not a painter, I am ...

So, I don't really do pomes to order, but one of the waiting 4 the bus guys approached me on this, since 3 of us have a month's end shared feature at the Mercury Cafe. I said, "sure," either begrudgingly or full-bully (depending upon that evening's vino intake) & below is the 1st draft of what came to me.

The subject? So, at St. Paul's in Wicker Pk. (new home to a great 1st Friday poetry series), in the 'big room,' there apparently exists a big-ass Jesus mural/painting. I have never been to this 'big room' or seen this Jesus, but, what the hell? I mean, maybe that's the point?

enjoie


_____________________


i.



consider the source
of all this
is overhead
mythologies invented

by Egyptians to dumb
down the journey

of Earth in the Cosmos; astronomers
they were
in the time of folklore, planets

for gods
& all we knew was blue
sky the phases

of moon
its nightly arc & sun

its retrograde into
resurrection

the 1st nomads into
Palestine

brought this along
reworked to spite the pantheists
& strongarm

the populace. consider the age

of Aries, rung in
to run off the bull-calf
then finally give way

to this fisherman myth. read backwards
the star signs
& believe

nothing you can’t touch
trace
or deduce, fear

not the burning
@ the stake, rack
& hairshirt. that time

is past





ii.




I was a 5th grader @ St. Luke’s Roman Catholic, piss-poor
altar-boy in the days before attention deficit disorder

I’d learned my 1st few chords on a $70 JCPenney guitar & beat
around my 1st few Beatles tunes, would have rather grown up to be

John Lennon than Jesus, in spite of my cracked, flat pre-adolescent voice, my semi-absent old man

who saw me odd weekends, insisted upon attending
Fr. Shori’s Sat. p.m. mass, arriving early
so we could get a seat behind

Boom-Boom Mancini, fresh off his 1st-rd. pasting of A. Frias for the lightweight belt. I marveled @ being nearly his equal in height

@ such a young age, his date ea. wk. a different lady, his
rote knowledge of the mass ritual, the very altar boy

I never was &

ea. peace-be-w/you ego boost enough to my old man’s Cath. failure complex. The father, like son, no big fan

of the 1st commandment





iii.




believe?


I think I may have, once, @ a young-enough age
to have had viable nightmares

5, maybe 6
& the happy pills
prescribed to numb

my folks’ divorce
potent enough to illicit
hallucinations: Evil Jesus

outside the bedroom window in the night to
kidnap & keep me

some rusted out van
& the S. Cal. hillsides, an image

retained from an episode
of CHiPs

& left afraid
to sleep lights out until one day

I spit out my pills
to wait out the half-life, no longer

fearful of
anything I couldn’t touch & jaded long before

& little more than this white likeness looking
down onto peeled paint, chachke

to dollarstore candle-hipsters & burned
into the collective brain

of 1 billion-plus
save us

.






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