{"id":6178,"date":"2020-07-08T22:24:28","date_gmt":"2020-07-08T22:24:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/?p=6178"},"modified":"2023-07-08T10:19:40","modified_gmt":"2023-07-08T10:19:40","slug":"dear-planet-jesus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/posts\/dear-planet-jesus\/","title":{"rendered":"Dear Planet Jesus"},"content":{"rendered":"<style>\npre::first-letter { float: none !important; font-size: 100% !important; padding: none !important; font-family: \"Palatino Linotype\", \"Book Antiqua\", Palatino, serif; }\n<\/style>\n<pre>\r\n<em>Televangelists square off against Satanist Anton LeVey\r\nin a rollicking whacked-out play.<\/em>\r\n <a name=\"_Contents\"><\/a>\r\n If any God can survive the crucible of my will, then I'll bless him.\r\n\r\nin.seang.un yu.han.han.dae\r\nsi.ram.do ku.ji.op.ta\r\n\r\nLife has an end,\r\nSorrow is endless.\r\n\r\n\"Listen to this. 'Life has meaning but no theme. There is no truth\r\nwe can assign to it that does not in some way lessen the bright flash\r\nof being that is its essential matter. There is no lesson learned that\r\ndoes not signal a misapprehension of our stars. There is no moral\r\nto this darkness.' That's some nice shit. Extremely profound.\r\nBut the man who wrote that, he's not watching the water for sharks.\"\r\n                --- Lucius Shepard\r\n\r\n\"You're drunk on God, Sandoz.\"\r\n               ---<em>The Sparrow,<\/em> Maria Doria Russell\r\n\r\n\r\n <strong>DEMON-WALKER<\/strong>\r\n <em>The Story of Walker Railey, <\/em>\r\n <em>First Baptist, Dallas, Texas <\/em>\r\n \r\n <strong>SWAGGER<\/strong>\r\n <em>The Porno-Panegyric of Jimmy Swaggert <\/em>\r\n \r\n <strong>ATHIEST PRIEST<\/strong>\r\n <em>A Morning in the Life\r\n of Madelaine Murray O'Hare <\/em>\r\n \r\n <strong>JOB'S JOB<\/strong>\r\n <em>A Modern RENDering <\/em>\r\n \r\nThis pleasing insurrection erected by\r\nGREGG GLORY\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>ROGUE PROTEAN PROLOGUE<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\n\r\n[The scene. Procenium should be made up like a giant TV screen.\r\nANTON LE VEY is kicking the edge of the TV screen as the curtain rises.]\r\n\r\nANTON LE VEY, SATAN'S MINISTER\r\n\r\nANTON LE VEY\r\nI am that anti-holy bastard Anton Le Vey,\r\nSatan's minister, and revel revealingly within\r\nmy Mephisto-philosophizing and turmoiling role.\r\nOil me, adore me! But whatever you do, don't ignore me!\r\nHollywood's first, and most restless, rule-- the fools!\r\nI'm a proto-atypical American success story\r\nprostletyzing Faust for cash. I'm tired of TV's \"seems\"\r\nand ache for the intermittent hurt of reality.\r\nTechnology draws our attention nearer, tweaks our brains\r\nto the frame its making, and not to the God-analog\r\nof the wistful fistful of substance glow-glowering within;\r\nafter all, this is simply air dosed with ions,\r\na gamma ray whisper the same as a chunk of God's snot,\r\na radio-detected and iron-cored meteor, senior.\r\nAnother rum Sunday's come on, another day to delay praying in,\r\nsick with my universal wish to WANT to pray.\r\nAh Hell; Hell's the nearer circuit to salvation.\r\nI wrote my ruminative book about it\r\nwrithing in a pentacostal pentagram of flame,\r\na cheap, thumbed paperback beneath the weary mattress\r\nof every teenage metalhead in my America.\r\nMy plangeant, Satanic Bible, a gun of wrong\r\n(perhaps!) to knock the righteous fuckers on their ass!\r\nSin is kindness in my thin grin\r\nand under my black, rancid Elvis hair,\r\nevery evil takes on a certain sainthood in my eyes.\r\nLet's see what choir-hummers will come upon\r\nthe electric scene-scenario my wattage has conjured here.\r\nClick! Rearrange, my derranged mirror-ministers,\r\nthis hissing cathode ray to your boring dream;\r\nI sense they sense a certain something in the Cosmos\r\nthey can't shut up about. Five televangelists are scheduled\r\nto prate their aching minute beneath my wary stare--\r\nthe competition! Against 'em I'll win\r\nor burn my own bible on the waxed hoods\r\nof their long Lincoln Towncar Continentals.\r\n.... Ah, my soul's all of charcol and chafes to dust\r\nwith my wiry able body's little wreck.\r\nAntony Levy or Anton Le Vey, hey heh heh hey,\r\nI am whichever face my tongue has the strength to say.\r\nSo saint or sinner be, but be be be! Whichever's wiser.\r\nBut half of both is none of neither.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n-\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>DEMON-WALKER<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\n\r\nWALKER\r\nBlind on my righteous high, and erectly ecstatic after the miraculous,\r\nI am Pharaoh here in Dallas, commanding the irreligious\r\nfrom my grainy height of pyramid, the sandy pulpit\r\nsplashed by your unretractable prayers and spittle-bits,\r\nmy breath a Lazarus of chile peppers this sunny Sunday morn.\r\nMy divine invective flies out to scrutinize and research\r\nthe wicked hearts slumping in my pews, you, you, and you,\r\nflogging the bishop, and grinding your lecherous sins\r\ninto your bad rear molars, sin-silvered, as if\r\nthe Judgement Day weren't razoring in on us all,\r\nGod's stukka narrowing on your brown-nosed nose.\r\nAnd mine, no less targeted, but perhaps a touch divine.\r\nHappy Easter, greetings, fleshing blessings from God,\r\nthe incarnate mystery rolling back the stone of Death.\r\nOnce again we're gathered in His absence, post-Ressurrection\r\napostles and wayward acolytes each and every one, flung\r\nto our Dallas cathedral here, the seven, stiffened\r\nconcrete arches marching backward larger and larger\r\nto the dwindled pulpit; says something about the human scale\r\nof all our small things and doings before the huge,\r\nubermensching sanctity of God, don't you think?\r\nBut where would God be, in His gigantic, out-of-scale heaven,\r\nif we myopic mortals hadn't the vision to see Him?\r\nThink, think, think, continually on your knees\r\nwhile you pray at the dais, my humble, cowboy tribe.\r\nNow I know that the circumstances of this sermon are far, far\r\nfrom the very best, but we Methodists are used\r\nto setbacks; we deal with what we get, and put\r\nGod's hard-won trope of hope in our hearts,\r\nour faces staying as masked with rapture as any\r\nkid giving his Satan-grin on All Hallow's Eve,\r\nthus proving His saving success. Puts me to mind\r\nof that squib about God the Potter, all thumbs\r\nthrust down and in to hollow out a soul, the golden goal.\r\nBut what blind foot spins the wheel? I'll confess\r\nmy account of hope's been bled low as trench water,\r\nbut seeing you, this spate of loved and loving faces,\r\nmy endless sea of congregation gathered to my rock shore\r\nas if your righteous waters clashed eager\r\nin timeless lines of divine and crinkled light\r\nto subsume and crest my dry and alien land.... Well, folks,\r\nlumps my thick throat with gratitude; my tears begin to wear.\r\nA touching stone stands loaded on my chest, a milemarker\r\nstaking my heart.... Was it after midnight's witching minute\r\nthat I collapsed with my gasping Mustang at the house,\r\nedging into the blacked-out garage, a sinister raider\r\nof my own home, the nesting place; two eggs had hatched\r\nand blossomed at our backs, my wife and mine's,\r\nwe hardly knew that they had come, and there they were,\r\nalert, alive, not us, changing our lives forever,\r\nstays against the hideousness even now. Did you ever see\r\nus three at Galilee, my two daughters, those robbers,\r\nand me? I felt like a rinky King Lear\r\nlost in the sandlot of God. There was a presence,\r\nalmost, I'd swear, extraterrestrial, an angel in the desert\r\nbeating my timerous existence towards the Lord.\r\nI was caught in the backwash of whatever\r\nthose extending wings were heading toward\r\nand blinked against the light, a more morose, dour,\r\nplunging and self-unloving Eugene O'Neill type guy\r\nthan I had ever planned or prayed on becoming.\r\nStill I felt and followed where the wind twisted,\r\nmy own tornado of demons beginning their whirligig\r\nwithin me. Yes, demons. I am not unannointed by the vile,\r\nI only live <em>towards<\/em> the light, a humble heliotrope\r\nbarely better than a weepless cactus; I do not stand revealed\r\namong the high mercuric scrolls of God's good clouds.\r\nI am lost. I am dark. I am in the dark.\r\nRapidly praying here in Poe's peachy pit, tick,\r\ntick, tick, as our waiting clicks towards the Lord's arrival,\r\npawing in nerveless, yuppied and active ladies' hands\r\nan abacus of rosy Methodist rosary-bead Hail Mary's,\r\nforgiving ourselves the sins we witch-hunt the neighbors for,\r\nthe one calculus of forgiveness I still can't get straight.\r\nIf they're guilty, why not witch-hunt them to Kingdom Come?\r\nA guilty gilt of sweat slides off the bulbous forehead\r\nI use to think at God. Oh how morosely now\r\ndo I retchingly recall how I drove over\r\nmy knocked-out spouse's blue, endearing, enduring, blue,\r\nsplotched face and quivering sexless body.\r\nParamedics told me it was the usual dum-dum response\r\nof a body in rictus after a near strangulation event.\r\nI swear I arrowed straight from the seminary library,\r\nI told the officer, \"go ahead, write it down, I ain't scared;\r\ndone nothing wrong myself I wouldn't tell you and Jesus both,\"\r\nsnaking down the out-back highway lit-up as Lucifer\r\nextending to innocent Evie his evil fist of peach,\r\nmy dank crankshaft grinding at the amoral fog\r\ninto which I like a Nazi paratrooper had so slyly descended,\r\nmy rubber wheels steel-belted and invisibly bouyant,\r\ncarrying me undiscovered through it all.\r\nNot the best circumstances, all that just three days ago,\r\nthe fairy tale of Good Friday still pasty on my drying tongue.\r\nPrescient as my years of hard-won prayers had made me,\r\neven I couldn't see all the mistakes I was about to make.