ONCE, I WORE A DELICIOUS FACE
Deltas don’t forget distant headwaters.
The bare winter branch no longer flowers.
The butterflies of my youth
have matured into maggots.
That which was garden
has transformed by time’s arson;
the glowing bud, the smoldering rose
have become like pollen ash.
To harvest the remaining me
you pearlers must dive deep.
THE RIDDLED UNRIDDLING
Our togethered time was
antic —
anticipation of futured frolic is keen.
Not knowing how becoming comes,
we remained riddlesome.
What wealthy beggars we were!
As innocence succumbed to weariness,
our fountains – they limited;
our foundations – eliminated.
Your footprints faded. I no longer heard your call.
High above all heights,
tiny rags of cloud still cling to sky’s naked skin.
Afterwardness knits,
or tears,
pastward threads.
THROWN
I’m being thrown,
knocked into next Wednesday,
but all my bones
are boxed up like hens’ eggs.
In my young nest
I dreamed of being bird.
Dreams cannot last
against this cruel, hard world.
I was plucked and packaged
and sold in market aisles.
I’m a javelin
but not a boomerang,
a-hovering
in the air like a hanged
man. I’ve lost my grounding,
my home is in the sky.
I’m being thrown,
knocked into next Wednesday,
but all my bones
are boxed up like hens’ eggs.
LIBIDO THEOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENTAL STAGE THEORY
Time was still new
in the cooling cosmic stew,
and the immortal prepubescent
was still learning omniscience.
After establishing The Environments
God granted Himself a day of rest.
But, already bored with nascent existence,
He remained experimentally restless.
And so the Creator became the Render
and divided humanity into genders.
But His novel dirt-and-rib mixture
was still a static creature.
And the world still lacked tension,
drama, and dynamic evolution.
So, in order to bestir the universe,
God manifested as serpent.
The event was mankind’s catalyst
for stress, embarrassment, and sex.
And while the snake did shed and shed and shed
God, changeless, new-knowing, stayed frustrated.
Though lacking yet any human ego
God sought to assimilate libido.
The divine adolescent jonahed a whale.
But the erotic projection failed:
the prophet was one the whale couldn’t stomach.
And soon time exhausted the Tanakh.
And divine anxiety became more urgent.
How could God continue as virgin?
Then God knew Mary and begat himself as Son.
And that’s how God finally became human.
WE WITHIN HE WHEELS: DALIT
At the temple festival the tables went hummming under the cabbage, rice, and melons. The summer sun waning. The baldbearded helium balloons dancing grandly among nubile paper lanterns, buddhas bronze/rotund. Ah, the season it was of Experience Superior — the feelings of love and the perceived reciprocity of love, when, past all balance and sense and generational propriety, exuberant amidst the consuming and consumed, we two, lanternballoon-alike, food and Buddha commingled, music and the truth congealed.
That’s why your paradox didn’t register at the time.
And the Children happy as tadpoles aswim in father’s river. And the Children pampered like feathers adrift in mama’s balloon.
Now my beauty r e a c h e s o u t In search of your moist and hidden cottage. (Remember the crisp sunflowers asmoke unkempt against the steep&damp scampismelly dirt path. Recall the rose-of-sharon labyrinth oft-credited –before and since — as the soul’s taoWay, eelslick & serpent straight, into the nirvanic heart of notUnbeing.) Your thatched and pointed little house — it’s not where last I fingered its locks. The knobs now I’m told are handled some other way.
But even so, blind and blind, my beauty reaches out
reaches out
my blind beauty reaches
Out into cold and empty vacuum.
And the Children pampered like feathers adrift in mama’s balloon, and the Children dappled in shadow ajoy in haughty first light.
Your holy mantra for the season: Iloveyou can’t love you. And the rutting neophyte at your knees picked at the koan’s echoed contradictions. I angled it in the light, squinting along its crosshairs, but the scope just would not focus. Flash powder applied, I tried to freeze it in its frame. But the quiver could never quite gel. Dusted for prints, but no proper whorl ever emerged to point its finger conclusively. “I love you can’t love you.” I parsed the riddle into phonemic meaninglessness but the significance never decoded.
Affixed onto the acrylic stage for minutest examination, clarity persistently remained at yet one remove. Until Enlightenment came at last, slowly in a rush. I’d always known you’d go, of course, but not so suddenly. And not so soon. The painful puzzle pieces shuttered into place. And the Children dappled in shadow ajjoy in haughty first light, and the Children, dapper as bluejays, agreed in bawdy verdure. I love you can’t love you. Clause the first personal, in classic equipoise with clause two cultural. Subject-clause by predicate controlled, the halving twins yining and yanging about, plusandminus all at once. The treasured self, forbidden/desired, embraced/abhorred.
(My fellow amthropologists, take careful note: her heart’s harsh judgment was conditioned by decades and millennia of micromacroforming. Metaphorically speaking, as such, I am the incest taboo. In those society eyes, I’m the catamite in the homophobic gym, the nigger in the genepool, the sheep in the unbleating humanfold. In objective terms, and all in econocultural context of course, her loving me was always te equivalent of fucking the corpse.)
And the Children, dapper as bluejays agreed in bawdy verdure, and all us Children vampiric taters in God’s root cellar.
But the mantramoth, addicted, tethered herself to the tortured flame. The cycle doomed to turn and flutter, return and flutter, and flutter away. Return again, again away, covering and recovering the same old ground, rut after rut after rut again.
And koan’s mystery deepens.
But the Children happy as tadpoles.