Laughter

Have you ever been lied to?

You are Heaven’s daughter.

Some say “God is dead,”

and you say “I think not,”

and I say “That’s a free Sunday.”

What will you do?

Take offense?

It’s been thirty years since my last confession.

Here, let me tell you my sins…

I’ll start with my birth. Now you try.

For penance, let’s count the last ten years.

Tonight, I will have a dream of our childhood.

Mother will hold our hands as we wander the museum,

not so much from a fear of losing us,

but to transmit the shock of space and time and meaning.

Now that you are sure you have purpose, and I am special,

I can reflect on the fact that this meaning has no meaning;

it slaps to the ground and disintegrates

under the slightest wind.

Besides, do you know how

immense and ancient everything is?

Fine.

If you come to the museum with me,

we’ll find a drinking crowd afterward.

I’ll play guitar,

and you can dance.

Iron

They hoard their trinkets:

Children, dogs, and houses;

monuments

to the funeral of common fellowship.

And yet the wick of superstition

burns;

faith may be an island

on which one becomes shipwrecked,

and most find their loves

ashen,

carried by the wind.

But you,

I would have you stay as common,

and smoothed,

and beautiful;

filled with irregularities

like the rose quartz I hold

in my hand.

Immortalized

On the way past the park, I happen upon

Shakespeare, trapped in his personal prison garden

of perennials and succulents and iron bars.

It’s the most efficient way

of holding someone indefinitely-

they cut off his arms and legs,

stuck him on a pedestal,

and froze him like Han Solo.

He notices me,

and shouts up,

“Hey! Think you can get me out of here, man? Please?”

I stop, and think for a second.

“Sorry, Bill!

I’ll bring you a newspaper tomorrow.”

il Duomo

The vagaries of pomp,

as befitting a man…

 power corrupts him totally.

So then, prepare a table before me

in the presence of mine enemies.

But do I give myself to fortune,

which has not will

nor purpose?

My own will has been a weak support.

Are “Truth” and “the Good”, transient;

cast off?

I say now this is truth:

the unending Holy See of time and space,

the darkness dance of the heavens

whirling unchecked,

eons after man has slept.

Deny it then:

we are supplicant before the reliquary void.

Human Nativity

We are products of melting,
sloughed from the purest ore,
dismissing what insults our own souls.

Tonight, as the dark shroud of heaven covers the earth,
the mother with child will kneel, asking, Why must I be your servant?
And a sister will say, You are blessed among women.

As a light seeks to pierce the blackened reaches,
the boy rises, and asks, Why must I go?
And a father answers, No one else will.

As the lonely shadows grasp along the land,
the man asks, Why must we learn to die?
And another counters, What is God’s will?

Tomorrow, as the old man rises to greet the spilling gray dawn,
he asks, Why?
And is greeted with nothing but the rain.

We are products of melting;
if we knew, we would be God.
And as the Multiverse asks the question, it shudders under the weight.

Ground

The boy pondered the spot of ground:

low, soft, and brown.

Slightly sunken from rainwater

(what little had come that season).

The embrace of the earth

wrapped lightly around a single friend.

I’ll join you one day, if what’s said is true, he thought.

A large pine and its children

covered the softened patch of grass,

waving their arms each night in song

(he has witnessed this).

As he sought to ponder, his father walked past,

behind him,

carrying something to the truck.

“Don’t tell your mother. There were tracks;

I think coyotes got the body a couple nights ago.”

Antagony

Lord, they have killed thy prophets,

and digged down thine altars; and I am left alone, and they seek my life.

She talks to her guests of how she buys organic now.

This will help the years of beautiful chemicals

synthetic, which saturate the entire pyramid

and drip down its sides-

paint makes it look pretty.

Hear the rail of fifty thousand machinae shutting down,

clogged with impurities- please make sure nature does its job.

Fifty thousand moving from dwelling to edifice, speaking with the air;

the subway homeless content in conversation with himself.

She talks of how she fears terrorism.

Her home is made up like an old body, full of machines to filter

the air and the water and the food and the surfaces.

The machines become old and are dumped behind Golgotha.

She talks of how she loves the sun and the summertime.

He will emerge from his place in the wild,

where he eats grass from the ground as a beast

She will say, “Come inside and get some fresh air.”

He will say, “What a beautiful television.”

Soon the shroud replaces the virgin garment.

O Death, where is thy sting? When the time comes…

there will be no more summer and no more winter.

Please- legitimize, politicize, build, bandage, drug, dam, and splice;

make sure nature does its job.

According as it is written, God hath given them the spirit of slumber,

eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear; unto this day.

Bloom

Sudden stars tossed on the raiments

of a red evening,

resting in the desert air.

Woman, talk to me;

your words are thunder…

 

Cloudlings vault low

over the belly of a dreaming earth.

 

Remember this:

your hair is flowering grass

bending on a draught moon.

When you leave in the morning,

remember this:

my eyes are hewn rock

baking under streams of sunlight.

Assimilation

I get older, and if I walk after sitting for too long,

my knee sings a funeral song.

I’ve lost weight, because I eat less,

and I am more often a warrior in dreams

than a winged being.

I want to go deeper than the spot where Newton shakes his head in frustration.

I want to travel to the collapse of the wave function,

let my mind dissipate and moonwalk backwards…

I remember how it was cloudy gray yesterday.

I buy water at a gas station, and now am walking south.

The wind cries and howls over the mouth of my bottle-

it might be the echo lamentations of an old spirit who was trapped inside,

or I may have drunk him already.