Ulysses Beyond Gibraltar

Part of the poem **Ulysses Beyond Gibraltar** by Kevin D. Kinsella was included in the liner notes on *Strange Trails*. The entire poem was read in some concerts by Jesse Merlin:

"Strange Trails unwind, and the wind pushes you out of shade. Monuments free of names, red giants long dead among the frozen pines, beacons and landmarks along the borders of nothing.
You wander into something. Of the dirt, of darkness, of hemlock and the space, your path is just time and will. Strange Trails unfurl. What hinterlands we claim to not know have come home. Your stories won't manifest the edges of the world.
What parallax then, what weird choice, what frontier will you make yours? Belief is the irrational now between rising and falling, between empty and not. You see beneath the yawning graves to the deep quasars spun quick, blinking too fast to divide, but quiet holds the wind's static roar.
Is this still the deafness upon waking, the world without dreams within? And is that not the World Ender, the death when minds disprove themselves?
Hold your map upside-down; the lay is no different. As the pupil-dark night collapses, you treat with the descending abyss as singular, as though you had more to trade than schools of smoke and a fire built by the hand of a dead man, as though you could cull a reply without madness. Strange Trails unleash just so.
Will you look out at the sky or up?
The devil vanquished long ago, shattered limbs speared into the muck, remains a venom for the world. Its skull no longer gnashing at traitors, but a cistern to store the nonfictitious, the truth we ferment.
Way out where the horizon would be, languages once turned the night to flames. Now the tongues are all used up, spent on the death around you. Soft corruptions pulse from the hollows. Burning their green whispers, the faery fire lives beyond your ken. Could it be bait to hook the corner of an eye? But, what part of yourself do you truly refuse to break? You seek the dark matters, the love like ghosts.
No telling what will meet you in the woods, but bear this guilt along the fey path: The world is of the dead, and you are not.
Why should one care to come back? Why should a spirit be as water or smoke? A scar on the morning fog would fare better. O bleak phantom child of the sun’s first advances, you would linger in all parts of the journey at once. Fables and prophecy intermingled, your own eyes seered within you.
From the soft gravity of sleep, she pulls you to a circle of ruins. Cracks in the marble flash under the heralds of the storm and its juggernauts. Born from a pyre, you are the one made to ignite the winds, a signal to the universes of humanity that we are here, that we are the fools invoking the World Ender.
Do you hear the poets in their distant caves? The draugr’d apprentices scratching at the walls, eyes bared and brazen? You are the spirits quenching the world in their throats. They are the stranger in the wind, their laughter and screams muffled by space, whittled down to a bare moment of sound and another without. They are the breathing in the dark. You are the love they long to take life for.
No trees, no grasses, no more coyotes in the mist. Only the other, and she curves away. She curves without motion from the bed you’ve made. Along her spine your dark matters untangle, but lost in your own well, lost in an orbit, you are the space­-faller, stoic in your descent. She curves the illusion of dawn as though new. She curves all the oceans and sanguine trails to her, toward a solitude where our verses dine with the stone, where we feast on immortal dirges and the parallax we share”