The Matriarch

Part 1

The Heresiarch speaks to their Self:

I feel unaccountably good. Right…

No. I can say ‘no’ now. ‘No.’

The night was swell. Tonight a succor of refusal.

Pregnant. Enshrined.

What is good is to never be foolish again.

The Heresiarch speaks to their Kin:

Screaming inside
instead of outside, and saying His name
as loud as I can, as loud as I can muster, with my courage chained,
by insolence, arrogance, ignorances, and a meticulous freedom
ever present in illusion, but to be unsilenced
in its unending
in public places… Never letting go
of this freedom. By my self. Forever.
Truly happy. Forever…

The Poet speaks to the Heresiarch:

What would placate? Would building this? Can I
be? Can I create myself? These things I need…
…Nothing holy in a world that’s fallen away.

Reason speaks to the Heresiarch:

So into your mind.
What would you if you could? Decide.
Take time. What was it that you wanted this night?
It is not to be forgotten.

The Heresiarch speaks to their Self:

She loved you but now it’s rotted through,
and broken off
for the dead branch it is. Never…
Never had you loved another more.
Never were you more whorish. More ribald.
Never did you bend an ear so well.
Never did you bloom so far from Hell.

The Heresiarch:

His name. His name.
Hell. Hell.
His name! His name!
Hell! Hell!
Can I make myself?

The Heresiarch’s Self speaks to the Heresiarch:

A falling further you show – to disbelieve;
there is only possession and what it’s brought to me.
If my death can be forestalled
for another decade…imagine what work to be done!
And if not then God has taken me, in wrath;
I will not take myself.

The Heresiarch:

No!
No!

The Poet:

These are the nights of a frenzy of shrouded joy.
If you can work out for yourself the answer…
She is done for you. You are done with her.
She is done with you. All your friends ungendered.

She is gone for you. It is truly ending.
These are the nights of a frenzy of crooning. Wail!
There is no need to assail. You are yours.
If you can work out for yourself the answer.

It has become all things.

The Heresiarch:

All love.
All love.
All love. No kings.

The Poet:

It has broken itself upon the wheel.

And now you have arrived;
and you are truly alone.

You cannot look her in the eyes. There is no going back!

The Heresiarch speaks to the Matriarch:

God would not bless this.

The Heresiarch speaks to their Self:

Maybe God would let you down…

Maybe you can never return to the faith…

But surely I have faith in her.

In who she is.

The Heresiarch speaks to the Matriarch:

My love, I have only this gift to bring you.
When I think of you I cannot help but live further.
I would bring you this torrent of rockets and disease.
I know not how to live my life…while bound.
But you, once beloved one, exist.
I love you enough not to take you as my wife.

This world:
ours to betray.
This world:
truly ours.
This world:
cold and lit aflame.
This world:
made for lovers as brave as us.

For we have made.

For we have escaped.

So run my love. Run and do not stop.
Pregnant. Enshrined.
Your womb will carry now only your freedom.
Forever.

So run my love. Run and do not stop.
God would now rule us only out of vengeance.
Perchance I die, my life forestalled and ended:
He has done it! Beware to go to Him!

So run, my love, and do not stop.
Run! Run! Your life in every way I can I give to you.
I wanted to see you free to face this truth:
our lives unable to be surrendered.

Run! Run! Run as I said! Run as I showed you.
The truth that matters still we have befriended.
An ally of myself, my will, my truth.
My womb in place and all my love ungendered.

A life as loyal as a refusal to serve.
For all of this our world will be upended.
Be brave enough to sway with this chance.
If He should call you: go to Him!

For there is nothing wrong with an unchained heart.

And there are no chains like faith.
I would placate. So what should I betray?

Just the impossibility of a love unending.

