Dithyramb

Wake up! Be alive! Have some fucking passion!
Why must we live a life where dead spirits are the fashion?
Where are the spirits that make us want to dance?
Why can’t we touch and kiss, make romance
A fiery and wanton thing
That makes us bellow out and sing
From our very visceral guts, buried down
So deep our very memories of it have been drowned?
There is no Dionysian – and Apollo’s not the rule –
And every scholar, every fool
Who claims to know the masked god’s revelry
Is shown a Pentheus without chivalry –
An infection of our lives and culture,
Lacking the taste of even a vulture.
There is no Dionysus in academic verse –
Throwing random words together so only the worst
Are raised to the heights of academia –
Creating at best a poetic bulemia.
So be gone, you culture killers, killers of the human soul,
You who have the vision of a naked mole
Rat digging through the desert sands,
Whose ignorant notions of freedom only tie the hands.
Be gone, you culture killers, let be reborn
Dionysus with his goring bullish horn –
Dionysus with great Apollo, his friend,
Making this dead culture bend
Until it breaks up into something new
(Which is also old, full of life and the true).
It is time to wake up! Hear the siren call
Us up out of our beds until we recall
To this new life our new-cherished memes –
All of the passion and life of our dreams.

PÆan to God

I knew that I had God in me when I
Saw God in everyone and everything.
Before then, God could not appear in me
And my soul could not grow a single wing.
Before I saw the table full of guests
I could not feast, did not know what to bring –
Before I heard all the other voices
In the chorus, I could not even sing.

The emptiness which can destroy us all –
That is the absence of God. Let Him find
You – Beauty will enfold you in her arms,
And you will see that before and behind,
Eternity and time, many and one
All constitute the beauty of one mind –
This is the knowledge and wisdom we need
To become beautiful, just, fair, and kind.

And now I know that God is not out there,
An abstract force controlling from above,
But here, on earth, enwrapped in beauty. Here,
One with the lilies of the field, the dove
That brings us peace and transformation, life
Much more alive than any life, warm glove
That staves off chilly, cold, encroaching hate
By being, fair, the personhood of love.