Eternity
(Five Days of Eternity)
Eternity is lost in the stark belief of our death,
As the night presses down on our steadily fading breath.
The hush of animation is often long and pathetic,
And the bliss never comes with its futile anesthetic.
Discern the thrill in our voice, that whispering, buzzing land,
The dream date thought you were simply boring out of hand,
And made love with the recent daydream of events.
You caught the shout in your throat like quick-dry cement.
Eternity is the old movie, slowly slipping away from truth,
Laughing that there was ever such a thing as eternal youth,
Resolutely smothering the hope that freedom might not die,
Ripping the ramparts of liberty when we are too old to fly.
You wake to a songbird and the pain of the lonely cynic.
Crowded streets of ambrosial need steer you to the clinic.
Even the old dirty car is a palace compared to a coffin,
A thousand polished wine bottles drive you there too often.
Eternity listens for laughter ever closer to the door,
Dickers for contentment like a spendthrift in a dollar store.
There’s no shelter to protect the myth of immortal souls.
They’re simply jewels encrusted on an infinite roof of holes.
There’s a talisman of values in the arbor countryside,
And they say that there, no righteous person ever died.
We flush with the first ideas of the vacant lots they’ve sold.
The people who first bought them, you can bet were truly old.
Eternity is a city, whose streets are the very fields
Of the eternal garden with their houses never sealed:
Just a little casket of paradise in which time will yield,
Against the dreadful oblivion, the truth which it can never wield.
Fascist Sunlight
(Dancing in the Costa Rican Rain)
The youth was led to the line of liquidation;
With witnesses in a mix of a mediocre herd,
The insurgent teen of a sunny nation,
Engaged a last vista on a blue-tailed hummingbird.
Breezes bore back the gallant hair on the forehead.
Sparrows and thrushes sang in one cocking noise;
Then bolted from the flowerbed,
Not a swagger of swan-song in their poise.
Sunrays ripped through the riddled post,
Its shadow slunk behind a sullen fence.
There emptiness lay, maybe three minutes most,
The body isolated in solitude in the last instance.
Later, thunder clouds came to wash away the stain,
Lightening the horizon like bullets on the brain;
The sparrows rode the ruins in the tailspin of summer rain,
As sounds of grey catbirds floated through the lanes again.
In Autumn When the Leaves Desert My Town
(How to Increase the Volume of the Sea Without Water)
The government of my happy life fell into decay.
Vultures nest in its wings while the leaves all slip away.
Dungeons of my darkened dreams are piled in stacks of scree,
The halls of justice perch upon the limb of its empty tree.
The winter of my larceny sows the seeds of a stifling age,
And cold are the corridors of the vents and ducts of rage.
My castle curtains swank along the slippery window sill.
The beaming structures of its fortress are frozen by the chill.
Borrowed time banquets beyond the courtyard of my guards,
Their long lanky bones are buried beneath barren disregards.
Whenever the glaciers rise, they bury the hills into lakes,
And the blue-blooded voice of our hate suddenly awakes.
My monuments of autumn may not last the morrow night.
The sleet will soon slander the haunted-house of its delight.
The park of my resistance is in the province of deceit,
The mingling past-time of the nation, snow-covered in conceit.
Spies of my best-kept secrets have left for arctic caves.
The pendants on their crystal-cradles carried them to graves.
The towers of intemperance have twisted and tempted fate.
Snow-flakes the size of countries have revolutionized my state.
Now my fellowship of frost is the crinkle of far-off furrows,
Around the architectural bastions of hearts buried in the burrows.
In mitigated silence, I watch the social structure reclaimed,
Near the niveous of the Nazis and the chilblain of exchange.
When the Rivers Kiss the Trees
(Five Days of Eternity)
The Neanderthal night of wild life and beguile,
Gunning the dog down in the ditch,
Comes poking fun at your dead and dying smile,
And begging the small shallow lifestyles to switch.
In that time of day, the evening spirit complains to God,
‘Go now, so that the wedded virgin should sire,
A steed with the need akin to the rod,
For I will repeal the laws of your fire.
‘At night, they come slithering from under the fossils,
In darkness, they sample the delight over.
