three poems by michael baruch

so desperate was your need

for control

you very nearly didn't let go

the first time you remember

they admonished you

you have to be a big boy okay

pull the thorn out of your paw

and when it was your turn

to speak in your defense

against your sister

who was exempt from meaning it

on account of her condition

not because she was a girl

one of you has to be normal

words fail you as foreign

to the tongue as an ovum

wanting to rush back up

the flagpole esophagus

of the egg eater

jaw refusing to unhinge again

you remember thinking to yourself

if I let it go now

they’ll have to forgive me

could it be a lie

if I don't believe me

but you sob and suddenly

the soft hair of adolescence bursts

onto your legs your crotch your jaw

elongates into a meaty snout

you suddenly feel disgusting

weight on your face

you are the animal in the shadow

box the mad Faust torments

in a menagerie of file cabinets

the practical suffering of your animal

to elevate you above your nature

so that you may be made to see

and if you can see

the flashes of possibility that arise

from the collisions between things

that are so nearly silent

the animal machinery of your heart

will drown them out

then you can select the beauty

or let the beauty select you

without the imposition of having

to select the right words

or use your mouth for anything

other than a feverish slobbering

on a good bone

and without the lesson

taught by your pain

you would gorge yourself

on that bone until you choke

and all the animal in you

demands expulsion

and you begin to rise

above the exoskeleton

on the floor of your childhood

The Inward Ecstacy of Gold

For N.P.

Gold hums: the feeling starts in a dark, dark place, a hole under a hill. A pedestal for something precious.

If the devil is skepticism incarnate, and as we have discussed at length, there is only a fuller, more open anvil-could-fall-through-it relationship to experience, otherwise it is not experience, god is the autocracy of the gilded rose. God's is an empire of ambrosia that will sicken you, of clean-burning inorganic acid. So why do we speak of the temptation of the adversary, why do we speak of the validity of god. Even still, perhaps, if we allow, which we need not, for god to be wise, all-knowing and correct, and somehow that obelisk could act, it must have been in abhorrent love god deputized Lucifer with the gold sheriff star.

Imagine further, perhaps, there is no god at all, never was, and Satan were a kind of Moses leader-through-the-desert, but a liar Moses who saw Nothing on Sinai, who was the only one in the throne room when it happened. Maybe it was a panic room (what was he hiding from) and in his ultimate disgust at the way things were, which was nowhere near the birth of his disgust, he fell from within us that we may rise, and we did.

What makes us divine is our own, a universe of fiery gold that reaches out from us and receives and praises and elevates whatever it touches. For those left in the chorus of an empty throne, the angelic throng, those golden cops, those Spanish inquisitors, those bigots of I.C.E., those ranking officers of the S.S., if your adversary is bad all things are fair play. The host fights itself, as if the clamor of bells could illuminate night.

Or, if the subordinate angels were never real, he demonized himself, the accuser we made god of this world, to be the scapegoat for that golden delicious impulse in us. The only way to inoculate yourself is to admit it within you too, this enormous appetite to make idols of ourselves. Metal hurtles through us and we need someone to blame.

And what if the devil isn't real either, and it's just us, featherless, blind and tossing ourselves to our fate. We part the sunrise waters. We build the lake of flame. We can make ourselves feel Nothing, that ragged star, is real. And if tempted correctly, neither are we.