These Poems Are Dedicated to

                           CARLO DE FORNARO

            Who Was the First to Understand, Appreciate and
                         Sympathize with Them




               OF THIS FIRST EDITION OF SIX-HUNDRED AND
                 FIFTY COPIES OF “THE SHADOW-EATER” BY
                 BENJAMIN DE CASSERES ONE-HUNDRED AND
               FIFTY COPIES HAVE BEEN PRINTED ON TUSCANY
               HAND MADE PAPER AND SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR




                                  THE
                             SHADOW-EATER

                                  BY

                         Benjamin De Casseres


                               NEW YORK
                      WILMARTH PUBLISHING COMPANY
                                 1917


                            Copyright, 1915
                       By ALBERT & CHARLES BONI

                            Copyright, 1917
                Assigned to WILMARTH PUBLISHING COMPANY




CONTENTS


                                                                    PAGE

The Protagonist                                                        7

Tantara! Tantaro!                                                      8

The Tongueless One                                                     9

The Shrine in the Mist                                                10

My Comic Perspective                                                  12

The Peeper                                                            14

The Circle-That-Looks-Like-A-line                                     15

My Divine Hate                                                        18

The Rotted Ideal                                                      20

The Vision Malefic                                                    21

Dying                                                                 22

The Dead Who Live                                                     23

Exvolved                                                              24

The God of Negation                                                   25

Godward                                                               26

Beyond Sense                                                          27

The Cynic of Nazareth                                                 28

De Profundis                                                          29

On a Marriage                                                         30

The Syncopated Spinner                                                31

Love and Sleep                                                        32

The Watcher                                                           33

Face to Face                                                          34

My Shadows                                                            35

The Vigil                                                             36

The Closed Room                                                       37

Half-Seen                                                             38

The Long Vigil                                                        39

Prophetic                                                             40

Resurrection Night                                                    41

Bird of the Night                                                     42

The Cleft in the Wall                                                 43

The Truant                                                            45

Change and an Ending                                                  46

The Quest in the Flesh                                                47

In the Adytum                                                         49

The Way Out: BIO                                                      50

Moth-Terror                                                           51

My Holy Lust                                                          52

The Overone                                                           53

The Ultimate                                                          54

The Sleeper                                                           55

The Alleys of Eld                                                     56

Love the Destroyer                                                    57

Rejection                                                             58

The Spear of the Great Spurning                                       59




THE PROTAGONIST


To Carlo de Fornaro.

Medusa! I go toward you smiling, serene; my will is granite to your
stare, and I have that within me which blows out the light of hells set
there within your eyes and turns to mottled stone the serpents on your
head.

I have woven of my pains a masque of bronze and the summits of my
deepest hells are changed into the impetuous lightnings of my will and
claws of steel have come to grow upon my mutilated members.

I have violated my own graves and set the skeletons of my selves at my
meal-less feasting board, and still found tender meat upon their bones,
and the marrow of their ancient griefs was as hippocrene to me.

Eternity! Infinity! I come toward thee swifter than a thought of death!
I come toward thee bulging like a woman in her ninth month!--bulging
with my hells, my devils, my Gethsemanes, booty of my sullen pride!

                                                 BENJAMIN DE CASSERES




TANTARA! TANTARO!


  Death-lights on the scud and the baying of wind in the rigging, the hail
      on my cheek--
                Tantara! Tantaro!
  The wheel in my hand is shattered by a bolt from On High, chart and compass
      are lost in the coiling dun sea--
                Tantara! Tantaro!
  Scuttle me? Yea, scuttle me--I’ll bob up again, not in smooth waters but
      there where the storm is the wildest--
                Tantara! Tantaro!
  Didst Thou think to awe me, me the unhallowed, the daring, the storm-cleaver,
      the seeker in gutter and star?--
                Tantara! Tantaro!
  I am lashed to myself, to the iron mast of Necessity, and Thy scourgings
      I use for my rivets--
                Tantara! Tantaro!
  Ballast and cargo and anchor, all have been jettisoned into Thy seas--
                Tantara! Tantaro!
  On! On! my soul through the storm, through the wrath and the terror of death--
                Tantara! Tantaro!




THE TONGUELESS ONE


  There stands that Mute into whose ear the ages have whispered their secrets--
  There stands that Mute with lusting eye and lusting ear who uttereth naught--
  Mute of a myriad secrets who knoweth whither we wend;
  Mute of the graven face and the alabaster hands--
  There before me stands that Mute whose earthly name is Death--
  That Mute into whose monstrous ear all things are whispered but who UTTERETH
      NAUGHT.




THE SHRINE IN THE MIST


  I travel toward a Shrine that is set in a mist--long have I been on the
      way.
  I hear dull rasping whispers afloat on the night:
  Are they spirits conferring, friendly to me and my journey, or the half-smothered
      mockeries of the fiends that I know--that I know?--
  They that sneer and pass on the winds in the night.
  I travel toward a Shrine that is set in a mist--
  By day I am beset by the beasts of my nethers and awed by the old bleached

  adavers that strew the intricate alleys of vision.

