I remember that one November day, the softest wind reminded me of god’s bored sigh. The morning rose with a prickly stem and all the aromatic humidity of a summer’s eve. I like a bee buzzed round it, collecting the pollen of impression and passion. Yet I felt as mired as a soul within the skull. Melancholia’s joy’s companion. Because where pleasure’s had, I feel the guilt of a thief having stolen something undue. Are we to remain in debt to the pangs of love? I remember my home feeling like a grave to which I retire each night, dying one more time. I remember feeling it to be as cozy as a pine box, bug-teeming bedsprings, blanketed in six feet of fertile soil, and here I am shoveling metaphors on top of it all. I must consult the spirits which linger here. I must find solace in solitude. I must become attuned to the world’s intonation. Wherefrom comes that silent strumming? The humming pitch-fork of the infinite will never cease, though I shall soon retire. For the time I’ll match it with my voice, which, though singular, compounds across space and time to comprise the purest sound. Listen closely to dead silence, and you’ll hear the sustained note—a D-minor?—of the chorus of human hearts.

* * *

No where is now here. What was once blank is now concealed. Writ articulation of what I take to be real obfuscates, as if under an eternal fog, the unspoken, indeed unutterable, secret of blankness. In that blankness is origin, purity of essence and of existence, a body without subjugation, a body an unscrutinized object, with none—not even itself—to look upon and wonder of its weirdness. This is the dynamic convergence of meaning and truth. What was once innocent is now soiled;—yet how would we propagate if our wombs remained forever barred? We must muddle the metadata of the world with exploitations of it, misconstructions, contortions, contrived characters, third-person omniscient, craftiness of symbol, fabricated morals, attribution of law, minstrelsy of the human heart. For we ourselves are misconstructions. We defile the purest nowhere place and order it according to our linear wont. We place nowhere “here,” creating the setting of our lives. In this trial we are illegible scribblings communicating with other nonsense markers. We, the marks of the world, desire meaning, will not rest without it; we want the “I” to resonate along with all the other letters, “u” in particular; we want “u,” most of all. We look upon ourselves as alphabets and rearrange our characters to suit our themes, floating formless in the blankness, disgusted at the worldliness of it all, the worldliness it did not intend but which, by the birth of the myriad eyes soon to be cast into the reflecting pool, and the deeply desired exorcism of meaninglessness, it did yield.

I’m breaking consecrated ground here, carving these first marks into this once white page. The page itself will never be the same. It’s transforming before my eyes, from a vessel of unfathomable potential to a kinetic force set in motion by the lightyears these marks have traveled through the tongues and texts of societies across time and space and into this work. Characters come alive here in a new world, endowed with new meaning merely by their own reincarnation. I’m exited, and I let my pen sit a little too long at the end of the “e.” But that’s alright. A muddling of the form is essential to instilling further meaning to the characters. I run my pen on purpose, pooling black blood stains. I am the ink scarring the page, bled from a ballpoint pen, spurt from ballsac, penis, onto white sheets. The page is my world and I am born again into it; the page is my world and I am the mark.

I imagine images strobing past the eye. I expect a documentary of a sort only found in minds. Have I really been where I say I have? Maybe not in the real world, but my memory works in leaps and bounds, and though I may not remember two nights ago, I can remember old lives. All my lives are crosshatched as a student’s sketch, so that a feeling from the deep past overlaps the present and causes nausea, soothing nausea. I can see subliminal screaming faces cut into a shot of rapidly passing woods. I used to be afraid of them, but now I search them out.

Those faces are the insight, the parting of the woods to make way for a manifestation of pure meaning. To sustain these fleeting images of import, these portals into space, you must please the heavens to part.

You must not force epiphany upon the page. You must make yourself an agent of the blankness.

The prayer:
O sing O muse—cognate with mind and all acts pertaining
O brood O muse upon my mighty subject like a holy hen upon the nest of night
O ponder the fascism of the heart …

… And just as the man instils in woman his seed, the muse instils in me her grace, and guides me, the agent of her offspring, toward the marks I am to make in the world.

It is well known that in this sense of divine conception, art makes a womb out of men.

Worldly origins, however, prove to be of more immediate and dire consequence.

I’ve been a mark since I was born, my kin and I, since father raped our mother on the shore.

He used to call me beast; but Sir, I’d respond, On whom am I preying, if I am a hound at what am I baying? He never had a definitive answer. Simply that from the beast I took my nature, from the devil I took my morale, from the dark of night I took my color, and from the wild bush the texture of my hair; from whom did I take my name, though? I say I took it from him, as I did all my other attributes. If I took my nature from the beast, then the beast is he.

Just ’cause I’m a mark don’t mean I’m a victim. We are all marks of the world. We are all victims of our authors’ tyranny. But we have a choice, you see. We can choose to remain under the ball of the pen or we can assume the etymological import of our presence. We can sink into the paper and become one with its purity, as we were meant to. We can tell our story.

Our powerful father begot forgotten children.

He raped our mother on the shore, pimped her, sold her for boatloads, and kept her in chains. He whips her to this day, wearing her down and wiping away the memory of the greatness she is responsible for throughout all the world. Children, though, you can’t keep in chains; soon they will grow tall and strong and break them in time. And we don’t forget the traumas of a tumultuous childhood easily.

We were born in a void; not of mother nor of father; not on land defined but in the sea unbound. We did rock for a nine-month voyage in a wooden, lacquered belly. We were released into the waves. Many of us were stillborn, overthrown, and drowned in those watery depths. Many still were split apart, and grew up with different families in different homes. We hardly know them now. We came here with father. He may hate us, but he made us.

