That God of an Evil History

In the nature of each broken man!
Like a dry fire to the tongue
...relentless and incessant fear
toward which our feeble love is flung
perfecting every hollow word
...Hell's grace in Heaven's bells are rung
...and though such conscience is absurd
the fire is the trial of man,
there simply is no trial
by which the fires of God
would stand or fall .

We forget those things that we have done
and only know unworthiness
...a coward's act, beneath a leer!
That God of an evil History!
That graceless arbitrary song!,

by which the least among us die
and lacking death and death's mercy
give the mote unto the eye
...the eye and mote...the two the same.

Oh whimsical and fiery bird!, enigma!,
by which innocence
is always
justly murdered,
and innocence and its cowardice
are always justly blamed.

Living on Eternally

...among my many shady habits
in a cold and eastern region
where the madness
seems quite tragic
...while the world hangs upside down
...the strange facts
of poetry...shaminism, evil dreamy magic,
dipped with tooth and tongue and pen
and done-in by the great machine
by the least loved
loveless clown
who laughs and scowls
as he undresses
in a cleanly dusted bloodless
and unhappy brain

...a coffin like a bloodless brain
through which the coward's soul confesses
the more to drink,
to drink and bleed

.."the two, the same."
the bats who haunt the valley think
"...to drink and bleed
a human-
and a vampire-
need..."..among the near insane.

What the Europeans Might Have Learned from Alaska

Winter
is so profound
with dust and magic. And good men
pray to their god and essence
and to the small self
that has learned abeyance
even beyond the tribal stricture
and out toward the burning stars
or the raging
storm of snow
that lasts all night

like a wild dog that howls itself to sleep.

Or in facing naked fact
like the thin leaves
and twigs
that skirt the permafrost-sky and eons

in those most northerly
and sullen divides

of ice in the heart
that lets loose a howl
in nakedness
and clinging

where the Eskimo woman's breast
in that brown nipple
is offered
to a childlike lip

and feeds and fondles with a lust
to take gently as well
as a lust to give
warmth
in the freezing night
through which somehow
we all must live....