INAUGURATE THIS!
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