Red Carpenter

Forty days, you’re parched
No drink or company
Makes the devil come
To try keeping you alive
With rock bread and kingdoms
He’d rather you not die

Ideology and duty
Sweating righteousness, bleeding consternation
Makes you pray
While your supposed followers sleep

Spit and piety
Flying in your face to make you sad
Only still your lips and turn your hated cheek
While jeers rise from your clay jars
Who breathe heavy the breath you breathed into them

Your tired hands are boarded to bloody wood
Who would have thought
A humble carpenter
Could be carved like so much worthless flesh
For so many flaunting transgressions
You bloody carpenter, you

Looks like you’re on a tree
And you’re stripped bare-
My fault, faultless woodcutter

Ugly, plucked-to-beardless chin
Excreting man’s corruption
As death sets in
And then that mocking disruption…

That tastes like earth’s good wine, you think,
But smells too bitter
Is that really how they feel, say you,
Against a lonely carpenter

Just a test, you say,
Later on they’ll know
An empty gray, gray grave-
But, red martyr, what’s this now:

Nails destroy your healing hands
Lashes let you know they didn’t love your love
Thistles through the king of jews
You look on, lips parched like it’s still forty days

Thirsty?
Where’s your healing water?
Can’t you drink your many tears?
Or was this what you wanted

Plunged hard in the side, your stomach waters flow
You were only water after all
Water not from woman’s well
Your hands outstretched- let your holy waters fall

Another mock and stare-
An obsidian angel slips by
The guards know this one
This one’s voice is lies

Lord of lords, that fey visitor lets on,
Your hard work’s undone
So much for damning death
No one wanted you, he says,
Except fishermen and Mary
Ugly king of too few Jews

Yahweh, boy
“Son of God”
Kiss my cloak
Kneel before me-
I- man’s fey god

Six hours your supposed children hang you, continues six-six-six
Times that by twelve means seventy-two with me, king of only twelve
Because, carpenter, they hold back-
I torment you forty days; they lash you only thirty-nine

Then Hell’s tirade resigns
Satan looks on your broken body- smiles

You gaze up into roman eyes
Roman and Jew are now the same to you
As you gaze, they unbolt your hands
Fey visitor drags you down

But before Satan wins the bloody day
As darkness bleaks your lost domain
The curtain, torn in two
Begs man to burdens lay
On dear red carpenter, You