Rapture

It was a day not unlike another. The binary stars in the sky shone radiant energy upon the ground and heated the earthen terrain below. Kurt Kilgore, however, would hear something disturbing on this morning.
The crux of which was this…the world as he knew it was bound to end. As with so many other worlds and so many other times, existence as he knew it was set to end. This had been foretold by the prophet, Ford Douglas. The video screen mounted upon Kurt’s wall explicated this point in a trumpeting voice.
“The rapture is upon us. The signs are in everything and those who do not repent shall face the wrath of the Creator. Those who chose the straight and narrow shall be whisked away from the planet with haste. So long”
The image on the screen was a man adorned in gilded robes. It was at this point that Douglas began flapping about a kipper the size of his hand. He shrieked, speaking in tongues. This glossolalia, shrill and percussive in much the same way one would hold a pitch on a glockenspiel, resembles that of some cetacean found in his planet’s 12 oceans.
“Thanks.” Douglas’s effigy bellowed after he felt sufficiently accomplished with his high pitched fricative sonorizations.
Such messages were often common throughout the history of his people, the point of which escaped Kurt. He imagined it could be one of several reasons. Perhaps he thought, it was remarkably like children crying for the attention of their mothers. His alternative hypothesis being that the most salient of messages were the most ominous and in many ways, he was right. Something felt different about this. Douglas had all the trappings of a harbinger of closing remarks. Mostly, he wondered what a kipper was and how one would go about the business of kipping. It might be important.
Kurt, puzzled at the cryptic symbolism of it all, checked his clock which was adjacent to a leak on the wall opposite his video monitor. For reasons neither he, nor members of his species could explain, leak was the word for mirror. He supposed it was some sort of hole between things meant to be kept sealed.
The mirror displayed a young man of twenty. His hair curled across his eyes like a veil intended to shroud its wearer from the outside world’s inadequacies whilst also shrouding his inner insufficiencies from the world. The eyes behind reflected a hazel tone that was as soft as it was forgiving. The ocular cavities sloped to a broad yet regal nose. His brown mustache sat above his lips in much the same way his hair did upon his head. The gravity of it might suppress the less weighty of his words and deflect mordant criticisms. His slender frame was two-toned, alabaster and tan. The doppelganger on the other side had noticed something and so had he.
8:00 am…He realized the time had come to frequent his place of employment.
As he walked, in a most dismissive manner with a quivering concern he uttered these words….
“Today’s a good day for rapture.”
He said so due in large part to his love for a woman. Not one to take things at face value he pondered what that represented. Love, as much as he could surmise about its meaning, boiled down to this: The desire to do anything, including abject humiliation, to get in another’s good graces. Many scientists on his planet disagreed and boiled it down to a soup that was comprised mostly of broth. There, simply put, wasn’t much steak for all the sizzle. Scientists concluded this probably because of their own lack of experience with the matter outside a laboratory…and quite likely in their mother’s basement.

