None of the king-twits seems to be aware of the amassing of the ghouls. Our ghoulish souls, poems slipping by the normal death-laced lives of the capital, slipping between you and gathering invisibly near the great gares at night and along the dirty river with its pollutant-malformed fish. More cars full of diseased patients, death chariots, the poisonous toys of lesser twits and twitesses; we slip through, we fly past, we gather. We gather and gather.
Such a mean-spirited god. That you had to pray to it. It the little human prayed to it the little god—that was how they deserved each other; so there’s always something left to the little human: the little god. And if you won’t pray to it, it will implague you.
The ghoul Josepha had been a woman who had no foundation, as privately a cynic she didn’t allow the god in. When she succumbed to the pustules she didn’t budge in her secret disbelief, though she let everyone pray over her what else could she do. She couldn’t move and there they were hovering at bedside.
The whole life had been ridiculous, she thought. She hadn’t any idea why she’d had to do it, though being dead had never promised better than being alive. Maybe she really did love clothes and makeup, cars, who knows what I loved? They told me what it was: clothes, makeup, a job, someone else.
She turned her face away from her friends and away from the direction of the Coliseum where the Jesus-Freaks fried up non-believers on an immense grill, but you already know all this stuff, and don’t care. You get off on the smell of burning flesh.
And so who do I write to as ghoul of no class with this outcry in my hand and the story where we without stars in our crowns crawl finding blood to lap up?
I’ve told some of this history before. But the molecules of the perceived world of ghouls are shifting again: and once more, to whom do I speak? Do you love me? Lost so much weight we’re invisible crowding the masterpiece foyer of the architecture of our former masters.
The blood-sacs have still to be explained. The fact that our souls are poems is obvious, once it has been stated—in a book or in an oral tradition, the statement of the obvious is possible. In the technological arts one doesn’t really say things. Rather the work enters the audience’s mind as monolithically as it can so it won’t suffer loneliness—either the audience or the artwork.
And so who do I write to, no one. I am the activator of our ghoul world because as I record ‘my mind’ we see each other, our quaint whiteish forms. I am helping us to wait for what we’re owed, after the planet is finished and the gods all of them are defunct, the diseases are exhausted, and the genocides, successful, are concluded.
Who will pay us what we’re owed? A preoccupying question since there will be no one there, but I think we presume to agitate the air throughout the lengthy degradation all are participating in; ask but no one hears, staring back at our invisibility.
Who provides the blood-sacs we eat? Is it a force generated by ourselves?
Josepha, for example, drinks the blood. What difference—she thinks— does it make what she does? Drinks the Blood and Waits for What’s Owed provide as much structure as she’s prepared to tolerate. In ancient wherever it was, there was interminable structure, of hours and chores, of debts to the leaders and the gods, of grooming rituals, of supposed pleasureable activities, of meals, sexual congress: one served the interfaces with all one’s over flowing what? My image cries out unto you—rush towards, rush towards! Why had no one ever determined Josepha was cynical?
I tell Death the leatherclad that she has no art. How do you figure that my dear, she says clawing my hair, stroking me in the classical manner. You arrive in an instant, doing nothing, making nothing. She smiles at me in failure of intelligence. Your dog is more frightening than you are, I say. Your dog means you, you mean nothing. She continues to stare vacuously.
I Dido stood in cemeteries far behind the arras that depicted me. I didn’t kill myself, I stood around by graves. Obstinant the Sidonian to, in my primal aspect, be more amazing than in their virility, the poet and his locutions. What fate follows me, born of no goddess, through so many perils made inconsequential for being a feminine name? How can I speak so twisted in tongue as to have come to be added to his name and his praise— his language, and I called lover not a founder fortune-driven? Yet who hasn’t heard of me?
Dido stands, skeletal, on the dirty marble steps, doorway to the maw of the stock exchange: anyone has devalued us in there; they do so now.
Do you feel the December cold, ghoul? As once, honored, into the divine temple you were led.
You can see her skull and her ribs, you can see the pubic bone beneath the pale veil of ghostliness, for we are equals waiting: how do we distinguish one from another? No one was ever an individual was she? Wasn’t I educated that the perceived unique essence is socially inflected, an inculcation?
I transmit to you my fame, from my bone to yours.
