ON LOSING THE PLOT
“I came eating and drinking
and you called me names”
Jesus
How did it all become so miserable?
I mean to ask,
How did a joyous, liberating vision,
Get taken over by such misery?
Because drifting into last times,
‘Ageing Process’ times, that’s
How it grips me or, with more dignity,
That how it seems to me.
I accept the Garden of Agony,
Gratefully in tune with the Hill of Sorrows,
But even the Garden of hope and happiness,
With all its eternal futurism
Becomes a hostage to misery.
Kids are forced to cry when
They should be falling about
And screaming with laughter and hope.
Thirteen men with a few women pals
Out to dinner for drinks, food and talk,
In comes a prostitute
And the divine guest embarrassingly
Suggests she’s alright, even kingdom bound,
She washes his dust dirtied feet and again
He says she’s alright.
She’s certainly eternity bound.
Everyone goes glum-speechless,
Portents of oak polished benches
Occupied by bourgeois keepers
Of a mission shaped to their own comfort,
Frightened to death of prostitutes and,
Which is much worse, anyone that vaguely
Looks like one. Not a laugh to be heard
While God trebles up giggling uncontrollably.
Thus before that final Cross cry,
Even before the happy Garden greetings,
Here, there and, for that matter, everywhere,
God couldn’t stop laughing
In the eternal heart of, I mean it,
A suffering seriousness,
Promising a future of liberty and justice.
The problem? Too many vocations.
I mean there was just one heaven-born call
Taking root in the ups and downs of everyday.
To get to grips with this mind-blowing venture
We created a million calls out of the One,
Came up with ‘Ways of Perfection’,
Got quite snobby about ‘States of Life’,
Condemned Elites and created Elitism,
And simply lost the plot, divine and human.