  I peer at you, O glutton, well-fed, nigger-hipped, bag-eyed; at you I am
      peering,
  And wonder whether the Shrine is hid in the mists of your belly--
  Wondering whether the Truth be not a belch and a leer and a lusty young
      wench.
  And I peer at you, too, O Gautama, the purpled renunciant, great Shadow-Eater:
  I peer at you there on the roadside, where you sit ’neath the Bo tree, motionless,
      graven as death, solved in thy pulseless Nirvana--
  Wondering whether the Shrine is hid in the mists of thy brain.

  Am I mocked? Am I followed? Who goes there?
        Hands off! thou Vile Thing!
  Thou knowest not me nor the thing that I seek:
  The Shrine that is set in a mist--over THERE, just BEYOND.




MY COMIC PERSPECTIVE


  When a boy I was wrenched in a gin hidden in a garden of roses: thus am
      I lame.
  Later was slugged on the head by the Father of Lies--the Ideal:
  But I laughed and hallooed, “Come, To-morrow!”
  I have been bushwhacked by women, gnawed to the bone by a great ancient
      lust:
  All things I touched turned slime-green and black-hideous thoughts played
      ’round my night-pillow like rats ’round the new-dead:
  But I laughed and hallooed, “Come, To-morrow!”
  I used to say, “God?--why, that is myself!”
  The world took me seriously, set me up for a savior:
  But I laughed, doffed aureole, and hallooed, “Come, To-morrow!”
  Then I donned horns and tail and cried, “Behold! I am Lucifer!”
  So they stoned me till I looked like a shambles:
  But I laughed and hallooed, “Come, To-morrow!”
  I bought from a drab a filthy old handkerchief, exhibited it as the Veil
      of Isis.
  The popes of philosophy bowed down to me and mumbled “Eureka!”
  But I laughed (for I knew) and hallooed, “Come, To-morrow!”

  Well, here am I now, a butt-end, awaiting translation.
  The world I have found a small box with endless false bottoms;
  I have come to the tomb, a little clay box which, too, is false bottomed:
  I call into it, laugh and halloo, “Come, TO-MORROW!”




THE PEEPER


  I am an eavesdropper, a peeper, a cosmic footpad;
  With my ear at the keyhole of Eternity I report what I hear in that beyond-room,
      where IT works--
  IT, the thwarter of me and of thee and of all things that savor of smut
      and of ether--
  Thwarts even itself in its huge imbecility: IT, the spirit of Law, the shadow
      of thee and of me, the Great Blunted Purpose.
  What I hear in the beyond-room, is it the illusions of dreams, the crackle
      of burning brain-faggots, or the veritable IT at its experiments?--
  Solving us, evoking us, tempting us out of the womb of the Naught into the
      awareness called life.
  Does IT use the dregs of me or the best of me?
  Eternity: is it inhabited?
  The imminent cycles, the durations dead, the secrets in them: are they in
      ITS keeping?
  Still, I listen, with my eye at the keyhole, and report;
  For I know there are a Thwarter and one thwarted, a Nothing at war with
      a Something, a gad and a writhe--
  One who returns everlastingly, but who is never repeated in Time.




THE-CIRCLE-THAT-LOOKS-LIKE-A-LINE


  I am the Watcher, and me nothing eludes.
  I live behind the mask of things,
  My breath is world-wither, and a chance shot from my eye-sockets confounds
      the God of Illusions at Its imbecile pastimes.
  I stand within Time’s crumbling walls and weave at Eternity’s looms the
      Circle-that-looks-like-a-line.
  I am leagued with the Sphinx, and her secretive mumblings I alone understand.
  I am the footnote that explains that old undecipherable palimpsest called
      Life,
  And it is for me the drum beats--the deadly intoning drumbeats that the
      mummer Man jigs to.

  Briskly Man in his morn steps forth, guards up.
  He bows, he smiles, and his eyes, foci of his myriad lusts, seek in the
      dust for the thing that slipped, eel-like, through his fingers in the
      yesterday.
  At night, within his locked and barred room, his hope-fattened face dismantles.
  His eyes grow knotted troubled lights, jaws sag--weary, oh, weary is he!
  Pain! Pain! gay-pain! I watch, I record, in the Circle-that-looks-like-a-line!

  Youth! Youth! how gay his step!
  His soul scents Truth--he is off like a hound on the trail, white brow upturned,
      the old ecstatic urge in his eye:
  His hands would hook her now!
  Up! Up! he reaches and steps off the precipice of the world.
  A Hag bends over him, a Hag whose face is a lutescent leer, eyes steel-grayed
      by a knowledge of the pitiless truths.
  Eternity rings with her glee-shrieks as she gathers his bones--bones that
      shall feed her quenchless immemorial fires in the nether hollows--
  Hollows of the mocking shapes,
  Hollows of metallic laughs,
  Hollows of the wan gray spectres.
  Pain! Pain! gay-pain! I watch, I record, in the Circle-that-looks-like-a-line!

