The Suicide of An Aggrandized Poet

ACT I

A dusty, preposterous shelf lies

among the objects of a time now

lost, deep within the traces of

a heart, pulsating sacrilegiously

not to abandon what made it

    alas, why would it for it's

    flesh-made, an aberration

but to awaken a reminiscence, so

begins the tale of the unfathomable,

Decimation of souls on a silver

plate with a knife of a thousand

ache, a fork with tine of a goat's

hoof, and a spoon of a blind man's

hand, the feast began.

On an April day of a gloom rain,

    yet the rain brought us   

    a wave of life, no?

I went down a hill that left a stain

to chain a soul of a swain to a wain

that would reign the remarks of feigned

months that I wore as a mane in sights plain.

For a hollow coil, the world at my command,

A sycophant, my heart, thrilled once at

a bus station on a rainy April day.

Days and months, predecessors of a fountain

flooded red with passion and drowned

of indecency born of naivety within

    For what else would it be?

that shattered the shackles of my core.

Think not of a sex, rotten, for this

travel it merely was reflection

of a creation bestowed by a throne,

ultimate, so an achitect he was.

What other excuse was needed

besides the rain fell pitter-patter?

    So claims he.

And what of the sky torn apart

by the colors of tracks that had one 

too many to carry forward?

And of the eyes subjugated the very 

essence of what I sensed through my

pinky, just an essence?

    So claim they.

    Rightfully so.

A most glorious palpation, to

feel your heart racing the sun.

Oh to stand beside the envoy

of light, beseeching them.

For thoughts to fare, how

would one speak of the words

so little, but superb, to her

little ear covered by "zülüf"?

Tis' but a treason if none

told about valleys of her face

of none other, God's demesne.

Sprinkled with joy and what

the sea unveiled, a little salt,

she, a maiden, and I, a

nomad of torturous letters

hidden beneath verses, dire.

Were I convulsed by such

visage that wrought havoc

at the gates of my castles?

My mere presence, a liquid

of time felt eternal, was

challenged by this subjugation.

With each second, deluded,

a bus traversed, not the road, 

but perhaps our destinies.

A fool's errand to deceive

the man who hath conjured

none but null, a false image

of a mind and heart, concord.

Yet, thus began a tale of

discord and harmony to

reap hearts and souls, no more.

    Care I say, there was one,

    but only one, devourer?

Not many now, weeks have passed

and the dust that settled hath

become a storm of paintings

for generations it was built upon.

Thus took place a ceremony

of parting of classes naught.

But what of families of

whom we loved and cared?

And what of friends of ours

that shaped our destiny?

For the former, I was

blind as a bat, who felt

presences with no sight.

Accursed daggers were put

where I would witness life.

I endeavor a moment lost

in this ceremony I call life.

For friends, I, an observant

of norms, stepped away

from the mud I considered

a group of people grey.

Like a shapeless clay, they,

mere lunatics of passions

unfathomable, so I lost.

A ceremony was taking place,

for all hands together, all

but one, fragrant.

There she devoured the doom

and gloom, like a baby in a womb

to rest me in my tomb to bloom,

a red bedroom as her costume.

Dare I say, t'was a gaze

for my heart to blaze and

praise the creation's ways.

Now you may argue to say

"it is a heretic that makes the

fire, not she which burns in't."

Oh, but to combust the fire and

become an ember of allure?

To be the fire that summons

the man to leave nothing but ash?

She was my heart's fotia

that turned my vision crisp.

And of memories turmoil?

They remained for us to spoil.

    Yet, as the poet sings

    and dances with fires above,

    Dare I say, he forgot the

    ink he had for this poem.

Thus looms a ceremony of freedom

of souls and wits, we the mortal

coils, now all ablaze, putrid

flame within me.

There she stood in velvet garb

and my heart, a minotaur.

For a man to be a man, so I heard,

were the fountains of ale to be had,

A youth blurred and deferred,

Perhaps a muse I denied not to be mad.

Thus concluded the veil of night, the

unrelentless might of a blind knight.

Thus started the song of a decade

that would be whispered in a breath.

We, the forgotten cavalry of our hearts'

armageddon, and I, the mere flagbearer,

Stood at the gates of hell and heaven.

There she stood, an apsara for all ends,

where tangled woods of my heart would burn.

A mist between the gods and devils, I

had but a gaze upon, to witness creation.

I felt alive.

For a doom approaching, the bells rang,

and there I stood, an interloper of a fate

long withered and its corpse a weight

to diminish my hollow state.

