STIGMATA
by Robert Burdette Sweet
Reading of how, as the century turns,
the Rapture will swoop believers off,
bewildered by gods and devils as I am,
imagine my amazement next morning
awakening to discover myself stigmatized.
Blood flowed from wrists and feet,
an awful gash gaped my side
and crusted clots where thorns would reside
dangled from where my hair receded.
Quickly I sopped the mess with sheets,
struggled to piss as I nervously shaved,
wondering how the Padre Pio
dealt with the rancid taste of gall.
Drippy fingers walking yellow pages,
I phoned a therapist-shaman doctor.
"Hysteric," he offered, "like Emma Galghani,
St. Francis and others of their ilk."
"Ilk?" I pondered while boarding a bus,
traveling toward my deepest office,
a cow person hat cocked down my forehead,
Michael Jackson glove, a long-sleeved
Elvis shirt I'd donned to divert,
disguise and otherwise deflect
from my disturbing linkage to the god
I doubted, ignored, but was now the doppelganger of.
"Grab your crotch," the receptionist whooped
responding only to what I wore,
but it was my terminal chief and fatherly guide
who diagnosed my hemorrhaging, etheric self:
"Man, you're sick. Need latex to breathe
near you." "What must I do?"
dabbing at trickles seeping under my hat.
"I seem to have become what I am not."
"What else is new and don't you dare
even think of touching that key board with Michael's glove ..."
"But under it is holy, ironic blood ..."
"Are you planning to herd some steer,
thrill the kids, or play Las Vegas --
or all three in one as the sequins suggest?"
"I'm the echo of the Passion
of the Jesus Christ who might have been
and so died horribly as will we all.
The disguises I've chosen to disguise my disguise
mere necessities for the millennium's messy close
on the nightmare that the natural and supernatural
be knit, sewed, warped and woofed."
Raising arms dramatically and aiming
at the office ceiling's lights:
"I know now how we all are who we aren't.
I have forsaken all pretence."
The glaring lights stuttered, as would I,
flickered and went dark. "I - I deny
my transformation from ordinary to divine."
The door slammed, my chief departed,
I think in righteous, crushed disgust.
Because even an atheist such as I
might spring with the Rapture toward the sky.
Should all prove ghastly enough,
you can bet your ass
I'll try to fly.
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