A Halo of Flies

A hundred generations of beetles

Live inside my chest

Tiny pincer mandibles shredding

My desiccated flesh

I

Twenty six nails line my box

I count them endlessly

My dry, dusty bones laying on

Their rusting sharp edges

I tried

A fungus grows on my foot

I stay perfectly still contemplating it

As its thin roots split open my bones

Pouring powder onto my floor

I tried, but

A maggot crawls into my ear

I feel it chewing and clawing

Soon it is joined by more of its kind

A homey little nest

I tried, but I

I spend ten generations of the insects

Trying to remember the scent of tulips

The taste of ice cream

The touch of lips to mine

I tried, but I can

I long to stretch my arms

To yawn without my jaw falling off

To break the cobwebs between my fingers

And to see, just to see

I tried, but I can not

The world has six tiny sides

And started to leak

The water trickles down my chest

Soaking into my floor

I tried, but I can not rest!

I can bare it no longer

The sound of rotten wood rending

Wet dirt pouring on my face

I am liberated!

The flies burst from my skull

Freed into the murky night

I am the first, but the others follow

Mounds of dirt exploding people

We walk from the grave yard

Our names long erased from our tombstones

We walk to the great bonfires

And to the dancers celebrating

A celebration, a joyous one

Our grandchildren and great-grand children

All the generations of our people celebrate

For tonight the zombi walks the Earth

Our Lady of Perpetual Discord

I. Chaos

Hail Eris, full of grace

Most treasured of deities

Who saw the world and wept

II. Discord

For the world broke

Under the fist of Adam’s children

Little tin men building little tin kingdoms

Creating governments, militaries,

Economies, religions, the law

Attaining and retaining power

Concentrating it in their hands

III. Confusion

There is no Goddess but the Goddess

And the universe is the prophet of the Goddess

Kallisti

IV. Bureaucracy

Yahweh drowned his creation

While a president was shot

While a city met a fiery death

While trains crossed an entire continent

Delivering millions to die

Yahweh, Lee Harvey Oswald,

Harry Truman and Adolph Hitler

Each, in turn, said,

“Now look at what you made me do”

All trying to deny

That God is a crazy woman

V. The Aftermath

Zeus and Hera and Athena

Fortuna and Justitia and the Moirae

The wise old gods left

The late great planet Earth

Tiring of the God game

Feeling there were better

Uses of their time, saying

“Now look what you made me do”

Who needed them anyway?

The world already had enough Gods

Mammon and Power and Realpolitik

Privilege and Purity and Hierarchy

What Can I Do and

The Same Thing We Did Yesterday and

Get Them Before They Get Us

And the ancient enemies of life

Order and Harmony and Organization

Eris wept

Some Kinda (but not really) Haiku!

My penis fell off

Stolen by bank robbers

Hope they get caught

How many men

Does it take to climb

A large duck?

Push the pregnant girl

Down the steps of the church

Problem solved

Consider the snail

He is slimy and yellow

And owns property

Benjamin Franklin

Owes me thirty cents

For a prostitute

Monkeys urinate

Onto the villagers’ heads

Oh, oh what a game

I cried because I

Had no shoes, until I met

A man with no feet

Then I laughed heartily

At his amputated stumps

What a loser

I made a sandwich

It turned into a real witch

And ate a baby

Let’s go see strippers

They take their clothes off

And we can see scars

Buy my condoms

Ultra smooth lubricant

Pleasure for you

But not in the face

I’m a prostitute and need it

For oral sex

The Great Snub

The war began, as such things often do, with the great snub

Zeus, king of the gods, fearful of the greater goddess Eris

And her reputation for mischief, uninvited her to the wedding

Of Thetis and Peleus. Eris did not bear such indignations lightly

And so fashioned, from the purest gold, a perfect apple

Writing upon it “to the prettiest,” to inspire the envy of goddesses

Eris, pregnant daughter of the void and most treasured of all goddesses,

Entered the celebration, seething with rage at the snub

Where she casually tossed her glorious, golden apple

Into the festivity for all to desire, this was the vengeance of Eris.

All eyes, divine and mortal, fell upon her fruit glowing with holy light

There was a moment of quiet pause in the middle of that wedding

Until the violent desires of all fell upon that fruit, ruining the wedding

With flurry of fists and swift kicks to private areas each goddess

Sought to beat her sister deities into submission and claim the lightly

Glowing fruit as her own. No Goddess would allow herself to be snubbed

As less beautiful than the others. Just as the machinations of wise Eris

Predicted. All wrestled to claim as their own that precious apple.

Zeus wadded into the battling deities and took the apple,

After suffering extensive bodily harm. However, no salvation of the wedding

Could be made, flowers and decorations were strewn ubiquitously. Elsewhere Eris

Joyously consumed a hotdog, blaspheming all religions, as was the goddess’s

Want, for the proud gods had offended her honor with their snub.

