Mel Waldman

& the strangeness of everyday life
blossoms into the vanishing/suffering

& an existential question mark
pirouettes through the air
where

the butcher’s knife
slices the barren day

& a shattering
spills into nowhere
an oval prison cell

& the emptiness
within
& faraway

becomes a transcendental meditation in the park
about Heaven/Hell

& a non-guru wishes to bless
& taste the trauma & the sin

& within
the eerie
mystery

a demonic force devours the divine
but suddenly spews celestial light in an otherworldly sign

& waits for the vanishing/suffering
mine

Losing faith, a cracked invisible egg drifting homeless in the universe, G-d slipping away, a raw concept with no reality, only Freudian wishes, and an oxygen-spiritual tank in my dreams, and G-d on trial. Now, it seems I’m homeless too, a wandering creature forgotten by You, no Mother, Father, just G-d on trial. Lost, in a galaxy cul-de-sac, I pray to a make-believe Savior; I pray because there’s nothing left to do but appeal to a Higher Power, or cry incessantly, for no one sees me; or die laughing, inhaling laughing gas in Hell’s vast but desolate prison, where the invisible sit in solitary confinement for eternity, drinking a wasteland of sadness or uproarious madness, and pondering a runaway G-d who betrayed them from the start, a G-d intoxicated with nothing more, perhaps, than a fugitive dream He can never fulfill, a G-d on trial.

(the words of a character in the unpublished short story, The Paranoid)

Beautiful corpse, beloved Mother of Creation, you are lovelier than life itself; Lilliputian perfection and little woman of grace, celestial creature and beloved lover, you are my exquisite corpse.

Beautiful corpse, I kiss your cold face and brush against a vast emptiness, a chilling Void. I kiss your vacant face. But you’re not there. I disappear inside your nothingness. Yet when I kiss your majestic mask of death, I become one with you, Mother of Creation, my lover. When I kiss your celestial face, I fall in love forever.

Beautiful corpse, Mother of Creation, you are lovelier than life itself; I close my ebony eyes, kiss your ghostly image, and receive your love. Your icy lips kiss my burning face and when ice and fire meet, we bless each other.

Now, I disintegrate, dissolve, and disappear; I drift into eternity and reunite with you and the sacred earth; I receive the blessing, the bliss, and the perfect moment when we are one; a beautiful corpse in death, in dust, one.

I
am Freud

in my winter home & workplace Berggasse 19 in the Alsergrund district of Vienna upstairs alone in my study surrounded by books & antiquities antediluvian treasures lost truths buried in the tombs of time & still my silent friends speak to me reverberating voices of the past swirling around in the seething sea below the oceanic tempest trapped in the abyss within & now I drift off & plummet into the deep of the psyche

I
am Freud

mind-voyager of Vienna & the world beyond outside the chestnut tree looms in the courtyard & the stone staircase waits for you-my patients & family-ascend & follow it to my office or home here & now in this timeless moment of creation in this exploding genesis

I
am Freud

Death & Creation, Thanatos & Eros, the Destroyer & Creator dissolving & obliterating the old false ways & fallacious ideas & so it goes we shall face your crippling fears for behold I am the Creator of Psychoanalysis & this is the Apocalypse & the birth of a bold iconoclastic beginning this is a paradigm shift & the smashing of idols this is the revolution-the mind-blasting journey of volcanic revelations from the unconscious & perhaps, the opening of the soul

Dancing
across the deep of nowhere

around
the rim of Dreamland

I
vanish

into
the swirl of the dust devil & the fantastic desert

a
phantasmagoria

of
exquisite chaos galloping through the miasma

&
phantom mustangs

tasting
the music of trauma

&
I sing the Blues Apocalypse

while
the requiem shrieks & shatters the ruins of Un-Reality

&
I vanish

inside
the Blues Apocalypse

my
nowhere blues

in
Dreamland’s dystopia

where
my dissolving self

seeks
the Hidden Holy Haven of Ineffable Nothingness

a.k.a.
my immortal soul

Dreamland’s blessing
&

phantom gift
glittering in evanescence & everlasting in the perennial dream of Dreamland

After dark,
in the metaphysical night
I
rush slowly through Brooklyn
&
enter Café Bizarro
our
secret meeting place in Midwood
&
wearing a celestial crown of electrodes
&
a bestial brain-charger that I plug into a wall socket,
I
melt into invisibility & dissolve & drift & dream
of
Sweet Phantasmagoria my lovely Dream-Lady dancing & descending into non-existence

&
while sipping French Vanilla Delirium
I
taste my Lady Divine
swirling
into the omphalos of the universe
an
oval mirror of irreality
&
I follow her into the deep of nowhere
&
perhaps tonight I shall find Heaven
on
Electrode Highway
or
Hell on earth
if
a hallucinatory stranger a simulacrum or the Chimera-Manager unplugs me

Now,
in the ghetto

no time is sacred,
no time safe.

Death
comes now at 1st light & through the luminescence of day

flowing
into night

after dark
after light.

Death
comes, evil speaks

Brave one; listen to the rhapsody of death.

Pop, pop, pop in bestial hip-hop.

Gunshots shriek
& find the meek

pitch-black darkness
illuminated

&
life obliterated

sentenced
to otherworldly silence & mortal absence in the swirl of ethereal extinction

for
this is the time you taste the music of trauma

&
feast on fear.

This
is the time you bathe in crimson water

&
taste the underbelly of sin.

This
is the time you hear the eerily everlasting music drowning in the key of death.

This
is the time of the shattering

here,
inside the rhapsody & the requiem

&
a stranger sings of non-being

while
gunshots gut the grotesquerie of night & gallop into the deformity of day.

This
is the time to vanish in the music of trauma.

This
is the time to die & fly away.

(on reading Muriel Rukeyser’s poem, Seventh Avenue)

After dark,
the damned bless us with their presence.

The city
opens up like the maw of the fire-breathing Chimera

&
they come forth

frozen freaks thawing in the sizzling night.

They come forth
fallen creatures of obscurity

&
roam freely through our streets, the dazzling dreamy

labyrinths
of New York City,

illuminating
our glittering avenues with their bestial darkness.

After
shedding the skin of invisibility,

they come forth & bless us with their presence.

Yet
we rush away from the damned

until
they dissolve & vanish in the shadows.

On sultry summer nights in the cauldron of the seething city,
I catch a glimpse of the damned in the corner of my left eye

&
in a furious flash, the pariah-beasts of New York force-feed me

apocalyptic news
of sin & suffering

in the city that shrieks the crimson blues

&
gazing into & through their bruised barren eyes,

wounded windows
of Hell-on-earth,

I
see the ominous everlasting wasteland they see

&
ineffable evil

slices
my thick swirl of boyish innocence

&
my everflowing river of faith

with
a chasm of doubt

&
a heavy shroud of anguish covers me crushes my spirit

&
I too vanish in the shadows until a beautiful alchemy transforms me

if it does
&
my trinity of-

knowledge pain & will

becomes
the light buried in the pitch-black abyss

if I accept the Holy 3

&
I grow into a transcendence

if I grow
&

this is the blessing bestowed by the damned
if I receive it

WHO ARE WE
but fugitives from the silent blessings & secret divinity of the damned?

WHO ARE WE
if we don’t face the evil we see?

WHO ARE WE
if we do not receive the blessings of the damned?

WHO ARE WE
if we don’t ask why?