“April is the cruellest month…”
T.S. Eliot said…
he simply wasn’t paying
the steep cost of attention.

It’s in the brown pits of November,
when we lie in hopeless wait,
in limbo stuck there in between
the stupid and sublime…

stuck in that old and barren hollow,
wedged between a grease congealed
KFC bucket called Autumn
laying in dead crackly leaves

and its winter-shadow-self
approaching in uneven shambling
gait with cutting winds, harbingers
lurking in its fraying heart.

I listen hard, I strain my soul
in this insensate endless month
for a song, a sound…anything?
maybe a last, desperate word

of Release?
Real-ease?

Reeling, I go through the gates
of death that loom large in the night
aware that I may well be robbed
of all this nothing left to me,

of all the rest of my short years
aware the grave cannot give praise,
that death cannot sing elegy
and I know, finally, that we

are sick for life, and desperate cling
to this nameless shining thing,
a fountain sealed, we drift toward
our edges, there below revealed

in such familiar frightening
familiar numb-ed anguished sting
shared just by one Incarnate One
a weak and beaten broken man,

a God defeated, crying in
the quiet weeping freezing rain
falling slowly in the black
and cloying plummeting sloe dark

that’s darker than our darkened world
blacker than all blackened loss
blinder than all senseless hate
and bleak as splintery bloody cross

and it is there our questions cold
fall limp…just like the rain itself
and like His sadly dripping tears
(Himself a rain so red and warm)

and here His tears mingle our own
and here His blood flows from His side
and there the final faint quick spark
flickers within His ruined hide

His broken heart amidst the dreck
of our lives brutally played out
in this tragic blind senseless wreck
where light lays down, and breathes its last

and mourns all dreams of futures past.
our only hope a hang-ed man
become the lowest of the low
embodying every despair,

He gives a cross to cling to, know
a hang-ed man, His own self there
insistent Incarnation fair
drinking the deep cup of despair

and promises that it is Done.