Look at what you’ve accomplished: you’ve
killed your God.
You’re supposed to be celebrating the birth
of the son of the eternal, omnipotent author
of the universe, a son coequal and consubstantial
with his father, the one who beat out all
the others to become the sole deity of the
West.
He’s immaterial, and you’re supposed to
organize your whole life around him, to not
love anything more than him.
Especially not an idol.
Especially not the work of human hands.
But you give each other things and forget
about God.
They’re golden calves, your handiwork, and
you adore them like the Eucharist.
I see your decorations and spit.
I hear your music, and I’m filled with indignation.
Then I look at myself.
And I look beside me, in my bed, at the love
that supplanted God.
She was married.
We met at that bar and she moved in the next
day.
Brought two little boxes.
Mailed her husband divorce papers as soon
as she could and didn’t ask for a dime.
She said I was all she needed.
“You’re the most beautiful thing to watch,”
she said.
“How so?”
“You’re like a tornado.
You’ll dissipate soon enough, but not before
you destroy everything you touch.
You’re spinning your way to hell.
I wanna come.”
She came, and she hasn’t left.
We drink.
We don’t work.
I’m almost out of money.
They’ll shut off the power any day now.
I feel God nudging me.
It’s peculiar.
I should be afraid.
I drink.
I don’t need money.
I’m with her, and she’s all the memento
mori anyone could ask for.
Every kiss is stolen.
She is warm and lovely.
When you lust, you sin against your own body.
I drink.
I can feel my body beginning to fail.
I know I’ll face judgment.
I feel God nudging me, buy she’s asleep
and I’ll join her.
Soon.
Or soon-ish, I can’t get to sleep before
five most days.
I sleep past noon.
I need money.
I’d say to hell with capitalism, but Marx
is dead.
“I’m not dead – I’m right behind you.
Or, rather – I am dead, but I’m not in
the casket where they laid me in 1883.
I’m dead because I’m unrealized, because
all hitherto attempts at my material realization
have been at the same time and necessarily
attempts to murder my spirit.
I remain what I was when I was alive, what
I was before my birth: nothing.
I am nothing, but I must be everything.
The wage-laborer still enchained, the developments
of the twentieth century (political, economic,
scientific) only served to grow new imaginary
flowers on his chains.
In the twenty-first century, the wage-laborer
is beginning to recognize that his chains
are imaginary as the flowers that grow on
them, as the Christ who hangs like an orchid
on the wall of his church.
Allow me to offer a temptation,” he gestured,
and a tear in the veil appeared, and a sleigh
came gliding out.
“Allow me to pluck the flowers from your
chains.
It is not, dear friend, so that you will be
forced to bear your bonds without fantasy
or consolation, but that you, now conscious
of your enslavement, might throw off the chains
and pluck the living flower.
Hop in, friend.
Join me for a revolutionary Christmas.”
