The wooden pews

Lined with age and sermon

Laced with evangelism and bigotry

This was an old church indeed

Both in ideology and disposition

Planted by a dark and foul seed

Built by a warring breed

I took my seat

With intense indifference

I was here for someone else

With no intention to listen

But those around me were hardly,

Hardly a chatty bunch

So I turned and peeled my eyes

To the man in front of me

He was a strange man

Dressed head to toe

In robes of white

And he was certainly the chatty one

His sermon aged me a day and a year

And left quite the ache in my ear

He opened the Bible

With a compartment inside

And oh! What a sight

When he held up the gun

It glistened in the pale moonlight

He admired with gleaming eyes

A silver barrel, ivory grip

Turned it in his hand

Over and over

He took a trip

To his own f****d up dreamland

What on flat earth?

That doesn’t belong in there

Put that thing down

Down before you hurt somebody

That’s not a toy

Don’t you see?

And he did agree

For to him death is a chore

His chore

His responsibility

“For the angel of death came to me

Like a typhoon in the night.

Swift and unseen,

And causing others quite a fright”

He said with conviction

But he was not dead

And I looked around in quiet confusion

“This man is crazy”

I said to the woman seated next to me, with deep desperation

But she gave me a stern look

And with a finger across her mouth

I was sent back to the man with a gun in his book

What he spoke seemed nonsensical

But the crowd around me they sat,

Sat one the edges of their seats

Their rotten pews

And moldy cushions

It all soaked up the words of this man in white

So I sat back in rueful resignation

And aged a year and a day longer

As the man spoke of his god’s criteria for cannon fodder