Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Roaster

Your stiff body is tipped into the chute
and carried swiftly along on the conveyor belt.
Your shiny flesh crackles,
parasols catching your dripping fat
which turns their paper skins translucent
just before they burst into flame.
There are precious x's stitched in gold 
across both of your eyes.
Every hair smolders, a field of smoking wicks,
and then you crumble.

And then comes the waiting room, 
the decompression chamber, the firing range.
Your new body, less substantial but more durable,
gets put through its paces:
every time you get punched in the stomach 
you sprout a set of wings, and every time 
you get a blow job, those same wings
get sucked right back into your body again. 

Afterwards, you balance, exhausted,
on the thin icy blue balls of heaven
in an endless, airless hallway 
where you pray for a fire to warm your hands.
But there's no oxygen here to allow anything to burn.
You look down at all those devils sizzling down there
and say to them Look, kids, you don't know
the first thing about suffering.

Beside you, the saints shiver in their bathrobes,
wondering how much trouble they'd really be in
if they shot down a cherub or two and plucked
their feathers to stuff downy comforters 
for themselves so they can finally get some shut-eye.
You weep yourself to sleep, or maybe just slip into 
a frostbitten delirium, and some old guy wraps 
his beard around you like a scarf and tells you 
that when an angel cries, the tears sear the earth, 
carving channels through the rock 
 and seeping down to the molten core
of the planet, where they cause
a series of explosions that send magma
shooting up to the surface in a spray 
of sizzling droplets. Look, he says,

and when you wake up, its true,
that very thing he said would happen, is,
and you lean over and burn your lips on the burning,
bubbling fountain of molten flame.
Filled with new heat, blood burning through your veins,
you cram your hooves into golden sandals, tuck your tail up
under your robes, cram your halo on
over your horns, then turn and kiss
the virgin on the cloud beside you goodbye,
slipping her a bit of scalding tongue 
before spreading your hairy wings 
and swooping down...


1 comment:

  1. This is (I'm certain) my favorite poem from your last few months of wordart.

    affections to you
    among the afflictions

    uncle frank

    ReplyDelete