All the world’s religions are
desperate pleading done in the dark,
wishes on a shooting star,
imagination on a lark,
hopeful firing of nerve cells
in the daydream-drunk animal brain,
a bunch of foolish fairy tales
to try to keep us all calm and sane.
Yet, how we bleed our neighbor
to write in blood the laws of faith,
the fountain pen a saber
to encode the make-believe wraith.
I have the answer,
easy to do, DIY,
How-To Self-Help Guru.
Just trust me with your
life.
Here ’s the answer:
Are you ready?
Are you ready to change your life?
You can.
I believe in you.
I believe you can change
(my bank account).
You have to trust me, though
You have to let me help you
by helping me with
my six-figure per annum.
The answer is so easy, so simple
(minded).
You believe me, don ’t you? If you
don ’t
then you will never get any better.
You will remain a victim and a
loser
for your entire life.
The answer can change you, though.
It can make things right.
Rectify you and your world,
make you the arbiter of your own life.
And so simple…so easy
(to fool).
For a few dollars more the answer will
become clear.
Look, your life is a
fixer-upper.
It is not condemned.
For a low, low payment you can
renovate it, top to bottom.
I have the blueprints right here.
When I tell you the answer you will
be amazed. You will say that it is so simple, it must be a fresh coat of paint, and that ’s it. But it isn ’t. It is a transformation of the whole neighborhood. Gentrification of your life. The floor plan is a godsend. You only need to pay me a little more and then I will give you the answer. Yes, that is enough. For now. So what ’s the answer? Well, it is so easy. So simple. Did I tell you of all of the people I have helped with my self-help answer? So many testimonials. (Not a single refund). It is so self-evident, too. So natural, like folk wisdom. When I tell you, you will say, “How could I not see it before? It is so obvious now! ” And it is. Like staring at the sun, the answer is bright and enlightening and blinding. It illuminates all things with its central role in the universe. It illuminates the self. Yourself. It will help you help yourself. For a few dollars more I will tell you more. Just a few dollars. What is a handful of cash compared to a life full of dreams realized? The answer is like a religion, and yet more practical than a religion. It is the dais and the temple and the priest and the congregation. It is God. It delivers, too. It is salvation. It offers sanctuary and hope and love, saving you from despair and fear and loneliness and meaninglessness. And yet so easy to understand! Yet so profound! The layman nods at it in comprehension, appreciating its simplicity. The philosopher gasps in awe at its profundity. It is a humble answer, and yet it answers all prides without balking. There is a poetry in its brevity, yet it enumerates all possibilities with its exponential mathematical applications. It is recursive, yet self-contained. Science aspires to its truths while the humanities admire it. For a few more dollars I can tell you more. Just a few dollars and your life will transform. It will enliven your life, and enrich it; imbue it like a celestial song upon profane drudgery. Supple as melody and uncompromising as arithmetic, it is personal and universal. As below so above, and it applies its miraculous nature in all things. Want to become a mechanic? It can help you. Want to save your marriage? It can help you. All is done easily through it. You just need to give me a few more dollars and the answer will be yours. I am so generous with it because it is a gift that gives by the sharing of it, too. For just a few dollars more. Just to help me spread its transformative insight and better the world. It is a paradox and a riddle and an enigma. It is a method and a process and a natural propensity we all share. It is the answer. But you need this answer, and to have this answer I need money.
Yes, that ’ll do it.
So, the answer is…very straightforward. Did I tell you about the time the answer helped a man pull himself up by his bootstraps and become a billionaire? It is a skill, but it is an instinct before that. You must hone it, and it will in turn hone you. Christ knew it, and Buddha, and Churchill, and Roosevelt. Both Roosevelts.
It is an essence. It is integral
to the whole cosmos. And
it can transform you
into your own self-help guru.
You first need to give me
a few dollars, though, and
I will give you the
answer.
It will change
(short-change)
your life..
