Never Was a Gambling Man

Another reworked piece. I like this one much better.

Heavy-handed-slit-lidded, I’m casting those bones
- didn’t play my game as close-chested as I should have, though –
And now I’m throwing with higher stakes than I’d known prior,
starting to regret the forced nonchalance of trying to “keep cool.”
Cast and weighted as I could,
but don’t watch: I’m blind to the hustling pit and
eyes-dimmed of hope-glimmer, I’m resigned against
double-sevens and sacred fourteens, anticipating instead
the triple-ones and maybe solo-fours of feigned failure
- they’re the usual roll, anyway, but I’m standing, moving, gone –
I can’t watch this.
Black/whites give rise to new metrics of haste,
the cubes bouncing and dancing on damnation,
and as the headsman’s axe falls, the die settle:

Broken Leaves - April version

Someday, I will be content with this piece. Not yet though.

Pulled by a black magic so
ephermal it’s more mist than mass,
I conjure.
I conjure and summon the thunder the clouds, spinning
celestial hammers that make ruin of the land –
Sent forward to hew the stone,
to destroy to butcher to carve apart the image of
the hand that came before,
and make anew a likeness never before seen:
But my vision is hollow, empty, a fraction of yesterday,
missing a critical support mechanism
that remains as intangible as the lightning
that carved these lines known prior,
and the hand that ordained this world.

The struggle sometimes is not one of definition,
no, but rather syntax; but the cracks, holes, gaps
I failed to foresee, could not have seen,
they mar and line this landscape -
They define it, they claim themselves as
antagonia-in-opposition.
They embolden the horizon with a faultline that
I knew not these iron hands capable:
An awareness of futility so pervasive so as
to destroy in an eternity of decay.
But not the stone
- never the stone -
As even barring I or he who came before I,
These stones live of their own:
Grow and fall and form, and I – we –
elements of impermanence, and yet as strongly
as these molecules bind themselves my image,
as absolutely as they assume correct form,
they are to be only as dust, as laughably marred as crippled,
their pre-programmed entropy a display that I – we – have neither
those iron-shod hands nor power over stone, no, but rather -
The shattered leaf, the burned branch,
The wilted, scorched and dying grass, yes
- these things,
these things dead and fleeting and soon gone, yes –
These are the ways in which we carve.

The Lance of Longinus, I

Mother, would you believe
what it is that I am to do?
Of mine charge,
a Christ.
Of mine command,
a lance.
Of mine soul,
a damnation.

Mother, would you believe
what it is that I have done?
Of mine hands,
a murderer.
Of mine eyes,
a scapegoat.
Of mine soul,
an apostate.

Mother, would you believe
what they have done to me?
Of my spear,
a relic.
Of my armor,
an icon.
Of my soul,
a saint.

The Lance of Longinus, II

Blessed mother, sacred father:
your son has forsaken your way.
Gone from mine eyes is the radiance
of your puissant Pantheon, escaped
from mine soul as the blood-aery
poured from the vacated void of the blade:
Baptized, as it happens, on Sacred Calvary.

Blessed mother, sacred father:
your son has forsaken your way.
Mine spear borne away by bewinged babes,
and mine armour broken in devout decay as
dawn approached while the sun setting, unfurled:
The man thrice-pierced and twice crowned
had died, and as I to this world.

Blessed mother, sacred father:
your son has forsaken your way.
Lifted aloft and b’wreathed by angels,
promised the thousand glories of mortal deliverance
as my men bore him away and gone:
He is dead, gone and rotting in a cave,
but what can be of day if lacking in Son?

Blessed mother, sacred dather,
your son has forsaken your way:
Light not a pyre for him, nor
sing sorrows to thine furies –
strike thy son Longinus from the lists,
take all that we Romans know of this world
and cast it forth into the abyss.

The Lance of Longinus, III

Lance of Longinus III

Father, and fathers before he,
know that I fall from you without fear:
“Truly, this man was the Son of God,”
I spoke aloud as I thrust the lance,
and knew a dawn of peace within me
as the sun set upon our ancient empire.

Father, and fathers before he,
know that I fall from you without fear:
I have forsaken only the shadow that
has become our world, and beg a thousand times:
forgiveness, blessed father, but no longer am I astray –
“Truly, this man was the Son of God.”

Father, and fathers before he,
know that I fall from you without fear:
what that I could share with you this
blood, this salvation, that you might say,
“Truly, this man was the Son of God,” –
and what that only you didn’t fear to fall.