Someone came up to him with a cassette

of his own sermon on the mountainside.

“Do as I say, mankind will be all set,”

he answered, took his cross again, and died.

 

Wearing the tape out on his VCR,

someone wrote a whole script just from that scene:

“What trick is there in loving those who are

deserving? Love the bullies, the obscene!”

 

No one asked the deserving how they felt

being passed over time and time again

while troglodytes showed up in trophy pelts,

loved for their bloody march against the grain.

 

Like clockwork, the deserving were put down,

and people who depended on them starved.

“It’s not my fault,” exclaimed the virtuous ones

till once again the sun, a little heart

 

of Valentine-style love, came up above

the eastern side, suggesting a new start,

and the deserving swore they’d only love

those more immaculate than classic art:

 

no room for faults, not even in good fun.

There could be no forgiveness for the least

trespass: cross that fine line, and you are done,

rejected, hanged, fed piecemeal to a beast.

 

So the deserving, rightly criticized

for lacking human traits, were made to fall

in the same pothole as the Antichrist

while the obscene ate cake and had a ball.

 

Somewhere amidst the rubble, on the floor

of someone’s medieval cutting room,

more tapes piled up, never picked up before,

of Christ detailing how, when and to whom

 

love should be given, counter to their sins,

and all the nuances of what that means.

No one has bothered to review those since:

the world survives through necessary means.

 

And though it creeps ever so slowly now,

we know it wasn’t quicker in the past.

So we get over it, pick up our plough,

and cultivate our gardens in disgust.

 

First published in The Raintown Review.