Doug Draime- Two Poems

 Jesus Is Now

sanctifying your rotting thoughts

purifying the vessel of wrong action

&  illusionary desire

which you once called you    

& is a light moving up inside you 

burning to a crisp/ ending the days of

hateful coalition of wayward spirits 

&  pointless thoughts

that assembly of confusion

which devastates the promise

of your faith

In My Dream

 There were 10 literary critics,

all poets, mostly elitist asses, sitting at a long table.

I’m sitting on a lounge chair

drinking a Pepsi in a glass

with ice and lime, and munching

on potato chips.  They’re acting

as judge and jury, debating among

themselves, as to whether

I am any good as a poet.  And I’m

sipping on my Pepsi

trying to remember if I ever wrote

a poem for a collective body of poets?

Yes, I had, I remembered, I’d written several  poems very  

critical the literary establishment.

I lose my train of thought when

a pretty, sexy young lady begins to read one

of my poems (she says).  But it’s not my poem,

it’s one by Steve Richmond, which I’ve read before,

a very good one, so I listen intently and don’t bother

to correct her.  I always wished I’d written that poem.

When she finishes a swishy looking guy

at the far end of

the table gets up and tells her

it’s Richmond’s.  She glares at him, sits down embarrassed

and starts sorting through

hundreds of my poems (and  hopefully a few of Richmond’s). 

Then they all begin arguing and sorting through the stuff.

A guy wearing a Walt Whitman mask

stands up to read a light verse

thing I wrote for the Wall Street Journal.

Most of them snicker at me when

he finishes, and asked me 

what I had to say in my defense. Defense?

(I’m addicted to grocery store brands of

potato chips, and those I was munching on

were a Safeway brand, which are particularly

yummy--so I finished the ones

in my hand and washed them down with a large

gulp of Pepsi)  I smiled and cleared my

throat.  “Look,” I said, “I didn’t choose writing,

writing chose me.  It just comes through me

that’s all.  That poem is the same as the rest

and I kind of like it.”  I said my piece and took

another drink of Pepsi.

“And that’s another thing,” says a 

little guy with glasses, who looks like

a myopic Fidel Castro, “all this nonsense

about poems coming through you, and,

all your Christian tendencies, have no

place in contemporary literature.”

The little guy sits down squinting at me.

I looked around and shrugged, and the sexy lady

who read the Richmond poem catches my eye.

She winks and reaches up to touch a

small gold cross hanging around her neck.

I wink and smile back.  And as I sat there

I remembered a John Berryman poem

in which he says, that Jesus Christ is

the only true literary critic.  So, I tell them

that.  Wow, that really pissed them off!