I don’t want to go to Hell when I die,
to be dead and still be suffering and
not only suffering but suffering
worse than when I was alive, well, that’s not
good but in Heaven where the Afterlife
is supposed to be painless if not pain
-free there’s suffering of an
-other sort, I guess, too much blessedness
up yonder, sweetness and light and all those
things associated with God maybe
because He invented ’em, but there’s no
third choice is what I’m taught in church and Sun
-day School, you can’t die and live forever
on Earth, you have to bail out when you’re croaked
and if you’re good you get the Good Place and
if you’re bad the Bad, I guess it depends
as well on if you believe that Jesus
is the Son of God Who was crucified
for our sins, etc., everyone
knows the story, He who has ears to hear
let him hear and so on and the point is
you’d better hear what you’re being told in
the sense that even if you don’t buy it
it’s so anyway, that’s how things are at
our church, plus they get my allowance,
twenty percent of it, I only get
a buck, they score two dimes of that, I name
those Adam and Eve and I kick ’em out
of the paradise of my pocket, pinch
each with thumb and finger, drop ’em in and
somehow they multiply though they subtract
me in a sense but what more can you ask of
sin? So after Sunday School I walk to
the Korn Dawg King for a free Fanta
because they honor my church bulletin
which is more than I can say for me, sad
to say, I don’t have much mammon, it’s like
drinking blood without eating the body
so I have a scrambled egg when I get home,
Man does not live by bread alone but it
sure as Hell helps, but all in all I’m set
for another week of sin surviving
me, ha ha. Next week we’ll try the root beer.
Gale Acuff has had poetry published in fourteen countries and has authored three books of poetry. He has taught tertiary English courses in the US, PR China, and Palestine. Gale now lives in Tucson, Arizona.
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