Tattooist for Christ
She had a hard demeanor, but as she
said, she had given herself to God. Green
crosses were around her wrists like stitches.
Sketches of jungle vistas, where serene
messiahs stood, taming the beasts with their
divinity, were everywhere. I guessed
these were the things she had faith in. Where
she went, these went before. The weightiest
of charms. Moving slowly about her task
now, another crazy gentled by the yoke
of failure and grief. When I left, she asked,
Do you believe? The one of whom she spoke,
in that gallery of hearts, daggers, skulls,
seemed near. I thought that which annuls
fear, any power that balms affliction,
is power. But I didn’t want her attention.
I looked around at slogans of perdition,
the spiritual cartoons, the pretensions
of flames, roses, crucifixes, snakes, doves,
the whole plethora of delinquent loves,
I listened to the broken fan stirring
the sketches, incense sweetening the whirring
needle, and I answered her the way one
answers an aged, born-again harridan:
I purchased a t-shirt. It showed the blood
on the martyred god she was the child of.
Its supernal Harley rising beside
the words: He Died So That I Can Ride.
