The Bible of Hell: Revisited
By, Minadora Macheret
Book One: A Daughter, Signed her Father
Preludium
This body is a prayer
a father told his newborn:
please come back.
Chap. 1
Having forgotten the depths
sick-love drove
fathers to pray
he asked
gentle beasts watching
don’t let her out of your sight.
The godless watched
grins wide and long
teeth are meant for ripping
the same way babes
are meant for living.
Palm-open,
two-sticks-of-butter-big
skeleton half-formed
held flesh
tight and wound
a cry stuck mid-lips
left shards of ‘other’
between lungs and almost-oxygen.
Prayer is a funny thing
tells god
this space of oxygen-carbon-hydrogen
is necessary.
Don’t forget the star-dust of her cells
they outweigh her
before she can forget
to live before she dies.
He begs the will of the Immortal expand[]
roll the soul
back into this body, willing—
But, the body is a city
each intestinal wall a road
to nerves, to wounds,
the skin a sun holds in warmth,
the cold left to the feet and top of the head,
somewhere a brain, memory-cell-filled
asks forgiveness for faulty DNA
left to anchor blue-prints
through slit eyes.
This skeleton-train
a ribbon between god and man.
But when constructing a figure out of death
fathers beget darkness,
let the roots of their bones
splinter hospital floors
arctic-death linoleum
a color too-cold for blue
penetrates the body of a man called—Blake.
He who envisioned
typographies & coppered-prints,
etched lives and energy
to connect cells to a beginning
where breath was the body as prayer,
where breath was the dream of gods,
where breath gave the frame 208 bones
to be known by.
Old-souls know to remember
the hands of an almost-god
asked to bring the dead back.
Gold-chains aren’t just of the rich
who smother newborns meant for others,
they exist in binds
those incubator walls
that house the living
those almost-breathes
they force and replicate—
mimic living
so, she remembers Adonai—a nucleus,
her star-mapped DNA
closer to Eve’s than Adam’s.
He who is called Father
explored the waters of life
endless PIC lines and minerals,
they feed children into creation,
dragged from wombs
not yet ready for this man-built world.
You remind the babe
(nameless until her naming ceremony)
the world is a trapeze artist
swinging from a gaping-mouthed god
less humble as he doles out
essences of self,
the forges & furnaces
that spit out bodies
in an image we name perfect
but mean damaged until healed.
Sometimes bodies are a duality
and he who is Blake & the Father
bathed his babes in springs of sorrow
twin breaths don’t always mean twin lives
and if a girl lives
he wondered of Baba Yaga
and the ways a daughter holds
the anger of her father to build
chicken-legged huts
before the fall.
He forgot the way Los stretched the mind
asked the body for forgiveness,
and still you pray
for a body the beloved can handle.
Book Two: A Daughter, Signed Her Mother
Chap.1
When voodoo happens to be your day job,
that little graveyard love
multiplies—
Love is the nipple as prayer
the binary caused
when no other option
than feast— left lust
to shadows and manly-others.
He, a forehead prominent,
years of books
stacked between each wrinkle,
spoke to the matriarch soul,
asked if creation was an essence beyond god.
And, you, with your twinkling eyes,
those Roma rules of divination
coursing through Jewish veins
never disappointed the bells
like golden-globes chimed
to remind him of an Egypt
half-bitter by a people afraid
to move on.
Bondage in chains they knew,
was a comfortable-space,
a lion’s courageous-heart
meant links of a godly kind.
And, you asked him,
if Kaballah meant tree
and he with ivory bed and joy of morning hour,
taught you
the spirit becomes a mind, becomes a body.
Ahania a parted soul called Sin
is the relic of this mother
maybe meant to name Mary
or Sarah, Rebekah, or Leah
the voice of quiet tribes
watching the fall of Jericho
the body of a man praying to a false god
she calls him Urizen
he, with his Books
left a crumb-trail
to the women looking across stretched-sea—
those yellow-brick roads and white-picket fences
a grave-yard painted to resemble Eden.
Ahania swell’d with ripeness & fat with fatness
a joy mothers know comes from a stretched,
partially-consumed womb.
Looking towards Urizen, that father,
of promises & reason,
begged for a land a babe
could find home in.
The way she looks for eternal
is where bones from the birth are buried
before they see the light
and she is asked to forgive the body
that let go too early.
Sometimes a babe knows,
sometimes, we ask god
how he knows the way the ankles
exit the body,
why it’s backwards,
but somehow the joy is my mother’s
sleeping in bliss.
Book Three: Of a Daughter & a Twin
The mother (Ahania)
guides the way Blake
that father figure— listless
speaks to the womb,
when Love & Joy were adoration
chemicals mixed
time- a post lapse era,
I didn’t know the moment we entered into being,
like an unwrapped present, boxed one within another,
we exist together and apart.
Urizen forgot non-entity, a vacuum & cosmic space,
can hold the remains of star-dust and babes,
to follow the way imagination entered
the spirit, the mental, the physical,
to follow cells between fire and fire
a vast solid without fluctuation
left splintered, like a blue marble
the earth forgot it could be.
Somewhere an old mother cries,
cause ghosts / those spirited-beings /
tell tales of an almost-life
where the womb-orb stretches and drowns
the contrary being,
before first breath can occur.
They forgot about falling,
and how the lungs dull and heavy
leave metallic after-taste
because each breath produces blood-cells,
a stream meant for life,
but like a skeleton-train
god wraps hands around a conductor’s hands
pulls too sharply
and breath become shards of glass
that fragment and pierce a beating heart.
and when that Immortal being
watches an end to the body,
his sister curled around the remnants
of cells meant to be things other than fire,
finds the body’s gravity too much
and follows the fluid flowing immense
to where Los beheld the dark void,
and Urizen’s hands appear whole and heavy,
to knit the soul in place.
Daughters are meant to live to continue a progeny
that sons forget to uphold.
Sometimes tribes’ traumatic memory-cells
bind to the lips of leaders
before women remember to use their voice.
And, so, the brain is a rock & the heart a flesh of four rivers,
you asked me to come back
because the world needs more mothers,
and sometimes, daughters, too.
A human is only an illusion, after all.