All the World Was Broken [blank verse version] 4th October - World Animal Day Light and more light: the first of days began. To soar on weightless wings of air, God made Fair barbary doves and cocksure ravens, And mighty condors wheeling through the sky. For broad grass prairies he made wild sheep there, And bison strong of shoulder, white-tailed deer. For forests too he fashioned eucalypts And firs still green with dark and purple cones. He measured out the oceans and decree

Begin, Again, Finally: Poetics of Creaturely Failure and the Birth of Human Subjectivity 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 h

Atoms and Void There is no body without void – Epicurus I You’d have thought it endless, Lucretius— The laminar descent of atoms Falling through a void serene and mute, Each atom unhurried, alone, Descending at a constant pace, Unmoved by force, untouched by will, No dawn to break their quiet fall, No god to stir the silent dark. But then—a swerve, a subtle bend, Two atoms veer, incline, and meet, A fragile sign of nascent will, A fracture within fate’s per

The Turnings of the Fire And so the burning mass passed Through all its turnings: One half of fire became sea, One half of sea became earth, One half of earth became air, And one half of air – the finer part – Became the creator who did shape Those elements into a sphere. And the sphere hung suspended In a wide circuit Of stars and celestial bodies Split off from the primal fire, Now clustered Around the globe like a host of radiant gods, Casting their rays into the

All the World Was Broken: An Ecopoem On weightless air, the cocksure ravens flew. Wild sheep chewed grass; deer And bison chewed too. On a slanted hillside white mountain goats Enjoyed a lofty view. In forests, eucalypti, fresh-minted, grew. And fire-green firs with purple cones, Did too. For the silver-studded starfish there were oceans Wet with green and blue – And oceans for the whale and dolphin too. On blackest soil, the man called Adam grew His

A Strange Hatching Once there were other gardens, other plots, Other clots of clay. The old gods remembered. Cast from their temples, stripped of tribute and gilt, They kept their camp beside the pagan Nile. Then they beheld a land of light where nothing hissed, Nothing slithered or slipped, Nothing crawled or slunk through sedge and reed. The old gods smiled darkly. The maker had forgotten scales, Forgotten fang and feather, Forgotten fin, fluke and claw, Forgotten the sly

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.

By the Sound of a Voice After a long silence that seemed An eternity, There came a turbulent noise, A spirited noise. No, it was a voice, A loud voice Lashing up a storm, Singing intense, singing hot. And in the violence Of that voice, Whirled seeds of sound, Fragments of sense, Half-words, Commas & accents, Rhythm & image, Inclining towards poetry. And the LORD bent His ear To hear spoken The moon & sun & stars – & there was a dark saying too, Sung by

God, DNA, Bone Our DNA a polymer implant from our worldly creator, Backbone sidechain nitrogen phosphate And an oesophagus for food easier to swallow than pride. Offal and organs. God sticks in the gullet. Mitochondria In the nostrils. Bonding one cell To another, neuron to neuron to neuron, bone and bone.

Aither / R-O-R' Light realm of air, from which heaven came: Neither hot nor cold, neither wet nor dry. Quintessentially, it was either the pneuma divine Holding in place the classical celestial spheres… Or an unseen substance of science for the propagation And transmission of light and gravity. But now it is just a word used by chalky chemists Denoting R-O-R’ with C-O-C linkages.

Made of Light Everything is made of light. Everything is light, of differing gradations and qualities, from the big bang to the atom. Earth and sky are the light of God, and the spirit in man is a self-shining light. The light of lights is the true substance, and that substance is God. Art is the light of the imagination projected outward. Bodies are dark light, lacking luminosity, where “darkness is simply an expression for the lack of light.”

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

In the Beginning Was Strange to think I am the universe and everything in it too. I call out. No voice returns other than my echo. So evidently, I am my own cause and, worse, horribly alone. Bored, I fall into a deep sleep and dream of many things: wave-like particles in plasma; diverse organisms, vertebrates and invertebrates; metals and gases; all kinds of finite bodies with perishable qualities, competing for succession and place and rank. Time passed and, with time, entro

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

A Dark Thought in a Green Shade Somewhere in the newly planted earth, a god sits at his bench, creating and curating each little plant and flower. Day upon day he nurses roots, stems and leaves, talks to fragile saplings, puts to work all the surprising symmetries and fractals he dreams of when he sleeps for hours in the afternoon sun. Neither a Moses nor a Prospero, but looking like both, the god puts down his staff and exhales a fragrant cloud that veils the garde

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

Yehudah, I Make You Mine From out of the banks of the muddy Jordan River, I make you Mine. Into shape I press the grit, into shape I knead the clay And your body clings to my fingers. I knead and a verb puts you in motion. I cut and I layer and an adjective fleshes out your shape. I slap and I roll and a rhyme gives you weight. I model and I sculpt and a noun marks you as a thing. With a name, I form you in my image (Your name is on my tongue). With a name, I firm you

Wyrd In the beginning was the Wyrd. A story of weirding words and the poet fluttered his pen over the ink. What comes to pass has passed and is passing. We owe a debt of guilt. Go ever has he shall, he has. I shall.

God's Entropy (short version)