All these years, praying to the wrong rock? Doubt not the geometers of spiders and gods

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