Dance Of Destruction
How many times have we twirled around,
Kali and Man, hand in hand
circling the worldwide burial ground
of this atomic wasteland?
Take just one among her many arms
and spin apace the countdown,
hastening to the shrieking alarms,
trammeling every town.
Ashes to ashes and dust to dust
and the world a barren place—
hers is a radioactive lust
and we court her arms’ race.
How so lovely her necklace of skulls
and how seductive her hips
as we dance like island cannibals
and kiss her entrancing lips.
Ah ha! To taste the dust on her tongue
is to taste the Holocaust
and to be one of many among
the M.A.D. men—those ever Lost.
The Hammer, The Nails, The Wood
How fitting that a carpenter’s son
should die by tools of the trade,
all of the houses now undone
for an empire by conquest made.
When they hammered the three long nails
did he see the distant days
or hear the far-off church bells
summoning flocks to sing his praise?
Did he see the world overtaken
with his hard words so softly spoken—
when he proclaimed himself forsaken
was it in seeing the covenant broken?
No doubt he heard them sing such songs
in adoration of their beloved Christ
while committing unapologetic wrongs
to forge a blood-soaked zeitgeist.
Perhaps he heard, above the cheers
of the Romans who mocked his pain,
the war cries through the future years
of those of a self-righteous reign.
How like those planks of rigid wood
his flocks would become in time—
unbending, hard, holding as best they could
cross-purposes and poor pantomime.
So did he receive a vision of life
as he died a carpenter’s death;
did he see pain, hypocrisy, strife—
was that the doubt in his final breath?
Tangleroot And Tressknot 