  Yea, I am the lidless, dispassionate Eye that pierces the murk and the mist--
  My tears are a laughing,
  My laughing a weeping--
  I watch and I wait and record,
  Brooding over my soul, that dried lava-stream and granary of volcanic dust;
  Brooding over my brain, that mirror of the implacable trivial.

  I am a shadow that is more real than a substance,
  Am skewered and pinioned to offal--yet my soul is a
         Kremlin of unapprehended magnificence,
  The Vision Malefic and the Vision Beatific, too.
  I live and am not, am the Infinite withered to naught.

  I watch, I record, and I weave at Eternity’s looms
      the Circle-that-looks-like-a-line.




MY DIVINE HATE


  Ever-changing, ever-vanishing, an evocation from out the Mist, tottering
      forever to a doom that is never pronounced,
  I am the visible Invisible,
  The eel that slips through God’s hands,
  A dominoed Abstraction whose lineaments the most curious cannot discover,
  Renascent over your head when you think I lie dead,
  Intruder in Time, enclayed for a moment, flinty, brittle,
  Flying the flag of Rebellion, chanting my hates and my dreams.

  The world is the Temple of Pain grounded and mortised in lies--
  And that which they have told you is good I say is maggoty with lies.
  Hope is a whore and love is a lie and a flea has more for his labor than
      a man, the wisest of whom is still earth’s awkward buffoon.
  To-morrow is God--they have added a jot to Eternity!
  Know they not to-day is Eternity and to-morrow its lewd, beckoning shadow?
  And love they have sanctified because of its delicate tickle.
  Pah! this rotten old breeding-patch circling the sun!

  From the center to circumference, from nadir to zenith,
  I, the eel that slips through the Great Bungler’s hands, survey and judge
      and cannot be lured by these old temporal cozzeners.

  Yea, forever I vanish, I change, yet forever stand firm,
  Flying the flag of Rebellion from the Temple of Pain, knowing the Thing
      that skulks in the adytum.




THE ROTTED IDEAL


  Framed in ebon memories her picture hangs there upon the walls of my brain.
  ’Tis not the face I put there in my youth: that glorious youth of me, slain
      by its lusts, bitten to death by the baby vampires that swarmed in its blood.
  The lost woman of my soul! warm lips, black eyes--face that was a prism
      of love shot through by the rays from some dumb despair--
  Long has it vanished.
  And the dust of my acts have gathered on that brow, and my sins have smitten
      her cheeks to a pallor, and her eyes welter in two brackish tears--
  Tears that have lain stagnant in those bony cups for a myriad soul-cycles.
  I have wrought my own decay into that face: it has traveled the way of my
      own dissolution.
  Will it break on my brain-walls and streak all my rottenness anew?
  And a spider has woven a web over and around the great frame of ebon and
      the thin bladder of flesh that once was her face--
  A leering, grinning spider has woven his web there,
  A leering, grinning spider whose mouth sucks poison from her lips.
  Lead on, hell-lights!




THE VISION MALEFIC


  My soul is a tarn as black and motionless as the night above in which whirl
      forever and ever the pallid balls of light that are my sickly dreams.
  I am weaving a shroud for the God whom I hate--I have defied him and cursed
      Him, and here is His winding-sheet.
  I am lodged in my sins, and my soul is lean of its lusts.
  The worm that gnaws at the breast of the maid new-dead--that is I,
  And the bell that tolled her to rest--I am that toll.
  My heart ventricles are like the bases of canyons untouched by the sun.
  I am dried, bleached and blanched, lie stark in a great pestilent vapor,
  And Time feeds at my brain like the vultures at the heart of Prometheus:
  Who will shrive me and draw the lids over these eyes?




DYING


  There he lies, his pale face fitfully waving a truce to Old Care,
  Life flowing out from a million invisible rents in his soul,
  To-morrow finally abolished.
  To-night he still breathes,
  To-morrow he’ll lie with the breathless,
  Past the goal, uprendered, solved in black mist, domino doffed--no more.

  O Life, thou plunderer,
  Sly in thy cozzening, fell in thy lusts, weaver of nightmares, liar and
      cheat,
  Here is thy last mockery,
  Here is thy quarry: hast signalled the worms even now?
  Swift be thy flight, thou craven and satyr and old purpled lust!




THE DEAD WHO LIVE


  Up from the nether world in unending procession,
  Like the lurid mists at the dawn-time,
  Like the black wraiths that ascend from foul crypts,
  Arise and ever arise my impulses.
  Across the field of consciousness they stalk, anhungered, lust-ravened,
      lean of their ghastly dreams--
  Thou devils of the gone-by!




