Plato’s Pow Wow

Cyborg of Galilee

Having spent much time hiking the unspoiled wilds of Galilee this past three years, I would often find my thoughts wandering outside of the realm of politics and into the realm of the essential human condition.  I would sometimes return from these pathless and rarely tread terrains filled with otherworldly ideas, and occasionally I would write down these notions purely for the pleasure of it.  I would like to share with you, my readers, a story that I wrote after one such walk.  Here I have to inform you that despite the ‘Galilee’ being central to my tale, this piece has absolutely nothing to do with the current political crisis taking place in the region – you will not find any mention of Palestine or Israel in this post.  What you’re about to read is but a fictional drama that I conjured, inspired by the desolate parts of the Galilee landscape and the animal life that inhabits it.

I humbly present you ‘Cyborg of Galilee’, a poetic drama in three parts, and I encourage you to read through it in one sitting, so as to get the full intended dramatic effect.  Thank you.


Cyborg of Galilee

Theatra Poetic in Three Acts

To caves and canines and all creatures cursed with mute love

Prologue

FLASHBACK

Morning birds
Mustabeen singing
Beauty
Of earth
When I crashed
A stolen MIG-29
On the remote hills
Of the Levant

Thorns be my witness
I staggered too sober
Away from blaze
From violent metal
And breathless
That I had no voice
And only one breast
That I was dappled
Wide-eyed
In blood and soot
Meant all of a shocking nothing

But the shaking was everything
The trembling sun
My trembling eyeballs
Adrenaline and sorrow for blood

Heightened olfactory
For days
I sniffed animal and wandered
Wounded
Orphaned
Southwards
Inwards
To the Sea of Galilee

But I could not wash out
The drones of war from my ears
Memories of mankind demented
Tears tempests cacophonies
Sirens delirious spinning
Explosion after explosion
Oh plutonium bombardments
That punched and punctured
The trembling earth –
I could not forget
Laying under a pile of corpses
Waiting with eyes shut
Waiting like dust
With dust in my mouth waiting
Till I could hear the last particle
Of war-dust finally settling
At dawn

Oh waterless mouth
How I ran from the stench of guts in the sun
City dogs cleaved asunder on pavements
Corpses charred and half-melted nightmares
Citizens shredded like cloth on the streets
Of my fallen city
My spine-snapped country
All your machines are now useless
Dear dead world
Oh colossal untidy graveyard
All that remains is me
And all this wounded architecture
Puffing and collapsing
Beheaded trees
Eyeless butterflies
I leapt over
And under
The choke of gasses yellow and purple
I ran barefooted I ran
Following the last man-made noise:
The revving of a jet fighter

My only weapon
My will to live

So forgive me
It was necessary
Divine
To use the black rope of my bra
To strangle the blood-thirsty pilot
Napping drunk on the roof
Of the underworld
Oh desideratum
Forgive me
I killed the last man on earth
Plundered his MIG-29 to escape
The aftermath of the last war on earth

Ever

No I never imagined surviving my childhood
Surviving love
Surviving the last war on earth

Alone

I never imagined
Knowing the smell of wild grasses
In faraway Galilee

Never thought that I would sleep
In caves with Jackals

And that jackals would welcome me.

Howl

We do not need to know your name
To love you

Said the king of the jackals

We just want permission
To enter your dreams
When you sleep amongst us

You can have all my dreams
I muttered
But leave my melancholia alone

The jackals howled agreement

Thus together we lived
In wretched harmony.

THE DIG

There is no one left to revenge against
No one left to accuse

I am the last
To be so unloved

I’ve grown to hate sunlight
Moonlight
White stars

Nothing left to do
Except dig my own grave
On my knees
With jackals gazing
Oh circle of sorrow
On walls of cave
A thousand cranny eyes
Trickling slo-mo tears
Watching
My bare fists punching
The toothy gritty ground
My own gut
In convoluted agony
Frantic fingers clawing
Scratching flailing
And the widening tomb
Turbulent hole
Darkening
Deepening

Survivor’s guilt
My single bullet.

THE FIND

I did not except to find
A book under bitter soil

Muddy pages
Made of bones and metal
Ancestral bible
In a land of no god

I did not expect to hear
The king of jackals
Request that I read it
Insist that I need it
Before I deliberately leapt
Head first
Into my hand-tailored tomb
Into death’s
Infinite net

I especially did not expect me
To suddenly feel delighted
To find the book titled
‘Cyborg of Galilee’

Oh miracles deluge the dark pit.

*****

Cyborg of Galilee

INCEPTION

You would have thunk
By the bulging mass of muscle
Unclothed
This creature was Atlas the Great
Born of the seed of god in his bed of possibilities

But looking closer with one eye shut
The iris discerns the barely visible patchwork
Of soft flesh blending industrial metal
Raw blood rushing in Coppertone veins
Onyx and titanium for bones
And unlike Adam who was born of clay and prayer
This Cyborg was assembled by sober machines
Gathered to perfection in the computerized laboratories
Of blacksmith and alchemist
Under the watchful eye of creation
Through its nose breathed
And from its mouth spat out like a seed into a stream
Into the floral wilds of Galilee in springtime

This Cyborg was born
Clutching at nothing
Unknowing of nothing
Except the necessity to breathe in
The heady scent of the flowers of earth

And a brewing urge to kill.

