Bleak richness, beside a lake already
fouled. The crowd spasms its humbug
numbers, lets flinch the untried word,
unleashes its coarse humility upon the
picklock helpless orthodox, charity
in an alphabet no peasant loves.
Air out old hurts, unharbor recent
strings, lest boxed-in comfort prove
infection’s university. Blindfold whispers velvet’s
loyal night, compresses white-eyed widening,
till ‘stern’ and ‘mean’ and ‘incomplete’
are bridgeless, unseen barricades.
Calvin’s censors, rich in faith’s despair,
loom like angels in a heretic dream.
Torment’s vulgar music rings no false change,
as panders dance in idiot delight.
Exclude the unwashed from that pleasure-
craft of fools, let tides distort them
to a coral foam. With
seas of blood and trembling words
to praise an abstract, empty heaven.
It is not peasants whom they hate,
although they love not peasants.
Sin, ascending from the gull-thick
south, in purple’s royal menstrual blouse.
They preen with carols acidic and vain,
and stigmatize, with gelded hymn,
the riddle-loving pastor
snuffling young wives’ tails.
In brevity, in luxury, in death,
a blue pen vaults to regicide.
Blue-nosed furrier, cheeky with dread,
plumes a voluntary for comb and silk,
shades shadows with his secular tone.
As lamplighters wind darkness from the streets,
theologians talk their solid trash
and in parentheses of dust and fire
young presbyters, beside the icy lake,
flay their tongues against a girl’s soft satanic
skin.
Informants mumble at their flock’s parade,
turn inward to their apple-worming deity.
They clip bright icicles of skin, strip cuticles
from reluctant fingers and sweat a vestal stream
of beads. Bottoms up, the gallow-warriors toast
the glad necessity of hell, and relish the religious
whiff upon their victims’ awful breath.
Proud flower, spider-small, and pentagoned
with pagan blue. Laughing epileptic god
rams sleeping virgins to the hilt, to wake
unmortified, bedewed, and damned.
Love vanishes in a cloud of words,
the bored surrender to a gross caress.
He jangles keys or coins, intones the sham cryptology
of prudence, righteousness, and mercy.
Doubt, then, is the perpetual singe, amphetamine-
careen that burns the mind awake. And fear of death
(droll, wanton dream) is not the lever
with which to prop this leering, manifold
Almighty. It will take a heavier club
to crack this skull. Live and let linger,
humor the busy-bodies who whine the
silent universe for a sign.