Song in Barbarous Fumarole of the Japanese…

The wings pierce as if they were eternity.
—Shuzo Takiguchi

The Japanese Crested Ibis is now extinct.

“To claim as arcane vapour

ruination by intrigue

by kindled leprosy morays

so that I take up in my glottis

these moral hallucinogens which actively dim

which nourish themselves on behalf of active heavenly terror

as if forking my verbs with cryptography

with bird interrogation

with a haunted crystallography of deception

mentally cross-fertilized with defective aural lobotomies

so that I momentarily sing

with a cosmic catch in my wings

floating above

a black waterfall of rye

dazzled by partial torments

by seeming in-seminal scatterings

by snow in smoking germinal mazes

it could be said that my blood has been scorched

by intensive Venusian plasma

by updrafts of wheat

by molecules that slaughter

my throat continuously parched

by wild in-secular genetics

by unfiltered parchment

by incipient nerve cuisines

empowered by listless cranial singing

carving androgynous shapes with my voice

an ominous fluttering angel

kept aloft by diagrams

of smouldering electrical truth

as a tempestuous solar charisma

I can never speak in terms of oceanic remorse

or with the temperament of fictitious remedial doves

I am heightened by sudden sociological flaws

by prisms of seasoned parallel tornadoes

though shattered by various Saxon devices

I am the flame throughout the soaring absolute

I denigrate

I take on sanguine territorial opposition

with a force

enriched

with untoward fertility

with a dominate tendency to waver

with excessive a-regional metrics

with inhaled phantasmics

spilled on fortuitous migrational soils

there is ermine

there is discourse by nugget

there is scarification by increase

each of my echoes spinning through pictographic parabolas

graphic

with indecisive incest

which abstractly reduces

which plummets

into the frothing systemic of bees

a crepuscular arachnoidal utterance by sun bells

by pestilential archive

by vivid tourmaline exposure

there is expressed interstice

flotational temperature by prophet

by sun exposed Greek

therefore

a palace erected in bone plazas

to worship each grainy avian heaven

each tumultuous spire by detraction

so that there exists the one true clarity

the cloudy singular beam

more blinding than sun noons on Mercury

pinnacle by rot

by hovering phoneme & tremor

by sorcerous frigate & plasma

by flaming interior sign

by defenseless grenadine morals

as with Enoch*

I continue my metamorphosis

singing in capsized tarantula tree

melodramatic by despair

cogitation by a sense of entrapment

split along the cusp of a-tonal meridians

each guttural burst

struggling at great odds

at hieroglyphical knife point

dazed with magnetic electrical fuchsia

each of my wingbeats as death

as co-existent termination

as spoiled rudiment by colour

so I splice my lamentations

& open the diachronic

to spawned confusional rotations

amidst the equator of sundogs

heated by corrupted memorial sparks

my beak aligned with cryptographic cunning

with tantric scratches inside my steaming ink well treaties

my aggressions in tune

with an aching heraldic nopal

its coronal glare

flashing upon a-clinical watery mnemonics

filled with carnivorous morphine & diamonds

flying in Bardo*

above the scattered wrath of oneiric sesame pontoons

eclectic with my knowledge

of furious marginal germs & diseases

hyper-extended with discord

those bony schismatic ghosts

fused by synchronic retinal burning

drawing from the sky

a milk

seasoned with phlogiston & Hittite galvanics

yes

chandas flecked*

with sulphurous heretical clauses

because

I deny

& re-invigourate

I tear down

I re-pontificate

the bile from empty animal invasions

breaking through poisoned civil cataleptics

entangling quotidian farm worlds

with my traitorous acids

culled

from a barbarous daily wine

here I am

winged

with oracular sun-dust flowers

my eyes scattered into translated demon

like a blue demonic spy

sailing across transparent carrion planes

so as to re-inhabit the dead

so as to scan the weightless centigrade margins

in one simple respiration

I summon the tendencies of electrocuted corpses

the stony wrath

of drowned Phoenician sailors

my voice drills

with North Asian alewahs*

akin to compounded rock points on Vesta or Ceres

yes

I drain from stars pre-glottal alluviums

moth ceramics

a chalice of rote

pestles shaped

by incipient hulls of deadly carbon grains

I sing

across distracted ingress baying

with sounds

not even the dead can decipher

I can only increase funeric confusion

the invisible force which uplifts the void

which ingests the force of negation & mirage

yet I sculpt

in weakened anti-negation

spasms rampant with fire

distorting by quotidian thumb piano

by plagues which sustain gregarious verbal gestation

subsumed from susurrations extracted from the scattered

logistics of Titans

from the fevered optical beams

spilled from greenish sundial eternities

Ramses*

or Hatshepsut*

or Akhenaton*

invading as cherished cyclical spores

their luminescence by blankness

by swarming alchemical moons

by bewildering errata

as in rum by higher being

by serpentine

& flowing whiplash ideology

above all

I’ve cosmically transmuted the atmospheric bone

the dementia enveloped by protest

by turquoise weight

& somnific solar inclusion

singing by eclipse torrent

by waves of flame erupting from mirrors & dreams of post-

extinction

a geneaology of circles

beyond aphids’ scribbling

& logical strontium dialectic

my bleeding unbearable shadows

brewing

a sumptuous fever of poetic electrical charisma

its lightning shafts

of snow & rum & blood

mixed with the grains

of stunning axial omegas”

Notes:

Enoch: solar hero. “His years are numbered at 365.”

Bardo: the state between death and rebirth.

chandas: “The Vedic idea that the Spirit of creation framed all the movements of the world ... in certain fixed rhythms of the formative word, and it is because they are faithful to the cosmic metres that the basic world-movements unchangingly endure.”

alewahs: coined term, meaning “bitter cry” (ale, bitter; wah, cry).

Ramses: reigned at Thebes 1,300 years before Christ.

Hatshepsut: the only woman known to have actually ruled Kemet (Egypt) as the “Living Horus” (pharaoh).

Akhenaton: Egyptian pharaoh, ruled circa 1350 B.C. Called the Heretic King. “Thirteen hundred years before Christ he preached and lived a gospel of perfect love, brotherhood, and truth. Two thousand years before Mohammed he taught the doctrine of the One God. Three thousand years before Darwin, he sensed the unity that runs through all living things.”

Copyright Credit: Will Alexander, “Song in Barbarous Fumarole of the Japanese Crested Ibis” from The Stratospheric Canticles (Pantograph Press, 1995). Copyright © 1995 by Will Alexander. Used with the permission of the author.

Source: The Stratospheric Canticles (Pantograph Press, 1995)