Jesus Christ SuperSonnet

Stations of the Cross
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To the Reader: This is a sonnet sequence built on the Catholic stations-of-the-cross motif. There are 4 stations plus, an opening intro, that tell the story of Christ's condemnation, cross-bearing, suffering on the cross, death and transfiguration. I own upfront that I am a "lapsed" Catholic, which means I haven't sought the Sacrament in many years and have moved decidedly in my thinking toward atheism since my confession. Still, there remain important resonances from my childhood days filled with preparation for confirmation. My experience with Catholicism was a fine experience that I have never regretted. Here, each of the 14 sonnets represents a station of the cross, as well as a line in a super sonnet. The couplet rhyme of each sonnet is a part of a rhyme scheme with another sonnet in the group.

Opening Meditation

My soul is sad, even unto death. Jesus said.

Or, at least, that's what they said he said, but,

who knows? Maybe he said, instead, Hey Mac,

gotta a light? for his last ciggy. Good craic.

Yet who can relate to such sadness cut

with long term exposure to Liebestod dread?

He said, Let this cup pass away from me.

Second thinking from the Second Comer?

Had years among near-beasts and feral souls

left him enervated, their eyes dark coals

that registered futility? Bummer.

But he was saved at last, able to see.

You wonder, don't you, what he'd say today.

A postmod Jesus, AIs on their way.

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I JESUS IS CONDEMNED TO DEATH

I dunno. Before Jesus, Socrates suffered

fools and their fallacies, with the latter half-crazed

by the stupidity that informed the buffered

democratic masses. But Jesus was unfazed,

tossing bread and fish like no tomorrow,

as if suffering preceded essence,

and souls must be fed before hope can lift sorrow.

Socrates was handed hemlock as recompense

for loving Truth and freeing minds of false conceits.

His death was tragic enough for the House of Man.

But when we crucified Love, lamentoso beats

fading to black drained the light from the Master Plan.

We snuffed the effulgence, raised a chalice to night.

Yet Truth and Love live entangled in their insight.

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II JESUS CARRIES HIS CROSS

Who doesn't have a cross to bear is not a man,

but most likely a monster molecule of Cain.

Take the fellow Jew who mocked and spat at Christ's pain

as he dragged the heavy rood beam. Hey, J, what Plan?

cried the yoke who would become the Wandering Jew,

condemned to keep going until Christ returned to rule.

He is a one-man diaspora and a tool.

Epigraph: The rolling stone on which no moss grew.

Some say that curse was a sign of the last book's wrath;

Jesus tired of turning a cheek to the cheeky,

wasting his love and time on a tribe of freaky

nobs intent on proceeding down Satan's dark path.

I thought of Jesus while watching Happy Gilmore

beat snots out of a golfing heckler. Our Savior!

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III JESUS FALLS THE FIRST TIME

Most of us are proven recidivists

who will return to the scene of the crime --

who will fall and keep falling, time and time

again, venal and swooning dogmatists,

intellectual barks bigger than bites.

The whole idea of falling, said Christ, rising

from his stumble, is for the apprising

of our ways and means of sin's appetites.

Jesus, I've fallen down so many damn chutes

to dark places beyond hope and ladders,

where monster molecules and man-adders

party to the tunes of centaurs with flutes.

"I Get Knocked Down, But I Get Up Again,"

on the jukebox, stagger home, man of men.

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IV JESUS MEETS HIS AFFLICTED MOTHER

Christ's mom wasn't thrilled by the Cross idea --

Jesus had had plenty of better ones:

Water to wine was a fave. And his puns

won her over. But the Cross produced fear.

There are just things they don't want us to do --

sacrifice oneself for no good reason,

for instance, which is a form of treason

that no good mother ever wants to rue.

I recall when my working class mother

gave a look, as if to say, when she learned

I wrote poetry, her love had been spurned.

She much preferred my bank-robbing brother.

J's mom couldn't talk him out of it then

and became the blue Madonna of men.

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V SIMON OF CYRENE HELPS JESUS TO CARRY HIS CROSS

The Golden Rule is as simple as it can get.

No fireworks displays are required to understand.

No Marxist high wire loopy-loops without a net.

No need for Wagner tubas in the local band.

Empathy is an emanation of the Rule

and Simon of Cyrene had the Golden in spades.

He knew that trading places was not learned in school

and that you could not measure its value in grades.

Yet the human condition is such that we fail,

most of the time, to get beyond the naked beast

that recalls us back to Cain and our coccyx tail,

but when we succeed we raise the worth of the least.

Selflessness is perhaps Christ's greatest gift, for sure.

But capitalism's Mary Magdalene, a whore.

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VI VERONICA WIPES THE FACE OF JESUS

The blood, sweat and tears of Jesus. What a jingle

it could be -- a perfume for sinners on the go!

that some future dancing love conquest comes to know.

But, next morn, the suffering starts with a tingle

in the heart, could this be the One, a one-night knock

become a time-tested transmogrification,

similar to how the Transubstantiation

lifts up those who take a chance, with love, on The Rock.

Did they exchange shared ecstasies in their crossbeams?

Her pity, the seed of hearts that bleed for others --

protect us, candles in our endless night of dreams?

and the beasts that lurk in those we call our brothers.

Veronica's wipe cloth is not there on eBay tonight;

it remains a symbol for which no price is right.

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VII JESUS FALLS THE SECOND TIME

Stricken with grief for our sins, Jesus fell again.