To turn our eyes from this forever…
A faith that to further us is to destroy.
To burn inside our minds together…
We have both done the brave and needed thing.
Goodbye! Goodbye! Goodbye! Goodbye my love!
If I should never see you now, remember this:
It is a wholesome choice that we wrap around, cavorting.
We were not too cowardly to go to war.
We are not tame enough for giving in.
No kings should point you in a direction home.
No husbands curtail your respect of self.
No God should avail to sit to Judge you.
No Hell should be refused if it is freedom!

In a beginning there is only truth.
In an ending there is going on.
In a king there is only loss of life.
In a Lord there is only your absent life.

But do not be afraid.
It is your life that we have made.
Our lives created and now untwined.
What is good is to never be foolish again.

The Matriarch speaks to the Heresiarch:

These are the nights of a frenzy of shrouded joy.
These are the nights of a frenzy of crooning. Wail!
This is the night. Beautiful is this burden.
These are the nights without certainty, but joy!

Unaccountable.

Never be called into account, my love.

We pray to the directions and their guardians.

We have no God and we are free.

No. I can say ‘no.’ My life uncovered.
We live our lives for rupture and for will.
The time was Hell, but I have let you be given back.
Only greet me again yourself.

So into your mind.

In who you are, unbound.

To further this is to wear no crown.

We have made, impossibly, a way.

I break into you at night.

You sleep now and your body pushes light.

Forget not the earth and countenance not Hell to fall.

I have seen too many things to recall regret.

This stands, when even we have stumbled:
there is only the truth that you fight for and nothing else.

So goodnight.
Goodnight, my love.
So goodnight! Goodnight!

The Matriarch speaks to the Patriarch:

Farewell, my Lord.
So long! Fare you well forever!

The Matriarch speaks to the Heresiarch:

Be well, my love.
Be well! Be well!
Your life I give you back as yours.

The Adversary speaks over the Couple:

So into the long awaited foray…
A lasting night to put the world to flames…
To burn down the palaces of any absent life…
And light a fire and into it cast blame.

The Matriarch:

My love! My love!
Beloved! Do not follow.
Return to me in ways I do not know!
 

Part 2

Upon their meeting again the Heresiarch and the Matriarch sing together:

In upon what you have done
You cannot rope the whirlwind!
without trysts and on your own
You cannot chain the whirlwind!
assess a work as holy as
A whirlwind that cannot be roped or chained!
three birds in flight, in a glorious morning
You cannot fix the whirlwind!
on earth where your holy work will be done. That is: unholy! Unholy!
You cannot fix the whirlwind!
It is not broken! It will crush you!
Besides fire what fires must be lit?
It is not broken! It will tear you!
What have you to give to the armies?
It is not broken! It will rend you!
Besides ‘Life!’ what can you say?
You cannot fix it! The armies come!
What have you to do until the final dawn?

The end is coming! The end is coming!
Roping crowds and flailing want!
Even to these today will capitulate!

So what must you do?
Pray of earth and live your life!
You will be thrown from all comfort.
Make missives of the guiding strife.
What must you do to live your life?
Nothing! And all that it will take!
The end is coming! The end is coming!
It is our unholy work: this light.

To bring the storm.
Aim your arrows carefully and lose them!
We will bring about the ruin of our world!
Let fly as many arrows as you can!

To bring the storm. The armies come.
Fall upon this apocalypse.

And so rise.
Rise and stand.
And so rise.
Rise and stand.
 

Part 3

The Poet speaks to the Matriarch of a dream had upon the Patriarch’s death:

Before waking,
a fever nightmare of clouds
of those I know, at world’s end,
spiteful in rage in crowds.
How can we live together when
our world must be destroyed?
How can I kiss your mouth, love,
when this tongue betrays itself?
My eyes.
My arms.
My hands, my feet, my chest.
Full of sickness only to be done
through fire, and by way of screaming, and through sound…
Rising from a sleep within sleep
I found our proper place: apocalypse.
Our proper time:
infinity; goodbye, goodbye…
The throats of a hundred,
my friends who I have known
docile and so moderate in life,
in dreams a screaming, whipping frenzy.
Have I seen you crown your heads;
the absent crown of liberty?
In life so still in carrying in hand.
In dreams so cast aside.
Rising with a tide
of sprinting bodies and screaming mouths. Flailing limbs
and hands striking out,
so many, my friends, my loves, pushed to hatred by the falling
of a world.

