The Ghost of the Immolate

Said, and Done

The Brilliant

Are too bright,

Blinding the others

In smothering light.

The vermin recoil,

The cockroach scatters

Into the cracks

Where shadow splatters

A welcoming hate

Of warmth and reason

Disguised as community,

A prelude to treason.

They crawl one and all

Each over the other

And dare call it love—

Why even bother?

<>

This is not the home

Where life grows toward the sun

But the swamp where shit settles

Before all is said, and done.

<>

(This is not a role

Projected to protect

A fragile ego

But a destiny

Willed and embraced.)

***** * *****

The Ghost of the Immolate

The sky is smiling

With a mouth full of clouds,

Neither sees nor hears,

But only glows

Atop the dawn it enshrouds.

Breaking,

Breaking like a fragile heart

Whose courage expands

Beyond the chamber it crowds.

Sunlight

In a shadow-dappled glade.

New life

For the ghost of the immolate.

Carry on

Like the wind and the rain.

Carry on

Despite all the pain.

Sorrow

Unchains us from this hate.

Tomorrow

We slip the lock on Heaven’s Gate.

Carry on

Like a sad, sad song.

Carry on,

Standing brave and strong.

***** * *****

Rommentary:

I have here repurposed the word immolate as a noun, much in the manner that the term initiate can indicate both to start a process and an individual who is only beginning to delve into such a mystery. No sooner than the immolate becomes such, it must necessarily be rendered a ghost, but in no wise has it ceased living, but only living contrary to the way it previously assumed it must. Every culture has a version of this seemingly poor creature, but that which is considered poor in the world of appearances is often teeming with a wealth the value of which the culture must necessarily take for granted, for the culture remains in the petri dish, and cannot observe itself from beyond, as the Ghost of the Immolate is wont to do.

The lines "The sky is smiling/With a mouth full of clouds" came to me upon looking up one morning and seeing just that: a long stretch of clouds curved upwards in a smile as wide as Lewis Carroll describes on his Cheshire Cat, though it is my understanding that the term did not originate with Carroll's Alice but was rather a colloquial term that Carroll used to such magnificent effect that it came to be utilized as symbolic of many processes throughout many disciplines.

I offer this as yet more evidence of Percy Shelley's assertion that "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world", with the sincere hope that he and other bygone poets left that smile behind for me in lieu of their absent bodies, just to give me heart as I begrudgingly turned my eyes away from a beautiful dawn and back to the menial labor with which I earn my daily bread.

But even if it is not so, dear reader, it is the very essence of beauty and the fulfillment of life to imagine it so, and I bid you do the same wherever you go, rendering in your mind an eloquent scene that gives you he(art) and apt reason to reach for the sun rather than to bury yourself in the muck.