Brushes With The Dark Law

 Published in High Shelf issue XVIII, December, 2021

Archness as a Mode of Confession

scours the days, confusing ridicule for teasing
 
the sharpened tongue pries off the barnacles of the Received…
just as my purged personality inventories the past,
logs the time-stamps of pesky Canonical Hours,
molds Golden Calves ready for breaking,
delivers half- baked Culture, DNA and Biography
in the electrodes attached to my shame. 
the old eats the new. What was slaughter
is remembered as mere play,
and Loki plays hooky from Phenomenology
with the usual adult sleep.  Loki
waking up.  Anima
nudging Kundalini and both,
not exactly keeping Chaos at bay,
rather loving the rising Tide from today.
 
lifting nature’s pandemonium
up high enough to put up
sails
and sail away,
with the raging            wind of tricks,
no longer playing the game of looking for increments
in the colonized internal logics du temps perdu 
sealed from a jaunty world too large for jokes.
the past is stand-up comedy.  Today is a battery.
 
that old world of symbols, where tiresome repetition
is the signature symptom of the need to sing new songs.
a new world without symbols, where hunger just sings.
where wit no longer erodes with snappy comebacks
and venality drifts off into grey areas.
another night awake,
numbering my mistakes?
no style in forgiveness, n'est-ce pas? I almost waited too long.