*This December, I am reblogging some of the more popular poems and articles that I have posted in the course of the past year. These Unholy Sonnets, first written in 2002, deviate substantially and uniquely from the overall development of my style, for reasons outlined in the notes that accompany my previous posting https://oudeis2005.wordpress.com/2015/03/06/writing-201-poetry-task-10-sonnetsfuture/. In this reposting I add a third—Unholy Sonnet #19—which was the last in this short sequence of very bleak and very private poems.*

 

Unholy Sonnet #1

I have exactly nothing else to say.

You were the light and reason of my rhyme

and now, uncloaked, with nothing else to say,

I cannot claim you left even a sprig of rhyme

to cover up the lack of link between us.

Blind to the likeness between unlike things,

those senseless things that I remember meant us

are now reduced to dry and brittle nothings.

There is no longer feverish correspondence

between things. No sense in all that nonsense.

All things of everyday importance

are drained to a mundane significance

now there’s no us in them.

The sap of truth is spent; the bloom of meaning snapped at the stem.

 

Unholy Sonnet #17

When God hooks us up like fish out of oblivion

in a trice – a trick with prime numbers – we

will see each other for the first time again.

We will know what it is simply to be –

one another. Qualms will not part us and our God

will smile to see us meet infant again.

And we will reap the profit then of being odd

in this world, when all the all too even reasons then are gone

to Hell. And I will love you as I loved

you at first sight and I will love you as

I always wanted; and we will then have proved

that love is constant and irrational as

the square root of two; and we twin primes; our numbers

matched in this lottery that spares us an eternal slumber.

 

 

Unholy Sonnet #19

There is no loss more bitter than a pair

of brightened eyes about to disappear.

There is no earthly joy that’s deeper

than the moment you last touch and peer

 

over the brink of that abyss….and, for the love of God, do not impair

that instant with some whimpering half-plea to be thy keeper

ever more, nor hope a copy or another to compare

to that steep and diagonal perspective that does spear

 

us still—joined-parted always by a vanishing despair.

There is no point in this whole universe’s pseudo-sphere,

there is no surplus matter in it that could spare

 

us in the end. Our loss is now the only thing that can inspire

us more. There is no law of physics; there’s no empire-

builder. No super-being to bring our entropy back to repair.