\r\nOh Lord, o lousey Lord, and my simpering parishoners,\r\nforgive me.... spiralling my children to strangers,\r\nour dear friends who looked at me and never guessed;\r\nI taught them to worship me after God's goitered image,\r\nand then, all at odds and ends, drifting at speed,\r\nbouncing barbituates down with a stray beer, one handful\r\ntoo many, until, like Lazarus gone sour, I turned\r\ncomatose on the ashen carpeting, a dumped urn of wormy regrets;\r\njust one more stain in the two-star hotel room's history\r\nof blobby emissions. Today, well, I guess I'm better.\r\nNow pinned to the pulpit in a Bulletproof vest,\r\n(did I tell you I recieved a death threat typed at this office,\r\nright here where I slap my mincing madates\r\non the cherubic cheeks of my lazy cleric clerks? Well, I did.\r\nAnd still my heart's not right with it, I can't forgive\r\nthose who haven't properly executed their sins as of yet,\r\nnow can I? Could you? Don't answer. Silence is golden---\r\nI heard that passed between the spatting officers\r\nin the squad car as they pulled me up to Booking.)\r\nI ask you to reconsider the Ressurrection correctly\r\nlike I learned to do, straight from God's leaning lip\r\nto my wimpling ear, He told me Jesus was evil,\r\nknew the awful trickster to his snaky core;\r\nHis aquaintance with the abyss was everlasting,\r\nhis gospel a spastic chant to save his own erring soul,\r\ntrying to congeal in peace the ten thousand faces\r\nhe himself had drawn and erased between his birth and death.\r\nMaybe those Romans had done our doelike soldier of faith\r\na favor, nailing him to his final expression,\r\nand not the million guesses at finality his parables assumed.\r\nOur Lord God incarnate plays solitaire with the whole universe, y'know.\r\nTen thousand faces had our hero the Lord, like you,\r\nthe ten thousand faces not unlike your blinking faces\r\nstaring there into the abstraction of the nave above,\r\nthat kleenex-gleaming, glass-vaulted, sanctuary air\r\nof Heaven sparked with flecks of tinsel, marking stars\r\nthat arrow-out the Bethlehem in our Dallas, Texas hearts,\r\nour toasted community of the wounded, gasping here,\r\nburn-victim parishoners to mercy, every one,\r\nas indeed we need to be on this one-hundred degree\r\nEaster sunday. Check your faces, ladies, there's the Lord.\r\nUnpack your compact vanity mirrors, and let your lounging husband\r\nsee his own careening demon there, yes, a demon\r\nin each and every one of us, Jesus knows;\r\nsee the alarm-red horns peeking past your ears?\r\nSee them, see them? They won't melt back to skin or nothing\r\nlike the candy eggs you fob off your lambing innocents with,\r\nmelting uneaten in your Armani suits and snapped-shut\r\nBetsy Johnson pocketbooks before they're even littered\r\nto the kiddies after church, all your holy goal of extra-credit\r\ngenerosity reduced to a choclately smear where our worn\r\nhands end, and not much else. Now what kind of blessing\r\nto hand up to Our Lord is that? Manicured, uncuring\r\nfingers knitted in abject prayer again today,\r\nDear Co-Pilot, we ask you, please, whatever you may\r\nmake of us dullard mortals, squirming to sin\r\non the infinite blue of your homey globe, please don't\r\ncrush us too hastily to your downy breast. I'd die\r\nif I had to die , Dear Lord, before I'd gotten just\r\none more score on my horney, dear Lucy Papillon,\r\nthe faded butterfly, my mistusted mistress, delicate,\r\nirridescent, dying in her over-hasty haywire\r\nof father-hatred and off-angles adoration, turning\r\nand turning in her flittering yearn\r\nto please the world and be left alone.\r\nWhen I saw my honey twitching back of the Chevy....\r\nskipping home from the SMU library, making choice this sermon\r\nfor ressurected Easter Sunday, after nipping in nappies\r\ninto my mistress' house for a quickie, three days ago,\r\nGood Friday.... I turned into her driveway, following my car,\r\nits hiss of whispering gasses, suggestions\r\nI was too inertly normal to resist. Spectral trees\r\nloomed like shades in the unappercieving headlights\r\nluminescing past the gritty grille, my prison grate\r\nholding back a two-hundred horsepower, fuel-injected lust.\r\nI was Lucy's father-figure who told her what underwear to buy,\r\nand checked the ribald purchase with small, inistant fingers\r\nassiduous as the fabled Haynes Inspector number 17.\r\nMy lovely lady Lucy Papillon, the flustered butterfly,\r\nhow many hours had we downed, skimmed from conniving Fate,\r\nto worm around and warm our skin-close, closed coccoon\r\nin spendthrift, near-ecstatic flight!\r\nHowever bumbling our new-wet wings-- they worked!\r\nRemember consummating our tremble-tumbled liason?\r\nYour palpitating lap dance, The Ressurrection!\r\nThe Ressurection! a tap dance for the gospel-praters,\r\nbreaking the bread and bone at Emmanuel's,\r\nflesh and blood divided like a TV dinner on a tray.\r\nNow I look up and recognize my savior too;\r\nmy mortal sin winks at me, wearing its Jesus-beard.\r\nIf I were given just one more chance....\r\nReporter came to see me yesterday, timid, tricksy,\r\nasked me where I got off, polluting the plummeting union\r\nof God and man; let me know, I said, the last time Jesus\r\ngave you a blow job, and I'll holler all my God-spelled gospels\r\nat your ratty, tattered alter, you ass-licking Jimmie Olsen.\r\nNow get the piss out of here, and take your trash with you,\r\nand, no, I don't care how high-profile, either to save or damn me\r\nin the bought and sold wink of the national media,\r\nyou <em>think<\/em> you are, just get. Get! Christ,\r\nan inveterate smoker, had a nervous capacity to unify\r\nthe most disparate instances of things, and all the cold\r\nnon-things of God, too. Do my parables break into a patter?\r\nWell, consider that the one, final stroke of luck.\r\nIf I can sell enough people on the idea I'm Christ,\r\nwell, maybe I could step into the stuttering floodlight\r\nJesus Risen keeps X-Raying on my brain, my hidden conscience.\r\nMy conscience, an obscurity even I'd forgot.\r\nMaybe then I could arise at dawn and memorize myself,\r\na maze of christnesses obsessively traced\r\ninto the answer of myself. You know, I feel schitzophrenic\r\nwhenever I'm forced to not be the Living God.\r\nMy mind like a white lightning Molotov fries itself alive,\r\neach brimstone whiff a sweltered reminiscence\r\nof the God I lied aloud and still couldn't deny,\r\na broken image of my own internal withering brought to light.\r\nNow I am rising, like Jesus on a white pillar\r\nof Yosemite steam; I rise, I rise....\r\nMy darkness spatters backwards at its cracks,\r\nand I rise, rise in lightness among bright lights,\r\nrise, rise, until I am in the light, am the light, all light,\r\nnothing but that out-of-reach simpleness, that absolute blank.\r\nI am made blind in the glare of sin I initiate.\r\nNo god wrapped my hand around my young Ryanna's turtle-neck,\r\nI did it! Not God pondering from his inert sphere,\r\nnot you, alone and well-fed in your cloned homes,\r\nnot the six-pack of alieviating demons who'd howled\r\nmy soul though as if it were cheesecloth, or tornadoed up\r\nmy riveting memories like hurricaning hosts of ghosts\r\nto churn my attacked senses into a tragic hash.\r\nI know I am not God, or His Jesus next-of-kin;\r\nI know, I know, and will give you the same revelation:\r\nLook on my despoiled loins, my habit for disaster,\r\nsinners, look, peer where a heart inches toward oblivion,\r\nstare these essences to their ashes, and be appalled!\r\nI whipped close to my zeroed black hole, and loved it\r\nwith all the loving lashes a bullwhip might make\r\nagainst the uninhibited darkness of that obsidian,\r\nmy own stung, stone heart the universal center.\r\nLike a drunken Hopi, hoping, I lay the tracks in black,\r\nlash myself relentlessly with unforgiving cordage,\r\ncut to stunned emptiness, and in that absence find,\r\ndiscover once again, afresh, like a confused child,\r\nthe horrifying losses I had made mine.\r\nMy father never touched my crew-cut head approvingly;\r\nother parts, otherwise. Perhaps that's true;\r\na shread of verity gives the worst lie some hue of truth.\r\nIf I can make-believe I'm innocent, so can you!\r\nThe mind is what we make of it, my fellow-man,\r\nmy homilies come blustering like Custer, custard-covered\r\nonly to be soul-edible to only sweet-tooth you!\r\nDon't you believe me when I swear I am the raving Truth?\r\nI am the Way, the Light, and the Glory. I am the tenth story,\r\nfrom which, once jumping, treads Down into our only\r\nimperative narrative Road. Ha, ha. Walk with me!\r\nI am the Walker who makes mere gravity my whore,\r\nI have such sure-lightness in my shilling touch.\r\nOh my paratrooping minions, dive-gliding at my heels\r\nthrough the taxing Texas heat after my own, my true\r\nparaphrasing parables, look, look into my mirror\r\nand see yourself squinting for the afterlife in my rainbow-light.\r\nCome, come. Oh, Lucy, swished on those sinning satins,\r\nyou're divine, your legs conceal the Book of Revelations,\r\narising and dividing like Satan's wild horns, faster, faster,\r\nI swear you crooning sighs will be my epitaph;\r\nthe sheeny aftertaste of my own sweat makes me mild.\r\nIs something wrong? You orgasm at my groin.\r\nThere, you're settled now, wing-weary, my monarch-mistress,\r\nand status-satisfied. Yes, yes, I'll marry you after....\r\nNo, no, don't cry, don't cry. All better, my divinity?\r\nI've wiped your distorting tears back to flesh.\r\n\"Walker, dear,\" she said, pupating on the pillowy\r\ndivan her rotoring thighs subsumed in frightless whiteness,\r\na white of sinew and renewal. Oh my Whiteness! When I touched\r\nand stroked her emergent from the tomb, my monarch-angel\r\nflying from her cracked chrysalis to the cathedral bell\r\nwe'd sighed aloud to pull. \"Walker, dear,\"\r\nshe said, pupating Papillion. \"Again.\"\r\n\"Your flushed face is puffed, you know how that disgusts me;\r\nI'm going to trundle to my loving home now, Lucy.\r\nLucy, next time, make it better.\" The sporting door\r\nshuts hollow at my retreating back, my cross pin\r\nglinting as I unstick it from my hanging tie,\r\ngiven me by Lucy with a note: <em>For the bishop.<\/em>\r\nHow many times have I told you now of my arrival?