white houses
of shadow frost
—one bird hops

.

Do people come back from Hell?

If you were in Hell and the Pope decided that the particular offence you had been damned for was no longer that bad in your particular case, would that mean you had to be released and allowed into Heaven? And would you be entitled to some compensation? Perhaps even therapy for the probable post-traumatic stress? I mean who goes through x years of unbearable torture without some psychological fallout? If you weren't rehabilitated in some way you could be a liability always starting fights with the cool floaty people in Heaven,, which they might not find very heavenly, and which could lead to complaints and 'problems' in the place without problems.

But maybe if your sins are still pending a final decision as to their scale of mortality etc, you don't go to Hell but rather to some sort of holding complex until the decision is made. This might be 100 or 1000 years in the future, but of course God will know that it's going to happen and won't let you be subjected to any torture for something which He will eventually turn out to have approved of when his various popes realise it. This holding complex will therefore necessarily be a nice place that isn't too different from Heaven.

While we're at it there's something else I'd like to know. If the crucifixion of Christ brought about a new covenant between humanity and God, whereby humans could now be redeemed of their sins and granted safe passage to Heaven upon repentance and acceptance of Christ, then wasn't it sort of the responsibility of God to advertise this to all humans at the point when it became available? I mean why did he only let a few people know about it? I know they told other people and gradually over 2000 years a lot of people found out, but a lot of people died in that time without knowing and must have gone to Hell. Actually, some people still don't know up in the highlands of Papua New Guinea or deep in the rainforest in South America. So are some people still going to Hell every day because they haven't been told they don't need to any more?

I don't mean to be awkward or anything, but this doesn't seem quite fair to me. Are there any theologians out there who can explain these things to me?

And, if God is omnipotent, can He prove He doesn't exist?

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The Duodeniad

La Rage—sing, goddess, of the Rabies of Achilles

the Pope now has an HIV-infected Gay lover
—this has led to a considerable softening of his position
regarding the use of condoms

words that won't wash out: tubetrain/rucsack/Krak des Chevaliers

the Chinese eat cats like crackers
but that's nothing to the French
who drown young beaked boys in Armagnac
they bury in woodland in Spring let it all mulch down to thick soup
they swear by the fortifying properties

his vegetal body his machine massif
his midriff his central nervous plexus a clock
a barometer to be tapped and adjusted
it tracks responsively the snaking isobars set it in train
like a Victorian clockwork golem
trained to follow a bannister commit strangulation upon
a sleeper on the highest floor he intends instead
the meridians of psychic commerce every time that she
walks in the room rage sing of rage golem sing of
Aung San Suu Kyi at one end of a telescope
a little uniformed general with his mouth grinding the other
like a cat with nothing else

rage sing of rage he says all silly with a new bike and hat

North Utsire/South Utsire: a sea giant moderate to good
occasionally poor at first

who could love your face so full of interior disfigurement?

the Vatican explains that on a case by casis it has never opposed
the use of condoms if you have been kidnapped by Islamist baboons
force you to commit acts of disgusting coitus on a monkey
but regret that you will still attend the 7th Hell on the grounds
that to be able to commit said act you must have had something
going on

we took me and some friends took control of the world sometime yesterday
in ways too subtle to yet be understood

I have decided not to give up wanking
there is a pleasant place just outside Hell where you wait
until the Pope catches up
it's all just a formality now
papers and ID please how often did you do it
were you married no well in here please
try to cool it in the waiting room there will be opportunity later

the Vatican explains that it has never been opposed to the use of
trained monkeys for sex

The Papa has issued clarification-condoms

Hunkpapa winewall at the margo
in eery breathbasks

.
.

urgent cupboards unfold

let the hurt run deep

your hands poised there look at them
the big gun fretting at its work

there in the market mid-afternoon
buying wool for the evening
guffawing away into smoke

I looked down at my finger snapped off
the train coming in
the misty postcard light
rain of blood
is this perfect?

here I will diode
and shrink
like bee wolfs
thick and sharp
full of green

in the thick fear I think of breasts
I think I see them
coming at me
why the sad comfort of dripping eaves
as little cold mouths looking out?

this wine goes everywhere
nothing is elated

is there any difference
facing a bullet
standing on tiptoes
looking down at that fall
I am scared by your sex

love is a pattern recognition
I suppose
here in the wild hills we ride red goats
sleep in wet disaster
wake to explosions

you want to be us
you hate us for it

.

