The Say-but-the-Word Centurion 
Attempts a Summary

That numinous healer who preached Saturnalia and paradox
has died a slave’s death. We were manoeuvred into it by priests 
and by the man himself. To complete his poem.

He was certainly dead. The pilum guaranteed it. His message, 
unwritten except on his body, like anyone’s, was wrapped
like a scroll and dispatched to our liberated selves, the gods.

If he has now risen, as our infiltrators gibber, 
he has outdone Orpheus, who went alive to the Shades.
Solitude may be stronger than embraces. Inventor of the mustard tree, 

he mourned one death, perhaps all, before he reversed it. 
He forgave the sick to health, disregarded the sex of the Furies 
when expelling them from minds. And he never speculated.

If he is risen, all are children of a most high real God 
or something even stranger called by that name 
who knew to come and be punished for the world.

To have knowledge of right, after that, is to be in the wrong.
Death came through the sight of law. His people’s oldest wisdom. 
If death is now the birth-gate into things unsayable 

in language of death’s era, there will be wars about religion
as there never were about the death-ignoring Olympians.
Love, too, his new universal, so far ahead of you it has died

for you before you meet it, may seem colder than the favours of gods 
who are our poems, good and bad. But there never was a bad baby. 
Half of his worship will be grinding his face in the dirt 

then lifting it to beg, in private. The low will rule, and curse by him.
Divine bastard, soul-usurer, eros-frightener, he is out to
                                                                              monopolise hatred. 
Whole philosophies will be devised for their brief snubbings of him.

But regained excels kept, he taught. Thus he has done the impossible 
to show us it is there. To ask it of us. It seems we are to be the poem 
and live the impossible. As each time we have, with mixed cries.

The Beneficiaries 

Higamus hogamus

Western intellectuals
never praise Auschwitz.
Most ungenerous. Most odd,
when they claim it’s what finally
won them their centuries-
long war against God.

The Future

There is nothing about it. Much science fiction is set there 
but is not about it. Prophecy is not about it. 
It sways no yarrow stalks. And crystal is a mirror.
Even the man we nailed on a tree for a lookout 
said little about it; he told us evil would come.
We see, by convention, a small living distance into it 
but even that’s a projection. And all our projections 
fail to curve where it curves. 
                                                   It is the black hole 
out of which no radiation escapes to us. 
The commonplace and magnificent roads of our lives 
go on some way through cityscape and landscape 
or steeply sloping, or scree, into that sheer fall 
where everything will be that we have ever sent there, 
compacted, spinning — except perhaps us, to see it.
It is said we see the start. 
                                         But, from here, there’s blindness.
The side-heaped chasm that will swallow all our present
blinds us to the normal sun that may be imagined 
shining calmly away on the far side of it, for others 
in their ordinary day. A day to which all our portraits, 
ideals, revolutions, denim and deshabille 
are quaintly heartrending. To see those people is impossible, 
to greet them, mawkish. Nonetheless, I begin:
“When I was alive —“ 
                                       and I am turned around 
to find myself looking at a cheerful picnic party, 
the women decently legless, in muslin and gloves, 
the men in beards and weskits, with the long 
cheroots and duck trousers of the better sort, 
relaxing on a stone verandah. Ceylon, or Sydney.
And as I look, I know they are utterly gone, 
each one on his day, with pillow, small bottles, mist, 
with all the futures they dreamed or dealt in, going 
down to that engulfment everything approaches; 
with the man on the tree, they have vanished into the Future.

The Chimes of Neverwhere

How many times did the Church prevent war?
Who knows? Those wars did not occur.
How many numbers don’t count before ten?
Treasures of the Devil in Neverwhere.

The neither state of Neverwhere 
is hard to place as near or far 
since all things that didn’t take place are there 
and things that have lost the place they took: 

Herr Hitler’s buildings, King James’ cigar, 
the happiness of Armenia, 
the Abelard children, the Manchus’ return 
are there with the Pictish Grammar Book. 

The girl who returned your dazzled look 
and the mornings you might have woke to her 
are your waterbed in Neverwhere. 
There shine the dukes of Australia 

and all the great poems that never were 
quite written, and every balked invention. 
There too are the Third AIF and its war 
in which I and boys my age were killed 

more pointlessly with each passing year. 
There too half the works of sainthood are 
the enslavements, tortures, rapes, despair 
deflected by them from the actual 

to beat on the human-sacrifice drum 
that billions need not die to hear 
since Christ’s love of them struck it dumb 
and his agony keeps it in Neverwhere. 

How many times did the Church bring peace? 
More times than it happened. Leave it back there: 
the children we didn’t let out of there need it, 
for the Devil’s at home in Neverwhere.