\r\nIn my mind I keep coming to where she wallowed\r\non the gas stain, each asphasic, contorted\r\nfish-mouthing of her drowning mouth an accusation:\r\n\"Walker Reily! From this damning shame, no running!\r\nNo speed or rearing chase of dream-desire can take you\r\naway. Here's your destiny, the one, the fate\r\nyou handstitched against my neck and failing brain.\"\r\nWife! Wife! Every time I think about it\r\nthe flowing car seems softer, more cloudlike,\r\nmy gleaming feet floating through the door\r\nto tap-land on the concrete apron where a chalked,\r\nwhite, hop-scotch was scrawled by our dawdling daughter.\r\nOh god, god.....\r\nI know you never abandoned me. I still feel adored.\r\nNow, ah, where was I? This heat is enervating!\r\nI stand accused, and still you come! I arc up\r\nrecovered from a suicidal coma, and still you come!\r\nIt seems my unending tribulations have laved me,\r\nin name, at least, as the most popular preacher boy\r\nin society's old, corroded high-school heirarchy.\r\nYou know, the dilettanting prosecutor, at ease\r\nbefore his easel of low crimes and high misdemeanors,\r\nwould paint my paling contenance with a harsher brush.\r\nOh God, he might say, how I gloried in the blue, blurred\r\ncord my righteous Ryanna remembers. She got strangle-altered\r\nin the struggle to love unabatingly too, you'll recall.\r\nI'm sure you've read all the papers, and will buy up\r\nmy three books, to be put out by Random House this fall,\r\nmy season for winnings and windfalls, a choice time\r\nto tackle the passions that nearly strangle one!\r\nHow blind to the divine we are, your sinners, oh Lord,\r\ncrafted in thy crafty image, we regret\r\nour inability to step back from the plaster finish\r\nand crash the masterpiece to splinters! I, I regret\r\nthat my aiming hand was unsteady in the pinch.\r\nNeither my gum-tongued wife nor I knew how\r\nto consummate our finishing. How by the divine\r\nwe are squeezed until we are forgiven! Or forget,\r\nour brain-mass a lump of dumped cells, like Ariana's,\r\nmy putatative, however unloving, tournequet-necked, wife.\r\nMy charming potato sack, my dropping star, my life!\r\nLet's sing, choirmaster, after this fashion,\r\ndink the triangle in rebelling praise, sing high:\r\n\"Mine eyes have seen the blackness of Satanic habitats...!\"\r\nOh, when you're down, my listeners,--- on my coat-tails,\r\nchild and mother, and wastrel husband, come, come!\r\nI am the Spirit of Christ-Mass present,\r\nan imprecise arbiter of what's nice and not-so-nice;\r\nwhen you're at the black bottom, come, descend,\r\nfollow your plunging heart in my eviscerating wake,\r\ncome, come, plunge to its thrubbed nub of nastiness.\r\nRevile thyself! and expel the strength of Spirit;\r\nare you here with me now? It is dark. In the dark,\r\nyour nose itched in filth and the fat lack-of-faith\r\nI've described: no savior, no heaven up above,\r\nlike in that looney John Lennon song, then you know,\r\nathiest on a tightrope paralleling no earth in darkness,\r\nthe death of Life, the death of Hope;\r\nbut the death of Death, no, that does not come.\r\nIn the trough of the abyss I've lain three bleak days,\r\nthe sun or God an unanswering dialtone in my ravaged ear;\r\nan accordian of demonic voices demanded their ribbed hearing,\r\nexpanding and contracting throughout the vile Escapade,\r\nand I gave them my whole soul in that blistered,\r\nlistening liason with the very Devil. I know, bone-hard,\r\nI know my fractured pact was blissfully consummated\r\nfrom my gibbon-narrow skull to my cracked nuts, not a jot\r\nof whatever insists on being me omitted, not a jot.\r\nEach assuaging, persuading, suede or harrassing voice\r\ncame tri-toned and insinuating: \"Why not?\", \"Go ahead....\"\r\nI tried in my trial to deny that denial, but could not.\r\nGod wot! I was in a sulpher-crimson brimming stew,\r\nmy dick the stirring widget, as with so many of you, too.\r\nWhen I had her corded against the kitchen sink,\r\nmy enormous erection at the small hollow of her heaving back,\r\nvomiting a vile black blood bile, until her tongue\r\nnearly came undone enough to follow her slipping supper\r\nlike a starving snake between her bruised, contorting lips,\r\neach syllable of vatic ache she spewed sounded\r\nlike my own christian name. But it wasn't,\r\nI was not present, I swear. Who is it who really dies\r\nstrapped between uprights in the electric chair?\r\nThe guilty man? Or guilt itself? Or is it our own fears\r\nwe charbroil into non-existence? I was not afraid.\r\nShadow of a cat, shadow of a cat, black black black\r\nas the shadow of a cat, I came behind her without a whisper,\r\nsimmering in my new wardrobe of sin-wishes....\r\nSlipping in the overspill of my jimmied Ariana's spit-up,\r\nI nearly lost my grip and let her breathe. Easy\r\nto make a mistake like that, I guess, I'm only\r\na part-time psychopath, not an Old Testament pro\r\nlike that yattering Yahweh. And, anyhow, my state of mind\r\nis still no good excuse, I think all that Fruedian crap's\r\njust a sloppy cop-out; even when the demons were in me, I knew\r\nit was my triggering fingers on the jerking wire\r\nI had harnessed at her limp, uninjured neck.\r\nMy trying eye does not understand the I of sin.\r\nDoubting Thomas with the halo knocked off,\r\nI speared a tear with my little finger's little fingernail,\r\nfrom her bulging, suffocated, near sightless left eye,\r\ndrank deep its shallow Red Sea salt, and felt myself divided.\r\nI stand birth-wet in the unbearable glare\r\nof my own blistering sinning like the sun.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>SWAGGER<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\n\r\n<em>JIMMY \"JAMES THE SHAMELESS\" SWAGGERT<\/em>\r\n\r\nSWAGGERT\r\nI'm ripping this twenty dollar bill in half: take it.\r\nI'll fork over its disfigured sister half when we're\r\nall done here. Ooo Honey, Honey, shaking on the cheap springs\r\nall Primavera against that cheesy flowered print, knees aghast\r\natop the dimpled bluebells and spattered Jack-\r\nin-the-Pulpits squealing wildfire to your ham-handed,\r\nrotoring and rugged, dry sweat masturbation!\r\nFlail your sweet innards pink alive like St. Bartholomew\r\nfor masturbating me; my spanking Jack, a flogged man,\r\ncreamed against my satiny, jerking jogging shorts\r\nwhen I first spotted your sultry ass hitched against\r\nyour Airline Highway and rust-sagging whore door Sunday\r\nafter the big preachment when I took that sinner Jimmie Bakker\r\ndown as fast as he'd had that plastic Jessica Hahn\r\non the oinking office chair. Hell, his ass was mine.\r\nGod had mentioned in my red ear he had a guilty dick,\r\nso I circumcised it, cut his tongue off at the bled bud.\r\nNo one like that should be broadcasting to the people about my Lord;\r\nhis wife's white eyes black fountains of mascara tears....\r\nThese are my wicked ministry's secular resources.\r\nA shameless shaman telegraphing desire on a nickering wire,\r\nall taps and dashes and long undulant pauses.\r\nYes, yes, that's it. My cloven hooves clicker when you whinney.\r\nEvery heaven-minded man's bathed in sin. That's where, dear,\r\nour molten ocean of knowing bubbles up from in spuming spoils,\r\nthis boiling pit of blisters I call my holy soul,\r\na cancer-hankering for the groin and heart unveiled\r\nthe total tumor pulsing revealed in an unbridled, raw,\r\nrancerous and pimply pornographic tour <em>de lux<\/em>! No lie.\r\nChrist himself died naked and afraid. Who's to say\r\nMary Magdalaine's sin-oiled fingers didn't flex and give\r\nhis little suffering man-in-the-pants one last lube?\r\nWhat unshriven figure did her weeping hips lave and save?\r\nShe was a whore anyway, thumbed more times than my\r\nfiltched Gidean. You understand. Can you, can you... Ahh!\r\nBlank tears tickle-wiggle past my roaring nose, and I get\r\nthe harsh, salt lick of death against my moaning tongue.\r\nHallelujah! I'm gonna die someday raving and saved,\r\nmy doughty boxer's sheeny limbs will roll folded in the Rapture's\r\nswooping shroud, as backlit in heavenslight as an MGM production.\r\nLittle Lord who made me, I am but a wad of cotton\r\nwaiting to be nimbly picked and soul-raped by your risen fingers;\r\nI kneel in the twister-riven fields until you're here,\r\nUFOing from Paradise among the slashing stalks,\r\nrare, terrified and adored. I won't want to click\r\nmy sin-pinned nazi heels like Dorothy and go home, Lord,\r\nI swear I won't. I want to be in heaven with a silk dress\r\nlike yourself. But I cannot wrangle back to blessedness\r\nthe wayward ears of my mew-mooing parishoners in the pews,\r\nlet them wriggle as they will! Down among the dull swabs,\r\nI alone hear the ballooned, importuning, heroic, vatic,\r\nhollow on-high voice of my triumphant God.\r\nO invisible!\r\nBefore thy stemming mightiness, I am as a twig!\r\nO how unwell, I reach into the rancidness!\r\nHow rancid and entrancing I am, raked flailingly alive\r\nhere in the televised tent of my po' south,\r\nevangelizing my crossroads roots. Here I twist and simmer;\r\neverybody all weird elbows and sweat-dank shirt-sleeves\r\n---room for everybody in this christ's-body tent---\r\nI reach out to covet and knuckle your rearing ass....\r\nSome siren of sense is alarmingly rebelling within me.\r\nJesus the Savior is knocking on my soul's house's doors.\r\nI am ready for the charnel confessional of the truth.\r\nAt last, at last....\r\nDaddy spent his time before the war and my birth\r\ntrapping furs, \"a gettin' the little critters afore\r\nthey get the snap on us,\" as he brayed, and I still can see\r\nthe godawful racoon goo on his black fingers in my eye,\r\npunctuating the florid story for emphasis. I see him,\r\npicking pecans in due season, hard labor and unloveable,\r\nplaying the fiddle hard for whiskey and merriment,\r\nand fucking mom. He had his crooked finger ditched deep\r\nin every possom pie of our lazy days hamlet,\r\nmy little beleaguered, divine, divided, and deciding town\r\nsweet Fairaday. The yokels he'd swindled loved to squint\r\nup at his six foot five inch Ramses face and call him \"The Sun.\"\r\nGod, with a bootlegger's simmering snigger, had seen\r\nhim baptized as Sun Swaggert, my righteous-assed Daddy.