Boethius, Holding in His Palm a Pool of Pagan Dawn

Illustration from Consolation of Philosophy; Hans Holbein the Younger

& stuck in ‘barbaric space’
where languages under a commercial pax
are smuggled into cathedrals of speculation,
bazaars of polymers & metallurgy & essences
‘saffron, brass, magenta, porphyry’
not unequivocally legal in this world
are litigated as spelled out under night’s starry torch,
Hecate’s defiance still showing in butcherings of grammar,
senses snuffling under competence of vowels,
in swamps of codices & papyri,
in olive groves dry in their silvery ink,
vernacular of survival feeling forced to denounce
if not grow itself from the sophistry of its skill
into one & all

illiteracy hunched under dogmas militant & impatient,
sweeter times memorized like epigrams
recited beside a hearth around which
almond shells are scattered

contemplation-codes, logic-matrices, are translated
from librarial oblivion,
peripateticism of lexicons
in synergy with the physics & geometry
is introduced to didactic & decrepit judgments
along paths watched over by
bribable scribes in ignorance of
the lithic planetary core predicating scree
of psyche being broken in heartbreaking toil
of incarcerated thought

negating & condemnatory edicts (improvised vocals of kingpins)
reach in fundamentalist smatters
into the cuspids of citizens’ matters, as
within a slothful, gaudy anthropology of groupthink,
an idea of fair play (incredible as Jupiter)
begins washing out from occult booties of princes
into farthest rents of linguas & lingos
golden-tongued or garbled,
a ‘fairness’ seen as spreading like propaganda
of an awakened satyr tampering malefically
with suffering goods universally coveted
for hard illegible reasons

snake worship, the mother’s poison milk,
mixed up with Macedonian narcissism-cavalries
that overran half the world,
intertwines with psychoses left to Aristotle
to tutor (ethnocentrically), morphing
despite everything into categories of prostration
& mercantile projects tactile as Bucephalus

handshakes from stabs taken at worldcentrism
had bled into effluent of witches & troops
as philosophized clouds were billowing
above consumer ethos, visionary comforts &
bare-bones gnawed-on necessities,
above a ‘cave of your Being’
opening on one side to the Idea

orated from digestive tracts
of oracle’d primate beginnings & beguilings,
light diets of ‘Logos-tolerance’
become stoically scripted over generations of arches
against totalitarian erasure

‘intending to translate all the works of Plato’
when information was flying around
in an emptier atmosphere,
dispersing across centuries like
superstitions about heat & rainfall,
while the ocean’s consistency was inflated by rumors
whose attributions could’ve stretched from Hellas

literacy always in trouble,
the circus crowds intoning lucra, potentia, fama,
money, power, fame
that only a saint
would be capable of accompanying Philosophy
between the word-worlds,
removing it again from volatile
& mercurial Time, his gifts
meaning to mobilize
definitions, divisions, deductions
Pater, Filius, Spiritus Sanctus
into a given of

‘One Love wheeling through the mind’