Yes, this is the Autumn where Christ dwells

You're right  - as Emily Dickinson begins

To imagine a life of a Calvinist divine -

There is a beauty in it, unappreciated by many still

To have  your own broadcast on some Southern station

A Call for Anguish

Speaking in soft, burdened, worrisome voice

Using expressions like a season of grief

Almost tearful sound and utter silence in a place

From where you speak

(In a red cloudy sunset, in an abandonment of highways

Where velocity becomes something still, preoccupied)

And afterward dining in a large house of a bygone era

Where light is dim    

The electricity dulled to utter degree

With wearied old wires

And looking at your plate

With beef and mash potatoes

Closing your eyes

With conservative demeanor

Sitting there in suspenders

Saying Grace in utter silence

With a large mute family

Holding hands congregation-like

A Cry for Anguish

A bulb in general urgency

Eating sticky mass

Digesting words of Scripture

Alarming words

Sitting there in the bulb of a home

Shivering under your sheets

It's a place of security, still

Only from this perspective of anguish

You can see the world as it is

To perceive those inter-city tunnels

With filthy dark yellow lights,

Underpasses, parks,

People returning home at 4 am

In sterile light of buses

Third shifters, people 'unsaved'

Drunkards, folks wearied by daily labor

So that all this can became a part

Of a still larger Autumn

And the soundtrack of it

Is this scripture flavored, a closeted voice of grief

With archaic names and words from long ago

Words full of shattered glass

And large buildings outside, skyscrapers illuminated from within

With hundred moth lives furnished with sterile kitchens

And minimalist Donald Jud bedrooms

And white suburban houses also

From this anguish only

You can fall in love with the world

But not as if it is something grand

And accomplished, distinguished and bright

But as something so painful,

Tortured, and desolate

Feeble, decrepit from the vileness of life

From booze and pills

Wantonness and dissipation

And capitalism

To love something so painfully caged

In squared small offices

Utterly lost

Like in a maze of some queequeg's

Heathenish tattoo

There has to be some puritan rigidity first

For the world to attain its sad and dilapidated beauty

And you are a lover, desiring to hug all of it

but maybe due to some instruction and upbringing

unable to find the right words of compassion too

letting it all, this care, transfigure unintentionally

into some clumsy and angry condemnation

But it's not so ------

-Like Sarah from Parker's Back, you say.

You are right, you are still speaking

Clumpsy words of censure

As someone who is also himself

Damaged, shattered,

But as if from a different angle,

To see the beauty in things shattered

You must first see this in yourself,

This burning autumnal rage:

To be touched by fiery fingers of  a great Fall

Like tawny, honeyed forests entering lasting gloom of wintery decay

You have to have it yourself (but may be of a different kind)

So that your dark light can illuminate this same thing in others

But you never learn the language of sympathy

Maybe due to some instruction and upbringing,

You never succeed in expressing this thing in the right manner

As if you are sentenced to a well-learned language

An idiom of repeated phrases

Which you know yourself to be too rigid and phony

But there is something in you that can still

Perceive this solemn beauty in desolation

A fiery Autumn in everyone you encounter

Yes, this is the Autumn where Christ dwells

You can enter this great Fall-through

Maybe in Amsterdam or in some other big city

In some  long-neglected self-decay

In your escape from everything

In a desire to live on your own

In this great demise

Falling through rotten boards

In the furnace of loneliness

To Kingdom of Fiery Autumn

Where 'Christ of the burnt men' awaits.