The Garden of Earthly Delights
Henry Israeli

I love the little buns they sell in Chinatown,
the white ones, steamy hot and a little sticky,
with surprise meats inside.
You never know what you’ll get.
I can’t understand why everyone doesn’t eat this way.
Clearly Hieronymus Bosch is not God.
Nor, unfortunately, is any Dutchman.
God is surely a Spaniard
as he is wont to let emotions get the better of him.
Weeds will always overgrow the garden
and a wheelchair always wins the race.
So too do I love the tension the moment after
the television is turned on, before the picture appears,
a kind of nocturnal chaos of sound
and vision you can read like tea leaves
if only it weren’t sucked into the vortex
of logic and meaning so quickly:
some asshole selling cars or computers,
selling fake immortality in a microchip.
I envy those who’ve had shock treatment. Imagine
the wonders they’ve seen. Imagine taking every memory stored in your head
and running it through the spin cycle. Imagine
sweeping clean your karmic portico with 450 volts.
What ever happened to deliverance?
No one mentions it anymore, no one gives a fuck.
Two soldiers died today,
blown apart in Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization,
while I reject two artichokes in the produce section of Superfresh.
The devil, wherever he is, finds this so ironic he has to whack off.
He snuffs out the candle on his bedside, dreams of
a burned out cradle. I did settle
on a dark green and thorny beauty
that smelled of dirt and sun and summer’s breeze,
life in its simplest elements.

©