The Gullveig Working

^[1]4,646 words

My tarot deck rotates and coils in an onanist mitt and spills,
Dead men’s business cards, loser’s lottery tickets,
Un-redeemable pawn shop stubs for
Hearts and minds and souls,
Toe tags and thumb smudged nudes, traitor’s fingerprints
And cigarette cards for the hundred greatest
Cancer killed poets.
These jailhouse scavenged pocket scrapes and detritus
Shower a floor not worth killing for
With an unhappy confetti,
Spelling murder and fear in its disarrayed entrail tumble
On to bare boards.
And the solid truth is I am the hungry dead,
Dragged, drugged and Draugred,
And in my revenance I’ll chase mystery all over this damn town,
Like she was a blonde in a red velvet dress,
All curves and lips and promises.
And this corpse I have become will spin the whispers
From the traffic hum and eavesdropped cold cuts of conversation
As I carve through the crowd on an aimless trajectory.
DERIVE-UH!
And I’ll gaze long into the shew stone of a dead mobile
For a glimpse of the next empire
And hope for the Queens ear
John DEE-REEVE-UH!
In these sub-savage streets
And pseudo-strange days,
Where the red rivers of Powell
Are the only Enochian
And I am Peeping Tom
For the Godiva cadaver of this prurient world,
Tied dead in the saddle of the palest of horses.
DERIVE-UH!
All geographies are psycho regardless of the situation and its isms.
On a pavement sift I’ll ponder the spew of a spilled night
Auger the patterns for some glimpse
Abroad the cities palimpsest dreams,
Haunt the drinker’s trails across this place,
See it rainbowfracted in the dripping prism
Of the spittle on a pissheads chin,
Tracker on the hunt,
Urge within for buckskins and a Bowie
And a hat with a brim
To cast a shadow over my own dark,
A place to hide.
DERIVE-UH!
DERIVE-UH-HUH!
DERIVE-UH!
DERIVE-UH-HUH!
It becomes an Elvis mantra,
I can’t remember a day
Without I saw The King’s face or heard his name,
And let’s take a trip on that name
Elvis-he is EL-VIS,
He is Elf Wisdom,
AL-VIS – he is all wise!
Just how many eyes behind
Those steering wheel shades?
“There is but one King”
And it is awakeness!
And I this wounded corpse
Splash TCB
On my Presley stigmata.
Oh heal me King of Kings
Of this Kings evil!
Woe for I have to judge my heart
Against your brilliant feather
But you and I know it weighs like a lead tombstone
And I am found eternally wanting,
For Lo The Tupelo Midas spins
Base vinyl into gold!
The King looms carbohydrate large,
The shadow of his own light cast
As he discorporates and becomes
“EVER-MORE!”
Thus quoth the raven haired
Jumpsuit sparkle regent,
Tired of this guise he lets out a laugh
“There is only one eye in King”
And is gone leaving me alone
In the clamour of his
Own-Din.
And I’m still dead.
And aching for mystery.
So maybe she’s bored with my hounding,
Maybe it’s a reward,
She won’t tell me,
That broad in the red velvet dress
Is elusive beyond Elysian
And I’ll claw my way through concrete
For a hint of a whisper of a rumour
Of her perfume
In a room she thought about going into
Once a thousand lifetimes back
When I was still hint and dust and starlight.
So Madame Mystery
Sends a sister
And she’s sweet and says her name is Gullveig
But she prefers Goldslut or Goldie
And I like that
And we talk and I dig her
And her fire and her need
And she turns me on
To her junk
And her junk is GOLD
And she tells me it’s called awakeness
But it’s junk and it’s Gold
And she doesn’t even have to push.
So I ask her “Where do we score this?”
And smiling she says “Babe, the streets are paved with gold”
So she drives me crazy with lust,
For gold that is,
Your other passions fall witch tit flat
In the face of this fever.
But let’s interject about that other junk
For the squares,
So they have a hint of that hit and can dig something
Out of this diahorhea of a madman.
It’s the whole thing,
The needle, tourniquet etc, etc,
The ache like waiting to inhale
