Ego Soup

Ego Soup

You wake on Sunday morning to find

A drowned squirrel in the kiddy pool.

Nowadays the Anchorites float more fashionably

Belly up in petroleum rubber. Those priestly burdens once

Scooped out of chapel walls are just as

Withdrawing-ly faced from the tub

With a box of Kirspy Kreme. The bolsters of the lord

Find easement in the facades of saints

Above the television.

The good lord waxes:

Come to me squirrel

The trumpets are nigh.

I feel in my desperate & slow burning calamity

To get the bills paid, to be attentive

& occasionally forthright,

The rubbery zip zip of the squirrel’s claw

Upon the dazzling rubber, such water,

The yellow, the blue, the sunrise

Into drowning.

Now, the squirrel reminds us, we are free

To scoop the little corpses from our day.

Thank you, lord, I continue to beat the wall

With the apparatus of my forehead, the rubber

Vestibule of my brain, which squeezes off

Saints like other orifices shoot out bullets,

Other venoms.

Remember: The brick wall stained with blood,

The scrambling claw.