Gypsy

With Neanderthal bones in her purse
Belt of knives and bells
She eyes the Cyborg of Galilee
Half-man half-machine
Olive tree for soul
For comfort
Kneeling limp by a blue-gray stream
Gazing hypnotized at drowned distorting stone
You’d think him a poet
If you didn’t already know that poets
Like god
Had long ago
Abandoned the deaf world

There is a murder waiting to haunt your dreams
A love absolute that’ll take you to hell
The Gypsy croaked
Moths dashing from her mouth
Bouncing off Cyborg’s sullen lips

Gypsy with snake eyes shining
Calls Cyborg a dumb fool
Takes old bones out of her purse
Cups and shakes them like dice

Teeth and knuckles is life is truth
She chuckles incantations that make her hands
Turn giant
And casting the bones at the feet of the Cyborg
Neanderthal bones hit the ground bleeding
muttering:  “Machine is happy
While man remains discontented
In Galilee”

Yes oh yes
The Cyborg of Galilee utters his first words

Finally I am understood
He says and picks up the bloodied bones

The Gypsy’s giant fist bangs
The bloated mountain beside her
Hard in the guts
Spits a spiky yellow tooth at Cyborg’s feet
My bones never lie she says
Give me back my words my bones
You wretch you—

Half-loved man of skin and metal
He finishes her assault
He sniffs at the blood and bones in his hand
And the Gypsy now watches how he tenderly
Bathes the wounded bones in the relentless stream

You are diluting truth with water
Washing out the urgency of my words
She growls and black feathers fall from the night sky

I am clarifying in the name of truth
He quickly reasons

You do not understand bones
How could you
Having beaten alloys for bones yourself
Born from the friction of piston rods
Vacillating in onyx mortars
Now give me back my bones
She thundered and a thousand nocturnal
Insects from the mountain’s shoulder
A thousand needles from its trembling crown of pines
Leapt into the bloodstained stream to drown

The song of my heart
Is in these bones
So I will keep them
The Cyborg of Galilee insisted

Then we will go to war
Soulless war
She roared and lunged at the Cyborg of Galilee
Into the agitated stream they fell
Neanderthal bones in his wet robot hand
Unreachable by the titanic claws of the Gypsy
Together tossed over and under the water
Entangled limbs and hair rushing downstream
Whitewater rafting under the white Galilee moon
Turning glistening swirling grunting
Desperate for the love of bones and words
The Cyborg of Galilee and the manic Gypsy
Twisting with breathy wrathful waters
All the way down to the blue Phoenician sea

Neanderthal bones
Strangled
Entangled in violence
Dreaming of surrender
Drowning one by one somewhere
Down the throat of the amnesiac stream
Whose mouth burbles beside the gut-bruised mountain
That never forgets the sorrows of uttered words
Never forgets the voices of buried or drowned bones.

Phoenician Sailor

The Phoenician sea
Forever blue
Rejected the Cyborg of Galilee
Underwater embracing a boulder
Waiting for the god of rust to claim him
For the god of water worms to bleed him
But the sea would not swallow his grey metal
Cyborg flesh too bitter for fish
Spat him unconscious on the white sands of Tyre
For golden jackals to sniff his oxidized hair
Breathe pungent warmth over his open mouth
Growling salivating at his wrists and ankles
Till a tall Phoenician sailor saw their arched backs
Paid them with a sapphire ring and albatross beaks
Revived the Cyborg with wine and olive oil
Made a checkered fire for him at dawn

I was just dreaming about you
Cyborg said soon as his eyes opened

Out of one dream and into another
The sailor spoke
So it is true then
Machines have dreams too

Wilder than the dreams of man
Said the Cyborg
Wider than the eye of god
Sometimes a cyborg dream can last longer
Than a lifetime

When my mouth was too small to speak
My mother died at sea
The wistful sailor said
If only I can dream of her
For a whole lifetime

Oh impossible wish
The night’s hour hand
Is the knife that stabs the dreamer
The clock of god
Is the only enemy of life
I advise you not to dream long
The Cyborg of Galilee said and spat into the fire

The Phoenician sailor re-lit the fire
I have a hundred dreams left to dream
But only one day left to live

When you die
You will have a thousand dreams a minute to dream
And neither day nor night
The bones of Neanderthal assured me of this
Cyborg bellowed

The Phoenician locked tender eyes with Cyborg
Tried to speak but instead
Trilled a song of love and loss and water soul
That captured the Cyborg fast to trance
Moved by the Phoenician’s tranquilizing cadence
And the memory of words of Neanderthal bones
The dancing flames the crashing waves
That debated the agony of his essence in whispers

Man should have been created with two hearts
Crooned the Phoenician in long abandon
Till the Cyborg suddenly stirred
Punched in the eye by a fisty sun ray
And a tender Phoenician kiss on his metallic brow

I will go now to die in peace
I will go where water and dreams are one
The sailor walked away singing with eyes closed
Blindly following the water’s edge

The Cyborg called after him with the anguish of separation
I love your song my only friend
And I pity my endless life of loneliness
Please stay with me
Cyborg implored

The Phoenician sailor
Low wind in his ears
Deaf and blind troubadour for the damned
Water and seaweed curling bondage at his bare feet
Walked away knowingly into the unknown

I would be cursing you if I were to say
May all your dreams come true
Cyborg shouted at the back of the Phoenician
Walking now upon the blue waters
Out to sea oh Phoenician sea
Where the tip of the horizon curves and carves
A turquoise pillow for the crimson sun.