And then
A birth pain,
A tingled flood of pleasure,
Pure,
Tied to Nothing
Or anything better,
Pulling six aces on orgasm,
The grand “Fuck it!”
In that lengthened breath,
The release from all mortal pain,
The perfect instant
In the cease of then and when,
The notion of a power to breathe
The whole universe
In lungs like angel wings,
The feel of things long hidden found again
In dream remnants,
The paradox and wonder
Of being made of lead, light and helium
The absence of hate
Even for myself,
The forgiveness, the forgiveness, the forgiveness,
The sink into the burning cool
Of an angel kiss to the forehead,
Like a bullet made of your own laughter,
The universal dark behind your closed eyes,
The wonder of this secret, vibrating stillness
Rich with the sound of void,
The nausea , satiety and hunger,
The plunge of awakeness into sleep
In that sleep dive into dreams,
This is love.
And I’m back out searching and I’m alive-alive-oh.
Sold to Whittington’s lie
By Goldie with her cat eyes and curves
I’m dead again but don’t know it.
Nothing beats that glint in the dirt,
The swoop, the cold feel of the metal,
The certainty of a score.
I am possessed,
I am nothing without it,
I am beyond why’s.
You see the trails and tracks
In every street, gutter and drain
And sift for Sif within,
I can smell the pools of loss,
I follow the armies of fuck and fight,
I Raven and wolf in their wake,
Shark frenzied at a drop of the red gold in the water,
I start seeing the sense in cutting
The Christ chained throats of those fools
And in biting those fat be-sovereigned fingers off,
It’s wasted on them, wasted on them!
Can’t they see it?
Just give it up you fuckers!
THE PRECIOUSSSSSSSS!
But I hush myself and play by the rules.
The real map of any city
Is a Rorschach in blood
Scrawled by a lunatic
With a spirograph
Made from his own pelvis.
So I walk the rice paper of blood and lust,
Of random violence,
For the gilded sheddings and splinters
Of accident,
The spill from perceived slights,
From drugs and King alcohol,
The sweepings from Dionysus’s weekend night reign,
He rules, his libations
Wash away all pain,
And I sift his drift and pan
For the earrings, rings and bangles and things
With an eye ever open for the glister.
And that eye is sharp
For the venues of fuck and fight,
The illicit places,
The culvert and backway,
The uncivil spaces outside of time,
Jotunheim down an alley,
Arenas for fucks that bring no life
And fights that fall short of death,
All that energy spilled and circling,
Un-disipated in a whirl of frustration,
Seeping into the brick and concrete
Like rain.
And that seep can tension a city,
Bring it to a blood heat and on
Until it all boils over and King Riot reigns!
Or more likely the tension gives
And the town goes slack, reality loses elastic
And everything sags
Into the dull grey wash of unfulfillment,
The myth of renewal is broken
And if the myth dies
The city becomes undead, revenant, artless.
All things must fuck and die to live.
Magpie-eyed and seething with the need
I stalk the gutters,
Bugged by the gold, a Poe fevered ache and ague,
I cop glimpses in this mania,
This human obsession,
Gold, Gold, Gold,
And I see in those slices
A junk history, laid out in cadaverous avarice
As my eyes hawk the ground
For the slimmest glimmer.
And Burroughs junkie question
Hangs cock heavy, corpse limpid and stinking
“Wouldn’t you?”
You know you would.
I see it shine on a thousand throats
And fingers and ears
And I covet, covet, covet
But I can’t steal,
The rules of her game,
Finders keepers only,
Augury from the curliques of unreadable signets
That send you hither to a likely seam.
So carrion clad I track the trails
Violence ,loss and happenstance,
New roads for fresh kills in an old town,
Following the animals,
From watering hole to where they clash to where they fuck,
Vulturing the desert strangeways across
In hope of scraps.

