The Cutting Edge

At my back, like you, I always hear

The edge, the cutting edge is coming near.

Not the blind fury

With the abhorred shears

But this is what I fear;

The stealthy scissors of a blinded time

Cutting through accretions of the past

Dully and daily deleting, whatever is not next

Sneering, and sniping and snipping,

Excising every sign-post from the text

Paring all the parts that point away

To something other than our circled self.

I know the angels were the first to fall,

Cherub and Seraph spiralled down

In circling curlicues of sacred text,

Flaring in ink and paper to the floor,

The shredded evidence of our affair

Our old, embarassing affair with God.

And God himself will follow soon enough;

A little word so easy to excise

Another snippet for the cutting room

A sweeping on the heap of history.

But still at night, I tiptoe to the door

To rustle through these severed strips of love,

And strew my heart with scraps of poetry,

Forbidden hopes and shards of mystery.

They rustle through me in my waking dreams

And so I’ll have a heart-, a head-, a handful when

The scissors come for me.

For at my back, like you, I always here

The cutting edge, the edge is coming near.