Conflagration,
Conflict & confusion.
Consternation,
What comes, and has been.
Condemnation,
Of fact, and of fiction.
Comatose.
One world, many nations

There's a secret only one angel knew.

It goes like this:

       There is a place that once grew.
             A garden made for two.

A tree.
   A treason.
      Mankind evicted from Eden,
      ... for an obscure reason.

Curious,
An angel flew down
-biting into the apple-
Adam and Eve had eaten.

Because the Lord's plan must be broken?
The Angel pressed their luck...
But ...why plant a tree,simply,to test their trust?

Now in a rush to reveal what was learned
-before they could soar past those
pearly gates-
Lurid illumination eviscerates their pristine wings.
                        
                         The Lord sees All:
                            and He is Irate.

They create a crater as they collide with our world;
exiled forever from the Lord's estate.
They awake as a woman for their costly mistake.

Her place amongst the holy host is gone.
Cursed with forbidden knowledge.
Awareness of right and wrong.
Exchanging a halo for free-will:
Heaven is no longer a place she belongs.

The Angel outcast.

Cast out from her home.
Forced to roam this world all alone.
She sought out the Truth;
Then her faith became clouded.
There is few who listen to what she says now:
yet still she shouts it.

She tells me-the former angel yells,
"Devour fruit from the Tree of Knowledge
  ...if you dare.

but beware!!

God did not plant that tree...
    
It was already there."
  
-

When a surgeon had to operate on a man, she was ******.
She botched the operation because the patient was sexist.
She learned he was sexist and botched the operation so that he would die.
She bragged about it to her friends, it was something that she did not deny.
But she didn't expect one of her friends to turn her in.
Now she's rotting in prison, she's no longer a surgeon.
She doesn't even realize she did wrong, she thought she had the right to ****.
A surgeon is never supposed to take a life, it's a surgeon's duty to try to heal.
She thinks her patient was **** but he was a better person than her.
At least he didn't **** another human being, he was not a murderer.

The Human dream became the Martian dream as we slept on our Mars-bound voyage. We could see colonies amidst landscapes pristine, teeming with strange Martian plants discovered post-bloom.

The Martians were adorned with ivory carvings and had surrounded themselves with esoteric paintings of marauding faces. They spoke in strange tongues, switching between Martian and another almost incomprehensibly clandestine tongue of barbaric intonation. And although they clutched sharp, ivory spears with a fierce resolve, they remained docile in our presence, and told us of the vivid dreams they had engaged in as a group prior to our arrival; abstract dreams, tinged with fragmented images of insemination and visitation by the Mars Moth-Man— he who was oil-funded, and had been delivering concrete messages to the people of Mars ever since the first settlers had arrived in the distant past.

But, once we had truly set foot upon Mars— from outside the strange realm of dreams which lives solely within our collective mind's eye— we could not have foretold, our shared dream was revealed to be a sprawling wasteland of jagged rocks and infertile soil.

I grabbed her by the waist in the disco-ball light
And said that we didn’t have to stay here and dance if she had any better ideas.

Everyone smelled like liquor,
Vultures circled in masquerade frowns to listen in on our plotting,
To drag our way out of the party
Toward somewhere more secluded.

But the alone time we made for ourselves was just that,
Alone in the most quiet and heartbreaking ways
That could only ever materialize when you’ve communicated perfectly with someone
By a complete accident of circumstance.

And the balancing act of the words you’ve placed rigidly inside of hers begin to unravel
Beneath the weight of all the questions you ignored to ask.

Separated by progress
We live in isolation
Socially stagnated
Growing ever distant.

Focus further inward
Without hesitation,
Cutting off future conflicts
Before they even happen.

Perspective and reality
No longer separate
Echo chamber catalysts
Shattered-faction fragment.

Elitist tactics brainwash
Entire populations,
Localised abundance withers
With dying vegetation.

Doomsday clocks lurching
Our salvation diverges
Shouting to the twilight sun
We share but false elation.

Entire regions' designated
Means of production
No new doctrines allowed
All hail consumption.

Ever directionless, at a loss
Regressing into violence:
Revolutionaries' proudest
Of our failed revolutions.

Living out our dreams
Of solitary bliss,
Live alone in harmony
Or die in the abyss.

What piece of work is man
That chooses inhumanity
A species in a chasm
Led by mere savages.

Before hearing about your death
I began a novel inspired by you
and your struggle with the truth--
The truth of who you were,
what you wanted of life and of me.
And it became a journey
into the past, into a life
that had happened before
we met, decades ago,
and after we parted for good,
I wove a new life out of remnants,
of things I knew or just supposed.
And like a good researcher,
I told of your parents' failings,
the darker side of love.
Of your grandmother and friends,
and even your cousin who
brought you to me,
Luring you out of the homogeneous crowd
and into our perfect valley--
"the land of spires and dreams".
I even spoke warmly of our artless love
and our drifting apart like ghost ships.
After our second parting,
when you left the mortal coil,
I tried not to reminisce about us,
for the story was yours, not mine,
But I fear that a mirror kept
cropping up behind me and
around corners, erasing mystery.
Narcissus caught me time and again.
Even so, I created times for you
that I had never seen or heard.
I have you swimming off La Jolla,
traipsing on mountain paths
in the wilds of British Columbia,
or arguing with your wife
in that mansion you dreamed of.
I invented a girl you would like
and two kids who loved you
in spite of everything.
Your memories of me became
less urgent, locked in a chess box,
in songs or on film, hidden away.
I analyzed your youth, your vanity,
lust, boredom, mistakes and age.
And when it came time for you
to make a decision: to stay or go
again, either west or east,
I stopped and looked over your life,
rolled out flat, like the American plain
from western crags to eastern city
and like a broken record,
the choice shuttled back and forth,
not letting me decide for you.
Glancing at a photo
of your childhood home,
I realized at last,
not that you had died too soon,
but that I really never knew you.