The Unnamable Alien

I am a human, and so nothing human is alien to me
—Terence

Stitched together by the Arachne’s
web, we stack the loom.

*

                            The more we let the devil
entertain us, the more
we have in common with him,

—Augustine said,
              writing against the backdrop
of gladiatorial games, snuff
pornography playing out upon the sands
dusted with gold
             dust,
             crisscrossed with chariot tracks, pooling
with the blood of a dozen elephants and a hundred tigers.

How exotic is your
empire? Beyond
her imports spelling out rubies:

*

The time it takes a tyrant to raise his arm
implicates generationfold
                          upon
                     generations,
pleating the wedding dress of blackout
                                                       curtains: citizen & state

But each abrasion of evil happens like the impossible bug
who gets through the door cracks
and lays her eggs in your ear as you sleep—
such abnormality
nesting against the odds.

                           The happenstance instance
                           of long sojourn,
                           lucifer eclipsed
                           by his own jealous thought—

*

the citizen, Augustin says, must have dual
citizenship, one claimed here on Earth

by which you crawl to and fro across the furnaced clay

and another, a rite to that inner,
higher kingdom

by which you are claimed & through which you can hold

your lower lords un-
opposed—

*

                           The Monarch

Dalai Lama meditates on
the billion daily acts of kindness in China
while the Panchen Lama remains
decade after decade kidnapped—
                                                        a lost child
among children of his generation
forced to shoot their parents, among
parents sterilized without anesthesia.

While the Olympic games go on,
to the bystanding national anthems,
of records broken, gold metals
hung on the fittest, who gossip on their platforms
about those doping
teenage girls.

*

            The interruption
from the dinner salt, bread, oil and wine
of our common life—

evil creeps in through the ether,
like the ring of the tele-scammer
reminding you
we crept up from scum,

              it is a fault
in a world so flawlessly tuned
to spin life on the crust
above one inferno
of magma
and around another
inferno
of solar flares.

Evil—the shadow of a miracle, a tampered grain
sprouting against nature, a pesticide
                                           attacking its own hide.

…but no. Evil is none of these things. It is a null, an un, a not, a negation

of all that is, the spell of live
in reverse casting the die
of smeared sides. Who can describe it
as any THING?

                                           And why is that,

*

Augustine asks, writing upon the salted
land of Carthage, where babies were thrown to the flaming mouth of Ba’al—

                                          And why is it that
                                          all our attempts to describe genocide fall short —

                                                                                                 (….everything that is
                                                                                                 came into Being by the Word
                                                                                                 and the Word said all that comes
                                                                                                 into Being is Good—
                                                                                                 hence forth,

                                                                                                 anything that is not Good
                                                                                                                            is un-Being,
                                                                                                                            is un-Word
                                                                                                                            is unnamable…)
                                          and yet
              we must name it—

*

We must stack Arachne’s loom
We must monere, we must warn the monster to
the gods, the megalomaniacs of the world,
For what they are: reining thunder &
rape willy nilly, slaughter & lightning
                                                     helter skelter…

John Brown standing at the pulpit with a pig’s heart
inside the word, stabbing through the vellum
and splattering the blood upon the faces
of the southern slave holders,
                            a theodicy for all to times feed upon.

*

At every meal Confucius is right—
the quiet life of good family is miraculous.
It is a wonder of nature, to rise
above the animal envy, to care
for the widow and the orphan,
the maimed and the lame,

for the grocer in Ukraine
who cannot get ahold of any fresh produce
to give away flowers
& plants to his people when they rise
from their bomb shelters,
                            smelling the flowers between the sirens,
                            smiling for the first time in months.

We are the dead bolt to the great chain of being
we descended from: the LAW OF THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
through us submits to compassion’s tender—
volition bending with the bow that softens the wood,

taming the reptile
squirming at the base of our skull.

*

The golden ass flees the Roman brothel
where it would have been forced to defy
the nature of things. There is an order

to the course of the alligator’s meal—
and the jaguar that takes it by the neck.
No different. Even the lion
mauling the cubs of another lion
is within his jurisdiction. But when a human

is transformed into an ass,
its conscience remains standing on two feet.

*

The Hitlers of the world are human only to a limited
imagination. Decency demands we
represent them as vampires, as ghouls,
as the living dead, a contradiction of being, the vacuum
                                         which doesn’t even exist in the farthest reaches of space,
                                          but persists as a black hole through the recesses of our frontal lobe.

