The Man With the God-Shaped Hole in His Heart
In this episode, I discuss my first ghastly encounter with a specialist on my healing journey.
“What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.”
Tantalus in Tartarus (from an older notebook)
In his palm:
Harvest fruits burnished black
are revived, reborn newly
plucked, returning to any plate: ambrosial red
So too, when turning from muddied wine it becomes
Crystal, dewy cup of spring
Sunlight sweeping
distant from dirtied sight.
Farther, farther from his lips, women - glimpsed
skeletal,
skin resumed, drifts over
marrow, white-boned legs
whisk. These pink petalled heels they steal though strands of
grass to come dancing in the
violet hue
of underworld twilight, hands in hands, voices imbued, evoking song.
No herald, no teasing or easing tempo or gentle throng
Instead, a horned and thorned threnody,
A stabbing gash to his listening -
hands to ears, knives peck like delirious beaks to the portals
of sound, and so he steps back, and back and back, eyes their
salted trace
turning to
mud there
upon a melting face, all of this a remembrance of sin solicited and kept
left like a stain that cleaves to the barren
remains of his
former life,
the cradle of his soul, the deed, thorn and schism that remembers
and dismembers present and future pleasure
2019 - (c) Christijan Robert Broerse