Back then life was simpler
Ishtar’s lustful wrath
Open to receive tribute
From Father Sky
The rain of mercy
And the stroke of homicide

Nowadays only Adam’s sin
Demands human sacrifice
For only death repays the debt
Notation on a shopkeeper’s ledger
And a penny owed
Is a penny extorted

The lamb takes on the sins of the world
Along with all its agony
It cannot be
The torment torturous enough to be sure
The beating the nails the sop of vinegar
The dispatching with a lance

But a torturing unto death
Might be greatly more painful
And greatly more protracted than this
Even with the scorching sun
The public display
Of a Friday afternoon

Now the Agony in the Garden
There was a human creature
Trapped in fear
Trapped in ambivalence
The brain wrestling with the impulses
Of fight or flight or hopeless resignation

I saw a fragment
Of a pair of spectacles
Cartilage twisted on the sidewalk
The remains of an animal barely vertebrate
How it is a world of artifice
A world of illusion