HATEBOX

 

Christopher Jones

 

 

 

This is a poem for my mother's worship,

for the endless novenas and

unfortunate Chicago she comes from;

this is a poem for my cousin

who walks to mass every week

and is beaten every day by the father

of her three children, who smashed her

down so hard that my aunt found her

bleeding behind the TV,

incoherent and crazy-eyed;

this is a poem for my aunt who found her,

who picked up a stick and went after the man,

found him laughing in the garden and

hit him, told him to never come back

and when he laughed in her face hit him again;

this is a poem for the bastard who always comes back;

this is a poem for the half-crippled old woman

standing all through Christmas mass

in a church full of loving, charitable,

seated worshippers;

this is a poem for my mother and the money

she mails to St. Jude;

this is a poem for the person who sends me

chain letters from St. Jude

promising cash if I continue the chain

and death if I break it;

this is a poem for spiritual blackmail;

this is a poem for my friend

whose father died and fell from the sky,

he had argued with the parish priest

over the money filled sermons so

the priest would not let him be buried;

this is a poem for the greed and fat and loneliness

that are the three solid pillars of the church;

this is a poem for the letters I received

when I was a boy

itemizing my contributions

and how very short I'd fallen;

this is a poem for my mother's rosaries,

for my mother praying the rosary

with the monotone nunnery broadcast

when we had no money,

with the radio off

she prayed the rosary

and still we had no money;

this is a poem for the endless copper coins

I should have stolen from the plate;

this is a poem for my grandmother's wasted lifetime

of tithes and saints

and the senile mucousy death she died;

this is a poem for my mother

who has been lied to all her life,

who has been taught to respect an obese

an alcoholic brotherhood

that will fuck a thousand small children this year

then hide behind the Vatican's red skirts;

this is a poem for my vague thirteen year old cousin,

whose date knifed her over and over,

who bled and died praying to be saved,

and was not saved;

this is a poem to magnify my anger,

to copy that focus

into one thousand dollar bills of hatred

to leave on collection plates across the world;

this is a poem for the waste

of the constant Inquisition;

this is a poem for my mother,

for the box they keep my mother in.