LABYRINTH

I

So many Minotaurs to confront and conquer.
Anger is a monster, the bane of self-control.
What good is education if the teacher is
a fool, or foul fooler to himself, and others?
What good is religion if the preacher is a
sinner, lecherous liar to himself, and I?
Who is there can fathom the geometry of
a soul, timid or bold? Left to the devices
of enslaving vices, light as a feather, it
floated, unfelt by the body barometer.
Heavy as mercury, or lead, it fell and sunk
and sunk to a lower measure, miserable,
too miserable to be measurable by
precise science, or the body thermometer.
Why vent your crimson spleen at Spinoza in a
world unknown as our own?

II

Surrounded by land mines, the leader told me to
commit suicide for the cause, a wordy cause.
I replied, “After you!”

III

The features change yet the faces remain the same,
the same vacuous eyes, avoiding stares, staring
away, into nowhere.

IV

Amazed, I stand amazed, transfixed in a maze of
perplexities, the labyrinth of recurring dreams.
The Minotaur always appears in my nightmares,
split in two, he is a man and then a bull, a
bull and then a man, never, a mouse, nor a mare,
never appears in daylight.

V

Of the Sabbath, when a hungry God, the God of
the Sabbath, plucked the ears of corn so that sinners
could hear, and quench their spiritual hunger and thirst.

VI

Of the Sabbath, when an angry God, the God of
the Sabbath, plucked the ears of men and ran them from
the temple, overturning their money lending
tables, their dead tenets and laws cast in cold stone,
to give man hope and life.

VII

Solitude! O solitude! Wherein men may hear
their madness or their God,
meet their madness, their Master or their metaphor.
First I loved the silence, then I loved the written
word, then I loved the spoken word for I knew the
power of the word, then I knew the power of
silence— for in silence sings the celestial.

VIII

Labour! O labour! That sweats and serenades sweet
rest. Them that eat of the fruit of their labour are
truly blest. Six days God laboured to create the
world and rested on the seventh. Seven thousand
years are past and man is still working, to destroy
it, ceaseless, without rest.
What shall it profit the world if a man gains it
all and loses his soul?

IX

I believe in the universality of
being

X

The fisherman casting his net is art. It splays
out in the sun’s rays and captures, for one moment,
beauty, a rainbow, in its moist meshes, then death,
death, with gleaming scales, thrashes in its webbed tent and,
gills agape, screams silent, and, gasping for breath, in
an abundance of oxygen, does the final
dance. For the fish the water is full of food and
fuel and life. For the fish and the fool the sand
is cruel. For the fool the sand is cruel and
so too is the water.
For the sand the water is full of food and blood.
For the water the sand is full of fools and life.

XI

Biological clock and needs awake me and
I travel the short distance between bed and bath.
It is exactly 5:a.m. The cock knows and
crows, acknowledging time.

XII

The C.I.D. still undecided whether the
missing young lady eloped or was abducted,
they advised the perturbed parent to hire a
seer who said she was alive and advised to
hire a private dick to find her. Lost in the
labyrinth, like Hickory, Dickory, Dock, among
the fractured factions of the twelve fractions on the
big analog wall-clock, the clock struck one and down
fell young Donkey Kong, Hickory, Dickory, Dock.
(When you understand the meaning of life, to you
I will explain this line.)

Copyright ©2001 by G. Newton V. Chance