Kitsch
The pious heart longs saccharine,
And sacrilege upon the heel,
An aryan Jesus, blond and pink,
Pink kinfolk — grin and squeal,
Amid a jumble of Jesus junk,
That uphold this strange ideal.
Measure of his love measuring cups,
Mints testify bad breath to hell,
Cruciform easy chair for the game,
Bible land snacks for the hard sell,
Tees and tunes, biblical board games,
Blessed assurance that all is well.
Where the prophet the powers put down?
Where the cross that must be carried?
Where the love that enters the darkness?
Where the Lord Jesus, bold and bloodied?
Precious moments capture cloying belief,
Anti the Christ resurrected and gloried!
Zulu
Apple of my eye,
Why oh why oh why?
Sprite, not yet ten,
As red as cayenne,
Folding your frown,
Your world upside down,
My little animal,
Going aboriginal,
Sent to your room,
There you will fume,
My wild thing...
My Zulu warrior...
My little boy.
Dark Chocolate, Spaghetti and Meatballs
The lines furrow deeper in the brow,
As each day brings grief upon grief,
Nothing on the horizon brings relief,
And with such weight upon the bough,
Cracks.
Then the thoughts, like a renegade weed,
Burrow deeper into the troubled brain,
Parasitic — filling the days with pain,
Until each breath breathes to concede,
Defeat.
It seems dark specters will ever possess.
Yet simple are remedies to such melancholy.
Taste dark chocolate! Does it seem such folly?
That such could be a salve to dark distress?
Cheers.
But if the rabbit hole falls ever deeper,
A stronger salve, fettuccine and fellowship!
Better, meatballs, spaghetti and friendship,
And you will once more escape the reaper,
of all joy.
Feast,
Food is sacrament,
Friends are sacrament,
Love is holy,
And eternal.
3 comments:
I asked friends for more poem ideas...more as a writing exercise. The result is not Shakespeare. I was given a picture of Christian Kitsch...a mental picture of a friend's angry son (behaving like a Zulu warrior) and the concept of a dark thought taking hold...and from the same person more whimsically..."dark chocolate" or spaghetti and meatballs...I combined all of her ideas into one. See what you think. These are not great poems...more just the discipline of the attempt...as I was feeling (and am feeling) very dry indeed.
The first one reminds me of an evangelist I once met. He was so frustrated after having been in a Christian book store one day that he wrote multiple verses to "They Will Know We Are Christians by Our Fish" (to the tune of a similarly named hymn).
I love the zulu poem. Thank you!
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