The Blue Pomegranate

The blue pomegranate hangs
ripe for the picking
on a nearly barren tree
at the desolate borders of awareness
in a shattered wastelandscape
you can only reach by riding
a tired horse for three days
and nights through the rain.

Do not eat the blue pomegranate.
If you must ingest this fruit,
cut it cleanly from the tree
with a single stroke of your blade,
trap its roll upon the ground,
sever its leathery hide and consume
its sticky seeds in a single sitting.

For those who linger over
this rare and insidious fruit
and dwell upon the fibrous
intricacies of its integument,
the consequent derangement
of the mind and the senses
can prove even more profound.

Do not feed the blue pomegranate
to your mount if you have any hope
of returning from where you came.
Those who worship the blue fruit,
inveterate pomegranate-eaters,
gourmet cultists of the bizarre,
credit it with the most heavenly
of all flavors known to Earth.
In truth it has little flavor at all
except for a slight aftertaste of lime.

It is, of course, highly hallucinogenic.
The results vary dramatically
according to the individual fruit
and the individual consuming it.
Generally the bluer and less mottled
the rind, the more potent its seeds.
Generally the more rigidly defined
the personality of the individual,
the more devastating the experience.

Some eaters undergo a return
to an Eden-like state of grace,
a paradise where ordinary objects
seem to shine with luminous intensity,
where even the venations of a leaf
or the variegated plane of a rock
can render worlds of numinous being.

For others, the extended intoxication
proves to be a nightmarish travail,
brimful of monsters and paranoia.
An experience that jumps and kicks
from one bald terror to the next
without respite for hours unending.

There are certain scholars who
contend that the blue pomegranate
is not really a pomegranate at all,
not even a genuine fruit in the
sense that we normally mean it.

Rather it is their firm belief
argued in windy weighty tomes,
that some kind of djinni-spirit
has incorporated its devilish being
into this inert gourd-like form.

Others propose that the blue
has no actual spirit of its own
but merely acts as a catalyst
that serves to liberate the true
spirits of those who consume it,
natures often imprisoned since
the early days of childhood.

Prolonged effects can vary
widely in quantity and quality
as the lurid experience itself.

Returning to the everyday world
you may discover that all of
your senses have been altered
to such an irrevocable degree
that your immediate perceptions
of the ground beneath your feet
and the sky that caps your head
have changed in ways that you
could never once have envisioned.

You may have unnerving insights
regarding the nature of your life
and the ones you share it with.
Your work may seem meaningless
You may spend entire evenings
trying to decipher the ancient
hieroglyphs that you have only
recently discovered are inscribed
in the complex lacings of your palms.

The parameters of your existence
may telescope outward into a realm
of infinite choice and possibility.
Or collapse and tunnel downward
into the darkest regions of madness
and stray terror and incarceration.

So stay away from that horse.
Do not go searching for that tree.
Come and sit here by the hearth
while the burning logs crackle.

The night is mean and blustery
and a chill rain threatens to fall,
cold as a brand of death we can
never quite put our fingers on.

Forget the blue pomegranate.
Remember the blue pomegranate.

Never forget what I have told you.

--

Appeared in Masque of Dreams