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