‘Tis the Season

You have not been raped,
Or beaten, or maimed,
Or treated like an animal
With no right to think.

Blink. And you’ll see.
You have jewels, and cash,
Food to toss like trash,
And someone in the world
Who remembers your name.

Shame! That joy comes round
Once a year
To the injured faceless loathe to hear,
“We give; we give, in Jesus’
Name.”

Still, the faceless have no name
That you will remember,
Save, perhaps, in December,
That season of the year
When the poor do hope
Their name to hear.

Mourning in America

Legal rights
Are easily won
At the point of a gun.

But it takes patience
And determination
To win rights
Through agitation.

In some tenuous space
In the public square,
Face to face,
The human in you
Meets the human in me.

When faced with the thugs,
Atlas shrugged
And ran.
So here we stand:
The human in you and the human in me,
Holding up the world for all to see –
We can talk through, not around,
Our existence, with persistence.

Like roses, rights abound.
Pick them, share them.
Listen to the sound
Of the discourse in the public square.

But, oh, how you stare!
No, indeed, that is not our public square,
Where words like bullets wound all who care
To share the shoulder burden of citizenship,

Of the human in you
And the human in me.

Thanksgiving 1994

Clattering of spoons,
While silver children’s voices
Round the table run.

Discorporation

There are times
I want to discorporate
Into my component parts –
Not lungs, kidneys, and heart,
But atoms, neutrons, and quarks.

The squawks of people passing
Beneath my window, well dressed,
Laughing stupid, yelling mad,
Melodramatically sad –

That young mother, distressed,
Blowing chewing gum bubbles,
Steps into the public bus whirlwind,
Dragging her little lad – where is his dad?

Televisions and billboards squawk around the world –
The sound and fury of the whirlwind – and all the girls
And boys on the bus plugged into their little sound systems:
Little bubbles of sound destroying ear drums.

If a society presses its fingers into its human bubbles
They pop, one after the other.

Many years ago I walked on the beach,
And I watched the seagulls, squawking;
Fighting, stupid and mad, over scraps of food.
Across the ocean beat the drums of war;
Their import I understood.

To fly like a seagull, soar like the whirlwind,
Burst like a bubble –
We cannot stop the hope that in the morning
Binds everything together,
Nor the despair that in the night
Tears everything apart.

Veterans Day

I. Our Brother Orwell

Defenceless villages
Are bombed from the air,
Inhabitants driven
To the countryside;
Cattle machine-gunned,
Huts set on fire:
This is called pacification.

For freedom, for justice,
For the American Way.

II. On Sale

Somewhere in the Homeland,
At the Wal-Mart café,
She chews on a hamburger
That drips mayonnaise.
Her jeans are too tight;
Her diabetes not slight.
Her children have run out of sight.

We have all come from far away
To catch the sale on Veterans Day.

III. Until Tomorrow

He stands, listing, in the doorway,
Knowing nothing of Orwell.
He had enlisted, recalling the day,
The travel had been a good sell.
Though the journey ended in hell,
He was told that he fought very well.
Now he makes peace with his sorrow
Because, he’s been told, that
His check will come in tomorrow.

Long live our soldiers, who, every day,
Fight to maintain the American Way.

Dawn

In the pre-dawn light
I approach the window
And behold the sight
Of the empty sidewalks.

In that quiet hour
I imagine your returning,
Filled with a silent power,
Up the sidewalks.

You are always returning,
When the world is asleep –
Cracked, worn, and persevering,
Like the sidewalks.

But dead men don’t walk
Except in dreams.
And still it seems
The sidewalks expect you,
Cracked, worn, and persevering –
Returning from the long journey
With stories, strength, and learning.

The sidewalks do not reach you.
The dawn deceives.
For a while yet I shall expect you
Before your memory leaves.

Halloween

When I got the call
That grandfather died,
I wore a clown suit,
Big and white with
Blue and red dots,
And a tall clown hat.

Rat-tat-tat-tat.
Tat-tat-tat.

My face was plastered,
Clown enamel white,
Painted red lips,
And a red round nose,
Staring at the mirrors
In the back of the store.

Rip and tore, war and gore.

My boss had told me,
Go and get some rest.
So there I sat,
A thousand clowns
Staring from the mirrors;
Faces laughing, faces crying.

Sighing and crying
And lying and dying.

That night on the news
People were dying.
Machine guns fired,
Rat-tat-tat-tat.
Bullets tore, spreading gore.
Victims lying, sighing, crying.