And I have often wondered how the priests do it,

sitting behind the screen in the confessional,

listening to the trite, and to the obsessional,

to mafiosi clearing the slate, the poet,

the high-risen, and the homeless, and priests as men.

To take on the sins of a world that likes sinning

and intends to continue to do so, though damned

to any number of Dante's circles of Hell

in any given week, returnees tell, tell

of falling again, begging the pardon, their hammed

up versions of events that leave the priest grinning.

When Christ returns there'll be springtime house-cleaning,

and not a moment too soon for father's gleaning.

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VIII JESUS MEETS THE WOMEN OF JERUSALEM

I've known women who've loved me very much

for the rich variety of my sins.

Some would say, Hey, I'm up here; some would touch

on my sensitivities; kick my shins;

A pretty nun went on about my eyes

and I returned that she had an aura.

The old world is full of obnoxious spies

intent on dishing on obscene horror.

Sometimes I wonder what Jesus was thinking

when gals came at him like nymphos, circling

him with their needs, chaste and unblinking,

and with pure, sinless love, came offering.

Dunno. Jesus was a toreador.

Me, circle of Hell from Shock Corridor.

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IX JESUS FALLS A THIRD TIME

I love Peter Tosh's deep voice on Bush Doctor.

When he sings the Lord's my light, so who shall I fear?

I get goosebumps, as from an interlocutor

whose mighty bass humility frames his prayer.

You could tell that Tosh was in it for the long haul.

I was angry when I heard Tosh had been gunned down

in his home. Sometimes you can't get up when you fall.

Folks cried, Long live Rastafari in Kingston Town.

Nietzsche once said, and it's often been repeated,

What does not kill me makes me stronger -- t-shirt stuff

now, in an Age of slogans and memes depleted

of spirit, man merging with machines. God plays rough.

New world slaves in old Jamaica cut cane away

and were taught to believe in Jesus and obey.

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X JESUS IS STRIPPED OF HIS CLOTHES

The bitterness of the vinegar would have galled

him more than the loss of clothes. Water he'd changed to wine,

and wine would be his blood's transubstantiation.

They could keep the rags of his humiliation,

sell them as souvenirs of the fallen, divine

promiser of everlasting life. It appalled.

Material to immaterialism;

from dust to dust, as they say, to dust blown away,

molecules dispersed back into single atoms --

a cosmic diaspora to form new Adams,

new paradises to lose and regain one day

when the entire framework is reduced to one Ism.

If the fascists had stripped the Lord of Love today,

we would find his underwear on sale at eBay.

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XI JESUS IS NAILED TO THE CROSS

When the deal is done, and letters sealed and sent

to the apostles on the lam in Asia Minor

reach us hundreds of years later in homilies

delivered by priests explaining anomalies

of interpretation as raised by the signer,

in great Cathedrals alive with fugues during Lent,

then we begin to comprehend just what it means

to be nailed to the cross as a king by Empire,

and to suffer for the sins of Man and for men

who will, from what I have seen, forget his mission,

soon after, in grog halls and loin shops of desire.

But, I could be wrong. Instead, let's sing glad paeans.

If Jesus was not the Messiah then just roar

for two thousand years of mass illusion -- and more.

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XII JESUS DIES ON THE CROSS

It is finished. He will be coming back, but, still,

he makes a good point, had a good run. It's finished.

But to die forsaken and feeling diminished

for all he knew, must have had him heart-sick and ill.

He says, finished, but really he wasn't quite yet.

There was still the fire walk through Hell, and Ascension,

Mystery of Faith, Holy Grail, not to mention,

the Eucharist and the introjection of debt.

I've known Hell the way Sartre meant it -- Hell's people.

And I have been dead and brought back to life and light.

I've parsed the human condition seeking insight.

Spied the monster molecule hate-anger-evil.

I can't say that I've found the core of human meaning.

I've known Christ's love, but have seen, too, monsters preening.

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XIII THE BODY OF JESUS IS TAKEN DOWN FROM THE CROSS

Joseph of Arimathea took down Jesus

from the cross. He'd been lanced to make sure he was dead.

God got the better part, and the body returned

to Mary, his mother, before it could be burned.

Did Mary take the thorny crown from his head?

Did Joseph cuff it with the Grail? Fables tease us.

How it got dipped in gold remains a mystery.

Was that irony? Elevation of Office

over his miserable death, Sotheby's sought?

A Baalinization for which Crusades were fought?

I dunno. A gold-dipped crown makes me nauseous.

I'm tired, frankly, of one-percenter history.

Some scholars say Joseph was The Wandering Jew.

Yet he took down Christ's body? This requires a stew.

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XIV JESUS IS LAID IN THE TOMB

Joseph is a problem if he was The Wanderer.

Joseph is said to have been Jesus's uncle

and travelled with the tinsmith to Cornwall in Wales,

so we wonder why Joseph heckled Christ, say tales.

What did he yell, Self-loathing Jew? Or Carbuncle?

Joseph's still walking, the world's premiere ponderer.

Anyhow, Jesus was entombed in a fissure

at Calvary, and Joseph went on his long way,

circling the globe and never in one place for long,

observing the rise of the Church, singing his song

of woe for pity and a pittance, man of clay,

playing the twangy Jew's harp to know some pleasure.

And with Joseph, we're still waiting for Christ's revue --

nine-eyed goats, terrible swift swords, Climate Change, too.

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