Hoofhead There is an indelible mark on my forehead. I can't wash it off. In the mirror sometimes it seems to be cloven, a black tripartite hoof of some beast I've never seen, whose antlers I dream of, awake screaming. I have named it, hence it lives as much as I do or more. Its little filigrees under magnification look like the fist of Iberia, the bootheel of Rome, the mouth of Marmara, the skull of Crimea. Craniumbula, I call it, land under the brain, map of the hoofhead, home. Some millenium will come howling, gnashing its beast teeth, enraged, denied expression too long. Dracul with fiery and airless breath. I wish I was able to describe the anguish, desolation, loneliness I feel. No one knows I am. The lampskinshade diverts the light, focuses my sight onto a portion of the page which contains the phrase "made in the image of God". Light, light of light. Light. I remember a sun so blinding that the planets were mere sweat incandescences, roiling whorls of reds and whites like oily balls trembling on a body. I light up a turd of a cigar, watch the spiralling flame rush upward, feel its smoke curl down my throat into the deep thrombophagous tissue lining my lungs, cough out an exclamation. Ah. Ah-ah. This is life. Scabrous, hard, striated. Loud. Women I have pumped full of semen howling out the stars' names after midnight have turned toward me afterward in their delirium or lethargy and whimpered litanies of everlasting love, me, you, I, we love love love, we, I, you, me. Love love. My horns now are not soft but fire-hardened by agony, dying rhinoceros nails. God made me what I am because I would have God make all He made once made new. All the living creatures know what I mean. Pain pain life is pain, they pant. There is no reason that 'live' reversed is 'evil', that 'doG' is 'God', madam'i'm adam. Give me the one of unreasonable mercy, the manthorn himself who bore fruit and blossomed on dogwood, the regular guy who permitted nailing and gut-thrusts and delivered all from law. He watched the Magdalene crying over spilt milk and raised the mushroom Lazarus back to a firm flesh his sisters could eat. Jesus. On his head trampled forked deer feet, the bloodroot signatures that map the earth. O give us the living peace. Give us the living peace. Us the living peace. Peace. Leo Obrst |