%1

The lips of the angels
Blister and flame.
Their mouth pieces painful
From trumpeting name

After name. They lay down
Their horns and the dead 
Still arrive, dying to drown
Out the hush in their heads

That would crush paradise. 
You have their hymns
In your skin memorized,
Spilling your lungs and your limbs.

You don’t sleep. You don’t sleep. 
Your delicate chest
How it wails and it weeps
That overcome angels might rest.

No, Matthew’s gospel doesn’t mention me
when I was in that boat, wrestling that sail.
But someone had to do it—I could see
the waves were high, the wind a roaring gale.

The others wouldn’t help, saying they were shocked,
spotting our reckless rabbi suddenly
walking on water, then our stubborn ox—
yeah, Peter—trying to walk like he was He.

(That’s so Peter: first to speak, first to act,
pushing his pushy self against the master,
as if that made him Number One in fact,
as if he’d get to heaven even faster.)

The fantasy of Severance is that we can avoid facing the moral peril of the structures we inhabit.

               Flies swarm
over mulberries
               mashed on the road,
purple pulp fermenting
               in the heat beneath the tree’s
heavy shadow.
               Rorschach blots.