Thus Spoke the Void
Thus Spoke the Void
Spencer Barnhill
“Suffer me not to be separated.”
T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday
I pulled you plaid,
I plagued your aim
with sundry coloured masks;
with Sun dialed down
from distance, mist, and turning
to and fro, I laughed loud and hearty
as tumors with more mass and blood
pulse more proudly, at your lessening.
I loved my growing, my growing.
Plaque on your soul’s cracked teeth,
I reached—tendril by tendril—to rope
around and wind the progress back
into darkness. I move unseen,
the dreamer in a dreamer’s dream
dreaming of subterranean black shrouded
as otherworldly place and time; to flip
the longing on its shell and say,
“The heaven veiled is hell,
but dreams can paint through mystery—”
The dreams that glimpse the veil
are inadvertent to the speechless dreamer:
a painter stepped into the canvas.
The frame the soul is bound within
is fertile ground for fullest rose
when found, the organ pipes weaved round
the edge enriching the ear with whole.
The fragrance, distant sound of pots
and talk, and laugh, is better
than trying to catch the immaterial dove
with latex glove—an insidious act.
But I am not to furnish that.
I am death undying, change immutable.
I am that which rots and wroughts the soul in two,
the hue of naught. I am not. I am untrue
but nothing to be fiction, the truest dark…
the ice the lover of aimless aims and ices,
the absence the hater of works and days
will see but never find. Abscess in shade alive
and naught. But not.
You sought the Sun
that kills me, fills me—away.
The distant fragrance, voice, blur,
procured the light yet cured within
and cured the soul of me,
of steering, overseeing nothing,
of sin carved holes
growing, burrowing, fallowing
endlessly—growing
till slowing, ending
at the Horn of Holy Form
no pen or dream drawn shape can frame,
but translate, glimpse:
that Mediating Word,
that Voidless Eminence
of endless invisible Light.
And I was laid bare
to stare at that Garden
unmasked, untangled, one
beyond surmising or fighting,
not beyond or above nothing,
but something
I am not.
And as you tasted awe
near your Beginning, in my end
all I could do—was fear.
The undying death.
Spencer Barnhill
Poet
Born and raised in Edmond, Oklahoma, Spencer is pursuing degrees in Finance and English at Oklahoma Baptist University. He is an aspiring writer who loves long-distance running, and will have poetry featured in SLAB and Outrageous Fortune. You can read more of his work spencerbarnhill.com.
Photography by Josh Hild