Earth, hearth, heart, hear, ear, earn, learn.
I walked today between earth and sky:
I did not know about the bones
Dry and in the valley of the shadow of death.
Hansel and Gretel of mine, fertile as they all are,
Birthed a co-child, as they all do,
And failed their bread crumb trail, distracted,
Vegetating on flickering mirages in the dead forest
And so thus panicked, always, and driven thence
Into the gingerbread house of Hallmark divorce
Where the witch, after baking, will consume
All three children.
They do not know,
Despite my telling so.
Little Achilles of mine, fraternal in the laurel hills,
Is arming for the Saracens
Who will be commanded against the fundamental denizens
By a black president, resident woe
In a white house.
He is packing tin cans and MRE's and claymoors
For a day I suspect he looks for, bored
And bothered, anxious, unlived but fully entertained.
His rage will excite and consume
But will not resurrect. Entombs.
He does not know
His president is not so:
The power elite
Resides on Wall Street.
Apollo of mine lives down the lane
In a dreary abandoned lutheran temple he's converted
Into a shrine of a high school art teacher's dilletante enthusiasms:
He cannot draw after all, thus he emits.
A little Turkish tiling here, a few tombstone rubbings there,
Some watercolor of Tuscan impressions, of course,
To feel other than Pittsburghly.
And he told me, feeding his herd of fifty feral felines yesterday,
That he will build a ten-foot scarlet erection of Infernal Lou himself
And stand it up in the old sanctuary, behind where the pulpit stood
With WalMart scarf and flutter fire
For the adult halloween party he throws in the old mainline church,
Another desolation,
Every year, hash and beer.
He does not know
That the one below
Cannot come since he's all tied up:
He'll take, instead, a reign check and sup
On the worries of a consumer nation
And the priapistic petit mals of Viagran revelation.
I want to walk in wildness whence is the preservation of the world,
But my parish is the wasteland,
Preaching in the valley.
Willie Loman of mine can now only whine:
He's an old man of near fifty and nine.
But his women he claims
Have quashed his male aims.
So he's adept at machiavell from behind.
He does not know
That his tale of woe
Cannot be fixed by playing the role
Of dominus. He has taken the dole
Of ball, movies and debt, his name
He's exchanged for a roleplayer's game.
He needs Woman and hearth, he can't understand,
Like the crowd on the Parkway all want to be man.
All this not knowing is deliberate,
But the deliberation is forgotten
As are all decisions in a land
Where much information is consumed
Contained for a while and pitched into landfills,
But no one is ever convinced.
Agnosis is embraced,
For in her rich, bored, neurotic coition
All is forgotten, swathed from both
Light and Abyss, Tartarus and Heaven
And the eldest voice of Bombadil.
Grief is avoided, drunk away in spurts of ecstasy
And fogbanks of cyclothymia
Not even melancholia.
But there is anxiety in spades,
Panic in Hades, in the vestibule
Of wheeling banners, unmanned men and half-fallen angels who chose nothing.
Pursued by flies, junkfooding on lies.
Hurry Up Please Its Time
Is anxiety a passion? No, not even.
Are we somewhere else? No.
Is it time? No and not yet.
Poor man of mine, shorn by Agnosis
Your locks have made you drear,
Your sockets dry won't let you cry:
It takes seeing to let fall a tear.
The Phoenicians took you man by hypnosis:
He that has ears let him hear.
Son of man, under the red rock,
I have shown you fear in a handful of dust.
Will these bones live?
Agnosis, Agnus.
Hear, earn and learn,
Shantih, for peace:
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi,
Miserere nobis.
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