A Strange Hatching Into Eden fly the winged elohim screeching like owls, scattering dark mist and whirling about, their wings flapping shadows over baffled beasts below. The first of the elohim selects an animal on two legs & calls it Adam. Into the brainstem a long needle of DNA is inserted. The second elohim draws out a rib from a gash in Adam’s side. From that rib a female of girlish proportions is fashioned & named Eve. Grinning like an ape,

Begin, Again, Finally Begin Organic bodies. Competitively divergent, Striving to maintain Separation. First creature, Rat. Disgusted, self-hating, heart-horrored. Ties a string-taut wire around his skinny neck And kicks the stool. Begin again Second, Vulture. Stupidly well-fed on pride, Invests heavy in guns, Gas, nightsticks and, supercritically, All the plutonium he can lay his talons on, Ending in his own atomization: The birth of stars. And again Snake.

Expecting nothing but laughter and applause, Adam hears on all sides sounds of derision, Harshly sibilant. All were transformed to serpents

Krishna Statue at the Sri Mariamman Temple (Singapore) Courtesy of AngMoKio / Wiki Krishna Maya clouds -- sattva, rajas and tamas -- Encircle the throne of Krishna, the bright Abode of the ten thousand faces. Making (placing before and at first), Paramatman forms the ribs of Adam, Sculpts the mountains, fills up the oceans With the flesh and water of his own body. You can find him in grasslands, rivers, cow-herds, Under a stone and inside a piece of wood. He kills demons, swa

Adam’s Descent Adam is a dry rib but sinews are stretched, tissue and flesh fashioned. Man of Spirit, embodied. Descending the mountain with Moses, he falls with the rain, is blown on the wind; regales the tall and the small with poems and legends of Jonah; comforts the bloodied lamb, the gulping netted fish; descends further, into engines, turbines, hot factories, occupies the rolling paper mills; goes down, down into data banks, the microchips; enters gates, integrates cir

The Original Sin Our DNA a polymer implant from our worldly creator, Blake’s Urizen. Backbone sidechain nitrogen phosphate And a plastic oesophagus for when you can't swallow Reason. Bonding one attribute to another: the adhesive Epox is on the horizon. One mind becomes many minds Separated in competition, growing bodies to maintain Separation. Protesting, Adam fiddles a stringtaut wire, A thin-sliced reproduction of human forest life: gunfire, Gas, batons, guillotines, barbe

When He Planted in the Earth When He planted in the earth a tree of life, a tree of death (the latter with a curse of woe) did God say that this was good? And when He placed upon the grass the serpent Satan and his crew, did He ever stop to think why the Devil envied God? When Adam spied inside the bower that Eve was naked and alone, Was it Satan, was it God Who put the worm in Adam’s blood? And when God wept and cried some more inside a cloud of smoke and gas, was it then he

Seven Worlds God turns -- and the fishes dance blue gold silver beneath a yellow sky. Another turn, the boughs of thick trees become as air: invisibly light. The third turn, nothing but pea-green lizard eyes and cochineal blood. The fourth, an angel with four faces tolls the caked air with a dead bell. At the fifth there is only a fagged-out planet and the light of dead stars. The sixth, and it is said, “the former worlds shall not be remembered.” The seventh, and the land r

Adam (1951-52) by Barnett Newman Barnett Newman and the Art of Not Making Graven Images Barnett Newman was born in 1905 to Abraham and Anna Newman, Jewish immigrants from Poland who came to New York City in 1900. Although not religious, Barnett’s father was a passionate Zionist and a supporter of the National Hebrew School of the Bronx. As well as attending Hebrew school, Barnett and his brothers and sisters were educated at home by Jewish scholars from Europe. He went on to

Pictures of Eve I Adam cultivated Eve by swelling her belly with something so potent that it could only have come from the stone of a forbidden fruit. II Eve was striding the earth when Adam emerged from a black gap. Six days passed and earth was reduced to a pile of newsprint. And Eve tore her clothes and made for herself a garment of lamentations. But Adam, sated and pitiless, scoffed her beneath the absent apple tree.

On the Seventh Day On the seventh day God came down, dug earth deep and wide, buried Adam in the belly of the planet. From his grave came flowers and fruit trees, valleys and hills, rivers and seas, fish, lizards, birds, mammals, humans – lots and lots of humans. Seven million years later Adam awoke from a nightmare of holocausts, rape rooms, train wrecks, the rape of Eve. But being stuck in the belly of the world he could nothing but grind his jaw and weep for eternity to en

Contraction After the fusion of blood and tree, I descended, the voice of derision singing in my ears, past the wet-green eyes of my mother, down, past dry lips of statues, falling, through open doors, through graveyards, junkyards, a quarry of dry bones and fridges, past train-wrecks and dead horses, down, past falling towers and exploding engines, down, through smoky forests and palimpsests of mud, through florid rings of fire, past the crushed flowers on the hospital bed,

The Family Way Eve lay down and trembled. Her belly grew fat like the moon. Her womb conspired murder. Cain was gloomy at heart. Abel and his animals inflamed passions on all sides. Cain looked up and the sky shivered grey. Sin flew out the door of heaven. It stuck in Cain’s gullet like Aaron’s rod. Cain slaughtered his brother like a goat. He trembled as wiped the gore on his father’s coat of skin, which still carried the aroma of grandfather God.