To the Creationist

The summertime front-door caroler

Tells of a spectacle of ropes and pulleys

Behind the human mind, the grandest galaxy,

The unexplainable labyrinth to eternal relief

Inferred from a book proven by personal belief.

Yours is a bi-millennial song with one ritual cadence.

The nonspiritual world has practiced scales

Religiously in the past two thousand years.

Fresh music sounds sweeter to our dulling ears.

After all, all are after

Power and control with divine teleologies.

Power and control with divine eschatologies.

You say the Creator has left his mark

And I say you are connecting invisible dots,

Yet you repeat:
             The Creator has left his mark.

Humored, I repeat:

At bright midday meticulous creationist,

Squint, see amorphous clouds bear my initials.

Silence of the Lambs

Lambs. The lambs were screaming.

                                    --Clarice Starling

Entities abducted John’s wife.

For two months the police afforded all efforts

And John, while counting sheep,

Waited at home watching films.

The Car Salesman

Human empathy, concerning

That I should pity this drunken man beside me:
Dirt-smudged from a peppered livelihood,

Whose gun clip I hid when he was tripping on mushrooms,

Whose face I was reminded I had almost bashed during the blackout of whiskey,

Who claims a girl who is not his woman—

She remains at home, with her two children.

Again we are drunk, on liquor

And the girl beside him I crave.

This girl beside him he will stave

From me.

Besides, she is beside him and I am beside myself.

She bends for her shoes.

He slips his hand behind her,

Through her legs, over her pants, touching her vagina.

Her alarm turns to charm.

Empathy must occupy the heart of the seasoned judge,
Of the justified executioner.

I am of the new world:

Though exiled in my baser drunkenness

I recognize the verdicts of the older world,

Yet still my hands are clean.

Fungible

A coy glance,

Means a putative acceptance.

Yet not!

Speaking truthfully,

My lines are a tasteless pot of potatoes, carrots and greens;
But said to me is the meat in the stew:

Of all the fish in the sea

None art as fungible as thee.