Remember that
crucifixion only became theology 
with time.  Once it was
just somebody’s job and 
somebody else’s brutal
entertainment; some
avoided such spectacle as that
due to delicacy and others ran
like hell to avoid being the targets
of the ones with the hammers and 
the nails.  Remember that
it only became holy
with time; some say it took
as little as three days,
others say it’s still not all the way
there. Remember
that it was cleaned up and
that you’ll really never know
what it was really like; remember that
the next time you’re looking up at
the bare cross on the wall of your church.
Remember that there are some places in the world
where on Good Friday
some try to replicate it,
dragging crosses 
through the dirt streets,
hanging themselves bloody
to bring it home again; remember
how you knew of them, the penitentes,
once upon a time and had forgotten them
till now? Remember how it sobered you
up to learn of them? To learn of people
who preferred to recall it was once
routine and mundane and bloody
and vile, and maybe it should have stayed
that way; if it one day makes you uneasy
in church, if it pulls you down to your knees
in sick wonder, maybe that’s what you get
for forgetting that it did not start
in purity and that they only capitalized it
once they made it into capital.