From our kitchen window sill
even our shortest pets
can enjoy bird watching:
Great Tit, Blue Tit, Marsh Hen,

inspiring early this morning
before the sun appeared
some of our gerbil hims
to put on drag and play Bearded Titmouse

until one, ‘Beefy Karel’, went to change in
what looked like a little phone booth,
closed the door, hit the switch…
Microwave! A Crisp Mass Karel!

The rising Devil likes our minds encumbered
with the busyness of trying to rule this world
instead of dancing the steps for which we’re made.
He tells us that we are his footling foundlings;
he delights as we grow flustered by attention.

Unnatural heat unhinges our best steps.
His furnace, through the prisms of our eyes,
can cataract our visions: we see God,
in all we, self-appointed Shepherds, do.

When the Devil sinks to the darkness where he’s bound
he will not drag us whining: we’ll march proud,
complacently competing for the honour
of being first in line at any trough.

‘What is our purpose?’ rival Pharisees
ask us rhetorically, then claim to answer
while lost small children so very long at sea
in the space of time keep searching for The Dancer.

He stir-fried a pint of squirrel parts
with last week’s found duck eggs
and ate the mess with his hunting knife
and a wooden spoon from under the chassis.

He called for his dog and he whittled on downed trees
on the edge of his orchard while his dog bit fleas.

I was three wines into Wednesday when the world
went belly up and blew out all the lights.
In the darkness I called ‘Waiter’ and the Darkness
answered sotto voce,

Does this pen still write without me? One can hope.
There are buried stories worrying away:
On the forest edge a wolf pack chews a rank rope
that frays like rotting morays. Aspens sway.

It’s a Rocky Mountain Trinidad or conversely
a Caribbean peak beneath the sea
where fish and fauna interchange perversely
in the faux persona I imagine’s me.

Were the music other, would I order cava
and cavort with phantoms only I can see?
A Turkish ballad scars the redneck badlands
in the Smith and Wesson wasteland I call Mind:
When I mainline sugar my eyes conjure a Jesus
who drains the fountain that De Soto sought.

Norwegians drink at home from six till midnight
then go out dancing, singing, fighting Loki
for a last dance with Valkyries who will pay
for their twenty-bucks-a-bottle barroom beer.

On the 21st of December 2012, if it is still on, we’re going to an end-of-days party. Thinking of those misusing various modes of religion to profit from people’s fears, this End-of-Days archbishop’s soliloquy sprang as it were to mind then to computer.

I like the heft and sounds of ‘protoplasm’.
The fact few ken its meaning just endears
itself to us who earn food from religion.

When churches churl and minor prelates spasm
it is good we can fall back upon our rears
and public fears and take as alms a pigeon

that Cook roasts for us, giving its phantasm
to God above who loves a dove and cheers
us on, as smearing lips with grease and smidgen

of toasty bird, we chase crowds to the chasm
of the End of Days. We profit from their fears
and substitute for reasoning a pidgin

language blending piety, sarcasm
and awe for a made-up deity who repairs
to a made-up sanctuary playing chicken.

The dog remembered days
Of hunting rabbits in the dunes
His human hailing him from far behind

The man remembered runaways
And a puppy he had lost
Beneath a passing milk truck’s muddy wheels

The rabbits resurrect a multigenerational myth
Of being hunted by a yelling dog