Page Eleven Poem by B. Sven Telander

Ed Replica discovered his skull in a box
obscured by Grand Guignol dream,
slit his wrists with Occam’s razorblades,
amazed by potency of addictive desire,
the recursive relapse into bent obsessional patterns,
need to consume eager fear via mental venting
a profound perversity of ingrained estrangement,
drunk on Thunderchrome, Crimson Blitz,
Machine Hog, and Snowflake Furnace,
habitual junkie vector evidence,
lust fund scavenger fiddled with vigor;
eating fetal shrimp in the Theatre of the Absurd,
burrowing even further behind the accumulated trash
of an existence he used to enthusiastically claim was his own
before co-opting patient progress as a being willing
to kneel and deeply feel true,
that sublime previously undefined ultimate expression,
essence of un-dying love,
with intrinsic childlike remembrance
of the strong unseen guidance which rose for life
with easy grace and happy natural flow,
compatriot to pulse navigators of starsongs eternal,
voyager through intimate cosmic valleys
throughout inspiring galactic fjords
along arenas far above more than just a wordlord’s tapestry,
infinite pageant of argent travelers marching
across the spectrum of worlds and suns yonder;
another antidote to this broken age,
packed full with clamorous ribswain cutlet children,
skeletonian poultry poltroons, portly beef barristers,
pork patrol, milkmen, bloodboys, teethgirls, and skinwomen
scaling flesh cities’ walls in an ongoing meat and bone parade
glorifying the Diddlysquat Template;
a sad pathetic trade-off:
abandoning open intimacy and true communication
for a grim perimeter:
the inner terror, silent horror,
all-consuming hollowness
within a repetitive empty pitiful squalor regarding spirit,
the comfortable isolation of a closed soul,
drowning in shrinking sludge concerning realization,
devoured in total awareness of every character flaw,
bereft from sanctuary outside universal life,
an all-embracing neglect,
caught in slop-bucket of wasted time,
this dark participant, lazy voyeur, mindless paramour of not-so-secret years,
diabolical angelic creature, unique generic lifeform,
precious malformed elegant beast,
erudite blathering jackass for the sheer joy of proof of lunacy,
this child screaming and crying to exhaustion
outside the Disinformation Booth
among the Empire of the Clowns,
disobedient idiots celebrating shtick of caustic slapstick,
lighting sonic dusk, the night doesn’t mind
plenty of shadows and degrees of darkness
to cloak all those clandestine moments
they want hidden in many minds
that the cerebral sinecure of memory can not deny,
a flood of ghosts blown from bones hollowed at dusk
in Humanium at Rape Stage and the vast galaxy;
universe total and divine gave them large sums of Texas pennies
in exchange for drab compulsion of horrible thoughts
created and subsequently cremated,
grand silent sentinels ravaged the plutonic frontier
with a pure and malevalent hatred closer to any heart than love,
old dutiful clang of destruction’s caresses molded landscapes to new views,
unstoppable change burst worn barriers within the derangement of creation,
recent shapes birthed and squirmed and grew with the brutal slipstream
insistence of fresh energy,
passionate antipathies given through analytic scrutiny,
neoteric ideas clawing for supremacy
over boring stagnation and common death;
toward magic island in sea of instability,
no philosopher’s stone found floating
in ichor within the holy grail,
Olympus is but a shabby trailer park
where dull old gods watch us on stolen cable television,
as Mother/Devourer, primal daughter of Heaven
is chewing corpse of Earth with teeth of Moon.
A voice far behind his eyes,
beyond a numinous membrane,
rattled the bars of a cage in his panopticon head,
force fought for thought quickly bought
from under to over through plunder,
boiling skyclad eyes fade with shouted pleading, begging:
“Let the need for Eden end. Let me out! There are things,
so many things, that I want to do with your life, even if you do not.”