day EIGHT HUNDRED and FORTY EIGHT

ALABAMA RAPTURE

Can someone please bring on the Rapture now,
for Christ's sake, at least in Alabama,
and give the poor sods there a break?
Get the far-right state politicians gone?
If that is the only way, I’ll take it.
When the Rapture comes, so the story goes,
the good souls all fly up to Heaven.
The rest of us, I have been warned for years,
are going South to live in warmer climes
for any action that the good God squad,
in their wisdom, judge to be a sin.
But salvation won't be that clear-cut,
I reckon, if there is a Hell, or Heaven,
and both aren't just Earth.
I think they’re both just Earth.
If there's anything except the ground beneath us,
though, the Rapture will be quite a shock
to the rabble-rousing evangelists,
and the Repubs and other righteous bastards,
who spend their hate-filled hours at work
passing laws that steal a woman's rights away.
They might find Donald Trump’s their neighbour
in marbled buildings under clear blue sky.
They might say, ‘Jesus, we made it boys,’
and open up the bubbly to celebrate.
But the president’s a giant ball of ear wax.
Will they think twice when he begins to melt?
Who’ll be the first to work out where they’ve landed?
Will they smell the smoke before they see the fire?
Who’ll make a chain for splashing water buckets
when the flames engulf them and they flail and scream?
No one. There won’t be a single person,
because that’s how karma takes its satisfaction.
We’ll all be loafing in the higher place,
watching Hell on giant television screens
with our feet up, forking in potato chips.

--Bruce Hodder