When we were in utero, I was a nucleus, Golgi apparatus, ribosomes, chromosomes. We were a cosmic egg. What sperm slithered its way into Mama’s cervix? God? Chance? Mind? Europe? In embryo we festered with a hunger for life. But what is that? In infantry father beat us and made us his dogs. What is that kind of life? But still we hunger for his love. And where is Mama? we wonder. But we know she is gone; even if she could know us, she would not accept us, because we are father’s, he made us.

We were raised in an abusive household, around all of father’s other (legitimate) children, whom he loved so much more. He made us their servants; they were reared to degrade and despise us, for they were taught to believe themselves superior, they were the chosen ones. Father beat us into submission, to wash his dishes, do his laundry, cook for him, entertain him, dance for him, mow his lawn, and raise the children of his real wife, and he locked us in the basement when we were done our day’s work. He forced us into a passive religion which allowed us to take his orders more willingly—turn the other cheek, He said. There’ll be salvation when you die, He said. He gave us a god who looked like him, so that we would worship him. He raped our sisters when his wife wasn’t looking; he took all the most beautiful ones for himself. He bred us together like dogs, and even made us fight for his own amusement. When we got too old to control, mere adolescents, he cast us out to the street, and we’ve been there ever since. We come back knocking on his door, Please yet us in, we beg, It’s so cold out here. We don’t know anything else but being at his mercy. When he didn’t let us in we fought at the door, we banned together. But he gave us guns, drugs, and disease, and watched us turn on each other. We were his spectacle. We still are.

My kin haven’t yet realized that our father is merely masquerading as our god. He has all the tools and schools, but he is more afraid than he is feared.

Oh (we pledge allegiance), merciful God (to the flag), Our Father (of the United States of America), which art in Heaven (and to the Republic), hollowed be thine name (for which it stands), thine kingdom come (one nation), on earth, as it is in Heaven (under God). Give us this day our daily bread (indivisible), and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us (with liberty and justice). Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil (for all), for thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory, (Amen).

I’ve seen every manifestation of death. I’ve seen the black-clothed Reaper wielding his scythe through a plantation’s cotton field in the dead of night. That is the black death, killer of whites. I’ve seen a pointy-hooded white-robed ghost wield a loose-knotted rope hovering through the adjacent woods. That’s the white death, killer of blacks. I’ve seen disease wrapped up in the rapture, leather cloak and wearing a crow’s beak on his face. That is the red death, killer of men.
Then there’s H.E.R—Heaven’s Eternal Rancor.
This is the tricky death, because She’s been misconstrued for so long, no one recognizes Her when She comes. You may call Her “H.I.M,” His Infernal Majesty. But it is She: God, death of the world. Why? Because She is the only death who embodies woman and her infinite, all-encompassing nature. She is ruthless and passionate and blind to reason. She will kill because there’s a cold in the air. She is merciless but tender. We men succumb easily to her intensity unless we guard ourselves with anger. We men are defenseless before her; we are merely matter within her cavernous black hole. We are at the mercy of the void.

I don’t fear these deaths, however. I and all my kin, we’re already dead.
Death should have taken us generations ago. Those who She could slay She did, and the rest of us have been overlooked. We are living on forgotten time. We will never die; we have nothing to lose. Me, I been alive for four-hundred years. Negros, Jews, Irish, Germans, Japanese, American Indians, Latin Americans, Tibetans, those of us remaining, we are all undead. Genocide of man and earth should have wiped us all out some time ago, in one way or another. But we have slipped through the cracks and remain as ghosts of human evolution. We walk the earth as vampires, hungry for the reparations of our grudges—yet all too aware of our positions as monsters. The last living races, the Chinese, the Saudi/Muslims, and the Americans, will wage the last war. And when they are exterminated, the last of them will join us in the ranks of the undead, and then the world will be full of monsters, people of the night. No one will fear death, no one will hold morals; humanity will be as merciless, pitiless, and rapacious as death, as earth, as God, as Her.

There’s not a wonder in the world why man is by nature a misogynist. It is because he fears, reveres God, and God is She;—within the womb, that unhealing wound; within the void; within the space; within the hole; within the “O” thing. He is by nature a penetrator, and it is his wont to penetrate that fearful empty space from which he came.

[options for a romance]
She blew………. {my cock
………. {my mind
………. {my brains out

Once, as I was being taken though the belly to my father while she lay dying on the shore, I thought I heard my mother speak.
She told of her rebirth. She said:
(I) I feel out of place here. Unnoticed, unappreciated, unacknowledged when I open my mouth.
A woman in her third trimester walks in reverse. Why is she walking backwards? Her face, her belly is calm. I follow her.
We are disconnected; I lose her. Now where am I? On the floor! I see another woman. A different woman. I go over to her, kneel down, looking into her face—it’s turbulent. I put my hands on her belly. It moves and stretches—I feel elbows, head, and knees. Is it arriving? I close my eyes.
(II) I am in a dark place. Now, no longer feeling out of place because I cannot see this place. I walk. It’s a long canal, dark and damp. There is a light ahead. I poke my head out.
(III) I am greeted in a brightly lit room. It is immaculate. I ask, “How could I have been so lucky as to have been chosen?” Reply: “You don’t know how much you have to offer the world.”

That is the only thing that kept me alive during those early maddening years.