Random Modulation

Joy is a virtue
haunted by the way human bodies materialize
in front of where they are,
on a narrow street strewn with bricks
where thru a 3rd story window one can see that a saint hovers
anxious & common
over a sink full of plates.
Joy resists the shame of mirth, the tears of television
& three rumors of 14 museums to the south.
Autumn leaves are glad when no joy arrives.
Joy is independent of cooking, adventures, forgiveness, statistics, 
   signatures, systems, birdhouses, jailbirds, exactitude, existence, 
   tangled underbrush, the ability to divide width by duration, 
   Ezekiel, Pontius Pilate, pomp & circumstance, grit & grandeur,
& a book left half-read on a chair.
Joy is a sin. In my father's house are many dishes,
but that doesn't mean you can break one.
Even if joy does hide under the glaze.
The moon has no joyous phase.

No holy book, no cursed tome, tells
what happened the day before days began:
how certain angels came together
hovering half over half by turn
and with their talons tore away
one another's feathers; and then,
thighs and claws straining, broke
and broke again naked, pimpled wings
into crooked arms and hands;
extinguished the nimbuses that glowed
from their flesh, which grew heavy and damp;
and shrank their eternity to a pinch of life,
that they might walk briefly among
clover and grass, cottonwood and ash,
touch randy young goats and flatulent cows,
caress snake and spider, catfish and cricket,
know all the green and withering miracles
Heaven endures without.

Don’t pry into love’s thoughts:
the back of a smile
is hideous, the interior
of a kiss has fangs.
Take the pleasure that’s offered.
Ask not through what fraud
or cruelty it has come.

The older I get, the angrier I become.
The angrier I feel, the more I fight.
The harder I fight, the younger I grow.

the magnolia branch
leans over the fence
and nods hello

Scenario 1: The expanding universe finds no end as matter spreads 
   itself ever thinner until only a dim fog remains, the history of 
   Rome a swirl in the mist, my life a jig of a few dozen atoms, 
   until even these ghosts dissolve into the tepid bath of eternity.
Scenario 2: The Big Bang puffs out the last huff of energy from its 
   lungs and inhales, the expanding universe contracts, time 
   runs backwards, all the rocks and dust and star-stuff rush back 
   into the womb, all the angels crammed onto the head of a single 
   pin elbow to eyeball with gods and devils and junkies and 
   geniuses, and then it all blows up again but every explosion is 
   different and so if I’m reborn in the new universe I make other 
   awful choices.
Scenario 3: Quantum collapse, the subatomic glue does not hold, the 
   structures of space fall apart, existence unravels at the speed 
   of light, hell it might be happening now, we’d never see it coming 
   until it pulled the plug on our synapses for good, sudden as the 
   evangelical return of Jesus but without the Rapture, God himself 
   caught by surprise, all those pearly mansions built on sand 
   crumbling away.
I saw these doom scenarios on Twitter (where else?) and I don’t 
   know which I’d choose, not that I get to, but whichever way it 
   goes whatever choices I make in this moment come to nothing, but 
   they matter for now and screw me later, if now and later are real 
   but to be honest spacetime seems sketchier than this ditchweed I’m 
   smoking, which really is helping me think about these things
of cosmic importance, and the thing I see clearly is that things of 
   cosmic importance don’t matter because they’re not doable and not 
   here, but my nextdoor neighbors are here with a big bowl of jambalaya 
   they had left over and I have some Trader Joe’s single malt scotch to 
   offer them and we can sit and watch the sun which is just now setting 
   like it’s the first time ever, and then we can watch the stars.

As we trash the Earth,
We look to space
For a second home
For the human race,

But Mars is too cold
And Venus too hot,
And those are the best
Options we’ve got,

While here’s becoming
An unlivable mess.
We’re horrible tenants,
We must confess

To the Celestial Landlord,
And forgiveness implore,
As we bust down the walls
And tear up the floor.

Behind the walls is a room made of glass and in that room a ship too large to
fit through the door (which is hardly wide enough to admit me), its planks
draped with seaweed and dripping,

and the streaked milkiness of the glass is an accretion of salt, it comes off
powdery on the finger which I instinctively lick

and taste brine, my tongue’s nerves reach into the brain to scribble pictures of
squid anemone starfish crab coral flounder

suddenly moves and stirs the silt on the floor of my thoughts and the salt
liquid in my veins wrinkles and icy currents surge my body through

and here 600 miles from any ocean the moon’s waves break ever towards me but
never reach, and I stir in the bed that is only mine, my wife beside me away on
her own dark voyage,

and it’s nearly certain we’ll see each other when day breaks but not guaranteed
at all that either of us will have returned or ever shall.