ISSUE FIVE: July, 2020

AND NOW A WORD FROM YOUR PERSONAL PSYCHOPOMP

by JOSEPH HIRSCH

Look, I’m already too long in the tooth, gray in the beard, and blind in the eye

To lie to you or tempera smear these words.

You are going to have to walk on hot coals

And the pads of your feet will either callous or melt.

The men counting coup on your ribs and scalp

With stout brickbats will drub you-

But if you slow, you stop,

And if you stop, you die.

And their chief will make a big medicine bag

Of jerked and tanned hide from your left testicle,

And a necklace from your pale ivory teeth.

It gets harder from there.

Mazes stocked with minotaur like ponds with catfish,

Fibonacci spirals showing fractal rings of Dante’s red concentric Hells,

Sheol where serried ranks of men in black caftans weep

For the uncircumcised eyes of the heathens courting the red vortex,

Marching into the mouth of a Moloch to whom all worthies are an emetic, 

While all evils are swallowed whole and accepted.

Pox-ridden skeletons breakdance to Billy Jean 

in the crenelated towers of Breughel’s dreams.

All the girls from your third grade class at Catholic school

In checked jumpers and shiny metal braces, laughing as you waddle along the corridor,

Slick as glare ice due to a janitor’s diligence with paraffin (and a flask of whiskey);

Your soul foaming with awkward diarrhea until you reach those high school halls, 

Which, while not Hell, resemble it enough to warrant lower-case acknowledgement: 

So hell, then.

After being taunted a last time,

You’ll forgo the schoolyard’s fever-heated asphalt and wander 

the elm and poplar woods where dead leaves and cedars become your cathedral.

You’ll walk on feral fours through wilderness,

Forget words and accumulate lice in lieu of knowledge,

Make a pillow from a bed of red pine needles,

Develop a taste for raw gazelle hindquarter (a bit gamey),

Learn to speak with babbling brooks and wolves 

until some rich Christian with a stovepipe hat and ivory-handled cane finds you,

Sends you to a lady in a pinafore who feather-dusts you clean…

From there it’s on to a tutor to reteach you English,

And finally to a woman with a nose like an inbred Alsatian 

to drill elocution into your spine

Via corset stays and whalebone tines.

You’ll pay your keep on display in a Volkerschau,

Where you’ll compete for pfennigs against a hunger artist

With ribs as thin as the bars of the cage where you’ll both scare up a pittance 

from the outstretched hands of rabid, top-hatted gawkers in attendance.

Nights you’ll spend in a teardrop gypsy caravan,

The gondola’s outer hull filigreed with gingerbread scrollwork

As intricate as a betrayed Saint’s woodgrain-weeping misericord,

The car glowing like a jackolantern or a coalminer’s carbide lantern. 

You’ll meet a peroxide blonde with a garconne bob,

Who slinks in kimono and plots to do away with that tintype Barnum & Bailey manager

With a dose of her inheritance powder.

Things will go hinky and you’ll end up in hoosegow

Running on a grey treadmill behind the great-grey Egyptian tomb walls of Sing-Sing.

The dame will abscond her vamping way to Mexico, but you won’t begrudge the fatale 

When she sends you stationary with aptly-thorned roses for bordering marginalia 

And lipstick prints like fat cherry-cherubic bows 

Smeared in the center of ballpoint-written words,

plump ruby remnants of mouth’s dactyloscopy, mixed with an inkpot’s black ichor,

promises of love stained brown by coffee and drained white by time;

a twilit sky outside your prison cell window

the same shade of eau-de-nil blue as a torch singer’s swaddled toque.

Nights you’ll fondle a golden heart locket 

Hung upon an ormolu chain that depends like a sagging breast, 

Holding a sepia ambrotype of your mother 

In hands as callused as your toes,

Admiring her as she twirls a parasol at Coney Island, bathing in white sands, 

sporting a candy-striped, one-piece bathing suit 

when she was (hard to believe) once young

And she even smiled (!)…

…The shouts of other men in their cells mix with the echoes of an Ave Maria  

Coming from a phantom gramophone’s bent brass ear

Weeping prayer-song like bullets shot from an elephant gun.

Eventually the steam whistle will blow for the potter’s field,

And you’ll see an angel swoop down over the courtyard during a prison riot,

Like the Seraph of Mons kissing the eyes of mustard-blinde soldiers in mud revetments.

The Beast of God’s beating white wings will flutter and cast down eider feathers 

to the gothic stone cobbles where almond trees stand without bud in winter,

Letting you know that at least you were not a total fool,

That your fate was not one of a faith entirely misplaced.

There will be green grass, but it will turn yellow.

Then there will be stone.

Then it will be dark.

And you will finally be free.

Trust me.

For I am here, on the other side, sequestered in a souterrain of Istrian marble,

Where harp-placid, former captives of the demimonde

Are well-enough succored by clouds

To play poker without cheating,

Or have resort to Navy Colt to blow the other man’s head off,

When they lose a hand of cards.

For what is a hand in Heaven

When these toes have already twinkled 

through Hell 

And hell?

JOSEPH HIRSCH is the author of many published books, short stories, novellas, and articles. He can be found online @ www.joeyhirsch.com