They are not human, says the Ukrainian father
             who buried his two year old son,
             preserving the meaning of the species that observes
             funerary rites.

We need demons & angels, bodhisattvas & maras
to think of ourselves properly:

Those who are possessed by the inhumane
we ostracized from The City, writing their names
into the broken pottery shards of history—

There is within us a power that defies
our innocence, an innocence
we’re so fretful to forget
we forge it forth against the facts—

When the Polish Diplomat, Jan Karski
told the Supreme Court Justice, Felix Fankfurter,
about the Nazi genocide, Felix
said he could not believe it—
              I’m not lying, protested the Diplomat.

I’m not saying that, the Justice responded,
I’m saying
                                         I don’t believe it

is happening.

                                         Exactly—

*

says, Augustine: Evil is contrary
to existence, everything that exists is
by nature of being spoken into being GOOD,
so to be un-good is to be un- , -UN
what.? Abomination, the embodiment
of what cannot be
yet is(n’t).

Raphael Lemkin drives the banned three pronged bayonet home:
Genocide—you WON’T believe it is happening
because it is too much, too
much against what our JUST essence
assents for holding our spines up,

                                          but for that reason,
we must extract the lie
and beLIEve it

*

                                                        to end it: Hear! Hear!
each of the dying’s names. Try, we must
                                                                      try
the impossible

lament. In Prague, there is a synagogue
with the names of the ~100,000
people from the ghetto who were sent to the death camps,
written on the walls. The synagogue

is endless. And this is one
one-hundred-&-twentieth of the those who were slain.

Yet to take in even a portion is more than the mind
can bear.

No one is fully enlightened, not even
the Buddha, who said

if he meditated upon the suffering of the whole
universe for more than five minutes,
he’d go insane.

Dante was wrong. Hell has infinite levels,
and is eternal
because it can always get worse—

the gyre spins
and spits our past back up to the surface.

History doesn’t repeat
with symmetry, its rodents pop up
like a game of Whac-A-Mole
in unpredictable places
with ever changing facades.

*

             We must try
             the crime, every crime—

to know the Truth is the only means to Reconciliation,
bringing light to the lie heals the wound.

             Not punishment,
             not vengeance.
                                         Said Fr. Desmond Tutu
                                         exorcizing the crimes of apartheid
                                         into the indestructible vase
                                         of confession, containing
                                         the abomination in a sacrament.

                                         For who could live with humanity
                           if we did not forgive every
             mineral and animal and criminal
used in the making of evil?

Even the devil, Origen Adamantius, heretical doctor
of the universal body, says,

must be redeemed
in order to vanquish evil. His luciferin horns mounted

on his own remodeled living room wall as a light fixture
in the palace of ultimate ends.

             For the devil’s goal was to corrupt creation,
             and as a created being himself, if
             even he alone remained unredeemed,
             evil could claim
                                      success.

Evil will not win, with or without clever logic.

I must believe this
even if it is untrue,
until eternity
where all parallel
lines        meet.

Until the eternity

of Cambodia, where a pagoda is filled with the bones
of monks who were disinterred
from the killing fields
represents the buddha’s mind. The monks
built it NOT lest we forget, but to warn us
it will happen again to us
who are little above the beast
chewing on the crust

*

again. A course to war. A path to punish.
Preserves of trade. Will under law.

Raphael Lemkin’s lexicon shimming
on overdue wings. Padmasambhava

giving a treasure to every demon
he exorcised—a jewel, a book, a song
something precious to protect and belong.

We reflect the beauty of a regular
day with gods and demons as our kin,

holding on to what makes us unique.

Evil isn’t banal. It is unexpected, or
even rare. I protest
and say it again. It is always unexpected,
and even rare.

Rarer than the seizure
of a mega earthquake on this smoothly rolling rock,
even if the tele-scammer’s tremor
mummers daily through the waves,
it is an outrage

whenever and wherever it strikes
it strikes home. But when the tsunami crashes,
let us grieve and then

let us paise our response to each other,
building out of the wet mortar
a way to the mundane routines
that make us remarkable
and ordinary.

To be humane once again

*

we wake up by Love & Love
writes the tragedy—
there must have been a fall
from Love and Word and Beauty
                                          to make the tragic so,

otherwise there would have been no surprise
invasion, genocide, the unspeakable
cruelties to children and animals
behind close doors, or the banal
interruption
from the tele-scammers. There’d be
no twist in life, no art
making us co-redemptrixes of the world.

We so easily forget from
what great heights we were ascribed to: erasing

the naming of beasts,
our particular skill.