by Zach Kincaid
(Damn you) Adam.
You discovered emptiness in a place of plenty, where God raced you to the water’s edge to make you his watershed. But you preferred baptism to sweet water, wilderness to milk and honey.
You tangled fruit with weedy soil and turned rains into floods, angels into guards. The deep inhale of evil dried up the land as your son soaked it with man blood. God hunted him down as he hunted you and all you could do was leap behind shrubs?
You towered your babel to the heavens only to get lobbed in the tongue and circumcisedly confused.
You turned nomad as God searched for a new place that might salve your burned up lips. You made Abram share his bed while Sarah laughed in the face of angels unaware.
You brought together tricksters and jerks who rammed tent pegs into temples and erected the same by the hands of Solomon’s 800 unchaste nights.
You walked out on balconies, roughshod in masculinity. You are the man. You are the man.
Did God bury you as he did Moses? Did he weep for you as he tore the cursed ground and stuck your body into it, emptied of the breath he gave you?
(Damn you) Adam.
You rung us out between the lost and found, exile and freedom. Like a bully, you pushed heaven down and it’s never gotten up. Stairways and stars fall into this fall... but now it’s winter and I can’t see.
How did you lose your way back to the forbidden garden? Where is it? Get out your map and put your finger down. Right there?
Where is your trail of crumbs, your road to Jericho?
You left with no way back and now we’re digging in black holes... shooting up our insides looking for a soul... carving out the earth’s skin... to get under it, discover the story of how, why, what if.
Is it that sorrowful patch of another place, bound in by the Jordan and the Great sea, where the garden of abundance gets squeezed into desperation?
You’re the lazy lush that dined on wine blood and then denied three times over. Some faith. You’re the mob who took the fires of sacrifice and raised them on a torch as you came after the God who once went looking for you.
But there is no hiding and no shrub obliges.
Round a dying fire goes a defying messiah, mistaken and denied. Because you bit the apple, God bit the bullet. And you hurled your rotten fruit on the stage while a new crop of villains takes their part.