The Words Of The Very High One
I know I was strung out
Four score years and some
On the windy streets
Wounded by the needle
Junkie Bill given to Old Bull Lee
On those streets of Interzone
Where Nova Mob knows
From what party they rise
They dealt me no bug powder no Mugwump jism
Staring down at my shoe
I spied a vein
Screaming I spiked it
And fell back on the nod.

But I digress, eternally,
So on you pan, you miner sixty-niner,
Forever after the Goldrush,
Pan the city’s culverts and kneel you in, they are its filthy veins and bowels,
And you eyes down for the Bingo of the glint,
So tell me true, on the rack, wrack of your obsession,
You spin your eyes gutterward for the merest hint of a glint,
Enthralled at a toffee wrapper,
Hard on for a ring pull,
It’s hardwired within you now,
The most hopeful man in town, he looks for gold in the shit,
Gaze up and blind in the sun and it is gold,
Eyes down and blind to all else save that glint
And the heart skip
As you pan on and on
On the cities hidden tracks of fuck and fight,
For the cursed Rhinegeld , you Alberich, you Uber-prick,
Mired in the midden
Of others loss, bad luck and tough fucking shit.
She is in that glint.
Like the shooting star flash
Of gusset in the cross of legs,
In that Silbury white mound of breast
In a view through liberty straining buttons,
The raptor eye plummet headlong, into the valley
Of cleavage, cleavage, cleavage,
Like the satori distraction of a bitten lip
Or a sideways glance through lashes,
The back drag on a wave caught just right,
She is beauty
And the promise of a love supreme.
She is in every curve
And every cunt and mouth
You’ve known,
But more in the ones you never have or will.
She is whore and virgin,
She is Old Crowley’s doubt
And he was always in debt.
And you would pass up
Any booze, junk or cunt
For this golden whore and her locks,
She is just right,
For she is the thing that is better
Round every corner of every block
And she is the grass that is greener
And the prophet who makes it so,
She is just right,
And she promise the world
And everything in it
And you know this lie is her truth
Because all are under her spell
And none can resist her smile
Or promise of her fix.
But especially not you,
Oh grubber in the dirt and shit and gutters,
And you would burst your heart asunder
Olympiad of the sewers,
With your eyes on the golden prize,
So on and on but there is no finish line for thee.
The Tarot begins with you oh fool!
And your optimism and its junk blindness,
Hope is the monkey on your back.
And wouldn’t the world
Twist beauty-full if we all dug just the one agree
On a single thing?
And wouldn’t peace be the thing,
And we all not brothers and sisters be
In a unity rapturous, harmonal and endless?
Well here’s the news suckers,
We do!
We agree on her worth and beauty
And our junkie need,
And every day is a kill spree
In her name
Because of our togetherness!
Halle-fucking-lujah!
And you can hear her laughter
Rattle within every final choking breath,
As she pulls the pin on another Golden apple,
And lets it roll baby roll
Into the heart of our own avarice, pride and delusion.
And the real mystery
Is our fascination,
What is this madness?
It’s not just its hypno-pretty glint surely?
What is this madness?
Dying Poe reaches out,
Touches the angel Gold Bug and expires,
What is this madness?
We irrationalise our guilt,
Flee whole hog into
Annunaki, miner slave fables,
Seek otherworld absolutions,
Alienate ourselves from the guilt
Of madness and obsession,
Cover it over,
But still it slumbers
Safe as the standard
By which it is the measure of all things,
This lust the dragon on the hoard
Of our occupied consciousness.
Oh little yellow metal
Who made thee?
Was thou birthed in the heart of a burning sun?
Was thou the shit of the Gods,
As the Aztec heart rippers surmised,
With their priest fists full of gore and pumping meat?
Thou marks our bonds,
And rings a world of bonded fingers
And sly the message to the metal bonded,
This the love enduring.
Thou drinkest deep of the meaning
Of all you touch,
Thou pretty vampire of value,
The Rhinegold taint is the blood in your veins,
The red gold is bloodied
And beyond all earthly defeat
For there it lives not,
Thou hidest behind an innocence false
Thou whore of whores,
Thou virgin of virgins
Who is all promises.
Andst we give to thee
Who is perfect and reproachless,
Unsullied even steeped in the blood
Of numberless horrors wrought in thy name.
Butter soft and harmless,
You ever fresh and willing malleable,
Blameless as a child at crib,
But it is we who are molded,
Called quicker to action than a babes cries could summon
By this the changeling fair.
Uncorrupted, uncorruptable
And yet the spur to all corruption,
And we’d crawl a million squelching miles
Over a charnel field of our own dead infants
For one of your smiles
Our MAAAAAAMMOOOONNNYYY!
Christostomos opens Ulysses
With a smile and a razor
And he knew history was a nightmare
He was trying to awake from
And we know the horror
Of death camp forceps,
Is it safe?
And of slavery and a sea
Of Inca blood,
So try not to think about
Where the smile glinted
Before it graced that loved ones knuckle,
Goldfingered into that eternal Bond,
But it’s there
In its gold DNA, in its blood,
Its history, its myth,
For this is where she lives, Goldie!
So deny the tiny human horror,
And as you stare into the glint
Behold! In that gilded smile,
The face of a monster,
Oh Calaban enraged!
So we Rune that we begin with a fee,
There are no free rides,
And we begin with a lie,
That cattle are gold,
But we are the cattle,
Everything lies,
All is symbol, a glyph, a cipher,
A hint at some mystery,
A clue in this case,
In which you are the cop,
The corpse, the murderer, the witness,
The whole damn pack,
And you are worse than all liars,
You are lies.

