Suffering is Hip - Poems by A.B. Druwelyn

THREE POEMS by A.B. Druwelyn

Voiceless

She lifts, twisting down through his deepening silence. Silence is a man's purest communication, his most courageous confession. Across the ages men have lingered there, gazing upon the alluring terror of the moist Fount of Life. Trembling with fire in their hands and a warmth of desperate poetry on their lips--- sniffing, marveling and searching as if to leave or find some mark on those cosmic cave walls of Time. I WAS HERE! their graffiti would read. Yet none venture deep enough, stalling in a confusion between ecstasy and fear, grasping in quest for the vast Unknown that must spiral off somewhere between the tender parentheses of the cunt. Life and logic are separated by the warm aura of these parentheses--- saloon doors men pass in and out of as if at will, claiming exclusive rights to their inner sanctum, though it's here they're truly lost, where along those perilous creases they struggle with a need that unravels to a primordial hunger more remembered than real, more spiritual than visceral, where the music of all ideas is spawned yet pushed aside in a moment of dissolving comprehension. Inhaling life's raw breath moist across time, they fall again plummeting back into slapped first gasps squalling wet from the cave where their graffiti was first scrawled in shared blood-rhythms echoing their veins to evermore circle their resistance that surrenders to instinct following the downwind approach of desire and terror twisting into rhythms of longing to be outrun or followed but never ignored when the panties fall their bloodhounds dive picking up scent stalking tangled trails of the soul for lost path back home.

They gasp, hypnotized by the clasping pink circle. Dust sparkles from their mouths as they push higher into the ring of fire. Thrusting into that inner circle men find there a plot of rich earth where they might take root if only for a moment and escape thus find themselves, sensing a shortcut to transcendence, a hidden passage leading off to a fulcrum glowing like calcium upon which they might balance with the magick of Mother Earth and stir the stars. They find there a tender idol divided between beauty and abomination, between light and chaos. They find there terror, terror for all they can never truly enter, never truly possess, never truly become a part of nor ever leave behind.

In the clutching still of time they lean closer and find in its unfolding dimensions an abstract equation too complex for their algorithmic theories, a folded shroud of mystery between their fingers unfurling down to a revelation of glimmering nothingness... an alluring abyss where the world is reduced to zero with no trace of remainder. Not a zero cradled in loin tenders, but a zero from which their spirit is subtracted to balance outside itself, balance weightless above the continuum of time where they again find themselves walking the windy fields of innocence back to an invisible stairway which had taken them without their consent, moving ever to a mortal fragrance of Female which returns on those lost winds to lift them as they gaze into that zero,

through circling depths of time to find the zero of the world awaiting their multiplications-- circles within circles rippling infinite as the stairway falls twisting away in circular departure, a Möbius strip spinning in infinity, the circling sky arching with their desire as they fall again, slamming straight lines into the curving cave with a hypnotic longing for dominance of the indomitable

and they're gone--- moving with blood-rhythms beating across the ages back into themselves curled tight kicking wrought from the womb spinning down the years to vanish again into a crack in time as the glowing fulcrum draws them upward unexpectedly to bury their faces in starshine.

There, gasping, seeing too much, they can't stop it can't fight breaking on through coming sparkling out of themselves to the Other Side, again crying thrashing squalling gasping.

An angel places a finger of light to their trembling lips, then turns them away as flesh blooms into fire.

There in climactic surrender is homecoming. They arch into oblivion's tight light where their dreams are roused and returned, where Inspiration blows a kiss to her reflection in their eyes, where Light and Dark shower away in genesis-crimson over the moist ledge of the Absolute as creation draws them back into her spawning vortex. Mother and lover sizzling away on a single fuse to illuminate their fleeting apotheosis, their lusty sovereignty erected only to sink away into the unfathomable.

A distraction of boyhood echoes lures them aside and Bogart pours them a drink beneath a slow ceiling fan as the fuse spirals off into the unknown of themselves. They turn away as a sudden light makes of them shadow.

The pass of a hand sets the moment back into place, and they're again lying in a quiet room, released from a feeling that's more a memory of remembering. The negative image of understanding realigns with their mistrust to neutralize their fear as they again look down at only a zero. Nothingness. But out of nothingness arises the twisted circle of infinity, with its entrance disguised as an exit, from which nothing escapes itself, where their terror sublimates into the heat of love, or hatred, or sometimes it sends them running.

Yet their fear is born not of women, but of a remembered light which once exposed their own shadowing frailty. And this is their terror, and their love. The same fear that makes all men women, and all women men.

- A.B. Druwelyn