\r\nThere wasn't a dirty trick in the Devil's book\r\nhe hadn't learned to rue. Darlin', slower now, we're almost home.\r\nHis fatal eyes stared past death, stone blue.\r\nI peeped up at him with a drooly infant's grin\r\nfrom the slick backwash of Momma's powdery collar-bone,\r\nfirst time, and cried. My first memory is of the briars\r\nin his eyes. Momma <em>chuched<\/em> my rump and kissed my dew-lapped pate's\r\nsweet-pea pompadour. Where could I hide my innocence\r\nand watery, thunderstruck eyes? He was a big bright man\r\nfull of sweat and gumption, never met his like,\r\nnor any doppleganger unlike of his either; he slapped\r\nmy candy ass with a bible-hard hand and quoted Deuteronomy.\r\nI knew in my soft-soap bones I had been born to an immoral man.\r\nI myself was the raw result of most degraded sin:\r\nquicker a bit: baby, baby! Your sour rose undoes my crooked worm\r\nflying all afternoons into one evening's ashes!\r\nHow could my blanching existence, however white,\r\nhowever benignly pale about the bleeding knot\r\nof my diapered umbilical and squalling, toothless mouth,\r\never justify the spattered blackness of my setting forth?\r\nI swooned, a marooned baby-bit of conscioussness,\r\nagainst my mother's loving tit and pinched nipple.\r\nThere was no way. I had stared into the sun and eclipsed myself.\r\nI, a midnight-eyed ape mendicant still too young to swing\r\nhimself out of evolution's tarry jungles, my swamp of self.\r\nAnd Father's own wild life was set to atone;\r\nYes, he beat me to the savior's raptured punch\r\nand heard the word of the Lord before speech sneaked into me.\r\nHe always knew how to change himself before he got too bored,\r\ncontracted the clap, or got L'isiana crawdads down his shorts.\r\nHe'd get even with all the quicksand world\r\nthat'd sucked him down, dragged his scanty white ass\r\npast the precipice and nearly drowned, in mud,\r\nthe slick silvered areofoil of his quickened spirit\r\nin this hissing trash of sex and life! Never, o never!\r\nwould he let any of his sin-spawned progeny dodge\r\nthe cold knowing of his gospel-doctored heart:\r\nwe needed his gracing spate of light to save ourselves!\r\nHe looked at Mom over his gilt-edged Old and New Testament\r\none searing evening at dinner, and let her know\r\nthere'd be no more of that \"kissing business upstairs\"\r\nfrom here on in, even unto the erected Ressurection!\r\nI sighed into my peas, whacked off in the attic, and prayed.\r\nWith Daddy's magic conversion, all the apocalyptic world\r\nhad to get its camel's ass into the reviving\r\nrevival tent too: none were to be eschewed, or God\r\nHimself would thrash His wavering son Sun\r\nstraight down Hell's alley like a flaming bowling ball,\r\nall fire-mottled, there to burn, incomplete, eternally.\r\nDaddy had gathered us in the driveway at dawn\r\nto disgorge his night-attack of vision. We knew....\r\nMomma's face was black and blue with praying.\r\nWe would be battering-ram Daddy's little evangelistas,\r\nhis heavenly icicles nailed into the Devil's stew.\r\nMy poor dim-watt Daddy, I see now, was a sure-fire\r\nhellfire and leather-strap man: whap whap whap\r\non my little brother's wicked little ass-- never mine;\r\nI was the sunshine angel of our brood that Granma had prayered for\r\nwhen out popped my righteous Papa; she saw he understood\r\nsin too well to become beatified before the Lord.\r\nBut me, well, my powdered neck drifted in from heaven itself,\r\nshiny-clean in my new haircut and perfectly white white shirt.\r\nI gave all the townsfolk their sermons with a smile,\r\nsecretly defying deified God himself to knock me off\r\nmy pederasted pedestal; I was one hot holy-boy\r\nsteam-rolling sin out of our southern gospel town.\r\nFair-a-day, For-a-day, Fair-this-day, Far-a-way Fairaday,\r\nmy little beleagured, divine, divided, deciding town.\r\nYour loony hopes had roped you to God's creation,\r\nlashed like Ahab on his unabandonable whale.\r\nRemember how, at nine, I prophecized Hiroshima\r\nfrom the swept tabermnacle of my bedroom?\r\nThe ashen mushroom cloud bloomed from my small-boy's mouth,\r\ntender as an eyeball one might refuse to eat, or see with.\r\nToo gun-shy to talk Allied English for three days afterward,\r\nI howl my moronic mish-mash of scolding German\r\nand Axis Jap until half the state had made it\r\nto our rickety outskirts church to touch and behold me.\r\nFunny isn't it, how, sometimes, the whole world\r\nshrinks itself to a cheap, tin pinwheel, glittering and flaring,\r\ncircling back on itself in a spanked child's little [baby] fist.\r\nMy steady hand never abandoned its blessing wrath\r\nto administer any spat of doubt unto my simple people,\r\nstaring at my washed and clarified features as a proof\r\nabout how the days of future Rapture had come down\r\nto prowl among 'em now. Yes! I was that\r\ncondemnifying angel at hazard in their midst;\r\nI was their very conscience in my sunday best,\r\ngiven a nickle a week to preach them straight,\r\nadminister old Sun's sallied broadsides until they loved\r\nto hate their own twisted, purgatorial souls,\r\nunsunned and sickened shit-black without my tongue.\r\nAnd how they loved it all!\r\nEach sin-grimmace flashed ecstatic to pulpitted me.\r\nNothing like eternal damnation to wake up the sleepy day,\r\nand really, as we say, put a new curl in your pie-crust!\r\nI recall being rolled awake one meek midnight by\r\nmy brother's raspy hollerin' in the next room;\r\nit seemed some beery iron-clawed sin-demon had nabbed him!\r\nI shook in my thin bed, sweating out the August dark.\r\nWhat could be going on in there in the other, nearby dark?\r\nWas he still quarantined in his skin, to scream\r\nand carry-on like that? He sounded all blood and lesions,\r\none tortured and torqued voice, all maimed and baying boy.\r\nEach slap echoed out louder than the last had crashed,\r\nlike a beaver's damned angry <em>swap!<\/em> mapping terror\r\nout over the alarming waters-- have you ever heard it?\r\nMiles it carries, they say, and they're right.\r\nI hear it still.... every other night, or so.\r\nBut that was coming from my own brother's body and back,\r\nrack after rack of hideous slaps\r\nand whappings; the ceiling distorted with my tears.\r\nI could hear him squeal his prayers bible-page thin walls:\r\n\"O Lord, O lord, come and rapture me afore Daddy\r\never has such cause to revile me again....I don't care\r\nif I go to hell, just don't let him be so mad again.\"\r\nI arose at clear dawn to see the blood-vomit at his neck,\r\nhis face a knot-- hate and real fear combined there\r\nas he slept, crunched into a curl so tight it seemed\r\nhe never wanted to wake up again. I prayed,\r\nthere and then, for God to make me a little wicked too,\r\nput some touch of Satan in my makeup, smear my clearness,\r\nso that Daddy's smacking hand could get a little tired\r\nagainst my face and body first, before he'd beat\r\nmy brother to the grotesqueness of a bruised rainbow.\r\nAnd the Lord did it. And I believed.\r\nBut my tired-eyed Daddy never blamed me a lick,\r\nlet me carry off every sin as if it was a medal o' honor,\r\nlike from the war. My guilt! my guilt! my guilt!\r\nMy ruse of bruises won't convince myself---\r\nI am the one who should be undone by what I've done!--\r\nI am the guilty party, and I rock in self-hate,\r\ncrushing my sweat-fat head back against the velvet\r\nheadrest in my royally on-rushing Rolls.\r\nWhat argosy of incidents might unsettle me before the Lord?\r\nThose were the glory days; Jerry Lee Lewis, my cousin, and me\r\nrevelling in the little pleasures of the flopping flesh:\r\nMy life at the pious piano had twenty flicking fingers, not ten.\r\nMy own hands and little boy Lewis' happily combined\r\nto play our childhood souls to an amiable blankness.\r\nNo, that's not right, but I forgot some spiking hurts,\r\nseated crosswise-ass from Jerry Lee on the sotted lawn;\r\nthere we were, a trembling terror of tenors\r\nflying from low to high, rolling the black keys\r\nlike drunken niggers with our plaster-blanche palms,\r\nrolling the black keys like the rut-wet whores\r\non our side of the racket-making tracks, fluid\r\nunder strangers' paling knuckles and loving fucks.\r\nOur shoes were kicked off to feel the sweet, wet aspect\r\nof grasses rustling under folding chairs pinned to earth\r\nby the meaty buttocks of the congregation,\r\nFirst Spellbinders open-air sitting church, too poor\r\nto afford even a rented tent's swaying steeple.\r\nOur wired hearts floated into the uppermost of the air,\r\nwinged by our rude harmonies and gospels,\r\nthere in the swart, flat field we scrimmaged in,\r\nrummaged this sunday by a million faithful footfalls.\r\nMarooned in paradise by our weird croons\r\nand baptist mass, we gospelled the ringing keys\r\nand made those disintegrating eighty-eights shine\r\nand tremble before a scornful God and all his high pack\r\nof quack magicks and Cecil B. DeMille screen-effects.\r\nHow passionately we dreamed to die angel-hearted,\r\nregistering our fatal love at the Lord's illuminated doorway!\r\nHeaven was a honeysuckle we could pull down and chew,\r\nno abstract majesty but our fingers could pull it through,\r\nno mere fart of honor in a lackland backwater\r\nlike our already forgotten town, but the real deal,\r\nopium-gold and landed among us: each impoverished, pie-fat face\r\ncommuned with scripture, tortured word by word,\r\nlike removing a tattoo, and on each humble aspect\r\nthere in the spasmed grass, you could see the scar-shadow\r\nfaith had palimpsested upon the prayerful\r\nlike moonlight through a torn screen.\r\nHow our roused fingers impinged on sound to whorl\r\nall those imploring buttermilk souls flooding loving\r\nfrom their uneasy chairs into the ghost-crowded air!\r\nThe holy ghost itself, down for a cameo role,\r\nbroke out upon the parishoners' ecstatic faces\r\nlike a sweat; they moaned their own, lonely orgasmic assent\r\nto each trembling tone of our stab at divinity!