Asylum

My sis pumps gas at midnight

and a hobo calls her Magdalene 

bearing her myrrh

to the wound of a Range Rover Sport

The three of us drive 

eremitic, 

through desert winter

 

Often fused were three in the gospels:

Mary Magdalene 

and two who anointed Jesus’ feet

Mary of Bethany 

and an unnamed sinner

A composite of trespassers 

Variations on a single theme 

 

My sister is a saint 

Rightly popular

and I sit on her passenger side 

Riding out her virtues

I proffer her heavenly manna

I offer what arid protection 

my climate can give 

As repentance 

 

We are scarcely mistaken

all the same 

I would like to spend my closing hours 

an ascetic in Provence 

I would like to wail in ecstasy 

finally 

I would like to lay down and die 

 

 

Misericorde 

My joy has been immeasurable, ethereal 

and that has been the problem

I cannot hold 

it at the shoulders,

size it up

I’d like to give it the outline 

of a pet, or a flower

If only seasonally 

So I could witness some 

thing’s life and death 

Before me 

mark the dates,

the borders of my trials;

I would like, when I find myself 

alone again, to know

for fact

were I guilty or blameless 

the ill-starred prey to chance 

 

Either would be better than this:

this part of the suspect

forever in question

prospecting, conceiving my wrongs 

I wish a jury would convene and size me up,

take my measurements 

Make the decision on me 

For me

Give me a number and tell me 

whether I ought to be 

punished or redeemed 

 

I cannot help but to disdain 

those souls who take

the Law to be truth so 

unequivocally  

But surely I envy

their peace of mind and sense of place.

All the while I am lost

watching weather shift minutely,

charting stochastic values 

incessantly, expecting in vain 

a pattern to figure itself 

Give an outline 

from unreconciled points 

bedazzling,

consummate

Beauty and Reason

A revelation I know to be implausible

 

 

[Untitled]

What could be worse to you

than expiring, not famously

Humiliated

Nor even divested

of the sundry accoutrements

which could define your likeness

still, in absence: Mnemonic 

shades of a hero bereft

Survived by his miseries

canonic, pathetic, gorgeous 

 

Memory is our principal contact with the dead 

held hostage in gesture and habit

Mythologized into 

relief 

 

Lit in the court of honor, you were 

Delusional: believing 

your markings stigmatic

Medals of martyrdom,

at the crux

They were only obvious sores

of mortal compulsion

Tiresome and unromantic

in fact 

Entirely ordinary