preist_a_novella
oldephebe< The arc of
my life has
carried
me into the dreams
and harrowed lives
of many women
I have heard
the baying of their souls
of incest, brothers
who raped their
sisters over the course
of years
and parents who turned
a blind eye
the folds of their
ears grafted,
stitched into the deafness
of unwanted knowledge
mute with denial
as their brother
gang raped them in the
chicken coop
upon sour damp beds of hay.
and the scent of
feather and feces
in her long auburn hair
stamped into her skin
until finally she learned
to drive and endured the
humility of homelessness
the bleak comfort of the streets
to the betrayal of blood and gender and
mute parents, whose souls had been
weathered and beaten into
submissive, dismissive existential husks
as if any remnant of being had been reserved to wrestle
the seed into unyielding
exhausted sod, scoured of all nutrients
yes, that was it surely
the last remnant of being
her parents had reserved to wrestle
the seed into unyielding
sallow sod, to harvest a thinned
and soured milk from stoic wet eyed
cows, only the cows were just blithely
moronic, all that remained
of the two souls that had
nurished her, and taught her
to love her archepilegos of freckles
and her long arms and large feet
and swan neck
were reduced to
A curdled, vestigial humanity
in the service of 15 hour days
grueling unremitting labor
the farms fortunes had slowly changed
slowing like a torrent from a faucent
into a thin bleak stream
women of ephemeral beauty
would pour the rancid bile of
thier lives into my ears.
I did not ask. I did not protest
I only listened and made my face
gentle and yielded to the entrails
of thier lives....

End of Page 1
more to come
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040127
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its snowing! oldephebe first published in 1998 copyright SW for New Vista Publishing/Music Entertainment a wholly owned subsidiary of Tandym Entertainment a Division of Tandym Enterprises* Now Defunct 040127
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u24 ooeer. 040128
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oldephebe Thier sorrow sifted down upon me like ash and ah sure it created some kind of nexus in some nether place between us and everyone I knew who tasted the unblunted tongue of thier lover or parent or friend, every word underscored sparkling with contempt..sure I know about all of that and them some things I should let lie...
but I feel kinda conflicted about putting even bowlderized and embellished versions of thier so long sagas, or encapsulations, more like sonnets of their so long songs of the sad..so..I'll need to embellish and bowderize a few things..if I can..

later,

maybe I should just let them lay like fossil water laying beneath the sands of an african desert..don't understand this recent spate of geological metaphore..but anyway..I'm off to perfect my tortured pose..ready begin..bowdlerize!

later...
040128
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pipers ooer is right. 040129
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oldephebe What does ooer mean? Is that like UK slang or something? I'm not familiar with that expression. 040129
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pipers ooer is UK slangy, and its like wow, only makes your mouth look nicer
(plums..prune..papa...yay for dickens)
040130
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oldephebe Oh okay. ah thanx pd..dickens..we keep discovering over and over his brilliance, his beacon beams indefagitably against the Times relentless and invariably (...) tide.

i will resume this page in the very near future...it strikes me that the "ready, begin, bowdlerize" phrase, is probably non-pareil the most abhorrent line that aspired to sardonic verse, i've ever written sober...

so c'mon bring on the burning tide of their tears dear...i am incorrigable
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040312
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oldephebe And so each time
I bent my heart
to the bruising fugues
of thier experience and memeory
it wounded me and so
I grieved
for them
who seemed cursed
to drag the burden of all
thier brokeness that beceled thier
backs across the scarred tundra
of the remaining years left to them
So many sagas of such
length and breadth
it stretches like continents
within me.
050717
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RIC beVeled not beceled 050717
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oldephebe There were the anguished confessions of lapsed Pentecostals, strangers
to the heart of grace.
co-eds who were
estranged
from thier parents. Pastors, and freinds
girls in love with girls
who repressed violent
longings in the tyranny of puritanical
fathers and the gilded morality of small
towns. It happened afte a feild hockey
game, she told me. they'd just qualified for the State finals,
when
in a deserted shower room she walked in to find her team mate
still showering and the innocent or not so innocent showeroom antics and
post-game celebration
soon yeilded a quiet moment of ineffable intimacy
naked skin upon naked skin. she ventured a timid caress pressing
her lips softly against her freinds pouty mouth and saw the flash of passion in mutual cunninlingus.
her freind in turn initiating her
into this opiate of spirit and body.

