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You might think of Satan as a one-dimensional vulgar beast drooling over the lost souls of mankind. Sure, he may be clever and tricky, even sometimes gentlemanly, but rarely do people pay attention to his artistic side. Quite far from being a coarse, unrefined brute with no more sense of beauty and high culture than a tapeworm clinging to the colon walls of a bag lady, the devil can actually be quite expressive with verse. This criminally overlooked poet has penned some strikingly memorable stanzas over the eons, showing at least some of his works to be worthy of canonization into the academic curriculum. In the following selections you will see his development from the youthful immaturity of his early years expelled from heaven, to a more seasoned and insightful poet ready to tangle with deeper introspection and the larger metaphysical issues at hand.
The first selection I have chosen is one of his earliest surviving works, dated between 1000 and 500 B.C. Its free verse was discovered on a stone tablet that had been used by a Spartan warrior to bludgeon a Persian invader. Luckily, the event did not damage the inscriptions, which only recently have been painstakingly translated by a team of scientists in Switzerland - the same team who had become notorious during the 80’s by transcribing backwards messages in Heavy Metal music.
| Devilicious
Rape-smiling dwarves with foaming lips wait in the bathroom
their carnivore eyes watch the clenching agony
of kidney stones dispensed.
Soon the sticky aftermath of flayed innards and gushing veins
will be all that’s left of these precious moments.
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Scholars continue to debate the higher meaning of this cryptic piece. Clearly, it is not one of his better works, yet still it seizes hold of the imagination with its suggestive imagery. It also sets a tone for later poetry with a sort of perversity that would later become his trademark.
Leaping forward to 1396 A.D., we can read perhaps Lucifer’s most wretchedly alluring piece. This one had been kept in the vaults of the Vatican until recently when a renegade bishop defected to the “dark side.” Apparently he had been wooed by the beauty of Satan’s poetry and wished to share it with the world. Without further adieu, here is the controversial poem:
| Nature’s Prurient Glory
Mother Nature, thy Oedepal love,
Thy lusting maiden fair,
Often I dream of your bosom drenched with oil,
Your liquids swirled amidst my own.
The monoxide on your breath intoxicates
Like the smell of burnt forest
Or the chemical tingle of toxic water
Dredged from contaminated wells.
Your mood swings with capricious force,
a tidal wave of wanton waters.
Treat me rough as thou wilt, you fickle mistress!
Make the magma spew from Hell
And spill onto your supple earth skin.
Mother Nature,
I am a naughty angel
trapped inside your fiery caves,
aching for your subjugation.
Mother Nature,
let us create tremors
That raze civilization,
Flame-lick each other until Judgement Day
Whence together we shall smoke
in a blissful state of apocalyptic repose.
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One of the most shocking aspects of this poem is its foresight into the environmental devastation of the future, albeit as a fetishized fascination. More importantly, though, we can witness a developing, though somewhat crude, word-craft in this burgeoning writer. The use of anthropomorphism applied to both Mother Nature, and also himself, is simply staggering. The debate over the intent of the piece is clouded by the prejudices readers bring against the vilified author. Was he saying that the ruination of the planet’s life-supporting faculties is a good thing to be savored; that the harsher Mother Nature becomes, the more he finds Her appealing? Or is this indeed a work of satire, of derisive sarcasm - a notion that is supported by the sometimes playfully wicked tone of the poem?
Much later on into the early twentieth century, we come upon Satan’s driest period. There was a flurry of output, but it was geared towards the mass markets, and lyrically it came off as feebly inept. Here we get works saved from the annals of banal Hallmark tedium only by the irrepressible touch of evil that haunts the dark master’s vampiric soul. The following poem attempts an inspirational optimism, but falls short of the mark in an almost comically disturbing manner:
| Puppy Dogs and Rainbows
When your shaky ladder of success has lost some vital rungs
When green globules of gore issue forth from your dying lungs
When porno mags and holy books just won’t see you through
Think of puppy dogs and rainbows, and feel my love for you. |
Fortunately, this period in the career of Satan was brief and paved the way for an era of his most poignant works. The next poem shows him pondering human existence and the process of aging with shocking sympathy. Here his words show a harrowing insight tempered by his own eternal gaze. It is as if he himself had been personified as a lowly human, in same the way that Jesus had been the fleshly embodiment of God.
| Birthdays of the Damned
Pieces of shredded heaven
Float through red sky,
God-flesh, confetti falling
white-hot snow on napalm babies.
