I’ve fallen helpless on my backside,
and am being methodically dismembered.
A detail of malevolent dissemblers have come
to effect another day of plundering. They abscond
away with my choicest parts. Finding my sadness
gratifying, they joyfully proceed without reverence.
Their long shadows glide across the walls
of my dorm room. exploring its contours.
Its surface is a tattered landscape, having evolved
over twenty years of neglect, and multiple
misapplications of butter creme latex.

My familiar fiends chuckle over the decrepit
state. Who would pay to live in such a state? They
let loose a string of indignities and epithets, composing
them into an effortless aria.They always sing while they work.
The melody lingers as I wax woeful this latest loss.
They finally begin to slip back into the shadows
of my room, having sufficiently pilfered the emotional levees
I’d rebuilt since the last great raid of my inner resources.
This time was different. I’d practically served up myself for slaughter.
“I want it all gone. Nothing left by the end of the day!”
And so, I lay there in all my remains, an open-ended husk of a man.
From each of my cavernous wounds there issues a trail
of raw sinew, mixed with royal crimson purple blood.
The blood has life as its price. I fed my five thousand,
just like I’d been taught in seminary.
I have been Christ to His sheep.
This I have come to learn, though,
the sheep bite.

The Prince sacrificed something
of more precious worth than I.
His holocaust was hallowed.
I’m just a phony.
I can hear a doctrine of demons
pursuing me.
“Some fine Savior you got, punk.”
My friends never fail to spit in my wounds before leaving.

Then, one of my associates comes over.
He’s panting like an eager canine.
Perspiration runs down the sides of his mercurial face.
“My fourth riddlin t-day”, he confesses. He condemns himself,
“Don’t judge, man. Gets me ready for class.”
I can’t manage to squeeze out an edge of a word before
he bounds away chasing after his master’s ball.
I muse for a moment.
“There goes another
of the great devourers”.

Help me not to feel so much, O God!
I want your love, yet push it away
when it comes due.
I cannot seem to rest.
I fail to see your image in my own kind.
What about genuine concern?
Does our God embarrass us?
The unsavory fill our ranks.
They neither smile nor frown,
They possess an open disdain for poverty, and
conceal a contempt for its victims.
“Life is good”, reads their sabbath tee.
My life happens to be messy.

“Your God is the Creator, is He not?
It seems He cannot turn you into something useful”,
observes the cautious worldling.

Our heads belong in the dust.
Another associate draws near, a woman.
Can she dress my wounds?
No, she’s also one of the fallen.
The Daughter of Eve is held up
by frayed strings that may snap with a sudden move.
She has decided, therefore, to become an unassailable wall.
She’s keen, observing that I can’t even manage my own life.
No wonder she’s walking so fast!
She shouldn’t be so exposed,
could catch something malicious out here.

Why all these fractures? –this frenzied rushing?
Where is the board-meeting being held?
Who told you that you’d lost your momentum?
I fear to say the word, but who else will?
Better an up-and-coming dead guy.
The word becoming flesh, is: “lukewarm…
lukewarm… lukewarm”.

Chris Heidt 2008