Three Haikus (Shi)

Little girl, unwell,
pulls herself onto my chest.
My love enfolds her.

Sunlight paints our house,
we exult in our blessing;
winter means nothing.

A storm-wracked planet,
ancient sins predominate;
there is still faint hope.

The sickness wraps around you

in many different ways.
For a lot of you, it began in
Sunday school, or the madrassa,
or Hebrew school,
when you learned
(or thought you had learned)
that God only loved people like you
and that everyone else was simply
pitiable,
misled,
deluded,
trash
that was meant for the Fire.
And the fate that was waiting for
the heathens
was really unfortunate, of course,
but it couldn't be helped,
because it was His Will. (Amen)
Everyone outside of your own belief
became The Others, Them, the Infidels, the Terrorists,
the Jihadists, the Zionists, Great Satan, and worst of all
the Eternally Damned who would suffer
shrieking agony every second of eternity
because they didn't embrace the same
absurdities
you did.
And some of you have the sickness to the
terminal degree.
You're the ones who are waiting for
praying for
hoping for
watching for
the End Times, and the mass
killing,
and the victory of Your God
over all the hated unbelievers,
and the Eternal Victory of You--
I mean, God's justice--
over everyone outside of your
righteous certainty.
And I'm standing on the sidelines,
watching in fear,
hearing you damning each other,
and throwing anathemas at each other,
and threatening each other,
and seeing you tear up each other's "Holy Books",
and hearing you invoke His mysterious name
against the ones you loathe even more than your
mythical Satan,
the ones who dared to believe something else.
My only hope is
that in trying to "help God's work along"
or "do Allah's will"
or "interpret the signs"
or whatever other damned fool nonsense
you call it,
you don't end up
killing the people
I call sacred
in the process.
And that last possibility
seems a lot more likely to happen
than anything in your terrible, demented
eschatologies.

The cast changes

at terrifying speed.
At midnight last night
multitudes still drew breath
that now lie silent and motionless.
At that same hour hosts of new
biographies were still waiting to begin,
and they have since burst forth
onto a world that will only know
most of them
in the abstract.
Sometimes I imagine standing
on some impossible precipice
on one of those midnights
and seeing billions of
individual lights glowing in a huge
dark valley before me,
looking like an immense city
in the desert.
I imagine
that I can distinguish each of them
by their individual colors,
ones never seen
before those particular lights
started shining, and never to be seen again
after they are extinguished.
As I watch, some of the lights go dark
forever
and many more new lights
shine forth
for the first time.
It doesn't change the picture
too very much, I suppose,
if I just look for 24 hours.
But if I come back in ten
years, I would see
half a billion of the lights I saw before
now burned out,
and a billion more I had never seen
now radiating.
And if I returned after a century,
very few of the lights that
I recognized at the start
would still be displaying their
unique colors.
I would look at a picture of the
valley taken on that first night,
and hold it in front of me as
I saw the galaxy as it looked
36,525 nights later.
And I would know,
perhaps, that my light
may have been just one of
many, but it had never
been seen before,
and its like will never be seen
again, and
that that is enough.

In my dream he was

alive again, but only sporadically
(or so it seemed),
resurrected spontaneously
and randomly, popping up alive
at unexpected moments
and then vanishing once more.
We were seated in a restaurant
(cafe? bar? Who knows?)
He looked better than I had ever
seen him in life.
He was happy, relaxed, at peace,
smiling warmly all the while.
I asked, "Does your family know
you're here?"
I wanted them to know the good news
that he was back with them, however
unpredictably, so that his
sudden appearances,
like those of the ghost at Elsinore,
didn't surprise them too greatly.
Later, awake and immersed
in the daylight,
I remembered the odd vision,
and hoped
(even though I know better)
that it had not been just mere
random nonsense tumbling
through the weird landscape
of night time,
but rather that it had been
(perhaps)
a particularly long-distance
call.