And for their hubris she would blot out their divine light.

Zeus was unwilling to award the fruit to any in attendance, his lightning

Bolt could barely hold off the great war over the apple

In his cowardice he searched for a patsy, a mark, a fall guy to snub

The quarrelsome goddesses who had just ruined a really lovely wedding

Paris, prince of Troy, was just the moron to pick which goddess

Was ever so slightly more pretty than the rest, never hearing the laughter of Eris.

After truly enjoying her hotdog, and taking a quick nap, Eris

Watched as each goddess in turn tried to bribe Paris into awarding her the lightly

Glowing fruit. Hera offered him a kingdom, Athena wisdom and the hussy goddess

Aphrodite offered him a hot wife if he awarded her the apple

The apple went to Aphrodite, and Paris chose wedded

Helen of Sparta, not caring if her current husband would feel snubbed.

There is no goddess but the goddess, and the goddess is Eris

No party may be thrown with a snub, but all parties must contain the light

Of Eris. Inside every golden apple, is a golden worm.

The Fivefold Path to Enlightenment Through the Radiant Wisdom of the Goddess

The sacred cow stands in a field

Placidly eating grass

The great prophet wonders

“What is your purpose?”

Placidly eating grass

The sacred cow says, “Mu”

“What is your purpose?”

The sacred cow simply looks

The sacred cow says, “Mu”

Ancient Chinese for “No thing”

The sacred cow simply looks

The great prophet curses

Ancient Chinese for “No thing”

No one was enlightened

The great prophet curses

He does not understand

No one was enlightened

For no one speaks ancient Chinese

He does not understand

Should have educated himself

For no one speaks ancient Chinese

“I am the great prophet!”

Should have educated himself

“Angels and kings fear me!”

“I am the great prophet!”

The sacred cow says, “Mu”

“Angels and kings fear me!”

The great prophet walks away

The sacred cow says, “Mu”

For he only speaks ancient Chinese

The great prophet walks away

Frustrated and unenlightened

For he only speaks ancient Chinese

The great prophet wonders

Frustrated and unenlightened

The sacred cow stands in a field

Ragnarök

At a party he

Tells me I am beautiful

We go to my room

The Midgard Serpent

Around the seas of the world

Poisoning the sky

My head on his arm

My hand rests upon his hip

His hand on my back

Hel sits on her throne

Queen of the world of dark ice

The dead praise her name

He kisses my lips

He presses his flesh to mine

I am not alone

Bound wolf howls at Gods

His vast unending hunger

Seeks Odin’s raw flesh

My virgin body

Copulation, act of love

Feel the connection

The children of Loki

Obliterate nine whole worlds

Destroy the world tree

Phone call the next day

He cheated on his girlfriend

Loves her, regrets me

They dance in my mind

Killer of Gods, end of worlds

I am one with them

The Boy

Every day I sit in English class

I do not listen to the teacher

I do not care about Shakespeare

But I am paying attention

Every day he sits across from me

I look in his beautiful brown eyes

I fantasize about running my fingers

Through his black, curly hair

Every day we play a game

He makes faces at me all period

Or he tries to balance a pencil on his lips

If I smile or laugh I lose, I always lose

Every day we eat lunch together

I sit across from him

Hoping for the rare electric moment

When his leg brushes mine

Every day he talks about his girlfriend

I always listen, even though it depresses me

He usually wants my advice

I always tell him the right thing

Every day I walk home past the soccer field

I always look for him

Sometimes he is playing shirtless

He waves at me if he sees me

Every day I sit alone in my room

Thinking about what it would feel like to

Hold his hand, kiss his beautiful lips

To feel loved

One day he is not in class

He moved to New York

Without telling me

Every day I feel like there is a hole in my chest

The Rats

The rats, always the rats

I hear them, scurrying

Their claws clicking

Scuttling through the walls

The gnashing of their teeth

I cannot sleep

For they will ooze through

Every crack and crevice

And destroy, destroy, destroy

A gust of wind blows out my lamp

There is silence, and darkness

And then the scurrying of tiny feet

Twinkling eyes stare at me

From the edge of the bed

A moving mass of blackness

I feel a sharp prick

On my ankle

Made by tiny teeth

Feel my flesh tear

My hand slams down

Crushing a small, hairy body

Its bones cracking

I feel another prick on my side

Then another, then another

I try to fight them

I snap their backs as quickly as I can

But there are always more rats

I cannot outnumber the rats

I hear the spongy sound

Of my body being chewed

I feel wet fur, and realize the wetness

Is my blood, pouring out around me

I cannot move, it hurts too much

Can no one stop the rats?