Gary Onderisin | + Follow Poet |
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No House Built On a Bridge, Part Two

2.



"Those who have gone astray, whom [the Holy Spirit] itself begets, usually go
astray also because of the Spirit.  Thus, by this one and the same breath, the
fire blazes and is put out."

--- From the Gospel of Phillip

*******

Alone, so very alone, one can only be hard-pressed, can only 
Be cowed and lied to, be otherwise foiled in our Material World for so long:
That great "Entheogen" Hiway finally opens invitingly before one, tantalizingly -
Disappearing out of sight, over the horizon:
Turn 'round any street corner there. What does one see?
The local shopping mall beckoning, alluring.
But mired in conspiracy:

Mall.
Mall the Merciless.
Mall the Unheeding.
Mall the Hidden Destroyer.
The one, baleful Cyclops' eye ever watching.
Darkness waiting to pounce.

Endless, close rows of cars
Parked head to toe and visa versa.
Like an endless sheet of chain mail gleaming dully -
Across the expanse of the mall parking lot;
Rows of cars like scales on a fatally errant dragon,
As far as the human eye can see.
But surely there's more here than meets the eye.
Surely. Now with new eyes, one looks again, 
Looks for the first time:  Scales duly drop from
Eyes of the spiritually blind,
And the weigh scales all Creation right themselves.

[In a perfect balance

Perfect placid Gnostic twin fish,

Languid, pearl, and drifting,

Bathing in the Light,

Rise,

And the blind see.]

Now one goes down another street corner.
(It really could be any other one.)
Down the Hiway there:  Another world unfolds:
The city is "rusting out", the city is betrayed,
Abandoned in a fog of soulless economic manipulation -
And predation.
A city water tower, the city's name painted across it,
Tilts, failing to one side, scarred and with peeling paint,
Like a doomed, industrial Leaning Tower of Pisa.
More "ruin ****" for the hard of hearing, left behind by
The heedlessness, by the "hard of loving".
Stagnant green ponds grow by silent rusted factory production lines.
Trash from a "trashed" lunchroom high on a hill.
One just has to stop and look again at all of this,
One just has to stop and listen intently:
One's ear is filled duly with that glorious Hiway's siren song:
Now there's Life, now there's Light.
Royal purple flags up high, ripple in the wind.
Opulent Byzantine towers rise, gleaming in the deep blue
Proverbial vault of the sky.
Magical, brave mirrors.
Pools of gold.

Copyright © Gary Onderisin | Year Posted 2017

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