Originally posted 4/16/2016.

Radio preacher, how you talk —
lips looser than Lucifer’s,
spitting hate from a so-called 
Christian face. Your God forgot
to put a muzzle on your judgment
when He laid His manly paw
upon you. Are you insisting 
He was perfect at the craft 
and this is — YOU are — 
are as good as it can get?
Are you really your God’s 
best selling point, making claims
for your own humility before Him 
even as you aggrandize yourself?
Get gone, sticky fingered priest,  
knife tongue pastor, pope
of nighttime rope, saint
of burning necklace, deacon
of past prejudice and future petrified heart,
congregant in the church of bending love
into daggers and handcuffs, bishop of murder 
under the high altar; your game is
looser than Lucifer’s, 
who did not hide his dark hatreds
behind a Cross, who at least owned his pride
at not being in the slightest way
anything like God.

Originally posted 9/20 /2013.

The animals are off the grid.  
Think about it: they have no jobs, so no need to keep time.
What’s the point of Monday or Tuesday? Friday? Pointless.  
There are no weekends, people, and no Sabbath!  
This is intolerable.

Give the animals jobs.
These will of course have to be tedious —
how else to depress a deer or make a clockwatcher out of an owl?  
Soon enough, they’ll develop calendars and then start crossing off
the days to vacation.

Then, we just kill them at random.
Nothing structures time like the justified fear of sudden death.
We’ll have to think about an afterlife for animals.  
Will deer get their own, and owls get another?  
Will they be close to our own?

This new world is coming:
forest cubicles. Rows of antlers visible, the deer bent to their tasks.
Owls calculating in the trees, softly hooting their dismay at the results.
Now and then, a shot will ring out and a corpse shall be dragged away.
That’ll show them what Humpday means.

No more slacking. 

No more full sensory awareness as a result of living always in the Now.
They’ll soon enough begin to line up to get a good pew on Sundays.
They will learn to tremble and to pray for benevolence.
They will learn not to expect it.