Rolling whips of water flame and twinkle in moonlight.
Moths whisper and fluster at the lamp.
Warm summer’s darkness sits wet on my skin.
Everything seems Holy tonight.

He was dead.  Inside and out.  
But still, there was a chance
A tiny hope that if I dug
Him up, for one last glance

At face and form I’d loved so long,
To me a hope, to him a wrong.
And scoop by scoop, the dry cold grave
I shoveled, like some spellbound slave    

And brought him home, to me, ALL MINE
And propped him up to bathe, to dine,
He’s quiet now, so calm, resigned
To be a body deaf and blind.

And when his body start to rot
I loved him more, and so I ought.
And so we live, me and this thing,
His stinking flesh, his eyes two holes
It is enough for me, though,
This dead body with no soul.

I’m no hero.  I’m not wise.
I’ve never been to war.
I have no mental illness.
I’m something of a bore.

But I’ve lost my parents,
I’ve felt pain and grief and loss.
I’ve been in love, and I have seen
the leaves and flowers of the spring
And I’ve felt, beneath my feet,
The warmest earth, the sand and peat,
The softest, greenest moss.

So I clip my toenails, and I floss my teeth
And somewhere in the daily grind
the stuff of poetry I find
In things too often left behind.

Roses have the sharpest thorns
That stain with blood and ***** the flesh
causing but new pain afresh.

And violets? Weeds that strangle all
the weaker, finer buds of spring,
smothering, choking each tiny thing.

With thorn and coil, these flowers of love
are but a boil, a cancer that blights
the subtle, the frail, the fragile, the slight.  

Their promises sour, their perfume is stale.
I don’t want your roses or violets or tales
of longing, devotion, or how you’ll assail
the enemy, the beast.  You no doubt will fail.

So give me a lily, a flower of death.
Or give me an iris, or maybe the breath
of a baby, an orchid. Any will do.
But if you bring roses and violets, we’re through.

Before the bomb exploded, before my own last breath,
The terrorist in bomber’s vest pinned a poem to his chest.
A poem that foresaw my death.  

Can I read your poem?  Can we conceive of what you’d pen?
Did you write of anger? Or pain, or fear or when
your own father went to war, or his father before him?

I might think, some riotous spirit you’d invoke,
a thing of fury, envy, rage.
But rather, you might fill the page
with every pain of every age
a memoir of a stoic sage.

And this great choice before you,
Do you see it as a chance to free your heart, to free your mind
your soul reborn, your choice resigned, your one last final stance?

“Do they not see?”  You wonder, “that I’m not scared to die?”
“That all my wrath, all my worth, this choice will amplify?”  

You’d ask how kings and lords who dine,
who themselves drew the battle-line,
in restaurants, sipping sparkling wine,
now sermonize and opine
your life and mine should intertwine.

We know more before we’re born,
When the soul is still one
with beauty, truth, pure knowing.

All the universe is ours.  
All time, all mass, every atom,
a thousand Angels on the head of a pin.

All paradox laid plain,
All mysteries resolved.
Then the great rupture, pure being
poured molten into flesh.

Charred Mortality pollutes
and warps what once was whole
and infinite. The skin, teeth
bone seem a gift,

but only does it seem.

Clotted and entangled, the mortal self precludes the truth,
erects a shelf we cannot reach, a barricade of rusty razors
against which we smash and die.  
We cannot help but live a lie.
Ask flesh and bone, they’ll tell you why.