A woman was a female of the species that Kurt belonged to. They often sported longer hair than the males. They had smaller bodies, an adaptation made to belie their more subtle hypnotic powers of persuasion. They had orbs mounted on their chests as well as a chasm between their legs that were the chief progenitors of these powers, second only to their brains. He often thought breasts must have a mind of their own because of their proximity to people he fancied. By the same token, he couldn’t help but be of the mind that undergarments that guarded the former must be equally brilliant.
All together it signified quite a silly sentiment. Kurt was no more in control of his own actions a propos the woman he loved. He was mesmerized by her. The totality of things that made her comprised the totality of his aims for his own existence. She was beautiful, kind and intelligent. Mere mentions of her made his heart do somersaults, back flips, and tumble like a dryer sheet. The judges might award a perfect 10 for these feats were they done by something other than a sanguine sphere propelled only by alacrity. Consumers on the planet would later come to give rave reviews to the dryer sheet as well. A dryer sheet was a small section of porous material that lent its softness and freshness to clothes after one put them in a mechanical apparatus that used an electric heating element to remove moisture from clothes. Incidentally, he fancied his heart to share many characteristics with dryer sheets. It was all to willing to share its weakness with others and generally spent large portions of time being jostled about until its desirable qualities were mined out, at which point it was thrown with all the other refuse, such as movie tickets and pocket lint. He imagined that his awkwardness functioned like a dryer as well. Only it removed wetness from women’s the demesnes of women’s leg chasm, the moisture being a reflection of their interest in copulating with him.
Like the clothes in the dryer, he thought of all the ways he could wear her, the most entertaining way being on his arm. He thought that of all the ways, out would be most likely. Soon enough he would be at work.
Work was rapture worthy as well. In the same way he wished to be relieved of the responsibility of duties as a dryer sheet. Work on his planet was one of the most soul-crushing activities one could engage in. The purpose of it was to gather tiny pieces of paper requisite for one’s survival. Even if a person enjoyed their job, the fact that they had to spend hours of their day as a cog in some nameless machine ground against the teeth of even those most well-geared to handle expropriation.
He worked in a cubicle, a cubicle being, as the name would imply, a tiny cube. The Rapture was slated to happen at 4:20 in his afternoon. He had hoped he would avoid being required to practice his function as a sentient dryer sheet. However, he had a deep seated concern that he might never do so again.
The hours dragged on. The clock laboriously grinding like so many gears in the machine Kurt called employer. With each passing hour, outwardly he expressed his disdain for the world, the girl and prestidigitation of some talking head in a robe. Inwardly, he didn’t feel in accordance with his exterior. He wondered what Earth would be like with the non-presence of people. He reckoned it would be quite bland…like that kipper Douglas had held earlier with no salt. He had no choice but to wait, as much as he found it to his dislike. His chagrin hit its peak at 4:19. He prepared for the worst. An agonizing removal from his corporeal form. A slough off the old mortal coil.
In an instant it happened.
He was enveloped by blue light and suddenly he found himself in a place remarkably like the heaven he always thought was made up to sell self-help books. The ground shone a silverfish gray and the walls were adorned with golden runes. He found the whole enterprise to be quite puzzling. Like a puzzle, pieces didn’t quite fit together easily in his mind. The rapture might have occurred but he was quite alone.
A hooded figure approached him. Nothing could prepare Kurt for the sight he would observe upon the removal of the shroud.
“I am your creator,” uttered the fricative voice.
The being took his, or her, Kurt wasn’t quite sure, hand and revealed itself. Not the sort of revealing oneself that got you removed from the subway, mind you. More like the end of a story that causes that “oohhh” moment.
The gestalt was quite thorough. As thorough as it could be finding that the creator of all things was a sea dwelling mammal. The Creator’s grey skin and blowhole served to explain a lot. For example, why had he never shown himself, why the red herring must be kippered for later use and why religion stunk so much.
The being explained to Kurt that he was in fact the only sentient being on the planet. His presence here was as the ambassador for the race of androids. The being spared his planet because all the automatons all pretended to care for the fate of the planet and in actuality did not, while Kurt pretended to not care, and did.
“You may have one wish” spoke the Being.
“I wish that you grant her autonomy,” requested Kurt
Kurt waved goodbye, “So long and thanks for the wish.”
He was returned to the planet, wiser and more in tune with his responsibilities and more in tune with the former android that you the reader will know only as Her or She. They lived happily after, the puppet girl cut from her strings and the dryer sheet…
And so on….

Her of Insufferable Necessity (Heroin)

Her fantasy, admirably, is to be a combat medic
Dressing wounds in a dress
It fits so fantastically on a femme so empathetic
Syringe wetted with astringents, to end the pain so fetid

Cool and calculated like a computer with steel
Blue as a violet the hue of my iris
Tied to the electroencephalogram
Extremities spanned across memories, calm as diazepam

Magnetic resonance imaging
Displays waves of dissonance limiting
Gray parietal vitals shimmering
All of my love for my nurse emitting
So viral antibiotics can’t stop the hypermitotic riled static of myelin
Miles engrained into my brain
In time, denial replaced by pain
My heart rate rose as ruby tulips
To lips sparked fate like a match to looseleaf
Woozy, with clarity comes patience
My heroin moves me from my nascent awakeness to a patient adjacent
Blood racin’ at this particularly wasted occasion
Prickly, hair raisin on the base of my spine
The particular kind roused by her embracing
Sick in the mind, bicuspids grind
When I’m without her face
In a somnambulist haze
Affluent praise, “Ma’am you’ve been grazed by the had of the divine”

The IV mainlines my lifeline
The same time it rights mind
Ivy veins, vines by night climb
When it rains, winds a tight line
I be vain, I’m high on her
I’m entranced by even a glancing blow of her romancing
Chancing this cancer dancing through is worth the headache of the operation

