JOHN THE BAPTIST
My school is the desert.
In the dry slot of a cave
I study what is.
There is the heart,
pumping its river of nutrients
to the famished flesh.
There is the brain's
mesh of synapses, and the tremble-
wired spine, masterminding
the distribution of
uppers and downers, salts and catalysts,
tracking the tidal appetites,
the protean gonadal hungers,
the peristaltic rhythms of the gut.
And there is the mind,
that great white skate
gone deep, miles under
your turrets of coral and cutting keels
and glitter-dust shoals, so deep
it's high on the fear
of what it might meet – mirage-
beasts, alter-egos, doppelgangers,
all those alien realities
tenting the mental skin
between this world and the rest.
And yes, there is the soul,
that hypothesised planet
whose name is a fleshless rumour
passed on in wordless
speech – and all that weightlessness
of space, and the boot-sucking crust
of the earth, all craving their harvest.
And lastly there is God,
As real as you want,
unsure what's coming next except
for an end to this, your world
of Pilates and Herods,
peasants and privileged star-gazers,
divisions of goats from sheep.
I was there when the mother
caressed that swathe of baby-skin
in which he swaddled
his hybrid creation –
his singer without a tongue,
birdsong without the bird,
one soul
with an audible name.
Look, in your mirror's mirage,
where the bevel bisects belief,
rumours are happening.
Naked as human fear,
with a rod for splitting atoms
and a riddle for sifting genes,
the mutant appears.
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