Twinkle

Twinkle, twinkle Little Star
sing with Lady moons guitar
fill the vast and vacant sky
till all the lonely earth reply

we've heard and sensed your songs deep dream
our children trace the milky stream
with fingers that can point the way
to Heaven's Gate in living day

twinkle Star and twinkle again
glimmer on my now and then
till I am young as morning dew
resolved to twinkle just like you

Rev. Reptile

Look at Rev. Reptile poised among the clutter on my desk. See what I have tamed by my finest mental taxidermy. Stuffed, calm and harmless with its dangling warrior headdress, I've exorcised the electric demon. The iguana feared since childhood, the crafty colleague, the open question, the undisclosed contingency, the thing I should have thought of, the violating impediment, the person in my way, the velvet green creature is now frozen impotent, now a mere vile paperweight that I can keep my eye on just in case.

Because I remember how, like a thought in the back of one's mind, they will not move, sometimes for hours at a time, like statues with something secret pulsing cold within. And I think I've heard they can sleep like a scheme with their eyes open, wide and waiting for you to look away until the switch, like it happens in a bad dream, the bulb that zaps before it dies and then their on you in the dark, in a power-line snap to the jugular with stony claws reacting at your neck and a high-voltage tail, the convulsive wire giving up the unsuspected storm that gathered for days upon your desktop, that lies inside all lizard's, laity and clergy.