While I listen to all the grumblings in the pew, old women intent on inspecting my behavior, whispering, sunk in gossip, wiping, righteous wicked women, demonize me after every Mass, realize, loose the essence of the service, focusing instead on how they’d go about wiping my seat because I’ve refused to wipe it. I don’t know which is worse but Mary is their Queen.
Blow-ups, blowing by blown marriages, mine is bad, it’s our second, betrayed, she’s left me again, loving son more than me and he’s four past twenty three, hers is a sickness, it’s for good, so she claims, but we’re Catholic but not in this case and so I cut the beard for her favor but should have kept it but it’s crept back before and so I surrender our separation to the Sovereign hand of the King, Mary is my Queen.
Faithful but cynical sons celebrating the kill shots of militant vigilante gunmen this crisis, consigned to Hell, video loops of small pockets of fire and flare ups played over and over you’d think it was the whole world, streets stripped of saneness, senseless, something is amiss, police missing from the scene, to be there a great risk, what to make of this sin, how to handle this sin, charges of systemic racism, defiant young men doomed to hell, indecency their bloodline except Mary is their Queen.
Ladies using exercise mats move into parking lots like flash mobs gathered to flex muscles and a junked up junkie bunking on a street bench doesn’t know what’s going on next except I drive by and she’s gotten up to walk and so we see each other’s faces and it’s in that moment when I pass her that I say: Mary is your Queen.
Gary Edward Geraci