Poem: Wax

*

She was wax
in the sun --
existence had to fix
itself on someone.

Oh do not be
like the girl in the parking
lot leaning sullenly
on her thug's hip, enslaved so young.

Everywhere so many
frauds.
The only real authority
God's.

Can you go
blindly
and follow
someone you don't see,

slip the carapace
of pleasing
off, let the apparatus
of church fall with a clang,

let the inner
be exposed
though still too tender
to go outside?

She was not going anywhere.
Where she needed to be
was here
already.

If I could only
obey my own
feel for my
own intention,

nothing but wax
melting purpose-
fully in the flux
of that other one's purposes.

*

Poem: Disarray

*

A sense my disarray
brought me closer to God
on a pathway
almost never trod.

I can't judge I can't
and it's not
that I won't
but I can't do it.

God's own beauty
blew me up like a balloon
Without that air I was nobody
and nothing not even a man

So for me to be obsessed
was just to breathe
God was too close to be embraced
or even simply be with.

In the presence one said
no no give me space
I am buffeted --
but in absence distress

and the old disarray,
which was good
in its own way
because it told me what I wanted.

My craving for immediacy,
considered
okay in a sex criminal or junkie,
in a believer seemed weird,

like a lunge
into worship without
knowledge
to sustain it.

Probably whatever bad thing
anyone could say
about me would cling
as a truth and never flush away,

but my God! this poem
is not about me
but about him.
And he knows my disarray.

*

Poem fragment: The X in the heart

*

In that country it was as if
everyone
was forced to be alive
because deaths were none

deaths were not but only
people disappeared
as if they moved away
without a way to forward.

The deceased
there was not one example of
so it was hard not to exist.
Everyone was alive.

But there was a hole
in the flank of one house
& the people
inside were in distress

at the mess and unfixedness,
her bookshelves lined with gods,
her walls deep with celebrities
in defiant attitudes,

but where was she?
She didn't
even say
where she went.

In the hall
dogs howled --
nobody could console
the child.

But look: everyone
who is is alive & nothing
is gone by definition
no one is missing

there
is only
here
the rest is pathology,

useless tears
of spoiled
children kicking tires.
The world it has been sealed

& those removed
we do not approach
or speak of or to -- we avoid
even their touch

& O! this X at the center
of our hearts no one
will look into ever ever.
We do not look no no -- just fall in.

& O! there are no words
to say or unsay,
only these dissonant chords
we will never play.

*