Father Timelessness (blank verse)

Father’s consuming fire created us

in His spare timelessness. The Tree of Life

& Branch of Jesse of one Tree of Life

are one. His flaming sword flicks restlessly.

He flings Pleiades into place. The pace

picks up. He hangs the galaxies on strings

like Yule-cum-Christmas lights & knows all men,

yes all of our cognitions & our deeds.

The Lord of Everyman & DNA --

who deigned by incarnation of best fit

to speak exactly in the corner -- is

aware of all the 'Once upon a time

& space' that He created to a t.

You know Him in the secret passageways

where you admit you don’t know everything.

He ponders every iteration of

temporospatial statuary,

every ensouled terracotta warrior

wandering the hive of hamster cages --

unimpressed with the Forbidden City,

penguin suits, & all our other rags -- with

an omniscient justice outside time.

Shanghaied (cinquains)

In 2012 one set out on a quest

against a backdrop of declining West,

Eurasian integration, Shanghai Pact’s

emergence from the same & all the rest,

positioning for temporary pax

& then for war to break the nation-state.

Of course, one did expect a longer wait

before the Russians & the Chinese warmed

relations, but the Ukraine crisis stormed

past; so, one watched it all accelerate,

ignored just-paying-off-my-mortgage men

disgustedly, passed Chinese 3 & then

began to study Russian for a change

while inwardly convicted of one’s sin.

One realizes that this must all sound strange,

but all of it occurred exactly so.

One ceased to sleep around with men. Although

that was 9 months before the Day Star’s rise,

He sometimes lightens us before we know.

He watches us with 7 flying eyes.

The Day Star lightens the horizon first,

perhaps because one might have feared the worst,

& one is still not sure quite what to make

of Him, considering He means to break

us! but the textbook says He quenches thirst.

The textbook says so very many things.

For instance, there are ladies with stork wings

who carry a lead-shielded harlot far

away & plant her in a fresh Shinar.

Chimeras even torment with their stings,

though one is still unsure why there’s a goat

fused to the Neo-Hittite one. I note

that the most controversial two words

-- yom & aionos -- bookend what He wrote.
I wonder when our Lord will feed the birds.

Simultaneous Verses (blank verse / couplets collage)

CERN spastic gestural equivalence
blue hardhats  Gotthard choreography –
Troop preparations in the Baltic states.
Rumors of war in the United States.
Drought in the Horn of Africa, Far East
& India CLICK Toxins have increased
in drinking water.  Toxins fill the air
near busy roads, the air we have to share.
We’re late! Our schedule is just action-packed.
We gotta pivot to the Shanghai Pact.
Alzheimer’s on the rise. Die-offs on coasts
of Vietnam & Chile. Heads on posts
at Raqqa. Swivel to the Caliphate 
No, pi- No, swi- We're very late indeed.
“Therefore keep watch, because you do not know
the day on which your Lord will come”, He said. 

The Spark That Lighteth Every Man (fourteener couplets)

Dialectical materialist views of history
are the doctrine of four ages taught in ancient mystery
schools without the pesky, overt supernaturalism
which would be unsuited to an age of naturalism,
a procedure Jefferson & Tolstoy follow –
doubting Thomases without a prayer? – who think to hollow
out the Tree of Life then hallow the remaining dead wood
into a totem pole & build the world a world of good 
with minarchist & anarchist ideas that don’t bear fruit –
that is, eternal life; rule over many things -- & loot 
scripture of salvation, thinking they do men a favor.
Libertas binds men the more! Hath their salt lost its saviour? 
Plato’s daemons fell & tarnished their beloved Golden
Age, seduced the hearts of Socrates & Jung. From olden
days unto modernity, the selfsame writhing snake nest
wrestles with free wills that God designed to choose a house guest.
Why don’t you invite the one whose yoke is not deception?
Jesus christened you with His zinc spark at your conception!

