Stealing God back

Bumper stickers augment my ESP. They are ideological beacons on the highway that suck at my eyeballs and force me to increase my speed so that I can accuse the backs of heads of being my enemies or my allies. If I see one of the ubiquitous Bush-Cheney placards, I shoot tendrils out of my brain and ensnare, enshroud the driver and her or his passengers and fill them with globs of curdled poison.

I become hot with clairvoyance, I see them. They have hundreds of angry crabs jammed into their eyes, cheap, wormy rubies packed in salt. Something thin and purple is boiling inside their mouths, not wine. I try to count the fissures in their great vapid noggins but hairspray coils into the cracks and bakes them shut. They shriek blisters into me and their marionette teeth clack in unison; the dental percussion terrifies me. I know they can eat me because they ate God.

Maybe masticated, digested deity boils thin and purple.

My feminist neighbor Betty died three years ago. During the great Atlanta ice storm of 2001, neither I nor she had any heat and we gathered at our neighbors' house in front of the fireplace. We sought warmth and to rot the conservative pit out of the Georgia Peach collectively. Betty was in her seventies when she passed away. She referred to herself proudly as a "yellow-dog democrat." At her funeral, her three liberal children let anyone present eulogize their mother in any way they saw fit. I chose to laud Betty's courage to struggle and fight against oppression. I learned at her ceremony that she had been ardently active in her church and that she had fought to see that underprivileged children of color got medical care and equal educational opportunities back when the white potentate in Atlanta equated lynchings with Christian responsibility. I imagined Betty sitting alone in her little house near the end of her life knitting and listening to the minute hand on her clock clicking through silence with the force of a cannon and I think that solitude is no reward for the life of this incredible woman. I curse myself for all the times I sat in my house across the street browsing for sex on the internet when I could've been shrinking myself, falling into her ball of yarn, letting myself be woven into her history and into microcosmic greatness. She was a woman of compassion and kindness, qualities born of her faith and staunch belief in the equality of all humans. I wonder if God died with her or if the last vestiges of Him/Her were crunched between the teeth of the charismatic zealots who stole God and reappropriated Her/Him for hate at the same time she departed.

A single man in his early thirties bought Betty's house from her three children. He drives an SUV and smokes cigarettes. For a while, I secretly wanted to fuck him. Then he put a Bush-Cheney sign in the front yard.

I saw a bumper sticker last week that said:

JESUS WAS A LIBERAL

I will buy it and place it on my truck. I will lurk at my window until the Betty squatter cranks his Ford Explorer and I will hurtle through my house to my truck. I will beat him to the stop sign and I will freeze myself in place, I will refuse to go and he will read and reread the words on the back of my truck.

His eyes will melt and I will gather them in my right hand. They are my lubricant; now I will fuck him.

Amen