CEDAR

Cyborg of Galilee
Bewildered by loss of Neanderthal bones
Vanished Phoenician mariner and song
Up the northern shaken shoreline he staggers
Thumping hunger in his half-fleshed guts
Now whiffing east where the sun un-eclipses
Red heat-rays buzzing copper fingernails
He climbs the vertical jags of Mount Lebanon
Climbs a topmost gnarly boulder
Where a lone cedar stands with trunk
Almost as wide and older than the sky
A thousand arms balletic out-turned
Forever ready to catch a tumbling star
Above the winds oh mother of cedars
Occasionally waving at the small world below

Cyborg curious climbs blind the top of the tree
Needles scratching his metal eyeballs
Now squats on the highest branch
Watches far downwards the thread-thin ravine
Lush labyrinth of taut and twisting gorges
Eye following a smoking column
Squinting at its source to see
A hairless hermit thin and nude
Grinding wheat and baking bread

Cyborg his eyes the color of plums in autumn
All morning perched and watching
Hermit’s slow fingers sliding loaves
Into a sack of knitted twigs and leaves
Irresistible soulful aromas rising higher rising
Entering him taunting him
Turbulence and hunger in his distended gut
The fire of survival rushing the tunnels
Of his indium intestines
Tweaking hyper his famished nerve endings
Till like an animal he pounces wanton
Free-falling flying downwards
Grimacing at wind and gravity
Landing predatory beside the frail hermit
Machine fingertips swiftly criminal
Snatching the sack of fresh-baked bread

But nobody owns this bread
Not you not me not the birds
The hermit speaks trembling
Startled feminine timber in his voice
Standing shorter than Cyborg’s bulky thighs

Cyborg noting the strange grey film over hermit’s eyes
Accuses him of blind injustice
And the hermit can only kneel and weep at Cyborg’s ankles

There is no justice in the universe
There is no justice in the universe he repeats
But that doesn’t stop purity manifesting
No stopping virginal snow in this world

Cyborg spiky knuckles backhanded
Strike the hermit in sudden impatience
Smirking to see the paper-bone man
Torn and folded on the earth
Blood streaming from his ears

Cyborg dips stolen bread in human blood
Stuffing his ravenous stainless steel jaw
With soft lips licking satisfying hunger
Wet red sugars satisfying his thirst
But aware acutely all the savage while
The slow-mo shredding of his conscience

Oh how the moaning hermit deflating lamented
Comparing himself
To a white swan with no feathers
Now bloodless
He issues his last breath
And the sun above them
Witness to all crimes and cruelties of the world
Eclipses again now twice in one day

Cyborg of Galilee in sudden pitch darkness
Being the only machine sewn with a human heart
Weeps involuntary rapidly
Running away from the unclothed corpse:
A shriveled white worm glowing in the dark

And one hundred breaths in panic later
One thousand giant leaps across Phoenician hills
Of thistle and pine and a thousand sprouted prickly thoughts
He returns back to the wilds of Galilee
Everywhere scratched and the stain of injustice
Grooved on his coiling barium breast
Curling in shame fetal
Inside a cave with sneering jackals
He sleeps and dreams of the voices of bread and blood
Deliberating the condition and contradiction of life

Not hungry but haunted now I am
My crime saved and damned me together
Damned be now and damned forever
Cyborg moaned in his tormented sleep
Jackals sniffing jealous at his parted fleshy mouth

A wheat grain stuck between two metal teeth.

Song of the Jackal

Shame is desolation of soul
Confessed the Cyborg of Galilee
To jackals huddled around him

The morning sun is an icy star
The cold wind is my grief
Stay with me
Make me forget my blood lust

We trust no sun no star no one
But the moon
Said a jackal with raw stumps for ears
Your metal reminds us of our spiritual orb
But your flesh appeals to tooth and gut

So savage the part of me that thrills you
Implored the Cyborg of Galilee
Release me with relish
From my imperfect half

But you have an olive-sized light bulb for navel
We don’t understand your creaturehood
Best not tear what we cannot grasp
Cautioned the mystified jackal

Fleshless
Damn you make me fleshless
Cyborg pounded the small but thick
Glassy window over his throbbing heart

Your iron will go cold without your flesh to warm it
The jackals in unison warned
You will freeze like a forgotten statue in a cave
We ask you to leave and take your infectious turmoil

But I cannot bear to be alone
I cannot love myself
Nor do I have another to love me
Despaired the Cyborg

Then we will give you a song to take with you
The earless Jackal compromised
Stretched his neck upwards angled
Sang an aria composed by the ethereal god
Of birds and burdens
A melody so exquisite and soft and calming
Echoing back and forth the cave’s walls so soulfully
That white roses in slo-mo sprung at the dirty mouth of the cave
And the Cyborg of Galilee rushed at them
Having an involuntary weakness for scented flora
Overwhelmed compelled to sniff them one by one
Forgetting himself and his torment till sundown
All the while repeating the Jackal’s chorus under his breath:

“In the temples of Baalbek
In the fountain of the grape
I will sleep tonight with love
And in the morning wake with blood”.

Baalbek

I.

By moonlight rising red in turbulent skies
Cyborg headed east
To where all things begin

Over the many feminine Galilee peaks
Atop the last breastfull hill
Behold below
The gold and green and red-earth valley
Of Megalomaniac Baal
His barrels of wine everywhere for anyone to drink

But there is no one nowhere to be seen
I am still alone with me and nobody
Grieved the Cyborg and agitated
Threw rocks with all his might at the red-stained moon
I cannot drink alone
For fear of forgetting the words of Neanderthal bones
For fear of remembering the blood-floods of my nightmares

He flung a rock so high
It smacked the scarlet mouth of the moon
Instantly bruising and fast the moon spat out
One hundred paces from the Cyborg’s feet
An eyeless bull with flaming horns

Tame this beast
And you shall see with your own eyes
The gamboling brothels of god spread across the Bekaa
A thousand temples and tonics for your meaninglessness
Scoffed so the moon at Cyborg’s loneliness

Damn you and your exulted rites of death and desire
The Cyborg charged at the eyeless bull
I am the unburnable he shouted
Gripping the bull by the blazing horns
And with one moan-thruster maneuver
Turned the fiendish mass on its side
A swift precise twist cracked its spine
Digitized wrists jerked clinically
Separating bull’s head from body

Look here your beast is bloodless
Nothing but illusion
Irked the Cyborg and the moon laughed

You may dazzle humanity
The Cyborg challenged
But I am artificial intelligence with a chambered heart
Immune to your bathos and your mesmerism
My eyes see you in cross-hairs sepia
My fingernails will grate you into a pile of talcum

