Of Attis and Cybele

(Carmen 63, Gaius Valerius Catullus)

“The screeching furies rode the ancient winds

And lashing out with glass-tipped tails

Drove Attis and his twisted crew

Across interminable days.

Astride a mile long iron deck

Attis drilled his skulking ranks

Through heaving seas of piss and blood.

They painted flags of jagged teeth,

And with raggy scraps of napalmed skin

Polished up their mercenary steel.

When at last they pitched upon a midnight shore,

A mountain’s shadow-blackened hoof,

Attis ranked his thousand brothers all together

Along the dark and loathsome sands, and standing

Proud upon a rock before their gazing lines

He roared:

“Before the creeping dawn

Strips this shady mountain bare

We’re going to gain the  mountaintop,

And be writhing joyously, out of our minds,

Like nests of incense-addled snakes,

In the courtyard of my mother, Cybele’s, fort.

And here before we start, before you all I’ll prove my mother-love,

I’ll tear my own balls off for MOTHER DEATH, for MOTHER   DEATH”.

So down he bent, and with the sharpened blade of a bayonet

Sliced out his tree of life, root and all.

Attis brayed like an electrocuted mule,

Attis bled like a slit-throated bull,

Then watched his brothers emulate.

Men no more, trailing dark red rivulets,

In which the strangest stalks took root,

They charged as one mad rushing troop Into the forest’s deeper gloom

On and up towards the mother lair, the mountaintop.

All night they trampled down the ferns,

All night they scrambled over rocks,

All night they tore past thorns and grizzled bark,

All night they hollered, sang and screamed,

Banged out tunes with hollowed shins on tambourines,

Till their lungs were raw and quit

And their amphetamine insanity was spent.

Then tripping up and staggering round

Like squads of wet-brain, park-bench drunks,

They fell to earth, and took the land of  nod.

Between two steaming mouldy rocks

Attis curled up on the crawling forest floor

And dribbled, dreaming, on his mother’s breasts,

A dream that flushed his madness clear.

Attis awoke.

Sun-fire and shadow danced across his skin,

Dawn song warbled from the canopy.

The air and everything within was pine-pure and glassy-still.

His mind was fresh and clean,

An empty glass, poison free.

But quickly flooding guilt took hold, regret, and fear,

And spying the boiling rusted scab that clamped

His midriff, a putrid leaf from a tree of rot,

Attis set to abandoning his groaning seedless crew

And fled back cock-less to the shore.

Across a white sea of fire he stared,

Across an endless sea of burnished skulls, he stared,

And pleaded for the fathering of home.

Where he could spend himself in slot machines as old,

Where he could train again his hounds to tear the snouts

From other hounds,

Where he has bitten earlobes off with glee,

And guffawing stamped in jaws with studded heels.

Attis cried: “Oh take me to the streets of living pain— enduring things,

The streets my father rules with cane and buckle, boot and blade,

For there’s nothing here but weeds to slash,

Just vermin hides to pierce and skin”.

A hundred yards away, shrouded in an arboreal mist,

Flanked by lizards, cobras, lions

A guarding coterie of unnameable, phantasmagoric beasts,

Cybele marked her only son’s betrayal,

And spinning in a fearsome rage,

She ordered out her fiercest brute:“

Scatter Attis from the shore,

Harry his heels to deepest woods till he is lost

And whimpering, and roams alone for evermore”.

The lion sprung, and Attis fled, dripping blood, into the darksome wood.

Slithering branches shut the darkness in behind him.

So were Attis and his brothers trapped,

So still, deathless and undone,

They roam those vulture taunted woods”

Oh Mother Death

Old time whining coffin queen

Queen of bombs that look like toys

Queen of toys that look like bombs

Queen of Kings and Presidents Queen of maiming

Queen of depletion

Queen of rendition

Queen of hoods and executions

Queen of absence

Queen of fragments

Queen of disappearance

Queen of the swarms of red-hot nails

Glittering

Phosphorescent

Corrosive

Flame-engulfing queen

Silver haired and shadow browed

Blue tongued and bloody eyed

Your  needle crown

Your dress of shards

Your yellow breathe

Your crooked teeth

Your deadly stare

Your pallid flesh

Your frigid limbs

Your pus filled veins

I hate you

I hate you

I will not be your lover I plug my ears to the Lure of your moan

I refuse your embrace

I will not be your  lover

Keep the white dust of your knock from my door.

Keep the stamp of your black lips for someone else.