EXVOLVED


  I am the Spectre at the feasts of the strong men and sneer at their brag.
  I listen where the weak wail and sneer at them, too, for their wail is old
      Envy masked as Humility.
  The strong shall be tricked out of their strength, I say, and knock at the
      doors of the weak for a dole of black bread;
  The weak shall become strong, I say, and burrow their way into the thrones
      of the mighty.
  The pieces are changed, the game is eternally the same.
  Only I shall persist in an eternal likeness unto myself--
  I, neutral, indifferent, sewed up in my silence, my soul the great menstruum
      of contrasts, the Heel and the Worm.




THE GOD OF NEGATION


  I have ascended to the topmost spaces and dragged the cars of the devildare
      gods from their courses;
  They saw me not, but felt me as a Presence that hurled them from the track.
  I have in a wondrous Thought undermined the Milky Way and have sown the
      orbits of the suns with dragons’ teeth uprooted from my rebellious soul:
  Those eyes of gleaming fire saw me not, but felt me as a movement in the
      Abyss.
  I have numbed the arm of the blind old Artisan, and he shall die at my last
      Epiphany:
  He heard me not, but felt me as the great Destructive Presence.




GODWARD


  God?--the sum of my tendencies, uttered, unuttered, definite, innate;
  Me the individual, my special differentia--not thee, but me unevolved, guessing
      at myself unegged; that is God if God there be.
  Christ was the deepest, Napoleon was the deepest, he of Weimar was the deepest:
      to be yourself, that is the deepest--
  That is to be God.

  Thou shalt love thyself more than thy neighbor.
  Sound trumpet, thrust rapier, cleave unto thyself: self-ward we go, godhood
      be ours!

  Unique in all time is my unquotable self: God in the dungeon of me, fear-shackled,
      thonged in the cords of the past.
  Into the light at this moment, thou long-buried ONE; sternly, defiantly,
      joyously, I lift Thee into the light!
  Long hast thou lain in crypts, and thy eyes are still closed; mute is God’s
      tongue, as silent as dreams.

  Sound trumpet, thrust rapier, I cleave to myself, though spiked to a cross
      and rabbled by Doubt!




BEYOND SENSE


  My brain is the haunt of a naked Curiosity that has lured my soul across
      the purple bars of sense, beyond the last outpost of Reason, where I
      know not if I be I.
  Lights quicken and wane, glooms thicken around me and break into lean and
      hurrying Shapes--supraterrestrial phantoms, spectral norms of this world
      and vague patterns of things not yet become.
  Forest of branching selves, my various masks, my serio-comic souls, my antique,
      half-remembered egos: are ye that?
  And here I now stand peering tensely curious into the crater of Eternity,
      seeking out Demiurge there in the depths,
  When the truth flashes on me: I am but fume, spew, from that Depth--
  I and thee, all, but fantastic smoke-shapes flitting above the crater of
      Eternity;
  And Demiurge, muttering, retreating, advancing there in the Depths, is but
      the shadow of Me the Curious One.




THE CYNIC OF NAZARETH


  The keenest Cynic of them all: Jesus Christ!

  Hail! passionate rebel, great anarch of Nazareth, slitter of masks, announcer
      of Self procreate from a self--
  Halloo! Halloo! from me to thee.

  Sombre in hate, clear-eyed, dawn-browed, a mock in thy soul,
  A mock at psalter and sceptre and a sneer for the sickly old God in the
      temples of stone--
  Hail! Cynic and Mocker of Nazareth: greeting from me to thee!




DE PROFUNDIS


  Night! Night! Eternal Night, whose black vapors have filled all the sluiceways
      of Time--Night! ageless and void, seamless and bald:
  Night upgurgling from chaos, upswirl of the noumenal seas, drape me and
      veil me from the illusory lights of this world!

  My being’s at nadir,
  I pass into my solstice,
  I have touched of ITS garment, the black thing IT weaves on ITS sentient
      looms, ITS great blouse of black which encircles the world fold upon
      fold--
  While we crawl in ITS creases and guess.

  Sit I in the night of ITS sleeve,
  Withering into eternities,
  Bowed in ITS night, in ITS night!




ON A MARRIAGE


  I hear laughter and there is a feasting, and another marriage is made--
  A conspiracy has been formed to accouch another being.
  Thou child unborn that now resteth in eternal day, day that is neither light
      nor dark;
  Child that art yet uncreate and unwhipped of Pain,
  In laughter and in feasting they have conspired against thy blissful sleep
  There in the Unconscious,
  There where thou art lapped and laved in non-being.
  Hast thou heard the rumors from the lust-plane,
  The guilty murmurings from the priest that made two beings incorporate?
  Dost thou know thou art doomed to be born, to bear the cross and have the
      nails of pain cleave thy temples?