My grandfather died
On Halloween.
Sadder news we all have seen.
That night, at the party,
Nadia laughed. She said,
Clowns don't go to parties
When their grandfathers pass.

October Morning

Today -
The first cold day;
In the pale light,
The mixed sensation:
Gray sky, cold air,
And resignation.

Yet the leaves cling
Still to the trees;
Just a few turned brown,
Blown down.

Outside -
Breezes sting;
Newspaper kiosks
Through headlines
Speak to the sunrise
While a bird sings:

This week the President,
While waging war,
Won the Peace Prize.

The time is out of joint.
O cursed spite
That ever I was born
To set it right!

Music

The blending
Of the body
And sound
And thought
And feeling
And memory

That took place
Before
Either of us knew
That we would not hear each other,
That we would not see each other,
Again.

Postmodern Mood

The Modern derides
The Enlightment,
Which, in turn,
Derides the Medieval.

I'd rather affect
The Postmodern:
It thinks the derision
The evil.

Haiti

Haiti is an accident;
I prefer not to look at it.
Mangled parts abound;
Nothing astounds.

You see, the sun is too bright;
The skin and bones too tight.

Though Wilson sent Marines
To instill a sense of order –
The milat, moun andeyo,
And all that negritude –
Too much, too much,
They bust the motor.

And all through the years
The parts have tumbled
Down deforested hills:
Estime, Vincent, Magloire,
Lescot, and Duvalier.

And who will care?

Where have you gone, Daniel Fignole?
The nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

Mesdames et messieurs,
Gens de couleur:
Start your engines.

But they have nowhere to go,
Surrounded by the wide, wide sea,
Where the sun sets too bright
And the skin, bones, too tight.

Around the Block

When I was a boy
I used to walk around the block
So many times far
From the ticking clock.

Around the bend there was the house
Of our neighbors; the two older boys
Who washed their cars, and when wet
Their sex showed, hanging, as they’d bend
Those tall spindly legs moving awkward, and alien,
Like the Martian invaders in War of the Worlds.

Around the bend again, there was the house
Across the street, across the border,
Where lived the brown boy, that other.
He was not like us kids, white brown,
But from South America, brown brown.
And so we launched stones and taunts
Like missiles launched from our starship
That launched from the tree in our yard
Lurching at light speed to escape the dark
And the calls for dinner.

Around the bend again there was the house
Of all those children but we never saw the father
Except in stories of drinking and sleeping and jail.
But we let one of them play with us;
Not the others, though, they were babies, and a girl.

Around the bend again there was the house
Across the street, an ocean away,
Where the woman sat on her porch quiet.
They said she was an old Russian lady,
A little girl in the Russian Revolution,
Though none of us knew where that was.
So she was the silent witch from Oz.

When the radio played static,
When my mother’s shoe caught my brother’s head,
When my father bellowed in the living room
And my sister cried in her bed,
I walked around the block
To escape the ticking clock.

Marketing Call

The person you seek is not here.
He was deployed
To Afghanistan
Last year.

So please don’t call me.
He is beyond telephones
And the twenty-first century.

Beyond computers, too,
He might be
If his body lies
In a field of poppies.

Afghan shepherds standing
By a dusty roadside wait
For our troops to come calling
With bread for their plates.

Then to your customer
The shepherds lead our troops.
They cannot describe his death,
Only saying it was youths, a group.

So, before I hang up, I ask
How does it feel to peddle
Trinkets and frauds to others
Who could not prove their mettle
By attempting to settle
The quarrels of savages
Who could scarcely buy bread?

You smile, I hear it, you say:
Gladly I’ll sell vacations to you instead.

Locked in Time

To say I will not likely find
In the years ahead a being
That will appreciate my mind
Is to apply the prejudice of time.

In the present dwells a certain sadness,
The sense that joy will die in future darkness.

But if, from the far side of the earth,
Your life I fail to note,
Then, from a hundred years hence,
You remain just as remote.

Therein lies the trap of time,
Our minds prisoners of the present.
From day to day though I may fly,
Our meeting – miles, years away –
Stays locked beyond this moment.

Castle

Impregnable
Wall of rock
Sheer and steep
Above a moat
Of waters still and deep;

Imposing,
The yawning keep,
That beckons from
The drawbridge
At my feet.

Narrow the way
Through the iron gate:
Beyond those walls
Their world awaits.

Nobles, ladies,
In finery played
Their flutes and dulcimers
Round the table well laid:

Goblets of wine
And meats with cheeses,
Candles that swayed
In the evening breezes.

