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Lament by Martin
Higgins This
is God. May
I have your attention please? The
man standing before you, struggling at the microphone, Has
been kind enough to yield, His
mortal body to me for exactly 2 minutes and 34 seconds. So
the words that I speak through his lips, And
the concerns that I have about all of you, Hang
in the air with his voice, Your attention, and the smell of 3 dollar a cup coffee... Blending,
creating a sacri-acri-monious mist of discontent, Which
will unsettle, slowly, in your adequate
minds.
I
am not happy with most of you. As
you may know, I speak through all of
you, From
time to time, As
much as needed, as the whim strikes me, as your folly demands, Whenever
people claim to hear me, And
their hearts color my words to sell something... Wealth,
Happiness, Power, Redemption… Endowment… even War. Then
I help them, I lift them high, Up
onto a warehouse assembly table, Or
into the bed of a pickup truck, Or
guide them smack into the middle of a blood-hungry throng, Or
confidently, up to their mark in a television studio, Where
they usually bray like a jackass - my
most beloved creature, by
the way, My
most perfect creation.
Right after poets. Who
have been blessed by nature with the ability to bray like their long-eared
brothers, With
or without out
my help. Where
was I? Oh, yes, of course, I'm everywhere.
But
on to my point.
Let
me touch upon the issue of prayer for a moment. One
of your moments, that is, Or
I will be wrapping up this lament To
a room full of dusty skulls. Why
do 93.157% of your calls to me, Come
from less than a dozen locations? County
Jail holding cells and chilly marriage beds, Sobriety
checkpoints and grade school classrooms, Long
lottery lines and craggy clifftops, Shoulder-crowded
Chevy vans racing through Escondido, L-1011's
aborting a windshear-stalled takeoff, Old
age home Sundays and Oval Office Mondays.
Another
6.310 % from birthing rooms and post-op recovery, Golden
anniversaries and first dates, And
lawns covered with anxious March crocuses, Too
bloom-happy to fear the capricious Spring snow. By
the way, standing with a flock of other people, Mumbling
away absently on a Sunday morning under Star or Steeple, Is
like having a bunch of near-friends and strangers, Sing
"Happy Birthday to You!" in a Round Table Pizza Parlor. Like
the food, it fills, But
sits heavy on the heart. So
I'm left with 0.533%, call it 1/2 of 1%, (Make
a note here - from now on, .533% also shall
be 1/2 of 1%!) This
paltry pack, who just want to talk, Who
just want to tell me how they feel, How
they love, how they grow, How
it is to be human - Fearing,
and failing and lying, faithless. Faithless
in the face of each instant alive, On
a flyspeck green planet, Lost
in a boundless universe where each of you would die, Like a fish on the beach, in the blink of an eye.
My
eye.
These
flesh failures that prod you are the very things I created you for! The things I cannot be. Weak, Confused, Ignorant, Prideful.
When
you call out for me, for love, for truth, For
success, for faith, for luck... Your
need creates these, my mirror blessings, That
bring me my joy, in re-creation, And
opens my heart to you, in your need, My
mind to you, in your invention, My
soul to you, in your wandering, My
love to you, in your loneliness. Well,
the man standing in front of you, When
he rouses from his stupor, Will
believe he has just read another of his dreary, "My life has been hard, my love has been in vain..." poems, That,
between you and me, Makes
me miss the Jack-ass. Who,
for all his kicking, Occasionally
has the common sense to Shut the fuck up.
And
not try to speak for me.
So,
On with the show. Copyright
©1998 Martin
Higgins all rights reserved
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