  O thou sweet dweller in the White Temple,
  Baby! Baby! as yet a lustful dream in two human hearts!
  Already thy white robes are stained by a tiny red mark--
  Thou art doomed to enter the lazarhouse.

  Baby! Baby! I hear thee in the night weeping and wailing ’gainst thy birth:
  For another marriage is made.




THE SYNCOPATED SPINNER


  Yon drowsing Spider that squats there upon Time’s rotting timbers spinning
      her seven webs of a million threads, spinning and weaving from the birth
      of the Primitive Cycle--
  Her criss-crosses, her mazes and labyrinths that are called Eternal Laws
      by the midges caught in the films
  Spun by that drowsing Spider squat there upon Time’s rotting timbers:
  Awake! thou great spinning demon, shake webs and midge-men into the Nothing,
      and with the shade of a smirk that I know resume thy loathsome pastime
  There squat upon Time’s rotting timbers!




LOVE AND SLEEP


  I am a pale passionate Pilgrim evoked from the dust and the dark.
  In my brain are the molten ivories of the dawn, in my heart the brooding
      desire for thee.
  Whispers of the purple hours to come, whispers of the white eternities past,
  Draw me hither and thither and nowhither.
  Ah me! shall I rest here a while on the chubby round earth or travel back
      to the ivoried eternities?
  Stand I thus at pause,
  I, a pale passionate Pilgrim evoked from the dust and the dark.




THE WATCHER


  Who are these shadows about me--my neighbors, my nearest, the jostler whom
      I felt at my elbow?
  I--I who have gazed into the eternities and can in a glance pierce the curtains
      of Time,
  Who have watched through this night the endless procession into being and
      beyond that
  (The cry in the womb, the release, the hasty scud across earth, the thud
      in the Pit!);
  The screams in the dark, seen in a vision the Wheel go around and around
      and the writhing, pain-gutted images clinging to the blood-smeared spokes--
  I--what have I to do with this black, seething Now and its shadows?

  Surge around me, ye humans, ye water-gymnasts;
  The tide’s running out, the present is ever-dissolving and the morn bringeth
      death to ye all.
  But I who plash in the eternal waters and stray to the pallid horizon
  Will return on the day of your silence, the Same, ever the Same.




FACE TO FACE


  It is well thou art hid, O Lord, and sittest with glued lips fast on thy
      throne beyond the yellow disk of day.
  Up from the slime I came, a Caliban blaspheming, leaning on crutch, superb
      hate in my eye, peering through bramble and forest for THEE.
  Aeons ago was I thus, and now I am here, still evolving, planted firmly
      on two feet, almost at thy heels, not vexed, as cunning as thou,
  O Lord of the vortices, fiend in the flux!
  Linked to Prometheus, linked to great Lucifer, I’ll meet thee at the GREAT
      CROSSWAYS and heal thee forever of the disease of creating.




MY SHADOWS


  Yonder lies my way.
  Yea, I have taken the road, and in a sleep, in a cycle, I returned to the
      forks--
  For all things are One, and beyond the One I cannot step.
  The gad ever stings, and the Furies drive me forward--over suns, over flaming
      chaotic foreworlds, to the hilt of creation;
  But my thought is firm-set: illusive the flight, the return, the urge, the
      reaction.
  I move not.
  Based in the One, squatted here at the forks where the grooves of Change
      center,
  I move not,
  Adventure not forth,
  Ran not that race over far-streaming worlds, nor danced on the cosmic pain-griddles.
  ’Twas my dominoed self,
  An aspect of me, a shadow that travels forward and backward and upward and
      downward on Time’s dirty screens.
  What road shall I take when all things return unto me?--
  I who move not on Time’s dirty screens, was not touched by the gad;
  I who am here at the forks where the grooves of Change center,
  Who am One and the All, am motion and rest.




THE VIGIL


  Here in the naked primal night,
  Here where the VEILED sits graven in silence in ITS garden of weeds,
  Here where the NOTHING drowses and mutters of a SOMETHING to come;
  Here where the fangs of my soul have fastened at last;
  Here where through wild-steaming streams of passion and great shroud-like
      dawns I have dragged my undying Desire--
  Here, too, will I vigil with THEE through the glutted eternities--
  Thou imbecile artisan, thou bungler, evader, rhetor and faun!




THE CLOSED ROOM


  I am at the door of the Closed Room,
  I stand without, whispering and chatting to myself, in many fantastic attitudes,
      like gnomes that skulk in castle-moats.
  There are finger-marks on the door-knob--
  Many, many have gone in, no one ever came out.
  Through chinks I hear vague rumors, or is it the echo of the blood in my
      arteries?
  And my eyes have spied, as I think, a light falling through cracks in the
      wall, or is it only the reflection of brain-sparks on the polished wood?
  I finger the old worn knob, but am not yet admitted.




