A colleague told me how
“All poems are hate poems.”
And I battered this wondered
Clobbered up like mudpies flopping,
Topped, and tossing between
Palms. Qualms pulled apart,
Stretched, stringy like
Taffy, sticking tongue to teeth, why
We can barely spreak when
We touch upon love.

There is Love – and there is Hate – two sides of the same blade
That steams your blood –
Smoke signals to
Your loved ones that you – in one way or another –
Are still orange-warm.

In this forgiving House of Blue Light – singing of malefic effigies:
Christ Light. Water light.
Trickled dirt along the corridors, wood-swollen, too.

Grab the safety handles of Hate – embrace them, know them, love them.
Hate is the pause between heartbeats that exhales the light in your veins.

At three in the morning,
The mists hang, mixing
With the grass,
An unscaled rainforest,
Fog intertwined with the blades
Delicately, like the last puzzle piece
Being placed.
A flashlight shines on a snowflake--
The first of the season--
As it spirals slowly,
Slipping silently by stretched branches,
Stopping softly on the green.
The light shuts off,
A door lock clicks,
And a plume of black erupts
From a chimney.

These are the signs
Of a slow deterioration
Into what is expected to be.

And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales:
     and he received sight forthwith...      [Acts 9:18]

When judges decipher what lawyers speak,
offended defendants may leave confused.
Legalese labyrinths capture the weak;
Babylon's law makes for justice refused.
Enshrined at the ziggurat's doubtful peak
tyrannic gibberish mocks the accused.
He blinks at the courtroom, bewildered freak
as sentences are uttered unrecused.
Cuneiform marks... codified patter—
who dares define such esoteric terms;
in Heaven's eyes does it even matter ?
While the sacrificial defendant squirms,
Justice, unblinded, lifts higher the sword
unscaled eyes beholding—her gaze restored.