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.
BETWEEN TWO SUNS
One more melanoma day
ends itself in ash and cinder.
Our crisp souls, cliched
to yet another auto-da-fe
to competitive conformity.
But (just now starting(
we mount our nocturnal bucket brigade,
begin passing forth and back
these cool liquids of our life
from one to the other,
refill and back again,
refill and back again
between two suns.
DOUBT AND REASSURANCE
“With all the wonder you have won
–O you, who took my summers’ sun–
will now you win my winters too
or spend my age on agile youth?”
“The seas flow. Seasons flower.
but I delight in my idol.”