The Mud God

When the low plains of Babylon
drowned in the year of the Great Flood,
the waters ebbed on the seventh dawn,
but then came the god of the mud.
He swelled up from the sprawling swamp
to gift mankind with fertile soil—
he was a scheming psychopomp
and gave them crops that would not spoil.
It was he who took the drowned dead
in exchange for the fertile years,
for he was the alluvial bed
that fed from sacrifice and tears.
From the corpses sprang up new crops:
grains and sweet fruits, row upon row,
and wheat and barley and the beer hops
with which they washed away sorrow.
Drunk and full, they gave sincere thanks
to the god that drowned their dear kin,
gathering and singing on the banks
where the mounds of mud bloomed again.
So Sumer flooded once a year
and the god rose to bless the plains;
a god of death, life, silt, and fear—
praised and abhorred, like heavy rains.

By No Other Path

(An atheist’s advice for believers)

You think that upon your earthly death
you will exhale at last your final breath
and sprout from your ghost the angelic wings
to carry you aloft, to the King of Kings,
but with whom you count yourself there among
depends on how well you climbed each rung
of the burning ladder that leads to Heaven
during your life, enduring the Seven.
You cannot fly high by flapping tongues,
but must give with open hands to take the rungs—
by giving up your all with selfless alms
and bearing the wounds of Christ upon your palms;
for it is a burning ladder you must ascend,
each rung a Hell before your End.

21st Century Wickermen

A slow fire burns
in the temple of the world
and by the smallest turns
we are roasted as we are twirled
around a workaday spit
for someone else’s meal,
cooked however they see fit
to have their cannibal fill,
for we rarely sacrifice
as we did in days of old
when a virgin would suffice
in the ancient pagan hold—
a throat slit, a heart torn,
the blood of one’s firstborn.

Nowadays it is a subtle price
which the poor must always pay,
an odds and ends sacrifice
on every menial workday,
for life is made of dissected time
and our time is given to others—
to those willing to claw and to climb
up the heaped bodies of their brothers.
A little time sacrificed from a lot
to benefit only the wealthy few;
a little from which is thus bought
the Devil’ intractable due.
“The cost divided among so many
amounts to little,” they say, “if any.”

Yet, instead of notches on bone
we have notches on clocks;
instead of feudal seeds sown
we have dividends and stocks;
because many are slowly killed
in the dead-end, daily grind
to maximize the market yield
for the stockholder hivemind,
which is why the aristocrats
overwork others, and fire some,
just so their bloodline brats
can inherit a bigger kingdom.
The only way to insure your blood
is to make others toil in the mud.

Blood may not stain the chopping block,
but blood does sustain the gears,
lubricating the industrial clock
for machines throughout the years.
Paradise has always come with a cost
even in a world of cornucopias,
and our guilt will never be lost
in these ostensible utopias.
There is a reason the word “fire”
is used when terminating you,
because they are adding you to the pyre
of the unemployed, too.
A pink slip is the pagan mark
to light the wickerman’s spark.