Writhing Tongue

[Lucifer:]

... but to swathe me, the wound, in globular

Gauze, that is, with salt to smother,

Upon which to cultivate the waste,

Was quite another.

From the suppurating heart, pounding with magma,

Through cracks I had crept towards open space:

A circumscribed garden, where time, if not

Languished, but dallied like the new race,

Snoozing alike in a surreal siesta

Under a bower of unknowing bliss.

The idyll be mellow and pure,

Yet idle ideals did fester

The malignant cells of my memory,

Seething like brimstone with sorrow's

Own secrets of purulent war!

The quill's been plucked from my broken wing,

My pulsing wrist's open to flow poisonous ink.

But why should my hand rather tremble than pen

The first germ of history's scenario

On the tabula rasa, the hymen unflushed

As yet on the eve of time?

The earth will not be bare of but bear

The germs of my existence.

My skin has sloughed off and my Tree stands

Upright in the womb of fecund innocence.

[Eve:]

If I entered the haze, won't it steal

Into me? if my tongue won't tell me,

Why, dear stranger, should I follow

Your glide which defies it?

[Lucifer:]

How dare you distrust a divine visitation?

Have I abruptly carried you off?

Do you think a stranger can be this intimate?

Allow me to implant a sense of the divine.

[Eve:]

I alone govern the tongue

To lap up the juice from a fruit

So rife with vistas of divine relish

It could erupt any moment;

But our familiar orchard looks

Unnatural and remote.

[Lucifer:]

Swallow or choke in the bittersweet seed.

Convulse in the death-throes of knowledge.

Does not the hangman-tree's overripe fruit

Tender tastes hitherto unknown?

[Gabriel:]

Exit your home of indulgence.

No cover is constant 'gainst spite and distress.

Wear sorrow's shroud and naked shame's sackcloth,

But no dressing can heal the world's hideous wound.

The infectious miasma of decay

Swiftly swells up the world over,

The wood of Nature's tree

Bows to the burden of sin.

And Paradise is nothing more

But a mirage embedded in your minds.

[Lucifer:]

The history of time

Was condensed in one diminutive drop,

Where I am the alpha and the omega

Where, eye to eye, I meet myself,

Downwards pursuing the spiral revolutions

Until the bottom line, the end of times,

The big bang,

When history collapses upon itself.

[Adam:] The tongue is a raw piece of meat,

[Eve:] Which writhes with the foul tang of terrible words.

[Adam:] We're fooled into wisdom, then naked truth shows

[Adam & Eve:] cruelty's cold angular grin.

[Adam:] The trees shed our guilt to clothe us in shame;

[Eve:] With shame thorns and thistles sting our bare skin.

[Adam & Eve:]

Despite or due to the vileness of tang

And tantalizing intangibleness,

Our thirst remains unquenched.

[Lucifer:]

My throat is still dry and parched.

The tears of heaven shed but salt

To preserve and inflame the wound

Which can't tell between burn marks of caustic catharsis

And frostbites of piercing paralysis.