A Poem —– Without End

“Without End”

Palm Sunday,    March 29, 2015

By Jane Tawel

For My Mother, Jane Cook whose birthday it is today March 31 and who hates blank verse but reads mine anyway.

I am an acolyte of Time.

Mastered by a ticking clock.

Doesn’t even touch me with her hands any more.

Incessant Screens like Greek Sirens

Beacons of corpse-like digits. Beeping bait–

Three goddesses I serve by sacrificial waste.

The Past–She plants a field of nettles, I crawl through;

I scab, unhealed,

Itchy and swollen with remembered hurt.

I clutch her, unable to let go

Of toxic weeds,

Fearing to lose the blossoms

Now rotted and decayed

That Time won’t let me keep.

The Future – She whose unformed quixotic days –

Fill imaginary pus-filled blisters between my fearful toes,

Anticipated pain, keeping me

From moving forward without wincing.

My dance card is filled

Before I learn to stand.

Time’s future soundless, sightless ghosts tango stoically

Stepping on the feet of my dreams.

The Now—Wieldy Wanton Witch waves a wand

That makes a many lane-ed highway,

Not a path diverging into two, but endless choices whizzing by

Too fast to choose, Which? Which? Which Witch?

The other worshipers seemingly knowing where they are going,

And I immobilize myself, worried and irritated,

Unable to walk.

So I gluttonize the Present by choosing everything

And gaining nothing.

Too obese to rise.

An anorexic—starved for a taste of

Just

One

Moment.

God, The Real One ……

Outside Time.

Outside the small numb blip of Me-ness,

I have lost Your Timeline

In the hanging garden.

I meander in a paradise of

Nettles, thorns, and burrs

To give glory to an idol from a dog’s age.

Hosanna…..

Free me from the holy moly of the Past,

Free me from the jaded janus of What Might Be,

Free me from the ever enticing loveless vishnu of the Now.

Set my body running, climbing, twirling

Free me to be an abject slave to the Centered Point.

A to O I Am, embolden my bondage

To be the image of Your Was and Is and Evermore Shall Be

Into Your Eternal ……

Starting here and now without any here and now assured.

Never dying, living wholly holy into your Timelessness,

On Earth as it is in The Havens.

If freedom once meant nothing left to lose,

Poor Prophetess, how right you could have been

If you had known The Way.

If only you had traded rock

For rocks that cry Hosanna.

Freedom in Yahweh in The Now,

The Endless Circle of His Moment…..

“Being Your slave, what should I do but tend

Upon the hours and times of Your desire?”

You steal Time and replace it with Eternity,

Like a Thief.

Joshua! cries the clock.

Nothing left to lose

Means nothing left to choose.

Freed to renounce all my Time

And place a wager

On this moment

Choosing nothingness

But You.

And only You.

Forever You.

From Quark to Quark

My Dust implodes, resettles and reforms

Into Uncertain Certainty

Electrically charged

To worship: Hosanna! Timeless One.

You save a lot of Time.