Ashé Journal, Vol 5, Issue 2, 208-212, Summer 2006.

Pan On Terrorism

Trebor Healey

Pan has his arms crossed
And his brows knit
Appalled by the antics
Of sexless men
Feckless and fuckless

A paradise full of virgins
What crap
(As absurd as Christian monogamy)
The word is many things
And if it’s fucking you’re after
This is it, assholes

It’s spelled out in genitals everywhere you turn

There are no virgins or whores in heaven
For those who’ve fucked and good
Know that paradise is nothing
The vanishing point of sexual release
Emptiness
Oblivion
A jewel proferred by the cumming Buddha

So get a clue, angry young men
The jewel is in your boxer shorts
It grows from out of your own mud
It’s name is Prostate
And it is legion

Now put down your explosives
Drop your pants
And serve god and country

Drag Queen Dharma

Trebor Healey

A lotus flower
above the mud
her practice is her heals

Sweet Son of Pan

Sweet Son of Pan, Trebor Healey
(Suspect Thoughts, 2006, 135pp, $12.95)

As Gavin Geoffrey Dillard observes in his introduction, some of the most powerful spiritual poetry has its roots in the erotic—Whitman, Blake, Rumi, Mirabai.  Like his forebears, Healey is a shaman of the word. This collection is a fitting homage to the randy cloven-hooved demigod.  The poetry invokes the god into the reader (the shaman’s unwitting co-conspirator).  The god then reaches down, drawing forth the most carnal, and coaxes it, like a serpent, to the crown.  Quickly one realizes that spirit is spirit—a continuity of being from the chthonic to the divine. 

Healey brings Aleister Crowley’s ressurected Pan of a 100 years previous into the twenty-first century.  His “Pan” is a direct successor to Crowley’s “Hymn to Pan.”  Crowley wrote, “(Io Pan! Io Pan!) / Devil or god, to me, to me, / My man! my man! / Come with trumpets sounding shrill / Over the hill! / Come with drums, low muttering / From the spring! / Come with flute and come with pipe! / Am I not ripe? / I, who wait and writhe and wrestle / With hair that hast no boughs to nestle / My body weary of empty clasp, / Strong as a lion and sharp as an asp— / Come, O Come!”  Healey, for his part, raises the call anew: “Oh Pan, o-pen / me! / Coax my kindness out of the highrised city / of competing cocks at sunrise of greed / skyscraping city   cumming rules and regulations / Coax me buttsex beautiful and bodacious out of the beehive of behavioral boroughs…”

William Burroughs wrote, in his Apolcalypse, of a cry heard by mariners off the coast of Tuskini: “The great god pan is dead.”  Now that Trebor Healey has proven himself to be the god's sweet son, I have every suspicion that news of Pan’s death has been greatly exaggerated.

Trebor Healey is the author of the 2004 Ferro-Grumley and Violet Quill award-winning novel, Through It Came Bright Colors.  He has published poetry in more than 50 books, reviews, journals and zines.  Trebor lives in Los Angeles, where he is working on his second novel, A Horse Named Sorrow.

Author website: www.treborhealey.com

Photo: Taro Akita

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