God is a gold box in the sky
With a kind of mermaid tail
Without the flippers
And just a few strings of hair
God made some people
But not others
It's not easy for God to tell
Which people God made
And which God didn't
But the people can tell
They pluck out God's skinny hairs
Until none are left
They tell God's lies to each other
Because truths are too tender
To survive the pressure of their mouths
Sometimes, God teaches people -
Both those created and those not -
Something about emptiness
God puts the little children
To bed in the ocean
It is black and shows them how endlessness
Has its borders in blindness
The older people God allows
To run around as if awake
This is a good joke
But also full of God's weird little lessons
That are like real life
God has an endless capacity
For learning
If you ask God a question
God will say 'You tell me
Then we'll both know'
God has a believable story
And all kinds of see-throughable disguises
God is a broken violet
In the nape of the sky
 
 

GOD'S GENES

'Everything has genes of God inside.'ⁱ
These genes wield the tremendous clout of remorse.
Inheriting them means inheriting the game.
The need to be an offender.
These genes align us with each other
                    so that we may see how to destroy each other.
Sweets from a stranger.
Kindness of the stranger.
All those years spent as a potato pay off
                     when one begins to invent the soup.
A sad woman's days are relived, quivering and literal,
                    as an earth-bound frond which rakes across your hand.

The genes of God that are in everything are ritualized, as is the visit of a butterfly to a flower. They give rise to deformity, monstrosity and distinction. They are, themselves, a trauma. An interrogation. From time to time they have no definition and then the song begins. It is a song of pursuit. Sung by the creator and the created. Both pursuing. Both pursued. Genes have no inkling of these finer points. They simply sing along without understanding the words.
 
 

ANTICIPATING THE MAIL AT THE SAME TIME; NONDESIGN

Anubis - "ancient Egyptian jackal-headed God of the dead." I turned the postcard over, certainty pre-cancelled like the stamp. I didn't know anyone on holidays. Anyone who had left the country. Anyone Egyptian. But it was addressed to me and covered in words still and cold, like a comment left frozen in a block of ice. I touched the words and overhead grew a bird on fingered wings. At my feet flew a flower I could not find the scent of.

Dear You Dear You Dear You. Whose initials happen to make up the world.

"There is a difference" I read "in the ways we know one another. Here the sun is a Chinese magnolia, large and white and inattentive. There the sun in its nest sits hot upon your head, oppressive and patient in its long days. Here we feel free from the taint of the supernatural; you imagine all kinds of magic, as dangerous as the context of a stranger."

Dear You Dear You, Protector of the ordinary, the everyday, and the obvious.

"We are having a good time. Visited a serdab - an underground, secret chamber in an Egyptian tomb. The place is full of Germans and Australians, indistinguishable in the heat from civilization, energetic in this desert to mimic the perseveration of an ancient culture. They take picture after picture..."

Dear You. Who knows the unknowableness to a certainty of all things?

"Wish you were here. To see appreciation fight possession. To feel the memory weaken. To reach the point of maximum disturbance. To offer some kind of new motive to the manes of the dead. Maybe even, to avoid an imagined risk.

Love from All of Us
who sense the movement of your ground
From a distance

XXX"
 
 

THE COUNTRY OF INSISTENCE

What to think of that part of you that denies what is. Gratefulness.

And all the time a dark bird in my chest ripping off pieces of god and feeding it to my disbelief.
 
 

THE BRUNT OF GOD

We have to bear this. Believers and non-believers alike. Brunts do not distinguish. Single-minded they push you down. The dark ages come and go depending on who's in charge of the lights. The resurrectionists say upsadaisy. The lapsed reincarnationists stamp ants but are secretly trepidatious and before you can say 'you're a gnat' have relapsed into reimagining their lives as flies. A brunt is enlarged. It is a feeder. The brunt is a puppet show in which the puppeteer remains visible throughout the performance. There are no side seats to the brunt. The body so selected. For the undeserved mercy of God. We have to bear this. The short and the long of it. You can clench your whole body and it will not help. The message of the brunt is that the ball is at your feet. You are the part of the horse in front of its rider. A pastime. Do not try to avoid the brunt of God because then the brunt will begin to utter poetry. This is pretty but painful and poignant for the bearer of the brunt. A brunt is like three lots of Wittgenstein plus more. It is a genius that knows only your name.
 
