DELIVERANCE

 

 

Away in the tides of distance, the Sun

afflicts the moon. Its orb’d sphere aroused in darkness

creates and catalogues the afflicted. Lights the nebulae

deep down in Niger. Impresses the impressionable: those sons

who wrought iron from gold of nebulous morality, of alchemies betrayed.

Where, pray tell, are the Keepers of the World?

 

Inside her closet

(A constabulary of perfection)

Time marches on, but atoms stumble.

Behind the disorder of the order lies the ordered disorder

of her apothecary mind.

 

His steeled gaze shears light’s cross.

In blindness he cries, “Why have I been forsaken?[1]

Why, transfixed by my Rubicon, was I turned away?

Soft-hearted am I, but dare you try me upon my own mercy?

Swords: bring your justice down upon my gilded pate.”

 

A diplomat in the arbitration of fate said,

“When the will is trammeled,

will the worst fill with passionate intensity?”[2]

He drowns quantum convictions in the seabed’s poisoned mollusks, sprouting

horns which impale catholic feasts. And so he laughs

and turns away.

 

Why do some choose to unchoose the blinders on their gazes

fixed upon sights self-seen, the sentinels

in their pews each week?

Perhaps they are the seekers who seek Piscean hooks to draw

blood from the Red Sea.

 

When there is an eclipse in the world,

When the world is itself eclipsed,

When the hidden reigns over the closeted,

When each speaks to others but not to himself,

When the narcissist and the schizophrene war,

Then the tide rushes in and drowns them all.

 

Copyright ©2001-2005 Steven Mason

 



[1] KJV: Psalms 22:1; Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34

[2] Adapted from “The Second Coming,” W.B. Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”