Cobra Lunch

The t.v. screen goes blank, then green,

Split by a serpent's pupil, black.

Down glowing matrix glass, a track

Of dead cells slice.

Stunned like a rat, pink-nosed and fat,

'Neath shadows of the sheaves of grain,

Slumped, mesmerized, in awe of Pain,

I hear soft words that reassure

"Don't fffear! Don't move! Don't even sssstir!"

Hiss-words my sad, small self entice.

The galaxies wheel back and freeze

My steady heart to ice.

O cobra saint, unwarm, unquaint!

Sink onto knees! Oh no! Oh please!

Despair is Joy! The spirit longs!

-- Attention! Rapture! Welcome fangs! --

Longs to endure swift venom pure,

And bid adieu to air.

The Taint

From infinite black emptiness

Stung here and here by burning points

Disturbed by waves of gravitons

Thus momently asserting time

She spies and picks a piece of light

And holds it up to study close

A gem exuding beauty rich

Complete, precise and intricate

Of color, clarity, and shape

Of aromatic bouquet ripe

The tears well up and brim her eyes

As joy transmutes to helpless fear

Then anguish, crushing to despair

When, straining every cell, she tries

To now recall the place from where

She plucked the gem of crystal ray

To fit the template back to stay

But finds on fumbled, failed attempt

She cannot ever put it back

No treasure's from decay exempt

Once taint, it rots to empty black.

Terrible Beauty

Mister Smugly C. Confident lies in his bed.

He's thinking his thinking is All in his head.

With terrible beauty the mind’s eye can see

Comes Allah, blotting memory, meaning, and “me”.

Blotting meaning from “me”, like a match on the sun;

One is all endlessly, one is All, All is one. 

T.K.O. Life in Forty 

the dark dark waters of the lake

that look so cold

lie, lightly furrowed under lowering clouds

below pine-shaggy hills

Don't dive. Don't even think it.

Stay as you are.

Mostly now I listen.

I'm forty-one.

My kids tell me about life.

My wife has left.

Do people learn?

I ... nations ... any one sad sapient soul

Look.

Me. People passing in the street.

History. Science. Philosophy.

The Eternal Sea of Strife called "Daily Life".

Femininism.

Deconstruction.

HAH!!

Mostly now I listen.

The water looks so cold.

I'm forty-one. 

Non Nomination

Do not name it.

Hear you?                   

HEAR ME!

Do                   not                   name                     it

Names are dungeons

What the trembling aspens murmur

Seas eternal faintly whisper

Deep within the Earth a shudder

As the stars shrug off their armor

Suddenly, you're in the timber

See the nameless tracks ahead ... there

Stalk the scent in desperate hunger

Poise predation's ancient silence

Rustling grasses, trickling sunlight

Scent the blood; you are the deer, and then

You are the cat. 

Just for today                        

In every way that meaning may be done

It may be un

The concrete base where mind is traced

Will be erased

Thus in capricious agony

In garden-jungle Memory

There flits my Sanity, my Me