Screen Sublime

Your limpid, glowing screen

A televisual mirror, reflecting what you want -or fear- to see

Simplistically, undimensionally substitutes

For Luna's sweet argent light.

She is but a rock slab, dusty and cold

Showing a hard, unfeeling face to the world

(And only about half of it, at that.)

Yet the squared-off static luminescence before you is but a dim pall,

Lacking the quirk of phases, the Dance of Shadow-On-Sphere;

As if concocted beauty and forced agreement could ever replace

Chaos and glorious discomfort!

Do your liquid crystals wax, wane?

Turn from new to sliver to gibbous, heedless of schedule?

If so, embrace the malfunction!

And fear not the E-clipse!

Sail upon that darkened, glassy sea

Let it swallow mistake after mistake

And light the current with bellwhether dreams

As it nudges you along.

-But don't forget to save

Lest you end up 

Right back

Where

Your limpid,

Dig on Digs

Spade into the dead dry earth

Carve out a scattered skeleton 

Of some great deceased beast

Clean, inspect, assemble

The puzzling jigsaw of inferred anatomy

Publish or perish the thought

Clothe mineral mesh with imagined flesh

As those from before stripped the real for a meal

And left bitter pills for the ground to swallow.

How kind of them to anticipate scarcity

And offer means to excavate for laxity,

Never guessing that the golden age

When manna rained and plenty reigned 

Was already tarnished bone-white;

And the wrongs were left

For light to right.

Deify

The desert breeds prophets, it seems.

For lack and desolation

Demand austerity and fatalism

Offering space for belief in return

Provided there is only one.

Henotheism is silent in its solitude

Talking to the One and Only

Becomes an internal debate

An endless war against Self.

A peace treaty demands witness

And companions cry for more for less

Divine laws are carved into sun-bleached rock

Unmalleable at birth, made to be broken

Or eroded until indistinct in interpretation

Like a mirage, simmering in the raging heat

Only to reveal a reflection of an empty bowl

When approached in hopeful anticipation.

Only the great Shadow and its castings

On the sterile earth

Under a blank sky

Waiting to die

And become fuel

For the Chosen

To strangle the air

And broil the land

(Why should the Sun have all the fun?)

Lift Hell from the holy books

And sear it into Life,

Where it ought to be.

Slow-roast it all, ash and concrete and sand

Spin this globe to a glassy eye

Its dark pupil fixed firmly on heaven

Its cornea reflecting weary faces from below

Its hard shell bearing no footsteps to follow

Just the etched sayings of the prophets,

Too loudly prophesying

To hear the here and now. 

Staring longingly at an imagined past

While the future shrivels in mute neglect

And what could have been

Becomes what was, before

You burned the Garden.

Carbon scattered and swept away,

Tracing its passage with elemental progeny

Burning bright silicon

Its eternal playlist looped to endless repeat:

History.