Fakir News

Earl Fowler

Some pastors are like the nubby nibbed tips of God’s editorial pencils

dripping venomous Christian nationalism toward the sermon below.

Such pastors maintain the Prophet has a beard like blood flowing

from faucets in which their distorted reflections taper to points

where Edith Holden drowns while gathering chestnut buds

where the widening wake of the Law fans out eternally

and Virginia Woolf sinks with pebbles in her pockets

and laughing peasant women go on cracking nuts

tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock ... where I will show you fear in a handful of dust a way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun

twit twit twit jug jug jug jug so rudely forc’d

where life first gained a foothold in the tide

where Pharaoh’s daughter wades toward

lonely old grubbers desperate for touch

evangelizing on a Grail-shaped screen trumping angrily onto the bread loaf

door to the Marsh Queen’s brewery

forever clouding clerical spectacles

with a yellow fog that rubs its back

in acerbic bulrushes of misogyny

baptizing bassinets of baby boys

the Nile running carmine with

blood, beards of the Prophets

soaking with righteousness

thundering righteousness

despotic righteousness

fathomless emptiness

of papyrus scrolls

pastoral beards

sacred texts

a wailing of

unholy

males

drips

drop

dri

dr d