Wicked
Her sins shadowed her
like playful dogs yipping and snipping
at her heels,
and she frequently curtsied
so as to pet them,
letting the men in the village
gaze deeply into her
tumult of cleavage,
her swelling bosom;
and whenever those dogs played
they were as hellhounds among marriage beds,
causing many wives to wake in fright,
losing their heads
and their husbands
to a wandering night.
Humiliation
He stripped her bare
like a tree of its bark,
her body pale and slender and smooth
to the touch
like sapwood,
and just as soon dying of exposure.
Orthodoxymoron
He channeled the holy spirit
through the computer screen,
bathed in information brightly lit
like a halo, harsh yet serene.
He learned how to make a big bomb
and clutched his crucifix to his chin,
repeating to himself “Absalom—
science is a most needful sin.”
He scrolled down the profane webpage
and scoffed at the modern zeitgeist.
“They revel in this secular age,
but they’ll see the blinding light of Christ.”
Earworm
Echo chambers deafen
by mantra, by zealous song,
the reverberating bass of
tribalism
booming as the loudspeaker of each
blowhard pundit
overlaps and amplifies exponentially,
the automatic algorithms
reinforcing and overwhelming
with the deadening stagnation
of propaganda. It is
weaponized audio
to concuss the brain into
malleable mush,
obedient putty
while parasites breed and multiply
from one ear canal to the other,
this self-administered
brainwashing
building unto willful frenzy,
until all contrarian thought is unheard,
anathema, a blasphemy
against the word of a jingoistic God;
a discordant chord
struck to clang against the
hymns of dogma
as if to shake loose the choral worms
writhing between the serenaded ears
so as to open the mind
to worms of a different breeding.
They conduct an orchestra
with which to marionette us,
beating our heads into submission
with the conductor’s baton,
and so our heads become echo chambers,
and the emptier they are
the more room for parasites,
the louder they sing their songs
using our own gawping mouths.
The worms writhe so loudly
in the echo chambers
of our ears,
and we cannot hear ourselves think.
Can we think for ourselves?
Hubris
Arrogance and ignorance
are
Siamese twins
connected head to head,
brow to brow,
so that they peer deeply
into each other’s loving eyes
and neglect seeing all else,
goose-stepping to and fro
blindly
with their backs turned dismissively
toward the humbling world.
Tangleroot And Tressknot 