From the Archive: Holy Sonnet IV

The waters compassed me about, I was
Within a great within; the deep surrounded
Like out the closing maw of hell, compounded
Extract my soul as high abstraction does.
All radiant dolphins lost their lust for life
When they nor life nor lust without beheld:
The faith of pleasure is experiential.
They long to bear, as does the heaven's wife,
And to deliver, once the sea has swelled
Its mystic womb, relief to belief sensual.
From out the whale did vomit my potential
Imagination, that the forms withheld.
I am, as sailor's home is dirty ground,
A hidden treasure wanting to be found.

From the Archive: Holy Sonnet III

III.

There is one force to fuse the universe.

Is jealousy a fallen form of love,

Wrath a misunderstanding of above?

And what our ancestors calld Adam’s curse

A fractured reflection of the grand

And ancient scheme our divine selves created,

When with our seed the future permeated,

With nourishing desire, filled the land.

My love it is a drunken spinning wheel

With one still center which will never move,

And tho the sands the four winds breathing feel.

Our lives exist infinity to prove.

The twist is that the fuel we call desire

Will never be consumed despite the fire.

From the Archive: Holy Sonnets I-II

I.

My metered speech, exalted language –

O yes there is a scheme to poetry.

My mundane words enshroud the lotus tree

And sound of beauty high transcend the page

And music what we hear & vision see

And manifest the cosmos with to be.

But no there is no way to hide my face

Exclusively in unseen silent realms:

Try as I might my ideal concepts lace

Themselves in woman’s eyes & outward imagery

That ecchoes in your rural pen & see

My grace immortal in all art’s embrace.

I speak of everything & all exists,

For thru my sustenance the earth subsists.

II.

My words are music & my thought is food.

I nourish all the cosmos with my pen,

And from it dust from dust will rise again.

All your reflections of my face are good.

My images are bread from which you live.

My outward nourishment permeates in.

The cycles that you breath & eat begin

When one intakes & I that apple give.

O must you woman mourn over your pangs

& you usurping king control our deaths?

No you will never take your feard last breaths,

For from a tree the fire stealer hangs.

My knowledge from the branch is what one eats

And art th’ imagination excretes.

Last Two Holy Sonnets

Exchange this paradise for boundless concrete,

Exchange this wilderness for endless ghetto,

Put junkbone devastation on a meadow,

And want, where once creation was complete,

And waste, of all the finite sums of breath,

False balance of the soil’s promise, replete

And bounteous; or could the cock be free,

Or could the war be won without his death,

Or houses & books existing with forests intact,

Or could the love be full without the jealousy,

Or thirst or hunger slaked with immortality,

Our lives entire without the slightest impact.

Could we do well what still we will do well,

Or life or health or sacrifice for fuel?

On trains across the Rockies comes a man

Who knows the blue lakes as he knows the divine,

And next to obese theists, takes bread & wine,

He will profess since all the hours began,

Till those who pray to know the ample rapturings

Will concentrate on snowflakes in the sunshine,

Till those who preach of martial glory can

Enlist their zeal towards imaginary capturings;

And he will speak of glowings on the surface,

And he will rhyme in every holy language,

And he will find a seed whose roots will wage

The ephemeral crusade to sing in her space.

This consummation then he will consume

When gold & raining peace together bloom.

Holy Sonnet

Are Christians prattling sycophants to God?

A God who messed up sin & pain & hate,

And memory & intellect & fate,

He screwed up nature, life & breath & growth,

And jealously expects no criticism,

He’ll nix a frog & then expect a nod,

Can millions suffer during a loyalty oath,

A vortex in a pyramidal prism,

And yet your coworker, whose gay facade

Emits approving smirks, drops to his knees

To show his boss how much he’d do to please,

Then, starting wars, expects Him to applaud.

If absolutely power corrupts, what fool

Would proudly worship an omnipotent rule?

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.

Sonnet

I’ll copyright the distance from my love -

Monsanto owns the future, but it needs

To loan me interest for its present seeds -

And space & hours measure her remove,

Are ours the motions, ours the times & places,

Is hers the air ten thousand miles above,

Or curse or share the dirt between our faces?

Today, to move an inch will cost a penny,

A ticket is the right to borrow speed,

Tomorrow, if the courts impede, how many

Violations of my intellectual property

Can I collect for every errant weed?

If copyrights are fences in a field,

My love is an investment fraught with yield.