God is a Male Goat, image by Irene Koronas
XII.
God
enters Gordon like convict woods after escaping
crashed
transport bus. Gordon’s branches engulf him.
God
wades bog, camouflages face with mud, eats
frog,
bog weed. God needs gun, money, wheels; God
needs
new mug. Gordon shelters under eggy moon,
Gordon
accommodates. God blackens self under
brambles.
Cops track with dogs. God’s handcuffs cut
wrists.
Damn things. God self-castigates: idiot, block-
head,
blunderer. Gordon wraps night round God
like
raw bacon. Hyper-vigilantly God sleeps, dreams
of
Camp Winnipesaukee. God fantasizes Sylvester
Stallone.
Blood shatters out Gordon’s ears from
God’s
inhabitance. Acid flames throat. God feels to
Gordon
like male goat. Damn it all. God’s dirty. God
spits
grit. God defecates magma. God’s blood
impregnates
mosquitoes. Gordon prays, “Stop this
pain,
help me giggle.” Gordon screeches like tea
kettle.
Fugitive! Fugitive! Murderer! God penetrates
Gordon’s
pelvic swamp—bladderwort, skunk cabbage,
moccasin.
David Livingston. God curls under pitch
pine,
chews chick-weed root. Dozes. Authorities rake
purling
mass but God slips through. Three years pass.
Rubble
crushes Haitian babies. Indonesia boils in
tsunami
stew. Sludge fills Peruvian schools. Gordon’s
mother’s
flesh rots. Gordon abstracts. God thickens.
XXXIV.
God said let there be darkness and
there was darkness.
Light is world’s original state. God
split light with
sin for He was bored. He needed peep
show to
grease masturbation. Adam, Eve numbed
him with
tepidness. And so He created shame,
naughtiness,
exhibitionism, addiction. Dripping
spit. Pro-
nounced it right. Now delicious
videos. Hot
XXX. Eve didn’t give head. God hired
world’s
top hit man, half in advance, half on
delivery,
who wound about trunk hissing
cost-benefit.
Adventuresome, Eve bit. God drooled
watching
shame-mixed sex, rubbed hands. God
said less
light, more dark--lab mouse hitting
bar--and
darkness fell like black crepe wherein
sin—war,
rape, slavery, bacchanal—shot through
world
like bloody thread. God slobbered, ate
crazy
corn. Light like weed peeps through
concrete,
God shoots it with Round-up. Let there
be dark
and it was delicious with sex-laced
violence,
spree killing, delectable AIDS, provocative
starvation. God’s biggest hard-on is
witnessing
still births: meaningless labor. You
can’t blame
owner of such efficient ax for
splitting tedium
in half, light cleaved open. One loves
spilled
viscera. Whose apogee is soldiers gang
raping,
murdering girls before their mothers,
then
slaughtering the mothers. This for God
is a binge.
XLI.
I make love to God, unnatural for me
as I am not
homosexual. I do this as pilgrimage
though other
men’s erections repel me and God’s is
especially
clammy, brutal, like wet lead bludgeon
protruding
from barbs. I suck it like supplicant,
he bloodies
my anus, relishing. I am made female
debased by
King for initiation into cult.
Henceforth I shall
plead in squeamish architecture
oval-mouthed,
cradling hymnal, and bend over naked
to his will.
LI.
…and this little god cried wee wee wee
wee all the way home
which is unusual, for gods seldom
scream home afraid
to mommy being immortal, omnipotent,
impervious
to pain, imagine Zeus sucking thumb,
clinging to mother’s
apron under bully-pursuit. Imagine
Neptune in water
wings. But chill climbed little god at
something unspeakably
evil escaped from pit, red skinless
muscle and gut joined
by enzyme-shiny fangs. This little god
full of cock girded
for fight but caved bloodless like any
coward at implacable
dominance. This thing can strip you
off bones like sleeve
of meat discarding pile of steaming
guts, so wee wee wee, god’s
springy piggy tail corkscrewed up
asshole as he flees. Mom,
cookie-warm, wields rolling pin like
club, don’t fuck with
this, slapping cudgel in hand, nasty
piss-ant, crack you
like tick. Piss-ant pops tollhouse,
pops mommy’s head
between jaws, brains running out like
burst egg, slashes
to neck her cunt, sticks head inside,
gnashes guts, spits
out ribs. God unshelled nakedly
stands—little chubby
package—and is gone in an instant but
for chewed
gristle. The other four, like toes:
the walls look like
tomato puree blender disaster…
LVII.
God shields, exclaims soldier of
salvation, flashing Him
like firewall before mortality.
Mortality shrivels before God
like ancient penis. Death devours
flesh, not soul. Flesh is empty
meal for stomach, deepening, not
satiating hunger, like
Cheetos. One soul would bloat Death
like fire hose gush
down throat. I own Wyatt Earp Sheriff
badge, Elite
Black Visa Card, BJ’s Warehouse
membership, valid car
inspection sticker but defenseless
lies my soul—naked
infantryman. I am without armor
against bullet. Faith,
he says, is your shield. God
intercedes like Kevlar.