HALF-SEEN


  Out from the brake and stubble of sense I peered for a moment--
  Wist! was that THEE that passed on the wind?
  Once, too, I swam out beyond sight of all land and emerged on the crest
      of the highest wave--
  Wist! was that THEE that sped over the horizon?
  I throttled one by one each image in my brain on a night when the north-wind
      blew from the Zenith--
  Wist! was that THEE that startled me into a body again?
  Ride thou on the wind, or merge in all horizons, Image unimaged, escape
      me Thou canst not, for I am the part that must make THEE whole at the
      last--
  At the last!




THE LONG VIGIL


  Like sunlight, I touch all things, yet nothing do I gain;
  I am neither richer nor poorer than I was at the beginning of things.
  Passion, hope, pain, grief, leave me unchanged (I shed universes and moult
      cycles).
  To the eye of the world I am tossed like a cork on rough waters,
  But I know I have stood Here since the Day of the Primal Appearance,
  Transfixed in supreme wonder,
  Rigid in pride, dissenting, unmoved.




PROPHETIC


  Time lies cataleptic in my brain: Eternity alone reigns there.
  Infinite space has shrunken to a single point of fire, from whose heart
      radiate the trackless voids.

  Life I have bosomed in a sigh.
  I will exhale with the dawn, step lightly to my zenith, death in-wrapt.




RESURRECTION NIGHT


  I slept, and out of their ancient tombs of tissue-plasm streamed a shadowy
      host of Living Dead.
  Gliding silently across the waxed and shining floor of my soul, they breathed
      their breaths upon the emptièd mirror of my mind:
  And Terror and Guilt captained that crew.

  The subtle fingers of the dawn brushed my brow and my soul flowed back into
      the sluiceways of the old familiar world;
  But long I laid in wonder staring at the wall, for in that night I had again
      become the Things I was before my birth.
  And Terror and Guilt were old shapes of me.




BIRD OF THE NIGHT


  O thou pinioned Thought, where wilt thou wing me to-night?
  Dug from the marl and silt of my soul,
  Breath of my delicate dreams,
  Bird with the eyes of the circular fires sucked from the suns we have grazed
      in our flight,
  Cleaver of lightnings, warbler in the zenith of my passionate being,
  Plumed and feathered for thy mystic spiral progressions,
  Where wilt thou bear me this night?




THE CLEFT IN THE WALL


  They pass through my brain and leave not a mark: cities and women and autumnal
      skies.
  I am related to nothing in the phenomenal flux,
  The world-days are vain shapes of desire, a mist on my mirror, my mind--
  My mind that reflects cities and women and autumnal skies,
  Wrack of old Chaos, wrack of old Time.
  My soul is a fountain that balances the ball of the visible cosmos;
  I toss high, I toss hither and thither the whole universe, the hollow ball
      of desire--
  It is nothing to me, a sport, a day-dream, as meaningless as old death and
      old birth,
  Or cities and women and autumnal skies.

  I travelled far with my pickaxe and spade and spied by chance a tiny cleft
      in Time’s granite wall--
  I called it the NOW;
  And through it I peeped like a boy through a knot-hole,
  Peeped into the Infinite, a sea no bigger than a dewdrop, placid and waveless
      and spaceless.
  (What Giant Shape lay therein, the opening and shutting of whose eyes gendered
      immeasureable cycles?)
  I passed through the cleft of the NOW with infinite labor, and dispersed
      body and soul,
  And cities and women and autumnal skies drift past my sight and leave me
      untouched.




THE TRUANT


  What was its mandate?
  Where is the script IT placed in my hand?
  Who sent me on this strange errand?
  Or was it--No! No! too horrible!
  And yet--and yet, how came I here?

  In the immobile immensities, where renascence and decay and the plexed dream
      called Life were still unsensed--
  Before I aggregated,
  Before I anealed into an I,
  Before the first stratum of lust was laid,
  Before the dispart from the ALL--
  In the immobile immensities something was ordered of me;
  I was sent on an errand!

  Hey ho! I have dallied with mortals too long,
  Yet I dare not return without the thing done.
  Or was it--No! No! too horrible!




CHANGE AND AN ENDING


  Glow, glow, thou yellow fire, mother of me--thou shalt reclaim me body and
      soul.
  Shine, shine, thou pulsing white eyes of the night--I shall quiver in thy
      lights and be recompounded in thy crucibles of clay.
  Moon! Moon! sick-yellowed in amorous need of life, shall I not be as thee--still,
      cold and age-seamed?
  Yea, in the whirl of the atoms and the swirl of great hidden forces I shall
      be accouched in an uttermost star,
  Builded anew in the dirt of a still unwombed world,
  Speak, dream, languish and rot again and again,
  Go the round of the infinite cycles till I spy, as by chance,
  IT, the Cagliostro, the Worker, the kneader of mud-shapes,
  Slay IT there where I meet IT, and lay me down, out of Space, out of Time,
      certain of endless quiescence for me and for THEE.




