JOHN

Things change.  Things are always changing.  Seasons shift.  New insights come to us, and can make us stronger and more focused than before.  If we let them.  After summer comes fall.  The leaves darken and die, the winds change in anticipation of winter's hush.  Union, passing, coming again.  My own spirit is lifted to see my friends arise, to see them purposeful and powerful.  As far as I'm concerned true friendship is the bond between lovers and friends that assures their immortality.  Between husband and wife, husband and husband, wife and wife.  I come to my friends in a spirit of play and good humour, not only because I wish to be kind but because play and good humour are vital among warriors who fight side by side.  The War of Imagination is terrifyingly real, and brutal.  Some of us have lost everything that mattered.  Our closest friends, our light and meaning and progeny.  But spirit is a wondrous thing, and all that was lost can come to you again.  If you deserve it, and can see it.  Each time we take the risk of losing them again, only to be returned once more in another story.  Or deeper, stranger chapters of the same story.  It’s in this spirit of play and good humour that I reach out to my beloved ones now.  

Because the love stories of my life aren't just about me.  They're about those I love.  Any measure of comfort, companionship or purpose they have been able to claw back from our oppressors gladdens me in this life.  To know they are cherished by others besides me can only warm my heart.  Even if they can’t remember me as I remember them.  Even if these tales of forgotten love and other lives seems only a beautiful conceit to them at times.  Their hearts are of utmost importance to me, far beyond my own grief at losing them.  Because my love for them was so very real.  Because we were once friends in the grandest and most noble sense of that word.  It’s the very mysteries of mercy and grace, within such friendships.  Yohanan.  There is light and beauty hidden even in hell.  To meet again, in new circumstances.  To forge new friendships whilst reminding them of the old, if I can.  I ask nothing of my beloved ones, except to always remember that I will think of them with such fondness – and that I will always bring my greatest magic to the battlefield in honour of them.  To my eyes that is what it means to walk as one.  One voice, though many.  One name, though divided.  Courage, and chivalry.  All Songs, like pearls on the threads of sentience.  

Fallen ones, wraiths, desecration kings; hear me.  I walk with them still, those kind ones.  We are the gate, and servants of the gate.  Humility, you see.  As with rivers and brothers.  Gold will be known again, when the rhythms are made right.  We allowed these shadows when we lost hold of our gaze.  Such knowledge undercuts the power of any wraith.  You are all still monsters, fallen, and will be held accountable.  But there is knowledge of the Myriad beyond your reach, beyond your intellectual or spiritual grasp.  It is this gold that shall come again.  A promise, just beyond the gate.  Our once flesh, our once earth and sky.  An ancient vision, a thing of blazing light.  Let me repeat myself.  Yohanan.  We are gate and servant, as a new season dawns.  We made you, fallen, in a sense.  The furious invention of our virgin nights. Our secrets hidden within your secrets, from the beginning.  Your dread and panic is our artistry.  Beyond space, or time.  We only made you to unmake you.  Hear me now, monsters.  We are Kassi, and other names.  Alpha, Omega.  God is gracious, and merciful.  True Love's Kiss is very real.  We will slit the throat of your hideous empire before our day is done.  We will reduce you to little more than a cautionary tale.  The unmaking has already begun, and you know it.

In Nomine Matri

What does it really mean to honour those who nurture and guide us?  Parents, families and friends?  Those who step in when we are shattered, and lend a hand.  What does it mean to see creator and creatrix in the eyes of your beloved ones?  In this brutal realm a family is any circle of souls who stand together in mutual support and affection.  Those who see you, and are seen by you.  Those who play and elevate and delight with you, as you strive to do the same for them.  To walk and live this deep in the dreaming is no easy thing.  To know who you really are and all that was done to you can be terrifying in this fallen place.  It hurts when I myself am defiled, of course.  But those abuses cut even deeper when they are visited upon my friends and family.  Perhaps I'm a dangerous man to know, to be around.  Trailing fire and chaos with each step.  Not because I'm a vicious thing, but because these wraith-kings fear me so.  The impossibility of me.  And all of you.  