Sin, with reference to the painter Ljuba (couplets)

"O sing unto the Lord a new song: sing unto the Lord, all the Earth!" -- Psalm 96:1

The Bible says that we are slaves to sin.
Well, one is much the same as other men, 
in this regard, but can articulate 
the fact that lust is shaped the same as hate
in one’s mind’s eye. Are these, then, "unclean"?
I will explain exactly what I mean,
but first would like to mention Djuba’s work --
“Temptations, Afterwards” -- where 'cthulhus' lurk,
where what was throbbing is unraveling. 
One mentions this for those whose traveling
is less internal & more visible,
whose consciousness is less divisible 
into compartments & comparisons.
Most horses don’t see their caparisons,
so that is why I’m holding up a glass.
It isn’t just a pretext to be crass. 
It’s why the human male smokes afterwards 
& why it says “unclean & hateful birds”. 
Such pairings are not simply accidents,
& what at first seems simple can be dense. 
Paul says, “[that] which I would not, that I do”.
It’s shaped like the recurrence when we stew
about someone or something, or we lust
about someone or something. So, I trust
the Bible’s psychological insight.
We need not merely believe who know the Light. 

Verse Notes on Nomadic Territorial Explosiveness (fourteeners)

Nomadic territorial religiosity
of Canaan’s conquest Alexander Islam Genghis Khan
explodes like telegraph or fiber optic cables, but
animists (such as the Mongol Horde) or polytheists
(such as Alexander's or apostate Solomon's) break
up like a marriage or a fragmentation hand grenade.
Nomadic territorial religiosity
may be a prairie fire like Marxist-Leninism or
a slash & burn bell curve of Rust Belts & fresh markets or
some other coatrack burning coal mine time release snafu.

'Let's all go to Europe & America!' (blank verse)

Her face would be unrecognisable,
but there’s a blind spot to Enlightenment. 
No wall can trump an ancient prophecy.
No ideology can stem the tide. 
They vomit from clay souths into iron norths.
They’re in the book of Daniel, Ch. 2;
atop Tren de la Muerte roofs; crowded
on decks of overloaded, sinking ships.

To rule those feet of iron & clay, you’ll end
up with dictatorship* to keep the Pax.

* In the model by which one understands human governance, and because of which one has never voted, there are soft oligarchies & hard, covert oligarchies & overt. Iron brings forth soft, covert oligarchy of its nature -- the so-called 'representative democracies' whose reality Machiavelli describes in The Prince; but if iron should mix with clay, then that which sufficed for the iron must change to suffice for the admixture. So it is that the soft totalitarianism becomes both increasingly hard & obvious at once. 

Forgive us, Father, for we're trained to sin (sonnet)

Forgive us Father, for we’re trained to sin 
against your statutes long before we know
quite what is going on, deafened by din
& interaction, reaping what we sow.

We slumbered deeper towards the pit,
and many were the snares we did not see.
So many were the traps we would not get.
So many ways to kill a human flea

defile & thereby steal your gift of time;
& down here this has all been normalized,
or nearly all, as what was once a crime
becomes first normative then formalized. 

Forgive us, Father, for we grope around
& cannot even trust this shifting ground.

Big Father is Watching You (alexandrines)

But in the meantime, everything we do is watched
& everything Big Brother touches ends up botched
like Libya or all those spikes in rates
of cancer all humanity has on their filling plates.
The birds are dying & the fishes in the sea,
& Man cannot fix any of this by decree
nor world-state nor syncretic ideology,
nor yet by cybernetics & technology. 
SIN trashed the fertile paradise God gave our kind!
One in ten thousand people even seems to mind.
It couldn’t be coincidence when I discerned
the ‘loss of Heaven’s mandate’ in world histories, learned
an index of this X & Y & realized it was real. 
Sin really does dry up the land, & too the commonweal. 

Ah, Mrs. Moon! So nice of you to join us (hexameter sonnet)

Pale rose moon rose into first blue then purple sky
then changed into an evening dress of shining bone
as spangled Port Hills lurched from white sarcophagi. 
As one admired it, one realised: I'm not alone!

No, not alone, & they weren’t looking at the moon
but at yours truly. Please have better things to do
when moons are full than staring at one’s blissful swoon,
or anyone’s! Their stares distracted me askew.

I watched my interface. What does one even say 
to people who blurt, oh, a couple hundred words,
a dozen prefab lines, stage Earth's most boring play?
They are as differentiated to me as the birds

because they give no thoughtful traction for one’s wheels
& will not speak their living minds or go on spiels.  

