The Devils Below

A collection of free verse and prose poetry to be published 2025

We speak of going beyond a certain time, a train of events which have arisen out of circumstances quite foreign to corporeal ailments. We touch upon themes of body, death, memory, and love – the corporality of the celestial – to seek that which possesses or obsesses the mind, and can exert power transmitted through the motive and sentient spinal nerves, here occasioning a little smarting of the eyes. This measure of time contains the remains of those substances which existed in the world and can be remembered as past, or imagined on some other occasion, where the mind does not regain its balance. And it must be some fatal error that causes a rapid descent – love must fall upon someone deprived of all salutary control or the memory of a life that was calculated to exist in heaven.

Calcitrare in testiculis

It may be taken for granted that there is no honourable way out of the most atrocious poetry called ‘contemporary’. There appears a most deplorable union of publishers (litty-fiddlers) and everyday banality, and after this customary stupefaction no robbery, murder, or other heinous crime is too good for them.

We are all men of strange truth, and we recognise it as such.

Selection:

UNION

The inflammation spreads and extends itself. It spreads deeply,

Inseparable from the blush of deep red. Flames of various lengths

Enter the bodies of the hells, and disturb and excite –

A living power that can never die. More closely entangled

Are the bodies of the earth, the young, which lick their parents,

And resemble the animals that stimulate them. They may die

And lie together: this union was called love. And in a dark place

Not proper to be seen lay the body of a woman wholly finished,

The feet feathered to the toes, smooth stones lodged in the vagina:

“Touch me here, for I am memory.” This union is called angelic.

The instrument touches the foreign body, shining and glabrous,

Deeply immersed in the fleshy placenta. Organs of reproduction

Adhere near the orifice marked with a blood-red spot.

Fleshy garments would first illumine, bronzy green most brilliant

On the budding fronds, and all nerved uppermost, villous and silvery,

Quickly to divert them whose stamina is tender. But only those that are

The subjects of experiment will show that sensation reveals nothing.

The living body requires a longer interval between the acts

Of sexual gratification. Sperm introduced into the generative passages

Will often bring away clods of blood, and hydrocyanic juice dropped

Into the eye of a dog will loosen the belly and inflame internal wounds.

The nerve divided high up in the arm would not fail to produce

More frequent outgoings of the spirit, confirming the observation

Previously made – that the only sensation is that of a flash of light.

Evidence of life is found. Sleep has become necessary,

And will gradually become more.

A sovereign lord, like a tender passion, so sweetly beguiling,

And knows no bodily shape, but like a sudden light of joy

And recognition, affording a temporary union, as might be expected,

With the human soul. A long-desired voice, how beautiful it is!

An ethereal medium pervading all space, a truth evidently revealed.

He shall not appear in his whole body, a luminous figure that breathed

A deep nature, spirited away, half turned, merely visible to the naked eye,

Still living, preceded by a sensation, the same light of revelation.

The talk is straightaway of babes that loved each other dear.

By alteration of things that remain, every perfect gift from above

Is continual and uninterrupted. She is discovered on Hang-Monday,

And heard in the adjoining room, which properly signifies hell.

Here is the rooted vine planted out in the low pits,

Not infested, not observable of any sexual form of multiplication.

The object drawn by eye has no breadth of being:

I declare things enabled, no sex discovered

In the extremity of the abdomen. No foetal heart heard.

Every incipient dread shall be revealed. All else is fume.

The transient, only like moving shapes, to be imagined

And not allowed to waken. And if they are deformed and suck

Upon the breast, they will go back and recall no other life.

The spirits who living entirely upon dreams, seem to be gathered,

That we may suspect the existence of another child.

Before the human female appeared, perfumed with sweet things,

The last metamorphosis (so often before named as resurrection)

Took place: a being existing here only temporarily, a vestige

Of terrestrial breath so far withdrawn from original nature,

Seeking the place below, but still subservient to human pleasures,

To those above, and to the divine. The creature has the characteristics

Of both sexes – nebulae and rare – and gives origin to the female organ,

The nature of flowers, and the everlasting semen upon the prolific earth.

The worms and brutes sing praises to God, and the creature having leisure

Takes an interest in itself, and demands particular attention,

And is not at all perplexed by the amatory life; which by a kind of habit

Produce ova. Heaven might appear the more transcendent, coalescing

Soft, rather rare – a smooth-faced animal of a very promising appearance

Equal to that of the finest classic outline. Yet the unchanging picture

Is a visionary dream, an involuntary act that constitutes infinity.

What the female furnishes is not thus alive, except by accident,

And is essentially immortal.

Spirit of the air, who dies faintly away,

There is scarcely a memory. No bond of association

Required in the first movement to take away a part

From the rest, to draw the breath that goes out

Of the womb and only admits of momentary duration.

A change of habit, as if unconscious: dresses dreaming,

And made perfect as the first day. The husky skin

Touched with the naked hand, hair curling beautifully.

An unblemished revival passed over time,

And would pass through space – a single shock,

Pressed into the opening, excited and moved by itself,

A slightly luminous flame that came from heaven.

Now the whole mystery revealed to me, unknowingly

Yet surely, passing from death to life on the new earth.

The apparition waking out of sleep – gold and silver –

The spinneret on the soft membrane, the drop hanging below,

First called a chrysalis, laid singularly upon the human frame.

Loose hair and skin covered with a piece of muslin;

The life carried away, swept into the open extremity.

And from the all-pervading law seen then to return

Void of all perceptible heat: the arms wide open,

Close the fingers up. And so I made a thought endowed

With endless life, and from the mere organism

Of matter reduced to immortality – “You are that boy,”

And slipped my hand away.