Doubt not the geometers of spiders and gods
They’ve directed us to the incorrect rock
So we pray the wrong cardinal direction
Kneel thee, kneel thee
Pray for any fine correction:
(
Have I chose
the wrong stone
the wrong newborn
the wrong manger
those less wise
a wrong shepherd
?
)
Doubt not the geometers of spiders and gods
Take up your protractors
Draw up your stencils
Lesser and greater of scope
Spin these compasses of gods
Let us walk
This god’s valley
That god’s draw
Those gods’ arroyos, ravines, their slips, their wadis
Let us walk
In all its meters
With all its spiders from Mars
When guessed you
They sold us a false basalt?
Baked flour into mud into
A caricature of our misplaced god
Let us lick this black basalt errant
With our greedy cat-tongues
In search of onyx, we’ve realized only abrasives
Collapsed to flightless ash
In search of our god, we’ve realized only cinders
Abrading the throats of petulant gods
Convecting of an afternoon
Rising as of a reckoning
To meet you to accost to account
You errant, like the black basalt
To impale your father’s fattest swine
To reckon
To report it your fault
Warp mis-woven as woof
Our rugs, our madrasas,
Woven ass-backward
Tangled as half-baked prayers from simpletons muttering thick-tonguedly to unerring gods
So, confused in the wind have we lost the lays
Of our children, their plays?
Have we prostrated our dear
To the wrong gods
Valley by valley
To the wrong manger
Meadow by meadow
To the wrong less wise
Wadi by wadi by draw by quarter
?
Inverted at the tyranny of the sinister-palmed
Have we dragged dates, pomegranates, pollens, berries, grapes, pistachios, shadows
Have we prostrated our dear
To those dragging words, inks, gods and infants by their bellies across the black basalt
To wells
To springs
To unspeakable things
?
Our imaginary city has garrotted all who enter
Sent its newly-dead days-distance to claim new souls
To layer the sacrifices, the pyramids, the obelisks, the beliefs
To undergird its sagging, sway-backed gods
They flying carpet no match for the flying buttress
Diasporic we insist on the wrong orients
We insist upon
Inversions of eyes
Eversions of ovaries
Perversions of kindnesses to centipedes
Prolapses, petroglyphs, petrifications
All the volates having gone to our heads
We see clearly
The gods that hunger for infants
The sits-in-a-corner god who hungers for virgins
Not of his own wool
Under these foreign virgins
Heaped like shellfish
Severed by sleeping barnacles
Upon one’s pewter plate
Lies the unsleeping starfish
I am the geometer of gods
I care not for your starlings, your trade, your camel, your shade
I care not for your trees, your wadi, your well, your springs
I care not for your blind falconer, your deaf dog, your one-eyed horse
I care only for the errant rock, that
Wears my geometries like tapeworm-henna that
Lights the way for gods as blind as falconers
Let us gather there in our forbidden
Let us inhale our haram
Let us come, go, shit, pray
Claim your moon, not mine
Your palm is unknown to my moon
Point thee to the kaaba
Your name is unknown to my moon
Look upon me as your Qiblah
Your mis-named stars are dung to my moon
The protractions of your buildings mere
Chicken-scratch for the scattering
Scratch away
Scratch away
Scratch away all
Inshallah
Amen
Om