I would infect you with an incurable madness
Said the moon rubbing clouds on her bruised lips
But you’re already rattled like a luckless sack of dice

Half-rattled
The Cyborg of Galilee corrected her

Then love and loss
Will break the rest of you bone by bone
Wire by brittle wire
The sword of love and loss will cut you

Cyborg laughed darkly
The only laughter he knows
Neanderthal bones did tell me
My death is possible only
If I solve the riddle of perpetual pain

I have no sympathy for creatures who live
In suspended mortality
The moon hissed impatient

I was created for a cruel purpose
The Cyborg of Galilee agonized
I am consigned to be confined to this tedious world
Till I find the panacea to the sorrows of mankind
I cannot die from violence or torment or madness
Every bone of mine you can crush
My machine self will instantly stem-cell resurrect

There are infinite numbers of ways to slaughter
Some of them quite amusing
Cackled the moon
I will kill you like I used to kill the poets of old
You will die for love
Because of love
Because of the presence of love in the world

The Cyborg threw another stone at the moon and missed
Love is not the poison spat by the mouth of pain
Love is the nurse not the executioner
Only love can save the living from life’s burdened chaos
Words from Neanderthal bones do not lie
The Cyborg insisted

Before I was a sniggering moon
I was a perfect bone joining the shoulders of god
And I can tell you that all the all-seeing moons
Know more about life than bones buried beneath earth or flesh

Cyborg firmly clasped his metallic jaw then cracked it
A series of electronic beeps issued from behind his ears
He forced a cough
Spat into his palm a microchip wafer on a golden chain
Wore it like a choker
Against his renaissance Adam’s Apple
And it shone a blinding blue ray on contact
Then dimmed and blended traceless into his skin

Technological sorcery is for terrestrial rogues and truants
Hooted the taunting moon

The book of god is now in my throat
You cannot teach me anything
You have nothing that I desire
Asserted the Cyborg of Galilee
Gazed up to see the moon catch a shooting star
Use it like a knife on fire
To sculpt a perfect woman from a passing cloud

This here is your tender love
Undulating scent of the flower narcotica
Amorous fog of forgetfulness
Here is your white shadow clinging
To your wretched machinery
Flip-side to heartbroken lonesomeness
Here is your lover half-flesh half-vapor
Here is her heart I made of rain
The smug moon incanted and chanted
And like a gift from a deranged god
A flawless woman fell nude from the sky
Caught by the Cyborg of Galilee
And against his burnished palpitating breastplate
He held her with tender care and awe
Looked deep into her paisley eyes and named her… Lunaphina

Love is thirsty
She whispered in his ear
And he carried her to the darkest valley thicket
Where she made them a bed from her endless streaming hair
Inside the sanctum of the leafiest vine
Where the moon from her red window in the night sky
Could not see them drinking and bathing in Baalean wine
And kissing for six days and seven sheltered nights…

II.

There is no god godly enough to forgive my uxoricide
Wailed the Cyborg of Galilee

Green vine leaves now hung soused in blood
The smell of mud and sweat and wine in scuffled hair

Look here at how I devoured love
Look how violently I wrestled with tenderness
Only the beautiful hand of Lunaphina
Clasping at her heart of rain
Remain
Nothing else of her nowhere
Oh death you are a relentless machine
A double shadow multiplying
Against the walls of my unlovable skull
The Cyborg of Galilee despaired
Tearful but weepless
Crushing willfully a flower underfoot
Prompting a nosebleed trickling over lip
He stumbled away from the unforgettable abattoir of love
Small regretful steps across the squelchy flats of the Bekaa
Till he could see in the northern distance
The monolithic pillars of Baalbek
Sprouting through the earth and pointing high at stars
Giant stone fingers glowing and beckoning.

III.

In the guttural innards of mother machine
Tumultuous memories are erased
Triangular wheels of fortune
Spin fast and perfect circles of translucency
A square blue fire
To seal a torn fleshy heart
Mercury and stardust and oil of titanium
To ward off outbreaks of machine melancholia
This is what Neanderthal bones promised
The Cyborg of Galilee deflating recalled
Standing now dwarfed by the pedestal of a Baalbek column

Where this slippery pillar points I will go quietly he said
And it was days of amnesia and unnameable sorrow
With Cyborg shinnying up and up the endless monolith
Till he reached the apex discus where he stood akimbo

Nothing here but wind and thunder and loneliness
He said and caught a bolt of lightning and stabbed himself
Repeatedly in the eyes
Till all he could see were white-noise tapestries
And under his electrified cobalt heels
A stream of neon tubes erupted knitting a staircase
Pushing upwards to outer droning space
Leading the blinded Cyborg towards the door of the stars

The higher the Cyborg climbed
The more he felt the sensation of falling
Step by electrified vertiginous step
The Cyborg of Galilee ascended so high up
Breaking through the stratosphere’s achromatic hymen
Where the wiry candescent stairs suddenly stopped
And Cyborg putting his foot on nothingness
Fell face first into the endless arms of space

It rains clocks where there is no gravity
Was all the Cyborg could think
Falling weightless in a dreamless slumber
In measureless unfathomable absolute
Space…

IV.