Blown has the wind of centuries,
Gone now the tapestries, luxuries,
Silent the courtyards and hallways,
Where troubadours once sang their lays.

Dance a while yet, I say.
Safe within the mind’s walls,
Lords, ladies and thralls,
As phantoms you may stay.

To Adversity

In the face of outrage,
Facing the brink,
It takes great courage
Not to drink.

Knock

I don’t sleep well, torments at night –
The soft kind.

(small noises, moving, rustling)

What can might,
What could should.

Without sight,
grasping, touching in the dream closet:
dream silent children playing in dream coats –
or smothering?

(small noises, scratching, muffling)

In sleepdark,
always misplaced, the keys I cannot find.
The hooded man ate all the light switches,
electric smiling, switching back and forth:
now lamplight through my window pane,
now sleepdark.

(small noises, tapping, tapping)

In the hallway stands the hooded man
waiting for the knock on the door.
Am I coming home?

Sadness

Sadness: it is
the force that
spurs learning;

The shadow of the moon;
yearning
for relief from light;

Nourishing vision and sight
with a tear or two.

Delirium

Never waste a good delirium,
A time when Up is Down.

You
Move your
Mouth all Around
Open shut –
To say nothing;
A delirium nothing,
Surpassing sweet – unlike
The plodding words –

The stumbling weight of all those years . . .

There was a farmer had a dog,
And Bingo was his name-o.
I pledge allegiance to the flag.
The square root of sixteen is four.
Our Father who art in Heaven,
Hallowed be Thy Name.
Dad, I won the game!
Paris is the capital of France.
Can I have this dance?
Buy now: Operators are standing by!
That sissy boy; he couldn’t hurt a fly.
The square root of four is two.
Mark my words:
One day you’ll see. They’ll all see.
Darling, it’s so good to see you.
What is the square root of two?
I’m sorry, Ma’am,
There was nothing we could do.

And when the fever cools, as it will do,
And up is up and down is down again,
You see the chance is gone to start anew –
As reason, restored, confounds the brain.

Suicide

Of all life on this planet,
Only Man
Can see his death –
And plan it . . .

Socially unacceptable,
Financially impossible –
Yet morally defensible.

Mother was saying on the phone
One Saturday afternoon –
“I’ve fixed your room.
We can have your favorite beans and rice.
Just wait until you see the garden;
The new plantings are so nice.”

All those years spent howling
In the black box, in the office.
But no one ever hears:
Just sign here, and here, and here.
And we need that revised report
To include the budget cuts next year.

The books show me all the things
I will never live to see:
The heroes yet to greet,
That princess kiss, so sweet,
The castles left to climb.

Silent the symphonies of the mind,
My days laid out to mine
A life for deeper meaning.
But the truth bubbles up, streaming:
I was really mostly dreaming.

Never played the piano,
Never sang in choir,
Always saying I was This or That;
Drawing breath like any liar.

Never married,
Hardly tarried
Over sunsets past a certain age –

Now I know that all the rage
Is to die screeching, laughing.
But pardon me, if in my passing,
I sit and tell the truth – for
I did so love the dancing.
I did so love your silly looks
And the passages from certain books
That we read, as if romancing.

Faucet

Water dripping,
Drops plop, plop
Into that pot
In the kitchen sink.

And I can hear me think.
I want to sink
Into the couch.
He sits there, slouched.

This silence forlorn,
Stretches the length of the room,
Like a railroad platform.
We have arrived at the end of words.

Drip, plop,
Drip, plop.

I smile.
The tea is drained.
Our minds and our teeth
Are stained
With the knowledge
That, at least, we two strangers
Failed to cross the breach.

Palestinian Boy

Today
yesterday
Lama was not in class
Because her house fell down on her.
That is what Reda said
Last week
yesterday before yesterday.
But Mother says
Tonight
now
That Lama moved far away,
Maybe to Bethlehem.
I don’t know,
Maybe to Israel.
That is where the Devil lives.
So says Reda
Sometimes.

Rainbows

Don’t go chasing rainbows
In the middle of the night
Because you’ll not find them.
The rainbows were last seen
Flying over Belgium in 1917.

But other townsfolk say it was
An American jet patrol
Shot down a rainbow over the desert
Near Alamogordo.
Only they didn’t shoot; there was no fire,
And it wasn’t the desert.

Still others say the rainbows
Have little to eat and less to see,
Kept in a camp with barbed wire
Down the road a few miles out.
These reports you just can’t doubt.