My bed quakes with red tape fear of isolation
She has no peer in my concentration
Pure, in my observation
As far as I’ve gone I’m waiting for the medicine she has in store
Reticent more and more, I engorge
On the lore of the wounded healer
I a centaur horse poor and destitute
I’d give the moon to feel her
Boon whether real or fake
With patients comes clarity
My distress temporarily convalesces until she effervesces
Endorphines morphin to orphans
Can’t nurse me back from my own vivisection
I push the button, to call my heroin.
I put the arrow in for my love injection

Monk-Kn(om)

Down the rabbit hole, the Abbot stole away
Arias starry and branches of olives
I’ll live thousands of years in solitude
If only to call it to attention
So that it might reveal intention
Release tension
Dispensed, not in rivers, but in drops
Forever delivered, it never stops
Props to the beauty of your voice
Choice poised poinsettia in color and noise
Cloistered in clusters
Moisture in mustard seed faith
Boisterous up thrustward mountains, valleys and lakes
8 folds in my path
So I fold time, space and math
Vitruvian viscera graces multiple places
Faces traces of patients, patience
And makeshift vacuums made faceless
By want, gracious
Replaces the vacant once salacious, fallacious, rapacious desires
With lattice laced with flowery shapes
Erased in taste for the fire
That was once displaced
Scrolls for understanding roles and how the cycle spins
Arms spoke by cycles, spiral in a file of the djinn
Bottled, lamping in ample temptation not taken
The bait dangled in and on the hook

I decline to acquiesce to all request
My mind’s self indulgence repressed
Tis best to reciprocate
Give don’t take
Except advice
Veracity is the capacity to understand sagacity only comes from passively speaking while listening actively
Map it, see with apathy, but never adapt it without tactic
Telepathically is merely acting empathically
Acting…Fact: it never succeeds
I’d rather be, me,
Free in a sea of conformity
Swarming boringly in a snoring tree
Of all the norms I see
Them of shrunken heads
Diminish all the grins off the finish, start and middle
Little did they know, I fiddled with the belfry
It’s next tell will make hell freeze over
New Dehli will for one second by purged of the pestilence of selfishness
And a surge of selflessness will melt in bliss
The most frozen of hearts, a cozened ohm to which no resistance would start
Artifices startled the vicious to stop desirious thoughts seditious
Artisans owed in great measure, the Earth’s most sacred treasure
Inner peace now free to all and artists, the monk parted
Back to his hermitage Mahal

Typewriter

I wonder if I can type this out
Nigh blunder when I write this out
But the tight lipped mouth
Can just as easily send things south

The message moves messenger
Messiah moves method, myrrh
Frankincense, making cents
Shekels, shilling and gold
Billing told of his coming

Cave paintings count
Cavemen painting, words
Though, in sense, of intense
Hunting and gathering
Against, battling for survival

Sumerian summers
Chisels as runners
Euphrates cradles these
Infant, etchings old
Like kvetchings

Hieroglyphs highlighted
Halicarnassus hecatombs
Nile reeds, logographs read
Symbol, of Ra, of Isis wrote set of
Soot and water on papyrus, Rosetta

Phoenicians phoneticize
Fun for Ephesians to Phoneme prize
Wisdom, wizened them
Ancient, a pillar of classic
In ages, a pillar that seem to last since Jurassic

Latin loving Legatus
Leave legacy in Lexicon
Romulus and Remus, wrongs writes Realist
Reticent, a column of Stoicism
Read instant, all of them of knowing wisdom

Kyoto katatana
Kanji konjured on Katana
Hiragana on Inariyama
Discipline, a white yojimbo haiku
Made like Dakuten dots in limbo, you
Mounted moors and mamluq
Mastered Mongols
Saladin stopped paladins
Ayyubids, of Arabic
By the bid of Salaam

Gutenburg goldsmith
Granted glory
Printing pressing, ending oppression
Learning, pass a torrent
Yearning masses absorb it

Hvem, who, Hansen
He has hatched his
Rev. Rasmus’ writing ball, atmosphere write it all
Next complex qwerty typewriters
Vex perplex wordy rhymewriters.