The woman with no arms speaks: on your same continent, Dido, I lost what you have—can you see that? How are we able to know us? Is Death an idiot of so little skill in her negative talent, that she can reduce us to equality in ghoulishness but not destroy ‘what happened’?
No one can destroy what is happening to me, a soldier speaks, for I still smell gutted flesh. Can you see that I’m tainted?
We see ghoul, but we know who you are. We can know who each is even in the myriad count where we throng, as I am dead, says the speaker, and unconscious see the clarity of your form.
The machine of genocide was in place, she says. Then the murderous furor spread through all of the country. Why, Dido, do you boast of your name, when many of us fell from machete blows or lost all to torture? What else can be real?
I am a name, Dido says, it is my fate to be branded. Don’t you have your own? your own lie-name? she asks the woman.
Nothing matters, says the woman, except to wait for my arms.
All ages blending or blinding here. When waiting begins it has always been and then your story has no context save for the ghoulishness of this condition.
Josepha the cynic who died of plague is branded by her maleish name and her lack of explanation.
All the great religions failed, with everyone frantic to practice them. Josepha talks to Christian ghouls, Buddhist ghouls, Muslim ghouls, animist ghouls, sectarian ghouls. Ancient pagan ghouls of every polytheism. They’re all puzzled because it didn’t happen: whatever their divinities or doctrines predicted didn’t arrive. No unearthly afterlife, no reincarnation, no nirvana, no return as soul of tree or stone, no being transmitted into pure racial flow, nothing as simple as atheistic-type extinction. No. We’re all ghouls. It’s as if we’re permanently trapped in some form of blasphemy, an existence that’s blasphemic to almost everyone.
Josepha isn’t puzzled, having had no expectations. To be a whey-faced fuzzy blood-lapper is as reasonable a fate as any other she had heard of.
I thought I would be somewhere nice in my best younger body, happy, a ghoul says. Josepha laughs.
There’s a discarded compact; open it and look at yourself.
In all the history of the ghouls, does the same ghoul visage suffice, does one face the same ghoul regard no matter who opens the compact?
Is this nothing but ghoul, face of my eyes?
Face of my nose and mouth?
This is the species ghoul looking back at you: in type you have reproduced, but you do know you are you.
If someone calls you across a hundred ghostly bodies, it is because you are ever detectable.
Where do the blood-sacs come from? Scattered to us twice a day by arms even more ghostly than ours? Where does our purpose—propensity to wait—come from?
The future starts to appear, the far side of it first. Death is showing us something.
She doesn’t know how.
Where do the rules for cruelty come from?
To practice torture your back sits approving: stiff but rippling, satisfied.
This came from nowhere in nature, says a ghoul: nature is dull.<
br />
Are we in nature? says another.
Death is showing us something; she doesn’t know how.
She stands near Dido, with an eyebrow arched, though we know she’s too stupid for irony. ‘I know what irony looks like,’ she says.
Death is dumb but beautiful: is she always blonde and blue-eyed? No. But I am seeing her that way, Josepha says.
The woman with no arms sees her as African, smiling in empty malice.
Cemeteries, the little huts they build for us, which we don’t inhabit.
Everything we did for Death was as empty as she is.
I am now building the city with my feelings, Dido says.
Do you have them?
Try to find what Death doesn’t have. But if she isn’t very smart, her erasures are powerful, for here we are in ownership of nothing but ourselves.
You are Dido, founder of a city draped in the red cloth of the individual. For when you saw him leave progressively smaller in the harbor, your vulnerable wound fed the very foundation of this civil pact, that the mirror show us equals, citizens.
Because he left, am I not worthy of you?
I remember a sumptuous cloth: what if it were all that I needed?
I need my own arms cries that other. Retribution for the ghouls is not a light topic, citizens, she says. In this civil gathering of cheated souls, we will create a psyche of the deserted which contrives to render back to us our lost, our heights, our love. Oh magisterial light we will make without looks, without sound bodies; oh red brocade unsighted, us all to transform, if malformed we have been.
Dido remembers, and I stood at a window so dark-blue that trees cried glory for all that existed, a color, and one light’s riches, fulgent candle. Nothing to be hidden from this feeling—is that what we seek? To found a feeling which is already incipient. We have no colors to our forms, but we cry out to each other in jeweled tones. These are not dictated woods, renewed gifts or burning morrows: we have founded now. And we will push it to deep enduring.
