Equinox

The ghost would change his clothes.
Knowing the sun, its persistence,
the face off one has when it returns.

The shades say things;
they sting your fear-queered brain
with their predictions.  Soft prophecy,
the oracle ignores my trembling
because she believes...

"It is better to accept--
easier to swallow--
the aching fate
doled out in superstitions.
Even the cruelty.  There is comfort
in a purposeful universe
where God does not forget
your name."

But I do not need
to feed on this delusion.
I too will shed the dark
shrouds of winter.  I will
forget the black iris'
of Persephone.  Her eyes are only
adjusting to the light.
She knows...

As opposed to the lists
of lies that might protect you,
the rather ghastly indifference
of a random clock
in the godless sky
might be unnerving.
But Science says nothing
against the metaphor
that moves you, that keeps you
sane. Or keeps you
awake.

The ghost goes into
the illuminated day;
his white levis, his crisp tee,
the freshly laundered canvas
of his all-stars are all fighting
against the constellations,
from which his father's father's
father once discovered deities.

Very soon, sooner
than you think, he will be
assumed
back into heaven.

Last Rites

The Alchemist reasoned that if it were possible to capture (in some glass contraption) the very last breath then it was likely that said vessel would also ensnare the escaping soul. An ambitious hypothesis but, if true it would afford he and his colleagues the opportunity to study, to describe and to measure the most elusive portion of our humanity.

There was no question that if with specimen caught they were able to achieve their various tests, some fundamental assumptions would be challenged. There was no question that the Alchemist must be shielded from the scrutiny of the church and its representative. Already, a good friend, he imagined "like-minded", had accused him of heresy upon hearing his plans and had needed to be talked down: "It was just a hypothetical. Absurd speculation."

In reality, the group, five highly respected members of the faculty at the already old and gold encrusted university, were making encouraging progress having managed both the shape and the construction of the glass tube. In secretive late night meetings lit by black oil and honey mead these very best of the monkey brains would grunt and grin, commiserating on the next ideas that would guide the tribe "forward."

One night, motivated by hard cider and its subsequent guilt, one of the professors approved of the plot to capture a soul but noted the challenge of doing so when, invariably, at the end of a life, there was always some priest about muttering in Latin "making a nuisance of themselves."

Laughter rolled through the sated bellies of the gathering; this was something that the Alchemist had not considered. He thought for a moment looking around at his bemused associates. They had all, as was customary, had ecclesiastical training and, as academics, considered Latin their natural tongue.

"Couldn't," he began, "one of us impersonate a priest and, as part of extreme unction, convince the person in question to exhale into the bottle?" He had increased the wages. This was no longer a matter of toying with the mechanisms of life and death but would now be a conscious act interrupting or ending an individual's salvation.

A critic emerged quickly in the room, "You would be responsible for the fate of their soul."
 

"Not," the Alchemist did not hesitate in his defense, "Not if the elect is so certainly destined for hell that we are merely delaying his journey." There were nods, a grinning wisdom.

One of the group stood and lifted his glass. "The damned," he toasted.

"The damned," came the collective reply.

The Refutation of Logic

Children are superstitious creatures, magic thinkers tinkering with truth and mythology.  An infantile fascination with cause and effect becomes the lens by which they see the world.  Thus, when something is "inexplicable," the human animal (driven by innate curiosity coupled with a discomfort with mystery) designs a system to make sense of the circumstance, to tame the monster.  Thesis formed, evidence is collected but without benefit of science.  Rumor crystallizes into fact, and the meme either infiltrates the communal mind or withers in the consciousness of a few.  When the notion is adopted, a "just so story" that complements cultural bias and assumption is then added to the canon of human delusion.  Logic lays down to the God of these tangled lies.

Butterfly Collector

I have fucked a mussulman, a muscleman, a monster and a midget.  I have kissed septuagenarian millionaires and penniless urchins young enough to be Gidget.  I have sampled the whole box of chocolates swallowing the coconut and spitting out the nougat. I  have tasted the rainbow and found that there is nothing to it.

