by Michael Boughn

How much sense you yield to G
depends on weight delight bears
in sounding’s jubilation, whooping
and yowling being a bit over
the top for a little alliteration
but expressive of expanses
of fragrance in a different mode
Blake had at the centre
each flower opens to eternity
in tonic resolve despite chaotic
avian sky inscription soul reads
in blank January dome

Og and Anak
sneak into the poem through the Blake
door along with swarms of vultures
rise out of auguries into formations
roil with malice dedicated regimes
of pain and demonic release shaped
world in self’s paralytic image
WhataboutMe all dressed up
as monetized christian lollapalooza,
mostly because their names are cool
Og and Anak, which is how they got in
here trailing unknown clouds of Ugaritic
inscriptions, old Amorite theology,
and Nephilim’s Transjordanian
monolithic giants’ Cyclopian walls.

Augmented auguries continue
to overproduce alliterating thrills,
hope for sense to justify alphabetic
jouissance, more than just relief from
bowl-of-shit-news’s daily dish as Empire

once again crumbles around us as did
the Achaemenid, Ayutthaya, Akwamu,
and Angevin Empires and we’re not even
half way through the As, get used to it, waves
of resentment’s engorged rage and lust
for inflicted pain’s intimate contracted self
affirmation’s satanjoy, that and unrestrained greed
seem to be the order of the disintegrating
day, an Ahrimanic energy flare leaves
channels out deported and abandoned—
enter Og and Anak
to lock down further glimpses of sky’s
sky and strip G’s repeated delight
from orders of knowing.

No question, it gets downright nasty
out there, a world of pain and suffering
but claims
the world is broken
serve the same old inflated sty
in your eye loss of proportion leaves
Perfection (Human brand) to lurk unspoken
in unbroken’s necessary Whole
which just happens to hang out right
around the corner, it’s a kind of well-lit
whine, really, that they could have done it
better given newly inaugurated body
of knowledge’s collectibility
and same old blame it on evil matter (mother)
sleight of hand
What you see is what
you get, a lot of what you can’t see, too, all
of it, and the goat god could care less for your moral
loveandlight schtick and fantasies of salvation—
salvation? really? save what?
through a “body of knowledge”?
though the minute knowledge is assigned
its body, body-experts arrive, elbow
knowing, transitive, out of the way
and tell you what it means and which whatever
came first as if it was written down
a long time ago and all that remains
is to read it
                  and then
                                transmogrify
                               your apocryphon,
an obscure arcane ritual known
to juice up the gneo-gnostic purple prose solution
to some unfathomable metaphysical
problem, if that tickles your fancy, and leave
the broken world behind on your way
to unbroken world, the secret in plain sight
Og and Anak hide behind

Augmented auguries inaugural
silly alliterating jubilation
may not be enough to get you past fallen
if broken is your thing, but in the cosmic churn
of Duncan’s What Is nothing’s broken
because everything’s as it is becoming
and to stay tuned to all the horrors and joys,
pain and ecstasy, war and peace, ignorance
and knowing, broken and unbroken, cruelty
and kindness, rage and tenderness, all the
darkness in your own soul that you find
around you, to get beyond that Olde Book’s
compulsive divisions requires a leap
into further’s blossoming augmented
inaugurating fact

by Michael Boughn

“We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.” —W. H. Auden

“To be quite honest, it’s just a fucking brownie.”
—Chef Kwame Onwuachi commenting on The Cosmic Brownie

Birds scatter into the poem every
which way, swallows, wrens, vultures, and geese,
eagles of course, etch indecipherable
prophecies on the sun’s face
as raven’s stark slash
interrupts the sun, speaks of god
knows what, fire perhaps
quickly erasing whatever settled illusion
of happy mastery in the roar
of our own vast indifference to light
stone, water, earth, scent of smoke
the news, travels fast littered with Hittite
names for house and tenebrous allusions
haunt chiaroscuro implicated
announcement of earthquake, plague,
tempest, corruption, war and collapse,
a veritable catastrophic kit
and caboodle, ultimate doom prophecy

undone by the children’s laughter
down the beach on the verge of the Bay

Yeah, but what
do kids know about the Council of Trent
and inquisitory constrictions condemned
art’s knowledge of humandivine 
matter-of-fact-god-joy’s last

supper’s good food and good
company, one eye on Gethsemane,
the other on the wine to a feast in Levi’s
house (landed Veronese on the Hot
Seat, too much imagination
for the Bishop) opens a geography of world
secretes its own light, earth of emerald
cities, geosophical co-ordinates entwined
cross-roads’ limbs heave with joint passion,
a word emerges from suffer to point
to mind of uncertain compass in heat
of caring’s embrace of matter of fact

