The Missionary Position

The sky pilots, they were called. Every church sent them into the wilderness
and brought them back to the fold to acclaim and endow with renewed zeal
they carried home to the heathen (as though the savages were squatters . . . ).

I have to tell you right off I hated missionaries. They were the same as Mafia
handing out favors to believers in exchange for saving them from Hell’s fire..
I read Melville’s Typee with its unexpurgated original expose of missionaries.

Of course only priests and preachers and their ilk were known as God’s own.
That was why I invented my own church, La Iglesia de La Puta, on this earth
and open to sinners of every shade, profession, and style of dreaming death.

Cathleen was right. When we die we go inside our dreams. Eternal life? Yes.
Angel would be there because even though she sold pleasure to anonymous
souls, male usually and female occasionally, the love she gave was returned.

I lived among the savages. Gerry said that’s how he saw it, but not so clearly.
He came from Africa; for all he knew that was where he would go back to.
The Church fucked up his life. Why couldn’t nuns and priests have their own?

Dee was the most downtrodden, having been raped by a priest whom he loved
in his child’s way. It hurt his soul more than his body. He never returned.
His mind evolved from Hawthorne to Poe. Yes, the zombie was a reader first.

All those down and out dream of writing of their unspeakable experiences.
Beasley raped by a nun and fathering a Satanic child. Dee, an altar boy,
raped by a priest for whom women were sinful. Angel, her own sad story.

floycealexander told me once he and Irene sat through mass to be seen there,
then hightailed it up to the summit of the highest hill overlooking the town,
where every Sunday they practiced the wholly sanctified missionary position.

Cathleen had her own mind. Priests came to her father’s house to tempt her.
Businessmen tried to get her to go to bed, and after the first time she found
money flowed easily from the rich to the poor, though the price was too high.

In La Iglesia de La Puta confession came with the rain and opened windows
in the soul, where you saw other damned souls clearly in the streaked glass.
One was my mother. Though I found her alive, I waited eagerly for the rain.

(7 April 2013)