Like the Lion Skin of Bacchus

Poem inspired by Ibn Arabi’s Futuhat Chapter Manazil of Breaths

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From the hidden interior of the deity

The golden skin of a new creature

Flashes across the hemisphere

Of his observatory.

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Like the lion skin of Bacchus

Every living sign 

from the underworld culture

Is made of light and fire

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The fire arrives to you

The rounded globes

Of your Juperterian face

And your Venusian stomach

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The fire arrives to you

From Hermes

Your shadowy brother

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The challenge is to locate

Through orientation

Which sphere you are on

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Are you in the interior of An Earth

Or on a solar beam extending beyond density? 

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Begin to let the voice

Deliver its message

To the One who listens

The One who needs to know

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The One whose being is an Urn

That holds the Milky Way

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If you can fill the Urn 

With the living Image

Your diamond constellation will persist

Stars will connect into a shape

Of expansive brightness

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Many of you wonder why Orpheus matters

Many of us in the cave of Maia

Wonder at the prostration of Moses

In the interior of the Earth

While his spirit rises

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Some of you go up

And others bury themselves 

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You stream past the ghosts

With an insatiable speed

But there are oracles that line the lanes

And they whisper through the trees

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Their whisper is a bridge

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“In the hiddenness of the deities being 

is the bright skin of a new creature

Made of fire gold and light”

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The light flickers between depth and brightness

This creature is a bridge

Between the shadow of Orpheus 

And the light of Apollo

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How much real light do you think 

You can see in a grave?

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Moses is gathering light and honey 

With the kite of his spirit

As the patriarchs role in the bliss

Of Her squeezing paradise

They all bow low to show the sacredness

Of Her hallowed hills

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Only with their carbon mixed

With Her clay can they fly/fall through the spheres

And collect the golden dew of the new creature

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Despairing one, this is a message for you 

Generation after generation of your ancestors

Roll through the hallowed hills

To make the sun of this day rise

They catch it with their flying spirits 

And draw forth a new creature

Just for you

Because you hold the golden token.

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The lair of the patriarchs

In Persephony’s purple depth

Solomon and Moses incubate

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Their Soma (corpses) animated with alchemical fire

Perform a spell

And their spirits rise like kites

Like sails, catching solar winds

This special Earth changes course

Based on the perfection of their sacrificial act

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The matriarchs and oracles sit together

In larger less secluded graves

Mixing the voices, spices, messages

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The lair of the patriarchs

Drive this interiority into new spaces

This is how they fly a planet

In harmony with six others

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Each patriarch arrives in a special Earth and Sky

Drops his bones into the squeezing 

heaving earth and hearth

Based on his perfect operation in the lair

He deposits carbon, into the clay

And an ore is activated

And his spirit ascends

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Living Image for alchemical contemplation:

7 patriarchs in the graves

Performing the sacrifice

Their bodies bow low into the interior of Her

Hidden Grand Mosque

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All at once their spirits ascend

Like sails they reach the highest space 

of the subtle sky

And these 7 sails catch a ray of solar wind

That steers the totality of the 7 spheres in a new direction

Towards a new destiny

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The lair of the patriarchs exist externally

And inside the body

In the subtle centers they bow in each person’s body

They pray and incubate 

in the deepest parts of Her clay

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And their spirits soar, 

catching the wind of the future

Pulling the body of their loved ones 

Away from the fray and into the new dawn.

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For each patriarch, buried beneath 

The hallowed hills

There is a circle of matriarchs and oracles

Jubilant and Silent

Holding the cords of their corpses down 

so it doesn’t ascend with the angelic fire of their rising spirits.

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These weighted corpses 

The wildly ascending fire bodies

This labor of love, this action of supplication

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All for a Lady

Wrapped in the bulging green of these hills

Keeper of knowledge, letters, medicines, riders, and healers

Green mountains and vales, 

whose interior is the record of our journeys together.

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When you cross the crooked mountain gate

Adorned with gold and silver lanterns

You have a chance to find the opening

Out of here

To go into, down and through her hallowed hills.

The spheres of escape are generative deities

Bodies both apparent and hidden of multiple

Goddesses.

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But you do not ascend out of here

You descend into a new reality

Into a denser weighted body made of ores

Rooted, fruiting, rotting, disappearing

The terrain is Hers, the bodies are yours

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There is a window open for me

to get away from all of your theologies

I will get out by taking you all the way down 

Into Her paradise.

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The prophets and the patriarchs are nothing 

without Her hallowed hills

She dresses you in elemental ecstasy

Squeezes you in the womb and tomb

And you roll in delirium pretending 

The One above, the Vacant 

remembers you.

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Yet the seven spheres beneath you

Are waiting for a token from your

Desperate hand, 

Acknowledgement 

Remembrance, respect

The queen of the dead

And her hallowed hills

Of generative earth.

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This piece of writing is a piece of gold

And a white candle for The Seven Ladies

The seven earths and skies like them

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Their golden chain goes down and through 

The thin illusions of culture

It emerges from your quiet miraculous subtlety

The seven live in you

And flow into this place

As healing, as wisdom, as presence, 

as transformative consciousness

When She is seen as Hu

The guide, the truth, the way.

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