Wild-eyed, Moses-bearded, mostly;
ignored in their own land
- inevitably; maniacs or manics whose stand-
up routines make wrinklies hurry on, the young jeer.
God's burning bushes, each thorny mind's on fire.
and put to the production of rhetoric and, often, ginger hair.
This means they stand in the Inferno
but are not consumed, just purified.
Their flames are fanned by the wind
that howls right through them, the desert within,
through which they wander each their forty years.
Then they have the right to blast down from on High
excoriating the weary, the work-bent, the God-shy
grey wash of homing commutation trudging up wet steps
to bus queues outside. As if Brixton
were not terrible enough an admonition,
they pass down the Truth in tablet form:
smudged photocopied pamphlets, the toner gone
like all else to dust, staples like tiny bones
that snag your nails, catch your borrowed cashmere.
And on the crowded bus, jostled, mugged up close
with odours of stale perfume, armpit-reek and,
I have to say it, piss,
you read that, after all of this,
you go to Hell.
Well, I guess, the eyes have it: the candle in a skull
or the coals on every tongue.
You know the ones who crucify themselves slowly?
Each Good Friday nailing a piece of wood,
(on which they have, painstakingly, pokered the XXIII Psalm)
to their left annually stigmatised, and no real wonder, palm.
A hand closes like a claw on yours;
you feel the nails tighten on your wrist.
Others with hair shirts, scourges,
a missal's red ribbon sewn into the flesh above the heart
like some SM Valentine.
Or, cursed with the gift of tongues,
speaking gibberish, tolling the rosary line
of petitioners for the Two Zone Travelcard.
Or, scrawling warnings in the invitingly broad
margins of library books.
The Plague is coming, maybe already here.
They underline numbers people do not see
when the Devil's knocking minds and hearts for Six Six Six.
Or, that divine amanuensis with his spray can uncapped,
taking down the whispered Enochian
of each Angelic Conversation
and putting it up, the writing on the wall.
New Scripture, the Last Testament,
luminous, growing from the hissing nozzle.