Poems & readings

 from The Lost Songs of Gravity (2021)

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A painting by Siemon Scamell-Katz inspired by this poem

​https://www.siemonscamell-katz.com/new-page-2-1-1

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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 frozen like a pre-historic insect beneath your skin

             has been preserved here?

             a phylactery 

containing a codex 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 heart

             negotiate your Ascension).

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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

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            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?)

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             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 univers

             in order to portray

             (at the same time!)

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both the resurrected

              and dead!

here, where, wearing a balaclava of your own

              death’s head

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              and then wait, buried

                deep into this unable 

              to-be-thawed glacier of a planet.

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

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                     into view by faith

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

                     they will replace

every last temple and 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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from Beast: The Lost Chronicles (Broken Sleep Books, Dec. 2024)​

 

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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