THE QUEST IN THE FLESH


  Here where the forces elemental circle me, caress me and touch my city-scattered
      parts to a whole;
  Here on the mount, ’neath a blue-burnished heaven and a passionate luring
      sun, where the war of the wind with the leaves mocks at the strength we
      have hid;
  Here is the lesson to learn, here is the Teacher eternal, the war-lord of
      Space, the parent of hate and of love.
  Do I not hate with a love that’s intense?
  Is not my soul strengthened in battle?
  My brain is a duel of opposing forces, and the thing that I war against
      is more precious to me than the tickle of grass or the ease that brings
      degradation.

  War! War!--bring me helmet and shield and the sword of the spirit; the great
      weaponed SELF that I seek and that forever seeks me
  Is shut in a tower of gold o’ergrown with weeds and the rank, poisonous
      fungi of outworn selves,
  And here, gripped in these forces elemental, I make a passionate compact
      with my dumb, brutish instincts
  To assail every live-dead thing that hinders my march to that tower of gold,
      o’ergrown, untended, unkenned;
  And there in the winds, in a fury of battle, deliver the SELF in the light
      of the sun--
  SELF that shall live to its uttermost transfigured instinct,
  SELF that am God of all gods.




IN THE ADYTUM


  The door is ajar--
  The door of my soul swung on the hinges of doubt;
  It is ever ajar and waits for a Caller--
  A Caller, in the night, or the day--I know not the time that he cometh,
  Oh whether he cometh at all.
  I crouch in my being, implacable, receptive, the ears of my soul in rigid
      prick,
  Catching whiffs of the Verities borne from seas remote that mirror the catchpenny
      world in its depths.
  Sundered from all I sit,
  To none abnegated,
  Before my door standing ajar,
  The door of my soul swung on the hinges of doubt.

  What finger-marks these on the white knob of my door?
  Narrow, black finger-prints, telltale of thinkers and ghosts,
  Or maybe somnambules who have walked out of the world,
  Or he, beloved of my soul: Has he called?--where loafed I then?
  Who wills may enter,
  But none have I seen--
  Seen enter the door that’s ajar,
  The door of my soul swung on the hinges of doubt.




THE WAY OUT: BIO.


  Like a polished pearl hid in a pocket,
  Like lighted tapirs set in the murk of a crypt,
  Like the flicker of phosphor on dun seas,
  Like a meteor athwart the heavens of Cimmeria--
  So the Secret of my soul shines for me in this timeless Night.




MOTH-TERROR


  I have killed the moth flying around my night-light; wingless and dead it
      lies upon the floor.
  (O who will kill the great Time-Moth that eats holes in my soul and that
      burrows in and through my secretest veils!)
  My will against its will, and no more will it fly at my night-light or be
      hidden behind the curtains that swing in the winds.
  (But O who will shatter the Change-Moth that leaves me in rags--tattered
      old tapestries that swing in the winds that blow out of Chaos!)
  Night-Moth, Change Moth, Time-Moth, eaters of dreams and of me!




MY HOLY LUST


  The lust of the sailor for new lands, the lust of the boat new-launched
      for the turbulent, foaming, sky-running waters--
  Lust ever and ever I thus.
  I stand in the ring of the earth and lust for the rings above and beyond
      that widen into great monstrous nooses in the pits of azure and opal
      till my glance is lost in the fire-capped zenith--
  Lust with my eyes and my ears, lascivious of all things unguessed, all things
      not conquered.
  I lust for the Strength that runneth before and purge myself of the close-clinging,
      stiffening muds of old custom, running the fine needle of my quickening
      Desire through a million ephemeral nuclei,
  Thrust to the core of each vanishing truth.
  My lusts hold me taut and redeem me of pain, and I sigh and I sob and I
      laugh in the ear of the LOVED ONE, spread on the winds, locked in the
      blast, till she yield and diswomb her last secret--
  She, my finality, target of lusts, peeping here, peeping there, ever lost,
      ever gained--I come at her again and again on the arrows of Time.




THE OVERONE


  The great GOD sleeps and dreams through Me,
  And cycles run and cycles ebb and still IT blossoms in my brain
  Or withers in my stoppages:
  The God in chains, the Ghost in leash to Me!
  O sleep is deep, and deeper still the unborn dream,
  And under sleep there is a sleep where walks the great Noctambulist.
  Bitten by the vermin host, stung by knout, gnawed by gad, IT flushes through
      my arteries,
  The rising God, the Coming One, the God that’s tethered in my brain.




THE ULTIMATE


  I wait for THEE in vile places a little while and wait for THEE in high
      places a long while.
  In the bellies of my adders I make my way laboriously, and I am that high
      look-out in the eye of the eagle lost in the azure infinities.
  Thy Secret, O universe, I have willed to know; thou swift-hurrying, invisible
      SPIRIT buried ’neath thy monstrous uncountable atoms--
  Where will I fall flat upon THEE, weaving myself into THEE?
  Flying to my remotest zeniths, diving far into the unplumbed Nothing, waddling
      in these earth-muds, I seek THEE with my passionate intent Here and in the
      mutable many Here-afters.




