Lilith Leaves Adam
All nights are not created equal:
clouds can blur the nuclear stars,
disturb the math of spring
Volcanoes heave up sulfur breath
left by other suns and seasons
The sea takes sorrows elsewhere,
pregnant with disaster
“Ridiculous,” says Lilith
as if a stellar judge of man,
“to legislate the night into a day.
You and I aren’t equals
any more than they.”
Moon in the Bone
Perhaps he’d misheard the whispers
as the moon waxed past her prime:
“Superman” for “Supermoon”
“a pair of lips” for “apocalypse”
“out of thyme” for “out of time”
Perhaps the sun would once again promise
business as mid-month usual with
a well deserved scotch at the long day’s end
Not till he turned at the touch of a friend,
glimpsed in that eye all the madness, the mayhem
of life both political and princely,
did he sense that he’d always known everything
all along the length of snake
that slept with him in boyhood,
that whispered as it licked his ears,
“Your term as Superman will end
with supermoon;
a pair of lips in lies
will spell out your apocalypse
and that is how a true prince dies.”
Timeliness
You silly apes,
who haven’t even yet
colonised your very own moon—
You fur-less little mammals,
who dreamt up a god
to give you a job
of naming and knowing
but it seems the instructions
were lost in translation
which hardly bothers the males
genetically unable
to ask for directions
but splendidly capable
of turning two dimensions
into three (or even four
if you count time)
or imagining destinations
never yet dreamt by the gods
It seems we arrived
bang on time,
ringside seats
for your final show.
We’re taking bets
on whether you’ve learned,
you busy little beasts,
that mistaking departure
for some kind of arrival
means only you’ve traveled
twice too far
for wherever you go,
that’s where you are.