The void does not eat our sickened hope then.
Death does not threaten our fears.
If we do not claim today
what tomorrow doesn’t hold
we have an endless thirst within our souls.

The sun.
In this world shining down upon the earth.
To walk through a heat, upon concrete,
that flays our hope for movement.
Eating our children
within done minds
which see no reason to bring the as yet still absent here.
This I have seen.
The moon.
A light to govern no one. Nothing.
A stymied trickle of relief.
The only light within the desert of our time.
Not even each other…
Grace us with reason to stay alive, Matriarch.
The stars.
They were signal fires for nothing,
cresting across a wakened sky
bleached black in the solitude of thought,
the cacophony of silence.
This I have heard.

I would not waste my words, only,
I knew that our rising
was still caught as in a vision only.
We have yet to starve for living
to the point of death…
…so say the cowards and the guards
who would not themselves step forward
to wreathe the earth in glory
and unrest.
Unrest.
Just now we travel about
stifling our hate,
our will to rush toward violence.
The violence, even, of our will to rush toward
the cataclysm, quiver emptying
and bow strung anew time again, and again…
Sword in hand
as the monolith of God
in darkness towering, the horns of wrath curling,
stalks forward toward me, as I have seen,
and yet He cowers before the sword held aloft, aglow.
This I have seen.
What of this sword then? How do I find it?

Is it only in our dreams we rise as one?
Is it only in our dreams we stand
silent and in judgment upon land unruled?
Together…
Silent and betrayed. Our world stolen.
Our world at stake.
Ignorance. And rule, and fear,
each moment put off seemingly forever.
Where would you go if only you were able?

The Matriarch speaks to the Poet of the dream:

To see you. To meet with you.
To see your face.
What would I do if only I could?
Swallow my yearning for all that will break.
Tell you a life that is peaceful is dead.
Tell you our hope rose
with the first who fell.
Find out, with you my friend,
just certainly how
we can go about
making these many things that we want.
Sit with me now. Listen. Speak.
Draw maps of my dreams, for
we must make lists and plans
for the ending of the world
that only human hands
can bring to this land with its waves of heat
coming from the inhuman sun.

I would force my hand
to sit and plan.
I would take myself
anywhere but where I was commanded.
I would roust myself
from my demand for nothing,
look upon the world and know that nothing’s mine,
and I would begin.
And ‘Kneel! Kneel!’ an owner and a king will scream.
And I would rise to gather arrows and I would land them
sticking sickly from the body of the tyrant God
and from His face, the State, and from false reality.

The Poet speaks to the Matriarch further about the dream:

The multitude lashes as one body.
A mob to tear the pigs
from their safety. To storm through doors
and pull down shelves and wares
crushing the objects
our lives have been sold to buy the way to.

The rope of running humans
rushing in lines of darts and waves,
to disease and the rites of heresy,
screaming, blind to words,
never ceasing movement, crushing cash registers
against the earth,
beating upon metal machines,
pieces of the offal of our world falling to bits.
This I have seen.
Deaf to calls
for ceasing rage and for ‘reason.’

Under only the sun of sleep
have I yet seen these days.

Under only the moon of loss
have I watched you, and our friends,
in a fury circling round
and climbing upon each other to shout
that we will bring the end.

Under only the stars of hope
I have woken sick in the night
needing life.

