"OBSERVANCE OF A KHLYST RITUAL"

     "God may only fill a heart
      already full to the brim –
     and the soul's corruption is a devilest art
     most heinous, dark and dim..."

white flaxen shirts, airy like the habits of nuns,
hang loose on their naked bodies,
and are stained with menarche – the crusty textile flow
in autumnal breezes of a Muscovian hinterland

spirited sermons of a dimlit cellar !
Khlyst prayers echo in the flickering candlelight :
from the basement of a peasant lodge
explodes the ritual energy…

   sacred chanting erupts in the half-light –
   corrupted verses of the Easter canon :

   "seeing, we are gladdened, for Christ has risen !"

an egregious laughter and a magical circle
levitates them into fixation, suspended within
the polygonal force-fields of the liminal  

an old man of the slimmest stature, with joyful eyes light-colored –
we call him the local Christ – burp and eruct his carols to a bevy
fear-stricken below the pulpit : he whips himself with birch and cane
until the blood appears and runs from the wounds of flagellation
and from his home-made cilices of penance

the choir chants their prayers : their voices rise ever more savagely,
ever more fervently, ever more fiercely with every breath and moment !

some of them are already screaming and sobbing in their Passion !

   the old man stops in his whirling and cries out wildly :

   “brothers! brothers! I feel it, the Holy Spirit!”

   “God is within me!”

and he begins to croak the wildest auspices,
belching incoherent tapestries of sounds,
mixed into which were the human words :  

     "Oh, Spirit !"
     "Oh, God !"
     "Oh, Spirit, Oh, Lord !"

extremist glossolalia in the Kostroma underground
spreads like a sickness or wildfire amongst
those whom the spiritual psychosis possessed, our Holy Flock !

   a thousand psalter pages turned
   within the confines of another existence

this total disruption of mundane circuitry
collapses the "local Christ" into mad dances of abandon
whirling and frolicking as if possessed
by some great power beyond us all

the masses tumble in disorganized dances
as the voices tremble across hysterical pirouettes
and the twirling of terrored congregants   
clawing, reaching in a kind of shameless desperation
for some iteration of a kind of Swedenborgian New Jerusalem !

“escapees from the world and its dull spiritual languor :
the nadir of human experience is to be found
amongst those who deal only in the mundane… “

    the vicious and spiteful attacks on Tsarist power and nobility
    and heretical blasphemies on the priesthood of orthodoxy
    are hurled without temperance through an air impenetrable,
    filled to the brim with unnatural energy

the worldly structures of a prosaic and temporal elite,
this illicit Tsardom of a false imperial idol :

   their values, their hierarchy
   and their doctrines of supremacy and conquest
   reek of the Devil’s piss !

their palaces and riches in amber and gold,
their systems of worldly power and control;
they all fail in this dimlit cellar tonight –
in the observance of a Khlyst ritual !

all the gold and glitter of Gehinnom,
all of its Mammon-fires, false lights, shines  
and shallow gleams and glimmers mean nothing
in the pitch-black tunnels of theology,
where broken men and women chase
the ultimate vacuity of Revelation,
the ultimate surrender to the inane and the insane
as methods of personal denouement and reckoning :

    depression, inwardness, rumination –
    solitude, asceticism and reclusion –
    plight and mental illness !
    psychosis – neurosis  – hysteria –
    reverence – ardor – duty – piety – faith !

faith is the highest passion bar none
in these wooden huts and dank cellars –
here is the conclusion of our sanctitude !

here is only the fanaticism of the true faith :
most won't travel this far – and none will travel farther !  

  faith is the only bridge
  between man and mystery –
  and the Khlystic ritual
  is the only bridge to connect
  man to his faith

     such was the devotion
     of the Khristovovery of Imperial Russia

     such were the means and reaches
     of their fanatic pietism