Jesus As A Lounge Act

I saw Jealous Rage
(JR for short)
as he lay in his easy chair.

(I say lay because to consider him
sturdy enough to do more
would be a feat in itself)

Death was at his back,
occasionally whipping him with
a croquet mallet,
which racked him so throroughly
it seemed to stymie the air.

(You see, JR had given up most of his power
to become Indefinitely Embittered;
and while it may have improved his writing considerably
for only a short time
it killed him thusly.)

"My God," I said, stupefied, "I thought you were getting better ..."
"Where the fuck did you hear that?" he coughed back.

He apologized for his condition as bronchitis
It was morose, standing before
what was once mighty,
feeling pity for one which despised such sentiments.

It so happened that in the course of conversation
JR looked strangely at me,
and, for a bright moment his eyes came back to himself,
and he smiled inwardly.

(He made a comment about Jesus as a lounge act.)

I saw in that glimpse
the old power.
I saw through him.
the hooks and the fishing line connecting
I saw the relinquishment ...

Then his eyes wheezed themselves back into weakness;
Death slowly nodded towards me,
raised his mallet and saluted.

Indeed: if even Jealous Rage can be destroyed by
something so fearfully trifled,
so can my rising power as Sarcastic Hopelessness

(Though, admittedly, it couldn't possibly be the same affliction
if it happened to me ...
Our poems are completely different.)

Jesus As A Lounge Act by Michael W. Hyde is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.