That old butterfly flap to tornado yarn
haunts current street’s dawn peach glow,
so still, waiting for the wave to hit, far away
joyboys disconsenting the liberal consensus
activates lower regions of imagination’s
infernal geography disgorge gangs
of pain monkeys, impish creatures pour
from Moloch’s arse to inflict
maximum suffering on the poor
suckers who empowered them in the first
place and turn the joint over to
The Lordly Ones™
who aim to reconstitute the Constitution
in the name of Divine Right of the Strongest
to kick the living shit out of everyone else
and make them thank God for it

by Michael Boughn

“Beauty and Justice are alike in that humans do not make them.
They make us human.” —James Hillman, Aphrodite’s Justice

“—this body made of this place
now silent but for all the night of metallic sound,
keeps strict visual contact, which is like memory itself—
as the McDonald’s truck takes off, puffing the air brake—
while the flesh connected to the mind is all blind
as in any religious (Praise the Lord) mystery, how can I
be here without where?  Oh yes, Tender is the Night.”

—Jack Clarke, “The Butterfly Sleeps under the Temple Bell”

Where you wake up is where you begin
with or without angelic attendance
though that often has to do with how
you wake up as much as interdimensional
visitation rights
Day’s grey face a sign
of yet to be determined inflections
of nasty weathers stuck in today’s craw|
anima mundus
as conjunctio monstrum

Your hyper-bio-what-not is fine
and dandy, Jack says looking in from
1987, but it’s over and left you
looking back, pay attention to your
reactivated orientation and it doesn’t
much matter where you are, a Best Western
in Bowling Green or sick bed at home,
Polaris in your heart knows which way
is loose, beats the hell out of non-somatic
thralldom to a scentless hell of words
miss their mark every time, returns again
and again to rehashed encounter
with vanished meaning, well, not meaning
itself which wouldn’t be vanished,
but say the blank stare and cardio
excavation site left behind, though Jack
reminds me it’s not really mine, more like a sign
of the storm churns in moment’s heart, unfolded
frenzy for glib promise of tomorrow
dressed up as yesterday, all shiny and run by
somebody good

It’s an invisibility he says, stirs
within visibilities so don’t take it
personally, or maybe it’s both ways
around since both are caught in current
circulates through days’ recent
Thanatos eruption renders the demos
yearning for a state of great again
acidic segregated spiritual
rigor mortis leaves Beauty and Justice
outside looking perplexed
by the Geist’s insistent backward
Zeit lurch into a stall of perpetual
cruelty and mean-spirited exclusionary
pale face hate outbreak disguised
as order’s wholesome missionary
position orphans human
in some desolate 14 the century
lockup

It ain’t the first Time, hon,
and it sure as hell ain’t the last
but that’s not much solace when the King
in the grip of unadulterated testosterone
overdose bolts up in a rage leaves
the Queen subject to random declarations
of dependence and constitutional
subjugation to hormonally challenged
avatars of chaos, unhappy dropouts
from MIT, always lurk around somewhere
but freed to really fuck things up in the name
of the same self got Lucifer in that big
Dustup back in the day when it all
seemed so hopeful before the Black Sun
rose and I took over, all damn the torpedoes,
fuck the boss and toss the bloody tea
in the harbour, Milton had that down,
then the Shit hit the Fan
left us subject to mass distribution
of declamatory hails to individual
stupidity which Schelling located
at the origin of being only to have
his hand slapped by Hegel who couldn’t
handle the thought of imperfectible evil,
but then he never had the pleasure
of meeting current dark angel squadron
and what is this Satan after all, that tears us
away from Eternity’s call to bring
mind to attend to who’s speaking not
lose your lonely I in communion’s
mindless rhetorical sway

by John (Jack) Clarke

Seek and ye shall find The Night Mind, mine
(not Mike Flannigan’s) the one that has people
in it, as many as came over (after 1 Brumaire Napoleon)
Sandusky, Santa Monica, Gloucester, don’t know, Key Largo
but am less and less interested to pursue anything else,
Novalis’s Hymns hold no interest, nor my own prior
excursions, too aware of company not even going there,
Fred might, just because he is flexible, and doesn’t try
to do what he can’t do, namely, to be another American,
floating over the years as though we were still pioneers
just because we live west of New York City, like the Vatican
it thinks it knows what Night is, people stay up, yes,
but not enough to connect with more than the mind of Milan,
come join us, help me find the way to Night Mind

to begin again
August 30, 1986