For Azazel, 9 April 2018

One goat goes to God. The other goat goes

To the wilderness or, in later tradition, gets
Pushed over a cliff or down a rugged slope
Steep and rocky enough to break its bones.
What waits for the goat in the wilderness
Depends on one’s sect or tradition. Enoch
Had it that an angel who had taught humans
How to make the weapons of war and seduction
Was buried in the desert to be punished
And stored until the flames of Judgement.
Other traditions said it was the proud angel
Who would not bow to Adam, the new lord
Of lower creation. Traditions, of course,
With their tales, art, and morals, are part
Of human culture, and so it seems apt
And fascinating that culture itself could encode
This distrust of an angel of culture, of war
And cosmetic technology, blamed for violence,
Sin, and sex, banished to the wilderness,
The recipient of punishment and goats
Sacrificed in the name of purifying sinners
Who lust after and deploy technologies
To kill who they want to kill, get what they want,
Fuck who they want to fuck. It’s a kind
Of ritual apoptosis, a kind of built-in strigil
By which culture could scrape off excess
Culture from human behavior, scrape the wax,
Clean its own palimpsest, send the excess
To itself where it most definitely was not,
To the absence of culture that is death or
The wilderness, Azazel: proper name, false address.