Writhing Tongue

[Lucifer:]
... but to swathe me, the wound, in globular
Gauze, that is, with salt to smother,
Upon which to cultivate the waste,
Was quite another.
From the suppurating heart, pounding with magma,
Through cracks I had crept towards open space:

A circumscribed garden, where time, if not
Languished, but dallied like the new race,
Snoozing alike in a surreal siesta
Under a bower of unknowing bliss.

The idyll be mellow and pure,
Yet idle ideals did fester
The malignant cells of my memory,
Seething like brimstone with sorrow's
Own secrets of purulent war!

The quill's been plucked from my broken wing,
My pulsing wrist's open to flow poisonous ink.
But why should my hand rather tremble than pen
The first germ of history's scenario
On the tabula rasa, the hymen unflushed
As yet on the eve of time?
The earth will not be bare of but bear
The germs of my existence.

My skin has sloughed off and my Tree stands
Upright in the womb of fecund innocence.

[Eve:]
If I entered the haze, won't it steal
Into me? if my tongue won't tell me,
Why, dear stranger, should I follow
Your glide which defies it?

[Lucifer:]
How dare you distrust a divine visitation?
Have I abruptly carried you off?
Do you think a stranger can be this intimate?
Allow me to implant a sense of the divine.

[Eve:]
I alone govern the tongue
To lap up the juice from a fruit
So rife with vistas of divine relish
It could erupt any moment;
But our familiar orchard looks
Unnatural and remote.

[Lucifer:]
Swallow or choke in the bittersweet seed.
Convulse in the death-throes of knowledge.
Does not the hangman-tree's overripe fruit
Tender tastes hitherto unknown?

[Gabriel:]
Exit your home of indulgence.
No cover is constant 'gainst spite and distress.
Wear sorrow's shroud and naked shame's sackcloth,
But no dressing can heal the world's hideous wound.
The infectious miasma of decay
Swiftly swells up the world over,
The wood of Nature's tree
Bows to the burden of sin.
And Paradise is nothing more
But a mirage embedded in your minds.

[Lucifer:]
The history of time
Was condensed in one diminutive drop,
Where I am the alpha and the omega
Where, eye to eye, I meet myself,
Downwards pursuing the spiral revolutions
Until the bottom line, the end of times,
The big bang,
When history collapses upon itself.

[Adam:] The tongue is a raw piece of meat,
[Eve:] Which writhes with the foul tang of terrible words.
[Adam:] We're fooled into wisdom, then naked truth shows
[Adam & Eve:] cruelty's cold angular grin.

[Adam:] The trees shed our guilt to clothe us in shame;
[Eve:] With shame thorns and thistles sting our bare skin.

[Adam & Eve:]
Despite or due to the vileness of tang
And tantalizing intangibleness,
Our thirst remains unquenched.

[Lucifer:]
My throat is still dry and parched.
The tears of heaven shed but salt
To preserve and inflame the wound
Which can't tell between burn marks of caustic catharsis
And frostbites of piercing paralysis.