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“The Gates of Hell”
Today I'll do something I might regret.
Today I'll make
history.
Today I'll make dessert.
Today I'll take the day off.
Today I'll say I'm sick.
I'll
say I'm sick.
Today I'll do something extravagant.
I'll have the dog put to
sleep.
I'll do as I've always done.
I'll try to enjoy my
job.
Today I'll quit.
I'll buy tomatoes, tobacco, butter.
Today I'll use a fine
tooth comb.
Today I'll clean this room
I'll cover my tracks.
Today I'll tell him it's over.
I'll comprehend nothing and
hope for the best.
I'll weed the garden.
I'll fight tooth and nail.
I'll cough.
I'll smile.
I'll swallow.
I'll spit.
Today I'll use the finest china.
Today I'll be lucky.
Today I'll pray for a change.
I'll change.
© Drew Pisarra 2002
“Angels”
The angels are lounging.
The thinnest veneer of sweat
makes
their bodies glisten.
They're promising salvation
to those who
dare to listen
to siren songs created to tantalize.
Here is a
heavenly feast for the eyes.
Angels have faces like
pugilists
with flattened noses, swelling lips.
Angels have
bodies like adolescent
wrestlers with broad shoulders
and
girlish hips.
The pendulous swings between their thighs
as if
to mock eternal time
with its swinging.
Listen! the angels are
singing.
What starts as a vocal caress
becomes
molestation,
as angelic hands and feet engage
in a circular,
cyclic motion,
designed to fire the basest emotions.
What once
was the strongest desire
begins to scare
as resistance in all
its forms
is severed and burned.
The parts that acquiesce are
reborn.
The angels nail with pelvic thrusts,
as if this were
the pain of Christ to bear,
this kiss of the heavenly
host.
The rapture maddens, joy crosses
the threshold of pain
when the most
of everything wanted is everything gained.
Blood
runs nowhere, everything is aflame.
© Drew Pisarra 2002
“Purgatory”
You actually have to pay to stay
and most of the folks arrive
at night.
You have to strip down to the bare
essentials, wrap
a clean if off-white
towel around your waist or chest
then
passively lean against a wall,
the jamb of a door, or
fall
bare bottomed on your single bed--
not searching but
hoping to be found
by others who prowl these congested halls.
They say, some people leave this place
and move to a higher
plane. They say,
there's places worse than this
from which
there is no escape. But we
here know there's nothing
better.
We paid with our debit cards and paper
money. We
financed this building:
its mirrored walls, its brick red
floors,
its plastic plants. We breathe the recycled
air
composed of all our final breaths
which reek of sacrificial wine.
We enter,
roam around, and sit at best. Drunk
and doped, we
slowly turn the hours of time,
and urge the funereal dirge that's
faintly
heard behind this boring bacchanal
to lull us finally,
eternally to rest.
© Drew Pisarra 2002
“Saint Sebastian”
I couldn't renounce the little faith
I had and so I was a
target
for arrows of derision sprung
by those who knew better,
and
proved it by the accuracy
of their barbs. I
couldn't
say no, I'd lost that ability
to fight off my
persecutors,
and let the pain take me
to an ecstatic
state.
I reveled in the slaying
that I knew I would
survive.
In the end I lost my head.
I did nothing to ward off
the pain.
I had a vision of God
without salvation.
© Drew Pisarra 2002
“God's Second”
In nineteen-hundred-and-sixty-six, A.D.,
God died. His death
graced the cover of
Time magazine, which posed the
question:
Is he alive, thus signifying the end
of a reign.
Since then, no one has taken
his place. A vacancy remains.
Resumes
rise in the applicant pool. A mountain
of busy work
distracts the haloed clerks
who ought to be weeding out the
fools,
for a position as loft as this deserves
the best there
is to offer. We've
a nation of high-flyers here, we shoot
for
the top, what's stopping us now.
These interviews necessitate inquisition.
Suffering is the
people's choice
when sovereignty must be restored.
In the
meantime, an acting officer should
be selected or, better yet, a
deity-elect.
Is it so hard to hire for celestial posts.
I'm as
good as any for a heavenly job. Can
God be deceptive,
distrustful, unclean. If
he is all, then this as well. My
campaign
starts today. On the ballot I place my name
below
where none of the above usually goes.
God is more than love. I'm
running for
omniscience, omnipotence, omnivorous.