Computer
Can confound CEO
Poets go, know it though
Paid for typing,
Not writing so I can get paid
Disguising it, because inside I have nothing to say
To them

See, my chest is a jade hemp impressed palimpsest
Progressing and carapaced to a yojimbo’s armor
Bushido, I bleed torrent ink, fight Warlords,
Kamikaze, I write not for Lords, but the Divine Wind
I divine in my dojo. The Nile flowing, knowing, Knowledge homing to my brain
Rev Rasmus’s writing ball, signal hit past this inciting my inner Solomon
Shamanic demonstrations occur
on my external dermal abrasions
Transformation happens, skin turned to papyrus
Displays in my form placed in a new echelon
On and on, om. My Will, earthen
My legs pillars of classic construction
Arms stoic tools for the destruction of the junction that’s been
Clouding shrouds the seas of Pleas to the divine
Wielding a samurai sword I seek to align the is with should be
Chiseling, I crave to paint the pointed point of the message
I, was and will always be, phonetic, morphemic, pictographic, logographic, photographic, the Word
Salaam

Cygnus "Noir"oses (A Tribute to Natalie)

Frenetic beat
Energetic feet
Twist telekinetic symbols
Inch by magnetic inchful
Pinch dull motions
Only streams of emotion
Consciousness, devotion
Corrosion to close in
Explosion to grow when
Pressed for explanation
Tendons begin bending
Socket’s Rotation
Ending in ligament ascending
Gyration to Pirouette
By grace in the name of the Holy Ghost
Wholly engrossed in what we call movement
Most to all are soothed
From opening number to tomb it
Makes on ruminant, consume in it
Breathe the soon, now and later
Dance the dance of the animator
Salivate the silhouette
Gyration to pirouette
Populations forget
Animations and the dance to beget
Beset, ligaments slide
Through predicament and into frying pan fire collide
Sockets glide rocketed through, past, and to pockets with trouble inside
Tendons panic sent past mishap in form of pride
Pressed for one last exhilaration
Corpus Cygnus died
Flied, rather than to have never flown
Flown, divide two sides, inside-out
Yin-yang, implied by the things put forth
By motions withdrawn.
Dichotomy in life and lobotomy. Pas de deux Swan
Orchestra strikes upon a chord
Minor makes lifting the spell’s discord require
She die

Not drifting but swifting
Into a wall, down a brick well
Shifting from dead swan to dead women
How bittersweet, life so
For the fowl
Of beauty of feat, feeling defeat
Her lover dances the delicate dance of mourning
Frenetic beat, cease storming

Evil by Langston Hughes

At Open Mic on Thursday a lady read this poem and gave me it on sheet of paper afterwards. Perhaps, I'd like to think, it's a bit like the fortune inside a cookie and will bear some significance on the days events


Looks like what drives me crazy
Don't have no effect on you--
But I'm gonna keep on at it
Till it drives you crazy, too

Another Sleepless Knight

Sleepless knights
Insomnia’s affection
Is all in the predilection
To spend 40 weeks feeding infections
Of Mitochondrial Projections
Endogenous organelles sectioned
Swells with the Force
Midi-chlorians in my mitosis forth
Midi mpeg-4 be in the rank of Jedi
Red eyed, sleep deprived
I sense a disturbance
The guardians of light
Rhyme writing, in stepped a Jedi Knight

The knight wore a tunic
Brown and white, a saber of light in tune with perception, will
A unit with its master
Who holstered it in his obi
“You don’t know me but you have bolstered your ranks with your prose
Your flows happened and midi-chlorian counts rose
From Dantooine to Tatooine; the Force knows
On Yavin 4 there is a Sith Lord
With powers unmatced
You must defeat him to bring balance back to the Force”
And of course, I accepted the challenge
Talent, I had.
Proved it, I had not.

The rap battle of the century or ages
Great things meant for the writer of better pages
Days it took, to make the trip
It looked as if we went several times the speed of light
And I asked might this be fast enough for the Kessel run
The knight smirked, wryly said “Right”
Now years of light past the sun
In parsecs the starcruiser’s deck
Played a tape of 3030
Dirty version of Battlesong
Rattled on the speaker
We stopped and landed in Mos Angeles
Manning this fuel station
None other than an undercover Bothan spy
He pried my third eye open, hopin’ to find a weak part
But he saw my soul and knew I was true and destined to seek art.