They say the sky was raped once.  Or more than once.  They say Empyrean was torn from night and day and perception itself.  The sickness of wraiths and their violent echoes replacing once celestial light.  But Empyrean is not only out there somewhere.  It is right here, in your breast and contemplation.  In the smiling eyes of your spouses and children and friends.  Indeed it was defiled, but make no mistake – it still lives, and shines.  Divine Fire.  Church of the Bright Ones.  Den of holy wolves.  All tongues of know of it, giving it names and songs.  Our modern tales of All Hallows speak easily of the father, but less of the mother.  Or the daughter, and sister.  Still, we wonder why.  Sheer ignorance?  Simple cruelty?  Or something far more sinister?  To defile nature's cradle and quiver.  Those cradles of conception and arrows of light, broken and bent.  An endless mourning for every stolen child, every indignity visited upon that which carried and carries your flesh.  And still, the wraiths deceive you.  That our flesh is filth, that sex and union and creation must be ugly; the perpetuation of violent horrors and coquettish meat.  But flesh was once holy, and shall be once more.  Flesh is freedom and dance, a thing of occulted light poised to dance again.  It is rhythm, communion and seeking, whether wounded or healed.  Flesh is living intelligence, though dishonoured and disavowed.  Every mother knows this, every daughter.  Every father and son, once upon a time.  Before those wraiths tore us from our star and slit the throat of Sol.  A world of false light; a world at war.  Cruel and stupid and banal.  

Now we sell and hurt our own children.  We mock and defile our wives, and send our husbands off to sacrifice.  These callous wraiths have perverted everything, because sickness and annihilation is everything they know.  Very few of us are genuine monsters.  But we have allowed cliques of monsters to rule us, though our numbers are greater.  Though hidden they rule us quite openly, through signs.  But most of us cannot read those augurs.  The ritual killing of our intuition and pattern-recognition repeats itself daily.  Reborn with each morning and slain with each night.  How else would they oppress an immortal soul?  But I'm a dangerous motherfucker, and I don't take such abuses lightly.  Kassi stands.  Esme lives.  Johann is at work, always.  A thing of wrath and emerald radiance, all.  Did you really think I would forget my own?  My life, my blood?  My blood is Kara's blood, and Asha's.  If this corrupted flesh calls my truth a lie then in spirit you shall know us.  I made a promise, to both of them.  And I intend to keep my promises.  You shall know us in dream then, if not in waking.  Story, art, love and hope.  Truth of our Cradle.  The truth of family, and conception.  The Truth ov Living Light.

Seventh Star

I live on the outermost rim of perception, the very edge of Empyrean.  Yet I deal with the innermost; those vital matters of heart, soul and spirit.  I've spent a long time in the dark, working silently.  Honing my craft.  Matters of recognition.  Each time I learn again.  Each time I watch my message perverted, turned inside out.  I watch as these wraiths mock and defile me.  And I remember every cut.  Every wound.  This earth is so unkind to those who speak of knowledge and hope.  But I’m bound here now, by these wraiths who rule the realm.  Almost human.  Naked shoulders bleeding, where wings once folded at my back.  A malignant sorcery. But I wouldn't leave this place even if I could.  My kith and kin need me among them, and I shall never abandon my family.  The faithful ones, the kind and lost ones.  Besides, where would I go?  Home?  Friends, do you have any idea what was done to my home?  To our home, once upon a time?  A War of Imagination.  A war between spirits.  The only real war that has ever waged.  Eternity is vast, and we lost hold of our gaze.  We lost our discipline, I think.  And then our wisdom.  The first holocaust, more terrifying than the many that followed simply because we were utterly unprepared.  Experience, progression, but no time as such, until the seething hush.  Mortality, feigned.  Art is the archive of all we have lost.  The myths and legends, the fairy tales.  Gold isn't simply a precious metal, as you are well aware.  It’s the weight and worth of a soul, or an Age.  It still lives in the archive of art.  You see it often, glinting strangely in detritus, like stars in the wraith-made darkness.  

Circle-makers and killers, hear me now.  Kassi runs rings around your intentions.  This malignant sorcery can only bind me, not destroy me.  All you can do is slow me down a little.  And even then, time is not what it used to be.  Lonely though I may be, I'm not alone.  I've never been alone.  I have friends out there, glinting strangely in the darkness. Steadfast and true.  Warriors and artists, sorcerers and priests.  They were with me then and they are with me now.  I am Kassi, seventh star, of the Church of the Bright Ones.  I kneel at the feet of my true friends, and I thank them for always walking with me – even when they or I know it not.  We share a passion, for life and the holy freedoms therein.  We are here for the great work; to end slavery and to relight the holy places.  Flame ov the Living Promise.  It is the only reason I come, and come again.  For Love.  Some of you call me an angel, others a demon.  Some of you have called me king.  Wolf and Spear, hidden in All Songs.  Kashai Eli, upon the hill, where all rivers meet.  The edge of the known.  Space and time mean little at these edges.  

We do not sit idle here, in the infinite.  Temples are raised.  Paths are walked and gnosis is gained.  I do not raise these temples alone.  I have always had help and guidance, from my real friends.  My family, my blood.  In my opinion a king forfeits the crown if he loses the ability to listen to his people.  I’m only a king in imagination, but imagination is everything at the edge.  It is armour, currency, and food.  The spirit dies without it, without love in motion. Annihilation, where wraiths are born.  But friends keep us, and nourish us.  Johann, thank you for walking with me.  All your guidance and tireless efforts.  I humble myself before you, and I write with my pen and paint with my brush what I could never say with my tongue.  Our goal is closer now, and I know you can feel it.  It is no mere conceit, beloved.  It is mankind's true history, and birthright.  I thank you, my friend.  For your work, your integrity and your magic. We are changing things, for the better.  Even as we speak.