I'm ambidextrous and ambiguous. My slogan
is "Vengeful and
All-forgiving." In short,
I'm running for my living. I'm
kissing
babies, I'm shaking hands. I'm changing
like weather
upon demand. I'm blighting
the unbelieving lands. I'm
flying
and learning to soar, to bellow, to curse.
I'm destined
to decree. I am me with
my flowing beard, my billowing
robes,
my metallic wings, my six full breasts.
You know the
rest. My forked tongue croons
a tune of woe. I wait for your
applause
that's bound to come, I know. Now bow.
Kiss my
god-awful boot. I've arrived,
I'm in charge, and I'm one of
you.
© Drew Pisarra 2002
“The Crucifixion”
I'm bored. My wrists are tired.
My neck is in an awkward
bend.
My ten toes twiddle with impatience,
all ten, eager for
an end.
Amazingly, I've risen again
as He foretold. I was a
skeptic.
His fat sloppy tongue has traced
its present path
from foot to face
and follows the trail of spit
back down to
the middle.
Why couldn't I stay slack.
My gagged mouth won't
protest.
His fantasy is mine to make.
When push came to
shove,
I acquiesced to three bandannas
and the bed. Next time,
if it
should get this far, I'll yank
bed posts asunder,
fracture
the frame that helped to form
this human cross. I
want
my tongue, my hands, my body
unrestricted. I
can't
transcend this crucifixion,
though for tonight, I'll
accede
to his wishes, and hope that
afterwards, having
supped
at this perverted altar,
he'll be in good
spirits,
and maybe wash the dishes.
© Drew Pisarra 2002
“Blood of my savior”
I do not wish to attend the church
where my brethren assemble
to
drink the blood of my savior,
and search for a man to die
for
my sins. I've tried and continue to
try to find the
secular whole in one,
the permanence in the passing sight:
there, in that man with the orange
cap, that man right there
who's
stroking the cat, or there! that woman
who's laughing at
her own misfortune,
a newly chipped nail on her
manicured
hand! or even, there! the calico cat
itself licking
its hind legs again,
again and again. Resist as I might,
I'm bound to return to that church
and its attendant gestures:
the ritual
wave of my smoking wand, the sip from
my spotted
glass, that's full
of my savior's blood, this blood
that's no
longer red, that hasn't
been red for years, it's yellow,
a
liquified nimbus, a cowardly hue.
I drink with a neophyte's fervor.
I drink myself deaf, blind,
and dumb.
I see the haze of my confusion,
I'm on my knees as
if in prayer.
This service is in medias res.
After a bitter
crumb of communion
I wait. I wait for my kingdom
come. The
happy hour is almost here.
© Drew Pisarra 2002
“Opposable Thumb”
Scientists theorize, this distinctive
joint, not the size of
the brain,
is the evolutionary feature which
disposes man to
build and dominate
then turn the doorknob, turn the key
while
dolphins paddle around small
pools at Circus by the Sea,
and
spin balls on their snouts
because their blippers
forego
giving the finger or raising
a thumb to an upturned
nose.
At the grocery store, a limbless
woman samples fresh
fruit
with her spotless foot. At diners,
thumbless men flip
eggs and grease
their griddles. No one's contrary
proof. Each
has risen to standards
set by the differently abled.
We'll
never sing songs like whales
broadcast across the ocean
floor.
We'll never work in harmony like
ants or bees. We'll
continue to
fondle with tentative fingers
until we feel better
or more.
© Drew Pisarra 2002
“Skeleton Men”
X-rayed photographic plates
reveal the me I'm bound
to
become: over two-hundred
glowing bones as white
as a
mid-August beach at noon
when sea and sand blind
by
reflection. When held to
the light, these
plastic
pictures are a full-length
in parts to which
any
specialist might point
a fat finger and rattle
off
latin terms like a radical
priest stuck with a
dead
language. In the
warm adjoining room, technicians
are
covered with lead.
Their protection only
goes so far for they
too
are destined to arrive
at the place my ghostly
prints
coolly forecast.
The cold facts are;
the immortal
element
in us is a brittle
foundation that doesn't'
include
the brain.
© Drew Pisarra 2002
“Teeth”
My vegetarian days have ended.
Hunger and Anger seem
synonymous
words as if the need to attack
were the same as the
need to
consume. A carnivore watches
you. He's running his
tongue
across his lips. Desire's
a furious state of
mind
when incisors allow an initial
grip, and canines dig
deeper.
Bicuspids can puncture with
two-horned crowns. The
molars
will crush and will grind
not for health by
digestion
but for salty taste as your
blood trickles out my
mouth
and down my chin. Wisdom was
long since extracted.