Or how about the 24 year old college freshmen
who confessed to me in the
receding moments of an
early September beer bachannial--
after an exchange of animated banter.
We were introduced by b a mutual freind.
I wasn't trying to hit on her,
it wasn't like my preferance for her company wasn't completely guiless or anything, I mean it wasn't like she had this indefinable and irresistable moth to the wanton flame kind of allure or anything. She wasn't trying to hit on me either.
I was well androgenous then I guess, and
so not a threat.
So there was no reason to cover the abcessed sores of her life in the cosmetic of some coquetish mating quadrangle.
I'd shared some petty bruise of ego with
her and she paused her face becoming heavy, and told me w/o prompting
of her twin daughters aged eighteen months
who were taken by her estranged Latino
boy friend to Venezuela, there was some
hazy reference to a discreet pattern of imbibery, nothing serious
just a few iced Michlobs before bed every night.
And
then
there was a confession.
The Deadbolts of her tongueunhinged in the warm buzz of September air and beer
She said
She would not sit like a nun behind
ivy and stone
in a cloistered marital decadense.
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050821
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oldephebe My heart was like a land that needed the seed of God.
To listen to this scream, to listen as her shoulder blades were crushed between the boulder that was tied in the cleft of them.
She determined in the sacred silences of her own heart that she would leave, take her babies and find freer air. And not live amidst the wake, the effluvium of hubris and a really detestable kind of preening male vanity.
She's been skittish like colt before, a golden haired colt who was afraid of big wide doorways. Every time she thought about leaving the doorways of her home seemed to close in on her. Those wide mahogony stained oak doors, they narrowed into these small asphyxiating barn doorways to the charnel house.
Eden has turned to rot.
And once the Hector, the adonis, the charasmatic, the aesthetic glory of her life had turned to this mad mocking Mephistopholean daimon of neglect and cruelty, she felt like a priest whose God had cast him out of His heart and so she'd thrown the vase through the gaudy painted windows of the church and burned it down behind her.
Her marraige wilted to death and no sacrement would ever ressurect it or redeem it or stop its soul from hurtling into the deepest hell were neglect and desolations screams were an entity unto itself.
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051102
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oldephebe So Hector
her boyfriend
in a convulsion of spurned ire, once he'd discovered the house was empty of his gilded treasure...
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051102
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oldephebe We'll get back to Hector later. I'm interupting this narrative to add this: I knew there was a point where all of my eloquence and my poetry and my heart/soul would fail. There would come a time when all of my assaults against the ramparts of her soul would fail. I aspired to the canons of God and man, the romantic and aesthetic glory that represented the best in Heaven, Hell and in Man, this happy animated bag of flesh and..I failed. It failed. Loves magic wore itself out. There is magic. I mean talking to all of these women I've learned that.

The human soul has magic, even if not endowed with the charasmatic glory of Christ, or Satan or Moses or Jeremiah or even the eloquence and self abnegation of Paul, or the genious and the ingenuity, the god like power of Shakespeare to not just apprehend the human soul but to fashion it into characterizations that have such a palpable and fluid and epochal and timeless vitality of thier own so much so that the characterizations become muses unto themselves and unto the generations of men--and I realize I am subtly invoking Old Testament cadenses here. The worlds of words and syntax--the tradition of human utterances are limitless and yet finite in that there is a point where because of the cogency or facility of a phrase, because so many things slumber at the dreamed edge--there are epochs and ages and contexts that will intersect. Sometimes again and again.

This collection of vignettes, first written in 1999, is about the soul, the prodigies and pathos of a womans soul specifically. It is the aesthetic glory of THIS work.

I have spoken into the depths of peoples souls, not just sat and typed forlornly at a keyboard while I burned, burned abysmally in the unbearable cavern of lonliness rattling my chains and moaning like a specter bound to this plane in one of Those Dickensian fictive cosmos that like the prodigies of Shakespeare and Silas Mariner (Moby Dick) continue to be these extravagantly persuasive muses that again constitute and simultaneously inhabit kind of literary equivalent of a pantheistic hall of the gods and a cultural referance (iconic), point for those of us who carry these common repositories of education and experience.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is a story, a commentary upon the soul. We need it. No. Wait. We need the full throttled glory of our souls back.
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051103
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oE The characters of shakespeare and mariner and dickens to fitzgerald and baldwin and mailer and the screams of saul bellow that pierced heaven achieve a consciousness of thier own. even the emotional truth of that terrible charismatics hatred [richard III], is on some levels out done by only hamlet and rivals ahab as a figure so completely suffused with himself and his own vision of conquest. But then richard is really his own cosmos unleashed upon the hapless world of blood and bane where one is sometimes the other and all the same, subject to his Satanic charasmatic caprice, he the uncomely becomes beautiful in the perfection of his will.