He told Darth Blancus he was in for the fight of his light
And 5 days, we crossed the space then arrived.
Face to face with the Dark side of the force.
I flipped a coin and won the toss
Weak in the knees like an At-At around snowspeeders, too late now to call it off

I used the Force even though I had to go Solo
And here was my flow yo
“I blow up like thermal detonators
Know the eternal music makers
May the 4th be with you as I rippit on the crossfader
Vibrate the face of fakers with cuts like Darth Vader
Haters better take steps, make tape decks get scales
Scale your weak rhymes down like shaving a Rodian in jail
Do or do not there is no fail, believe in what I say all good things will prevail
Aayla Secura couldn’t write anything purer
Yoda couldn’t have wrote a rhyme so tight
Mace Windu couldn’t cut through the still of my mic
Try to steal or bite my this and my rhyme saber will slice with assonance
So passionate and controlled it’ll purge the Sith from your Anakins.
Imagining beating me is thought last when the battles on,
Cuz I’m a master and you’re a Padawan”

He was reeling like a Tie Fighter
Hit by a torpedo from an X-Wing but next thing, he was on the mic.
“Strike me down, you can’t I’m more powerful than you imagine
From the Dark Side academy of battle rappin’
I captain the force and force push your lrhymes in to little drawers
Or better yet, I force choke you with my tight lines
Write ten times better than a Rodian tells white lies
Trandoshens notion Wookies the same way I be filetin rookies
With lightning I’m sightin the hair burn off a Wookie
Took me years to best my peers and be leader of the Sith clique
Rip shit like a rancor or fett in a sarlac pit
Beat bangers make danger and anger fuels my power
I’m the best and if you join me the galaxy will be ours.”

“I’ll never join you , Rap told me you killed it.”
“No I am rap and all along I’ve concealed it”
No…
Search your feelings you know it to be true
He removed to reveal an A and R
In actuality he made the stars
With brutality, no individuality, blunts, bitches, cars and rappers who aren’t what they say they are.
At this time I yell “It’s a trap”
In an instant, I kick a wicked rap
I ain’t a skywalker more like a mic rocker
Regenerate disparate arms of the galaxy like Chewbacca
Phat fly talker and your eyes offer you the truth
I’m the one hip-hopper to balance the youth.
His soul sunken like a Gungan colony
I hum my homily ironically
Like a Magnaguard I vanguard the avant garde, with a clap
I stabbed my saber, belabored, and in put an end to rap
And the light of the force burst right from the source
And hip hop is born
May the fourth be with you
In a galaxy not so far away
A not so long time ago another day
Real emcees save the day

Black

Unattainability makes sustainability of your brains ability
To retain unassailability due to unavailability
And refrain from loss of fealty
If you did, you’d wither like nobility
After becoming poor with utter facility
Feeling a sense of sterility
Due to a newfound lack of social mobility
To turn the tides in pillory
Free the ill of these
Lovesick refugees killing ‘em softly
Invalids of empathy
Tide turned on the whim of entropy
Patterns still present to me. Themselves witches crosses in effigy
To test the seas you’ll face many enemies
But resource reports to exclusivity
An apathy that trapped the refugees in the now dry estuary
Of the Barren Munchausen bayou, caring to house in the dark depths fear
Making myself see sick, The Solitude Sea all of you wish to be
Fishing in misery
Is her black embracing antipathy
Worthy of putting a drill through my sympathy?

No sooner have I though this, than it has happened
Captaining the vessel past the withdrawn trestle
Strange meadowlarks nestled in the mortar and pestle
Crestfallen, the depths calling to me
I Take Five Giant Steps
Three to Get Ready, two to get In The Mood
One of my Favorite Things are Autumn Leaves
C’est si Bon, it spirals.
Everybody’s Jumpin, Moanin “What a Wonderful World”
Their flag unfurled like a cursed String of black Pearls
It is an iron and steel ambassador
Plunged thousands of Miles below
Where Will o’ Wisp fish glow
Kind of Blue, Blue Train
Liquid Coal train coming through
The price that men’s souls are due
With all the force of a Chattanooga Choo-choo
The subdivided tempered steel broken and push aside
Three over two
I cover the waterfront on a gloomy Sunday
Call me, they call me crazy
Hazy in black blood, the life that lived here dies
Mr P.C. hates you B.P.
All that jazz from the B.C.E. ain’t peachy
Gulf turned into a bitches brew
By felonious monks
All blues on June Night
Stellar Regions without Seraphic Light
A bible black ocean like starless months