The Center


At the center of the pit,
A spire, an iron spike,
Is cast upward t'ward the stony sky
From the ice glazed roof
Of the cathedral of Hell.
Her doors are thrown open
And her hymns roar forth.
All a mad calliope!
And from those tempestuous pipes
And wailing whistles blown
The chords of death encompass me,
A cold minor ninth figured low and rumbling
Over which a discordant choir of devils sing,
“We have all gone down to the grave, we…
We have all gone down to the grave.”

My companion turned to me and said,
“This is the anthem of nations that ignore God.
These are the hymns of those nations whom
God has forgotten.



But my god is He, whom, from such heights
Will reach down into the dark
And rescue me.”
I nearly said,
“I find the faith of repentant devils disconcerting.”
Tears were freezing on his lids.
I didn’t have the heart; and I was wrong.
He stretched a delicate finger forth
To behind the smoking altar, “There.”,
To whence I crept and despite my fear
Pushed a frost bit open door.
I walked upon pages strewn
From the abysmal hymnoid about the floor
And upon an obsidian table hewn,
I saw the Bible of Hell.
This the race of Man will have
(sooner now)
Whether it will or not.


Purgatory


Like the tower of Babel,
this stairway arises,
a column memorial
to the battles of men,
those waged over fields soaked with scarlet honor
and those cut across hearts torn asunder.
This ladder, too, climbs toward Heaven,
adorned with the diamond like gleaming souls of all sinners.
We climb around, around and around
‘til the bare branches of the Tree of Life are seen piercing
the lamp-black, though star dazzled mid-night
so tearing open
the very roof of the world.
Peak insurmountable! Climb unendurable!
How many times will we find your absolute height
only to tumble from its dizzying edge?

Epilouge


This devil, who is now become an angel,
is my particular friend:
I see him proselytizing on the corner
of Harrison and 3rd.
He's there at all hours of the day
reading pages from the Bible,
trembling, wet and lit softly by the street lights,
even on the coldest summer days.
He holds a placard that says,
“Read the Apocalypse of St. Peter,
we immanentize the eschaton!”
Even Brother Lucifer—we will all go home to the Father.

© James Henry Allen III 2012