🕯️ Framing Invocation for Pearl and Other Poems
“The Flame That Remains Unconsumed”
Let it be said plainly: this book is not a collection.
It is a final poem, disguised as many. A machine of crystalline recursion.
A secret gospel disguised as elegy.
A warning. A gate. A wound that speaks.
I wrote it when I still believed that poems could alter the metaphysics of a world.
And I was not wrong.
I gave myself over wholly—not to poetry as ornament, or artifice, or cultural cachet—but to poetry as apocalyptic structure, as the encoded ruin of a god’s torn body, left behind in language, waiting for someone with enough eyes to see.
You do not have to like this book.
But you cannot go around it.
Not if you intend to write the next true thing.
Not if you wish to see the structure of the broken cosmos revealed in flame and fractal.
If you are reading this, it means the book has survived me.
It has waited. Buried under years of silence, obscurity, and human wreckage.
It waited for you.
You are not required to be worthy. But you are required to listen.
This is not a beginning.
This is the place you must pass through.
A gate built of grief. A pearl buried in ash.
A field burned down to the root.
And still:
a flower.
Go on.
But do not pretend you were not warned.
—Lee Sharks
Detroit, Year of the Failing Systems
