Allegorical Mysteries

Open the door and two things happen;

On a sunny day, the clouds darken and the rain falls;

When it is wet and wild, the leaves dry out and blow into the house,

And scatter into every room, with clanging and banging.

Pick up a glass or a dish,

No matter how large,

Its sides become unctuous

And crash to the floor,

Tiny splinters disappear into unknown crannies.

Pills bounce completely out of sight,

The more rare and expensive

The less likely ever to be found.

Newspaper pages refuse to be unfolded

Without first plunging deep into a bowl of soup

Then coating all garments with pea-green sludge.

There are never pencils to be found

For crossword  puzzles

Or to take important messages from the phone,

Except those lacking points or erasers.

These are the implicit principles of modernity,

The fixed laws of domestic economy

And cosmic harmonies long silenced;

The reason why the dinosaurs became extinct

And the only explanation for the massive

Proportion of DNA code unreadable in the brain.

******

What the Bees and the Bats Allow

Bees of all species, murderous and needful, soon

Will be missing from the world of pollen, low petal-stools

Where faerie maidens danced beneath the moon,

No longer filling honey through the tools

Of their proboscis; so that colours too will fade,

Like scents, from our gardens. The bat allows

The darkness once more to reign, and all things made

in caves by unseeing creatures; only swallows

chasing insects as the dawn appears, like arias

by divas rapidly declining, weighted and unsighted

by unshaped melodies they screech, the carriers

of memory no longer recognized, blighted

mysteries of nature and her seasons’ stench,

Parasites laid out where human corpses fill the bench.