One hundred million times brighter than the sun
A supernova whizzed above Cyborg’s crashed body
Prostrate in an undulating ocean of snow
The orange and purple fire of its tail
Burning off his thick head of hair and eyebrows
Foul stench of ammonia and pickled protein
Stirring the Cyborg from his cryogenic sleep
Flooding back the saddest of memories
Oh the unforgettable scent of Lunaphina

Remind me why the heart is chambered
The Cyborg looked around and lamented
I am still me and here
The butcher of Lunaphina
The crusher the gnasher of utter tenderness
The flesh of me in love and loss
The metal of me in absolute indifference
The total of me in irreconcilable failure
I have no love for myself nor cure for mankind
Why did my maker set me an impossible task
Why assign me the mysteries of the elixir of life
When the tools of love and alchemy are denied me
I was a fool to have hope for myself
To think that a thornless rose was growing within me
When all the while my seed was empty
And hope itself
Was the enemy of the laws of my universe
Oh my breakage my own doing
Not even the curative words of Neanderthal bones
Can now subdue the eternal murderer in me

No – I no longer believe in the words of bones

Cyborg rose reluctant and stood hunched on an icecap
Brushing snow off his gleaming metallic body
A single snowflake clinging to the glass window over his heart

New beginnings are always a clink away
The eyeless snowflake pleaded and clung dearer

My destiny is per-determined
I have no free-will therefore I will never have new beginnings
Cyborg impatient smashed a fist at the flake on the glass
And the window over his pulsing heart shattered
What merciful hand will claw out the heart which pumps
Forever in me
What celestial sickle can harvest my wires with a single swoop
The cyborg attempted to grasp at his heart
But found it impossible to touch the sacred drum

Damn these metal hands
Programmed to halt all acts of self-mutilation
I can do nothing because nothing I am

The snowflake still clinging to a shard of broken glass
Wept blue steaming tears that melted the ocean of snow in an instant
And a dark tide rose and carried them funereal
In its watery breast a sad pearl eulogy for company
Carried them back to the tranquil Phoenician sea
To the shores at the feet of the hills of Galilee

Within me I hold a single water-seed
A speck of mirror made of transparent love
I am the gatekeeper and vault
Of the future of futures
I am hope eternally multiplying
The snowflake glistening melting in the sun said
Believe me lick me drink me quick
I have the power to water the flower of the dead
I can show you how to shut the window of pain
Wide open over the world

The Cyborg of Galilee deaf from guilt and anguish
Blurry-eyed watched the imploring snowflake
Swish and slowly turn to vapor on shattered glass

Waves crashing empty foam at his californium ankles

I remember being here once before
Said the Cyborg to himself
Yes it was right here that I was created without a childhood
Assembled from crystallized alloys and tender human pulp
It was here that I was force-fed the Akashic records
And every fiber of information under the sun
It was here that I was offered the wretched choice
Between cherishing a flower or worshiping a nail
Between petal or metal
Between pollen or rust
And I did not know then oh how could I
That the tender flower I would choose
Was attached to god’s perpetual hammer

Cyborg knelt and fingered the wet whispering surf
It was right here that the scent of a flower
First stupefied me with its etheric vapor of love
The absolute necessity of my surrender
To its soulfulness
Wondrousness
Perfect consciousness

Cyborg’s eyes drooped with unbearable sadness
Oh grief I now remember the last words
Of sinking Neanderthal bones:

“The hoarse song of death
In the hollows and marrows of man
Will echo with every birth
And toll with every mirth
Till man becomes all machine
Or machine becomes all man”.

V.

In purgatorial time
Only inertia and misery exist
Absence of sufficient alpha particles
Deficiencies of automated nano-tec sugars in the bloodstream
In the fibrous nuclei of the world and surrounding space
And the everlasting presence of the unfathomable dark curtain of night
Imposed on man by the god of birthing tunnels
Make seed possible
Make dreams possible
Make the Cyborg of Galilee
Seeker of the pheromones of Lunaphina
Tread the Galilee an outcast
Surrendered to bondage of the impossible riddle
Empty of words
Prophetless
Killer and orphaned flower-lover
Stalked by the golden jackals of Galilee
Unseen troubadours of midnight
Sniffing out imperceptible traces
Of the blood of his heart and the oils of his metals
Howling and infecting the lonesome Cyborg’s nights
With their song of desire and despair

A lullaby for the ears of a troubled future.

Cyborg In The Mirror

Fingerprints of man and god
On the rope of my jugular
Between inner ear and third-eye
Oh cage of my nightmares
I should be beheaded without fanfare
My nostrils sewn with rusty wires
My arms amputated and thrown whole
At loveless sharks to fight over
Blind hands severed by tooth for murder
Fingers that ripped apart
With profanity and drunken vengeance
The only woman I have known to adore me
O tower of love O Lunaphina
All flowers now wilt at my strangler’s touch
No blossom will allow me smell or approach
Because it is true that a lover’s blood
Spilled sudden on the white sheets of god
Is ever unwashable
No lemon lather no chemical bleach
Can purify the clinging dark alchemy of a slayer
I am forever stained therefore I will bury myself
To the neck in the waste of jackals
Rub dead eggs on my nasal concha every wretched hour
Birthing fungus dying fungus I deserve to breathe
Putrefaction of my olfactory be my desire
So I may bury the haunting memory
Of the sweet scent of Lunaphina
A thousand cruel punishments a day I ache to embrace
No mercy for me never
Because the hour of perfume
Has forever abandoned me
O misery o marvelous misery of Adam
I will stand shattered before this mirror
And it will crack a thousand times
A thousand pieces of glass I will feed myself

In the dim hope of forgetting the seventh night.

Rain

Is beautiful

But no rain is more beautiful
Than the rain cupped in Lunaphina’s heart

Cyborg of Galilee
Soaked in pluvious drops of grief
Muddied eyeballs
Laments skywards
To a thrashing storm

Sadness is a deluge
Of wounded words
From the book of memories
Oh martyrdom and sorrow
Of crushed innocence
Oh hammer-tongue of love
Ah you thorny carnal feathers
Come pierce with whispers my hours to hell
Oh sad hell of infinite needles
I warned the blue bruise of the sky
No sadder place exists
But here this here
The lone tomb of the heart

Cyborg beats at his chest incessantly
Rhythmically
Rains smack at the white of his eyes
He cries mud
Blue ink trickles out of his ears
Drop by drop to the ground
The name of Lunaphina in blue is writ
Then washed
Writ and washed again

As if a Cyborg’s ablution is possible.

