Forever and Ever, Hallelujah, Hallelujah Amen


Christmas 2007

Faith can become logical disappointments
when applied to the railroad tracks planned
by the grand Vizier in the most vital metropolis
constructed for disease, despair and isolation.
Big Words doth drown in idle conceits.

When love explodes, when the target drips
into a solemn urn and is kept by Priests as
their defense against evil and good devils.

Now, we pass from accented sounds, words,
artifacts of memory and hallucination, we drive
along the highway to find mystical romance and
the danger when love and the cross are set deep
in the macadam school yard. We wait with love
to hear when worship sets the cartouche drawn
by holy men by delusions with footnotes sung
by philosphes with a fradulent twang.

Now, at Christmas red Santa’s, white Snowmen
and the devil appear to sneak another lie
from ragged corners of the room and we say
in unison “Lord have Mercy Upon me,
Your Sinner, and settled into a new crease
we drink wine and wait for Faith diluted
by spleen to rise again out of mistress death.

She is sometimes He, but no one can prove
one gender or the other; faith lies in temptation
as apathetic swoons indifferent until delta
"this or that"stained by foot prints
plays in the earth and grit without protection.
After all, in celebration, we string lights
redeemed as we affirm faith but cannot
precisely fit the illusion to the dance while
we hopelessly write about sex, and the
grace of its mother. No one can measure life
without faith, but the answers are left for
analysis and not even computer mavens
can show freedom without the flaws
designed by a party of more than 1 to help
formal truth revise the alphabet of matter
to make our guess about life at least a map
where we pin our awards to keep specimens
without prejudice, name tags of
before we throw them all away as we
shriek to a new celebration without rancor
and the acceptance we call out as love
while we wait for the execution of faith
at midnight in some moldy prison in Florida.

Christmas is a bloody field, white snow men --
And when you sing “Oh Holy Night”
the beginning of faith as divine walls
and romantic church lights, candles
and incense wafted into the marble floor
by prayers without exceptions.