And behold it gives us absolution
From the pain of thinking , like all junk,
And it is not evil
But we are for our love of it,
And it is a hope
Of all salvation
And a lie,
And we forgive it
All our trespasses,
And pray that God
Is golden
And make him over
In gold
In hope of ab-solvo-lution
But it is all a lie.
I was torn from earth,
I was a coin,
I was an idol,
I was a crown,
I was a cross at a slit throat,
I was a tooth,
I was stolen,
I was stolen,
I was stolen,
I flowed to your hand
On a river of blood and atrocity
And you will forgive me
And you will believe
The lie that you tell yourself
That I am as the lamb
Innocent.
But for every lamb
There is a tiger,
And you have seen her
Ride it in Schleswig,
And you have seen her
Straddle the besom
And been jealous of that stick
And apprenticed yourself
To her source, sauce and sorcery,
So tell me her need
Was gold anymore,
Riding the tiger,
A millennia before Evola cribbed
And the sad old men with their flaccid staffs
Turned her golden LOVE to EVOL
And I am a Gilded Master
So you have to dig my truths!
And if you sup from that crock of shit
You’ll never be one!
And you’ll need a cat’s cradle of Valknots
To ladder you out
Of the grave
Of your sorry belief.
And you realise this shit
Was just in your head
Well fuck you Alice with your golden locks
We love you
And the creations of Carroll’s
Be they Lewis, Christmas or Pete,
That it’s all just
Cold, Frankenstein and murder
And you know that to posses
Is to become a possession
And you empty your pockets
And having nothing
There is nothing
And you gain everything
And you stalk the dead roads
For the Buddha
With a twelve inch bladed Bowie
You bought from Old Bull lee
And you made this happen,
And it’s all junk
And you are the prophet
Who makes the grass green
And you made the gold golden
And all the blood is on your hands.

And your eyes spill like dice
Across the dirt of this town
And you’re eternally trying your luck in the filth,
Let it roll baby roll, all night long,
And the wager is your sanity,
Snake eyes, sevens, pairs and elevens,
And you are The Diceman,
What’s in a name
Luke Rhinehart
And what’s the heart of the Rhine if it’s not gold?
And Luke begat Look and luck
But it’s all low-key
And you see his huckster eye behind
A fucked up scheme like this,
And you’ve met her too
The Maiden of all Rhinemaidens
You saw her in a hashish revery,
The woman with a thousand dice for a head,
She is Chaos , she is Runa,
She is all faces and none
As you long for that one you’ve never seen,
So Hugin and Muninn
Magpie up in a small white lie
And become dice and the halves of your fevered brain
And there is fear
As they tumble abroad
The green baize of the worlds.