Wisdom
caused nothing but pain.
Ruminate on excess:
a diet
without logic or
intent except, you hurt me,
I am angry,
hungry, I hurt you.
© Drew Pisarra 2002
“The Break”
The bone snapped
clean
like a salted cracker
or finger
and thumb
rubbed together like
crickets'
legs.
A
crack
that pierced the air
when what was once one
now is
tow.
The severing
into a pair
that which should
have
stayed whole,
of piece,
a thing in and
of
itself
entirely
transpired.
© Drew Pisarra 2002
“Van Gogh's Ear”
This curious whirl of a shell,
this cartilage swirl,
an
object of sound contained
is deaf to the tremble,
the
anatomical splendor
which suggests a pair
that no longer can
be.
Love was the unsightly cause
of the radical act
that
history deemed insane.
Packaged and posted
to pined for and
prayed for
was flesh detached for
flesh unwilling, flesh
deaf
to entreaties and deaf to
all sounded pleas.
The unheard have no need
of ears, no need of a two-
sided
sonic boom. This lonely
world bristles and wavers
with a
thousand hairs
and each part of the field,
each petal of the
flower,
each empty room is a cry
against the
inevitable
embodied by divisive strokes.
© Drew Pisarra 2002
“Baby Daze”
When Jesus was born,
Mary fried the placenta,
for despite
all the gifts,
not one honored guest
had thought to
bring
some tasty dish
or a vitamin-enriched
rejuvenating
shake.
The unwise men
had brought instead
some
semi-precious stones,
some faggots of incense,
but forgotten,
dismissed,
or been ignorant of
the labor it took
to birth
this son
foretold
by a heavenly star.
So Mary cooked
her all too earthly
afterbirth
over a
fragile fire,
salted it--
for salt had been given--
and ate
it
while the nearby coos mooed
their thanks
at not being
slaughter.
Mary knew, there had been
enough blood for one
night.
Twenty centuries later,
the babies birthed
are freakish,
grotesque,
all too clearly of a kind.
Newspaper headlines
brag
of the seventy-five pound
infant whose
mother,
desperate to raise
the needed funds
for the adult
diapers
that he wears, has taken
to charging the curious
a
nominal fee to see
the puffy, pink cloud
of cumulus
flesh,
the press proclaimed.
Another woman,
warily thanks miraculous pills
for filling
her up
with a regular litter:
Seven curlicues now await
the
caesarian's knife.
The hospital prepares
their lobby
table
to display
the incubating chambers,
and local
midwives
powwow about
a pair of nipples
never meant to
nurse
a brood.
A final woman, quite contrary,
aborts one of a set of
twins.
The outcry, the promise
of economic
deliverance
falls on deaf ears,
or probably came too late
Each mother, as blue as Mary,
though virgins none,
prays
for the best of
futures for her child,
a future to fill the
mother
with a pride to which
her own life
never could lay
claim.
Invoking the holiest
for their yet-to-be's
these
mothers forget
that the one
they now beseech
led a life of
betrayal,
set up by the father
then done by a friend;
a man
who never found romance,
that stylish love
these
mothers
earnestly crave
and secretly seek
in overpriced
dimestore trash.
Dawn comes, three mothers
rub elastic bellies.
One stomach
hangs slack,
its monster come. Another
is big as Life
yet
silent as a glottal T.
The final one appears
a sadly dented
mass.
Each mother stands
at her respective stove,
and sets
the flame on high,
then cracks an egg--
that unborn
breakfast--
into a griddle sizzling
bacon fat.
Realizing the millennium's
anniversary is nothing
but the
unavoidable arrival
of the terrible twos,
a promise of nothing
but more
of the same, these mothers
forget to flip,
forego
a scramble,
and watch
as one single egg,
with its jaundiced
eye,
curls up at the edges
a frightful brown,
then darker,
out
of vision, behind thick
smoke that reddens
six dopelike
eyes.
The alarm has sounded,
is sounding, a high-
pitched
mechanical cry
that will simultaneously
mimic and
outdistance.
the human voice
it has replaced.
There's a
kind of comfort
to be gained when
a call for help
remains
unmet, unsaid.
You stand there,
mute,
unmoving,
knowing
that the worst
will only befall yourself,
and what does it
matter
when you're young
or once were and feel
for this
early morning
moment, completely
if sickeningly
full of
life.
© Drew Pisarra 2002 | 