There were sunrises in which he felt the divine
And without knowing it crashed into the sublime.
On those days and in his own way
He would have forgiven all of them their debt,
Handed back the lease to their land
And driven back to the office emptyhanded,
Giving notice by the smile on his face
That beyond money he had touched grace.

I was anointed with motor oil in 1959
The baptism was in a Detroit factory
With a foreman and a priest
And some people from the same factory
They poured motor oil on my forehead
Saying something about man god and war
To this day I grin when I hear an engine
To this day my gears are oiled and aligned
But who knows after so many miles
If those drops of motor oil
Which sanctified my ride through life
Cleansed me of original sin
Or stained me all the more for being human

Sudden death walks through a wall
And like a flash, it illuminates eternity.
It’s on the other end
Of every phone call we receive.
When we first hear its voice
The shock leaves us speechless.
I’ve also known it
To knock wildly on any door,
Crying out for help
In solving a riddle already solved.
Don’t hate sudden death,
It divulges the mercy of a temporal god
Who spares us from prolonged suffering.
Without sudden death
Who’d know humility from hubris?
Because it exists
It is our only hope for a sane future.

False friends fight to the alphabet’s end
Brothers muffled on roadsides
Soon to be cognate in ice
Parsed by the grammar of days
Fate covers them in common ash
They’re familial only as information
They listen for the drones and moan
They’re muted by a shared gun
And then washed away by time
They’ve broken the bread of flesh
Into language and starve
Laying waste to the present tense
A battlefield of Cyrillic characters
Mangled like twisted smoldering alloys
Wars begun in shared languages
End in babel and begin again

Mother, the bread is moldy,
The meat is rotten
And the milk curdled.
We return to you then,
One son after another
As though back
To the belly of the earth.