Many would say that

he was unusual, or even
unsettling
in some ways.
He often gave subtle
(and sometimes blatant)
signs that he was being churned
and roiled by demons of
an indeterminate nature,
and it seemed as if he was always
involved in an argument
somewhere in the recesses
of that eccentrically organized
brain.
Maybe he was crazy, after all.
He embraced no gods,
but was often moved to prayer,
if only to plead for the safety
of those who were irreplaceable,
even though he wasn't sure
just who (if anyone) he was talking to.
He had the opportunity now
to rest on his past life,
but he still felt
an amorphous challenge,
emanating from a half-remembered dream,
to complete some final task,
which he was approaching
in a haphazard,
halting way.
He knew a great deal and still felt like
it was the first day of kindergarten.
The Finish Line was now visible
and yet he was just getting started.
He understood less than he did
when he burned with that
diamond-like fire
all those brief decades ago.
Words were his life, and yet they were
now increasingly hidden, as if they resided
on a murky, darkened hill.
He sighed for the lost, torrid vigor
of a young man in stud,
but he saw the newly minted adults
going through
the anguish of being the New Players
in the Oldest Game, and he wouldn't
trade his comfortable Peace Settlement
for their romantic trench warfare
for all the pages in The Joy of Sex.
And he had been wrestling, like Jacob,
with a stranger, not just all night
but since he could remember,
and he was beginning to suspect
that his opponent
bore a striking resemblance
to a face he had seen many times
before, and
would not be someone
who would bestow a new name
upon him.

You think you can fool me

with a day right out of the Pastoral Symphony,
and a wife who is better than I deserve,
and a surfeit of glorious food,
and the fellowship of countless people
of gentle good will and friendly disposition,
but I'm too fast for you.
The nicer you make it for me, the more
I'll prove you wrong.
I'll let in all the midnight thoughts, latent
fears, babbling nonsense,
and bad drama I damned well want to.
You think you can make me forget who I am
by making my life blessed every day?
HA!
I earned it, pal!
You're trying to make me finally take that
barbed wire shirt off, the one that represents,
to an audience of exactly one,
all of my mundane, utterly ordinary suffering,
so I can be a Happy Idiot and enjoy
what 99.9% of the rest of the world
doesn't get to have.
You think you're so smart,
you think you're going to get me
to put down that globe,
accept what I can't change,
take those nails out of my hands, and
stop starring in my own (long-running)
version of Days of Our Lives.
You even want to take away
the most real satisfaction
I have, which is the fact that you will
never, ever make me look only at what's
in front of me
and love only that
and revel only in that
and be at peace, if only for a while,
only with that.
Well, I'll show you!
I'll show...you...
I'll...

Its folds and valleys

didn't evolve in order for you
to comprehend the Ultimate Truth.
Its multitudinous, spindly little branches
aren't there so you can contemplate
the whole Universe and embrace it
in your grasp.
Its contentious family doesn't exist to prop up
your philosophy
or your gods.
And most of all, it didn't become what it did
in order for you to figure out
all the tricks it pulls
when you're not looking
and the hocus-pocus it performs when you are.
It's there to help you figure out
how to get enough to eat
and how to find allies to protect yourself
and how to kill anything that threatens you
and how to convey a part of that continuous
river running through your head
to others.
And it does all this
so you can survive long enough
to find someone to screw regularly
so that others like you can come into existence.
It's a jerry-rigged, jumbled up collection of
parts that proved useful, and nothing more.
It's a shack surrounded by a house encased in a mansion,
and you live in all three.
So stop expecting it to make you Happy,
and stop your absurd game of telling yourself
that you've Figured It All Out, and most of all
stop your village idiot proclamations of Certainty.
All the noble aspirations it's given you
are an afterthought,
and the more you try to figure out the gifts it gave you
using the gifts themselves,
the more you will become Alice
falling down the rabbit hole.