Stephen Ellis

from Opulence

Portland, Maine

THE JUDAS SET

I is a double theatre in which the theatrical double of self can hide
doubled over and up two ways twice at the same time for four times
the price, to pop up later Jack-In-Box unexpected, bodiless
and languageless, or be swallowed by the story of the precipitant
dispersion of beginning "the story", whose embryo is tight, high and hard,
like they say in New England, Jesus, that thing's really in there,
veritable tree of blackbirds screaming skyward up the uterine path,
where there's a message to be misread either left to right or the reverse
that may be no more message than flesh itself, withholding revealer of
light by its form, tissue builder of the double twilight, holding out or being
taken away, falling to eternity or rising to an end, how the eye sees with
what it also sees ahead, makes no future more than the one one already
takes place in, and as, and with, as the trick that treats the complex whole
sans any simple bridge between the given and The Gift

Portsmouth, New Hampshire - Boston, Massachusetts

LE CLE DU BONHEUR

     for Helena Belvoir

We are right now completely here, a fictionalized account of the real
conversation we had in a place where the pleasure center of my brain
opened to the slow breathing of everyone gone to sleep, and gave in
fully to your voice, whose sound still constitutes the inner petals of
the rose that encloses the discontinuous ring of analogical thinking
that yields via protein electrophoresis migration the completed ringlets
of fragmented energy that wiggled your toes and continues still to
consume the red lining of the dinner jacket beneath my skin, feeling
as we did the situational identity of desire as pure trauma rather than
the more immediate doubly-invading event of sheer fucking, wanting
instead to reach the end of the common fable of simply having undergone
each other, the (self) not fetishized in limbo, but placed first almost
meaninglessly in relation one to the other, not causally but contingent on,
relieving ourselves finally as thus we did, feature by aching feature

Chauncey, Ohio

FIREFLIES IN FULL LIGHT OVER BALL DIAMONDS OF PRE-ADOLESCENT EGYPT

               for Roland H. Ellis (1918 - 2002)

Twice at different times I had a female genital organ, although a poorly developed one, and in my body felt quickening like the first signs of life of a human embryo: by a divine miracle God's nerves corresponding to male seed had been thrown into my body; in other words, fertilization had occurred.
- Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of my Nervous Illness

Straying off course is intended to protect the ego against loss.
- Susan M. Schultz, Memory Cards & Adoption Papers

The most essential thing, in Bruno's outlook, was to find the living "voices", signs, images, seals, to heal the rift in the means of communication with divine nature introduced by pedantry[.]
- Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition

Now I hear Samantha's antlers rubbing against the window.
- Tom Veitch, The Luis Armed Story

The ghost of my father stands in Shibe Park, Philadelphia, in 1931 forever
testimental to Alamut and like meditative Pentagrammatic practices that catapault
the Saturnian character through the youth that never goes away and can't be spent
on anything but the sex, drugs and rock 'n roll that levitates leptoid man and
raises him to the "her" implicit in the patterns of study, propagation, organization
and attack that curl in upon each other under cover of the flower of politico-
religious activity whose deep fucking in sweete spring grass is the pedal tone
that shoots the Muslim spore of Zoroastrian-Isma'ili jism straight up the Mississippi
delta to seed the black brain stem of Damballah Wedo that mounts and strings
together the mile-by-mile flowering of catalpa eastward along the Pennsylvania
Turnpike's Path of Greater Resistance, like the practice of remembering ever
further up if also against memory's perfect seductions, to let ghostings stand while
producing of their pressure intimate presence, a feeding outward from one's "person"
making sexual the (in)visible yet magnetic line dividing life from mutant death