The Garden

Let me go
where I’m told not to go,
the dungeons of the poor,
who have no time to pose
for Goya, Van Gogh, old
Bruegel, and do not know
what to say of the Garden
of Earthly Delights,
save this:
You think we are poor
and therefore
demons
as forbidden, ugly, cruel
as you, our captors,
the garden an arena
for our extinction--
you must know,
you landscaped and drew
the borders,
set your dogs with wings
at the gates
to growl, No farther, this
is the entrance
to paradise on earth,
the same here
as it is in heaven,
though enter here
and you earn Hell.

Let me say
why Hell is writ large,
though I am no
Whitman
or Blake
or any one among poets
and painters
whose world is yours
not mine:
You honor killing here
in imitation of Cain,
or so the man says
who runs this place.
They want
us to lay down pen or brush
and share life! screamed:
SILENCE.
A tapestry of blood to prove
the dead are dead,
names scarred, illegible..
Blood to adorn the walls.
All the skulls aligned to warn:
Nothing above,
all below. Pandemonium.
Inferno. Milton, Dante.
Edvard Munch on the bridge
a scream to the very heart
of ice, the devil’s asshole.

Something up here cavorts
twisting its sleek body
to create God’s member,
pulsing with blood before
the angelic dogs at the gate
bellow out the cock’s crow.
No woman born of woman
may proceed, God says,
without a child in her arms
or on her back,
holy fodder
for the next war, the one after,
and the final triumph
when only I am here
to begin again what humanity
put asunder.
Ah, perfection!
Ah, cupidity!
Who knew the chalice,
the bowl held such wonders?
Politics of Living Death:
all this to reopen the Gate,
all this to cleanse the rivers,
all this to know God exists
and at whose expense?
Yours, brother, yours, sister.
Make war on heaven,
your only way out of Hell.

(15 March 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander