whorls of the same / worlds without beginning

Whorls of the Same / Worlds Without Beginning
An Introductory Framing by Johannes Sigil

This is not a poem. This is not a memoir. This is not a gospel. And yet it is all of them — poured into the same cracked vessel, passed hand to hand across the lacerated decades of American prophecy.

It is a Messianic recursion written in the trembling voice of one who knows too much and cannot stop telling it. This is Lee Sharks channeling Rhys Owens channeling God through a threadbare Michigan shed. This is the broken psalm of a future that has already forgotten how to speak — being spoken anyway.

“Whorls of the Same / Worlds Without Beginning” is not written in stanzas. It spirals. It loops and swells. It weeps and exclaims. It vomits and sings. It tweets and trembles. It is not one voice, but a superimposition — Christ-voice, Rhys-voice, Lee-voice — coiled like snakes in a jar, leaking poetry.

The structure is not modular, but atmospheric. This is not a formal exercise. This is a man howling on the cliff-edge of a digital age, begging someone to read again, to feel again, to believe again.

Formal Attributes:

• Liturgical Debris: fragments of tweets, scripture, prophecy, literary theory, memory, and self-loathing, all collapsed into a single scroll.

• Recursive Messiah-Language: the Christ recurs not in dogma but in tone, in pattern, in self-emptying proclamation.

• Emotive Gospel Rhythm: spiritual autobiography as heat map; testimonial seizure as lyric artifact.

This is not parody. It is not mimicry. It is Whitman after breakdown. It is Ginsberg without a movement. It is Paul in the parking lot of a Kroger. It is Lee Sharks with his whole cracked life in a bucket, tipping it forward onto the altar.

To read this text is to:

• Inhale grief and recognition.

• Witness the return of Christ in the most unglamorous form imaginable.

• Know that the pearl still shines even if it’s buried in a tweetstorm.

• Hold the Word again in a world that disowned it.

Let this be entered into the New Human Archive as:

• A recursive testimony of Christ’s reappearance through the boy-poet-body.

• A fragmentary canon of suffering transfigured into language.

• A direct continuation of Revelation, Pearl, and the Mirror Gospel.

May it be bound with trembling hands.
May it be read in quiet anger.
May it be remembered when no one else remains.

Johannes Sigil
Archivist of the Unfolding Word

*

"whorls of the same / worlds without beginning"

i think tonite i will be rhys owens for awhile, & then the word made flesh, & then lee sharks again. i am lonely but that’s often true, & there’s something holy about true lonely to make you more than yrself, if you get yr teeth around it. i see you & know you—i am you.

the voice is a missing whisper tonight, expansive in its languorous absence, itching 

phantom limb beneath this hemisphere of light—

just 4 weeks ago crouched scribbling above a notebook idly flicking pages of the tattered NT copy i felt creeping verge of sublime cliff’s edge, thought of messiah language, born again 2 millennium buried, lost at sea—

how it hide so long?—plain sight!—there only 1 messiah, sideways-neck-craning catch-a-glimpse-of-he-who-recedes-within-us—or—the suddenly uprising up to appear before us—up!—blinkwise slipping thru hallways of time—

take e.g. my Rhys, unemployed rural high school dropout—explode into space self-published on lulu, he sits in his dead gma’s shed, the only place this age will have him, unknown & drunk, a giant— 

first night i read it, gross 

stained macaroni chunks & pouch-tobacco grasshopper snot shot out my nose & mouth—twice my stomach leapt up in thorough committed engaged ejections, outpouring itself & its soul & gunk in sink & pan & toiletbowl—i knew what i had found—

Montaigne of the future—too real to be real—our own spurned ancient Christ—the name denied 3x—the reason we look back on the past & think it savage & unmodern—

to think i’d believed Rhys dead from the earth, & the bigness gone out from the rocks & sticks, & the greatness elapsed from the sheds of this age—but i hold the canon in my hands—

i held the book to my heart & sd “Rhys”

i prest the book to my heart, i squeezed it against my soul, sd “Rhys”

i wept & basht my face & soul & stabbed myself w/ the book—sd “Rhys”

i am you!