 
 

GOD'S GIFT

The word 'god' is a shortened form of lover. It is a Japanese paper which comes - rolled like a poem - in the Summer months. Fine and soft. Mulberry bark.

You might not feel better sitting in a palace but you'll have fun building it. Wonder, meanwhile, how to breathe. Especially when thinking of God.

Tireless universe.

Pronounless. Pronounceless.

For a moment, not myself but all that is unrecollected, and rain amongst rain.

The wind that blows from the mouths of those in love when they speak is the scent of green lilies bursting from the genitals of god's desire.
 
 
 

HOW THE GODS RETURN

What kind of time passes and does not pass
as trice and trice and trice something calls,
as the thing appears and vanishes, as the image
elapses and what exists listens at the keyhole
of the room in which the very shape of absence is found?
Is it the time that pushes the child on a swing, where
being enlarges and contracts according to a
suspended rule? Is it the time it takes
for a cloud to give birth to a poem or a new continent
or the time within sand, the grain
straining towards glass, towards cloth,
towards passing and having passed, faking rest?
Shall this time be the raft of boats seen
by the returning eye of the spinning bird or the small face
fearful against the plane's window, seeing forever
these boats and their untending sea?

Is the poem about insufficiency? Longing? Desire? Is the poem about betrayal? Is it daring us?

'How dare you, an atheist, mention God!'

'"Not divinely." We hear now as echo: "The gods are back, comrades. They have just penetrated this life, but the word that revokes beneath the work that unfolds has also reappeared so that, together, they might make us suffer." Is this a response?'ⁱⁱ

Echo: 'The gods are back, companions. Right now they have just entered this life; but the words that revoke them, whispered underneath the words that reveal them, have also appeared that we might suffer together.' ⁱⁱⁱ

He puts his cock in her god. And it crows. Betrayal again.

'Thus through fragmentary writing, the return of the hesperic accord is announced. It is a time of decline, but a decline of ascendancy, pure detour in its strangeness: that which, permitting to go from one deception to another ... leads from one courage to another. The gods? Returning, having never come.'^iv
 
 

GOD IS WAITING

Left to be vile and despicable all by ourselves, at least we can be secure with the knowledge that God is waiting. In glorious madness. (Or so madly we think of his glory.) We feel confident. Enough to doubt God's existence in the mass of time on our hands. Enough to believe in chance which we despise because it doesn't exist and when it presents itself we are furious. We are furious. Furiously we squeeze out life in the peaceful days of death. Furiously we exchange the warm skin of today for a little bit of tomorrow. Furiously we sift through each other for traces of buoyancy. We do so want to stay afloat. At least until God comes - for we know that God is waiting. With what do we pass our lives? Some people hit each other. Others put plums in trays being careful not to bruise the flesh. Some think privately, others figure out things on street corners as if the world was responsible for their urge to describe tics. And that might be. That might be. God hasn't arrived yet to either confirm or deny it. It's all a bit stressful - this sitting around wondering. This being forced to wait 'in the second place' as it were. There was a person who was even driven to ask What is the core of a human being? Silly enough but they dropped a bomb on one to try and find out! In the last resort, when one is forced, violence will always find an answer of of one sort or another. And it is the right of us all to wait for God in a manner that will bear explanation to God when God comes. We make notes for this: 'a ladder is a series of steps used to ascend to or descend from heights'; 'a glass of water is see-through to a certain extent'; 'the horse is sometimes ridden on'; 'what makes for a good seat is something soft on top of something hard'. We are working on our very own Codex of Things to Tell God beginning with how long we have been kept waiting because of the secret of divinity and including somewhere in there the part played by the human mind. We tap the table top with our fingers - plonk    plonk    plonk. Occasionally we hear what might be the echo of this sound. Occasionally we find something to do with ourselves in which waiting plays no part.
 
 

Notes
i Daniel Ladinsky (translator), 'Forgiveness Is the Cash', The Subject Tonight is Love - 60 Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz, Penguin Compass, New York, 1996, 2003, p3.

ii  Maurice Blanchot, 'The Fragment Word', The Infinite Conversation, (translated by Susan Hanson), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 1993 (1969), pp309-310 (quoting Rene Char).

iii  Rene Char, 'The Gods are Back', Verse, Volume 20, Numbers 2 and 3, 2004 (University of Georgia), p 11, translated by Peter Boyle.

iv  Maurice Blanchot, 'The Fragment Word', The Infinite Conversation, (translated by Susan Hanson), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 1993 (1969), pp309-310.