Daniel Wilcox

a few blasphemies

Little boys and fat men
Fall pell-mell from the sky
Toadstooling shapes
For the earth scorched,
But we Americans assure
Such weapons are
God’s droppings to ‘u.s.’
But hell to pay for Iran;

We're waterboarding but
The Persians are blazed to blame;
Orwell’s Blaired novel doubling
Comes to mind,
The true ‘blastphemy.’

The Winged Ones

Overlooking the City of the Winged Ones
  At blooded sunset distant in the haze
  He stood on the skyscraping angled roof
  And lowered the stars and stripes of the clawed eagle
  Watching its stretched flapping shadow
  Flit about the darkening roof out to the edge
  A bat on the prey over the slate gray world
  Not the dove of the olive branch he so imagines.

Black Light
 

My eyes pressed and I slipped
  in under her fleece cloth
  in the desire of my mind.
 
Her eyes glowed iridescent
  in the blackness of herself
  in the darkness of the house.
 
She spoke a southern accent
  from carved ebony lips
  from a northern white city.
 
I spoke with unprejudiced hint
  from separate loneliness
  from a dusky existence.
 
I wished to be able to protect
  against the loss of innocence
  against our blotted culture.
 
She was black light intent
  against the vulgar glare of war
  against the shadowy white.

Daniel Wilcox © 2009

Concerning this 500th Anniversary of John Calvin And his Tongues of Fire

Not the tongues of Acts
Those of mercied news,
But Gehenna'd tongs
Of Calvin and Geneva
Firing the green wood,
So hard to blaze
Down to Hades,
Slowly, more the skin's scorch,
Long sought end of Servetus,
Head drenched in sulfur.
 
And our god fell,
One of the casualties
Like the reprobate infants
Outside of Geneva,
With the sudden rise
Of a myriad of bats

Out of a dark theological pit,
The poisoned t.u. l.i.p.s kiss
In that Judas of nights,
A tongue-lashing
From eternity past when

The primordially hidden,
Instituted decrees
Blazed through Europe
With 'help' from Rome
And millions of saints
Slew for Jesus' sake.

Our doubts abyss up
Like doctrinal vampires,
Hovering over a hellish cake
And the lowly clay pots
Fitted for destruction;
We drink the 'vain' dregs,

Not the loving grail
Of new wine at Cana.
 
But John wishes Michael
Had only been beheaded
Of his heresy of baptism.
 
What a shame...
 
1 Luke 23: 31 If men use the green wood like this...?
2 James 3:6 And the tongue is a fire. The tongue--world of wickedness--is that one of our organs which soils our whole nature, and sets the whole course of our lives on fire, being itself set on fire by Gehenna.
3 Acts 2:3 Then there appeared to them divided tongues, as of fire...
4 On Servetus "a crown of straw, doused in sulphur...The fire was lit. Green wood does not burn easily, does not roar up. It smokes and sputters, burning unevenly and slowly. And so Michael Servetus' life was not extinguished quickly in a blazing wall of fire. Rather, he was slowly roasted, agonizingly conscious the whole time, the fire creeping upward inch by inch. The flames licked at him, the sulphur dripped into his eyes, not for minutes but for a full half hour. 'Poor me, who cannot finish my life in this fire,' the spectators heard him moan. At last, he screamed a final prayer to God, and then his ashes commingled with those of his book."

Out of the Flames: The Remarkable Story of a Fearless Scholar, a Fatal Heresy, and One of the Rarest Books in the World By Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone

Daniel Wilcox © 2009