Bodies are bodies, and once stuck on a pin

they are scientific specimens, no longer writhing in sin.

Blow chloroform blow.  Ether is a good way to go.  Your wings are like your fingerprints.  I will forget you oh so slow...

False Prophets

The redundancy is obvious.  We do not see the future; we imagine it.  The punch-drunk hunger for a crystal ball stays with you long after your last life science class, your last dissection, your last epiphany in the lab.  Superstitions are the science of a limited vocabulary, the slurred words of a world drunk on metaphor mistaking poetry for second sight.  And all you can do is stumble and weave when reality tattles on you.  Your faith, on the other side, in this soothsaying is easily justified (to you).  You have a mania for splitting hairs.  The lies are teased out with a nit-picking comb, the old crone's brittle mane, until the handful that is left might be called evidence, proof positive of the veracity of the oracle's gift.  Bullshit. 

Grave Robber

Before the corpse had been exhumed, preparations had been made.  In every room the flowers, past their hour and purpose, stretched and yawned and were already gone--a famine rusting the petals--forty eight hours after the funeral.  They were fading in the chilling whispers of mid-September.

In August, in heat, escaping, an adolescent girl had collapsed into something, the old forgotten mineshaft, toxins and tailings that haunted the world with another generation's greed.  But Shelia, her name, couldn't care.  She was hopeless, gazing  up at the moonlight making its way through the rising dust and the debris.  A cloud rolled like a stone away from the luminescent tomb and a brilliant white light illuminated the corners of the cave.  Shelia looked down, her torn jeans, a dark stain as if she had soiled herself, the white-washed wood that pierced her thigh.  The moon peeled the night back further; it was not wood at all (nor piss, nor shredded cotton).  Her own bone, her broken femur, had torn a wide gash from which the blood discovered nothing.  It was gushing from her own ragged skin.  Instinctively, like doubting Thomas, she put her hands into the wound.  Like warm water...

Shelia's eyes found again the disk of the moon.   The effervescent gray of the storm poured over its artificial light.  Soon Shelia had fainted.  The rain started.  The blood and dirt and tears made a thick mud at her feet.  When they found her, her left shoe would be stuck there.  It would be left behind.  

There had been her epilogue, the concussion, the coma, the hope and hopelessness of waiting as the infections indentured her young body to the hospital bed.  She was getting better.  She was out of the woods.  Everything would be okay.  "Our prayers have been answered."  Then, as if she had fallen through some other false landscape, into a new shivering pit, the fever came over her in the night and by the time her mother arrived to spoon feed her oatmeal for breakfast, she was dead.

Like witches, the coven of doctors convened in the hospital building adjacent to the cemetery.   Thick curtains doused the suspicious light.  Scapulas and speculum laid out among the slivered lands of the wooden table, eyes and papers fluttering with anticipation, curiosity and anticipation.  Every twitching nerve like a candle flame, the forked tongues of snakes and superstitions, the sinister creatures that creep to the edge of the shadows, the dancing ledge, the frayed seam between knowledge and belief.  Science ushered in a new era in which the most obscene act may be forgiven in the speculative probing of "knowledge".

Here is the problem.  Before the dissection occurred, there had been opinions and ideas already in place that these learned men were expected (if only by themselves) to find in their method.  The metaphors of the ancients, the biases of the church, the comforting simplifications that had been passed down by shaman and midwife...all of these were awaiting ratification.  Undressing this girl--first of her funeral vestments, then of her skin, then of her muscles--revealed a pornographic expectation, pet suppositions that blurred the candlelight.  There is a blindness with which Science tries to see.

Strawberries

if the carnival should pass
while I, suspended under glass,
can neither hear the song nor drum
and all of life reduced to hum
is nothing that it seems

then will I hear the voice of god
muffled, when it bids me come
or will all truth be rendered dumb
and I be nothing but my mass
dissolving mineral and gas,

sweet strawberries and cream...