Richard, who even as a one dimensional incarnation still blazes across the horizons history as well as the pages, still unfolded and fresh after 400 years.

his For Ahab tempts and defies even the nature itself with his singularly self possesed hatred of the whale and hurls the lives of his men into the tempest of his malevolence and into that of the whales and to that of the sea semingly roiled by Posiedons trident.
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051103
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oldephebe So unlike Hektor scoured of all defect and infirmity and flaw in the pages of lore and the glittering lines of history, whose exploits seem still to sing to us from greek antiquity, the Athenian warrior king/prince who achieved the apotheosis of his being, nay yet even his kingdom in the art of slaughter, noble slaughter for the gods, father and the kingdoms favor and nobly fought his enemies in the streets and in the shadows--This Hector upon arriving home and finding that his wife had absconded to her mothers house in a consvulsion of spurned machismo and the megalomaniacle cowardise of ire whose seas of madness had churned as if stirred by Posiedons trident or the winds of chaos. And so with exacting lacertaing precision began a Machiavellian campaign of vindictive machinations which resulting in him seeding the minds of the court, her family and friends and employer with the fable of a rift beginning in thier marraige because of her dependancy on alchohol and her recalcitrance towards dailing down the drinking and being more attentive to her twin sons. Most of the alchohol was purchased on her credit card, he also used a profound bout of bi-polar induced depression to undermine her fitness as a parent and obtained weekend visitation rights and eventually absconded to Venezuela (he and the children had dual citizenship)
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051112
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oldephebe So, after he used
the jaded apparatus of the child welfare system which was deeply embedded in a systemic and intransigent
incompetance.
The case came in the throes of a
highly publicized scandal in rural West Virginia--
And Hector leverage a return to Venezuela with thier twin daughters.
She wept a torrent,
a mothers heart sick pleas, confession the arms of her earnest her open in some desperation gesture of akimbo, in search of consolation.
I wasn't sure what whe wanted.
I was awed by the stark kimensions of her grief, a comfortless ache that sneered. I wanted to wrap myself around her and run at the same time.
I made myself soft again in that moment,
too young to know the words of comfort.
I caressed the soft edges of her fragile psyche with mono-syllabic groans of spirit, looking wounded and wet eyed into her.
So many songs of sorrow have been sung in me, and each time it wounds me, the heart receding, a slow ineluctable callous beginning.
I would fall in love with
all of them. here then are the gradations of empathic co-dependance.
I needed the prick of pain to feel alive.
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051112
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oldephebe There was the raven haired Jr. who was in the Production of Godspell with me. Then there was Kimberly Wies who had come down from the high walls of her hubris. She was the girl friend of a cross campus rival of mine. She comforted me after
I'd wept
choked and wet
ejaculations of sorrow
after singing "on the Willows There"
The lights and music and lyrics
finally dissolving my will
as all composure wilted
and
I ended the song
with brimmed wetness
and heart break
pulling at the edges of my mouth
The audience was a streaked collage
in the glare
of house lights
like the blurred
shimmer of
street corner beacons
in rain fall.
Waves of embarrassed self revulsion washed over me.
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051113
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oldephebe There was the raven haired Jr. who was in the Production of Godspell with me. Then there was Kimberly Wies who had come down from the high walls of her hubris. She was the girl friend of a cross campus rival of mine. She comforted me after
I'd wept
choked and wet
ejaculations of sorrow
after singing "on the Willows There"
The lights and music and lyrics
finally dissolving my will
as all composure wilted
and
I ended the song
with brimmed wetness
and heart break
pulling at the edges of my mouth
The audience was a streaked collage
in the glare
of house lights
like the blurred
shimmer of
street corner beacons
in rain fall.
Waves of embarrassed self revulsion washed over me.