As for our town these days,
We light the sky at night
With giant lightpoles far too bright:
The mutant children of gas lamps
Whose contribution to pollution
Blinds the turtles, the birds,
The bleary-eyed office worker
In his tower of glass.

Upward, higher, flies the light until
From their space orbit the rainbows see:
The signals, flares, fires, and flashes –
The searing heat that turns glass to ashes.

Silently the rainbows turn
And return to their home planet,
Flying through the dark of night,
Guided by the light of the stars.

Birthday

Happy Birthday
To me,
Happy Birthday
To me,
Happy Birthday –
I’m one year closer to death
so I’d best turn from the wayward
path leading me through the wasteland
of entangling briars, so base my desires,
and find my way to the one true path
that ends in authenticity, my own felicity,
only I can’t because I’m lost, no map,
and my compass fell into the bay
where my future stretches away,
tossing among the waves, though
perhaps my ship will come –
To me!

Hemingway

Today is
Hemingway’s birthday;
He would have been
110 years old.

Rain today, we are told.
Out the window,
The dry grass is gold
In the noontime heat.
Across the street,
A black man in shirt sleeves
Beneath a tree, standing,
Waiting.

A stray dog lopes along,
Sniffs, and moves along.
His coat is bright in the
Dappling light.

Out of sight, a cicada
Screeches and is silent.
Then another screech, slight.
Then the air is quiet.
It is hot and dry and
Waiting.
Everything waits.
But nothing comes.
No rain.

Sight and Sound

How can I make you see me,
Not you, but me?
You have fixed me with your stare –
My words in mid air –
And have trapped me in amber.

A practical paperweight, amber,
It can be hurled against windows,
And, finally, the cries of anguish
Can escape into air
With the pleas to reason;
Perhaps – to you – all rubbish.

And though the caged bird sings,
Still its song is not heard elsewhere.
Silent is the vast landscape
Where a new soul grows in the wooded grove
And the words fly to the trees, feeding, at night.

Oh, what a sight! The multitude that is me,
Cresting that moonlit hill,
Without a sound, they cannot fight.
They stand, waiting,
For your surrender of me.

Passenger

When I was a young man,
I was an old man,
Watching the world with wary eyes,
Though not yet capable of sighs.

Backstage I curled up in solace
With ancient tales of a golden chalice,
While the other dancers with silly stares
In laughing poses brandished their hair.

In summer sitting beneath a tree
My father explained divorce,
Returning home to my room to flee
Where I found my childhood corpse.

Years of tragedy sundering
Family, friends, like lightning a tree,
Over a cup of tea last week wondering:
What became of you? What became of me?

A ship on the horizon dwindling,
Headed God knows but I know not –
While I on the sand sit mingling
What I could have done with what I did not.

Wretched Summer

Any moment
Could, perhaps,
Be a wretched moment,
Like walking home alone
In sultry heat,
The moonlight on the street -
Indifferent the cobblestone -
The same moon shines on you
Wherever you are.

Martin and Hope

“Everything that is done in the world
is done by hope,” said Martin Luther
King, Jr.

Boy, I tell you,
This girl Hope, she is one busy gal.

Matter of fact,
Just the other day,
A fine morning,
I was walking to work.

And there was Hope!
All passed out, poor thing,
On that bench,
In a state of exquisite,
Senses-shattering,
World-saving,
Stinky exhaustion.

Come to find out,
That very night,
Sure as I breathed,
I was walking home.

And Hope was gone!
Sure enough moved on,
Her work is never done.
Poor thing, still pushing
That cart with everything,
And no time to settle down.

I wish she’d
Just one time slow down
To tell her about her friend Martin –
How he praised all around
Before he got shot.

Lincoln

Now here was a guy
Who was all things to all people:
Cruel and merciful;
Peace-lover yet fighter;
Protecting slavery and freeing slaves.

I, too, wish to be
All things to all people:
Alive yet dead;
Scoundrel and well-bred;
Kind of heart yet stubborn of head.

I wish to bring you close to me,
So close I taste your thoughts;
And I wish to flee so far from you,
Go somewhere among stars –
That little planet Pluto.

But Pluto is now a rock:
A planet no more – a victim for sure
Of the cruel narratives of history,
Of all things and all people . . .
Like Lincoln,
Like you,
Like me.

Living Alone

Alone in my home –
Stirring the soup and farting;
No need to chuckle.

(after an original Japanese senryu)

In Your Memory

Who are you
To believe
That I will go on forever?

You make me
Into God
When you leave me in the ether.