Blood dripping, our lips sang a song

whose words a heretic they belonged.

A red wave of emotions under the silken cloth

of a harbringer, all to be uttered was how

much I appreciated a goddess in disguise.

Just as the flood washed the streets of my heart,

My cheeks, now purified, ran through my tears.

I was alive.

Two passengers we were, standing on an aisle

of journeys unfathomable on a train

for words that wrought havoc on our smile

yet prepared a grand tyrst.

    A spark mistaken for a star

Mountains on one hand, sea on the other,

Ours but was a small miracle of sight

where transient desire took place and

an amorous dalliance rebirthed me.

The matter of time's ephemerality is elegant

My words washing her face? Inelegant.

Thus, we parted to worlds unknown alone.

What our sacred communion presented was simple

A hopeless soul, whose wings drenched in blood,

A baphomet with a servant, promising divine encounter,

and a pilgrim standing before a locked chapel, 

hearing the bells inside begin to loosen from their old rope.

I stood like a saint before a borrowed altar,

praying not for ruin,

but for the false god to leave

and the temple to remember my name.

I was a raven whose memory was embedded

with the very sight of the elegance of the reshaped.

I was but a candle outside her window,

glowing at the brightest outside, yet

never heating the halls within.

I was alive.

ACT II

Limerence.

The return of the essence to the soil

from which it came.

A sinister turmoil hidden as a jaded palate.

One mirror with the fragments of a soul within.

A fleeting commitment of reciprocity to

engulf one another in flames of rapture.

Delirium unsheathed to summon forth

a foul beast of untamable worlds.

I was alive.

Many poets attempted the same.

Dante crowned a woman into heaven,

yet could only watch her from the dust.

Petrarch carved Laura into a wound

and called the bleeding devotion.

Shakespeare dressed decay in summer’s breath,

begging time to kneel before his ink.

Keats kissed beauty as though it were death,

then mistook the poison for nectar.

Byron set the body aflame,

but never learned what remained in the ash.

Neruda filled the mouth with fruit, salt, and skin,

yet even his hunger returned empty-handed.

They named the flame,

praised the flame,

painted the flame gold,

but none of them burned correctly.

None of them returned

carrying the animal by its horns.

They all approached the altar

with trembling tongues,

offering metaphors like severed doves.

And still, they failed.

For they wrote of love

as men write of storms from behind windows.

I had stood inside the lightning.

They circled the same beast

with garlands in their hands.

I opened its mouth

and climbed inside.

Their quills were no more than blasphemy,

committing sins by failing to make love divine.

I bathed in sin.

I loathed it just as saints loathe the silence of God,

just as prophets loathe the deafness of kings,

just as Eve loathed the sweetness of the fruit,

just as a sinner loathes the prayer that saves him,

just as a priest loathes the tremor in his own hands,

and just as a god loathes an unanswered altar.

Yet the sovereign state of my mind was

what led me to her.

I was alive.

Because I was no Dante or Shakespeare.

I was above them.

Tryst of unspoken dreams of a man,

now spiraled with boiling blood

for a dream not caught.

So I left with words no greater than,

“You have aspects which I appreciate.”

Not many have reasons to celebrate May 24th,

yet here I stand with my own chalice,

drinking the wine

of a confession once swallowed.

Bitter, red, and mine alone.

All at the threshold of a new decade.

May 26th.

ACT III 

The Heretic’s Dawn.*

If you held a bouquet of flowers,

their scent would be you.

If the sun warmed the beach where we met,

its heat would be stolen from you.

If the waves that bloomed against our feet,

they would mimic your grace.

Such attributions, barely scratching

the surface of values attached,

only entombing me in paralysis.

May 25th, stargazing.

Had I known there was

a competition between you

and the stars I frowned upon,

I would have accused the heavens

of arriving underdressed.

The terrace held me like a witness,

its stones cooling beneath my restless feet.

I watched the sky pretend to be infinite,

while my universe trembled

inside a silent phone.

Every minute descended

like a star refusing to fall.

Every vibration that never came

became another prayer

I was ashamed to name.

I did not yet know

that tomorrow would open its mouth,

that a single invitation

would bend the spine of my life

toward another scripture.

That night,

I was only a man on a terrace,

waiting for judgment

from the softest god I had ever made.

No church or mosque could accomplish

what I sought to abolish.

