A Magazine of Many Arts

Old Seer
Don’t you think sometimes
that you got the world weighing down on your shoulders
or that your brightest day
is a little dark?

Don’t let cards or crystal ball get to you like that,
it’s just the fortune tellers’ curse;
learn to live
with the bearblood mark.

Fortune Teller
Sometimes my cards hold water like buckets
left out in the rain,
sometimes I feel their edges singe;
a glass ball is a strange thing,
shards beneath my feet, made whole.

The Tarot Deck
we are not just paint and cardboard, says The Hanged Man
but you’ll have to know us good to know, says The Priestess
Swords chatter their blades, not sure why people would read cards
and The Devil and The Fool sit smiling, back to back.

Old Seer
Before we had words on paper,
we had robes dyed bearblood dark;
people knew what we could do,
and so did we.

Glass Orb
Sometimes, I’d rather be the moon than this,
always clear so she can see through me.
Nobody asks the moon to be glass
and nobody asked me whether I wanted to be just
her crystal ball

The Green Candle
It is funny to watch her pick the truth apart
so she can make a proper fortune of it.
Sometimes, she works true magic, and that’s a different thing;
I’ve never burned so hot
as when there’s magic in my flames.

Fortune Teller
Sometimes I wish I could hide in a bearskin,
the bear’s claws and the bear’s teeth my own.

Why do people come asking for the truth
when it’s the last thing that they want to hear?

Old Seer
Remember that the moon is dark and wild
or starlight bright, yet no more tame.
We are of the moon you and I,
and a grain of moondust is wild in all of us.

Petitioner
I have brought boughs of oak, white ash, and last year’s sage,
incense and a few coins…

I have so many questions!
What say the cards? What is my fortune?

Old Seer
See, when we wore the bearblood robes
all they’d ask us for were proper questions.
These days…
well, you know yourself.

Just make it up
as you go along.

Fortune Teller
I’ll shuffle, and you cut the cards.
Now let’s see what’s in the cards for you:
they are like rivers full of rain
but don’t you worry about that…

 

I have tried to stop eating stars;
they make me gassy.
I know that planets should be eaten by the galaxy,
all resting on one’s fork, full of fibre and crunch
and water and magma.
I know that asteroid belts, if eaten whole,
contain all the necessary elements for health,
especially if one swallows
the odd meteor shower too.
And they all say, have the occasional comet.
It does no harm.
But don’t eat the stars.
Don’t eat the stars!

I can’t help it. I see them there
in their sweetmeat box, chosen to show
them off as much as possible, and I long
for that full mouthful of warm comfort.
The red ones, a touch overripe, are the best
– spicy, sometimes bursting on your tongue.
Afterwards I feel warm and energetic.
I can juggle gods after a few suns.

One day I’ll explode with the gluttony
of warmth and light, and spew out the most
voluptuous universe, all light and curves.

 

 

for t. winter-damon

Forever interpreting
ancient texts
as their tattered
scrolls unrolled
within his mind,
treading the borders
of the Axis Mundi
with no more than
an empty leather satchel,
ranging the streets
of Xanadu and Carcosa,
Asgard and Babylon,
tracking like a beast
with a ravenous beast
astride its back,
whispering sacral curses
and foul blessings
to the eldritch winds.

Immersed in dreamtides
and chimerical visions
and cimmerian prophets
whose shadows rose
from the dust of ages,
worshipping priestesses
created for the day,
following transient avatars
down to a dim beach
and the dark sea
of a false dawn
to hear the damp cries
of beached mariners
echoing in his brain.
Intoxicated by secret keys
and magical rings,
obsessed by puzzle boxes
with hidden compartments
only to be opened
by the wisest of men
and most cunning women,
drunk on myth and
history and a tomorrow
that foreshadowed
more than night.

Enthralled by the occult
and the fantastic,
Crowley and Blavatsky,
Faustus and Paracelsus,
Levi’s Dogme et Rituel
de la Haute Magie,
poring over maps
revealing the locations
of imagined kingdoms,
Mu and El Dorado,
Atlantis and Shangra-La,
the Archipelago of Dreams,
maps fashioned by madmen
on a transcendental high
over a fifth of Ravens Rum
and a pinch of fly agaric.

Anticipating the excavation
of underwater ruins
and red temples
crumbling to red sand
in some distant desert,
astounded by age-old
architectural mysteries,
the Great Pyramids,
the dour monoliths
of Easter Island,
the astronomical
savvy of Stonehenge,
awaiting the lab tests
on the Shroud of Turin
and the release of
a revised annotation
of the Bardol Thodol,
praying for the miraculous
to snuff the everyday.

Last heard from
traveling to parts unknown,
head down and eyes afire,
carrying no more than
a worn leather satchel
stuffed with worlds.

The pages curling like lovers
around her flame phoenix fingers
their color darkening like the blushing of lips
in an orgasm, lasting as long
before the ash purls away on the breeze of paper turned.

She strays all along stacks and racks
and piles of her lovers, one-night-stands
all of them, to be collected on her lips,
their ink and vellum like questing tongues
longing for her voice…

…her hands, her eyes, her very breath
a disaster that poets have called love;
sometimes the spines remain, pages she did not turn
a tale she could not see through
to its end for reasons hidden within her own heart.

She puts them, one atop the other, high
as walls, porous as the promise of true love
and walks past them every night
before she goes to bed alone
pretending to herself
that both sides are happy in this charnel place