The chores of snorting whores soon end.
Wheeze-laughing trolls with laundry baskets,
lips flapping like lacerated wrists,
dancing to time’s dying pulse.
Sit alone, crooked spine
bent into a question mark,
the middle-ages squandered
on holy grails and bourbon breath.
The smell of cancer lingers sarcastically
in the living room, feel the creak
of once marrowed bones long sucked dry.
Another birthday,
the candles of youth blown out,
too parched to drown pain with sin.
Guilt, a vice of the meek,
grows stronger every year
until the frail body scatters
into the blown remnants of omnipotence. |
Lucifer’s next poem is perhaps his most controversial, especially among right-wing satanic fundamentalists. Condemned by both reactionary Lamarckians and gay rights advocates who resented the association of the devil with their cause, it was written in the early fifties as a confused deity dealt with complex and conflicting urges in his own sexual identity. In modern times this poem has actually formed the basis for comic lampooning, most notably in the popular South Park cartoon, although such satirical lambasting belies the artistic merits of Satan’s tormented psychology. Scholars have suggested that this poem’s homo-eroticism is a byproduct of Beelzebub’s self-adulation and infamously inflated ego. Clearly his inner turmoil is compounded by restrictions on him made by mankind’s growing conceptions of him as a ultra-masculine entity, especially salient when considering the rise of rock’n’roll as purported “devil music.” This popular trend undoubtedly limited his expression in the collective psyche. But rather than attempt an exegesis of this text wrought with prolixity, I will let the work speak for itself:
| The Muscled Mirror
Blistered red skin bulges,
Horned majesty pervades
With the aura of sensuous evil:
Feral urges flogged by identity
Indemnity paid in hallowed phrases,
shrieking at the barbed edges of damnation.
My shameful bones tremble
at my own wanting eyes.
The glow of lust acerbating,
Pungent flavors of beast flesh,
the aroma of forbidden fruit
rotting on the vine.
Panting dogma on my trail
mocks these stirring desires,
re-molding the sculpted intentions
of longing, thwarted and contorted
into a cursed blessing of ambivalence
and hot sweating beast breaths.
Tired, dripping and yearning,
I crawl into submission
alone, holding to myself. |
The final selection in this cross-section of Satanic poems shows Satan attempting further progression into the Avante Garde. Inspired by Joyce’s stream of consciousness writings and Yeats’ automatic writing, he grew more adventuresome with language and form. Often nuanced with post-modern leanings, this poem becomes both harrowing and stark in its impact, despite being fraught with the pratfalls of a developing craft not yet honed to distinction. It is perhaps the most enigmatic period of all his works, leading most critics to summarily hail it as ineffectual claptrap. Still, these pieces merit exploration, if for no other reason than to divine some glint of knowledge from its pathological soul-mongering scatology. His poems became more self-reflective and ironic as he deals with problems of attaining a father’s love, often verging on a telegraphic, schizophrenic melange of words and phrases. He seems unable to cope with the evilness of his blood, and equally unable to transgress his own nature that lies in polar opposition to his progenitor’s. The following is a short piece form his “Red” period:
| Blood Charter
Freakish sinews tau(gh)t with death
vermiculating ideographs burrow
in gasping spasms of love need
deformed figurines balance on the tender loins of eternity
A father’s disdain collars me in luminous gravity
haloed like a steer
anchored to the earth’s core
lactating hate boils the planet’s membrane
geysers cool in the whistling of sacred errors
dry humor, the petroleum jellyfish of the great plains
blooming tumors in fruit salad laugh then laugh more
while sadness sickens the paranormal flowers
the ghost of a tulip pukes on a cloud
Inside, cadavers seasoned with celestial crumbs
perk up on their summer slabs
and draw equations from the sky
I wear tension, clenched and sweaty
the closet is filled with worn out spines
gelatinous bastard am I
rubbed into the rancor of the rapture
the devil evolves
does not believe in himself anymore
lost his tale
body fenestrating on a soggy backbone
A calm collective of distorted wombs tangle together
clamoring to carve holes in new ivory passion
the hand-tooled canals of the witching valley
open up and receive the black tar.
smell the mortal mitosis mitigating as it does
Eat the dead flesh.
Dangle your philosophy over the edge
of the cliff notes.
My face is iridescent foliage,
pirated art with a prayer victim pedigree.
The world stinks, of art(it)chokes,
Let me lie amongst the vegans
In penurious bliss. |
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