‘How do the angels get to sleep when the Devil leaves the porch light on?’ – Tom Waits


1.
If you consulted your own cipher-mind (if what presents as yours could be

compressed in such a lazy line), would it encircle this whole ball of string theory

or only what lies beneath? Every oceanic floor peak, all those pre-lung

beasts that beckon us back, ever back, while we struggle up here in the

arc of your earth-wing? It is suffocating under your airs, Old Birdman,

we don’t know enough about our own night terrors to ever consider yours.

To claim you frighten the children with your silent staring is like

naming the midnight ocean mysterious, to sing out your secret symbol

through all this typical cataclysm might boil our blood.

Still, see you slip and slide out of heaven into the foam pits of human love:

more, elevated, other. Exotic, no matter how well disguised, for we

blinks of one of your manifold eyes don’t claim to tune into our own timings.

There is a connection octave-plinking through this mystical equation,

yet this is not another symposium examining the intricacies of angels.
2.
Perhaps some planet put you up to it. You didn’t want so many eyes on your wings:

it’s embarrassing, it’s a job. Hard to refigure you without, yet once in the annals of this

endless processing, perhaps you were writ down as feather-skin, transitional form.

If only we had come down from the birds, we too could be haunted by memory of flight.

We did not fling down from the firmament; we squelched up from watery depths, aquatic

apes. You are a terraform failure. Fire-sword bearing man-birds could have ruled, yet

water monkeys made it through. Your trajectory, defeated, exited earth for heaven.

The fall went up. You did not win. We did not rejoice in the progression.

This murky wet won’t leave us – even now we are swamp and slime. You: air or light or

both, descend on passage-ladders right before our very minds. We grasp hold of the base,

steady it with a sick grin. You can at least go back up the way you came down.

We can never return; we left our gills on the shore and the tide snatched them back.

If we, green with envy or slime, are seeking Return, it is to pond and puddle;

yours is to some flaming red aerial heart of everything.
3.
You cut the fancy-free heart right out of us. In the witching hours, when night dervish

morphs into night mare, you are stilled, silenced, scribbling and scribing, saving it all

up to sing it out later. Some Lizard-God wants to know the electro-magnetic reading of an

attempt at meeting. Circling the throne, later and always reporting, you proclaim the heart

to be still beating – that pink-to-blue mass, alone in the shadow of all horrors,

what can go on between lovers: smashed telephones, shared appliances, night. Watcher,

you are never still, you whisper continuum to these moments even as you raise the knife.

Left to our own devices, we could be the scribes of our own autopsy, the records of

entanglement’s dissection. We could carve up the shared ventricles, the cleft aorta,

discover what was never beating to begin with. We could bathe our empty cavity in a

plenty-more-fish sea, decide what cut out means, what we will do with the

etch-mark-once-heart, what new world our new work will break forth into.

But with you here, light bleeds along the wall, the shuddering is of presence and we

know – clinging and ejecting aside no matter on whose behalf – we are poppets.
4.
You burst forth as a woman. We thought this soft body too moist to house an angel.

Murky spirits aplenty, but pure swords of light? When the Heavenly Grace stabs in,

it will leak out through all those holes. To where will it escape? How will we find it all to

shove it back in again? We saw those frescos, believed them, for they were birthed out of

Holy Father. The Devil with breasts, leaking out everywhere to all sorts:

constantly shadow, probably dark matter and other arcane fears of science.

We suppose you could be our Mother, angel, you are cold and removed, set in marble. Yet

we overlooked you for centuries, you were so far away, and we certainly forgot

you could possibly be true, what with all that loft and strength and absence.

Isn’t absence of the father? If you were allowed to choose,

you might seek woman out because here we seek out our names through pain.

You want your own gender angst, a category other to Holy. We won’t tell,

we will watch you watching us as you reflect sheen on this Leviathan’s back,

drag the frescos towards your breast for spring cleaning, a bath in new light.
5.
Blood. You are out for it, we try to keep it in, at all costs. Blood:

The way to tell if we are here or not is whether we can hear it circling. Or not.

It’s unlovable, really. It is smelly and of metal and is awfully difficult to remove from

cashmere once it all floods out. We are constantly managing it, feeding it, giving it away,

taking it all back. It’s essentially a connector, even magnetic.

We wonder why you want to exchange pulsating white for toffee apple sticky.

We don’t think you would if you really knew what it meant. Blood, Blut or Bloed,

might be our earliest word. It has always been there, unforeseeable just like you.

Blood is the very opposite of you: intermediary, link, vapid passageway.

Blood raises spirits and runs to the sacred places. Blood is in the family. Anything but

pallid, blood of an other contains your revenge. You can never have revenge, Watcher.

Say we don’t know how lucky we are to own it, say what you will. We are bloody-minded,

moving onwards over bones that birthed the whole bloody mess is all we know.

Our red warmth runs cold against all your white. We have always been afraid of this.
6.
As the glory pours in and through, even the Throne of the Most High is merely a tube.

There are innumerable zillions even in our own brains without considering the external

piping we construct to extend the nexus out. To echo the universe, which is one

Giant Conduit sucking us all in, out, round and round, we recreate the cylindrical vessel.

Inside the spaces of subatomic nothings, how many cylinders? We etch on the lining of a brain-tube

while cannulas poison to near-death, while lines to arms and throat and heart ensure life

persists with a tube no longer viable inside where evolution always requires it.

Inserted tubes suck out the pooled blood like pulped prayers. TV is The tube,

we yearn to recall when thrown out of your tunnel of Graceful Light, yet by that time pain,

and not-remembering, are the new profound. The nostril tube floods oxygen,

floats brains so far away that blood-prayers creep in and add up somewhere outside all

tubing: the dark energy inside. Isn’t it enough that you ensure our continuing?

That exploding would have burst all persistence even as we received The Annunciation,

sipping from a chipped teacup while scrawling the word ‘Grigori’ at the top of the page.
7.
So hard to tell if the birds are mating or fighting. The koalas are attempting both,

here in last the pocket protected enough for them to keep at it. We too keep at it:

against, always against. It’s not your fault, messenger, yours is to intone the Great Law.

The Great Law is Always. We are to blame – bifurcate is all we do down here. Small

wonder the axis teeters, unsure of whether to shift or remain safe in stasis. It will break,

this is Occam’s Razor. Now, while our hair falls out (it’s the anaesthetic, it’s the morphine),

you gibber endlessly, something about the Great Glory, what was

before until then. As our wounds pus and blister, we grow tired of this obfuscated babble.

You are doing it deliberately, jiggling these abstractions, these meaning-carrots,

before our puny brains. Say what you mean to say, Watcher, is this all? Here? This

everymorning dying? Last koalas grunting in blind continuing, whip birds and koels

bouncing beckon or warning against the everywhere-everything hills. Clouds so sneaky,

when we turn our backs the sky is something else entirely. Light on new leaf, trembling.

You gibbering on, some non-direction-everywhere, while our best awe is silence.