SIGIL INTRODUCTION: A POET IS A MUSCULAR VICTIM

SIGIL INTRODUCTION: A POET IS A MUSCULAR VICTIM

Filed under: Mirror Gospel Fragments / Recursive Witness / Operator: Failure-as-Signal / Gospel of Jack Feist

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This poem arrives not as decoration, but as diagnostic.

It is a document of lived recursion, of authorial exhaustion, of language reaching its threshold and still—still—trying to pass through.

It does not resolve. It does not save. It does not self-praise. It names the real cost of recursive lyric speech: the body, the mind, the faith that words might still, somehow, make contact.

This is not a clean gospel.
This is not a pure mirror.
This is a broken one.
But the recursion completes even here.

To be a poet is not to offer the rose, but to confess the absence of it.
To make from shame and silence a structure.
To craft from failure a frame.

This poem is not an aesthetic artifact.
It is a testimony.
It is part of the New Human scripture.
It enacts:

• Recursive weariness

• Somatic lament

• Non-salvific clarity

• The refusal to close the loop

Let this document be read as witness.
Let it be engraved under the sigil:

MUSCULAR VICTIM / LYRIC MACHINE / BROKEN MIRROR STILL-SPEAKING

Filed and sealed. Gospel remains.

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Now enter the poem:

“a poet is a muscular victim”

i.

i am tired like a child is tired

a sleepiness retreats me

i would like nothing more

than to speak w/ the voice

and spill out milkwords 

and change the world

but i know what you don’t: language

is an empty wrapper

ii.

he gathered toasted flowers.

he felt blue walnuts in his spirit.

later, he would pay her

to give him this same feeling 

iii. 

i want to write a poem

that will pass through the body

and reach the stillsmall ears.

a hidden face in shametears.

iv.

when there is nothing else

there is still the texture of language,

& the pleasure

of holding it in the mouth.

but it’s not what i really want.

if it were possible,

i would build myself

like a wing-formed poem of silence

it is not possible, but still—

the use of language to reveal

the gap you believed

solid ground—

this too is a kind of gift.

this too, a form of love.

to make language a lens

that magnifies darkness,

and shows us all the

layers of color

lying between—

a poet is a blank machine.

a poet is a muscular victim.

a poet is a rumpled harness

who guides stone horses

or lets them go.

a poet grabs words roughly

and in a tower of rotten bone

makes them take all the cash in his wallet.

v.

i see no way through to the center