Post-Neology

Impish footsteps fall,
fully around and swelling,
above all,
into a song sung
by chorus tidal,
summoning with a murmur flowing
that swallowing sound —
of a soul’s piece drowning.

My adobe walls,
with blood-red mud melted,
surrounding me
in a pauper’s tomb,
the hellstorm pounding,
resounding,
raking each shingle with both claws:
velociraptors
marching like Jericho
to the funeral tune
of a machine gun singing.

Rat-tat-tattling my sins to God,
trailing my future’s fate astray.
Each staccato note translates
to another hole poked
by God’s blightning —
each half inch fallen
two inches more for the moat,
cutting off the world
to an old man with no boat,
no oar,
no shore,
no land in sight,
just the water holding like an anchor
and the storm
looking for a fight.

I might not mind
my wholly holy home
invaded
and desecrated
by some baptism born
of heavenly corrosion:
change has never been
my friend nor enemy,
and I’m not shy of a test.
But that cross would be bearable,
were it not
so terrible a testament
to damn my own kin
suffering my pain in kind.

The storm took from me my faith.
Stripped the shingles of my certainty,
every single one,
left the rafters bare,
purely exposed
to whatever heaven
chose in fury to dispose.

But my heart,
dry and unshook,
kept hold through the desert
of the parables —
old words deserted
by my father’s weathered voice:

“Burden yourself first.
Grab the weight, both hands,
before it befalls your loved ones
from fates too terrible.”

My living will
is to mend ten thousand roofs,
so that even in death
I won’t let a solitary
cloudy tear
reign over the smile
meant for my daughter’s face.

I will stand,
eye to eye,
beneath every storm
and call it
my ancestral camping place.

Shivering still:
I.
Will.
Embrace
the world,
and in silence answer
its thundering reminders rumbling:

Another hole to patch,
another night to outlast,
one more job
until it’s two more jobs,
and another one
till your time bank’s
double robbed —
the work is never done
for humanity’s caring.

Like Sisyphus whispers,
imprisoned beneath thatch,
“A broken world is worth repairing.”

Hope,
stilled by shadows reeling,
is eternally by
forward movement healing.
Rising easterly
like the cloudy sun
that burns through
the daze of yesterday,
just the same —
that absurd defiance,
refusing to ever
be overcast.

Today.
And only today,
We can decide,
If we are to rain;
If we are to rage,
to rally against fate,
Futilely,
( so they pray )
Turn the tide.
Back against entropy’s,
Infernal coastline.
By finality’s wholly action,
The future can be:
but only be unified:
At last, we will,
by our own will,
Outlast the last,
of tomorrow’s last times!

Until,
time slips,
passed the past,
Once again,
As it was,
eternally,
Universally,
Without any,
But our own end.