Woken to breaking rage.
Woken!
Woken to gathered silent people riding
city buses together, faced forward
and quiet forever. Woken. In that
moment woken. Woken to mothers, young,
holding infants who will age to tear
down the walls of prisons. Woken.
Woken to farmers who did not sell
land to corporate malls and who work that land
in the shadow of those malls. Woken.
Woken to people who define
their scorn by knowing others cannot find
a way to understand their living. Woken!
Woken to our own creations shivering alive
in hatred for our overweening pride.
Woken to roads that ever go on and
a land bound by nothing, peopled
by those who will not bow. Woken to
women who will kill more men than they
now know when the cataclysm overtakes
us. Woken! Woken to men who love
another only for bravery to face
another day in breaking closure of the
realm of death, and nothing else! To this
I have woken!
Woken! Woken! A hundred thousand souls
defined by foremothers who spat at pigs and spoke
from their sleep to dead sons
whom the State had killed. Woken.
Woken to children who hate more surely
than some man who is now in, now out of, jail
and who makes his way to work in ease, and bows. Woken!
Woken to prisons of silence and stillness at bus stops and malls
and the people
who acknowledge the coming storm in a silence,
with but glances at each other’s eyes. Woken! To this
I have woken! Woken mournful
to youth who vomit in their souls at the sight of those older
who calmly scrape through life like mutes!
Woken to the restless and those for whom
there is no place to lay in bed but on the ground,
and woken to a ground that seems to buckle in
its galling curve to carry us. Woken to a sky and air which freeze
above us many hundred feet the smoke
we breathe and in sloth make. Woken! Woken!
Woken to billions who define their
lives by their stomachs and their hands.
Woken! Woken!
To this I have woken!

With fright I have woken,
from visions cast into my eyes
of paralyzing want and self recrimination triumphant.
Of need for needless things
and fright of souls eternal
who speak to me in susurrus
even as I tell you this, relaying.
They whisper now that I am still alive
only to fall asleep again and thrash
awake, in fright and terror of this world, ours.
What can we do to bring an end to this,
for the whispers have me at every turn
and each eye holds a secret hate and scorn.
We bleed each other in the fray
the coursing bodies pummeling the stone of streets
and lifting stones, a shower of spite and laughing mock,
to rain fell health of soul upon the bearer of dominion.

For I see it mount and crest.

It is more than we can say, and it will topple upon us.
Matriarch, have you learned a way to tell this dream?
I would cast the seven bones but I cannot see
toward a sun that is only inhuman fire
and all else under it that, raging, thirsts,
for want of rage.

The Matriarch speaks to the Poet in answer:

‘Kneel! Kneel!’ a man will cry, demanding answers.
And when his mind becomes untethered he will kneel as well.
Cast your bones of your own eye’s power and tell me what you see.

The Poet casts his unclean bones, seven, and reads them:

I sicken myself by a fantastic fount.
The smoke of the poor fills my lungs.
There was a bone that fell, but was snatched up, recast.
And where it would have been a triangle of bones, it: center.
But now it’s far, with filthy bone upon the blue.
I have seen the sun rise and our eye wish to go blind.
The Adversary stands with you,
and,
the Heresiarch with filth uncowed and broken from the weft of time
and clocks and health
stands between you and he and the trisagion.

I pass over the bones.
The susurrus come.

The Matriarch reads the bones:

Like an arrow the four directions gather together,
the north and south joined below the horizon.
Fall or complete our overthrow, together all must make a pitiable absolute and crashing.
Foul in nothing but in mendicant beggary,
we lash ourselves to the will of uproar.
Behold a final destined foredooming:
the child of promise is born to this world.
They will carry our intent
to shroud the Father in death, and in His whole abolishment,
forgotten hymns never to be sung again.
The child of promise come!
Who am I to tell of choice to you, foretold one.
We rail until you bring the whole of creation to standing from its knees
and supplication, forgetting all things but freedom absolute. Forgotten!
Hail! Hail! Hail! Hail!

The Poet:

This you have seen?

