A Troubled Genesis

A Troubled Genesis

Beginnings do not pop
into reality, nor did that first
creator suddenly decide that he
was incomplete. Like us, he had
to first associate at least two things—
big bang was not alone,
despite its cosmic, roaring birth
that down the line would spawn the earth
and all its sibling particles to dance
among the stars.

Pop! Another isotope unfolds a man,
and leaves its own mate shrouded
in another mystery, another
thousand ages of a mystic night
while the deities are winking
at each other. No wonder some of us
are weary of creating creeds,
of using inverse telescopes
to focus on the seeds
inside the womb of Mother Universe.

It's recess time! Our present
calls us far away from weaving myths
around a non-existent past,
to tap instead our youth-enraptured sun,
to grasp a new eternity
that sings of finite gods no less divine
than their original, whoever she may be...
nor may indeed demur to see
her Zeus-like counterpart on high.
~

Forbidden Dreams

Minutes from oasis in the night,
there is a flight together
that my body and my mind prepare,
writing chapters in another consciousness
that takes its joy from that entire state
of mindlessness, both past and future bound
upon my pillow.

It is a school that I attend with caution.
If I could just prepare,
I'd meet the wondrous monster
on a plain that I design. There it is
to twist the time, conflate into an "I"
already dead, already disappeared,
forgotten at the dawn.

Yet as intent is stronger still
then from the well inside
both apogee and perigee are one
Now like a sentinal upon the path
the watch is centered here and I may
reach the corner of the wind and
throw the swift forbidden dreams away.

The night is mine to own,
to revel in, to play,
and in its own illumining
to frame the blazing day.
~

Apologia of an Iconoclast

The maker of the universe is God.
or so I read; if that is so, I need
to be aware that all that is, is good--
or he, himself, is not. But that is rot,
of course.

Then Aristotle has his say. I may
not slay the progeny of Good, or I
betray the logic of my thought and thus
create anathema; no God am I,
or might I then become, to my dismay
a schizophrenic paraclete!

Oh I am very good at chopping heads,
and yes, I see the irony in that, for how
may I be made of God and still believe
in brother enemies when each of us
shares not a care for his own blood?

Ah, no, I fear there is no room for this
dear papa in the sky who makes such vile
pretenders down below. Hard-pressed to reach
Him here, they press their knees to earth, look up
and try to make amends, while seeking help
to go on sinning just a few years more.

But in the process, there are those who see
that He is not the major fellow up
above, but us together here below
and stretching to the stars in this
vast playground, yes, forgetting who we are
sometimes, and pressing forward to the mark

like old St. Paul, (who could not get it straight)
his fearsome lightning-tossing deity
defines the universe that we are now
and all of cosmic time and space is God.
~

The School of Dreams

Asleep, recalling yet again
a moment on the path that we call life,
and quickly gone—rejection's pain
now too acute to cherish,
still those soft curls are filed away
in memory much too intense
to be forgotten.
But Wisdom speaks to say
a past like this must never be
the prologue to a second vanity.

The only moment is the one before us,
close at hand to touch, explore
and reel at all the priceless possibilities.
This is where repose may win the night,
to take the now and flood it with new light
to give it of ourselves, our old remembering,
our hopes and manufactured dreams,
the love programmed within us;
all the sweetness of a smitten child
is ours again, and now to give away
for this is all we have.

The battle lines within are clear;
the present must regain the day.
Yet through it all, the dream retains
a maddening, persistent vision
of a little cardboard box inside a drawer,
and laid among its cotton fill
is Charlie Brown,
his own creator also still,
while Charlie's slumbers prowl the night
with deathless dreams
of that red-headed girl
inside another box somewhere,
forever out of sight.
~