“THE HORROR (SELF-PORTRAIT AS COL. E. KURTZ)”

by Johnny Cate

I will be the first to admit: my methods

                                                        have become unsound.

 

I’ve made of my soul a wild

                                          & established myself above

 

the savages there—a jungle god

                           whose gravity is collapse…

 

It happened suddenly:

                Heaven just fell on the earth

 

                                          in the form of gardenias

 

& I began to consider real freedoms,

                                                       what they may be—

 

& to say things even I find

                                         alarming. These pages,

 

classifieds made disgustingly public,

                            stuff your casefile, O reader, assassin—

 

call you upriver & rattle the top brass 

             in the safety of their bases.

 

                                        Their Golden Boy, they never

 

imagined I would break away. But revelatory cadres

                                                         invaded my mind,

 

hacked off the inoculated arm of my conscience

                                          with oh my God

 

a will so genuine, so pure, complete, crystalline,

                           I came to admire it… & now

 

 I’ve gone & made a friend of mortal terror.

              Nightly, I dream a snail

 

                                         crawling a razor blade

 

& not cut—who are they, these grocery clerks,

                                               to terminate my command?

 

Who are you, errand boy, to judge me?

                               Have you peeled the juniper bud

 

before its time & felt its pain as your own?

                             Have you opened the fire lily

 

 of your heart with homemade napalm 

               & burned alive

 

                              so it can bloom?

 

You’re clueless. Abandon flirts with me

                                                 like a foreign stripper—

 

a Babylonian call girl teasing the zipper

                                          between me & true poetry…

 

Only once, I let myself go—lightning clapped

                            & now I’m clearer in the negative

 

 than the photo—as shady as I am ablaze: 

                 leaning from the shadows

 

                               to show my bald crown 

 

as the sun its corona in full solar eclipse

                                                 —you have a right to kill me,

 

you have that right—the raging bull

                                     must be sacrificed,

 

the divergent blood shed by the sane

                             to wage their war of reason… 

 

& to their rank & file I am horrific,

             but this horror, my horror

                           is my glory—even found in Hell 

 

I stun like a blood diamond refracting fire—

                                                        a photon in psychosis,

 

I whip the dark with torture-light.

                                        Even found in Hell, I swear this,

 

I am Heaven itself. For what is Hell,

                            but justice perfected?

 

              & what is justice, but perfect beauty?  

CONTRIBUTOR’S STATEMENT:

[The poem] relates my own struggles with destiny and sanity as I find myself inhabiting the role of one of the most captivating characters in film history from one of my all-time favorite films: “Apocalypse Now”…