World of Law

We set up laws
to obey the king upon the throne
and to turn the country into home,
a place where people would greet
each other passing on the street,
not kill each other over scraps of meat.

But laws did not suffice.
For such is mankind’s vice:
we ignore the law, respect the price
of the devilish things that do entice
our monstrous greed to play at dice
with children’s lives
and ancient forest woodland,
the ocean tides,
the dying crops on the drying land.

Laws would not have slowed the fire
that every soul does char and burn
if the king had not in turn
revealed in tales a land of fire
reserved for murderers, thieves and liars.

Hell is the ultimate prison, ultimate end,
the king would say,
and death is here eagerly willing to send
the disobedient to torments vile and eternal,
to die endlessly in suffering infernal.

Still the threat of hell has failed to stop
those greedy few who laugh and mock
the hellish stories as children’s stock,
those bloated beasts with hearts of rock,
who chew upon the people’s bones
and sit atop the world’s gold thrones.

Murder

I stood up in the courtroom
And made my final stand.
"I don't deserve your doom
For murdering a man. 

"Yes, I did murder.

Yes, I did kill.

Still I say I'm innocent,

For I lacked my own free will! 

"Our every act is part

Of the Lord our God's own plan.

He fixed my dark inerrant task

To kill my fellow man." 

The judge peered down

And said to me with steady,

Troubled frown,

"You say God made you do this.

I've heard this tale before.

For better men have claimed the same

Facing their own death's door.

"Kings have claimed the solemn right

To slaughter towns in foreign lands

In name of God's great might.  

"And Popes and priests

Through centuries

Decreed swift death to infidels

Without regard to inquiries:

God's place for them was hell.  

"To all that I have but one reply:

That the Lord our God is indeed sly.

So he sent his killers out to kill.

But I, too, lack free will!

God's plan at last has justice in it;

My role as judge is to instill it." 

"Oh, woeful end!"

I stand and cry.

"Our God indeed is very sly!

How could I have foreseen this?

That God's own planned creation

Fails without the constant death,

Takes the believer's final breath,

And seals his own damnation!"

 

 

Proper Place

All things have their proper place.
Places are claimed by the things in time.

Time lays its sleepy charms on all people.

People secure the things by their claims.

Claims on things are dreams by nature.

Nature secures a place for all things.

All things have their proper place.

Independence Day

When the end came
It was a fiery ball of rock
Screaming from the heavens -
Total and sudden annihilation.

It was the Fourth of July,
Two hundred and fifty million years ago,
When the dinosaurs were laid to rest
As the bedrock of our nation.

The beasts in the field would never ask why.
Indeed, the dinosaurs that looked at the sky,
Unaware that they were beasts,
Unaware that they would die,
Could scarcely pull themselves away
From their lives of mastication.

The mighty brontosaurus,
Thirty-five tons of hunger,
Flatulence and defecation,
With empty, misty eyes,
Was hurled, dismembered,
Miles into the skies.

Though no one would remember,
The brontosaurus - bones, entrails, and cranium -
Would become for generations
A source of quick petroleum.

Oil powered the grill
That cooked the senseless pigs,
And every parade powered
By the oil from countless rigs.

The factories that made the flags
That waved in scores of stadiums
Were powered by oil, blood-like leached,
From brontosaurus cranium.

At last the cars, their gas tanks full,
Filled the parking lots of churches
In the baking July sun.
Parishioners, their stomachs full,
Ate the body and drank the blood
Of the Holy Son and sang a song:

God Bless America
This Independence Day.
Our Land is rich;
Our Land is bright.
The power of our Nation
Is of God’s clear, endless might.

Order

Our sidewalk had been spared
By the fickle gods of city maintenance.
Across the street were ditches, and blasted earth,
Where unknown men sweat the cool morning,
For whom dollars were new, mysterious things,
Like childbirth or the endless patience of their women.

Today there were four or five,
Tomorrow perhaps two or three –
With no one present to see
The unmarked vehicles take them away,
Every day, for lack of permits to live;
No one who toils may stay.

From the depths of those ditches no one can hear
The lamentations of the women, their cries so clear;
Still they, too, disappear,
Their children steered
Into lives that veered in all random directions,
Like the frantic ants that flee the pounce of the spider
In some well-tended garden blessed by the fickle gods
Of city ordinances.

At my window a tiny spider has woven its delicate web,
Wet with the morning, the cool air tugging gently
At the random strands that radiate in all directions.
The spider, coiled, awaits:
Ants, children, men, lifetimes, gardens, cities, gods.

Even as I walk along my spared sidewalk,
I hear echoing the sound of shovels
Across every mansion, garden, hovel.
The ditches are dug across our strand of days:
Like brown men and spiders, none of us, though we toil,
May stay.