Ce Vieux Paradis (As Published in Concrete Magazine)
Ce Vieux Paradis (As Published in Concrete Magazine)
High above in Pandemonium,
Satan herself is fuming now,
She, the pale vision of death
Or the portrait’s glimpse of opal
Her, the regal sorceress of sin
To make all beneath a formless sex
So much is hellfire in this court
To those who watch, the unsightly,
Her wicked pets of rust and ruin
Spelt out Belial and Mammon
Etched to the walls of her grand chateau
Satan herself is fuming now,
Maddened with riot and ravenous want
For she is the taker of life
She, the thief of pearls from the oyster’s tongue
A fresh nightshade blossom is she,
That uniform whose image is burned
Scorched to the near-perfect epitaph
Upon that eyelid’s frailest underbelly
Satan herself is cursing now,
Striking with vicious daggers
Calling desperately to her grande amour
The wounded God, whose breasts are pink
And whose visage peers downwards,
From the kingdom of unfallen angels
As though to gloat in passing, says God
The gravedigger remains ever-devoted
So scoffs Satan that God knows about nothing
For the sexton only ever strains against the night
That frailest addiction to insomnia,
Put into the blood of all nocturnal creatures
Suffused by that slender hand of Satan
Whose delicate touch will forever belong Above
As an artful talon or the painter’s widow
She has made a striking figure,
Newly-made unto the image of her lover
So Satan dreams each night, of God
Dreams of a grandly poisoned autocrat,
The politician whose romance now withers
Forgotten is the promised whisper
Taken in the eve of that ashen month
Where, by the banks of the white river
Satan and God’s love dissolved in tandem
All forgotten now, into fatal dreamland
Into Pandemonium’s highest vault,
Kept from the sightline of Sin and Death
Those cackled geese of spurious rumour
Who might observe this love laughingly
Or make a mockery of Pearline grace
Satan herself is fuming now,
Wishes to remind God of their youth
She, the ever-plotful assassin
Whose shrillest arrow is drawn back
Pricked by the tar and bitumen
Which has since drowned her lowly heart
Sends that arrow streaking upwards
Far past the Marquis and pale bureaucrats,
And even beyond the fleeting lips of religion,
So that this insidious arrow descends
Deeply and justly into the hips of God
How she, the wondrous angel, shrieks
Clutches with her veiled fingertips
That indigo scar of death
Recalling now the lips of Satan
Worn like the broad flag up on high
Remembers, as a sudden vision
That mountaintop palace of glass
Of her promises to a lost amoureuse
Look above to the locked gates of Heaven
Where God herself is fuming.