Henceforth, I was more than a man:

a serpent to some, slithering among waves of stars;

a spark of life to others, inflicting warmth;

a poison, mistaken for medicine

by every mouth that needed ruin

sweet enough for the faithful to call it wine.

Regardless,

I was alive.

And of the second I received the call?

I felt like a deity, pulling all the strings

of all lives entangled in harmony.

None mattered for I had it:

An answer to my prayers.

I was a juvenile thing again,

crawling toward creation

with trembling hands.

I wanted to taste the world raw,

to bite into the light,

to feel the sun brand my skin,

to bury my fingers in the sand

    the very sand that would envelop me

    the next day

as though the earth itself

had finally agreed to hold me.

The sea was no longer water.

It was a pulse.

The wind was no longer air.

It was a messenger.

Even the heat upon my face felt like a blessing

I had not yet learned to deserve.

Perhaps I had.

So I slept, with the slumber of a child in a womb,

only to be reborn tomorrow for her.

I woke sun-kissed, as though the Phoenix itself

had torn fire from its wings and dressed me

in a gown of feathers.

I was no god, and even if I were,

a dethroned one, my very fabric

shook me to my very core.

I was alive.

The destination seemed distant,

but I was transformed in an instant.

Would it be me who is persistent

or the journey that I made resistant?

Once I got off, I was in a distant land.

The sun laid bare in my palm, melting

what seemed like my flesh and revealing

the withering within.

It was melting the mask of flesh 

and revealing the blight embedded within.

What redeemed my soul of woe 

had much sadness to bestow.

There she stood

and all words became orphans.

Beauty was no longer a quality.

For it was an event.

A rupture in the law of things.

A wound in the visible world

through which heaven bled.

The sun, ashamed, withdrew its claim.

The sea forgot its rhythm.

The wind stood still

like a servant before a queen

it had no right to touch.

I wanted to speak,

but my tongue had become an altar,

and every syllable placed upon it

burned before it could become sound.

She was the paradigm of creation

and to witness it was to touch

and feel the warm embrace.

It was but the first warmth

ever given to flesh descended.

A rift must have torn somewhere

in the architecture of heaven,

for celestial beings leaked through

as though her beauty had recruited them into worship.

I was reborn.

A cataclysm came upon me and undid

what I was, unraveling my very fabric.

Many songs I sung, verses I sought,

yet even today, her hair,

nightfall at the crown and dawn at the edges,

remains untouched by the poverty of metaphor.

Her smile did not arrive upon her lips;

it opened softly, as though mercy had learned

the shape of a human face.

Her eyes, half-veiled beneath calm heavens,

did not look at the world.

Instead, they absolved it.

And I, standing before her,

felt every cathedral of language collapse into dust,

for no hymn, no flower, no fevered sun

could teach my mouth how to name her.

I was a trespasser of the halls I deemed

holy, dominating my acts of sacrilege.

So we met, with our hands and souls intact.

And away from the fever of the world,

we found ourselves a sanctuary,

a small hill beside the Aegean,

where grass bowed beneath the evening

and the sea breathed below

like an ancient thing pretending to sleep.

Behind us stood a hollow building,

three stories of emptied windows,

its walls pale and watchful,

as though abandoned by every life

except the one beginning there.

We leaned our backs against it,

not knowing it had become a witness,

not knowing its stone had been chosen

to carry the weight of a moment I would never escape.

Before us, the hill rolled gently toward the water,

and beyond it, the Aegean opened.

Blue, endless, indifferent, yet somehow kneeling

at the edge of her presence.

There, no sermon was spoken.

No bell declared us.

No scripture dared interrupt.

Only grass, sea, stone,

and the unbearable silence

of two souls beginning to understand

that something had already changed.

An oath was made through lips sealed,

Words were spoken for the grandeur 

of our compassion,

of my courage,

of her awakening,

of my decimation,

of our desecration.

And there, beside the Aegean,

I learned that rapture was a lesser truth,

a pretty lie poets dressed in gold

because they had never met a god

who answered back.

The soil beneath my feet did not merely hold me.

It remembered me.

Grass pressed against the hill like fingers upon a pulse,

feeding my soul as though I had been buried there once,

as though every root below had waited years

to return me to myself.

I was not standing on earth.

I was standing in origin.

The sea breathed before us,

the empty building watched behind us,

and between them

she sat beside me,

not as woman,

not as mercy,

not as temptation,

but as meaning given a body.

The hill fed me.

The grass knew me.

The Aegean opened its blue mouth

and spoke in salt.

And she, beside me,

made the world legible.

