Ash Wednesday

i

Only Joshua’s

incorporeal cauldron-bowels

can

consume

this yearly unsoulful suffusion

of

rouge-faced oblation

and

then

regurgitate them, again,

ash-smeared foreheads

of

cosmetic contrition:

only Joshua’s.

 ii

Joshua propagates back my left ear
down at Gethsemane
doubling his battered body’s fatal fruition
that conduces equally
to sudden otherwise disconcerting pulls

now of triumphal dance and now of choral doom
now of labial kiss and now of silver kiss
and showers on both equally
his rain and his shine and o
his blood too
on that tree of boundless dualities
that now props him high the heavens

now just as low down the deepest bowels of the earth
that swallows up so slippery a Joshua
who propagates my ear down at Gethsemane
so our dismembered lobe

doubles his fatal fruition
when the baffled bowels
regurgitate him again:

shroud-shaming summer of winter immortality.

iii

How many times will Joshua shun my sword

and blow the smear from oh my earthed auditory lobe,

plug it back like scion-bud
before my sheath-spurning sword ceases to tear it again

out

so I never ever gain the boon double audit
that alone hears the soberer other half of his case
that relentless beckons me

like conquest-drunk Ojadili's flute
from the meretricious rotundity of the apple
the fraudulent charm of swine-fellowship

the Janus-lustre of the scarlet silver pieces
the arboreal lure that draws a disillusioned Judas
the carnal cry on his left arm to merely lumber back my lobe—

gross rehash of the crimson chorus to bail me Barabbas
towards the sudden soulful Longinus-cry
that solely secures me his Joshuadom?