3 Poems by D.M. Rice
Thoughts on Apocalypse
Sacrosanct with worship , here — this death
cult vilifying life in praise of the undying.
But gather, gather round as intuition screeds
the substance of this faith as letters drawn
on sand make tidal vessels, glimpsing
fellowship the ephemeral—which is sustained
if not for these & others such as are becoming
your very own imagination. That trumpet’s sound
some dew-born heavenly host plays not the music
of your in-born capital, self-replicating surplus of value
buried in the de-valuation, smaller boxes for to breed conformity
of thought, or lack thereof. Angels will not dictate taste
to living ears but nature’s thunder claps, the volcanic ash
swooning by at naught point zero zero zero hundred hours
graven, decibels to wake the feeble sleeping of the dead.
And such exacting frequency will resound until time defaults
upon its debt to turn recurrence––for no abstraction of the cyclical
could dare fathom the immortal—nor would such thoughts accompany
the risen up, decaying flesh or skeletal remains or many others turned
to dust grumbling as mounds of shambled living substance there renewed
, breathed to exact the lost hours—with no awareness of sequential forms
that give their way to rot. Yet each pursues with little introspection the course
they once sought with constancy , freed at least from other concerns such as
how to live in the exacting social systems of their given era — which scarcely
would exist but for those who vainly would attempt to court these meagre
standards , at least in this course satisfied by their mere effort at correction
, needing not the validation of a coherent authority:
from whence might such a standard hail?
For in this new world the crowded corpses
run amok from t h i s & t h a t ,
lost in sensation with scarcely any knowledge
of the holy war for which they have been summoned.
Amusement in their vacant eyes or sockets through
which this stimulation does not elude them, reaching
with totemic focus for the venerable pleasures of their
lesser reigns, tyrants over tyrants as the corpses pile
high in the dull, plaintive waves over the cities crushed
like glass against the hammer’s knell, asymmetrical
glands of dirt gyrating after whatever most resembled
purpose for the living dream. Gloss varnish on a gilded
sheen of dust. So many bodies that interchange in substance
and desire , and cover the land as a flood of blood and viscera
, dissembling after thought of the first creation, which knows
not rest or hate or satisfaction, flailing dumb under the metaphysic banner .
And neither would you mind this, too, if time dictates that ,
indeed , you live to see it , for merely the trumpet blast
alone will ensure conformity of all persons, such that none
may distinguish with any degree of accuracy the difference btw/
the living and the dead .
Malleus Maleficarum
Even this arena, circumscribed by Prometheus, insofar as the postlapsarian tendency toward exposition remains ipso facto a composite panorama elucidating the crags of the canyon, carbon dated effeminacies from featureless rooms, marble vaults to convey the strychnine ebulliencies what consciousness is heir to, don the regurgitate evocation, hyperbolic postulates in the waiting rooms of bureaucratic excess, teetering planet on the metaphysical conceit, turtles' smooth cage fought for to the extent that the exoskeletal framing is internment, mesh wires and the buzzing hacksaw of arbitrary detainment, free radicals buzzing in my X, upside down criss cross martyrdom, even flies do it, even spies do it, even educated wives do it, misinformed zeitgeist hall pass conformity to convey the metonymic simulacra, contusion, [redacted] justice by the minority lobby, fastidious ornate inlay on the diamond guitar of crimes against humanity, artificial hallucinations in defiance of the very notion of intelligence, word salad prayers to live as Socrates postulated, with formal ignorance and a humble acumen to agnostic charm, rhetorical slip sliding away, down the rabbit hole of shattered windows, algorithmic surveillance and the deviant bifurcation, code endemic not of natural selection, but the very immanence of deluzian cynicism, all of the faces lit up in the arena, such diverse reactions, and the camera lens of poetry rotten in its voyeuristic tendency to let it lie
At Hampstead Court Palace
There seems to be a gulf of understanding
, a chasm of shredded paper canon rifting
what makes the better age, conscripted
accountants making sense of whimsy
, dialogue pre-ordained by what reason
class entails—meek earthworms holding
court in the colony , tarried foghorns bulbous
clouds of smoke over the Thames, this theme
of ours against shift-clicks: a glass partition.
Ovid becomes Alexander the Great
becomes my own kin, William and Henry
, square circumference in the alchemical
storeroom, ageing wine in the cask of
austerity, disinvestment made only
kings poets and only poets for
murals such as these which line
walls and ceiling, above the stairs
and underneath ascension of a symbol
—starry reverent knight in dull-worn
armour. File this petition against a
pagan lottery. Moreover, humility
goeth before the slow decay
of centuries. Peacocks losing
no sleep for their unsubtle
arrangement of syllables.
What could the meaning be?
Under the guise
of these beautiful
handmaidens, sitting
at the roundtable, silver
daggers forever
at the ready
to be turned
inward.
D.M. Rice is the managing editor of Sybil Journal. They have several collections published through the site, which are available here.
‘Opening the Third Eye’ by David Mampel (2016)