Of Diamonds and Darkness (or, The Book of Contra-Genesis)

[Some notes beforehand: this is waaay long, 5 pages printed. You were warned. I designed this so each line or pair of lines could be its own statement, independent of the storyline. In that way each line is in my perspective, but collectively the story isn't]

Mine is an ambiguous world

That precedes the stars.

Under distant leaves,

Adam harkened the foremother of dawns

While the elastic conscience of billions

Shattered with the diamonds in metamorphotic chaos.

Dig deep in your ears, for the sound still rings:

The rise of your contra-Genesis.

I was born flying-

My flaming wings accustomed to life

Within a helical cascade:

Nativity at ten-thousand feet.

Like a flashing watchdog glance of God,

Cast adrift into oblivion,

That drifted along wrong paths into tangible space.

I am the anomaly.

As I wander this virgin soil,

Lotus flowers,

Shining free violet in the streaming sun,

Wilt beneath the weight of my wispy ink shadow

And the smoke of demise

Burns so sweet on my throat;

Tastes like my tea leaf

Stemming from the fruits of disaster.

Your watchman God looks down at his brush-

This is not his art

And I not his patron.

The forests are wise.

My niche is worlds away from this peace.

The trees know I am to be the craftsman of hate-

The nomad of realms that torch to dust beneath my step,

The beetle eye through which all history and space will flow-

For their leaves wither and fall to dirt.

Though they may rot there into nonbeing,

The ground cannot be poisoned by my exhale.

I yearn for the same,

But how can I escape my own breath?

When I encompass all around me,

Is nothing about me avoidable?

The answers slip past my mind

Of B-grade thoughts.

Does my head spiral

Or does the Earth spin?

For neither feels right.

I feel it.

I’m no member of this harmonious world.

My eyes pierce the façades of darkness

Behind which sins crouch, starve,

And flourish with an anti-life not meant for this world.

My ears dance as they hear doves’ cries of terror

And a thousand bones cracking like thunder

…But all my eyes see are twigs.

I grasp your arm, if misfortune treks your path,

And I feel no flesh-

Only the hot blood that jets through your levee veins.

It lovingly twists through my fingers

In the instinctive way light embraces the angels.

Why is my sea barreled into such feeble bottles?

And if I have any purpose for this world,

Would it not be to uncork them?

Behind all his convoluted politics,

Yours is a god of gavels and brooms,

Ever-sweeping the porch of purgatory,

And of diamond-crested spectacles that search only for darkness.

Theocratic dictatorship stands atop this wall-

Every brick path I take builds itself into a locked gate.

His sight sees through the petals

Growing gradually blind as I spider by.

This cannot be, and neither can I.

Under today’s sun,

Blinding me with the light of all eternity pressed into one beam,

I cannot see to run as the wall falls down atop me.

Perhaps by that gavel,

Perhaps because the land taught itself to purge out venom,

I slipped into a new device, concocted all for me.

Night.

In this cloud I cry caged,

And howl prayers to the black tide,

On a barren islet that floats in tune with the sun,

Eternally tied to the dark side of the globe.

Hard as I try, the sun won’t rise for me.

Five thousand braids of diamond,

Whose brilliance is not constrained to the light,

Bind me to each mole of sand,

Rooting down into his gemstone courtroom.

As I budge, the magisterial sand twists about me;

I feel it writhe past skin to mold my bones instead,

In the way of five thousand beetles.

I am like them, but seldom less regal.

Yet even your emblem madman, made divine,

Acknowledges respect for the antagonist.

If I retain any will, that reluctant river shall not flow both ways.

The darkness wrinkles my flesh like ten lifetimes in the sea,

My eyes pinned to the folds of my chest.

The turbulent ant of my worries,

Hunger tackles me like the neurotic tornado

Whose company I might slay for.

All I am, tripping atop the edge-

A compound-existence with suffocation.

If I must succumb to your linear logic

A thousand days slinked past.

Beneath the gravity of all his artillery,

These cracks are but scars on the mask of this urchin titan.

They spell my revelation:

The universe must convulse, until its inside is out,

To make us gods stumble.

Purgatory is nothing but a standing lesson.

The senses are the last mortality to be disrobed;

Lust and greed close in for long-foreseen reinstatement.

A relic of infancy wafts through my mind- fruit?

Nomad mirages of elephants plucked from gardens,

Of rivers overturned on their backs,

Find refuge behind my eyes

All times they find themselves homeless.

But my wolf snout ratifies this anomaly.

The wafting stream leads beneath the beetles-

My toes retrieve an apple, grown within barren sand,

Charcoal black as night.

This is the working of an adverse Nature.

The rotten peel stings my lips,

Yet kisses it with enamored compliance,

As do I.

Is this love by default?

Within that taste, anarchy sweeps my veins dry.

I sweat ghost and god.

As my fingers extend, stretching out my heart’s last pump,

The diamond braids burst like lead.

And I stumble, to lay back,

To gaze up as my eyes purge out the mortal blood,

And I ingest the toxic beauty of shadow,

To fill my veins,

To brand it my emblem.

My prosecutor did not see the reins on this beast.

The diamond braids flex, for we share liberation,

And still bound to my spine, they lift me up,

And my legs become powdery ash, crumble into the sand.

Carried by spider legs of diamond,

I climb atop the wall of theocracy,

So chaos may rot it away.

Anarchy snarls at a leader,

Yet there is nothing that does not bear a mother.

This kind of sin, my self-exalted brew, sits in my lap

And becomes cemented to all who grasp it.

As a fragile sun rises,

I wade through the Indus sky, dragging the languid moon on a leash,

Pushing away the night sky, my rejuvenating bed sheet.

The seas rise to stop me, and yet I float higher.

A woman’s swaying voice prays in the deciduous distance-

In intrigued disgust,

I pull upon that pugnacious rope until the shores are met.

At last arms reduce to ash,

Cracking until they convert into black wind.

My hollow torso follows in turn,

As neck and skull evaporate in smoke.

The anomalistic body has been shed by the snake,

Slithering onward to forge

From lotus flowers and smoke, apples and sand:

A hatred,

A history,

A human race

All my own.

Counter-creation breathes through these lungs.