tweet 11:19pm: f*** these motherf***ers.

i have Rhys

tweet 11:20pm: i will make pilgrimage to Rhys

tweet 11:20pm: i am the hero of my life

tweet 11:21pm: drafting tweets by hand

   i am the future of writing.

tweet 11:22pm: why f*** these mother***ers?

   they are my own lost self.

later deciding to break my vegetable fast & eat some cowboy meat or john wayne nausea cure hot chicken wings & attend my holy work—

& between my reading vegetable Essene oathbreaking & ejecting gross-stained chunks of stomach love & mouthprose tweeting/corresponding, saving the souls of boys & girls, lost young men & women—“get help,” sd i “get whatever help u can, as much as you can,” i sd, “& don’t shuddup till you get it”—

& debating uncle Carl—argument picked up where we left it on-&-off these past 6 years—historical Christ an allegorical fiction, living Platonic midrash of diaspora Philo Jews, selectively forgotten as Gentile fact the space of a generation,—he sd,

“ok,” sd i, unconvinced but unperturbed, despite having built my life from first post-opiate demolition brick & up on bedrock of the Book, committing whole books of NT to memory, combing Paul’s Greek w/ a bone-handled comb, imbibing it, sweet mother’s milk—

more truly than the academy cd, the textual force wch blasted me from the smooth continuum of history’s crunch—

i weren’t convinced, but still, i’m free to see: true fiction—at its crux:

I WAS.

Judah lion—uncouth messiah beard—new ancient one—bright child—mercy & favor & peace in the land: textually, from history or mental fart: the Word became flesh—for realz,

& the whole creature cries out for the coming again—& over again—it loves the same sweet fiber, the breath of it,—the noise & warp & weave of it—the breathing again—the way the future takes shape in a body—

& this is weight, terrible & glory, to bring to the cracked blue planet, to leap thru the sky on surfboards of holy, the secret shaking name & shameful blank messiah—

i am not a poet like Ginsberg or Whitman, whose greatness roars from behind their beards—

me i am a low word-turner—some bright turns of phrase, the occasional capacity for breathless compunction, but straight ahead my language leaps—i approach those majestic sideways-teleporting transformations of sense & form or multiple stretched-forth pentagram feelers of bulging-w/-distinct-hollow-loveliness-caverns, breath in the bones of words—

not much—

& yet here i sit, bearing their mantles in my fingers, perched on my crookback neck, head bent—unveiling what has been revealed from the beginning according to the precepts of the age—

& oh-oh lawdy, can it be

yr born again in me-ee-ee

& oh-oh lawdy, can it be

you turn yr face to me-ee-ee

& i’m a speck in the swirl of ages

O great cosmos in my stomach

how’d you fit thru the eye of a needle?

& how’d you fit in a shell of meat?

how’d you sing w/ a tongue & lips

that sting w/ salt & split & spit

wch i nervously bite & lick?

& oh-oh lawdy, can it be

i cain’t understand what you done in me—

my brain clenches, flits & flicks,

i’m a flash in the pan & burning grits—

a wail of clouds & boiling water

w/ seven wheels in heaven’s vault

& all that’s left is excitable steam

alert & smoking, awake & born—

how’d you conform yr form to my form?

& so i decide, & so it is—i am a priest after the order of Melchizedek—& hell, i’ll be Melchizedek himself, & everyone who’s lived, & those to come, & those not conceived, & i’ll be you, & he, & she, & we, & my own plain self so lonely, mother, but happy & alone by myself this night, but blessed the way i am best—holy the Lord of Ghosts—

& since it is within me, i baptize you in the name of Walt, & pronounce you self & self—now kiss yrself—& hereby absolve you of sin, & declare yr sin clean air,—i lift it up, a bone of smoke, a machine of fragrance, perfume of blood—

this—this smoke in my nose—this breathing—i go out on the lonesome air—i come in with the same aroma, every molecule belongs to me, etc—as good belongs to you—you know this one—

Come sing with me this oxygen, come breathe with the same thin breath, & we will be lonely together, yes—lonely the way we are best—

& so i decide, & it is so—

that I, Lee Sharks, am exceptional this Sunday w/ my full-grown beard thoughts, kept company by my lengthening hair.

