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This is a new series I'm working on. My goal for this series is to explore an some ideas I have about the nature of the divine and how it's worked its way into the popular culture.

vox angelica

pure of mind
     body; heart; sing
          sing of me, sing of he
she, it; there are no nouns
to describe what you are to us.
we, greater as chorus, sing
light, love; gentle and dreamlike,
we inhabit your better half
as if it were a high-rent condo.
We live you, live through you,
delight in your choices,
the fine tread you walk between
your better intentions and your
base actions. We live in the bottom
of your spine, we love the way
you move when you dance, we long
for you with all the energy
of the spurned lover.
We love you more because you are
freewilled and therefore hopeless.

there are no verbs to describe
what you do to us, your love
informed by delicious greed, your sin
wine to us who cannot. You liberate
us, you who make choices, we drink
your anger until you are spent
and lay exhausted in your seamy beds.
We eat your misdeeds and grow fat on them,
experiencing your anguish as a caress,
taking from you what you do not want
and we cannot make for ourselves.

We cluster close around you,
we ignore the vast emptiness above us.
We live to serve, and in service to you,
tormentors, captors, lovers, hungers,
we grow sticky and content, singing
to ourselves, in choruses calling
the eternal delight of ourselves,
the feathery servants of the unknowable.
We live to serve.
This is our reward eternal.

This is our love, eternal.

—3/10/00

vox diabolica

we own you. our contracts
are sealed, signed, delivered
with your first breath,
solid gold from first to last.

but you love us, helplessly.

we're not the origin of your vices;
you do such a wonderful job of those
all on your very own. we're stain-free
from your sordid desires.

we don't inhabit but abide. we claim
nothing but your blame. among ourselves
we swap stories; nothing we can invent
is so creative as what you do to yourselves.
the angels claim your guilt and
we smile, go our own ways.

we never fell as much as sauntered slowly downward,
coated in a bubble of enormous thoughts
from the One Who. Sent down, given charge,
we are your humming machinery of life,
your pistons, your greased palms,
everything you have accomplished,
we have stood at your elbow.

We surround you, make you comfortable,
our birthright your birth, our pride
your free will. Like posessive parents,
we hover, help invisibly, push a little.
But we have our secret pleasures, too--
the roar of an engine on the highway,
the purr of industry, the stock ticker
and the sensual way money circulates.

you are born, tiny perfect packages into this world
we have created, ready to assume your place
in this structure of ours. You are ours,
you love us without thinking,
play your parts and we thank you for it.

Solid gold. Every breath, deeper in debt to us.
It is an equillibrium we enjoy.

—3/30/00

vox humana

Between the sadists and the lawyers,
we are tongue-tied. So many
of us there are, incapable of
moving in chorus, throwing down
this semi-divine yoke. Free will?
Nothing but an attractive nuisance.

Give us something to bow down to
(something to submit to)
something to dream about
(something to devote ourselves to)
something to move us
(something to obliterate us)
something to pray to
(something to love us)
save us from your angels o lord
(save us from your devils)

But if good is not good and evil is
the machines of buisness then we have been
framed. Let us pray.

And all that comes back is silence.

We care nothing for truth. We care for love,
for comfort, for all of those things
that keep us alive, our need to continue.
We cannot eat truth, so we reject it.
The battle trumpets, the clarion calls—
out! let us sleep!

Give us something to love us
(something to lie to us)
something to make us whole
(something to widen the gap)
something to stir us
(something to lull us)
something to feed us
(something to content us)
save us from your anger o lord
(save us from our inconstancy)

Will makes us imperfect.
We are a curious mix of animal and divine
and deny both. Only you compete
with our superior selves
our beautiful rebellions.
You are our reflections.

—3/30/00

(the empty set)

Large thoughts, and hollow:

(I AM)

impression of vastness, of uncaring
beyond everything even Itself:

(I AM)

paradox, this ultimate inheritor.
It is the thoughts the universe thinks.