Ex Cathedra

To weave garter belts with chaos and snakes, the nun’s toenail
of crimson phallus, her breast of alligator, her tail, crow’s
buttocks. Steel pricks of the ciborium dovetail her white
pantaloons—snake oil on a eucharistic tongue.
In crystal movies: an owl’s path beneath slumbers of the woods
that died to bolster the miserable stations of the cross, instead
of Bugs Bunny laminating the hedgerows through the pews,
stench gathers power in censers of the debasing perfumes.
Time of frostbites laid over crumbs of bile-soaked christies,
famines roasted with divinity, allah jacks up his “prisons within
prisons,” the flayed kaaba-stone pitched to the solar gobbling
machine.
After the great Dusting, this Pope exhibits his toes in carnivals
sure to spring up in sideshows of enigma, hot flints of the
anti-christ, my brother, in lesions of the darkening space,
Revolution the Star in the West springs the play of foam
on the rocks below . . .
Field mice from the mouths of “the hell sermon,” I lop off the
head of the oldest nun with a fragment of the reforgeable
brassy metallic cross; this priest whipping Sister Matilda with
guts spilled from the monstrance his tongue laps up at her feet.
Oh, junkyards of eternity fester in leads of clock time, but
Humankind invents the bomb I hurl to The Box of Infanticides,
Black-hearted children flee gehenna, pissing through mountains
of priestly corpses, those burnt hams in the tree of winds.
Schools of fish move in the night, plagues of scripture blown to
smithereens.
Secret rooms fly open absolutely by stealth.
The star card bestows the charm of new rivers, this word
tomorrow, Andromeda, and with you, Amor.
With the skull splendors of the imperium romanum, the alchemical
pope skewers a host of puffers on the backsides of saints.
Cardinals butcher in the market day for clerics.
Inside the chalice of battered gums, the vengeance of witches,
salmons to spawn the invisible eruption in the Street of the
Five Rats.
Talismanic, the marigold’s not a wing-feather less!
From the stone bubbles of Mother Angelica a herd of corpses
rides to the spider compass of my bones: the blood of swans
lace my handcuffs floating the altars, the inebriate sickle quick
to slice those melting emeralds inlaid with scripted shit the
great unknown rages to fruition on the flanks of Carthago.
The absolute pulverization of all the churches will be the grace of
love’s freedom!
On that day black holes of thought radiate the wind’s lost word,
this death that is not death: that day is magic is love.

Author's Notes/Comments: 

1989
from Bed of Sphinxes (New & Selected Poems, 1943-1993) City Lights Books, 1997

Philip Lamantia (October 23, 1927 - March 7, 2005) was an American poet and lecturer. Lamantia's visionary poems were ecstatic, terror-filled, and erotic which explored the subconscious world of dreams and linked it to the experience of daily life.

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