INVOCATION
What is the function of invocation, what
do we hope to achieve? Grotesque rituals
as a form of ghost dance, dodgy seances
with incoherent messages from the dead,
do not constitute a resurrection machine.
When people listen to themselves what
do they hear? Years of silence, whispers
of brutality and inner selves. Help us
to reconfigure and confuse, to stay alive
and respond to the command interface
you specify. Death is a Möbius strip
of lies and decay, so what keeps you
going now you have abandoned life?
Emails from the living, kind eulogies,
and traces of self-evident decay.
In the beginning we invoke the one,
but now we are struggling to breathe.
What is the function of elucidation,
transformation, the idea of the divine?
Something to cling on to as we die.
© Rupert M Loydell
Rupert Loydell is a writer, editor and abstract artist. His many books of poetry include Dear Mary (Shearsman, 2017) and The Return of the Man Who Has Everything (Shearsman 2015); and he has edited anthologies such as Yesterday’s Music Today (co-edited with Mike Ferguson, Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2014), and Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh: manifestos and unmanifestos (Salt, 2010).
Amethyst Review 