Poetry
Suppose He hung the fruit
on the highest thorny branch.
Ascetic, stripped
of its rind
by Heaven’s gustings,
its stained-glass flesh
denuded and mateless.
Unbuttressed save
its tenuous stem,
do you think it still would long
to taste the lips of
virgin genesis?
Of course it would.
Had He not said
Be fruitful and multiply?
The serpent was merely a matchmaker.
Here is what you must do:
Sleep with lions
and sleep with whales.
Part seas.
Part these
duo-mothered sons.
Shear your empowering locks.
Tear blocks from Jericho’s walls.
Slay giants.
Don’t look back.
Don’t look back.
Pluck fruit from the tree
and crack your paling Eden:
I have paved the road with thorns
and laid brambles for your
soul.
When no one was looking,
we cut off the head of God
and dragged it under the mountains.
We took it under the earth,
where the sky couldn’t find it
to take it back from us,
and we loved it there.
We dragged God’s big hairy head
into the belly of the earth
and put it in a room full of lights,
full of electricity and full of steel
and full of us and God.
We talked to it. We told it stories,
we asked it questions,
we kissed it we kissed it
on the tip of its big leather nose
and we slept there beside it,
in a room full of lights
and the smell of God’s breath.
When no one was looking,
we braided wildflowers into
God’s big bushy eyebrows.
We watched them wilt
and we drew pictures with our fingers
on God’s big spongy tongue
and we talked to ourselves.
We told ourselves stories,
we asked ourselves questions,
because God wasn’t listening
and we kissed we kissed
our own little noses,
in a room full of lights,
full of us and a God
we couldn’t make speak.