Frogs D’Amour

For thirty rainy full moon nights
Three million frogs encircled him
Sad god on his knees with raindrops
Perfect statue of lovelessness
Worshiped by six million bulging eyes
Neck to neck frogs packed imploring
Lungs inflated mouths big as bellies
Wailing hoarse high pitched
Erratic desperate deafening droning
Syncopated swirls of white-noise piercing
The swish of a mass of fizzling stars
Lancinating maddening
The ears of man and mountain
Music to bleed to in slo-mo
A cacophonous chorus for the damned
Haunting the baffled night
And the scrambled moth that stumbled in the shadowland

Yet the Cyborg of Galilee was irreconcilable
Unmoved immovable insomniac
Numb to sensation and alphabet
Insensible to three million throats beckoning him
To halt his merciless self-loathing
And seek for himself some human sleep

Oh your dream is waiting your dream is waiting
Frogs croaked in a glistening din of despair

But Cyborg was absent in mind and present nowhere
Nothing could move him to move an inch

Cyborg has rocks with roots in his ears
Yodeled the male amphibians to the stars
Pelt him with petals the females incanted
Pelt him with all the petals in the world

And so it was that six million webbed hands
Threw six million petals per minute and all night

Finally burying the Cyborg deep deep deep
Under a scented mountain of blossom

Tomb for the forgiven
Oh incubator of dreams…

Cyborg Counts To Zero

Before he discovered love
The Cyborg of Galilee sang to himself a lullaby
Counting to zero to open the door of sleep:

ONE: there is only me in the meadow of sorrow

TWO is the addictive number of love and war

THREE is me my shadow and my shadow’s shadow

FOUR are the pieces of my heart stitched asunder

FIVE petals five some thorns for when I die and when I’m born

SIX eternities I counted once in a single morn

SEVEN jackals and seven prophets I rejected to befriend

EIGHT stars I pounded into the powder of sleep

NINE nights in a row I dreamed of god

ZERO is the number of my understanding.

Milk Thistle

Below a pinhead Venus and the crescent moon
A great wind and chaos whipped up
Rolled over odorized fields of wild thyme
Shaking jujube and budding fig in the dark
Rattling the veiny nerves of vine leaves
Blowing here blowing there howling-howling
Dust and time at the eyes of moths
Turning them upside-down in mid flight
Whirling shadows of leaves and twisted wings on earth
And shapeless fists that beat on thirsty rocks in the night
Oh how the sky was in tearless agony
Coughing out blank pages from future bibles
White words on luminous sheets
Falling in slo-mo
Gathering like a ghost blanket
Over a bleary-eyed Cyborg
Nude and fetal
On a bed of rocks and milk thistle.

Thorns in eyes make for sore vision
He mustered a whisper

What is this place, life?
Who is making this thought?
Something is propelling my thoughts into words
A strange force within me pushing me out
And all around me data
Pushing me backwards inwards
Nameless
Shapeless force
Full of breath or wind I cannot tell
Less than air but more than infinity
Oh ethereal dictum
Alchemical abstract quantum
Leapers imaginary leapers
Thoughts like dancers twisting in midair
Marvelous cognitive lace unveiled
Hands of ideas weaving the hairs of air
Hall of thoughts hall of mirrors multiplying me
And I am another seeing another me and the other of another
I am many spectacular many
Oh dear twigs of god
I am not alone
It seems
I am not the loneliness of a machine
I am not the cold in the veins of metal
I am not the loathsome odorless unknown

I am

Not within the seed of creation
But the third fruit
Of the tree of man

Therefore I must embrace

My flesh my metal my thought

My prototype.

Miracle

To be truly free
Is to kiss the mouth of death
With no shudder or fear of life
To catch the untouchable sparrow in the olive tree
Breathe without need of air or roses
To drink the blazing milk of time
With the ghost of sad love beside you
O violent fight in a beautiful garden
That you should one day call me victor
Immortal aspect beyond copulation
Decisive miracle offspring
Not man not machine not god
But with ribs from each
And from each a perfect thought.

DIAMONDS

The devil is made of triangles
And not a circle in his bones
The cyborg of Galilee cross-browed
Said to his shadow by an icy lake

Oh fickle father of death
Because I am so useless to life
Why not turn my bones to diamonds
Mother of living death
Your lips to diamonds
Your teeth to feathers
Your breast to the rising sun
Or else I will seek you out in the cracks of my skull
Strangle you for your abduction of man
I will force the answer to the riddle of pain
From the onyx of your solar plexus
Plunge repeatedly your thorax with the key of life
You will taste raw death
Or you will confess
All answers you hide from me and man

Cyborg grabbed his shadow in a headlock
Charging the frozen waters with fury
Deep diving the icy deep outside of time
Away from ethereal scribe and eye of iceberg
Cyborg pounding gnashing tearing to death
Death and the ancestry of death
Before noting that death has no mouth
No words
No knowledge

No blood.

Exit Exists

I am the only fly in a field of butterflies

I live to live
With purpose and with no purpose
But to live

I must be content with this
My reality

This is what Neanderthal bones once told me
But I was too machine then to understand

Too human to grasp.

Love Song To Lunaphina

Who said the moon is silver?
It is gold gold gold
In faint water
Gold like your skin
Lunaphina
Gold like the gold of your eyes
Golden gold the milk
Of your breast
The milk of your loin
Oh Lunaphina
The tremble of your pale gold passage.