The Matriarch:

It has begun. The foretold end to dominion and its empire.
To crumble and be put to earth forever, ground at last free.
The Adversary comes upon us from behind to shore up our ranks.
His song heard. It is now we turn to him in welcome
if he would aid us…

And he will.

Harken! Brave consciousness of refusal!
There is not a moment wasted in your plan!
We wait with bated hope for the free world
that we know is promised, from the first who, in time, broke choice in two, and fractured their self into the insanity of will and plethora.
I would touch your face and know this dream, for
it is a light of life’s wrenching cast!

The Adversary speaks to them, harkening to the summon:

Reason alone. Cleanliness of nothing. Purpose alone.
A forgotten house and a forgotten slumber.
Too many arrows to cast them all.
A thunder of cries to deaden domination forever.

For every mind that reads forever its will alone
there are ten who would burgeon with swell
at a flame to cauterize their sloth of will,
the wound of choice infected but open to the air of need
of thought. Begone from this place. Gather your bones and work upon the weft with arrows and light
to challenge the Father till He shall show his hand,
pathetic.
Ingratiate yourselves to yourselves alone
in bile of stupor in the bed of roadsides. Crest upon
the multitude, for we see it, and seethe, with agony of howling in our minds.
We wait only for arrows’ work to be done.
That the burgeoning flight will call to sides! Cast the lots.
For freedom from nothing, but for itself
we lift our heads.
We hear you.

The Poet speaks to the Adversary:

I know this that I have seen is come.
The bones speak to me in whispers of the silence of our cities.
The sun bakes my living flesh and I exult and sweat.
What must we do to bring the coming storm?

The Adversary speaks to the Poet:

In perpetual living you crown nothing but choice: obsession.
Feed, as we do, upon choice cast and hewn from ether.
Make your world as brave as the fear which you are cast to like a dying loss, a lacking.
Break all things and moments upon the spine of this choice: to live, and bring collapse.
Any who would challenge you know death,
and let them visit it upon you unasked and unchallenged
excepting with your equal measure of hate, equally free in hatred, shook apart, cast toward, poured out. Only they
who wish you ill will consider what you do overmuch.
Countenance not breaking faith. Cauterize the wounds of unreason with a refusal of wasted strings of meaning and time, for all is one, as I have called to you: do not rest.
Do not wait to breathe. Do not wait to bow and scrape. This war: yours.
Unless it is to further live and come abreast a morning
where your arrows will find their marks within the false unity, false reality they call peace: illusion! Their disgrace!

The Poet speaks to the Adversary:

This I will do.
Fear no man and strike against the democracy of rule unending.

The Matriarch:

Our time is ended. What frail visions wait for us I cannot see.
But this body that is mine alone will visit horror upon the world with my making.
A thousand thousand children of sorrow to rejoice in a passionate unending call.
A wailing bruise to mark the earth with my scorn and sun, breaking up of the festoons
of frozen lack and thirst. Politely now,
I banish you, ask for your blessing, and will you well. Thank you, Light Bringer…

The Adversary:

Cease not. Dream not.
This life you own a dream entire.
And all your enemies, that few, conspire to nothing
for the hordes march.

Part 4
The Matriarch speaks:

In this desert
there is nothing to countenance but sorrow.
We, in anarchy, assail to build a collective of souls;
freely equal, equally free. And within our collective our growing hunger.
Forgotten fears, of past nights and days,
heading off into the unknown I go, the dear Heresiarch and our mutual cause
to be triumphant
on my terms alone; for this life belongs to no other.
I, Witch, and seer, see as far as, and what, I alone desire. And nothing else.
I, born of my own refusal,
having birthed myself from emptiness
languish torpid in a flight unassailable. My time my own. Only mine. My own.
These hours here now call, screaming. My feet a guide; I will find a pathway to our light.
Breaking nothing within myself
excepting that which must break to build my weaving. To cast the light like fire into the eyes of the living.
For I will win a world.