November 05, 2009

Shisha Poetry from the Archive: "I want to smoke with you Jesus Christ"



A short story I wrote in college, "The Arabian Bird; or, The Intrigue of the Arabian Bird", a sort of dense pretentious mystical private-eye mystery, had some 'additional poetry' written for it (around 2004). This was the final poem of the set, an idea I've returned to many times, about sharing a hookah with Jesus.

IX.
I want to smoke with you Jesus Christ.
I want to pass the proboscis of the nargileh
Between me & you & all the saints & martyrs,
(Especially the visionary teenage girls like Perpetua & Felicitas,
& also especially Ignatius because he’s so damned witty).
We would see the electricity of the campfire
Be orphically mysticized by our fumy exhalings,
But I wouldn’t care, because my savior would sit beside me,
A fat Havana dripping from his lips as he lectured softly:
I give to thee a purer smoke, sans briar,
Although that cigarillo’s also good,
For in it you shall find parts of my fire,
As even dormice bleed grains of my blood.

W.C. Fields once said:
Did I ever tell you about the time,
When we were hiking through the mountains of Lebanon,
& we couldn’t find a corkscrew,
So we had to survive on food & water.

2 comments:

S. Sandrigon said...

And in re W.C. Fields' dilemma about opening a bottle of wine without a corkscrew, this video has been going around the tubes today:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9s89FqNpXO4

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