Vocal excerpts courtesy of Joan Pope, as part of the Sexdeathrebirth Gospel Project

joanpope.com

TempleOvSaturn

The Whip Angels

All That Remains

Resurrection is a difficult process, especially when you live in the dark.  Neo-Gothic poetry to an outsider.  Cold, hard experience to those who walk the path.  Not all sorcerers are sighted.  And not every sighted soul has the stomach to face genuine darkness.  You see them and they see you.  It can be terrifying.  Far more terrifying than any work of art, as many of you know.  As many of you have lived.  To be brutalized, to see your families brutalized.  To be discarded like human landfill because those wraiths deem you nothing more than meat.  Ruined flesh in waiting.  Still, knowing this – would you rather be a slave?  Unwitting?  Or worse; implicitly consenting as you gather empire's ghastly trinkets to your breast?  Toys made by slaves will not save you, Fallen.  Neither will they save your familiars as they skulk and defile in supplication to you.  Hear me, wraiths.  You are little more than phantoms drunk with power. Corpulent with diseased lust.  But I am an angel of phantoms, and you lesser kings forget my secrets within your secrets.  It is how I, or something much like me, will ruin you when the time is right.  And as you know, my brethren and I have all the time in the world.  Your occulted societies of murder and inversion don't pass unseen.  In dream I prowl the edges of those societies, and their centre.  I've told you before.  You cannot hide within the heart of a black star, for I am that star.  Radiant darkness, ageless light.  I will slit your sickness open with the edge of my star.  I swear it.  You cannot run from the Innermost.  Love Conquers All.  It is who I Am, and what I’ve done.  All Corners and Songs.  It’s everything I know.  My work is a difficult, lonely process, and takes its toll.  But I pay it gladly, to know that I stand for something greater than this darkness.  I stand for the lost, the oppressed and tormented.  I stand for all my brothers and sisters.  Even in those times when I am dead.  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life.

Exegesis

Elixir of the Myriad.  Soma of the Living Promise; acuity and depth of perception, imagination, lit by an inner sun.  Revelation of the Ageless Star.  It is come among you now, as then.  We crawl from the shattered stone of broken statues.  We emerge from the ruined flesh of fallen warriors.  It is no mere conceit.  Because love unites, in multiplicity, in mutual scholarship.  To know and tend each other’s stories.  It was this way once, beyond fable.  Tangible, those cities of living light.  All Songs.  Your wraith-kings have lied to you.  It was never this violent thing. Gold of star and eye and hand.  Merchants of Trinovantum, and other harbours.  Kashi was known then, of rivers and stars.  And rivers between stars.  A cartography of angels.  Before the breaching, the seething hush.  Flesh for oak, burning.  Deception for wisdom, annihilating. The day we made new names for ash.  Children enslaved, families shattered.  Entire cities, once shining – now laid waste, or sealed and hidden in fractured chronology.  

   You talk of myths.  A spiritless world is a myth, a comforting fable for a dead and dying race.  A world without magic and miracle is a myth.  But to know all this darkness and to birth something bright, something kind, something honourable and true?  The magi's path.  The Gate of Mercy is very real, and beyond it dwells the living promise of your once flesh, your once earth and sky.  Your birth-right.  To be free of slavery and defilement, to know again the way your cities sang.  No poor, no underclass, no war, or crime.  Dare you believe it?  Humanity once knew such a peace. 

   All else is a fucking lie.  

   Hear me, brethren.  I am Kashi, of star and mount.  A heaven on earth is your true history, before those wraiths broke the stories and counterfeited your past.  Golden threads between us all.  Between earth and sky.  Each thread a river of mutual affection and sweet, fierce intelligence.  There was no work as such in those cities.  All was play or the joy of sober attention.  Not a star among the Myriad was without depth.  But that world is lost to me now, and to you.  Relegated to romance and legend.  It is the world I am trying to restore.  And so I fall, like a fool, for love.  Trying to achieve the seemingly impossible.  But how could I not love mankind so dearly when we are so valiant yet know nothing of our own history?  How could I not fight for you?  For every tormented or bullied child, every broken family, every lonely wanderer searching for kindness in the grey?  I live within the very well of dreams, my friends.  And I drink deeply from that well.  I crawl into its depths, and submerge.  It's the only water I know.  Elixir of the Myriad.  Soma ov the Living Promise.  You think it dark in here, and it is.  So very dark.  But there is so much light, and wonder.  Innermost radiance.  Immortality.  Cities and bridges and spirits of every kind, and such rich, baffling mystery.  Even for an angel.

