INHERITANTS
It was Adam’s first sunset.
Clothed fully in nakedness
he watched blush balance blackness
and studied how the ruby
became coal-dull and sooty.
He was the man of duty;
thus Moses would brand Adam;
Paul would call him the pattern.
We are cuttings from his garden.
Eve’s limbs sprawled cloudward. She lay
there like an uprooted tree.
“Bury us, we are the seeds.”
We still pray for redemption,
never for reconstruction.
So, when all is said and done,
immortal Adam and Eve,
our pools carry your dead leaves
and we echo you always.
IN YOUR WAY
We’re all an archeologist digging through our holy waste.
We’re all an archeologist in urgent search of one high missing piece.
Now you’re uncovered under my spotlight;
I maneuver each little potsherd, trying to put your life complete.
So why do you still resist?
Bring me into your days,
oh bring me into your ways,
your arms, your dreams, your thoughts, your schemes.
Bring me, oh bring me deep into your crotch.
After such tender words as these, how can you still resist?
Any poet’s a privileged beast, main course at the culture feast.
Every poet’s a privileged beast, society’s sacrificial priest.
And I’m your private cosmic messenger, and — every word like legal tender –
I’m poetry’s last big spender!
You cease, but yet I persist.
Bring me into your days, oh bring me into your ways, your arms,
your dreams, your thoughts, your schemes.
Bring me, oh bring me deep into your crotch.
And oh, such tender words as these! How oh how you do resist.
UNKNOTTED
Far off we see those bright quasars
captured by their own black holes,
their old buds dying inside,
hopes fettered to fears,
guards shackled to their convicts.
We’re soft diamonds under iron skies.
Lovers of the youth earth’s noises,
but raised in cold and shady nations
where light is unknotted from the sun,
we end here in ancient silence.
AND, DO YOU STILL GO BY BEATICE?
So, you want to be immortal, is that what you say?
You’ve searched and you’ve lurched down that old Tao way?
But you won’t need that potion, and you don’t need to pray:
Just sublimate some poet to put you in his lay.
He’ll sonnet/sanit/ize you, fix you in his line to stay.
Your locks of jet: they’ll turn to gray,
your bones metastasize into clay–
but you’ll still be fresh and vital a million years away.
Just convince a versifier your name’s good for a lay.
NEO-GNOSTICS
The Church of Christ Geographer
fixes its axes
between Bethlehem and Gethsemane,
charts its coordinates at Patmos and at Tarsus.
Heretics infidels schismatics iconoclasts
occupy our incredulous post-pagan planet.
There are those who claim
the universe is actually a Freemasons conspiracy,
and those who maintain
that’s absurd – obviously, it’s the Rosicrucians.
No, no, some insist
the Universe Machine does exist
but it’s a self-construct.
This is in contrast
to those who preach
the universe as a divine wet dream
or, more likely, a component
of a cosmic plan to accomplish
an unfathomable end.
“It’s inscrutable!” “It’s immutable!” “Oh, it’s beautiful!”
(and don’t we all admit
the future is finite,
while dreams and gods
are limitless?)
Cosmologists define chaos
as order not yet perceived.
An artist believes
in the mathematical function of the mind:
A poem is a formula.
And every past
is an artifact of imagination;
art, and not religion,
is our only interface
with eternity, with reality.
To those who posit the passing
phenomenologically,
as the present swallowing
some possible tomorrows
to appease the past,
and to those who
pile past upon past
with no diminishment of futures
(though I myself feel yesterdays
lengthen and futures growing short),
the upholders of omnipresence
counter that God is timeless —
God does not believe in Wednesdays —
and the demarcated God
does not admit of territory.
The Church of Christ Geographer
proselytizes its atlas
among us mapless navigators
lacking compass and astrolabe.