You can lock the priest in Pentecostals,
But his acolyte rolls naked in the clover.’
But the sun frowned, taunted to its bowers,
‘I force the plants up by their bootstraps.
The insects, I make an army charging down on the flowers.
From cliffs, I command the water to sculpt the maps.
‘In darkness, t'is true, evil runs the rudders of the stream,
But in goodness, the routes never fail.
About the chattering marsh, the blind souls may team,
But ever, I will fall to them in braille.’
‘Seven days wasn’t enough to deliver the fools,’
Night hissed back and brought all shadow to its boast,
‘Seven years, it doesn’t matter, in the end, darkness rules.
From your throne, the best that can be said of him, is, almost!
‘But even there, that pushes at credulity,
Seven centuries, seven times seven, it doesn’t mean a wit,
For he remains a creature of the night and the city,
Long before you made him a pale image of your spit.’
‘You’ll not have them gold over love,’
Day growled, then, angered at this retort,
‘They may admire the hawk, but will dream always of the dove.
They’ll ever struggle to my harbor, even the worst sort.’
The devil laughed then, having pricked his archenemy.
Said, ‘You’ll ever be a naked platonic ideal,
Baptized in water, brandished with wine, see me?
I am the warm comforting cloth and the hot nourishing meal.’
The sun drew his Apollo breath, pallid over the seas.
Night sent his own Dionysus will, dead-drunk to his knees.
Thus of goodness and evil, neither one ever agrees,
Until at dusk, when rivers kiss the trees.
What the Devil is Due?
(Murder at Summerset)
Sweet chirps are the scream of a black void,
For the bird stuck to stucco-roof gargoyles.
Every moral from kitten to cat recoils;
A tiger sprang from every grace destroyed.
Every need has an eagle to feed,
And swoops down and tears it apart.
Any group virtue in its true heart,
Is a wolf pack which roves to bleed.
The damage done by the sacred wine;
The damned duty-bound dance of god.
Every ethic but a backwash of fraud,
In nature’s sewer; whithers on the vine.
The fresh-shaven priest holds the reins.
His cloistered souls have the house-mice code.
I am the raven at the side of the road,
I watch while they scurry by in their chains.
And myth rolls on, ‘Call forth the creed.’
Every human need has an ego to feed,
True virtuous deeds, a hero destined to bleed,
Any ethic we feed, puts the damsel dragon to steed.
Shotgun Socialism
(Five Years After)
Come dance, the bankrupt rate is set by the state,
The bar is regulated and the liquor first-rate.
Millions are pregnant with simple slow distress,
Raped with the plunder from his desperate caress.
And the brides and grooms of strangling breath,
Suffer shrewd speculation at her chest,
And marry, jaded in summer’s true delight:
A bridle vow to a once unfamiliar fight.
Come dance, the corkscrew is out on public platter,
The band plays/the bar is open; what is the matter?
The wine wonders to itself from Cana, ‘A venom adder!’
The whisky wise-cracks, ‘A host of Mad-hatter.’
Actual love does not exist to this deadly serpent,
And guests in the reception, lose double what they spent.
Millions divorce in a slick, sudden reverse of success,
Half-baked on the rack of their wedding dress.
Come dance, it’s a sad old song, ‘We’ve Only Just Begun.’
The bar amasses the marriages of redo and redone.
And falling through the cracks, we know quite well,
That for love of the state, we can all go to hell.
We dread the main course, from human debacle to a beast,
The bacchus schemer anticipates the progressive feast.
Friends, throw down the crystal-glasses and shout,
“The bar is open so let the machiavellian spirits out.”
Come dance, ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.’
How did we get so ravaged and who did we marry?
Those falling through cracks, the state can just cash out and bury,
The new dionysus religion, a dose of democide and some hari-kiri.
We watch the bar’s tiktok screens from clean shaven to Dirty Harry,
Tonight, the indulgent fiend is expecting the spirits to make us airy fairy.
Come dance, throw down the crystal-glasses, it’s a sort of funny-scary,
The bar is really busy, but on the bartender's cell: ‘Tom and Jerry.’
