Bag O'Guts

This obviously worries at the same theme as my poem "Bowel on Legs," posted recently on 26 November 2023. The Biblical allusions in the final stanza are to Ezekiel 37: 1-14 and 1 Thess. 4:15-16.

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   All beauty, fineness, gloss of mind,
   Great thoughts, great passions, every kind,
   Boil down to reams of gastric lights,
   A’slivered, greasy, greys and whites,
   The womb of life, no ifs, no buts,
   A loathsome mobile bag o’ guts.

   My true love with a look so sweet
Cried, “Yes and yes, and let our bodies meet,”
   But her guts fell out and swung to her knees,
   Hanging like vines beneath the trees.

   The savant with his glass-clear eyes
Wrote wisdom’s books, compendious as the skies,
   But his guts fell out in sheeny ropes
   Which strangled all his careful tropes.

   The mother and her new-born child
An each-loved Eden crooned, so pure, so mild,
   But their guts fell out and swamped the cot
   With oily snakes which drowned the tot.

   Heads of state a’scheming late
Disposed of rivals, never governing straight,
   But their guts fell out all looped in grins,
   Purple-rotting like eels in gins.

   O Son of man, can these guts live,
   Their stinking heapings in a sieve,
   What mid-air fiat might save this flesh
   That’s soul and mind and tripes in mesh,
   How can wet guts, their ducts and folds,
   Be divinized to gems and golds?

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© July 2021

Pride: Skeltonics

I have not closely read John Skelton but should because there is much more to him than the disorganized rhymester we tend to think him. Obviously the poem below plays with that caricature. It is an exercise on one rhyme. I did the same thing with "At Seventy," posted on 15 August 2022 and linked here and "Admonished," posted on 26 September 2019 and linked here. I think I have now worked out that particular vein!

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That which damns a man is pride;
All sins lead from and to its side:
The one who spryed,
The one who shied,
And he who spied,
And who was snide;
With self’s glamour plied,
All scale and context fied,
Surely all such to date have fried,
Joining Satan in his fiery bide.
They screech, they screech, “I tried
“All rules and guidings to abide;
“But, oh, I lusted after another’s bride,
“And easily I lied,
“With a practised sidestepped slide
“I pocketed what I descried,

“And when wants and wills collide
“Is it too much to ensure my foeman died?”
Ho! now they know that Justice, wide,
May glide,
May stride,
And then condignly chide.
Elide
Who will the facts of pride,
By it good will is dried,
Is mummified,
And each bon that’s cried
Is blackened, dyed,
Suborned to hide
Or on its heels has hied,
An absconded guide.
A man’s left pied,
Black-white, his sins unpryed,
And the Tempter’s streetcar required to ride;
And if he sighed
For Truth that’s skied,
But did so in pride,
It’s trumps he’ll drown in God’s wrath’s tide.

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© July 2021