\r\nYes, yes, they cried, we are the afterwash of the Lord,\r\nthe mudflats and swamps that received drydocked Noah,\r\nthe fizzled helium ballons of aereonaut angels\r\ncrash-landed in Louisiana, wandering dead drunk\r\nand light-headed at our nearness to God. Yes, yes!\r\nWe put off the creamy blazers of the Devil, never\r\nwill be his limber minions, or stumble lumberingly\r\namong the downed lines of that master puppeteer,\r\na fallen luminescence forced by the purposeful Lord\r\nto hold his own black threads above his knotted head,\r\ncareering blind-man's-bluff through his perveted dominions.\r\nWe made the heat-rich air itself shiver to our fingerings,\r\nlike that wild Sally Fletcher at the Corn Pone Fair\r\nbeneath the jilting ferriswheel earlier that same year.\r\nFor us alone in all the rumored world, the very air\r\nsplit and lived to the rapidity of our quizzings,\r\nas if we'd asked for nothing other than to know all ourselves,\r\nthere in the abject field, honeyed by daylight.\r\nAll eyes the stoned eyes of Eternity inflicted\r\non decaying heads, argent looks that out-shone the dead stars,\r\ngave the lie to all gravestones, and all death's\r\ndissolute dissolvings of the flesh at a flash.\r\nTo know and see, truly see, each and every\r\none of ourselves as we were and as we are,\r\nkneeling there in the field with God himself by our side,\r\nthe one absolute we had engineered a syllable for,\r\nthe rest made up by passionate guesses we'd timed\r\nour heartstrings to plink out of the cheap uprights\r\ndumb luck had donated beneath our detonating paws.\r\nOur battered harmonics were laconic: lazy\r\nL'isiana's high-powered answer to St. Cecilia.\r\nOur own young notes had spiderwebbed these green folks\r\nup to choiring Jesus' highwire electric netting:\r\ntwo billion volts straight through the admiring spines,\r\nthe small fry swivelling like the million eels\r\nthat fattened Mr. Pike's steel net in the bayou\r\nout back; his tobaccoed, cajun-thick accent\r\nthe provenence of tongues, inspired Non-Americanese.\r\nCome on, my tender wings! Ascend! Jiggering Jerry Lee and me\r\nwould bend and bend, helping each uncertain passenger on-board\r\nour hunching backs as we dazzled the rearing keys\r\nto Kingdom Come. It wasn't easy, but I felt fine;\r\nfine as if my heart had never given out\r\nto anything other than these implorings of the Lord,\r\nOur Father, who art tugging me home by my scrotum.\r\nAnd now the anxious nails come singing from my wrists;\r\nwhen I cross them in pain, I get a sightline\r\nviewing the eternal bastardy of God, The Abandoner!\r\nI peer into the soul-ruining firmament until I'm blind.\r\nEyeless cows plough lowing through the fields,\r\ntheir bony hips magnetized on new seed;\r\nthe ploughman's work-bitten hands dash pure wheat-golds\r\ninto the filthy nurturent ruck to make it yeild and breed.\r\nO I was a carpenter of sorrow, and built my sadness true,\r\nthe unerring blueprint filigreed vein by vein;\r\nIn my house, all sky-blue verity's reduced to muralled pain,\r\nCome hold the shivering brush, push clouds\r\ninto the plaster muck, or turn a humped\r\nharried black blot of demon in the white, or make\r\nparticular however the haunted paradise you hunt:\r\nI guarantee whatever evil thing you rush to caricature is you.\r\nThe child's wind-mastering pin-wheel stays stuck\r\non dreams and dreaming rainbows in this wind's created wake.\r\nNow nailed, and dying once again, I ache\r\na waterlogged winter-soul anxious for the summer floods\r\nto quicken and float me quickly to the top!\r\nOf Heart! Oh, revenging, evangelizing heart, stop, stop!\r\nI am whatever color is the color of my blood,\r\nwhich bleeds, invented afresh, by these kind, expulsed\r\nvoodoo wobbly pins I arrow away from my skin.\r\nHow shall my charring shame come to its surcease?\r\nA waste of rest to refresh my wreck! Spare me despair,\r\nO Lord, whose source I cannot knowingly unknow,\r\n--I have seen the ripped insides of my own bewildered heart,\r\nthe furious, angry engine where generating Destiny carooms.\r\nKneel by me, jerking Jezebel, weep, cry the fabled tears\r\nthat freeze the eyelash and shread the sight. Blindly tear\r\nevery wonderment of looking down to our longed-for nullity!\r\nHere in the dark we drink, and we ourselves are ink,\r\nour wanton souls the dry blotters for each sin spilled\r\nby anxious, trembled hands upon the snowy fields.\r\nPray by me, a crooked man low-kneeled, afeared\r\nin my hot polyesther and thinning pompadour....\r\nBaby, baby, aspen-anxious in the creaking pew,\r\nI'll tear the living God's cradle to flinders to shelter you,\r\nweave a semi-sacred arch in our ruined southern woods,\r\nshaded beautifically now in Proserpina's pagan spring;\r\nI'll set you up as my new Madonna too, a thing all of gold\r\nand enamalled blue, a Byzantine bitch, whose frail\r\nwhite hand shall masturbate me through the wrenching gale\r\nof all this wicked world's spitting storms.\r\nCome, come. Let us adhere together, and sail in my grand\r\n       cadillac\r\n--luxurating on its mounded pouch of fake leopard skins\r\nlike your straining leotards, my friend in christ--\r\nto our Airport Highway Motel Paradise.\r\nArch, arch, yes, yes, like that, like that, I'm saved....\r\nLet me sop up this pus-sy holy water, spilled\r\nwhere your manic, gracing hand had raved.\r\nWho wouldn't grind a little gracelessly, and twist\r\nto the the rainbowed aura of your halo when you pissed?\r\nI was, my non-virgin Virgin, slutty Queen,\r\nwith your near-perfect lipstick, Carnation #12,\r\nnot quite right a little afterward. Small,\r\nhallucinatory blushes blurred beyond the outline\r\nof your cookie-cutter smile. I was, and am,\r\nyour most devout and devoted Vouyer votary,\r\npeeking past your wise debasement to my wild depravity.\r\nIt seems that my personal Hiroshima, all legs and ass\r\nand steamy profusions of eggy emulsions, to exist,\r\nmust be tele-evangelized. I quake. I speak.\r\nI wait, in the abnegated space of the cathode tube,\r\nfor the exchanging rain of the flames' flakes\r\nto hiss into my sin-wicked skin as soul-hot ash.\r\nIt seems these votive forces are forgiveless of my sins.\r\nMy guilt I may not expiate, not by gospel,\r\nnot by harried grace, not by the sweet swirls\r\nof knowing notes we pounded on the warped piano,\r\nrocketing Jerry Lee and I, out-facing Destiny and Satan\r\nin the perverted revival tent we inverted to a Honky Tonk.\r\nBy none of these escaped likenesses shall ye know me.\r\nI am the guilt of getting-away-with-it personified;\r\nmaybe one day I'll be more, be ill, a simple,\r\nwilled and living human being without a mounting boundary\r\nI can't find the dirty eraser to efface.\r\nI am the smeared line of lipstick on that girl who blew\r\nme until she herself was blue. I am the target\r\nfor which I feel the awful lure. O Fisherman of men!\r\nDrag your swept net however low, however down, and get me!\r\nI shiver in my meek blackness to be <em>once<\/em> un-dim\r\nto my own electric self. Surely Maureen, or Doreen,\r\nwhatever your tongued name is, my pimped up, dear\r\nMadonna-Whore complex with the stereo too loud, surely\r\nmy lifting of you into the temporary-Eternal\r\nwill have some blistered bliss of effect\r\non me too? I create the icky sin we stick to\r\nby flying, adult maggots, into each other's fly-eyes:\r\nbumped heads and hearts and groins, all staticy\r\nshynesses swervingly combined in our one minute's shine.\r\nNow, my mopey sweet, to create this freak feast\r\nas a true looming eminence-emanation of the whore-adored,\r\nI shall unwhip these seven crocodile skins, the sins\r\nmy Daddy razor-slashed and wired to his sculling\r\nbirch canoe way back when, and wear them like a face,\r\none for each day of the terrified creation, snaked\r\nout of the swamp and history of our putrid damps;\r\nthen I shall dance a dance to the murderous Word\r\nlike a circus-act, your sweating worshipper here\r\nclowned out of the bayou woods and backwaters, myself,\r\nand I'll pull them over us, still slick-shiney\r\nin the apocalypse-light, like backlit clouds, silver\r\nand mirrored in the rictus-center of your divine eye,\r\nthe true object of my aim, or almost, and I'll plunge\r\nin naked abandonment until I uncover your undercover heart,\r\nyour bleeding, suffering, roiling, rancid heart,\r\nand eat it out like the Last Supper with my jaw.\r\n\r\nWHORE SPEECH, INSERT ABOVE\r\nAw, honey-baby, when I peer at you,\r\nyour dew-boy darling hair goes so cutely askew\r\nviewed through the inverted V of heaving me...\r\nYour swizzle-stick dick sure looks awful lonely\r\ndandled in your ham-hand, darlin', whyn't you just\r\nbounce your horny cornpone ass yonder and stir\r\nmy primordial crotch-broth?\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>ATHIEST  PRIEST<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\n\r\n<em>MADELAINE  MURRARY  O'HARE<\/em>\r\n\r\n\r\nO 'HARE\r\nGod bless fornication's force! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!\r\nMy well-heeled grey matron's bun shows off\r\nmy shiny-sheeny shins to good effect, ay? Ha! Ha! Ha!\r\nPretty Betty Grable of me, huh? I'll say.\r\nPerch my aching legs above this steel steering wheel\r\nand drive me home, Elvis! Doo wop me pop til my top flops.\r\nUgh, uhh, ugnh. Oh, I'm sorry, Sonny, I didn't mean to speak so\r\nin front of you, to use that toothless dirty-bird word,\r\nGod; but I want you to understand you're an animal\r\nor crawling onion with a buzzard's vagrancy-enhanced\r\nturn-the-tide on the vouyered worm brain, a thinking something\r\nto pick out the dead eyes of the nurturant lot with,\r\nan animal, man, just like the sexually mixed rest of us, by damn--\r\nAnd as your damn dam I oughter know of what I squwak!\r\nAnd, yes, I know, since I tol' you, Damnation's just a game\r\nwe play one syllable at a time in this primal scream scam,\r\nso-self-called Life. Get it? Here's a new tune for you;\r\ntiddly-tum your bum tummy when you sing it, and you'll\r\nfeel better, I forswear swearing it, other than with\r\na ruinous blue tongue, my salty sucker, so-called:\r\n\r\n     Little Lamb, who made thee,\r\n     Dost thou know who made thee?\r\n     Whitely do you buck and gasp\r\n     And expire upon the grass.