GEHENNA
I
I
Here on the far side of the river valley
A stark burn black and charred
Trees dead and limbless like amputees
Along the blind road
Here a billboard lying across the fields
The deadlands gullied and barren
The world raw and stillborn
The shape of a burned city against the gray
Like charcoaled wastes.
II
No obituary for this cold late world
Dead and no one to mourn it.
A corpse across the street caked with dead ash
A fossil with none to excavate it.
The paling day
Look to the gehenna sky
A dead baby drifting in the washes
its bulbous head blind and its skin curded.
To fetch up in the wickerwork of fallen branches and used condoms.
III
Let us find the evening redness in the west
The blind and cauterized land
All burned to refuse and refuge
Cold to take a life
All lives
All things
This is how it ended
In darkness.
Something nameless.
This the tombstone world we once knew
What once were fields and cities now scabbed over
With barren soot flaking like lepers' skin.
Where has Christ fled to?
IV
The dull sulphur sky of the endworld
The waters black with sludge
Decades of runoff
A river slurrying to a dead current
Telephone poles loop in husked lianas
Across the skeined streets
The far shores where the huddled masses once sought
Now a crumbled waste wracked with ruin
The feral wilds silent and coagulate.
Godspeed America.
V
No time left in the world and yet all the time
No provenance and only providence
The world finally divested of the pest
Origins remote as its destiny and now its turning
What once bepopulated it now only dead clay.
Like things so charged with meaning
that their forms are dimmed away to dust.
VI
Who were they who once lived here?
Walked here?
"No one knows anything about them.
Can't you understand?
They're like martians.
What do you want me to tell you?
Their love for one another overcomes all reason.
Not like other animals.
They won't abandon one another.
They died with all of their kind.
VII
What has become of Eden?
That selfsame paradise lost to they who tended it
anyone who could learn their own fate
and take another course
would only forestall it
And now has it failed.
When a man works as he did for the common good
God? None? Free will?
It depends upon what the meaning of God is.
VIII
Woe is the world
Piles of human bones burned and boiled
Smashed and scraped to powder
Pewter cookpots smeared with blood.
An ancient cannibal feast latent in its coming.
The death reaching even to the earth's very elements
A pristine world sullied by men,
an extension
if not the origin
of its evil complicities.
IX
In this world of the dead evil exists.
Not selective but only opportunistic
Where resides the spirit?
In all things rather than one.
Meet the dark self.
Is there no bloodguilt?
X
And who did Jesus love, friends?
The lame the halt and the blind.
Them is the ones scarred with God's mercy.
Stricken with his love.
Every fool legless and old like you
is a flower in the garden of God.
Except this garden is dead and so are all the flowers
And who is tending it now?
[/I]
Gehenna: A Serial Poem
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