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!