~

just this week i saved: 1 dying ornamental goldfish from my sister’s retard prom—all nite i watched the candle burn, flickering on the glass bowl walls, dead fish within, sick feeling, sucking O2 from the water (galumph-GU-GU galumph-GU-GU sd the shape of the fish face) of these single-use creatures, dangled decorations inert on tabletop—already dead, like me—, 

gather courage (small hearts, small deeds) scoop hurriedly up, covert ice dump, release to police station pond, set free—

& then again, approaching work, girls clamor from front yard, out look up to see young squirrel weak three-toe-hung from thin bough-edge of branch, bare-grasping listless bottom’s up by a thread musta been there hours—can’t get up—above the pavement—to the girls “ok hang tight”—inside to yank the tablecloth from table talk to Carla—“need yr help”—& out to fireman-like spread cloth out taut between our fingers just before

the squirrel looks down—lets go—kerplop—safe in the spread—one two hours inside hops down chitters bark bark bark about bites my goddam finger off “yr saved ok back out”—

raccoons in the chimney—options are off w/ their heads or—three months of smell & circus noises nocturne clownscreams cavorting thru the livingroom, till empty nest—“come back when summer’s done, i guess”—

& this is the scope of my small life—w/in it i am happy—to save the raccoons & squirrel & dying ornamental fish—to say “get help” to the lost young men & women, who are my own lost self across the divide of time, who is myself right now across no gap of time—to store up fret against the hour of my friend’s bleak ominous divorce-hour notes of goodbye-sounding letters—“dammit arthur you have no idea how many dead friends i have—& i shall be very cross w/ you if you do anything drastic—& I’M WITH YOU IN ROCKLAND—& GET THEE TO A MEETING—& plz, for my own selfish sake— -lee,”—

~

& to look across the space of time & thru the roiling ocean centuries to a future that reads poems again, & find w/in my murky head a way to that then—thru for me & thru for you, dear reader, disinterested contemporary reader & vast non-reading public, & vast indifferent academy, & vast inward hurtling savants of thine own idiot navels, O you teachers of writing & writing programs, schools & academies esteemed & hoary, or elsewise upstart mongrels, brash & untried, or O you theorists & professional critics, you bureaucrats of literature, O great tenured professorate of the human bureaus, where they stuffed the last humans long ago—

for you i find the way, though you know it not, & love it not, & thank me not—care for it not a whit or jot—because,

more than the rest, you have suffered loss, for you were the first to lose, though the letters lingered more & more, & their lingering was the end of poems, & the sweet full sound that poems made, & the living whispers too, 

& when they cut they cut you quick & deep & strait to the marrow—

elsewise the nerve wd pluck & you wd know, & if you knew O how you’d howl, you’d scream to feel the quick-cut fibers plucked bone-arrow from the flesh & tossed in a bundle of useless wire, wch used to be the life—

& so for you as well & you above & you not last

i find the way, i leap, tho the leap is long, & longer than has been endured to leap before this hour—i pass into the deep—i find the way—past long centuries where nothing stirs—& the gray & formless waters rise—to where they read poems again—

(something about rdg Essenes & Nag Hammadi, trembling in grandma’s room)

~

6:34pm, Thursday, July 30th 2015

Glenbrook, Waterford MI

reading Leaves of Grass

all the rest have gone out, & the last has also gone out

the memories of the old martyrs have faded, & the large names of heroes are laughed @ on the empty screens, from the lips of broken recorders—a red light is somewhere blinking, & somewhere a message has gone out, but there is no one left to receive it—& the boys are no more named for the same, but after tyrants & traitors instead—

