The Devil is Amish

The Devil is Amish

Out of the cradle, then lighting a candle
next to the bed where she lays,
her lipstick red and the cigarette menthol.
The air humid with perspiration,
years before your lives
were in your phones and
your phones were in your pockets.

The Devil is Amish, you’re hardly squeamish,
but you know that a hint of sex
is as prohibited as pleasure; all murder is mass,
a genocide of one,
just like committing adultery
even though you never asked
your eyes to see her random smile.

Preacher quoted unknown scripture
but described familiar sins
as you glanced at her ankles
glimmering through the shadows
beneath the pew, as sensual as you later
discovered her inner thigh to be,
but here is when even the sight of
those ankles is too much to resist.
Thoughts never obey a body bound by law.

The devil’s pencil scribbles lyrics
obscuring the blatancy of desire
with complimentary implications
using eyes and hair as metaphor.
Your friends passed the note
to her friends who passed the note to her,
back when she could still blush.

In your mind when she’s not there and
when she is here in front of you and
wanting you she is
all that’s in your mind, so
much of she you ignore her and
forget any non-tactile memory.

In sunshine or shadows you hid.
Kept the nose to the grindstone,
wrote the checks on time and maintained
credit rating respectability,
but no matter how bloody
the battle or the thousands
of famine-starved infants,
Satan always found time for you.

The son and daughter and
the mortgage, the annual flooded basement
the career disappointment, the bills, bills, bills.
Your parents died, the children grew
too busy with resentment to call.
The intimacy as constant as swampland mosquitos,
it was always July there between you two,
dysentery displacing desire.

The holidays turned
tragic, then lonely, mild sorrow,
cable TV reruns, still an improvement
over the false merriness of sniping, mutual
blame was all you had left, hate is not indifference.
Lawyers proportioned the rest, on the
courthouse steps, your eyes never met;
that goodbye was forever.

Years later, working for the pension
and the healthcare, you play golf just so
as not to drink alone.
Despite terrorist attacks and
deceiving your fellow citizens
through plebiscite, enriching
the wealthy and punishing the poor,
the devil still manages the massage parlor lobby,
that monthly happy ending is still in your budget

Summer, commuter train’s
sudden lurch jostles her shoulders
and her t-shirt slips for a moment
revealing more of the apex and
that sweaty cleavage was all you needed to
go home and dream about killing an ambassador
or Senator or that neighbor next door
who plays his music so loud
everyone can hear.

If you only had the patience to fill out
a hand gun permit application,
you would keep the beretta
in your jacket, get close enough
then shoot him in the head.
You don’t want him to suffer or survive.
Then she would see your face and name
on the internet, eagerly confirm your
request to be Facebook friends.

copyright 2012, held by auhtor