Too Much Piles Up

The squalor we live in comes from our pores,
excretions of consumers' entrails--
all the wrappings, all the cars, all the cellphones,
or other blessed technology,
(Hosanna to the microchip!)
oozing down streams of moribund oil wells,
photochemicalling ourselves into new creations.
Microscopic plastic beads float in our water,
our air, our bodies metastasizing us
into hydrocarbon chains of permanence.
What need of God when eternity flows
nanopiece by nanopiece in the blood,
collecting in the liver--that prophetic organ--
the first to go.

"Roll me over in the clover and frack me"
is the hymn we sing, embracing
horizontal drill points like St. Teresa
clutches ecstatic darts of Christ.

Make us true believe while our pores
bear witness to doubters
bound for holy decay. 

The Impossibility of the Jesus Poem, for Holy Week

Begins with the mystery of the hows--
how to believe,
how to love,
how to feel,
how to believe. Again the how
returns to face the world.
Jesus entered and brought hows--
how to be born--once, then twice,
how to live last yet first,
how to love that rascal neighbor
who's howless about his life
and you're supposed to love but can't stand
the S.O.B.
How again, to live like Christ
has entered your marrow.
To die. How? Always death
howling: how on the cross
could this have happened?
Howling at the Father's desertion;
how to let the pain take over--
unhealed. How the healer dies.
How recorded in dead language;
how disected words evicerate;
how to find the holy.
How to pray for the hows.
How impossible.

Aisle Four Blues

I get lonely in the grocery store

at the end of Aisle Four between Produce

and Meat. A longing filled emptiness

creeps off the shelves, shelves crowded

with Platonic Dreams of perfect meals

served to welcome mouths, promising bliss

and treasured joy that’s as hollow as cereal

boxes gutted with sugar puffed lumps of corn.

I trudge the cart of snarking food that winks

and smirks, knowing the lies they carry

of joyful meals spread with honor

and sanctity—the kind that Jesus ate

when he sat down with sinners and sluts,

making dinner a holy, not the common feeding

of livestock at the trough.

I get lonely, envisioning feasts never served,

at least on this side of paradise.

Moonskinned Healing

You reach into the harvest of moons

on a March morning, plucking them—

luminous melons to caress and admire

before knifing their thick skins

that mirror your thin-skinned hollowing

when the words of the Beloved cut

so close to the bone that your sinews

barely survive the slicing,

that seeks the seeds buried

beneath onioned layers of fallow flesh,

too long turgid in weightlessness.

These moonskinned seeds burrow roots

in star patterns to catch the Beloved’s

invasive gaze that heal the wounds

made at the harvest of your morning.