Featured Poem • February 2016
The Immortal Accursed
Olchar E. Lindsann
Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, thou hast driven me this day from the ground; and from thy face I shall be hidden; and I shall be a fugitive and wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will slay me.”
Genesis 4: 13-14.
I have received life as a wound, and I have forbidden suicide to heal the scar. I want the Creator to contemplate the gaping crevasse for every hour of his eternity. This is the punishment I inflict upon him.
Lautréamont, Maldoror, Book III, Chap. 1.
Estranged from God in vengeance and in fear, my penance shall not be adjourned: Men cringe in horror when I reappear. Eternally they wound and jeer me as I wander, deathless, spurned, estranged from Men in vengeance and in fear. Plunged deep in doubt if I draw near, yet frenzied in their self-concern, Men cringe in horror when I reappear. If in the course of my career we meet, God quakes at my return, estranged from Him in vengeance and in fear. I voice his curse for Men to hear, his cruelty which they dread to learn— They cringe in horror when I reappear. This curse lays God upon his bier where I alone can bid him burn: estranged from Men in vengeance and in fear, He’ll cringe in horror when I reappear.
Olchar Lindsann is a poet, theorist, teacher, and historian of the avant-garde, and runs mOnocle-Lash, an avant-garde press publishing contemporary and historical counter-cultural work. He has recently published the Weird Fiction novel King Jaundice on Roanoke Pulp & Paper.
About “The Immortal Accursed,” he shared these thoughts: “There is a persistent mythos of persistent curses—those upon Cain, Ahasuerus, Melmoth, Maldoror, Dracula—curses which do not eradicate their target, but inscribe them forever. The villanelle is a form of return, of persistence. But to persist is also to resist the power that curses.”
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