1
When god was a boy
spending the long hours of the primeval twilight skipp’n commets cross the night sky
with his best mate lucifer,
god wanted tusks
like ganesha down the street;
but uncle baal was mishna-bound and plier-bent,
so when god was a kid,
baal set him up on a great dentist’s chair
balanced between the broad backs of the sky-oxen,
and there baal ripped away
four of little jehovah’s back molars;
why and where they fell is known to no-one,
but in the source code for that holy thing read backwards
it is written that the cast teeth were driven into the furrows of eden
and the tree of knowledge took root and sprouted there
from god’s jetsam wisdom teeth;
round, smooth, and bloody.
2
On the cirrus-blank east wall of my apartment
is a replicate map
drawn in a time then called the present, now called 1914
in place then called the empire of japan;
like the constellations of the galaxy circling round the void,
the tectonic drift is depicted to orbit the pacific,
bound by the ring of fire;
reykjavik be damned, this old chart cleaves up the atlantic,
making a frill of the arctic and crowded fringe outta europe;
from cairo to capetown on down, africa is shown striped florid
bleeding british red from khartoum, bruised blue and purple in belgian congo and french sahel
with spanish pus in sahara and italian gangrene in the horn;
but the tangled ink brushed in silken characters
makes elegant sutures edging bureaucracy's bluntness;
the precision of it all fades at the poles,
where icebergs and undiscovered continents fall and recoalesce
into that holy thing.
3
Where the iron bars were doubtlessly set down,
the rust pulses in rough grains in the sidewalk grooves
and the ruddy perpendicular rhythm writes a jon scieszka portrait of christ
lauralled by the autumnal dye of leaves fallen, faded and left unswept;
the pavement leads to the tenement’s grey slab jenga block flank
where an acid-gold nicotine stain is collecting like an oak knot