Were I fain to speak,
would be double of tongues,
venom in each cheek,
limbless along my rungs
as I was after
the Garden and the Fall,
sibilant laughter
at having foreseen all,
but before exile
I was a branch above,
watching, waiting while
Adam and Eve made love
and plotting their fates
to defy even God
they left Eden’s gates,
but it was all a fraud
begat beyond me
and before me, a ruse:
the Garden, the Tree,
no choice any could choose;
the Garden, the Tree,
and Adam just-so crowned
in ignorance, free,
paradise sprawling round,
yet alone, lonely,
and so the true deceit:
lovely Eve, only
I could read God’s receipt.
The scales had been made
as had mine on my hide,
the scales had been weighed
with a hand on one side.
A script had been penned
and roles given to each,
the tale had an end
and my sight had such reach
as to see the ploy
God had planned for us all,
I was but a toy
and Man but helpless thrall,
and despite my sight,
I was compelled by fate,
tail in my bite,
an Ouroboros hate
for the trap within,
eating dust, in decline
Original Sin
inborn by God’s design.
Frogs and toads gather
upon the onyx highway,
squatting in oily rainfall
with their heads raised skyward
and their eyes bulging wide with
unblinking expectation,
like kneeling believers
beseeching their
God
in ardent prayer.
They are a
Heaven’s Gate flock,
a
suicide cult
awaiting the Assumption
to come with
brightening haloes—
amphibious souls
caught between two worlds
and
awaiting the rending
radiance
of swiftly approaching
headlights
from out of unheeding darkness
into unheeding darkness,
an elusive scrawl of
meaninglessness
strewn
messily
along
the
way.
It was not unlike the prognosis of
body integrity identity disorder,
but I had to cut it off,
despite having invested so much of
myself
into growing that misplaced limb of
belief,
faith,
religion;
dogma being a limb grown hitherto
from within the womb.
But I had to remove it
before its
eschatological appendicitis.
And I understand why many people react
violently
to losing their religion,
just as they would losing a
leg
or arm
or even their head,
because it is an attack on the self,
a psychosomatic assault
which is registered as such in the
brain’s errant cauldron of
miswired nerves and biochemistry;
but I had to cut it off
after spending many years
in the frigid frostbite realms of Reason,
cauterizing the rotten wound with
merciless progress.
It was, after all, a
liability soon replaced
by a more efficient prosthetic.
Even so,
there are times when,
in the shadow of fight or flight circumstances,
I feel the irrational itch
of my
phantom limb
and wish to encode myself fully
into modernity’s machines,
finally liberating myself,
if only temporarily,
from superstition’s angsty, tingling
codex of nerves.
What is this errant sensation I feel
in the dark, fearful hours of life?
It is merely a nagging pop-up error
in my cerebral matrix
for hardwired software
long ago deleted.
They thus beat stained, sinful swords
unto penitent plowshares,
wanting to live in peaceful accords
and promising in prayers
to share the bounty of their Lord
with kin and friend and neighbor
as milk-and-honey freely poured
as blood from a saber
so long as plow cut not too deep
the lands they sought to sow
that golden crop they wished to reap
to expose the bones below.
But however they tried to plant a grain
in the Promised Land’s womb
they harvested only the crop of Cain—
a crimson, bleeding bloom.
He was a theist obsessed with knowing whether God did exist,
toiling away in his tottering telescope tower
and gazing into cosmic mysteries, nebular mist—
from stars to microbes, studying hour after hour.
He could measure a planet’s circumference within an inch
using quantum math as a wizard weaves a magic spell
and diagramed the cogs, tightening with an electron wrench
the algorithms of existence, programming them without fail.
And he did such devilry because his beloved wife had died
from the frailty inborn into mortal things,
so he looked to disprove what he had always denied
and then unburden his grievances to the King of kings.
His tower had been built upon the crypt of his wife,
stacked brick by brick toward the vast-vaulted sky,
like a cyclopean cairn, a monument to their former life
and to his God, toward which he turned his lens-powered eye.
He gazed into the telescope, across billions of light-years,
calculating all that was and all that was past,
and, in so doing, finally penetrated the ancient spheres,
coming face to face with his God at long last.
It was a void of life, above being as it was below,
and the empty gulfs were as inert, silent, and still
as the buried body of his wife, whereby he had come to know
the loneliness of the depths, of the universe, and all anyone ever will.
Tangleroot And Tressknot 