Tuesday, February 2, 2010

The elderly guardians of the ancient gate

watch with wizened satisfaction
as the heart-shaped young acolytes
clean up its rust,
fix the hinges,
give it yet another
coat of paint,
and once again make
the effusive signs of greeting
seem fresh and
anticipatory.
Their kind has stood by this gate
night and day in every battering
tempest, through every howling
battle, in every
blistering drought,
and through every earth-ripping
upheaval.
They have watched over it
from the moment
the Persecutor's brain
was flattened by the
electrical storm that
transformed him into
the Fool,
the Slave,
and the Prisoner.
The gate stands ready to greet
the only One
who will ever pass through it, the one whose
arrival must surely be waiting
on the cusp of the
morning,
the one whose long-silenced voice
is even now
readying its
glorious proclamations.
Faded invitations pass
from elderly hands to callow ones,
and all gaze toward the
heavens once more,
waiting for signs
and miracles.




He wanders through the jagged landscape

of the 3-D asylum,
its inmates wrapped in shrouds
made from solemn, decaying manuscripts,
redolent of dried blood,
suffused with the color
of dead seas and prayer-filled
deserts, and
steeped in wrathful love.
They look at him
with pleading, piteous eyes,
hoping to save him from
the worst sufferings of their
fear-saturated
imaginations,
calling out to him
to join the cloud-destined
procession, urging him
onward toward the ladder set in
majestic isolation in the
heart of the windswept field,
its cobbled together rungs
boldly reaching toward eternity.
It is all he can do
to not simply
give in and clamber up
the steps and leap
off the top,
hoping to ascend to
unimaginable dreamworlds
of transcendent peace,
rather than finding out
just how unforgiving
sun-hardened clay
can really be.

The trees are resonating

to the sounds of the sweet voiced
little dinosaurs,
the most earnest of them calling
I am here
I am here
I am here
into the twilight of the caldera,
convincing the credulous apes
that the song is for
them,
that its delicate urgency
is for their benefit,
and that the airy songsters
have no darker purpose
but to convince the apes
that the world is meant
for apish ears alone.