The Professor

A constructed visage, a fabricated guise, a finished frontispiece
Worn to conceal, instead reveals, worn to reveal, in return conceals
Reposed in authority, to speak with divinity, to be perceived
Powerful, enlightened, formidable, threatening, admonishing
To lose control, to unshoulder the yoke of courtesy and lash
Whipping and kicking against those who otherwise might control you
Wearing masks of their own, posing as gods, golden faced and vigorous
To oppress, to impress, to confess, to administer, to profess
Leaving none unmasked, some beneath many filmy embryonic layers
Occupant of the mind behind the mask, in becoming, a metamorphosis
Molted and mutated, transfigured, transposed, commuted identity, exposed
A veil, a cloak, a camouflage, an assembled visage, a posture and pose
Humility to no longer possess, or an obedience to suddenly perform
One mask for the world, to present the person you want them to see
Another gloss veneer lurking in dim tunnels and serpentine catacombs
Winding beneath the twisted roots of trees away from the atomic sun
Where sometimes on the quietest of lunar lit and luminous evenings
Heard the most foul and clangorous inhuman screaming and wailing
Issuing from beneath the ground, from within the grim grottoes
Where strange and hideous undead creatures cry from their cages
Lowered into pits and vats, corpses disinterred and disappeared
From graves left uncovered, mounds of wormy soil at their sides
Casket lids left broken or smashed, opened and evacuated
Dragged below the dank and murky earth into foul boiling vats
And burned over infernal fires putrid, rank and revolting
Ashes and salts refined, collected, condensed, and preserved
Used to resurrect the mind of the deceased, to probe beyond the flesh
A knitting needle jabbed deep into the brain, it’s button hook snags
On stringy sinewy threads, pulling them through and over the eyes
To meet the dead even as they were in life, reanimated, standing
Behold there is a pythoness with a familiar spirit at En-dor
Whom given a magical amulet and an offering of incense and myrtle
Shows the upright shade of Samuel, sending Saul to fall on a sword
The professor was perfect and well mannered, fearing the grave
Not for the cold cradle of non being and inevitable death
But for he had been clasped in the clutches of quietus twice before
Having been careless with his vices, worn upon the shoulder
Where before the eager and hungry, to aver, allege and asseverate
A trance state muttering, names spoken from the murk of shadow
The steward of a ship used to conceal and mask the trafficking of slaves
A Yedoni with bones in their mouth, slobbering in secret tongues
Odes and platitudes provided to the blind second soul of Tiresias
Who remained an eyeless prophet beyond the fields of Asphodel
That the dead may rise powerless to deny their insistent insipid request
And bestow upon them the wild and wafting incorporeal wisdom
Where only the essence of the unrestrained mind may tread