Open eyes, heart, be saved. I shut
lids, epoxy heart,
cover self with spite, throw myself
from prow into sea
of denunciation, plummet into watery
abyss. Death
tears off my flesh. What shark leaves
pipefish eat,
plankton devour fiber off bones. I am
cloud of
underwater feast. Faith repulses beast
from breast.
Have you been saved? “Yes, oh yes!”
cry billions.
LIX.
One proves God’s existence by citing
the stinking garbage
Dumps of Lagos, Nigeria; Fresh Kills,
NY; Bordo Poniente,
Mexico, Great Pacific Garbage Patch,
Pacific Ocean.
Mountains of teeming human blight:
humankind’s
temples riddled with scavengers,
bulldozed into mounds
thick as Pyramids. Here lies altar,
chancel, transept,
sacristy, Eucharist, scepter,
wriggling masses. Pilgrimage
of diesel engines belching black
repentant fume like
thunderous guilt, depositing spermy
blankets, bloody
towels, expelled placentas, vomiting
couches, frizzy wigs.
Priests preside these cresting seas.
God forgives. God
absolves. Come unto Me. Dogs shit upon
these Pews,
gulls pull coagulated fat. This our
ark. This our craft.
Board it now wretched sinners. Here
lie rotten ratty
pants, here loafers stiff as husks,
here’s plastic sucked
by lips. No greater proof than this.
Let us, then, gather
round these sewers, shiver humbly, and
worship God.
LXI.
God says, pass, you lived admirably--
loved, forgave, prayed, sacrificed.
Then God says to another, you, back
off! You’re condemned. You cheated,
raged,
strutted, begrudged. You shall
blister. The consigned one pleads
on deaf cochlea. Trap door bangs.
He plummets to pit of wailing skulls,
boiling flesh, bubbling cauldron
within which sinners eternally
scream. Like fuel, new sinners slide
down shoot. Satan resembles Mr.
Kurtz. Mad, utterly, heads on
pikes. Meanwhile he who passed
gorges divinity, virgins, beefcakes,
girls. Satan bathes in bone
liquefaction. Bartholomew washes
believers’ feet. I, Jew, decide to
marry Jesus in formal ritual:
Baptism. Transubstantiation.
Rapture. Reinvention. This I
saw in Ezekiel-like vision: angels
floating round Virgin Mary levitating
above floor of crawling adders.
God said come. I approached.
She bore two faces: one anterior
angelic, beatific, one posterior
grotesque, evil. God commanded
kiss her evil face, kiss Mary’s
monstrous ego, kiss her
festering oozing sore. Love her,
he demanded. Suddenly charioteer
lopped off my head, tossed it to
God who jamming digits into
jellies, gullet, with my ropy
member naked, flopping bowled
me over with my own globe into
whose mouth involuntarily I
shat again and again in liquid
terror. Upon awaking I married
God in formal ceremony and
ever after worshipped the
filthy, repulsive, and abominable.
LXX.
I was faring swimmingly—woman
hair-washed
feet, infirm glowed, deceased rose,
food-fish
teemed in nets, throngs
converted--without
you. You couldn’t leave it alone,
stuffing me
with pudding, over-gloating, pumping
with gift-
bearers. I was satisfied, functioning.
I didn’t
need your head stuck in my details.
Predictably
you snuffed my happiness, bribed
friend to
rat me out, mortified flesh, nailed me
shut
under mocking sign: “King of Jews.”
(Why
through wrists and not, sadistically,
balls
or tits; you always resented me.) Such
splendid
revenge, subsuming me eternally under
your
fluff, suffocating me. Granted my
swollen
egotism, but needed you lance my lava
out? Couldn’t you allow actualization?
I was
superb physician, I abated suffering.
Selfless,
always selfless, liberator against
autocracies.
And you, hateful to the last, stripped
my
thunder to bloody bone, stuck me in
crib
somewhere near Microscopium. Baby,
even
now, into whom you ply universal
infantilism.
LXXI.
Men, grease painted, kill each other.
Head, necks thick black streaks. Gangs
Clasping signed, countersigned
contracts.
Lone assassins crisscrossing streets.
Rage-fuelled hatred, cartridge,
barrel,
Throat-slitting shiv. Rapists, too,
Neck-dragging women by belt behind
Dumpster for spasm. Snow, horse,
Four Roses. Gaudy iridescent tattoos.
One shatters whiskey bottle, twists
In girl’s cheek. One crooks fingers,
Rips open victim’s mouth. Churches
Groan with prayer. Belfry traps
flapping
Hymns. Futility of humble. Innocent
Billfolds split like figs to
gun-thugs.
Poet’s final vision: moron’s pistol
Muzzle. Nothingness. Psychopathic
God lays out with porn, Astroglide,
Levitating over ant bed creation.
Teeming thoraxes, mandibles, legs,
Dragging line of microscopic dung.
Starry God, internet smut, spasm.
Humanitarians mail charity flyers:
Starving children, harelip defect,
Diseases. Goats for family. Donkeys
for drudge. Nobody gives. Death.
God swallows petitions like sludge.
—Gordon Massman