So I’m slapped in the midnight line at a central Station convenience (so called) with the un-waiflike waifs and not strayed far enough strays, all seeking further oblivion in the first minutes of a new day.
I need some wine and bread for a less than holy communion with inebriation and satiation, my eyes are on the ground despite Oscar’s wild advice regarding stars, because drunk, sober, asleep or awake I’m still mania-ed maenad and panning and panting for gold in the Klondike of this gutter. I also shoe gaze because the last thing I need or want is a conversation here, my reality does not interface, it doesn’t play well with others. A heavy set, dirty (on several levels) blond with a boxers nose and more freckles than skin has just flashed her tits to the acne riddled boy dispensing numbness at the hatch, perhaps the mutual speckling confused her, tripped her into this blatant mating rite, she’s laughing harsh and cigaretted, she cops her lager and smokes and slumps off into the night with an equal punchy pulchitrudy friend.

I should dish the skinny on the hatch it seems. The goods are slipped through the said hatch at this hour, the corporate paranoia of robbery and rank incivilty looming large in a gamble against profits from the almost blind drunk. So I’m ground watching, waiting my turn when I catch a glint! There before me, a yard away is a gold ring. I quit my place in the line in a heartbeat, this score beats any ten minutes more in homage to the hatch. The ring is thin and cheap and is set with a black stone heart , the metaphor to the town is blatant and coarse but it’s gold and it’s all the damn world in that instant, rapt and elated and greedy I scan further and there shining on the pavement is a pool of blood, its colour muted in the sodium to an inky limpid, I step up and the carrion man Narcissuses a deaths heads into the black, I scope for more horror in this show oh my brothers and Droogs and there it is, a scalp torn tuft of bottle auburn hair.

The whole sorry scenario plays out in the myriad scenes and minutiae of this butcher fresh brute encounter. Whose ring? Whose blood? Whose hair? Who did what and why? Was it a him, another her? Come on Gumshoe! There was sex afoot in this game and sheer luck saw you here to witness this graphic passion play left in sordid haiku on the pavement, Ripperesque grand guignol leavings on a lonely drunken corner.

And this I know is the last fix, the final piece of this puzzle, a blood full stop before my heart turns stony black to match, this is the last gold.

And I tell you Oh seeker
Of this mania
Not as warning
But as a necessity like water.
So now you have your snatch of gelt
And you spill the shrapnel of grenaded hopes and dreams
Through your avariced carrion fingers
And savour the heartache
Of loss and broken hearts and betrayals
And the million things this gold has been
Of the glinting magick fragments in welsh streams,
And the hidden hoards as yet unfound
And you know that as the owners bled out
With futile fingers to spilled guts and blood
That their last thought wasn’t home or cunt or mother or the Gods
But that gleaming heap they’d never see again,
Of the slog and slavery in the African mines,
Of the Spanish slaughter,
And the gilded mouths and Jew gold and theft
And the coins, the coins
And the thousand , thousand hands
That have touched it and the desire
Of every eye that beheld
And you trickle all human history through your fingers
And you are as much this gold as it is your story.

So you have your stash and you’re burned out
And used up by it and the search
And The Blonde and her just right urgings.
And the mania is salved by this brief cool satiation
And you think as you finger your pile of murder
“Well what the fuck now?”
And in that instant
The note flutters down from the ceiling
In a shower of Golden sparkles and a whiff of snatch and perfume
And it’s from Her
“Sorry Babe, had to split town, Ciao. Goldie XXX”
And you’re alone again
With a fistful and broken promises and an ache
For curves that are gone, gone, gone
And you’re coming down faster than fucking Daedulus
From this trip,
Awake from the mania.
So you trek a careful cat’s path
Over this the ice
Of your abandon.
Eyes up Motherfucker!
You’re not grubbing in the dirt,
That games over you sap!
But your treacherous heart still flickers
At a glint
Wherever it may be
Fingers , ears, throats
And cleavage, cleavage, cleavage
In an incessant gilded incendiary echo.

