Absolution For the 9/11 Mosque

All smokers and drinkers
inside, all plagiarists and heads
without bodies and hearts
consistent with the full fisted
containment and immense
inability to watch
what it is we want.
All fascists belong
to yesteryear and now
we only have ours.
Digging and praying
between the two lights
promising the night
with its excess and vigillantisms
to begin with the small
cheats, as if no larceny at all,
as if no savvy-eyed witness
might adjust the number
of executions as if
on a dial, parse
the misdemeanors,
the tragedy of the separation
of church and state
to the honest
economy of mankind
that uses a cruel wager
instead of weights
and measures, that
formulates a recipe
of your personal percentage
of daily requirements
in penalties of salt
and worship of fats,
that makes hallowed
ground out of thin air.

I was repelled at Times Square in 2001.

In the fond letter
addressed to the men
at the counters
of the world
a note about what he
should be doing
because it is all the same
and he might as well
do what it is he wants to
because he will end up
doing it anyway,
in another way.
The look on that face
the soon to be less so and less so
Christian, beguiling blue-eyed
bald contagiously clean
wanderer through the sun
was worth the ink.
To explain to him
the variations of theft,
the grades of dishonesty
and equality of such things
as adultery, murder, rape
and apply them
to his docket, relieve
him of at least
some of his illusions
in a laying on of hands
and more hands,
speak brother bring
up the pentacost,
Now! To watch him walk
again, the leader of the crippled
left whole townships gawking.
Half way between loves
rummaging our nests
with fire fingers and then
our screams in the trees
between each other
are circular economies,
no one accepts
the currency, that comparison
between evil this and evil that,
nor if the penny is better
off than the dime,
or which dove turned
on the day, upped the light,
knows the math, reckons
with the seed, in short
surrenders to the days
uncorrected mishaps
of which life is composed.