Food for Prayer

The world on the head of a pin,
world views whirling about like
every-ice-cream-flavor-swirl,
confused, unknown to itself and icy,
runs circles coming and going nowhere.

The child of eleven
claiming the right to bear arms,
in a night full of arms to slice
especially her own, screaming,
dreaming of no nightmares anymore.

Who will go for Me
into this international street
paved with progress
of a kind to make angels wince,
architected by false god followers?

Who can cut with this plow
through the cybernetic chaos
to the heart of man
still naked under the pile of metallic rubbish
knit by strange machines?

Intense anger flows over a minute lost,
or a few dollars - just nonsense
when every second and every dollar
goes to things admittedly unimportant
yet somehow still urgent.

The priesthood of constructed beliefs,
still boycott flagrant polluters of earth,
though its purpose faded gray
the day simple faith became too simple,
clinches a paranoid fist at anyone looking.

Who can hear what is spoken
in their faraway thoughts
of parading panaceas
in their frowning peacelessness
broken only by restless sleep?

Who can see the irony
as the pantomime of the enlightened
fades into the dark hallway of hopelessness
and can shout once again
the simple truth I spoke?

She flashes a leg in ostentation unconcerned,
numb really, to the perilous looks of lust,
never wondering whether it was
the attention or the money
that laid the first snare.

He wipes his brow
as the market closes uninsured and uncovered,
the smell of going down
crawling through yesterdays tee-shirt
with beer spills and secretions and death.

Who can pray
like the twenty sixth mile,
like break fluid spilling onto the mountainside,
like a freefall elevator,
against an ocean of tar ceaselessly?

Who can live without
things that have collected
under the rooftop of possession,
just dead weight in the desert,
a lampshade to the lost?

Tombs of metal and glass
buzzing through satellite lenses
that sort and report of threats to the state
from the cold space
that once warmed hearts of the wondrous.

Tombs of polypeptides and daily supplements,
of sixty-four daily ounces of spring water,
of newspaper educations,
of psychobabble repertoires,
die nonetheless against every fiber of will.

Who will step into the fire
with their goals forgotten,
the past fully passed,
the present in living color and motion,
naked but unashamed?

Who will submit to the chain
whether the horse is wild or tame
without hesitation
with no word in mouth but just one,
meekly, with mind whole?