I remember the grief in Samuel
when Saul failed,
like the grief in Nile
when blood crept into it —
just like it creeps into the bones of
this earth.
The rage in grief is distant but distinct,
escorted by bits of frozen nuts
and wizened grains of desert sand,
white assembly of killing spectres in
a background of black eclipse with
lunar talons
and swords of claws
and jars of cold tears.
Oh, how Samuel grieved for Saul!
The mourning is immense . . .
Sempervirence fossilised
along abbeys forayed with hot silt
and Dane guns of lewd hunters
Pulsations and acrid fever,
with the disease of camels, are frequented by
a recrudescence of the mastodon,
In liaison with his extended kinsmen the dinosaurs.
We are livid with mourning,
for the soul of a toothless one
gone from us
this grey day of elegy
and season of potent grief.
Fetters exist, and persist, swinging in
our faces like treasures of hell
where we hear that bug-ridden mats
are spread for us;
there, chants of elegy
hoot,
and black furnaces boil
and smelt
the repast we are to devour.
Abbeys made for monks
Filled now with dirt, dust, and moss
Just tell me one thing
Which believe they're more righteous?
Which of the two truly are?
Uncle Didi stays in abbeys and churches.
Ministers, nuns, monks gather.
Group of seniors, veterans lurches.
He was never a minister -- a butcher.
Behind the church is a shop,
where he used to work and chop.
Slum
Where hard looks and thin soup oppose,
the spider, cockroach, rat, and mouse dispute
in patient litigation or in border raids
our title to this world.
There is no mystery, it boils down to food.
Our ruined lunches providing theirs
as Roman baths provided stones
for abbeys of a different creed.
They too win converts. With earbite and cold fear,
patient, persistent, numerous,
their inquisitors huddle together in dim light
to study our disgust.
Greyly, brownly, blackly surpliced
they muse on our improbable millennium.
How all the ales taste of despair?
Before Belgium my thirst was quenched
Not long ago they all were fair
How all the ales taste of despair
In Belgium abbeys monks prepare
Tripels to make my drought get drenched
How all the ales taste of despair
Before Belgium my thirst was quenched
What trace of shadow, of language long and distempered in memorial
elegy, of abbeys as dismembered dolls lifted from their wrappings, of
hallowed grounds embedded with upturned forks while cigarette
embers chuckle soon sound aslumber in the crooks of pews, of
fallow convictions interred between dour stones of the Thames,
retracted like a lover's kiss, of security in flightless ebon wings
while its mercurial eye peeps on Marriott's old ladies for 30 quid,
of refuse systems as landmarks to history, dear old old Form(al)
city.
no cat no cradle in its strings of moving metal carriages in the heavens
and hell,
Shakespeare Shakespeare! What a play you've made of her, our fair
Lady London
A question that baffles me most
is why some men and women,
at the peak of youthful vibrancy,
opt to exchange the glorious glee
and pleasures of mundane freedom
for a life of somber contemplation?
What is it in the mute adobe walls
of cavernous hallways, dungeons
and catacombs of ancient abbeys
and monasteries that lure them
to a voluntary monastic exile,
a life of deafening quietude?
How can they seem, or be, happy
tending secluded gardens and barns,
or kneeling in candle-dimmed prayer
in the doldrums of deep meditation,
with each ego dignified in humility,
grateful, still laced with childlike awe?
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