Togli, Dio

Most poetry comes caput mortuum,
The dead man’s head pigment from bitumen.
Have a fig, God, here you go, here’s to death
And any additional punishment
Invented when you found out extinction
Was insufficient for your argument.
It’s not your fault. We needed your justice
To supplement the potions we cooked up—
We needed to put a good face on this.
For you, our darkest inks are loveliest.

We paint your eyes as unripe fruit, fallen
Back to soil’s old soul, and then we roast you
For consumption, using this convenient
Portable dragon of symbolism.
And there you are, as sayings have made you,
The output of our mummified corpses,
Wrapped in the death of flax, in the caskets
Of felled trees, dug into the dirt to change
As little as imagination can
Manage, our little imaginations.