Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Doug Draime- Three Poems

Jesus In Wartime


The bodies are piled
like slaughtered and rotting cattle,
in abandoned stockyards.
And each morning before sunrise,
the decision is made
in a business like and calm way
to aim the big guns,
drop the big bombs
to destroy a handful of people
clustered among many thousands.
The military shuck and jive,
to justify these insidious deeds,
as the Leader of The Free World
is on his knees praising Jesus
for the death and mayhem.
This Jesus is diametrically opposed to the one I know
His Jesus is a warmongering imperialist who loves only billionaires
and millionaires and the idoits who worship them.
This Jesus he prays to, appears to love nothing scared, or honorable,
or righteous, or humane.
This Jesus entrenched like cancer by lies and madness.
This Jesus adding to the plies of bodies, as if human life and
Creation mean nothing. 


This Side Of The Mystery Game


Death is the bottomless pit, a ravenous
beast that
gets us all in the
end.
It even got Tolstoy who denied it.
And Dylan Thomas who raged against it.
Even Christ, though they say
he came back for
a visit; bloody as hell,
walking through
walls,
talking to invisible people even
doubting Thomas could see.
Jesus came back hungry
asking for wine and something to eat.
And as he ate a plate of Jewish stir fry
and several glasses of wine,
he started wisecracking about
the lack of sustenance
in the ethers, and demanding
Mary Magdalene’s apostleship,
which pissed off all the Jewish men
and all the Roman men
and all the wannabe men. And they killed
him again
and he walked through the wall back into “death”.
Wasn’t that the point,
that he “died” like the rest of us?
Like the bum, the poet, the mortician,
the politician, like the great Joe Lewis murdered
by the humiliation of Las Vegas, like you
and me, like John Lennon shot down
by his biggest fan, like most of us living ordinary lives,
dying ordinary deaths, 
like everyman and everywoman.
Death is the bottomless pit (and our most deceptive illusion), 
that every human falls into, and is never seen again, at least not
on this side of the mystery game  




John


Starless, moonless, hopeless
night
filled with shadows
of ravaged dreams.
On a platter, a bloody platter
engraved with
cannibal dragons
sits the
magnificent head
of the Baptist.
Salome whirls her incestuous whoredom
around the marble floor.
The music of the dance
floats through the stagnant
and murderous air.
As the lamb of God, a few miles away
lies prone in prayer,
he feels the
ax through
his own
sanctified flesh.
His head 
rolling slowly
from the pallet
of His repose,
like a comet
passing through
the cosmos of dead
and dying stars



This Side Of The Mystery Game first appeared in Cause & Effect Magazine in 2007, and
John first appeared in Ancient Paths around 2004 or 5.

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