by George Eliot Clarke

 

Poems by George Eliot Clarke

Moses

  1. Irreverence is Relevance.

 

  1. Though we risk the rabid, fatal bolts

of a pissed-off Deity,

His views are sounded in thunder smashing

vacuumed Silence.

 

  1. Elsewise, our tongues must cringe to ash—

never escape a limbo of blood—

distillation of ferocious genocides

(despite accretions of academe ivy)—

all those amassed tribes, slaughtered mongrels—

denizens of bankrupt, desert, tuneless latitudes,

their hearts puking brine, phlegm.

 

  1. Pharaoh was hinging on wrinkles;

still, the vile royal tried to jostle God.

Well, he ended up bawling in his bathtub,

drowning in beer,

while his troop guttered,

thundering blood—

clustered, lustrous, riotous blood.

 

  1. Defeat was an alien emotion.

 

  1. Pharaoh’s son became a bath of erupting tissues:

Locusts leeched his blood.

 

  1. But God always has a grave need

to spit on graves.

 

  1. (If such is detestable,

He informs us elsewise—

by many factors of loudness.)

 

  1. Wicked lawyers and legalistic theologians

crave to be respectable “martyrs,”

but they spread about such Evil,

their silver tongues bringing poets’ black eyes,

their every church is shaky,

with ministers’ brains gone tinny….

 

  1. They preside over humans stuffed in sacks—

gone to humus:

They look like white maggots

writhing in a sea of black rot.

 

  1. I’d prefer to taste nuptial bread and honey—

rations of rum, fractions of ham—

with Pharaoh’s daughter

than swallow unpleasant plonk.

 

[Vicenza (Italia) 7 & 8 mai mmxvi]