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The Bible of Hell: Revisited

 By, Minadora Macheret

Book One: A Daughter, Signed her Father

Of The First Book of Urizen

 

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

Of The Book of Ahania

 

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

Of The Book of Los

 

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.

 

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