I stood upon that hill with the relief of Zeus

after Cronus had fallen, as though an old heaven

had finally released its throat from my hands.

I was alive.

ACT IV

Peregrination.

Then came the age of distance,

where love learned to survive as light trapped behind glass.

Her voice arrived in fragments, her words crossed cities

like pilgrims with wounded feet.

I held the phone as men once held relics,

believing that even absence could be kissed

if worshipped long enough.

And I was the most devout of them all.

Orpheus descended for Eurydice,

yet still turned back.

Lot’s wife looked once,

and became salt for loving what was behind her.

Icarus reached for the sun,

but lacked the faith to burn properly.

Prometheus stole fire for mankind,

yet even his torment was chained to purpose.

Majnun wandered mad for Layla,

but madness alone is not worship.

Abel bled innocently,

but I bled willingly.

Job endured the heavens,

but still demanded an answer.

The martyrs kissed their blades,

the saints starved their flesh,

and the prophets carried their burdens,

but none of them held absence

the way I held her name.

Rewritten through my laws of passion,

devotion was forged through the forge

of emotions that had not yet been born.

Harboring pleasance only, we sailed

to tomorrows of a distant future at bay.

Our distances were an instrument

not to chew on hollow concepts,

but to grow compassionate to

annihilate animus towards absence.

Tender awakenings followed.

Distance became our instrument,

not a hollow doctrine to gnaw between lonely teeth,

but a discipline of tenderness, teaching us to unmake

our hatred of absence.

From it bloomed strange devotions:

the ache of missing,

the warmth of being sought,

the hunger left unnamed,

the tenderness of voices

    and dare I say, my muse, with her voice,

    taught Moses to divide the seas now

    unfathomable, and thus, lost.

reaching through the dark.

We searched for one another in every hour not shared,

in every night that placed cities, roads, and restless skies

between our hands.

And still, absence did not empty us.

It sharpened us. It taught our souls

to recognize each other before the body could arrive.

A few weeks later, in June, she came,

carrying with her the blessings of a lover.

'Twas once again the Aegean that welcomed us,

laying us gently into its cradle.

As it had cradled our love, so too did it cradle us.

So we explored, not the cartography of flesh,

but the geography of becoming.

Sappho made desire a wound of song.

Catullus gave it teeth.

Ovid dressed it in instruction.

Donne made the bed a chapel.

Byron crowned ruin with perfume.

Baudelaire found rot beneath the rose.

Neruda pressed hunger into fruit, salt, and earth.

Yet none of them understood.

They mistook the body for the temple, whereas

I knew it was only the door.

Whereas simple men cared about breaking through gates,

I was pivoted to be blessed by temples.

Thus, I grasped the meaning of life.

The Aegean sea, the Phoenix sun, and

the lover descendant of a god.

There we explored, like two children.

There was nothing irredeemable,

but the time spent, reminiscent of

a waterfall pure, flowing forth.

The waves were at our command

and we beseeched it to strike us

to bring us together, again.

And so I gazed and 

and so I prayed

that I shall not be bathed in the sin

that devoured me once, again.

If the heaven and earth hear me cry,

how could I not accuse the usurper-creator,

when before me stood creation’s penultimate apotheosis?

To witness such a creation is to

transform your soul for the unknown.

The veins expanded through my hands

and carried remnants of my soul, reshaped.

Those crimson rivers that once carried me

possessed an appetite of passion.

Oh to be those veins which once

carried me in ashes of creation,

what would one not sacrifice to

relive those days of distant glory?

Days went by, the sprout of love blossomed

into a visage of two travelers dancing

against all meaning of life and the void

of death incarnate.

July.

A month of grand incursions, of entering foreign gates

lacking a sword or scripture, carrying a heart accused

before it could speak.

I, the solemn crusader, came not to conquer,

but to be believed.

They had dressed me in the rumors of my birthplace,

made a mask of my city, and called it my face.

Yet I carried courage borrowed from a thousand suns,

leached into my blood so I thought.

In their eyes, I was not yet a man,

not yet a lover, not yet a soul

trembling before their daughter’s name.

I was a rumor from the East, a borrowed sin,

a familiar accusation placed upon an unfamiliar face.

They weighed my birthplace as though geography were prophecy,

as though a city could confess on behalf of the heart it raised.

I was a mere lover.

Of all things life, they lacked human.

For them, I cried, and pain I endured

as she was my crown for the grand

inauguration of my love.

For days, I stood beneath the quiet trial

of their walls.

