The Hospital Adoration

‍

My son’s rifle is filled with rotten flowers.
He wants to live. I picture his pill jar
full of bee husks. I picture the nurses dressed
in beige with beetles running up
their beautiful necks. Why do all the rancid birds
shriek inside their cages? Why do guns
protect our innocence? My son has to gather
up my tears in his little bowl
but the cup runs over and there’s a stampede
of horses in my room, in my cage,
in my rotten flower heart.
My son tries to protect me but he can’t.
He has a bowl, not a gun
and it’s not a bowl meant for collecting tears
but for collecting my mother.
My son has dumped her honeycomb ashes
in the woods behind the condo
and he comes back with beetles on his arms
and neck. I have to shoo them off his skin.
I have to picture innocence as a mansion
in which my father has many mansions
and my wife practices Chinese
with a revolver in one hand and a bowl of tears
in the other. It’s running over
so I’m waiting for another riot to tear
through the house. The rioters are in more debt
than we are but their children aren’t smashing
windows inside the hospital of innocence.
So they don’t need to cry.
I’m writing a book for my son –
a children’s book for children
without childhoods, mothers without children,
fathers without fathers, and hospitals
without guns. Nobody will buy the book,
so I will shoot it full of holes and give it
to the rioters as a bribe to make sure
they destroy everything except my son.
When they do it feels like we are winning,
but that’s before they carry Jesus’
mysterious body through the hospital
all vaseline and roses
to pay for all our sins. To pay our debts.
To convince the rioters that they are horses
in a black and white movie
about revolution. Once upon a meadow
I thought I was so knowledgeable
about the mysteries of the human body
that I could pay off every saint
every counterfeiter of saints
every money lender in the hospital
but now as I carry my son through the fire
left behind by the rioters
I understand nothing about trash.
Nothing about the beautiful words
I’ve learned to pronounce
with my mouth full of gasoline.

‍

^{(From Johannes’s forthcoming book: The Adorations)}

‍