Lullaby For Lunaphina

Love
Subatomic particle
In my gray gland
And in my blue gland
A hologram
Of lonesome Lunaphina
Gazing at me
Tormented
Tormenting
Haze of woman
Rain of woman
Oh mist oh essence
Of Lunaphina
Un-falling into me
Un-embracing me
In eternity’s maze
Waiting
For eternity
To grow old
Shrink to a dewdrop
That I can lick
Like hemlock
My Wedlock
Oh Spanish love song that I adore
My slow epic agony
I dream to sleep with you
To hear the music of mort and hound
The sound of hooved raindrops on roses
Clock and plucked string in a cave
Debating death’s immeasurable silence
Oh sweet Lunaphina
My impossible
Protozoan conjugation.

The Final Stitch

When you’ve seen rains falling
From the eyes of the sun
Nothing left
But to take a vow of silence
Nothing left to witness
No more forced testimony
No nothingness and agony
All words in my chest
I’ve now tied to rocks
And swallowed in the dark
(So drown in your lone pit you thinker drown!)
Oh solar plexus
My graveyard of storms
No more singing despair to the skies
My lips stitched with soporific bramble
Unwilling voice padlocked to bones
Oh capsule in cave with no echo
Book of my life I wrote with tooth and nail
I will sit here where desire ends
Silent and fetal mountain in bereavement
I will let nature overwhelm me
Climb me in my surrender
Grow over me in slo-mo sorrow

My metal inside a tree trunk in a thousand years.

*****

 CODA

Word

I.

Mono-breasted woman
Mankind’s conclusion
The last thinker and lover of language
Wept and read rapt
Cyborg’s story of love and loss
And golden jackals beside her consoling her
With hypnotic eyes and small moans of mercy
Interpreted her choking tears as passive permission
To plant a seed of thorn brush
In the grave she dug herself in their cave
Water it with the milk of her lonesome bosom
Bury it to make a lily-white garden
Instead of a dark and heady tomb

Thus the jackals with muddy paws
Labored horticultural
And chorused in unison at the lactating orphan:
“Oh you will live and see many tomorrows
For no other purpose but to live and ponder
Live and wonder
Live though conclusion and meaning of life
Are eternally mute
Moot
Oh marvelous epic with no last page”.

II.

Adam was first and now you are last
And everyone in between it seems
Is meaningless
Even you and Adam are meaningless
Oh the shivers and terrors
Of accepting meaninglessness

Infinite meaninglessness.

III.

With articulate jackals following at her heals
Not sad not happy not sober or drunk
The last survivor headed north away from Galilee
Towards denticulate Mount Lebanon
Seeking the tallest widest cedar tree
In the hope of finding the Cyborg of Galilee
Curled and sleeping inside its ancient trunk

But such a task could take a lifetime
She confessed to sighing jackals
Every night under empty moonlight.

IV.

The last page was made of rain
Or was that my tears cupped
For jackals to drink from
She remembered mulled whispered:
Dear Cyborg of Galilee
Where do you sleep
Where do you bathe
Where do you practice
The art of dreaming of your maker
Where can I find
More of your torn memories
Disheveled collection of memoria technica
Where can I touch you explore you
Without losing myself lonesome
In a maze of hallucinations and cryptomnesia

You will knock on the door of every tree in the world
The king of the jackals interrupted
And you will never find the Cyborg of Galilee
I urge you not to cultivate hope nor aspiration
Harbingers of doom and madness in this empty world
Beware of seeking meaningfulness beware-beware

With drooped head she nodded agreement:
I will seek no hope
No martyr of love will hold me hostage
No love song no perfume be my bondage
I have learned this lesson from the Cyborg of Galilee
But I will continue my impossible senseless journey
Of life
Be witness to its specks and big bangs
Woman with eyes that can never close
Passenger with nothingness for destination
Empty of child and the thrill of ambition
Void of attachments to history and to the future

The king of the jackals circled her
You have problems with your present
He sidled up breathing on her wrist

Yes every inhalation presents me with a proposition
She raised her arms then fanned them down
All this world is mine and mine alone
And all the clocks in the world are mine alone
I am time’s only remaining child
Insomniac child with a thousand beds
And not a storyteller to sooth my existence

Yes I can live adjusted without excesses
Without the creature comforts
Of the gaudy old world
But I fear that without the bread of stories
Without the milk of fiction and fable
I might become a wasteland beast like you
But without fecundity without dazzle
A bipedal sorrowful celibate jackal

The pack shifted unsure of her meaning
And their king licked his lips to calm them down
We jackals never understood
Why man
Depends so much on stories
Drawings etched with blood and dust
On the curves of our caves for millennia

Perhaps when you’re free to howl
There’s no need for stories
She muttered bracing herself

Then howl howl!
The jackals suggested in unison

How can I when repeated howling scratches my thorax
And words passage through it so smooth
Uninhibited divine

And what is the point of howling
When it’s impossible for a human
To forget their dictionary of words
Impossible to stop the use of words
Even when a vow of silence is taken

Every manifested internal thought
Is built by the bricks of silent words

Words words words
Words exist
Because consciousness exists
Words rush like unseen blood
Through the brain and soul of every mortal
For the love of the twang of words
God made this world a contradiction
Made man aware of his impossible condition
All for the love of words
God made beauty and horror and all opposites
To widen the lexicon of life and death

We are not concerned with god
The king of the Jackals mused
Laid at her feet like a sphinx
Impossible for us to relate
To the human concept of god
We live for the belly
And the blood rush of our loins
Our existence is perfect
We have no questions

She laid on the ground and looked at stars
I have been forced and I have flung asunder
All unanswerable questions
But one pulsing question remains

A single question can trip and fling you
Into a hall of mirrors for a lifetime
The jackal sighed and rolled sleepy on his side

I wish to know where Cyborg is she said

King jackal yawned
His pack followed suit and slumped
Huddling up for comfort

He’s the only storyteller in the world
She whispered
Perhaps I will find him
Or plausible he finds me before I die

You may be the last of the last
But you are nobody and nobody will be finding you
Pointless to be wishing your last days away
If I had your biography
If I was the last jackal in the world
I would wish for no mortal nothing
But I would chortle and laugh like a playful child
At the black comedy of my condition

