Alice
O. Howell
KRAKAJAXAS
The
Gnostics had prefigured
everything,
everything
but
scholars and small boys
with a sweet tooth
and they
were vulnerable in their verbs
to nouns
so when
they spoke of flight and light
they
really meant flying and lighting
but
in the footnotes to
Basilides
( a kingspringer
if
ever there was one)
you
find him tied down by good intentions
in
an anthology (of all things!)
of suppositions
Anthos and Logos, the flowering word
speak to us as One
and
seekers today
are
either readers or skydivers
we must ask them
about
the footnotes of the sun
thus how
to place their soles and souls
upon the racks of heaven
a scroll
is but a rolled-up, spiraled truth
and dusty words to dusty death
makes powder
for
some Zosimox for hot and itching
angels' feet
burning
to explode, transform, illuminate
as
in fireworks on roads to
Damascus and Podhvoretz
or
at that Alameda of the Muses
with
hiccuping Clio and the Furies
explosions are iconoclasts:
winged, uncorseted future Ogdoads
accelerators of sperm and vision
and a better product
perhaps
the Lord of lords is impatient
in his highchair
wanting
crunchy instead of regular
the
roots may be Sanskrit or Bantu
entwined
with Hebrew and Navajo
the stalk might be Europe
but
the flowers are trembling, risked
in
the Renaissance of Las Vegas and Miami Beach
(have we forgotten the bare breasts of Knossos?)
alas,
the seed is always future
folded
(do not mutilate!) in sparks
of one or two
compacted
in aeons and ions
and
where they cross and spindle
there hang we
crucified
in a perforated box
of neglect.
a.o.howell