Oregon exorcists
say “cases are getting darker”
now is the time of monsters

Certain men crept in unawares
clawing through cracks
leaving traces
slime trails fluorescent with stench

Call it obsession at first
a fetish external to the body
sky gold oil cattle wire coal maps labor lumber plutonium tchotchkes
_____server farms factory farms universities fruit groves iron ore blood
a horizon
below
the land

Call it obsession
when the demon acts outside
possession when it pries
into the unwilling

The priest was wrong
obsession’s how one comes into possession
not just the grasping kind
_____a fist
_____buried
_____in the earth
_____scrabbling to hold
_____what exceeds its grasp
but infernal
the agitations of blasphemers
speaking in tongues
delving unknown
secrets
depths
of obscure knowledge
whatever buzzes down the transom
rung by an invisible hand
whose vibrations stir the limbs
to do the unthinkable

Some things that come over the transom cannot be recorded
_____the tenor of minds
_____retuned
_____ringing in dark thrums
_____dark thoughts
_____that cloudcast the alluvial plane
_____(in a scriptural sense
_____lunatics
_____unchained foaming fleeing mankind flailing violent
_____their convulsions called
_____sense)

Obseded
possessed
no matter
key sprockets in the machine

Seers in Delaware
astrologists in Nebraska
California’s witchy enclaves
pick up the gaps in the signal
along a ley line

Paranormal investigators on the coast
conclude that Fort George
is haunted still by the vision
of Alexander Henry the Younger
who saw in the celebratory musket fire
a soldier mistakenly turn the barrel
against himself
_____he turns again
_____and again
__________spikes in the EMF readings
_____retracing
_____with his eyes
_____back and forth
_____the musket ball
but the pseudoscientist the seer the witch
even the astrologists watch the time all the same
clocking-in to the transom signal
where waves and wires synchronize
the spirits to cycle the sprockets

Keep your eyes down

Above
the angels kept not their first estate
but left their own habitation
_____whom He hath reserved
_____in everlasting chains
_____under darkness
_____unto the judgment
_____of the great day
in silence
but word got out
always does
from John Dee
to John D.
_____יוֹחָנָן
_____Eòin
_____Ian
_____God is gracious
hierophany or possession
what’s spoken
is what is
Dee said British Empire
Rockefeller said Standard Oil

Since
there’s been bodies stolen
_____skull & bones
grandaddy Bush
jacking Fort Sill
to trap Goyaałé
in the Tomb
ten years later
some Fort Sill parking lot
make-work for the grunts
_____pave it over
_____dig it up
_____pave it over
_____again
_____make the marker
_____unmovable
maybe there is nothing
to be gained by digging up
putting bones back
in the ground still
means they’re dead
never mind the stamping up above
the grass is trampled
tamped down
cut with deep ruts
fresh and damp
smelling of swampy spring
_____others ossified
_____become bone
_____from wagons west
_____pulled by ‘obby ‘oss
__________look at the hoofprints
_____in the wan sepia halflight
_____of summers acome
_____and acome again
__________the iterative dirge
__________ploughing time
__________the whisper:
__________oss oss wee oss
but now it’s just autumn’s decay
_____long winter clouds
_____hang heavy up ahead
the ruts intersect
mud overflowing
from one
into the next
the tracks lead
in every direction
casting lines to form a grid
intersecting with other grids
to make the map
with a hill at the center
_____every center is a hill
_____and that hill’s always a grave
_____paved over or not
_____but if the grave was empty
_____then so’s the Tomb
_____just try to exercise that spirit
__________as the Younger recorded
__________It was, therefore, determined
__________to take possession of this hill

Near antonyms of possession
dispossession relinquishment surrendering transferal
it’s that last one
they turned to
in the exorcism
_____a Sophistic opposition
_____they knew
_____what they were doing

No
Michael the Archangel arguing for Moses’ body
but a myth they could make
and keep around
obsidian oil tables
new proxy for gold
the old cover story
for violence
they fingered bin Laden
let him run
called him Geronimo

The grandson
to ward off
the generational curse
his father had failed to fend
fired so-called Tomahawk missiles
flew so-called Blackhawk helicopters
even sent in the 7th Cavalry
_____113 years after
_____the butchery of Wounded Knee
for Shock and Awe
for Fallujah
finally bedding down
at Forward Operating Base Apache
to complete the ritual

But to no avail

Oil would have to do
millennia of decay
brought back to reap again
hauled in machines painted the color of sand
painted to become sand and stone
in order to contain
the multitudinous fuligin spirit
sleeping ancient in the earth
buzzing over the transom to be set free
_____until finer minds prevailed
_____realized that magick
_____can be manufactured
_____contained in totems
_____disseminated live via satellite feed in reconstructed ones and zeros
_____of sickly green night-vision photography
_____frenetic movement
__________a pensive roundtable
__________observing the proceedings
__________a final announcement of victory

All the while
more and more bones
still stacking up
underhill
with no sign
of the stolen ones
yet

So America said
what’s spoken
is what is
even in possession

So America says
but what’s seen is another matter
_____irreal
alternate streams
tributaries of time
coursing across the wires
to havoc the transom’s hypnotic whine
_____what is
_____what was
_____what will be
_____all hazards

The Younger was too blinkered
_____eyes glazed over
_____skin pale with ghosts
_____snowblind in the Dakotas
to understand the vision
but he took it down anyway
_____This morning we took
_____a walk to the burying-ground
_____about a mile South West of the village
_____upon the declivity of a hill

_____Here we saw many melancholy spectacles
_____of decayed and decaying
_____human forms

_____Some were tumbling
_____to the ground
_____while others obliged us
_____to keep to windward
_____to avoid the horrible
_____stench

_____We also observed
_____a great pile of human bones

Somewhere in the Missouri Basin
the signal could have been
hijacked for a moment

Call it back
take it down again
note the symptoms
of decay
so that we are not thus
blinkered
divine
in the feedback
what was not there
before
possessed by hostile voices
corrupt their invectives
their ancestral commands
traced back along the transom to that first incantation

Now
look up again
waterless clouds carried on the wind
trees without fruit withered in the heat

The empire has never yet ended
but just before it does
you can bet there’ll be a band of cultists
_____ancient M-16s slung over their shoulders
at empire’s edge
plumbing the Mithraic mysteries one last time
for all time’s sake
looking for something sacred
haunted
to give meaning to their desert outpost
_____their shitting-in-caves
_____starving-in-the-dark
_____hoisting-the-tattered-flag-each-morning-in-the-howling-wind last stand
to keep them from turning the barrel
mistakenly
on themselves
where
punctured
they’d erupt with shame like foam
they’ll invent prayers and rituals
stories to make the rusted shipping containers of New Fort George
seem noble
_____almost holy
_____wandering stars faded
_____in paint on the side
holding the last drops of crude
to ever be extracted from the earth
they’ll parade in reverse
the celebratory configurations at Old Fort George
without even knowing it
without knowing
the shrunken cartography of the Invisible Empire
_____extends
_____now
_____only a few
_____meters beyond
_____the cave’s mouth
_____where the nuclear
_____sandstorm howls
_____perpetual
_____in the blackness
_____of darkness
_____forever
with no clue
how spooked-out the American map is
still
with no thought
of its last restless ghosts bedding down
in the overgrown offramps
its last righteous vengeful spirits nearly sated
its last demons exorcised
all of its acts thrown in the athanor,
so all that’s left to do is wait
_____for the alchemical digestion
_____when maybe the monsters will give no more trouble