Something @Bigdukesix and @LotusBud can maybe agree on.
TALKING TO LEONARD COHEN’S GRAVE
I shed one scale at a time on this snake-strip, this herpetoerotica
I’ve cooked up for today’s invocation to the sun, muted as it is
behind a scar-tissue cataract, smokey vision through slit eyes,
and so I dance in the vine tangle, become a vine among vines,
camouflaged. Time to slither away and grow my soul since history
is about to select me out. Poet. Shaman of a fading dream,
gone the way of radio and catalogues full of trusses and false asses.
Slither faster: the apocalypse is coming. They done chased love
into the barn and set it on fire and see how the bees swarm
from the burning wood and paint your name in the air above in cursive.
Ain’t no escape. Babel is here. ID politics so reified everybody’s
got a corner on it. Me, what about Me, and you’re wrong
for all eternity. Shadenfreude, shadenfreude rah rah rah.
Who’s going to be roasted in the colosseum this time round?
And it came to pass that we all hated each other so much
we had dreams of jackboots, left and right. These are dark times,
Marat revived to scribble the nightmare. The tower of Babel,
the tower of the Tarot deck, Trump tower, ain’t no flower power
gonna Lone Ranger in to save us. And the earth itself
retching up magma to burn away suburbia—hurricanes, tsunamis,
all agitated by our lead-shoe nature stomp. One asteroid
hiding out somewhere waiting to administer the tercio de muerte.
We wore love out like an old shoe and forgot this old foot
with its old-age talons is the soul itself. We had a choice:
Open or close the heart. Chose one because in the final stupidity
a simple mind is mistaken for intelligence. Some of us opened.
Yes, offered the heart to the fisted pike, here I am.
Get it over with. Let something less Hell-bent be born. Hallelujah.
~~ Doug Williams