Suicide Mission

Launched from the womb of his father, Christ has no
Choice in the matter—must be assembled along human
lines just as we have no say in being born:
it happens,
and in his case:
like a mudslide from the stars. Falling into holiness as one
might a pit.

Yet the maneuvering inverts: rather than redemption
of the race he joins, the divine suffers the boils
and blisters of humanity, its eruptions of
corruption

father is aghast at what is wrought. So while lil’ boy slings
the gospel, He plots his expiration, tries various natural
methods—drowning is
one of them—but meets only
failure. The fleck of Himself he allowed
to break free, to become earthly, thrives in a place
it shouldn’t, like a cyst of Glory, like some beautiful
filth.

Finally, He comes to realize: only rats can cannibalize a rat.
The people whom tiny Jesus would save rend him with their tools
and their apathy and their greed, and so he cries out to the Lord
whom he both serves and is. father greets him with the hatred
He reserves for all dying folks, crowning him with indifference
and honoring him with a myth that salutes
the myth-maker.

You Wouldn’t, Would You?

when it comes upon him, he’s struck by the old-timey cartoon swoon
of it all: there are no visions of killing them down naturalistically, of
destroying their bodies while shock floats up to push out their eyes
and cheekbones and platysmal fault lines into full relief, at least not in
any way that resembles
reality

no struggle, no slipping on blood-slicks, no errant slashes on his own hands
or forearms, as he’s been led to expect from all the footage he’s con-sumed
and consummated

he owns a shotgun, and a couple of times, yeah, the roar and the inversion
of the internal, the moist puppet look of everything, that is something he
can imagine

but he’s never prepared for how the fantasy takes playful flight, shows
him jaggedly jigging, burying handy axes in the lined-up skulls, prancing
really

one knee high, one knee low; then repeat, hidey-ho

or, in another queued formation, this one back to front, he slices the
necks in one fluid razzmatazz, like a floor gymnast with a pretty ribbon;
in another, he shoots into their skulls from behind their kneeling poses,
like he’s cheating at some county fair, the way he’s walking the line
behind the targets, taking his sweet time, watching them resist
not at all

still, all the hurdy-gurdy melodies, the simplified color schemes, they’re
all so juvenile and that

makes him so happy; they can’t be serious fantasies of brutalizing his
many rickety enemies, he tells himself, can’t be precursory; no reason to self-report
out, to warn the community that doesn’t know him; no reason to break apart its
unawareness

you’d never imagine such things, I know; don’t worry,
(I know)

one knee high, one knee low; then repeat, hidey-ho