Suspending my existence
You forget me –
A quantum space that no one watches.

There I reside,
Gods and demons alongside
The stillborn visions of our future.

And so I - nonexistent - wait
For that day when
You escape your selfabsorbing kingdom.

You will think of me and
From the Timeless I will spring,
The angels flying to their frescoes.

Briefly while I live,
Narrow the window of Time,
Yet will I live and die
Before you again forget me.

Internet Love Signal

SGWM
ISO
SOS

hi AM looking
4 someone whose
NOT too serious about life
[Like a stone.]

Someone to spend time with
Home alone.
And chill
[Like a corpse on ice.]

My friends tell me
Im nice.
And fun
[Like Disney World.]

Please no guys who act
Like girls.
I wanna man whose
Prfect for me
[Like Jesus.]

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are the meek,
For they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are you when they persecute you,
So I say to you, love your enemies,
For God makes His sun rise on the evil and good.
If you love those who love you, what reward have you?

For no one can serve two masters;
Either he will hate one and love the other.

As the lamp of the body is the eye,
Then if your eye is bad,
Your whole body will be full of darkness.
And if your right hand causes you to sin,
Cut it off and cast it from you.

So Judge not, that you be not judged.
Cast not your pearls before swine,
Lest they trample them,
And turn and tear you in pieces.

Therefore do not worry, saying,
“What shall we wear?”

Hypocrite! Remove the log from your own eye,
But seek first the kingdom of God,
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from Evil.

For where your treasure is,
There your heart will be also.

Valentine's Day

I think of that time
You took me out to dinner.
But tonight,
The pavement, slick with rain,
Shines brighter than my shoes.

I don’t remember
How bright that night was.
But tonight,
The moon behind a cloud,
Just streetlights at my door.

I don’t hear you
Discuss your workday anymore.
But tonight,
Noises by my window,
Formless faces passing by:
Talking, laughing.

Faceless and numberless:
In all those years since dinner time –
The millions who have died of famine,
And war,
And earthquakes,
And too much rain . . .

Yes, there is pain, still,
A hunger streetlights cannot see.
But that matters less
With each war, with each monsoon.

With no moon at my window
You cannot see while I prepare
This microwave meal.

Indifference

One time
Words, sincere and naked,
Reflecting life
Like a beautiful, painful mirror
Brought us together.
Tonight
Something,
An indifferent force,
Pulled us apart.

Amid the music and the lights
You glanced
At me through me
Like a half-empty glass;
The indifference of nightlife
Glinting in your once-thoughtful eyes.

On the walk home
In the cool air
Wrapped in myself I note
The moon’s stare;
Its light shining
On all stumbling souls alike:
The vomiting man,
The giggling woman,
The sleeping bum,
And me -
A light that you shall never see.

Wretched

Every moment
Has the potential
To be a wretched moment
Like walking home
In bitter cold
And the moon shining, quiet -
Still
It shines on you tonight
Wherever you are.

Reading One Night

I read an article,
astounding it was.
It had been a long day;
I was tired.
But the ideas propped
my eyes open –
Wide.
I turned
to tell someone.
But no mind was at my side.
Everyone had gone

shopping

driving, laughing, drinking,
pushing, shoving, stinking,
lusting, eyeing, praying,
fussing, flapping, slaying.

So the article said,
“Hush. You can keep our secret.
We will wait
for next year’s children.”

He Said

I was never Fated
For the quiet, unexamined life.

God said to me
In my sleep before birth,
You will suffer - profoundly.
He said,
Though the trees shall be green each summer
And bare each winter,
Yet the birds shall sit always
Upon the branches and sing to you
The Beauty of the World.

Therefore find the branches
In your Heart
Where the birds sit
And feed them -
Or they shall die.
And you will suffer without song.

The Sad Little Love Affair

When you say
“I love you,”
Like that,
Did you practice
By a mirror?

And in all the furor
Over authenticity,
Was that you
Or mere duplicity?

Endless reflections
Of I-love-yous,
All backwards-right-to-left,
And I feel bereft
Of direction
When I stare up to see
Endless Funhouse Clowns,
Their eyes crinkle with glee -
Because when I shout:
I love you,
They know - I know . . .
That can’t be me.

Endless

You and I will both be dead
Before Endless;
The color on your lips
Both drained of red
Before Endless.

This American Empire
Will crumble to dust
Before Endless;
Like Ozymandias’ works
By winds into the sands thrust.

