CBE: Pharisees

Another Chinese Brush Experiment: the poet can only go forward and not change a single word except for grammar or spelling. Enjoy the roughness of unfiltered verse, unlike my usual formal posts, which, surprisingly, are usually just as rough in terms of immediate composition.



Pharisees

Oh you brood of vipers with your venomous hippocracy,
Steaming in the waft of your self-righteousness
Above the artichokes that take so long to cook.
You don't tremble at the tripartite God.

I went to you once, to an elder
For advice about dating and whatnot
He decided my girlfriend was an abomination
While his wife reminded him of his own petting (early in their relationship).

Should I countenance the religious with anything but scorn?
Should I lick their boots for a scrap of forgiveness?
I do not think the humble know them.
Give me the humble every time.

The sun rises on the righteous and unrighteous.
The sun is implacable in its fairness.
The gold disk illuminates the dark corners
Of human lies, traditions, protections, evasions.

This would be a moral poem if it had a moral.
But it is a moral poem, if deceivers are understood.
I knew a man once with a thousand Krugerands.
He also owned semi-automatic rifles and taught Sunday School.

Do we need people like this to advance religion?
The slavery of the Indians to the preternatural host?
The incorporation of folk beliefs into the bleeding Jesus?
The mother gods become the blue and white Mary?

Fuck the systems, fuck the gods.
True light comes from true light, there is no mistaking it.
It cuts the soul with a diamond-edged blade
And leaves a man with nothing except a beggar's bowl.