UNIDENTIFIED
When the image broke—
I keep seeing that as
diamond shots—
even more
vocal inflections
You
nobody . . .
or anyone, hanging on
to the last-throb civilization,
gasping the last air
ghoul!
There are no vendors
in my condition
Had
Sold you and sold you and sold you
maintaining artful
con upon nothing was.
To You
You still think you’re you, tough
able to get
your way. Because of money or
dad
Weren’t you appetizing?
A life as strenuous
as strutting.
You could be a shit, alive
But in this kind of alive
everyone’s a blood-lipped
mirrory wraith—recognize the world?
not only this space
I’m not even
making this up.
Don’t know you, he
says. I know
you, I say: you’re a jerk
Come wait with us, we’re
waiting for
something: some sort of
laminated lie.
Maybe it will work
maybe I’ll just get back at
you, by saying things.
All of us
conning
each other till
the end.
There’s got to be something,
you say
Does there?
In this city of my voice could we
become beautiful?
homo sapiens y va changer le monde
an ad for the ancient past
The men were eating each other.
The king
was simply a cannibal; I
saw the dishes served to him, a
man’s face
cut off cooked, on a platter
pale, eyes closed. The serving man
replaced the lid and carried
the dish downstairs.
I walk around holding
my coat close: sexless,
ghoulishly thin I was—
so I could disappear into
the world I “imagined”:
where I could be
possessed by any
turn of voice I gave ear to.
Since the mondial war
had conquered the
dimension of mythology,
could I trash it there
damage it so hard
it would back down, a
chastened sea, and calm?
Who do you know named
Judgment? I ask
You have always
hoped no one, but it is a
condition of these pages.
You are judged wanting of
your trappings
Who the fuck are you now?
SAND
Repetition of sand: colored
patterns till
nothing wins. I want to win
I don’t exist; I have the skills
to win.
Everything is still hidden.
heart in sand.
Am
tearing you apart.
This is no
form of
protest: why protest against
the long-gone
coward, your
heart
lowering the scale
against Maat’s feather?
Voice: you are going to enter an
African country. Called Maat or Judgment.
I’ve been here for days, disposed to
cruel meditations. Dark forms pile up
in my heart to be weighed. Halfway through
the poem, I am another person.
Leave the drunk man at the table,
There is no consecutive order
Whatever you’ve done doesn’t
stop, or
start.
But haven’t I already
been here?
You’re
always here.
I have a ferret on a long leash pulling
me on. I have a ferret in a long lash
a lithe unpuling curious form: I have a
history if I choose it. Can I unchoose
recast it apply for another?
The ferret slips into a
cage
it is a monkey’s cage
then the monkey tears out its
throat
my throat?
rip it out on my way to declaim
at the, who is your? history
Because Frat boys had to hang
Greek letters over
the Alamo. Is that my
history? No. Almost
my throat.
The Egyptians didn’t understand
that Maat weighs your heart
continuously.
That’s why she’s so tired. And
why it hurts.
I have no throat for this aria
Do you recognize my heart?
You are the public, reading a
book
wondering if it can be yours.
But I came here to be you,
long the leash pulled at my throat;
taking us to any last stand,
heart composed of tragic moments
in sung patterns.
Who can stay near any more of his
telling and drinking?
The man sinks in the rhymed world towards
the table poised
to prop up our pose
but he’s dreaming of Maat
The dead woman’s voice
comes out of the CD
male version of
her fury: her masterpiece
How can Maat weigh her
heart, it
’s
composed of his
action, creation—
Once more, the ghoulish task
of waiting
for righteous renewal: but
all ghouls
are not women—
CAN’T I EVEN BE JUDGED?
LIGHT AROUND RIGHT SHOULDER
. . . all these things
look like they’re from a
charnel house
No
one of them
is my most precious gris-gris.
How do you know which one
It looks like knucklebones.
Everyone is here but so invisibly.
Their words cling to
me shaky pearl skins. It was
a lot of victims; exhaled
speech
must become lucent
despite given to a
black
metal wind.
Forgiveness is recommended
by those who fear us—
For if all our energy
turned toward
the source of our
misery,
Nothing you say would
remain
nothing you’ve said into being;
the ghost of you unspared
to the last
vapor.
Who had been tortured
centuries ago or now
someone standing over my shoulder
Songs and Stories of the Ghouls Page 11