I learned the shape of restraint,

the etiquette of guarded rooms,

the sacred violence of being measured

by hands that never touched me.

Yet near the end, when suspicion had grown tired

and the hours softened, the world finally closed its mouth.

And there, beneath the fading sentence of July,

her lips found mine and unsealed the passages,

left beneath the surface by jailers and wailers,

as the first mercy my crusade had earned.

ACT V

Elegy of Madness.

Death, I learned, was never merely the heart

forgetting its rhythm.

What ended did not end cleanly.

It dragged the heavens down with it.

A swan song solidified my rupture,

Harnessed the essence of my life's structure.

The remnants of my life were no more

for I had forgotten to breathe.

I played my part in the grand scheme

of a trial, torturous, still apparent.

Just as I observed others' failures,

I was granted my penultimate bloodshed

of all conclusions in life.

Let the Aegean be stripped of its myth.

Let the Phoenix choke on its feathers.

Let the sun confess its theft.

Let the altar crack.

Let the chalice spill.

Let the chapel rot.

Let the god descend.

Let the goddess become a girl.

Let the scripture burn back into paper.

Let the prayer admit

it was only sound.

Death is the sea becoming water again.

Death is the sun losing its divinity.

Death is the beloved returning

from goddess

to name,

from name

to memory,

from memory

to wound.

Ever since, I remained a no one

among the gospels that I devoured.

I was alive. Now I am become unholy.

Eater of verses unleashed for the sake of

what I found miserable.

Each night, I stepped into my house

where pilgrimage had failed,

with writhed feet, sucking my blood.

The fountains of love, now a drought,

each memory for a mind now drugged.

Functioning as a narcotic for a man

too broken to refuse itself.

I was born again when I died,

sulking and sinking when I tried.

Whereas I promised the Garden of Eden

I have nothing left but hands, eaten,

that once promised the worlds within

to massacre our fallible skins.

The Aegean no longer cradled me.

It spat me back as water.

The Phoenix no longer dressed me in fire.

It circled above my ashes and refused to descend.

The sun, once stolen from her warmth, burned on without memory.

The hill that had remembered me forgot.

The grass withdrew its fingers.

The soil closed its mouth.

The empty building,

our pale witness,

stood innocent

of everything it had seen.

Countless times, I found myself questioning:

“Was it merely a trial of sowing the evil

that I have yet to spur?”

Death began appearing

in the architecture of ordinary things:

in the sealed mouth of metal,

in the sermon of a high window,

in the laughter of lovers

passing beneath streetlights

like a life I had been exiled from.

I did not wish for death, perhaps.

I wished for the world

to stop resembling her absence.

Remember to never be touched again,

as it echoes through my skin every day.

Forget not that I am a mere traveler each day

that is nothing but null once the sun sinks.

Whereas you have ones to observe the ocean,

I am but a fish in a net, waiting to be harpooned.

I, too, lost my grip on words that were powerful

just as I lost the sense of humanity surrounding.

Alas, it ends.

Exhaustion washes over me, so answer my call,

Which limb do I cut

Which eye do I remove from its socket

Which Aegean sea do I drown in blood

Which castle do I conquer

Which sun do I allow to burn me

What do I do

to make you remember this poem?

I was alive.

Alas, it ends.

Encompass:

Poets for Love

• Dante - Dante Alighieri
• Petrarch - Francesco Petrarca
• Laura - Petrarch’s beloved/muse
• Shakespeare - William Shakespeare
• Keats - John Keats
• Byron - Lord Byron / George Gordon Byron
• Neruda - Pablo Neruda

Instruments of Religion

• Orpheus - Eurydice
• Lot’s wife (From the doomed city of Sodom)
• Icarus (He who flew too close to the Sun)
• Prometheus (Titan who stole the fire)
• Majnun (Also, madman) - Layla
• Abel (Son of Adam)
• Job (Old Testament)

Poets of Lust

• Sappho
• Catullus
• Ovid (Ars Amatoria)
• John Donne (An artist bathed in the harmony of erotic and religious imagery)
• Lord Byron
• Charles Baudelaire
• Pablo Neruda

* Also: Gospel of the Fallen Sun, A Heresy Written in Gold, Where the Sun First Betrayed Me, or simply "Apostasy".

694. 694 lines of madness untold, now presented in a feeble attempt to share a glimpse of what it wrought. I care not for stories, inadequacies, or injustice serving this world when I myself am but a pioneer of all that is lost.