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

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 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.

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

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

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)

From Creator to Creature After the birds and mammals lost their speech (the serpent's tongue having already turned to ash) and Heaven swayed and fell to within four miles of the earth, a disappointed God crept low into the sea’s womb, into Mary, our lady of the ocean, and transmuted his glory into the microscopic, a millimetre in size, living between grains of sand on the sea bed, eventually emerging in the form of a fish.

A Song of the Sabbath Sacrifice And so the gods of lead and brass, The idols and their thrones, The teraphim made of fibreglass The mummified skulls and bones, Are tossed inside a whirl of wind And shattered into shells. But deep inside the kellipot The light of Yahweh dwells. And from the pieces Something new arises in the land, A temple of the sabbath king Built by Ezekiel's hand. With cherubim and fan-leaved palms Carved in the walls of paradise, And the air perfumed with