So you gather your indecision and stash the gilt
Under the bed with the weapons and secrets and porn and dust
And you incubate like an old Greek
On a goatskin,
Seeking a salve for the cold turkey of an ordinary life,
Hide your panic
In something Pan-ic
Daddio. Dio IO! IO! IO!
And hope in some dream that comes
You’ll find the next thing and ease.
You let that pony run,
Maybe all gestation is a nine month,
You dragon your hoard,
Snug up on the pillow
Of your holy avarice
Awaiting the voice of the Dragonish guest
That is your own awakeness
And its word and sword
That slays you for the third time
Oh thrice dead Gullveigman
And drives your serpent inertia OUT! OUT! OUT!
Into action
As the creative destruction surge
Splits the seed in growth
And spirals on the axis of your imagination
Sleep , baby, sleep.

And the gold cold turkey is over
And waking on this dawn of all days
You want beauty about you
Like a blanket on a cold one.
So the gold is yours to use
This is your prize for slaying the dragon
And the blonde is gone
But there’s always another.

So your instinct is to bin the junk,
Cash it in on a wild night out, Give yourself an occult yarn to spin
About how you dumped the gelt
In a lake or a river or a bog
Knowing full well that riff will run like a sore,
The stash growing cock-like with every retelling
Till the legend wets the lips and loins and soaks some to the skin,
Popeyed with the Tsetse bite of the bug
In search for your lost gold.
But you won this glittering mittfull of the sun
From the jaws of madness herself,
Caught that lunatic dose,
The gold Junk Pox
And flogged yourself three times deceased
Oh Herpes Trismi-dead –horse.
You died in that moment
When your eyes opened and
You saw that all was dead
Including you,
Your love was dead to this world
And your second death was your will,
Dead to all else but
The search and the mania and lust for her
And your final death was even that
And thus the world came back to you alive
And knew that all you were
Were love and will.
So you give nix to that
In the dark Nox of this comedown
And hang on to your souvenir loot
And thinking hard with your one eye closed
And stood on one leg
You glom the notion to giveth this thing
That was yourself in the long months of madness
To yourself.
This glint that was the whiphand
That became who you were,
That began where you ended and blended
And vice-versa
Like all great loves,
Of this thing you are now the master,
It lies under the thumb of your will.
You’ve seen the blood and pain of it
And know she is a great servant,
Makes Mercury for a sluggard
And can buy all the steel and lead,
But she the worst of mistresses
Because you give it all up for that love supreme,
All control
And as Old Bill glommed
What does control want?
More control.
But this is the oldest yarn,
We awake and seek power and fall
From that infantile, innocent grace.
Go find yourself a smith
(If you can smith for yourself well bully (Bull Lee) for you
Some of us can only bend words to our will)
And you get him to dwarf you up your beast in this gold of yours
Maybe get him to spill a vial of your blood and mead
Into the mix
But you are the Master Oh Gullveigman
And the rules writ here are yours alone
But make it beautiful,
Make it so your heart leaps
At each glimpse and touch
As your breath draws in
As you peek in the pouch
So give yourself this beautiful thing,
Bind it into your power,
Now the glint serves your need,
Can carry,
Can Fetch.
And make them all jealous
That your eyes don’t shine
Like that at them
And smile Oh Master
For you know it and this world are mere glyph and seven veils,
That your idol is not The Golden Calf,
It is not the blonde in any fucking red dress,
It is yourself,
Your one true love,
The spark of you
That is eternal awakeness,
Glowing warm and dancing wild
in the light
Of its own dark fire.

D. Jonathan Jones
December the nineteenth 2015