Lord, rebuke me not in thine anger
These bones are nothing—human bones are leaves
in waxed paper—but I am stuck in them;
I am my veins, my thoughts are smeared on them:
where does love begin and my corpus end?
You are the beginning of the end. You
are what I am not and are what I am
and on the page you say you are I AM.
My heart is paper, a veined pressed leaf
that lies on the sea of salt where it fell.
For I have sinned and am a fool, alone
in an old ocean, lost, at home on bones,
becoming comfortable with myself:
as far as anyone knows, good in bed—
the satin one, where you stay when you’re dead.
Psalm 6 (b)
Depart from me, all ye workers of iniquity.
What shall we do to work the works of God?
“Believe.” Iniquity works by itself.
Would you be pure, be pure belief in God
and in whom He has sent. None of this help
for the other side, the mills and engines
of iniquity. Work in the pure Word.
On bad days I am friction—grit and grime—
in the motor of the Ford of the Lord;
on good days I’m a Fifty-Seven Chevy,
small block two-barrel, two hundred fifty
cubes of honey-smooth exuberance: me,
a classic two-tone, steering-mounted shifter.
Juice me up with ethyl, I become all creed;
avenues of asphodel dissolve in speed.
Psalm 7 (a)
God is angry with the wicked every day.
The wrath of blood. Expose it to the air,
and blood wants blood—like water wants the sea,
like fire wants dry company:
everything compensates the nothing that things were.
It must be seen to be appreciated,
the wrath of God. Expose it to the air
and we inhale the icy glass of terror,
reasonably. Lenience is over-rated
in matters of moral accuracy.
No sin goes to waste. We shovel our own
bladders and livers onto our own plates
and knock up hot mock-ups of our own facts.
Dust to dust, seed to seed—it all returns
under the sun and at full speed, daily:
glaciers steaming, bleeding into the sea.
Psalm 7 (b)
return thou on high
The Lord on high is just and fair,
and righteous to a fault;
He is a god when he’s up there,
presiding over all.
Down here he/she’s another thing—
invisible as salt
in use, more intimate than sin;
if found, then found at fault.
A lord almighty’s dignity
requires the proper place—
a mausoleum in the sky,
not someone’s beat-up face.
A deity conceived is free
to be, to will, to do—
not troubled by contingency,
not breathing next to you.
Psalm 8
When I consider thy heavens . . .
Thy heavens frighten me, to tell the truth.
This little Earth’s speed is a constant shock;
you’d think our air would fall off like a sack.
And then where do you go to take a breath?—
the next atmosphere is light years away
and it’s a soup of half-frozen methane.
But then I think that speed is relative,
and distance too. My thought masters it all.
I am the lord of all that I survey:
you reduce everything that you believe.
There’s no catch. I’m as simple as the rain,
and all I have to do is fall.
Psalm 9 (a)
the Lord shall endure forever
Eternity could not exist except
in God; tomorrow is nothing unless
its soul is God; and today is a vast
Korsakov’s Syndrome, blank, total, and rapt.
Then let us ride the emptiness like fleas
on a blind pachyderm—not only blind
but lobotomized; not merely mindless
but possessed of the blitzed
