TEMPERATE TERRAIN
“like a fiend hid in a cloud”
William Blake
No one is innocent.
For a while
the sky expressed this
as if engraved
in stone
as if
a neon sign
and now
nothing free, or
for free
not a vestige of
that original freedom
for human eyes
look only with
thought of dominance, enslavement,
political subjection
power to
subjugate the soil, plant
sow seed
make woman
accept, carry the
scar about her
for that
crime forever
(memory of that
moment of knowing, its insane pleasure
a history of
perversity the
pen of time
will battle to
spin and doctor, religiously conceal,
legality
viability
technicality
a whole new language
from the corpse of
the poetry
with which, in which
we conversed
with the face of God
now it is
all division, splitting, ideology
of binaries
where we stand
on side of
market forces or
forces of
production
left
hand
right hand
no end
to this fight
and blood too, over what the meaning
of divinity facing off with
respectable money-lending
anger there
searing, intense
as laser light
and still we tramp
the planet flat searching for all
lost to us, stripped
from us
the eight billion souls as the world
is forced
to take shortcuts, to
twist all interior shape
into a single sided, mirror slip
Oh let me not get
started on
the nature of that mirror
the pride of our
creation, fabrication
reflected upon reflection
until
horizon disappears
and across that
horizon
a place not
storm-scoured, not
scorched as
the Sun gets horrendously
magnified by
every single toxic cloud
jungle desert
jungle desert
nothing temperate
as we struggled
like the Laocoon of myth
like our own
sorely afflicted Sisyphus
it seemed that nowhere
outside that garden
outside that
true temple
special God place
nowhere now
that Eden is death, is
the Sin we
have inherited
could there be
even a
shadow of
temperate terrain