Fitzroy's Moral Collapse

alle kunst ist umsunst wenn der engel auf dem zundloch brunst
(all technology is in vain if the angel urinates on your musket)
—Austrian folk poem

it is stifled during that first marinading of the Congo
that a humongous Black Man encroached all in fur-lurks
in the ochres for white women
in vapid trails of fortnum ectoplastic whereupon
He wouldst rush to gripe upon their birdbones in transports
of shuddering & lissome delight

.....................................for such Christian middens
.....................................whose vapours always uppermost

& inveigled & even & unto the lateness of the Ireland
such fettled behoof is as those sauvages
squint inholy trees of trinity affront the passages of
.....................High English Women
....................upon whom to inrush

with many urges—eek now it is spake in sech North Americanas
where chestheaded men still lilt and loll in the frontwoods
of Vermouth and Moorish Caliphorn in long quackgrasses
as shy big birds parlay wildly for the extrusion

................................of bonneted females
................................from their wagons below
whence errant junglee wildness of this order saw also
Darwin observe in his fritter such a general finching
of life and aquatic erotortoise during his inchaunting
of the galapageese as would give him cause to flutter
and take heart—in the guise of a vast bird

..................he would stoop into Fitzroy's cabin there
..................to demand more pumpkins
be allocated to some dying damned lizards
on the foredeck
(where it is recorded that he would prefer to perform
his morning daunce of the galapagine finchfather)

Fitzroy's reply is from scripture & to the äffect that such
lézardice has now no place in the lives of elder men
whose wives yet abide
in their flossing bosoms of yeastertide

this in its askance
is his moral claps


(Published in Burning Gorgeous anthology 2010)

.

blouse a little stretched and face askance I estimate her shapes of disaster

this new assembly of inexplicable light
this alchemy of far things

churchheads in spate the animal forces
of electric the song as lungs of foam

look for it on the sides and flanks
look for it where the season sleeks

here are fairies again
every winter now
their tracks lead away
from the garden

around the bend in the hill

to the old house at the far place
where the dogs no longer bark at night

fairies in our hair
they struggle a little
before sliding in soft
just the long blown-out lanes
Russian horses in songs of wind
a whole new sky of Corsair ships

black approaches

.

Thinking about Nick Clegg...

"I have a set of ethics. If you don't like them I have another set."
—Groucho Marx.

Em and then open EADGBE tuning

it's firework night at the bloodhop

them kaisers need the bodies to earth their magic
—Madeleine Shine

(don't get me wrong I would eat a domestic cat
if that was the done thing in that place
I don't needlessly disdain convention)

but this magnetism this transmission
the body tissue radio that mudslides that spasms
hansels and gretels spilt all over chinatown
jerking there in the sweet dirt

down at the boondocks the mark twain the mark once
in shivers of skittish facehawking a lowly cat gawks
—Galileo of course had this covered suggested an experiment
whereby two men with lanterns on distant hilltops
sending signals of light would be a sure way to ascertain
the average size of a male Catholic dissent

man I find this Injun cream make your balls melt off
like stardust in thick rain with cats cryin low distance
an everythin blowin all round respect see respect
it is like some beautiful death like the marines he was talking
semper distemper—like this last time I see him
only in his filth and hat

a one such a one was he when first beheld

now look black owl now fuckin look at me

—ah now soft they survey with temperate currents & it is more of

a shift than is first apparent as though the fingers that disengaged
the cervical suncogs the lesser cogs these engineered fractals of steam
were exholding the fetch the whole field itself barking as they

wonders within from the exo-inner
you can't do anything reasonable
in fog like this—no one can, not now

we are thinner come the breaking it is a mechanical
detachment we practice here in the Origo Colony

(who is boondock?)
this and no more
we are inured at least to animal ruptures

they looked out on a gaseous future landscape
run by wild dogs,he said, all shifty like he was then

I couldn't believe their eyes

.