\r\n\r\n     Little Lamb, who made thee,\r\n     Dost thou know who made thee?\r\n     Little Lamb, why am I free\r\n     To create the God who created thee?\r\n\r\nYou know, don't you, untutored one, that I'm responsible\r\nfor every bluebird word that comes pecking at your tow head.\r\nLittle boy, and termagant of not, whenever I spoon some jejune\r\ngreen food in you, at least, you are that not knot I can't unknot,\r\nwell, I won't back back from my eternal-maternal charge to teach you\r\nsweet and sure out of all this world's altared whoredom\r\njust what's what, and where that what stops at what's not.\r\nHere, hold the wheel a minute, I gotta light a cig'.\r\nSheeit! You near reared that fool's-gold El Dorado, boy,\r\nmy elvis-headed mischevious princeling, freewheeling\r\nthese backward-ass Texas streets, spinning fast back\r\nto the school that'll no longer make you stay and pray\r\njust to get an education; smart's smart-- and that's not.\r\nLeastways, not to my Baltimore-poured concrete stammering\r\nbrainstem and swizzle-stick stiff nerveless backbone;\r\nI was a rocking rocket on those cement docksides of quay-graves\r\na double-barrelled Pelican bagpipe anxious for tripe.\r\nI blacked-out once because I wouldn't shut-up to catch my breath;\r\nif only I could make an audience so catch, heave and tip!\r\nHar, har! You know, double-loved one, my algebra boy,\r\nI couldn't have those scolding soldiers of Christ,\r\nmartinets of ministry, naybobs of cloudy hob-knobbing,\r\nknocking your naked knees out from under you to reel kneeling\r\non the squealing gymnasium floor toward some awful God. Gad!\r\nYou're my genetic inheritance, not some other slob's.\r\nThanks, hon, I got a good drag going now. Let go!\r\nContrariness is in you too, I do avouch, each ouch\r\nyou cause this recalcitrant mother's heart earns a sob.\r\nHow joyous when you'll be your own owning tower of oneness\r\nin this sway-backed, wildly wired world of the\r\nperpetually new.... My one egg whirred you upright too,\r\nevolution's goy, self-replicating without God's nod,\r\na wish mixed with groin's groaning, purloined insistence, dear.\r\nAnd so now you're here. I love you; you know that dontcha?\r\nThis screwed universe can move a lonely heart to sceam.\r\nI tear a damning blackness from my heart and start to dream,\r\nthe images a flicker-rash of happenstance and desire.\r\nMaybe you'll listen to others as you grow old\r\nand the acuteness of your hearing starts to go; I don't know.\r\nI don't know. How could I? And that's the plastic\r\nglory of it all: each one of us invented fresh\r\nfrom the artificial mesh of our own dear doodled imaginings.\r\nI am the spawn I propigate, nothing less.\r\nI am all splashed flesh and wish, a nymphy fish\r\npaddling my four-cornered heart with limitless desire;\r\nwhat I may dream my weaning self to mean gives me all the excuse\r\nI need to belch and be. Birragh-urp!\r\nLife's a spermy-paisley expressiveness, I insist.\r\nAyn Rand and me, Lesbos' sisters of the anti-trinity!\r\nWhat is the religious Want? To manifest the immanent\r\nIndividual into the public Something, not to dissolve\r\nour arrival into invisible archival. I don't respect\r\nreligion's wry psychology on that point yet;\r\nit keeps me from the parade of things I can be here and get.\r\nCome join the rational revolution Ayn Rand and I spawned,\r\nthe founding bitch-hounds! Your religion's all of twigs....\r\nI build my fading eternities faster:\r\na mass-produced inspiration that includes a universal joint.\r\nWhat're you? A squirrel? A chameleon too?\r\nMy pleasantly plump Proteus riding shotgun\r\nto my ribonecleic essence, sweetie, you're neat.\r\nIf I thought you sucked or weren't worth the breath\r\nI nearly lost to get you, would I have you here?\r\nHell no! Sixty miles per hour over the cliff-face, baby,\r\nand no shreadding gears in regret, neither.\r\nI'd watch you go diapered into the abyss and never blink.\r\nYou know how I am; but I take my parenting\r\nwith a clear seriousness these painty-waste preacher's boys\r\ncan't begin to hanker an imagining for: my each\r\naction has its impact in your bio-reared brain;\r\nyour brain is the basic basis of the consciousness-wish\r\nof life as presently understood by those\r\nwho bother with any mirror of understanding, therefore\r\nour time together is the everything\r\nof which you breed your appalling all; you see? Sit still,\r\nas long as the taxpayers here demand it, I must\r\njettison you for eight blue hours a day from my side,\r\na hurting birth that alienates our intimacies.\r\nWhen I first looked down on fuzzy you, the red spot\r\nsqualling on my church of lurching lap, I wondered\r\nat what new-born notion you would hug to you\r\nto rip your life apart upon; that's the only question.\r\nEverything else is a matter for spastic dandies\r\nwho neither build nor burn, but merely cease to be.\r\nMy non-God God is me; I am the Deity I elevate!\r\nIn America I shall assert my non-irrelevance ecstatically!\r\nHow do you explain your life to yourself? Sweet teat-sucker,\r\nmy poisoned arrow found me grinning in the target's shadow.\r\nI had lashed my tarred ass to an unfashionable mast\r\nand tarry weary there still. Dear, dear,\r\nit wasn't fate that pinched me to an athiest, but God\r\nhovering stony-loving above the sidelines\r\nin an insanity of paitience, a waiting hail-rain\r\nwaiting for the precise aesthetic moment\r\nto reveal His benificent magnificence as we died ugly.\r\nO that arrow of thought struck deep! Its feathers brim\r\nmy knocked-in skullcap still. See, Cochese?\r\nWe're the wild indians to these slowpoke cowboys\r\nand choose the ambushed height of thought we shall purvey\r\nupon the diminished plains scuffing at our ponies' feet.\r\nGrab the wheel again, Tonto, I need another piffling puff.\r\nLeft, left; how much drunken time do we have left?\r\nI'll use the laws they make me pursue against 'em, I will.\r\nI'll unfurl my victorious pinions until light fails,\r\nand all their reaping crop of stolid citizenship\r\ncringes atrophied to dust. I'll do my dessicate best\r\njust as dad who had me on the kitchen table,\r\nprayering the rapist out of himself against my skin.\r\nThe fuck! He would tear at the bandage on his scarred chest\r\nand say I stole his heart from Mom and God.\r\nMe, the Temptress! That's a laugh. My tongue's\r\ntoo widow-withered whetted and sharp to out-harp God;\r\nhard enough to find a man who'll keep near me nowadays.\r\nA foul mouth can out-howl the saintly any day, too fey to growl\r\nwhen old wolf hunger's at the door anyhow. A parable.\r\nThank your mommy if you feel a reaching need to pray.\r\nLook too lovingly long at heaven, and I guarentee\r\nthat the paster's got his palm wormed down you pants, baby.\r\nPluck the wings off angels, and let them wrestle on the sill\r\nwith the unrested self-testing rest of us, dammit.\r\nThe world's changed from when I first kicked into it,\r\nsquallin' and shittin', foul at both ends\r\nif you read the papers. But things are different,\r\npeople squiggle after their little worm of grub\r\nand shove on without a thanks or a thought. Who thought life\r\nso pitiless for the enganged brain and mind? Not I!\r\nBut I guess I was jest better at foolin' myself\r\nin those young days; my glucose-count and intake\r\nmust've been a whirlywind few ticks greater then,\r\nI suppose. I just don't know! Words you'll never hear\r\nfrom that pinned and powdered, periwigged and\r\ngem-jimmied besprinkled pope bunkered down on his\r\ndivine acres of palatial Italian paradise.\r\nMoney's just a sin unless it fall\r\nfrom the golden hands of Christ! Har, har.\r\nIrony will have its winning tickle-effect on me yet.\r\nYou know that hard-molded statuette atop my desk:\r\nfucking bull and fucking bear? An image of\r\nfruitless gain, fruitless loss: Money is as Not! Ahh,\r\nI can't be as long in the tooth as the eternity I feel.\r\nDo you have your biblical diorama ready for today,\r\nHow Pontius Pilate Served Justice in the Roman Citizen-State?\r\nI just love the way you made Jesus look aggrieved.\r\nAnd remember, don't pray on the sly with the others,\r\nthat'll reflect poorly on me. The newspapers'll get it\r\nand rake me ass-ways from Sunday over the Newcastle coals\r\nthey'll bring to my public burning. Lucky I'm not stoned,\r\nand you the jew-orphan out to start a Texas cult.\r\nStranger things have happened, blast it! You watch out,\r\nnot everyone who says they love you bleeds enough\r\nto mean it. I have bled. I have established my credentials.\r\nWell, here's the school, and all the yellow buses\r\ncowering against their low white foot of curb;\r\nremember, you are the nurturant Lamb yourself\r\namong these protein-poor puce wolves here,\r\nyou're your own solace and sanctuary until the day's done\r\nand I hie you to our groaning home staked on the sand flat\r\nagainst the harrassing hurricanes the smoking Gulf\r\nmoves in huge ruin against us; there we'll play\r\nat our atom by atom perfection, or notions and motions\r\nsilly-simple as Newton's dropping a bible\r\ninto a dirty pool, and then unwiring his equations\r\nfrom a thus unilaterally uncluttered mind.\r\nJust remember, God's an athiest, for he needs no faith.\r\nHere, here, your grey diorama's queered\r\nagainst the misshapen oblong of the turned-down window.\r\nHand me back my cancer sticks. I don't want to\r\noutlive my wretchedly religious times into an Age of Reason,\r\nthat would shorten my horns and trim my grin\r\ntoo much; an old heiffer like me's got to have\r\nher flowery field to play in. I'll keep on,\r\nno need to pull that long old face with me, Jr,\r\nmy loud cowbells dangle in my goitered wattle's shadow\r\nwith spoofing usefulness enough still;\r\nI feel real well when I make my world feel ill.\r\nI'll keep on just as long as I can reel assured\r\nthat my manure has use, and still stinks in the chapel.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>JUST ANOTHER JOB<\/h2>\n<pre> \r\n\r\n[JOB lies in a hospital bed, dying of AIDS.]\r\n\r\nJOB\r\nHere I am, laid naked to the braziers,\r\nthin tin licks of flame spray me open to pain,\r\nmy spine's a garland of knotted hurts and worse.