Poems & readings

  

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from Beast, The Lost Chronicles (manuscript in progress, 2023)

 

 

The Relic

 

“What have we to do

But stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards

in an age which advances progressively backwards?”

T.S. Eliot

 

Upon this day, fresh from a god’s crypt  

or catacomb, you, the beast (a blunt and 

 

impractical end to Historical theology) arrive,

                        struggling to surmise

                        just what it is, this relic, 

 

this contraption fallen into desuetude, 

                        half-buried in sand,

 

where every hour, in every century, blindfolded 

                        and tonsured beings

                        (in case of your birth)

 

keep attempting to repair it: a prayer-machine…

 

                         (invented, built, then 

                        abandoned by aliens?)

 

the only still extant piece of machinery 

in the universe designed to re-open them:

                        Christ’s wounds…

 

                        re-open them to stop man

                        copulating with beasts.

 

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God’s Prophecy

 

“its hour come round at last”

W. B. Yeats

 

When your udders begin leaking Christian blood, you’ll hear it,

from the bottom of a staircase, before a door in hell’s basement:

                                    “You will be born”

Throughout a lipless land of switched-off microphones, 

into which a last species screams out in vain God’s name:

                                    “You will be born” 

As the last person to see you dissolves on your tongue,

and your mouth eats off your own ear until hearing it:

                                    “You will be born”

Before a sudden involuntary stampede, as the saved, running off

the leg-braces of their human bones, they overtake you, singing:

                                    “You will be born”

Until the day when, the love-lapsed you, has been pushed through into

a world of no-bone, cartilage or sinew, and you finally understand, what

                                    “you will be born” means…

having fed for centuries on geckos, gnats and dead scorpions 

to sustain that still unborn second Christ in your diaphragm,

                                    until you in your 

                                    real body were born.

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© Paul Stubbs 2023

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from The Lost Songs of Gravity (2021)

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The Search for the Cosmological Christ Ends in Ice

                        

                        For my Blandine

 

            Since the first nebulous

            galaxy folded in its petals

            and began to bloom only

inside God’s head, you’ve been trapped here,

a body: freeze-framed by faith,

            pre-dating what pre-dated theology;

(with your Christological visor lifted

            to reveal an eye swabbed

            by unbroken resurrection);

            and God's one respiratory

mask

                           abandoned,

                           as your inter-

                           glacial birth,

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                           in your own phlegm

frozen, it continues to fossilise the

the one baptismal result of God's rejection;

                            while the real cross:

                            (a signpost to

                            the noumenon?)

it persists in re-directing them: the

cartilaginous and (still?) churchless Christs shattered

by the shrapnel of the big bang;

                            as you, you refuse

still to become the salvific outcome

of any heroic attempt at a cognitive

                            ritual undertaken

                            outside mankind;

 

                            So what, apart from the Adam's

sin trapped like a pre-historic insect beneath your skin

                            has been preserved here?

                            a phylactery or rusted messtin,

containing your visa now eternally expired? yes, and

                             a fragment of your spinal column

already corrected (in case, one day, you

                             are unable to botanically depart

                             your own cold head and 

                             negotiate your Ascension).

Then, how many philosophical suppositions

will first have to be falsified before you, you

                             are allowed to allegorically thaw?

 

            You, who, once free of religion,

will remain what,

            without sin you have never been:

            a stylite or rank moistureless thing

            cross-legged on Jupiter, Saturn

            or Mars,

                           while stilled by a saucer 

                           of your own frozen blood...

           (you, a Christ unable to be Christ)

            —So what new wrinkle discovered

            on your flesh, preserved, but unable

to

 

age you

 

            will continue now to age the

            too-human womb on earth?

As you, you

            failed to multi-socket and branch

            off your own lost limbs to infinity,

                              for ice-boxed by some god’s

one theodicean whim, you remain here,

                          with your now uninterrupted

                          flesh stretched tight across 

                          a still pretended absolute.

 

—One billion christologists needed now

to forget their opinions on the biblical Christ

            in order for you to

            go on re-churching it, ice...

Thus, in order for God to one day teach

you how not to rot,

                          just how many lung-replacing

                          canisters of his breath would

be required? (the anthropomorphic substratum

of your body erased now by whose Christian love?)

                          as, in every Eucharist, 

                          the body of the last

authentic chiliastic figure

 

                          to survive you arrives:

                          a flesh-correcting hologram

ready to film God’s cognates from your mind,

that,

            and set up on every planet,

            the most elaborate holographic

            light-show in the universe

in order to portray you (at the same time!)

both resurrected

                        and dead!

here, where, wearing a balaclava of your own

                        death’s head

you wait,

 

                        buried deep into this unable 

                        to-be-thawed glacier of a planet;

as, amid the god-vaulted Vaticans of black,

you (who now no juridical wafer can recall,

                        or dying theological animal

                        smell the decorative blood of),

you will continue to ignore the deep-space

                        fog light search of us all...

that, and your misplaced sense of present tense

                        for when you are

eventually

 

                       thawed back into view by faith

the still-to-be-fixed tarpaulins of your church,

                       they will replace

every last temple, shrine erected (mistakenly?)

in anticipation of you... so that, when on the day that

                        theodicy finally it

                        is sin-corrected,

and the one discernible mannequin

in the universe still to resemble you,

out of God’s head,

                       it is shouldered...

 

                        (because unable to work out for itself

                        just how to ever supernaturally decay)

                        You, God, today?

you must rename this never-to-be

                        prayed-to torso: Christ...

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© Paul Stubbs 2019

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