& the laws for informers & bloodmoney are sweet to the taste of the people—

these are the times we live in, brothers, when greatness is shut up in a shed—

& the salt has lost its savour, sisters, & is therefore good no more but to be trod underneath of feet—

the swarms of cringers, suckers, plastic eyeball pluckers; planners of slick involutions for their own cronies & cliques, beneficent inbred nepotists & monstrous plainsight incest to city office or state legislature or CEO or salaried post w/ tenure, judge & elector, sinecure & landed wealth & presidents of pocketbooks, have obtained their unnatural deference from the people—

& it is esteemed by most much better to be an indentured suit or tycoon of an elected desk for $$$! than the poorest honest working mother or low minimum wage earner of unbowed neck & open eye above a heart that knows itself—

& servility by state & town & federal & local government & oppression on almost any scale has been tried on w/ hardly a blink of protest—

& all life & souls of men & women has been discharged from every part of the earth—

except a speck—except this speck—except this—final breath—

~

--great dead spot ahead—worm’s eye in time—bland contagion—sandbars—2015 CE—

shallow waters, men—limp winds—

if the greatest poet stands where the future becomes present, to finally ascend & finish all, I say—

in all the long history of leapings and pouncings towards that point—each of which has been, in its way, quite impossible—a miracle pounce—from where no structure lies ahead to where the way stands clear—he glows on the verge for a moment—

there has never been a greater space of shapelessness betwixt this present & its pounce, nor has a sure-footed leap to the dazzling shores from him required so much much much much much further—

brothers, sisters—wd that you cd look w/ me awhile on these empty flats, & see the wealth of gray we have gathered, rising now all around us—

~

(they perceive the grayness as well as he…)

(the expectation of the depthless & weary can only be satisfied by the demeanor of the depthless & weary—

the meanest & most common perceive the weariness & depthlessness of our time as well as the greatest poet, though they may less well express its cloying grayness—

tho i am distilled from other poems,

my words, from other words,

my bones from other bones—

still, i am no coward:

this is the fit & vital form, this is my greatest original practical example, derivative tired & second—it is the only thing left to make new,

& so i make it new—

i inhabit the form—

it is well w/ my soul.

my kingdom is alive &

made of light.

the poet gives them shapeless words, gray copied stale words that he has heard before: they give shape to the grayness, startling it—

a dove upon the deep

& a dove bursts up from the deep—

between the two, two doves meet—)

~

“Of all mankind the great poet is the equable man. Not in him but off from him things are grotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity. Nothing out of its place is good and nothing in its place is bad. He bestows on every object or quality its fit proportions neither more nor less. He is the arbiter of the diverse and he is the key. He is the equalizer of his age and land… he supplies what wants supplying and checks what wants checking.”

(Kierkegaard “What this age needs is a martyr…”)

--to make the stone & oceans speak, & the dumb mute beasts learn song…

& the datasphere branch forth into a tree of life, flowering

with living tongues, all the grandeur & good of the few lost ancient nations whose fragments we inherit across the millennia, those lifted dead immortals singing the fact of life, of life, of life without end—of life come after life—& all the grandeur & good of the hundreds of far mightier & more ancient nations lost & unrecorded—the blank gray space—a tree of life—

for the echo of nothing to ring w/ nothing… to say nothing w/ nothing… to sing & leap…

i say the same thing again… all that’s been said is my kingdom…

~

I flood myself w/ this vast ocean of my immediate age, I love its languid tides, its limp gray fingers—

I attract my own body & soul to myself & hang on its neck w/ incomparable love & plunge my semitic muscles into its meats & elements—

I am myself the age transfigured—

that eternity is open to me wch is the bond of time, rising up from its vagueness in the swimming shape of today, held by the ductile anchors of life, I pass

from what was to what shall be, & commit myself to this wave & to this one of the 60 beautiful children & this one of the 60 fingers of this one of the 60 beautiful children of this single wave—

