Doug Draime- Three Poems

Jesus In Wartime

The bodies are piled

like slaughtered and rotting cattle,

in abandoned stockyards.

And each morning before sunrise,

the decision is made

in a business like and calm way

to aim the big guns,

drop the big bombs

to destroy a handful of people

clustered among many thousands.

The military shuck and jive,

to justify these insidious deeds,

as the Leader of The Free World

is on his knees praising Jesus

for the death and mayhem.

This Jesus is diametrically opposed to the one I know

His Jesus is a warmongering imperialist who loves only billionaires

and millionaires and the idoits who worship them.

This Jesus he prays to, appears to love nothing scared, or honorable,

or righteous, or humane.

This Jesus entrenched like cancer by lies and madness.

This Jesus adding to the plies of bodies, as if human life and

Creation mean nothing. 

This Side Of The Mystery Game

Death is the bottomless pit, a ravenous

beast that

gets us all in the

end.

It even got Tolstoy who denied it.

And Dylan Thomas who raged against it.

Even Christ, though they say

he came back for

a visit; bloody as hell,

walking through

walls,

talking to invisible people even

doubting Thomas could see.

Jesus came back hungry

asking for wine and something to eat.

And as he ate a plate of Jewish stir fry

and several glasses of wine,

he started wisecracking about

the lack of sustenance

in the ethers, and demanding

Mary Magdalene’s apostleship,

which pissed off all the Jewish men

and all the Roman men

and all the wannabe men. And they killed

him again

and he walked through the wall back into “death”.

Wasn’t that the point,

that he “died” like the rest of us?

Like the bum, the poet, the mortician,

the politician, like the great Joe Lewis murdered

by the humiliation of Las Vegas, like you

and me, like John Lennon shot down

by his biggest fan, like most of us living ordinary lives,

dying ordinary deaths, 

like everyman and everywoman.

Death is the bottomless pit (and our most deceptive illusion), 

that every human falls into, and is never seen again, at least not

on this side of the mystery game  

John

Starless, moonless, hopeless

night

filled with shadows

of ravaged dreams.

On a platter, a bloody platter

engraved with

cannibal dragons

sits the

magnificent head

of the Baptist.

Salome whirls her incestuous whoredom

around the marble floor.

The music of the dance

floats through the stagnant

and murderous air.

As the lamb of God, a few miles away

lies prone in prayer,

he feels the

ax through

his own

sanctified flesh.

His head 

rolling slowly

from the pallet

of His repose,

like a comet

passing through

the cosmos of dead

and dying stars

This Side Of The Mystery Game first appeared in Cause & Effect Magazine in 2007, and

John first appeared in Ancient Paths around 2004 or 5.