Poetry Collection

SELECTED POEMS FROM:

Dead Crow & the Spirit Engine

1. Birth

Why? Why here? On this planet?

Creation’s womb swells

with stars

colliding—

black blood drop

falling through space

is blessed by light

and becomes thought

without form.

And falling

into Earth’s atmosphere,

thought is blessed by air

and becomes feather,

to skiff the ponds of heaven

and eventually

become wings.

And falling through cloud

wing is blessed by rain

to become body,

the strength to rise up

out of Hell

and ashes.

And falling

through snowtipped wind,

body and wing

are blessed with breath

that they might speak

and continue living.

And landing

on the topmost branches

of Ararat’s ancient cedar,

Crow is born.

3. Arrival

Wing blessed by rain becomes body…

A word to the wise. Never

let yourself go at a banquet

of the gods. You’re bound

to end up the goat to somebody’s

trickster, like I did. I’ll never

get that goddess’s laugh

out of my head! Inanna, Aphrodite,

Madonna—I’ve loved and lost them all,

every one. I never

should have looked into that mirror.

Next thing I knew,

I had a whanging headache

like a hangover on speed,

and found myself here—on Earth—

hurled in a heartbeat from the sun.

How I got here from the other side

of the galaxy is a complete

conundrum. Still, as planets go,

this one ain’t bad.

Plenty of water, trees dropping fruit,

dead bodies everywhere.

I see their spirits rise

in morning mist.

It’s what keeps me alive, this beak

that can sniff out the dead

from forty miles away.

After my first year or two

I began to see what the dead see—

silhouettes of energy

a tracery of frost on glass.

But hell, what’s my mission here?

To scratch off the days

foraging for clues

in a holocaust boneyard?

To chew on blood-raw liver

in the desperate hope

it’ll spit up the omens and cures? Besides,

who listens to prophecy anymore?

The two-by-two of paradox

makes poor food for a Crow.

Listen, I’ve been around.

I’ve stared into the water long enough

to see what’s on the other side.

Doesn’t make me a genius. Just means

I know how to pay attention.

You think this world is everything there is?

26. The Day After Covid

They had for their king the angel of the abyss, whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek

Apollyon, or the Destroyer… He seized the dragon, that serpent of old, the Devil or Satan, and

chained him up for a thousand years; he threw him into the abyss, shutting and sealing it over

him, so that he might seduce the nations no more till the thousand years were over. —

Revelations 9:11, 20:1–3

The day after Covid, surgical masks

lay dead in the gutters, so many leaves

riffled into history by the collective sigh

of billions—breathe, O breathe free

at last! The lie laid bare, the masks of power

cracked, blue-backlit screens split open.

Shaggy-horned demons scurry, still

sucking the world dry—O hunger, circling

the drain, fill, fill these beasts that they prey

upon us no more. Strap them into the SpaceX

express and fire them into the eye

of the sun. Failing that, build them cages

made of gold, that their bloody forked tongues

lick clean daily from top to bottom,

their cells far, far away from the living

and sealed like a nuclear bunker

with the warning: There be monsters here.

Trespass at your own risk. The Angel

of the Abyss, shining lancet of Revelations,

will stand guard, stanching infection

at its wormy roots in the heart, where dreams

dark and deadly take hold. Fear not, O you

who tend the sapling and mend a broken wing,

for this guardian is an Angel of Dance,

who skips off the sun’s corona as it crests

the arc of Earth, spirit-sails the spiral arms

whose galactic milk stains the summer skies,

jigs the ocean for its shattered jewels

and sheds us all of our Earthly chains.

6. Storm Year

The year crept in rainy

and feline, black as lung tar,

as if you could feel the snarl

crouching in the hedges.

Now that we have banished demons

and angels, debunked water diviners

and spirit mediums, we are more afraid

than ever. Lived apart from the wild

too long to recall the sinuous

darkness we breathe awake.

But it’s not about us anymore,

if it ever was. Gaia is awake,

and unlike us, doesn’t discriminate.

All who tasted the banquet then shat out

plastic in my oceans, raided forests

for toilet paper or stripped mountains

to bare rock, all will feel me roar.

Your poor and your starving, your weak

and your powerful, all will feel me roar.

Do not dare close your ears to me.

I can feel the garden soil tense, waiting.

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