The Human Refreshment
After the gawking and eye-rubbing
a culture discovers through lab coats,
periodic table, and Petri dishes.
Once upon a gawk and eye-rubbing
tribes assumed through vestments, tapers, wafers.
The prop designers answer to scientists now,
where the scapegoat, guinea pig,
and two from every species
that have not yet gone extinct
travel around a sun:
Passengers and crew squeal
in an orbitting atmospheric cage.
The replaced priest and minister
plead and pray for followers
to use imaginations to form
neighbourhoods, churches, congregation.
The declining stages creak and wobble
under the weight by present tenses
and the new masks and theme music.
Victimhood adds to the pigeon
a mouse in a maze
until squinting brings onto lids
knuckle massages, re-viewing,
and the always inadequate fix.
Visiting Hours
(for Suzanne)
I will write you in the dream ministry
and the yellow marks it has on mad sundials
like knuckle stars from ivory rulers.
Each bit of fractal magic passed
from the apple of Adam's eye, now sleeping.
The porch skeletons and goblin flowers
hatch on our deserted moon villa,
on the son you whisper in a siren's tune
to draw me back in unyielding midnight
to the stray columns of potter's field
to the dead's eyes puffed with pale gold.
I have my finger on this doorbell,
a caretaker's cellophane house
strained with erased faces.
The next time you return
in the moonlit monstrance
in this dry rain drop hour by hour
in the circus columns for potter's field
I will wait patiently in a night's dilated strata
I doze in the promise of your nearness,
Your pinhole eyes buzzing clusters
The buzz as in a jar the draining pallor
Pinhole eyes
That sting like stuffed bees in a jar
I know it's been well for
past an hou-