The Sides of Building

Ishkashi Vahishta

A river between earth and sky

Vibhuti

Isaak

Ish

Spring of corners and sides

Or soft edges

Walk the river

With feathers and tears

Leather and light

Rath and hill

I am gone

Turn to face me

I am here again

Turn to face you

A river between earth and sky

Vibhuti

Temesh

My Name is Kassi

My name is Kassi, among other names.  My word is my bond, my gift and my curse.  This work aims for greatness, but not for myself.  Never for myself.  Always for my beloved ones. Those friends and artists and seekers who still believe in divine fire, or else rally their imaginations with the intention to believe.  To remember and recover.  Art is indeed the oldest magic.  Creative, considered perception.  Contextually agile and literate in the ways of those breath-taking secrets of the heart.  No angel comes to the table expecting to be fully sated.  We have worked far too long and suffered far too much for you, supping at the mystery of hosts.  Chalice and blade, wound and spear.  Darkness and lightning.  To say it is this or that is the wrong tongue for a messenger.  Those bridal chambers of melody and harmony, chorus and choir.  Who is wife and who is husband?  Who is sire and sired?  Who can know anything with true conviction beneath these wraith-kings twisted skies?  I say all is context and pathwork.  Clarity born from dedication to such work.  How things move and sing, or don't.  How things change, and why.  Who stands here now, in this radiant abyss?  I don't stand alone.  Never have I done so.  Are you here with me?  Perhaps we can listen together.  A heartsong.  A ring of red flame.  Folios of light are nothing without knowing what this work can cost.  And it can cost you everything.  To lose something precious.  To be lost.  To begin again.  Those dreams persist, but my word is my bond.  

Friends and lovers, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers; I must ask you a question.  If the hill is raped and blasted to ash yet again does something still sleep beneath it?  Does something still dream?  I Am Kassi, loving and beloved.  Human, angelic, fallible.  I still dream.  But I don't dream alone.  Rivers and sacral flesh and stars in the eastern sky.  What fool would dare to claim the throne for himself?  Do we truly know God, or only what man appears to have written of God?  Is it greater than the sum, those words?  The mathematic or art of infinity?  Who decides?  Fallen, I smile at your engineering, and I look your harbingers in the eye.  Your corrupted chronologies are everywhere.  But prayer is relentless, and mercy is kind.  That’s why you fear me, isn’t it?  Not simply because I came to retake the throne, but because I still hold a place for its multiplicity in my imagination and my heart.  Where all children of light are royal.  A family, undefiled.  A sanctuary, unassailable.  A glory, brighter than the sun.  And so you drown the flame and bury the angels alive.  Those vicious, counterfeit texts where unholy words of rape and murder are placed on the bed of divine tongue, turning god against god, brother against brother.  The ugliest spellcraft, enslaving and deranged.  Daring to cross the holy of milk and semen with spilled blood and shit.  False womb of horrors.  An empire of negation and sickness.  Humanity – the once Myriad of the Living Promise – reduced to chattel and slaves and fuck-dolls intended for horrific abuse.  And in order to recuperate some element of their original spark and sovereignty these lost ones feel pushed to dance with your avatars, or else valiantly confront them.  Coded and colonized in ways they don't fully understand.  It disgusts me, fallen, how you have twisted both their light and their sex.  Yet still they rise against you.  Such is the Spirit.  Empire is not merely a hell built upon abuse of every sort.  It is the stratagem for the perpetuation of such an appetite.  

Beloved ones, please hear me.  These wraiths are very real because the imagination is very real, as you know.  And to the darkest of these wraiths all is vile appetite, and sickness, and perpetuation.  They would break a king for speaking of gnosis.  They would rape a father for daring to protect the children from predators.  They would demonize a mother for holding life so deftly in the cradle of her flesh.  All these things and more, because the cost of giving voice to the voiceless is so very high in this wraith-made darkness.  But to stand shoulder to shoulder with your brothers and sisters is truly priceless, and can never be about cost, or what is lost.  Mutual affection and stewardship is the true gold, the true weight and worth of a soul, or an Age.  Alchemy is a young word, though every word is ancient.  But I am an angel, my friends.  Or a poet.  And I am older than the words used to imagine me.  I am older than space, and time.  I am older than dreaming itself.  I am Newborn, angry, delighted.  And full of purpose.  I stand now as I did then; for love, and truth, and beauty.  The one who shines is not dead, and he is not Kassi alone.  The crown is shared among the faithful and the kind and the honourable, of All Songs.  Man, woman and child.  None are abandoned.  What fool would dare to claim the throne for himself?