Father always said:

A man and his tears are a private thing. So I ran to the wings not even hearing the applause, and wept and this girl who'd rarely spoken to me
gently pressed her busom into my back of my neck. While another girl tried to console me by exploiting the moment in vieled passes, a furtive clumsy stroke of inner thy and tightly bundled genitals. Then, a subtle grind of hip--feeling the bush of brunette puba soft and warm against my flank. I wanted to hide from the emotion.
From the girls and the guys who saw another chink
in a porcelain masculinity.
It was my muse
being born in me.
the
cumulative
angst and ache of heart
woven into music
woven into my voice
a visceral cry of spirit
in every pulse.
The same girl on my left
with the deft touch
of a sculptress
kneaded me
into mid-erection
and I pressed
my legs
together in
in the haze
against her
graceful grope
she was a taut brown eyed
diry blonde,
who was almost cute.
She'd tried to bury
her tongue in me
a few days earlier
even though
my mouth was swimming
in the dross and pathogenic
soup of an early spring flu
during rehearsal
in which I'd tried to lift
the sky with my ravaged voice.
She was heedless of her boyfriend,
an inocuous Stroehmann
bread bible boy who's face had a
vain kind of choir boy appeal.
He was aploplectically trying to muster
the rudimentary dance steps
two doors over.
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051113
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oldephebe androgeny - lithe, taut women invested with the muse of the andrew wyeth ouvre

what if its just an aesthetic that you prefer? you know?

maybe it's just some ripple,
of a memory like the first time she unfolded her wings, the first time you touched her naked, the first time you kissed her in the dimple of her clavicle, the first time you grazed her lovely ivory crane neck, the time you heard her soul, her passion rumble in her throat, dark like a waterfall spilling from a cello, maybe it's the gratitude, the splendor in those eyes for you and only you because it's the first time someone saw gold in her lovely alabaster wings, such unfolded glory, maybe her short hair, her dancing black eyes, her dusting of freckles, her long legs gently bowed and maybe her knees had this way of endearingly brushing against one another as she walked and something in that, in her effulgence, in her quiet unnoticed glory made something rumble and scream in your core, undulate in your flattened belly, and maybe a thousand sparrows burst from your chest or danced in your stomach, maybe some sweet moist fever fell upon you every time you saw her or heard her, and you were like, how come the rest of the world doesn't see this? how come they can't see her? and then nothing no darkness, no winter snow beating against the windows, no time away or spike of mood or argument or anything could make the light crumble into darkening folds of night, no matter how bad a day the two of you may have had, and then something selfish in you says
i'm glad they can't see her yet
for when they do
she might forget the first time
we touched naked
the first time i kissed her there
the first time
i felt the river
insdie of her thawing
the first time
her eyes went wide
in wordless scream
the first time we shared and roamed amongst the pockets and rocky highlands of dream and wakefullness
a total spilling into one another
minds touching
the first time you looked into her half closed eyes and never wanted or worshipped anything more
as your lightly brushed against those lids, like kissing petals, flowers
they opened and you never wanted the moment to end
can i just be right here with you
right her in this unbroken moment of perfect beauty?
seh was no more the stone flower melting into grief
you were no more
the aloof and bookish
autistic
mute in your endless day of storm
no one heard the music singing in your soul
no one heard the arias
the cadenzas
the oratorios
piling up from the ground into the sky
like a white night blazing as you stared off into space, your eyes wet with wonder
and then
there she was
this treasured friend
holding a flame
...

yeah so sometimes beauty is just beauty
a different kind of beauty
but you can't help being no less thunder struck by it
you know?
and the memory of it
never crumbles into moaning eddies of time or age or forgetfulness or you know just carrying so much shit around, so much shit gets added to the trumpery -the whole cumulative albatross
of what? this existential and unblinking sentient prison we call life?
so you awake, in those first few seconds of that euphoric buzz still hugged by sleep and you remember
what it was like to hold that kind of quietly incandescent beauty, body and soul and mind in the hollow of your hands mouth heart and miss it and you wring the anguish from your being, or you try, god i miss
god it was just a fucking dream
some pang of yester year quietly stabbing you in the rapture of sleep and then rupturing you in the cold icy glare of daylight, or graylight
so you slowly
reconstitute yourself
a silent tower
to walk the empty streets
and no parting word
no echo of her spirt
is a consolation
so you watch the words
treble down to dust
to dirty glitter
and then finally
into nothing
...
060117
what's it to you?
who go
blather
from