The Television is a Fish Tank

On the Animal Planet, God, a close facsimile (or at least a be-speckled, white-haired, man with a Lancaster accent), is talking about "sperm curds" and "the urge to spawn".  The imagery is graphic, a white stain on the surface of the water where the male herring have exerted their spasms of covetous milt.  This is like rain for the underwater garden of eggs.  The saturated bay will take care of the residue with tides and waves but, in the meantime, a wanton oil spill now thickens in the coves and along the jettees, carving out the coastline like Christo.

In the deep ocean, the squid, hideously attractive as they emerge, stir the light out of the water.  They are shy;  becoming murky visions (that slowly clear).  Now and again they appear in blossoming profusion: monsters, ballerinas, and these are all paratroopers, yet another planet, living in reverse.  There are thousands and thousands and thousands, male and female, wave on wave.  They rise out of the nocturnal sky, a kind of invasion.  They are rehearsed by science's improvisations and disciplined by instinct's generals.

Unsurprisingly,  there is the unsubtle magic as their tentacles tangle.  Underneath there is wiring hidden in dull gray skin so that when stimulated the tentacles ignite a bright lipstick red.  Their gelatin flesh is scorched for a moment; the cogent alarm is merely the blushing of pleasure, a shiver of goose flesh when the earlobe is lightly bitten.  The squid has a body electric and so do I.

There are associations or ideas in this briny opera that, stretched by imagination, might even be considered erotic.  However the lesson is elsewhere.  The impulse and imperative of two distinct schools of thought--I mean schools of fish--are variations on the zeal that drives on nature, compelling the planet through space, allowing the continents to drift and collide, and the instant agitation of the groin in its various phases, the hunger of skin for skin, that magnetism.

Belief is but the petrification of speculation.

Idea is a fossil inside unbroken rock.  

Creation is a concept that,
by fixing the random mixing of time and situation,
denies the fullness of God.

Geology is born out of the same obsession as picking a scab.  

The crystals cut from cave walls could only acquire meaning in the form of value from dumb-founded innocents who confuse rarity and significance.

Hot Air and Cold Lead(s)

As hard as I try--on hands and knees, or straddling some 21st century conveyance--I cannot mop up the viscous fluid, the slime trail of despair I leave behind...It is impossible; this pollution is my wake.  

I am the wacky automobile billowing black smoke as I am chased through monochrome streets with monochrome moods.  I choke the air with comic relief.  But half the crew has asthma and are excused from the set.  I wonder with witless sarcasm how it is that this delicate hyper-sensitivity is pandemic with young, spoiled starlets and Hollywood harlots while the extras (on the streets and in the cars) are immune to this plague and breathing freely at least until they pickup a paycheck.

"Where does your hostility to the workers originate?" she asks me, and I stare blankly.  She is a psychologist and it is apparent we are far beyond politics here.  She earnestly believes that there are markers of experience (perhaps trauma even) that have constellated in my memory to skew my opinions from the righteous and correct path of progressive thinking.  She stands by her science.  

Meanwhile, I have neither the energy to contest her point by point nor the manners that might help to succour the situation, the clenched teeth of a disingenuous smile, the gentle waves of salutatory praise moving from my lips and my eyes.  Her impatient ears.  She wants that:  "I was wrong."  That would mean so much to her.  And I could say it--with phonetic precision--and I could mean it.  

We were all wrong in that analysis.  Our politics and our theology are fragments, Dead Sea Scrolls,  the Rosetta Stone, the teeth and jaw of a giant camel or the adrenaline-infused staccato of these tracks of a crowded herd of miniature horses.  But all the measure and methodology does not make for truth.  One persuasive, self inflated, forked tongued, divinely inspired minister of the lord can erase the enlightenment and the renaissance in one arrogant sermon that will make us remember...

The dark ages live on in us...in a chamber with rusty lock...in the back of our superstitious minds...