The Devil You Don't

He started out as just
a wayward scrap of light

and now consumes
whatever he chooses,
cutting a stolen strain

of lyrical case with his own.
His heart

rolls into the palm of his hand
and waits there like a blister

in a tree.

***

The faint alluring radiance

that twitches
over the black seafloor,
held up
by a fish made of teeth

and to which are drawn smaller things-
this is how he tries to love.

Were he to put flesh
on you, it would be flame.

Were he to pick you up
then drop you, all through

the burning sky would you fall
And burning still you would rip

a hole in the sea, the boiling sea.

***

He turns angels
into the same fire that melts
the guts of the earth

or spews unbearably out of stars,
then makes of their wings endless

chains from which to swing.
When the planet's fontanel yields

to his fingerings, he rides, rides,
cOvers his ears against
a rumor he cannot bear.

His aliases crackle
over the airport speakers,

but they are nowhere
and are never going home.

***

Not for a moment
does he wish for
us to give up our gods. Renounce,

he says and shrugs, renounce and still
you die and nothing else. But no one

is listening-the poor have stopped,
the rest likely never began.

Here's the best way to see a thing: catch
the edge of light
that burns

around its opposite, that
which it would otherwise
obscure. If we could view

this light entire, we would call it
god-but then, if we saw collected

in one place
all the ants or all
the abandoned cars or all the dust

in the world, we would surely
make that thing god instead.

***

I am going to pull the music
from your nmouth and furthermore

r'l take the orange aching light that splits
your ribs when I or any
beautiful things come at you.

***

He rolls by on a skateboard, chased by
Snakes of smoke. Helicopters rear

and waver all around him, gusting
down the avenue,
toward the fissured monuments,
kicking up a blast
of helices that settle like pollen

in a glittering layer
over everyone. He adores
the show, the high

tech of it, the low-but don't broach
evil, don't bore him so.
Clearly this is no Saint

Paddy's Day parade and he's neither
headed off to some seminar

nor giving you the eye.

***

He's going to stick
to the roof
of someone's mouth-American

palate, quintessential mistrust.

He writes fortunes in clear
lip gloss on a funhouse mirror

as the oracles take down their tents
and their oracular fountains

bubble in the rimy night. One finger
in. Now Say
what you want
more than anything else.

***

Did the president just say,
"I readjust my horned suit,"
causing our screens to flush
and flicker blood?

On American highways, cars hydroplane
through the acid foam
that slides from blazing
angels' Hanks. When the press
corps cranes its collective neck
to get a better view,

the devil turns water in the glass
under the lectern to steam,

then absconds with his toy
piano under one arm
and a seashell pressed
to his glowing mouth, leaving

the president who is not the president
trapped in a red room.

***

You can pretend I live in a burning box
underground,

that you'd know me if you saw
me, but I don't

and you never do.

***

His smile is an electric fence
spitting an amazement
of scarlet fowers into the night.

Hell also has a sky, the world
being devoured by the sun.

***

Abominable fancy, slide us across
the burning lawns.

That which doesn't kill us
is merely waiting;
it will.

Flattery will get you started, boy.

Hell is coming. Hell is here.