Acedia, Angst, and De Profundis

Stars, strange stars have come over me and shone,
Shown, shown me strange dreams, dreams that I will tell.
The creaking insects whine away their drones
That yearn for heaven and promise hell.
I am on the wrong side of reality-
The passage is the breaking of my glass soul-
Heard I them aright, in angel harmony,
They would possess heaven, fear not hell.
This mortal sleep and blackened sun capered
Over in its hypnotic yellow
In a blissful death makes them immured.
But I am waking and it haunts a fellow.
I would not trade with them, I think,
Unless I cannot pass the middle of this bitter drink.
The lees of this wine is where, just like a God,
He's put the drug elixir lotus for His sods.


This poem is part of a sequence with Clementia Dei, and obviously should have come first.

Our world is rocked in cradles sleep and dreams
Unsettling and profound disturb us-
Not since waking life itself, it seems,
Becomes a greater nottle for brainfuss.
Hurtled down the invisible grooves of void,
Swept in chaining circles of cold space,
Our clay lump is God's long, lost toy.
Or perhaps a quarantine for our race.
Unchancy, unlucky, and unblithe,
Undone, uncomely, and unfit -
And this, the reckoning of the wise
And of the good, so it is writ.
Our heroes had their feet of reddened clay,
But their brave hearts mistook the nights for day.

These poems come from reading Charles Baudelaire too often, a Catholic "turned inside out", said Thomas Merton. It is written and it is breathed by God that we all shall despair and fall before God's childlike Love finds us. We should never take sin too seriously, in this sense, because grace much more abounds. We should not fear, but watch carefully, our dark sides.

Perhaps, tis so- they see what we will not-
A glimmer on the lips of dawn to them-
A nightmare ache that yammers to a sot-
Or some discharge behind the eye that dims
The pain or changes boredom at the first,
But soon becomes as common as the gloom.
A miracle seems so but once, and worse
Elements creep in and make heaven's tomb.
I must go on, and mankind as well.
Perhaps if nothing's sacred then is all
Holy- rediscover heaven, reinvent hell.
Or damn it all, just reverse the Fall.
One hero did, and God read the Fates-
All He loves prospers, withers His hate.

Ihr volt, ewige leben?