2nd Heaven combat simulation (scifi blank verse)

“Though Babylon should mount up to heaven, and though she should fortify the height of her strength, yet from me shall spoilers come unto her, saith the LORD.” -- Jeremiah 51:53

Lasers decommissioned most space stations
first, debris from which would take down
several hundred satellites in slow motion,

"We aren't armed, we're here for research pur-!"

eventually depressurizing the 
last greenhouse-lab where taikonauts
had managed not just to survive but keep
the scheduled observations coming... Then, 
a lethal piece of human femur pierced
first bulkhead wall then taikonaut, & last,
but certainly not least, their oxygen

supply.
какой кошмар 

After the destruction of the fighter-
interceptor shuttles Nautilus &
Rabbit in the Moon, the gift kept giving

valued customers
dead zones
真糟糕

as satellite upon satellite shook & sheared:
AT&T & Telecom lost 4 
& 9 respectively as bits of steel,
glass, bone, & composite whizzed past, zikked through
computers, cameras, sensors, & -- of course --
those solar panels, sending still more clouds
still more directions in the course of days.

Then, in the course of weeks & months, a North 
Korean spy satellite went down -- or, more
precisely, upside down & all around -- 
which took a NASA magnetometer out
of commission, plus a European
weather satellite in the bargain. Hundreds more
streaked down like burning brains. Though EMP

pulse weaponry might have prevented this
abrupt, unsettling end to orbital 
traditions, if it had been generally
deployed, the military brass still thought
in terms of operatic smithereens.

Besides, the EMP emitters were
to be alongside the torpedo bays --
a bike next to a thousand SUVs,
a tidal turbine next to nuclear
reactors -- so we know how that turns out.

The post-War Soyuz capsule with Jane
Kennedy & Evgenia Boroshin 
that was supposed to represent Peace/Mir
as usual didn’t make it through the cloud.

How did we manage to blockade ourselves?
Although we had unlimited expense
accounts made out of malnutrition, bridge
collapses, even gravel roads, it all
went wrong! The moral of this blank verse is
the first Star War would likely be the last.

Moths sprang round at Linwood Cemetery

A coil of tussock grassland moths sprang round
Linwood Cemetery. Although sharp wind
sliced through their ranks, 8? straightaway snapped back,
a hornet’s nest of angry rubber bands. 
The meander of a single moth or pair 
go by ago as two months coil up
two moths amid that marbled blue we breathe
in, then one saw that entire squadron sproing
past crosses toppled & upright then boing
off hills off stage.

The atemporal Godhead thought of time

So many flourishes, wild whorls, winged cherubim & horns
festoon the Lord God, our Creator’s, work of timely art,
His panoply of giants, penitence & unicorns
that one can scarcely wrap one’s head around it, for a start.

The Lord is atemporal, yet He thought up time & space!
This is the very benchmark of originality:
We couldn’t do that even if our milling minds should race.
One sees the restless artist in His personality:

He tells Hosea to go find a harlot & get hitched,
but also tells the prophet Jeremiah not to marry
(this quite vividly). The narratives were switched
around like swords, a process that one finds, at times, quite scary.

But one is resigned to be calligraphy & scribble;
thanks Him for the scenery, the free will & the kibble.

Antebellum (2011 couplets)

The ongoing spread of antimissile installations
indicates that there may soon be strife between great nations,
that these years are, for all intents & purposes, pre-War,
an Age when -- not “Democracy”! -- but Big Lies flourish, ‘soar
on wings of eagles’, set the bloody Middle East afire
with overt bombs and sneaking Earnest Voices both. Earth's pyre
is yet unlit, awaiting some Gavrilo Princip’s shot
when BAM! an undeclared “Cold” War clicks suddenly to “Hot”.

Jesus' General Amnesty > your retirement plan (couplets)

But one is even as a Shaker chair
dwarfed by galaxies that rotate there
& superclusters of the same as stars
arranged in constellations. Beyond Mars
gas giants do their duty, organelles...  

Meanwhile, most go for that which strokes & sells
& ye shall know them by this sign: they say
“retirement” “mortgage” “practical” all day.
But “practical” is just the sepulcher 
dressed up in alabaster, splashed with myrrh.

One is not better off than on the dole
if one has not done more than heaping coal.

Shockwaves from the Crucifixion (couplets)

As rain drops fall within the sky,

so even joy enfolds a cry;
so bubbles rise within the sea,
foot-dragging shirks behind decree,
a prince of evil swamped by Love;
so doth the hand fit to the glove;
so Intercessor named "Guan Yin";
so interplay of Yang & Yin;
so Jesus Sutras reach the East
with the Nestorians, at least;
Sidharthaism--> Ancient Greece
(great white expanse as Golden Fleece).
A Nameless Dream & Hidden Voice!
In which nor both should one rejoice?
For one converted this Wild West,
the firstborn that Far East at best.