The worm on the pavement -
How many forms will it take
Before Endless?
From worm to earth to rain
To the firmament,
This cycle, too, will end pain
Before Endless.

The Moon

The moon
Behind bare branches
Is a delight on any night.

And yet it bares my plight
When the light in the sky
Glints off your eyes,

Eyes that too soon,
Like the moon,
Will set upon another.

Memorial Day

Our children were forced to go to war
So they could pay for college,
With bombs to kill hundreds or more,
But they only found a village.

Hapless villagers prayed to their gods
As they were run off a high ledge;
Our children, chasing, barking like dogs,
“See? This will pay for college!”

And so they marched on Graduation Day,
Their hapless parents cheering;
And village ghosts, like out of Judgment Day,
Around the bleachers peering.

“We’ve come to see the children grown,”
The godless ghosts cried clearly,
To snatch from them the fruit they’d sown,
Tuition in lives paid dearly.

Numb and dumb the graduates were struck in their places,
Wings covered their bodies, crows’ beaks on their faces.
Cawing, hawing, into the sky flapped the murder of crows,
Unmentioned, save in prayers – a silence no memory knows.

Faggot

Your crackling energy
Brightened the room
And our faces – the first
Bottles flowing soon.

Boundless and lively,
So merry and gay,
You pranced about the room,
Lighting our faces –
A welcome boon.

Corks popped as we talked;
Great Days returning and their haunts.

Did you not like our conversation?
You seemed to demand always the attention.
Hissing like a cat and grasping at the air,
We could only laugh at your sullen stare.

Corks popped as we talked;
Great Days returning and their haunts.

But the party could not last forever.
Heads nodded; hours wore on.
And the shadows of your brilliance
Flitted from glass to glass,
Over our faces – through the plate glass
Window into the long night.

Oh, how you despised us then.
For you knew that, in our lazy silence,
You were smothered, spent.

And, oh, the contempt you felt then.
For your fiery beauty, sweet and youthful,
Had by night’s end fallen,
A face ashen mournful.

Yet, in your glowing embers of resentment,
Lies the memory of our Great Days.
We – without you – the silent faraway stars;
You – without us – the dark spaces of the night.

Snow

The snow faded, lingering
Only
In the cracks on this sidewalk . . .
And on either bank
Of the snow white lines meandering –
Stains: the ghosts of ancient
Leaves and chewing gum.

The snow faded,
Swept away
By sharp, polished shoes
Of serpentine leather;
Swept by shoes that have weathered
A life, cracked with toil,
Stained with soil.

Walking along the white lines,
Wondering, I think
That your shoes walk in warmer climes.

Old Friend

Morning,
The air through my
Kitchen window fresh:
No sign of ice.
Winter-fattened birds,
A handful, warbling,
Twittering, lilting,
All sitting, fussing,
On the rose bush -
Bare branches pointing up.
Vigorous the conference,
Salient the message,
I lean into the window,
And ask,
“Is that you, Spring?”

Daylight Savings Time

But what could I have said to you
in the extra hour?
With you staring
at the café door,
at customers entering, leaving;
and me glancing
out the window, planning
reports, phone calls, meetings.

For the week is just as long
in your life as in mine;
the hours come and go the same.
And still we do not say
what we mean.

An extra hour will not
resolve the scene.

The Temple

The Body is the Temple
Wherein the Ritual that is Life
Is conducted in Honor of the God
That is Spirit, our True Identity.

But my Temple has been defiled.
The Moneylenders and the Merchants have had their long days
Amassing coffers of coins in their Bazaars. Now the refuse remains,
Empty stalls and silent signs advertising baubles.

Prostitutes still lurk in dark corners.
Everywhere the floor is spotted with the excrement
Of the animals that were sold. A pair of dirty Drunkards is fighting
Over the last bottle of Wine sold in the days of the Bazaar.

And the God of the Temple is angry
That the Body has been defiled.
Spirit has sent its only begotten son, the Mind,
To make the Temple clean.

Mind will sweep the Temple,
Chase away the Prostitutes and Drunkards.
And one day the Temple will be made holy
For Spirit again to dwell therein.

And is your own Temple clean?
Perhaps your Mind has cleared the waste.
Perhaps some offal yet remains,
Or a Thief dwelling in hiding.

But if indeed your Temple
Is made clean and holy
And the great Ritual is conducted
All the days and nights in the Hallowed Hall,
Where then has your God gone?

By the light of the stars
My God meets your God,
And together they walk,
Past the sleeping Thieves and Drunkards,
Beyond the Temples,
In the grove beneath the hills.