\r\nSunday night, and nothing on the hospital TV IV.\r\nI need some holy words to spur my moans to prayers,\r\nsome heavenly-other spliff of righteous insistence\r\nto puff my spaghetti-boil of turmoils back to simmer.\r\nAh God, drug, drug! I've been buzz-buzzing\r\nfor that spastic, ironed-neat nurse for half an eon now;\r\nmy rotten thumb crumbles against the button;\r\nmy broken hands stain the bedsheets.\r\nWith my high-flying dose of roasting AIDS\r\nI've contact contracted that blue biblical ill\r\nleprosy. Yeah, in this day and age. What's the year?\r\nLook at me! tremors of the vast ecstatic float through\r\nmy vetted veins no more, no more. Call me Morte.\r\nMorte Totality. Pleased to kick your ass on the way out.\r\nLook at this shithole. Pardon, if my more expressive\r\nrhetoric has tongue-tied me back to agued zero. I'm sick.\r\nNo hole of mine does as I would wish it.\r\nNow God has shut widom from my mind\r\nand the portals of understanding open not to my hand,\r\nand wisdom is fleet before me, though I do run after it;\r\nall is clouded in my sight which now sees farthest;\r\nits limits clearly in sight, clouds are drawn before me\r\nand a heavy darkness obscures from me what I might see,\r\nhorizons are foreshortened although my steps are tireless\r\nand I lie in a grave's-den opium of ignorance\r\nalthough I would ask to see all that I may behold.\r\nBut God's hand is against me, and his works shut me out;\r\nhis dominions rally against me,\r\nand the elements become my enemies.\r\nWhere in this is Justice? I can smell what it is\r\nand annotate with a bitter heart its absence.\r\nTo give a capacity for love and deny its object....\r\nIf God Himself ain't somehow Just, then what's the point?\r\nmy reason razors itself into me repeatedly.\r\nAnd ain't God GOT TO be just somehow?\r\nThe seventh son of a seventh son, I learned\r\nto be by rebelling, a rapturous repel\r\ndown lofty logic's cliffs, a nordic\r\nsword-saga revealingly reversed. Down\r\nto the gravity-well black hole nadir\r\ninstead of ascended into snow-blind heaven.\r\nAnd if God ain't somehow Just, what's the point?\r\nHow else we going to count the ticks on this\r\ntickertape parade? What other way we got\r\nthan to know a noble God lovingly unfurling our souls?\r\nGod: does her voice belong gonged to the annihilated ages?\r\nIs she a sage that can whisper comfort\r\nto my radiation-washed atomic-barraged sockets?\r\nPierce the wish, divine the desire, deem clean\r\nthe weird deeps of the dream, and THINK before\r\nyou answer, oh my how well unwell auditors!\r\nWill your troubled verse last out the rhyme?\r\nYou're being insincere with me. Death is all\r\nyou get. Forget this prism-window\r\nof jewel-lush Life; its crush-touch is past,\r\nor nearly so, the empty suck of a train gone away.\r\nTo be alive and not to lie, that's a challenge.\r\nAm I condemned to repeat the makeshift mumbles\r\nof my sire-soverign, God? Then let them be\r\ntrue sounds of Liberty! Oh if, if this injustice is His\r\nand I a fish in his ocean of wishes,\r\nshall I not as innocently-unjustly condemn\r\nmy wry maker with the crooked implement He's designed?\r\nGod's hollow thumb has fashioned a boomerang,\r\nKA-Tang! Whang! I spend my whittled spittle\r\nagainst his craftily cranked downward and\r\nsteel-engineered cranium; oh my porus Lord!\r\nto let your wavery undeserving servent\r\nbe poured through your baffle and exit thus!\r\nI am not so crossways-wise as Yourself,---\r\nAnd oh the skin-mist rain's a prayer\r\nGod has flooded against us feeble ones\r\ndrowning for that love of another our skin can't supply.\r\nWhyn't you shuttle down on an airfoil, Lord,\r\nand shoot the breeze with your targeted marked-man,\r\none who has been roused to a beggar's indignation\r\nby your prayer-piss rouse-- I look\r\nat every poor face and see death's injustice writ\r\ntherein; every fabulous face of wealth is cankered over\r\nwith a deceit of life, a something given\r\nthey haven't yet thought to throw away\r\nwith last year's diadems and cadillacs\r\ninto the glittery trash.... Why have my man's bones\r\nbeen stolen upright from the stony earth?\r\nThey shall lay there again just as soon;\r\nflesh is misery, wherein I apprehend delight!\r\nWhat's Justice, and how can I feel its scab-plaster\r\non a skin so ripped open and acid-fragile?\r\nAnd yet, and yet, some bullet in the brain\r\nis making its hacking exitus, the gun of conscience\r\nrevelling in its unrivalled use of explosion's force\r\nto come to some energy of purpose: I'm fucked!\r\nI am narrowed and nailed to my railing life:\r\nmy syllables have come to put sinews to this use:\r\nGod is unjust! God is unjust! God is unjust! God is unjust!\r\nYet how may a man imagine his creation\r\nand imagine a justice while living in it,\r\nand still that justice own no home in the Architect?\r\nGreat are the sheaves that feed us, and yellow with life.\r\nGreat are the moments that meet us, and make us\r\nthis life despise. To be Just is to know all things,\r\nand merit each iota to its final place;\r\nto be Just is to know the place of Place,\r\nand to know when the course of things is overturned,\r\nand when they must return; to be just is to know\r\nall potentialities and discern the best,\r\nor discern that \"best\" is a falseness in Eternity.\r\nWhat feeling has justice for us, who cry for it?\r\nMy hair comes butchered from my ripped-open head,\r\nmy face is a wine-cask dark with weeping, flush to busting;\r\nI thrust my hands before me as in darkness,\r\nI search every blankness for hope.\r\nA legless man, I stand, a drowning bruised torso tossed\r\narmless in the tempest that sends these waters above my face;\r\nmy raft has surged over the departing swell\r\nand the greenness that hems me in is baleful.\r\n\r\nANTON LE VEY's voice:\r\nAnd then God, whirly-winded, bespoke\r\nout of his temple-tempest to the pest:\r\n\r\nGOD\r\nWho's this wondering thing? My claustrophobic creation\r\nwhose dumb damned words blacklight my shining design?\r\nAre low-witted and dull-watted you the thing you spew,\r\n<em>Der Mensch in Der Mitte?<\/em> Hahr, I larf at you!\r\nPluck up, and stand masted like the man I made you!\r\nI shall ask the questions here, on my real world,\r\nand you, poor doomed plume of flustered dust,\r\nshall answer:\r\nWhere were unspooled you when I cement-spit\r\nthe splendid foundations of this earth,\r\nits rumored basement of gems and curtained caverns\r\nof crystalline stalagtite might? Tell me,\r\ndaring dunderhead and worm supreme, if you know\r\nwhat you know; if you understand, what understand.\r\nHas meaning heaved cleaving into your hammer-clawed skull,\r\nor is it the murk-mist of insistence merely\r\nrinded like margurita-salt behind your hind brain?\r\nWho settled the roaring sea's sway-dismaying dimensions?\r\nWhat hand sharped the coral and bladed the triagular wave?\r\nSomebody on the bus whispered that you, yes you,\r\nwould know the spasming answer to my God-query\r\nso let's hear it, zit, explain it plain to ME,\r\nlet me in on the gimcrack gist of it all, small one,\r\ngive me the replete lay of the unland ocean, o Man.\r\nWhose plummet-line zipped past the seas' wet limits?\r\nWhat divine line appeared from nowhere, repelling past\r\nthat place where spinning world and womb had stopped,\r\ngiving begotten ground and spermy earth its swollen span?\r\nAll mountains that spume up as dust-splash cannot last;\r\nwhat thing rings kite-string past them to dissipate their peaks?\r\nWhere are the roots of the wind's pillars?\r\nWho bludgeoned from naught the cornerstone nut of ground\r\ndown into pounded permanence; who engineered its wicked kick,\r\nlullibied all rumor to rucking rest\r\nwhere stars spur skyward to speak (this is, I mean,\r\nthe wicked wick flick of your self, selfless-- for what's\r\na thing as dumb as you to do with willed selfhood?);\r\nwho gave place place so some scarred start could start?\r\nWhen all the morning stars sang together\r\nand the thousand sons of nodding God shouted aloud,\r\nwhat besotted face before the infinite presented thou?\r\nWho peered angel-eyed upon the pinking wink\r\nof the reccusive sea's restive entrance, when she veered\r\njellyfish-floodlight from the drumming womb of sand?\r\nI it was and I alone, know thou, thy great God, alone\r\n(in all the universe of tones the Tone), I alone\r\nwho was so moved to discommode surging ocean's\r\nsquallorous spread and spry sprawl-clawed-crawl\r\nfrom its icy gasp and washed swipe at Eternity--\r\nI it was, and I alone, who subsumed its movings in fine fogs,\r\nI alone who stretched a stitched coverlet\r\nof roofless clouds to down its bounding. I alone who said,\r\nThis far, o ocean, shall you sway thy ton of suds, no more;\r\nhere's land to become a door to halt your waltz,\r\ngive your infinite swish its slaking brake, redound\r\nyour emerald turmoils in coiling spoils upon\r\nthemselves, all in hissing backwash burning as if fire---\r\nroil thyself in vast confusion, ocean, and no\r\nfurther step shall you steal upon the large.\r\nIn all your limp dick-inch of life, punter, have you ever,\r\nmy good and growing knowless human, have you ever\r\narrowed up the dawn from its vault of heart,\r\nor laid red the barbarous target for its arrival?\r\nDid you, ruminative, teach a speech of light to the day-star,\r\nrivering its run of tongues upon bleed-born earth,\r\nor rebel-bell the morningglory from its weak wilt?\r\nHast thou shaken away the dog-star to its appointed oblivion?\r\nDo not lie to me, but speak out plainly and be plain,\r\nI hear your withering things, your unshrouded shrinks\r\nto blinking nothingness, void moving over void,\r\nyour small coward's ice-whispered self-melt, o man,\r\nquavering a snake's nest of shivering quivers\r\nbeneath your sheep's bleat-cloak of might's and mightn'ts,\r\ntoo small and dull a dodge to slow my all-seeing eye.\r\nDidst thou ever slip'n'slide to the sea's one source\r\nor walk awake in the unfathomed deeps, sleepy one?\r\nDoth the gore-loaded lore of all-lording LIFE\r\nunlock at your wicked picking? Does it, must it?