I.

The door stands outlined in white:
in this dark night, a presence
weighs in from the corridor.

The fan holds a garbled reflection
of stray light on its illusory blade-disk.

I'm talking about parthenogenesis.

How can renewal be born, when
creativity loses her companion,
freedom?

This monotone life lugs on.

II.

The tree shrugs the question off
by her parting arms half-illumined
by the streetlamp.

The late bird of five calls flew away
to a far-off tree, couldn't be
bothered more.

I hear a voice
soft in the setting chill of the distant autumn:
choked eyes beaming in love.

I seek palingenesis.

Check all emails and ensure zero
unread. But
answer none, follow up
nothing.

Umpteenth time through the day.

III.

Autotomy all over again.
Habits
die like tails, to be grown
all over again.

This is an etiological myth.
An apocryphal story that
renews itself on the palimpsest of life.

I must cut my nails.

This tea has brewed too dark.

That ‘merry wanderer of the night’
Goodfellow Robin (our sweet Puck)
lends his name to the pin-cushion
gall, the wind-brought bedeguar
born and bred on rosa arvinsis.

A mass of mossy filament
sticky-branched it turns to
green then pink as autumn
falls, wearing winter’s crimson
‘Fore it dons a reddish-brown.

Inside ‘til spring
this tissued home with food
becomes a womb for
wasps upon the stem,
upon the branch, upon the tree.

How beguilingly
these wood-land growths
are so confined: beneath
the gentle rose - sub rosa
parthenogenesis divine

In a jungle of the senses
Tinkerbell and Jack the ripper
Love has no meaning, not where they come from
But we know pleasure is not that simple
Very little fruit is forbidden
Sometimes we wobble, sometimes we're strong
But you know evil is an exact science
Being carefully correctly wrong
Priests and cannibals, prehistoric animals
Everybody happy as the dead come home
******* nemesis, parthenogenesis
No one move a muscle as the dead come home
We feel like Greeks, we feel like Romans
Centaurs and monkeys just cluster round us
We drink elixirs that we refine
From the juices of the dying
We are no monsters, we're moral people
And yet we have the strength to do this
This is the splendor of our achievement
Call in the air strike with a poison kiss
Priests and cannibals, prehistoric animals
Everybody happy as the dead come home
******* nemesis, parthenogenesis
No one move a muscle as the dead come home
Priests and cannibals, prehistoric animals
Everybody happy as the dead come home
******* nemesis, parthenogenesis
No one move a muscle as the dead come home
How bad it gets, you can't imagine
The burning wax, the breath of reptiles
God is not mocked, he owns our business
Karma could take us at any moment
Cover him up, I think we're finished
You know it's never been so exotic
But I don't know, my dreams are visions
We could still end up with the great big fishes
Priests and cannibals, prehistoric animals
Everybody happy as the dead come home
******* nemesis, parthenogenesis
No one move a muscle as the dead come home

I’ll grant you that it would be possible to track the woman Mary,
who is mentioned about three times in the bible,
and to show that there was no male intervention in her life at all,
yet she delivered herself of a healthy baby boy.
I don’t say that is impossible.
parthenogenesis isn't completely unthinkable,
but it does not prove that his paternity is divine,
and it wouldn't prove that any of his thereby moral teachings were correct.
nor, if I saw him executed one day and walking the streets the next,
would that show his father was God,
or his mother was a ******,
or that his teachings were true.
especially considering the commonplace nature of resurrection at the time.
after all, Lazarus was raised, never heard a word about it,
the daughter of Gyrus was raised, didn't say a thing about what she’d been through,
and the gospels tell us
that at the time of the crucifixion
all the graves in Jerusalem popped open
and their occupants wondered around the streets to greet people.
so it seems resurrection was something of a banality at the time.
clearly not all of those people were divinely conceived.
so I’ll give you all the miracles,
and you will still be left exactly where you are now,
holding an empty sack.

*C.H.

one can imagine an infinite variety of women
& they won't compare to the real thing;
I've never given the Western,
Christian God credit for creating women;
women are always
Parthenogenic; parthenogenesis
is a natural form of voluntary ******
reproduction in which growth
& development of the embryo occurs without
fertilization. development of an embryo
                  from an unfertilized egg cell;
             mid 19th century: modern Latin,
from Greek parthenos ‘******’ + genesis ‘creation.’

The issue is this, Major;
you may travel back to the historical
Garden of Eden & come upon the
original Adam & Eve but we have
no assurance that the primal human
pair will bear any resemblance to
present day man & woman. Willing
to chance it, the Major departed.
Upon his return, the Major reported
sighting what he took to be the first
abortion. When asked about the
mother, the Time traveler went silent,
then said, 'there was no father. It was
a case of spontaneous parthenogenesis.'
The scientists went away scratching
their heads; the Major never revealing
the truth that the woman who more so
resembled a large ape had roughly
taken to calling him "Ah-****'',
the word he'd shout during his ******.