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.

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