Three Poems from "Revelation"
1. The Second Horseman
The red horse dawns on the appointed day.
Silence juts an arachnid face beneath the steps,
jaws
and arms weaving a muffled cocoon
where
the cries are stilled, the daughter
of
destitution silent.
The crowd congregates for prayer at the end of the
street.
When the letter explodes in the enemy's hand,
they
invade a child's sleep and kick
the
breath from her toy of desire.
Profit and loss gauge corporate recrudescence
the
corporation lens recording our self-deceit
and
transmitting its unholy bidding
to the
margins that define righteousness.
A cancerous hand registers defiant despair.
The red horse wakes the cicada from its seven-year
sleep.
Water pocks dirt in a rainless desert,
as
jungle fires raise suicide tribes
who
pray to Coca-Cola and ITT.
The house of the wind crumbles in chemical decay.
When the red horse rider greets the night
seeking
fleshly light., political palms
itch
for his grammar of the ultimate word.
The crowd trembles and grows meek.
The red horse is a oneness
for which the many seek.
2. The Third Horseman
"A day's wages for a quart of corn, and a
day's
wages for three quarts of barley, but
do not
tamper with the oil or the wine."
-- Rev. 6:6
When the third horseman comes to town,
we spit
and cough blood.
The fields are deep, dark and plowed,
but we
did not sow this year.
He says to grow factories in the fields,
and to
burn the jungle.
"Take out the oil and the ore,
and you
will be rich like the North."
When the third horseman comes to town,
the
horse neighed with disdain
at the
holes in our lungs.
The women who sew all day crawl along
the
walls of the streets at night
with
dead eyes.
He has a lean and handsome face.
The young girls dream of him in our embrace.
His lips fill a hunger between their legs.
Heaven's gate hears his prayer.
He is pure and good, hard and without mercy.
He loves revenge and destroys good and bad.
He is not like us, but we can be like him,
Like Rambo and Clint Eastwood with a gun.
3.
"The greatness of man even in his lust,
to have known how to extract from it a
wonderful code, and to have drawn from
it a picture of benevolence." -- Pascal, aphorism
402
The pale rider carves thin bones
Into masks of sorrow.
Old men do not argue with math
When children and their games vanish.
The village is dying with blood in its
Guts and prayer in its hand.
In the
The corporate evangelist walks with angels.
He reads prophecy and weighs each verse
Against the balance sheet. The code
He unlocks is a virus in death's economy.
The old men swat flies and rock in the sun.
They do not know the equation of finality,
and
they will be judged for blindness that sees
Only village ghosts on the old paths.
This discourse
with
oblivion is impotent with rage.
For biology is certainty. The pale horse
will
dig out the eucharistic offering
from
our chests,
compare
need with resource,
and
plot the final body count.