The Black Key (music by Moëvöt, Chant d'Eternité I & II, a French dark ambient collaboration from the Les Legions Noire movement, but largely of unspecified origin)
As with most things, you misconstrue this endeavor. It's natural, when overcome, to infer divinity where none exists. Fear erects idols, like totems against things distant and terrible as if stone might deter evil. So when you kneel, I want to drip with laughter from my wrists. Do I look like some decrepit old bugger squinting from the rear of the rectory? Prayer is fear. But pray on, if it soothes you, as I will continue preying on the prayerful.
You are a caged bird banging against the grille of its confinement. I merely breathed across your clay wings. So who is leading whom? Only gods can give life to clay. But they left us long ago to our wretched religions. There are no gods here. Amen.
Think of me as a shepherd, adept at reading the entrails of the forgotten. It was on one of my many sojourns that I found you, crouched in the reeds, weary from neglect, your pelt picked at mercilessly by jackals and hyenas. Immediately I sensed how your heart wanted to be raced through the brush, in a blood-mixture of fear, abandon and impending capture, but only by a predator worthy of the name. I only pretend to offer respite in these pathetic pews.
If it's affirmation you seek, then feel how your eyes cannot hold my gaze. Time and again, they sink (as do you) to the floor, our savannah, witness to your pain, then pleasure, then pain again. Cornered, your voice falters, and you are summoned back to your last authentic moment. A girl of eighteen again, you stand frozen above your mother's corpse. The completer of many circles, I administered the last rites that evening. I noticed immediately you had your mother's eyes.
Life has schooled you well in the paradox of flight. Though it runs, the gazelle secretly relishes the jaws of the lion. Ah, I see you blushing! What held you rooted to this spot all these years? How you gasped for breath beneath the genius of your camouflage, sweltering in a canopy of evasion. Disease, carrion, old age, inertia; all are ignoble ends for lesser beings. But you stand to inherit a much larger death. See how your blue throat, lifted up, excites me! Here, follow me out behind the church. The devout never stray beyond the sanctuarys vestibule.
You wonder about me, thinking, he leads me further astray. Yes, I am a collared bedevilment, hoarse from petitioning the messiah's stone ear. Wild rabbits dart through my wilderness with the zeal of predators. For years I subsisted on berries and grasshoppers -- the gruel of humility -- until lethargy and higher station corrupted my palette. Now I preach my acquired tastes beneath the cross of subversion. Ask yourself, what compelled you to venture out at the very moment you did? You were a
stranger to my Mass for many years.
Let us set for one another the role of perfect novitiate. But be warned. I am the strangest of men. My project lies beneath your flesh and beyond the marrow of your bones. My strokes dance toward an ever-distant thing. I strike at your ass, two windswept polished stones at the mouth of a secret cave. Your tongue chokes on a forgotten language. There are no answers that will please me. Perfect obstruction to my endeavor, you are indispensable in equal measure. Flesh and bones, I confess, are merely the
beaten pavement of my ceaseless inquiries.
How many times must I bind you to the truss only to have your thighs weep like faucets? And how many times have you reveled in the excitement of pointless struggle, inciting me to be harsher still? Beyond the foot of this bed lies an open door, and yet you will not escape. I could drag you to its threshold, but the sun would only shutter your eyes. Your world now lies within the bosom of my cell, where I cultivate in your prison-heart the perfect jailer.
I savor the wine of your confusion: But I am too old for earnest expressions of loyalty. Even the utterly beholden require a latch to secure their place. When our ritual is done, as always, I will return the black key to the cabinet above our heads.
Copyright 2008, Norman Ball
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i really like your poem it was great :)
kerrygreen1 2 years ago
I'm afraid this "prose poem" is a piece of didactic secular philosophy and Gothic pretensions. Prose poems are not this accessible at all.
hopkins4545 2 years ago
Please, do not mock what you don't understand.
I like this poem...it's beautiful.
I wish i udnerstood it to its fullest, but it will take so long to do so. Untill then, I will savor what I gain from this poem.
Thankyou for uploading it.
ThexRedemption13 3 years ago
LOL, wtf??
1000Eyes0016 3 years ago
FAIL
gigel2006 3 years ago