Ecce Homo

"Be doers of the word and not hearers only, deluding yourselves." --James 1:22

Even Herod liked listening to St. John the Baptist.

How new is a remembered thing.
It is to remember everything.

Everywhere is sin and in everything:
city's acclimation never tires,
in which the goods of each are weaned, sired,
bought up, dealt to, fecklessly stretched, tight-stringed:
coercion of comfort's namelessness ringed
with slicked voices; debt-racked, grin-backed briar.
Only one step and you're necked in quagmire;
one techni-gain the gainsayers bring,
another is soon to come, given grease.
Everyone assumes virtue's lithe look-a-like
(yet one will-death and new become your limbs)
that preemptively locks on truth a lease,
as one would strike an object pig on pike,
or as one holds thanksgivings back, and hymns.

Those who debate the "ends" of the nuclear genocide committed by America on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, either saying that the ends do not justify the means, or what else could have ended the war, leave me asking, what in bloody hell "end" are you referring to?

The dropping of the Bomb was no end at all. How could it ever possibly be? The unfolding of history will show that it was the incipient beginning of a Third World War beyond reckoning; a demon child born in continuity with the Second. If there was anything final about the dropping of the Bomb, it was that it was the breaking of any remaining innocence that had been present.

How anyone can believe that to be an end to the Second World War is absolutely stupefying.

Before Brueghel

The king is like flotsam, floating down the walk-path,
here to make rounds of his rising citadel;
face of the man-made mount, a vast hollow mask
his counter jetsam: toddler's mud pie, laboured anthill.

Not even honourable mention at the beach's
juried sand castle competition, annually held.
Remotely a tide is slithering away in feathers.
Ceaseless industry in the crannies and niches

fails to beat back the sleepy sense. No one cheats the time
taking longer lunches, doddling during work.
Operation runs smooth by the one who visits
with another at his side, and points his rolled-up blueprints

at a distant stairway, arch or garden square.
Yet some hear words in whispers hard to tell, like the water's
yonder sparkles, a shushing along the level sands:
a magnitude of folly explodes upon our work

like the crimpling sun: come dark your ruin comes. Perhaps
the two bowing fools, down there, worm fools, who precede
the king, are the wisest around, laying down
invisible pavers, founding mirrors of the clown.

Fireworks of bees and other buzzers
make festivity of flowers;
kindle-risen, the herbs in brooms
ring a concerted much ado
calling the tribes down leagues of air
to conviviate and make the nectar's
celestial dance - orbital gathering
the sap proffered through
inconspicuous minaret blooms.
To the thyme, oregano and hyssop,
peppermint, borage, Oswego tea:
airborne jousts jar the filaments,
mercy of flights upon the pollen sea;
sumo bumblebee with his stimen drop
smashbreeds opiate from prior terms,
gratuity and essence, ends and means,
as flippant as grass, as vital as earthworms.
Essential play and playful essence
work in the day-strong, one bow-shot of
duty's what's-at-hand and windy hurry:
if sun climbs, the nectar climbs; the mind
is not a clockwork box, repository
data receptor, stacking library.
But like celled honeycomb, mind is roomed
with wax time-capsules later oozed
with the unexpiring transpiration
of the seasonal unfolding, sun and moon,
cloud and rain: never is it information;
bare knowledge is nothing but deviation,
certain colony collapse disorder
when the clean and well-kept waxen borders
remain unsticked, ungummed, unhoneyed
ossuaries, without even funeral rite
for there is no dead to grieve, no body,
no harvester's decapping knife
to procure the flow, the golden flow,
content fraught, for winter feeding. All is grace that grows.
You can know something without knowing that you know.

Sudden now the mountain is snuffed
that just before had sung and blushed
its face of snow, watched and clocked
the warming light descend,

the while becoming a ghost of glass:
helio-ward the eastern ether
staring through, as after a going lover,

back to which the wing-fledged poplars
run their shades, over flatland lay,
towing behind the temporal slash

that cuts the mountain's base away
in smooth upclimb - earth rim's shadow axe.
Detached like cloud the peakmost then,

dusk's instant holds the open world,
the downs yield up musk essence when
base and mid and cap again, stand sea-green

like a close-at-hand toy or gem
obscurity-flattened, hazening brink.
Sudden now the mountain is snuffed,

in night-world, sends mountain-word
multiplied clear, closer and farther
at once and the same, an everywhere house

self-despoiled, of burial birth,
great the presence, throne unseen,
like a beating white-hot heart that beats

so that would each of our burials be.