It’s a compromising situation...

It's a compromising situation...

 
The would be Bride of Christ begins perspiring

before the crowd.

Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring echoes through the antique church

just one more time,

a little loud.

With every added verse and every flickering vigil flame

the organist begins to falter.

My indifferent, unwed brother Mort begins to twitch and snicker.

“Jilted at the altar.”

He is sick.

The doctors say he suffers

from a case of spiritual despair.

He jokes and throws his yoke like

arm around my neck.

“I don't care!

It can't cause acne or make me lose my hair.”

He is sick. He knows it.

He is sick and he is dying.

And, with all my human faculty to feel such things,

I know that secretly he's crying.

“We lack an object of adoration...”

my father said to me in the final moments of his death bed melodrama.

And, as we wait for the second coming,

I ruminate to my brother's quiet dirge like humming

of an advertiser's jingle.

“...And in our nation

we spend our lives, pitched and

sinking,

like lonely pennies in a wishing well...”

I start to twitch and feel my sleeping soul begin to tingle.

Hark!

The horns are sounded

and o'er head the marble clouds are parted.

Behold, the Angel of the Age is come!

Suddenly, my brother's brooding soul appears before me,

a stranger at the door

aching like a severed limb,

in guise these eyes have not seen before.

And lo!

He is writhen and enraged,

and in his fury questions why

God dares to stand up his bride?

“While I,” he shouts, “I, His bastard son

have never been engaged!”

“Indeed!”

The august and gray haired guests

begin to hem and haw,

for they do not appreciate

such strange behavior.

“It's like a man upon a street corner,”

they sputter to themselves,

in a well conditioned responsorial guffaugh,

“who opens up his trench coat

and vents his naked spleen to passers by...”

They adjust the collars and the cuffs of their Sunday go to meetin' clothes,

and return to sleep

to continue waiting for their savior.

“Each generation of our race,”

or so my father said,

“must forever seek The Buddha

only in the end to slay him...

We must forever steal the flickering flame of the gods

again.”

But in despair

and a brand new pair of fashionable Air Jordan's,

emblazoned like a pagan god,

my brother's angel wanders down the isle,

and through a land of shopping malls

like Hebrews in the desert

seeking love not from above

but Nike's victorious trademark smile.

“Can't you see?”

My father struck a frail fist

and shook his bald and uncrowned head.

“Remove the veil from your eyes!

You must become that restless thief within the night,

And yourself be bridegroom to the bride.”

And in the fevered moments before he died

he rubbed his wrinkled hands and licked his lips.

“Go on! Take her by surprise

and rape her in the fallen candle light

and, in so doing

replant the seed...

refill the grail...”

But still we wait for a twist of fate and the coming of the groom

as the organist plays on and on in the ever closing gloom.

Now the wedding guests begin to snore and sputter

to my brother's soothing dirge like humming

while the minister, concerned about his payment,

insists repeatedly that the bridegroom will be coming.

And, all the while I wear a knowing smile...

even though my soul is numbing.