Two More "Holy" Sonnets

And heaven’s a palace hidden in a wave -

Couches & porches embedded with lapis lazuli,

Chaldean lanterns designed by Dale Chihuly -

And hell’s a prison buried in a cave -

The vales & swales all desolate & gray,

A heat-death, or a dearth of oily energy -

One hundred too important years of mystery,

And then a changeless judgment all eternity,

One hundred years to test how we behave,

Then fiery coaches take us past the sky

Where houris on Aeolian dulcets play,

Or tedious pits where popes & satyrs rave.

So if this transient courtroom matters there,

We might consider keeping better care.

Inside my pit of anguish, I surveyed

A destitute & angry heterosexual:

His shallow rage as damningly reflexual

As white Narcissuses in autumn fade,

As all whose hatred renovates revenging

Into that surging that it seeks to quench,

As all whose dismal stench invades the bath

In which they soak to purify their wrath,

And blood & oil rending, mixing, singeing,

That burnt & frozen crevasse in his loathing,

His rabid lips onto his mirror frothing,

Until his backward image is his path.

Each neighbor earns mine own self’s love, he said,

And down with me into my pit he hid.