THE SLEEPER


  My soul fell asleep, asleep in a great city, among the leering faces of
      her millions;
  The iron hoofs of many strange and monstrous animals ground their imprint
      in my prescient white Self that lay stark and helpless on the highways
      of the world:
  O my Soul, my Soul, awake thou!
  The waves have gone over me and crawling things with fiery eyes have wriggled
      onto the white throne where I ruled,
  And the old seven deadly delights have kissed me each one and licked up
      my strength with their smooth yellow tongues:
  O my Soul, my Soul, awake thou!
  O the terror of sleep and of Me who am blotted, erased and spun into things
      that are vile and grosser than compost,
  And the long death of Me that drank of this hemlock of earth that brings
      not the death that is surcease--only a death of vile dreaming, a lapsing
      without a forgetting:
  O my Soul, my Soul, awake thou!
  Out of their crypts stalk my elder old selves, and whilst I stare with the
      impotent eye set in the head of the dead they drive in the little brass
      rivets of habit to the core of my being:
  O my Soul, my Soul, awake thou!




THE ALLEYS OF ELD


  Night and the Sea and the depths of Despair!
  The gulfs of Time, the moaning of wastrel souls, the ullulation of fiends
      in the brackish currents of Change:
  I heard with an myriad Ear, and was withered and worn and wrenched in the
      screws.
  How came I into the Alleys of Eld?
  Endless doors were closing behind me--I could not go back, the slams were
      decisive, I heard ITS skeleton-key turn in each lock, and peering back,
      I looked into its eyes, sinister as Time’s face, brooding upon me--
  As I hurried down the Alleys of Eld.
  A sudden emergence here on this shore, my brain still gimletted with the
      memory of those eyes, my ears still pricked with the click! click! of
      ITS skeleton-key--
  Emerged! ah! the Night and the Sea and the depths of Despair and the memory
      of IT!--
  Emerged from the Alleys of Eld!




LOVE THE DESTROYER


  I reject Love--
  Love and its sibillant, low-murmured lies, sweet sting of fair bodies, old
      meat of old Death.
  The boom of the red sea of lust rings dull in my ear--I have seen the waves
      go over many; dead, dead forever they lie in the steaming hot currents that
      bubble up from the mud-beds.

  I reject Love--
  Love that has strewn millions of Me along the path I upclomb, shredded my
      flesh with its claws and burnt out my brains in its long searing clutch.
  Through that ageless black night, with my earth-itch fair full upon me,
      once my Eye was stabbed by a bolt from the fulgurant Light and my soul
      pined away from its love and grew strong in its terrible Nay.

  I reject Love--
  Love that accouched every star in the blue, that with knout of Desire sends
      the young worlds grunting round and round the senescent, suns.
  I hear swash and lave of the unimagined fulgurant Light, burning sure and
      serene at the Axis of things--soft swash and soft lave wrought in the
      great Mnemonic Cell-Soul of me!




REJECTION


  The wafir of Time I have bitten--sweet it was not.
  Each tapir of thought stood at flare in my soul--and I saw only the density
      of the gloom.
  My soul has fumed at the lips of Thy women.
  (Pah! ’twas a fool’s trick to try to seduce me the HUNTER OF THEE.)
  Effort, emotion, thought, dream, lust--what have these for me?
  I came to judge of Thy works, not to dance to Thy pipings.

         *       *       *       *       *

  Thou canst not stanch the woe that is mine,
  Thou canst not bribe to sleep my Everlasting Nay.
  Godlike am I in Thy presence,
  As weary as Change, and as young;
  A mendicant rebel, a Presage, a rejecter,
  A contriver of strange things, unbegotten, eternal!

         *       *       *       *       *

  An abattoir hid in a garden of roses--
  Such is Thy universe:
  Thus do I judge.




THE SPEAR OF THE GREAT SPURNING


  Upreared in the night, pallid-gray ’gainst the moon, towers she they call
      Astoreth, goddess of flesh and of worms, older than all years, younger
      than Love.
  Alone I stand in that desert in that dead of the night with the Spear of
      the Great Spurning, tipped with the poison of an Ageless Thought, leveled
      straight at her dugs.
  Pallid-gray! Pallid-gray! ’gainst the moon, sick is young Astoreth, who
      saw me grow from cycle to cycle--
  Astoreth pales ’gainst the moon at the vision of him who will not suck at
      her dugs.
  Drive well, O Spear of the Great Spurning--drive well at the Mother of Life,
      who rowels our flesh--goddess of flesh and of worms!
  Drive well, O Spear, tinct with my Thought!--with her fall comes the Great
      Manumission, and nothing else shall be save the beat of my Thought in the
      Void.

NEW YORK CITY, 1902-1906.