\r\nHave the serenely pristine and aquiline gates of dear DEATH,\r\nall a pearly curl of skeleton-enamel above a waste plain,\r\nbeen thrown Hercules-aghast to welcome thy breathing form?\r\nHave you gone, heart heat-beating, through the soul's wheatfields?\r\nDo your heart's valves saloon-door open backwards\r\nfrom death to life at your ticking beck? Hmm?\r\nHave you yet God-spotted in you high-res com-sat sights\r\neven the tipsy hat of one of the all-tall doorkeepers\r\nkept at that lowest place of places, or is it all just\r\na smash of myths and mumbled fables for you still,\r\nfabulous trash? Has your poor comprehension and low-score\r\nSAT serenity ever compounded to blank the vast expanse?\r\nCome, come, you garrolous old lung, fun bunny-girl\r\nor more serious, AIDS-diseased spoiled boy,\r\ntongue aloud the sum total of all you know to me alone\r\n<em>now<\/em> I've an unvanishing eternity of timeline to spare!\r\nThy moored core is pourous, o softest squish of wishes!\r\nSpeak, speak, and hesitate not to detition's tripping,\r\ntittering, tip-tip, halting and troubling timing--\r\nI'll understand your oogle-bugling ululations well, mortal man.\r\nCan you photon-skate your willed way\r\nto light's first residence, or may you neon-out\r\nthe ultimate Not where weary darkness dwells?\r\nCan you take a sunbeam by the hand\r\nor hold all-eternal darkness in your mouth?\r\nEscort a satr upon its twine-spineing path\r\nor beath out of nostrils the universal bulked black\r\nthrough which its loops its lone way along?\r\nYes; yes you can, I'm sure of it.\r\nYou're no lowly trilobite, mister, centipede-pedalling past\r\nstone muds to a proffessor's lab-table 2,ooo years hence,\r\nare ye? No, no. You're a human man, and know all--\r\nweren't you the thing rich-birthed before the cosmos-smoke,\r\nand don't you exist after its wisped finishing?\r\nSpandexed man: of your screeching skin I hold the measure\r\nand of your every diminishment, I carry the past expanse;\r\nclear squeals of your eeking spit and spirit\r\nflip from the tittle-pip of pipping pipe ripe at my side;\r\nyour commodius mind's my small-change purse, slug-bug;\r\nyour wide-window view zooms to a luger-sight\r\nnarrowed on nothingness compared to my barrenness,\r\nso vast am I.\r\nHave you stepped into the storehouse of the snow\r\nor kept slickly afoot among the proud arsenals of hail?\r\nWho indices the tuneles rumor-mongering of the avalanche?\r\nWho's silver sire of the swept-kiss of this hissing rain?\r\nWho has zephered slipstreams for the holocaust,\r\nor made blank space appear before the roaring downpour?\r\nWho has axed a passage for the high-hurdled thunder?\r\nWho birthed bastard land's aridity to eat up the moisture,\r\nwho commanded its derelict loins\r\nto spurt to an annointing greenness before ye,\r\nwhereof ye eat sweet-fingered figs in the wilderness?\r\nCan you bolo aloft the Plieades, master-man,\r\nor untie the stars to open Orion's white belt?\r\nDo you, o lame and sour dewdropp drop-kicked here,\r\nproclaim with loud sound-surround the governance of heaven,\r\nor do you put obeyed law into the everythings of Earth?\r\nWho has taught freedom by the destruction of chaos?\r\nCan you stand demanding distorted forms of clouds\r\nto cover-up your foul flux with their weight of waters?\r\nIf you bid the limber shins of lightning streak the dark\r\ndoes it say to thee: \"I am ready\"?\r\nWho poured airy wisdom into obscure, unscoured dens,\r\nwho laced up understanding with the spider's web?\r\nDoes the unleashed ox nose open you shaken tent\r\nand consent to serve you without slavery?\r\nDid it stand beside your creaking crib before you learned\r\nhow to shackle its wildness with thy cunning?\r\nThe stunted wings of the ostrich twitch proudly,\r\nbut are they the pinions and plumage of love?\r\nHave you carpentered the horse with his sweet strength?\r\nHave you clothed his neck with thunder,\r\nwho says among the battle-trumpets, Ha Ha!\r\nand smells the whiff of war afar off?\r\nAre you stiffnecked enough to dispute the Almighty?\r\nShould he who picks sticking arguments and quests questions\r\nwith God Himself, should such a one talk back?\r\n\r\nJOB\r\nBehold, I am of small account.\r\nWhat shall I answer thee?\r\n\r\nGOD\r\nArise on your hind, hidden, wooden legs like a man,\r\nstand brittle and apart, my little, from the rest\r\nof my mazed creation: you, worm-turd, are a human!\r\nDoes your wrecked face dare deny that I, I am Just?\r\nThat the wayward tumbleweed turns to my true word?\r\nAre you unhinged enough to put your crossed Lord\r\nat the witness-stand defense's stable table so that you,\r\nblue-suited in thy skein of veins, might <em>prosecute?<\/em>\r\nWould you crow-crowd me with cried-aloud Wrongs so that you,\r\nsilent as a null sentinel,  might rise as Righteous?\r\nDo you bowl me to the see-saw's low-tided side\r\nthat thee and thine might vaunt up even one mite the higher?\r\nDo you have a mighty arm as God's arm is mighty?\r\nIs your snoring voice coiled in the thunderclap?\r\nPatch your pride, undim your dignity,\r\nrobe in pomp, and spark with splendour--oh my little\r\ntittle-bit and wolfed somnolence of utter dust!--\r\ndo all as best you may and if you may and as\r\nyou may: scatter acid-sharp the fantasic attack\r\nof your planet-racking anger, let your poured fury\r\nundo the wicked and disincarnate the fiber of him,\r\nlet it glance kings unthroned into the dirt, let it\r\nlook on the proud regent and take no fault of fear,\r\nignore thy tax and spend no worry, scowl thee\r\nat the broken brow of the high and proud\r\nand humble them to stumbles, throw down injustice,\r\nhide evil in an inconspicuous grave, and shelve\r\ntheir catastrophed bones in the shattered earth\r\nwith your looks. Do this, my mini-kingdom man,\r\nand I'll whirl pirouettes to your great greatness,\r\nbow soberly all day to your drunken mein,\r\nadmit like a matted wrestler, crying sweating\r\nto the invisible weight hovering over his pinned shoulder\r\nthat your own right hand can grace ressurection\r\non heal alone your current littleness of crippleness.\r\nMan is in such a desperate case,\r\nchurning headfirst into his disappearace!\r\nYet how fierce a morsel he may seem, when once roused\r\nto the snarling stature of his testosterone!\r\nWho's left to stand aloft against his impaitient measure?\r\nWhat creature bears the rainbow veins bright enough\r\nnot to pale away to extinction in his tincts?\r\nAm I myself to be the animal I send against\r\nhis self-titled mightiness, his stumpy lunge\r\nat the greatness he sees conveyed in my being?\r\nI am Leviathan.\r\nCan you mince-meat my skin with whipping fishhooks,\r\nor hood my awful head with the sharp hawk's?\r\nWho will pass over tongue-tied the manyness of my limbs,\r\nor ogle unawed at me in contemptuous silence?\r\nIn powerful grace I descend, and graceful arise;\r\nwho has scratched by a micron the least scale of my hide,\r\nor pried open the storming portals of my face?\r\nI am all shields, my impenetrable eye sheer flint,\r\nmy spiring breath is ice, or charring fire;\r\nstars' cauldrons chuff from my mulling hum;\r\nno stop makes good before me, and inevitable energies\r\nrear me on forever; eternities dance before me\r\nlike fireflies; my firm heart weaves lavas\r\nthrough its rock, a millstone at home\r\nin my grinding ever-onward design, eversteady....\r\nIron and stiff steel touch me as straw against a strong\r\nthing, all crumples; millions duck at my merest passing,\r\nwarheads phase out against my skin as chaff\r\nfritters after the buffalo's passage; the harshest club\r\nis as a bent reed near me; sabres and F16s\r\nfashion my heart for laughter at their launching.\r\nI sprawl in my God-awfulness upon the drubbed mud,\r\nI am Leviathan.\r\nI charge hurricanes out of the chapel-water heart\r\nof Lake Michigan in a wish, whipping its deeps\r\nlike cudded fluff in a spinster's mixing bowl;\r\nall trails shine at my going on, and my wake\r\nis stardust; the great river everywhere is made mad white\r\nwith the furious apprehesion of my feafulness;\r\nmy equationed equal resides not upon the earth,\r\nI am so terrible; forests flatten at my shaking dry;\r\nno part of my magnificence has a single stamp\r\nof the least tremulous timorousness of fear at all,\r\nI am so unassailable and sourceless.\r\nI glare down in infinite and terrible happiness\r\nupon each and every creeping creature of the dust,\r\neven the highest; king of the king of beasts am I,\r\nwithout a sparring breast to beat my great chant upon.\r\n\r\nJOB\r\nOmni omni omni;\r\nI talked without understanding of great things\r\ntoo wonderful to be wondered at, so smashed\r\nis every brimming thing with thy\r\ndawn-spawning awfulness.\r\nI had only heard of thee with my ears,\r\nwild tales and fables torn from books,\r\ncampfires and stray table-talk,\r\nsongs at school, and the passover prayer....\r\nNow I see thee in my very eye,\r\nin my very eye you appear, and I see thee:\r\n\r\nTherefore, I melt away;\r\nI repent in dust and ashes.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<a href=\"#_Contents\">Top<\/a>\r\n\r\n\r\n<h2><strong>End<\/strong><\/h2>\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Televangelists square off against Satanist Anton LeVey in a rollicking whacked-out play. If any God can survive the crucible of my will, then I&#8217;ll bless him. in.seang.un yu.han.han.dae si.ram.do ku.ji.op.ta Life has an end, Sorrow is endless. &#8220;Listen to this. &#8216;Life has meaning but no theme. There is no truth we can assign to it <a href='https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/posts\/dear-planet-jesus\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1740,1760],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-plays","category-dear-planet-jesus","category-1740-id","category-1760-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6178"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7356,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6178\/revisions\/7356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}