The Tunneling

I.

The Descent to Hell is easy. It is the re-rising unscathed that requires a feat.
The feet that knows no winning and neither defeat that is for now is lying.
They have not known everything. They have not known nothing.

Oneiroi– eaters of realities– on their tables, on their feasts, I have dined. I have inched
Towards the black door. Royal, I have kept my innards focusedly suppressed with my fists
Like a track-list of killing under the banished tree. (The banshee will wail for me! Royally wail!)

The fusses and the sophistry are decked. (The banshee will wail for me! Bum me and you–
You will see! You will see!) Oneiroi, Oneiroi, flap your wings once more! Oneiroi, wail!

I wore nothing as nothingness is armor; and my backpack, my arsenal, my lead–
Just sins upon sins upon since, with only the frail trace of breakfast racing away:
The broken bread, the restless dead. But I may be a gladless youth– the guilted,
Gilded youngyin. The walls, they bend over and around– Around, just like me;

Inferno to Inferno–
Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. Like crayoned ash,
Your word, the unaltered word, is the lamp to my feet. Kiss me beautiful and unmake
The making and shaking of the deigned and decked. Make my path the right one path.
Inferno to Inferno!! You will see as I shall see!! YOU’LL HEAR ‘EM ALL
WAILING FOR ME!!

Refrain I:

Only eterne, and I eternal last.
Only eterne, and I eternal last.
Only eterne, and I eternal last.
Only eterne, and I eternal last.

II.

Only I– the crayoned ash made bespoke;
The Saltpeter Divine by hell’s el’ment’ry schoolies
Hushed and hurried and suffocatingly vogue–

Only I vagues and bullies and bullets.
Their’s is mastery to the unknown. These elemental vagrants,
Not having known life in the full:

(I fall for the full moon. Life in the eternal is life that is unknown.)

Only I– the fool; the kid unaware of his own strength;
Only I– the brute, the cavalier, the desperado going town to town
For love and darkness and drugs and tomorrow’s fuel; cruel
As the clowns of the undertown and the underbelly of my pop-pop;

(…For one can only dine when one has not yet dined with Oneiroi.
…For one can only see when one’s eyes are not yet of sorrow.)

Yekaterina,
Smog had dirted by limbs. My old shirt; the skirt of the punisher;
The hand-me-down shorts; the oversized and overzealous tousers;
The ruffled, rusty hair; the scenery of the coal fact’ry I spent countless weeks in;
The chimneys swept; the paraded papers in markets
As stocksmen and brokers and the have-made-its swerve
That little piper whose papa must have been so absent…

Yekaterina,
I looked like I reflected the world– and that is a scary image to bear.
I seem like I could not afford the passage by the boat. Even the half-rotting port
Avoids me. Avoid me,

Yekaterina,
The geezer of our pub quickly offered and, quietly,
I had made my mind.

“Yes, to there I shall go!
“Take me to the dark spot by the dark alley and show me the door to the underworld.
I will trip by the stairs with your final lamp as my guide. Fear shall be the carpeted floor.
I, too, am one fear-loving fearmonger.”

Refrain II:

Only eterne, Yekaterina. Only eterne and lust.
Only eterne, me, lovely Oneiroi. Only eterne and dust.
At last, at last, only eterne, lust, and dust.
Adjust the wails of your wings await me.
Wait for me with fear and lust.

III.

It’s raining down here in Margaritaville.
Either my eyes can only perceive the color orange,
Or everything really is orange. It’s strange–

The ibis stretched Their wings. Glory to the sun god from the bookish,
Big-brained birdhead, god of no defeat.

They said, “Hey, thee little tunneling, have you heard about how the secret door
Opens only and for the way-past-their-bed-times?”– I shrieked. I shrieked.
“But, nah-bearded mister monster, then maybe look way ‘yond no more
For I have no home, no ma and pa to shout at me, if I’m not there before
The drip falls. To there, the door, I, too, shall fall.”

“No home to go to?” He slapped the mug to his lips and reconsidered.
“Hey, maybe that’s perfect. Hey, maybe no one’ll miss you.”
He’s right, so cursed. I cursed, too, at the gone-aways invited.
“Sit there and be still, ye little tunneling. Sit and listen to me squawk.”

“If I were afraid, I shall listen no more. If I were easily bothered,
I shall rise back to damnation’s door.”

“There is a path you can take down
The old windy road
Where no soldier, nor knight,
Nor stave slaying-Apep-on-weekends dare be foolishly venture”

“Does no one return?” inquired I, to wish They hummed, “Only the bravest.”
“That is me, aye! I– the bravest!”

IV.

There’s a hole in the wall with an eye, resting.
An eye, but no body. An eye, but no head.
The eye knows everything.
The eye can’t be dead.

So tell me about it, and tell me some more
And followed, I, the foul fowl. And began, I, the ‘venture to orange.
Hand me a map that burns in light. Say now, I, owning it’s only half.
The other cut presents only to I at hell’s center. But

Abandoned streets now rusted as candles and lamp posts reflect
About the absent lonely faces of the hookers-in-coats,
Drunken men about to get dead. There at the corner, I posit–
There! a suspicious entrance that said–

“Hell is everywhere without you.”
And to hell, I descend,

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