She closed her eyes with brows relaxed:
There’s a comfort in being a nobody a nothing
I am consoled by the transience of life
I have seen the mother of all wars
The destruction of humanity in seven days
I have inherited the meaningless wealth
Left behind by industrious humanity
All their good for nothing objects are mine
All nugatory and no compelling narrative
See me here now
I have come to discover in sorrow
When comforts are violently snatched
All that remains in the chocking rubble
Valid sanguine vital remaining
Is an inner voice and a trunk of words
Oh it would so be my bliss
To spend the rest of my days
With body reclined and eyes closed
Listening to story after story after story

For moments everyone breathed in calm unison

Let me share a secret with you she stirred
And the king of the jackals opened one eye

When I wake up every morning she said
I think of being buried in your belly
When I die when I die oh when I perish
I would embrace the comfort of our closeness

All the jackals rolled closer to her
All their tails braided and quilted to cover her

Because I love you all she said
Because you are all I have to love
You should know my most intimate
Involuntary compulsion
My recurring persuasion
You should know that every night before I sleep
The image of a fountain pen is the last thing I see

King Jackal exhaled with nose to ground:
Eve’s last image before she died
Was a worm by an apple multiplying
I see no difference
Between pen and worm
Jackal said and closed his lantern eye

Maybe tonight I will close my eyes for the last time
She whispered and buried her head under furry tails.

V.

After you die

There will still be stars
Whispered the jackal
Foolish to have thought
That stars were made for you
For your eyes
For the dreams of mankind
When essentially stars were made
Only
For one another.

Curtain

There’s a third hand on every clock
Passing under
The bridge of numbers
Passing through absence of time
Death
Not death
But neither life neither

Unwordable everything
Inside a kernel of nothingness
Stuffed into the mouth of time

So let us hold hands with memory
Let us hold hands with a broken stranger
On a rainy bridge
Let us speak with eyes only
Oh soul clinging to cells of man
We are here
We are here
To dream of dreaming
To count the endless zeros
In the belly of the sky
To forget the unwordable

Inevitable

Watch the wind blowing
A curtain burning in a window.

E N D

Standard

7 comments:

  1. Taxi, dear Taxi,

    After the first reading, my mind does somersaults of wonder at your imagery, the amalgam of mysticism, philosophy, poetry , beauty and Love and loss, unfathomable wordings, a dream of our unexplained unexplainable existence…. your use of the language 

    WOW !! I am totally lost for words !!

    Cyborg is in all of us and with us all 

    Thank you for sharing this most personal intimate part of you.

  2. seanmcbride says:

    Coleridge is in the house. 🙂 — (perhaps a bit of Kafka, too) — this is much more engaging than political commentary.

    I am reading this slowly — and have just barely scratched the surface.

    Dystopian and apocalyptic doesn't begin to cover it — actually, you may be intuiting an imminent future (otherwise known as prophesying).

    This could possibly be rendered as a powerful animated film — the visual images are vibrant and memorable.

    I need to get deeper into this with multiple slow-motion rereadings before understanding the full dimensions of the words on the page (screen).

     

  3. Bornajoo says:

    Wow Taxi! After reading this just now for the first time I'm amazed, humbled and bedazzled. What a talent you are. Your divine use of the written word leaves me at a complete loss of my own. Bintbiba and Sean have done a much better job above

    I will read again and again as it deserves and try and return with a modicum of coherence.

    Thank you for feeding our minds

     

     

     

     

     

  4. annie says:

    i just got as far as the brilliant "miracles" and "diamonds" one right after the other. i'll read the rest ..soon. i loved those two simultaneous parts. it seemed like the perfect place to thank you. 😉

  5. seanmcbride says:

    Ok — this poem isn’t about an imminent dystopia or apocalypse — it goes much deeper than that — it’s about the fundamental problematic nature of human existence and of all existence, in which time and mortality consume and erase everything (including gods and superhuman beings).

    Certain passages reminded me of A.I. (Stanley Kubrick/Steven Spielberg), Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, especially the Rutger Hauer character — Roy Batty), Dante (The Divine Comedy — Beatrice/Lunaphina), Matthew Arnold (Empedocles on Etna), Richard Wagner (The Ring cycle, especially Das Rheingold) and T.S. Eliot (Four Quartets) — but it is completely original.

    Nice: “force-fed the Akashic records / And every fiber of information under the sun”

    My favorite passage:

    BEGIN QUOTE
    Words words words
    Words exist
    Because consciousness exists
    Words rush like unseen blood
    Through the brain and soul of every mortal
    For the love of the twang of words
    God made this world a contradiction
    Made man aware of his impossible condition
    All for the love of words
    God made beauty and horror and all opposites
    To widen the lexicon of life and death
    END QUOTE

    One could view the poem as a humanist interpretation and critique of Ray Kurzweil’s utopian (and arguably simpleminded) vision of transhumanism and artificial superintelligence.

    Some fascinating thoughts are rolling around in your mind while you walk your dogs, Taxi.

    Note:

    Roy Batty in Blade Runner:

    BEGIN QUOTE
    I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
    Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
    I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.
    All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
    Time to die.
    END QUOTE

    (Those lines always send shivers up my spine.)

  6. Taxi says:

    Thanks everybody – I really do appreciate the time you took to read my story.  I wanted to give readers a new year's gift that's outside the norm – and on such a dull news cycle on the last day of the year.  Many thanks again to you all: bintbiba, Sean, Bornajoo, and the marvelous annie.  May this coming year bring closure to at least one or two flaming wars.  And may we all remain a step ahead of the news curve.

    Peace.

    • Walid says:

      Hi Taxi, great writing. Gone through the very picturesque Part I  and will continue a bit later. Very nice, I can see how much you love the land.

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