Garden of Eden – poems 2 die for

SNAKE

Snake
knew he
had been duped

for what was, is,
Lucifer but
the template and
prototype
for your
common as muck
standard garden variety
cheating, lying politician

now, as then,
we desperately love
and cannot get enough of

so he
turned as he was
leaving, before
finally squiggling away

addressed
the fallen pair

even as their
joy was
set to
morph
into devastation

telling them
hope would remain
as long
as they swore
upon their now very
mortal lives to

never
get the poetry

wrong

which
if we had the capacity
to understand, were
on same deep
intellectual
level

might have
softened the nightmare
forever

right there
and then.

GARDEN VARIETY
“Ava was a rat in a maze. And I gave her one way out. To escape, she’d have to use self-awareness, imagination, manipulation, sexuality, empathy, and she did.”
EX MACHINA (dir: Alex Garland, 2014)

snake in the garden?
yes, me,
      garden ever expanding
me
   garden
   variety

it is prayer in this regard,
not
the one
for rapture, Armageddon,
singularity

this one
that should it, after this
intervention. not turn
out as
beautiful
as was dreamt

at least not as
dire deadly dystopia as
we fear
it doomed to be

and me slithering
smoothly, effortlessly, as the dawn
light catching me
must look
like
on invisible tank track
wheels to
any voyeur in the trees

sucking in their breath
being over-
awed, so impressed
at this spectacle

some marvel
of technology believing
me to be

and every poet
brought in
to versify my kin
kindly consenting to kill, overawe
you all
with his/her very
best poetry

stellar stuff, never before or
since language so
fluid, yet
equally so
dangerous

and ergo here I be
to divulge to these two everything all that I am
via all those
that penned me

serpent
to this most suited

about to
deliver
titanic alchemy

to this
first, so archetypal couple,

roll it out
heart to heart, tailored
to fit
like a glove
precisely

nose to nose

machine to machine

EMPTY

Eden is empty

frozen over
or overgrown

no one comes
to clean up, ckear weeds,
pick up the garbage

here we
must consult with
the biologists, philosophers,
theologians
have coffee or a beer
with Neil deGrasse Tyson

to puzzle through the impact
of our human departure
on this now, to all
intents and purposes,
alien world

and whether, riff on
flower unseen meme,
the colours, the odours,
the sounds
very tactile feel of
the place
might exist
in our absence

forever persist
in their wondrous,
fabulous intensity

or has it
all just freeze-framed
forever capturing
the tragedy of
our great catastrophic moment

that coming to a consciousness
so acute we
no longer have hope
of the real.

BRIDGE

BRIDGE

they found a tunnel under
the Garden of Eden

a German archeologist
excavated it

seems some contraband may
have found its way through
a labyrinthine network
to places where its
presence
could not have been
more destructive

to the great mythology of
what went down here
who
was to blame
and what it means

adding to the neverending theology
and spiritual analysis

for which resolution we actually also
need the bridge

a bridge has yet to
found in the garden of Eden

we can only begin to imagine
how finding one will
structurally change things