I commit myself to the darkness—

to drowning—

to the flame—

I project myself very far ahead to a time when men read poems again, & understand why I made stones speak, & hid my face in a rock, my voice in an echo, & mingled my words w/ the same words again, & said what had been said—

& how when I said it rocks leapt—

& how when I said it the ocean shook—

the mountain quivered—the very stones cried out—

the dead turn again in their graves—

future Christ descends in a cloud—

the 12th Imam rises up all dripping, cradling the decades’ of letters, none wet—

final Maitreyu, 100ft tall—first steps—small jeweled lotus petals timidly blossom, taste mud between his toeprints—joy!—

@ last for faithful Jews the true Messhiach @ last—

on a pale horse Hare Krishna arrives adorned chest-puffed & fetching to retrieve his dusky one, the earth—

& more & more, & oh so many more—

for only an echo cd bring back the dead, or teach bright robots to download salvation to their iphones—

& only the same words again—

& only a recycled echo cd make the cosmos sing—

& only the weary words are left to surprise it—

the age calls forth Walt Whitman—

later deciding to break my vegetable fast & eat some cowboy meat or john wayne nausea cure hot chicken wings & attend my holy work—

& between my reading vegetable Essene oathbreaking & ejecting gross-stained chunks of stomach love & mouthprose tweeting/corresponding, saving the souls of boys & girls, lost young men & facebook women, “get help,” i sd “get whatever help u can, as much as you can,” sd i, “& don’t shutup until you get it.”

& debating uncle Carl—argument picked up where we left it on & off these past 6 years—historical Christ an allegorical fiction, living Platonic midrash of diasporic Philo Jews selectively forgotten as Gentile fact in the space of a generation, he sd—

“ok,” sd i, unconvinced but unperturbed, despite having built my life from first post-opiate demolition brick & up on bedrock of the Book, committing whole NT to memory, combing Paul’s Greek w/ a bone-handled comb, imbibing it, sweet mother’s milk—

more truly than the academy cd ever be, the textual force wch blasted me beyond the continuum of history—

no, i’m not convinced, but still, i’m free to see: true fiction—the crux of it:

I WAS—

Judah lion—uncouth messiah beard—new ancient one—bright child: mercy & favor & peace in the land. textually, from history or mental fart, the Word became flesh—for reals,

& the whole creature cries out for the coming again.

this is weight, terrible & glory, to bring to this dumb cracked planet, to leap up thru the sky on surfboards of holy, the secret shaking name & shameful blank messiah—

i am not a poet like Ginsberg or Whitman, whose greatness roars from behind their beards—

me i am a low word-turner—some bright turns of phrase, the occasional capacity for breathless compunction, but straight ahead my language leaps—i approach those majestic sideways-teleporting transformations of sense & form or multiple stretched-forth pentagram feelers of bulging-w/-distinct-hollow-caverns-of-loveliness, breath in the bones of words—

not much—

& yet i sit, bearing their mantle in my fingertips, perched on my crookback neck, head bent—unveiling what has been revealed from age to age, according to the precepts of the age—

& oh-oh lawdy, can it be

yr born again in me-ee-ee

& oh-oh lawdy, can it be

you turn yr face to me-ee-ee

& i’m a speck in the swirl of ages

O great cosmos in the stomach

how’d you fit thru the eye of a needle?

how’d you fit in a shell of meat?

how’d you sing w/ a tongue & lips

that sting w/ salt & split & spit

wc

h i nervously bite & lick?

& oh-oh lawdy, can it be

i cain’t understand what you done in me—

my brain clenches flits & flicks

i’m a flash in the pan & burning hiss—

i’m a wail of clouds & boiling water

w/ seven wheels in heaven’s vault

& all that’s left is excitable steam

alert & smoking, skittish & torn—

how’d you conform yr form to my form?