For the thunder has places of rest which are assigned while it is waiting for its peal; and the thunder and lightning are inseparable, and although not one and undivided, they both go together in spirit and are not separate.
          —1 Enoch 60:14¹

Took me this long to question why it is
I live this way. Two solitudes coming
together ending a period of
seemingly endless questing, friend, is it
any wonder, then, this pen’s prison of
short sentences needs written a better
beginning?

Is it a crime to be committing to
public memory how we won, convinced
a dual god in a different world
indifferent to this one to admit
to remember is to time travel, to
begin again? To bend to no one’s whim
but our own,

re-envision creation? Tombs open
now sin’s empty mouths to be criticized
for implementing whole-hog, once and for
all, fulfilling revisions in a duel
existence wages against plagues of cruel
exigencies emergency exits
refuse this

egress. Bitterness of intentions pits
against the best of them confrontations
which test illusions of innocence, burns
into flesh cataclysmic temptations
to question catechism statements. Re-brands
confusing sentiments to splinter each
into schism

from their status quo those disadvantaged
representatives of the closed-minded,
crassest, classless masses who never much
before relented to wanting to taste
them, to honour without warning their tongues’
desire to savour those men lightning sent
to vanquish

Sodom turned to pillars of salt. Swollen,
cocksure seas of scorned, lustlorn survivors
arriving in spurts, perverts Lot’s wife looked
on and mistook to be her brothers, those
of us wanderers who work hard toward
finding each other, to return reborn.
Deviant

diviners of what sign’s force will unite
the divided by dividing them still
further, looking forward to quenching thirst
with this hunger’s fire. We are wild, dwellers
on the threshold of the forest floor and
the world’s back door, followers of flowers,
fatherless

and falling forth from our cradles into
strangers’ beds. Prophetic & profitable
head-case studies in accidental love
for once comfortable being our Selves,
the ones everyone else wants dead. Moss
thrown off and threatened by our sparks, by our
stoning’s bold

progress when, heretic and errant, out
surpassing signposts of judgment, even
angels digress. And one of them, I am
understanding and acceptance sent, in
all his nakedness, to end this distress.
Dressed only in the red, wet kisses of
a lover

I would be remiss not to acknowledge
as the one I understood to seem then,
and ever since, best suited to me, how
together we undermined prejudice
by bringing to complacency’s blind and
deaf thunder in places of rest waking
them. The same

explosive commotion this poem’s heat
kindled against hate emits when, with your
wish, the paper on which its lyrics are
written perishes in flames only your
heart can quench, never forgetting what wins
is the hand which fans to conflagration
love’s aching.

__________
¹“The First Book of Enoch: 1 Enoch”, [Chapter] 60[, Verse] 14, in The Books of Enoch: The Angels, The Watchers and The Nephilim (with Extensive Commentary on the Three Books of Enoch, the Fallen Angels, the Calendar of Enoch, and Daniel’s Prophecy): 2^nd Edition: A Volume Containing The First Book of Enoch (The Ethiopic Book of Enoch), The Second Book of Enoch (The Slavonic Secrets of Enoch), The Third Book of Enoch (The Hebrew Book of Enoch), The Book of Fallen Angels, The Watchers, and the Origins of Evil: With Expanded Commentary on Enoch, Angels, Prophecies and Calendars in the Sacred Texts: by Dr. Joseph B. Lumpkin, published at Blountsville, Alabama by Fifth Estate in 2011; page 75.